Memory Of Your Nose

Re the UFO – the unidentified flying orifice -, the nose I thought I saw on the Dick: it’s the fin of a quibble. Quibbles are cars of the future: flying cars; cars you land – park - on your roof.

But once I got my nose into the Dick – I’m on chapter 22 -, look what I found. I don’t know if Louis Panda’s song, ‘Memory of your nose’, actually exists, but I do know that memory and smell are closely linked; smell evokes memory in a way that no other sense can. George Orwell – after running a second-hand bookshop – loathed the smell of old books, and Freud’s obsession with the nose is well documented.

I’m trying to remember all the ‘nose-books’ I’ve read: Pinocchio; Gogol’s, The Nose, about a St Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own; Patrick Suskind’s, Perfume – the story of a killer; there’s a lot of ‘smelling’ in Proust, and much about scent in Huysmans; and The Plumber, how could I forget The Plumber book? I am the plumber (according to the mother in the children’s section of the library). Freud believed reproductive organs were directly linked to the nose. Nose holes are also inextricably linked to toilet bowls. 

The Nose Of Light and The Big Swiss Sneeze

If that nose belongs to that head - and this photograph wasn’t taken in Denmark, and we all know how thick telegraph posts are - God only knows how big the face is!

I was once almost flattened by a Danish Parachutist, called Lars Plugg; he had a tiny nose, but a hell of an expanse of forehead: you could have landed a helicopter between his eyes without him even blinking. 

I had a brief if somewhat dramatic brush with Plugg, in Switzerland, one day last summer. I was munching Toblerone beneath the Lautabraunnen Falls (the big Swiss sneeze, where Sherlock Holmes and his arch enemy, Professor Moriaty, fell to their deaths in a deadly struggle), I had a triangle of Toblerone wedged in my cheek, when ‘Plugg’ dropped out of the sky and landed almost on top of me. I shudder to think of the consequences of a direct hit from a Viking – a fast descending Dane - from above: the triangle of Toblerone would have been forced through the skin beneath my chin (like a chocolate-face version of John Hurt’s stomach exploding, in Alien)!

I was in Switzerland to investigate the strange case of ‘The suicidal cows of Lautabraunnen’. Local police were baffled when dozens of suicidal cows threw themselves – for no apparent reason - off a cliff in the Alps. In the space of three days 28 cows and a bull mysteriously died after they plunged hundreds of meters off a cliff down into the picturesque valley below. Local mountain rescue services using a helicopter had to be called in to remove the bodies.

Strange thing about that triangle of light under the chin: if you were to trace it, it would cover the nose almost exactly; a patch of light, the perfect nose guard against the sun. I can see the advertisement now: ‘the right guard is the light guard: the light-guard against the sun is the nose-of-light under your chin’. Warning: don’t use triangle of Toblerone to protect against the sun. Not unless you want a brown nose. And what drove the cows to suicide? Who knows? 

Pyloneering

A nose, like a mountain peak, is a triangle. It is the simplest feature of the face – or the natural landscape - than can possibly be drawn with a ruler. Noses are blown, and in the hills, it blows like hell. Mountains and noses are both prone to avalanches. You do not have to look far – you only have to follow your nose - to find many uses for noses. We are all familiar with: 'he wore his heart on his sleeve'. But it's also possible - if somewhat unfashionable - to wear your nose on your sleeve (as well as wipe it there, too). Structures such as bridges, cranes and pylons are made up of mountains of noses. But a nose, unlike a mountain, can be broken quite easily: like a heart.

Robert has come upon a steel tower for carrying electric power cables and he sees the whole framework is really a giant set of connected noses, leading to a break in the cloud that appears to reveal the Matterhorn.

The ascent of pylons is a branch of mountaineering all by itself, called Pyloneering, and is practiced by visionary children like Robert, to reach the clouds.

