Vada Scoparti's Diary

ANSELM KIEFER - LOT'S WIFE, 1989

Sorry I haven't been in touch for a while. I've been busy with work, busy with partying and busy with getting busy. LOL. So I met a new guy. At first I was somewhat hesitant, because he is like, black, but actually he's quite a nice guy. And the rumours are true.* 

So anyway, we met at Baa Bar, and he started daggering me to that Kid Cudi tune. Turns out he's on my course, I know, right? Weird, cos there's only three black guys on the course so I'm surprised he hasn't noticed me before. Back to Baa Bar though, I think the clincher was that he had some fucking mega meow meow. 


*He's fucking hung.

Famous Paintings Explained

Gian Girolamo Savoldo - La Maddalena, c.1535-40, Oil on canvas, National Gallery

 

Returning to the sepulchre, this image captures Mary Magdalen in turning to see the barely clothed Christ who has just risen again. In this sensual, sexually charged depiction, the artist juxtaposes his own lascivious desires with a novel yet wildly misinformed interpretation of a verse from St. Luke's Gospel. The passage in question loosely narrates the point that the Magdalen emerges from the shadows of uncertainty to recognise the resurrected Christ, calling him 'Rabboni', the Hebrew for 'teacher'. 

However, due a monumental mistranslation somewhere along the line, Savoldo was led to believe that the Magdalen had in fact growled lecherously at Christ - 'Raaaar, bone me!' Recent X-Ray scans of the painting have uncovered some telling revelations, notably that originally Mary Magdalen had been portrayed removing her suspenders and readying herself to receive - which accounts for the fact that her left knee is raised up close to her face (and is not, as some critics have said, her right arm). 

The fervently pious patron rejected the image however, and so to save the commission Savoldo was forced to cover the Magdalen with the silver cloak seen shimmering on the canvas today. 

Ardent Speculation

'That's the main problem with the Trident Drizzler you see,' postulates Dave as he clambers out of the shower scratching his greying whiskers. 'With the T400 you don't get this kind of limescale build-up, but with older models I'm afraid things aren't so jazzy.' The latest in a long line of unwashed householders stares at him blankly. 

'How has my Eton education left me such a wet spanner?' Dave soliloquises as he restores the dripping tools to the Berlingo. And so he pooters along through Hammersmith on his way to the next job sighing as he passes a snake of voters outside a polling station. Alas! So many painful memories, so many heart-wrenching visions of what could of been!

'Fucking fuck!' concludes Gordon as he fumbles around for the tap. Having never quite become accustomed to blindness he has just taken a shit in the bath for the second time in a week. Downstairs Sarah is again twisting the knife in the Ed Balls voodoo doll to no avail. 

Nick on the other hand stretches his feet out over the desk at No. 10. He is on the line to Mark Zuckerberg and Myspace Tom to thank them for their unwavering support in his successful second campaign. Vince meanwhile downloads pictures of women in varying states of undress, their modesty preserved only by the occasional pocket calculator. 

 

ARTWORK (FROM TOP) -

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, GODDESS 13, 2006-7

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, TIGER, 2006-7

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, SOLA ON HORSE, 2006-7

January

Vada Scoparti's Diary

There hasn’t been much productivity here recently considering that the majority of the writing staff has been sitting in the library sobbing into the pages of books on Renaissance etiquette. If you expect to me to apologise, stop. In fact, I really have much better things to do right now. To introduce to the fray is our new columnist - the sassy sashaying student soliloquist, Vada Scoparti. Hence: 

I indulged in a most unsavoury liaison at Vodrevs Tuesday last. He wasn’t an Adonis but I saw he was dressed well so, TVRs flowing (if it’s too complicated an acronym then you belong in the proletariat), I thought it apt to go home with him. Honestly I was absolutely out of it, I must have had literally a gram of meph on top of that, so one couldn’t very well be blamed for falling into so promiscuous a trap, nor if I make any minor discrepancies in this story (which I assure you I won’t). The house. Was. Filthy. Ohmygod - I had to leave the Kurt Geigers by the door simply because of the state of the carpet.

