Find Page One on APPLE PODCASTS or STITCHER.
(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith, published in 2007 by Vintage; cover © Nayeon Kim.
Joining Charles Adrian for the 54th Second Hand Book Factory is Ben Walters whose work life takes him to, between and around film, moving image, cabaret, performance and queer culture. They usher in the purple epoch of Hollywood, the fight against the patriarchy and a peculiarly loveable psychopath.
There is a link to a video of Justin Vivian Bond singing Golden Age Of Hustlers here.
Other books by Angela Carter discussed on the podcast are Wise Children (Page One 54), The Bloody Chamber (Page One 86, Page One 135 and Page One 141) and The Sadean Women (Page One 123 and, briefly, Page One 190).
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith is also discussed in Page One 175. The first novel in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series, The Talented Mr Ripley is discussed in Page One 53 and Page One 170.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript for this episode is below.
Episode released: 8th April, 2014.
Book listing:
Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger
The Passion Of New Eve by Angela Carter
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
Links:
Golden Age Of Hustlers by Justin Vivian Bond
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 76th Page One. This is the 54th Second Hand Book Factory. I'm Charles Adrian and my guest today is Ben Walters.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hi, Ben.
Ben Walters
Hi, Charles.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] Thanks for having me in your lovely flat in the shadow of Waterloo.
Ben Walters
[speaking over] Well, it's a pleasure.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] It's very nice.
Ben Walters
I'm very happy to have you here.
Charles Adrian
So how do you describe yourself?
Ben Walters
I never quite know how to describe myself because I always feel like I'm forever doing... keeping lots of different plates spinning. So I suppose I do a variety of things to do with film, moving image, cabaret performance, queer culture, things like that. I edited the cabaret page for Time Out for about four years. And that came to an end in December 2013. And during that time, I co-directed a couple of documentaries about sort of cabaret performers. I do a lot of film criticism. I produce a couple of nights. I do a night called Burn, which is moving image work by cabaret performers. And I'm just about to start producing and presenting a quarterly cabaret show for Chelsea Theatre.
Charles Adrian
And what's this...? What, for you...? I hear you making a difference between ‘film’ and ‘moving image’. Is that something you're doing deliberately?
Ben Walters
Yes, I suppose so. Because when you talk about film people tend to think of feature films. Whereas when I talk about moving image that might be videos that people are making, it might be using video within live performance as part of a live show, or it might be TV. It might be any number of other other things. But it seems... it can sound a bit wanky [indistinct].
Charles Adrian
No, no, I like... but I like... I've said this to people before: I think it's okay to be wanky because I think it's important to be specific about what you're doing. People are very quick to decide that something is what they already know and it isn't necessarily. I mean, people are very familiar with what they see on TV and what they see at the cinema but there's a whole other world. Which is... I think, part of what you're doing is telling people there are other things around.
Ben Walters
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's very nicely put.
Ben and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Ben Walters
But I think that is something that I feel quite lucky to be able to do - that on the one hand I get to see a lot of really interesting, unusual stuff and then, in a good week, I have some kind of avenue to express that to people who might not have had the chance to come across it themselves.
Charles Adrian
Right. Right. Oh, I think that's great. Tell me about the book that you like that you've brought. Well... ‘brought’... [laughs]
Ben Walters
Well [laughs], the book that [laughs]... that I like that I've brought all the way from the shelf...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Brought from wherever... [indistinct].
Ben Walters
... is Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon.
Charles Adrian
Aha!
Ben Walters
Which is a sort of... well, has a lot to answer for in a lot of ways.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] I've never heard of it.
Ben Walters
Have you not? Well, it's... In certain circles it has a kind of totemic kind of status. So Kenneth Anger himself is a fascinating figure. And his whole life story is kind of bound up with Hollywood, in a way, and with filmmaking. So he's... I think he's in his eighties now. He might be ninety even. I'd have to check that. But when he was very young child, he was an actor. He was in Max Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream - very early sort of silent Hollywood. He had these film roles. He then was one of the earliest experimental gay filmmakers. As a teenager he made this amazing film called Fireworks, which is this sort of weird erotic, biker, quite violent, aggressive, surreal short film. He roped in a bunch of sailors who were on shore leave to take part in it.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] [speaking over] It sounds extraordinary.
