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Category: Artistic

363 • Famous Last Words

363 • Famous Last Words

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A monk who had jumped from Ben Nevis
Left his suicide note in a crevice.
Hand-lettered in gold
And five hundred years old
‘Ars longa,’ it claimed, ‘vita brevis’

Illuminated lettering – such as we find in masterpieces such as The Book of Kells – was not normally used for personal communication, but in this instance the author had no choice. An ordinary hand-written message would not have been ‘ars’, so his Latin text would have been irrelevant. Likewise, of course, if the doleful memo had been discovered the following morning, ‘longa’ would not have been apposite. And if he’d simply climbed the mountain, hidden the note, then gone home to the nunnery or wherever he lived, ‘vita brevis’ would have been nonsensical. And the choice of a secure crevice to hide it in, rather than just leaving it to blow about on the mountainside, ensures that it’s not found until ‘longa’ is appropriate. All in all, then, a well-thought out farewell to a no-doubt exemplary life.

353 • Take-Away (6)

353 • Take-Away (6)

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‘’Tis an etching,’ said old Piranesi,
‘And kindly don’t tell me I’m crazy.
If you say “engraving”
It’s not me that’s raving
It’s you being mentally lazy.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN JALFREZI.

The same problem arises in every era: the Old Master indulges his penchant for pedantic pontification, while relying on others to minister to his basic bodily requirements. A man unable to cook is in no position to hector those untroubled by the self-involved niceties of his Terms of Art, ‘engraving’ and ‘etching’.

339 • Overheard

339 • Overheard

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Please note, your saxophonist, ‘Baz’,
With his ear-splitting urge to play ‘jazz’
Is required to abstain
Or else Take the A Train …
To Alaska, if not Alcatraz.

Who wants to live in a world whose free-spirited exponents of improvised music can be threatened with exile to a notorious penitentiary, solely for practising their art in places where others might overhear? Not I. Surveillance is a scourge, aural fascism a tyranny. And the intolerant voice of this bulletin appears to be upset as much by the would-be musician’s hipster sobriquet as by the unruly racket the neighborhood is nightly obliged to endure.

332 • Semen / cement

332 • Semen / cement

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Said philosopher-poet John Ruskin
On exhuming a half-rotten buskin
‘Hopping round in this boot
Will cement my repute
As an expert in all things Etruscan.’

And revered archæologist Schliemann
Slept out (to discourage a demon)
’Neath a Bacofoil™ awning,
Yet woke every morning
Quite sodden with incubus semen.

Is it something about their preoccupation with the remote past that distorts the mental processes of such famous men? Perhaps they fell into recondite professions precisely because they were unable to relate convincingly to the way ordinary folk make sense of the world? Or, if the above tales are reckless fictions, do they nonetheless ring true because we instinctively sense that a particular echelon, existing in intellectual society, assumes it can get away with murder?

301 • Naked cheek

301 • Naked cheek

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We beheld an old Burgher of Calais
Who’d come, without clothes, to The Ballet.
When they called him immoral
He said, ‘Do not quarrel
With me: take it up with my valet.’

As ever, the challenge to a wealthy pervert’s idiosyncrasy is brushed aside, and the onus of explanation – and inevitable blame – falls on the shoulders of his hapless factotum.

300 • Postcard (4)

300 • Postcard (4)

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My postcard to Wole Soyinka
Said ‘How d’you like Rodin’s “The Thinker”?’
‘Not as good as “The Dunce”,’
He responded at once
(I got the same answer from Glinka).

It’s encouraging, of course, to receive fresh evidence of empathy-across-time between writers and musicians, but it’s unsettling to discover that both spurn a sculptural masterpiece in favour of a work so definitively substandard that not a single art historian bothers even to mention it. Yet it sounds like a statue for our time, when so many forcibly-emptied plinths stand ready to accommodate images of some contemptible thick-head, should such a person come to public attention.

293 • Nefertiti

293 • Nefertiti

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I flew my cartoon autogyro
To draw Nefertiti in Cairo:
What a look of surprise
When I dotted her *i*s
And crossed both her *t*s with my biro!

It was Tintin, I believe, who introduced my younger self to the possibilities of the autogyro; likewise his creator, Hergé, sparked my lifelong interest in drawing. The summons from a Pharaoh was a pleasant, if predictable, consequence of these twin influences (Akhnaten was gracious enough to approve of the woman I drew for him, and subsequently married her).

292 • Gnasher

292 • Gnasher

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The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.

That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.

228 • Épater la bourgeoisie

228 • Épater la bourgeoisie

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At dinner, chez René Magritte:
Just silence, and nothing to eat.
As the third hour passed
He hissed ‘Welcome,’ at last
And the maid brought a single boiled sweet.

In this brief bulletin we commemorate one of Belgium’s cultural Titans, who died 53 years ago this morning. In his life, just as through his mischievously haunting image-making in various media, Magritte gnawed relentlessly at the malignant roots of bourgeois sensibility. Bravo!

214 • Skintext

214 • Skintext

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This morning, a bolt from the blue:
Our tadpole has got a tattoo.
Neatly lettered in black
On the small of his back
It reads ‘What would Lord Attenborough do?‘

I confess I find it distressing when the young choose to disfigure themselves with texts they may well regret in adult life (I spent a small fortune getting ‘What would Jesus do?’ lasered off the mons veneris of my Significant Other). It’s perhaps not surprising that animals look to Sir David Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS FSA as a saviour, but any responsible tattooist would have known that ‘Lord Attenborough’ refers not to the well-loved environmentalist but to his brother Richard, a noted squanderer of frog DNA in his role as the unconvincing proprietor of ‘Jurassic Park’ in the eponymous blockbuster movie.