Honky Tonky Spotty Dotty

So who’s survived and what’s been lost, and who and what has been gained in the slippage - from photograph to image - between Honky Tonk Party 1 and Honky Tonk Party 3? For a start the pianist’s shirt’s gone: it drew too much attention to the noses pointing at it. If you traced the black triangles on the pianist’s shirt, and then slipped any of the triangle-tracings over the nose of the pianist - or that of his admirer (right of piano) - they would be a perfect fit, a perfect match. Nose covers on an album cover, under the disguise of a loud shirt.

And why not trace? Look at the cross between Hank Marvin (of the Shadows) and Michael Caine (in the Ipcress File) - a shadowy spy? Hank and his girlfriend survived almost intact, they must have been traced. But notice she’s changed her top, and he’s borrowed the yellow jacket from the headless man obscured behind the smoking woman, on the left in Honky Tonk Party 1.

Let’s stay with profile of the smoking woman behind the pianist’s head, because it too has been traced, duplicated, and transferred to the plates on the wall in Honky Tonk 3. 

And finally, take another look at Hanky Caine’s girl. The shirt she’s wearing in Honky 1 has been used for the pub carpet on the cover of Honky 3. And if you care to count the dots on the shirt and dots on the carpet– spot the spots on both - you’ll find a numerical parity there too. The floor is 146 dots dirty and the shirt’s 142 spots spotty. But if you add the 4 spots on the shirt – on her right elbow reflected in the bar (next to the pint glasses), the amount of spots on the shirt equals the amount of spots of dirt on the carpet.   

Wildfowl Management - Not Golf Course Management: And Elephant Memories

I bumped into a tree - a tree with a split personality. It had a trunk that wasn’t its trunk (in the tree-trunk sense): it’s trunk doubled as a nose. The tree was both an Indian elephant and a Red Indian, depending on how you faced it.

The elephant face had an eye – I’d heard of Elephantiasis – swelling of the lower torso: thick legs and swollen scrotums; I’d seen Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980) with John Hurt as the unfortunate John Merrick who spoke like a door sticking; and let’s not forget the beautiful Hannah Gordon (the wife of kindly surgeon Antony Hopkins); I’ve been in love with her since 1972 (“My Wife Next Door"; “Call My Bluff”).

The last time I clapped eyes on her she was as fragrant as ever, presenting the highly successful “Watercolour Challenge” on Channel 4. In the episode I was glued to a group of Sunday painters were trying to depict the archetypal English village churchyard at Crowhurst, East Sussex, in watercolour.  The place seemed to have a placid beauty – in fact the village of Crowhurst is just the sort of wisteria cottaged village I’d imagined Hannah Gordon had retired to (she’s 68). Perhaps she just popped out from under her thatch – found a window between the jam pachón and her pension collection (from the village post office) to present “The Watercolour Challenge”.

I felt a sudden itch - an itch that could only be scratched against Hannah Gordon’s thatch – or at least, on the very gravestones the star of “My Wife Next Door” had rubbed against as she’d faked praise on those Sunday painters.

My guidebook says: “Crowhurst, with its famous yew-tree, is within a quarter of an hour's railway journey from either Bexhill or Hastings”; so I set out from London and alighted at Crowhurst an hour or so later, with a photograph of Hannah Gordon – book-marking “The Crowhurst Yew” – her face flattened against a mustached Victorian, jammed in a crack in the tree: A typical autumn day – thin sun between heavy showers. I make my way towards the Church. Here’s the guidebook again: “On the south side of the Church stands the famous Yew Tree, said by some to be three thousand, and by others fourteen hundred years old. Its iron-bound trunk and propped-up branches betoken its age: and the visitor, as he gazes upon it, may reflect with tolerable certainty that it was flourishing here when the Norman defeated the Saxon close by, more than 800 years ago. The tree is now 50 feet in circumference at its base, and 38 feet in circumference 6 feet from the ground.” The guidebook I am using is a bit out of date: Ward Lock &Co’s Red Guide, 1907. Would the ‘famous yew’ be still standing? My heart, like my pace, quickened. As I entered the village, I thought: funny, if this yew tree is so famous why I don’t recall any of the watercolourists painting it, or Hannah Gordon hugging it – why shun it?

