Some of you may have noticed I am prone to hyperbole. When I said that someone fingerbanged me for seven hours, it may have been only three. Equally I do not really think E. Jean Carroll is a lush. So when I said that I saw someone ‘wearing a checked 3 piece vintage suit, and covered in old school tattoos… listening to Kanye West’ I didn’t actually think we’d be suitable life partners. Sure, he was hot, ludicrously, jaw droppingly, hot, and it seemed there was an overlap in our interests (fine tailoring, good music), but I’d never spoken to him and probably never would.

Those of you who were not well-acquainted with my penchant for ridiculous exaggeration, and falling in love at the drop of a hat, became rather obsessed with the idea that I had a list. That’s right: a list. Because life really does echo Sex and The City, I mean art, and women do indeed carry around lists inside their minds which obsessively detail what their prospective partner should be like. This is why we’re always hounding you guys to get jobs, settle down, cut your hair and nagnagnagnagnagnag. Lol. Lol. Omg. Wtf. Lol. I love the colour pink! Men suck! Women are bitches! Let me file my nails while you talk to me. OMG. BBQ.

Ahem.

As you can guess I did not find it amusing that people assumed I was going out with a strict checklist of things I want in a man. That kind of thinking a) only exists in the one-dimensional characters that chick-lit writers create, b) is utterly pointless. Of course I have preferences but they’re hardly unreasonable. I would like to be attracted to a person I want to be in a committed relationship with. I tend to find that my crushes are either tall thin men with acres of shaggy dark hair or long limbed women with bee stung lips. Preferably I would like my partner and I to share a few common interests: at the moment I am obsessed with ASAP Rocky, Emile Zola, Humphrey Bogart movies, and okonomiyaki. I’d like to think there’s something there for everyone.

Dating someone ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, or homophobic,would, obviously, be a nightmare. No young Tories for me, thank-you. It would be nice if my partner was good with money, as I am abso-fucking-lutely awful with it, just as it’d be lovely if they liked cats and dogs, but one or the other is a bare minimum. Despising children is almost certainly a deal breaker, even though I am not sure I want any of my own. Lastly: funny. I just cannot go on another date with someone devoid of a sense of humour or, and I think this is worse, who genuinely enjoys watching Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Last of all I would really prefer to date someone who loves food as much as I do, because there are few things I like doing more than eating and making sex noises at the same time.

While these are enviable traits in anyone, I would like to point out that they do not always translate into qualities my squeezes have. My last serious relationship was with someone who liked bee-bop, was almost as bad with money as I am, felt ambivalent around animals, and uncomfortable around children. The one before that was the same height as me and liked cats and Huggy Bear more than he liked me. The thing is this is an ideal: a fantasy world where I look like Elizabeth Taylor, all my jokes are puke inducingly funny, and I rarely if ever have to fart. Even the shonkiest life coach will tell you to dream big because when you do you end up getting either what you want or something that is as good if not better. I’m not delusional, I know that some things are out of reach. And yeah I might not win the Nobel Prize for Literature or own the house from Ferris Bueller, but I can dream can’t I?

Painting by Amos Sewell for The Saturday Evening Post, January 1960 and photo of Paz de la Huerta by Mark Seliger.
Blog post title from this Franz Ferdinand song.  

For the last year or so I have been attempting to write a novel. Well, I say that: for four months I said I was writing a novel but didn’t actually do anything, and sometimes it’s not so much writing as squeezing tiny fragments of words out of my fingertips in a truly painful way. It’s absolute torture. The novel is (at it’s most basic level) about a girl who is in love with a girl who doesn’t love her back. I don’t want to wank on about it because I’ve written two other novels that were both piles of pap, and if this one ever gets finished it might turn out to be toss too, so to talk about it too much would be to jinx it. I refuse to fall into that trap. Unrequited love, that’s what we’re thinking about, that evil evil thing.

In films, and in books, there is something poignant and beautiful about loving someone who doesn’t love you back. Time and time again authors use that tired trope of the friend, waiting, pining in the background, until one day through luck or by wearing them down the object of their affection caves in. While I refuse to watch One Day, which I believe is based around that premise*, I have fallen for the saccahrine rouse more than once. I don’t know how they do it, but fictional unrequited love makes everything, even Peter Gabriel, seem adorably sweet.

But now we come to real life unrequited love, something I unfortunately know quite a bit about. For about a year I was in absolute 100% love with a man we shall call ‘Fatrick’ as that is what my best friend called him, despite him being neither fat nor called Patrick. In the year of my ‘loving’ him I had spoken to him precisely once. And yet I was smitten, almost disgustingly in love. His face swarmed up in all my dreams. I wrote stories about us, the glittering life we’d lead when we said more than “Oh, I’m sorry, did I spill my drink on you?” “Yes” to each other. Whenever I was bored I would allow my mind to wander off into a Jeremy Blake esque world of colours and sounds and all enveloping love. In my head this was all so cute, so adorable. Soon we’d be laughing about it together in a dim bar somewhere.

