Mariel Franklin > Quotes

“We discussed the high camp of the Middle East and she sent me a photo of Samantha on a camel. That’s why you don’t see this kind of camp in Iran. It’s because the British never colonized it. It’s easy to laugh at the trashiness of the Emiratis but it’s all British, we exported it Not so much actual homosexuality, though I’m sure we tried.”
― Mariel Franklin, Bonding

“She was never—and neither was anyone else, ever again—going to be an artist of any stature. The culture had become too transparent, every innovation documented, processed, replayed and tweaked in a stream of infinitesimal progressions, each version on display, every player in the game embedded in a furious feeding frenzy of production, reproduction and repurposing. The more people tried to individual themselves, the more difficult it became. No one’s ‘voice’ was particularly outstanding; the atom had devolved almost entirely into the wave. What all of this produced, above all, was trends. That’s not to say there weren’t still personalities in the art world—galleries needed name recognition, and high prices still brought spikes of interest—but the characters that circulated in the limelight were generated to dramatize certain vibes. It was the trends themselves that did the work, the artists like a revolving cast of actors in a soap.”
― Mariel Franklin

“It was a state I’d never seen in him before, he was usually such an amiable borderline alcoholic.”
― Mariel Franklin, Bonding

“All those years in which nothing had happened – the bad connections that went nowhere, the bad sex, the uncertainty, the gut-wrenching instability – none of that had been under my control. People suffered from a lack of love under wholly arbitrary conditions.”
― Mariel Franklin, Bonding

“They always had taglines that were grandiose but also bland, like ‘globalizing breathing’ or ‘exploding words’. It had a kind of poetry to it, I thought, as I made my way down Kingsway, like haiku but without either the heart or the intellect.”
― Mariel Franklin, Bonding

“The French have banned the hijab. What have we banned?’ She paused for effect. ‘Foxhunting.”
― Mariel Franklin, Bonding