Thursday, June 28, 2012
The
Green Fairy Beckons
I’m off to
Paris tomorrow to an international meeting that will include preparations for
the forthcoming international anarchist gathering at St Imier in August.
However Friday will be “free” and I am determined to go to La Fée Verte, an absinthe bar on the Rue de la Roquette on the
north side of the Seine. Pot-bellied absinthe fountains squat on the counter,
and they are filled with iced water, with their miniature taps hanging down
like multiple genitalia or nourishing teats. A dozen brands of the mild green
fairy liquid are on offer and of course I intend to exercise due moderation.
After all, as the immortal Oscar was to note, with due knowledge of the subject,”
After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish
they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see
things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I
mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But
you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had
never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or
you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men
mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was
singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the
sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and
made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non,
monsieur, il n’y a rien.”
If you cannot go to
Paris and live in London, go to the French House pub in Soho and take the
stairs to the first floor. There you will see a magnificent absinthe fountain
on display. The owner of the French House, the Belgian Victor Berlemont, had
large supplies of absinthe which lasted for many years and the bohemians of
Soho were grateful to him for this.
Labels: Absinthe, Green Fairy
I have a fondness for the books of Patagonian-born
Englishman W.H. Hudson, writer and ornithologist. Nature In Downland is an
evocation of the Sussex Downs, my “heimat” as it were, whilst his remembrances
of Patagonia in Far Away and Long Ago and in Idle Days in Patagonia still bear
reading. And of course there is his most celebrated work, Green Mansions, “a
romance of the tropical forest”.
Perhaps less well known is that one of the leading characters of
Green Mansions, the young woman Rima, can be discovered inhabiting the
wilderness of....Hyde Park.
Whilst I might have a fondness for Hudson, the same cannot be
said for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose best work was The Rock Drill and
whose opus, in my opinion,then went into rapid decline with heavy and uninspired
work. He certainly appears to have been an anarchist in his younger years, though
he was very cagey about this in later years. He did admit to attending meetings
addressed by Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, knowing anarchists like Victor Dave
and Hutchins Hapgood, and dressing for a time like a “traditional anarchist”,
whatever that means! Anyway when Hudson died in 1922, there was a proposal to
set up a bird sanctuary near the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Epstein was commissioned
to create a statue of the “forest spirit” Rima, whilst the surround fell to
Lionel Pearson and the actual architectural block to Muirhead Bone. Rima looks
more like an Egyptian princess than a Latin American forest dweller. She sports
long hair flying out behind her, with a large eagle to her left and a smaller
bird to her right.
In
front of the structure is a small and stagnant pool, ringed by a lawn and a low
fence. Weather and lichen have left their ravages on the monument.
Whatever
one’s opinions of the quality of the work, it certainly did not deserve the
philistine campaign, so often seen in Britain which it then underwent (witness
a later and similar campaign against Rachel Whiteread’s work in East London).
Horror was expressed at Rima’s nudity, That wonderful paper The Daily Mail
described it as The Hyde Park Atrocity and that it should be taken away and
there was a wave of press agitation from May to December 1925, with the slab
being painted green in November. Blackshirts seem to have been involved in
attacks on the figure, with a tarring and feathering in on two occasions in
following years, and an attack on it with chemicals in 1935. It cannot be ignored that figuring in this
attack, with its accusations of “Bolshevik art”, was an unhealthy dose of anti-semitim,
as Epstein was a Polish-Russian Jew from America.
Now
the monument lies in an unfrequented part of the Park near the Serpentine
Bridge. If the fortunes of Epstein seem to have been rejuvenated with a recent
exhibitionof Vorticism, Hudson remains sadly neglected, with little recognition
for him as a premier writer on nature.
Thanks to http://parkroadstudio.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/finding-rima.html for the image
Labels: Hyde Park, Jacob Epstein, W.H. Hudson
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Blow My Skull
Off
During the
Australian goldrush of the 1850s, Melbourne gave birth to a number of what
could be called cocktails. The most savage of these was The Blow My Skull Off.
It consisted of the following: opium,
cayenne pepper, spirits of wine (which would be something like grappa or marc),
rum, and sugar to taste.
Here’s a
recipe for it, which oddly leaves out the opium and cayenne and substitutes
brandy for “spirits of wine”.
