Miles

There was a private view at the October Gallery on December 3^rd where I was pleased to run into Liliane Lijn. We showed her at the Indica Gallery back in 1966. She is going from strength to strength and has more shows and projects than ever. 

My old friend Victor Bockris made a rare visit to London. We first met in 1973 (I think), introduced in New York by Allen Ginsberg. It was at a poetry reading at Barnard College and he said, ‘There’s someone over there that you should meet. I think you’ll get on.’ He was right.  During the seventies and eighties Victor and I were very close. I hardly saw him in the last 35 years as I rarely went to the States and he moved, first to Florida to be with his father, then to Philadelphia. I had not seen him in 11 years.

One evening Jim Pennington came to dinner. Jim has a thing about obsolete pieces of office equipment and in this case brought with him a Polaroid camera with some clearly out of date film. The pictures came out very dark and Victor suggested that more light was needed. He proposed the bathroom, which had super new LED-lighting and so, like the old fools that we were, we crowded into the shower while my son Theo took pictures. Naturally Victor leaned against the shower controls and we all got soaked., Victor more than anyone, requiring a complete change of clothes. He paraded the red suit he wore in Lisbon.

I did an interview at Darren Coffield’s Colony-Room-Green on the 8th. We got a full house, but that’s not difficult as it is a small room and it was free. Here we are with Roberta before she returned to Slovakia for Christmas.

2026 will be the 100^th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth – June 3, 2026 and his friends are preparing various celebrations in his honour. Jesse Goodman and Antonio and I met to discuss some of the proposals at the Colony-Room on the 16^th and it looks like we will be able to give him a good show if they work out.

The next day I spent the afternoon working on the illustrations for my upcoming In The Eighties (a follow on from my In the Sixties and In the Seventies) with my friend and publisher Hannah Watson from Trolley Books. She just had a dramatic new haircut in Paris  that reminded me immediately of Francoise Hardy, so we spent quite a lot of time looking at pictures of her and comparing them.  And also got quite a lot of work done.

On the 22^nd, Marina came over, visiting from Lisbon where I’d last seen her. We went to the Picasso Theatre show at Tate Modern. As usual the pictures were lit from so high above that they had a dark shadow across the top, altering the picture ratio and, of course, obscuring detail. It is not difficult to fly lighting just over people’s heads so that pictures are not changed in this way. Whoever hung the show should be fired, but it is common in London. The Courtauld does it too, and the National. Any roadie could do it for them. They don’t have a clue. As for the show. Some engravings and etchings were hung so far above eye-level that you couldn’t see any of the detail. There were none of Picasso’s actual backdrops. It was a very amateurish, badly conceived show, made up almost entirely of their own holdings and so they were charging an outrageous entry fee for pictures that could normally be seen free (if you asked to see them in advance). Many of the pictures were, of course, wonderful. To me Picasso is still the master.

That evening we ate quail wrapped in prosciutto with pears and roasties. Victor loves his roasties.

The next evening it was Victor’s turn to be interviewed by Darren at the Colony Room Green. Another good turn-out, only two days before Christmas. It went very well. Victor used New York audience tactics on them: no talking in the back, no statements, only questions. 

Victor flew back to New York on Christmas Day, and Theo and Mina took a cab at 4:45am on Boxing Day to Heathrow to fly to Tokyo. Suddenly the flat was empty. But not for long as my good friend Marsha Rowe came to stay. We celebrated New Year together and had a wonderful visit. 

She may have moved to the right, but for my generation, Brigitte Bardot was an important part of our lives. She died December 29. RIP.

Let’s end 2025 with an inspiring photograph: the last CIA flight out of Saigon in 1975 after the Vietnamese whipped America’s ass. 

My friend Camila is a William Blake specialist, and we have often talked about where he and his friends lived as most of these sites are close to my flat. Fuseli, for instance, lived at the south end of my street and Blake himself was born in Soho, 15 minutes’ walk away. In the course of other completely different research I found that after Blake died, his wife Catherine moved to a house that originally stood at the north end of my street. Sadly, that block was completely destroyed in 1966 and a large block of flats now occupies the entire site, with the road itself moved some yards to the east. Catherine’s house is now beneath the north-east corner of Holcroft Court, with even the foundations swept away by a subterranean car park. However, we can make pretty good guess at how it once looked as the houses there were very similar to those built in the 1770s on nearby Warren Street and in the remaining south block of Hanson Street where I live. Classic cheap Georgian with one ground floor window, round head door, string course and an attic with dormers. Here’s a nearby example c1777.

