Trout Mask Sepulchre

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Clearly, you idle bastards have been shirking while I’ve been away. So, just to get you rabble back on your toes, let’s have Rondeaux on the subject of fresh-water fish.

You’re not working for kindly, easily-imposed on Dr. Jekyll Mills, now. It’s Mr. Mishari Al-Hyde. So, get cracking… freshwater fish…no halibut, cod or sardines, you slippery sods.

Let’s see if you clowns still have the chops.

Here’s mine:

Stream Of Conciousness

The world flows by like a swift dream
Swirls round your mind like feeding bream
The sun dawdles; the air stays chill
Magpies chase each other downhill
Mayflies rise, wreathe water like steam.

In town, you aren’t what you may seem
Out here, vast nature reigns supreme
Keep what you catch; eat what you kill:
The world flows by.

The air flows over skin like cream
You mine your mind, a rich new seam;
Ore you must refine; have you skill?
Make something fine; takes time–and will;
On the brow of the hill, sun’s gleam:
The world flows by.

…alright, alright…or poems about freshwater streams.

Pretty Fly For A Beige Guy

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Many Things Very Considerable or Trout Fishing With Robot Jesus

And an ingenuous Spaniard sayes, “That both Rivers, and the inhabitants of the watery Element, were created for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.” And though I am too wise to rank myself in the first number, yet give me leave to free my self from the last, by offering to thee a short contemplation, first of Rivers, and then of Fish: concerning which, I doubt not but to relate to you many things very considerable. –Isaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)

The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. –Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

“He’s supposed to have a particularly high-class style: ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ … would that be it?”

“Yes,” said the Managing Editor. “That must be good style.” –Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1938)

I come from haunts of coot and fern, where the curious Pyrenean wombat barrels through the lush undergrowth in search of….ahhh, fuck good style. I doubt it suits me.

Greetings scribblers, versificators, assorted creatures (and Mowbray, who’s sui generis). Politely Homicidal is back in harness…goddamn it. Back to the city I love/hate, where the dulcet tones of the Lesser Spotted Crackhead echo in the detritus-strewn streets; where pimply teenaged policemen club you to your knees and taser you for being beige and politicians and ‘celebrities’ make the air hideous with their noise and unseemly contortions. Ah…London. Where I might, if I cared to, emulate the Blessed Freep and ‘slink sullenly through Slough, or prance petulantly past Penge.’

I picked up the robot Jesus image from a souvenir stall in the portico of Girona’s cathedral. Even given Spain’s long predilection for blasphemy, I was a bit surprised. I’m not sure why, but I was very struck by the image and carried it with me throughout our varied fishing jaunts around the peninsular.

I must mention, in passing, the Aragonese hamlet of Sant Jordi des Arroyo or, as I came to think of it, The Village Of Ghastly Headgear. For some inexplicable reason (and believe me, I was too disconcerted to actually ask) the entire population of the village (all 200 of them) wore what are called in the US ‘gimme’ hats, i.e. baseball caps with a corporate logo emblazoned across the front. (‘Where’d ya git thet hayat, Gomer? Feller down the John Deere place gimme it‘).

It was passing strange to see an 80 year-old crone shuffling down the main drag, shopping in one hand, fiercely-smoking Ducado firmly plugged into the corner of her puckered old gob as she emitted metronomically regular puffs of smoke like The Little Engine That Could, a Microsoft baseball cap planted on her old grey head. The local priest wore a cap that declared his fealty to Metallica and the local game warden advertised his penchant for Dr. Pepper. I suspect some US Air Force plane, winging its way to an American base with the necessities of US-style existence (hamburger patties, guns, crack, Percocet, baseball caps), was forced to jettison its cargo over the village.

Even more intriguing, I came across firm evidence of our friend Steven Augustine’s double-life (something I’ve long suspected him of, the dog). A local establishment bore the sign:

Estaban Agustin i Germans-Pernils (‘pernil’ is ham in Catalan, ‘germans’ is brothers)

Berlin hipster/artist provocateur by night, purveyor of quality pork products to gnarled Catalan rustics by day: if I had one of those gimme hats, I’d take it off to him. That’s what I call subversive.

I’ll be back later on to bore you all comatose with tales of derring-do: how I matched wits with the cunning trout in the eternal battle for primacy between Arab and fish. But lest you imagine that trout are the only wildlife of interest to be found in an Aragon trout stream, disabuse yourself of this notion. Many shy and lovely creatures may be observed in these bucolic mountain landscapes.

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a bientot...

Public Service Announcement

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Politely Homicidal is going to be mostly off-line until September. All that means is that I won’t be around. The blog will still be live, though and everyone’s welcome to use it as a sort of graffiti wall…until then, I have a wife to placate, children to terrorise, a sun to worship and fish to catch.

Born Today-Edward Hopper

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Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to 1900. Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism.

He was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore, were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals.

