Up in the tenement flat on a grey street in the awkwardness of autumn. The succession of strangers who have traipsed through this flat, shuffling over its carpets, takes a toll on one. Sometimes you are suddenly introduced to the friend of a friend, who you never see again, and yet you're with them in a photograph that somebody took.
I'm not sure if I like these impermanent relationships, although they seem to be all the rage with the smart set. People encounter you and then completely forget you, or there's the embarrassment of encountering someone who you encountered drunk or in a compromising moment, now sober and formal. Somehow all this was a source of pain to me, these masks and other selves that people wore.
Now the job of getting a flatmate to share with; the succession of strangers increases, becomes a flow. Some bring their mums, who do all the talking. A Chinese girl arrives, a blonde German girl, a dark German girl with a bumbag and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, a cheerful Russian girl, an Argentine, a Nigerian, a girl from New Zealand. A native Briton who has brought his sister and approved of my C.D. collection. A garrulous girl who brought two friends, one a very tall fellow. A Latvian girl, and her friend, another Latvian girl, who said she would take the room and then didn't.
I saw them all without favour or prejudice and usually it was obvious which would align with the flat and myself, and which would not. The best flatmate is one who is studious and quiet and is there to sleep and then removes themself in the morning, to school or work. Girl flatmates are not necessarily a problem, in fact they might be preferred as girls are calmer and sometimes more civilised.
Here the impersonal relationship is to be encouraged.
This flat is supposed to be Bohemian, and that was the atmosphere I tried to cultivate. Bean bags and jazz and I looked at wonderful pictures of Bob Dylan in the East Village in the early sixties.
In fact, far from the sixties, we go back into the fifties: I got the Fifties source book from the library, and was repulsed and fascinated by the horrible cadillacs and the glossy sheen of Elvis Presley's face, his skin that looks like pink airbrushed plastic. Even to look at these things makes one feel nauseous and strangely full of desire. When you get a hold of old 1950's magazines the most interesting things are always the advertisements, far more interesting than the articles. Because the ideal in them is always to be perfect, plastic, shiny, and presentable, glamorous but respectable, sweet-smelling but with a maximum of artifice.
Boards and bulbs should be bare. A Dansette record player can be included. Beatnik poverty cultivated in contrast to the technicolour luxury in the magazines and in the source book.
From a cheap book I took a cheap black n white photograph of Gene Vincent. Cheapness again you see, in contrast to the luxury.
Gene is emblematic and significant because proletarian and naive. He has a sickly smile, a semi-cripple of some kind from a Virginia seaport, habitue of sailors and unsophisticated. He is very pale and his hair is slicked back except where it falls in a bunch of greasy hair on his thin forehead.
I thought by association that Gene was a sort of sailor or longshoreman. Even his leather jacket was a simple one, of basic type. He was poor but aspirational; he didn't have a car but he could get it. You felt that his persona was bluster, that he was not really a greaser or a biker, but was just a boy, essentially naive and pure-souled. Above all he should not be made fashionable or hip.
The theme for the fifties party should be: Those parts of the 20th century that have gone out of fashion and in fact have been forgotten.