Blow my Skull Off
Two pints Boiling water
Quantum Sufficient loaf sugar
Lime or lemon juice
Pint of Ale or Porter
Pint of Rum
Half a Pint of Brandy
The English and Australian Cookery Book, 1864, Edward Abbott.
Two pints Boiling water
Quantum Sufficient loaf sugar
Lime or lemon juice
Pint of Ale or Porter
Pint of Rum
Half a Pint of Brandy
The English and Australian Cookery Book, 1864, Edward Abbott.
Another ingredient left out that appears to have been originally included
was cocculus indicus. This is the fruit of the Anamirta climbing plant, found
in South East Asia and India. The fruit contains the picrotoxin used to stun fish but also used by 19th
century brewers to impart “giddiness” to their beers. Charles Dickens fumed against those "brewers and
beer-sellers of low degree,... who do not understand the wholesome policy of
selling wholesome beverage." It was outlawed in England in the 1850s with
fines of £500 for its sale and £200 pounds for its use.
Landlord, a pint of your finest Blow My Skull Off!!!
A SLOW BLUES IN A MINOR KEY: AN ELEGY TO THE PAST GLORIES OF THE GOLDEN FISH BAR
Once you could sit in this wonderful place on a winter night with a plate of fish and chips and peas and a cup of tea with a slice and watch the traffic pass by through the steamed up windows. There was a feeling of melancholy and loss, a feeling that if it could be tasted would lie on the palate like a mixture of vinegar and honey. Now the magnificent interior has been gutted. The rosewood tables have gone and whilst the cafe remains with its new fittings it has lost its soul. It sits like a lobotomised patient, staring out blankly onto the Farringdon Road.
Labels: Chip shop, Clerkenwell, Farringdon, Golden Fish Bar
THE RIVER BIEVRE AND MAXIMILIEN LUCE
You can read my biography of the anarchist painter Maximilien Luce in the pages of Organise! and on www.libcom.org . Here's a painting by him of the tanneries on the River Bievre in Paris.
http://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/luce-maximilien/le_s_tanneries_bievre.html
Like its analogous counterpart the Fleet in London, the Bievre was turned into a foul flow of effluent and like the Fleet is is completely buried underground. like the Fleet, promises were made to uncover some stretches of it within the city, promises never kept because of course it was "too expensive". Sure plenty to spend on arms and foreign wars but....
More to follow on the Bievre.
Read more »
Labels: Maximilien Luce
COMING UP SOON
The cat statues of London, the arcades of London, the lost river Bievre in Paris, the forgotten monument to W.H. Hudson, Parisian proles, an elegy to the past splendours of the Golden Fish Bar, forgotten English "cocktails"- Caudles and the Dog's Nose.
The cat statues of London, the arcades of London, the lost river Bievre in Paris, the forgotten monument to W.H. Hudson, Parisian proles, an elegy to the past splendours of the Golden Fish Bar, forgotten English "cocktails"- Caudles and the Dog's Nose.
Labels: cat statues, Cats
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The Comte and the Chartier
"Qui ouvre la porte de ma chambre funéraire ? J'avais dit que personne n'entrât.
Qui que vous soyez, éloignez-vous".
"Qui ouvre la porte de ma chambre funéraire ? J'avais dit que personne n'entrât.
Qui que vous soyez, éloignez-vous".
"Who opens the door of my funerary chamber? I said that no one should enter.Whoever you are, remove yourself".
When I was living in Paris in the early 1970s, one of the cheap restaurants I went to was the Chartier on the Rue Faubourg Montmartre. The Chartier is a bouillon, built in the last years of the 19th century and meant to provide cheap meals to the Parisian working class. I have often returned there in visits over the next few decades. However, it was only fairly recently that I realised that Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the pseudonym of the Comte de Lautreamont, had met his death in the building that abuts upon the courtyard outside the Chartier.
Ducasse's life was murky and obscure as was his death which took place on 24th November 1870. This would have been during the Prussian siege of Paris. No details of the circumstances of his death are available, hardly surprising when many were dying of privation in this period. Did he starve to death, take his own life, perhaps die of TB or less likely, was he murdered? He was scraping for a living at this point in his life, so the first two scenarios seem the most likely.
The quote above is from Maldoror, the staggering book penned by Ducasse and hailed by Breton and his fellow Surrealists.
Labels: Chartier restaurant, Isidor Ducasse, Lautreamont
