On December 10th, Hannah brought over Viv Albertine for an afternoon drink. It was great to meet her. We had met before, a decade ago with Thurston Moore at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival where she was launching her autobiography Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. (as said by her mother when she was a teenager). It’s a wonderful book, mostly about her time with The Slits and adventures with all the usual suspects: Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Mick Jones, and helpfully lists the page numbers for Sex, Drugs and Punk Rock for those in a hurry.
I made a second visit to the Monet in London exhibition at the Courtauld, this time with my friend Martha Stevns who once ran a gallery herself. For Londoners at the turn of the twentieth century, the thick fog – smog it was called later – was a major health hazard but Monet loved it and made more than 100 paintings of the Thames shrouded in fog, made either from the balconies on the top two floors of the Savoy Hotel, from the other side of the river from St. Thomas’s hospital. There are just three views: Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. He returned with them all unfinished and completed them at his studio in Giverny. This exhibition reunites most of the 37 paintings he called ‘Vues de la Tamise’ [‘Views of the Thames’], finished in 1905 and intended for an exhibition back in London. Monet liked to work in series: haystacks, waterlilies, Rouen cathedral, but his work was in such demand that they were sold before it could happen. This remarkable show has brought them back together, 120 later, and for the first (and possibly only) time we can see this incredible series as originally envisioned.
There are few great paintings of London; unlike Paris where there are hundreds, it is not a city that lends itself to that kind of celebration. In fact Monet was not painting London, he was painting an atmospheric condition; one that he had painted many times before. It must have reminded him of the industrial port of Le Havre, where he grew up: Light and air seen through the steam and smoke of the docks that he drew and painted hundreds of times. Impressionism is a northern art, born from the rapidly changing light conditions, where the passage of a cloud can change everything. He worked in series, 30 or 40 canvases on a particular theme. He finished in the studio to represent a particular state of the light. Cezanne was the only one who develop impressionism in the south with its steady luminosity.
So we can be grateful that a great master chose to paint here, even if it was not London itself that interested him. Martha pointed out that the pictures are better seen from some distance because only then does his technique gel and reveal his virtuosity. He applies his paint on in bold brushstrokes, taken from Delacroix. A scrim of colour brings the Thames alive: the choppy, restless water surface slopping around the bridge below the fog, reflects the weak sun, and suddenly it’s London. The rooms were all filled to capacity (and always booked-up for weeks ahead so it was hard to get a distant view, particularly during my first visit. Now it was worth waiting for a gap in the sightline to see each painting click into place, like focussing a camera.) They are wonderful.
It was December, as usual filled with dinners and celebrations. There was Sara Stevns’ birthday, held at Moro in Exmouth Market. Photo of her speech below. Dinner with Fran Bentley, surrounded by her pictures. Dinner with Valerie who cured her own salmon and made her own game pie. Delicious it was. Mina took a photograph. Viv Albertine and Hannah Watson came to dinner, so did Jill and so did Martha. Fun times for all.
Well that didn’t last long did it? When Henry Luce, in a February 1941 Life editorial called for ‘an American Century’, saying the US should ‘exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit,’ he clearly expected American leadership, however unwillingly received by the rest of the world, to last until the middle of the 21st century. But with Trump, it has already gone. No-one will ever take the United States seriously again. American moral superiority was always a deeply suspect idea to begin with, but it’s over, destroyed by a convicted criminal, a narcist surrounded by a court of weirdos, religious maniacs, conspiracy-theorists and cranks. Let’s hope we survive the nest four years. The American Century lasted about 75 years; a blink of the eye compared to, say, Egypt’s 3,000 years before the Romans, or the Romans’ own roughly 1,000 years or even the 3-400 years of the British Empire. What, I wonder, will America be known for, if at all? My guess would be for the Moon landings and for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the first – and I surely hope, the only – use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets. Also for jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.
The inmates have taken over the asylum. Everyone who collaborates in any way with Trump or his administration faces future ostracism, particularly in the arts and music communities and probably within the better academic institutions as well. Good. There should never be any acceptance of his ideas as being in any way legitimate. My hope is that this time it will cause a groundswell of rebellion and dissent, similar to that of the Sixties youth movement against the Vietnam war. In fact, as well as popular opposition, I fully expect a new generation of Weathermen to emerge. Perhaps the next gunman won’t miss.
Meanwhile, Israel continues its programme of genocide, but world opinion is gradually changing against them: 157 to 8 countries supported a UN General Assembly call for Israel to withdraw from all the occupied Palestinian territories based on pre-1967 borders. And for the first time there has been talk about reparations. From the river to the sea, it’s all Palestine.
We open on the 8th November when we had a William Burroughs evening. Normally these consist of myself, Luzius Martin, and, quite frequently, Udo Breger, both flying in from Basel, and Terry Wilson who lives in Notting Hill. However, this time it was Jim Pennington and Annette, joined by Demi Raven and Janet from Oregon whom I met for the first time. As one of them was a vegetarian, so I thought, I attempted a cauliflower in coconut sauce dish which got a bit overdone as the wine flowed. I am always astonished at the depth of knowledge displayed by these Burroughs scholars, and it was great to finally meet Demi, whose work I have known for the long time. Jim, inevitably, produced an antique Polaroid camera to record the event but the results were a bit dark. I thought they went out of production decades ago so maybe the film was out of date. Fortunately, I remembered to take a few shots with my I-phone: L to R: Jim, Annette, Janet, Demi.
The next event to record was Mina’s birthday on the 12th which we celebrated in the traditional manner. Theo found some Happy Birthday candles and here they are in use.
On the 14th, Hélène Leroy came to dinner. She holds the wonderful title of Conservatrice en chef, Responsable des collections at the Musée d’art modern de Paris, and was over to install and check on the condition of the Dreamachine that Tate Modern had borrowed for their Electric Dreams show which opened a week later. It was great to see her and catch up on her news. The long-promised Collaboration show of Burroughs and Gysin at the MAM is now a Gysin show and will open in 2026. I hope I’m still alive. Brion Gysin left the MAM almost 500 pictures as well as a collection of Mss and archive material in his will, but no-one did anything much with it – except for requested loans – until Hélène joined them and she is now actively promoting the material. The new Tate show has a room devoted to Brion with the Dreamachine (his preferred spelling) and a vitrine featuring his collaborations with Burroughs. I made chorizo-stuffed squid for her.
On the Saturday Jill and I went to the Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo show at the RA. It is amazing to think of these three great artists meeting together, on the 25th of January, 1504, in Firenze to discuss where to install Michelangelo’s ‘David’. Sadly, British collectors opted for the School of Venice rather than Firenze so there are few examples of this trio’s work in Britain and the major ones; The Taddei Tondo – Michelangelo’s only sculpture in Britian – and Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon are both very well-known. Nonetheless, it’s a superb show. Even the king let them borrow some of his Leonardo drawings.
As we were there, we had a look at ‘Flaming June’, Lord Leighton’s best known work, on loan until 12 January 2025 from the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, who picked it up for $140 at auction in the Sixties. It is the subject of many a poster in a student bedsit though I always thought the frame was a bit too much like a proscenium arch – or like looking through the keyhole of an elaborate doorway. Victorian porn really.
I had only been back in London from Algeciras for two weeks before I set off again, this time for Basel, Switzerland – and this time on business. I travelled with Terry Wilson. We were going for the launch of Severed Due Stations, his book of cut-up collages which coincided with an exhibition of more of the same at Gallery Ann Mazzotti. I was also going to sign the signed, limited editions of the Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive II that my friend Luzius Martin was about to publish. We also needed to discuss plans for a number of future Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville projects. It was going to be a busy trip. LHR was sunny when we left but as we neared Basel the captain warned of problems ahead. Basel airport had just closed and would not open again until they had snowploughed the runway. We circled the city for an hour. The typical British Airways captain was hearty and jovial about it, ‘We’ve got plenty of fuel,’ and in fact he brought the plane down in about the most perfect landing possible with no shuddering, flapping or final bump. It was an Airbus, and I prefer them to a Boeing any day for landings. Luzius was still waiting for us even though we were an hour late and, again, fortuitously, we found a cab just as they announced the last bus before the Basel bus service stopped because the roads were unsafe with ice. This was not normal weather, but I had to admit it was beautiful, once seen through a window with a glass of wine in hand. Here are Terry and Udo in Luzius’s restaurant.
