julianrichards.com/homily

Hopenhagen to Smelsinki: Piracy on the High Seas of Hoopla

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

It is a rare morning in the lifecycle of the agency that dawns with cause to be proud. Ordinarily it’s a matter of prying open encrusted eyelids to find oneself slumped in the wrinkly palm of last night’s barcalounger, empty bottles of King Shag Sauvignon Blanc scattered like bowling pins across the deep pile, fag-ends drowned in glasses, the record player still bumping the shoulder of Fleetwood Mac Rumours, the Kleenex flowers of onanism crumpled moistly in the crevices. It can take a solid hour and an all-orifice Listerine douching for the phoenix of Julian Richards to rise from the ashes of his Keithly namesake.

So imagine blinking, yellow-eyed into the hangover glare of the Macbook Pro, expecting to encounter the usual cartel of child-poisoners, vivisectionists and knee-dandlers, only to find a clean, bright body of worthiness staring back at us, crunching with good health and Utopian zeal: HOPENHAGEN. Pro-bono, climate-controlled, unapologetically UPPERCASE, backed by the United Nations, sprung from the creative loins of our good friends at Ogilvy: and shot all over the planet by an elite cadre of above-the-line photographers including John Clang, Stefan Ruiz and Joachim Ladefoged not to mention our own Alex Tehrani and Henrik Knudsen. Three cheers for Tom Godici, Greg Ketchum, Michael Paterson, Greg Gershner, Justin Walsh, Leslie D’Acri and Cindy Rivet for bringing us on board and making us feel like we’ve eaten a fistful of alfafa in our otherwise seamless diet of snout, tail and grisly bits.

Alex Tehrani for Ogilvy

Henrik Knudsen for Ogilvy

But wait. Lest we forget our grist is ground in the scallywag mill of global advertising; no sooner had we heaved our bedimpled buttocks out of the Herman Miller in order to polish our newly-minted conscience with a teatowel (and find the corkscrew while we’re at it) than reports began to surface of vagabond plagiarists on the loose. Bamboozlers and swindlers from cities planet-wide, each with their own summit, treaty, conference and clambake to ballyhoo. Finding themselves bereft of even the crumb of an original idea, they nibble like vermin at the edges of someone else’s, biting out chunks and running off to masticate them into something worthy of a paycheck. Hopenhagen? What the fuck, I mean, our city has a name too! Maybe we can lose the first letter, replace it with a different one, make a cool word … and Bob’s your Uncle, right? Right, Hans?

Right, Helmut.

The shameless ripoff is hardly a new arrow in the quiver of contemporary advertising. Those of us who are in regular receipt of layouts and concepts will be familiar with the guilty gulp of estimating against someone else’s (aptly titled) swipe. We wonder how the likes of Phillip (Mr Peanut) Toledano sleep at night, their brainchildren kidnapped and molested each time they leave the room long enough to take a poo: the past few months alone have seen Phil’s offspring unceremoniously diddled by Sony PS3 and by McCann Milan, probably others too. Perhaps it is an indication of our own originality barometer being stuck on rain that we have seldom been at the butt-end of such outrages. Until now, that is. Until Hopenhagen. It is almost as if, having undergone creative hymenoplasty after a decade-and-a-half of hopping on anything vaguely zucchini-shaped, the Gods are sending us a message regarding our affectations of virginity: that a whore is a whore, regardless of any monkeying with the introitus.

First up (barely a week after Hopenhagen broke) from Rotterdam, the city that brought us such originals as Rem Koolhaas, Willem de Kooning and the 1970 Holland Pop Festival (featuring Canned Heat and Jefferson Airplane) we have a decidedly unoriginal campaign for what appears to be a Festival of Ass Glorification: Botterdam. Yes, you heard it right. The organizers allegation that horsing about with your undercarriage can help expedite World Peace cannot be easily verified, but it does seem plausible:

Zachte Haan Vennoten, Amsterdam

Hot on the heels of the cheesy Flatlanders (thanks to our friends at Pilfered for spotting it) comes what we assume to be the deep irony of the Bushveld, as the City of Johannesburg endeavours to position itself as the place to toddle off to if you’re in the mood for a septic orgy. What this campaign lacks in nuance it amply makes up for in candour:

Voortrekker Botha, Cape Town

Persisting with a theme (and slithering still further down the pole of depravity), as the fulcrum of the Eastern European sex industry slowly dribbles south from Prague, Bratislava Slovakia appears to be setting up road-blocks in its path. Evidence; this uncompromising campaign (seemingly for some kind of Reality TV show?) from young-gun British agency Corky Albright Fystme Sweetling. Despite the breathless Hopenhagen appropriation, it is a laudable effort from a city which has otherwise brought us fuck all really:

Corky Albright Fystme Sweetling, London

The prize for the most overtly nose-crinkling counterfeit must surely go to Copenhagen’s Scandinavian counterpart (who should probably know better), Helsinki. Other than Hanoi Rocks (2nd to Marillion in the 1984 Sounds Magazine Band of the Year Reader Poll), the only thing of note to have emerged from the frigid Finnish capitol were the 1952 Olympic Games, in which (as we all know) Emil Zátopek won three gold medals: the 5000m, 10000m and the Marathon (which, curiously, he had never run before). Likely feeling in need of a home-run after half a century in the wilderness, they are seeking to establish themselves as the City of Reasonable Doubt in the climate control debate, with the forthcoming Smelskinki! Summit (note the exclamation point). A cursory glance at the small print suggests that the main attraction of this event is an effort to break the world record for contiguous human methane production, which basically translates as making the world’s biggest fart:

Länsiväylä 33, Finland

And bringing up the rear in every way possible, from the sultry seat of Turkey, Ankara (14th in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest with Didai Didai Dai) we are blessed with the following crusade for an apparent summit on the manifold delights of masturbation. We are currently on hold with Atatürk Air frequent flyer desk:

Tünel + Tünel, Istanbul

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Filed in advertising, disciple updates, revolting self-promotion | Tagged Alex Tehrani, Emil Zatopek, Eurovision Song Contest, Farts, Genitals, Hanoi Rocks, Henrik Knudsen, Hopenhagen, Istanbul, Joaquim Ladefoged, John Clang, Marillion, Masturbation, Ogilvy, Perkin Lovely, Phillip Toledano, Pilfered, Rem Koolhaas, Stefan Ruiz, Tom Godici, Willem de Kooning | Comments (2)

Gerard Hopkins: The Manley Burden of Responsibility

Sunday, November 1, 2009

‘Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe.
What need I strain my heart beyond my ken?
O but I bear my burning witness though
Against the wild and wanton work of men.’

Sarah Wilmer

Minutes from the Annual General Meeting of Julian Richards’ shareholders, backstage at their old haunt, the Gaiety in Times Square; it’s now an American Eagle Outfitters, but if you gather on the second floor in the corner by Men’s Hoodies you can still breathe in the ejaculate. Following collective back-and-bottom slapping over this year’s cheerfully burgeoning workload, the primary issue on the agenda seems to have been the benefits reaped – and pitfalls encountered – by the birthing of this very organ, the one you, Dear Reader, have inadvertently stumbled upon whilst searching for ‘A-Rod wanking technique with eggplant’ (welcome back, by the way). Beginning at a low rumble, voices were soon raised to a degree that we were required to stop and pretend to be browsing the ‘Peace on Earth’ Graphic T’s. Sentiments to the effect of ‘Nobody gives a shit about Keats, dude, can you score me a fucking Nike campaign?’ along with ‘Everybody’s gonna think we’re a bunch of queers, sorry Deano, no offence man’ and ‘Perkin’s vaginas are freaking out the Pottery Barn people’ all expressed in strangulated whispers so as not to arouse the suspicions of a densely pancaked shopgirl from Secaucus. Which all begs the question: how does one pin down the shifting battle-lines that govern the artist/agent relationship? Where does one thing end and another begin? Is collaboration just another word for nobody’s called about your shit in two months? For those who are churning through the industry like paddle-steamers on Lake George it’s something of a moot point: in such cases the approach is essentially to keep doing what one is doing, with the addition of alluring elements of upkeep, renewal and the plucking of dead leaves (all made much easier by the heady presence of money). But what of the at-any-given-time-unannointed? How does one alchemize interest out of its exact opposite? From the photographer’s point-of-view is it perhaps ‘look, I’ve given you loads of great shit, I gave it to you more than half a decade ago, now go knock on more doors. Or take them up some fucking Krispy Kremes for breakfast or whatever it is’? One is tempted to quote Withnail in the Cumbrian telephone booth:

‘Well, lick ten percent of the arses for me then! Hello? Hello? How dare you! Fuck you!’

Withnail

Whereas from the agent’s perspective, it might be more along the lines of ‘If I try to show people the same fucking thing for the three-hundredth time, rudely wiped, reshuffled, the spine patched, with your name in a different font, not only are they going to make a note explicitly never to use you ever at all for anything, but they’ll probably start to wonder whether any word I say about anybody anywhere is actually true. And before you say it, three 8 by 10’s of your next-door-neighbour’s cat don’t constitute a new body of work’.

Contemplating this riddle whilst browsing the thumbnails of Jacquie et Michel, Amatrices Françaises at three in the morning, I was struck by an analogous situation described in a letter I had read in last month’s Ecumenical Spanker pertaining to that most stygian of the Victorian Vicar Poets, the Undisputed Nonpareil of Sprung Rhythm, the Jumpin’ Jesuit himself … Reverend Gerard Manley Hopkins. Now boys, boys … you’re not going to tell me everybody isn’t frothing at the bit for a dose of G-Hop the Manley? C’mon now, he wrote the poem That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire! It has the word clit in it! He didn’t have the easiest time of it, Gerard. Deeply religious from an early age, he was somewhat disconcerted upon his arrival at Balliol, Oxford, to discover himself pining for the seventeen year-old buttocks of the handsomely monikered Digby Mackworth Dolben. His not inconsiderable consternation was only marginally relieved by old Diggers drowning in the River Welland whilst frolicking with the ten year-old son of his tutor, Reverend CE Pritchard (who may or may not have been watching from the bushes).

