How Rusty got his name.

I recieved another card from Rusty; an image of a bridge I'd never lost a shoe from but wish I had.

On the back he writes:
This is where it all started. this is where I got my name; Lula-Mae and me had been down to see Richard Brautigan one summer and we all decided to go skinny dipping by the bridge. Lula-Mae laughed when I stood naked in front of the red metal and she said: Far out Billy-Bob, you are so sun burnt I can't tell you from the bridge.
Richard laughed and said: "I guess Billy-Bob's just gone rusty, and it ain't even raining.

the name stuck after that.

Rusty wrote this part of a Brautigan poem at the bottom of the card. In place of a name:
It's Raining In Love

I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl a lot. -Richard Brautigan

Art or Balls.

The most natural thing to do, when you have an empty wooden fruit bowl and a pile of pool balls is to put the balls in the bowl.

I found the balls in the back of a rubbish truck in Notting Hill. The bowl was a gift from a woman who knew that I didn't have one.

What worries me is that this image would be quite happily considered 'ART' by those who think they know best.

It is nothing more than a bowl of balls.

Postcard from Rusty.

Rusty did it!

I recieved a postcard fro him this morning. that in itself is a miracle with the postal strikes we have been suffering; no doubt the postmen will be back at work in time to collect their Christmas bonuses.

The card was posted in Yorkshire (not an area noted for its rodeos).

The photo on the card is of a rhubarb mine; the caption says: Deep underground the plant is propagated by Yorkshire folk who are now completely blind. they live on a diet of batter puddings and Pontefract cakes...

Rusty writes: Hey Jan, you know it seems funny. London always seemed so big,, but you know you're in the largest county in the nation when you're anchored down in Harrogate. Harrogate Yorkshire.

He went on to write that Nurse Caz was travelling with him. They were together but not really together; Rustys heart was with Lula-mae in a tar paper shack close to a small town called Lizard Bend somewhere in North Dakota,

Nurse Caz's heart is in a specimen jar in Imperial college, London.

I listened to Michelle Shocked while I reread the card and thought of them both. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hffcyJ1GAg

Just back from my weekly dream analysis with doctor F. It does not concern me that she has been struck off (in fact I am rather hoping she will apply some of her malpractice on me) and can now only practice as an amateur.

Each time I visit I am encouraged to paint an image of my latest dream.

Last night I dreamt I was a child. It was a stormy autumn evening and I had been milking pomkin the goat who had lashed out at me with her hooves annd rendered me unconscious for a while.

Groggily I returned to the house and entered, but somehow I had gone in through the wrong door and found myself neither inside nor outside. there was a wall of raining teaspoons clouding my view of the walnut tree and of the three beakers on the window sill; my mothers red one, my dead fathers black one and my yellow one. Each time I reached out for my beaker (I was very thirsty) my hand was stung by the falling spoons.

I gave up in the end and finally fell asleep.

I awoke some time later on the straw in pomkins shed.

If it is possible for a goat to sneer, pomkin sneered.

Doctor F chuckled and clapped her hands on hearing the dream and seeing my painting and then ushered me out of the room giving me no explanation as to what it all might mean.

Rusty, depression and horse shit.

Rusty came round for coffee this morning. He looked distressed and depressed, I've not seen him this bad for a long time. I'm worried because I know I'm not going to see him for a while.

I said go to see the nurse Rusty, she can help.

I doubt it said Rusty. I hear she ain't nursing no more, I hear she has taken up horse riding. How do you know that? I asked.

Well, he said. Every time I see her she smells like stables.

I told him he should perhaps go back on the rodeo circuit one more time before he got too old. And Rusty, I said. Why not ask the nurse to go with you, she could look after the horses for you.

That woman is every man's dream, Rusty.

Yeah he said. But not every night.

I talked to nurse Caz later this morning. Told her I was worried about Rusty, and would she help? She said she would get back to me on that one. I also said that I had heard that she had taken up riding.

She laughed then (I have not heard that mountain stream for a long time) and said; I've just been putting horse shit on my garden.

I will not pass that information on to Rusty, I imagine he would prefer to keep an image of Caz in tight johdpurs in his minds eye rather than the reality.

Advice for young lovers.

If you are going to keep bullshit in a treacle tin there is no point reading each other the label.

Eyes.

Mutate Britain

www.mutatebritain.co.uk

Rusty, Babs and Dame Nellie Melba.

Rusty called round this morning to analyse Tristans performance last night.

We decided not to talk about it.

Instead I went to make cheese on toast for us all. I could hear Rusty and Babs talking and laughing in the other room as I grated cheese and then a finger. I burned the toast and Rusty came in to criticise.

I was about to throw the burnt toast in the bin when he pushed me to one side. He then grilled the bread on the other side, cut off the crusts and sliced the slices horizontally. once toasted on the cut side he had made 4 pieces of melba toast.

