Friday, 27 February, 2009

Reading Erich Heller on Nietzsche and the inbuilt paradoxes of Eternal Recurrence. If the ghost is fallible then so will the Ubermensch be, and so Nietzsche has no alternative but to paint himself into a corner of reassuring madness and actually become - or usurp - Zarathustra. I feel like that every day from the sickening stares I get from idiots in the street. "When are you doing another Roxy album, Brian?" until one just wants to screech for mortality. In the bathroom this morning there was a blister on my scrotum. Rushed to Harley Street urologist who kept his countenance. Said there were some good dressing gowns on sale in Debenhams. I blame the Socialists. In the evening I did fishcakes and salad for Bryan but he fidgeted and sighed all the way through Time Team until I had no choice but to turn over and watch the dreadful Friday Night Project. His tastes are real pleb stuff. I don't know why I stick with him. Made my excuses and rushed to bed. Thought of Thomas Carlyle landing inadequately on a vaulting horse. Traditional antics.

Tuesday, 31 March, 2009

We are performing on the platform of Dent Station. I brought swimming trunks & Gary Wilmot snorkel & there was no need. I got the cast to take up violins, euphonia &c. and emulate crow calls but without the transparent sherbet bonbon. Filmed it all & that should enable me to receive a Lump Sum of £9,348.27 from the Arts Council. Heaven knows it’s needed. Interesting conversation with Geoff Boycott at the bar afterwards & he says Britain is now in the same situation as the Falklands & we have to peer hard and long over Peter Mario spatulas – the ones Ted Moult gave me in 1975 – to ensure we are not overrun by treacherous outside forces. I have decided to extract a leaf from the book of the vile Mugabe & print & spend my own money. If the shops don’t like it then hee haw. If Britain wants donkeys it should move to Spain .

Sunday, 29 March, 2009

Dreared about Margate before realising that the clocks had gone forward and I could have gone back an hour ago! Rushed back home & got in at 6:03 A.M. Read the Papers. All this humbug about Anarchy Riots has not worked! Everyone behaved themselves peacefully. More coarsecut coddish cant about the Goody woman so I flipped right past that. Radio was noisy whereas on Sunday it should be silent so I switched it off in hope of humble worship. Took me nine minutes 11 seconds which is a record for Sundays! I had to use the Brillo pads afterwards though. Cliff picked Bryan & I up at 12:00 Noon & took us to Joe Allen’s where we pondered the lunacy of the Russian bishops & wondered whether Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s legacy has truly been squandered. Cliff thinks Pat Boone should engender a Military Takeover to remind me of importance of Christian message. Far too late for that now, I’m afraid. Otherwise Tony Orlando would still be having super hits & not Florida Gags or whatever these New Pop Stars are called. Must remember to de-soup the dace for Gloria & Elaine next Sunday. Sondheim never heard the end of it last time. I had to parade outside the Courtauld on yellowing stilts for 4 x days full. It was an outrage.

Saturday, 28 March, 2009

Margate is malodorous muck but one has no choice in such matters. Saw a pink seagull descending, Magritte-fashion, atop a discarded poster advertising Ted Rogers on the Pier. Wonder whether Fripp will be interested in fashioning a tabletop nestloop but what do I know about Stoke Newington these days? Went to Harry Ramsden’s for mirth chips but they were vile. At matinee all anyone was talking about was this new Dizzy Rascal song about “Going Bonkers.” Well aren’t we all? Made up a bit of business with the gramophone arm and gratis grinder that Clement showed me back in 1968 & that got a few chortles but Dame Bill was not impressed. “The build-up to the Grail opening was totally botched,” he butched. “We really have to work on this before taking it back to London .” I opined that it needed at least five years of polishing in the provinces but realised I wasn’t going to get back to Suffolk for early retirement that way. Great Yarmouth will have to do. For tea it was mirthless cod & Yarwood. Reluctant tradiola. Albert Steptoe. The amazing versatility he conjured out of a grey clothes peg.