Making a god-awful semantic nightmare of ‘salacious’, among other lengthy words beyond his comprehension, he wooed me to the cesspit he called his bedroom. I stopped by the bathroom beforehand however. Now, who in their right mind lives in a cold house and doesn’t have a wooden lavatory seat? What am I meant to do with porcelain, let my buttocks freeze to the seat? I am not wont to such blue-collar displeasures.

I got over this. But then the shit really hit the pan: Sainsbury’s Basics toilet tissue. BASICS. 2 shitting ply. Ohmygod. What kind of despicable oaf expects me, of all people, to wipe with such dross? I kicked aside some filthy clothes, finished his drugs and took my leave, slamming the door and harumphing loudly enough that he got the message.

As a mark of my disdainful contempt, I did not flush. 

VADA SCOPARTI

FAMOUS PAINTINGS EXPLAINED No.2

Bill Hammond - The Fall of Icarus, 1995. Acrylic on canvas.

Tears of acrylic seep down the canvas, sliding desperately down the painting into a white abyss, eternal nothingness. The drips remind me of a desperate man clawing for purchase on a cliff face. Unsuccessfully. The painting is meant to represent man’s effect on these elegant birds’ habitats - they sit powerless in the dead trees as pollution melts their world away, a despairing view of hopelessness through watery eyes.

But that’s what Hammond wants you to think. What people don’t realise is that he’s actually one of Anna Wintour’s harshest critics. You see, Hammond has an unfounded and totally irrational hatred of her, but has disguised this for years behind the ingenious veil of worrying about climate change and all that la-di-da. All the birds are in fact sullen little Anna Wintours watching her aging face in the mirror droop down the canvas (her cheekbones). So in fact, the abyss is the irrevocable past, and the long trickles of paint are Wintour's looks cascading into it, where they will remain. Ouch. 

As in The Merchant of Venice - 'truth will out'. Other interesting revelations that have come to light this month include the news that John Flaxman's Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus (1810), contrary to its lengthy title, actually depicts the most bodacious happy-slap of antiquity - the famous 'diving bitchslap' pioneered by the Athenians in the 5th century BC (below). 

THOMAS

=\\ JUSTINE LAI //=

It could feasibly be argued that I'm turning into an old man at 20 given the way I react to some things these days. I thought I was pretty liberal, but sometimes I surprise myself. With this in mind, one of the main reasons I like the Californian Justine Lai's project Join Or Die is that it can be cheeky and provocative, but not so much that the paintings cause offence, or leave you pissed off for the rest of the day. No gratuitous bell-ends, no casual vagina and most importantly no kids with dildos for noses. No, I'm sick and tired of that kind of stuff, only there for shock - no artistic merit whatsoever. What am I meant to say at a Chapman brothers exhibition? 'Great, you went to the trouble of putting a cock on the face of a child mannequin.......so?' I can tell I'm going to get terribly sidetracked here - it's time for me to 'get my fuck on' as the late Tupac Shakur once put it, and so eloquently too. So without further ado: Fuck you, Chapman brothers. 


The same goes for Gilbert and George. Fuck you, Gilbert and George. How in the HELL did they get so successful? Am I so sad and boring that I can't see the funny side of two creepy old guys blowing up colourful photographs of each other's wilting genitals and calling the works things like Blood, death, shit, semen? Well really. 

Lai started Join Or Die in 2006 with the aim of painting herself having sex with every US president in chronological order, and it works. It's amusing, different and attractively and skillfully painted too. Furthermore, there isn't any unnecessary genitalia, which would ruin the charm of her work. Yes, they're actually nice to look at don't you think? God I sound old. Fuck that too. The following innuendo-laced quote is indicative of Lai's way of teasingly fingering the boundaries of good taste without feeling the puerile need to bend them over and force-fuck them (think Gaybert and Gay and and the Gayman brothers*)


"I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated." - JUSTINE LAI

*Had to do that to make myself feel less old.