Although one of Hopper’s paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad, a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude. Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles.

Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks, shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.

Although Hopper’s work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City.

(Got tired of looking at Proust and his wilting moustache and spaniel eyes–Ed.)

The Parts Recaptured

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Proust’s Madeleine

Somebody has given my
Baby daughter a box of
Old poker chips to play with.
Today she hands me one while
I am sitting with my tired
Brain at my desk. It is red.
On it is a picture of
An elk’s head and the letters
B.P.O.E.—a chip from
A small town Elks’ Club. I flip
It idly in the air and
Catch it and do a coin trick
To amuse my little girl.
Suddenly everything slips aside.
I see my father
Doing the very same thing,
Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”
His breath smelling richly
Of whiskey and cigars. I can
Hear him coming home drunk
From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart
Indiana, bumping the
Chairs in the dark. I can see
Him dying of cirrhosis
Of the liver and stomach
Ulcers and pneumonia,
Or, as he said on his deathbed, of
Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.

– Kenneth Rexroth

I’ve been thinking about smell, taste and memory and how they’re linked. Of course, it’s hard to discuss the phenomenon of memory without stubbing your toe against Proust and rightly so. No writer has ever been so monomaniacally devoted to retrieving and examining the past (the personal past, of course, as opposed to the historical past that another hero of mine, Edward Gibbon, devoted himself to disinterring).

Proust is commonly considered the first great chronicler of a phenomenon that we’re all familiar with: random sensory input opening the floodgates of memory. In Proust’s case, famously, it was a madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea that caused the levee to break. Even people who’ve never read Proust know this…and they’re wrong.

It’s worth quoting the relevant passage in full:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ’petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.–Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

As we can see, far from the ‘floodgates of memory’ opening, the narrator is perplexed, mystified.

He concludes that he must ‘create…something which does not so far exist…’. In fact what Proust did is, I think, far more impressive than merely recording the flood as it passed: Proust created the past (or a past), surely a much greater achievement. But no matter…

Here are a few of the scents and tastes that have opened the floodgates for me or provoked me into creating ‘…something which does not so far exist…’:

Guerlain’s Shalimar, Patou’s Joy, 4711 (Echt Kölnisch Wasser), Lanvin’s Arpège, Chanel No.5…then there are the scents that were never really designed simply to smell good but do to me…lemons, Johnson’s Baby shampoo, WD-40, fresh cut wood or mown grass, hot tar, baking cake, the sea, cigar smoke, lipstick, liquorice, fresh-ground coffee, old books, leather, horses, wet wool, brandy, a hot engine, Paris Metro stations, the now sadly defunct Routemaster buses of London Transport, my favourite charcuterie on the Rue Cler at the Champs de Mars end of the Rue de Grenelle, the sun-roasted meseta between Burgos and Leon, fresh-opened oysters (see ’sea’), lamb cooking over charcoal; the mint, laurel, myrtle, lavender, thyme, rosemary etc. of the maquis, furniture polish, a fresh newspaper, pencil shavings (slightly different from fresh-cut wood because of the graphite…I think), night-blooming jasmine, clean sweat, apples, Ducados (cheap Spanish cigarettes made from strong black tobacco; the working-man’s smoke and an old favourite of mine), Lifebuoy Soap (no longer made, not the original anyway), the early morning streets of Barcelona’s old town, a smell compounded of roasting coffee, black tobacco, warm stone and raw sewage…the list goes on and everybody will have their own candidates.

Give us a Terza Rima on the subject of smell, taste and memory.

(I’m a bit rushed at the moment but mine will follow…)

The Sweet Cheat Gone

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Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. – Henri Cartier-Bresson

A conversation I was having with our friend exitbarnadine got me thinking about photography or more specifically, photographs and their melancholic power. Initially, I thought to quote great chunks of Susan Sontag’s seminal work, On Photography but then I thought if anyone wants to read Sontag, they can download the book here. Anyway, what I want to examine is something rather different, that is: why old photographs unsettle me so?

Although I agree with much of her analysis, I draw different conclusions. My thoughts may not be original or very interesting but they’re my own, not Sontag’s.

Consider the picture that heads this post. It’s my mother and one of my siblings. I don’t know which one and neither does she. The light and the eucalyptus tree in the background tell me it was taken in Kuwait. Sometime between 1960 and 1966. But since my mother had five children in those six years, the baby could be any one of them. Who took the picture? My father? Perhaps, perhaps not. Not only do I not know but I can never know.

There is nothing, to my mind, quite as unreal and leached of significance as a photograph with no context. A painted portrait, no matter how little information we possess about its provenance–who painted it, who the sitter was, when and where it was painted–is never as dumb as an old photograph, adrift on the temporal ocean and flying no flag, bearing no name; origin, destination and cargo unknown. Our friend Tom Clark has written some beautiful poems addressing some of these matters.