Friday, 27 March, 2009

Struggled with 2 x bulging suitcases on foot to Victoria Station for Train to Brighton to start this lousy rotten stinking tour. The Socialists are planning to riot again so let’s hope a fascist dictatorship is in place by the time I return. It is appalling how brave Fred Goodwin is being victimised. If this Government had any guts it would empower banks & lenders to foreclose on all Credit Users immediately & that would teach this country a robust lesson about living within its means instead of making Super Savers like myself suffer. On the Train I gazed at pictures of the reformed S. Ballet. Big Tony as usual too big to fit into the picture so has to bend down & grin. Gary looking ravaged. Martin really is a sneaky dish in that smart suit. Got v. aroused but no dust allowed on the windows in this carriage alas. Keeble College Oxford looks like my window cleaner. Probably IS my window cleaner come to think of it. I lent him £10.00 Sterling back in the Apollo days so consider my obligations fully discharged.

In Brighton we worked up a routine where I performed “I Love To Go Swimmin’ With Wimmin” in a brave knight of armour’s suit & several strategically pumped nasturtia but Kenwright put the doorstop on it straightway. “This speech has to be done seriously” she intoned. Dunno why he engaged me then since I am here to raise laughs. Fuck knows the strippy show needs it. Audience of 28. First act went well but we lost them during the drear interminable Frances de la Tour/Googie Withers dialogue section & never really got them back. Only 1 x curtain call. I am not going anywhere near London with this play in its present state. Dreamed fitfully of Martin Kemp fuelling piston peanut tubercles rather than sitting on sofas. Wettish trad but the red overpowered the nascent pink of cumulative Cortazar.

Thursday, 26 March, 2009

While sipping icy petrol cuboids in my kitchen, viewing the benign sight of the Post Office Tower & Tussaud’s dustbins & listening to the Faure-esque calm of side two of Metal Machine Music I reflect that I am only able to live this leisured life because of carpoboom bahtat like Golf My Vicar’s Teetits and Roxy Music. Read Rilke’s Sonnets To Orpheus and the majestic lush of the rising consonants (“Vacillating at the heart’s dark crossroads/He beholds no temple of Apollo ” – ‘tho I’ve spent a lifetime trying), queerly celebratory in their manifest melancholy, nourished me no end. I gazed at my febrile figure in the mirror & was understandably stimulated but then Bryan came in: “Haven’t you got a matinee to go to at 2?” and I rushed out of the reverie & back to the dull boards where I tapdanced my way out of trouble using a hair’s breadth brush. Only the finest vermillion. Audience of seven. Five of them were comp tickets for nurses. This does not bode well for Brighton. I see that idiot Big Tony Hadley has been persuaded to rejoin Spanner & Mallet. I s’pose that’s the Venezuelan trip up the Andes & no mistake. Thought of Gregory Corso and the missed camel bumps. Took all of sixteen minutes & 49 seconds before result arrived.

Wednesday, 25 March, 2009

Total fucking dopehedron paleocrapist nightmare in rehearsals today. Kerry Katona mumbled her way through Act I & missed virtually every cue & I remonstrated with her in front of the company: “We could have had Frances Barber, you know!” She stormed offstage & locked herself in her dressing room. It is an outrage. I knocked on her door & she stood there sobbing. “I know you think I’m a thicko…I know bloody well that I’ve only been put in this show to get punters in…but I can act…and I have to pay off my taxes…I am intelligent, you know!” I comforted her with apposite words from Nietzsche & that seemed to soothe her over to lands of crimson. Secretly I was taping the sobs ‘cos they’ll go well with the aquatic banjos at the Whitechapel Gallery. Then at 5:17 PM Kenwright stormed into my dressing room. “I’m sorry but I have totally had it with you,” he snorted. “You have done nothing but complain ever since you’ve been in this show…you complain about the delivery of the other cast members, you complain about there being no 100 Rehearsals sign outside the Gents’, you complain about the decrepitude of the alto bullroarers and I am sick of it.” I was startled since I have never done anything to offend anyone else & always mean to please but managed to placate him with Eric Morecambe’s sonnet about Nell from Camberwell. Every time the stupidity of others undermines & detonates my enviable competencies and I end up having to apologise to the idiots for THEIR idiocy! If you want to do anything in this world properly you have to do it yourself. To bed with anxious traditional. Barber poles & Francis Bacon in an Angus McBean Guinness head with confluent pliers.