The big trip this month was for a conference on the counterculture organised by my friend Camila Oliveira at the University of Lisbon’s English dept. It coincided with a visit to London by my old friend Victor Bockris. Victor and I have known each other for 50 years, introduced in New York by Allen Ginsberg, but I hadn’t actually seen him for 11 years, which is how long it’s been since I last went to the US. We flew to Lisbon on November 25th. Camila picked us up from the hotel and took us to a wonderful restaurant in an old palace for dinner. 

The next day there were two panel discussions. We were the first, Victor and I were interviewed by Camila about the sixties underground scene in London (me) and the seventies punk scene in New York (Victor), followed by questions from the audience. As used Victor and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye which made the audience laugh. Two young Brazilian women were moved to tears; not by our performance, but the physical contact with such remote cultural events, so utterly different in geographical location, language, and time from their present lives in quarter-21st-century Portugal. We joined another panel discussion the next day on Kathy Acker. Both Victor and I knew Kathy as a friend from the seventies and eighties but were not asked for any recollections. 

Walking around the streets near to my hotel I found a bookshop which had on display a Burroughs Adding Machine. This was invented by William Burroughs’ grandfather, the source of the family money, and the title of one of Burroughs’ books (The Adding Machine.). 

I did finally get some time with Camila, who persuaded one of the waiters to take a picture of us at lunch at the Gulbenkian Foundation.

That evening Camila and her flatmate Lilia cooked a big dinner for eight at her flat. Marina kindly dropped Victor and I off at our hotel where Victor took a picture of us.

While Victor went to visit relatives, my friend Maribel came to London for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other for about a year, when I visited her in Algeciras so there was a lot of catching up to do. She very sensibly left Britain because she could not stand the food, the weather, and the fact that British men had no contact whatsoever with their feelings. It was great to see her, as ever.

I went with Lucy to the launch party for the Lee Miller show at Tate Brit on September 30. What a show! I could have done with a few more solarizations, but all the top images were there from her Surrealist compositions to Lee sitting in Hitler’s bathtub. Her experiences as a war photographer covering the concentration camps obviously left a permanent scar and she retired from photography. Fortunately, her negatives survived and are in the hands of the Estate who are doing a wonderful job of cataloguing, preserving and exhibiting her work.

We had a bit of a Bailey family get-together on October 17, the before what would have been Rosemary’s birthday. Her sister Jackie came over with sister Caroline who has just moved to London from Manchester to become the Vicar of Dulwich. Here’s Jackie about to throttle me with Caro looking on. It is something of a family tradition: Rosemary’s brother Simon was also a C of E Vicar, and their father was a Baptist minister. 

It was cartoonist Michael Heath’s 90^th birthday on October 13^th and a celebration was held at Colony-Green in Heddon Street a few days before. Heath looks more like 70 than 90 and remained standing talking while I looked for a seat. Great man. 

Simon and Ginette came to dinner on the 15^th, as usual bringing a rather good bottle of wine. Simon and I have something of a tradition of taking lunch at the Academy Club every month or so. All very London. 

The 18^th was my son Theo’s birthday, and we went to Hachi on Brewer Street in Soho. You cook your own food and we had so much fun that we were the last ones in the restaurant, still eating as the chairs were being stacked on the tables. They conveniently label the different cuts of meat.

I’ve been spending more time at The Academy Club recently, one of the last remnants of old Soho (though not in fact very old, 1986, though the building itself is 18^th century). Here’s Celine modelling her new crown, prior to using it at a performance at City Racing in Shropshire.

At home, Mina proves to be an expert cork stacker. It’s harder than it looks.

Back at the Colony Green, Lucy and Cassie bond over Lily Allen’s new album.

Camila is editing an anthology of Allen Ginsberg poems that relate to his 1948 auditory vision of William Blake’s voice coming to him across the vault of time, reading poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I am writing the foreword. To do this we first had to agree on the meaning of each selected poem. I thought I was familiar with them all as I once spent a year editing Allen’s tape collection and selecting the best live recording of each of his published poems, but even so I was occasionally puzzled as to what he actually meant. (Allen himself sometimes didn’t know, sometimes placing two words together in the same way as Cezanne placed two colours together to get what Allen called ‘eyeball kicks’. He had also written quite a number of poems since I did that work back in 1971. By reading them aloud and discussing each one the meanings became clear. It was insightful work and, in fact, a delight to revisit poems that I mostly hadn’t read in decades. As you can see it was exhausting work.

Although we worked every day, there was still time for meals, for a drop of wine, and visits to friends. Martha has a swimming pond, surrounded by plants and flowers with a superb view of the mountains.

