GUNTER VON HAGENS AT THE O2 CENTRE

Gunter von Hagens is again exhibiting his grotesque 'plasticinations' of human body parts in time for Halloween.  The nerdy (his own description) son of an SS cook (that's Hitler's SS, not our dear Social Services), Von Hagens was deported from an East German political prison on the grounds that he was mad. Ever since, he's been making a slow killing from body parts, some sourced, it is said, from political prisons elsewhere (notoriously China and Russia).  His exhibitions are the human equivalent of Damien Hearst's pickled cow series which, as everyone knows, are now worth millions. Only a decadent (dying) culture obsessed with 'material' (the goods), in all its forms, could value a human skull encrusted with diamonds as a piece of high 'art'. Von Hagens's work is as soullness and dull as Hearst's, and as degrading to the human spirit as that other fast-growing mass-media genre, pornography, in which bodies are over exposed to the point of ---well, what is the point exactly? Saturation point was reached a long time ago. As The Telegraph writer puts it:

'While Von Hagens has democratised death, he's also done something rather more daunting to it. As you look at his exhibits, it's not only the soluble fats that have been removed. He's also sucked all the emotional resonance out of them. Far from seeming poignant, or even human, these people just look like animatronic models from a bad sci-fi movie, with wisps of flesh adhering to them like bits of old biltong.'

Quite. 

Apparently, there are people queuing up to have the soluble fat sucked out of them (dead or alive). Plasticination is just liposuction by another name that doesn't, presumably, smell  quite as sweet. I can see no earthly use in it - except perhaps one: could  plasticination be the right solution for Gary Glitter? 

COBBLERS AND CLAMPETTS

Cobblers, it seems, are doing well out of the current credit crunch. This is no bad thing, I think, it being no bad thing generally to exercise a little thrift and learn to live with what you have, inspired by the grace and wisdom (as Aeschylus wrote) to live by what you need.

But it may be bad news, weather-wise, if you are thinking, as I am now, and with increasing urgency, of moving away from the Celtic fringe. I'm a city girl, really. Liverpool spawned me and London formed me. I saw my grandma die in Cornwall, and my good, if batty, neighbour, who was only 63 when she kissed off, to be found, a day later, by me and another neighbour. I don't want to die here, like Rosemary, or like my grandma (who would have been 103 on 5 October), old and alone, after  a lifetime's travelling. 'I don't regret a thing, dear,' grandma would say. 'I've been in every capital in Europe.' What a stoic she was. How I admired her. But she wasn't loved, I think. She was admired, yes, but not loved. Maybe she was too formidable a woman to be truly loved. She was what you'd call a doughty dame.

Anyway, this morning, as I set off for Truro, which is a lovely, lovely city, and I love it to bits,  I ran the gauntlet of that antithesis of doughty dames: those fishwife-Clampetts (Baby and Ma) on the other side of my Japanese cedar. Baby was standing by the open 'conservatory' doors, blowing fag smoke outside. She wore a shocking pink towelling bathrobe, Ma squatting inside in a complementary beige number. Both muttered something at me, possibly because I looked so shocked.  It is breast-cancer awareness month, I know, but I doubt that Baby Clampett's deshabille showed any awareness whatsoever. (Terminal slatternliess is what that showed - and they had the cheek to call me 'a dirty woman' (you!)).  That's one niggling-nagging problem with this place. It's not the place: it's never ever been the place (I love the place). It is a certain mentality, common, perhaps to many rural/insular communities. Insular. Inward-looking, mistrustful of outsiders. And mean-minded - so mean-minded -  to the core. When I lived in London, the only violence I ever saw, in many years, was a 'domestic' argument on a Tube platform one night (at Charing Cross, I think). No one intervened, of course, the convention in the Underground being strictly no eye contact, ever. But then, shortly after landing in St Ives (as many incomers to Cornwall do - even one like me with a grandma in Truro still living at the time), I witnessed horrific, visceral, mean-minded violence, the whole town turning on on one another as soon as the summer visitors ('emmets') went home and the autumn set in.  Why? Were they bored like the Clampetts, terminally dull and shifty? Those days, I was ashamed to be an 'emmet' and flourished my Cornish credentials (thin and only on my late father's side anyway) as often as I could.  But not any more. I'm an emmet and proud of it. I'd rather be a sodding emmet than a Cornish Clampett. I'd rather say I was quarter Welsh (which I am) and quarter Yorkshire. Anyday.

