Nostalgia for Christmas – excerpt 3

New York – with Christmas 2003 closing in.

Uncorrected Proof: Text – New York pp45-47

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20
Got woken up by a phone call at eight in the morning! It was
Tony asking all these questions. Had to think for a moment: Tony
who? He asked what other titles were up and running? I mumbled
that I was still working on the list. Told him not to worry. He
recounted some guttersnipe crap about me being seen staggering all
over Manhattan three sheets to the wind. Without a coffee I had no
ready reply. I said he’d have his report on his table inside the week.
He said he wanted it today. I sighed, said okay. It calmed him down
but only for a moment. He went on about Menny this and Menny
that. Menny was always getting him into some war with someone or
another. We all better get ship shape or ship out, he said, that sort
of crap. He was angry about his boat being built somewhere, the
construction all behind schedule. I said, Do you know what time it
is? Every time Tony’s gets pissed about something he ends up talking
to me about the cost of his boats. We hung up on each other.

46 Louisiana Alba
I had breakfast in the room staring at the wall. Couldn’t bear to
look in the mirror. I think Menny wants to kill the imprint. Menny
and Tony want to kill each other but they talk on the phone all the
time. What have I gotten myself into? I went down to the gym and
sweated for an hour and a half on the treadmill. Had a sauna and
a facial. Don’t want to be outshone by a Bush twin. Called Dolon,
got his mobile answer machine again. I didn’t leave a message.
Something’s up. Lay around reading papers and magazines. New
design for the World Trade Center is 1776 feet tall. Was Ground
Zero something to do with the War of Independence? The Pope saw
Mel Gibson’s biblical epic The Passion and said it was ‘an accurate
portrayal of Jesus’s death.’ I mean, how does he know that? Was
he there? Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton have a new movie out,
Something’s Gotta Give. Not wrong there. Forecast says: clear skies
and a light wind, a cold night. Let’s hope we don’t have to spend too
much time outside. Dolon finally rang back at 5.30pm. He came
by in a Limo at 6.30pm with an open bottle of Bolly. He’s acting
all nice again. I couldn’t resist a couple of glasses heading uptown.
Could have easily turned round and ended up you know-where or
done it in the back of the car but there was no time. And anyway I
didn’t want my little black number all crushed. It took me the best
part of an hour to squeeze into it.

The Bush kids were at Nippon before us stashed in a private
room giggling about something. The place was empty then got really
packed. Kept looking at these scratches on Dolon’s neck. Did I put
them there? I talked a little too loudly about a documentary on
John Lennon that nobody else saw. By the time the lobster entrée
made an appearance and two more bottles of Bolly had come and
gone I was trading barbs with the twins about a certain political
unmentionable. By dessert I was in full flight banging on about
JFK, RFK, John Lennon and Princess Di, all those who got it square
and unfair.

UNCORRECTED PROOF 47
Forget about all the bloody phoney presidents, wars and elections,
I said. I was practically up on my chair. A couple of overcoats
appeared out of nowhere to adjudicate. Hadn’t noticed the security
detail before. Guess that’s their job, to blend in. Everything got to
be another blur after that. My dessert, Château whatever ended up
on the floor. Dolon took the head honchos aside. Must have slipped
them each a pony because they could not have been sweeter after
that, especially as we left. But the twins, sheesh, they acted like I
trod on their pet hamster or something. I made my abject apologies
outside, ’course none of what I said I meant blah blah.’ They were
so snooty. Think the whole deal with Dolon just got blown. What
an effing fracas. Rode in the cab like a door mouse back to the hotel.
As we parked Dolon said he had to go to Florida and practically
pushed me out onto the road. Caught my dress in the door as he
slammed it shut. Hey, I shouted but the Limo driver sped off. There
I was, my dress gone. I paid 200 smackers for that black rag, the
whole effing black lingerie effort I’d gone to for him on full view.
Jesus H. Christ it was freezing. I looked down at myself, at what was
left, and just started crying. The doorman was very nice about it
though. Couldn’t get the door open quick enough. Poor man got a
hand caught in the revolving door. Ouch.

There was this message for me from Tony. He now wants that
report before breakfast tomorrow. Turned on the TV. All is not well
in Barcelona. I started crying again, my mascara running all over my
face. Enric Bernat Fontlladosa the eighty-year old inventor of the
Chupa Chups lollipop is not well, probably won’t make it. So many
celebs loved that lolly with its Dali logo.

