
At 12.40, Timotchka erupted into the world, beginning the extra-uterine part of his life on Earth. Hail to the new-borns of this world! May them all be happy!

This is how it all begun, during the ritual reading of "Weekend FT" ... A scholar protests, attacking a point made previously by Chris Patten, also in the Financial Times, after a visit to Fez, that reading Paul Bowles is relevant for understanding contemporary terrorism..
The "Orientalist"-like exotic otherness of the souk in Fez..
That took me to re-reading Bowles's "The Spider's House"...
... and from there to re-visit Edward Said's texts on Orientalism and on the evident flaw of speaking about "West" and "Islam" as almost absolute categories.
Ludwig Deutsch's masterpiece of Orientalist painting...
... and I went back to Said's critics too and to some historical background research on the Independence struggle days against French colonial rule, in Algeria and Morocco ..
French Army against FNLA in the peculiar esthetics of comics books...
... besides, I wanted also to confirm from where Bowles was getting his insights for the Arab character in his novel (and that took me again to the Tangier chronicles).
Literary Renegades? They're mainstream now...
I took some notes and I got some photos about the books I handled during this particular quest. Everything is now ready for a blogtext. But the more I think about it, what each one of us has to say about "Islam" and the "West" is perhaps the most crucial statement of principles one is asked to do in this day and age. I lived near two active "fronts" of the confrontation, the Russian /Chechen and the Israel/Palestine ones. After what I witnessed, what I discussed and what I read, I do have a point of view. But a near-frivolous blogtext won't do. More time is needed. I suspect this post will remain a work in progress..
Will the Fez boy of Bowles's novel become a terrorist?
Herr Ingenier's son, Hadrianus, was visiting, having flown from Heathrow Terminal 2 to daunting Barajas Terminal 4, and Malinka and I found ourselves having lunch by the pool. A small gathering, with passport-holders of different frontcover colours.
Replace Mowgli image for that of 62-years old Keith ("Keef") Richards and you'll get the picture
Thanks to the HasselbaldPortraitist, this blogger of yours, together with his highly ballooned Malinka (38 weeks) had the occasion to peep into the mores of a peculiar Madrileña tribe, the Swinging Ibizians. With already close to perfect suntan, sexy good-looks and blasé smiles, many friends of Carlos Martorell had come to the book launch of his novel whose title one could translate as "Caged Memory" (an elegant and successful metaphor for the ravages of Alzheymer).
There was in the sobering comments of the writer about drug consumption in his heyday a "the-party-is-over" mood. Psychedelic summers in Ibiza, when the Stones (or at least Mick J.) were in town are now glorified memories, and the present there is treated with a slightly conservative and grumpy tone. In fact, what one cannot excuse is the Youth one can no longer claim. Harsh comment? Deserved one, I think, when there's a call for moderation directed to their children's generation which I find a bit patronizing, really... Something like "Do what I'm telling you now, Don't do what we have (eagerly) done when we were your age"... Survivors Syndrome, I know, I know.. but what moral legitimacy has a once upon a time happy consumer of chemical excesses to warn the current bright young things against going for it?
No surprise then that the favourite theme of gossip around the room was Keith Richards 's fall from a coconut tree. What on Earth was he doing on top of that tree? A matter of young enough to rock, young enough to coconut picking? There.. There you do have a true guru for the ex-60's flower people... No apologizing for bad behaviour, no Sir ... Sex and drugs and rock&roll.. You just keep on climbing those wretched trees.. Sometimes you fall down and you loose face... So what? ... Rock on..
Some articles on the British media were delightfully bitchy, like this one in "The Independent" : "Once admitted treating his body as a "human chemical laboratory", the veteran rocker Keith Richards has grown accustomed to the occasional unscheduled hospital visit. But in the latest scrape, spectacular even by his standards, he needed a brain scan after falling out of a coconut tree. "Keef", as the Rolling Stone guitarist is lovingly known, was holidaying at the luxurious Club Resort on Wakaya, Fiji, when he and fellow Stone Ronnie Wood decided to explore the same tree. The consequences were spectacular. Half-way up Richards - reformed heroin addict and one-time hellraiser - slipped and fell to the ground, severely banging his head in the process.The concussed musician, who will need no reminding that his band's hits have included "Tumbling Dice" and "Fool to Cry"...
Rephrasing the old adage one might be too young to die but never too old to rock roll...
Carlos Martorell at the Madrid launching of his latest novel
Once I finish “La Memoria Enjaulada” I'll return to "Blue Eyed Charlie", as Carlos Martorell was known at the prime of his Ibiza days (which he has written about in his very cleverly titled first novel, "Requiem for Peter Pan" ) .