Ben Walters
It's amazing. He then went on to be an amazing filmmaker. He was very interested in magik with a K - a kind of really occult sort of, you know, post Aleister Crowley... These sorts of things. He got mixed up with members of the Manson gang. He's involved in... I mean, there are stories that if you get on the wrong side of him, he will curse you. There are stories around that. But he made all these amazing experimental films. Really intense, intoxicating, sort of magical, occult things - but very beautiful as well. It's very lyrical kind of, you know, imagery. So really gorgeous. And he's also just like the most, kind of, devious old queen. And this is where Hollywood Babylon comes in, which is this book that he wrote, which more or less kind of kick-started the Hollywood gossip industry. I mean, it's this whole hinterland, essentially, of Hollywood filth. And it's... And what's great about the book is partly that it's this bizarre combination of absolute passion and fixation and love for this... you know, this environment, but also this completely cynical kind of hollowing out and, you know, really quite bitter kind of anger. And it's not always easy to tell whether it's this, sort of, moralistic anger at the outrageousness of some of this behaviour or this completely kind of titillated pleasure - at the transgressions going on beneath this, you know, industry that's setting itself up as, sort of, America's moral exemplar. So it's just that it really, sort of, sets the tone for so much of the culture [laughing] that we're still dealing with today.
Charles Adrian
Yeah. Where, bizarrely, I feel like it might be flipped on its head where all the scabs are on the outside. And it probably isn't nearly so... I don't know what the word is, but I doubt there's very much happening underneath. [laughs]
Ben Walters
No. I think you have to be quite a, kind of, conspiracy nut now to think there's really anything like the stuff that Anger talks about.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Read... Read the first page.
Ben Walters
So I'll read the first page. And, I mean, the other thing, which you won't get from my reading it because I don't have the charisma or the wit or the timbre of Kenneth Anger - if you actually hear him speaking, he's very remarkable... but he does just have this beautifully purple kind of style, which makes the book very easy to whiz through. So I shall read the opening page of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon - Volume One! There is a Volume Two as well.
Charles Adrian
Goodness.
Ben Walters
And this is from the first chapter, THE PURPLE DAWN.
WHITE ELEPHANTS—the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants, and white elephants he got—eight of 'em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the colossal court of Belshazzar, the pasteboard Babylon built beside the dusty tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Boulevard.
Griffith—the Movie Director as God—was riding high, high as he'd ever go, over Illusion City, whooshing up a hundred-foot-high elevator camera tower, giant megaphone poised to shout the command to the thousands below, the CAMERA-AH ACTION-N-N! to bring it all alive....
Belshazzar's Feast beneath Egyptian blue skies, spread out under the blazing Southern California morning sun: more than four thousand extras recruited from L.A. paid an unheard-of two dollars a day plus box lunch plus carfare to impersonate Assyrian and Median militiamen, Babylonian dancers, Ethiopians, East Indians, Numidians, eunuchs, ladies-in-waiting to the Princess Beloved, handmaidens of the Babylonian temples, priests of Bel, Nergel, Marduk and Ishtar, slaves, nobles and subjects of Babylonia.
Griffith's vision of Babylon!
A mare's nest mountain of scaffolding, hanging gardens, chariot-race ramparts and sky-high elephants, a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia dropped down on the sleepy huddle of mission-style bungalows amid the orange groves that made up 1915 Hollywood, portent of things to come.
The Purple Epoch had begun.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] Wow, it reads like a really trashy novel. [laughs]
Ben Walters
Yeah. Yeah. And that's essentially his his line on it, is that the history of Hollywood is a trashy novel.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh it sounds fun. I want to know what they got in their box lunches.
Ben Walters
I know.
Charles Adrian
What would that have been? [laughs]
Ben Walters
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
What was a box lunch?
Ben Walters
Would it have had an Egyptian theme?
Charles Adrian
[laughs] That would have been great.
Ben Walters
Like bologna sandwiches wrapped in banana leaves.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] Horrible.
Ben Walters
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
Now, I'm going to play the first track, which I've picked from your selection. I had trouble with your selection because I thought they were all quite good and they were all things that I didn't know very well. So I had no reason to choose one thing rather than another thing. But I've chosen We Are Electric by Fischerspooner just because I liked it.
Music
[We Are Electric by Fischerspooner]
Charles Adrian
That was Fischerspooner with We Are Electric. So what was your connection with them?
