Notes on Camp

• I also watch Project Runway. Recently I discovered a website called Project Rungay which offers a gay, bitchy, blow-by-blow commentary on each episode. One of the designers on the show likes to dress up in his own creations.

• Which leads me back to Ms. Sontag. I'm reading an essay she wrote called Notes on Camp. It's her greatest hit according to a poll of top 100 pieces of American journalism (I think it's number 74 or something).

• Point One for Sontag: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation."

• These pictures would be a case in point. They certainly aren't beautiful... artifical and stylised? Just a touch.

• Inevitably there are a lot of Oscar Wilde quotes: To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. That kind of thing. I realised a few years ago that there is a trick to Oscar Wilde aphorisms and they're quite easy to make up. Let's make one for Richard. No wonder Mozart died young. It's such hard work to maintain an air of casual brilliance.