I think what unsettles me most is how little I can glean from family photographs, even when I know exactly who the dramatis personae are. Take this photograph, for example:
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The picture was published in a Kuwaiti newspaper some years ago to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first group of Kuwaitis to be sent to the West to train. I know who all the men in the photograph are. They’re the men who built modern Kuwait (my father is seated on the far left). I know roughly when the picture was taken (1950) and where (London) but more than that, I cannot tell. All the men in the picture are dead and most likely couldn’t tell me any more than I already know anyway.

Who is the woman? Where in London was the picture taken? What happened afterwards? Did they go to a pub? Why do these seemingly unimportant questions haunt me?

It’s not, as one might imagine, simply the evidence of time past and irretrievable, it’s something deeper than that. I begin to wonder if in fact, photography does more to obliterate the past than preserve it. For decades we’ve been told that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words‘. I no longer believe it, not for a minute. How I wish my father had kept an extensive diary–how much more could a thousand words have told me about the taking of that photograph than the photograph itself?

We have been conned into believing that photographs provide some sort of unimpeachable record–that, yes, this thing or something very like it existed, that this person or someone very like them existed. But waves/particles of light exciting a light-sensitive medium and preserving an instant in light and shadow is just that–light and shadow, no more reliable evidence of anything than Plato’s shadows on a cave wall and when bereft of context, even less so.

I suppose what really causes the melancholy I feel when viewing old photographs (aside from a naturally melancholic disposition) is that for me, they serve to emphasise the essential unknowability, the unreachability of the past, even the very recent past.

Perhaps that’s why I regard our great libraries as one of our crowning glories. As unreliable as written records may be, as questionable as the veracity of chroniclers oftentimes is, a photograph will never be a substitute for a thousand well-chosen words. Falling into an old photograph is like falling into a well–the deeper you go, the darker it gets.

Books are the opposite: you may fall into a dark tunnel but more often than not, you’ll see a light at the end of it. However distant the light, however feeble its glow–books, words, can illuminate.

Photographs add to the deepening dusk.
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Great Auks From Little Acorns…

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As regular readers know, I often post a list of the latest peculiar (or downright bizzare) search terms that have brought people to this blog. I posted the latest today, inspiring our friend Captain Ned to suggest that we each write a poem based on one of the phrases. I like this idea very much. So here’s the list again:

banana bank robbery banana

having sex and sticking your penis in the

mickey hitler

sheep pie

how to pickpocket youtube

“horsefeathers swathed in mink

little girls pregnant in brazil

sheep with helicopter

nervous system of a sheep

i have offended god and mankind because

senile boss stuffed animals

tickle feet little girl

we’ll be friends senile

a cartoon little girl with a heart

forest path cartoon+ sheep

waffles bjork

three rich little girls from last century

english comic kebab hats in taxi

what formal hair style disguise a droopy

militant sheep illustrations

“looks like we’re in a tight spot” movie

out in the night… glaring eyes in dark

obama pickpocket president

the who mods

j t edson fascist

i had an almost apocalyptic vision that

muscular system of sheep

sheep autumn web template

waiting for something feels like eternity

angel in the rain

freep’s fashion

naked boys in arab films

chariots of the gods by erich von heineken

face masks transvestites u yube

dear sky shameless hussy press

“interstellar overdrive” jazz guitar wes

feeding in and tailing out timber required

picture of marilyn monroe eating a hot dog

exploded sheep

girl rubs boy cartoon

“marilyn monroe” drunk

alas, regardless of their doom the little girl

leni riefenstahl pretty swastika

wild west for little girls

marilyn monroe’s corpse

rothbury 2009 t-shirt

cool ford escape mods

mean little girls

william tell overture mum’s lament utube

…pick a phrase that appeals to you and write a poem around it.

A King Is Dead. The World Mourns.

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Bob Bogle, King Of The West Coast Guitar Sound Is Dead.

Nowadays, very few instrumental records are successful, but during the late Fifties and early Sixties there was a large following for instrumental groups. At first, they tended to feature saxophones (Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Champs), but then the classic beat group line-up of lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass and drums emerged. The bands that epitomised this were the Shadows in the UK and the Ventures in the US. Both had their biggest successes (“Apache” and “Walk, Don’t Run” respectively) in that golden year for rock’n'roll instrumentals, 1960.

Bob Bogle, who was born in Wagoner, Oklahoma in 1934 but raised in Portland, Oregon, enjoyed playing football and motorcycle racing, but was resigned to working as a bricklayer. While working on a building site in Tacoma, Washington in 1958, he gave a lift home to another worker, Don Wilson. Wilson noted the guitar on the back seat of his car, and soon they were playing together.