Almost perfect facial bone-structure...
Friday evening we all end up in the “Blue Bar”, a trendy spot where one can spend the “transición”, the difficult and ambiguous period between dinner-time and club-land. (The Right Honourable Reader has not failed to notice the irony of using the same term that in this country represents the transitional period between Franco’s regime and no-strings-attached-Democracy. Let us carry ourselves away at this splendid metaphor. Is the formality of a dinner, stiffed guests around a table, something resembling the conservative and authoritarian Franquista Spain? Is Western-style consumer-friendly Democracy a kind of everything-goes-night at an hip-hop & druggy stuff club? “La Transición” was then indeed something in between, similar to an informal but still subdued atmosphere of a post-dinner bar? End of metaphor).
The “Blue Bar” is where the thirtysomethings belonging to A+ and A sociological strata of Madrid happened to have installed their tent for the time being. For the nomadic life of the Golden “Treintañeros” today’s trendy spot where all caravans converge is just tomorrow’s abandoned outpost. How can this blogger of yours affirm the Caravanserai status for this particular bar? Easy, pizzy.. It passed the Duchess’s Son Test. If that particular Grande of Spain is there (hélas!.. as much treintañero as this blogger of yours..) the place can legitimately claim the “fashionable” label.
I had just asked a whisky from a safe brand (meaning that the risk of next morning’s hangover due to creative beverage manufacturing is relatively low). In a side wall, the glowing square of a TV plasma screen where one was unexpectedly met by the exquisite bone-structure of Ms Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s". Starting enjoying my drink, I remember that Audrey dear was at some point in her life a Goodwill Ambassador, on behalf of UNESCO, I think. A good example, I decide, of that peculiar hybrid of personal chic and non-governmental duties. In fact, I mumble to myself, my dinner companions are AudreyHepburns themselves. After the second gulp of iced and soda-ed Irish whiskey I make up my mind to blog about it.
Who was there at that pleasant off-Velazquez dinner who could be resolutely described as an YLONGO (Young Lady Of Non-Governmental Organization)? For reasons of sex,... sorry, of gender (one cannot be too sexually correct in these current times), I’ll have to exclude Brusskholm, the giant Viking with indeed some features of a PHD in Engineering. I’ll have to exclude MediumAndRare too. He manages “Marie-Henry Beyle”, a nice red and black restaurant, the one in fact where I proposed to Malinka. Off the list dear old Phyl too, the young architect working at the new wing of Prado Museum thanks to whom I got close to an original but perfect plan to rob “Las Meninas” through a hole on the floor. The fourth male guest whose perfect English also betrayed some non-Spaniard DNA was not into charity work, as far as I can remember. Let us consider now the female attendants to that outdoors warmnightish dinner of spleen. What about the Hostess, BlondeLou? Of course! She has almost completed her own self-process of audreyhepburnization. She still works for Government, although in those border-areas involved in aid to development and sustained cooperation where one never knows who is NGO and who’s GNGO (Governmental “Non-Governmental Organization”). She has the chic, the charm, the fashion sense of a very suitable marriage prospect plus the humanitarian instincts, the curiosity towards other cultures and the feminist drive that constitutes the proper mix of a good Audreyhepburnesque activist. What about BeatrixPotter? A financial adviser interested in expanding her clients’ fortunes cannot, by definition, enrol as charity worker... Or could she? An expert fund-raiser perhaps? Malinka, I also see as too tough to be an YLONGO. More likely to defend the cause of a polluting plant generating substantial employment than defending a environmentally-correct scheme with few jobs down the line. And that brings me to AlighieriMuse, the 100% YLONGO present at the dinner. Effortless elegance and MotherTeresian willingness to do good… perfect diction of difficult African family names… missionary humbleness with here and there sparks of toff frivolity.
We had, AlighieriMuse and me, a serious debate about this all-expanding business of NGO activity. Large morsels of Governmental responsibilities are now out-sourced to charities (.. and why do you think Hamas and other Islamists win elections?..) or to NGOs. The old proverb about teaching an aborigene how to fish rather than granting him a fish comes to everybody’s minds. We cannot ignore tragic primary needs though. And so YLONGOS will have a bright future for many years to come.. But still.. How many of them aren’t secretly dreaming of breakfasting at Tiffany’s?
Nureyev took me once more to Las Ventas, for one of the bullfights of the 30-days-30 long Feria de San Isidro. His generosity with his season tickets is legendary and one of the few possibilities for this blogger of yours to indulge in his under-cover facet as aficionado. The Right Honourable Reader has to bear in mind that it's more difficult to get a ticket to the neo-Moorish bullfight arena of Madrid when, say, El Juli is performing than to acquire an entry to Central Court in Wimbledon when Federer is trashing some poor guy.