They have quite a set up there. I had expected to be staying a few doors, or even streets away, but in fact the entire Basel cut-up conspiracy is neatly stacked in the one building. Luzius and Sairung have a Thai restaurant on the ground floor serving high-end Chanthaburi dishes that is used extensively by the art trade, particularly during the Art Fair. Sairung is a spectacular chef and the restaurant is named after her as she was so well known from other Thai restaurants in Basel that a Chez Sairung made sense. She and Luzius live on the floor above the restaurant. I stayed on the third floor which is rented to a friend of theirs. On the fourth-floor lives Udo Breger, and on the top two floors there are students. This means the wide staircase is filled with art and bits and pieces from the flats and everybody knows each other. It’s a warm, friendly building. It was great to be able to just go upstairs every morning to have breakfast with Udo, an old friend whom I have known for 51 years, having first met him at Bill Burroughs’ flat in London. Udo’s Expanded Media Editions published several of Bill’s books back then.
Basel remained exceptionally cold and the pavements were treacherous as they had not been cleaned of snow and ice. I was not dressed for below zero weather and the slow progress along the pavements meant that it took three times as long as usual to get anywhere. We walked to the art gallery but the three hour private view was marred by the gallery being very, very cold. However, they had sold some of Terry’s work so that was good. Afterwards there was a dinner in a much warmer room: long table with candles, wine and good food which cheered us all up no end.
It was a nice neighbourhood, with a Turkish restaurant across the street that made wonderful spicy soup, a large coffee shop around the corner filled with young people on their computers and, at certain times, young women with children, and just down the street the Café Flore, a bar based on the Paris original. Nothing like it, of course, but the owner was a friend of Luzius. As you can see, le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé.
I naturally wanted to see the Kunstmuseum again as I remembered it as the most important museum in Switzerland with its huge collection of Holbein, Brueghel, Rembrandt, as well as Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Manet. They have a lot of Picassos, a lot of Leger and a room and a half of Giacomettis including ‘Woman with Her Throat Cut’ (1932) that I’d just been reading about in Michael Peppiatt’s evocative Giacometti in Paris and here properly displayed on the floor as intended. It is a wonderful collection, far better than that of the Tate or the National Gallery. I wish I’d had time to see their new building and their late twentieth century collection which I’m told has a very good Helen Frankenthaler, one of my favourite artists. One of the weirdest things there was a painting of John the Baptist (1505) from the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci which resembles nothing less than the Mona Lisa, if she cocked her head to her right in the manner of classical madonnas. One of his campest works, it would not have left his studio without his approval.
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Next day we took the streetcar out to the Fondation Beyeler which is in the nearby village of Riehen. Fortunately, the streetcar took us door-to-door. It’s a Renzo Piano building, one of his best, and apparently is the most visited museum in Switzerland. The Matisse show: Invitation to the Voyage, is a retrospective of 70 of his most important works spread over ten rooms. I knew most of them but there were some surprises. ‘La fenetre ouverte’, painted in Collioure in 1905, for example which I’d not seen before. In the 90s, Rosemary and I used to stay in a friend’s apartment next door to the building where Matisse painted this view of the harbour, and the living room was on the same level as his studio so the view was virtually identical. It is a superb show, with not a dud in it, open until 26 January 2025. Well worth the trip.
Luzius and I spent a few hours signing the special editions of the Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive II. Back in April 1972, William Burroughs wrote asking me for my help in finding a buyer for his archive. I agreed but pointed out that it would need to be described before anyone was likely to make an offer. The first volume of this description was the result; published in 1973 in a small edition of only 226 copies, it now goes for huge sums of money, if you can find a copy at all. The original archive is now in the New York Public Library, available to one and all. Before its description was published, our search for missing parts of Bill’s archive had revealed a great many manuscripts and related papers that I expected would become part of the archive, but through a complicated set of events, they were mostly sold off to the trade or to other collectors. Subsequent years saw more material come to light and this second volume is a bibliographical catalogue of at least some of the missing Mss. It is in a slightly larger edition of 400 copies, including a number of signed copies. It is designed as a uniform edition with the first volume. Here’s a picture that Udo Breger took of the two volumes – new volume on the right – before I came over to sign the new one.
I rarely spend a lot of time in all-male company, tending to prefer the company of women, but this visit to Basel was great. Over the years Luzius, Udo and Terry have become very good friends, good drinking buddies and fun to be with. Seeing them together was not exactly like seeing the Clash together in one room, but there was a sense of comradery that I rarely experience. Of course, we all have a shared interest in Burroughs, Gysin, cut-ups and the like which helps. While living in New York in the seventies, Bill Burroughs proposed forming a ‘League of Grey Gentlemen’, who, like him would be armed to the teeth and form a vigilante group against muggers and bad hombres. Fortunately it never happened, but for a fleeting moment, while waiting for a streetcar in Basel with the other guys, I saw us right there.
Before going to Venice, at the beginning of October, I was invited to observe a group of women throwing 1,000 pullet eggs at a huge canvas, organised by Sarah Lucas at the T. J. Boulting Gallery to create Sarah’s piece ‘1000 Eggs: For Women’, the key work of a group show called Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf, (I’m sure you get it). My friend Hannah, who owns the gallery, intimated that it would be okay for me to throw one as it was open to ‘women, those who identify as women, and men dressed as women,’ but as I didn’t fit any of those categories I felt it would be improper to take part.
However, my friend Marsha Rowe was staying overnight, and she was a perfect participant. I introduced her to Sarah and Hannah as the co-founder of Spare Rib, Europe’s first Feminist magazine, and the co-founder of Virago Press, which began life as Spare Rib Books. Her Feminist credentials were therefore impeccable. They were delighted to meet her, and she threw a few eggs. Here’s the action, the result, and Hannah keeping a careful record of the participants.
I had not seen my friend Maribel for six months, when she visited London, so I arranged to visit her at her new home in Andalucía. After a decade in London she finally realised that, much as she liked her friends in London, she missed the wonderful food of the South of Spain and the huge, wide beaches of Terifa too much and bought a house in Algeciras. I was naturally reminded of William Burroughs, who, on being asked by British Customs and Immigration the reason for his visit replied, deadpan, ‘I come to Britain for the climate and for the food.’
I first visited Maribel at her new house in November of last year [see my December 2023 Blog] and was interested to see how much work on it she had done. When I was there before there was no stove, no fridge, no electricity in most of the house, and so-on. Now she had painted the place and had a fully functioning kitchen, comfy living room, worktable and power. It had been transformed.
This time I flew into Gibraltar, which is just across the bay from Algeciras, and dominates the skyline whenever you look towards Africa. I had checked the Wunderground weather forecast and was only slightly dismayed to see that rain was predicted for all eight days of my visit. But the point was not to sight-see, I’d done that, but to catch up with Maribel.
Unless he’d been travelling, my old friend Hoppy would drive out to the North Downs about once a month to ‘stretch his eyes’. It seemed good advice to me, and though it was not long since I stared out across the Venetian Lagoon, it was not actually raining so we went down to the sea at Tarifa. To my mind, the Atlantic is always grey as opposed to the Med which is Le Grand Bleu, and today it lived up to expectations. But it is still magnificent, with dozens of container ships at anchor offshore, awaiting their berth at Algeciras’s huge container port. The beach, with low cloud, was even more impressive in the grey light, with no people, much as it has been since the Strait was opened millions of years ago. I love it.