The Drowning - Sarah Wilmer

Hopkins understandable reaction was to swear an oath of celibacy, convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism (they know on which side an altar boy’s bottom is buttered) and enter the Priesthood. He also took to recording his sins in a diary, which I believe can be reverentially beaten-off to in the Bodleian every Tuesday afternoon in January. Oddly, he also suffered from lifelong diahorreah – which had to be a bit tiresome – and the poor bastard lived in Dublin. I’m not making this up. His poetry was both his solace and his torment, passing largely unnoticed in his lifetime despite the attentions of his friend (and soon-to-be Poet Laureate) Robert Bridges. Hopkins viewed Bridges, with his wealth of contacts in London poetry circles, as a kind of advocate for him; almost (dare I say it) … his agent. He wrote long letters to Bridges, imploring him to push some poem or other under the noses of Newman or Tennyson or even Charles Darwin, whose only recorded contribution to the canon of world poetry is a scatalogical limerick about a gibbon. Bridges would write back unfailingly, always attentive and encouraging even in the face of his contemporaries’ seamless indifference to Hopkins’ work. The following is a letter dated September 1881, from Bridges to Hopkins. It follows a period of intense frustration on the part of the poet. He felt he had written some excellent poems over the years and yet scant interest could be engendered in them from anybody who might have the wherewithal to help him pay the rent. To some extent he seems to be holding Bridges culpable for this failure: the latter wasn’t getting his material to the right people, wasn’t pushing hard enough, had become bored and complacent, focussed on other poets or his home in the provinces. Had he considered doing a Sonnet Breakfast, for instance? Taking along some Butterscotch Bulls Eyes and a flagon or two of mead to some secretaries in a tall building? The poet had gone so far as to remove himself from Bridges’ patronage and place himself under the wing of one Seamus Baggage, hawker of minstrels, who had once carried Wordsworth’s watercolour easel up Helvellyn. What follows is Bridges’ response to his denunciation at the hands of an old friend. I think it draws an interesting parallel.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thursday September 29, The Knotty Pines, Lickham Bottom

My Dear Gerard

Thank you for your correspondence regarding the return of that small stock of pamphlets held in my office for clients to retain after discussion of your work. I find myself saddened by the idea of you taking these items (which, as you know, bear my name and address) gluing a label over said information and replacing it with that of Messrs. Baggage & Baggage. Does this not seem a tad shoddy in your estimation? An item made to my own specifications, to which I was comprehensively a contributor, hastily pasted over and attributed to another? If some person brought such an item to me I am afraid I would reject it out of hand, precisely because it would be so clearly associated with my hypothetical predecessor. Really, my dear Hopkins, it is a trifle tawdry. I would rather, in all honesty, you began afresh; the Baggages are going to need at least that from you – a wholly different approach and plan of attack – if they are going to make headway where I have not been able. You could with certainty have new pamphlets printed in little more than a fortnight, it is a remarkably straightforward affair: and if these pieces are to serve simply as a reminder to their recipients of your talent and earnestness, a keep-sake of sorts, then you will surely need but few; truthfully such items are seldom retained unless they constitute a published volume of some measure. That said, I see no reason as to why you should not produce such a formidable volume for yourself; a remarkable piece, cut and bound in Morocco, something to surprise and elate the viewer and stir him from his erstwhile complacency. It would certainly require earnest investment on your part; which is the reason I have always shied from broaching the matter with you. But in the prevailing climate of difficulty, and bearing in mind that you are already a known (though frequently passed-over) quantity, I do not see that you are presented with an alternative. Baggage’s sphere of influence – along with his reservoir of goodwill - is demonstrably no greater than anyone else. If he plies the same narrative he will reap the same rewards; which should be your greatest fear, because the truth I’m afraid is that he has precisely no magic at his fingertips whatsoever, none: but, my dear Hopkins, you do. You have your works and your passion. It is you that will make this happen, not he. All the paths he treads have been trodden before him (even though it seems it is this very point that you dispute).

‘The Windhover’ has been ever an exemplary piece and I am most gratified that you have finally decided to forge it into the cornerstone of a book; but I am compelled to point out that this is a matter we spoke about at some length several years ago, and on which I was most pressing and encouraging; but which you nonetheless neglected. Not to mention several other ideas and fancies set out in your correspondence. If I display an air of astonishment at any of this, you should understand that it emanates entirely from the feeling of having myself tried to wake these concepts in you on so many occasions, knowing that only a fresh approach could garner the interest of the people to whom I was referring your work; and that I arrived nowhere with my pressing. No new volume from you. Rarely new material of any sort, and then merely a line here, line there, nothing of breadth or of substance. Now you have decided to gather your belongings and move on, to try the same hand elsewhere; and it is the inspirational figure of Baggage that you have alighted upon to parlay this into commercial success. Please don’t misunderstand me; I cannot say I am displeased to see you go. The relief from guilt, from the inability to speak honestly about these matters, from not being free to express myself with candour about certain bodies of work, from having to display implied support for your actions even when I did not believe my own words; my Friend, this is consummate relief indeed. Such an epiphany is troubling only inasmuch as it has caused me to consider other relationships in this light and wonder whether a more joyous life, one less sullied by inner vexation, would be within reach if matters in general were more steeped in honesty. Yet this is likely impossible. Such, I fear, is the lot of an advocate.

What, my dear Gerard, of Baggage? Perhaps my sentiment is best echoed by Cordelia’s aside to her sisters regarding the welfare of her father:

‘But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place!’

I might have wished your apparent awakening had alighted upon a more worthy recipient. It is not that he is perfectly vulgar and dreadful; but he is by no means deserving, not in the manner of say Miss Nellie Kagan or Mr Ronald Magenta, these being good people with the gall to apply themselves to the development of talent in its nascent form. The Baggages have ever advocated for doggerel. Now it appears they are poaching established (but underachieving) artists in an effort to embroider their gaudy ranks with a veneer of sophistication. But respect is not won through plundering the decade-long endeavours of others; neither by preying upon an artist’s sense of vulnerability during times of trouble. Finding patrons for artists is important, but so too is integrity; and I suspect that ultimately one does not come without the other. Having said that, my desire to see cynicism fail does not extend to you; above all I wish you the success your work deserves. I have invested too much heart and soul to wish it any other way.

I am compelled, however, to address a particular point expressed in your letter. You said your commercial career had dwindled at a time when you felt it should have flourished. This bewildered me, as it bewilders me with other artists; because more often than not I am at a loss to understand what it is they believe they have been doing, in practical, game-changing terms to engender such an anticipated flourishing. Some novel, entertaining, exhilarating body of material, beautifully formulated, fastidiously distributed, augmented by a refreshed, challenging portfolio of works? A renewed passion for lasting, productive working relationships with appropriate luminaries in the field? I can say with due humility that I am able to wrangle a certain quantity of patronage from the community each year by my direct recommendation alone, trusting that the client in question will, when all is said and done, be delighted with the result of placing his trust in me. This has been true for the lion’s share of this year’s successes. Unfortunately you were not able to partake of this, your style and approach being too remote to fit the work at hand. I would have seemed a liar and a scoundrel had I recommended you for work for which you were not suited; and I would in the process have risked killing the Golden Eggéd Goose of Trust. But for the remainder, all an advocate can effectively do is prepare the way for the artist, open the door. It is the artist himself; his work, his personality, his desire, ideas, charms, passions, work ethic, intellect and humour; these are the elements that must combine to bring the matter to fruition. An advocate can almost pretend to be the artist, to create a chimera of enthusiasm and passion which is ultimately attributed to the artist himself. An advocate can fill the gaps, explain away the contradictions, excuse the missteps; but there is a moment at which his influence ceases and the artist must step up, take the baton and sprint to the finish. This is not to say that I am seldom confronted by this vexing enigma. Quite the contrary, it occurs with remarkable frequency. When I ask the artist what it is he has actually done to deserve the spoils he so ardently desires, what more than the scores of other artists who are working so diligently, he will usually respond in the manner of “Because I am good!”. As if what is required to drink from the Ambrosial Cup is that an artist be ‘good’. That they deserve it all because they are a ‘good artist’ perhaps even more naturally gifted than some of their contemporaries, who have slaved like Hercules to do what is required to win the prize. But believe me, Dear Hopkins, when I state that if an artist could spend but a few weeks in the place of his advocate observing what is required to garner the spoils of victory in the face of such competition; then they would swallow the words ‘because I am good’ before they dribbled out. Few are rewarded with rooms of gold for simply being there and making pleasing work; and rightly so. The artist who truly understands what is needed goes diligently about his business untroubled by the howling and moaning of his contemporaries who sit upon the shoddy laurels of self-proclaimed talent.

I have come to believe that I have on occasion been too close to some of my artists. I have invested emotionally in them as friends and been culpable in fostering the delusion that they were doing what it takes to be successful, when I should surely have been reporting the truth of what I was seeing; namely that they were off the back of the pack and falling farther behind by the day. Perhaps in a small number of cases I should have stepped forward and brought matters to a close, spent my hours and my concern (every hour of the day, though you may doubt it) on subjects more likely to respond with vigour. But I confess to being lily-liver’d in these matters. No decent person enjoys being the bearer of bad news. Instead I have endeavored to enthuse over any grain of possibility the artist produces, even amidst a wilderness of indifference. And after that, embarrassed silence. But it might actually have been kinder (and less cowardly) to tell the truth. Less wasteful too. With less sting when the whole affair culminated in an ironic charade.