We went with Martha to a concert of Bach Cantatas played by the Ensemble Correspondences at the tenth century abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa, part of the Pablo Casals Festival. The building was erected in 950 in the Mozarabic style and has superb acoustics. I was not that happy with the lighting which was sometimes distracting and would have preferred to see the 1000-year-old horseshoe arches in their natural colours, but it was a great concert. 

I forgot to mention the Anselm Kiefer-Van Gogh show in last month’s post. Jill and I went to the show which was at the Royal Academy. As usual I found these artist pairings to be a little forced. It’s true that Kiefer liked Van Gogh but he wasn’t that much influenced by him. There were some nice Van Goghs though. 

Back to France and my next visitors were Ken Weaver and Maxine. I hadn’t seen them since I visited their place last year with a film crew who were making a documentary about Ken’s fellow-Fug Tuli Kupferberg. Here’s Roslyn with Maxine and Ken in Prades. They overlapped with Richard and Suzy. Suzy had just completed a six month residency at the Citie des Arts in Montmartre and I really regret not having the time to visit them there. They brought with them some rather interesting anarchic local wines from the other wise of the Col.

I saw quite a lot of Roslyn and Gordon which was good because they rarely come down to London. Unfortunately, we didn’t overlap by many days as they had to return to Britain because of Brexit rules (a pox on all who voted Brexit!). There was time for one more concert: the Cobla Sol de Banyuls did a free concert at the local church. It is some of the strangest music you will ever hear in Europe; despite the bass being the only stringed instrument, it sounds like the string section of an orchestra. A cobla consists of 10 wind instruments and a double bass, with one person playing both a flute and a hand drum attached to his wrist. Women have only been permitted to play in a cobla since the 1980s and to my disgust, at the end of the concert, only the men were called to stand and take a bow by name. They played modern works, but all had the distinctive triple beat of the Sardana at their root (actually a 6/8 rhythm). It has a slightly sinister feel, an echo of the distant past. The earliest reference to the Sardana is from 1552. Here’s more what-we-did-on-our-holidays pix of the cobla and of Gordon and Roslyn with Catherine and Billy and their daughter Niamh.

My final visitor of the summer was Marsha Rowe, veteran of Australian Oz, English Oz, co-founder and editor of Spare Rib and co-founder of Virago Books. We have been fellow travellers for decades, hoping to subvert people! She last appeared here throwing eggs with Sara Lucas. Meanwhile, bamboo threatens to overtake the garden and life goes on, at least for a bit longer.

I usually try to get to the Soho Fete each year. Held in the churchyard of the wartime bombed St. Anne’s, on Wardour Street, it remains a truly local affair, with the bar run by the French pub and locals manning the stalls. There is a Soho waiters’ race that starts and ends outside the French, when waiters carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne, a glass and an ashtray, run up Dean Street, round Soho Square, back down Greek Street and across Romilly Street to the finish line; this year won by the Ham Yard Hotel. The London Fire Brigade won the tug-of-war against the local police and the London pearly kings and queens were out in their finery All the usual attractions were there including the Human Fruit Machine and the snail race, a Rocky Horror show singalong, the drag queen finale and a few choruses of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘Cock Linnet’. How London can you get? Here’s the Fire Brigade getting their award and some of the alternate London royalty showing community support. 

My son Theo was there with Mina. I went with Lucy but soon ran into Hannah. I love being with them both and when the fete ended we went on to The White Horse on Newburgh Street, next to Carnaby Street, where The Fallen Heroes, friends of Lucy’s, were playing. The three of us finally got home where I had fortunately prepped a meal that I somehow managed to cook. It was a real Soho day in brilliant sunshine, though it took me a day to get over it.

The US has left UNESCO yet again, following their withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and WHO. It’s really only their money that will be missed as the US has very little in the way of culture, given the size of its population; the Paris Climate Accords are inimical to the oil business so American compliance with any attempts to cut back on oil production were always likely to fail, and of course, with regard to WHO, the US is the only developed country in the world to not have a national health system. In other words, reactionary through and through, and destined to get worse as their position in the world becomes less and less significant. In fact, to use one of Trump’s favourite phrases, a real ‘shithole country’. 

On a lighter note. Camila and I went to see the David Hockney show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. All the great pictures were there: A Bigger Splash; Peter Schlesinger looking petulantly into a swimming pool and waiting expectantly on a bed; ‘Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy’,; the giant landscapes and the wonderful Royal College work from the early sixties which I have always liked. I sent Raymond Foye a pic of his portrait with Henry Geldzahler to show that we thought of him while viewing the picture. Sadly the Wayne Sleep-George Lawson double portrait wasn’t there, it would have been a nice tribute to George who died not that long ago. 