Last Sunday everyone in Las Ventas did what is expected of them in a day of Corrida. The general public was eager to have convincing Toros and the experts of " Sector 7" were as ruthless as usual (starting a pateada just as a dissuasive strike to prevent the oreja that seemed quite probable was a particularly nasty trick). The amphitheatre officers, in red scarves that one can see in Pamplona or in a Pioneers demonstration in Red Square, engaged in histrionics to prevent people from abandoning the corrida during the last animal's turn before its death is certain. The weather helped too. Hot as an Andalusian field, without any of the irritating showers or grey ski that are as regular features in San Isidro as near-tropical rainstorms are in the lawns of Wimbledon. The bulls themselves conformed to current expectations about their bravery, meaning that if one in six is brave enough everybody feels quite happy, thank you. The picadores were booed, but that's part of the script too. The matadores tried their best, and sometimes that best is very close to boredom. But sometimes, o sometimes!, dear Right Hounorable Reader, their best is very close to an almost mystical epiphany.
Last week a bullfighter from Madrid, César Jiménez, was determined to be triumphant in San Isidro and he did managed it. He really went for it. Very close to a fatal accident, which would have happened if the horn of the bull that near-touched his body during the choreography had just deviated a few more inches.
Afterwards Jimenez justified in an interview his temerity: " Teñia que hacerlo, uno viene a Madrid dispuesto a todo y si la gente no ve que estas dispuesto a morir esto no téndria sentido". (I had to do it, one comes to Madrid ready for everything.. and if people there do not see that you're ready to die all this would make no sense).
Risking life for ephemeral Glory - Hemingwayesque stuff indeed...
Forget Pasternak's "Dr. Jivago", either the book itself or the film and TV adaptations (this week NTV (Moscow) is finally broadcasting a Russian version with Oleg Menshikov).. forget Bulgakov's "The White Guard" (book, play, film or TV series).. forget even "Corto Maltese en Sibérie" !(comics book or animation film).. If the Right Honourable Reader wants one forceful insight about Reds against Whites in the Civil War just after 1917 He has only to look for a copy of this unbelievably powerful fim. Miklos Jancso, an Hungarian film-maker with a classic Soviet schooling, gave us the most credible depiction of military logic and of the heroic absurdity of war this blogger of yours has ever seen .
And some of the images are just to die for:
... like the ball-dressed nurses in the forest of "biriosi"..
...or the cossack uniforms in a abandoned monastery...
... or the Bolchevik light brigade charge ...
"Woman and Boy looking at a Book" by foremost American photographer Gertrude Kasebier
Malinka now and then confesses herself lacking in stamina to find the ideal next book to read and asks for my help. Her usual technique is to shout from the library-corridor the name of an interesting looking book. I answer back with carefully chosen two-syllables expressions like "Hmm-Noops!", "Hmmm..Good", "Forgerit", "Tooboring" and "Didnlykit". A couple of weeks ago she shouts "What about The Go Between"?. "Nothing is ever a lady's fault " - I reply. "What?" "Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" - I insist. She emerges in my room with the paperback in her hands. "I guess it's worth reading, then..". I tell her that the book, by L.P. (Leslie Poles!) Hartley was turned into one of my all-time favourite films.. The colours of long English Summer afternoons.. A simple but unforgettable theme music one tried to play on the out-of-tune piano.. And there were big names involved too.. Joseph Losey,the Cannes-laureate Director... Harold Pinter the Nobel-laureate author of the screen-adaptation... And Julie Christie of course. Julie Christie, to die for, in the main role. "Who is Julie Christie?" - asks Malinka. Who is Julie Christie??? Who was the main votive figure of all my generation's adolescent wet-dreams?.. I try to explain that she was even better that Virginia McKenna or Michelle Pfeiffer or Jacqueline Bisset or Charlotte Rampling, although part of that category of out-of-this-world passion-inspiring beauties when in full cinematic lighting and make-up. She had never heard about her . I tell then to my too young "The Go-Between" prospective reader that I will order the film first thing in the morning, so that she can understand what my awe is all about.
Surprise! There is no DVD edition of the film! Fortunately, when I'm about to resign myself to ressuscitate my VHS video player I spot, among the amazon.co.uk order list, a reference to a second-hand DVD in a cardboard pocket. A vivid e-mail correspondence then follows with a pleasant auctioneer which has for sale a free bonus to a Daily Telegraph week-end edition many years ago . Gerald wants to make sure I understand that it's a freebie and that it's not a video, which is the only format released so far by the producers of the film. I thank him for his gallant concern but I was indeed eager to get a DVD, either bootlegged, downloaded or newspaper bonus, I didn't care.
