9 March 2024

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to see Pompeii. I grew up in Cirencester, the Roman city of Corinium, which back then had a population of between 10-20,000 people, the same estimated population as Pompeii. In Cirencester the Roman level is just below the surface; there used to be, and possibly still is, a local regulation prohibiting anyone living within the Roman walls to dig more than ten inches deep in their garden. At my primary school, each child had a small square of garden to grow plants and we regularly turned up shards of pottery and fragments of mosaic. I once found a coin and was given half-a-crown for it by the Corinium Museum. There were several column bases in my grammar school playing fields and the groundsman knew where several large Roman pavements were, but he wouldn’t tell, not wanting his carefully tended turf dug up. There is very little left above ground, of course, as the floor level is so close to grade, though the remains of the amphitheatre and quite long sections of the Roman walls survive. At school, from the age of ten, we listened enthralled to the story of a similar town destroyed by a volcano. Here’s a mosaic floor from Cirencester found next to my junior school.

Camila and I flew to Naples from different cities and met at the airport which is only a short cab ride from the city centre. I had booked hotel rooms close to the Central Station so that we could get an early start for Pompeii. But at the hotel’s address there was just a business card giving the name of the hotels on one of the bells and no-way to open the huge double doors leading through to an inner courtyard. Thinking this maybe was how things are in Naples we waited until someone else arrived who knew the door code and followed them in. The next surprise was an elevator that you had to pay to use. Fortunately Camila had some centimes, but again, at the hotel’s floor we were met with a closed locked door, a key pad, and a small card with the hotel’s name. Then we noticed that the address on the card was different from the one we were at. We were in some sort of annex, and Expedia had sent me the wrong address. I had begun to wonder what I had got us into and was already mentally preparing to look for a new hotel. But sure enough, a few doors down the street was the perfectly nice B&B Hotel, with a friendly desk staff, tv in the lobby and clean, cheap rooms. We headed out for lunch.

I ate more pizza in one week in Naples than in the previous ten years: the dough is thin with a thick, puffed up, airy rim. The tomatoes are the famous thick-skin San Marzano variety that only grow in the rich volcanic soil of the area, and the mozzarella is from local buffalo milk. And they are half the price than they would be in London, except you can’t get anything anywhere near this good in London. Next, we stumbled upon the Galleria Umberto 1, perhaps not quite up the standard of the one in Milano, but impressive none the less. It’s across from the San Carlo Opera House.

In Naples they have a habit of wrapping buildings in netting. At first I thought it must be to protect people from loose masonry falling off and injuring people, but after seeing several examples on perfectly sound buildings, I realised it was just to keep pigeons off. The result is that the buildings all look like they’ve been wrapped by Christo and you can’t see them as they should be seen. We do it in Britain too, but with finer, smaller mesh netting that you can’t really see.

I had taken the precaution of looking up a few restaurants near our hotel and we enjoyed the food at Antica Trattoria e Pizzeria da Donato, to give it its full name, so much that we went back. We only ate pizza at lunch time, the evening is for proper food. There are two services in Naples: 7:30 and 9:00, which means you can’t linger over coffee or liquors if you book the early slot. Every restaurant we ate in had this system though if you arrive at 8:30 and your table is free they will let you start early. 

Crossing the road requires an act of faith. You have to launch yourself into the traffic, and they will stop for you, but if you wait at the curb on a crossing they never will. It’s best to follow a local and join them as they cross. It reminded me of Cairo where Rosemary and I once needed to cross six lanes of honking overloaded trucks, mouldy camels, motorcycles and buses. In the end we hailed a cab, went to the end of the street, round the roundabout and back down the other side. 

Naples is a seaport and you never seem to be far from the sea, and consequently from a view of Mount Vesuvius, looming over the city. People live all around its base despite the fact that it erupted eight times in the 19th century and three in the twentieth, the last being during the war, in 1944, when it destroyed about 80 American B-25 bombers and buried three villages. It will erupt again, and soon. 

On the 23rd, Burroughs’ magic number, we went to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. It is hard to concentrate just on the treasures rescued from Pompeii as this is one of the world’s great museums, so we saw the Farnese Bull, the largest sculpture recovered from antiquity and a load of other statures before restricting ourselves to the collection of art from Pompeii. Camila, as it happened, was perfectly colour-coordinated to fit in with the Roman wall paintings, of which there are many. 

I particularly liked the wild-life mosaics and the cat. Given how static the media is, the images are lively and full of life and fun. I particularly liked the cat. I was interested to see how much the Roman idea of beauty differs from now. Venus, for instance, is a mature woman, see below.

The museum building dates back to 1585 and is worth exploring in its own right. After Camila took a series of floor pictures of us, we looked back to find several tourists copying her idea. 

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3 March 2024

February opened with another Pro-Palestinian march. They start at Portland Place, outside BBC Broadcasting House, just a couple of streets from my flat. It’s always interesting to see the marchers arriving and to judge how big the march will be by the number of police vans parked in the side streets. I liked the quote from Nelson Mandala: ‘But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’ Margaret Thatcher called him a terrorist, too, of course. 

It was good to read that there were demonstrations at MOMA in New York, long the bastion of art-cleaning. Leaflets called-out museum trustees Leon Black, Larry Fink, Paula Crown, Marie-Josée Kravis, and Ronald S. Lauder for their involvement in Israeli military weaponry, surveillance technology, real estate and support and began a sit-in in the atrium. Over the years MoMA has become more and more like a corporate HQ and less a celebration of the human spirit. At least they no longer house Guernica

The Yoko Ono show opened at Tate Modern with an uncomfortable scrum to get in. It is a retrospective and showed how overlooked she is, and what an accomplished body of work she has produced over 60 years. It is fair to say that her best work was all produced before she got together with John Lennon, from 1961 till 1966 in New York when she was collaborating with John Cage (she is a trained classical pianist) and the Fluxus Group, in which she was a central figure. The New York art scene is tough and she was one of the very few women able to hold their own in it, particularly as she had the added disadvantage of anti-Japanese racism. Her work consists mostly of instructions, owing a lot to Japanese zen koans and Chinese haiku. Other works are whimsical, often impossible to execute, but always intriguing. ‘Cut-Piece’, first performed in Tokyo, consisted of Yoko kneeling in the traditional Japanese female submissive position, dressed in her best clothes, while members of the audience cut pieces of her clothing off. This raised an enormous number of issues addressed by the women’s movement almost a decade later: misogyny, the subservient role of women in society, aggression, equality, long anticipating the work of Marina Abramovic. 

