Asterix Und Der Goths Mit Der Herz Aus Glas Mein Gott Leibchen

I just watched Herzog's Heart of Glass after several months of pronounced dawdling and dithering and evasion (watching Monkees, watching Dog the Bounty Hunter). These Herzog films are forbidding, not in a sense that they will be an intellectual powerball overload, but in the sense that they could conceivably be dull. They almost never are dull, of course (Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small notwithstanding); one wonders why the trepidation persists. Maybe it is the humdrum, unwavering nature of the opening German rural settings of his earlier films. The willful, defiant holding of the shot on the static mountaintop or the roiling mists (or the landing aeroplanes) beyond an acceptable point.

Maybe it is the dulness of the flaxen-haired towheaded German peasant in his shit-coloured smock. The image does not draw us in irresistibly.

I wearily work my way through the three Herzog box-sets I bought years ago on Shaftesbury Avenue, like a duty to the god Weltkunstkultur. Like I ploughed through The Monkees Seasons One and Two. Like I strove like a pit-pony through the Alain Delon box set my wife got me for Christmas. It's absurd; wasn't culture meant to be pleasurable?

It is of course a symptom of the times that we are so ADHD that to sit through anything longer than an episode of Justified is considered a travail.

The Delon box-set was on my "Wish List" so it's hardly my wife's fault, but still it felt like a purifying mortification for the deity of KUNSTKINEMA, sitting through these less-well-known Delon vehicles. The Widow Couderc. The Swimming Pool. Simone Signoret at every turn, imploring us with her sad eyes to invest our spirits in the project of Kunstkinema weltschmerz.

Nothing ever equals Delon's fine work in the Melville films, of course. Still these films were okay and I liked them and I did my duty by the Lord and I watched them. I mortified my flesh and I am a better upstanding Christian for it.

And Herz Aus Glas was a good film too. Not particularly dull. It has a beautiful soundtrack, with Swiss yodelling and medieval music; and when I listened to portions of Herzog's commentary track, and I heard his enduring and unfeigned fannish enthusiasm for the soundtrack, my slight vexation at Herzog as a public man evaporated. Herzog was not posturing here --- he was not feeding his self-ego -- his gaping Cthulhu Mythos -- his shrine to himself as his own hearth deity -- his own skull kept in a cabinet in his Hollywood home -- he was speaking as an unabashed enthusiast, and it was good to hear. A bit of sincere humility Christ Sake.

I even felt bad for some of the uncharitable unChristian things I said about him in a previous post.

(The fact remains that his attested ignorance of Nick Broomfield is the arrantest bunk.)

When I was watching this film I thought, of course, in my chronic comparing way, that the film was very similar to the beloved "B.D." Asterix and the Soothsayer (1972).

Heart of Glass was made the year after the German edition of this book (Der Seher) was published (although it appeared in serial form in MV-Comix from 1972 to 1973).

I suppose that M. Herzog will now claim that he has "never heard" of Asterix the Gaul!

IT IS TO LAUGH, NICHT WAHR?

Werner Herzog Says He Don't Know Nick Broomfield

THE TWO GREATEST LIVING DOCUMENTARY-MAKERS --- THEIR SECRET LIFELONG ENMITY --- LIKE LINCOLN AND JEFFERSON DAVIS IT IS SAID --- SIMILAR IN SO MANY WAYS AND YET DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED ON THE WORLDWIDE "FIELD".

I was at the Library last night, there for to see Werner Herzog hold forth on the subject of the death sentence. His interrogator on the dais was somewhat of the "Charlie Rose School" of interviewing: he was partial to interrupting mid-sentence, just as the subject was getting going. He coupled this was an uncanny ability to poise, mouth agog, in silence for agonizing seconds on end while Herzog fanned the air with his hands in frustration: he had finished his sentence.