We were there largely to see Hockney’s new William Blake picture as Camila is a Blake scholar, on the board of the William Blake Society and the Blake Cottage Trust, and we were en route to the Pyrenees to spend a week working together on an anthology of Allen Ginsberg’s poems about the auditory vision of William Blake back in 1948 that so very much influenced his life and poetry.

The next day we went to the Museum d’Orsay. I sought out the Suzanne Valadon pictures, as I have been studying her work recently. The collection of Impressionists there is astonishing, I would love to live next door and see the pictures all the time. There was a Courbet there that caught Camila’s eye and a Renoir that matched her hat. I naturally did a bit of mansplaining having been several times to the Monet in London show recently at the Courtauld.

Paris would not be Paris without a few nice drinks. We were at Hotel La Louisiane, so the Palette was just up the street where William Burroughs used to score for heroin and boys – how things have changed! The pina colada pic was taken at the Rhumerie, the old rock ‘n’ roll haunt from when I was a rock critic in the seventies. All the visiting bands used to hang out there.

Next day we were on our way south.

Hannah Watson asked me for an essay on the role that the Liberty store played in cultural history to be included in a box set of booklets and essays published to celebrate the store’s 150^th anniversary. Oscar Wilde praised it, it promoted the arts and crafts movement, was loved by the bright young people, dressed the Chelsea set, provided furnishing fabric for Granny Takes a Trip’s psychedelic jackets and David Bowie’s many personalities, before finally showing up at Taboo in Leigh Bowery’s fantastic costumes. There was a suitable launch in the exhibition of their historic fabrics in the store’s fourth floor exhibition. I wore a Liberty foulard.

I have been working a lot with Ed Maggs from the venerable antiquarian bookstore Maggs. He kindly turns to me when the subject of an archive falls within my specialisms: Beat Generation, British Counterculture and so on. Here is a particularly pleasant evening I spent with Ed and Fran at my local Italian.

On June 22, we had a visit from my God-daughter Sara Minard, born in London of American parents and living in New York City. I hadn’t seen her in a while and forgot that she was a vegetarian. Here is her reaction to a tray full of roast quail. She works for the mayor’s office so she is a diplomat. She ate one. 

There was an on-stage interview with Nicola Bowery Rainbird, Leigh Bowery’s wife, to go with the huge Leigh Bowery show on at Tate Modern. I went with Hannah who curated the previous Bowery show, held at the Fitzrovia Chapel (I wrote one of the catalogue essays). Here’s Hannah with Nicola, her son Angus, and gallerist Riccardo Pillon. The party spread to the grass outside the Tate beside the Thames. Hannah is here with Jessica Baxter, who curated the Tate show. 

The global-warming fuelled summer sun brought out the flowers. My old friend Fran Bentley showed me her garden.

It had been ages since I saw my friend Yang Lee. He came over with Lisa and here he enjoys a smoke with George Orwell. Lisa is a model from Novosibirsk, Siberia, and we discussed the role of Siberian troops in the Battle for Moscow in WWII. (Always high-level intellectual conversation around here you understand.) We dined at the Wolseley.

In Paris to discuss a show of Brion Gysin’s work at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris, I stayed at the Hotel La Louisiane on the rue de Seine. It’s always an exercise in false nostalgia as I never met J-P Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Cossery, Boris Vian, Albert Camus or Fujita who lived there. Or Charlie Parker, Bud Powell or any of the jazz greats who stayed there (it was where Miles Davis and Juliette Greco had their legendary affair in 1948). More recent guests included Jim Morrison, Keith Haring, Lucien Freud and Juliette Binoche. It’s still cheap – by Paris standards – and though that part of the Left Bank is now insanely expensive and gentrified, it reminds me of how it used to be when I first stayed in the area – at the Hotel de Seine a few doors up the street – back in 1966. My friend Luzius was also staying there, in town from Basel, for the same meetings, being the owner of a substantial collection of Gysin material. His wife Sairung was with him, here at the Palette. On our off-day, Luzius and I visited the Balzac Museum, which neither of us had been to. This is the desk at which he wrote La Comédie humaine. It’s a beautiful small museum – free, unusual for Paris – with a delightful garden and café. It is hard to imagine that when the house was built it was in open countryside.