Look: the ancient yew’s still standing; it dwarfs the 15^th Century Church. I fight my way beneath the limb-like lower branches and vertical supports in search of the crack that leads to its heart – if I couldn’t photograph myself beside my favorite aging actress I was going to photograph myself inside one of the oldest trees in the land.

But look at this: the yew’s been fenced off. But would I have entered the crack? The tree’s infected - riddled with kind of disease (can trees catch elephantiasis?)

I’m looking for a crack and I find a bottom: this overhanging, seeping, bulbous, buttock-like branch reminds me of the baboon, Bosse-de-Nage (literally, “bottom-face”) who’s glowing buffed backside guided Jarry’s Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, through Paris (by night) in a bed-boat (see “Hanging Around Toilets”, 29/10/09). But it looked too much like a zoo, this yew.

In search of a pew, I made for the church: but I didn’t get further than the porch, where I came across these books for sale. I was half-hoping to find a novel, often encountered in charity shops: “A Crack In Forever” (a great name for a climb) but I was out of luck. I settled for “The Manual of Ornamental Wild Fowl Management” instead. Look: it shows you "how to hold young birds for sexing".

Equipped with this knowledge I dropped a few coppers in the honesty box and headed off into Battle.

On the train back to London I replayed the day – examined my photographs. Bored, I blew up the books – look at this:

Not only did I miss out on Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” – the perfect bookshelf companion to “Wild Fowl Management”- I failed to notice a novel about a hairdryer. Me who can’t fall asleep by just reading in bed: me who can't sleep at night without a hairdryer blowing me on the pillow! Me who’d once tried to shoot a thrush with a hairdryer! 

But I can’t really be blamed for missing these books next door to one another, I’d visited some ‘sacred sights’: elephants; memories; Red Indians; ancient burial grounds; buttocks; cracks; baboons; noses; split yew trees; split-personality trees, and Hannah Gordon, my wife next door (but here, next to a tree).

Strange Days Indeed

Got up, pulled-up, inhaled some white powder and photographed my nose. Yesterday, I had an out-of-focused nose (see: “On Powdering Your Nose”, 31/10/09). So this morning I straightened things out – I need to be focused.

Then I went out. But I didn’t even make it to the end of the road: Look at this.

Last night was Halloween.

It’s Sunday, so I fall onto my daybed with the papers. I look at this.

I’m going to bed early; Harry Houdini’s got me gripped (Brandon R, “The Life And Many Deaths Of Harry Houdini, Secker & Warburg, London, 1993). Houdini was a man of many obsessions. He specialised in death-defying escapes (for which his name became a byword); but what was Houdini really trying to escape from?

As for myself, I’ve spent the whole day trapped in yesterday’s blog – caught in its web. When I close my eyes I see my powdered nasal hair tangled up in the hedge. I'm even thinking of going back out and rearranging the Halloween decorations in my neighbour's hedge; in such a way that they mimic the peaks and troughs of the graph on the Business pages. AND ON THE SAME PAGE THERE'S A BUSINESSMAN PULLING - DOING PULL-UPS IN THE PAPER!

It’s been a funny Halloween and it’s getting even stranger. Houdini waged a long campaign against fake mediums (he fell out badly with his one-time-friend Arthur Conan-Doyle, a staunch believer in spiritualism). Houdini would often attend séances dressed in a “medium-trapping disguise”. I’m looking at a photograph of him wearing it; he looks more like Stanley Spencer, minus the pram. Here’s another image from the Houdini book. It shows ectoplasm emerging from a spiritualist’s nose. But this variety bears a remarkable resemblance to knitting wool (Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo’s was a dedicated knitter – he’d been keenly ‘casting off’ since boyhood.

No, I’m going to read some Duchamp instead. Oh no! All that dust breading on “The Large Glass” (dust preserved in Man Ray's photograph, 1921). And the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, which opened on October 14, 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan, was both historic and peculiar. Duchamp had festooned the primary exhibition space (floor to ceiling) with a tangled web of sixteen miles of string!

