Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Bluebeard
There lived a cold unloving man who dwelt alone in castle walls But tension worthy of a clan kept him company under a high-strung roof. Dreading women, loving battle and the hunt, A Bluebeard; frightened of, frightening children. His cellar stocked with vintage wine and bodies of the loved ones Who knew too late the fate that came of knowing him: Tied to sterile dreams, fated to form an empty vessel, Drained of all emotion, drunk by a leech’s thirst. Speed is of the essence, there’s no time to catch a breath, Hurtling deathwards with precision; He keeps the past…
Continue Reading →Straggler
"Isle of the Dead" by Arnold Böcklin (1880)
He felt he had lost the edge, Somewhere along the way. He thought he could only improve, That his powers were permanent, But he badly misjudged his talents And the transient mood of the throng, Woke to find he had lost the edge, Somewhere along the way. So he glanced more sharply, more often At the image growing closer before him; Rubbed the surface of the mirror with vigor, To gain clarity of perception, But with deep disappointment, he realized That the portrait grew ever still fainter, One day it would blacken and vanish, Somewhere along the way.
Continue Reading →Don Quixote
"I shall be the more highly esteemed..." (poster by Georges Rochegrosse, 1910, for the opera by Massenet)
(Miguel De Cervantes) (1605 -15) The man of La Mancha is somewhat akin to Walter Mitty, braver and with dementia. A proud and hapless dreamer, he is perhaps rather the inverse of Mitty (a modest man who dreamed of himself as doing great feats) in doing silly things and imagining them as great. Not just silly, mind – proud and uncanny – some of his acts verge on the psychotic. Idealised as the first ‘modern’ novel, arguably post-modern, reading it today, you start to feel as mad as the faux knight after working through the artless courtly romances of his time. A minor noble…
Continue Reading →Vivienne Westwood
Just plain bad. (I hear you Mum)
(by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly) It is no secret that, ever since I read “From A to Biba” and “Quant by Quant”, there has been a special place in my daydreams for an assuredly idealised and somewhat chronologically inaccurate 1970s King’s Road, London. I’ve often imagined bobbing into Biba for some knee-boots and popping into Mary Quant for some pop-art makeup*. But until I read this bio/auto-bio, I never, but never, envisaged wandering into Dame Vivienne’s “Worlds End” store on that same blue-skyed Saturday morning. Perhaps because it is in such a different world altogether from the non-challenging swinging London I…
Continue Reading →Incitement
Caesar stabbed in the forum & elsewhere, painted by Vincenzo Camuccini (@ Moderna)
Julius Caesar (1601) (Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953) A good film of a great play, scribbled when Shakespeare was limbering up and entering his white hot phase. The story is mainly of Brutus, nicely and very glumly played by James Mason as the ‘reluctant’ conspirator. All of the key players are good, although one might say Louis Calhern plays Caesar much like he was as the big spy boss in Notorious (that playing strangely fits the minor but key part in the play but is much too vigorous for a 66 year old prone to fainting spells). Suetonius called Caesar “deified” and suggested that…
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