2010 — 10 December: Friday

Judging by the time this morning1 I must have allowed a large sleep debt to build up. No matter. The concept of "oversleeping" no longer holds any fears for this doughty pensioner! On with the show.

The legend of the snake...

... can finally be put to rest, it seems. Source and snippet:

Helene Davis, back then an 18 year-old seated in the front row, says that there was nothing to see.
"We were watching and waiting because it was obvious that's where he was going with it," she said. "I just remembered thinking, 'Yes, it's going to happen! It's going [sic] happen! It's going to happen!' And it never did."

Chris McGreal in The Guardian


Priceless. But the current alternative to this fearless organ (I mean the newspaper) is the witless not-a-doctor Gillian McKeith on "Woman's Hour". So I've retreated to BBC Radio 3 and breakfast. One knows where one is with the Mozart Horn Concerto spoofed by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. And it was even the Dennis Brain performance.2 Indeed the presenter has now moved on to F&S! "Köchel rating 495" :-)

Will people ever realise, I wonder, that the main job of the armed paramilitary organisation still familiarly known as the police has for a long time been to protect the state against its own citizens (or subjects, in this benighted land)? So when someone chucks a brick (or whatever it was) at the luxury limo containing the would-be next head honcho on his way with his missus to the theatre, trouble ensues. Recall Brendan Behan: "I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse".

Not for the first time, I can illustrate the principle with a drawing by one of my underground comix heroes Ron Cobb. Here's a (deliberately) low-resolution copy of it:

Cops

It's crept above freezing, so I shall dash out and refill Mother Hubbard's cupboard before it goes all Arctic on us once again. There are still chunks of icy snow on the ground here and there. [Pause] Been there, done that, with an added detour to the "Print Room" to pick up my next kitchen worktop calendar to keep Christa's tradition going.

As we rapidly approach what would have been my Best Girl's 65th birthday (next Thursday) I once again ponder (briefly) those two impossible questions: how can Time pass so quickly, and how can our Time here be "all there is"? But since I still can't answer either of these, I shall simply enjoy my next cuppa, put my feet up, and lose myself in a book for a bit. It's 12:49 and either the unaccustomed warmth (+3C) or the impending festive spasm had certainly fetched out my fellow subjects in their hordes.

But I managed some neat reverse parking into a Waitrose space that would have met my instructor's approval :-)

Right! Time to join Roger and Eileen for a cuppa and a chat. It's 14:57 and I have a book to return.

Back less than two minutes...

... when the phone rings, and a caller from Bournemouth, after uncertainly getting me to confirm my name, assures me that he now has the results of a "hot rooms" heating survey recently commissioned by either me or my partner, and would I...? Well, I politely but firmly interrupted at that point to state that I haven't commissioned any survey, and (since my partner's been dead for three years) it's not likely to have been her either, is it? Collapse of calling party. Still, there's some cool music on PlanetRock, and the identity of that bright "star" is (says Roger) Jupiter. It's beautifully clear out there, suggesting it could be another icy night.

The weekend starts here!

The Guardian's habitual...

... punning headlines get a bit tedious after a few decades. However, I had to smile at "Bard Sex Award". Source and snippet:

The city of Mantua in northern Italy is one of the gemstones of the Italian Renaissance, and unlike Florence or Venice, it is relatively untroubled by tourism. You can wander practically alone through its Ducal Palace, imagining the lost world of the Gonzaga dynasty who ruled this city.

Pornography is probably the last thing any visitor is likely to associate with this civilised place. One of its court artists was, however, the most provocative erotic artist of the Renaissance. His dirty pictures travelled all over Europe and were studied avidly in Shakespeare's Britain. Now they survive only as tattered fragments and in a few degraded woodcut editions that escaped the censor's hand.

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian


Mr Jones had in mind a series of 16 explicit scenes by Giulio Romano that became known as I Modi — "the positions". So what? Well, having a trick memory, I recall that the June 1980 issue of Oui magazine has a short interview titled The Gooey Decimal System with one CJ Scheiner, "the proud owner of the largest private library of erotica in the United States." And Part II of Fenton Bailey's fascinating 1999 Channel 4 TV series "Pornography: the secret history of civilisation" interviews one Clifford J Scheiner, "Antiquarian Specialist in Erotica," whose New York accent makes a convincing case for this being the same chap still plying his esoteric trade.

My point being? In the interview he was discussing the I Modi, having paid $55,000 for it back in 1988. Happily, my more modern copy...

Book

... although bought in the same year, set me back a mere £19-95.

The worst aspect of dear Mama's dementia is the way her memory has almost totally disintegrated. If that happens to me, I'd like somebody to shoot me, please.

It's almost exactly four years since I bought my three Juana Molina CDs and now she's being played on the Beeb. She was at the London Jazz Festival this year, it seems. But I'm going to call it a day, as it were. G'night.

  

Footnotes

1  It's 09:57 or so.
2  Dad had this on vinyl; it was the first version I heard. Brain also played a garden implement (hose pipe? watering can?) at one of Gerard Hoffnung's musical gatherings. Music mixed with humour can be wonderful.