In Venice, I had been in a hotel and so unable to cook, whereas now I had access to a kitchen. Not that I did much, but buying food is always a good way to get to know a place. The first thing, of course, was to buy a good selection of wine, mostly Rioja, some local. I couldn’t find any Bobal, which I’d hoped for as it’s hard to find in London. I made stuffed squid one night and duck breasts another, both bought from Hipercor, part of the huge El Corte Inglés supermarket chain rather than from an open air market because I didn’t want to carry shopping to the car in the rain. (If El Corte Inglés actually had branches in England I would shop there all the time; as usual in continental Europe, the food far surpasses anything I’ve ever seen in Britain, and that includes Fortnum’s, Harrods and Selfridges, but they, oddly, have very small food halls in comparison. Of course it is much cheaper than them, it’s the biggest chain store in Europe, third biggest in the world, though by Spanish standards Hipercor is upscale.)
Algeciras is a small town – about 150k – but acts as the shopping centre for a large area including some very rich communities. I’m getting to know the old town centre which has some very good bars and restaurants. Maribel took me to the famous Bar Casa Pepe for tapas, which moved a few years ago to an unassuming new residential area so most of the thousand pictures on the net are out of date. The food is superb and very cheap with most items in the 2,00 to 2,80 euro range. I like the town, it is working-class, in no way touristy, but friendly and with a few nice features: the Plaza Alta, a pleasant town square with palm trees, where all the seats are made from elaborate tiles. It is surrounded by pedestrianised streets filled with outdoor restaurants and bars. A section of the old Marinid town walls, and pre-1342 Islamic constructions of an uncertain date have been excavated near the centre of town. Next to them is a delightful little park filled with gigantic trees. This was all in strong contrast to Venice, one of the most beautiful places on earth, a stage-set where every view is a picture postcard, where I had been only 10 days before, but there is a calm, Mediterranean quality about Algeciras that I find very pleasant and relaxing, and the complete lack of tourists helps. I, of course, am a visitor.
Algeciras is surrounded by a national park and it only takes a few minutes’ drive to find yourself in an area of incredible natural beauty. Bird watchers holiday here to observe the flight path of birds migrating to Africa, in some parts every electricity pole is topped by a huge spikey stork nest, usually with a stork in it standing guard, kestrels circle overhead, and then there is the beach: a huge wide stretch of sand reaching 20 k up the coast from Terifa, mostly completely wild but with windsurfers and kite flyers as well as beach bars and restaurants set among the pines. This was why Maribel returned here from London and I can see why as even in cloudy stormy conditions it is spectacular. I am not much of a countryside-lover but I do enjoy walking along a beach, and I love even more sitting at a beach bar, looking out to sea and people watching.
On November 4th I was the ‘keynote’ speaker for an online symposium from the Global Blake Network. The subject was ‘Musical Afterlives – exploring musical settings of Blake’s poetry and his inspiration & classical & popular artists.’ I was involved because back in 1969 I produced an album of Allen Ginsberg singing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience that was released by MGM Records. My friend Camila Oliveira interviewed me via Zoom, she in Lisbon, me in Algeciras. In preparation, back in London, I had made rather a fuss about using Zoom, which I had never before seen or attempted to use as it turned out that my computer was too old to use it. My son fixed it so that I could use my phone, but on the day Maribel soon set me straight as she uses it all the time and connected me to the conference on her laptop in seconds.
Situated in the National Forest are occasional country houses, now used as hotel, owned by the government of Cadiz but leased out each year. In one we ate in a huge airy room looking out over the forest. We both had locally shot venison in a chocolate and chestnut sauce with a nice rioja. Extremely rich, extremely good, and extremely cheap. As you see, we each had a serious portion of meat.
On a nice day we took a walk in the Parque del Centenario, created to celebrate the millennium but neglected ever since. The headland looks straight across the bay to Gibraltar. There are the ruins of two forts there, built to guard against the British in Gibraltar, the Brits referred to as ‘the enemy’ in the information panels, but now little more than ruins.
As usual the bay was filled with container ships waiting to enter the port of Algeciras. About three million containers a year pass through the port, for transhipment, transfer to smaller ships, or for EU markets. Who knows what is in most of them? They cannot scan them all. The month I was there, October, 13 tons of cocaine arrived from Guayaquil in Ecuador hidden in crates of bananas, ‘one of the largest seizures in the world’. That’s a lot of Charlie. It led to the arrest of Oscar Sánchez Gil, head of the fraud and anti-money laundering division of Spain’s national police force in Madrid. When they raised his home they found twenty million euros in cash hidden in his walls.
I was encouraged to see a fair amount of pro-Palestine graffiti in Algeciras (as well as in Venice), showing that the people recognise Israeli genocide even if the politicians don’t. One good example showed the slice of watermelon, used when the Israeli government banned them from using their flag – the watermelon has the same colours. (Note the flag on the roof).
Then, sadly, it was time to go. But there was one last surprise. As soon as you cross over from Spain to Gibraltar, there is a huge branch of Waitrose. This was something I really didn’t expect. If only my local branch stocked what they have there. It would make life so much easier.
On our second day in Venice I remembered that Ezra Pound had lived in Dosorodoro and wondered if there was any evidence of his many years in Venice. A little web-research revealed that he lived in Calle Querini, the very next alley down and that Camila’s hotel window actually overlooked Olga Rudge’s house, where he had lived – on and off – since the twenties. On our way to breakfast at our café we stopped to see the house. It is in a short narrow dead-end alley but actually has a plaque. It reads:
In un mai spento amore per Venezia EZRA POUND
titano della poesia questa casa abito per mezzo secolo.
Commune di Venezia
[In his undying love for Venice/Ezra Pound/Titan ofPoetry/lived in this house for half a century/The Venice CityCouncil.]
As Pound was also known to have frequented Caffe Florian on the Piazza San Marco, along with Casanova, Lord Byron, Dickens, Proust, The Queen, Charlie Chaplin et al, we decided that despite it being unbelievably touristic, we should add it to the sights and at least have a cup of coffee there. It still has some of that old elegance: a small orchestra cranking out the classics, waiters in white coats and so on.It is clearly more expensive now than when Yashim visits it in Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card, one of the best of the Yashim series.
More research initially suggested that our hotel, the Messner, was very likely the one that Allen. Ginsberg had stayed in when he visited Pound in Venice in 1967 and 1968 when it had a different name. He stayed at the Hotel all Salute ‘Da Cici’, a pension and restaurant with a garden at 222
Fondamenta Ca’ Bala, a pension with a garden that Pound used all the time as it was very close. The Messner, which also has a garden, is only 20 meters away, consisting of two buildings at 216 and 237, with the Cici between them. There seem to be many addresses for the Messner and it is very
confusing, so it may be all the same place. One day I’ll research it and sort it out. Here are Al and Ez standing in more or less the same spot, outside the hotel, taken from different directions, the Giudecca is behind Pound.
That evening we dined at the Antica Locanda Montin, Pound’s favourite restaurant. Sadly his favourite dish, coda di rospo – Angler fish – was not on the menu. (The Venetians call it ‘cerda di rospo’). This is my kind of restaurant, with the walls filled with paintings and a garden in the back. They tend to have an older clientele, but then, I am an older client.
This was Accademia day. Here are all the usual suspects: Bellini, Tintoretto, Veronese, even one of the few Canalettos not in England. It was lovely to see Giorgione’s La Tempesta [1505] again. Described by Dali as the strangest picture ever painted, I see what he means. The male figure, apparently unmoved by the naked mother suckling her child while a full scale storm seems to be ranging in the background. It is, among other things, thought to be the first landscape in Western history if you exclude watercolours and drawings. I remember being incredibly moved by it when I first visited the museum in 1968, and it still moves me today. There’s another one of his works, The Old Woman, there too. Superb.
I have to record that Camila was particularly struck by Titian’s St John the Baptist who, unusually, is depicted as rather a hunk, not as the usual emaciated figure of classical art.
It was a good day, so we walked a lot as usual everywhere is wonderful, everywhere is magical, but none so iconic as the views of the Grand Canal. Every day was a delight. I could have stayed a month.
Friday 18th we went to the Guggenheim Museum. The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was only a few minutes away from our hotel, on the Canal Grande. For some reason I’d been a bit loath to visit this as Peggy’s taste seemed to be largely determined by who she was sleeping with, or who she wanted to sleep with, but in fact it is a superb collection and I regret my doubts about her. Of course I had to take a picture of Camila with the Marino Marini and its detachable penis.