Unable to interest a record company, they started their own Blue Horizon label with help from Wilson’s mother, who named the group the Ventures. Their first single, “Cookies and Coke”, amounted to nothing, but the second was “Walk, Don’t Run”. The tune had been written and recorded by the jazz guitarist Johnny Smith, but Bogle had heard it on the Chet Atkins album Hi Fi in Focus (1957). Upping the tempo and adding a bright, punchy beat, Bogle played lead guitar, making use of his vibrato, which gave a crisp twang to the end of his phrases. The single opened with torrid drumming from Skip Moore, who unwisely chose a $25 session fee over a share in the royalties.

A radio station in Seattle used “Walk, Don’t Run” in the run-up to the news and it generated so much interest that it became a regional hit and was then distributed nationally by Liberty Records. “Walk, Don’t Run” climbed to No 2 on the US chart and sold two million copies.

At the same time, “Apache” was a UK No 1 for the Shadows, and their bass guitarist, Jet Harris, recalls, “I always felt that we were more gutsy than the Ventures as they were very clean-cut and very precise. We were at the London Palladium for a summer season when “Apache” was No 1. We were sent a copy of “Walk, Don’t Run” and were told it was coming out here in three weeks. If we were to cover it, we would have to do it straight away. We loved the tune, but we didn’t want to do it as “Apache” was selling so well.” In 1977, the Shadows did record “Walk, Don’t Run” and, indeed, there are over 50 titles that both bands have recorded.

The Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run” made the UK Top 10, but their biggest UK hit was with the follow-up, “Perfidia”, which made No 4. “Perfidia” had been a success for Xavier Cugat in 1941, but there was nothing Latin-American about their arrangement. It was effectively “Walk, Don’t Run” revisited. The Ventures had further success in 1961 with “Ram-Bunk-Shush” and “Lullaby of the Leaves”.

For many years, the band had a steady line-up. Bogle played lead guitar, Wilson played rhythm, Nokie Edwards was on bass and Howie Johnson, and later Mel Taylor, played the drums. As Bogle felt that Edwards was a more versatile guitarist, they swapped places, although Bogle returned to playing lead on The Ventures Latin Album (1979). Bogle wrote many instrumentals for the band, including seven on Super Psychedelics (1967), and he would label them as “Song One”, “Song Two” etc, until he saw something, a “No Trespassing” sign for example, to spark off a title.

The group’s policy must have been nothing ventured, nothing gained, because as soon as a trend was identified, the Ventures were on hand with an exploitative album. Their albums included Twist with the Ventures (1962), Surfing (1963), The Ventures in Space (1964), The Ventures A Go-Go (1965), Guitar Freakout (1967), Underground Fire (1968), Theme from Shaft (1972) and The Ventures Play the Classics (1972). They clearly welcomed imitators, as there are several albums in the series “Play Guitar Like the Ventures”.

Following a tour of Japan with Bobby Vee, they made the album, Bobby Vee Meets the Ventures (1963) and they had a US hit with a more relaxed, surfing treatment of “Walk, Don’t Run” the following year. In 1969, the Ventures had a US hit with the theme from the TV series Hawaii Five-O, which starred Jack Lord. There are so many musicians playing on the record, however, that it is hard to distinguish the Ventures’ contribution.

The Ventures released over 20 live albums, but the first, On Stage (1965), claimed to have been made in the US, Japan and England when they had never been to the UK. However, they were to capitalise on their Japanese following and they had astonishing success. Their sitar-led instrumental, “Kyoto Doll”, was a No 1 single, and they also topped the Japanese charts with “Hokkaido Skies” and “Reflections in a Palace Lake”. When Japanese singers performed lyrics over their backing tracks, they became hits over again. Through constant touring and a high profile, the Ventures sold 10 million albums in Japan.

In 1962, some years before Jimi Hendrix, the Ventures experimented with fuzz guitar on “The 2000 Pound Bee”. The record sold 50,000 in Chicago, but not elsewhere. However, it had one famous fan in the comedian John Belushi, and it was played at his funeral in 1982.

In 2008, John Fogerty inducted the Ventures into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Bogle, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, was unable to attend.

Robert Lenard Bogle, guitarist: born Wagoner, Oklahoma 16 January 1934; married Yumi (five sons, one daughter); died Vancouver, Washington 14 June 2009.

(orbituary lifted in its entirety and without permission from The Independent)

The Ho At Pooh Corner

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I’d like you all to subvert a children’s classic. Like this:

Eyore was looking gloomier than usual. Owl was looking thoughtful. Piglet was chain-smoking and seemed nervous. Tigger was bouncing up and down. “That motherfucker Tigger’s been sampling the product again,” said Piglet.

“Never mind that,” said Eyore, “we’ve got bigger problems. We promised Christopher Robin we’d deliver five keys. We’ve got nobody available to run it up to London.”