I remain, as ever, your friend and firm adherent,

Robert Bridges

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Filed in Poetry, disciple updates, homily on homily, loss | Tagged Dean Kaufman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, God, John Keats, Perkin Lovely, Poetry, Representation, Robert Bridges, Sarah Wilmer, The Gaiety | Comments (8)

Noah Sheldon: Nameneko is the New Bukkake

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

‘Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion’s intolerant look,
Behind the quarry’s dying glare,
Love raging for, the personal glory
That reason’s gift would add’

Noah Sheldon for United Bamboo

What an unnerving and enchanting experience to come round of a morning still strung in the harness, peel off the duct tape, spit out the plastic ball and discover a member of one’s own flock spattered across the style sections of Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Cute Overload, LA Times and People, not to mention a thousand dank and fungal corners of Faecesbook and indeed the Dome of the Rock itself, The Daily Show. Not since Dean Kaufman hijacked Yancey Richardson with his Organic Genital Sun Prints have we experienced such an ejaculation of unsolicited publicity. The long-and-the-short of it seems to be that young Noah Sheldon – he who we dandled on our knee to engorging effect almost a decade ago, but who has been a fully-fledged congregant for barely half a year – has recently undertaken a project with Miho Aoki and Thuy Pham of United Bamboo, whereby their Spring 2010 collection was manufactured both for the usual etiolated, underfed caste of childwomen, but also for litter-footed, Sheba-glutted felines (and photographed accordingly). So successful was this enterprise – conducted as a kind of grassroots hipster Williamsburg Idol Kitty Slam, with Facebook friends of the designers and photographer lined up outside the studio nervously clutching their aspiring moggies, drilling them on their audition pieces, soothing agitated catbowels – it was decreed that the feline end of the equation would be crafted into a beautiful, limited edition calendar geared toward the burgeoning fashion/pussy crossover demographic. No sooner had the images gamboled along Sheldon’s firewire than the phones began ringing: proof positive that if the sleepy old chestnuts of Universal Healthcare and War in Asia truly want to penetrate the national consciousness, they might consider taking a leaf from the book of cute animals dressed in human clothing.

Whilst on the subject of agency Wünderkinder … Noah was welcomed into the fold in January with the confident expectation that his first year aboard would garner the usual patronage of Modern Menopause, Men’s Breath and Hangglider Quarterly. Imagine our surprise to find that within a few weeks he was beavering away on a significant, multi-part project for our champion client, Apple, followed by features for Popular Mechanics, Details and FSB, before stone-stepping onto a Bank of America campaign shot double-barreled for Hill Holliday alongside our very own hemi-Persian Alex Tehrani. Barely pausing beside the bidet, we shunted him off to Europe for our Applish colleagues once more and thence to several domestic fleshpots for the very same Applefolk, twin 5D’s blazing in both palms, stills and video mix’d, reason in madness. Whilst lingering beside public lavatories, bars in bowling alleys and at Drive Thru Fatburgers across the nation, Sheldon was simultaneously able to foster a burgeoning art career, participating in an exhibition in a place called Mount Tremper (my rallying cry in the Fourth Form Dormitory c. ‘78) and in New York City at D’Amelio Terras where his light shone beneath the triumvirate buttock-bushel of Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney and Robert Gober. I’m starting to wonder whether I’m making this up. Still not content to rest upon his chapped and empimpled laurels, he concocted a show of his very own at Yautepec in Mexico City, behaviour so popular it is rumoured to be reprised in Miami and Tokyo. Back on the hump of the commercial camel, his caravan weaved through the notoriously barren Desert of the Periodical, picking up projects for the last remaining Condé Nast magazine, Wired, before basking at the sweet-watered oasis of Hewlett Packard awhile. And as if this wasn’t enough, as if it wasn’t time to detour to Tangiers for some respite at the Souq of the Boys with the Almond Eyes … up he pops with United Bamboo and their coven of chic kitties (which, by the way, we have just been informed now constitute the backdrop for a Yale University School of Art webpage … encouraging to see that the virus has spread even to the dreaming spires of academia. Here’s hoping the Department of Homeland Security adopt them as their official logo).

And bugger me if we don’t find ourselves having to stop the press for Sheldon’s solo show at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles, November 7th through December 12th. Okay, that’s quite enough. I feel soiled and sticky and in need of a facecloth.

Biosphere 2 - Noah Sheldon

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Filed in advertising, disciple updates, revolting self-promotion | Tagged Alex Tehrani, Apple, Boarding School, Cats, Dean Kaufman, Genitals, HP, Noah Sheldon, United Bamboo | Comments (0)

Love Again: Wanking at Ten Past Three – The Lovely Rambles

Monday, August 24, 2009

(cont’d from ‘Unsheathed, Perkin Lovely was a Ronnie Corbett Sausage’)

‘More likely they are his-and-hers avalanches of mouldering dumpling
mix, with dentures from Minsk, matching unisex carrier-bag breasts
and stained, swampy genitals. They’ll greet you at the front door of a
tract house in Teaneck wearing each other’s underwear, their rabbi in
the background humping an aging golden retriever.’

Perkin Lovely, meditating skeptically upon the gaping maw that customarily squats between dream and reality. Having singularly failed to eke any photography-related insight out of him in our phone interview (unless Shanks up the Keister are items one orders from Adorama) we girded our loins and greyhounded over to the Federal Sneezer in Terre Haute, having secured special permission for a rare same-sex conjugal visit. Warden Parsons is reportedly an avid fan and camping buddy of Sian Kennedy (Perkin’s collaborator and sex-addiction sponsor), having shared a caravan in the Poconos with him on several occasions.

Sian Kennedy for Details

Unfortunately much of the interview was conducted at close-quarters on low thread-count polyester, a couple of feet above a 350 pound gentleman called Tyrone having teardrops inked onto his trout-like beef-whistle with a darning needle. Our narrative was punctuated by the kind of tear-drenched exclamations that would ordinarily have drowned out conversation had we not snuggled up like puppies and pressed my dictaphone ever closer to Perkin’s mouth. And whilst we were unable to touch on a wide range of topics, we managed to cover a very narrow-range of Proustian ones quite exhaustively.

Woo Sung - Perkin Lovely

H: You’ve been quoted as stating that every photograph you have ever taken was inspired by the urge to impress girls.

PL: As well as every word spoken, deed done, breakfast eaten. It may not always be as direct as that statement suggests, sometimes the route is eccentric and round-the-houses in a way that even I don’t understand. But ultimately, yes, that’s the core impulse.

H: Never boys?

PL: It’s difficult enough to know what to do with one penis.

H: Is your approach ever counter-productive?

PL: Nearly always. But from the very start I think I understood that love and loathe overlap. Given my meager assembly of talents, I really had no choice.

H: From the very start?

PL: A collective blind date with the girl’s of St Mary’s Convent in Folkestone. We walked on different sides of the street throughout: little heifers of St Mary’s over there, Earl of Salisbury’s spotty bullocks over here. Not sure I even knew who was supposed to be mine, but I’m fairly certain she was mortified by the idea of being paired with a leering, shrunken Ronnie Corbett in full Angus Young attire. Actually, now I’m scraping the scale from my memory, I recall her name was Brenda. I like to think she was the elfin one with the pageboy bob: but she could equally have been the myopic walrus sprung from the pages of Where the Wild Things Are. The climax of the event (running against the clock of a potential gating) was when the two columns crossed, sniffing and snorting in the Old Spice mist. This was where I first experienced the heady aroma of teenage girl and life took a left turn. Until then it has been roughly okay to be Ronnie Corbett. Suddenly it was a grotesque handicap, akin to having a drooling arse in the middle of one’s forehead. The genesis of my Richard the Third complex. There were no further dates with Brenda.

H: Who conceived the idea of group cross-pollination?

PL: Oh, my dear, there was no pollination going on. My stamen was little more than a damp straw mushroom and I didn’t get my fingers on a pistil until almost a decade later. I think there was a letter-writing campaign undertaken between the girls in the Convent and the boys on the Hill. Burmese political prisoners exchanging pleasantries with hostages in Iraq. About The Rollers. ‘I (heart) Stuart, who do you (heart)?’. I was issued a letter from the stack. She wrote in plump, loopy cursive on lavender paper spritzed with Anais Anais. I think I replied in Hochdeutsch Gothic painstakingly counterfeited from the Deep Purple ‘Stormbringer’ cover, embalmed in Hai Karate. Probably looked like a declaration of war from the Kaiser. A date was subsequently set for the first massed skirmish.

H: Did you bring a gift?

PL: The gift of a camel-toothed, bespectacled Ronnie Corbett visage plastered upon a medicine-ball cranium. What more could she want?

H: What did you do?

PL: Ambled aimlessly with my friends on the opposite side of the road to the girls. Pointed at them and laughed conspiratorially. Kicked stuff. Smoked fags. It was pretty great.

H: Have you ever fallen in love on a first date?

PL: No, always before.

H: What did this first encounter teach you?

PL: It distilled my technique, the one I’ve been using ever since. Identify the target of your love. Move directly to the furthest point away from her in the room. Scowl. Malinger. Make occasional forays to check if she is still there, looking as poisonous as possible at all times; but be prepared to scuttle away at speed if spotted. If by some chance she happens to engage you in conversation, insult her.

H: Do you think you paid a price for these formative encounters?

PL: Yes. The price of ten Embassy Regal and a box of matches, requiring the surrender of that particular week’s Curlywurly and/or Lord Toffingham. It left me bereft in front of Saturday’s episode of Cannon but with a firm grip on the concept of sacrifice.

Sun Hee Park - Perkin Lovely

H: Photographic sessions with strangers are in some ways redolent of first dates, don’t you think?

PL: Unquestionably. Almost identical.

H: Which, given the visceral aspect of your work, begs the question … would you sleep with someone on a first date?

PL: A somewhat ironic inquiry given the current whereabouts of your genitals. No, it really wasn’t happening. Firstly it would have required crossing the street. And my Government Orphanage issue Tom & Jerry pyjamas were unlikely to arouse anything much more than muffled giggles, especially with Ronnie Corbett floundering in the creases. No, better to limit oneself to not knowing which of the cackling coven across Churchill Crescent is supposed to be yours.