The temporary exhibition was of very enjoyable op-art work by Marina Apollonio, many of which could be spun or moved in some way to produce optical effects.
There were excellent examples of virtually all the twentieth century artists that interest me, from Klee and Kandinsky to Picasso and Pollock, with good examples of all the principal artists of the period lacking only in women. There is a notable absence of female artists. The collection is brought up to date with more recent material in the Schulhof collection, housed in a separate pavilion. It was interesting to see the Pollocks from different periods though only three of the eleven she owned were on view. All seven Picassos were on show, but the majority of the pictures I’d hoped to see were not displayed. They clearly need more space. At least the website tells you what is presently on show.
As the palazzo was never finished, I see nothing wrong in adding a new floor to it so we can actually see her De Koonings and her Duchamp. If anything, a higher structure would enhance the building wall of the canal. I was a bit disappointed to not see any reference to Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), one of my favourite muses, who lived at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni between 1910 and 1924. She was a far more interesting person than Peggy Guggenheim, though one wouldn’t have wanted to get too near when she was wearing live snakes as jewellery.
This was also our day to see the Frari with its Titians, its Bellini, Donatello, and tombs of Canova, Monteverdi and Titian (or Tiziano, as we got used to calling him – his retable here, La Asuncion de la Virgen [1518] is one of his greatest works). So, quite a day for the eyes.
We crossed the Canale Grand by traghetto, almost the same as hiring a gondola only much much cheaper at 2 euros. I assume you get used to the wobbly nature of the experience as everyone scrambles on and off as if it was a number 55 bus. We saw the wonderful 15th century Scala Contarini del Bovolo, spiral staircase, and ate cicchetti for lunch – small plates like tapas, mostly seafood, like small versions of a full-course meal on bread or polenta. Here’s Camila showing her sea-legs and the spiral staircase.
We finished the day with an enormous baked turbot – Rombo chiodato al forno – at the hotel, carved by an inexperienced, but enthusiastic, waitress watched over by her supervisor. It was delicious. Lightning springs from Camila’s glass and the giant fish hides beneath the potatoes as her minder keeps watch from behind.
It was a rainy day on the Saturday but we managed to see the Ca’ d’Oro (1428) and, though the man on reception said half of it was closed because of the high tide, we managed to see everything: the Van Dyck, the Titian Venus, the Tintoretto, the Mantegna and the wonderful view out over the Grand Canal from the piano nobile. The ground floor colonnaded loggia was still partially flooded by the canal, but most was open and we could inspect the Cosmati tile pavement, which reminded me of the one in Westminster Abbey (1245) that they used to only uncover every 20 years. King Charles walked all over it at his Coronation.
We did see the Libreria Acqua Alta, where many of the books are displayed in boats and gondolas, but there is a queue outside, like Shakespeare & Co in Paris, and it has become a tourist attraction, so packed with people that you can hardly move or get from one section to another, let alone actually inspect their stock. A must to avoid if you were hoping to perhaps buy a particular book or see what they had on a certain subject. I couldn’t get out fast enough, but even that took time.
In addition to Ezra Pound, Venice was also famously the home of Lord Byron for three years (1816-19). He swam in the Lagoon, named the Bridge of Sighs, and studied Armenian, while at the same time writing the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the beginning of Don Juan.
Bored, despite his claim to have had sex with over 200 women during his stay, he decided to learn Armenian, as you do, and rowed each day to the island monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni near the Lido. The monks are still there, 200 years later, and their website suggests that their small museum contains some interesting mementoes of Byron’s visits. On the Sunday, we took a ferry that stopped there but the place was all locked up and no-one responded to the doorbell or knocks. We took photographs of the plaque commemorating Byron’s association with the place, spoke in a desultory way with the two other people who, like us, had misguidedly got off the ferry expecting to be able to tour the building, then settled down to wait the return boat. A wedding party arrived and milled around for a while, providing a distraction, and we admired the view out over the Lagoon which was gorgeous.
We decided to return that afternoon at the time of the guided tour and this time there were loads of people. The stern monk in his beard and black frock glared and warned us that the guided tours were in Italian and Armenian only but we’d come this far so we decided to carry on. However, though the website suggested otherwise, we were not allowed to wander freely.
We chose the Italian tour guide and quickly became very bored as she settled us in the uninteresting chapel and droned on and on about the history of the monastery and, presumably, the fate of the Armenian people and how this is one of the remaining centres of Armenian culture. She had an irritating, hectoring delivery and it looked as if the Italians were just as bored as us. There was nothing to see in the chapel. Then we trooped off to the museum which had hardly anything about Byron. A reproduction of a well-known painting, an example of his signature on a document, a painting of him in a woodland setting. The museum had a few nice things: a painted sarcophagus, and, in a second room a collection of about two dozen shabti figures which were unfortunately displayed so high up that they were hard to properly examine.
The library itself was a delight with breakfront cases with float glass containing slight imperfections, guarding thousands of leather and velum bound volumes including the ten-volume set of Napoléon’s Description de l’Egypte [1809-1829] that I would have loved to take out and examine. It was easy to imagine Byron working there with the monks.
Meanwhile there was nothing to do but sit it out while the guide continued her description of everything in the room. There was an ugly Canova, a Tiepolo ceiling, but that was about all. In the end we decided to just leave and retraced our steps, then waited in the gardens for the next ferry to stop. It was boring but I did not regret going to San Lazzaro. It was somehow quite worthwhile to slow down, assess, and process all that we’d seen so-far in La Serenissima, and to have seen where Byron worked in tranquillity which had obviously changed little over two centuries. We reinvigorated ourselves up with cuttlefish in black ink over buttery polenta with a bottle of rather good Cantina La Salute. (We both very much liked the local Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso grape which I’d not consciously had before. Sadly I see it’s rather pricy in London).
On Monday we took a vaporetto across the Basin to the Public Gardens. The Venice Biennale was still on, but even though it had a Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa, we decided not to spend too much time on it, just to look in on any of the International Pavilions we happened to pass. One of the best shows we encountered in our walks was Portraits in Life and Death, an exhibition of the work of Peter Hujar: pictures of Susan Sontag, Ann Waldman, John Waters, William Burroughs, et al, all reclining like Matisse odalisques in a historical snapshot of a certain period of the New York Downtown scene taken by a master photographer. Susan on the left, Bill on the right.
We walked slowly over to the Arsenal, where we found that parts of the area are still under military control and that despite Camila’s charm, we still could not achieve access. It didn’t matter, the whole area is of great interest. The Arsenal was where the great Republic of Venice built its ships and controlled the Eastern Med. There are some fine buildings still to be seen. As usual, they are guarded by the Lion of St. Mark.
It is a largely working class area, away from the tourists, where café prices are half that of the centre, people are friendly and colour-coded washing hangs across the streets as it has always done. This would be a great place to live.
The 21st was the first day that I had been able to buy jump-the-queue tickets for Saint Mark’s Basilica when planning the trip months ahead (you have to pay again to see the Pala d’Oro and again to see the museum and the Roman horses).
Here we truly have ‘the golden gloom of Byzantium’. The walls are covered with four thousand square meters of gold mosaics of the saints and Biblical scenes and a 12th century Cosmati mosaic pavement covers the floor with animals and geometric arabesques, gently undulating as the floor sinks into the wooden stakes and mud upon which it is built.
The unmissable treasure, the world’s only intact example of large size Gothic goldsmiths’ art, is the Pala d’Oro (the altar retable). It consists of about 250 cloisonné enamels of different sizes and epochs on sheet gold, studded with pearls and precious stones set in the enamels, commissioned by the Doge Vitale Falier in 1105 and added to in 1209 and 1345. Precious treasure from so far in the past has rarely survived and only appears in storybooks and ancient histories. It is extraordinary to see something so valuable from so far back in our past still in its original position. The High Altar canopy is even older, being from the sixth century. This is a very old building.