The conversation, somewhat freewheeling, was definitely a "curate's egg" - the good parts of which included Herzog's outspoken endorsement of Vladimir Putin, which you could tell perplexed the liberal arts community of New York City; also his enraptured praise for the library's book deposits under Bryant Park. I liked, and appreciated, Herzog's instinct that this was in its way a "sacred grove." I who have toiled in these groves lo these ten years---

Forgive me if I wax pretentious---!

The less noble moments in the evening's entertainments included the peculiar passage of time, irrevocable and alienated to me now, when Herzog tried to discuss the mysteries of Mycenean Greek, aided only by slides showing a book on the subject. I noted with displeasure puerile notes and underlining on the text. I felt like I was attending one of my own university lectures back in the old country, with my various xeroxes on acetate upon the lightbox-- "ah.. this is Thoreau with a beard; now, this is him without." Some of our most intimate passions and pleasures are really untransferable to other humanoids, I must regretfully conclude.

Now Herzog fell to reading from one book after another of middling prose which he deemed exceptional. Here was one of those books "brilliantly rediscovered" by the New York Review of Books imprint & resubmitted for the pleasuring and edification of NPR-listening McSweeneys hipsters. Ensues a protracted description of an owl. The audience hushes and warbles reverently because they have been told that this is good prose so it must be.

Then Herzog's interlocutor woke up for a moment to read a fine quotation from il miglior fabbro, Ralph Waldo Emerson, comparing death with the end of summer. Herzog responded: "Yes, that was very beautiful. Now let me read from Cormac McCarthy." Followed a bemusing passage describing a bull on a dusty tract of desert. Red clouds on its flanks &c., --- or some such.

Bulldust: seems apt.

Another score agin was the little old lady behind me whispering "That's right" to certain comments Herzog made. Testifying. Uncannily, every time he earned this lady's endorsement, I felt that he was mouthing commonplaces and platitudes. I also felt like this little old lady -- or her clone -- doppelganger -- or let us say her tanist in the tribe -- let us be mythological since that was the mood of the evening -- has been behind me at every cultural soiree I have attended in this good city New York. She crops up like the proverbial bad shekel at Film Forum -- she is at the Met when ye would goe --

Enough about that jazz. The thing over, I went to get my book signed by Herzog. And since I must be who I am, I of course did not fail to have a brilliant question to put to him as he signed.

I should really have learned, over the years, that these exchanges with the admired writers and artists (or, as Herzog says he views himself, "soldiers") never go well. They are too busy signing their names to give my incisive questions the rapt attention and full consideration they deserve. There is a line of dreary drones behind me as I ask it. The situation is awash with potential for misery. But I think it is also the type of question I go in with. I always seem to ask questions of influence or shared characteristics with contemporaries, and these questions tend to irritate the people in question. They fly too close to the petulant ego.

Mein Gott, they fly too close to the sun!!!

(These questions tend to irritate people in general. At university, I was roundly upbraided by a senior academic for my persistent inquiries into the mysteries of influence. "Why influence?" he cried from his regular booth in the bar, slamming his tankard on the table with emotion. "Why not the clash of the valiant unwashed against the prevailing ideology?"

"I don't know, I just don't seem much to kyear," I responded [quoting George Arnold].

This as I was trying to claim Cotton Mather's influence on --- what --- the Uncanny X-Men?.)

(Then I was in Rapallo, too, among those who had known Pound on the lawn at Saint Elizabeths --- and I went to them and I was among them and I asked them each of them, Did Poundie ever speak of Artemus Ward? Did he ever speak of Mark Twain?" ["Did he ever mention me?"] )

(And again see also my question to Updike, as he signed my copy of Terrorist: "Is this your Catcher in the Rye?"

"Fuck off home, sonny."

I do not win them with these my questions.

I am always going to be the preppy guy with the horn-rim glasses and the tweed jacket irritating Dylan in Don't Look Back who doesn't know what to do when Dylan hands him a harmonica.

