God In Corduroy: Corde Du Roi

A Prickly Relationship

Spent the morning scratching around amongst my records for a corduroy-clad-crooner (see last blog). Still considering the correspondence between the grooves of a vinyl record and corduroy fabric. The nearest I can find: Gentleman Jim Reeves – a legend sitting cross-legged, fingers crossed - outside a gas station, contemplating 'the hand of God', in a cactus. 

Or is the cactus standing in for Christ on the cross? We arrive at another crossroads (cross-cords?)  He’s got a ‘far-off’ Godly look in his eyes, but his hands are saying cactus; and the cactus says corduroy.

Cacti = corduroy. Scratching + records = needles, and cacti are known for their needles - and don’t you ‘cut’ a record? And if you read nails for needles, and Reeves as thieves - two thieves were crucified either side of Jesus, but the bible doesn’t name them – you’ve found God; and if you can find God in a cactus, why shouldn't he exist - if not be seen - in corduroy as well? Corduroy in French is, ‘Corde du roi’ (‘cord of the king’): God’s own fabric. Where are my (late) Elvis records? Bring me The King in a corduroy jumpsuit with sequins.

Consider another prickly relationship: ‘Moonlight and Roses’ (released the year I was born). No corduroy, but it’s Jim Reeves again, and it’s a Dynagroove recording. 

Dynagroove records have "a realistic presence – sound projected in ‘photographic' perspective", and any "inner-groove distortion is virtually eliminated". I bet it sound’s heavenly. I’m going to wait till it gets dark, data-project it big on my wall, and distort my dancing shadow in front of it. And I dance like I'm being crucified on a cactus. 

Doors Of Perception

Vinyl records are double-sided, are paper-thin yet, it’s their insides we’re interested in: the often long-dead voices speaking out of the black grooves (graves?), I’m thinking of Roy Orbison and Kathleen Ferrier. And I’m always on the lookout for an album-cover with a picture depicting a dead singer clad in a corduroy suit (such an album must exist): the grooves of the record containing the dead/alive vocal cords: the cords of the corduroy suit containing the dead/alive crooner.

Doors say, yes and no: keep the outside out and the inside in, but some doors are paper-thin. Walls have an outside and an inside – are double-sided - and as everyone knows: walls have ears. Doors have a letterbox, and records used to be played on the jukebox (voice-box). Who could forget Kitty Lester’s “Love Letters Straight From The Heart” or the Carpenters cover of “Mr. Postman”?

It’s possible to speak through a door, and records speak to you (if sung in the right key). 

What’d happen if doors go the way of records? As Perec says: “If there wasn’t a door there wouldn’t be a key”.  And for me the key to the record is the cover: bring me a groovy, corduroyed crooner on an album cover. 

Mirages And Mirror Images

Imagine the arousal caused by a camera, dancing, tap, tap, tap, on the lap, whilst traveling over the dunes, on a camel’s back: would make for some blurred mirages! And if a puffin landed on the camel’s head, and you traced both of them – the camel’s head and the puffin, in situ: would you – when, back home, examining your holiday-tracings - be able to tell the difference between the two? 

Tracing a puffin can be tricky, and you should always use a very long pencil (like Matisse) when tracing a camel’s head. Pencils are used to being bitten. The Dulux dog doesn’t bite, he’s whiter than white. Let’s trace him, as well.

But none of these mirages or mirrored heads matter, the happy couple, they've been usurped by a sailor. What's an old sea dog - a seaman - doing in the desert? Looking for a lost puffin that reminds him of the Dulux Dog? 

Bring (Come) Me The Head Of A Millionaire

Two smells I miss getting a fix of: fix and glue. First, fix, the chemical used to preserve a photographic image. When you develop a black and white photograph – in the old-fashioned way, in the darkroom - the print goes through three trays of chemicals: developer, stop bath and fix, and fix smells like Brie. No: fix smells of sperm.

Long before eBay I bought a photographic enlarger from a millionaire’s widow in Chalk Farm - saw it advertised in 'Amateur Photographer' magazine. When I first set eyes on the enlarger it was wearing a black bin-liner on its head, as if in mourning for its millionaire master. The widow told me this was not the case, that the enlarger had been bagged in the cellar for ages (like a hostage); her late husband hadn’t used it for thirty years or more. I paid her and struggled across home across the river with it. We made for an odd couple on the underground. I very much doubt whether you could travel – on public transport – with such a sinister object nowadays, what with hoodies, the impending burka ban in Belgium and all. And if we had have been stopped-and-searched I would have had some explaining to do. Under the bag, inside the enlarger’s head was another kind of head: a dead head. I was rocking around on the Northern Line with a deathly exploding penis on my lap.

When I got home I discovered, in the negative carrier of the enlarger, what I could only presume is the moment a millionaire ejaculated (sometime in the mid 1960s - about the time I was conceived). This explosive image only appears on one of a strip of six negatives. The other five negatives depict his wife - the widow I’d just met - thirty or so years younger, riding a camel in the desert. By the look of things (he’s kept his socks on) it must be a self-portrait (headless, but not strictly speaking, a headless self-portrait). Much of photography is about control, yet here’s an image that demonstrates pictorial control over a loss of control; what Cartier-Bresson would have called, ‘The decisive moment’.

And I’ve heard you can have such a thing as a blinding orgasm: this image could have been taken, but not seen. And it’s only right and fitting that the exploding penis was found in an enlarger; a machine with a head at the top of a column; a device that spits-out light.