H: Is chivalry important at all?

PL: Chivalrous sneering from afar definitely has its place. Along with the bravura demonstration of how far one can gob a loogie.

H: Is anything else important?

PL: Possession of a febrile imagination.

H: Is there anything you unfailingly do on a first encounter?

PL: Spontaneously contract an extraordinary flora of pustular acne.

H: And anything you never do?

PL: Speak.

H: What about preparation?

PL: I think the process benefits from an exacting regimen: triple-wash and blow-dry my gossamer bangs into a frogmarched centre-parting with ancillary whitecaps of feathering racing across the rooftops of the ears. Ronnie Corbett with gullwing Barry Gibb accents. This gravity-defying cavalcade would collapse into a lank mediæval skullcap within ten minutes. Spend half-an-hour transforming honest pimples into throbbing, boiling carbuncles with a finger-nail and the arm of my glasses, douche the entire battleground with a fiery, blistering three-quarter pint of Blue Stratos, rendering everything the shade of a freshly-painted telephone box. Clamber into illegal charcoal Oxford Bags (24″ diameter bellbottoms) indistinguishable from my mother’s Palazzo Pants, sneakily undo the button beneath my fist-fat double-Windsor: Schoolboy Corbett with Blackadder do, face like a cobbled wound and a bouquet that could strip paint at fifty paces. Primed for conquest.

H: What would be the measure of a successful encounter?

PL: Somebody laughing at a funny face I pulled on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Short of that, being ignored.

H: And an unsuccessful one?

PL: Anything to the left of being ignored. Examples might include: watching my prospective partner’s face curl into a tragedy mask of disgust upon my arrival; having somebody punch me and break my glasses while my partner looks on, giggling; overhearing the words ‘but he looks like Ronnie fucking Corbett!’ from the knot of girls by the toilets; being ganged up on and bogwashed for the entertainment of the crowd and/or having my trousers and underpants pulled down, inspected for skid-marks and tossed from hand to hand whilst I scuttle around at a crouch attempting to shield my barely pubescent penis from view, all the while repeating the mantra ‘C’mon you lot, this isn’t funny’.

H: What’s the most extreme measure you have ever taken to secure an encounter with someone?

PL: Killing them and propping them up every night at the table in a ball-gown and several strings of pearls in front of a candlelit champagne dinner, before carrying them off to bed in my arms and fornicating with their dead body. Melting my penis with a bunsen-burner and remoulding it into a statuette of a Robertson’s Marmalade Golliwog. Placing myself in the expensive front row of an awful Victorian drama they were appearing in for three nights in a row in fucking Greenwich, London, which is several lightyears from anywhere, going completely unnoticed on all three occasions before skulking off anonymously to discover the Cortina’s alternator had failed, necessitating me rolling the car around the parking lot late into the night attempting a fruitless one-man bump-start. Giving up and sleeping in the trunk. Flying a thousand miles to another city, checking into a hotel, driving up and down outside the coffee shop they worked at only to drive away in panicked horror when they came out. Flying home. Renting a car in a state of bankruptcy, allowing them to drive uninsured, unlicensed and inebriated to the coast, springing for an exorbitant dinner and hotel (separate beds). Next day being dragged around endless suburban childhood haunts, grimacing though an encyclopedia of family anecdote before finally collapsing onto the beach, where it took me four hours to summon courage enough to hold their hand, a gesture they misinterpreted as me reaching for the water which they handed to me before suggesting that maybe we should call it a day and head back now. Plying the dog with Percocet then staring at its inert body wondering whether or not to go through with it.

H: Any particular ice-breakers you’ve found to be effective?

PL: “Actually I fucking hated that film” always garners a response. Also:

“I haven’t changed my underpants in a fortnight”
“Do you drink your own piss ever?”
“Do you ever come when you’re doing this to people?”
“I thought you said I get three songs.”

H: Ever been stood up?

PL: Up no. On yes. The road is usually fairly featureless until people clap eyes on me. I have returned from the lavatory to find my date had upped and made a run for it. I have seen a girl wince involuntarily, as if stabbed, when I was pointed out across a room. The first breast I was ever permitted to gingerly brush with my fingers was already being kneaded like bialy-dough by someone else. I have had a rendezvous which consisted of little more than holding a girl’s head above a pool of her own vomit whilst reassuring passers-by that “she’s okay, she just had a bit too much to drink”

H: Were you ever rejected for someone else?

PL: Frequently. In fact, unfailingly. Karys Adams, Dirty Doyenne of the Lower Sixth, having viscerally experienced the palms and digits of the entire Class of ‘81, was left with the choice of me, an acne ravaged Chinese kid even shorter than me, a kid in polio calipers, a kid with chronic glandular obesity and a cleft-palate kid with Thalidomide flippers. She chose me for a fortnight, but after repeatedly bashing her teeth into my equine pearlies and snagging her hair in the joint of my glasses, she left me for Flipperboy. I wrote her epic poems in tripping dactyls and a song fashioned in the style of Nights in White Satin, all of which she spurned like cat diarrhoea, compounding the humiliation by broadcasting my manifold shortcomings the length and breadth of South East Kent. I made up a joke with the punchline ‘it’s the Last Mango in Karys’ but nobody laughed as loud as they were laughing at me.

H: Have you ever rejected anyone?

PL: Amazingly, there was a girl named Kat; a music student who my friend Barry had dallied with briefly (while I was in the same room, actually, with the lights out, trying to wrestle a manatee from Cleethorpes into an unclean half-nelson). She was about twenty, all flopsy-bright and Beatrix Pottery, from Garstang in Lancashire, so she gonged her all her g’s. Song(uh), bong(uh), tong(uh), dong(uh). Music students are all confirmed retards, having been strapped to an oboe by Korean parents when they should have been building forts or exposing their vaginas to me after PE. She would spontaneously erupt into operatic arias in full warbling vibrato, chin down, eyes bulging, trembling arm thrust out like a panhandler with Parkinson’s. Her passably ordinary appearance would balloon in my imagination into a hornéd-hatted Brünnhilde in frame-tent kaftan, gargling pebbles deafeningly. She was also gifted with a kind of rampaging psoriasis which required her to lather mittenfuls of some metallic-smelling petroleum extract onto her entire body twice a day. Like she’d gone down in a Spitfire over the South Downs. Not great. She would trowel on the Swarfega, then hop bunnily into bed and tiptoe her fingers up the leg of my boxer-shorts; a saintlike act of charity I would ordinarily have received as blesséd unction … but from an oily, radioactive green Jessye Norman smelling like a dismantled gearbox? She liked dried flower arrangements, gingham and wanted to meet my family. I don’t believe we ever touched significantly. I suspected it would feel like I was calibrating her.

Christmas - Perkin Lovely

H: Any blind dates?

PL: I have often wished my dates were blind, as have they.

H: Have you ever used any kind of agency or service to set up encounters?

PL: I’ve fantasized in that direction, having watched the likes of Katy Grannan post ads in the Poughkeepsie Sentinel or whatever and be swept out of her tikki hut by a tsunami of lonelyhearts eager to be free of all their togs. And the internet seems to suggest there are itinerant flocks of people out there interested in peeling off their dungarees and rubbing, scratching and oozing on a not-for-profit basis. They will pull up at your doorstep with a winnebago of vegetables and their boyfriend Helmut. They’ll fuck you, your wife, your vacuum-cleaner and your parakeet, then sashay cheerfully out of your life. They’ll greet you and your muculent other half at the door of a crowded SoHo loft wearing only a glittery cat mask on a stick and a moist Hitler moustache of pubes. Maybe. More likely they are his-and-hers avalanches of mouldering dumpling mix, with dentures from Minsk, matching unisex carrier-bag breasts and stained, swampy genitals. They’ll greet you at the front door of a tract house in Teaneck wearing each other’s underwear, their rabbi in the background humping an aging golden retriever.

H: Have you ever been proposed to?

PL: Once, by a Thai girl, Minh, who was unusually blessed with two breasts and a penis.

H: How much time would have to pass before you’d consider yourself to be in a relationship?

PL: Once the Rohypnol has kicked in and she’s bound with gaffer tape in the basement, we’re officially a unit.

An Interviewer - Sian Kennedy

(Bell rings loudly)

H: Ah, I think our time is up. Perkin Lovely, thankyou.

PL: Most welcome. If you could pop that film canister back up before you leave I’d be most grateful.

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Unsheathed: Perkin Lovely was a Ronnie Corbett Sausage

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

‘ … was once fat, with great swathes of cellulite, folds in thighs and arms,
blubbery, utterly hairless, cross-eyed with a massive hydrocephalic cranium,
no teeth, nonexistent chin, lathered in spit-up and drool, an extremely small
penis, no balls at all, pants full of wet yellow shit. Things have improved
marginally since. Now have hair.’

A ruminative Perkin Lovely struggles (at Homily’s request) to join the formative dots of his unlikely career as a photographer, writer and fisher of men. It’s one of the many astute insights he offered when I spoke to him several weeks ago on the phone from a corridor at the medium security detention centre in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he has been given the opportunity to reflect on the trajectory of a life immersed in photography, as well as a plum job in the laundry. Perkin is one of our all time favourite photographers. We worked with him several times swabbing the 4 and 5 train platforms of Atlantic Avenue station on community service, and once forking plastic bottles from the verges of the Pallisades Parkway. The most exciting part of the process is when he beckons you over with an urgent nod (and that peculiar hissing sound he makes with tongue and incisors) and shows you the heavily thumbed sachet of personal snaps he keeps tucked in the lining of his boxer-briefs, because it feels like a Prison Christmas when you open it. There are the smartly executed pictures that he emailed you about before the police broke in and then there are always new surprises, images and ideas you would never have imagined unless you’d had a recent stint as a veterinarian technician.

