La Mer, qu’on voit danser...

Merely passing on a few links here, courtesy of one of my favourite bloggers, the wonderful Agnès Giard who writes for the French daily, Libération. That’ll be political, then, eh? Pas de tout! Agnès’ blog, Les 400 culs, devotes itself to La planète sexe and this week reports from Venice.
The Divine Annie Sprinkle has been there, conducting a mass wedding in which artists and lovers marry the sea. This is the Blue Wedding, to match the Red, Green and Yellow ones previously enacted. It’s a four elements thing.
See the pictures here:
http://thefearsociety.wordpress.com/
and read the CVs of the Big Blue’s marriage partners here:
http://loveartlab.org/our-bios.php
Also highly recommended, while you’re on her page, is Agnès’provocative essay La fellation - acte rebelle which views the Ur-Eve, Lilith, from a radical new angle: elle fait l’amour d’une façon mystique, recevant le phallus comme une hostie, à genoux devant le fétiche qu’elle embrasse, éblouie par la grâce…
In poor taste? Er, hardly!

Shooting the breeze

Ambient weirdness factor higher than it has been lately. A two on the Beaufort scale, I would judge. Stronger than just blowing smoke sideways. A tangible feeling of it on the face, as though breathing nearby.
First, half of a conversation on a mobile telephone, overheard:
‘He’s stupid. He thinks squirrels came to Britain from North America by flying. He thinks they flew here. First, the Atlantic Ocean’s three thousand miles across, right? And for another thing, squirrels can’t fly!’
Not long after this, I am on the top deck of a bus. There are a lot of things you can see from this vantage point that you miss on the ground. For one, the curious objects that have been placed on top of London’s bus-stops. My favourite is a potato struck all around with coloured, plastic cocktail sticks. It looks like a giant amoeba.
Then there are the trees. As we pulled up, I noticed a small metal name-plate nailed into the bark of a tree. Far too high up to read from the pavement, it was visible only to bus passengers, if they saw it. Very small and faded, I took it to be the scientific name of the tree. I read it:
‘Eugene A Cernan.’
One of the Apollo astronauts. Someone has named a tree after an astronaut, I thought. But not just that one tree. As we passed them, I saw that every single tree on the street had a tiny name-tag bolted to it, and each and every one bore the name of an astronaut. Why? I could not imagine. Perhaps as the trees grow, the tags move a little bit closer to the Moon. They are quite invisible to those on the Earth. Only in transit can they be seen at all.
Then there was the Polish argument. Three Polish people got on. They were in furious debate about something. Or, rather, about someone. I can little understand bits of Polish now and then. It shares its grammar and about half its vocabulary with Russian, which I do know, although the pronunciation is a world of its own.
‘It’s true,’ the older man was saying. He was wearing, for some reason, the Ghana national football strip. His two friends strongly disagreed with him. Tiny scraps came through to me. They were discussing the differences between English people and Polish people and money matters... I had missed the beginning of the argument so had no way of grasping even the gist of it now.
Then a man with a thick African accent interrupted them. I suspected he may actually have been from Ghana.
‘Do not speak about people in a disrespectful way!’ he shouted, in English.
I turned in as much surprise as the Polish people. Does he know? Does he speak Polish? How?
‘Are they listening to us?’ the Ghana-top wearer said, in Polish. His friends waved their hands, dismissing such a daft idea. But they had been disrespectful. I knew just enough to work that out. Did their heckler really understand them, or was he acting up? He interrupted their discussion many times more, though by the end he was laughing to himself like a crazy man. Did he really know Polish, or was he just mad?
By the time I got off, smoke was rising straight again, weather vanes still. The wind of weird had blown over.

Tie a Yellow Ribbon...

