boosey_soho

now posting at http://thisisphoebe.blogspot.com/

As I lowered a book on Erotic Antiques into the window display, I wondered, Why do I always get The Pervert? I don't have anything against perverts (small p); it's to be expected in an art bookshop. I even quite like the pervert who comes by and asks "Got any Aubery Beardsley in?" To which I reply, "O, um yes, let me have a look on the shelf..." and as I am ascending the ladder to the "B's" he clears his throat and says loudly "Just the sexual stuff dear, please." But The Pervert is a whole other ballgame. He is very fat and sweaty, and has a high-pitched, quick voice.
"Metamorphoses." He announced, after slapping his hand down on the counter.
"Metamorphoses, what have you got?" He licked his lips.
"Do you mean, as in the theme of transformation?" I inquired.
"Yes," he salivated, "transformation of the body... humans... undergoing... surgery."
Weakly I reached for the book on Orlan. His hands pawed it over. "Yes, yes, more like this, more... surgery."
After he had gone I poked my head round the door of Rowland's office. "Why do I always get The Pervert?" Rowland just smiled weakly and carried on cataloging.
Last night I went to see one of the Isabelle Huppert films showing at the NFT. The film was pretty good. Afterwards Su said that she thought that back in the day Isabelle Huppert looked like the ginger one from Girls Aloud, and that this thought alone had possessed her throughout the entirety of the film. She apologised, and carried on to debate the definition of the female gaze with Paul's friend Ben. I enjoyed the film mainly because I had inadvertently blagged a free ticket from the muddled ticket vendor who thought I was in film promotion. Getting into things for free makes me incredibly happy. I also got into the Velazquez for free this week. I saved £22 this week! I thought about this as I passed through the Elephant & castle on my way home listening to Thin Lizzy. The Elephant & Castle seems to pass a lot better with "Dancing in the Moonlight" as it's theme tune.
And now for a poem: (I have been reading a lot of greek verse recently)

Kicking against the Pricks

Said horse to ass, "Why kick against the pricks?"

Anon. The Oford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, 1938 version.

Paris was a fun... at first I couldn't find Anne (my friend from NYC, who'd been touring europe with her orchestra) and had to expensively telephone her via UK, USA, Czech Republic... "Meet me by the Sorbonne", I said, as though in a french film. Everything went a bit nouvelle vague after that. We went to the Conservatoire for a performance of John Cage, Xenakis, and some young Polish composers. Sophie and her friend arrived late, half way through the 20 minute Cage piece, and got nervous giggles because the trombonist kept making farting noises. Also, the translator was wearing incredibly tight white trousers, which should have been a big warning about where he had arranged the evening's party. At about 11.30 we turned up at a very seedy gay bar near the Peripherique. The walls were adorned with naked men in rugby scrums. The waiters weren't so polite to the ladies (especially english ones, it's no good, they think we are awful...) but everyone had lots of wine and I met Anne's boss, the conductor Petr Kotik. He is an old acquaintance of Adrian. I thought about what I could say to him from Adrian's assessment, and rejecting "He's a bully and a megalomaniac" opted for "I hear that you are an excellent flautist..." In the end we drank until the early hours and finished up making what seemed like then, hilarious origami...


Anne and her very nice Peruvian musician friend who was also an Origami genius

What else can you say about Paris? It's really Parisian. It was lovely to see old friends, and eat a lot of good food and drink a lot of good wine with them, and I managed to visit the Palais de Tokyo before catching the train home. One of the best pieces in the show was a model of a 3ft man bashing his head against the wall. It scared the shit out of a group of four year olds on a school outing.


Hiroshima rendered in noodles, at the Palais de Tokyo


Going home on the Eurostar

BYE!

It is really entertaining when you get a telephone call from a friend who begins their conversation with "yeah, so I'm in Manhattan at the moment trying to buy some bongo drums..."

This, of course, was Anne, who is coming to Yrp (Europe) in a couple of days with her orchestra. We have arranged to meet in Paris. Everything is so international these days.

I haven't been to Paris in ages. To be honest I don't associate the great city with the best of times. I remember dinner out on a school trip when Angela "Countdown Conundrum" asked "ou est les frites avec mon lasagne?" in a really south london accent, causing those of us who'd holidayed abroad since our tot years to cringe with middle-class culinary embarassment (then inwardly curse our snobbish inclinations, exacerbated by a inferiority complex to the French ... it was a crap restaurant anyway, oof.) I remember looking into the eyes of the Devil on the Metro. I remember when Mhari asked a man directions to a monument, and he tried to show us his monument...

