AUTOBULLSHIT AND ILLUSION
Why the greatest threat to the creative is themself (via Bob Dylan, Larry Charles and a terrible lunch at the best restaurant in the world)
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1.
Imagine getting to write with Bob Dylan! That’s what happened to a man named Larry Charles.
To call Charles a fan of Dylan would be an understatement. In his memoir, Comedy Samurai, he calls Dylan “one of the most important and brilliant minds in the history of civilisation.” In case you think he’s exaggerating, Charles lets us know, “I’m not exaggerating.”
Dylan wanted to make a TV comedy. Charles, who was connected by family to Dylan’s manager, was a highly respected comedy writer and director: he’s won two Emmys (and been nominated for twelve) and a Golden Globe (and been nominated for eight); at the time of his encounter with Dylan, he’d worked on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He would go on to direct the Sacha Baron Cohen movies, Borat and Bruno.
At an early creative meeting, Dylan brought with him an ornate box filled with “dozens and dozens of scraps of paper”, each with a handwritten note on it. These scraps of paper were deemed so important that they had to be returned to the ornate box at the end of every creative session and taken away again. They contained aphorisms, made-up names and non-sequiturs, all written in scribbles. “Seemingly random and incongruous and arbitrary they formed the basis of our project.” Charles pulled out one note that said “Uncle Sweetheart” and then pulled out another note that had some other nugget of nonsense on it and said, “The character can be named Uncle Sweetheart and he can say this.”
Dylan was gobsmacked. “You can do that?”
“Why not?” said Charles.
They spent months writing this way, sometimes for twelve hours a day. It was decided their project – “a sci-fi spaghetti western musical comedy” – would be a movie. Dylan wanted to call it “Masked and Anonymous.” Charles wasn’t convinced: “Are you sure?” But Dylan said yes, so he agreed. “I was a believer,” explains Charles. “Bob was conjuring spirits from another realm. He was pure instinct. No second-guessing. Fearless as an artist. And he taught me to take that final step and be the same. Trust your instincts. That’s all you have. Everything else is bullshit and illusion.”
Larry Charles is a man of undoubted taste, talent and drive. He is unusually successful at what he does. But reading his account of the making of Masked and Anonymous I thought, “but, hang on. This is going to be shit.”
2.
A couple of years ago, as a birthday treat, Farrah took me to the best restaurant in the world. I couldn’t wait. Fine dining is my indulgence. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t take drugs, I don’t have any really expensive habits. Except that, whenever I travel, I make a point of eating (usually alone) at a Michelin starred restaurant.
This was going to be one of the greatest meals of my life. Lunch at Noma!
We arrived on a freezing, cloudy day in February, to be sat in a room that felt like a museum canteen – plain, flat, joyless and washed through with the dead light of Winter. We then spent three hours being served a parade of cold, vinegary finger food. Only four out of the sixteen dishes were warm (and some of those merely tepid). As a precondition of our lunchtime booking, we were forced into paying for the drinks pairing. Ours, non-alcoholic, cost £357 (each!) and felt dominated by vinegary, salty kombuchas and teas that tasted, as Farrah put it, like “someone had put their Marlboro Red out” in them. An early course – a brain custard – tasted of not very much and had an unpleasant grainy texture. We overheard the table next door to us making the same complaint. We left our brain custards half eaten, only to be patronised by an unsmiling waitress – “Not comfortable with offal?” About halfway through this confusing ordeal, I stood up to go to the bathroom and was ordered by another waitress to return to my table as the next course was about to be served. This was unorthodox. Kind of cunty. But at least, it seemed, I’d be getting something hot. But no, it was a small plate of reindeer penis ragu, served cold – the diced meat mixed with large quantities of some kind of seed, it tasted bland and felt in the mouth like a health bar that had been left in the fridge to collapse overnight into something gritty, slimy and formless.
I am not especially conservative in my tastes. I don’t care about eating brain and penis. I have ordered and enjoyed horse sashimi and beef tendon and crumbed lamb’s brain; probably the single best dish I’ve ever eaten is Bernard Loiseau’s Golden Veal Sweetbread. But I believe good food is about flavour, texture and temperature. Noma failed at all three.
Our lunch cost nearly £1200.
It was bullshit and illusion.
3.
In 2010, a team of psychologists published a paper called “Hidden wisdom or pseudo-profound bullshit? The effect of speaker admirability.” They had participants read sentences that sounded deep and meaningful but were, in fact, devoid of information.
‘Our minds extend across space and time as waves in the ocean of one mind.’
‘Nature is a self-regulating ecosystem of awareness.’
‘As beings of light we are local and non-local, time bound and timeless, actuality and possibility.’
‘We are being called to explore the totality itself as an interface between serenity and intuition.’