Luzius and I were in Paris to meet with Hélène Leroywho is the Conservatrice en chef, Responsable des collections at the Musée d’art modern de Paris, and is organising a Brion Gysin exhibition for 2026 together with Olivier Weil. We have had previous meetings both here and in London and we are all in agreement as to how the show should look. Here we have Olivier, Hélène and her daughter Julie, at one of my favourite Parisian cafes, Chez René on blvd St Germain. (The snails are very good – huge, and they also do frogs’ legs. It’s a proper place.)

I ended my visit with a couple of nights with my old friends Catherine and Steve. We went to the Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely show at the Grand Palais. It is a huge show. I should have done my usual thing of running through the show first then returning to the start and pacing myself, as there were loads of videos that, for once, I really wanted to stop and see. But I didn’t and we were there almost two hours. I hadn’t realised how much of their work was genuine collaboration rather than mutual support. I had a picture of them, torn from a magazine pinned to my wall when I was art school back in the early sixties, and have always liked their work enormously. When we started International Times, one of the first art illustrations we used was of Nana, the huge sprawling female figure that you entered between the legs, that only existed for six months in 1966 at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet before it was destroyed. Fortunately, a few fragments remain: the head was at the Grand Palace and a fragment of torso. More importantly there was a lot of very interesting documentation about the figure and the original show. 

There were also some major examples of her ‘tir’ series, where she made large assemblage ‘paintings’ which incorporated bags of paint which she, and invited friends, then shot at, causing the paint to spray and drip all over the work. William Burroughs credited her with being an influence on his ‘shotgun’ paintings. The pieces, before-shooting, reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s work, and indeed, he was one of her friends and did some of the shooting.

And of course there were loads of Tinguely’s amazing machines, including several painting machines, shown here, as well as films of the ones that auto-destructed like the one in New York. In the film a small section, like a small trolly, can be seen escaping as firemen tackle the implosion and it is displayed in the show, next to the film of the event.

Catherine and Steve collected me and my baggage from the hotel and it was fun to hang out at my old haunts with them. Back in the sixties and seventies the area was still cheap and filled with inexpensive hotels that you could just show up at and get a room. Then they started installing lifts, putting up the price, then they were bought out. Only a few remain today like the Hotel du Seine or La Louisiane. The Palette is still there, and the mirrors are becoming more and more corroded. Bill Burroughs liked it here.

Catherine and I visited the Musée de Montmartre, housed in a 300-year-old complex of artists’ studios and housing. Renoir lived here, (his garden has been recreated), as did Raoul Dufy, Suzanne Valadon, her husband André Utter and her son the painter Maurice Utrillo. Valadon’s studio is preserved intact with no vitrines or glass protection and you can just wander about in it. It’s like time travel. A wonderful experience. 

The museum also contains items from Le Chat Noir. Here is the original zinc, complete with ancient bottles, Catherine, and me.

A visit to Paris would not be complete without a dinner with Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari and her companion Junor. Her latest recording, ‘Errant Ear-2024’ has just been released. She worked with her husband, composer Luc Ferrari for 40 years and after his death in 2005 continued to release her own recordings. Catherine cooked a superb dinner for us all, then apparently tried to raise the table. Pix by Junor.

Remember that from the river to the sea it’s all Palestine. Israeli genocide continues.

The spring weather brought everyone out and we had a very busy start to May with dinners for Lucy and Valerie. Luzius Martin and Udo Breger arrived in London on the 5th and we had our usual dinners: one in a restaurant and one here the following day, always accompanied by Terry Wilson, who lives here. On the 8th we all had lunch with Tom Neurath at the Palestinian restaurant beneath his office on Golborne Road in Notting Hill. Tom was not looking at all well. He had lost considerable weight and had grey skin. Nonetheless, he spoke enthusiastically about his collection of Samuel Beckett first editions and asked me to have Ed Maggs send him the list of Beckett items that I knew that they were about to send to auction. His numerous cancer treatments had all failed and though they were trying a few experimental procedures he knew that he was dying. Consequently, he taken up smoking pot and cigarettes again and, certainly a few months before, was drinking a little schnapps again. We had an almost tearful hug when we all departed. We knew it was unlikely that we would see each other again.  

I kept up on the art world: the next day Marsha Rowe and I attended the opening of the refurbished Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery. Architecturally it seems to be a great improvement, but they still light the pictures from high above, throwing big black shadows from their frames across the tops of many of them, distorting the size ratio, obscuring detail, and very much damaging the viewers’ enjoyment. Why they can’t lower the lighting gantries by 10 meters or so is beyond me. Any rock ‘n’ roll lighting roadie could do it for them and it wouldn’t even cost very much to do. [I can recommend some.] As it is, the hang is a disgrace. In some cases, the shadow obscures the top half of a figure’s head or puts a strong wavy line across the top of the picture, distorting the composition. Typical of Britain, I’m afraid. Here’s Raphael’s Garvagh Madonna [1510]; Pontormo’s Joseph’s Brothers Beg For Help [1515] and his Joseph Sold to Potifer with their thick shadows.