Good old Bertie Basset al Mick McGahey returned to a hero's welcome in Libya tonight. Thank goodness we live in a country where justice is tempered with mercy. He’s served his time... well, a little bit of time, anyway, and as he is dying, it is surely right for us to free him at once. Even as we speak, prayers are being offered up to St Ernest of Saunders and St Augusto of Valparaiso for his miraculous recovery.
Some may say this contrasts oddly with Jack Straw’s decision in the case of Ronnie Biggs, just lately reversing a judgment he had made only a month ago never to release him Biggs, of course, was “wholly unrepentant” about his actions, said Straw, while, by complete contrast, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has always insisted on his innocence.
Age is a factor, too. Biggs is a mere 79, whereas the Libyan is an elderly 57. Fortunately, unlike many barbarous, uncivilised countries, Britain is free of any statute of limitations. Thus Biggs could be locked up the moment he arrived home even though his sentence would have been finished with years before, and his crime written off as being just too long ago in places like the degenerate United States. Thank heavens Britons could sleep soundly knowing that this vile old man was safely behind bars, just as they can now that Fred Basset al-Mugabe is free as a bird in Libya.
Well, those people who carp about this decision tonight should remember something important. Ronnie Biggs committed a foul, filthy and inhuman crime. He stole bags of money! He savagely parted bankers and businessmen from their loved ones. They were never to see them again.
Some of this cash was to have been destroyed by the Royal Mint, so it could have been included in Britain’s famous Back Hand Aid Programme and helped needy politicians and civil servants in their retirement. Biggs cruelly prevented this. He is an evil, evil man, and none should pity him.
On the other hand, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi never stole a penny. All he did was help remove a couple of hundred perfectly ordinary people from the surplus population. It is not as though there is any shortage of them! He did, admittedly, cost an airline company the price of a new plane, so it is right that he should have served eight years for that, but surely enough is enough.

Hard-Boiled Defective

I can’t believe it of him. Talk about feet of clay. The other day I picked up a curiosity. A Hercule Poirot mystery I had never previously encountered. The Labours of Hercules it was called. Strange, I said to myself. I thought I knew all of them, but that title is news to me. There had never been a film of it, with the immortal Peter Ustinov, nor a TV version with the actor whose performance seems to have surgically moulded him into Poirot - David Suchet - nor yet a radio adaptation with the excellent John Moffat. It was an old edition, circa 1970, although the fly-leaf recorded that it was first published in 1939. So, it had been in print thirty odd years but faded since. I wondered why. It was on a bric-a-brac stall in a small market town, far from London and very cheaply priced. I bought it and tucked in on the way home, but soon discovered why it is somewhat less famous than other classic Poirots.
“Oh, I know,” you’ll be thinking. “It’s going to be like with that other famous Belgian, Tin Tin. It’ll be Poirot in the Congo - right?” Actually, no. It is politically dated, but not in that way. If anything, this one is worse...
I was highly impressed with the problem story, at first. Hercule is called in by the ‘People’s Party’ to deal with exactly the circumstances that overtook Westminster this year. Soon to be accused of presiding over a massive plundering of public funds for their own enrichment, party grandees admit that all the allegations are true, but can the story be suppressed? It’s so prescient, it’s almost spooky. The story is even called ‘The Augean Stables’! A passage from seventy years ago that sounds like it has come straight out of today’s papers.
I am sure that many politicians besieged by the expenses scandal might have wished for some help from a legendary detective to rid them of their duck house and moat-cleaning shame. Weirdly, Agatha Christie had foreseen all, in 1939, and put her top man on the case. So what happened?
Ah, well, that is where the clay feet come in. Poirot does exactly as he is told. He sets about ruining the newspaper that is preparing to air the story by feeding them a fake ‘scoop’ that he himself has engineered. They seize the bait, print the posed ‘sex scandal’ photos he has given them, and in no time Poirot has them in court for libel, trotting out a host of actors he has primed to testify the version of events that suit his clients. Success! The newspaper is forced to close as the case goes against its owners. Now no-one will believe their real story! Hurrah for Poirot! Lashings of ginger beer all round!
I turned the page, waiting for the O Henry ending, the one where Poirot reveals a far worse scandal that he has uncovered, one which will send the whole rotten People’s Party to prison forever. It was not there. I was aghast. There was no trace of irony in the mystery. Hercule Poirot, the great detective, had lied, set a ‘honey-trap’ for investigative reporters, fabricated evidence, wasted police time, solicited others to perjure themselves, faked a scandal to ruin a campaigning newspaper... and done all this purely and simply to make it safe for politicians to steal as much money from the tax-payer as they could carry! This was the moral of the story: helping good chaps in government to plunder the public purse in secret is a jolly good thing, don’cha know!
Oh, Hercule, Hercule... how you sold yourself! No wonder Ustinov, Suchet and Moffat never enacted this one. Those journalists were just like your famous compatriot! It is as if you were helping crooks that Tin Tin was trying to expose! That’s how ghastly this is! Maybe your readers cheered your actions in 1939, but today, as events repeat themselves, your reputation would look about as good as Hazel Blear’s car does right now, and you wouldn’t be using your little gray cells... you’d be in one.