John Dunbar was there, director of the Indica Gallery that presented her first European show back in 1966. One of the items from the show was at the Tate: a white chess set. It is almost impossible to memorise the position of all the pieces. At the Indica Gallery – which I was a co-owner of together with John and Peter Asher – there were two occasions when Roman Polansky and Sharon Tate came to play a game, but they didn’t buy one. Here is John with Gabriella Daris, who is writing a book on Yoko.

BBC Radio 4 called up and asked me to be on ‘The World This Weekend’ their weekly news and current affairs programme broadcast at 1:00pm on Sundays. I was to walk around Yoko’s show with Edward Stourton, the veteran broadcaster. He was a total professional and we had a pleasant, relaxed conversation while looking at the first few rooms of the show. After it was broadcast, I was contacted by more than a dozen of my friends to say that they had heard the broadcast, which seems to be one of the most listened to programme on the radio with more than 3m listeners. My friend Jill Nicholls was astonished at how much time Stourton gave me – normally it’s all over in a couple of minutes for that sort of programme. Fame at last!

Maribel returned to London after working on her new house in Algeciras – see November blog – and we spent the day in the British Museum, just wandering. The thing that brought tears to her eyes, that she found most unexpectedly moving, was the fragment of the library of King Ashurbanipal, from 7th century Niniveh, Mesopotamia, described by the British Museum as ‘The first library to contain all knowledge’. The BM has most of the 30,000 tablets excavated there but only a select few are displayed as if on modern shelves. I can see why she found it so moving. It’s good to have her back in London, if only for a short time.

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January 1, 2024

I was sad to see that John Pilger died on December 30. I only met him a few times, but I admired him greatly. I remember being at the bar in Dingwalls Dance Hall in Camden Lock sometime in the late seventies when he came in and joined me. He was fresh off the plane, jetlagged, and had not yet even been home. His green, short-sleeved shirt was soaked in sweat though it did not seem like he’d been drinking. He said he just wanted to check in on the ambience; to get a London fix; to ground himself back in Britain. Well, nothing like Dingwalls with its assortment of seedy Camden and Notting Hill characters to do that. I think he had just come from Cambodia. He was courageous in the extreme and spent his whole life fighting the powers that be, from the Murdoch press to the Israeli government, to reveal uncomfortable truths and present them to the general public, largely through his brilliant television programmes. RIP. 

I took a short cut through the British Museum, as I often do and remembered that there was a time, 50 or 60 years ago, when I was one of the few males in the halls of the British Museum not wearing a tie. The staff of the library – then in the Museum – gave me dirty looks and I was often made to sit in the front row of the North Library if the film magazines like Continental Film Review I had ordered up had even the slightest suggestion of a nipple. I clearly looked undesirable in my open-necked, un-ironed work shirt. Now I am virtually the only man there wearing a shirt. Sometimes we shirted-few are bolstered in number by groups of Japanese businessmen in their black suits and their white open-neck shirts. What next I wonder? Sometimes you long to see a pair of crushed-velvet purple loon pants or a frilly shirt among the drab hordes of North Face hoodies. But you wouldn’t want too much of a good thing.

Christmas was a quiet affair, just Theo and Minako and me to tackle foie gras and a roast goose. 

A new year, and at the end of the week I had a pleasant Soho evening with the art historian Geraldine Norman. She lives close to me in Fitzrovia and is the widow of Frank Norman, author of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’, ‘Bang To Rights’, ‘Banana Boy’ and so on. I recently wrote an introduction to Frank’s ‘Soho Night and Day’, (1966) more a personal reminiscence than a guide book, that he wrote with Jeffrey Bernard taking the photographs. Geraldine is hoping to get it republished. Now almost 60 years old it is an important record of the times. Jeffrey had not yet started his career as a journalist but his photographs have a wonderful period quality. We had dinner at the Academy Club then went on to the pop-up version of the Colony Room started by Darren Coffield who misses his old drinking hole so much that he decided to revive it. (His Tales from the Colony Room is highly recommended by the way.) The New Colony Room, in the basement of Ziggy Green at 4 Heddon Street, off Regent Street, did have something of the atmosphere of the old place, partly caused by loads of photographs of the old members, but it is bigger and cleaner, and the clientele is much younger. We didn’t know anyone there but soon met some older folks who had been brought along by their children! 

On the 12th Stephen Coates came over to discuss the Allen Ginsberg in London project to be held at the Horse Hospital in March. I hadn’t realised quite how much memorabilia I still had of Allen: certainly enough to fill a few vitrines for an exhibition that will probably run through the whole month. Here’s a picture of Allen, taken in 1992, the last time he was in London, helping Rosemary cook lunch. And here is his family portrait of Theo, Rosemary and I. I miss him still.

My friends Udo Breger and Luzius Martin came to town for a performance by Ramuntcho Matta at Reference Point to celebrate the birthday of Brion Gysin. I was advertised as interviewing him but with someone like Ramuntcho that is impossible. He likes things to be so unstructured that he even called the venue ahead and had them dismantle the low stage they had planned. Everything had to be spontaneous. And it was! I did get a few words in edgeways but mostly Ramuntcho told thew same stories that he had told us the previous night when he came over for dinner. It was if the dinner was a rehearsal. He composed a lot of music for Brion’s songs and poems and recorded and produced them over the years. Like many of the poets of the sixties, Brion had always wanted to be a rock star. In the middle of our conversation/interview he produced a red electric guitar and gave a version of ‘I want somebody’, one of Brion’s songs. It was great. At the end he distributed tarot cards of his own design to members of the audience but instead of discussing them, that appeared to be the end, so we all went home. 

Jill Nicholls and I attended a talk on Pauline Boty held at the Gazelli Art House on Dover Street in conjunction with their show of Boty’s work. I have always thought that Boty was one of the most important of the British Pop Artists, up there with Hockney, Gerald Laing and Allen Jones in that there was a depth of meaning to her use of pop-art imagery. The girlie pin-ups were of strong, sexual women whereas her fellow artists like Peter Blake just used them as pin-ups: women as objects. Both she and Blake owed a lot to Jasper Johns’ 1955 ‘Four Faces’ with its row of boxes at the top, dividing the canvas neatly into a square containing a target and the four low reliefs. Blake used this as the framework for a lot of works such as ‘Got a Girl’ (1961), whereas for Boty it was a new way of dealing with the composition and the picture plane. A good example is ‘With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo’ (1962) with its lovely rose, her symbol for female sexuality, sitting on his hat. The picture was in the show and is still vibrant and filled with youthful energy. 