At the show’s opening children ran around and played catch and some of the painters became annoyed because nobody could get to see the paintings. 

On Powdering Your Nose

About this time last year I began to smell burning first thing every morning; I put it down to toast from the flat below. I smoke, so I’m used to having something burning, right under my nose. But this was different – burnt toast is the only way to describe it. It wasn’t until I attended a ‘sleep-over’ in a museum and woke up amongst mummies (dressed like a mummy myself – you had to bring your own sleeping bag), to the all too familiar aroma of burnt bread, that I knew something was seriously amiss.

I was referred to an Ear Nose and Throat Specialist. She poked a tiny camera a long way up my nose (a kind of fiber-optic tube). My watering eyes followed her dry ones, deep inside my head, via a monitor on the desk. I was both uncomfortable and somewhat nervous. “We are on a ‘head-trip’ together – complete strangers, yet fellow travelers” I remarked. No response, she just made a few notes then after a short while slowly withdrew the camera from my nostril. I waited for some kind of diagnosis, but she seemed more interested the state of her camera. The Doctor examined the camera, turned it over in her fingers, brought it up to her eye; in fact the Doctor spent more time examining her own equipment than she had spent examining me! The whole thing was disproportionate.

“What’s all this white dust?” she said, as she continued to scrutinize the tiny implement. I reached for my glasses and said, “White dust up my nose? Here, let me look”. She was right, the Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist wasn’t seeing things, the tube was dusty – no, pasty, coated in what appeared to be a flour and water type of gluey substance. I smelled it and it was odorless. I had no explanation other than I used to sniff hell of a lot of glue. But that was years ago – when I was a teenager – we used to meet in a bandstand in the park… I spilled the beans, named names: Bostik; Uhu; Evostick; Superglue; Gorilla. Strange thing: I can’t recall the names of any of my fellow-sniffers (friends?) yet I can recall all the brands of glue I abused – as well as a fair few of my preferred felt-tipped tipples, of the time. Perhaps the names of glues just stick. Someone should research ‘Adhesives and Memory’ (Bergsonesque). She sent me for a brain scan.

I’ve got to have an operation – a problem with my sinuses – nothing serious – keep putting it off (worried about the swelling and wearing all that wadding); and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the white stuff I secreted on the camera. I only recently got to the bottom of that mystery (almost a year after my consultation), and quite by accident; the enigma was solved by another camera (my own) making an accidental exposure of my nose.

I have a chin-up bar in my hall, from which, first thing every morning, I do one hundred, two-armed chin-up’s (in ten minutes); from then on through out the day, whenever I feel the urge, I reach for the bar and perform other altogether more complicated gymnastic maneuvers (one-finger-pull-ups, front levers, lock-offs and dead-hangs etc). 

I often record these ‘pulling sessions’ with self-timer photographs. But one ritual I never forget to perform (before chinning of the bar) is the generous application of gymnastic chalk to both hands. Gymnastic chalk (light magnesium carbonate) is absolutely essential as it absorbs sweat that inevitably builds up on the palms, as well as aiding grip – adhesion.

The camera’s self-timer was still running on ‘continuous’ (taking a picture every four seconds) as I fumbled to release it from the tripod, when it made this accidental exposure of the interior of my powdered nose - of  the light magnesium carbonate I must unknowingly inhale (and remember, you become heavy breather when you are pulling) at least one hundred times a day, each time my nose becomes level with my chalked fingers (yet, inhaled it is, as I never pick my nose).

This artless image has perfectly captured my chalk encrusted nasal hair, and portrayed it with all the beauty (in its own way) of those photographs you often come across; Jack Frost encrusted cobwebs in the hedgerow on a bright winter morning (a subject-matter much beloved car crash victims, as they lay dying in the ditch; a lovely 'last sight' at least - especially if the crash victim was active in a Camera Club). Also, cameras and chalk don’t mix; the Doctor was right to show concern. I’m mindful of wiping the chalk off my hands before touching my lens. And this mistake of a picture does go someway towards proving: “art is the act of making the invisible visible”.