Seen it all before...

“Jordan’s Naked Hols Romp... Amazing Pictures...” yelled the cover of today’s Daily Star. Really? I mean, really “amazing”? There’s no doubting what the pictures will show: topless glamour model Jordan naked, having a “romp” (I believe that is a journalistic expression referring to sexual intimacy, m’lud) on her holidays. What larks! But how exactly do these pictures qualify as “amazing”? Do they feature Jordan “romping” with Elvis? Bigfoot? A space alien? The Duke of Edinburgh? Those images might well be amazing, though not because of Jordan. The sight of any of these individuals involved in “naked romp” on holiday would be amazing in and of itself, but the presence or otherwise of Jordan would produce scarcely any additional amazement value. Having sex in flagrante, on holiday is well within the bounds of what might reasonably be considered expected behaviour for Jordan, and as for being naked that is, after all, her metier.
But doncha, eh, wanna see Jordan, like nude and, you know what I mean, going at it? Yes, I know what you mean, but ho-hum. It’s not like I haven’t seen Jordan naked before. Of course, I haven’t ever actively sought out such images, but they are impossible to avoid. They are as ubiquitous these days as the adverts for Chelsea Lately that are plastered all across London in the most over-the-top campaign for a TV show I have seen since the Living channel scooped the rights to Season 5 of Will and Grace. Actually, I am a bit unsure about the image they have chosen. I don’t really know it’s doing them any favours. Yes, that picture is on every third billboard in this city right now. Mind you, it got me to watch last night, just to see if the show itself could be as appalling as the poster. It did at least answer one question for me - what Whose Line Is It Anyway? regular Greg Proops is up to these days. He is one of Chelsea’s “Round Table Regulars” it would seem. The show is not exactly funny, but it gives a strong sense of having been taped before a live studio audience... in 1981. Greg’s new hair-style - a buffant mullet - adds to the retro feel here no end. Hey, this is a show for men who love to leer up women’s skirts and drool over their gussets... what could be more 80s than that? Let’s all have a holiday from the 21st century, just like Jordan, yeah!
As for Jordan, well, if her snaps were to show her demurely dressed, reading a book or watching the races from Goodwood on TV while having a crafty fag, or talking to a plastic surgeon about having her breasts restored to their original size while not making any attempt whatever to seek publicity for herself, perhaps even shielding her face from the cameras... now that would amaze me!

The Chicken and the Yegg

I hadn’t realised the new film Public Enemies was based on a book, nor that the book was a straight history of the gangsters of the 1930s. I turned up a copy of it the other day and have not been able to put it down since. The revelation in it is that although I was vaguely familiar with the names and exploits of the prominent do-badders of the period, like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, I never realised that they were all operating at the same time... nor that most of them knew one another. The gangs were in each other’s pockets the whole time. The crest of their crimewave took place during just two years, from 1933 to 1934, and the focus of Brian Burrough’s excellent history is how these ‘supervillains’ pushed the formation and development of the FBI. Out of this remarkable period in Depression-hit America come the stereotypes that informed so much of future crime fiction. I have long suspected that the pantheon of super-criminals of this era fuelled the imaginations of the cartoonists of both Dick Tracy and The Batman which emerged in the 1930s - Bob Kane’s Batman making his first outing in May 1939. Most striking was a reference in a contemporary newspaper to John Dillinger treating one of his many arrests ‘as a joke’. An inspiration for The Joker, perhaps? Certainly Two-Face and Baby Face are not a million miles apart. Pretty Boy Floyd must have been named ironically, as he wasn’t very pretty, indeed to my mind he did bear a vague resemblance to the Penguin, although it is also alleged that he served as the model for Chester Gould’s Flattop Jones. Bonnie and Clyde left mocking poems behind them, a little like The Riddler, maybe?
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’