Though there was a microphone it was only being used to record the conversation and consequently I was unable to hear much of what was said, though as Jill pointed out, the phrase ‘male gaze’ seemed to occur fairly often; coming mostly from Louisa Buck. Nell Dunn read from her interview with Pauline Boty that is published in her wonderful Talking to Women (1965) which also contains a fascinating conversation with Edna O’Brien. It was lovely to see that Nell Dunn is still out and about; I always liked her work. Here is a picture of the meeting from the Gazelli Art House’s website. It’s good to see this revival of interest in her work. 

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21 December 2023

I was able to fit in one more trip before Christmas and went to see how my friend Maribel was getting on with her new house in Algeciras, in Andalucía where she comes from. It needs quite a bit of work but it’s solid and has parking. Unfortunately none of the furniture, fridge, stove, coffee machine, etc. that she bought on Black Friday had been delivered so it was pretty basic but I went there to see her not to admire Spanish interior design. I had a bed, bedding and hot water. That’s a good start. 

It was 22 degrees when I landed in Malaga on December 5. Like a British summer’s day. The light on this stretch of coast is extraordinary and makes the waves sparkle like jewels. The huge beaches were deserted except for a few hippies in the beach-side shacks at the entrance to the beach at Tarifa. An eagle flew over the car on our way there, but it didn’t impress Maribel at all. A few days later I saw why when she took me to an artist’s settlement, Castellar de la Frontera, high in the mountains where a convocation of more than 100 eagles was circling over the ruined castle and village. (I counted them on my photographs) I had always assumed they were solitary birds, but these were real eagles, as confirmed by the locals, and may have been gathering to migrate. I later found that in Tarifa you can sometimes see as many as 20 raptor species in a single day, it is a paradise for bird watchers. I’m told that the Spanish Imperial Eagle, which is very rare, can be seen there thanks to a conservation programme. 

The beach at Tarifa is enormous and continues for more than 10 kilometres. It is hard to imagine that it could ever be full, and in fact in the section we were in there were few facilities for tourists beyond a couple of small beach bars. Most of the beach is in the National Park and is protected from development. It really is magnificent, the ultimate beach with soft golden sand with a very special light coming off the sea. Of course sunset over the beach is quite spectacular and everyone sits down to watch it. Not that there were that many people there to do so.

Once the sun has gone down and it has grown dark, the closeness of Africa becomes apparent. Glittering across the Strait you can see streetlights and car headlamps in Morocco which is only 14k away at the Strait’s narrowest point, separated by one of the most treacherous meetings of seas in the world as the Atlantic meets the Med. Even in the day, the outline of the hills of Cap Spartel are visible outlined above the sea mist. 

I had not realised how separate Gibraltar was, sitting out on its peninsular, directly across the bay from Algeciras. To enter requires all the business of passports and security checks that you get at border crossing all over the world, but once you are there, it is like crossing through Alice’s looking glass. Suddenly, in the Mediterranean sun, you have red phone boxes, British style number plates but with GBZ or the post-Brexit GIB prefix, loads of Range Rovers filled with middle-class couples who look like they belong in Chalfont Saint Peters. There are pubs, filled with badly behaved British children, their mothers quaffing white wine rather than afternoon tea, and a High Street that belongs in somewhere like Cheltenham circa 1975. And towering 470 meters over it, sits the rock itself, a spectacular cliff face, honeycombed with tunnels and doubtless containing multiple gun emplacements, aimed at the Strait, which is why the British captured it from Spain back in August 1704. It doesn’t take long to see as its only 2.6 square miles – 6.7 km2 – but the views are wonderful. We wandered in a small graveyard where tombstones recorded officers from Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, shaded beneath giant olives and eucalyptus. It is the other, secret, end of British military might: there are battlements, gun emplacements and defence towers of all ages everywhere. It evoked poignant feelings, a weird set of childhood images from the world of British colonial power that I was taught in school in the forties and fifties that is virtually, fortunately, all gone. I remember at primary school being told at morning assembly that we should no longer refer to the ‘British Empire’ and instead say ‘the British Commonwealth’ though what event prompted this I can’t say as I was only about nine years old and the Commonwealth has existed since 1926.

As Tangier was just across the water it seemed silly not to go. In fact, I had booked hotel rooms at the El Muniria for February and wanted to see the hotel again as they seemed just a bit too cheap at 25 euros for a room with en suite bathroom. And they were. The El Muniria, where Burroughs had lived, and where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky also stayed, is next door to a building site. They were drilling the last remaining fragments of the adjacent building when we arrived and we could only speak to the receptionist in between bursts of drilling. Presumably by the time we arrived in February, construction on a new building would have been well under way. No way could we have stayed there. We retreated to the El Minzah for a bland, international hotel-style glass of wine. 

In the Medina we peeked down the alley where Burroughs used to live in Tony Dutch’s male brothel, but we were regarded with such suspicion that we rapidly retreated back around the corner to the Petit Socco where Burroughs used to pass the time of day with Kiki. Here they are in 1954, and how it is now, 70 years later.

There are frequent mutterings in Spain about the sovereignty of Gibraltar, but it is very convenient for the local rich people – of which there are a great many – for it to remain British. Also, the port of Algeciras is the largest in Spain, and the second largest in the Med. Over three million containers pass through it each year and many of them are filled with drugs, smuggled goods and sometimes even human cargoes. The local mafia is very powerful and they, too, like the proximity of all those British banks down Gibraltar’s Main Street. 

Of course the food in Algeciras was fabulous and incredibly cheap. This is a working town filled with working people who appreciate good food and wine: Pulpo con mayonesa – 2 euros; Pollo salsa, 1.5 euros; Calamares 2.2 euros; Boqueróns – 2 euros. Oh, and very large glasses of wine at 2 euros. About a quarter the price of the same in London restaurants and ‘tapas’ bars and of course much fresher. They are not paying London rents, nor London wages, and the fish was landed that morning. We went to a number of bars. Maribel seemed to know people in all of them. Most people stand – being old I usually got a stool or, if I was lucky and they had one, a chair – and watched the show. They shout in Andalucía, even when their faces are inches apart, and there is a great deal of play acting. They start a sentence, or make a statement, then repeat it in order to get going, getting louder as they reach the main content of their argument at the top of their voice but they are polite, they will be quiet while their protagonist speaks, again using the same formula. This speeds up, to and fro, with a lot of laughing and dancing about. It is a largely blokey thing; I didn’t see many women in the bars but there were some.

