I meant to include one of my favourite photographs of Ken
Weaver in the last instalment of this blog but I forgot. Here it
is now. Jimi Hendrix filming Ken and fellow Texas Janis
Joplin, backstage Winterland, San Francisco 1968.

I had only been back from France for four days when on
September 7 th , Ed Maggs called to say that Fran had just got in
from Ireland with a large bag of chanterelles that she had
gathered in the woods surrounding their farm in Kerry that
very morning. He was planning on buying a lobster to go with
them. Would I care to join them? I only live two or three
streets away from them and was right over. It was very kind of
them to offer. I might have been tempted to eat them all
myself. Delicious.

I was able to reciprocate a few days later, when Camila was in
town, with some squid stuffed with shrimp and a peach,
mozzarella and Little Gem salad. Here are Ed, Camila and
Minako tucking in. The weather was still good so I took some
shadow pictures in Regent’s Park.

Luzius Martin was in town and spent the afternoon scanning
collages by Terry Wilkson for a forthcoming book of his
work. Terry’s reading at the Paris Cut-Ups conference was
apparently a great success and they sold a lot of copies of his
re-issued Dreams of Green Base (Moloko Print, 2023).
Unfortunately I couldn’t be there because poor Catherine and
Steve, whom I normally stay with in Paris, had Covid.

On 25 September I took the Eurostar to Paris and straightaway
found myself in the middle of Paris Fashion Week as
Catherine and Steve had recovered, were Covid-free, and were
attending a catwalk show called No Social Media that evening
for the brand Ivana Helsinki. This was Paola Suhonen’s 25th
year in fashion but she also writes books, is an art
photographer and makes records with her band Lone Deer
Larado. https://www.ivanahelsinki.com The label was started
by Paolo and her sister Pirjo as a pioneer of sustainable
fashion, a sort of Slow Fashion movement, fully vegan, and
with clothes that never go out of fashion. It began as an art
project and they make just 50 numbered pieces of each design
in a variety of different sizes to fit a very wide range of
women, and once all 50 have sold that was the end of that line.
To show them, she assembled 80 models, also of all different
sizes who appeared in great groups of 50 and 30 at a time. In
their midst, the reason for our attendance, stood Lee Ranaldo,
late of Sonic Youth, who manipulated three electric guitars
hung, suspended from the ceiling, that he was feeding back by
swinging them in circles past a range of monitors. He also
played noise-guitar and had a variety of floor pedals to further
change the sounds. The models sometimes had to move
smartly out of the way as a guitar came swinging toward them
and Lee himself was sometimes engulfed in a stampede. It was
very hot. We were in a huge half-finished warehouse-type
building fashionably distressed as only the Parisiennes know
how, and Lee’s frilly jacket, made by Paolo Suhonen, an old
friend of his, was like wearing a fur coat.

After a long wait we finally got a long table at a highly
regarded ramen restaurant. Lee’s wife Leah Singer, herself a
photographer, multi-media artist and musician, was with him

and we had a good gossip about mutual friends in London and
New York.

The next day Lee and Leah stopped by at lunchtime, on their
way to India, and in complete contrast, we went to the Musée
de la Vie Romantique on the rue Chaptal, one of my all-time
favourite museums. We saw Chopin’s hand and George
Sand’s watercolours. Here she is with Chopin’s cast.

For years, our friend Brunhild had maintained the recording
studio of her late husband, Luc Ferrari, more or less as he left
it. It was used by other musicians but no significant updates
had occurred. Now she was transferring his tape archive to the
National Library, so we went to see it before it was changed.
Brunhild was accompanied, as usual, by her friend and carer
Junya. It was a classic electronic music composer’s set-up
complete with several Studer tape recorders. I used Studer
recorders to make a number of the spoken word albums I
produced in the late sixties and though these were slightly
newer than that, it was great to see one again after so many
years. We used them at Apostolic Studios in New York when I
produced Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake’s Songs of
Innocence and Experience, and I was first introduced to them
by Frank Zappa who had them in the basement recording
studio of his house in Los Angeles.

Steve Shepherd and I went to see the Modigliani show at
L’Orangerie but when we got there we saw the marker signs
telling how long a wait that part of the queue would have. The
line was already past the one hour mark so we walked on,

following the Seine to the Left Bank where we had a very
pleasant lunch on the rue de Buci and did some people
watching.

While in Paris I naturally wanted to cook. The markets there
are so fantastic in comparison to anything offered in London:
eight sorts of mozzarella, half a piglet (you’d have to present it
with half an apple of course). The temptation is to buy far
more food than you need. I settled for quail and wrapped them
in prosciutto when one of Steve’s old friends Simon, drummer
from The Fall, and his wife Lulu came to dinner. It was quite a
rock ‘n’ roll visit this time.