Crumbling Glamour Trentham Gardens - V McGarvey - cc-by-2025
Just found this I wrote it in 2018. I'm not sure how I feel about it now...
Yes, Sunday. That pondering meandering of days. Thinking about the week ahead, reflecting on the week gone, no homework but having that homework feeling, that leads to the inevitable pre-Monday feeling. I started thinking about glamour today. I watched Funny Face for the first time yesterday. A facile film with great style. Audrey fresh at 28 and Fred fresh at 58. No questioning the romantic age gap between these two, all very innocent, in this 60-year-old film, with its odd reference to the avant-garde it being in Paris and all that.
I watched the making of Cabaret on Friday off work with viral flu-ridden little energy for anything else. Followed by Fiddler on the Roof 10 years after Funny Face what a difference what a classic. A lot of time to think this weekend. Listening to cabaret playlists watching films and thinking, thinking, thinking. Is there a way out, do I want a way out? Where is the glamour? I’m not talking designer bags, new outfits but the dreamy glamour, where have my glamorous dreams gone. Waiting in a cafĂ© in Amsterdam, singing in a Jazz Bar in Berlin, living in that airy white apartment in Palma, eating out with friends and family in that shady street in Lisbon, where has it gone. Is it because cognitively at 50 your brain says that dreaming is wasted on the old. I watched the film "45 Years" last night and there was a line something like when did we start remembering the things we used to like, but maybe it should be stop remembering,
I don’t want to be famous, and I don’t wish for infamy, I want flexibility. I want to say FU to the people who start corroding my glamour, the people who make reality bite. I am not saying that I want to ignore all the difficulties in the world, but glamour is simplicity. I watched Nigel Slater in Lebanon eating a simple flatbread breakfast with a modest family, to me that was glamour. The appreciation of a simple approach to life. I support youth and their ambition that is what youth is about anything is possible. As you get older you need another word for ambition I cannot think about that at the moment, so I will just use the word glamour. I am frustrated with the horror in the world and I will support those who want to fight inhumanity, they did it glamorously through cabaret in Berlin in the 1930s, in the basements of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, the student unions in 70s and 80s. It’s about doing not dreaming, and if you are not doing, accepting.
That’s Sunday.