And so to Paris where I stayed with my old friends Catherine and Steve in Sud Pigalle, or ‘soupy’ as it’s known (Sud Pi). Catherine and I saw the Mark Rothko show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and, though I normally hate blockbusters, this one was great. The exhibition contains 115 works so we hurried through, then returned to see the most interesting ones. The first two rooms are all figurative – and of figures – and show the early use of his colour palette. He was clearly influenced by Arshile Gorky in his pre-abstraction work. Then we reach his wonderful mature style, vibrating blocks of orange, red, magenta on colour saturated grounds, mostly made between 1947 and 1958. Some of my all-time favourites were there. LVF have brought over the 1959 Seagram series from the Tate. These nine paintings were commissioned by the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York but after disagreements (they wanted brighter happier work) he kept them for himself and in 1969 bequeathed the nine paintings to the Tate so that they could be near his beloved Turner’s works. He made 30 pictures in the series all together and offered them all to the Tate but director Norman Reid declined, citing ‘storage problems’. Another typical Tate blunder; in 1921 the Tate turned down a gift of Cezanne’s ‘Mountains in Provence’ as ‘too modern’. 

As the work continues it gets darker, more depressive until we reach his 1969-70 ‘Black and Gray’ series which are just that, canvases divided equally into black and grey. Then he committed suicide. It was uncannily like the Nicolas de Staël show held at the Musée d’art moderne this summer in which the paintings became more and more depressing and lifeless, as they led to his suicide. But here one can go back to the glorious ‘light’ paintings, the reds and yellows whose colours move and change the longer you view them. It was not too crowded so we were able to study them properly. It’s on until 2 April 2024.

Finally, it’s that time of year again. Here’s my son Theo dressing the tree. Happy Crimble.

And let’s not forget: from the river to the sea.

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December 1, 2023

28th October was my son Theo’s birthday and I made him a dinner of all the things he loves: a tricolori salad, foie gras (duck have no gag reflex as their necks are designed to swallow large spiky fish so gavage doesn’t hurt them), fresh anchovies, confit de canard and cherries. Minako poured the wine. 

It was followed on the 4th November by Simon Caulkin’s birthday. I have known him about 45 years. It was held at Lemonia, a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill. My friend Valerie, who I stayed with in Rome in the spring, was there as she is another old friend of Simon’s. Here she shows that she is half-French in conversation with Minako.

The third picture here is completely gratuitous. I found it on the web. It is the last known picture, supposedly, of Paul McCartney and John Lennon together. Taken on March 29, 1974 in Los Angeles it shows May Pang, front, John Lennon far left, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney and Harry Nilsson. I think it was taken by Mal Evans, whose autobiography of his time with the Beatles has just been published.

Then, on the 9th, I made my first visit to Lisbon where I stayed with my friend Camila who had only just returned from a long weekend in London. I was impressed and scribbled down my first impressions: 

The cobblestones. The contrast between the shining iron tram tracks cutting through the square white marble cobblestones that immediately reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?’ [1921] with its 152 white marble cubes, like sugar lumps, in a white painted metal birdcage.

The hills. A rollercoaster of white cobbles, catching the sun like the crests of sea ripples glinting at day’s end. Like a child’s square building blocks.

The tiles. Entire house fronts of textured colour, sometimes a figure entombed in a cartouche but mostly vibrating symmetrical patterns of intricate interlocking shapes. I love tiles and in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum they have superb collection of. 16th c Iznik tiles from Western Anatolia that I spent some time examining. Also worth seeing is Gulbenkian’s collection of Lalique.

San Francisco could have been like this but instead they imposed that wretched, mindless, American street grid on even the steepest hills, ignoring the topography, and ruined forever the chance to make it a world class city.

Each morning we would go to a museum, followed by lunch, usually in the museum. Then we would wander around the old town, seeing the sites. As an ex-editor of Time Out I felt I should see the Time Out Market, one of their most successful franchises. 

The most amazing picture I saw in Lisbon was the Triptych of the Temptation of Saint Anthony (c1501) by Hieronymus Bosch at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. I love way he so accurately depicts the weirdness of the medieval mind, and this one has dozens of vignettes each of which deserves careful study. I was delighted by it. I particularly liked the little fellow in red.

Lisbon, like San Francisco, is built on hills which have been amply provided with viewpoints and panoramas of the city and the river. There is usually a convenient bar located there too and one of the most pleasant things in the world is to stroll from one viewpoint to another, tasting the local wine as you go. It is also essential to try a glass of ginjinha, a liqueur made from Morello cherries in Estremadura. Very tasty. I first heard of it from watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations programme on Lisbon where he does appear to genuinely get drunk from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3UEo5XKFt8

I had not known that the world’s oldest bookshop was in Lisbon until Camila took me there. As an ex-bookseller myself it was encouraging to see a shop that had managed to remain in business so long. Livraria Bertrand was founded in 1732 and though there are now 58 other branches nationwide, the original shop still has the right smell and a pleasant atmosphere. It moved to this location in 1773 after the earthquake. The picture shows the famous white pavement cobbles and the tiled building facade. 

Lisbon is a beautiful city, with countless unexpected vistas that sometimes end with the light of the river or are animated by a moving tram. The riverside allows huge vistas and many of the industrial buildings have been repurposed as galleries, shops or markets – like the Time Out one. It seems to be a very young city, filled with youthful energy. The downside of this being that young people from all over the world have moved there, able to work remotely on their computers they have realised that living in beautiful Lisbon, with its architecture, wonderful food and wine, and cheap prices for everything except rent, is preferably to the freezing winters of Chicago or New York, Berlin or Amsterdam. Unfortunately their presence, plus the plague of AirB&B, has virtually doubled rental prices.

Camila followed me back to London a few days later to see a concert and record producer and manager Joe Boyd came to dinner. As the producer of the Pink Floyd’s first single, all of Nick Drake’s records, early Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention albums he is an integral part of sixties British rock ‘n’ roll history. He has just finished a seven-year survey of World Music which, inexplicably, has now to be called Global Music. I have known him since the early sixties. Here are the usual suspects disporting themselves: Camila, me, Minako, Theo and Joe. That is an ISB album on the coffee table.

And finally, an attempt of a much more sober portrait of dinner, this time with Hannah from the T. J. Boulting Gallery, and her partner Biscuit. Her show of Lee Miller photographs had just opened. 