I suppose it is churlish to moan about Paris. I'm looking forward to seeing Anne considerably, and it's only a short train ride back to Peckham anyway. Vivre la Différence.

Conway Hall Foyer sign and pot-plant

It is nice to hear that you are catching up with the experimental sixties, said my friend Adrian Jack (buy his cd, it's good!), after I told him about the Christian Wolff concert last night. It was held in Conway Hall, home of the South Place Ethical Society, and the place, it seems, for liberal creatives to hold their wedding receptions (marriage is so fashionable now amongst liberal creatives, like the experimental sixties never happened...) I ended up sitting next to an old tutor from Goldsmiths who reminisced about a wedding reception he had attended where the djs annoyed him "trying too hard to be cool" by playing Genesis(?) all evening. I recalled how the last time I was at Conway Hall (for a wedding reception) everything had appeared in double-vision after I got drunk and went crazy on the dancefloor to T.Rex with my dad and Alison Goldfrapp. I remembered the cool stone of a solid egalitarian pillar as I leaned against it in the foyer shouting down my mobile telephone to a friend that Alison Goldfrapp was "stealing my dad's moves."
Talking of hot celebrities, I was mistaken for Kate Moss today. Well only for about half a second, and because of some densly obfuscating glass, but still!... After I had pootled in to Cornucopia on a quick stop for the charity shops in Victoria, I realised that Kate Moss had also decided to visit the shabby boutique for yesterday's chic. Being totally unaffected by celebrity after a year in Harrods serving the likes of Ronnie Corbett, I did an "oops, 'scuse me" round Croyden's finest and the bulging rails of vintage clothing, and decided that I needed to get home for a cup of tea. As I went to leave, Kate Moss's bodyguard was in the way of the door, and being big and awkward, sort of collided with me. The Papparazzi, who had gathered outside, obviously just saw a big bodyguard and blonde fussing behind the glass door, and for one very short moment as I stepped out the cameras rattled away. I should have wise-cracked something like "Look at me, ten Kates in one!", but I didn't and tried to look as though I was thinking of something far more important as I walked off.
Before leaving the Victoria area all together, I went into the Aids charity shop and found a book of sheet music with "All By Myself" in it. I rather look forward to adding that to my Ukulele repetoire.

Are You Afraid to Die?
This morning I received a cd in the post from my new pal Jill (dead sparrow) and this is the title of the last track. I think that she makes a very good mixtape cd, ending it like that. Also, she illustrated the cd. I have never done that. As you can fit an average of twenty four songs on to a cd, I always get fatigued writing them all out for the "sleeve", and so can't be bothered with extra embellishments. Once I was given a cd on to which the offer-er had pasted a collage. The centerpiece was Clint Eastwood for some reason. Unfortunately the combination of paper, glue and Clint Eastwood seriously disagreed with my cd player, and I had to give up on it. I think that it was some Bob Dylan bullshit anyway.
Tania has left my house. She's not moving back to Mexico, but to a semi-squat behind the Old Kent Road after finding that she can't rent anywhere decent cheap enough to match her immigrant finances. I'm going to give her a blanket and cushions. It started getting cold last week, and little Tania needed some tights. We decided to visit cheap local shops, and in the deathly TK Maxx (more on that here) Tania found a friend to mirror her mood.

At my house the other night she went through the records, finding anything by Los Paraguayos or The Tijuana Brass, and swayed mournfully to the toots of a mariachi trumpet.
Tomorrow is the opening of a new show at the Barbican. Dominik, another immigrant friend and former colleague, has been assisting the curators, and has invited Rowland, Su and I. Public events with Dominik are always guaranteed fun because of his unusual behaviour. He is also dying to introduce us to his friend from North Carolina, who he once lovingly imitated for a whole hour. He has a thing about american accents, and always assures us in strong slavic tones, that Americans think he's "bitchin". Despite this rather continental lack of self-deprecation, I admit that he is... and especially as he smuggled some Witkiewiczs over from Poland for the show, I am looking forward to it all very much.