Ben Walters
Well, I have a personal connection with Fischerspooner which I must declare upfront - which is how I came... how I first got to hear of them - which is that my cousin, enormously talented Vanessa Walters, is their lead choreographer in New York. So they came over and did a performance in London back in... I'd have to check... I don't know the date but it must have been... it was probably about 2005, something like that. And so essentially it was just... it was my cousin's band. So...
Charles Adrian
Oh nice. Thank you. Now this part of the podcast is my book for you. And I think what I've chosen fits in well with what you chose. I don't know if you've read it before. It's the The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter.
Ben Walters
I haven't, no.
Charles Adrian
And the reason I chose it is because I feel as though, in a very broad sense, what... what seems to happen in the cabaret world - at least what I've seen - is that sexuality and gender, they're all kind of thrown up into the air like the cards at the end of Alice in Wonderland and they just fall where they may...
Ben Walters
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
... and I like that about it. So there's no... there... I mean, there are people who are more or less political but it's something that is, I think, very lightly dealt with. And this is kind of the opposite, in a way. She's really attacking gender and sexuality. And she's... well, she's attacking patriarchy, I suppose. But it's also... you'll see at the beginning it has a lot to do with the world of film and the image that comes across - especially from, you know, Golden Age Hollywood. These beautiful women and their appeal for, I think, both straight and gay men, bizarrely. So, yeah, I don't know what you will think of this but...
Ben Walters
Well, it sounds like it's ticking a lot of boxes.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] ... it's a really... It's an interesting book, I think. Here's the first page:
One
The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa.
A late show, a crowded cinema. The drunks all stubbornly remained unmoved and jeered, laughed and catcalled throughout your film though sibilantly hushed by pairs of sentimental queers who, hand in hand, had come to pay homage to the one woman in the world who most perfectly expressed a particular pain they felt as deeply as, more deeply than, any woman, a pain whose nature I could not then define although it was the very essence of your magic. The film stock was old and scratched, as if the desolating passage of time were made visible in the rain upon the screen, audible in the worn stuttering of the sound track, yet these erosions of temporality only enhanced your luminous presence since they made it all the more forlorn, the more precarious your specious triumph over time. For you were just as beautiful as you had been twenty years before, would always be so beautiful as long as celluloid remained in complicity with the phenomenon of persistence of vision; but that triumph would die of duration in the end, and the surfaces that preserved your appearance were already wearing away.
But oh, how beautiful she had been and was, Tristessa de St Ange, billed (do you remember?) as ‘The most beautiful woman in the world’, who executed her symbolic autobiography in arabesques of kitsch and hyperbole yet transcended the rhetoric of vulgarity by exemplifying it with a heroic lack of compromise.
I think it was Rilke who so lamented the inadequacy of our symbolism – regretted so bitterly we cannot, unlike the (was...
[laughs] It's a weird place to stop but... You see, it's a little bit overwritten.
Ben Walters
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
The whole book is a bit like that. But I quite like the slightly Baroque nature of that. Because she's describing this very dystopian New York - particularly at the beginning - where race wars are happening and women are becoming very violent. And it's a kind of vision of, I suppose, what might have... It's written in the late 70s but it's a vision of what might have happened if the movements that were growing then had really become stronger and more violent. And then it becomes very symbolic and ridiculous and quite fun. So see what you think. It's a short book. So...
Ben Walters
Well, thank you.
Charles Adrian
... you can just...
Ben Walters
No, that sounds fascinating. And as you say, the slightly ...slightly overwrought quality there... But that seems to be completely, sort of, in keeping with what she's talking about here and the sort of construction of glamour.
Charles Adrian
Exactly, yes. And I think she is very interested in how particularly gender is... how that's something that happens because we view it from outside and where gender really lies. And I think that... Yeah, I find that a very interesting question, which I think a lot of artists are exploring in interesting ways.
Ben Walters
Yeah. No, I mean, I think Angela Carter's someone that a lot of performers on the cabaret scene certainly take a lot from. Nights at the Circus in particular.
Charles Adrian
Right. Which I saw the Kneehigh version of but I haven't read it. I feel like I should. Yeah. What's your book for me?
Ben Walters
Well, my book for you is Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, which... I don't know if you've read much Highsmith.
Charles Adrian
Somebody gave me The Talented Mr. Ripley not long ago so that's quite... that's quite cool.
