#I think all George really knew was the rules of the gentry and his business. I do give him props for trying to raise Jojo. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lordjohntheshow · 6 years ago

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John Grey and his boyfriend Stephan Namzten have a great life (and now three dogs) and are considering taking the next big step: marriage and children. Complications arise. This is a Modern AU set in 2019.

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VANITY FAIR, November 2017

A FAMILY AFFAIR

An excerpt from the actor’s forthcoming memoir WILD NIGHTS chronicling his early years growing up to his days as a struggling actor. In anticipation of the Royal Wedding enjoy his take on a wedding among Britain’s upper crust.

By: Percy Wainwright

Imagine my surprise when my stepfather George invited me to his third wedding, in London. He wanted me there with him as he took on his new life and invited me out for the “whole season”. I took one look around my tiny, non air conditioned studio apartment in the Valley and knew I had no other choice. Within 24 hours I was touching down in Heathrow. I wondered a little about why George invited me, but in a small way it made sense: he had no real family himself and didn’t want to feel left out. He let me have the use of his apartment- or “flat” as I learned to call it, having already moved in with his bride to be.

I then did what any self-respecting 22 year old with a large, empty apartment, an allowance, and too much free time would do. I went clubbing. That’s how I first met Kay*. It was sometime past midnight, and the DJ was trying out some experimental trance pop. I saw him before he saw me. He was small, but he didn’t have that obnoxious edge some short men get. Cute blonde hair a shade most boys grow out of. Muscular, but the white shirt and jeans he wore showed he didn’t really care about his appearance. He glided through the crowd, disappearing in the back room for a moment. I lost track of him until I saw him cut through the dance floor to leave. On a whim, I grabbed his hand and kissed it. He looked up at me and laughed, crinkling a pair of baby blues that would have made Paul Newman jealous. I pulled him to me, like he was water in the desert. The music was too loud to have a coherent conversation, but neither of us wanted one.

After three or so songs (who can really tell with electronica?) he was pressing me up against the wall outside the bathroom, kissing my lips, my neck, as if he wanted to swallow me whole. In fifteen or so minutes we were in my flat and I was flat on my back. When I woke up the next morning alone in that big bed, I actually laughed- I’m usually the one that leaves them high and dry.

I still went clubbing, but I didn’t see my blonde boy again. Four weeks before the wedding George invited me out to a dinner with the family. “They’re gentry, you know. You don’t have to bow or anything, but do you know the proper forms of address?” He’d asked me nervously, in the taxi on the way over. “Um.. milord and milady?” I’d said, trying to remember what I’d learned from my days of getting high and watching Downton Abbey. He sighed. “They’ll just think you’re an uncouth American, it will be fine.” He’d huffed in reply. It was cute, to see him so nervous to make a good impression.

How to describe the family. Everyone looked like one of those paparazzi pictures of the royal family on their time off: trying to look normal in jeans and a sweater but the outfit still cost 700 pounds. I suppose I’m not one to talk though, my style’s always been very Gucci via Goodwill.

My new stepmother’s flat also had that rich, lived in feel. There was a couch from 1972 next to what I’m fairly sure was a pair of original Chippendale settee chairs. Every flat surface or shelf was covered by books: leather bound ones in the library and slick, glossy ones in all of the real living areas. Yes, you read that right: this was an apartment. With a library.

We all sat down to drinks in the living room. I chose one of the Chippendales, of course. An actual butler took my drink order. Once everyone was arrayed and properly lubricated, the true conversation began. The son who was obviously serving as Head of the Family grilled me and George about our jobs, hobbies, acquaintances, and was probably about to start on what petty misdemeanors we’d committed when his wife patted his arm and started a real conversation instead of a background check. It was boring, but I was surprised to find I was enjoying myself. Mostly I was enjoying what I am dead certain were a pair of original Degas’ ballerina studies.

Nearly an hour in I was shocked out of my art appreciation when my own tiny dancer walked in. He was out of breath, dressed for work (a boring navy suit, so a professional of some type, I noted), and apologizing profusely, to his mother, his soon to be stepfather, his annoyed brother, and then his gaze fell on me. I’ll say this about him: I’d never want to play poker against him. There’s not a man alive better at controlling his face. For a moment I was certain he didn’t remember me (I mean, I was in a clean cut Oxford, not the neon green mesh tank he’d last seen me in.)