“We need some fucking moron,” said Owl. As they contemplated the problem, the gang became aware of approaching singing. “The more I pom-tiddle-i-iddle-i-pom, the more I dum-diddly-diddly-ti-tum…” A rare smile spread slowly across Eyore’s features. He looked at Owl. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

*****

On reaching Charing Cross Station, Pooh had exited the concourse, turned right down Villiers Street and walked to the river. The river was very big and not at all suitable for Pooh Sticks, he thought. How kind of Eyore and the others to send him on this exciting trip! And how strange London was! Pooh considered the word ‘fark’. The word was new to him but he had heard it many times already. A large man on the train had told him to ‘fark off’. Another man had asked him if he was ‘having a farkin’ larf’, another had told him to ‘get to fark’.

An odd kind of word, thought Pooh. Not very hummy.

“Get a taxi-cab,” Owl had said, “tell the driver to take you to the corner of Railton Road and Cold Harbour Lane in Brixton. Walk up Railton Road until you get to King Tubby’s I-tal Bakery. That’s where you must deliver the bag of icing sugar.”

A bakery, thought Pooh. Perhaps they’ll have something with honey. Pooh began to sing “perhaps they’ll have some honey, yummy-scrummy honey…”; a dishevelled man told him to ’shut the fark up.’
That odd word again. Perhaps Christopher Robin will know what it means, thought Pooh.

*****

Pooh walked up Railton Road. What a lot of new words he was learning! The taxi driver had called him a ‘kant’. A man he’d asked directions from had called him a ‘bomba clart’. A child had offered him some ’skonk’ and called him a ‘batty bwoy’ when he’d looked puzzled. This was quite an adventure, thought Pooh.

A white van screeched to a halt beside him. Pooh was knocked to the ground by large men with guns and the sports bag was torn from his paws. He was dragged to his feet. “Where you going, sunshine?”, he was asked by a burly, unshaven man. “King Tubby’s I-tal Bakery,” said Pooh, “I’m delivering some icing sugar.”

The men burst into raucous laughter.

*****

“Well, what’ve we got?” said the Detective Inspector. “Fuck all, guv,” replied the sergeant, “the bugger keeps talking about donkeys and owls and piglets.”

“Think we’ll get anything out of him?” asked the DI. The sergeant shook his head. “Doubt it, guv. He’s a pro. You know what they’re like.” The men gazed at the small, brown figure in the interrogation room. The DI nodded. “Hard as nails,” he said.

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…your turn.

How Do I Loathe Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…

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In 1977, the novelist Irving Wallace and his off-spring, David and Amy, scored an enormous sucess in the US with the publication of The Book of Lists. I came across an old copy recently and browsing it reminded me of the guilty pleasure of lists.

So what I want is lists. Lists of anything at all–The Ten Best Drug Fueled Albums of The 60s; The Twenty Greatest Films Noir; Ten Worst Alcoholic Drinks; Ten Best Novels Written By A Convicted Felon; Ten Best Poems About Cheese; Twenty Worst Fake Accents In Films; Ten Worst Performances By Actors Pretending To Be On Drugs…whatever.

Even better if the list is in verse form. The image of Marilyn Monroe, erm…reading Joyce might be a place to start: Ten Books Least Likely To Be Read By A Film Star…

Check-Out Time Is Now…

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I think, at this time of political uncertainty, it behoves the unaknowledged legislators of the world to try and make sense of it all. So let’s have sonnets on the current situation. Here’s a Spenserian sonnet:
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They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.

–from The Empty Church by R.S. Thomas

Out Of The Darkness

In his prime, they said He’s the coming man
And ever since, he’s climbed the greasy pole,
Most everything went according to plan:
His pals on the teat, the plebs on the dole;
Of course, some fools claimed he’d sold his soul,
As if such a man had a soul to sell;
As if such a man had any role
But to open the gates to a new hell;
Such men go too often to the dark well,
Replenished by Nemesis, topped with bile,
All senses deadened, such men cannot tell
Drinks that refresh from the drinks that defile.

Now shunned and despised, he clutches at straws:
Begs for a comfortable seat in the Lords.

I also urge you to serve up a slice of lyrical cake over at our friend Zepherine’s blog.

The Long Day Wanes…

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Even a right-wing moron in a hurry would feel completely unembarrassed to vote for us–Tony Banks, late MP for West Ham on New Labour

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So…farewell, then, Hazel Blears. Thank fuck. What is it with all the so-called ‘Blair Babes’? Why have New Labour’s women been so impeccably ghastly? Almost without exception, they have been every bit as bad as their wretched male colleagues–as spineless, as dishonest, as given to spouting doctrinaire drivel, as capable of a shabby thing. Is it that ‘Blairism’ attracted the worst type of woman? The blinkered ideologue, the relentless careerist, the most devoted trough addict?

Baffling. I like women. My wife’s a woman. My mother’s a woman. My sisters are women. My daughters are women in embryo. Many of my friends are women. All of the aforementioned are clever, funny, kind and brave. Is it simply that party politics doesn’t attract clever, funny, kind, brave women?

