Bridget Bardot, Gobbledygook in Art, Greens Under the Bed

                                          People

“The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life. This worship of celebrity …suffocated me…I don’t know what it means to sit quietly in a bistro, on a terrace, or in the theatre without being approached by someone.”

(Bridget Bardot, in Tears of Battle: An Animals Rights Memoir.)


Gobbledygook in Art

The Sleepless Alliance resists the parasomniac dystopias of current political genealogies, as an exercise of non-fiction. Taking the position of the tangible dreamer, invited artists experiment with producing concrete future imaginaries, through fabulation, improvisation and resilient commonality…Inciting alliances and proposed wakefulness, the exhibition agitates for radical re-composition of existing relations, as it repeats the mantra – the future is not given.

(Art exhibition, Pembroke College, Oxford, in Private Eye No 1492)

Indeed. Crystal clear communication.

*Through the apprehensible dimensions of experience, in the shadows of form, these works enable us to intuit and experience the complexity of that which is utterly indefinable and allow a space where the unknowable might emerge.

(Lisson Gallery website announcing a new exhibition by Anish Kapoor, Private Eye, 1497)

Despair, Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson (1887-1941)
Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

The Greens

Several readers have written to ask me about the origins of the expression “greens under the bed”. It is often used in a slightly mocking way, as when somebody is accused of being only too ready to “find greens under every bed”.

…The answer, as with many etymologies, is based on actual practice – in this case the widespread, if not well-known habit, of members of the Green Party of sleeping under the bed when staying in hotels at conferences. Most hotel guests sleep on top of the bed, but the Greens, being sensitive to the impact of the laundry processes, are known to sleep under the bed in order to save sheets from being laundered.

The expression “to look for greens under the bed” is therefore a simple reflection of actual reality. In McCarthyite times there may well have been reds under beds, but they have now been replaced by greens.

(Alexander McCall Smith, The i, 2.4.2019)

You’re having a laugh, aren’t you, Alex?