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November 26, 2023

This year I have been very fortunate in being able to travel a great deal. The year began in Kerry, where my son Theo and I spent Christmas with Ed Maggs and Fran Edwards, having gone there via a night in Dublin. In March I spent a wonderful week in Rome with my old friend Valerie Orpen who knew where all the Caravaggios were as well as which restaurant served the best offal. In April Theo and I went first to Barcelona where we were entertained by my friends Michael and Judy and then on to our house in the French Pyrenees to avoid being in London for the Coronation. In July I took the Eurostar to Paris and on to Perpignan and the mountains where I stayed until early September. After only two weeks I was back in Paris, enjoying the company of Catherine and Steve, visiting the market, cooking and seeing shows. And now, finally, I have just returned from Lisbon, where I stayed with my good friend Camila who teaches at the university there. 

But first there was the Marina Abramovic show at the Royal Academy. I have been there three times so far – it closes January 1st – and each time my opinion changes. I have never been a great fan of performance art; the ego of the performers always irritated me, but I found Marina Abramovic’s show very moving at times, perhaps because many of the pieces were done on film, playing to the camera rather than an audience, though the viewer’s role remains the same. She works in the tradition already fully established by Dada and Fluxus, particularly Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ (1964), as well as Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci and, of course, Chris Buren’s ‘Shot’ (1971). In almost every case she succeeded in being absolutely there, grounded in the human condition, with our attention fully engaged: she and Ulay slapping each other’s faces, Marina violently brushing her hair; she and Ulay taking turns to scream at each other; Marina holding a bow while Ulay points an arrow at her heart (‘Rest Energy’ 1980) for four minutes ten seconds. She said, ‘It really was a performance about complete and total trust.’

 The famous performances are there: ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010): Marina in silent eye contact with members of the public, eight hours a day for over three months: a strangely moving event with both participants filmed. Being so focussed and attentive made many of the public participants cry. ‘Rhythm 0’ (1974), the masochistic event where Marina laid out a table of implements for the public to use on her body, including a variety of knifes and choppers as well as a gun. There was a much smaller selection of more kindly items like a rose. The audience stripped her to the waist, cut her, wrote on her skin, and even held a loaded gun to her throat. The active audience was mostly men. The performance turned part of her hair grey. It certainly grounded her in the moment, but at what cost? In ‘Rhythm 5’ she lay at the centre of burning five-pointed star until she lost consciousness. The RA press release says these pieces ‘pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.’  

We squeezed between naked models forming the portal to the next room; a re-enactment of her ‘Imponderabilia (1977), though many people took the easy route around the side. I went with three different friends. The first time with Camila who was a bit shaken by the very real presence of the naked bodies; Jill, a veteran documentary film-maker who took it all in her stride; and Vanessa, herself a performance artist who was much more excited by the later stage of Abramovic’s work where she explores the energy of crystals. The critics were quite upset by this piece. Time Out said: ‘The couple are too close, you push them aside to pass, their balance gets shifted, their backs get pushed against the wall. It’s so intrusive, so full of questions of intimacy, misogyny and closeness, that it’s almost stomach turning.’ 

The audience are understandably not permitted to take pictures of the nude performers, so I’ve used Abramovic’s original performances with Ulay. In other rooms, however, I took a lot.It’s a huge exhibition, but the audience seemed to enjoy the crystal energy room the most; sitting on polished rock seats, pressing their foreheads against rock, wearing giant crystal shoes, laying down with a crystal pillow. On my three visits I recorded Camila, Jill and Venessa trying out the same exhibits: First the rock headrest:

Then the clumpy crystal shoes:

And exit through the crystal portal. You could almost feel the weight of the light as the spots illuminating the crystals were very bright. Jill enjoyed this room and thought it was the most fun in the whole show. Vanessa loved this as she is very into crystals and she stayed in the doorway for ages, having ‘crystal shower’ as she put it while a line backed up.

I also tried some of them out and the rock chair headrest did feel very comfortable.

Overall, I feel that Abramovic does change the audience’s perceptions of life: she makes them more aware of their vulnerability, their strengths and, by shifting the focus of everyday behaviour, suggests new possibilities and hopes in the viewer.

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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.

On Saturday Catherine and I took in all the big commercial
galleries in the Marais – nothing struck us as particularly good – and visited Saint-Sulpice. I had just read Jean-Paul Kauffmann’s wonderful The Angel of the Left Bank, the
Secrets of Delacroix’s Parisian Masterpiece
, and wanted to
see ‘Jacob Wrestling with the Angel’ for myself. It is
wonderful.

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April 22 – August 21.

In April, shortly after I returned from Rome, Theo and I travelled to Barcelona for a few days en route to our place in the Pyrenees. We ate with my friends Judy and Mike each evening and spent the day as flaneurs. We had lunch on Sant Miquel beach, overlooking the brilliant blue-green Med and, strolling aimlessly, came upon the Picasso Museum with no queue outside and so were able to walk straight in. Even El Quatre Gats was half empty. I love Barcelona, there is such a contrast in the architecture with every street and alley filled with buildings of interest. I’d love to spend a season there, as Allen Ginsberg used to call his sojourns of six-months to a year in a foreign country. Rosemary and I always stayed in a different hotel in different parts of the El Gotic and El Raval barrios when we visited in order to get to know all parts of the old town.

Theo in Barcelona

From Spain we moved on to our place in the Pyrenees where our friend Valerie came to visit. I had recently stayed with her in Rome. Valerie enjoys rustique cooking. We had talked about it many times before but I had finally realized her enthusiasm when I cooked a rabbit for her in London one time and she carefully pried the brains out of its head, declaring them the most toothsome part of the animal. Both Theo and I love escargots but those she cooked for us in France were the real thing, not the trimmed morsels in a green garlic sauce you get in Waitrose. Valerie’s snails were serious.

Valerie in Catllar

In June my God-daughter Sara visited from New York. As usual she had a tight schedule, visiting as many people as possible in a short time, but Theo and I managed to have her to dinner and catch up. Born in London to American parents and brought up a Brooklynite, she brought all that New York energy with her. I only wish she visited more often. 

Sara in London

I paid several visits to the Piet Mondrian and Hima af Klint show at Tate Modern but ultimately found it unsatisfactory. The pairing of Mondrian and Klint was artificial. Its true that they were both early abstractionists, with Klint possibly the first artist to paint large abstract canvases, and they were both involved in the spiritualist movement, but they were unaware of each other’s work and the formal similarities of their work was not that great. A better pairing, if you have to have one – it seems to be a fad these days – would have been with Kandinsky whose position as the first abstract easel painter Klint has taken. They were both Spiritualists and believed that emotions and spiritual states could be expressed formally in shapes and colours. I was very impressed by Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art when I first read it at art school back in 1960. Ultimately the fact is that Klint is not as good as either of them so a pairing is almost invidious. Plus there were two many Klints and nowhere near enough Mondrians, presumably because insurance and shipping are so expensive. Many of my friends liked it though.

