I'm guessing that not all of my regular readers are regular readers of Alice Bachini. (And vice versa of course.) If so, had I not linked to them, they might have missed these Quentin Crisp quotes, of which this one is my favourite:
I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
And my personal favourite Crisp quote of all, if I remember it right, goes something like this. He was accosted in a bus or some such public place by a group of belligerent young men, or it may have been a belligerent middle aged lady, who asked, belligerently, "Who are you???" His reply, clearly much used and like his appearance something he prepared earlier:
Who indeed?
A few more Crisp quotes here.
You get the feeling that, provided he was all kitted up, Crisp liked being photographed. In fact I believe he regarded being photographed as a kind of public service. (Crisp was also a quite good graphic artist, which I didn't know until now.)
Which reminds me that, in Britain (and elsewhere?), many of us fondly remember the TV play called The Naked Civil Servant, not least because it kick-re-started the acting career of John Hurt. This was shown in the days when starring as a very obviously homosexual homosexual would be "career suicide" for a leading man of the Hurt sort. Said Hurt at the time: "What career?" He has been interestingly busy ever since (most recently as the star of the TV Alan Clarke Diaries.)
Not long after doing Crisp, Hurt got the on-the-face-of-it completely non-Crispian part of the bloke from whose stomach the Alien first emerged. I wonder, did he get that part because he had played Crisp? Did the John Hurt persona, from The Naked Civil Servant onwards, suggest a normal looking guy who harboured a monster within?
Now they're all at it. The last time I observed Michael Douglas at work, he was doing a turn on Will and Grace as a gay police detective. The publicity profile of a leading man cannot now be said to be complete until some suggestions of gayness have been sprinkled into the mix.
This obviously means that Western Civilisation now teaters on the brink of collapse. But doesn't it always? Isn't that part of its charm?