Jeju - Perkin Lovely

We consider Perkin to be one of the most peculiar and stunted photographers of our generation; he also cares very deeply about a hard-drive he misplaced in a motel on the outskirts of Tulsa and was very generous with his time for this interview. The wide-ranging topics discussed were only slightly curtailed by his access to a supply of quarters, the faint awareness of third-party shallow breathing on the line and his religious reluctance to wax imperious about photography. Here is a portion of our conversation, a latterday homage to A Photo Editor’s seminal series of perspicacious interviews with luminaries of the photography industry.

~ • ~

H: You’re on your 20th week inside, right?

PL: Yeah, couple more days and it’ll be an end to shanks up the Keister.

H: ‘Scuse me?

PL: Sorry, old boy. It’s the chameleon in me. I once participated in a project to celebrate the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accord called Thongs of the Maya. Two days soaking in an indigenous temazcal hut composing amorous limericks in kaqchikel. Back in the 80’s when I was in Bethnal Green on the Genitals of the Pearly Kings & Queens project for UNESCO, I became spontaneously fluent in cockney rhyming slang. To this day I know a complete James Blunt when I see one.

H: For the readers who, unlike myself, have not had the benefit of participating in one of your iChat ‘Beggar My Neighbour’ cyberthons, could you describe your current condition?

PL: Furtive, metamorphic.

H: As in …?

PL: Over the years there have been several maggoty pupa, chrysalis, grub and inchworm phases. Beards, peculiar glasses, hair here, hair there. Like Carlos the Jackal. But never as yet the exulted butterfly. I’m skeptical about the veracity of the life-cycle as taught in third-form biology. Why do you ask?

H: Somehow I hoped that it would speak to the broader picture, if you know what I mean. A mutual friend of ours (was it Michael Kaye?) once described you as ‘a frowning, runty neanderthal’, which I thought was an interesting take.

PL: Well, there’s unquestionably an elemental runtish caveman theme; peering out from beneath a shelf-like brow, scuttling across the periphery of your vision, doing something dreadful with his gopher-skin loincloth. Simian, I suppose. But not in the cute banded-lemur kind of way. More in the PG Tips ‘avez-vous cuppa?’ line, an ornery stage-chimp goosing the female extras with leathery fingers and proffering a leprous bite when reprimanded.

H: You consider yourself to possess a dangerous bite?

PL: No, no, of course not. Just the snarl of one. Much more likely to retreat behind the scenery and shit my pants.

H: You sound relatively content with your condition though …

PL: Content? As if I’ve got it under control and am primed to add a few more features? A turgid bulge in the bow of my underpants that might just be deftly balled socks? Malodorus red-arsed baboon, absent-mindedly palming a tuberous phallus? No, no. Not content. Resigned. When you’ve looked in the mirror and been confronted by a verbatim facsimile of the Wikipedia image entry for Satyr, you learn to shrug and move on.

Choi Sung - Perkin Lovely

H: Is there anything in particular that you think distinguishes you from your peers?

PL: I have a dreadful scar running like an enormous and thickly segmented worm across my abdomen. It used to be bulging and tumescent, puckered with Halloween stitch-holes, but since I’ve contracted middle-aged bloat it is now more of a long, unsightly slit, a perspiring cleft tugging unevenly at its fatty envelope like the bald, nightmarish vagina of a really fat woman. Except that it crouches where no vagina should be. I also have the glassy, semi-blind eyes of a nematode, lurking microscopically behind jam-jar glasses. Did I mention the thin skein of weasel fur that carpets my buttocks? The nails on my blunt and nubbish fingers are bitten bloody, cuticles swollen into the sore sucker pads of an Amazonian tree frog. I have the soft, prim feet of a Japanese girl, so small I can still buy shoes with flashing lights and compasses in the soles. My teeth, Arthurian shields ground down to squarish slabs: snorting mule teeth, splayed, rearing forward and outward as if to rob you of your carrots. The overall effect is of a human facsimile forged from the mangled remnants of a suicide bombing.

H: You’re a photographer – are you really semi-blind?

PL: I have the kind of morbid short-sightedness that calls for the deployment of spectacles so architecturally monolithic that they can only be held in place by an arcane system of pulleys and cantilevers. The lenses were ground from the same glass as the Hubble Telescope and have the effect of rendering my eyes no larger than summit points on a topographical map and my head several feet thinner than it actually is: entire cities can be concealed within their microscopy, whole colonies of ants lazily incinerated on camping trips. I actually have a complete canon of disabilities, most of which are psychological. But to speak of those we would need immunity from prosecution.

H: How do you cope with your disabilities?

PL: By inflicting bitterness and recrimination upon others.

H: Given the opportunity, would you make any fundamental changes in your life?

PL: Any change would likely result in the wholsesale collapse of the loosely strung third-world bamboo refugee camp. It’s effort enough to remember not to wipe one’s bottom with one’s facecloth. Having said that, I wouldn’t mind having my foreskin back, the one Judaeo-Christian dogma hacked off in the name of cleanliness (but we all know better). With that in place I’d be a third of the way to an obedient and elegently statuesque pepper-grinder.

H: In the nature/narture debate, where do you stand?

PL: I follow the maternal line, which I’m sure ignites a supernova of hellish possibility in the mind of the viewer. Common decency demands I don’t elaborate. That generation upon generation of slowly mutating genetic material can have led to this is a sad vilification of Darwin. Then again, it’s hardly an argument for intelligent design either.

Patchouli - Perkin Lovely

H: Do you think you’ve changed much, over the years?

PL: I was once fat, with great swathes of cellulite, folds in thighs and arms, blubbery, utterly hairless, cross-eyed with a massive hydrocephalic cranium, no teeth, nonexistent chin, lathered in spit-up and drool, an extremely small penis, no balls at all, pants full of wet, yellow shit. Things have improved marginally since. I now have hair. But as one’s friends and colleagues slowly implode into hoary gargoyles, the journey downwards becomes less solitary. You see the palsied shock on erstwhile handsome faces as they pass you on the waterflume to hideousness. Complexions become scribble, teeth nubs, chins goitre into horseshoe airline neck-pillows, eyes like Jean-Paul Sartre’s, scalps are arid blizzards, skin suet, guts migrate south in search of rest, eclipsing pendulous, tortoisy genitals. Contemporaries – the ones who used to get the girls – appear to have run both laps of the Grand National. And the objects of their departed affections, the girls in question also look to have gone through Becher’s Brook instead of over it; now they limp on, anusmouthed, Tiresian-breasted, turkeywattle-loined.

H: Wow. Where does it go from there?

PL: Tutankhamen.

H: Or surgery, I suppose. Have you ever considered having an elective procedure?

PL: Beheading.

H: At what age do you think you were at your best?

PL: In utero.

H: And worst?

PL: Oh, nine to thirteen. I was an adult Ronnie Corbett compressed and stuffed into a prepubescent skin. A Ronnie Corbett sausage. The Ronnie Corbett version of the kid in The Tin Drum. A 50-year old bowling-ball Ronnie Corbett head slackly bobbing on the apex of a little boy’s body. People would visibly recoil when I turned around, like the dwarf from Don’t Look Now. And furthermore, I went to Military School. So there’s this shrunken Ronnie Corbett bobble-headed bantam in full parade blues marching to Sambre et Meuse, arms half-cartwheeling, fay little hands fluttering about like moths, head choked fatly into a beret. Like a terrible Photoshop South Park disaster. Really, I should have been culled with a club or left in a bag under a warped sheet of plywood.

(Cont’d at ‘Love Again: Wanking at Ten Past Three – The Lovely Rambles’)

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Song of the Best Western (III of III)

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

(cont’d from ‘Song of the Best Western (I of III)’ and ‘Song of the Best Western (II of III)’)

She thought she hadn’t slept, but she was disoriented and vaguely aware of lightning. She squinted at a point of red light in the deep dark. What was it? She could hear him breathing, Philip, half-snoring. But at an odd distance, off and below her, on a flat rock perhaps. Car headlights smeared themselves vaguely across thick curtains, then a rush of fear as memory pulsed and fractured into half-consciousness. Not Philip. Martin. And the yellow light on porcelain, herself in a mirror, heart racing. Then the slow, deliberate lifting up, her elbows crooked, the cotton dry and bunched in her fists; now pendent in the thin air, motionless, bared; and the bold, broad stripe of vertical darkness a few feet away, so wide now, so much wider than she had thought when she’d committed herself to it. And the pin-bright sound of his activity just beyond. And then the end of his sound; the knowing; the shocking, high-frequency silence of collusion. Without breath, suspended over a tear in the silk of time, holding it, she held it, as the light browned and granulated and parched air crackled from her throat.
She jolted, spasmed, a dry gargle in her open mouth, its echo hanging in the blackness. Then his clotted breathing again, out there; and the tiny, red point of light. She wrestled the panic, fighting herself back down, down, blood humming in her ears. She lay still, her eyes set on the opaque smudge of the ceiling, a vivid pulse in her neck. She focused everything on his breathing; thick and long. But authentic. She was sure.
She pushed back the covers, quietly edging them off the bed, wriggled easily out of her nightgown, placed it by her side and laid back down. She gazed up, still, open on the wide plane of the sheet, sensing the coolish air breaking across her, pooling warmer along her neck and the flurry of her pubic hair. Time passed, punctuated only by the distant tide of his breathing. She sat up and eased her legs over the edge of the bed. Her eyes adjusted to his form across the room; an indistinct hump, clumsy, littered with scraps of clothing. His breathing rolled on in waves, oblivious. She lifted her hand and lightly touched the skin beneath her collarbone, her fingertips poised over the slight swell. She eased her fingers apart until gooseflesh rippled down her side and she tasted metal. She stood up, swallowed lightly and walked to him, slowing past the foetal curve of his legs and body, stopping beside his head. His breathing snagged momentarily and resumed, blank and even. She edged her feet slightly apart and looked down at him along the flat plane of her body, burnished monochrome in the darkness. If he began to wake now she might make it to the bathroom without him comprehending. She sank into a squat, her knees parting evenly, the curve beneath her belly close to his face. She could feel his steady breath there. His glasses were folded and set carefully above his head. She gently picked them up, unfolded them and drew her fingers back steadily on one of the frail wire arms until it snapped. And then the other. She leaned both arms over him and put back the pieces.