Fatrick and I did speak again. I was outside Trash on it’s last night, he bumped into me and said “I’m sorry.” My response was to burst into tears and run away. While it would be easy to blame the 3 bottles of wine I consumed prior to the meeting (very easy in fact) he was just such a disappointment close up that my ‘love’ for him burst like a bubble. The next morning I woke up and realised what an ass I’d been. He had been, for almost a year, a tarnished sun that I’d revolved around, and now I was careering through the galaxy alone. It felt great.

This whole pathetic spectacle made me think that unrequited love is ridiculous. Why would any sane person put themselves through the toe curling pain that is loving someone without being loved back? It makes you feel pathetic: like a dog begging for crumbs at the table. We looked at each other when I got off the bus! This has to mean something!

Then again, maybe unrequited love is the most honest pure kind of love at all. You’re loving someone, totally, fully, crazily, getting nothing back, and yet carrying on. Sure there’s something deranged about it,but isn’t love in general kind of deranged? I mean other people are vile disgusting creatures who only disappoint you, so maybe by knowing that and doing it anyway you’re one of those rare good eggs? Who knows? Now then, I wonder what Fatrick’s doing these days…

*I may be very wrong about this.
Photos from Heart-Shaped Apple and La Dolce Vita

Let’s check out my dream crushes and what their strengths and weaknesses are, shall we?

Orson Welles
Pros: wildly successful, driven, an stare so intense it could open tin cans
Cons: blacked up to play Othello, possibly a little single minded, not great at monogamy

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (I can’t decide who I fancy more, sorry)
Pros: more blindly beautiful than staring at the blazing sun, way too talented, worked well together
Cons: tiny problem with drinking, got married and divorced twice, really into tanning

Claudia Cardinale
Pros: did you look at the picture?
Cons: I know nothing about her personality

Serge Gainsbourg
Pros: How many times do I have to say it? He is amazing. Mind blowingly amazing. Sexy, gorgeous, smart, funny, caring, sexy, talented, creative, sexy, French!, well dressed, grew into his face really well, and did I mention sexy?
Cons: may have had a wee drink problem, bit of a philanderer, made that reggae album

What have we learned? That I like them dead, pissed, cheating, and possibly slightly megalomanical. Sounds good no? Who are your top 3 dead crushes and why? Do you think they say anything about you? Answers on a postcard (or in the comments box) please!

Photos from Devenir Gris and the wonder of Google Image Search.

My personal favourite is Rock Hudson. He was a stone-cold super fox, insanely tall, and sadly for me, gay. Obsessed as I am with his and Doris Day’s work together one of the highlights of every film is the inevitable topless shot of Rock getting dressed/stepping out of the shower/going swimming. Fanservice it may have been but who’s complaining?

Sadly Rock and Doris only made 3 films together, and Send Me No Flowers the last, is not exactly a golden era classic. In fact unless you dream of starring in your own Doris Day, Tony Randall, Rock Hudson sandwich then leave it be.

Now, just so I don’t feel like a freak: who are your top dead hunks?

5. Dr Zoidberg
So he’s a little nervous! What woman doesn’t want to try and use her universal mothering and calming skills on a tentative future lover? With a little soothing breast smooshing hugging and some pizza he’d probably stop shooting ink at you, and when that’s over, then the sticky seafood scented kisses can begin.

4. The Women From Space Thing
Specifically the first on the left, and the captain. However I’d only date them if they promised not to make Space Thing because it’s a dreadful film and it made me hate comics, aliens, sci-fi, and io9 for about a month after I watched it.

3. Tommy From 3rd Rock From The Sun
Now I know you’re looking at this saying “Ew Vanessa! That is a CHILD!” but no it’s not! Because a) his character was actually really old in the show despite being played by a child (that’s why it’s funny… duh), b) I started fancying him when I was too a child, c) he now looks like this and gets to do stuff like this with Claudia Schiffer. Now who looks silly?

2. The Sirens of Titan
I’ll let Vonnegut himself explain this one:
“Constant looked down at the photograph that had been ignored. He found that it was not a photograph of Miss Canal Zone’s predecessor. It was a photograph that Rumfoord had slipped to him. It was no ordinary photograph, though its surface was glossy and its margins white.
Within the margins lay shimmering depths. The effect was much like that of a rectangular glass window in the surface of a clear, shallow, coral bay. At the bottom of that seeming coral bay were three women — one white, one gold, one brown. They looked up at Constant, begging him to come to them, to make them whole with love.
Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.
Constant sank into a wing chair again. He had to look away from all that beauty in order to keep from bursting into tears.”

