Your obsession makes you interesting.

Actor Alan Cumming has started a website documenting people’s obsessions. On www.itsasickness.com you can join existing obsession groups (Shakespeare, sloths, Buffy, etc) and add your own, then upload photos, videos and articles.

“Itsasickness is an obsession network honoring sicknesses; the objects of our obsession. We believe that no one is ever more interesting than when they talk about what they love. To do your sickness justice is to own it.”

Here’s Alan talking about the project on the Joy Behar show.

While it’s painfully obvious what I have been obsessed with for the last 20 years, this project made me think about past obsessions. I have dreadfully bad memory, but here’s what I was able to dig up:

• James Bond movies
• Paul Newman
• AFN/BFBS Radio
• Film posters
• Joao Gilberto / Brazilian music
• Sports (tennis & baseball) and sports clothes (Adidas)
• Field recording gear
• U2 live concert tapes
• Ireland
• Robbie Robertson
• Eddie Izzard

via meg

I hooked up an old HD to my computer yesterday, and found the most recent backup of the site, made just before I took the site off line in 2000. Among the files were two original pieces I wrote. They are a review and an interview, both of which I’d like to share with you again, starting with the review.

I’ve also put part of the site back online, not originally created by me, but given to me to host. It gives me great pleasure to present: Pantscat!, an early Izzard creation.

The review follows after the break. I haven’t followed Izzard’s career the past five years. I stopped ‘believing’ and thought he was a bit too calculating, too eager in the quest for fame. Not a lot of soul. Then I just lost interest. But this was written at the height of my comparatively brief obsession with the man who said ‘Jam!’

Eddie Izzard – Unrepeatable
Nieuwe De La Mar, Amsterdam
April 19th 1995

A whirlwind affair, this. First time I saw Mr Izzard was on tv and I was wondering who the hell he was. I thought I knew most British comedians. Wrong. I knew all the British comedians who show their face on tv: the Elton’s , the Connoly’s, the Enfield’s… And Mr Izzard has devised a cunning plan for himself – not to appear on television other than to proclaim his show will never go on television. Calculating man. I think it was ‘Have I got news for you’. He irritated me, which is always a good sign. I’d rather have someone bug me than that I’m left completely indifferent. But there was immediate respect as well.

He may have been wearing make-up, or there was somet hing else that made him stand out and you got have guts to dare to be different on television. Then I read an interview with him in Attitude. Interesting article. Made me want to see him. Which I figured would never happen, with me in Holland, he in the U K. The article gave me some idea of who this bloke was. So he’s tv. Okay cool. Gotta thing about men in dresses. Like it.

Come April ’95, friend sends me video of Eddie’s show for my birthday. And this is where it gets weird. I stick the video in the VCR, walk to the kitchen for a bite to eat, flip open the papers and hey presto: an ad. Eddie’s playing Amsterdam on my birthd ay. How many British comedians ever play Holland? Uh… not a whole lot? So I get the tickets.

On the night, the first thing that strikes me is the pearly shine coming from his fingernails. Nice touch. TV in the broadest sense. Eddie mixes it up. The way people should – if they had any sense. Then the shoes, hah – he has taste – black lacquer jobs, like mine on the night. Only mine are more masculine, his have heels the size of London bridge. Makes him in command of things, coming on like a peacock. Scarlet suit, no shirt, rather funky. Bright red lips, too. Brings a smile to my face.

My male friend fixates on the – he says – curious arrangement in Mr Izzard’s pants. He can’t figure it out. He asks me. Well, how would I know about wobbly dangly bits? ‘He has two,’ I whisper in his ear. We come to an agreement. Meanwhile, Eddie makes us laugh. And I’d like to tell you how, but I don’t remember what it was he said. Unrepeatable, you see.

There were thimbles, clarinets, singes sur des arbres, dickhead men and lots of times when he seemed – but then that could be totally planned – to lose his way in his own fantasy world: – sudden silence, ‘I’ve forgotten who I am now …’ and on again, down some unexpected alley. His jokes are the ones we all make. Not terribly clever, no pearls of wisdom, but the silly, childish pranks you play among friends, when you share a particular framework and are close enough to act like a kid again. Others might not understand.

Eddie’s talent is that he can make you part of his framework within a couple of minutes. You just let go and ride upon the cliches made funny again and the everyday silliness of life that Eddie dishes out. And somewhere, reading between the laughs, I sensed a vulnerability. Kids can be cruel. Adults even more cruel, cause they should have more sense by then. And aren’t fantasy worlds created as places you can hide in? Eddie’s the crazy kid down the road that makes people laugh.