GARY GLITTER-SPOTTING

Heard a rumour today that Gary Glitter is planning a move to Cornwall, to Falmouth, in fact: Budock Terrace. What a truly ghastly admission to have to make in your sellers' pack for prospective buyers.  (Problem neighbours? -  Well, just one, a third-rate ex pop star with convictions for child abuse and rape in Britain and Vietnam...)

Gary Glitter, Gary Glitter. Oh man, it takes me back to a time when I was allowed to stay up and watch Top of the Pops, and even in those days, even when I was eight or nine, I still thought he was crap. 'D'you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang...' (Stomp. Cue wide, beseeching eyes, like some sick Pied Piper.)  I wish to God he'd fallen off those platform boots and broken his neck, or poisoned himself by inhaling too much hairspray; but the sun, alas, shines on good and evil alike. Glitter made record sales out of the pocket money of kids like me. And went on to even worse exploitation, the very worst of all abuse: abuse and rape of children.

Some say (he himself would say it for certain) he has done his time. But he did his time before, and time in prison taught him nothing. Secure in his royalty payments,  he hot-tailed it to Vietnam to exploit and abuse more children there. And now, perhaps, he is fetching up in Falmouth (as he will have to fetch up somewhere), to live around the corner from a primary school and art school, Falmouth being very nuch (and unusually for Cornwall these days) a town of the young.

Segue to previous post: yes, indeed, friends, I may be better off in Mayfair!

Here's the link to the Murder by 4 competition (25 for 25)

http://murderby4.blogspot.com/2008/09/25-for-25-free-pre-release-download-of.html

TURN AGAIN, WHITTINGTON

In London all last week, securing a base while my daughter is at school in Sussex. It was worth the turning, and I realise now how much I have missed the city during my self-imposed exile on the Celtic fringe, what an insufferably precious poet here calls 'a near-island on the edge of England...where the wild landscape and the rich culture combine to create a uniquely inspiring environment. ' Maybe so for her (gush, gush) but it was edgy London, not the edge of England, that gave me the energy to write. It's an energy I can't cope with now for longer than a week at a time; and, fifteen years ago, it nearly burned me up; but it is an energy I need, like the odd sugar rush, or the high dose steroids that kept me buzzing all night during my chemotherapy. 

Nevertheless, some aspects of London - or, rather, what the City (with a Capitalist C) stands for, are still all too alive and waiting to send me scuttling back to the fringe in a fluster of moral unease. The greed of the City still stands proud amongst the beautiful buildings (like the glorious Gherkin) that have sprung up in the decade since I left. And what the City stands for - boom and bust, sky-high profit and crushing losses, was highlighted last week with the Lehman Brothers demise sending shockwaves through the heart of London markets, emptying the champagne bars as the pubs of Fleet Street were emptied twenty years ago with the death of the old print unions and the bloodletting that went therewith. But some still saw a curious profit to be made from the Lehman crash. At Canary Wharf, the morning after, like pickpockets on the aftermath of some great battle, representatives from the Teacher Training Agency set out their stalls in a bid to lure the fired bankers with the promise of a rewarding new career in education. Is education thus devalued  then - a last chance saloon for chancers in striped suits who can never see their way again to making a million in bonuses? Oh doh re mi...

