I’ve struggled to establish my credentials as a dropout. In London I made a first rate error. Starting out in West London (10 years ago) I worked the fashionable joints in that human wasteland, the feeding grounds for the big game, a global capital for dead souls. Clearing tables, stacking shelves, cutting Roquefort & hand carving Jamon Iberico de bellota, handing out parisian sticks, lobes of foie gras entier. Day jobs gorging the fat creatures of West London: arms dealers, bankers, actors, the old money, the new money, Tories, Saudi princes, aristocrats, royals, Russian oligarchs, every conceivable incarnation of shit you could imagine: patrons of the arts. A demographic glimpse from the other side of a counter, from the other end of the blade, behind menu or table, from over a La Marzocco with a perfect shot extracting, like the tail of a mouse, and me looking out at the world.
As a friend, a KP (kitchen porter) from Krakow liked to say (when he stumbled up from a subterranean kitchen infested with rats… for a drink… and some fresh air):
Here come tit and arse painter.. there go Saudi arms dealer.. Godfather of reality TV… the (singular) beneficiary of Russia’s shift to private ownership… they go around, and around… coffee for head of IMF… there go the vastards… fat ugly vuckin vastards … Tadhg stop looking!: espresso two sugar, snap, snap!
That part of town represented our hereditary disease, the West a sick old man that people liked to toast, and, in celebration, confirming its own elite’s worth – confirmation and validation of privilege and depravity.
And now in another part of town, south of the Thames, I find myself stumbling into a book shop. My eyes fall upon a face, and a set of eyes, like so many I once looked at. The eyes belong to the pre-eminent British painter of his time, Lucian Freud. It’s the cover of the latest chapter in his deification amongst the London cultural establishment; Breakfast with Lucian, the title reads. And for a moment I recollect my meeting with the great man on a distant morning having fallen out of one bad job and slap bang into another. Working behind the counter of one of Mr Freud’s shops. The staff viewed his daily arrival, on time, as a perk, a plus in the job. They could see the famed artist, bring him his coffee, after a time exchange remarks, and be bowled over by his eccentricity.
A local girl and I had started in the job together, and we stood behind the counter as he strode in, not missing much with his strange eyes. He was old, and bent, and craggily faced, with those eyes wide open – very, very wide open – as if he had a match stick jammed between each lid. The image of the artist, straight from a postcard coated in paint, dishevelled, sharp, gaunt, concentrated, intense. He walked in with a jolt, and very briskly picked up a bar of nougat and tossed it, mid air and long, to the new girl; an act to be considered as further confirmation of his peculiar genius, as confirmation of his disregard for convention. The girl, to script, stumbled, caught the bar, and blushed crimson. The next day it was my turn. Like clock work Freud arrived, I looked around and to my satisfaction realised it was just the two of us. I had thought on his action the day before, of Lucian throwing the bar, of the girl stumbling, and him paying, and the action explained by the fact that he was a rare genius – not a stupid fucking prick. And the girl – she was lucky, the girl she had the privilege of catching his genius. Now on the second occasion when Lucian walked in I concluded that it was inconceivable that the same trick would be played twice. This act would only expose a fraud, a fool, a man that was good at tricks.
I took it in the left hand, mid air again and this time high. A little to the left, not a good throw. It was a good catch. In Tasmania we play bloody cricket. He paused, and turned his head towards me, and opened his eyes very, very wide – wider than usual. It was clear from the look on his face that he realised I had anticipated his behaviour. And now looking at his face on a book cover in South London it was clear that he was the perfect artist, and now the perfect corpse, for this age.
Still my first instinct writing this is that an attack on the dead, even one so slight, seems wrong. But Freud represents more that his own work. He represented, and captured, the heart of the established order, and its celebration – all those lords and ladies, and all that royalty, and pedigree that he painted. He represent the petty, mean, hollow, carnal world of the elite. And this in art is dangerous, the world of a half-baked genius, in a world run by and made for other half-baked fools.
Now, sometime later – and still from the other side of a menu, a table, a counter – I conclude: there is a time for dancing on the graves of the dead.
WRITE-ON is an underground literary movement operating out of the East and South East of London, set up by Tasmanian Tadhg Muller and Londoner Sean Preston.