Perkin Lovely/The Lovely Brothers

He was instantly aware of a presence. Instinct brought him from deep sleep to acute awareness with barely a catch in his breathing, the circumference of information sluicing him to attention, leaving his external self untouched. Right beside him and above, quite still. He focused hard on the silent hum of the air. And then feet gently parting, definitely, inches in front of him, the tiny hiss of carpet. His pulse thudded in his temples. He heard the supple click of joints and suddenly she was near, very near, sultry air pocketed on his face, fecund, unmistakable, refracting his breath. A leaning motion, the soft tang of sweat, and more, close, and the click of his glasses. He could hear her blood. A small tension above his cheek, finally giving, thin wire snapping. Once. Twice. The leaning disturbance of air again and an organic stillness.

“Abi.” he said.

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Song of the Best Western (II of III)

Thursday, July 9, 2009

(cont’d from ‘Song of the Best Western (I of III)’)

“Done. He’s off.” She held up the match-head. “Want to see him?”
He peered along his chest at the tiny blackened raisin, his face still slung in a protracted grimace.
“Did you get the head out?”
“Probably. You’ll be fine anyway.”
She eased herself to her feet, officially bringing all ministrations to a close, leaving him supine and glum on the bed.
“They carry Lyme disease,” he said through a double chin.
“Most don’t.”
“Which means some do.”
“Not the big ones.” She arched her back in a stretch. “Think I’m ready for bed.”
“We haven’t had dinner”
“I had some trail-mix stuff at the bar. I’m fine. Tired”
She yawned and leaned over him, pulling her suitcase to the floor. It was as casually familiar as she had been, the front of her dress relaxing imperceptibly towards his face, perhaps a foot away. The lingering atmosphere of ersatz family clinic and his guttered status as hurt child neutralized the proximity, rendering it harmless.
“Off,” she said, continuing her sisterly cheerfulness.
“Huh?”
“Off. I want to go to bed.”
She pulled back the bedspread and tossed a pillow onto the floor.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I dunno. Go down to the bar, get something to eat.”
He was silent. She looked at him evenly.
“Sit in a chair, read a book. You can keep a lamp on. C’mon, Mart, get up.”
She moved away towards the bathroom, kicking off her sandals. He sat up slowly, pausing to survey his whereabouts before rising to his feet. He was right, there was nowhere to go. The room smelled of sulphur and burnt hair. He could hear her brushing her teeth.
“Guess I’ll go to bed too,” he said to nobody in particular.

Sarah Wilmer

She emerged from the bathroom and knelt for a moment by her suitcase, pulling out a cotton nightgown.
“Think I’m going to turn in too. Long day,” he said.
“Suit yourself. You might want to put it over there.”
“What?”
“Your sleeping bag. There’s more room in front of the closet.”
His eyes followed the trajectory of her pointed finger, alighting on a blank patch of carpet by the door. He snorted and looked at his feet.
“What?’ she said.
“Abi.”
“What?”
He was quiet.
“No, what, Martin? Huh? You’re suggesting you sleep in my bed?”
He felt a tug in his groin. Odd that she chose to put it that way.
“Not your bed. The bed. The one king-size bed in the room. We’re both grown-ups.”
“No, Martin. You sleep in your sleeping bag. That’s why you brought it. For situations like this.”
“Okay listen, Abi. We both need to sleep or we’ll be useless. That’s a bloody big bed. You’d barely know …”
“No. No, Martin. Really.”
“Abi, if Mum and Dad had …”
“Martin, it’s the floor or nothing. Stop, okay?”
She gathered up her nightgown and went into the bathroom. He looked at the space where she’d stood. There was a picture above the bed. The Lady of Chaillot in the bow of a rowing boat looking deranged. He loitered towards the bathroom, squatted beside the half-open door and unclipped the straps of his backpack. He heard a rustle of clothing and a cough from inside, close by. After a moment he felt her immediate presence in the doorway and he half stood, anticipating her being there. But she wasn’t. From where he was crouched he could see a corner of the bath and, a few feet distant, the bulge of the toilet bowl, her underwear discarded on the floor in front. He caught his breath as her feet, ankles and the long hem of her nightgown moved into his frame of vision, turned and paused by the bowl. He saw the hem rise, the lengthening blur of a leg as she sat down, her upper body obscured by the shower stall. He listened to the clear, bright tinkle of her urine chiming through the silence; saw the profile of a calf, a thigh and hands knotted lightly in her lap. The sound abated, gently. He heard the shuffle of the toilet roll, saw her edge forward and upward on the seat. He felt the seeds of panic burst as, in a single, extrapolated motion the dislocated legs straightened at the knee, shifting out of profile, easing out from behind the barrier of the shower stall and turning toward him, the hem of the gown drawn up unnaturally high, clear, far above the thin skein of fur, utterly still. Nothing moved. His pulse thumped hard in his ears. Time and fear and distant comprehension collided, fragmented, and he broke away clumsily toward the desk, the folders and brochures, tripping heavily on his backpack and causing it to slump forward with a thud. She emerged, smoothing the long cotton nightgown at her hips.
“So?” she said.
“What?” He looked up from the folders with the smile of the Madwoman.
“What are you going to do?”
“Oh. Go to bed. On the floor over there.”
She looked at the backpack marooned on its belly, its guts visible.
“Okay. You can have a couple of pillows off the bed.”
“Thanks, that’d be great.”
She took two pillows, fluffing them unconsciously, and put them on the floor before slipping under the covers and clicking off the light, leaving him pooled at the desk.
“Night,” she said, muffled.
A febrile silence hung across the room.
“Abi?”
Quietly, “Uh-hu?”
He paused.
“Can I turn the AC down?”
She lifted her head a fraction. “What?”
“I think I forgot my bag. But I can sleep under a coat. It’s just with the AC it’d be a bit cold.
“You don’t have a coat.”
“Well, some shirts and stuff.”
“Sure, turn it down. Turn it off if you like.”
“Thanks. G’night”
“Night.”

(cont’d – ‘Song of the Best Western (III of III)’)

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Song of the Best Western (I of III)

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Martin tossed his backpack aside and dropped his trousers.
“Christ, I’m bloody red raw,” he said, peeling his boxer shorts gingerly away from his thigh and stooping to peer inside. “It’s like bloody beetroot”.