“Hello. You must be Percy. I’m Kay.” He said, warmly, holding out his hand for me to shake. The look he gave me, and only me, had so much heat I thought I was back in L.A.

He sat across from me when we moved to dinner, and chatted politely. I was annoyed to find someone so handsome was also smart, and funny, and kind, especially to his mother and my stepfather. Yet, when he raised his brows to me at the end of dinner- a challenge, and invitation- I was all mush.

The next four weeks went by quickly- too quickly. All the pomp and nonsense of what American hetero weddings have become pales in comparison to An English Society Wedding. There were morning suit fittings, tux fittings, and even normal suit fittings, to make sure I wouldn’t be looked at some poor American cousin. Forget a bridal shower at some swanky country club. There were at least three engagement parties, a trip to the Queen Anne Enclosure of the Royal Ascot (requiring another suit), and multiple days involving skiffs, yachts, polo ponies, and cricket. I was game: it was like being stuck in some specialty park at Disneyworld, and I love to learn the rules so I can break them. Here were a few I discovered:

-You can’t ask people where they go on vacation. You ask them where they summer, or winter, or, for the younger, sportier ones, where they ski.

-An American accent threw them, especially when I turned on the Southern drawl I usually kept safely packed away. If I wasn’t from Newport, or Vail, or New York, I was no one of importance.

-No one ever discussed money, but every conversation was about it: where children were going to school, what new homes or paintings were being purchased, who had just closed what deal.

-And unlike in L.A., where everyone bedecked themselves in the latest runway looks, here you often learned the richest people also had the oldest clothes. The Princess Royal attended one of these parties in a dress she’d had since 1983. I know the year because I asked her.

By the time the wedding rolled around, part of me was ready to go back to the plastic sheen and bounce of Los Angeles. Other parts of me, like my heart, wanted to stay in this weird world forever, because it’s where Kay was. If this world was a weird Disneyworld, than I was its Cinderella. I’d been scraping things together for so long, spent so many nights wondering where the money was going to come from, how I was going to eat, I cannot explain the relief of having that disappear. Of having someone ready to pick up the check like nothing- and unlike a lot of the men I’d slept with, not expecting a quid pro quo.

Kay and I spent a few weeks before we even had sex again- he was busy, and I was being pulled along to every wedding event anyone could possibly imagine. It’s the stolen moments I remember the most. The way his breath hitched when he saw me partially undressed during our tux fitting. How he always made sure I had what I wanted to drink, no matter the party we were at. When his hand brushed mine and we hooked our pinkies together, walking down this hallway or that. And the night we were finally together again: breathing our secrets together in the dark.

I told him I loved him. I didn’t actually say “I love you”, I’m not an idiot. I told him “I’ve never felt this close to someone,” and that “I’ve told you things… I’ve never told anyone before” and “I know this must sound strange.” He soaked it up, and looked at me, those blue eyes full of affection, rubbed my arm. “I care deeply for you, Percy. My heart… I think someone else has that. I can give you everything else.” He said it like he’d pried it out of himself… carefully and painfully.

I wish everything had been enough for me.

The summer swept along, and suddenly it was the day I’d come for all along: the wedding. It was held in a quaint village in a “small, country chapel” that sat the two hundred guests with ease. The interior looked like a florist’s shop the night before Mother’s Day. (Kay’s big brother had to take at least three puffs from his inhaler and everyone had to pretend they didn’t notice it happening.) All the women were arrayed in pastels, or florals, most looking ten years older than they actually were in the severe, pinned up styles the occasion demanded. One of the coach horses ate the fascinator Kay’s girl cousin had talked about incessantly over the summer. But seeing my stepfather trip over his words, bursting with happiness at his new life and new wife was truly one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. In short, it was a perfect family wedding.

And then it was over. They were off on their honeymoon, backpacking in East Asia as if they were 22 and not 62. I’d seen my stepfather off. I knew he would always be part of my life, but that I wasn’t meant to live in his. I finally understood why they call it a flat: that’s all I felt walking around that apartment.

