The View from the Cheap Seats (42 page)

W
ho am I?

It's a fine and legitimate question, one that haunted me when I was a boy. I would stare into the bathroom mirror and do my best to answer it, teasing information from my reflection, hoping for a clue. My face would be framed by the mirror: a glass shelf with toothbrushes on it beneath my face, tiled wall and frosted glass window behind me. I had too-short dark hair, one ear that stuck out from the side of my head and one ear that didn't, hazel eyes, red lips, a sprinkling of freckles across my nose.

I would stare and stare, puzzling over who I was, and what the relationship was between who I thought I was and who I really was and the face that was staring back at me. I knew I wasn't my face. If something terrible happened to me, like a fireworks accident, if I lost my face and spent my life bound in bandages like a mummy in a scary film, I'd still be me, wouldn't I? I never found an answer, not one that satisfied me. But I kept asking. I suppose I still am.

That was the first question. The second was even harder to answer. It was this:
Who are we?

And to answer it, I would open the family photo album. The photographs, black and white at the front, color in later volumes, had been carefully stuck into the family album with
photo-mounts on the corners, and handwritten notes beneath each photograph identified the subjects, and where and when the photograph had been taken. Glassine, semitransparent paper covered each page. There was something extremely formal about the photo albums. We were never permitted to play with them unsupervised, or to remove photographs. They were, when the time was right, produced by adults from high shelves or dark cupboards, only to be put away again once we had looked at them. They were not to be played with.

This is who we are,
the albums said to us,
and this is the story we are telling ourselves.

There were the dead, grave people in uncomfortable clothes, posed in black and white. There were the living, when they were so much younger as to be different people: the old people were young people then, in ill-fitting clothes and in places we could scarcely imagine. Here assembled, formal and stiff, are grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, weddings and engagements, silver and sepia, gray and black, and then, as time moves forward, the people and the poses drift into color and informality, the snapshots and the holiday shots and
look!
you can recognize the wallpaper and you realize that the proud grandparents are holding a baby that was you, once upon a time. And now you are here again, in context, pondering your infancy, and the people who surrounded you, and the world from which you have come. Then you put down the photo album and go back to your life, reassured, given a frame and a place. The images of our forebears and our loved ones give us context, they tell us who we are.

For years, I believed I had visited the National Portrait Gallery, because I had been to the National Gallery. After all, there were portraits on the walls, were there not? It was not until I was a grown man that I finally wandered the corridors and spaces of the National Portrait Gallery and realized that I had
never been there before. The embarrassment in my mistake was rapidly replaced by delight. I was glad I hadn't visited the Gallery as a boy: I would not have known who these people were, save for a handful of kings, and perhaps Shakespeare and Dickens. Now, it was like being handed an album of a family I knew too well.

Initially, I walked the galleries looking for the people I was familiar with—the ones whose stories I knew, the ones I wondered about, the ones I would have loved to have met. And then I moved wider, using the Gallery as a way of learning about people. Wondering, as I walked and as I stared, about the faces I passed: how they fit into the history of the country, why each person was there, and not someone else in their place. The faces became a dialogue, the paintings became a conversation.

The National Portrait Gallery is the nation's family album, I realized. It gives us context. It is our way of describing ourselves and our past to ourselves, our way of interrogating and explaining and exploring who we are, inspecting our roots in a way that is more than just looking at the places from which we come. There is landscape, and there is portrait, after all, and they are ways of explaining the orientation of a sheet of paper, and they are the ways we understand who we are: the places we came from, the people we were.

For years I had loved Constable's landscapes: the clouds, which seemed so much more cloudlike than any clouds I had ever seen, and which forced me to stare at clouds and wonder if they were art, and the trees, and the way the sense of place gave continuity: the Suffolk landscape, which could have been my own Sussex lanes and skies. Now, for the first time, I saw John Constable: I did not expect him to be handsome, or so pensive. And there was something odd about his eyes: they seemed to be focused on different places. I wondered if he had a lazy eye, as my daughter did when she was young, or if it was simply the way that Ramsay
Reinagle had presented him to us. I imagined what it must have been like to live inside that head, to see the world, and its clouds and skies and trees, through John Constable's strange eyes.

Some portraits were important because of who the subjects were. Others were important because of the artist. Still others were important because of the historical moment, because they were a record of their times, which are our times. Most images gain their power from the moment of intersection: painter and subject, time and history and context, ever-changing context. All come together as we walk the corridors of the National Portrait Gallery.