Sian Kennedy

“I’m going to take a shower,” said Abigail, “there’s Neosporin in a ziplock in my case.”
“It’s ridiculous, I mean, two sodding miles and it must be ninety degrees. What was he thinking, for God’s sake? It’s weeping. It’s probably infected. Christ. I can’t do it tonight. We’ll have to cancel.”
He listened to the water hissing indifferently behind the door. Trouser-manacled, he shuffled across.
“We’ll have to cancel!”
“In the ziplock!”
He cracked the door. “We’ll have to …”
“Hey, shut the door!”
“Abi, we’ll …”
“Martin, shut the damn door, you’re letting the air out”
He shut the door. Perched on the corner of the bed, he wafted the leg of his underpants clear of the wound and winced. He unzipped her suitcase. Odd that a woman so abbreviated and geared to forward motion would keep her toiletries in a plastic bag: the little travel toothbrush, the Tom’s of Maine, Advil. Odd. But sweet. A hint of the lie, maybe. The germ of that childishness which, if he dwelled upon it, could bring everything rushing back. He squeezed the tube more gently with this thought hovering, eased open his groin and dabbed flecks of ointment along the crease at the edge of his scrotum.
“Any chance you could do that somewhere else?”
She was mummied in a bath towel, carefully tucked, turbaned and backed with steam. A moment’s glance took in the shallow slope of her chest from her sternum into the towel, barely a hint of contour, flat and bound like a geisha. He shuddered lightly.
“Sorry, you were in the bathroom.”
“It’s all yours.”
He rose carefully, tenting the fabric away from his thigh.
“It’s so bloody sore. You know, we’re going to have to cancel.”
“Oh, and by the way, what’s the deal with opening the door when I’m in the shower?”
“You didn’t seem to be able to hear.”
“So shout louder. I was in the shower. You can’t just walk in.”
“I only cracked it …”
“Yes, well don’t do it again. Or anything else, actually.”
He resumed his gerontic shuffle.
“I didn’t see. I wasn’t looking.”
“Not the point, Martin. Why don’t you take your trousers off?”
“I’ll do it in the bathroom.”
“Suit yourself. Be nice if you put them back on before you came out.”
She waited for him to close the door before reaching for the ziplock. With some relief she verified that she hadn’t put her diaphragm in with her toiletries. What was she thinking, offering him unrestricted access to her suitcase? She needed to be more careful – exasperation had bullied down her guard. She hardly needed that skinny bulb of hope in him to be nourished inadvertently. She pulled a blouse from the suitcase and held it up. Tossing it aside, she returned to the suitcase and retrieved a patterned sun-dress; an appropriately startling choice, wholly out of keeping with the firm air of circumspection she had been at pains to establish. And it would slip easily over her head. She moved around the bed and positioned herself directly in front of the bathroom door, placing the dress on the vanity within reach.
“You okay in there?” she said flatly.
“Yeah. Cold washcloth seems to help.”
She moved to within a foot of the door. With one hand she reached across her chest and unclasped the bath towel letting it fall to the floor. She felt the chill of full exposure waft across her. Staring at the door, she began counting silently to herself at an even, steady beat. At five, she heard movement from inside, a gathering of effects. She counted on, eight, nine, ten, an elongated eleven. She let the moment hang, thicken, before reaching for the dress, lifting it above her head and pulling it down over her shoulders, chest, hips in a single movement. She moved away from the door and eased the curtains apart as he emerged from the bathroom.
“I think we should cancel, Abi.”
He had put on trousers but was barefoot and shirtless, beetling across the room at a slight crouch, cradling shoes, socks and a towel. She registered his skinniness, the knuckles on his shoulders and that his hair was wet; but she hadn’t heard the shower. He dumped his stuff on the bed and, toweling his hair, straightened up to find her looking at him. Intently? Blankly? Certainly directly, but with a palpable absence of engagement. He half-smiled and focused on the bedspread. Jesus. That sun-dress. He sensed the gauge of the cloth, the faintest barrier interrupting her from the air and the room and him. Jesus. The drop of the fabric from that neat, small shelf. The pocket of space that would lie beneath the taut swell, the faint curve and crease, shaded and dappled through the flower pattern. He toweled more vigorously and almost began to whistle. In the periphery of his vision he could see her still watching him, neutrally, meaninglessly.
“I really think we should cancel, y’know,” he said, still toweling.
“Great.”
“It would be a pity to be below par on our first outing.”
“Sure. Suits me.”
She moved away from the window and began leafing through the staggered folders on the desk. Guest Information, Room Service, Local Attractions. He thought she had something else to say but he spoke up just in case.
“So, that’s okay then? We’ll let it go and see how things are tomorrow?”
“Sure. There’s plenty of other things to do.” She tossed a brochure onto the bed – Cave of the Leprechauns. She smiled and flared her eyes in mock mysteriousness. His stomach fluttered and the moment was gone. She uncoiled the towel briskly from around her head.
“I’m going downstairs for a drink.”
She shook loose her hair and took a plastic key from the vanity before crossing to the bed, making a cursory search of her suitcase and pulling out a pair of panties. She moved towards the door and in the shadow of the hallway, her back to him, slipped the panties on under her dress with practiced efficiency. His breath stopped and his ears rang with tinnitus.
“Don’t catch cold,” he said.
“Hmm?” She looked at him, but the lights were out.
“Your hair.”
“Oh. Right. See you down there.”
And she was gone. He watched the fire-drill notice on the back of the door and registered an inkling to masturbate which he knew he wouldn’t act on. Distractedly, he lifted his foot to scratch an itch on the opposing calf. His toe moved across a little lump and he felt a jab of pain. He looked down. A dunnish-brown tick the size and shape of a lentil sat fatly on the muscle of his leg where the hairs thinned at the long-sock line.
“Fuck. Fuck. I don’t fucking believe it. Fuck.”
He sat on the bed and crooked his leg, inspecting the tumid little blob from the middle-distance lest it leap from its perch and go for his face. He could faintly make out the triple segments of its body rendered indistinct by fatness; weak indentations across its back, cilia, perhaps even the upper portion of a face ducking into the flesh of his calf. He stared it, his face curled into a tragedy-mask of disgust. He imagined he saw it moving, shuffling its position the better to suck. His stomach shifted. He crept along the edge of the bed, keeping his leg raised; pressure on his foot would surely thicken the pulse of blood up his leg and further engorge his hideous passenger. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a book of matches. Trattoria Firenze. He tore off a match and advanced it towards the turgid monster, pausing a few millimeters away before tremblingly slipping the tip under the swollen butt of its body, easing it upwards. It had mass. He sensed it tighten its grip, hunker down, and he was suddenly aware of cold perspiration on his forehead, a brightening of his vision as it narrowed into vignette. He groaned and pulled his hand away, leaning back on an elbow, gazing out toward the blank television. His mouth was hollow and pasty, his tongue a furred mouse. Addicted to the horror, he peered sidelong at the awful gray teardrop far away at the other end of his body, feasting. He reached over and picked up the phone.
“Yes, I’d like to reach a customer at the bar please …”

(cont’d – ‘Song of the Best Western (II of III)’)

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Filed in Prose, vintage | Tagged Genitals, Neosporin, Pornography, Sian Kennedy, small breasts, Ticks | Comments (4)

Hanging Tender 2009 – The Sexy Airs of Summer

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

‘That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.’

poster by Mark Ohe

And here, survival tips for Hanging Tender 2009, the first with Barack in the saddle (with gratitude to Linda Aldredge for poring over all eventualities and crafting a list of stuff to bring and do). As ever, the horseplay will be conducted largely on Juliette and Julian’s land on Townsend Road in Bovina, with satellite rough-housing at Linda’s Treepalace across the road. Directions can be gleaned from the internet with the incantation bramley mountain road bovina center ny. Townsend dead-ends off Bramley Mountain Road on the left, zoom in and you’ll see.

This year’s is the earliest yet: Saturday July 25th, the Heart of Summer. No more layering up and huddling beneath blankets to ward off the effects of an arctic Bovina September. Music will begin at 3 in the afternoon in the barn and this year’s lineup, as assembled by Mike Taylor, is the broadest and brightest yet.

Joan
One Hundred Dollars
Meg Baird
Disciples of Agriculture
Hiss Golden Messenger
D Charles Speer & The Helix
PG Six
Family Band

There will be unchaperoned activities earlier and throughout, including (but not limited to) swimming in a choice of ponds: one in a wooded glade for those of the Rupert Graves/Simon Callow/Julian Sands skinny-dipping scene from A Room With A View persuasion, the other in an open meadow for those of a more ambidextrous Glenda Jackson/Jennie Linden Women In Love bent. There will also be a good-sized bonfire ’round midnight in case any of the chaps wish to continue the theme by stripping down and oiling up in Oliver Reed/Alan Bates Greco-Roman stylee. Children are a critical ingredient, please bring them. Given their tendency to band together in feral packs to giggle at the naked hippies or lock people in the portajohns and rock them to-and-fro (and bearing in mind that there will be no roaming battery of child-minders) parents are asked to keep a generous and watchful eye on their progeny. There are bodies of water as well as tall things, sharp things, heavy things, hot things and some peculiar things any of which could be the genesis of deep therapy in later years.

Rule of thumb is camping. Other than for band members, there won’t be any place to sleep in any houses (honestly, there won’t). But there will be a twin flowering of tent cities: one in a field (with its own firepit) adjoining the one with the music-barn and another at the (similarly pitted) treehouse site a short walk away. Bring tents and camping gear; sleeping bags, something soft to lie on … stoves are also useful for the establishing of multiple coffee/breakfast/lunch/dinner-making outposts. There is a single hydrant for cold potable water at Juliette’s, but no such thing at Linda’s (so think drinkable water). There will be a couple of portajohns, come early. No showers, but good clean ponds. It does get dark and when it does it sometimes gets chilly, so think flashlights and late-night hoodies and a pair o’ pants. If freak showers are forecast, plastic poncho. For the daytime, significantly less clothing is prescribed, but a towel is handy if you don’t want to publicly air-dry. If you’re going to bring a dog be certain it is poultry, cat and other dog friendly. All three roam the site and would prefer to do so afterwards. If you’re not sure whether your dog will chase a chicken or a duck, don’t bring him (because he likely will).

Hanging Tender - Henrik Knudsen

Hanging Tender is an essentially uncatered affair. There will be grills on the go, but bring stuff to make, cook, eat, drink. There’s a tendency for half the flock to roll up each with a cheerful watermelon or a half-a-dozen ears of corn. This tends to get a little colorless. Feel free to spread out across the panoply of the edible firmament. Short of fermented shark and dog soup, your efforts will be greeted with enthusiasm, even awe. So bring a bulk-pack of discount wieners only if you plan on eating a bulk-pack of discount wieners. There are a few off-campus food options too – Heaven in Bovina is open on Saturday and Sunday until 2 in the afternoon for baked type stuff and Russell’s Store (also Bovina) all day both days for sandwiches General Store type matter. There is the wonderful Slow Down Cafe in Andes as well as pizza and burgers. Delhi has Japanese, lousy Chinese and really good American. For on-campus supplies (a cooler’s not a bad idea) there are supermarkets in Delhi and Margaretville, good farmstands and local meat nearby and Delhi also has the great store Good Cheap Food. Booze-wise, bring it. Most people find they need it. Liquor stores in Delhi, beer all over the place (but not in Bovina, which is historically ‘dry’).

Hanging Tender - Henrik Knudsen

For those averse to greasy poles and fusty mummybags, various bed-and-breakfast type places nearby offer accommodation of a less rudimentary (but correspondingly less fun) variety. These include:

The Mountain Brook Inn
The Andes Hotel
Stoneflower Farm
The Swallows Nest
The Fisk House
Buena Vista Motel

Hanging Tender - Henrik Knudsen

One really important thing. This year for the first time we’re asking people to dig a little into their pockets (on a purely voluntary basis) and make a contribution to the welfare of the bands. They do all this every year for the pure love of music, fields, barns, ponds and alcohol. It’s amazing and inspiring, but neither of these things help pay for the gas to get up to the Catskills. There will be buckets out and announcements from the stage. We’re hoping everyone will be able to give $10 or so, if at all possible.

It’s going to be another great summer happening, this year right when the fields and the sun at are their highest.

Hanging Tender - Henrik Knudsen

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Filed in Happening | Tagged Bovina, D Charles Speer, Disciples of Agriculture, Family Band, Hanging Tender, Henrik Knudsen, Hiss Golden Messenger, Joan Group, Julian Richards, Linda Aldredge, Mark Ohe, Meg Baird, One Hundred Dollars, PG Six | Comments (9)

The Pube Bush Wild – Keats in Love, Miller in Nashville

Saturday, May 23, 2009

And so another languid excursion through the Italian homeland has run its course and we find ourselves pottering about the conservatory at Lickham Bottom (yes, we bought the Smithy’s Cottage) dabbing at the spots on our succulents. Once again we were thwarted in our efforts to attain a private audience with Pope Benedict, despite having brought him along a splendid bromeliad, unfortunately confiscated by a member of the Swiss Guard (looking not unlike a semi-furled maypole) who politely informed us that pineapples are not permitted in the Sistene Chapel due to the corrosive effect of yellow spot virus on the frescoes. Pity. We had hoped to reminisce fondly with His Holiness on his Ratzinger days; on jugendlich star jumps upon Nuremberg lawns and full-throated treble renditions of ‘Vorwärts! Vorwärts!’. No such disappointment in a meadow outside San Casciano near Florence though, where we were roundly applauded by locals and tourists alike for our full-costume recreation of the ‘kiss in the field’ scene from Merchant Ivory’s A Room With A View, Perkin on this occasion taking the Helena Bonham-Carter role (to my own gouty Julian Sands). Critics suggest this to be the superior combination, Mr Lovely’s facial features more naturally evoking those of a crumpled Victorian dwarf.

