Thursday, September 13, 2018

Roaring Radcliff. A Film by Ken Loach

Raddy always headed straight to the next Tesco after collecting the dole. He bought four packets of rum flavoring, three bottles of vanillin and two pounds of sugar in the baking aisle and the cheapest bottle of gin available. At the Boots next door he grabbed a £ 2.99 bottle of obnoxious aftershave. Returning to his filthy one-room flat in Whitechapel he lit a fag and started stirring everything together in a rusty old pail. As the dazing fumes rose around him he began singing old military tunes, while nestling himself into a ragged tassled polyester smoking jacket he'd bought years ago at Marks and Sparks. Finally, he raised the pail above is head and poured the juice all over himself; then, puffing and blowing, he began to march around the room, chanting, ever louder and at last screaming at the top of his lungs: I AM THE RIGHTFUL LORD RADCLIFF, I AM THE RIGHTFUL LORD RADCLIFF, I AM THE RIGHTFUL LORD RADCLIFF...
As always, the neighbours started knocking on the walls, then the police arrived, and, finally, an ambulance. Holidays in Bedlam seemed inevitable. They knew him well there already, old "Roaring Radcliff."

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Fragrant Remebrances of the Belle Époque

Renoir, La Loge (1874) Source: Wikipedia
"When I think of this time of my childhood in the Seventies, it  appears to me in the form of half-faded images of beautiful women and their now oh so historical costumes: romantic cumulations  of ribbons, frills, lace, poetic exaggerations of the aethereal here and the carnal there, by virtue of  mysterious billowings from which wasp waists artfully burgeoned, leaving little to view of the reality of the female body, but all the more confusing and enchanting. And also the perfumes, which gently wafted around these apparitions, are engrained in my memory; perhaps more clearly even than the dim portraits of their beauty: Brise des Îles and Origan, Rose du Soir, Chypre, Souvenir de la Réunion - their exotic names I learned later, but the distinctiveness which every woman lent them through the scent and the sultriness of her skin, I learned to distinguish, when I was still lead from out of the nursery to kiss this hand or that."

Harry Graf Kesseler (1868-1937), Gesichter und Zeiten. Erinnerungen [Faces and Times. Memories]. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1962 [1st. ed 1935], p. 10. Translated by the Duke of Pall Mall.