We look at a portrait and we begin to judge, because human beings are creatures of judgment. We judge the person being painted (a bad king? a good woman?) in the same way that we judge the artist, and occasionally we find ourselves judging them both, particularly when the subject is also the painter: Dame Laura Knight's self-portrait, a symphony in crimson and vermilion, shows the painter in perfect profile, flanked by the naked flanks of both a model and of the painting of the model. As a woman she was forbidden to attend life-drawing classes, and here she tells us that she is a woman, and she is a master at drawing from life. The technique is remarkable, the statement powerful.

Examine the Chevalier d'Eon. I mentioned him once in a story I wrote, having vaguely meant to put him into a tale: a cross-dressing spy, caught up in intrigue, royal proclamations and court cases. Legally pronounced female, apparently against his will. I knew all this, but I did not know how kind he looked. I know that if ever I write about him, this portrait, painted by Thomas Stewart after an original by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, who knew d'Eon, will change the way I tell his story.

As a writer, I find myself drawn to the writers: the Gallery's troubled portrait of the Brontë sisters is like something from a
mystery novel. On the left side of the painting, Anne and Emily, jaws set and defiant, on the right side the third sister, Charlotte, her face gentler, a half-smile at the edges of her lips. The three women of glorious gothic romanticism, describers of ex-wives in attics and runaways on moors; three women who wrote of haunted figures in just-as-haunted landscapes, in a portrait painted by their mysterious and dissolute brother, who was, we realize as we stare, once himself a character in the painting, the central figure around whom the three women cluster, but who is now painted out, replaced by a pillar. Still, a ghostly shape confronts us, like an after-image, or a reflection. The painter's lack of skill somehow adds to the power of the picture: this is not a portrait by a professional. It is a story, frozen and mysterious, and there were, I have no doubt, tears and harsh words involved in Branwell's painting himself out of the portrait. (Or did someone else paint over him? Is the pillar some kind of clue to a mystery most gothic?)

I know that photographs tell us things about the photographer, but I do not wonder about the photographers in the same way that I wonder about the painters, even when they have composed their photographs as elegantly as any classical portrait. Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of Alfred Tennyson, austere and windswept, taken on the Isle of Wight, is haunting. The background is a smudge, the hand holding a book reminds us of formal portraits of the religious, while the face is thoughtful and seems, to me at least, almost tragic. This is the man who would write “Crossing the Bar.”

Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark!
I think.
And may there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark
.

I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.

And as we come closer to now, as we come through modern (and what a beautiful, old-fashioned word that is), the paintings erupt and divide into contemporary movements and ways of seeing and of describing. Strict portraiture is given to photography, then taken back once more, and now we are in my lifetime and in the material of my life. The Brian Duffy portrait of David Bowie is as iconic as the
Aladdin Sane
record cover that I contemplated when I was twelve, certain that if I understood it and its lightning-bolt imagery, then I would understand all the waiting secrets of the adult world. Bowie's eyes are closed in the
Aladdin Sane
cover photo, but in this image, anisocoriac eyes stare, surprised, into the flash. Bowie seems more vulnerable. And, looking at an image that once symbolized all the mysteries of adulthood for me, I realize he looks so heartbreakingly young.

The joy and power of portraiture is that it freezes us in time. Before the portrait, we were younger. After it has been created we will age or we will rot. Even Marc Quinn's chilled nightmare self-portraits in liquid silicone and blood can only preserve a specific moment in time: they cannot age and die as Quinn does and will.

Ask the question,
Who are we?
and the portraits give us answers of a sort.

We came from here,
the old ones say.
These were our kings and queens, our wise ones and our fools.
We walk into the BP exhibition hall and they tell us who we are today: a confluence of artistic styles and approaches, of people we could pass in the streets.
We look like this, naked and clothed,
they tell us.
We are here, in this image, because a painter had something to say. Because we are all interesting. Because we cannot gaze into a mirror without being changed. Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone's eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

Perhaps it is not a portrait gallery. It is, as T. S. Eliot (hanging on the wall as a modernist scrawl of overpainted profiles) put it, a wilderness of mirrors.

If you want to know who we are, then take my hand and we will walk it together, and stare into each picture and object until, finally, we begin to see ourselves.

Originally published as an essay in the exhibition catalogue of
The BP Portrait Award, 2015.

I
want to describe Amanda Palmer, half of art-punk cabaret-rock band The Dresden Dolls, in a way that makes her seem like something exotic, but truly, it's hard for me to think of Amanda Palmer as exotic: I know her too well. We've been friends for three years, a couple for nearly two, and engaged to be married for the best part of a year now. In that time I've seen her play gigs of all sizes and all kinds, alone or with bands, playing piano or keyboards and, sometimes, a joke that got so far out of hand it became a Radiohead covers album, the ukulele. I've seen her play grand churches and basement dive bars (once on the same night going from chapel to dive bar), watched her play a seriously genderbent Emcee in
Cabaret
and half of the pair of conjoined twin sisters known as Evelyn Evelyn.