If I was ever to collect my "celebrity interviews" in a book, each actual interview would consist of one or maybe two lines, with the usual considerable preface and epilogue (or: "flummery") in which I made my excuses.

This time, in my defence, I asked the question which I would, after all, have liked answered. It wasn't abstract or arbitrary - I had been wondering it for some time, since seeing Herzog's excellent documentaries The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974) and La Soufriere (1977) several years ago and noticing a familiar tone and even methodology. My question was a good one, I maintain it, I say, goddammit, and the answer it got flummoxed me.

I asked him: What his opinion of Nick Broomfield was.

"I do not know who this person is," Herzog replied steelily through his permanently pursed lips. He'd signed one book for me, and, at my request, written To F_____ in it. However after this question, he most summarily signed the second book, notably without the gentle dedication.

I was slightly taken aback by his denial of Nick Broomfield. I said, "He's an English documentary-maker. He's made films on subjects quite similar to those in some of yours. For example, about the penal system."

(Herzog, this evening, was -- in his roundabout way -- promoting a cable TV series [? - it was never made quite clear] of documentaries about the eccentric characters who make "death row" their home. Nick Broomfield, as I thought was well-known, at least in documentary-maker circles, has also made films about people on death row and in jail, and in fact at all the stations and strata within the wider "worldwide world of crime" and criminal prosecution. I give you the superb Juvenile Liaison [1975] and its sequel [1990] about quaint English pre-teen delinquents and their treatment by the authorities. Then here is Tattooed Tears [1978] about a juvenile correctional facility in California. Here is the famed visit to Suge Knight in prison in Biggie and Tupac (2002). Then there are of course, most prominently you would suppose, the documentaries Broomfield made [1994, 2003] about Aileen Wuornos while she was on death row. )

I was taken aback, probably visibly, by this unexpected response, anyway. My expression bespoke bullshit.

It is well enough known that the worst thing one can say about somebody is that one does not know the cove. People say it and sometimes - perhaps even oftentimes - it is just as they say. But sometimes (perhaps even oftentimes) it is not so. Rather it is the most cutting remark one could make. "I don't know the puppy." "The coxcomb is a stranger to me."

Woe unto the person who says he don't know a man and he is then caught in the lie and it is shown ("thuswise:") that he knows the man.

After I had "explained" to Herzog who Nick Broomfield was, because of course he didn't know, Herzog repeated gravely the fact that he did not know who he was. He was quite at pains to publish the fact that he did not know this Broomfield creature. Even as I was leaving, he was saying for a third time "I do not know who this person you are talking about is, so I am sorry I cannot answer your question."

I was inevitably reminded of Herzog's "war-of-words" with Abel Ferrara over Herzog's film Bad Lieutenant New Orleans: Port of Call (a very good film, incidentally, and far superior to Ferrara's earlier film Bad Lieutenant). Or, as Borges described it, "two bald men fighting over a comb." In that instance, too, certain corners of the filmic industry doubted whether Herzog was strictly honest in his public claim that he had "never heard" of Abel Ferrara or the original Bad Lieutenant. But why might Werner dissemble?

Three words: ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE.

Some artists (of whatever variety), however personable and magnanimous and gosh-shucks they may appear in public appearances, can withal be extremely protective of their published selves and souls. One score I had against Herzog I discovered when reading Herzog on Herzog, a book of interviews with the great man.

In this book he is interviewed about his filmic career &c. &c. There appear in the text certain anecdotes that he tells which are almost word-for-word identical with his previous tellings of them in his (excellent) documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend (1999). For instance, there is a good line Herzog uses in that film about Kinski trashing a room so thoroughly that all the fragments of the furniture and contents of the room "could be passed through a tennis racket." This is a novel and illustrative description. He says the exact same thing in Herzog on Herzog (2002) which instantly halves the puissance of the original usage. I thought then, Wasn't the author of the book - who surely had a thoroughgoing familiarity with Harzog's films - vexed at being given second-hand chickenfeed?

