Jeffrey Archer - 'Ken Livingstone will win ...'

Jeffrey Archer thinks Ken Livingstone will win the London mayoral race "by a whisker" even though Boris Johnson is 10 points ahead in the latest YouGov poll. "He's the best political operator I have ever known," Archer tells Rob McGibbon of Livingstone in a video chat for Access Interviews. Will Ken resort to dirty tricks? "Oh yes," says Archer. "In the next few weeks ... " How fascinating. But Archer should know as a master of dirty tricks himself.

Archer may very well be the best London mayor we never had - he was thwarted by a little criminal matter some eight years ago - and he reveals Ken's biggest mistake in office. "He should have gone to New York straight after 9/11 to show Americans we care - it would have brought the American tourists into London! We missed a chance." Isn't that a bit cynical, suggests Rob, riding on the crest of such a cataclysm? "Yes! But that's what mayors must do ... " Only Archer could make Ken seem, um, palatable. To see the interview click here.

My dream of Ken Russell and the Amises

Oddest dream I had last night. Ken Russell is up a ladder painting various full-length portraits on a huge, long billboard. My attention turns to Martin Amis and his late dad Kingsley standing together not far away in the street. They both take out their dicks and masturbate over a drain (separately but in sync). Martin then pulls away from the drain but morphs into a small alligator. His father fondly lifts Martin's tail and dabs him where's he's still a little damp. Can't work out this dream. Must be the drugs.

A ghost writer for Madame Arcati?

I am fascinated to learn that increasing numbers of company suits are employing ghost writers to engage with the blogosphere. These blogger-tarts are commanded by their suit-pimps to drum up business by planting posts and comments that focus the impressionable consumer mind on the suit-pimp brand. Why am I not surprised!

Still, this leaves me with a thought. Soon I am off to Turkey and I'm wondering whether to file from there - as I did from Israel last year - or hire a ghost blogger to run Madame Arcati in my "absence". What do you think? Possible ghosts ...

Duralex? - Well informed but would his tendency to lapse into French alienate my American audience?
Duncan Fallowell? - Brilliant writer, but would the Maori boycott Arcati?
Stephanie Mastini? - A force of nature, but would various psychos personally known to me start blitzing the site again with crypto-Nazi, Kevin Spacey-worshipping shit?
Jasper Gerard? No, no, no
Bryony Gordon? - Too young I fear, not bitter enough ...
Ms Baroque? - Literary and learned, not bitter enough ...
Nesta Wyn Ellis? - A delight, but she'd turn Arcati into the house of chanson!
Kevin Spacey? - Now that would be interesting. But the fat head doesn't engage, does he?

Oh, I don't know what to do ...

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: A gay love that sings its name

La première dame of France - and the new pretty face of French nuclear energy - Carla Bruni-Sarkozy - lends her very lovely voice to an Argentinian love story ...

Duncan Fallowell Movie 2: Electric Bile

The Duncan Fallowell movie has proved to be so popular with Arcatistes that his godson Wyndham Richardson has sent further footage of the untitled film. Enjoy these rushes from the car scene entitled Electric Bile - chavs and street kids may want to give this one a miss. Cannes is only a few weeks away ...

The Sarkozys: The new face of nuclear power

While the media focus on President Sarkozy's stacked heels and Carla's likeness to Jackie O (such a lovely pillbox hat) the real reason for their visit emerges: to export France's nuclear energy capabilities to the UK, now that it's been decided by Gordon Brown (and Blair before him) that nuclear is the 21st Century answer to carbon. Does the government have a people's mandate for this? I don't think so. Nuclear power provides 80% of France's energy needs - quite what happens to all the waste is not known because of a national security decree. For more click here.

Meanwhile, back to Carla's Dior suit ...

Who is this 'Jacqui Stephen'?

The mysterious Grey Cardigan in Press Gazette bemoans the inexplicable axing of “Jacqui Stephen” as the Mail’s TV soaps critic. “Jacqui Stephen might be short, Welsh and female but she can actually write,” he opines. This is true but his fan letter might have been more credible had he spelt Jaci’s name correctly. She now has a weekly gig in the Guardian's Media section as an online TV critic – a column that hardly draws on her vivacity. She should be given long colour pieces to write – celeb interviews, travel pieces, those sorts of things – to flex her prose muscles after years of grazing in front of the box. She'd make a perfect restaurant critic at the Telegraph ...