Anyway, good riddance. I detest Labour’s women more than I abhore the Tory version and for the same reason that I detest New Labour more than I loathe the Tories: because I expected more of them. I never felt betrayed by the Tories. I expect them to be what they are–swine. I demanded more of Labour. Now I can’t wait to see them utterly destroyed. The Tories will be a disaster, to be sure, but we’ll survive. I honestly don’t think we can survive much more of this worthless shower.

Home, Home (Mon Deranged…)

I haven’t time to write a new post, but at least I can give regular visitors something fresh to look at. I’ve been fascinated by Joseph Cornell’s work since it was first introduced to me many years ago by a jazz drummer friend.

I wasn’t surprised when years afterwards, Cyberpunk progenitor William Gibson used artefacts remarkably similiar as McGuffins in his highly influential Neuromancer trilogy.

There is, I think, something oddly, disconcertingly lovely about Cornell’s boxes. I hope at least some of you agree.

Talk amongst yourselves. Smoke, if you’ve got ‘em…

Printed In A Book…

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Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! –Job 19:23, KJV

I thought I’d take this opportunity to salute our friend Billy Mills and all the poster poets who made Poster Poems such a delight. I know I’m not alone in welcoming the prospect of Poster Poems returning, albeit less frequently.

It also gives me great pleasure to see that many of the contributions will be anthologized. I’d like to think it’ll become the Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the digital era. So well done, Bill, tolerant and encouraging landlord of the on-line Mermaid Tavern. May your moustache never grow thinner.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt…

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Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain–Billie Holiday

I was sitting at a table outside a backstreet cafe in La Serenissima, watching the autumn rain come down in sheets. The downpour hitting the awning above my head sounded like a carpet being beaten with wild enthusiasm.

I was the only customer–enjoying the rain, savouring the caffè corretto (coffee with grappa is ‘corrected’ coffee: I love that) and contemplating the way the surrounding buildings, already crumbling, appeared on the verge of melting into the murk of the canal. Liquifaction, dissolution, things returning to the primal source–it all engendered an agreeable melancholy.

The owner brought me another grappa on the house. I invited him to join me. We both contemplated the deluge.

“No wonder we’re the suicide capital of Europe,” he said. I thought perhaps, given my imperfect Italian and his strong Venetian accent, I’d misunderstood. He handed me a copy of Il Gazzettino, the local daily and pointed at a front page article. Sure enough, Venice was apparently the most popular destination in Europe for people intent on suicide. According to the article, autumn and winter were the most popular times for visitor suicides. Considering this, I decided that it made perfect sense. Venice is a melancholy place at the best of times: in autumn and winter, when it’s raining or foggy or misty, it’s even more so.

Venice has always struck me as perfect illustration of what the passage of time and the elements do to the monumental vanity of man. Every damaging high tide brings the city closer to falling back into the lagoon from whence it sprang. Wandering the back streets, along the small, little-used canals, one senses a city that is moribund. The young flee to the mainland, old family businesses and local markets close and the elderly shuffle about waiting for the next damp, cold season (Venice is freezing in winter) to carry them off.

Surrounded by the fading, crumbling glories of the past and a dying city, it’s hard not to draw the right conclusion–everything ends. Worlds, empires, cities, lives. Venice demonstrates that nothing could be more natural. It’s a comfortable place to make an end. Hence it’s popularity as a suicide destination.

So let’s have poems on death, dissolution and melancholy weather. Like this:

Sonnet 15

What was Ashore, then?… Cargoed with Forget,
My ship runs down a midnight winter storm
Between whirlpool and rock, and my white love’s form
Gleams at the wheel, her hair streams. When we met
Seaward, Thought frank&guilty to each oar set
Hands careless of port as of the waters’ harm.
Endless a wet wind wears my sail, dark swarm
Endless of sighs and veering hopes, love’s fret.

Rain of tears, real, mist of imagined scorn,
No rest accords the fraying shrouds, all thwart
Already with mistakes, foresight so short.
Muffled in capes of waves my clear signs, torn,
Hitherto most clear,—Loyalty and Art.
And I begin now to despair of port.

–John Berryman

Cardinal Sins

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A recent article in The Grauniad revealed that, “suave symbologist Robert Langdon, star of the international phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, is set for a return to the literary stage in a new thriller this autumn.”

Oh, goody…

According to The Grauniad–

The long-awaited novel – one of the most anticipated in recent publishing history – will be called The Lost Symbol, and will take place over a 12-hour period. No more details were given about its content, but persistent rumours have suggested it will be set in Washington DC and will focus on freemasonry. It will be published on 15 September with an initial print run of 6.5 million copies – the largest first printing in publisher Random House’s history.