Oh, and how do I know it’s a millionaire’s dick? I’ve since done some research. He was quite well known in fact. But that’s for another day, another blog. And I didn’t send his widow a print. Perhaps I should send her this drawing instead - it’s the nearest thing to it, and a sticky end too: I used to sit on top of this dick-like rock and get a fix of glue. 

The Bra Outlived Two Dogs

The bra maid married the fireman and her bra outlived two dogs. But it doesn’t do to hang on to things. Towards the end I took to taking the bra out climbing - used it as a chalk-bag(s). But when the going got steep – and I started to breathe deep – I inhaled more chalk than I put on my fingers; coughed harder than I climbed.

Even though I was only climbing on small rocks (bouldering), when I was exhausted, when I lay on my back and looked at my chest, I had a view of the Alps. And when chalk spilled out of the cups – due to the coughing fits - I witnessed my own avalanche.

And then I read about two women being killed by a bra in Hyde Park. It was a balmy summer’s evening when a solicitor, walking though the park on her way home from work, happened to notice two women asleep - close together - under a tree. Next morning the said solicitor, taking the same route back to work, was surprised to see the women were still there, hadn’t moved an inch. She raised the alarm. Both women had been dead when the solicitor first set eyes on them the day before. The cause of death: electrocution. They’d been sheltering from a thunderstorm, under the tree, when lighting stuck. One of the women was wearing a wired-bra. The tree took a strike; the bra acted as a lightening conductor and the shock was directly transferred from one woman to the other, instantly killing both. It doesn’t do to cling on to people through their bras: I’ve never worn a bra since. 

Wedding car - bra photographs, Professor Paul Hill MBE. 

Chest Freezer

My grandmother loved her garden but was cold to children – her chest freezer was full of babies: gooseberries, raspberries and blackberries, frozen in Sainsbury’s bags, molded into the shape of babies. There was a white tomb in her utility room; when you opened it, it looked like a baby boom: fruit of the tomb, she called it.

Fruit Of The Loom - a clothing company based in Ireland - manufacture bras, and I had a hot-affair in Ireland once: with a fireman’s fiancé - older than me – burned for three nights. I was left with a puffed-out chest an empty bra. No idea I’d hung on to the bra - I’d been home for a week and eventually got around to turning-out my rucksack; must have unknowingly scooped it up with my dirty laundry. It was the smell that hit me – her preserved: more fragrant than Mary Archer, as dirty as Monica Coghlan. Vapour-locked, as Frank Zapper would say. Elvis Costello sang, ‘My Aim Is True’, but it was Costello’s line, “you think your love’s like frozen food, you think it’ll last forever”, that spoke to me - told me to freeze the bra. My grandmother’s chest freezer: it was only right and fitting  - what better place to freeze a bra than in a chest freezer?

OAP inhaling a defrosting bra.

I moved out of teens, moved away from home, moved to my mid-twenties; but the bra remained – a chest holder in a chest freezer - a tiny baby (never filled-out); preserved - like Walt Disney - in a state of suspended animation. Until the morning after the night of the great storms of 1987, when my grandmother phoned: “We’ve had a power-cut, you better get here quick, your bra’s defrosting - along with the fruit of my tomb”. We couldn’t save the fruit but we could saver the bra. We took turns inhaling its dying aroma, out of a baby-bag on my grandmother’s allotment, affectionately known as ‘the bog’.

OFP hanging on to the bra (foetal position aided by chalk, not baby powder).

Notes:

Re the infamous Jeffery Archer and the prostitute court case (at the time of my Irish affair): The Guardian reported: Monica Coghlan was the greatest victim of Jeffrey Archer’s lies. Her involvement with him left her reputation forever tarnished; like Christine Keeler her name became synonymous with prostitution, but unlike Keeler there was no glamour in her trade, no Snowdon to take her portrait.

According to Mr Justice Caulfield, trial judge at Archer’s infamous 1987 libel action, Coghlan provided “cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel room”.

He called her piteous, and she was portrayed as the apogee of vice, in contrast to Mary Archer, apparently the embodiment of virtue (the Judge went further, he called her ‘fragrant’). The stain stayed with her for the rest of her life: 14 years later in her home town of Rochdale people still whispered behind their hands when she went shopping.

The words, vapour lock, inexplicably punctuate Zappa’s wonderful, ‘Jewish Princess’ (Sheik Yerbouti, 1979).

'Love’s like frozen food’, comes from Costello’s ‘Uncomplicated’ (Blood and Chocolate, 1987). 

Atmospheric Advertising

The planes are back in the air, but there’s still a volcanic cloud up there. The RAF found ash in the engines of two of its Tornados this week. Jules Verne - writing in 1889 - predicted that by 2889 the clouds would carry advertisements: they’d be writing on the clouds. A thousand projectors would achieve this ‘atmospheric advertising’ by constantly displaying on the clouds, mammoth adverts and news stories. I can see tomorrow’s headline (cloud-line?) now: ‘Volcanic ash causes Tornado crash’.

This is not a hairdryer

Magritte was a great painter of clouds (in light skies, dawning on dark days), and there’s ‘an advertising-quality’ about much of Magritte’s art; indeed, Magritte’s imagery - from Homepride flour to The Prudential Building Society - must have visually influenced more adverts than any other artist I can think of. But let’s stick with things that smoke; consider things with wings; let time fly. 

 This is not a pipe

This is not a clock

This is a wing-mirror

This is not a mirror