But I'd never seen The Dresden Dolls. They went on the sort of hiatus that most bands don't come back from about a month before I met Amanda for the first time.

I'd been a lazy sort of Dresden Dolls fan before that. I had their first two major-label CDs (but didn't even notice when they released
No, Virginia,
their third). They had a few songs on my “Stuff I Really Like” iPod playlist. I'd felt vaguely warm towards them after hearing Amanda was nice to my goddaughters Sky and Winter after a gig, and when I noticed that the Dolls put up the hatemail they had received (complete with occasional hatedrawings) on their website. I tried to see them
once, in 2005, when they played Sundance, but I had a panel on animation to attend when they were on, and I watched Nellie McKay instead.

When I started going out with Amanda I asked about The Dresden Dolls. She told me it was a pity that I'd missed them. They were
so
good, she said. Brian Viglione and her, well, it was special.

I was sure it was. But then she'd talk about Brian, the other half of The Dresden Dolls (Amanda played keyboards, Brian played mostly drums and sometimes guitar), and talk about their time on the road in the way someone talks about a bad marriage she's glad she's out of: they had been together all day and every day, and for 120 minutes of that time they had made the music that made her happy, and the rest of the time they drove each other crazy. They'd sometimes been lovers, or at least, they'd had a fair amount of sex over that seven years, and they'd sometimes been friends, but mostly they'd been The Dresden Dolls, a band on the road, united in a vision of art as liberation. And then in early 2008, they weren't.

Curious, I'd watched a YouTube video from the end of their final tour. Brian talks about why it was time for them to stop: “Why constantly fight?” he asks. “It's not a marriage. It's a band.” Cut to Amanda: “It's like being brother and sister and married and business partners and then put in a box where you have to see each other twenty-four hours a day,” she says. They both look tired and they look done.

But time heals. Or at least it forms scabs.

Which explains why I am standing on the balcony at Irving Plaza at Hallowe'en, at the first gig of The Dresden Dolls reunion tour, watching two young ladies, wearing mostly glitter, Hula-Hooping in the dark with glowing Hula-Hoops, watched by an audience of clowns and zombies and mad hatters and such, and I don't actually know where the Hallowe'en costumes end and the dressing up to see The Dresden Dolls begins.

Amanda appears on the balcony to watch the support band, the Legendary Pink Dots. They were her favorite band as a teenager, gave the Dolls their first break. She's happy that they are playing to twelve hundred people who would never have seen them otherwise. She holds my hand, introduces me to the man who introduced her and Brian at a Hallowe'en party exactly a decade before, and slips back into the shadows.

The next time I see her, she's on the stage wearing a red kimono over a Hallowe'en sweater she bought in June in the Wisconsin Dells. The sweater has a scarecrow on the back. She's wearing a red military cap, and when, two songs in, she takes off the sweater and the kimono to play in skin and a black bra, she has the word
LOVE
written in eyeliner across her chest. Brian is dressed in a black vest, black trousers.

The first strange thing about watching the Dolls is the feeling of immediate recognition. The “Oh, I get it. This is what the songs are
meant
to sound like.” As if the drumming makes sense of something, or translates it back into the language it was originally written in.

The second strange thing about the Dolls is this: it's very obviously a band that consists of two percussion players. They are two people who hit things. She hits the keys, he hits the drums.

And the third, and strangest, thing about the Dolls is that they are, when they play, quite obviously, telepathic, like a couple who can finish each other's sentences. They know each other and the songs so well that it's all there, in muscle memory and in their heads and in the subliminal cues that the rest of the world is never going to see. I'd never really got that until now. I'd puzzled over why, if the songs needed a drummer, Amanda didn't simply go and get a drummer. But drumming is only part of what Brian's doing. He's commenting, performing, pantomiming, playing, yin to Amanda's yang. It's a remarkable, virtuoso, glorious thing to see them play together.

They play “Sex Changes.” They play “Missed Me,” and the
audience are pumping their fists, zombies and superheroines and Pennywise the clown, and I think,
I've heard her play this song so many times. I've seen her cross a hall with a marching band behind her playing this song. She's done it with a full orchestra. And this is better than any of them.

Two nights later, on the phone, after the Boston gig, she tells me how irritated she is with people who tell her that they like The Dresden Dolls better than her solo performances, and I feel guilty.