My parents telephoned from Monte Carlo:

"It's boiling hot in this phone booth" Said my mum. I could hear traffic and then it became muffled. My dad had obviously entered the booth and closed the door, and was laughing. "Get off!..." She growled, and the receiver klonked against something.
"We're on the beach today, and I've done some drawing." Said Mum. "Everyone here is so old and brown they look like they've already died and been cremated. I've been drawing them."
"Have you had any nice meals?" I enquired, with the banality of expensive holiday telephone conversations.
"Yes, we had a plat de jour."
Dad grabbed the phone;
"Phoebs?"
"Yes?"
"Heh heh."
"What?"
He was laughing again. "Are you ok?"
"Yes."
Tears were streaming down my eyes. No, no, I wasn't crying, I simply have a disgusting cold.
"Well no, I've got a cold."
My dad laughed. Mum took back the telephone receiver.
"O.k, well we'd better go. We're dying of heat in this phone booth. How's Nobby?"
I looked at the dachshund at my feet.
"Hang on, I'll put it on speaker phone and you can talk to him..."
Nobby's ears shot forward as reverberating coos and kisses boomed into the room. His little knock-kneed legs stood braced in attention.
"What's he doing?" They chorused.
"He's looking confused and alert." I said. "He's confused now."

After they'd gone I gave Nobby a pat and sneezed. It's completely grey outside. When Tania came in we watched Amadeus on DVD. It's a very enjoyable biopic. In it, Mozart has a fey high-pitched giggle which Tania and I wondered about - did Mozart really laugh like this? I'm going to find out now. The most irritating thing about being laid up with a snotty cold is you only just about feel up to engaging in minor tasks like researching if Mozart had a ridiculous giggle.
I look forward to a return to health and the beginging of a new painting.

POST SCRIPT - from the IMDb, Amadeus (1984))
"The concept for Mozart's annoying laugh was taken from references in letters written about him. One described his laugh as "an infectious giddy" while another described it as "like metal scraping glass"."

"I won't read anything published after 1990" said the highly pungent German (Berlin Wall syndrome? - Bette Midler suffered that too) with whom I conversed for at least one whole hour yesterday in the shop.
"Then we entered the digital age," he continued, "and the speed... it has us entranced, a pornographic trance..." His flow was often broken by a customer (it was a busy Saturday afternoon) who caused him to drop his filthy Jesus -like head and mutter "No, no, they mustn't listen to this... they... no.. ah!"
Rowland finally appeared... "Did you just have a nutter?"
"Yes," I said, "but he spoke mainly sense."
We laughed, just as the man re-appeared. He told us that it was ok, that he knew we were laughing in the right way, and that we had analogue souls (this was to do with Rowland's knowledge of German communes and me owning a few prog-ish LP's.) When I got home, the album of outsider music that I'd been after for ages had finally arrived in the post, but I couldn't face it until this morning, and am right now enjoying The Legendary Stardust Cowboy Standing in a Trash Can (Thinking About You) - a fitting description of our German post-'90-exile prophet.
Musically, I have been challenged over the past week or so to traverse an Alpinesque line of variety. The other night I accompanied Jason to see "Wicked - the Musical" which delivered everything you could possibly want from a top US Tony Award winning production: lots of key-change belting numbers, an obligatory anti-Bush joke (Wizard of Oz - "if there isn't an enemy then we gotta create one!"), a dry-ice forest scene, and the opportunity to purchase a "Wicked" sweatshirt and cuddly flying monkey in the foyer afterwards.
I must admit that musicals aren't quite as much fun on home turf; somehow the mid-westerner musical enthusiasts on Broadway seem more exotic than the West End coach trip entourage from Dudley.
I also played a bit of accordion and rythym ukulele for Joe's band Moses Strongpeace and Lord Gorefinger in Finsbury Park. I feel like I'm on holiday when I go to North London. We are enjoying an Indian Summer at the moment, and after recording we sat outside in the balmy evening air, imagining what it would be like to be married to a tortoise, and then listened to a bit of 70's Spanish rock which I liked but Joe didn't.
I have also had the great fortune of meeting Jill from Chicago, who has invited me to play along with her compositions like "Dead Sparrow". Although I am a very limited performer, I feel empathy with a song called "Dead Sparrow" so I hope that bodes well for our collaboration.
It is nice to be so involved with life, but I am not very good at being busy. I got something in my eye that has probably fallen out but feels like it's still there. I think that I am getting a cold. Last night it all got too much, standing in a crowded bar waiting for a Hepcat rythym shamanic blues singer to appear, and I had to retire. I'm going to take it easy this week, and let the music come to me. I have, after all, an analogue soul.