Hilma af Klint

In June my friend Camila came to stay, en route to a William Blake conference in Bradford. We made the rounds of the galleries, had lunch at the Academy Club and visited St. James’s, Piccadilly, where William Blake was Christened. I remembered how emotional Allen Ginsberg had become when he gave a reading there in 1991 or ’92. Blake remained his great love. I have always loved the Grinling Gibbons’ 1694 Reredos but had never fully examined the font before. Here it is with Camila looking into it.

Camilla in St James’s Piccadilly

On June 26, Luzius Martin and his wife Sairung came to dinner alongside Terry Wilson. Both Luzius and Terry have a great interest in William Burroughs, who is our usual subject of conversation. Terry wrote Here To Go: Planet R-101 with Brion Gysin, the best exposition of Gysin’s ideas there is. Sairung runs the Thai restaurant that she and Luzius own in Basel. Anxious that my food might not be hot enough, she brought along her own fiercely hot chillies.

Lucius, Sairung and Terry

Summer was here. I picnicked on Hampstead Heath with Suzy Treister and Richard Grayson, attended a Christie’s pre-view with Egyptologist Tom Hardwick, with whom Rosemary and I stayed in Cairo, cooked more rabbit for Valerie and saw the Anselm Kiefer show at White Cube, Bermondsey, with Jill. Though called Finnegan’s Wake, it consisted of the usual piles of rubble, twisted iron and building-site detritus. Many of the collections of objects displayed on shelves I had seen before in other installations. I usually love Kiefer’s work but much of this one seemed knocked together by assistants and, despite the hundreds of James Joyce quotes slapped onto the objects, it seemed ill-thought-out and rushed, and one got the feeling that the viewers carefully examining each pile of broken concrete had looked at it more closely than Kiefer himself had ever done. 

Keifer at White Cube

My tickets to the Yoyai Kusama show had been cancelled as the gallery closed for emergency repairs, presumably the flashing lights and spacial disorientation had freaked out a viewer enough for them to cause significant damage in trying to get out. However, a new date was provided and Camila and I went. The installations were great, though not of great significance. I think I preferred the first Tate show some years back. But it is a very popular show and everyone seemed to be enjoying it immensely. 

Finally got to see the Kusama show at Tate

My son Theo lives with me and in July we were joined by his girlfriend Minako, which makes for a much more lively and enjoyable household.

Minako comes to stay

On July 26 I boarded Eurostar and left Britain for the South. The first guests to arrive were Yuri and Pauline. Yuri is from Dodge City, Kansas, and I first met him at the William Burroughs compound in Lawrence, Kansas, where he was organizing exhibitions of Burroughs’s artwork in various cities. He helped me enormously when I catalogued Burroughs’ archive there in 2014. In the course of his job he met Pauline in Paris. She is from the Loire Valley and also works in the art business. They got together, married, bought a small house in Paris and now have a 22 month old son, Gus. Here’s Yuri, wearing a real Stetson.  And here they are in my friend Martha’s swimming pond.

Pauline and Yuri. Its a real Stetson
Yuri, Pauline and Gus in Martha’s pond

Camila was next to arrive, just in time for the village Sardinade. Many of my old friends had already arrived for their summer sojourns: Martha Stevns, who build a beautiful swimming pond that is the envy of the whole valley; Roslyn and Gordon, who were so kind and supportive when Rosemary died, as well as permanent residents like Paul and Polly Timberlake, whom I’ve known for more than 30 years. Here’s Martha, Camila and Roslyn at the Sardinade, followed by a picture of the locals dancing the Macarena. They love a line dance, and have been dancing the Macarena ever since it was first released in 1995. You have to know when to jump and turn 45 degrees. 

Martha, Camilla, Roslyn at the Sardine
Villagers dance the Macarena

Camila’s friend Nora came to join us after a few days and the two of them practiced a few songs. It was delightful to sit out on the terrace at night under the stars and listen to them sing.

Camilla and Nora give us a song

On August 13 Richard Grayson and Suzy Treister arrived, bringing with them the art critic Adrian Dannatt. We had a full house. Both Richard and Adrian were in good form, with plenty of art world gossip, flashes of wit and cynicism and Camila and Nora serenaded us. Clearly it was like this  when Andre Breton’s friends visited him at Saint-Cirq-Lapopie.

Adrian, Nora, Suzy, Richard, Miles, Camilla in front
Richard and Suzy
Adrian clears up

Richard, Suzy and Adrian left and were replaced by Nora’s boyfriend Antoine and her sister Ella. We had a day at the beach at Canet Plage, having lunch at NBC, my favourite beach-bar. Rosemary and I loved the place, which is reconstructed in a different configuration each year. I once went to the toilet there and returned to find Rosemary surrounded by the entire Catalans Dragons Rugby Team, not that she knew anything about Rugby. That was not the point. Here I am with Camila.  

At NBC Beach Club, Janet

I hated to see them all go, but no sooner had I replaced the sheets, than Ken Weaver and Maxine arrived. I’ve known Ken since 1967 when I first visited New York and stayed with him and Betsy in the Lower East Side. We stood on the fire escape and watched a knife fight in the street that was only broken up when a prowl car arrived, and everyone fled. Ken was the drummer with Fugs and wrote several of their greatest hits including ‘Slum Goddess’ and ‘I Couldn’t Get High’. Paul Timberlake and Polly came over for dinner with them. I’d driven with them to have lunch with Ken and Maxine a couple of days after I first arrived but trouble with the car made it into a long drive. Theo came down from London for a week, purposely overlapping with Ken who he has known since he was at primary school.  

Ken at Molitg-les-Bains
Maxine, Ken and Paul

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In January, I had one of the most memorable dinners so far this year. Documentary film-maker Jill Nicholls invited me to dinner with three women who had worked on Spare Rib, the Feminist magazine from the early seventies. Jill herself was one of them, having worked there not too long after leaving university. She was joined by Marsha Rowe who co-founded the mag as well as co-founding Virago Publishing. I first met Marsha somewhere back in the mists of sixties’ dreamtime, but it was probably through Richard Neville or just casually in the Oz office as she worked for Oz originally in Sydney and then in London. The fourth person at the table was Marion Fudger, who now goes under a married name. I had not seen Marion since 1978 when she was the bass player with the Art Attacks and also touring with the Feminist rock band the Sadista Sisters. I attempted to manage her, in particular her songwriting side, but I was too busy writing for NME to give her the attention needed. I had toured Europe with a number of bands, but I thanks to Marion, the Sadista Sisters gave them all a run for their money as far as bad behaviour on the road goes. In Amersfoort I returned one day to find the glass front door of our hotel had been smashed to pieces. Marion had run right through it, presumably carrying her Rickenbacker which was heavy enough to use as a battering ram. Or maybe she just didn’t see it and was running at speed. Wonderful days and wonderful to see her again after 45 years.