Here he said; presenting it to Babs.
What's that she asked.
Melba toast!
Why is it called that?

It is named after Dame Nellie Melba, who, when not eating peaches liked to eat this stuff.

Ditto TV at the Tabernacle. 10th October.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi6-jFsX0aU

Bridges I have lost shoes from. I've lost count.

I'd gone down to the Serpentine this morning to photograph the bridge having lost a shoe there a while back.

I was astonished to find Tristan there fishing. Fishing is not permitted in the serpentine. I pointed out the sign stating this fact.

He said. I'm not fishing Jan, I'm pretending to fish.

Have you caught anything I asked.

Only an old shoe and the attention of a crazy old woman who said if I catch a tuna she has the maionnaise...

What bait are you using?

Approachability.

Mountains, views and dogs.

Babs calls from Mountain view, California.

And I think is that a view of a mountain or a view from a mountain and Babs says that the sky is as high as an elephants eye.

And I say you are lying Babs

And she says I know, I heard it in a movie. And eveyone knows that the movies lie.

I left that sleeping dog to do the lying.

Horse shit. Bull shit. Holy shit.

She said I suppose you are going to use this as material for a poem or a story or something.

I said no. Personal experience is like horse shit; it needs to stand around for a year or two before you dig it into the garden. Otherwise it is too caustic to do anything other than kill everything.

So you won't be writing about me.

Oh yes! I'll be writing about you, but only the stuff I make up.

Prairie omelettes, hangovers and male bonding.

Rusty came round tonight. I thought he'd want to skirt the nurse but no.

He said, as he eyed my larder, she may be a nurse Jan but the only thing she is nursing right now is a hangover. He went on to say: Women teach us a lot of things Jan but all she done teach me is that I'm way out of my depth, and she aint teaching me to swim.

He found eggs, strawberries, black pepper and cream.

Heck, if we aint got a prairie omelette. He said.

What is in a prairie omelette I asked.

Whatever you got left in the chuck wagon at the end of a drive. He said.

Do you know, a strawberry and black pepper sweet omelette with cream is quite extraordinarily delicious.

Hey Rusty I said as we licked our fingers, let's go rent Brokeback Mountain.

Aw shucks. Said Rusty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypRTiSq4qas&feature=related

Tristans wall

Coincidences in nature, guns and tulips.

A mat of ivy roots pulled from a wall and a robin that watched. Is it not interesting the colours in the two images.It is as if the robin is camouflaged for stealth flying between the ivy roots and the wall. The ivy roots do not sing as well as the robin. Not even as well as Tiny Tim. And he's dead, pushing up the tulips rather than tiptoeing through them.

rusty came along shortly after the photo was taken and shot the thing with a Colt 48.

I said Rusty you can't do that and he said Jan, the constitution says I can do what I damn well please with my gun.

I said GULP.

Show business.

Things may be quiet for a day or two.

Tristan has a 'gig' (nasty word) coming up and requires my help for read throughs and rehearsals.

He is reading 3 poems with films made for the event at the Tabernacle, Powis Square on October 10th. Ditto TV are putting on the show... Probably best to be there. Just in case.

Babs says she will attend.

Swine flu. Pigs flying. what's the difference?

Shoe Trees

There appear to be many 'shoe trees' on the planet.

I am told that the first occurrance of the phenomenom was in the Herault region of France. I suspect that I might have been guilty of starting the trend when losing shoes from bridges.

Ballerinas make unsuitable muses and trees rot.

Years ago, after I had known her a few weeks we walked on the heath.

I foolishly agreed to carve the words SHE and I and FOREVER on a tree.

I already had my doubts about her suitability as a muse, so spent the day searching out the tree nearest death. Just in case. I found and chose an old horse chestnut, it's leaves blighted and yellowing.

I carved 'she and I forever' on its elephant bark.

I returned to the tree alone this autumn and found the tree fallen and decaying. My carving obliterated by rot.

The muse gone

The muse has gone back to her garden
she has put on her don't mess with me boots
She has put away her fuck me shoes
The muse has gone back to her roots

Shoe

Cerebral grafitti

Tagging a train of thought.

Jim Carroll

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/fashion/27Cover.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpw

Polanski, Orson Welles and cheese

So the Swiss have seen fit to arrest Roman Polanski on a 31 year old US warrant.

Would they be the same Swiss who have been protecting, and profiting from, Nazi war criminals as well as genocidal dictators for decades?

Orson gave me a swiss cuckoo clock when I helped him get over his vertigo for the big wheel scene in the Third Man. That bloody clock broke after three weeks.

Swiss cheese is tasteless drab and a waste of space.

Sums up the Swiss in general...

Bed bound with Ginsberg.

I am bed-bound.