Wow, I just saw this article and thought that they were turning Don DeLillo into a musical on Broadway. As it turns out, this White Noise is not quite "Throw up your Jazz Hands, it's the Airborne Toxic Event!", but it still looks like a promising show. Anything that puts the Razzle into Racism and comes out the other side professing that "the most terrifying and unstoppable form of Fascism in today’s culture (is): Top Forty pop" has to be a riot.
I can't wait until they bring it to the London Stage and hold auditions on tv with Andrew Lloyd Webber, like they just did with The Sound of Music. Who'd audition? Can you imagine a young ingenue cooing to the camera that it had always been her dream role to play Blanche, a character inspired by the real-life teenage white supremacist pop/folk band Prussian Blue? But there are plenty of young Fascists in the UK who might heed the call of stardom. Fascists are naturals in the limelight, and finally the BNP might be able to channel some of their dramatic energy down the more traditionally inclusive vista of musical theater. I'd love to see that wonky eyed leader of the BNP doing an Al Jolson number with the BBC Big Band, then Graham Norton would take him aside to get A.L Webber's reaction and coax him into a pun about Phantoms.
Despite Post-Modernism, some of my friends are super high-brow, and would rather go to a Baudrillard talk about Trans-Aestheticization anyday over Broadway. My trouble with this is that Baudrillard can't tap dance. Maybe he should write a Musical. I think that these new contemporary and controversial musicals are really going to pave the way, and we can expect a whole batch of "Kristeva on Ice!", "Lacan's Vegas Swansong" and "Johnny Guattari - an adaptation for Stage" in the near future.

I felt uneasy all day.
Firstly, I was reading An Unfortunate Woman on the bus this morning, and it overwhelmed me with sadness.
I had discussed reading it with the poet with a red face who wears a beret who's always around, and he told me how the manuscript was discovered by Brautigan's daughter, who had to scrape off the brains which her father had just blown out of his own head all over the said manuscript.
So obviously you can't read it without that thought in your head.
And then, enjoying a nice sandwich and cup of lapsang souchong at the Photographers' Gallery Cafe, I bumped into Debbie from Any Amount of Books and we had a little joke about the evacuation of Charing Cross Road last week due to a suspect package.
I'd noticed the suspect package - a metal box sealed with duck tape - outside our shop. I assumed that the woman upstairs with the dreadlocks and stage make-up had left it there because she's always dropping odd things outside our shop. She fiddles around by the bin which has an abrasive surface, and as she leaves, one of her floor-length dreadlocks often sticks to the bin and detaches from her head, like a bestial remnant of some unknown creature escaping the hunt. But anyway, then the police arrived and told me to leave the shop. Unfortunately Rowland was down the road at Any Amount of Books, and I had to inform him of the procedure.
Leaving the new girl, Tori, nervously in charge, I promptly went to retrieve Rowland. As I entered, Debbie and Barry warmly greeted me and struck up a pleasant irreverent conversation, which I falteringly tried to interrupt with news of the evacuation. Rowland appeared, amused by the suggestion that we had to join our manager up the road at the Beaujolais Wine Bar while the Bomb Squad did their work. "Have you ever been evacuated?" asked Rowland to Barry, "Heavens no!" Barry replied, "I'm an Anglican!"
But this has gone off topic, the point is that in the Photographers' Gallery Cafe Debbie started to run through other dramatic events on the Charing Cross Road, including the shocking story of a woman who plunged from one of the flats above to her death. Debbie described how the man in the newsagent had witnessed - and here she slammed her hands together, breaking the poised cultural quiet of the Photographers' Gallery - how he had witnessed and would never forget the woman's head smack into the pavement.
Yesterday I read an article by Michael Frayn about dreams that made me think of Brautigan's writing, and then today, I thought that it freakishly echoed the unsettling criss-cross of associated narratives that were popping up relating to violent fatal damage to the head... http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1868174,00.html
I went back to work feeling depressed, and then had about six seconds of deja vu when Sandra brought the post round. That is all that I have to say about today.

Harry Lime might have thought that the cuckoo clock was the only thing Switzerland has to offer, but I like cuckoo clocks. During my recent trip to see Iori in Switzerland, we visited a cuckoo clock emporium in Montreux; a plastic cave, decorated from top to bottom with contraptions going "boing - cuckoo cuckoo... boing - cuckoo." I like the fact that they cartoonishly symbolise madness, which seemed most apt considering the events of my stay in Switzerland.