Art, commerce and the dizzying world of artifice

I have been trying to get a blogger of note to become a reviewer of note, that is, get to her to do a notice on my book. Or should I say write a note, postice me, no, well notice me in her..well I think you get what I mean by now.

The problem is or was she was taken up with blogging the Hirst thing as he was selling 111 million or whatever pounds worth of what, we don’t really know yet, in the middle of what we’re not sure yet is the second worst (or just the worst) finance mess of all. I fear the financial bang down on economies and hell only knows what else, all that money stuff that holds us all up in the first and last place has much yet to say.

That Hirst Thing - SuperTouch

My own hazy memory of other memories tells me that 1929 was the first big stock market etc crash, but 1931-4 was the real pain that the ordinary bloke felt so keenly, pain the world felt all over. Ditto for 1987, which became 1991-3, when the real ordinary mess that was house values falling down around people’s ears really hit home.

I remember 1987 very well. I was in Sydney and was about to try to sell my apartment, and, a few days before the crash, went to a property auction in the suburb of Bondi Beach to see what I could possibly do, auction or straight sell. That auction day was a scene from Fellini. It was dizzying mad, like nothing I had seen, people shouting over each other to buy huts and hovels for double and treble their one day prior worth. Perhaps I exaggerate the doubling and trebling but that was what it felt like being packed into that auction house room on that day.

Bondi Beach - by Pio Carlone

At that time the king of all things money down under, particularly the market gambling sort, was a one Robert Holmes a’ Court, greenmailer and white knighter extraordinaire, who became Oz’s first billionaire. He was richest but still unofficially vying for the title of most wealthy man in Oz , fighting with two redoubtable dark nights and media moguls, Rupert Mudoch and Kerry Packer, for the privilege, probably because he came from the West not the East. But all up before the 1987 crash Holmes a’ Court was worth 2 billion, a tidy sum even today, and from reports of his worth, enough to buy Hirst out twice over.

And Robert Holmes a’ Court – like that other Robert from Oz, Robert Hughes, the bloke that Hirst doesn’t too much like – was a lover, no, a connoisseur of Art. I say Art with a capital, because Robert Holmes a’ Court was into ART in a big way. A horse lover, a stocks gambler, he also bought into the big and small art stables. He bought and supported big and small names. And one of his stable of small names was a one Paula, of whom I knew in passing. Paula created holograms, was a pioneer of minor reputation in that part of the world that by geography alone diminishes the adjective minor to very very small in the world of art. She told me about Robert, what she knew of him.

Those who know what happened in 1987 will remember the face of Robert Holmes a’ Court standing at the glass wall of an upper floor overlooking the Sydney Stock Exchange that day his fortunes went a little too far south for his liver to digest. His face was a newsprint picture, financial grief of power disappearing faster through him than a bad curry. Post crash, when the bits stopped falling, when the exchange chit dust cleared (long weeks on after much gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and of course, horse trading), he was worth 600 million, not too bad either even for a mogul today. He devoted himself to other matters thereafter, his horse stud, his art and perhaps some charity if I remember well.

Paula told me how he arranged to see her work that she had been doing under his patronage, some days after (for him) a catastrophic crash – he was dead in three years, at 53. She described how this distracted figure walked into her studio and stood trying to get his head around what she was doing, tried to fathom what she was telling him (and Paula could tell you). Perhaps unable to control the big he put his mind to gripping the tiny. Robert Holmes a’ Court stared at one of her projections stuck out in thin air. ‘But it’s so small,’ is all he said. He left without another word. And that was the last Australian dollar she saw from him.

Paula in her studio - COFA

Now no one could say that Hirst’s work is small in the way that Paula’s experiments were back then, what with that artistic industry of so many hands, the massified repetitive manufacture of tanked animals in preservative, but somehow Holmes a’ Court’s newsprinted face comes to mind, an apparition staring at the tanked cow, and turning to the assembled art gamblers, the multitude, I see him trying to say something. Only I can’t hear him against all the clamour of bidding. Was it: what’s next Damien, the white elephant? No, that’s what I would say. Was it something about it all being so small? No, that cash cow aint tiny. Anyway I can’t read his lips anymore disappearing as he has into thin air. He and that auction room moment are ethereal elements gone, along with a good part of the world’s financial infrastructure, not to mention that review of my book, so I guess we’ll never know.