On the terrace stood the four enormous horses made from golden copper, 835 kilos of it, that once pulled a Roman emperor’s chariot atop a triumphal arch. They are from the 4th century AD, seized during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the fourth crusade. The originals are now inside the basilica, in the museum a few meters from them, and those on the terrace are pretty good copies.
Of course the view of the Piazza San Marco is spectacular, as is the view south to the Bacino di San Marco, so no shame in including some ‘what we did on our holidays’ snaps. The trouble is, Venice is filled with such views, so one’s entire record consists of picture postcard shots.
That evening we walked to the tip of Dorsoduro past the Salute and looked across to San Marco. The twinkling lights reflected in the black waters of the Bacino danced in the wake of a vaporetto. A row of moored gondolas bobbed up and down. A young man sat propped against the wall of the ancient church, quietly playing a guitar. It was enough to make you want to climb a lamppost.
On the 15th October, Camila and I flew to Venice. She had not previously been there, and I had spent two weeks there in 1968, 56 years before. Though I remembered some things in photographic detail such as the wall panel carved as a wooden bookcase at the Scuola San Rocco, and the size and presence of Giorgioni’s The Tempest in the Accademia, most things were hazy or forgotten. I booked hotel rooms for us at the Hotel Messner in Dorsodoro, as I remembered it as a student area, close to the Accademia and the Guggenheim Museum. I had an up-to-date water-proof Michelin city map and a highly opinionated translated sixties Italian guide to the ‘History, art and monuments’ of the city with floor plans of the major churches identifying and explaining all the mosaics and paintings in a degree of detail not found in modern guides. It had originally belonged to Kenneth Tynan and had his annotations. I got it from Kathleen Tynan when I sold some books for her after his death. It seemed that in Venice virtually nothing had changed. The pictures were still in the same rooms of museums or in the same church as in the sixties. Ed Maggs recommended that I read Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, [1888] which I never had done despite enjoying Daisy Miller and his more famous works. It was a perfect choice, not only is it set in Venice, but it is about chasing down a literary archive. I also reread Jan Morris’s Venice [1960] revised but still a bit dated]. It is a beautifully written evocation of the city, often cited as one of the best travel books ever written. There’s not much about the painters and School of Venice but that’s fine as it is a very subjective account of what Morris (who was then a man) found interesting and worth seeing. S/he wrote that it was an impressionistic picture, ‘less of a city than of an experience’, and that is so true of Venice. It has an enormous impact, whichever way you look and whichever lane or square you are on, you are overwhelmed by it. It is unique, overpowering almost; the canals and vistas all demanding the kind of detailed study you just don’t have time enough on Earth to do. Here are a few local streets and the delightful wooden bookcase of the Scuolo di San Rocca.
The next morning we set off down the Zattere, looking for our café. It’s always good to find your café as soon as possible and stick to it. Ours was the Gelati Nico where the café latte was pretty good, and the view across to the Giudecca even better, fortunately they have now banned cruise ships from using the Giudecca Canal. We stopped off next door to see our first Tintoretto at the Church of Santa Maria del Rosario, next door on the Zattere. Inevitably it was a crucifixion [c1565]. Christianity really is a death cult! It was to be the first of very many Tintorettos.
Here’s my café latte and Camila with the view of Zattere as seen from the café’s front door.
We crossed the Canal Grande by the Accademia Bridge and headed for the Piazza San Marco. Quite a few tourists still but these places are too important to miss so you just have to deal with it. In fact the Piazza was mostly empty, it was only around San Marco itself that you had to push your way through. We had jump-the-queue tickets bought on-line some time before so there was no waiting to get into the Doge’s Palace [1300 onwards]. One of the world’s great buildings and utterly unique. Venetian architecture had to be lightweight as the entire city is built on wooden stakes pounded into mudflats in the Lagoon. For this reason they used brick instead of stone, and where-ever they could filigree the marble facings they did so. They are gorgeous. Gothic came late to Venice but their version of it is superb. Here we are on the Accademia Bridge followed by the maze of small canals and walkways, some of which lead to a dead-end canal side, before we arrived at the Piazza San Marco.
Once inside you are in a great courtyard, featuring two bronze wells, from which, on the eastern façade leads the Giant’s Staircase. After consulting the guidebook we just chose to wander, knowing we would see everything of importance. I still worry that the immense 16th c painted ceilings will finally collapse but miraculously they don’t. According to my guidebook the Room of the Great Council is the largest in the world not supported by columns [54m x 25m]. And of course the rooms are filled with all the heavyweights: Veronese, Tintoretto, Tiziano (known to Brits as Titian) and even a room of Hieronymus Bosch. We spent several hours there, pausing only to denounce our enemies by posting an anonymous note in one of the ‘bocche di Leone’ or lion’s mouths. Of course we crossed the Bridge of Sighs to see the prison cells and did the whole thing taking several hours.
And as if that was not enough, we continued, after a pizza near the Rialto Bridge, to the Scuola di San Rocca for another hour’s worth of Tintorettos. This was as I remembered it: you come up the staircase and turn into a room filled with beauty. It is not quite as spectacular as reaching the top of the staircase at Sainte-Chapelle, and entering a huge room filled with light, but almost – because of the insane gilded painted ceiling. This is Tintoretto’s greatest cycle of paintings – there are more than 60 here – but my favourite is a view of The Last Supper seen from an angle so it looks just like a bunch of guys having a drink, a bite to eat and a bit of a natter. They are real humans, if, as usual, a bit distorted. It was hard to see because preparations for a conference had sealed off that end of the room. As his first biographer Carlo Ridolfi wrote [in 1642] Tintoretto sought to synthesize the colour of Titian and the drawing of Michelangelo – only more so. The carved wooden books and bookcase were just as I remembered them. These are powerful works, like standing in a jewel box. I always liked Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on Tintoretto in Situations IV [1964]. He thought that he opened the way to Modernism and wanted to write a book about him. He completed 963 pages before giving up on the idea. Mind you, he wrote very quickly. All that amphetamine helped. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, by the time we got back to the Messner. And that was only our first day there.
And so the daily round continues as autumn approaches. I had lunch with my old friend Andrew Sclanders, the Wild Man of Counter-cultural and Beat-Gen bookselling. Here we are checking out Darren Coffield’s New Colony Room, but as no-one appeared to serve us we waited for a while then departed without even serving ourselves in the correct sixties manner.
My son Theo and his girlfriend Minako attended a wedding. Here they are looking suitably spiffy. I think that’s a John Pearce suit. It’s mostly funerals for me these days.
Then Camila came to town to attend a meeting of the William Blake Cottage Trust in Felpham, in which they presented ideas for the community use of the cottage and received ideas from the local people. Before she headed into the country we managed a nice meal – that’s a steak tartare in the picture – saw the Vanessa Bell show at the Courtauld (tiny, only worth it if you also visit the Monet show, which was not yet open when we were there) and the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery which had just opened. Magnificent. It would cheer anybody up (except maybe poor Vincent himself). On the one level it is beautiful, luminescent, vibrating with colour and life but there is an underlying seriousness – thick black lines around trees, sinister almost threatening distortions. Many of the 61 pictures were painted when he was in the mental asylum. So, thought provoking as well as life-giving energy.
We also passed a few tourists sites which we dutifully recorded:
Meanwhile, an intriguing literary puzzle has emerged in the form of a glossary explaining terms used in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. It would appear to have been written by an English person before the publication of the book, but turned up among the papers of a young American in Paris two years after the book was published. Presumably it was compiled to aid a translator. I sent a copy to Peter Hale, who runs the Ginsberg Estate and does such a brilliant job of keeping Allen’s work in the public eye, and also one to Jean-Jacques Lebel, who was there in Beat Hotel days, but if anyone can shed any light on the author of this ms I’d love to hear from them. (I afraid I don’t often look at the emails sent to this web-site so I might take a little while in getting back to you.) Here’s the letter I sent to Peter and the glossary. Peter and I agree that it was written from a ms, copy of “Howl”, and almost certainly before 1956 when the book came out.