Iori does Elton John outside the Grand Hotel, Montreux
Back in our student days, when Iori and I found friendship through, amongst other literary concerns, our favourite dame Muriel Spark, we often imagined a Sparkian scenario in which we would run an eccentric Finishing School in Montreux. Unfortunately our funds and connections are not yet sufficient, but we did marvel at the fact that we had made it together to the faded resort. After a visit to the château de Chillon, where we saw Byron’s name engraved in the stones of the dungeons, we larked about in front of the Grand Hotel, looking out across the Lake as the sun set and a few wealthy elderlies promenaded quietly along into the dusk.

Lake Geneva

Can you guess what it is yet?
This is the toilet at château de Chillon. It is an approriate image becasue the Abyss was very much the theme of our continuing global adventure in the footsteps of Patricia Highsmith.
The Schweizerischen Landesbibliothek in Bern was hosting an extensive exhibition on Patricia Highsmith, something we had intended to see since March, but had only, in the last few days of it's run, got around to. Here is a link to the archives http://ead.snl.admin.ch/html/highsmith.html

We discovered, in a documentary which had obviously gone through a series of foreign translations to great comic effect, that Highsmith had decided to dedicate her life to a study of the psychological abyss when she was eight years old. It was at this age that Highsmith had begun to worry that mental deviances are hereditary, after concluding that her mother was mad. She picked up a copy of Menninger’s The Human Mind, and although Menninger argued that madness was not, indeed, passed on, it all seems a little by the by when an eight year old has considered these things anyway, and goes on to cultivate an obsession with snails (how the shell spirals into oblivion!) and collect lists of murder rates and, just for the sake of it, the number of times a neighborhood dog passed through her property. Patricia Highsmith was not your average Joe!

Portrait of Patricia Highsmith by Allela Cornell
We were completely overwhelmed by the exhibition. I had never seen Highsmith’s expressive drawings, or the strange carvings that she made. There were facsimiles of all her photo albums, showing her at parties with Barry Humphries(!), and letters from Edward W. Said, Muriel Spark, Grahame Greene, and the Bowles’s. There were unpublished manuscripts, her EXIT membership card (the Swiss legal euthanasia association), her typewriter, the Confederate swords which she’d bought at 13…

Hell is the Other - Iori & I reflected in Highsmith's Mirror
Exhausted, feeling perhaps that as Highsmith had often claimed “Hell is the Other”, she wouldn’t have wholly approved of strangers trawling through this fascinating yet highly intimate bazaar, we left the Library and headed to the city's famous Bear Pit. As we gazed into yet another dark hole, it seemed that the current residents (Pedro and Tania - imported from Spain) where not going to show up, so we went and had dinner to recover.
Funily enough, a man on the train back to Geneva struck up conversation and tried to convert us to a cult, scarily fixing us with his dead, unblinking eyes and badly concealed video camera. We agreed that he was sent by the spirit of Highsmith (Strangers on a Train!), and bow in reverence to her memory.
On my final day in Geneva, we decided to keep it real, and headed to the Paquis - Geneva's red light district. In the Cafe Arts, we observed the best Quentin Crisp homage we'd ever seen.
Then we walked along the riverbank until the point of confluence between the River Arve and the Rhône. There was a clear seam between the two rivers, on one side blue, the other grey, and Iori described how he'd once come past this spot and witnessed a woman sunbathing naked on a landing point, whilst another woman stood high above and played the bagpipes.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that Switzerland is a boring mittleland of neutrality and fondue; it's completely cuckoo!
More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/22095585@N00/sets/72157594277374306/

Today a small child came into the shop, approached Su, and rapidly said:

"Hi Phoebe it's Joe I've been in a time machine."

Before Su, who'd clocked the joke involved, could tell the little child that he had the "wrong blonde", he opened the door and yelled:

"I've done it, where's my money?"

And in walked the real Joe, chuckling.