My back, already twingeing for days, finally seized up in the night; it is too painful to move, or to cough, or to roll into another position.

Fortunately I have, beside the bed a bottle of Perrier water and a Kilo of dates. Unfortunately I have, beside the bed Allen Ginsberg's journals(1954-1958).

It is a perfect autumn day and the bed is perfectly still and I have all the time in the world to think of times past when the same bed would rock with laughter, with joy. Or would rock like a schooner at anchor in a long easy swell.

I have no muse here to nurse me or nurse here to bemuse me.

The perfect occasion to write an Haiku on stillness and calm.

I cannot reach pen and paper.

Under the westway carnival monday

Portobello Road...

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh417o3OGfe38cdXt0d4PoLus4BvYYGKUt1q91BZIT-qzUUGiD3sp6pfuJYoPC7TLP02BQ6NHF2sPgE22Ojbib1Yu5U3ezPkRAaOncvi7KUeE-Hz4OaNwu54rO7QwVXNTXvD9m4u7SvHc8/s1600-h/Picture+2.png

Lost shoes, Heads and penny loafers.

'Heads' writes:
Two shoes lost in the Herault, surely a pair!

Funnily enough one was a blue espadrille bought on impulse but much too large, the other a penny loafer, well polished, that I stole from a ships captain for the penny. In fact I didn'y lose the shoe, I threw it off the bridge to hide the evidence.

I gave the penny to a beggar with a bloodied and bandaged child... She had borrowed the child from an agency that specialised in that kind of thing.

She put the penny towards buying a shoe from her one legged husband.

I should have just given her the shoe.

I didn't Know.

Stalked

I am being stalked by the coolhunter
How cool is that

She is good
she frightens death
and chills out hell

She can stalk in high summer
without working up a sweat
she can stalk on the ice pack
invisibly
while casually clubbing seal cubs

She can stalk you at truck stops
at Soho house
she is just too cool to be noticed.

Except by Phil Spector

And she dealt with him.

Bridges I have lost shoes from. No.4

Angling

The muse has gone
Leaving me nothing but a tin opener
And a can of worms.

Opening the can
I take up the fattest, juiciest .
Snag it on my gaudy hook.

Trawl it.

Trawl it through the bars
Trawl it through the clubs
Trawl it through the pubs
Of Notting Hill
Trot it down Portobello road
Tesco disco
The Globe
Finches
Electric
Ravenous
Mau Mau
The Star
The Gold

Patiently angling for the muse.
　

Smoothie for a lost weekend.and its side effects.

Rusty came round for a beer. We skirted the subject of nurse.

With nothing else in common we got to talking about food. Rusty mentioned the smoothie for a lost weekend.
I asked about that.
He replied that it contained 15 kinds of fruit, a pint of yogurt, a pint of milk, some honey as well as concentrated multivitamin powder. It makes about half a gallon; difficult to get down but once you got it inside it was your 'five a day' for three days.
Enough time to get lost.
Lost in what? I said.
Oh heck anything; Fishing for that fabled carp, learning tap dancing, a sexual binge or even getting drunk in bars.

And what do you do during the lost weekend. I asked.

I stay pretty close to the lavatory. He said.

Rusty, I said, Rusty I am too old for exciting bowel movements.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/30887/yogurt_smoothie_recipe.html

Clogs, Ronnie Hilton and Michaelangelo

I have been thinking about the phenomenon known as the CLOG (cult blog).

Who decides 'cult status'? Is there a points system?

Wanting attention is different from having something to say: Wanting attention is a streaker at a football game, Having something to say is Michaelangelo's David. That to me sums it up.

A clog is also a wooden shoe used solely (forgive the pun) for dancing on cobblestones to 'Old Amsterdam'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fg7w49UnGA

Bukowski and the American nightmare

I met 'Chuck' bukowski back in the sixties; I had the apartment above his for a while and would occasionally have to go down to tell him too keep the noise down...
boy could those american women kick up a fuss,

I asked him one night if I should read his work. he said NO. You would be better off spending your time drinking and fornicating.

Having now read his work I can honestly say he was right!

He had a couple of good poems and a good short story in him (in that little space not filled with booze) but that is about all. He suffered from the malaise of most mid 20th century Americanliterature, especially the 'beats'.

Washington State

Did you know that Washington State is known as the evergreen state.

It is named after a Barbara Streisand song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmuF3jiufww

You don't get cheesier than that.

Osmosis between blogs.

I find that this directly references one of my early blogs; 'Milking a goat in a thunderstorm'. I think Tristan might be nicking my material. But hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Is'nt it?
It is from:http://tristanssecretsofmagic.blogspot.com/

Why the middle child?