When I hear somebody repeat themselves, repeat their best lines I should say, jealously devise and then trot out fine words for sundry occasions even, I think to myself: "strictly self-fashioning." People - at least those people we hold in high esteem - should not be caught so flagrantly in self-fashioning. Larry David does the same thing.

Don't they suppose that parties interested in their work might conceivably come across both usages, as I did, and feel a certain subtle deflation?

I believe the same egotistical preening is at work in Werner Herzog's insistence that he "don't know Nick Broomfield."

In the interest of "transparency," I must declare an interest inasmuch as I have been called egotistical myself, and I believe there may be truth in it. Even so I am perhaps egotistical enough that - were I to be interviewed on the scale Herzog surely is - I would endeavour to be ever-vigilant against repeating the best-loved lines and also the mock-casual-denial-of- recognition motif. Werner, you and Nick Broomfield were both guests in the documentary category of the Toronto International Film Festival in September last year. Did you not perhaps hear tell of him among your colleagues?

Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!

Egotistical though I may be, I do, and we must, travail against the tendency, rather like Emerson did.

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Funnily enough, I can pinpoint in my memory the first time I physically recoiled from somebody because I caught them in the act of egotistical self-fashioning, and that too was a gentleman of Teutonic extract: one J___ M______.

This J___ was a charming, excellent, guileful, gregarious, urbane, designing man, who overcame ye with modest charm,-- hooded eyes -- serpentine tongue -- but then would after a while over-egg the mixture and become unctuous - imposing -- and he would slip - his masque would -- and you would mark the chink in his works - the conceit beneath the modesty and the humble handwringing. ("The poor handwriting.") This phenomenon, when a man overplays his hand and exposes his vile, pulsing egotism, -- became known universally as the "J___ M______ Moment", indeed.

Since then I find myself more and more apt to recoil when the ego rears up - as it did last night, Mein Herr, in your avowed and over-said denial.

I hurtled away from this, yet another peculiar exchange with a cult director (see also: David Lynch, John Waters), and walked headlong into Paul Giamatti, who I grabbed him earnestly by the hand and told him he was "great in John Adams."

Only walking home, down at the turnstile in the subway by Bryant Park, did I think "I should have said how much I enjoyed him in Fred Claus!"

"They Say The King's Gone Mad."

“QADDAFI PRONOUNCED MAD”

I confess to the tribunal that I had been disturbed by all the vicious footage of Qadaffi's decline and fall. Not having stayed as close as perhaps I should have to the arab street or the revolutionary underground in Tripoli over the past forty years, I couldn't in good earnest summon enough righteous angst in support of the bloodthirsty masses of crowing tweeters and Youtube snuff posters. I say, I wasn't slavering and honking a klaxxon when I heard of how they had "scourged" the Colonel with a cattle prod &c. I really couldn't seem to get into the democratic moment and share in the joys of the Arab Spring. I felt like a terrible reactionary. That is, until I read the New Yorker piece about Qaddafi's last days and I was illuminated.

I was reading it while my wife overslept. I roused her with excerpts.

“You know what they called Qaddafi towards the end of his reign?" I asked her. "They called him ‘Abu Shafshufa,' which means ‘Old Frizzhead’. His problem hair was the subject of national mirth and satire.”

Nothing daunted I went on, “The truly amazing thing is that when he had fled his compound and the rebels broke in and sacked the place, alongside all the other outrageous luxuries there abounding they found a personal hairdressing salon. Can you believe it? A hair salon for Qaddafi! And still he looked like that. Whoever was doing his hair, he should have fired them.”

Finally my wife drowsily responded, with a woman’s patented insider knowledge of such things: “He was very vain, that’s why he looked that way.”

Only now did the penny drop for me. “What, do you mean you think he intended to look that way? And he thought it looked good? My God... the man was insane.”

"Storage Wars - Again."

