Another Sagittarian

Today is the birthday of Paul Klee, born on this day in 1879. I find him one of the few great modern painters whose works (mostly) lift the heart, cheer the sprits, even raise a smile. His jaunty natural draughtsmanship, acute sense of pattern and brilliantly inventive use of colour are instantly attractive. He's lucky to be taken seriously in an age that tends to overvalue the appearance of seriousness and difficulty, and undervalue humour and the light touch. Klee might have died in the Kaiser War, having volunteered to fight on the German side. Happily his family pulled strings to keep him out of danger and he was put to work painting camouflage - even in war, painters have their uses!
Meanwhile, I have acquired a ferocious 'cold' on top of the WRSE (Work Related Seasonal Exhaustion). But I don't complain...

Admirable Frankness

Last night, after a Herbert Spencer of a day at work, I arrived at Victoria to discover that - per contra the high-tech indicator boards, and unremarked by whoever was manning the tannoy - the trains on my line were not running. I eventually escaped the growing throng by boarding a train heading in roughly the right direction, which proceeded southward at a stately snail's pace. After a while, the driver came on the intercom to apologise. Here we go, I thought, expecting one of the usual meaningless (non)explanatory formulas - but no. 'I don't know what's going on,' he continued with admirable frankness. 'No one's telling me anything. We seem to have got behind Miss Daisy's chauffeur.' I laughed, but no one else seemed to have noticed. Perhaps by that stage I was hallucinating.

Naked Amazement

The fiercest NigeCorp workstorm since records began has left me, in my unoccupied moments, capable of little but listening to music and reading the odd chapter of More Women Than Men, which is (but really shouldn't be) strangely soothing... Last night, I happened on this: John Martyn singing his beautiful song May You Never, with Danny Thompson on bass, Jerry Douglas on dobro, and Kathy Mattea pluckily trying to duet with the wayward Martyn. Her facial expressions are a picture - especially after the performance ends. Did you ever see such naked amazement on a musician's face?

Virtual Nige Takes a Walk

Although the corporeal Nige is toiling in the mighty engine rooms of NigeCorp HQ, I'm pleased to see that his virtual form is over on the Dabbler, walking the fields of Leicestershire. Corporeal Nige very much wishes that he was, too...

'Ain't life grand when yer daft?'

The other day I found my mind turning to the Lancastrian comedian Frank Randle (it must be the overwork). I've been uneasily fascinated with this monster of comedy ever since reading King Twist: A Portrait of Frank Randle by - of all people - Jeff Nuttall, whose Bomb Culture was on every bookshelf in my student days. This clip from a recent BBC4 series, Rude Britannia, gives a flavour of Randle, a comic hugely famous in his day, who was to Blackpool what Elvis was to Las Vegas, though a lot less wholesome. It is hardly surprising that his fame did not outlive him - he was absolutely of his time and place and belonged to a particular phase in the history of impolite popular entertainment. And yet there is something so Dionysiac, so anarchic, so darkly clownish about him that he is bigger than that, almost archetypal. He represents, perhaps, a particular twist (King Twist) on the Shakespearean fool at his darkest and most unruly. Perhaps.
Randle, who seems to have spent much of his life drunk, was also brilliant at playing drunk scenes, so one was invariably included in the handful of low-budget feature films he made (in one of them, mind-bogglingly, he appeared with Diana Dors). The best of the drunk scenes involves Randle negotiating a grand staircase while barely able to stand - I couldn't find that one, but here's a taste of Randle in action, making good use of one of his catchphrases, 'Geroff mi foot!' Those were the days...

An Unexpected Tag

Among the birthday gifts showered on me by a grateful nation last week was a bottle of champagne, to which was attached a small laminated plastic tag with the legend 'Remove before microwaving'. These mysterious tags turn up, it seems, on all manner of unlikely items - DVDs for one. I wonder if they are there for any other purpose than to be removed before you carelessly toss your bottle of champagne or DVD into the microwave. Once they are removed, is their work here done? Are they perhaps like the famous notice that says only 'Do not throw stones at this notice'?

Born On This Day: Nige

In the eye of the raging workstorm, I achieve my 62nd birthday today - as does my exact coeval, dear old Tom Waits. Sadly, Edmundo Ros, having reached his 100th on this day last year, is no longer with us. Why does He always take the best ones first? (as the priest said at Father Jack's funeral, or something like it)...