So I waited for Malinka to finish the book and then.. zzzzwaap! Like a white columbine or a a flower bouquet in the palm of a magician, my DVD cardboard envelope appears in my hand out of nowhere. We proceed to spend a nice couple of hours around the film and our own experiences of Summer manors with posh English accented-aborigines .
Now it's maybe the right time to humbly confess that although I had acquired the book with the firm intention to read it - having loved the glorious film - I had not in fact did it so far. I am now engaged in countering that shameful hole in my reading armour. Having already almost finished that task, I'm most pleased to announce to the Right Honourable Reader that, as it happens time and time again, the novel is immensely more rich than an already enormously satisfactory screen-adaptation.
So, let me act as a Go-Between myself, carrying this time a message from the author to the Right Honourable Reader: please be curious about the most "different" and exotic of all places, the most foreign country of them all - your own Past.
What we don’t have is a burned-out finale (like Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones or Jim Morrison). He does not OD but has, instead, a rather “silent majority” moralistic end. In his death-bed he turns from atheist into a Catholic, his wife and kids are all around him and he does repent and apologize for his sinful life.. That somewhat surprising decision rises an interesting point: if the impairment of judgement that can be ascribed to a tertiary syphilis brain coupled with all the pathological effects of chronic alcoholism is invoked to justify (that is, attempt at nullify) his bad behaviour, shouldn’t one doubt the mental sanity of his last minute conversion, too?
In any case, it might be interesting to remember that the alter ego of Rochester in Etherege’s play, I mean Dorimant, is not himself a thoroughly radical Don Juan figure. He does not have to face the Commendatore and end up in Hell ( soundtrack by Wolgan Amadeus M.) after repeatedly refusing to repent. Besides, Dorimant and Rochester proper also do not quite carry their utterly ruthless delight in controlling others to the sadistic heights of Valmont or the Marquise de Merteuil. We have here in fact a hybrid. The “rake reformed” pattern plus a “D.Juan”-like biopic. ( For Portuguese consumers only: there is an pious highly-moral equivalent to this hybrid pattern in the figure of Jose Maria Barbosa du Bocage, a XVIII century poet, who also begun as a libertine, a sceptical and a pornographer and ended up conformed and comforted with the Church’s last ointments).
What must surely be stressed in the end is the brilliant quality of Rochester’s writings and the scintillating English of the Restoration play-writers ( Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Thomas Otway, the Howards and a few others). Full justice to the supreme wit of their dialogue was done by Stepphen Jeffreys in his modern play (and script). His is a tour de force of bringing to our attention the exceptional life and times of John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester.
The poster of a double-bill evening at the Royal Court Theatre, circa 1995
As promised, I will try to share with the Right Honourable Reader the logbook of my recent trip into the universe of "The Libertine". What immediately came to my attention when I first got acquainted with my Lord Rochester was the fortunate conjunction of so many kudos or brownies points in my personal table board. Let's check. Relevant historical period (Restoration), importance of Theatre as the art-form of his Times and a rather first class personification of the myth of Don Juan. Bingo!
Let's take on History first. I hope I've made clear for some time now that I believe in a kind of 'quantic' or darwinian evolutionary History whereby more important than a slow chronological flux are some crucial "nodules", historical short periods who have critical mass of data, revolutionary energy and political "pathos" (either drama or tragic-comedy) enough to carry us, - in a quantum-like leap - into new times. The "nodule" Restoration is a very interesting one indeed. When the exiled son of the decapitated king returns to Britain in 1660, as Charles II, an intense and exhilarating unstable chunk of history ensues. For a brief period, not one single ideology, or political movement, or institution of statecraft, or religion apparatus was strong enough in itself to impose its viewpoint or its solutions. People were fed up with the Puritanical party-pooper's zeal of Cromwellian times and welcomed, at least in London, the soft debauche of the restaured monarchy. And the art form which provided the aptest expression of that age was Restoration drama. Theatre as the key to revisit the inner loins of that period ! (as Cinema is doing for these days and ages) To make it a little more appealing to our patriotic eyes we even have a certain Catherine, a Portuguese Queen, kind but moustachoed, sweet and accommodating but ugly as the Sin. Too crude? My apologies. Allow me to proceed.