'What has Charlie Brooker contributed to society?'

The TV psychic medium Colin Fry - star of Living's 6ixth Sense - has just returned from a tour of New Zealand where the Maoris performed a Haka for him. "I was named a 'medicine man' by one of the biggest tribes in Auckland," he tells The Argus. He adds quite correctly (NZ expert Duncan Fallowell please note): "Indigenous populations are usually deeply spiritual people, so the type of work I do appeals to them."

It is however his comment on the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker which amuses me. Brooker has been particularly brutal to Fry on his BBC 4 show Screenwipe. He once said of the man who has mediated for the spirits of the late Quentin Crisp and Kenneth Williams (do I sense a theme here?): "He has a face like a rat trying to work out if someone's just farted."

Fry's riposte lacks Brooker's stiletto, that sieving for the right phrasing refined by years of freelance notice-me hacking during wanking episodes, but here it is: "At the end of the day, what has Charlie Brooker ever contributed to society? He's the kind of man I'd like to go up to in a restaurant and tip a plate of spaghetti over his head, because I just think he's vile and nasty."

Vile and nasty. Oh dear, that won't do. Brooker is paid to be vile and nasty, wittily. Brooker may look like a man struggling with the ravages of face thrush but I have heard many a chuckle burst forth behind a copy of the Guardian - and I can assure you that Peter Preston was not the cause. Fry should show clemency and summon up his "croaky-voiced" spirit guide Magnus for guidance on this matter. Brooker is the Norman Wisdom of prose antics, the Jeremy Beadle of comic reassurance of conventional prejudices. Even smart readers need their placebos.

Julian Barnes: Just an astro-puppet really

In his new book (a memoir really) Nothing to be Frightened of Julian Barnes reveals, as a literary performance, the full extent of his fear of death (or thanatophobia)- why, the poor poppet wakes up at night screaming and chewing his pillow at the prospect of eternal extinction. No more book awards! No more cool reviews from John Walsh in the Indy! Oh woe, cruel world! Fashionably, he is a devout member of the Literary Godless Religion (Christopher Hitchens is its current Archbish; M Amis one of the vicars) - "I don’t believe in God, but I miss him," Barnes writes, largely because the divinely-inspired painted prettier pictures on church windows, so far as I can tell. He tells us he's a melancholic person.

Mr Barnes will be appalled to learn that he is very true to his horoscope - he's just an astro-puppet really. Born on January 19, 1946, in Leicester, he is a Capricorn - with quite a Cappy (serious, ambitious, doleful) chart. Saturn in his ninth house promises much anxiety, or to quote my source: "In a practical sense, your attitude to all higher intellectual functions is that of a studious, serious, and meditative person. You must, however, be attentive to the possible presence of several challenging elements in your intellectual make-up such as depression, fear, and severity." This placement indicates a preoccupation with the impermanence of all things. His fear of death could just mean he's a cosmic grasper.

Still, his Venus in the fourth house promises a happy old age so perhaps that'll cheer up misery-guts.

And a Happy Easter to one and all - enjoy this German pagan festival, scheduled to happen just a day after the Full Moon. V astrological.

Nicholas Coleridge has three-hour baths!

Nicholas Coleridge - one of the world's worst novelists but near-supreme ruler of Condé Nast - discusses his favourite books. These are of little interest set against his pronunciation of aer-o-planes, the revelation of his three-hour baths (topped up by endless. hot. water.) and the sight of his curious head-shakes when he puts on a Nigella Lawson-type crazy smile about one minute in onwards.

Duncan Fallowell naked: The Penis

Click on the pic for the big version, then use zoom


A darling from the Mediterranean region - Arcati's big down there - gets in touch and shows me an extraordinary photograph of one of the UK's most brilliant writers, Duncan Fallowell - naked! My correspondent writes:

"Dear Madame - I see your site and you are interested for [sic] Duncan Fallowell. This photo was taken in our house in Sicilia. It is beautiful and I don't think he will mind but will surprise. He is ancient Greek in a way.