It was more than just a bucket of laughs. It was like putting on a record that makes you feel all right, or getting out that book that tells your story. So we left feeling groovy – the ultimate Izzard word – not just for having laughed, but for having recognised. We wandered off, my friend and I, for a late meal. Talking about how we felt about the night, feeling closer for having had the same thoughts and experience. And if videos and newspaper ads isn’t enough for coincidences, Eddie walks into our restaurant.

‘You picked the right place to eat,’ I tell him and – totally uncool – ask him to sign my programme. I haven’t got a pen, and it isn’t for myself. All the wrong words. Eddie’s cooler than me, probably quite used to this kind of BS. I send the programme off to the friend who sent the video, which leaves him gasping and me pining for a souvenir.

‘Come back,’ I told Eddie. He would.

Do me and my kin a favour and vote for ‘De foto’ on the ‘Wonderen bestaan’ website. You’ll find the poll on the right hand side and ‘De foto’ is the last option in the poll (which doesn’t give it much of a chance of winning!).

It’s a great story and my uncle, who is an author and lyricist, does a great job of telling it (well, duh, he does readings and theater shows for a living). In short: About 20 years ago he was on holiday with his girlfriend L. and another couple. It was a miserable day and he hadn’t even wanted to go to England anyway. When they stopped for lunch, they came across an antique shop.

My uncle had a thing about ‘a book without a title’. He had been talking about this obsession during the trip, of wanting to find this ‘book without a title’. His friends had said books without titles didn’t exist.

Looking through the books on the shelves in the antique shop, he didn’t find anything he wanted. But there was one more book, sitting on a table. Picking it up he saw the book’s cover didn’t have any marking or lettering. It was a book without a title! And when he opened it, he found a picture of himself taken when he was a young man.

Cue theme of the Twilight Zone. Vote now. Vote often.

Like a lot of women, I have a thing for shoes. But strange as it may sound, I think I inherited this particular obsession from my father.

Growing up in WWII he did not have any shoes, so he developed a fetish in later life. My parents would, and I believe they still do, fly down to Lisbon for the weekend to buy shoes. Shoes are cheaper in Portugal.

Ever few weeks my father, a rather conservative man with 15+ pair of shoes — can you imagine? — will line up his collection and he will clean and polish them all. I never did pick up that part of his habit.

There are 30+ pairs of shoes in my closet right now. A few years ago, I threw out a lot of older ones, but kept enough so as not to make me nervous. I’ve stopped buying new pairs regularly, mainly because most of my money goes on computer stuff and music. But lately I’ve felt the old itch coming back.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s bare feet. I wear shoes most of the time. The practice that has people taking their shoes off the minute they step into their house is evil and should be outlawed.

Clunky shoes have always taken my fancy more than elegant footwear. Boots, shoes with impossibly thick soles (‘creepers’), Timberlands. For a long time, I wouldn’t wear anything but black ones. I bought the odd pair of Docs, though never those classic boots. I’ve got lots of tennis shoes and runners (or sneakers, or whatever you call them in your country).

The last couple of years flat feet and heel spur have forced me to wear runners to relieve the pain. I ran out of ‘dress’ shoes. The ones I have don’t fit anymore. Like your nose, your feet keep growing.

I went out in search of a pair of classic penny loafers. They’re preppy (… yes, I do have polo shirts and chinos too.), they’re boring, but they’re terribly comfortable. Then there’s the unisex factor. Appeals to my gender confused self. I drove my mother insane choosing ‘boys’ shoes from the day I was old enough to have an opinion. The sight of a pair of good suede brogues makes me all tingly inside. But even I have to admit they look severe on women.

I’ve never been able to work out what I am, preppy or alternative, posh or common, Dutch or Indonesian, bitch or butch. Maybe that makes me middle-class incarnate.

It’s hard to find penny loafers for women in this country. I suppose they’re not in vogue. The girls are all wearing these impossibly pointy boots. Shoes like that weren’t made for walking. A friend of a friend fell down the stairs wearing them. She broke her hip. Most of the time these trendy ‘girly’ shoes don’t fit me anyway. They’re too narrow.

Cycling all over Amsterdam I ended up on P.C. Hooftstraat (beyond nouveau riche) where I bought the final pair of Sebago penny loafers (rubber soles instead of leather, unfortunately) in my size in town.

They fit like a glove and I can wear them going out for dinner and not look like a complete knacker.

Talk about ones you have on, or the ones you covet. Tell me about your shoes.