The new season of Storage Wars has been a bit peculiar so far. As Randy Jackson used to say (at every opportunity), it's been a bit "pitchy". This season Dave Hester (who I had expended some energy in rehabilitating) has not endeared himself to the "studio viewing audience at home" with his dull high bids for boring but valuable "white goods". Who fucking cares if you get a dishwasher cheap, Dave? It ain't great TV. One week he bought about thirty vending machines - and was brimming with delight. Strange to report this excitement and delirium did not transfer infectiously and irresistibly to the viewing audience at home.

The problem is that Barry Weiss and Darrell Sheets don't own a consignment store like Dave's, so there is no point in them bidding on the sort of junk that Dave can sell in his would-be dollar-tree warehouse. (In fact at this point it is unclear what Darrell's remit is, or even why he is on the show - except to bitch bitterly about Dave). Meanwhile Jarrod and Brandi do sell similar chintz, jetsam & miscellaneous bushwa to Dave, but they simply don't have as much dough as Dave so they can't compete. Consequently Dave seems to be on a winning streak by default, buying boring merchandise and then toting up how much they are worth himself. Shall we, you and I, my dear reader, "switch off our television sets and go out and do something less boring instead"?

"Sitting at home, watching TV,

Turn it off, it's no good for me.

Why don't you?

Why don't you?"

I have occasionally had to discuss Storage Wars with outside-world (i.e., "non-television character") people when the conversation has reached such a nadir that I am forced to say, just to stave off sleep, "Hey have you seen that show Storage Wars?" When I do lisp these thrice-doomed words out loud to the table, the chattering classes of New York routinely say something that would never occur to me; they say "Oh yeah I've seen that show. It's fixed."

I fail to see what the point would be of fixing a show like Storage Wars. I think that rather this is a case of "post-punk" ennui; that is, "media-savvy" kill-joys being overly, even ostentatiously, jaded. I very tediously respond to their allegations by patiently listing instances where there was nothing valuable in a locker ("When there was nothing to gain from rigs or calumny"), or when the characters ("contestants") ("real people") are hopelessly misguided in the pursuit of riches and rarities ("Fool's gold is ofttimes all they mine, milord"); but only a few sentences into my earnest testimony I notice with some sad surprise (and yet a corollary reflex of horrible familiarity) that I have become the despised bore at the table -- again -- and I pull about me my customary mantle of enigmatic introspection for the rest of the evening.

This season has also had a rush of nondescripts jockeying to become regular, featured characters on the show (which, nota bene, if it were "scripted" and fixed would be an impossibility). Like the fat bloke with the skateboard/skronk goatee. You know, Herne Bay c. 1993. Swallowed squirrel is the look. He bustles like a navvy about the forecourt and painstakingly essays to crane into shot but he is almost invariably edited out every time and his interior existence remains unknown to us the viewing audience.

Because the premise of Storage Wars is simply that in the state of California unpaid lockers are auctioned off, it seems that anybody can turn up at one of those auctions and potentially appear on TV. It is not a "closed set". Obviously this differentiates Storage Wars from Big Brother or American Idol. And lo this season the regulars have been shown, more and more frequently, grumbling about the people who have been coming to the auctions and grandstanding and pratfalling to be on TV, bidding high rubles for rubbish just so they can be seen on TV bidding against Dave or Barry.

Worse case of this was yesterday's episode with this vile, slimy, morally broken-down interloper called "Mark Balelo" who turned up at the Hollywood auction and proceeded to bid astronomic, inordinate amounts for every locker. He pushed the prices up unnecessarily for the lowest specks of dross. (Would he care, I wonder, to bid on a pile of issues of Punisher 2099 comics I have?) He swaggered and pouted and planted himself on the spot squarely, impertinently, arms folded, feet apart and then duly and right brazenly played pocket billiards in front of the womenfolk, with his wad of cash between his teeth (and his cellphone, of course, tucked under his chin). He sucked the pleasure (not to mention the carbon dioxide) out of the whole enterprise. He added nothing more to the show either - he has the personality and the face of a squashed rat-turd. But what he has, it seems in droves, is cash - which abundance he loves to advertise.

