Convenience Big Store: The director who traded his shoes for a bath full of fish

16 December, 2023

Life

Werner Herzog getting shot, mid-interview

The director who traded his shoes for a bath full of fish

Reading Werner Herzog's memoir, says Mark O'Connell in The New York Review of Books, I started to think that, in comparison, I have lived "barely a life at all". I have never, as the German film director has, "worked as an arena clown riding bullocks at a Mexican rodeo". I have never cooked and eaten my own boot to fulfil a lost wager. I have never "hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Amazon rainforest", as Herzog did in his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. I have never fallen into a crevasse while mountain climbing in Pakistan, or been bitten on the face by a rat while delirious with dysentery in a garden shed in Egypt. "I have never swapped my only good shoes for a bathtub filled with fish in order to feed a film crew in the Peruvian jungle."

This "blasé attitude toward peril" is demonstrated in a 2006 BBC interview, conducted outdoors in the Hollywood hills, during which Herzog is shot in the stomach by some lunatic with an air rifle on a nearby veranda. The interviewer and crew are aghast, but Herzog is dismissive, telling them: "It was not a significant bullet." He later complained about their fussiness, saying he "would have continued with the interview, but the cameraman had already hit the dirt". Whatever you think of the 81-year-old's films, "there is no doubt that his real masterpiece is the character known as Werner Herzog".

👰‍♀️🤷 Herzog has a lot to say about these exploits but "comparatively little" about his private life. "Such material is mostly confined to a brief chapter, late in the book, with the startlingly utilitarian title 'Wives, Children'."

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog is available to buy here.

Heroes and villains

Alamy

Villain

Sheridan Smith, according to Sheridan Smith, who is cursing her past self for getting such extensive arm tattoos. While shooting a forthcoming TV series, the 42-year-old actress had to turn up to filming three hours early so that the makeup team could cover up all her ink. In 2019, Colin Farrell gave a similar explanation for why he was getting his tattoos removed: "It buys me an extra 45 minutes of sleep in the morning."

Hero

David Davis, who fought off two hooligans who were attacking a homeless man near parliament. The Tory MP was on his way home when he encountered the men, as he put it, "kicking seven bells" out of their victim. Davis, a former SAS reservist, stepped in to help, then let the rough sleeper stay on his sofa before taking him to A&E in the morning.

Villains

Cats, which eat pretty much any animal they can get their paws on. A new study reveals that domestic felines have been recorded munching on 2,084 species around the world, of which 981 are birds and 119 insects. For the targets that are too big to handle when they're fully grown, cats just prey on their young, including the endangered green sea turtle.

The Pogues in 1984. Steve Rapport/Getty Images

Hero

Shane MacGowan, for being a party-starter even in death. Attendees at the Pogues frontman's funeral last week decamped to a Tipperary pub for the wake – where €10,000 was put behind the bar, as stipulated in MacGowan's will. In tribute to the permanently sozzled songwriter, the establishment was drunk dry.

Villain

TikTok, which is ruining Christmas. Weekly carol-singing sessions on Columbia Road, east London have had to be cancelled because of overcrowding, after viral videos of previous events prompted more than 7,000 people to turn up last week. It was a fitting visualisation, says Emily Bootle in the I newspaper, "of what happens when an unwieldy online culture comes up against the limits of the real world".

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Behind the headlines

Students at Berlin's Humboldt University in 1931. Bpk/Salomon/Ullstein Bild/Getty

A disturbing parallel to 1930s Germany

As a historian in the US, says Niall Ferguson in The Free Press, I have been amazed at the creeping politicisation of American universities by illiberal progressives. For a decade, friends have been telling me I must be exaggerating. Who could object to more diversity and inclusion? "Such arguments fell apart after October 7." Just as disturbing as the overt anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses – the son of a Jewish friend recently found a note under his keyboard with the words "ZIONIST KIKE!!!" in red and green letters – is the pathetic response of college leaders. After years of radical "institutional change", Harvard ranks dead last for free speech among US colleges. Yet when students are chanting for genocide against Jews, "speech is protected".

This is not the first time the world's leading universities have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism. In the 1920s, the greatest centres of world scholarship were in Germany. But over the following decade, "non-Jewish German academia didn't just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way." The idea of a "final solution to the Jewish question" originated in lectures, scholarly articles and the songs of student fraternities. What makes the Holocaust a unique evil in world history is the very fact that it was perpetrated by a "highly sophisticated nation-state" and planned with technocratic precision by PhDs. Anyone who maintains a "naive belief in the power of higher education" to instil ethical values, or accepts the lie that a little campus anti-Semitism is "tolerable", should read up about universities during the Third Reich.

Books

Pen Vogler's history of British food, Stuffed, certainly lives up to its title, says Rachel Cooke in The Observer. It "bulges temptingly" with extraordinary facts on the evolution of our national cuisine, from the enclosures of the 15th century (and before) right up to the modern supermarket. The Anglo-Saxons thought "artichokes in wine" would banish smelly armpits, and that depression could be cured by radishes. In medieval times, women struggling to get knocked up were prescribed parsnips. The Victorians liked anchovies to be dyed a lurid "Venetian red" – "perfectly safe, unless lead was involved" – and marinated their gherkins with a copper coin for extra brightness. Before Yorkshire puddings were invented, beef was often served with plum pudding. What's particularly striking is how often our food fads "go in circles". Dickensian gruel and 21st-century oat milk, for example, are "basically the same thing".

Stuffed by Pen Vogler is available to buy here.

Zeitgeist

The Great Gatsby (2013): yes, but imagine the queue for the taxis

Why we can't say no to a party

"Everybody knows how it feels not to fit in at a party," says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. "One might say that this is the definitive, universal experience of being at a party." The host has no time to talk to you, and you don't know anyone else. "Torturously, you wander, looking for someone, anyone." If you're lucky, you get 20 minutes out of your victim before you slink away. And yet we're horrified at not being invited to them. Even if we don't want to go to "some damn party", we live in fear of the "sinking misery of exclusion".

One explanation is "mimetic desire", the brainchild of the French philosopher René Girard, which posits that "we want things because we think other people want them too". It's certainly true of parties. "You want to go because everybody else wants to go." But take away mimetic desire, and it'd be a "luxury" to not be invited – to be spared from standing in the cold at 1.30am, trying to find a taxi. There is only one party "to which I would absolutely, definitely like to go". It's the one described by Douglas Adams in Life, the Universe and Everything – a bonanza that has gone on so long it's populated by the fourth generation of guests. "Still no one shows any sign of leaving", he writes. "Somebody did look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up."

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