I wanted Kay to say: “I love you. Move in with me. Marry me, when it’s finally legal.” He didn’t. He was still caring, and attentive, and sweet, but we never talked about love or a future. Maybe that’s why I invited the Swede back to the flat on the last night before I left. Why I forgot that Kay was coming over to cook me a farewell dinner. Why I didn’t lock the door.

Turns out, he’s not as good as a poker player as I’d thought. I saw it all. Shock, dismay, pain, but never the anger. He left, never saying a word.

It wasn’t until the next day, somewhere 10,000 feet above Chicago, my suitcase full of a bunch of fancy clothes I’d wear only to auditions that I realized he always got quiet when he was angry.

*names, dates, and details have been altered to protect the innocent

#writing percy is hilariously fun #outlander fanfiction #outlander rarepair #john/stephan #john/percy #lord john grey #outlander modern au #percy wainwright #percy beauchamp

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vitalmindandbody · 7 years ago

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Zadie Smith: dance assignments for columnists

From Fred Astaires elegance to Beyoncs power, Zadie Smith is inspired by dancers as much she is by other writers

The connection between writing and dancing has been often on my brain recently: its a path I want to keep open. It feels a little ignored to report to, say, the relationship between music and prose maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

One of “the worlds largest” solid patches of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers you can find it in the choreographer Martha Grahams biography. But it loosens me in front of my laptop the same room I reckon it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their paws and toes. Graham writes: There is a vitality, a life force, an intensity, a quicken that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of day, this show is unique. And if you impede it, it will never subsist through any other medium and it will be lost. The nature will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how precious nor how it compares with other formulations. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the canal open.

What can an prowes of words take from the artwork that needs none? Yet I often contemplate Ive learned just as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance readings for writers: lessons of orientation, outlook, lilt and form, some of them obvious, some indirect. What follows got a few memoranda towards that idea.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Alamy; The Life Picture Collection/ Getty Images. Crown: Getty Images

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

Fred Astaire represent the gentry when he dances, claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, and I represent the proletariat. The separation is immediately satisfying, although it was a little harder to say why. Towering, thin and elegant, versus muscular and sporting is the fact that it? Theres the obvious stuff of silk hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that towering, this is the only way held as if “hes been”, and when moving always appeared heightened, to be gliding across whichever skin-deep: the storey, the ceiling, an ice rink, a bandstand. Genes centre of gravity was far lower: he stoops his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is floored, securely planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating.

Likewise, the aristocrat and the proletariat have different relations to the field beneath their feet, the first moving fluidly across the surface of the world, the second specifically tethered to a certain smudge: a city block, a village, a factory, a stretching of plains. Cyd Charisse claimed her husband always knew which of these dancers shed been working with by looking at their own bodies at the end of the day: bruised everywhere if it was Kelly , not a blemish if it was Astaire. Not only aloof when it came to the field, Astaire was aloof around other publics figures. Through 15 times and 10 movies, its difficult to detect a few moments of real sex strain between Fred and his Ginger. They have enormous unison but little hot. Now think of Kelly with Cyd Charisse in the fantasy sequence of Singin in the Rain! And maybe this is one of the advantages of earthiness: sex.

When I write I find theres generally a choice to be made between the grounded and the float. The ground I am thinking of in this case is communication as we meet it in its commonsense mode. The communication of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the governmental forces, the daily public discussion. Some columnists like to walk this sand, recreate it, violate fragments of it off and use it to their advantage, where others scarcely recognise its existence. Nabokov a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one barely ever applied a toe upon it. His language is literary, far from what we think up as our shared linguistic home.

One argument in defence of such literary speech might be the style it acknowledges its own artificiality. Commonsense language meanwhile claims to be plain and natural, conversational, but is often as erected as asphalt, dreamed up in ad business or in the heart of government sometimes both at the same epoch. Simultaneously nostalgic and coercive.( The Peoples Princess. The Big Society. Make America Great Again .) Commonsense language claims to take its result from the behavior people naturally express, but any columnist who truly attends to the practice parties address will shortly find himself categorised as a distinctive stylist or satirist or experimentalist. Beckett was like this, and the American columnist George Saunders is a good contemporary sample.( In dance, the illustration that comes to my attention is Bill Bojangles Robinson, whose occasion was tapping up and down the stairs. What could be more normal, more folksy, more grounded and everyday than tapping up and down some stairs? But his signature stagecoach procedure concerned a staircase pressed right up against another staircase a stairway to itself and so up and down he would tap, up and down, down and up, entirely surreal, like an Escher magazine come to life .)

Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but “he il be” surreal within the meaning of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a few questions proposes itself: what if a organization moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical query, for no figures move like Astaire , no, we only move like him in our dreams.

By contrast, I have appreciated French boys run up the steps of the High-pitched Line in New York to take a photo of the opinion, their backsides working just like Gene Kellys in On The Town, and I have accompanied black girls on the A train swing round the pole on their way out of the slither openings Kelly again, hanging from that eternal lamppost. Kelly paraphrased the cliche where reference is danced, and he reminds us in turn of the goodnes we do sometimes possess ourselves. He is the incarnation of our mass in their youth, at their most liquor and potent, or whenever our natural aptitudes compound ideally with our hard-earned skills. He is a demonstration of how the prosaic can become poetic, if we work hard enough. But Astaire, where reference is dances, has nothing to do with hard work( although we know, from profiles, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes ). He is poetry in motion. His crusades are so collected from ours that he adjusts a limit on our own aspirations. Nothing hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

Harold and Fayard Nichols

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Harold and Fayard Nicholas

Writing, like dancing, is only one of the arts available to people who have nothing. For 10 and sixpence, advises Virginia Woolf, one can buy article enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare. The only absolutely necessary paraphernalium in dance is your own form. Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With numerous black dancers this has come with the complication of representing your hasten. You are on a stage, in front of your people and other parties. What look will you show them? Will you be your soul? The very best soul? A representation? A typify?

The Nicholas brothers were not street teenagers the latter are the family of college-educated musicians but they were never formally trained in dance. They learned watching their parents and their parents peers performing on the chitlin route, as pitch-black vaudeville was then announced. Later, when they entered the movies, their executions were generally filmed in this way as to be non-essential to the storey, so that when these films played in the south their dazzling strings “couldve been” snipped out without doing any harm to the soundnes of the plan. Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also genius undeniable.

My talent was the weapon, bickered Sammy Davis Jr, the supremacy, the way for me to fight. It was the one method I might hope to affect a mans supposing. Davis was another chitlin hoofer, initially, and from straitened situations. His logic here is very familiar: it is something of an article of faith within the kinds of houses who have few other resources. A mother tells their own children to be twice as good, she tells them to be irrefutable. My baby used to say something like it to me. And when I watch the Nicholas brethren I think of that stressful rule: be twice as good.

The Nicholas brethren were numerous, many importances better than anybody else. They were better than anyone has a right or need to be. Fred Astaire called their routine in Stormy Weather the greatest sample of cinematic dance he ever sight. They are progressing down a monstrous staircase doing the splits as if the divides is the commonsense mode to get somewhere. They are impeccably garmented. They are more than representing they are excelling.

But I always thoughts I recognize a little difference between Harold and Fayard, and it interests me; I take it as a kind of exercise. Fayard seems to me more concerned with this responsibility of representation when he dances: he looks the fraction, he is the part, his propriety unassailable. He is formal, contained, technically indisputable: a recognition to the race. But Harold sacrifices himself over to rejoice. His hair is his tell: as he dances it slackens itself from the slather of Brylcreem he always put on it, the ebullient afro scroll springs out, he doesnt even try to clean it back. Between propriety and rejoice, choose joy.

Prince& Micheal Jackson

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Michael Jackson and Prince

On YouTube you will find them, locked in numerous dance-offs, and so you are presented with a striking choice. But its not a question of grades of ability, of “whos” the greater dancer. The choice is between two entirely opposite evaluates: legibility on the one handwriting, temporality on the other. Between a tombstone( Jackson) and a kind of mirage( Prince ).

But both men were good dancers. Putting aside the difference in meridian, physically they had many similarities. Atrociously slight, long necked, thin-legged, powered from the torso rather than the backside, which in both cases was improbably small-time. And to its implementation of influence they were of course evenly indebted to James Brown. The divides, the increases from the divides, the gyration, the glide, the knee bend, the jerk of the thought all stolen from the same source.