A Pair of Drainpipes and a Trouser Press

Just received a communiqué from a photographer - a well-known art-photographer, from the 1970’s. He’s all excited about “The Excited Young Caddie” (27/10/09). In fact he became so excited about the ‘excitement’ in the young caddie’s trousers, he traced it - look!

As well as physically tracing the “bursting out”, our old art-photographer went a stage further and traced his tracing of the “bursting”, historically, back through his own negative files, back to an image he made in the late 1970’s titled “Pinocchio” (and remember, photographs were starting to be ‘made’ and not merely ‘taken’, back then).

“Pinocchio” is the shadow cast by a neighbour’s drainpipe, photographed through a kitchen window.

The black and white world of late 1970’s, art photography was a world in flux, a tough (yet sensitive) world where photographs not only had to stand-up for themselves, they had to stand in for the ‘soul’ behind the camera - “self-expression” via a machine. Their exposures were ‘made’ towards the reflection of some “personal truth”; photographs that attempted to tell you more about the photographer than what was actually in front of the camera; photography as a vehicle of “self-expression; metaphors, equivalence and personal resonance were mined out of patterns on rocks; transcendence, myth and essence blossomed in the trees – you could even tell whether or not a drainpipe was merely dripping, or really fibbing!

Rather than views of, photographs served as meditations on. Furthermore, these shamans of self-expression often quoted and appropriated Buddhist principles – “the sound of one hand clapping” etc. But not, ironically, this old Buddhist saying: “To the man with no knowledge, rocks are just rocks and trees are just trees. Yet to the man with a little knowledge, rocks are much more than just rocks and a tree is never simply a tree. But to the man with complete knowledge, rocks are just rocks and trees are just trees”.

But as I ponder Pinocchio (as a drainpipe) it’s not noses fibbing (“Lie to me, lie to me Pinocchio” she moaned, as she sat on his face”) or drainpipes dripping (or visa versa), or even the uncanny similarity between my caddie’s excited groin and the drainpipe’s extended nose; it’s Vivian Stanshall (1943-1995) of the Bonzo Dog Dog Doo-Dah Band, and their song: “My Pink Half of the Drainpipe” I sing.

My pink half of the drainpipe

Semidetaches us

My pink half of the drainpipe

Oh, Mama!

Belongs to moi

Hey, neighbour!

My pink half of the drainpipe

I might paint it blue

My pink half of the drainpipe

Keeps me safe from you!

The name of the band came out of a Dadaist word game (sentences were cut up and the juxtaposed fragments were used to form new ones). But the band had to drop the Doo-Dah after becoming tired of explaining what “Dada” meant to audiences with no knowledge of art history. Thus they became “The Bonzo Dog Band” – later “The Bonzos”. “My Pink Half of the Drainpipe” appeared on their 1968 album: “The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse”, side 2, track 9.

But look at the preceding track, “Trouser Press”, track 8. “Trouser Press” beautifully iron's out the creases; the excited young caddie pressing against his own trousers; the 1970’s art-photographer’s more recent pressing/tracing (rubbing?) of the said young caddie’s groin; the 'Pinocchio effect' on the drainpipe. All of these images are sublimely sandwiched together under the "Trouser Press" (not forgetting, Drainpipes were the fashionable style of trouser when "Trouser Press" was penned.

Through the association of drainpipe, trouser, groin and nose, we are driven back onto the golf course where it all started getting exciting, just a couple of days ago. And if all this is not enough, look: one Roger Ruskin-SPEAR wrote “Trouser Press”. What's it coming too? We'll be performing press-ups over golf holes whilst reading (coming down hard-on?) Freud next. But lets not get started on the subject of Freud and noses - enough has written about that already! Finally, Vivian Stanshall often carried a euphonium and wore pink rubber ears...