Auguri - La Donna Mafiosa"

I toy with the idea of contacting Duncan about this, but what if he explodes at my treacherous conduct and denies me the pleasure? I consider: sometimes things must be done in the public interest: sometimes Madame Arcati has to take the law into her own hands and just do the unthinkable - in this instance, publish a cock pic of a serious writer without the subject's permission: perhaps a first in this genre. I'm sure the cognoscenti will advise. Happy Easter, my bunnies!

And after this, read his wonderful new travel book Going As Far As I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book, click here. New Zealand will never seem the same again.

Robert Peston - the Caligula of the BBC

Gritting my teeth this morning at the histrionic noise that the BBC's Business Editor Robert Peston makes while trying to explain stagflation or whatever, I was suddenly reminded of the actor Jay Robinson as Caligula in the Jesus propaganda movie The Robe (1953). Click here (if you can also bear the sound of Richard Burton rumbling velvetily). Note the sand-papery screeching, the shrill italics, the demented changes of key. Now listen to Caligula ...

Ant(h)ony Minghella Dead: Not an interdental fricative phoneme

Am shocked by the death of film director Anthony Minghella at just age 54. Only the other day Nesta Wyn Ellis' praise for his The English Patient took my mind back to that most beautiful of movies. Go to Access Interviews for Minghella's Barbican talks about his movie career, click here.

(Would Americans especially please note that in pronunciation of his Christian name the "h" in Anthony is silent: only the English seem to understand this. In phonology the "th" in Anthony is not an example of an interdental (voiceless, non-sibilant) fricative phoneme. When a speaker pronounces fricative consonants, parts of the mouth such as the teeth and bottom lip partially block the flow of air. It is as though something has obstructed the air flow - like a large uncooked turnip - and it is fighting its way out. But not in Anthony. So don't do it, OK? Think of Ant(h)ony. Hit the "t" as in tart, t t t !!)

Heather Mills - The Baptist

My congratulations to Heather Mills on baptising Macca's ghastly solicitor Fiona Shackleton by throwing water over her dyed blonde locks on the premises of the Royal Courts of Justice. For this act alone I wish Heather all the best in her new life as her daughter Beatrice travels "B-class" on a measly £35,000 a year from her father while he travels "A class" on his £800m fortune (or £400m if you believe the idiot judge). See the Goddess' new website, bow in the presence of a true heroine, click here. Hillary Clinton pays tribute to the Goddess Heather, click here.

Where is the wonderfully named Joy LoDico?

An Arcatiste writes: "This week's diary in the Independent On Sunday was bylined Matthew Bell, the little boy they employed when the rather fabulous Joy LoDico departed. He didn't write it, though, as he is on holiday. Peculiar." Someone had better explain ...

Nesta Wyn Ellis: 'Normality is tedious, boring, imprisoning ...'

"Gordon Brown was Marcus Brutus and Tony Blair was Caesar's alleged nephew (possibly one of his illegitimate sons) Octavian, the self-renamed Emperor Augustus, the victor at Actium ... " - Nesta Wyn Ellis

Nesta Wyn Ellis should need no introduction in Arcatiland. She is the former political correspondent of Harpers & Queen, a former high profile journalist who contributed to most major newspapers and magazines, whose career reached a high point with her John Major biography in the '90s, dominating the front pages of The Sun and Sunday Times, before her migration to Paris a few years ago. A novelist, a singer and an astrologer, she agreed to talk to Madame Arcati about her life today, her views from a spiritual perspective on the political world, and her move into TV and movie production ...

The English talk about the weather - what's the Parisian conversational gambit ...?

Mostly about food. As you walk down the street or hang out in your changing room at the swimming pool, the conversations are mostly about what they have been eating lately. Fooooood matters to the French. You could almost say they live for pleasure alone, but I never ever in my life overheard so many people of all ages talking about food and meals they have just eaten. Or what they are about to eat - Qu'est qu'on va manger ce soir? Ouf!!!