1. Ford Prefect
He likes beer, talks to cars, lives in England, and is the semi-half cousin of the President of The Galaxy. Also he’s a man who always knows where his towel is and I am ready to go anywhere with him providing there are Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters and that adorable smile waiting for me.

At least once a day I drift into a blissful daydream about Serge Gainsbourg where we re-enact scenes from Histoire De Melody Nelson and generally jump around having fun and doing suitably Gallic 60′s things like smoking Gitanes and running along cobbled streets while breathlessly laughing.

Most people who I tell about my Serge love do a double take. “Serge? Gainsbourg? The ‘Je t’aime’ guy?” then they screw up their faces and tell me how perverted he was or about the Whitney Houston incident. Once or twice I’ve even been told how he evilly coerced France Gall into singing a song about blow jobs, which she innocently thought was about lollipops. On the latter count all I have to say is really, France? Really? Pull the other one. Fair enough, the guy made some pretty tasteless photo shoot choices with Jane Birkin (his then wife) and he did make that really creepy song ‘Lemon Incest’ with his daughter, but the overall impression one gets of Gainsbourg is a highly sexed man who loved women, and his family, who’s work ranged from the classic, to the sublime, the surreal, and beyond. Unlike most modern pop stars who hide behind a façade of respectability Gainsbourg was honest, painfully so and saw no reason to sugar coat his preferences. No matter what I hear about him, listening to the raw passion in his voice as he sings Ballade De Melody Nelson smoothes away any of his rough edges, and makes it so easy to retreat back into my black and white dream.

Of course I have crushes other than Serge and his knee shakingly beautiful voice: in fact one of my other long-term loves is Slash from Guns N’Roses, specifically during G’n'R’s 1987 Ritz gig. The thing is Slash now, and Slash at any time after 1987, has mutated into a bit of jerk. He writes self-indulgent biographies detailing what a prick he was, and how much he hates Axl Rose, as the two of them frequently argue in public about the most mindlessly petty things.

While I’m happy to point out that Gainsbourg was a very different person to the shambling greasy perv he is made out to be I have no desire to do the same with Slash. Its because I don’t care about Slash now; I have no interest in how he’s matured as a person, what he did after Use Your Illusion, how he feels about being in any of his subsequent bands, none of that crap. It’s also because Serge is dead so it’s easier to idolise him.

1987 Slash was a the perfect pin-up, the pinnacle of everything he’d ever be in public at least, so if I Doc Brown from came whizzing by in his DeLorean and asked me where I wanted to go it’d be to the Ritz, to stand right at the front, in a leopard print bodystocking, frantically swiping at Slash as he leant over the crowd. After he’d picked me out for some one on one post show backstage treatment, I’d hop in the DeLorian and be happy to wake up back in 2010. Obviously I’m hoping that this has no major repercussions on the world’s time line, although even if it did affect Slash in some profound way G’n'R had already written and recorded Appetite for Destruction so I think everything would work out fine. Who really needs November Rain anyway?

Time paradoxes aside, having Slash and Serge as my top two crushes creates awkward conversations when these sorts of subjects come up, those typical late night ‘guilty pleasures’ conversations. Other people’s secret crushes are people like the mild mannered Zachary Quinto, or wooden Stephen Moyer; people so nice and evenly mannered that my choices make me seem like an unstable masochist. However I’m unlikely to change my allegiances soon, and even if Slash came out with a bizarre Mel Gibson style rant I’d still fantasize about that half hour spent with sweaty top-hatted Slash in a backstage room in 1987.

You see it’s a fantasy, I don’t know anything about either of them; Serge could have been a puppy kicking maniac in his spare time, Slash could be personally doling out soup to street orphans every night, it’s all academic. Their politics, their views on women’s lib, bleh, I couldn’t give a toss. I just want to dream about fun, French accents, and deft fingers. And why not? Why make it realistic? Why can’t we in our fantasies seperate the real from the imaginary and give the people we find beautiful every attribute we’d like them to have in real life?

Do any of you have a genuinely guilty pleasure of a crush? If so tell! To those of you who can’t make the quantum leap, I say try, or at least make your dreamboats less mundane!

Further Reading:
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons
Slash: The Autobiography by Slash and Anthony Bozza

Further Listening:
Histoire De Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg – Spotify
Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’Roses   – Spotify
A brief Serge Gainsbourg sampler I made on Spotify, otherwise look for the Initials S.G compliation.