My other art day was to have a pleasant lunch with Andrew Wilson and art dealer Anthony Reynolds at the Academy Club which is always a relaxing yet invigorating place at lunchtimes. Of course in the evenings the members can sometimes become boisterous as you can see. 

Theo, Mina and I flew to France on the 14th where Rosemary’s sister Jackie had assembled eight of her family members for a reunion. They all came to dinner of course, but were staying about an hour’s drive away so I didn’t see much of them. Theo joined them for one night and they all had a good time on the coast. Theo and Mina in France.

Back in town I resumed the usual round of dinners and visits to exhibitions as befits an elderly man in London: dinner with Lucy, show and a dinner with Jill – the Hiroshige show at the British Museum. I enjoyed it but was disturbed by the fact that all the women looked the same: same face, same blank expression, even if he was depicting a crowd of a dozen or more, they were all clones. It revealed a lot about the situation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, they were virtually inviable. But his colour and his un-western perspective is wonderful. They are prints, and his publishers have sometimes substituted different colour backgrounds which completely change the reading of the composition, it’s all fascinating.) 

Tom Neurath died on Saturday 14th June. I had known him since 1965; 60 years. We were introduced by Ian Sommerville who first became his friend in 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris where they both lived. Tom had always been a supporter of Ian and his work and collected his infinity-grid pictures. He was also a friend of Hoppy, who I shared a flat with in the mid-sixties, so I quickly got to known him. We were not close, but over the years we did quite a few things together. We once took the Thames & Hudson Rolls Royce down to Deal, on the coast, to meet Harold Chapman whose book of photographs, The Beat Hotel, [1984] was out of print. Tom was considering re-issuing it. The problem was that the reproductions in the original edition were not good enough to use for a reprint, so we were going down to hopefully collect the original prints or inspect his negatives to find possible substitutes or additions for an enlarged edition. Of course Harold hadn’t prepared anything. He finally found a box with a few curled-up prints but couldn’t find any contact sheets or anything that would have been of use. He pontificated about this and that. Claire produced a bottle of whiskey and the afternoon drifted by, but the visit was a waste of time. Either Harold didn’t want to really re-issue the book, or his dementia had already set in, and we hadn’t realised. 

Another time, more amusing, was when Peter Weibel, the director of ZKM in Karlsruhe, invited Tom and I to give a talk on ‘Swinging London’. A less likely subject for Tom to speak on would have been hard to find as he had not been a part of that scene at all. But it sounded like a fun project, so we flew out and sat in conversation, in English, before a packed auditorium. I don’t recall anyone leaving so I think they were entertained. I will miss him. 

We visited Michaelangelo’s house, the Casa Buonarroti where he lived between 1516 and 1525. A nice small museum with very few other visitors even though it contains several interesting works. I love house museums and though it doesn’t have any original furniture or anything like that, it is still wonderful to inhabit the physical space that their owners once occupied. The two low reliefs in the museum are in a small, pleasant room with somewhere you can sit and have a proper look at them. They are the Madonna of the Stairs [c1491] and the Battle of the Centaurs [1492] both made when he was still a teenager but both fully mature  works.

With no-one around, these beautiful Renaissance rooms were a perfect place for a couple more Ceiling Portraits:

Camila is a perfect travelling companion. She listens attentively while I dredge up factoids, half-remembered from history of art lectures at my art college of sixty years ago.

I found the visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce a very moving experience. The mythical figures of history take on a new reality when you look at their tombs. Here is Galileo, and directly across the nave from him is Michelangelo in a tomb designed by his great friend Vasari. And to the left of him is Dante! (Well, a cenotaph, actually). And so it goes, all these local boys. Here’s Machiavelli and in the Sacristy is Cimabue’s crucifix, (1288) still damaged from the terrible 1966 floods. (I first saw it in 1968 when evidence of flood damage was everywhere.) And finally there is a woman, at the end of the First Cloister is a monument to Florence Nightingale from 1913. Here, in order, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli.