Biographer, singer, writer, actress ... now you are moving into TV and movie production. Tell us more about this. What drew you?

I found that I was being asked to do pre-production work, location finding, concert production etc, by TV companies who wanted to film stories about me in Paris, romance, glamour etc, and I guess there are those who still do want to look for that story - why did Nesta move to Paris, what is her life like there? Romance....always this association with love and romance. And well, yes, I was mad enough to come here on the command of my heart.

And, since coming here I have been writing stories full of romance, sex, love...and finding one more love of my life; is there ever an ending to this quest and the joy of this discovery. One love brought me here, another found me.

But the story that was in my head and the song which was in my heart when I came have matured into a film and a novel and I am now in the development stage of the film with a producer, looking for a director and the finance is there for a big budget with a name director and a box office star.

I'm on the hunt for the director who should be one with a sensual eye. This might mean French. And the locations and the actors are French. But the female star will have to be British or American, a singer who comes to France, following her love, and
encounters dire consequences - what complications! Of course there is a lot of beautiful romantic music with this story, the first song/theme of which I composed twelve years ago while the first strands of the story were forming in my head. This film will be the leader of a trend to more emotive, erotic, photographically artistic and psychologically powerful films for really grown up audiences. The film industry has lost this with the exception of great stories like the recent Atonement and going back a bit, The English Patient. But the photography got left behind decades ago with great cinematographers like Cocteau,
photograhers like Cartier-Bresson. I want to revive that brilliant sense of visual beauty, images poised in time which speak to the audience in depths.

My work has usually been in the psychological realm and I want my film images to evoke psychological depths with stillness and presence, in a way that present day film makers try but fail to do with too much shock, speed and violence.

With Paris Production Service, I came to the conclusion that the companies who were filming stories about me and who were also asking me to find locations and plan shoots for them were, in fact, in the market for the kind of services which my new enterprise can offer.

The turning point was last August when a company contacted me about a shoot they wanted to do of a Hen Party for a Big Wedding story. The show ran for six days, of which Paris was mostly one part. But, thanks to my knowledge of theatres and other locations for shows, at which I have produced events for my own concerts, I was able to find them a superb location, dancers doing the Can Can, music, costumes, a floor to dance on; get them hotels, negotiate prices, advise them about all the local logistics and, et Voila! it went like a breeze.

I even sang during one sequence - La Vie en Rose - of course!

But this is all great pre-production services, and some production as well including party catering, extras, on the night.

Anyway, the company was absolutely thrilled because of everything that went with, and I thought, well, why not make this service more generally available? So that's what I am doing. I teamed up with Tara Byrne who has a lot of experience in event management and is really involved with the entertainment business as well and now we are ready to roll. I'm pushing out the infos and we have this pretty good website with great video clips--if you can play 'em--and the kind of pix and gorgeous sense of Paris present and past. MMMM. what a city...

Are you working on movie and TV projects already?

Yes, I am.I have two movie scripts and several more stories in the pipeline. Meanwhile I'm thinking up stories that TV companies can do in Paris; documentaries, actuality stuff with a good tag for the UK market. You have to live here, have been immersed in the history, the emotions the values of the French to be able to find the way to a good story and a good show that will also interest the UK market - and I have to say also the US and maybe Scandinavia, Holland, Australia. I'm here now and with Tara Byrne, who helped produce one of my recent concerts, who is a wonderful professional and colleague, we can do things very fast and very well. People have been very impressed with the way I have found them locations, players, produced a concert for them, all at the drop of a hat. They have said "We could never have done this in the time without your experience and knowledge of Paris."

And I know my Paris, on my bike or off it ... I'm aware of the history and the best time of day for the best light to film a certain location. I know how to sweet talk the bureaucrats/administrators into granting permissions. And it helps if your French is good, and you look good and you are dressed well and you smile. They're all into presentation here.

And what the TV people need is instant service. So, when you need the action, I drop everything else and get on the case. That's me, I'm a professional, a perfectionist and a workaholic.

And you're working on a movie? Is that right?