When I was a child we had a goat
The goat was called Pumkin
We had a goat called Pumkin because my sister had ecsema
And couldn’t have dairy products
One of my jobs was to milk that goat
So my sister could have goats milk
And avoid dairy products
And avoid the humiliation of the betnavate
She is cursed by the memory of betnavate
A storm tormented Shropshire that summer
Lashed about Pumkin’s shed
Thunder boomed, like Nabokov’s dinner gong, bronzily
Lightning lit up my fear
As I attempted to milk that damn goat
How I shudder still at the memory of those distended teats
How Pumkin shuddered with fear and with loathing
At my amateurish tugging of her dugs.
The milk squirting into the timid pail
And I thought why the middle boy
Why me
Surely we could just plug my sister onto those teats
And let her suckle like Remus and Romulus like
And I imagine the unknown and unfabled
Older brother of those Italian twins
Who bravely milked the she wolves in their lairs
To feed his baby siblings from a bottle fashioned from bull horn and pigs bladder
And who vanished one night
The night that the twins were weaned from milk to meat
And tasted their first morsel of human flesh.
Flesh tenderized by lupine jaws in a darkly mountainside cave.
Lit occasionally by a flash of lightening and called to dinner
By Nabokov’s dinner gong.
　
　

the times when we, as a nation are at the greatest peace with ourselves is at times of war.

In the land of the learned the autodidact is king.

Listening to paint dry.

I met her at a party. she asked me if I was the hosts brother.

I laughed and said no! I'm his father.

She said you dont look old enough

I told her that I had impregnated his mother when I was 15 years old.

She looked concerned.

I said it's all right, we get on well and he gives me a cupboard to sleep in upstairs and feeds me scraps from the kitchen.

she looked concerned.

I told her it was alright. I was lying.

She said why do you lie.

I said it is what I do for a living. I am a poet.

she then held my hands and quoted strindberg in swedish.

I have had more fun listening to paint dry.

Paragliding between peaks.

He came over for a beer this evening, he was depressed and listless; post event blues he called it.

I said why do you do it.

he said it is not a matter of choice any more. I have to do it. but each time it gets easier.

How is that I asked.

He said: Each event is like a hill. at first a small hill, steep but not very high. you climb to the top and it is a struggle. you spend a couple of hours at the top of that hill and then fall, tumbling down the other side. Landing with a bump. you look behind you and all you see is the wall you have fallen down, you look ahead and all you see is an endless plain but there is no option other than to start walking.

eventually after a few days you see in the distance a purple haze which in time makes itself known as another hill; larger this time and more challenging but your pace quickens and you relish the challenge of climbing it.

But again, after a couple of hours on the peak you fall to the plain on the other side and the long trudge repeats itself.

After a number of ascents and falls you learn to take a paraglider with you and instead of falling to the plain below after an ascent you glide towards the next peak landing closer and closer with each flight. Eventually you soar from peak to peak making good use of the thermals that rise from the plain below.

As long as you refrain from soaring, Icarus like, too close to the sun you can maintain this momentum... A series of ecstatic flights between heights, your ears filled with your own whoops of joy.

Nothing gets better than that.

An imaginary overheard conversation

"She never uses my name. I will phone her and she will never use my name. she will call me darling or sweetheart or love but never my name. it is as if she cnnot be bothered to use my name or she has forgotten my name."

"Thank god we have never spent a Christmas together; imagine the horror of recieving a gift with a tag that says: whatshisname or the bloke I live with. Imagine your lover ringing your friends to ask the name of the man she sleeps with. Imagine her phoning your mum to ask her the name of her son.

I would love her to use my name just once.

but she won't

She hasn't forgotten it... She just didn't learn it in the first place."

The reason perhaps for shoes lost from bridges.

http://tristanssecretsofmagic.blogspot.com/

the lonliness of the long distance blogger.

In blogging regularly one creates a rod for ones own back. one becomes a slave to the blog.

It is a lonely, thankless task (occasionally brightened by the odd comment from a reader).

However it is encouraging to note that this is read in far flung corners of the planet and that people return to it regularly.
Feel free to comment or even email.

The most difficult question

This morning at 8.27 my telephone rang, waking me. I could not get to it in time. I missed the call. I did not recognise the number.

At 10.00 I redialed the number and before I had time to speak a childs voice said: "Daddy". That was all, nothing more, just "Daddy".

I was thrown into confusion, I was thrown back in time. My mind filled with the image of a four year old child, walking through a meadow high above the river Dart. A four year old child who asked: "Are you my daddy?" The easiest question to answer but hardest question to be asked.

This morning all I could say to that child was "I'm sorry".

"I'm not your daddy. I'm sorry."

Essential listening

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00mj7nc

Don Letts on Notting Hill/Ladbroke Grove. check it out.

Ditto TV

Nelson has eaten barbie

Bridges I have lost shoes from. No.3

I slid into the party like a well oiled houseboy