Yet Prince and Jackson are nothing alike when they dance, and its very hard to bring to psyche Prince dancing, whereas it is practically impossible to forget Jackson. It chimes absurd, but try it for yourself. Sovereign moves , no matter how many times you may have mentioned them, had not yet been house inscription in recall; they never seem quite secured or saved. If person asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if youre capable. But there wont appear to be anything specially Prince-like about that. Its strange. How are you able dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like trade secrets merely I know?( And isnt it the occasion that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone ?)

I never went to see Michael Jackson, but I received Prince half a dozen occasions. I pictured him in stadiums with thousands of people, so have a rational recognizing also that he was in no sense my secret, that he was in fact a celebrity. But I still say his proves were illegible, private, like the performance of a soul in the middle of a area at a house party. It was the greatest happen “youve been” imagine and hitherto its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.

Jackson was precisely the opposite. Every move he made was perfectly legible, public, endlessly reproduced and copyable, like a meme before the word dwelt. He made in likeness, and across age. He deliberately sketched and then observed once more the edges around each move, like a policeman drawing a chalk front round a organization. Deposit his neck forward if he was moving backwards. Cut his trousers short so you could read his ankles. Grabbed his groin so you could better understand its gyrations. Gloved one hand so you might attend to its rhythmic genius, the road it interrupted everything, like an utterance mark.

Towards the end, his strange stagewear is more and more tasked with this job of sketch and mark. It looked like a formation of armor, the aim of which was to define each element of his person so no crusade of it would legislate unnoted. His arms and legs multiply buckled a literal visualisation of his flexible joints and a metal waistband passing turn left in communities across his breastplate, accenting the transformation of his shoulders along this diagonal. A heavyweights region accentuated slender hips and partitioned the torso from the legs, so you observed when the top and foot half of their own bodies gathered in opposite directions. Finally a silver thong, rendering his eloquent groin as clear as if it were in ALL CAPS. It wasnt subtle, there was no subtext, but it was clearly legible. Beings will be dancing like Michael Jackson until the end of time.

But Prince, treasured, elusive Monarch, well, there lays one whose epithet was writ in liquid. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can own a deeper glamour than the legible. In “the worlds” of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to express what a long afterlife an elusive master can have, even when targeted beside as clearly depicted a illustration as Lord Byron. Prince represent the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to captivate a happen agitation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.

Theres no impunity in being a gravestone. Better to be the person still jamming in the wee hours of the house party, and though everybody films it on their telephones no one proves quite able to captivate the essence of it. And now hes disappeared, having escaped us one more time. I dont claim Princes epitome wont last-place as long as Jacksons. I exclusively say that in our brains it will never be as distinct.

Janet Jackson Madonna Beyonce

Michel Linssen/ Redferns/ Getty; Dave Hogan/ Getty; Matt Slocum/ AP

Janet Jackson/ Madonna/ Beyonc

These three dont only invite emulates they challenge them. They go further than legibility into proscription. They conduct infantries, and we join them. We are like those uniformed dancers moving in military constitution behind them, an anonymous force whose responsibility it is to mimic precise the gesticulates of their general.

This was realise literal on Beyoncs Formation tour lately, when the general heightened her fucking arm like a shotgun, drew the provoke with her left and the racket of gunshot resound out. There is nothing insinuate about these sorts of dancing: like the military forces, it operates as a anatomy of franchise, whereby a decree opinion America, Beyonc is presided over by many cells that span “the worlds”. Maybe it is for this reason that much of the crowd I ascertained at Wembley could be found, for long periods , not facing in the direction of the stage at all, instead turning to their friends and collaborators. They didnt need to watch Beyonc any more than soldiers need to look fixedly at the flag to perform their duties. Our ruler was up there somewhere dancing but the idea of her had already been internalised. Pals from the gym sat in curves and spouted their fists, girlfriends from hen nights made inwards and did Beyonc to each other, and boys from the Beyhive hollered every word into each others faces. They could have done the same at home, but this was a public display of allegiance.