Brown’s publisher Sonny Mehta is quoted, calling it “a brilliant and compelling thriller” which was “well worth the wait. Dan Brown’s prodigious talent for storytelling, infused with history, codes and intrigue, is on full display in this new book,” he said, adding “This is a great day for readers and booksellers.“

Well, for booksellers, at any rate, if the sales of the earlier volume are any indicator. And what, you might ask, made the first book such a success? Here are some of the reviews of The Da Vinci Code.

You’ll note that many of the reviews are from erstwhile reputable newspapers–The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune etc. British newspapers, including The Grauniad and The Observer, toed the line and gave the book enthusiastic reviews. So universal were the cries of delight and approval that I picked up a copy, expecting, at the very least, to be diverted.

I’m not a literary snob, quick to sneer at non-literary fiction, unable to pronounce the word ‘thriller’ save with a shudder. On the contrary, I revel in the work of writers like Alan Furst, whose brilliant, atmospheric thrillers set between the world wars are far superior to most of the so-called serious literary fiction I’ve read in the last 10 years. I opened The Da Vinci Code anticipating an enjoyable read.

I read the book with increasing amazement. The amazement turned to bafflement, which turned to irritation, hilarity and disbelief. The Da Vinci Code was wretched almost beyond description. The characters had all the reality of shop-window dummies. The dalogue was alternately wooden and tortured. The characters (and I use the term very loosely) appeared to have learned to speak English at The School For Endless Dependent Clauses.

Brown, whose mastery of ungainly exposition matches the King of DOA prose, Jeffrey Archer, is laughably inept. He is a great exponent of that hallmark of the bad writer: the extraneous character who briefly appears for the sole purpose of explaining the latest plot developments to another minor character (i.e. to the reader). That’s Brown’s idea of how to propel the narrative forward. The only reason I finished the damn thing was because I couldn’t quite believe it could be that rotten all the way through.

My mistake. It was. Reviewers had hailed the marvelous intricacy of the plot and wrote of its surprising plausibility. In fact, the so-called ‘plot’ could, as Martin Amis once wrote in another context, have been exploded by five minutes thought or a single phone call. It was the dullest, most moronic, most implausible, worst written and least enjoyable book that I had read in many, many years.

What were The New York Times, The Grauniad and the rest thinking? Of their advertising revenue, I expect.
The new book will, of course, be even worse. Writers like Brown don’t get better, especially when the previous effort sold millions of copies. The evidence of his bank account tells him he’s a great (or at least competent) writer. He is not. He is a rotten writer.

The last time around, rumours circulated that the rather sinister and secretive organization Opus Dei, Catholic nutcases with friends in high places, were mounting a plot to ‘eliminate’ Brown for the sin of exposing their secrets. The rumours were almost certainly started by his publishing company or the ubiquitous Max Clifford (that bugger gets everywhere).

However, in the unlikely event that the rumours prove to have some basis in fact, can I take this opportunity to wish Opus Dei well?

Weep and Howl…

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Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. –James 5:1, KJV

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The Chancellor and the pundits can blow sunshine up your undies all they like: there’s a depression coming and it’s going to get very ugly out there. Let’s have poems in the form of Decasyllabic Quatrains on the theme of the financial crash and the coming misery. I’ll work on mine just as soon as I get back from the soup kitchen…
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A La Carte

Money’s tight and it’s going to get tighter,
Tighten your belt and get set for the storm;
Your pocket’s light: it’s going to get lighter;
Your passions are cold, the soup is luke-warm.

Bodies are stacked in the street like cord-wood,
Burn them for fuel when they’ve dried out enough,
The parks are all deserts where trees once stood,
Denuded now of all burnable stuff.

Eat all the rich and the fat and your pets:
We’d eat humble pie but pies are long gone;
Stone soup and dream bread: as good as it gets;
We ate all the frogs–there’s none left to spawn.

I’ve eaten the kids; the wife was a treat,
The postman was quick, but not quick as me;
I’d eat my leg if it had any meat:
Oh, for a fat politician or three.
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Fascinating Fascism

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The reputation of Nazi über-babe and camera-fondler Leni Riefenstahl is one of those ineffable mysteries, like the careers of Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The last two, while baffling, are not particularly disturbing. They didn’t, after all, suck up to and glorify mass murderers.

Leni Riefenstahl is another matter. For decades, the orthodox view of Riefenstahl and her two alleged meisterwerkes, The Triumph of the Will and Olympiad, is that she was a film-maker of genius whose work has been tainted by her rather unfortunate association with an unsavoury political movement.

That Riefenstahl was an ambitious and brilliant woman whose romantic naiveté led her into the arms of more sophisticated and cynical people who manipulated her and her talent for their own ends. That Riefenstahl had no idea what Hitler and the Nazis were really about. She was just an arty young woman taken in by plausible scoundrels.

This is a view much promoted by Riefenstahl herself. Sadly for her and her enthusiasts, the most cursory examination of the facts quickly explodes this nonsense.

Let’s dispense with the ‘Riefenstahl the Political Innocent’ trope first. Here’s Riefenstahl describing her first experience of hearing Hitler, then a Presidential candidate, speaking in 1932:

“I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.”