As it turned out, the little child was Joe's Nephew, who was joining Joe and I for lunch. Pizza Hut, he declared, with the unshakable yet arbitrary resolution of a child, was where we were going to eat. Overriding protocol, Alex (the child) marched past the Please wait here to be shown to your table! sign, and we sat down. I looked at the menu, written in heiroglyphical fonts, which at no point described/illustrated something that I recognised as edible. "It's easy!" cried Alex, and made a fart noise with his armpit. Feeling like my mum trying to write a txt msg, I endeavored to decipher the compositional differences of a Hot Chick and the Saucy Hot One, then let the menu (thickly laminated for extra durability in the hands of squabbling coked-up -no, not that kind- minors), fall to the table, and passed over ordering responsibility to Joe. My only thought was that I didn't fancy anything that had been hand-tossed by the chef at Pizza Hut.
A woman came to the table and announced "My Name is Lezmo(!), I am your Waitress" and said we could call for her if we needed anything. I was going to say "forgiveness for my sins", realising that my conversation in the presence of a nine year old could, at almost every moment, be termed inappropriate. "What's your favourite film?" I'd asked little Alex. "Meet the Parents." Came his instant reply, "What's yours?" Having been brought up under the ambiguously progressive don't talk to kids like they're kids ethos, I replied "Apocalypse Now", ready to dive into my reservations, however, with it's conceptualisation of horror in Marlon Brando's wacko campsite down river with the natives. Luckily, Lezmo(!) got the food on the table, and I shut up, stunned by the array of yellow things that we were about to eat. For some reason, Joe had thought that two adults and a child would need the Feast for Four, and as I held a piece of "stuffed crust" aloft, pondering the mal-associations, I knew that I was not cut out for the job in hand.

But I strangely enjoyed this plunge into the unknown (to return to Apocalypse Now, Pizza Hut became, in a fashion, the Marlon Brando to my Martin Sheen) and it's nice to keep the kids happy! I returned to the shop with a doggy bag for Su. She wolfed down the last few slices of lukewarm pizza, and then corroborated my theory that the sudden increase in my heart-rate and feeling of weakness in the muscles was probably down to Pizza Hut's special blend of ingredients. There were several slices of cheesecake which we simply could not face, so I gave them to Barry at Any Amount of Books, who seemed ever so pleased. I hope that he is not dead.

(p.s Apocalypse Now isn't really my favourite film, but it would be if Bette Davis was in it.)

vote PHANTOM!



vote VAMPIRE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy3PCUxcr7o

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the aspidistra. - adapated from 1 Corinthians iii. 6. (After George Orwell)

“What are you doing, Farley Romaine?” Yolanda, a big-boned girl who was good at public speaking, had discovered Farley behind a tall filing cabinet in the common room. Farley had been on the verge of putting a snail upon her tongue. It was a test to see what she could bear.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Yolanda, “It’s probably got pesticide on it, or something gross.”
Farley looked into Yolanda’s eyes, waiting for the arrival of disgust that had been delayed by Yolanda’s Labrador straightforwardness and primary impulse towards common sense. But sure enough, her brows knitted together and lowered, and the eyes shrunk into suspiscion.
“Why are you doing that anyway?”
People entered shrieking, and Yolanda was instantly distracted away from Farley and her habits. Taking her chance, Farley slithered past the cabinet and out of the room. She had some time before assembly to hand in an essay that had given her trouble for the past two weeks, on the Corn Laws of 1815.
“Farley! Is that you? Or Fata Morgana herself?”
Farely was crouching by the pigeon holes, trying to find the hole in which she could stuff her essay; it had moved.
She looked up at Dr. Jappit, who despite her elegant face, had never seen an orthodontist, and had the teeth of a rabbit. Dr. Jappit was pointing a ruler towards her pigeon hole, and Farley deposited the essay there.
“Now that is done, you must water my aspidistra! Here,” she produced a watering-can, “is the juice.”
With the ruler in one hand and the watering can in the other, Dr. Jappit struck the smaller object against the other just as the gong sounded for assembly. The turbinating, oriental boom seemed to have been caused by Dr. Jappit and her ruler and watering can. Two girls passing by noticed this and turned to each other and laughed. Dr. Jappit glared at them, her front teeth biting down in a particularly rabbity fashion, and Farley used the distraction to sidestep into the procession entering the school hall.
Yolanda, who was deputy Head Girl, was standing on the stage. She was wearing a prefect’s gown which came above the knee on Yolanda because she was tall. Showing beneath, Yolanda wore bootleg trousers and platform trainers. She looked like Batman.
There was a great commotion at the front of the hall, where First Years had to sit cross-legged on the floor. A First Year had sat on a drawing pin, and was blaming it on one of the others. Another First Year, who had found a piece of flint in the playground and been rubbing it in her blazer pocket, had withdrawn her hand to find that it was covered in blood. There was a First Year who’s mother, Esther, often came to the school to read the bible to students, and the daughter of Esther was very religious. When she saw the girl who’s hand was bleeding, she had cried out “Stigmata!”, causing a panic amongst some girls in the Third Year who had watched “Carrie” at a sleepover on the weekend.
Yolanda stood on the stage, flapping her gown like a magic cape, as though she intended to stun the school into silence with a display of superhuman flight.
Farley put her hand to her stomach as though she were about to be sick, and dashed from the hall.
As she exited, she encountered Dr. Jappit, carrying her aspidistra.
“This institution would suffer ignominy without the Cast-iron Lady gracing it’s darkest recesses.” Said Dr. Jappit to Farley, though she looked wistfully into the plant, and stroked one of the strap-like leaves.
In the few minutes that Farley had been in assembly, a dozen aspidistras had appeared in the adjoining concourse. It was inconceivable how they had materialised, and Farley had only known Dr. Jappit keep the one aspidistra, which Dr. Jappit often referred to as “George”.
“Which one is George?” Asked Farley, but Dr. Jappit did not answer.
“Dr. Jappit?” Farley stepped behind her…
Suddenly Dr. Jappit spun round to face Farley, but the aspidistra that she was carrying came between their faces. Dr. Jappit held it aside.
“You,” she seethed, fresh spit on her teeth catching the light, “are just a figment of my imagination! And George… is dead!”
As Dr. Jappit and Farley stood facing each other, the aspidistra propped on Dr. Jappit’s arm like a bushy baby, Farley became aware of the hush that had now descended in the hall beyond. Yolanda’s voice, though muffled by the oak doors, was honking through the school reading.
“And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love…”
“…I am nothing.” Finished Dr. Jappit, as she walked away with her plant. “Corinthians, chapter 13.”