Even though it was only April, there were already crowds of tourists. In the Uffizi there was a queue for the Tribune, so we joined it, not knowing what it was. It is, of course, the octagonal gallery built by Francesco 1 de’ Medici in 1584, and famously painted by Zoffany. I should have remembered. At the head of the queue we found that you can only look in the door, but it is a wonderful room with a domed ceiling and Grego-Roman statuary arranged around it. In the centre stands the Medici Venus, dating to the end of the second century BC, a marble copy of a bronze Greek original. William Blake’s father bought him a cast of this when he was studying at Henry Pars’ drawing school on the Strand and there is also a cast in the Royal Academy School. She is justly famous, a reference point in the history of Western art. I was pleased to see the original.

Camila enjoyed the Botticelli room. It is filled with his works but the tourists cluster around the two most famous: The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Fortunately the crowds thinned out enough to get a good view of everything there. It’s only when you see the two most famous pictures in reality and can appreciate their size and the luminosity of the painted surface that you can fully understand them. The endless repetition of the images on tea-towels, t-shirts and coffee mugs have reduced their impact to mere branding, but up close you can see why the Pre-Raphaelites loved him so much and copied him so slavishly. We, of course, also took photographs. One of my favourites was another Venus, busy shocking the local prudes, in Calumny of Apelles. We liked the Uffizi. Here we are in the roof terrace café.

The Museo del Bargello has four Michelangelos, more than anywhere else in Firenze, but it was almost empty.  They are a bust of Brutus, a life-size Apollo, the Tondo Pitti, and my favourite, the early, 1496, Bacchus, huge, tipsy if not completely pissed and looking as if he’s about to fall over. 

I was expecting to find crowds at Michelangelo’s tombs in the Medici Chapels in San Lorenzo but there were only one or two people there. It was a good photo-op (sorry). The figures are magnificent, Michelangelo twists them uncomfortably to make the stone live. The main chapel is totally over the top as we used to say. The Medici balls are everywhere, and you could spend hours just looking at the variety of coloured marbles. Here we are with Lorenzo, followed by Giuliano’s tomb that faces it across the chapel.

It was not all museums, though as it rained so much, they were a welcome shelter. At the back of the Mercato Nuovo, the 16th century covered market (not worth seeing) there is a bronze boar, Porcellino, whose snout fingers have polished gold. Touching it guarantees your return to Firenze, so Camila will be back. People also put coins in its mouth, which is obviously what the chap sitting next to it is waiting for. 

At the Palazzo Vecchio Camila acts her Cabral moment and discovers Brazil. Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in Bahia, her home estado, on 22 April 1500, claiming it as a Portuguese colony. This was a disaster for the Tupinambá and the Tupiniquin whose land it was. 

Despite our pointless Florance City passes, we could only get tickets for the Accademia four days hence. They were for 3:00pm. We finally got in at about 4:10. The Accademia has nowhere for people to wait so the street outside was thronged with people and umbrellas. The gallery only allows a certain number of people to enter but, because of the rain, no-one was leaving. (The worst example of this poor planning is the Fondation Vuitton in Paris designed by Frank Gehry and costing $790 million. There is nowhere to wait so in the summer the long lines form outside in the sweltering heat and in the winter, they line up in the cold with umbrellas. I used to admire his architecture, but this building is a piece of egotistical shit. He should give the French State back their money. Over $600 million came from the French taxpayer. Harrumph!) The Accademia was established in 1784 when presumably the numbers of visitors were in the dozens not thousands (1.46 million visitors in 2016). 

It is the home of Michelangelo’s David. That’s what they are all there for. It is also home to his four unfinished Prisoners, originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II and a statue of Saint Mathhew. But it is David they have all come to see. The slab of marble had already been worked on by two previous sculptors before Michelangelo got it and was also quite shallow, meaning that he had to create a frontal figure without much projection into space. He worked from the front rather than the usual all-round shaping and by getting quite close in towards the final shape he automatically shaped the sides while the back remained very roughly hewn until the end. This method gave him room to improvise rather than working from a pre-ordained idea of the piece. The head is large to allow for perspective when seen from below. The hands are overlarge and expressive. It is quite rightfully regarded as his greatest work. In a nice reversal of the male gaze, we went round the back to have a look at his bottom. There were several young women there, demonstrating the female gaze, and Camila was one of them. He has a nice ass.  The prisoners are tremendous: struggling to free themselves from the blocks of marble that encase them. They are wonderful as they are, unfinished. 

The museum has a few other works, paintings by Botticelli, Giotto and Lippi and several rooms devoted to a collection of musical instruments including a violin cello and a tenor viola made by Stradivari.

And so to Siena, but first a quick look at Percy Shelley’s gaff which is just across from the station. 