THOMAS

MANCHESTER RANT TWO

The painting above is by David Inshaw, a former member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, and has absolutely nothing to with this article, except that I envy the quintessentially English serenity enjoyed by the two badminton players. 


It's a quiet Friday night for me, I've been working all day and all I'd like to do is rest. Not even rest hard like most people do at this time of the week, but just sit in front of the television eating something inane and watching something even more so, but apparently it's frowned upon to do that around these parts. 


I've just come back from a short walk incorporating a visit to the local Sainsbury's, apparently the place to go to have one's choice of evening entertainment churlishly mocked. I'm going home to London tomorrow to spend the week with my girlfriend, so sorry for not 'going large' the night before (see My Boyfriend Is A Dick for why). So you may now imagine me, standing in the queue, holding a modest four-pack of beers and a microwave meal. For one. 


I was staring into space and daydreaming as I got to the checkout and proffered said items to Stuart, my indefatigably helpful cashier for the day. Now, it's a fucking supermarket, do I have to have my wits about me every minute of every day, especially after spending hours learning why a fourteenth century Italian courtier should possibly want to be good at archery and ballroom dancing at the same time? And then he popped the question. 


"Night in alone eh?" Asks Stu with a patronising chortle. Urgh. One of his colleagues laughs, and sharing the amusement are three scantily clad female students (inappropriately so considering their generous proportions) each clutching their own crate of Strongbow, who titter asininely. What if I needed ingredients for a salad and happened also to have dry lips? What kind of reaction would I get if I put a cucumber and a tub of vaseline on the counter? For fuck's sake. 


I guess I must live the reclusive life of a total loser, and I was thinking that from now on I should use the self service checkouts so as to avoid the fatuous scrutiny of my shopping (or just to avoid any contact with other humans altogether) when I thought: No, you know what? Fuck you Stuart, fuck you his bald colleague and not forgetting the girls, FUCK you, you three, fat, soon-to-be-drunk bitches. 


I'm going downstairs to put the microwave to good use and listen to Minor Threat. It had better be a good fucking meal. Over and out. 

MANCHESTER RANT ONE

Manchester is home to two massive universities - the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan (three if you count Salford), so the city is great for students. The only problem is there are fucking thousands of them. Living in a student area like I stupidly do, it’s impossible to avoid them.

Tonight was a Monday night, and there was gash on the lash everywhere. Now I’m not a sit at home loser, I don’t even smoke pot anymore, but come on. I’m game for a party Friday and Saturday night, Thursday too, and maybe Wednesday. Okay Tuesday as well if there’s something good on. But Monday night? What could there possibly be worth going and getting fucked for on a Monday? You see drunk girls wobbling across the middle of the road, their fat fleshy arses illuminated in a car’s headlights as it has to slow down and herd them along like cattle. Oh no! Stacey’s broken a heel and now can’t walk because she’s too fucking obese and wasted. I don’t care, fuck you. Just don’t puke on my shoes while I help you stand up again.

So it’s 24/7 this stuff. Am I a psychopath if I have happy daydreams of watching all the shit clubs they go to burning down with them inside? There’d be me cackling on a rooftop somewhere to myself - ‘Tiger Tiger burning bright, Aquapop also alight, etc....’ I’d be listening to ‘The End’ by the Doors, except playing it backwards with my finger on a record player and throwing petrol doused faggots at virgins on the cobbled streets below.

Enough of that - I’m not trying to open myself up to a psychiatrist, or tell the court why I did it. But maybe you can sympathize with me, like I evidently can them - in life you face many difficult situations, so am I a bad person for wanting to smash some heads between a rock and a hard place? OK sorry I said enough. 