I just finished watching Apocalypse Now, and because I saw a tremendous spider yesterday, and am convinced that it is still lurking in the palour about to scuttle across my path, I had to sit with my legs in a most uncomfortable contortion to avoid contact with the ground for the duration of the whole film. It is a little depressing that there was an advert luring young people to join the TA half way through, too. The combined experience has given me heartburn.
Whenever I've seen Apocalypse Now with my dad (three times), he always mutters something about "and while that was going on, Andy Warhol was at the height of his career..." He doesn't realise that it's a whole lot better than what I've got to say if I get old and they make a film about Iraq; I will sit there shaking my head... "and Paris Hilton was at the height of her career..."
In the end I suppose it all boils down to the same thing, history repeating, fact into fiction and vice versa... but there's always Canada! (though they go around clubbing seals... the horror, the horror...)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2318643,00.html

Even though Stoke Newington always presents a good hour and a half journey on London’s indomitable bus system, it repays such intrepidness with bountiful pleasures. Lots of good people are in Stoke Newington, feasting nightly on £1 lahmacun, and cultivating a nice art scene.
Ummit, landlord of The Marquis of Lansdowne (quaintly Irish sounding, resolutely Turkish…) probably has a soft spot for Su, and so let her use one of his properties on the main road for a exhibition last night called Black & Tan. I was very impressed by Su’s curatorial skills, and enjoyed the chance to show my painting “Wasserkopf”. A good crowd had gathered by 8 o’clock, and soon everybody was eager to see the promised performance.
Rumours had been circulating that a double-layer strip of fried chicken boxes, cheekily imitating a Carl Andre, would somehow be involved. Sure enough, as a spotlight fixed upon the chicken boxes, Simon the Performance Artist had begun to remove his shoes and socks, painting one foot black with shoe polish, and inserting the other into a latex glove. He stood, one foot raised in the air, at the start of the chicken box runway.
Keith and I had become trapped behind the action, and faced not only the rear of Simon, who had begun to hop and wobble, making the battle-cry of a Red Indian, but also the respectful audience. I felt Keith begin to quake by my side, and I glanced across at Su, who’d put her hand over her mouth, and was looking hard at the floor. I think it was ok to laugh; it was supposed to be funny. As Simon alternately smashed either a blackened foot, or a latex-gloved foot, into the chicken boxes, a faint comment of “possibly racist, yet sufficiently contemporary” could be heard amidst the audience.
It was nice to see Jane and Erik and Keith, even though they had hangovers. Jane is a drunk, but under the cloud of her own demons she makes a delightful interlocutor, abundant with sleepy observational humourism. They had returned from a holiday in Sweden, Erik’s homeland, and Keith said that he had enjoyed his first trip to Sweden and liked the fact that it seemed flat, and easy on the legs.
I’m looking forward to my holiday next week, but seeing as it’s in Switzerland I imagine that, just like the performance art we witnessed last night, it won't be easy on the legs at all. I don't think that they have nearly half as many Halal fried chicken shops as London, but Switzerland is full of mountains.