In each "nodule" there are illuminating biographical case-studies. Among these particular revealing biographies, as code-breakers to certain periods of history, I've always had a fascination for rebellious gentlemen who incurred many risks in order to protect their individual freedoms and beliefs, and who, to top it all, have left beautifully written accounts of their individual struggle. ( Casanova name immediately comes to one's mind whereas the most evident cases in the A-league of English Literature, the only writers that had lived their art to the same degree as Rochester, are Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde)
As for libertine mores, it will not come as a surprise to the Right Honourable Reader if this blogger of yours confesses a certain obsession with the Don Juan myth. Allow me to quote here Prof John Barnard, who edited the play (Etherege's "The Man of Mode") where the main character (Dorimant) is none other but a thinly disguised Lord Rochester :
"Don Juan, the seventeenth-century creation who stands as a naturalist and rationalist antagonist to précieux idealizing of Courtley Love. (Just as Machiavelli's semi-mythic status reflects the emotional and intellectual crisis consequent upon the discovery of Realpolitik in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Faustus testifies to the scientific assault on the boundaries of God-given knowledge, Don Juan is a response to related crisis in sexual attitudes). (...) Dorimant is allied to Don Juan and hence to the libertine and skeptical strain in seventeen-century culture, whose most obvious contemporary exemplar was Lord Rochester".
Not everybody's cup of tea? Open to easy attempts at character assassination like this one from Samuel Johnson:
"in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, Lord Rochester lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness".
Jacob Huysmans's famous painting at National Portrait Gallery, London
depicting Rochester with a monkey
Is this then what made the figure of John Wilmot so appealing to generate one contemporary play (the already mentioned "The Man of Mode" from his good friend George Etherege, later knighted); inumerous entries in contemporary memorial efforts, including in Pepys' diaries; an extensive list of biographers (from the seventeen-century onwards with metronomical regularity, including, in 1974, from Graham Greene himself - "Lord Rochester's Monkey"; and, as the more recent pinnacle, a modern play, by Stephen Jeffreys ("The Libertine" )http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/jeffreys.html. It was that play which turned into a movie script gave us Johny Depp excelling in the powerful lines of the Prologue:
"Allow me to be frank at the commencement. You will not like me. No, I say you will not. (...) But later when you shag - and you will shag, I shall expect it of you and I will know if you have let me down . I wish you to shag with my homuncular image rattling in your gonads. Feel how it was for me, how it is for me and ponder: Was that shudder the same shudder he sensed? Did he knew something more profound? Or is there some wall of wretchedness that we alll batter with our heads at that shining livelong moment! That is it. That is my prologue, nothing in rhyme, certainly no protestations of modesty, you were not expecting that I trust. I reiterate only for those who have arrived late or were buying oranges or were simply not listening: I am John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester and I do not want you to like me."
But we do, my Lord, we do..
(to be continued)
Could this be the artistic end-result of a male painter?
The opening of the Exhibition of this blogger of yours' friend Ms Matte Gonzalez was attended by a disproportionate number of female Art-lovers.. That prompted a self-indulgent exchange of soundbites while sipping outdoors, in the calle, the red Rioja in the sadly obligatory plastic cups. Is the late afternoon vernissage circuit a thing for women, to add to the ladies-who-lunch concept? Is this the female equivalent of the happy hour in the local Financial District wine-bar?
Will painters adapt to market research results showing (like it did happen with car-makers) that in a couple the woman will be more and more the initiator of the buying process? What if there will be a special catering for "feminine" tastes in Art (whatever it might be?). After the third green olive and half a dozen cubes of tasty hard cheese someone asks if one can really talk about Feminine Art? (A bit like feminine erotic "good-taste" fiction versus phalocratic XY chauvinistic porcine pornography...). Is Georgia O'Keefe vulva-shaped botanics a precursor of that trend? Is Matte Gonzalez orchideacea-inspired forms something in the same direction?
We all know that when first suggested in regard to books this idea was deemed ridicule. Now, go to any Waterstone's or Barnes & Noble and you'll find gender and sexual-orientation-related bookshelves.. Feminist Literature... Gay & Lesbian Books (on the process of replicating into autonomous areas) ...
So will we have a Feminine Art Gallery by excellence, like a Ms. Peggy Guggenheim's sponsored museum on the Gran Canale, distinct from a mainly male hard expressionism Art Collection? Or, even, following the fashion of third-sex-friendly rooms in book-shops, will we have special areas in National Portrait Centers dedicated to Caravaggio and Hockney more explicit oeuvres?
All of the above is, of course, the kind of tongue-in-cheek gibberish toss one expects in the blog space.. Nothing serious enough to detract viewers curious with these blog- photos of Matte's more recent work from coming to Calle San Pedro,11 and see for themselves...
The most interesting work on show according to this blogger of yours...