I'm starting to understand why she went on her first tour with a dance troupe, even though it guaranteed the tour would make no money, why she would go on tour as conjoined twins with Jason Webley and a single dress that fitted both of them. I can see how much of what she's been doing onstage was looking for things that replaced, not Brian, but the energy of Brian, putting something else on the stage that's more than just a girl and a keyboard.

She introduces Brian, tells off security for trying to take a fan's camera: “We have an open photo policy.”

A change of energy: they perform Brecht/Weill's “Pirate Jenny,” and Brian acts it out as he conjures the ocean with the drumming. As the Black Freighter ships off to sea, and Jenny whispers that “On it is me,” the hall is perfectly quiet.

A girl shouts, “I love you, Amanda.”

A man shouts, “I love you, Brian.”

The Long sisters, friends of Amanda's, both made up dead, Casey with a bullet hole in her forehead, Danni's face a mess of stage blood, come and stand beside me.

“We love every single fucking one of you in this whole fucking room,” says Amanda, using her favorite intensifier.

The Dresden Dolls play Carole King's song of Maurice Sendak's “Pierre.” The moral is “Care,” and I don't think either Brian or Amanda can stop caring for a moment: about the gig, about the other's playing, about a decade of good times and bad
times and petty offenses and anger and disappointment and seven years of really, really good gigs.

Amanda goes into the chords of “Coin-Operated Boy,” a song that too often, solo, feels like a novelty song, and, played by Amanda and Brian together, it brings the house down: less of a song and more of an act of symbiosis, as they try to wrong-foot each other. It's funny and it's moving and it's like nothing else I've ever seen,

By now Amanda is a mop of hair and skin in a bra, Brian is a topless sheen of sweat and a grin. They launch into Auto-Tune the News's musical version of the “Double Rainbow” speech, as hundreds of balloons fall, and it's as foolish as it's smart and either way it's perfectly delightful.

“The Jeep Song.” I don't think I've ever heard Amanda play this live. They grab half a dozen fans and pull them up onstage for backing vocals.

Then it's “Sing.” If there ever was a Dresden Dolls anthem, it's this: a plea to make art, whatever the hell else you do. “Sing for the teacher who told you that you couldn't sing,” sings Amanda. The audience sings along, and it feels important, less of a sing-along and more like communion or a credo, and we're all singing and it's Hallowe'en and I'm up on the balcony slightly drunk, thinking that this is some sort of wonderful, and Amanda's shouting, “You motherfuckers, you'll sing someday,” and it's all so good, and I'm standing with two dead girls, and we're cheering and happy and it's one of those perfect moments that don't come along in a lifetime that often, the kind of moment you could end a movie on.

The first encore: Brian's on guitar, Amanda's now wearing a golden bra, crawling out onto the speaker-stacks to sing “Mein Herr” from
Cabaret
. Then a crazed, wonderful improvisation that slowly crashes into Amanda's song about parents, “Half Jack.” “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” said Philip Larkin long before either of The Dresden Dolls was born, in a line that
sounded like it could have swaggered out of an Amanda Palmer song, and “Half Jack” is just all about that. Jack Palmer, Amanda's father, is up on the balcony near me, beaming proudly.

A drunk touches my shoulder and congratulates me during the flailing madness of “Girl Anachronism.” Or I think he's congratulating me. “How do you sleep at night?” he asks. “It must be like catching lightning in a jar.”

And I say yes, I suppose it must be, and that I sleep just fine.

The band crashes into “War Pigs” as a final number, and it's huge and bombastic and heartfelt, and Amanda and Brian are playing like one person with two heads and four hands, and it's all about the beat and the roar, and I watch the crowd in their lunatic, wonderful Hallowe'en costumes drink it in until the final explosive rumble of drums has faded away.

I love the gig. I love everything about it. I feel like I've been made a gift of seven years of Amanda's life, The Dresden Dolls years before I knew her. And I'm in awe of what The Dresden Dolls are, and what they do.

And when it's all over, and it's two a.m. and we are back in the hotel and the adrenaline is fading, Amanda, who has been subdued and awkward since the gig finished, starts crying, silently, uncontrollably, and I hold her, not sure what to say.

“You saw how good it was tonight?” she asks as she cries, and I tell her that, yes. I did, and for the first time it occurs to me how bad it must have got to make her leave something that meant that much to her, that made so many people happy.

Her cheeks are black with wet eye makeup and it's smearing on the sheets and the pillow as she sobs and I hold her tight, and try with all my might to understand.

This article was written for
Spin
magazine, and originally published on their website on November 5, 2010.