My cultural life
We ask a tastemaker what they are reading, watching, listening to and downloading
UK Esquire’s Editor-in-chief Alex Bilmes talks books, music and exhibitions
Alex Bilmes is Editor-in-chief of UK Esquire magazine, the self-described ‘sharp, funny and entertaining read for educated, intelligent, ambitious and adventurous British men’ (@Alex_ Bilmes; esquire.co.uk).
My favourite piece of music is… Impossible! It changes all the time. But I always go back to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, as do all men I know who fancy themselves soulful and somewhat disgruntled.
The music I am currently listening to is Kanye West’s ( 2) The Life of Pablo. He’s maddening, of course, and off-putting and insufferable and all the rest of it, but I’ve been fascinated by everything he’s done. This is a tremendous album, dark and angry, funny, filthy. And you can dance to it, or some of it.
The song that makes me feel instantly happy is Ten City’s That’s The Way Love Is. I’m a handbag house man. (It’s actually a sad song, but I find those make me happiest.)
The books that influenced me most are all the usual canonical ones that impressionable young men read, so I’ll say one that is less widely known: Burning the Days ( 5) by the great James Salter (Picador, £9.99). It is my favourite memoir by a writer. I got to interview him a few years ago for Esquire, over two days at his house in Colorado, and it was one of the high points of my career so far. At the moment I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment ( 6, Europa Editions, £9.99). Like everyone else I spent last summer devouring her Neapolitan quartet as if it were a series of delicious pizzas and I hadn’t eaten for days, and now I’ve turned to this earlier novel, which is less digestible: it’s so raw and angry. Still a remarkable piece of writing, though. Her honesty is breathtaking and I think any man who pretends an interest in women should read her. My favourite film is The Sweet Smell of Success by Alexander Mackendrick ( 3). New York in the 1950s, at the peak of its dubious swagger. Machine-gun script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. Blaring jazz score. And career-best performances by Burt Lancaster as sociopathic gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as his creature, Sidney Falco. I must have seen it close to 100 times. I know almost every word. And actually I liked it before I became a ruthless journalist who hangs out with amoral PRS, so I blame it entirely for my poor choice of lifestyle.
The last exhibition/theatre production I saw was the Jeff Koons show at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery ( 7). I took my kids and they loved it: when you’re three years old, a shiny blue balloon dog the height of a double-decker bus is pretty freaky and cool. The last play I saw was Ralph Fiennes – an actor of genius – in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the Old Vic. No one does male midlife crisis quite like a Norwegian.
My favourite place for a good night out? I’m a restaurant person these days, rather than a disco diva. Currently I like the Colony Grill Room ( 4) at The Beaumont hotel in Mayfair. I sometimes end up in the Groucho if I’m feeling squiffy and don’t want to go home. But equally I’m very much at home in a pub. If I had a free day in London, I would spend it in my garden. (Really more of a terrace, but it does the job.) My favourite destination in the world is Los Angeles ( 1). For the simple reason that it’s the foreign city I’ve visited more often than any other, so I feel oddly at home there. I have a love/ hate relationship with it. It’s the most jolie laide of destinations.