At least the arts are still alive and kicking up in London. Saw a fantastic lunchtime concert at The Wigmore Hall. Jim Molyneux, BBC Young Musician of the Year, hitting the drums and playing some beautiful, haunting pieces on the maremba, an instrument that I have never heard in the flesh before, and what a captivating instrument it is. Rejuvenated by this experience, and by the ever-enthralling Wallace Collection close by, I am now looking forward to lunchtime concerts to come, and to walking those Soho streets again, mostly purged now of sleaze and sex (except for Rupert Street) but chock-full of characters and plots. I know my limits though: unlike Dick Whittington, I will never make Lord Mayor (has there ever been a Lady Mayor of London?); and I could never write a poem about the place as cheesy as Wordsworth's 'On Westminster Bridge'.  Dr Johnson had it exactly, and succinctly, right about London when he said that he who tires of the city tires of life. And I'm not tired yet.

So am I now a resident of Cornwall with a base in Mayfair, or a resident of Mayfair with a home in Cornwall? Chicken or egg?

BOOK RELEASE

COMING SOON....

6th September – PINCUSHION by Anne Morgellyn.

The latest in a series of psychological thrillers that chart the adventures of Louise Moon and her precarious love affair with brilliant but unconventional pathologist, Chas Androssoff.

Performance artist August Stockyard, attention-seeking heir to a media and property empire, dies in typically theatrical fashion, after making the bequest of adjoining houses to his pregnant girlfriend, Cressida, and to his former comrade-in-arms, Louise Moon.

But was August's demise simple suicide or was it the result of a kinky sex game that went wrong? Had he cleverly planned to shame his distant father and take revenge on his ruthless uncle, the obese and grasping millionaire who now had his eye on Louise?

Or was it a game from the grave, pitting Cressida and Louisa in a fight to the death as reluctant and mismatched neighbours?

Excerpt: http://www.bewrite.net/bookshop/excerpts/pincushion.htm
About the Author: http://www.bewrite.net/authors/anne_morgellyn.htm

All BeWrite Books are available from: BeWrite Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson and other online booksellers and to order from high street bookshops.

Print ISBN: 978-1-905202-82-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-83-6
Price: £6.99
Pages: 188

UNDER THE NOTE....

I could not resist this commentary by the MD of our local choral society. On their summer performance of Elgar's love-it-or-hate it magnum opus, 'The Dream of Geronitus', he writes:

"Let's get the depressing  bit out of the way, and not to beat about the bush. Up in the west gallery the Bridgeman Singers detracted from the overall performance, and indeed spoilt it in places. In 2000, this chamber choir provided the semi-chorus for us with true intonation and reliable rhythms, staying with the main body of performers steadfastly and contributing an atmosphere of magic and confidence, but I am at a loss to fathom out what has happened since then; I had taken them as 'read' and feel let down, as do many others. After living and breathing 'Gerontius' for the last year or so, it is depressing beyond description to have an otherwise splendid performance marred by such slipshod singing, which has absolutely no place anywhere near us. I invited them, so I am to blame, but on the day there was simply nothing that I could do to improve matters which were essentially beyond my control, what a shame.

"But on to better things, the vast huge majority of the performance...was magnificent. We had a magnificent orchestra, led by the indefatigable Malcolm Latchen, who did sterling work beyond the call of everyday professional musical life; cobbling this work together on such minimal rehearsal time is quite a strain on everyone...When thinking about the finances of such a large orchestra as this, it is worth bearing in mind that each individual player (most of whom make their living from music) was paid less than half the hourly rate of a supply teacher, or not a lot more than a heating engineer or plumber will charge for a call out fee with the first half an hours (sic) work, or half the hourly rate that we paid to our decorator recently..."

"...The great C major chorus on 'Praise to the Holiest' worked a treat, one needs to go into more detail than that - it was lovely. The Angel's Farewell was a little disappointing, due to the inexperience of the lady soloist (despite her lovely voice) and the happenings in the west gallery, but it did have sensitive and shapely areas, including the very end, and it is worth noting that it took a long time before someone broke the silence by applauding - which is what I wanted..."