Here’s what Riefenstahl told the London’s Daily Express in 1934:

“The book (Mein Kampf) made a tremendous impression on me. I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the first page. I felt a man who could write such a book would undoubtedly lead Germany. I felt very happy that such a man had come.”

In 1937, Riefenstahl told a reporter for the Detroit News:

“To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.”

Keep in mind that by 1937, nobody but an imbecile could have been in any doubt about what the Nazi’s policies were and whatever else Riefenstahl was, she was not an imbecile.

On June 14, 1940, the day Paris was declared an open city by the French and occupied by German troops, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler in a telegram:

“With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?”

So much for Riefenstahl the apolitical naif.

And what of The Triumph of the Will, so often hailed as the greatest work of film propaganda ever made that even people who’ve never seen it lazily accept that it must be true?

I attended a screening of the film recently. It was an eye-opener. We are asked to believe that it’s a great film despite its subject matter. In fact, I quickly realized, it’s a very bad film that’s of enduring interest precisely because of its subject matter. Riefenstahl is a beneficiary of what Susan Sontag called Fascinating Fascism. The compelling, evil gloss that coats everything associated with the Nazis.

The film that unfolded was, by any standard of cinematic rigour, as torpid and absurd as the Nuremberg rallies themselves must have been to anyone but the most fanatical and bone-headed Nazi. It was Wagner as envisioned by a dim adolescent bully. A puppet show for pinheads.

It’s not just the endless parade of Nazi grotesques–Streicher, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, etc., that sends ones heart into ones boots; it’s not just the tedious drooling speeches of spectacular banality, enlivened by paroxysms of mechanical applause; it’s not just the never-ending robotic marching, the mindless torchlit uniformity, the risible Nazi regalia of eagles and swastikas that appear to have been torn wholesale from some mindless Roman epic; nor is it the ear-grinding tedium of oom-pah marching bands making the air hideous with their ugly cacophony.

No, what really grate are Riefenstahl’s attempts at pregnant, metaphorical High Style. The opening scenes of Hitler’s plane flying above a sunlit cloudscape before descending to earth and his awaiting acolytes would have made D.W Griffith, no mean hand with a ham-fisted visual metaphor, cringe with shame. It is the worst kind of kitsch–obvious, leaden and utterly laughable. That such guff had a powerful effect on German audiences of the period is of some interest to historians and psychologists. That it’s cited as evidence of Riefenstahl’s filmic ‘genius’ is beyond belief.

The most straight-forward newsreel footage of the period is more powerful, more disturbing, more unsettling than anything Riefenstahl or Goebbels’ stable of tame film-makers ever produced. If Riefenstahl had not been “tainted” by the dark glamour of the Nazis, she would be utterly forgotten.

In interviews for the 1993 film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl adamantly denied any deliberate attempt to create pro-Nazi propaganda and said she was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used in such a way.

Dishonest to the last, Riefenstahl either refused to accept or failed to grasp that her association with Fascinating Fascism was the only interesting thing about her.

Crap Films II: The Return Of…

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Top Of The World, Ma…

I can’t remember when I first saw
James Cagney breaking the law
Perhaps it was The Public Enemy;
Cagney pushing a grapefruit into Mae Clarkes face;
But even a small boy recognized an electric presence.

It was no surprise to learn, many years later
That Cagney began as a hoofer, dancing in Vaudeville
He moved with a dancer’s grace, it added to his menace
Whether slapping a face or gliding in for the kill.

Whether dying in The Public Enemy or giving
Mae Clarke the boot in Lady Killer
Snarling like a panther in The Roaring Twenties
Or being a bad boy who comes good in
Angels With Dirty Faces or cackling insane
malevolence in White Heat, a crazed Oedipal loon
Before blowing himself to the moon
“Top of the world, Ma…”.

He was compelling: I couldn’t take my eyes off him,
Unlike modern stars, who send my eyes straying
Over set and scenery, sky and greenery, the script;
Whenever Cagney spoke, whatever he was saying
I was totally focused, completely gripped:
I always felt that Cagney was never playing.

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By the way, all the comments that appear on the poster are genuine. The various reviews can be read here

From Here To What Feels Like Eternity

A discussion of rotten films on the previous thread got me thinking: this is a seam of almost unimaginable richness. We all have our favourite celluloid stinkers. Memorialize yours in a clerihew. Like this:
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Lars Von Trier
Lived in fear
Of working with Bjork,
“She’s just such a djork”.

Quentin Tarantino
Said, “I think that we all know
That my name’s on the map
For making cartoonish, derivative crap.”

Guy Ritchie
Said “My wife gets bitchy
If I don’t let her act;
Though she can’t: that’s a fact.”
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Actually, any verse form will do or just prose re-calling your film nightmares. Lights! Camera! Action!