When I mentioned the dinner to friends, some thought I might have been intimidated but, on the contrary, I was flattered to be asked and encountered no ideas that were in any way counter to my own. I have thought of myself as a Feminist ever since I got together with Ann Buchanan in 1970. She opened doors for men, stood up when they entered the room, poured their drinks and challenged every received stereotype that came up. We even alternated buying the birth control supplies. We spent a lot of time with Claudia Dreifus, who was an energetic champion of early 1970’s New York Feminism, whom I knew because we both wrote for the East Village Other, (EVO) the first New York underground newspaper.

I was contacted by Joe Daniel, the nephew of Frank Norman, to see if I would be interested in writing an introduction to a new edition Frank’s book Soho Night and Day, that had been out of print for 50 years. It is a classic of the period, more autobiography than guidebook, with photographs by the as-yet unknown Jeffrey Bernard. It captures the spirit of Soho in the Sixties, with inciteful portraits of Gaston Berlemont, Muriel Belcher and other Soho celebs no longer with us. This was an excuse to read, or re-read, all of Frank’s books: Bang To Rights; The Guntz; Stand On Me; Banana Boy and Norman’s London. I didn’t go as far as to read his novels though I think I have them all and read them at the time. Of course he is best known for Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. And, as Jeffrey took the pictures, it was also time to revisit Low Life; More Low Life; Jeffrey Bernard Is Still Unwell; Reach For The Ground and Just The One, Graham Lord’s wonderful biography of Jeff Bernard, to see if there were any references to making the book. There were. Jeffrey lost his entire advance in ten minutes at the roulette wheel. The estate is administered by Geraldine Norman, Frank’s widow, who it turns out has lived just a few streets away from me in Fitzrovia for 40 years. We now have lunch regularly and reminisce about the Colony and Soho in the old days, as well as discuss art, and her special area of expertise which is identifying fakes. She is Advisor to the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, the subject of many of her books, a position which is, of course, a bit problematic after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but art often leads the way to reconciliation so we must try and be positive.

There were several interesting art shows in February. Jill Nicholls and I attended the Women in Abstract Art show at the Whitechapel which reminded me of the big Surrealist show recently. Fascinating though it was to discover that there were Surrealist groups in countries all over the world, their obscurity was no surprise because, though they were of great academic interest, they just weren’t very good. Same with the women abstract painters. All the show did ultimately was prove that Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning and the ‘Ninth Street Women’ were by far the best. The show opened with Helen Frankenthaler and closed with Joan Mitchell, the two greatest of the group. Some of the others, from across the globe were of interest, but paled against the New York giants. 

The other show was ‘Spain and the Hispanic World at the Royal Academy’ that I went to twice: with Suzy Treister and Richard Grayson, then again with Vanessa Vie who is Spanish and who was delighted to find a Juan Carreno de Miranda, a 17th century painter from Asturias, where she was born. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York closed for renovations and highlights from their collection were on show at the RA. Rather than just a collection of pictures, Archer M Huntington, who assembled the collection a century ago, included decorative arts, maps and other artifacts showing Spanish life and culture. One of my favourite pictures was there: Goya’s ‘Portrait of the Duchess of Alba’ (1797) pointing at Goya’s name, ‘Solo Goya’ – ‘Only Goya’, written in the sand at her (surprisingly small) feet. Was she the model for his ‘Naked Maja’? Sadly, probably not, though there is a strong resemblance, but she was the highest aristocrat in the land and he was just an honourable member of her household. The social distance between them was impenetrable.  

Peter Weibel died on the first of March. I wish I had known him better. For 24 years he presented cutting-edge shows at ZKM, the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. I first met him when Udo Breger put on a huge William Burroughs show there that I was involved with and again when Tom Neurath and I went over to give a talk on ‘Swinging London’ – of all things. I had lunch with Tom only two weeks before Peter died, and we had been speaking about him. I first heard of him back in 1968 when I had loved how outraged people had been at his performance piece with his partner and fellow artist Valie Export, described as ‘…on a balmy afternoon Valie Export led Peter Weibel by a dog’s leash on all fours along Kärntnerstrasse. Walking like this means succumbing to the way of the world, proclaiming the negative utopia of the upright backbone in our animal community. This film produces reality, recreates it from the rough tapestry of ideologies.’ Here’s a picture of Peter, Tom Neurath, and I in Karlsruhe and of Peter going for a walk. 

In March I went to Rome. I had always wanted to go to Rome, but something always prevented it. Back in 1966, my then wife Sue and I travelled to Northern Italy, spending time in Pisa, Lucca, Milano, Venice and Firenze. But we dawdled and spent so much time in the Scuola Grande di San Roca – I am constantly amazed by Tintoretto’s masterpiece – and the Accademia in Venice – I returned several days in a row to see ‘The Tempest’ by Giorgione, Byron’s favourite painting, that by the time we reached Firenze we only had a week left and spent much of it in the Uffizi with no time left to travel further south.

The same applied in 1969 where we spent so much time with our friends Nanda Pivano – translator of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs into Italian – and her husband, designer and architect Ettore Sottsass – future founder of the Memphis Group of designers – that we got no further than that. I’d never been anywhere like their apartment on the via Manzoni where even a cup of coffee had to ordered from the Grand Hotel et de Milan across the street and waiters in long white aprons appeared to serve lunch and dinner. There was no need to consult a menu – though there was one – we just asked for anything we wanted. Nanda recommended the fish en papillot, cooked in a paper bag, which was slashed opened with much ceremony. Ettore had another apartment, the same size, on the floor below that was devoted entirely to plan chests containing tens of thousands of examples of graphic design, from film posters to the printed bibs you wear in a lobster joint.