Dear Peter
Here’s a pretty thing. A friend of mine who used to work for Diana Phipps just catalogued her papers. Her husband was Harry Phipps, who befriended Allen and co at the Beat Hotel (and, oddly, whose family owned the land in Miami where Bill Burroughs’ family had their garden centre at Phipps Plaza). Harry died in the sixties of heroin, but Diana kept a load of his papers at her castle in Romania or wherever it was and has only just died. Fran was the one who sorted out the paperwork.
Among his letters she found this two-page text. It appears to be an explanation of terms used that a potential translator might need. Unfortunately, there is material missing but it can be reconstructed. The numbers refer to the line numbers in ‘Howl’. As Jean-Jacques Lebel was already engaged in translating Howl into French at the time Harry Phipps met Allen, it is hard to imagine who this was intended for. J-J, as you know, was educated in the States and speaks perfect English and would certainly not have needed this.
More curious is the mention of ‘Footnote to Howl’ that the author of this text does not have, suggesting that he was working from a manuscript rather than the book as ‘Footnote’ is in the book. But the book was published in October 1956 whereas Allen didn’t meet Phipps until c.June 1958 and we know that Allen had lots of copies of the book with him in Paris. (He gave one to Celine and one to Micheaux, among others).
This suggests that this ms was written before the book was published. But as Phipps had not yet met Allen, one wonders who wrote it. It is on European A4 size paper so it originated in Europe, presumably Paris, though the use of the word ‘flat’ instead of ‘apartment’ suggests the author is an Englishman. It is a top copy on thin ‘airmail’ paper used for international mail and for multiple carbon copies. The typeface is the same as that used by Allen in the original ms of ‘Howl’, and Allen did bring that portable typewriter with him to Paris, however there are very slight differences which suggest that it did not come from Allen’s typewriter: the ‘y’ slants slightly to the left in this ms whereas the ‘y’ on Allen’s typewriter slopes in the opposite direction – very slightly. …
And once again to end with the Palestinian flag – from the river to the sea, it is all Palestine. One day they will get their land back but, with the Israelis showing that you don’t have to be German to be a Nazi, I doubt I’ll see it in my time. But it will happen, as virtually all national liberation struggles have succeeded, but sadly often at tremendous cost.
As this is a what-I-did-on-my-holiday style blog, I’d better show the obligatory seaside pic. This is Catherine and Steve with me at Canet Plage, on the Med down near the Spanish border. It’s a pop-up bar and the last restaurant at the southernmost end of the beach. I’ve been going there for decades but have never registered a name.
My next visitor was Jill. I love going round exhibitions with he because she is always so critical of the labels; instantly spotting any inconsistency or imbalance caused by the latest fad. This is probably because she is a documentary filmmaker and used to handling biased information. There is a seven-meter waterfall in a canyon near the village, much frequented by the locals, and here is Jill after enjoying a dip.
After Jill carried on travelling south to see a friend in Spain, several of my friends arrived to spent time in their own houses nearby. Martha, seen here in Ceret where we went to see a very interesting Max Jacob show at the Contemporary Art Museum, and Roslyn and Gordon, who live just up the street from us.
Martha has a superb swimming pond in her garden; featured here many times in the past, and yet again we spent time sitting under the trees admiring the distant view of Mount Canigou. Her first house guest was Martin from Switzerland – as is Martha – seen here with Gordon paying close attention to the slicing of the tart.
I rarely see Roslyn and Gordon in England, as they live in Ashbourne in the Derbyshire Dales and rarely come to London, but in France we visit and shop together all the time. Here’s Gordon in the village square.
My next visitor was Camila who flew in from Portugal, via Barcelona. We both had work to do so the days passed quietly with breaks for lunch then, when the heat had subsided a little, a walk around 5:30, followed by drinks and a nice dinner. Here’s a few holiday shots:
Camila is a William Blake scholar, and though I like his poetry, I have never regarded his pictures as anything other than illustrations of his ideas, none of which have moved me apart from his ‘I want! I want!’ lunar engraving of a ladder to the moon (1793) which I love. We saw it at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Blake show in March. It’s tiny, as big as an I-phone. It’s been too hot to go out this summer, so it was good to retire to the cool of the library. Here Camila shows the correct reaction to The Naked Lunch. It’s supposed to be funny, even though it has apparently made some people retch.
We also made a trip to the waterfall, of course, which, although it is a bit of a scrabble to get to – a helping hand is needed in my case – is a beautiful setting being completely untouched.
I was delighted to see my old friend Log, a local doctor, who now lives down in Canet where he can walk along the beach each morning. He took Martha and I – another old friend of his – to a new restaurant in Eus where the natural wine was… well, okay.
The village held its annual Sardinade while they were there: thousands of sardines grilled over vine roots followed by sausages and, strangely, chocolate eclairs. To see hundreds of chockolate eclairs in one place is quite something. About 400 people crammed the square on long trestle tables, leaving plenty of room for the dancers. They love to dance, beginning with the sombre, gloomy Sardana, a traditional Catalan circle dance which sounds Moorish and might well be left over from the times of the Moors 800 years ago. But it’s the Macarena that they love, jumping 90 degrees in long rows, just as they have been doing each year since 1993 when the Los Del Rio song first appeared.
My friends Richard and Suzy were staying with me and brought with them Inke, a museum curator from Germany, who entered fully into the swing of things: dancing at the Sardinade and joining Suzy as she entertained us on the guitar. Here’s Inke, Richard and Gordon imitating the Three Wise Monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil but I got the order wrong.
And, just for the record, a pic of me and Suzy reviving the art of the hand jive as practiced in the 2-Is in Soho c1958
On September 3rd there was a launch party for the new edition of Frank Norman and Jeffrey Bernard’s Soho Night and Day, originally published 50 years ago. Frank Norman, who, sadly, I never met ,was the author of Bang to Rights, Banana Boy and many other books as well as the musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be which made him a lot of money. His friend Jeffrey Bernard was then a photographer and had not yet begun to write his serial suicide note, as Jonathan Meads called his ‘Low Life’ column. I wrote an introduction to the new edition and Frank’s widow, Geraldine, and I were interviewed by my friend Daniel Scott at the New Colony Room just off Regent’s Street to launch it. The book is sad to read in a way as it represents a lost world. In the sixties, Soho was the food centre of Britain. Cookbook writers would note that if an ingredient was hard to find it would always be obtainable at one of the food shops on Old Compton Street. In those days Old Compton Street had five or six butchers and nearby there was also a game shop. There were fish mongers and specialist French grocers where the vegetables were all labelled in French and arrived twice a week by lorry from France. You could get wine en vrac at the Vintage House and Berwick Street was a fruit and vegetable market, though even then they were mostly crooks who would slip a rotten fruit in the bottom of the paper bag. The New Colony looks very similar to the old Colony, with much of the old memorabilia and even a reproduction of the door and bar and the famous green paint. It has been recreated by Darren Coffield, author of the excellent Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Last Bohemia. It was a fun evening. Here are some pictures taken by Dean Chalkley: Scott, Geraldine and me.
As usual it was great to be back in Paris, albeit only for a short visit. We managed to get out to see Brunhild and Junya in Montreil, where Junya excelled himself as usual with his cooking. For me the star of the show was jellyfish, though the Japanese lemon chicken that went with it was pretty tasty too. Here’s a picture, jellyfish on top. One can’t help remembering the lines from William Burroughs in TheSoft Machine, ‘You win something like jellyfish, Meester!’ Back in 1962, my flatmates Hoppy, Peter Wollen and John Howe would read aloud from the book, and at that line everyone would collapse with laughter. Possibly the big bowl of pot in the middle of the table had something to do with it.
We went to dinner with Philippe and Valerie, friends of Steve and Catherine. I was delighted to see several Ettore Sottsass pieces in the main room, that usually indicates like-minded people. I’d not met them before so it was disconcerting to find that Valerie knew the name of my son’s girlfriend. Of course she had been reading this blog. One always forgets. She is a brilliant cook but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer quantity of delicious French food. A huge array of plates appeared, enough for a full scale tapas meal but that wasn’t even the hors d’oeuvres. It was the amuse-bouche that comes before you even reach the table. Fabulous.