I googled this guy, because I grimly observed that he's going to be on next week's episode as well, and I thought "I hope this swaggering schnook isn't going to inveigle himself on to the show as a regular."

He certainly seems to think he is the new "character". An online site (not attached to the show's official site) already trumpets that "Mark Balelo owns and operates a successful wholesale and liquidation company in Simi Valley California. He has two beautiful children, Ashley and Brandon which [sic] are the loves of his life. Currently appearing on the popular reality show Storage Wars, Mark can usually be found at an auction bidding on merchandise and treasures unknown. His charisma and fun personality make him an instant favorite in everyone's heart. Part of Mark's corporate responsibility awareness led him to offer his company as well as personal support to one of his passions, helping children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder." It is to be noted that this is not the TV company's official site.

Is this "charismatic" and "fun" nouveau rich Tea Party fridge magnet going to bid against all the regular characters every week, pushing everything up and outside the bounds of reason so that nobody even bothers attending the auctions anymore, and the show ends in fizzling piffling disrepute and acrimony? And if they try and bar him from attending the auctions, will he launch a "civil suit" against the television company and Dan Dotson the auctioneer, and take it "all the way to the Supreme Court"?

Where will it all end - the Hague?!

HADES?!

As an amusing addendum, I also found out, while again effortlessly mindlessly googling, that this self-same A-1 pilchard was involved in the recovery of a priceless copy of Action Comics #1 belonging to another poltroon of California extraction, the esteemed actor and adventurer Nicholas Cage, D.D.,F.R.S. One LAPD detective involved in the recovery remarked:"It's just too bad that Balelo with his big mouth thought it was necessary to contact the media."

"O Tempura!" Or, "Hell Hath No Fury."

Gordon Ramsay was on Kitchen Nightmares, this week set at a Japanese restaurant in Southern California. The show seems to be more concerned with family counselling than cooking at this point. Gordon did his usual scathing critique of the kitchen fridges and then moved on - to matters of the boudoir.

This was a family business. Akira, the Japanese father of the family, was now a joyless, remote loner hounded and humiliated by his cold, shrewish wife-and-business-partner. There was no longer any "chemistry" betwixt the twain. This conjugal coupling was a terrible admixture of Eastern reserve and Western audacity. Still, they had a pair of great kids, who were suffering. Akira was accustomed to skulking out into the night to (he said) "do Tai Chi down by the lake".

The wife and mother was severe and doomed with long grey hair and she whispered to Gordon, "You wouldn't take Akira's side if you knew how he was when he goes out after these young painted hussies."
She was plainly quite sick of this modest, reserved man and his shy philandering among the whores of downtown LA.
She seethed at Gordon, "He isn't doing TAI CHI down by the LAKE you silly, green man! He is out pissing away our business on teenage tail you oblivious, naive patsy!"

Gordon, though scolded, is never cowed. He whispered back, "You can castrate your husband, love, and you have, but you shan't catch me!"

One evening Gordon put on his deerstalker cap and night-vision goggles and, come the witching hour, stealthily followed Akira out into the spangled neon night. He brought along a camera crew with him for this rather remarkable scene. He trailed Akira into a seedy part of LA and a strip-mall whorehouse, where Gordon confronted the errant paterfamilias in one of the alloted motel rooms.
Next ensued, confessedly somewhat strangely to the "viewing audience at home," Gordon's scathing critique of the prostitutes on offer.