I saw this woman at the cafe today, and told her that she looked wonderful and asked if I could take her photograph. She said of course, and told me that she was from Lebanon. I said how sorry I was for her country. It was a delightful moment to meet her and take her photograph.

It's Betjeman-ia! Bells shall ring across Cornwall (where he R.I.P's) on August 28th to celebrate the centenary of his birth, and the BBC has been broadcasting documentaries on our Bard of Suburbia.
I tread carefully with Betjeman - I concede victory to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, and have also experienced a death in Leamington Spa, but I think that Stevie Smith, Fanthorpe, and Larkin are much more interesting english poets, and the first two certainly shant ever have the bells of their respective counties ringing loud and proud in their honour.
On one of these bbc documentaries, Joanna Lumley was gushing over B, and breathily describing how she's a "prefect type - into Tennis and Lacrosse...". Gryff Rhys Jones was jiggling about saying how well she and Betjeman would have got on. Betjeman was a snob, a devout christian, and an adulterer... but at least he made it rhyme! Is this why he is popular? I think that a great swathe of the English like to be lulled by the even tempo'd historicism of Betjeman's attitude. Gosh, doesn't he capture the english, with all their class quirks and carefulness...
Betjeman is fun, but there is something very annoying about Gryff Rhys Jones popping up everywhere telling us to save little villages around the uk that look like HELL (in his "Restoration" slot), and then to crack open the Betjeman and smirk through the net curtains. O, but I partly enjoy these things! I had a bad experience when I passed Bookends up Charing Cross Road, and spotted the collected Betjeman in the window for £3. The lady behind the counter (Betjeman would note; middle-aged, NHS glasses, polar-fleece) took me by surprise; "You can have him," She snarled, albeit with well-spoken ennunciation, shoving the book into a plastic carrier bag, "I hate Betjeman." I said that I was simply taken by the price tag, and thought it "wouldn't hurt" to have a copy. She just glared, and I made a quick exit. That evening I visited Adrian, and on seeing the offending book, he asked if I could get him a copy the next day! The woman wasn't there this time, but it just goes to show, the English aren't so very predictable; she would have probably been more friendly if I'd gone to the desk with a Tom of Finland annual.

The new term brings new challenges. The new term brings new faces. The new term brings news. The news is terminal.

Destina Prood stood at the foot of the steps which rose to the stage, awaiting her introduction to the undergraduate audience. She was about to share her world view.

In the fourteenth row back, six along from the left, Georgia Marais was holding a book that was not on her reading list. She glanced down at it:

I read a book today in one sitting,
it was so riveting.

It was not true she had got to page 8.

Then Georgia concentrated on Destina Prood, who had ascended the platform like a panther up a tree. Destina tapped the microphone, feigning faux-pro to endear herself universally. Then she began. Destina looked out into the audience, and they looked at her. Their hot attention created a reflective bubble in the middle distance, and she watched herself from that point, like a dirty zoom lens. She pressed her palms against the grain of the wooden lectern, and thought that she looked strong. Her voice was returning to her from the speakers at the far end of the auditorium. When she said the word “carcinogenic”, she heard back “photogenic”. Georgia, who'd clocked the first word, and subconsciously offered the silent other, approved of Destina’s unusual adjectives; they were really spicy!
As they left the auditorium, Clark Konemann leaned towards Georgia;
“Tight as a sail, fair as the cotton, fast as the race.”
He retracted, nodding, and narrowed his eyes as though peering through his own erudition.
Georgia thought that the “fair” bit wasn't wholly successful because Destina was mixed-race, but then she wondered if Clark had been attempting a metaphor based on the subordination of black cotton pickers of the South, and not simply referencing his Sailing background in Newport. She didn't know.
“What are you reading?” Asked Clark, and Georgia showed him the cover. Clark flicked the pages casually as though Georgia had just handed him a radical pamphlet.
He stopped to concentrate on the short biography at the beginning;
“You know I haven’t actually even read anything by Destina Prood. Can I borrow this?”
Georgia declined, and went to the library. She opened the book at page 8, then began again at the first page. She read the book in one sitting, it was riveting.