I arrived in Rome on March 3rd and stayed with my friend Valerie who was taking a nine-month sabbatical and had swapped her flat – a couple of doors down from me in London – for a similar flat in Rome just south of the Vatican walls. To walk or bus into town you had to cross the tourist lines in St Peter’s Square, just as I have to cross Oxford Street’s teaming crowds to get into Soho. If I had to choose just one building in Rome it would be The Pantheon, the design model for so much Western architecture – more or less any building with columns, a dome and pediments over the windows and columns has its origin with this building. I have several books on it, so it was wonderful to finally give light and colour, scale and acoustics to my image of it. Rebuilt from a previous structure by Hadrian in 126 AD, it’s been mucked around with a lot by the Catholic Church, of course, who, among other violations, robbed it of its bronze to make Bernini’s ghastly Baroque canopy or ciborium in St. Peter’s. (Other sources say most of the bronze, taken from the portico ceiling of the Pantheon, was used to make canon.) However, it’s still one of the best-preserved Roman buildings and its coffered concrete dome is a wonder to see. The central oculus is open to the weather and provides the only light to the interior. It is apparently still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome after standing for 2,000 years and it has now been confirmed that the giant bronze doors are original. 

We naturally visited the Spanish steps. It was also great to see Tragan’s Column in the clear Roman sunlight. I was only familiar with it from the dusty plaster cast in the Cast Courts of the Victoria & Albert Museum. There is still some debate over what use the column was intended for as it would have originally had its view blocked by two libraries, thus limiting its function as a triumphal feature, despite its position at the head of the Forum. We may never know. Before the restoration of the Cast Courts in the V&A, the pedestal, a sizeable room, had an admirable use: it was where staff members would sneak off to for a quick fuck. 

We visited Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, the model for so many public squares. Here is a picture of Valerie on the steps to the Sala della Protomoteca leading from it. I wanted to see just the most important things as to see everything would take a year. I restricted myself to Roman structures with a few exceptions, such as the churches containing Caravaggios, of which there are many. 

The other exception was of course the Vatican Museum. By booking online and paying an extra five euros you can avoid the long queues and walk straight in, at least you could in March. I was delighted to find that their Egyptian galleries consisted mostly of statues of Sekhmet, my favourite goddess. Though they had nothing to match the British Museum or the Louvre, they had a wide variety of examples. She’s a cat, with a sun disk on her head. At one point she almost destroyed humanity and was only stopped when Ra dyed beer with red ochre and poured it on the earth. Mistaking it for blood she became so drunk that she gave up and went home. They’ve also got some more realistic cats. It’s a good collection. They’ve even got a Francis Bacon Pope, but he’s not screaming. 

I managed to spend an hour in the Sistine Chapel while thousands of tour groups trudged through, led by bored tour leaders with flags on sticks or funny hats, followed by Americans or Japanese who photographed everything, not knowing if it was a Raphael or a Michelangelo, as a loudspeaker shouted at everyone to be quiet. ‘Silencio, this is a sacred place,’ he yelled. There are seats at the sides and the end which are easy to get if you wait a few minutes for someone to move. Then you can raise your eyes above the crowds, and they miraculously disappear in the face of the beautiful ceiling. 10,000 square feet of Michelangelo takes a while to examine. It is a great deal harder to distinguish and admire the Botticellis that are among the frescos on the side walls because you must push your way through the crowds. 

It was not all museums and churches, there was a lot of sitting outside cafes and bars, even an ice-cream, my first in about 25 years. The market was fantastic, and I made saltimbocca. I was restrained because, thanks to Brexit, I was unable to bring back any of the delicacies. As usual, even the most mundane supermarket was ten times better than anything you can buy in Britain (and the same goes for France and Spain). 

Rome is famous for its offal and has developed a whole cuisine to deal with it. Valerie’s favourite offal restaurant was Agustarella, where the eccentric spelling of the English translation made the food all the more appealing. I naturally plumbed for ‘Pajata arrosto (grilled viel entrails)’ as a main that were delicious.  

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January 1st 2023

My son Theo and I spent Christmas and the new year in Ireland, staying at Ed Maggs and Fran Edwards’ place in Kerry, on the far south west coast. 

It should have taken 11 hours to get there by train, but the day before we left there had been a rail strike which, as usual, had disrupted the service. By the time we reached Holyhead, we had missed out ferry to Dublin and had to wait five hours for the next one. This meant a stop-over in Dublin and a train the following morning. The trip took 22 hours in total. As I was expecting, it rained every day, but it was the gentle rain coming in off the sea often not much more than a mist. Distant hills were golden with sunlight while rain dripped down the windows, then the opposite would happen. This is why it is called the Emerald Isle. There’s not much green left on the hills, though, as overgrazing on a massive scale has reduced them down to their topsoil and what nature intended as a temperate rainforest is now a series of bald hill studded with thousands of sheep, making sure that not a shoot or flower survives. 

       Ed and Fran had a series of houseguests, including my old friends Susan Stenger (composer and musician: Band of Susans, Big Bottom, recently on tour with Nick Cave) and Paul Smith, the founder of Blast First records who released Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and other alternate bands in the UK.

Also there was Mandana Ruane, who for twenty years was the manager of the Academy Club, above Andrew Edmunds’ restaurant in Lexington Street, Soho, before retiring to SW Ireland. She is still nippy with a Waiter’s Friend. 

For one dinner the table was set for nine, including the local farmer who shot the deer that we were eating. And what a table it was: Ed was still making it when we arrived. He has an industrial scale workshop in which he constructed a trestle-style dining table of carefully planed wood. 

In these pictures we have Ed sharpening the knives and Paul laying the table. I hadn’t seen Mandana in five years, ever since she left the club. She told us that she had always had two dreams in life: to run a Soho drinking club, and to live in a cottage in the south of Ireland, and here now she had achieved both aims. 

We were able to get about a bit, saw some traditional Irish music in a pub: musicians some of whom didn’t even know each other but who all knew the tunes. Fran drove us to see some of the inlets down on the coast. More bald hills but 20 years of rewilding would sort them out. The water was beautiful.

I was very taken by the local amateur signage. Here are two good examples:

A few weeks later, back in London, I had dinner at Jill Nicholls’s house with her, Marsha Row and Marion Fudger. All three had worked at the feminist magazine Spare Rib; Marsha being the co-founder. It was a wonderful evening, particularly as I hadn’t seen Marion in 45 years when she played bass with the Art Attacks after leaving the magazine. She was also in the Derelicts and played on a European tour with the Sadista Sisters. I caught up with them in Amersfoort, in the Netherlands. Back then [1977] I was writing regularly for New Musical Express, but I’d rarely seen such outrageous group behaviour except for covering The Who and one time when Roger McGuinn shot out the lightbulb in his hotel room because it wouldn’t turn off (he was using the wrong switch). I went to see them in Holland, that evening, the glass front door of the Sisters’ hotel was shattered to pieces when Marion ran straight through it. She must have been travelling at some speed as it was made of thick glass. It was more fun being on the road with a female group because people weren’t expecting them to have so much energy. Also, the audience had far more girls in it than the boys/blokes that most male bands attract. 

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