"What's wrong with you Akira!!" he howled. "You're throwing away the family restaurant on a scrawny skank like this? Big boy, she looks like one of your broccoli tempura!!"
Gordon (still in deerstalker cap and goggles) next had the madam of the brothel line up all her "girls" in order of height and then he launched into a shocking, harrowing review of the girls on offer. "I don't know if I'd fuck any of you, even with Akira's dick!! Quite frankly I happen to prefer my children's blonde nanny!!" He turned to Akira again and said, "Akira, if you're going to throw away your marriage and your restaurant on floozies, and you are, at least make it worth your while!!" Then he nodded at one of the girls and said, "I'll have her. Come on Akira, let me show you how it is done."

I think that Gordon is losing sight of the original purpose of his show.

"Ain't Been Served; Ain't Getting Served."

New York City. 1:30 PM.
Are You Being Served is on Channel 21.
Do you know where your children are?

Watching five minutes of Are You Being Served -- which is, after all, as much as any thinking person can sustain without imploding -- and squinting into the grey-and-brown-and-snot-green screen, I thought: "And who of this nut-brown, motley bestiary is yet counted among the living and the sensate?" These people were old, broke-down, crooked and crabbed in the late Seventies. It is too much to hope that Captain Peacock is still among the living. Ditto Mrs. Slocombe.

The great shock of course, when one views an old episode of Are You Being Served, is how young Wendy Richard ("Wendy Richards") was in it. And yet when she appeared on our screens next, in Eastenders, she was a hoar-headed half-upright revenant. I believe she is now indeed a tenant of the grave. What happened in that mysterious interim? How badly and rawly and close to the flame did she live, that the gods threw her down so low and abused her spirit-self and bade her grub in the filth for dirt and blood and garbage as her daily bread? She was a frisky pixie one minute; the next she was the she-hag of the moors.

Was WENDY stranded on an island like Odysseus, and forced to "couple" with mythological mermen? Was she obliged to do battle with Cyclopses, and Scylla and Charybdis, to scratch and claw her way back to Borehamwood and Albert Square? Did she feast meanly and jealously on human flesh? Did she slake her devalued and voided soul with sweetmeats from the grave for sustenance in her uncalendered years of dark days?

Contrast the fate of the late Ms. "Richards" with that of JOHN INMAN. He's still alive (if being John Inman can ever really be called "living"), [I just checked and actually he's dead - he died four years ago -- but my point remains I think] {perhaps it doesn't} and well and living in Florida [he isn't] {he's dead} .

[I am going to continue to pretend I don't know that John Inman is in fact dead so that I can make my regrettably somewhat compromised point.]

John Inman is Dorian Gray, while Wendy Richards was his portrait; for every crude, coarse, vulgar, Gott-verboten thing that VICIOUS JOHN did (and they have been called legion, for they are many), it was thrice-damned WENDY who saw another lock of hair turn'd hoar overnight, whose back hunched some more, who grew a horn in the centre of her forehead and felt in her craw a snaggletooth inch another inch.

(M.K. P____ I think it was who once declared an undying and vigilant and pathetic love and admiration for Wendy Richard in Are You Being Served. I think he used to extract weird joy from confessing such things to shock his crowd of young and callow friends. Now LA RICHARD is dead and M.K.P. is in love with an aged corpse. Michael, very well is it said: that death shall catch us all, even our one-time true-loves!)

[...]

Admittedly John Inman being dead, and Wendy Richard in fact outliving him by two whole years before she too submitted to vile death, reduces somewhat the puissance of my original point (to wit: that John Inman outlived all his cohorts on Are You Being Served and was alive and well in Florida), but the point can be made to a lesser degree with reference to Barbara Windsor.

Barbara Windsor is older than Methuselah, and she is certainly older than the late Wendy Richard, but BABS is still alive and well (perhaps she even lives in Florida--). Could it be that WENDY "took on" the many sins of BABS and it was those abundant manifold sick vile excesses that cruelly "done in" MS. RICHARDS?

This is of course a matter of purest speculation.

(Pause as the author checks to see if Barbara Windsor is still alive or if she died in 2002.)
__________________________________________

NOW...