Catherine, Steve and I travelled by train down to Catllar in the Pyrenees and the very next day found us at a beach café in Canet. Here is Catherine enjoying a tentacle.
We drove two hours up to Ken Weaver and Maxine’s place and stopped off en route at St. Guilhem-les-désert, a beautiful medieval village in l’Herault built around the Abbey of Gellone. It once had a magnificent cloister, but it was sold off to the Americans. I am more familiar with it than with the church as it now forms a major part of The Cloisters Museum, part of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City where it is on display next to half of the cloisters from St. Michel de Cuxa, near Prades. The second half of the Cuxa cloister was only stopped from travelling to New York after it was already packed for shipping. I was a frequent visitor to The Cloisters museum during the years I lived in New York.
Steve Shepherd is the executive producer on a documentary film about Tuli Kupferberg, the American poet, pacifist and percussionist. He was the co-founder of the Fugs with Ed Sanders and arrangements had been made for a film crew to interview Ken Weaver, drummer with the Fugs and composer of ‘I Couldn’t Get High’, one of their most popular numbers. I stayed with Ken and Maxine (I first stayed with him in the Lower East of New York in the summer of 1967 and well remember us leaning on his fire escape watching a knife fight on the street below. Everything was just as I thought it would be.)
I filmed an interview with him and ate with them while Catherine and Steve, Dave and Francois, stayed in a B&B. My bedroom was in the old part of the building – 13th century. The next day Dave interviewed Ken and they got some more good footage. That evening we went to a party at an American academic’s house in a local town that was having its firework display a day early. I did an interview for Chuck Smith’s film about the Fugs a few months back, and now another for a film about Tuli. I look forward to the film, which is being narrated by Thurston Moore. Here’s my medieval bedroom; Francois, Maxine, Steve, Ken and Dave; and finally Maxine, Ken, Me and Steve.
Our next trip was to see Salvador Dali’s house in Cadaqués., the most eastern point in Spain. He had a special window built on his bedroom so that he would be the first person in Spain to see the sunrise but uncontrolled development to the north has now deprived him of that privilege. After we found somewhere for the car – very difficult in summer – we walked up to the church. I had been to Cadaqués several times before, staying with Suzy and Ian MacKenzie and Ian, who was a Bond Street art dealer, told me that Richard Hamilton had built a studio there in order to be near Marcel Duchamp, who also had a place there. Ian said the studio leaned against the church. For some reason he and I never went to see it and sadly he’s no longer with us. Well, there’s only one building that could be described as that and though there is no plaque or notice of any sort, I assume that the studio we saw was Hamilton’s.
Next we went in search of Bar Melitón, Marcel Duchamp’s favourite café, at Placa del Passeig, at the northern end of the Paseo, overlooking the beach. At 5:00pm exactly he would arrive, having walked the few blocks round the harbour from the top floor apartment on Placa Port d’Alguer where he and Teenie lived. He would enter the small café and turn to the right where even now the wall is covered with pictures and photographs, mostly by local artists, He would seat himself at his usual table – which was kept reserved for him – and light a cigar. At around 5:30 his chosen chess opponent would arrive, a wooden chess set would be brought, and the business of the day began. Now a bronze plaque commemorates the place he sat, and the wall is full of Duchamp memorabilia, but very discreetly presented. People queuing to use the toilettes, which are right next to the table, barely give the wall a glance though someone came in from an outside table and took photographs while we were there. The tapas, by the way, are very good there. An uneventful, purely residential yard around the corner from the café has been re-named Placa Marcel Duchamp.
The door in his last work, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage, (1966), came from a fisherman’s storage shed just along the front. The work is now in Philadelphia. You have to peer in through a pair of keyholes, one for each eye, to see a naked recumbent woman made from parchment holding a gas lamp with a waterfall in the background. It took him twenty years – on and off – to create this assemblage and there is a manual of instructions on how to assemble it. Here’s the door. And what you see through the peep hole.
It’s a 20 minute walk up over the ridge from the bar to Port Lligat and the Dali house. Visits are timed at 10 minute intervals and you can book ahead. Though there is a guide, they deliver a brief speech in Spanish followed by English then they stand aside to let you explore each room before moving to the next.
The house began as a row of fishermen’s cottages that Dali and Gala gradually bought up and knocked into one, extremely complicated set of interlocking rooms surrounded by a walled garden, a long penis-and-balls shaped pool and a large area of terracing overlooking the Mediterranean. Each room has many items of interest: I love the stuffed swans above the bookcases, and the strange shapes and juxtapositions caused by the different levels of the rooms and their connecting stairs. I had been there three or four times before but long ago. I always liked his studio, which has a long slot in the floor by the wall to enable particularly large canvases to be raised up or lowered into the slot to enable different parts of the painting to be worked on at eye level. Or from his chair – see the photograph. Nothing seemed to have changed in the house. There were a few small objects, rocks, shells, that he had wrapped in silver paper that were shining and new when I first saw them that are now wrapped in what looks like lead, as the silver foil has begun to decompose, otherwise everything seemed to be exactly the same as when I first visited.
A few days later, after Catherine and Steve had returned to Paris, I looked up Dali in my library. I found a large illustrated guide to the house and, tucked inside, was a five page, fully illustrated article by Rosemary, called ‘The Dream House’ published in The Guardian Weekend, on April 24, 1999. It had been 25 years since I was last there – I thought it was about 12 – and I had forgotten that Rosemary was writing about it. I am constantly encountering examples of Rosemary’s work and almost every time it comes as a shock, particularly if I was there with her when she wrote it. Dali’s house is so much more interesting than his museum in Figueres and I would highly recommend it, even though I don’t like his work.
We didn’t really fancy the 30 minute schlep back to the centre of Cadaqués so Catherine called a cab. We were expecting a normal car, but instead a beach buggy arrived with a very cheerful Jack-the-Lad driver called Diego who seemed to know every beach-bartender and pretty girl we passed, who all smiled and returned his wave. (Eco Car: +34.972.258.592). We forgot to take a picture but there are some online.
Back in Catllar, Catherine once again practiced her scorched earth skills on the garden and pushed back the invading hordes of bamboo. Then they were off, leaving quite a gap as they are really good friends. I miss their company already.
Despite my resolve to keep this blog up to date I see that two months have gone by without a line. I was busy doing everyday things so at least initially there was nothing to report. Jill and I went to the German Expressionism show at Tate Modern but neither of us found it particularly exciting, nor did it tell us anything new about Der Blaue Reiter.
I went to the launch of the film by Malcolm Boyle and others: Hoppy – Underground Head at the Tabernacle ( www.hoppyfilm.com ) and really enjoyed it, even though, as the title suggests, it concentrated very much on Hoppy’s interest in consciousness-altering substances and had a somewhat confused chronology. It was an emotional experience seeing Hop on screen, having known him since 1961. I last saw him in hospital the day before he died. I was his flatmate 1963-5; we co-owned Lovebooks Limited and published poetry mags in 1965; worked together on the Albert Hall poetry reading of that year; co-founded International Times, IT, the underground newspaper in 1966 (published by Lovebooks); and worked on various other projects together. I do miss him. Here we are together in Basel, 2006, for Albert Hoffman’s 100th birthday:
There were also plenty of other people from my past at the event, including Craig and Greg Sams, of macrobiotic food fame and Michael Mcinnerney, creator of the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream poster, UFO club posters and the sleeve of the Who’s Tommy.
Live performances included Sam Hutt in his alter ego of Hank Wangford, and Vanessa Vie, channeling Bob Dylan: here are Michael, Craig and Greg being interviewed at the event, followed by Sam and Vanessa.
The next big excitement was the arrival of Big Al from Dubai. My friend Valerie, who lives two doors down the street from me, wanted a cat but you can’t adopt a stray from the animal placement organisations unless you have a garden, which, living in the West End, she obviously doesn’t. However, in the Middle East, most cats have feline AIDS and shouldn’t be allowed out anyway in case they spread it. There are charities there that will send you a cat – in a fancy cage, delivered by a man in a cat rescue jacket straight from the airport once they have been cleared. Valerie was at work so I took delivery of Big Al. Who really is big and seems to have lost a part of his ear. He is very happy in London.