Ben Walters
Well, this is sort of by way of a sequel. Some time later in Ripley's life. But I, sort of, chose this because as I was looking at books to choose I, kind of, realised... which I suppose I know anyway, but I really don't read much fiction at all these days. And really the only time that I just, sort of, think, ‘Oh no, I'm just going to read a story’ is on holiday. So I grabbed this the last holiday that I went on last year. And what I like about Highsmith is it's on that, sort of, sweet spot of being very plot driven and very, sort of, entertaining holiday reading kind of thing but also, you know, it's a bit classy. She's quite good. And so it sort of...
Charles Adrian
Makes you feel good. [laughs]
Ben Walters
Yeah. It's like you don't feel like, you know, you're totally slumming it. But it's... you know, it's also, sort of, a page turner.
Charles Adrian
Yes. Oh, cool. Read me the first page.
Ben Walters
[laughing] Okay. So. So this is the first page of Ripley's Game. Patricia Highsmith. It was 1974 it was first published. So chapter one:
‘There's no such thing as a perfect murder,’ Tom said to Reeves. ‘That's just a parlour game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That's different.’ Tom was bored. He walked up and down in front of his big fireplace, where a small but cosy fire crackled. Tom felt he had spoken in a stuffy, pontificating way. But the point was, he couldn't help Reeves, and he'd already told him that.
’Yes, sure,’ said Reeves. He was sitting in one of the yellow silk armchairs, his lean figure hunched forward, hands clasped between his knees. He had a bony face, short, light-brown hair, cold grey eyes – not a pleasant face but a face that might have been rather handsome if not for a scar that travelled five inches from his right temple across his cheek almost to his mouth. Slightly pinker than the rest of his face, the scar looked like a bad job of stitching, or as if perhaps it had never been stitched. Tom had never asked about the scar, but Reeves had volunteered once, ‘A girl did it with her compact. Can you imagine?’ (No, Tom couldn't.) Reeves had given Tom a quick, sad smile, one of the few smiles Tom could recall from Reeves. And on another occasion, ‘I was thrown from a horse – dragged by the stirrup for a few yards.’ Reeves had said that to someone else, but Tom had been present. Tom suspected a dull knife in a very nasty fight somewhere. /Now Reeves wanted Tom to provide someone, suggest someone to do one or perhaps two ‘simple murders’ and perhaps one theft, also safe and simple. Reeves had come from Hamburg to Villeperce to talk to Tom, and he was going to stay the night and go to Paris tomorrow to talk to someone else about it, then return to his home in Hamburg, presumably to do some more thinking if he failed. Reeves was primarily a fence, but lately was dabbling in the illegal gambling world of Hamburg, which he was now undertaking to protect. Protect from what?
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Ben Walters
[indistinct] not [indistinct] hang about. [laughs]
Charles Adrian
Thank you. Wow. Oh, cool. Thank you very much. I love it.
Ben Walters
Well, so there you go.
Charles Adrian
And it's beautiful. It's a Vintage. I love these Vintage editions of books.
Ben Walters
Yes, they're very nice.
Charles Adrian
I think they're very nice, yeah.
Ben Walters
Yes. That's...
Charles Adrian
Very nicely printed
Ben Walters
The cover to that one is a sort of... I suppose it's a man trap, isn't it?
Charles Adrian
It's a man trap basically, yeah. Yeah.
Ben Walters
A drawing of a man trap against a quite, sort of, unpleasant kind of...
Charles Adrian
Acid green.
Ben Walters
Yeah, a sort of piccalilli kind of colour.
Charles Adrian
Yes, that's exactly what it is. Well, this is the end of the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this. Ben. This has been wonderful.
Ben Walters
Well, thank you Charles. It's been a pleasure.
Charles Adrian
And the last track that I've chosen is Golden Age of Hustlers... The Golden Age of Hustlers by Justin Vivian Bond. And so I went to Justin Vivian Bond's website. Totally fascinating. And I liked this quote: ‘For me, there is no opposite sex. For me, there is only identity and desire.’ So I think that fits in perfectly with what we've been [laughing] talking about today.
Ben Walters
[laughs] Yeah.
Charles Adrian
And this is a great track. But yeah, that's it. That's the end of the podcast.
Ben Walters
Thank you.
Music
[Golden Age of Hustlers by Justin Vivian Bond]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]