As the English firmament spins further away from me and as of course our own childhoods become more strange to, and remote from, us, I find myself having to frown and try to clarify neglected memories. Jamie Oliver on TV said that his chicken and potatos and tomatos dish was "fandabidozi" and as a consequence I found myself in the peculiar position of explaining who the Krankies were to my American wife. Found myself doubting the data as I relayed it: "She was... a Scottish midget... who dressed up as a schoolboy and... pretended to be her husband's son? She was his wife, but... [hesitating; faltering...] ...but she pretended to be his son."
_____________________________________________


(Sheepish afterword. Following further rudimentary research, I have discovered that Captain Peacock is still among the living. "Which is," to quote Emerson, "what old people called - the gods visible again." That great, grand, old man! That cheat of base, grasping Charon!!!

And ---

What a mess I made of this point I had to make.)

Obama Vs. Osama: Trump Trumped

Shall I be that pioneer, with the first of the Obama/Osama conspiracy theories? B'lieve I shall.

Where were you when Osama's death was announced?, asks the boring man who seems to permanently dawdle around the water-cooler, always looking for a "water-cooler moment".

"I was watching Celebrity Apprentice," I answer icily. "Now let me get a cup of water."

Last night Celebrity Apprentice had droned on inconsequentially and without any clear narrative, as it usually does, for the better part of its two-hour duration. It was reaching its "climax" - the boardroom sequence in which the losing team has to fight and bellow among themselves for their "very survival". That game slapper NeNe Leakes had spent the whole episode bawling and growling incoherently at Star Jones. Donald Trump was sitting across the table from them, squinting contentedly like mad Pontius Pilate, as the black folks squabbled for his pleasure.

("Is Donald Trump a racist?" - David Letterman.)

It was all going Trump's way, then, until suddenly the broadcast was interrupted with the announcement that President Obama was about to make an "emergency statement".

"This cannot be an accident," I remarked to my wife. "Trump rides Obama about his birth certificate all week and Obama just happens to make an emergency announcement while The Celebrity Apprentice is on?"

Could it be, I merely ASK, that President Obama has had the opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden at any time he wanted, and that he only struck yesterday - he only gave the kill-order yesterday - expressly so that he could make the announcement during Donald Trump's weekly two-hour slot on Sunday night?

Could it be, I say, that the death of Osama Bin Laden was merely a stroke of one-upmanship in that bigger battle betwixt Obama and Trump?

Mull on that a while, Mullah Omar. Here's an anecdote. When the news was broken, my wife had retreated to the shower, so when I shouted through the apartment, "Osama is dead!" she - in the shower - thought I was saying "Obama is dead!" For a moment, for her, it was a very different reality from the rest of us.
Actually, when I think about it, it is habitually a "very different reality" for my wife from "the rest of us".

[TYPE AND MOTIF INDEX OF HUMOR J1772: "One object thought to be another." Or K2150: "Innocent made to appear guilty." Subset: "School of jokes based around the amusing confusion between the similarity of the names, Obama and Osama."]

THREE QUICK JOKES.

-----Well, Osama is dead and that is that. He shan't be back any time soon. "Ding dong." We shall not see his like again, &c. I am only slightly anxious because I have been putting the blame on him for everything that has gone wrong in my personal life for the last ten years and suddenly I've lost that stand-by - that "wingman" if you like. Who to blame, now my scapegoat is gone?

-----Incidentally, in the name of fairness, I should note that Jenks Whittenberg was the first one with the news of Osama's death. He had claimed that Bin Laden was dead way back in October 2001. Certainly Jenks was slightly premature, but you have to admire his uncanny prescience withal.

-----I was a bit disappointed that Obama didn't pull Osama's decapitated head out from behind his lectern - or even (as my wife suggested) film the announcement while squatting athwart the corpse of Osama.

TO SUM UP:

"Osama Bin Laden is dead," Obama announced gravely on the television.
"That's all well and good," I responded, "but more importantly: who was fired on The Celebrity Apprentice?"