Lots of social meals this month: Richard Adams and I had a very pleasant lunch at the Academy Club, as did Simon Caulkin and I. Ed Maggs and I dined at Iberico and Jill and I went to Zeidel, which I always enjoy. My old friend Fran Bentley had me to dinner and we sat in her West Hampstead garden and watched the birds.
At home I cooked for Martha Stevns; Vanessa; Sara Crichton and Len, visiting from New York (quail wrapped in prosciutto); my God-daughter Sara Minard, who stopped in London for two days en route to Marseille from New York and stayed over; Simon and Ginette, with Valerie who ate Bucatini al’Amatriciana with the correct cheek fat from Camisa in Soho; Luzius, Udo and Terry came for their monthly dinner; Hannah and Biscuit came to dinner with Jill and had artichokes stuffed with garlic. Camila arrived for a weekend conference at the end of the month and stayed over, missing the Pride march which yet again involved over a million people. Amazing! There were other people to dinner too, but this is sounding like Andy Warhol’s diary, though with less well-known people. Here’s Camila in Soho followed by the evening with Simon Caulkin, Valerie Orpen, Ginette Vincendaeu, Mina and Theo and next is Hannah and Biscuit with Jill.
Election Day, July 4th, and I’m off to Paris (having used a postal vote). The next day, Catherine and I went to the Red Studio exhibition at the Fondation Vuitton. I almost went to New York to see this show as ‘The Red Studio’ (1911) is my favourite work by Matisse. Almost all the works shown in the painting have been re-united for the exhibition for the first time in a century: six paintings, three sculptures and a ceramic. One other large painting was destroyed at Matisse’s wishes. The work is beautifully displayed with a separate wall for each painting. Even so, Catherine and I felt that the organisers could have included more contextual material – the time the painting spent in the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street, Soho, for instance and any x-rays that might exist of the painting as it was complete before Matisse filled in almost all the background in red, leaving the objects suspended. What colours were used in the original, we wondered, surely there must be evidence at the edges, now covered by the frame? Fortunately, after looking at a ho-hum Elsworth Kelly show, Catherine went to the bathroom and on her way back discovered another, large part of the exhibition containing everything we had asked for: sketches and similar paintings, x-ray photographs explained by a film, large photographs of the Gargoyle Club (which Matisse designed) and so on. The signage in the main room of the show was so poor that we didn’t see the indications that the exhibition continued. We are both confirmed exhibition goers – Catherine is a professor of fine art at the Sorbonne – and yet we missed them. When she spoke to colleagues, they, too, had missed the second half of the show. I should imagine that the same applied to about half the audience. With all its money the Fondation Vuitton should get in a proper sign writer. They might also find a way so that ticket holders don’t have to queue outside, sometimes for half an hour in inclement weather, in order to see the shows. Clearly something as basic as that should have occurred to Frank Gehry but I guess he was too busy with his wonky roof and fountains to consider the actual function of the place.
And don’t forget the Palestinians. One day they will get their country back.
Life has been little more than a succession of meals ever since I returned from Lisbon on April 5. Maribel came for dinner and two days later I cooked bacalao for Jill. Before that we saw the Angela Kauffman show but we were not impressed. Next day I had lunch with my old friend Hazel at the Academy Club. Sadly, she lives out of town, so I hardly ever see her. Here’s Maribel, preparing to leave Blighty.
Luzius Martin flew into town from Basel for his bi-monthly visit and we finalised the book we have been working on for a while. Back in 1973 I published A Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, listing everything that was in Burroughs’ flat in London and everything we could find in storage in New York and Paris. Even before it was published, more material came to light in New York and Athens and I catalogued it using the same system that the original inventory had used, as suggested by Ken Lohf at the Butler Library of Columbia University who had originally expected to buy it.
The folders were numbered and I continued the numbering system from where it left off. Well, the sale was stymied, and the collection disappeared into private ownership for decades before finally being sold to the Berg Collection at New York Public Library. In the meantime, all the new material that came to light was sold off with no copies being made and no record kept of where it went, leaving behind various lists, inventories, and archive descriptions. Luzius Martin and I have collected as many of these as possible and have assembled them to create A Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, Volume Two. This is intended as a guide for future bibliographers, biographers, and researchers into Burroughs’ work, as it is hoped that one day, in the future, all these texts will be collected and digitised. But to collect them, you must know what you are looking for which is the purpose of this book. Most of the work has been done by Luzius, who is a Burroughs collector, but I have written introductory texts to the different sections. It has been fun, and it keeps me off the streets.
Luzius, Terry Wilson and I had lunch with Tom Neurath at Maramia, a Palestinian restaurant close to Tom’s office in Golborne Road, Notting Hill. (highly recommended!) Tom is one of the few people I know who actually lived at the Beat Hotel in the fifties. I didn’t meet him until the sixties through our mutual friend Ian Sommerville. In a blog entry from years past I described a visit we made to ZKM in Karlsruhe to give a talk on ‘Swinging London’ of all things. The next day I cooked for Luzius and Terry.
Helen Mitsios and her partner, the painter Tony Winter came to dinner. I’ve known Helen since the early eighties when she was living with Steve Mass, the manager/co-owner of the Mudd Club when Rosemary and I were living in New York. We had not seen each other for about a decade so it was a great reunion. I had to cook veggie, something I’m not used to as my main cuisine is French where they regard vegetables as ‘garnish’. But it worked out.
Marsha Rowe came up from Norwich and we saw ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula’: the ‘Last Caravaggio’ at the National. I can’t say it is his greatest work, but as it normally lives in a convent outside Naples, it might have been the only chance I’d ever have to see it. When Camila and I were in Naples in February we saw ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’ [1607] in the Pio Monte della Misericordia; to me, a much more significant work, in fact, a picture that you could spend hours examining as the eye moves through the painting’s ever-changing dynamic. (See the blog for February). We had a nice lunch at Zédel followed by a few drinks at the French House.
On May Day I had lunch with my old friend Andrew Sclanders, the rare book dealer. This is always a pleasant affair and I wish we did it more often. Friday the third was a cultural day. I met Suzy Treister and Richard Grayson at Raven Row on Artillery Lane in E1, where Alex Sainsbury was putting on a show of Brazilian art from the 1950s-70s. I was unfamiliar with most of the work but loved the four small formal abstracts by Lygia Clark from 1958. John Dunbar showed her work at the Indica Gallery back in the sixties and I very much enjoyed it then. The other outstanding work was by Hélio Oiticica whom I came to late in life, introduced by Hannah Watson at her T. J. Boulting Gallery though I seem to remember Guy Brett extolling his work some decades ago. We went for a drink with Alex Sainsbury who always has good stories. Here are two of Lygia’s pictures:
And here is Suzy disrupting the gallery calm, and one of Richard, Alex and Suzy after seeing the Brazil show.
At Suzy and Richard’s place, overlooking Parliament Hill Fields, Patricia Bickers and Simon Patterson joined us for dinner and Richard excelled himself in the kitchen. I stayed overnight and the next morning was able to get a wild rabbit at the Farmer’s Market. This I cooked with a farmed rabbit and a pig’s trotter or two for Valerie Orpen and Maribel Torrente, two of my best friends. They had not previously met and it was wonderful to see them together. I knew that Valerie liked the rabbit’s head, as I have cooked it for her before, and Maribel is Spanish where rabbit is a proper part of the cuisine. Sadly Maribel is now back in Spain after about a decade here in London. In the end the terrible food and lack of sun sent her back to her beloved Andalucía where she has bought a house. I stayed with her there in December and envy her the enormous beaches with a distant view of Morocco over the Strait as the sun sets over the Mediterranean. I shall have to visit. Valerie is also away, but just on holiday in South Korea – as you do. Spring does seem to have arrived. Here’s the view from the breakfast table at Richard and Suzy’s. Could almost be Continental.
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