'Dandy' denied entry to US dies after his play opens in London

Excuse the Onion dot com style headline, but I’m trying to get some attention. Because it seems to me sometimes, as this site’s only real up-close observer of London cultural life, (and this from the safe distance of Budapest, 900 miles away) so much flits across my proverbial screen, but this is one that I just could not let slip – the accidental death from a heroin overdose by soi disant artist Sebastian Horsley.

In case you haven’t heard of him, or need reminding, Sebastian Horsley was an art exhibitionist whose exhibition was himself. For one thing, he had himself crucified, literally, at a ceremony in the Philippines in 2002. He also wrote a memoir a few years ago called Dandy in the Underworld, in which he chronicled his chronic addiction to heroin (I suppose there’s no other kind) and his almost commensurate appetite for sex with prostitutes, as well as revelations about a love affair with a tough Scottish gangster and his own period spent working as a male escort.

When his agent decided to send Horsley to New York to publicise the book, Horsley went aboard the plane togged in his usual attire; which is to say stovepipe top hat, regency era crushed velvet suit and so on. After a 9 hour ‘interview’ with the INS, he was put back on a plane to London. If he felt sorry for himself about it afterwards, he certainly didn’t let it show. The border patrol had turned him back for ‘moral turpitude’ and Horsley joked that it should have been for “Gross moral turpitude”.

Why London has the jump on New York

It’s not just that we get out of bed earlier, but it is that simple. You’re allowed to fail in London. In fact, you can even be lauded for it, if you fail in sufficiently grand a fashion.

Jeffrey Bernard - unwell

I’ve written before about one of the most entertaining nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre, watching Peter O’Toole essay the role of a dipsomaniac British journalist in the eponymous play ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’. Taken from a byline that would appear in The Spectator when the great man was too hungover to file his column, the play celebrates a life spent ‘reaching for the ground’. He looks back fondly on arriving in Soho, and from that moment on, ‘never looking forward’, in an era when you could end up, (I’m paraphrasing) ‘drunk, miserable and alone on less than a fiver’.

These days it’ll cost you a bit more than a fiver to attain that condition, and you’ll have to smoke your Woodbines outside in the freezing cold, but something of the old Soho still remains. And long may it do so.

Of course, whenever he could find a magazine to stump for the fares and digs, Bernard loved going to New York.

Keith Richards quits drinking…

Jet-Set Hobo reels in shock.

‘Sir’ Mick Jagger accepting a knighthood and becoming a gym junkie was one thing. Ron Wood making a fool of himself over nubile Russians is another. All too predictable. Jagger always was the business man of the group, and Ron, well, he’s your true sex-addicted satyr. And fair play to ‘em both. Far be it for me to ridicule a man because of his vices.

But according to both The Guardian and The Sun, the man famous (among other things) for being surgically attached to a bottle of Jack Daniels has finally kicked the sauce, and has been teetotal for at least four months.

You’ll know if you check the links, that the Sun and the Graunian headlines are a couple of weeks old. I only found them because, bored, I was led there by not particularly interesting story about that puppyish hero-worshipper Johnny Depp making a film about another of his bad boy role models.

Still, I don’t know how I can have missed this staggering development, unless I was, well, pissed at the time. As in pissed drunk, my American readers.

Gloomy Sunday in Beirut

My loyal fans, all three of you, may have been wondering about the prolonged absence of the Jet-Set Hobo. Suffice to say, it has all gone pear-shaped here in Beirut.

As of tomorrow, I am once again a free agent, I am between engagements. Or to put in another way, unemployed. Probably it’s all my fault. Not in all honesty that I’ll be terribly sorry to leave the Lebanon. A bit of this place goes a looooooong way. The hobo has been routed, defeated, trounced, traduced, and put through the wringer. He has learned something about himself along the way however. In short, it is this. Without briefcases full of cash, a personal driver and an apartment with a uniformed doorman, he’s just not tough enough for day-to-day life in Beirut. And right now those kinds of accoutrements are somewhat out of reach. It has been a long, cold recession for this roving scribe and bon vivant, and on this rainy Sunday evening in Beirut, it’s hard to see the light at the tunnel except as a train heading towards us, as we struggle, tied to the tracks.

Whichever way you slice it, my implosion in Beirut represents another broken dream for the collection. Conventional wisdom has it that in life you only regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do. But that’s a load of tripe, I’m here to tell you.

The video link is to the trailer of A Cafe in the Sky, a little arthouse film I carried like a cross on my back for longer than I care to recall, but which of course has never made a dime. The tune is Gloomy Sunday, which is appropriate, and it’s the gloomiest possible version, which is also apposite.

Anyway, in a few days I fly to London. Oh my word. Whatever comes next, it will be a pleasant, initial change to be somewhere the electricity and hot water is reliable, internet speeds are faster than continental drift and I’m not regarded with something between bewilderment and suspicion when I walk the streets or into a cafe or bar. I have been trying to keep a brave face, at least in Facebook status updates, but it’s been getting to me.

Stiff upper lip and onwards and upwards. I do hope to send more chipper tidings from London, though too many of my pals over are there are writing me grim missives about job cuts and recession and you know, ‘broken bloody Britain’. For broken, they should try the Lebanon, where for example just this afternoon in the office, the electricity, gas, phone lines and internet have all cut off at various points. Spare me.