Janet Jackson knocked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna persisted it, Beyonc is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the girl will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The exercise is quite evident. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me. And then everybody in the crowd thoughts being obeyed like Bey a delightful imagining.

Lady scribes who induce similar passion( in far smaller gatherings ): Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Jane Austen. Such writers offer the same essential qualities( or apparitions ): total controller( over their structure) and no democracy( for the reader ). Compare and contrast, say, Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, dame novelists often adored but rarely replica. Theres too much freedom in their own homes. Meanwhile every convict of Didions says: obey me! Who moves the world? Girls!

David Byrne

Rex/ Shutterstock

David Byrne and David Bowie

The art of not dancing a vital exercise. Sometimes it is essential to be awkward, uncouth, jerking, to be neither lyrical nor banal, to be positively bad. To carry other the chances of mass, alternative appreciates, to stop making sense. Its interested in me that both sets of creators did their worst dancing to their blackest sections. Take me to the river, sings Byrne, in square trousers 20 epoches too large, looking down at his yanking hips as if they belong to someone else. This music is not excavation, his trousers say, and his motions going any further: maybe this mas isnt mine, either. At the end of this stratum of logic lies a liberating contemplate: perhaps none genuinely owns anything.

People can be too precious about their patrimony, about their tradition columnists especially. Preservation and protection have their place but they shouldnt stymie either liberty or fraud. All possible aesthetic expressions are available to all peoples under the clue of adoration. Bowie and Byrnes obvious love for what was not theirs brings out new slants in familiar seems. It hadnt occurred to me before realizing these men dance that all individuals might choose, for example, to match the arc of a drum drum with anything but the matching curving shift of their own bodies, that is, with harmony and hot. But it is about to change you are eligible to balk: throw up a strange slant and unexpectedly spasm, like Bowie, or wonder if thats truly your own forearm, like Byrne.

I think of young Luther Vandross, singing backup a few feet behind Bowie, during Young Americans, watching Bowie flail and beat. I wonder what his take over all that was. Did he ever suppose: Now, what in the world is he doing? But a few conducts in, it was clear to everybody. Here was something different. Something old-fashioned, and yet new.

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

Sipa Press/ Rex/ Shutterstock; Getty Images

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

When you face an audience, which direction will you turn? Inwards or outwards? Or some compounding of the two? Nureyev, so fierce and neurotic, so vulnerable, so beautiful like a deer unexpectedly caught in our headlamps is faced resolutely inwards. You cant take your eyes off him, as people like to say, but at the same meter he is almost excruciating to watch. We detect we might smash him, that he might crumble or explosion. He never does, but still, whenever he leaps you feel the possibility of setting up total disaster, as you do with certain high-strung athletes no matter how many times they range or leap or dive. With Nureyev you are an onlooker, you are a person who has been granted the largest honour of being present while Nureyev dances. I dont make this sarcastically: it is an honour to watch Nureyev, even in these grainy old-time videos on YouTube. Hes a kind of miracle, and is fully cognisant of this when he dances, and what did you do today to authorize an gathering with a miracle?( See likewise: Dostoevsky .)

With Baryshnikov, I have no anxieties of natural disasters. He is an outward-facing creator, he seeks to please me and he supersedes altogether. His look dances as much as his arms and legs.( Nureyevs face, meanwhile, is permanently lost in transcendent find .) Sometimes Baryshnikov wants to delight me so much better blaze even try tap dancing with Liza Minnelli, risking the sneer of the purists.( I am not a purist. I am delighted !) He is a charmer, an entertainer, he is comic, stunning, cerebral, a clown whatever you need him to be. Baryshnikov is both adoring and affection. He has high and low modes, tough and soft constitutes, but hes ever facing outwards, to us, his audience.( See also: Tolstoy .)

Once I filled Baryshnikov over a New York dinner table: I was so star-struck I could hardly pronounce. Lastly I asked him: Did you ever gratify Fred Astaire? He smiled. He said: Yes, once, at a dinner. I was very star-struck, I hardly addrest. But I watched his hands all the time, they were like a lesson in themselves so elegant!

Swing Time by Zadie Smith is being issued in 15 November( Hamish Hamilton, 18.99 ). To tell a copy for 15.57, going to see bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.