TEENAGE DREAMS

Everyone knows the saying 'live life to the full because you never know that one day you might walk into the road and get hit by a bus.' Yeah well me and that saying have a special little relationship, because it happened to me a few years ago. I was about 17 and drinking White Lightning or something similarly homeless near the Junction with one of my best mates, when we decided we'd go off to his place north of the river. Being the good, sensible little boy that I was, I phoned Mother Dearest to tell her I wouldn't be back until the morning. As I was on the phone, the bus came and I couldn't for some reason get my wallet out so I just told my friend I'd get on the next one. Biggest mistake of my life. 

As I was waiting, Mr Cuntfucking Biggest Asshole of all time (from Lewisham, urgh) came and asked me for change. Weighing this guy's appearance up, I decided to walk off, but he kept fucking following and pestering me. At this point I should say that my justification for this decision and some pretty stupid ones that followed it were probably due to the White Shitening, which I have only ever drunk since on one occasion, after which I was woken up by my fringe and forehead getting soaked as my calmly sleeping face splashed into the toilet bowl. I own class, me. So anyway, I kept getting followed, and we ended up on some estate where he was going to roll a joint or something for us. I said I didn't want any, and this must have pissed him off because the next thing I knew he had one of his hands going through my pockets and the other repeatedly punching me in the head. 

As you can imagine, I didn't enjoy this. The thought did cross my mind that I could have been about to lose my anal virginity, but don't worry, that came later by the hands of some Asian dude called Kerpal or something like that. I decided the best thing to do would be to leg it, and seeing a group of people outside the estate and on the other side of the road I reckoned I'd be safe if I ran to them, he wasn't going to mess with five or six people. In an inspired move, I got free and sprinted into the road, only looking for traffic after I was in the middle. I looked right, and missed a Transit van by literally about half a metre, and then coming over the crest of the hill from the left (it hadn't been there when I'd jumped into the road) was a huge passenger coach coming at about 30 mph. I suppose if I was going to do this, I may as well have done it properly, and I'm glad I got hit by one of the biggest fuckers on the road, not some pussy hatchback or saloon. It was literally like being hit by a moving brick wall, the face of the thing was totally flat. I reckon I must have been hit in the leg, flown a few metres and landed on my face. The worst bit is that I wasn't concussed, so I remember it all, the headlights, the hit, the taste of the road, everything. The thought of my teeth grinding along the tarmac still makes me shiver, and I hate that kerb bit in American History X now. 

I got up straight away and walked about a bit before it really sunk in, I was so in shock. Then the blood, Jesus it was everywhere, I wasn't doing things by halves. Some poor woman came up to me and asked if I wanted anyone phoned. I said to phone my friend (I wasn't too intelligible with teeth and bone hanging out everywhere) and tell him I probably wasn't going to make it to his that night, but forgot about phoning my parents, I wasn't really thinking too straight then. The ambulance ride was horrible, but morphine's actually pretty good, why do you think Snoop Dogg smokes medicinal weed? The NHS has got that shit on lock. My Mum got to the hospital, but declined to take a picture when I asked her, I was pretty bummed out by that. Then the nurses insisted on cutting my brand new shirt off (I had not a single chest injury, my face took the fall). I managed to persuade them to leave it, and so I just lay there staring at the ceiling in despair as my stressed out mother thanked God that I was alive. The girl in the bed to the left of me couldn't speak English and was in for a drug overdose/attempted suicide whilst the guy on the right had multiple stab wounds. I love living sometimes. 

That's about it really, I was pretty immobile for the next couple of days. The only further embarrassments/total losses of dignity include drinking a pint through a straw, having some guy shove medicine up my ass, spurting a pretty good jet of claret everywhere when I had my drip removed, not recognising myself in the mirror, having my mum bathe me at 17 and staring at some old guy's stinking, overflowing catheter bag for two days. I don't think I've been lower to be honest, but I got some nice cards and rumour spread that I was in a coma which is always pretty fun.