Musings from the drug/drink-addled mind of badboy hellraiser Keith Richards reveal the following:
Keith was a heroin addict for a decade and only quit cocaine a few years ago after falling out of a coconut tree and incurring even more brain damage and a metal skull plate. Seems a blow to the head was his wake up call to give up on Charlie.
On the night of the infamous 1967 Redlands drug bust, Keef was so far gone on LSD that when the police arrived at his Sussex country mansion, he mistook them for uniformed dwarves, welcoming them in with open arms.
Despite so much substance abuse, Keith has a razor wit. On the night Brian Jones was taken to hospital after throwing a punch at then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and smashing his fist into a metal window frame. Keith quipped:"He was never good at connecting with Anita."
He's also not averse to a spot of bitchery about Mick's trouser region. He says of ex Anita Pallenberg's dalliance with Mick: "She had no fun with the tiny todger." But according to Jerry Hall: "Mick is very well endowed. I should know – I was with him for 23 years. Keith is just jealous."
Hmmm, Jagger's Jumping Jack Flash crotch holds no clues about girls not getting 'No Satisfaction.'
Ah, it's only rock n roll but I like it! Life - serialised in The Times - about to be released soon.
Care for a denta vagina dainty? How about a little roadkill fancy? Or a shiver sliver of heart and maggot cake?
Glorifying all things gooesome and gory, 'Eat your heart out' is a collaborative cake/art venture from the fecund, troubled minds of various food fetish artists and confectioners, including George Morton-Clark, David A Smith, Miss Cakehead, Lily Vanilli and lots more. The whole event is curated by the Mad Artists Tea Party. It's deliciously dangerous and just the thing to give your Halloween party the goth factor.
These X-rated cakes are pure evil, but edible if you can stomach them. Not available at your local Greggs!
http://evilcakes.wordpress.com/ Eat Your Heart Out opens its gory doors from 28th - 31st October, in the 'dungeon' (basement) of Maiden, at 188 Shoreditch High Street, London E1.
Okay, its 8.30pm and I'm sitting outside a showy prime people watching spot, al fresco pastaria in Greenwich when in walks, or should I say sashays, a certain Jaggeresque look-alikey with a similar partied hard face and whippet-lithe physique dressed in a white outfit and shades that wouldn't have looked amiss on Hendrix. The waiters fussed as he sat down and I wondered who the hell he was. As it happened I bumped into him coming out of the bathroom and we chit-chatted for while - he about England and his daughter - me about me and stuff. He was charming, not at all arrogant, but maybe a little off his face.
I always wondered who the hell he was because everything about him screamed 70s rock star. Then I saw a shot of him in Empire and then he's just been on the Huey show. From the original 70s punk rock band - The New York Dolls - although I think they're more glampunk fusion, yes, David Johansen. Here with Syvain Sylvain (great name) and Huey of FLC. Enjoy!
I love this - it's sooo creative! Knitters are yarnbombing all over the place from London to Lima!Get this, there's a guerilla knitter called Deadlyknitshade, who is the brains behind Knit the City, “a crack team of woolly warriors” and “part of an ongoing campaign to guerilla knit the city of London, and beyond that the world.” A founder of Stitch and Bitch London, she describes herself as a ‘graffiti knitter’. She’s making our world a woollier, more colourful place and we salute her.
Ted Hughes widow has just released a poem about his reaction to Sylvia Plath's suicide. It reveals Ted's tortured state of mind and apparent guilt about Sylvia's suicide. Ted was all man - big, bold and brusque and yet this was tempered with incredible sensitivity as revealed in his poetry.
But Ted was full of dichotomies and essentially flawed. A serial adulterer, his self-destruct dial was set to max, and because of this, not just one, but three lives were lost.
Sylivia Plath's suicide is often recounted and blamed on Hughes, but what about Assia Wevill and her four year old daughter Shura? Assia also committed suicide and took Shura with her when Hughes cheated on her. Granted Assia was no angel and as often happens in these unfortunate circumstances – she reaped what she had sown.
Their affair had started after Wevill and her husband, David, visited Hughes and Plath at their home, also in Devon, in 1962. Assia claimed that Hughes had kissed her when they were alone together in the kitchen. Five weeks later, Hughes hurried to a London agency where Wevill was working, scribbled a note and left it with the receptionist. It said: 'I have come to see you, despite all marriages.'
Assia couldn't resist the thrill of responding and from her office window, she noticed that a gardener was mowing the lawn below - and found her inspiration. She went down, picked up a single blade of the freshly cut grass, dipped it in Dior perfume and sent it to Ted. Three days later, an envelope arrived at Assia's office: in it, the blade of grass lay beside one from Devon and the die was cast.
What a tangled web they weaved – one so murky and bloodstained it was worthy of a Jacobean horror play. Assia's husband David found out about their liaison and took an overdose of sleeping pills, but survived, otherwise Ted would have had four deaths on his conscience.
It's ironic that Assia told friends that Ted's lovemaking was so ferocious that 'in bed, he smells like a butcher.' Because that's exactly what he was...metaphorically.
How horrific that within two days of Sylvia's suicide, Ted and Assia starting sharing her bed in the London flat where she died. Assia was probably already pregnant by Ted and used the same bed to recover from an abortion six weeks later.
The couple parted in 1968 after Ted embarked on another affair. The following year, at the age of 42, Assia gassed herself, just as Plath had done. In a diary entry, she blamed the ghost of Plath for making her suicidal.
With so much blood on his hands, no wonder Ted was a tortured soul. The tragedy is he had the power to prevent Sylvia's, Assia's and Shura's deaths – but chose otherwise.
After long, hard weekend, I walked into the grainy world of Diane Arbus at Nottingham Contemporary and walked out to a grey, rainy afternoon floored by such an intimate slice of 60s life. And walked wondering why this talented woman with the world at her feet had gone the way of Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and other members of the 60s/70s suicide club.
Arbus came from a privileged Jewish background – her father was a wealthy furrier. She married young (18), had two children, divorced. But it was only really after her divorce that she gave free expression to her creativity, walking on the wild side, visiting the Bowery and Upper East side cataloguing New York’s downtrodden, deviants, freaks and the retarded and marginalised in society.
Look at the shots and witness her obsession with grotesquerie. The dwarves, the giant, the twins (spookily reminiscent of The Shining), the painted ladies, the trannies, the naturists…all on the fringes of society. All too often labeled abnormal, stared at and pitied. Even the blonde showgirl with pneumatic breasts who drips glamour looks bizarre set against a shabby dressing room that’s more Cynthia Payne bedsit Streatham than Las Vegas.
"Freaks were a thing I photographed a lot," she wrote. "It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Maybe that was the problem, maybe Arbus' reality became twisted by her subject matter. Maybe she saw only too clearly that life itself was a freakshow and she looked too deeply into the heart of darkness until the angst and pain became unbearable and pills and the razor seemed the only escape. I think Bukowski’s poem, Cause and Effect sums up her suicide perfectly.
Cause and Effect
the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them