To get from the station to the town, you have to go up 10 elevators. It takes ages but it certainly saves walking to the top of the hill. At the top was one of my favourite street signs which presumably means; ‘If you piss here we will cut your balls off!’ In Siena all roads lead to the Piazza del Campo where each year they hold the Palio. Siena seemed a nice town, perhaps a little quiet. Everyone seemed to be a tourist, as if it was a ghost-town with no-one actually living there. Finding lunch was difficult but we managed. 

Back to Firenze and then London. No Stendhal Syndrome, which some doctors argue comes from tilting your head back to look upwards so much that it restricts the blood supply to the brain and makes you feel faint. Firenze cannot compare to Venice, but I’d be delighted to visit again, when it’s sunny.

With the USA becoming more and more fascistic, one way that universities such as Harvard can retain their independence would be to move most of their endowment fund and research to Britain – or France, Spain, wherever – thus protecting them from the criminal Trump and his imbecilic followers. John Harvard went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, so that would be an obvious place for Harvard to build a facility. The main university could stay in Cambridge, Mass., but all other activity would enjoy intellectual freedom here in Britain. 

I have been on my travels again. Camila and I went to Firenze on April 15^th, our third visit to Italy. Previously we had been to Naples, to see Pompei and Herculaneum, and Venice. Unfortunately, it rained every day we were in Firenze except for the day we went to Siena, which was perhaps fortunate as Siena involved quite a bit of walking whereas everything in Firenze in close together. Fortunately the food in Firenze is excellent, as shown here.

Though there were some steady downpours, the rain was mostly confined to showers and we were able to see most of the things we wanted. The copy of Michelangelo’s David on Piazza della Signoria, for instance, and the famous bridge. In other words, all the tourist sites. This is a ‘what we did on our holidays’ blog.

I was pleased to see that the street art in Firenze was quite sophisticated. I collect street sign art and was able to capture some very good examples while there, as you can see:

Holiday snaps have to show various meals consumed, so here are some of our favourites: we returned to some of the restaurants more than once. We avoided obvious tourist traps where the menu consists of photographs of the food and tried only to eat in places where the specials listed in the window were all in Italian. Every meal we had was superb. And, of course, Tuscan wine is famously good. We particularly liked the Villa Antinori 2022 though also drank a fair amount of Chianti Classico.

There is so much to see in Firenze that you must be selective. We concentrated on Michelangelo and saw most of sculptures that are in the city’s museums and churches as well as the Doni Tondo in the Uffizi. It’s worth pointing out that the Florence Pass is more trouble than it is worth. No-one seemed to know anything about it and at the Uffizi we were eventually given a phone number to call to get the supposed priority booking. The organisation at the Accademia and the Uffizi was appalling, though a friendly young woman at the desk devoted the best part of twenty minutes trying to help us (and succeeded, eventually). So off we went, hoping for a case of the Stendhal Syndrome.

We walked to the Palazzo Pitti, and, as the rain had cleared, we went first to wander around the Boboli Gardens. There I was absurdly proud of myself for recognising part of Ramesses II’s cartouche on the obelisk there (Aswan c1260 BC). (Theo and I had been in Egypt two months earlier). There were some nice things in the museum including a Caravaggio that I missed but Camila photographed, and works by Raphael, Titian and Botticelli. Camila did our usual ‘Self portraits with ceiling’ and I managed to get a picture of her contemplating her future, as a row of doors opened before her into infinity.

Well, as we can see, the American experiment didn’t work. As Oscar Wilde memorably said, ‘America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.’ Most of its citizens can barely find their own country on a map and the country itself is run by a bunch of imbeciles. It is clearly time for Europe to take back the territory and start again. First to return all ancestral land to the indigenous people, of course, then restore New France (Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, et al) to French administration. Quebec would probably be prepared to take on the task of building civilisation and introducing European culture there. The 13 original English colonies – from New Hampshire down to Georgia – should return to the crown, and in this English-speaking Canada would probably be prepared to take on the task of introducing European values and culture. The Spanish colonised Florida, California, Texas, New Mexico. Arizona and parts of other states. It’s unlikely that Spain would want the enormous task of administering such a large area so no doubt Mexico could be brought in to do so for them as well as introducing edible food. An exception might be made for the Duke of Westminster whom I understand would quite like Florida back, but that could be negotiated. As for the mid-west; perhaps build a wall around it, Americans are seem to like walls, though it would probably be a good idea to remove the better things from the Chicago Art Institute, the MCA, the Cleveland Art Museum and a few others to New York first for safe keeping. It is a big task, and there might be some objections, but for the health and safety of the planet it has to be done.