Judith Beheading Holofernes - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Upon returning to Rome an entire afternoon was devoted to plodding out an equilateral triangle in the Palazzo Barberini between Caravaggio’s rousing depiction of Judith lopping off the head of Holofernes (her expression more akin to having been asked by her Grandma if she knows what ‘teabagging‘ is), Raphael’s slinky sideways-staring and dirtily nipple-tweaking La Fornarina and the Gents Toilets. Eventually ushered out by a battery of stern, gesticulating widows, we idled the short kilometer to the Spanish Steps in the hope of trainspotting a few audacious Roman lads dirtily nipple-tweaking teenage Korean exchange students. Greeted instead by German hippies teutonically strumming ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, we sought refuge in that gallant old chestnut of the Romantic era, The Keats-Shelley House, whose sad, stately windows gaze eternally down upon Israeli drum circles and Somalian gentlemen hawking clicking magnets. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the house (with its attendant museum) is one of the great oases of preserved-in-aspic nineteenth century Italy, worth a visit for its remarkable collection of late-adolescent, homosexual volunteers alone. We marvel at the trustees’ ability to winkle these rosy-cheeked and bumfluffed cherubim out of their boarding-school dormitories, curate their hair into effortlessly undulating flopsihood and arm them with enough Keats trivia to keep you from simply pulling down their linen slacks and spanking their bottoms right there on the spot. Amazing to think that these gauzy veal calves will one day metamorphosize into tumescent, walrus-tusked Members of Parliament, all ruptured capillaries, dried spittle and leathery after-shave. But for now, in juicy pupa form, they can be rolled up into impromptu cannoli and stuffed down the oesophagus in a single marscapone-gorged gobble. It was whilst gazing upon one of these gossamer apparitions that we learned details of the scandal which surrounds the composition of Keats’ celebrated poem, ‘Ode to a Nightingale‘.

The story runs as follows. It’s early 1819. Keats, despondent over the death of his younger brother Tom and stirred by a blossoming romance with Fanny Brawne, is ensconced – between bouts of early-nineteenth century swooning – in the Hampstead house of his friend Charles Brown. Ostensibly he’s writing poems, but there’s an awful lot of sighing going on, a good deal of staring out of lead-mullioned windows at mulberry trees, occasional listless walks freckled with reveries on daffodils. Brown himself, consumed with jealousy over Keats’ new-found obsession with Fanny, is almost unnaturally solicitous, beetling along behind the poet with bowls of cold damsons, picking up his grief-sodden hankies for cataloguing in a private collection, all pinned, dated and calibrated for snot content. Brown is at great pains to liberate the uninhibited flow of Keats’ poetic spigot, to get him back on the horse of poesy and off that of the bucking and whinnying Miss Brawne. Reams of paper and pre-inked quills are strategically positioned around the house in spots where the poet’s muse seems most likely to pipe up; beside the beds, in all lavatories, under pillows, by vases of lilies, tucked into frames of mirrors, next to watercolours of uninhibited boys bathing in tarns beneath The Langdale Pikes. Brown has taken to skulking for several hours each morning on his hands and knees beneath Keats’ window, making crude Nightingale-like noises with his tongue, forefinger and a sprig of stinging nettles.

All of a sudden, if Charles Brown’s self-serving memoirs are to be believed, the breakthrough materialises.

“In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale.”

Apparently purged of his prurient obsession with the infamously small-breasted Fanny Brawne and enraptured by the melodious exertions of Brown’s moist organ upon nettles, Keats had popped off behind a plum tree and rattled off an eight stanza paean to a small brown bird. He had then come rattling back indoors, giddily stuffing scraps of paper like shopping-lists into crevices in bookshelves, from whence Brown was later able to retrieve them and wave them in the world’s (and Fanny’s) face as evidence of Keats’ sexless muse having rebounded. What he had not bargained for, however, was the existence of an earlier draft of the manuscript tentatively titled ‘Ode to a Chicken‘ (Keats, always game for a pun, had taken to referring to Fanny as ‘My Little Pullet‘) discovered by Joseph Severn after Keats’ death in 1821 tucked under the poet’s mattress in the house on Piazza di Spagna. This draft, clearly treasured by Keats (and now housed in the Keats-Shelley Museum) had been carried by the poet on his travels for at least three years and was somewhat burnished, evidently having been the source of frequent inspiration. It appears to confer significant doubt upon Charles Brown’s assertion that tireless avian ventriloquism had succeeded in inciting Keats to transcend his destructive heterosexual infatuation with Fanny Brawne and to return to a course of benign pederasty. Judge for yourselves:

Ode to a Chicken

My balls ache, and a flatulent airlock pains
My bowels, as though of Chianti I had drunk,
Or leached blue gin into the veins
All afternoon, and floorwards had sunk.
‘Tis not through chagrin at thy little teats,
But being too happy in their littleness –
That thou, bow-leggéd Pecker of the dust,
In some mildewed bathroom,
Of sallow cream, and roaches numberless,
Appraise them uncertainly and gently squeeze.

Ugh, for a bottle of Chilean! that hath been
Cool’d a long twenty minutes i’th’freezer compartment,
Tasting of twigs and the peasants’ feet,
Warts, and pesticide, and oh, antifreeze!
Ugh, for half a pint of the warm Bulgarian,
Full of bits, the empurpled Butanol,
With chunks of cork a’bobbing at the brim,
And black-furr’d lips,
That I may slug, and go completely blind,
And with thee fade away unto the carpet brown –

III

Fade far away, torpify, and quite black out
What thou in shallow-pile had nearly known,
The cataplexy, belch, and brewer’s droop
Here, where a man sits and hears himself groan;
Where pride shakes a limp, sad, sloppy sausage,
Where manhood pales, grows earthworm thin, and dies;
Where but to speak is to be full of shame
And leaden-loined despairs;
Where Beauty cannot tease a half-way pole,
Or new Love beget another one ’til tomorrow.

Stay here! don’t go! for I’ll be better next time,
Not hamstrung by Bacchus and the farts,
But on the fright’ning wings of Sobriety,
Though the corkscrew mocks the trembling hand,
I’ll deflower thee! Hopeful is the night,
And badly must I seat my Moon upon the throne,
Blustered about by all its gusty rips;
For here there are no turds,
Save what from bottom are with breezes blown
Through rubiginous sphincter and winding flabby tubes,

I did not see my Y-fronts at my feet,
Nor what oniony incense hangs upon my chin,
But in the vulvic darkness, guess each lap
Wherewith the lockjawed mouth endows
The arse, the thicket, and the pube-bush wild –
Pink foxglove, and the bequivered jellybean;
Fast-swelling petals sprung with follicles;
And mid-way’s tiredest tongue,
The coming musk-rose, full of viscous sap,
The murmurous sigh of climax sighted in the glade.

Chicken, I am trying; and, for many a time
I have been half way there with treacherous Dong,
Called him soft names in many an abject groan,
To rise into the air his flexuous length;
Now just as ever seems he rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with that ache,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
Now wouldst thou sing, and I am all in vain –
To thy high requiem I am a sod.

VII

Thou merit not this little Death, impenetrable bird!
No thirsty Fartsack to bring you down;
This same old tune and passing gas was heard
In ancient days from Jollyone The Clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that whined a path
Through the sad hearts of ladies, sick to come,
Who laid in tears beside the pliant horn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed girls in basements, groping on the foam
Of ordurous futons in fetid flats forlorn.

VIII

Forlorn! The very word it doth propel
Me upwards, to clamber atop my old bookshelf!
Urrà! I trust I still can leap so well
As I was famed to do, crapulous gnome.
Urrà! Urrà! My reedy body sails
Past open window, o’er bedside table,
Past mattress edge, and now ‘tis buried deep
In kilim thin and unforgiving:
Was it a vision, bird or aeroplane?
Fled is that chicken: – do I wank or sleep?

Nashville - Greg Miller

No controversy surrounds the recent gushing forth of Greg Miller’s muse. Armed with a Guggenheim scroll and his famously oversized equipment, Miller ventured south on a journey of purgative rediscovery; to Nashville, home to Bocephus Hank Williams and Old Hickory Jackson, to Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban; and to Goo Goo Clusters, the only between-meals snack known to be modelled on human faeces. Nashville, the city where George Jones launched his sausage and where Mr Miller’s sausage launched Greg. His resultant trawl along the fist-through-the-sheetrock, neighbors-fucking-like-termites dreamscape of his childhood has spawned the finest body of work Mr Miller has produced since his seminal Italy series (although thankfully there are less swimsuits). Hand-crafted using actual rays from the sun onto cellulose acetate, employing all the faculties of vision, cognition and time, Greg is hanging upside-down painting delicate frescoes in a climate of immediacy, charalatanism and splatter; a privilege for which he may be forced to live in a cave or teach at a University.

Nashville - Greg Miller

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Filed in Poetry, disciple updates | Tagged Boarding School, bromeliads, Caravaggio, country music, Fanny Brawne, Greg Miller, Guggenheim Fellowship, Helena Bonham-Carter, Italy, John Keats, Joseph Severn, Nashville, Ode to a Nightingale, Perkin Lovely, Poetry, Pope Benedict, poultry, Rome, Sausages, small breasts, Spanish Steps, stinging nettles | Comments (4)

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