Yes, I have my own feature film, Children of Violence, a very unusual story, for which I have written the screenplay and the novel and the songs and musical themes. I am going to co-produce this film with a very dynamic woman producer of European origin who has a track record of production in the music business and the film business in the US. At the moment we are looking for the right director who should be a "name" but in my mind should also have an "eye" for the beautiful photograph.

This film will be shot in Paris, in mainly winter light and there are strategic moments and locations where there is something so evocative and transmuting about the time and the light here in the winter. I play with time in this story and I play with light as an expression of time, in the present full of shadows. You cannot forget those shadows here. You live with them all the time: the French, La France, recent history, humiliation, tragedy, pain which has been handed down the generations. You have to live it to understand it. Maybe you have to have been a part of it in a past time. There are summer sequences equally potent in their use of light, but they are in the past, which in the mind of the heroine is more present than the present. Heat, desperation, sexual passion and emotional confrontation, and a compelling denouement, in a time just before war erupts.

This film needs an A-list director. If I was further down the road of experience I would want to do it myself because when I write a scene I see the light, I see the focus on the players faces, the shadows. I think in pictures. What are words when you can use light and camera angles to tell your story?

Nesta, tell us about your love life (well I had to ask). Or just your sex life ...

What can I tell you? I am driven to love and be loved. I cannot, could not survive without love; and sex, for me is the expression of that love. There is no sensuality without the power of feeling for the other person.

Otherwise you have to play fantasies in your head. And, maybe you play fantasies anyway, and maybe love makes you vulnerable to another person and their decisions. I say, love anyway. We are on a level beyond normality in the life of feelings. "Human kind cannot bear too much reality," TS Elliott. Normality is tedious, boring, monochrome, imprisoning. Love is another dimension which changes everything around us. "La Vie en Rose."

Would you ever live in the UK again?

I hanker for London and maybe one day....a little pied a terre...?

I know you're an astrologer as well - what's your feeling on the US presidential race and Gordon Brown - you once said that you and John Major may have had a karmic connection ... any past life feeling about Gord?

Yes, Major was my son twice and a pretty bad son at that, both times. I know exactly who the historical personages were and I know that JM also knew about the first one because he referred to that life more than once and said more or less that he knew he had been that personage.

Gordon Brown was Marcus Brutus and Tony Blair was Ceasar's alleged nephew (possibly one of his illegitimate sons) Octavian, the self-renamed Emperor Augustus, the victor at Actium, and the author of the Crucifixion.

Brutus fell on his sword. Gordon still has that tendency. There are a lot of old Romans of that period haunting the halls of power in London. And I'm not the only one who has recognised them in their latter day time.

Gordon is currently suffering from the transits of the nodes and the eclipses which have taken place since his accession to the premiership, if one may describe it as such.

Of course, he drew the short straw because, as the wily Augustus well knew - he probably has his own team of astrological strategists - the UK was about to enter a period when its Pluto (power of the mass unconscious) which happens to be conjunct Gordon's Sun in Pisces was being occulted by successive lunar and solar eclipses. Things should improve over the next six months if the banks can control their debt creation fantasies. But I have to say that when Pluto re-enters Capricorn for 15 years in 2009 after a brief return to Saggitarius from May to November, the whole financial services sector, world wide will be obliged to restructure.

We are all awaiting the change of horoscope for the US which will occur as soon as a new President is elected. No matter which candidate, that change will be helpful because the Pluto Saturn angles to the US independence chart have been dire during the past four years. And these will disappear when a new election has been completed.

As for who the new incumbent will be, I think it will probably be a Republican. The Democratic candidate will be Obama and I haven't studied his horoscope yet, but McCain looks like the probably President, at least for the next four years from November. But I can't commit because I have not yet done his chart or done my final analysis of the other candidates' charts.

If you could kick someone and get away with it who would that person be?

I'll have to think about that rather deeply. I'm fundamentally non-violent. But there must be a deserving case in high places.

Give us a glimpse of your average day on Paris ...do you belong to a gym, for example?

I take a lot of exercise; swimming, walking, bicycling and yoga. It leaves some time for work in between. But it's no wonder I can't get to bed before 3am.

Nesta, I do wish you all the best with your new company. Any message to prospective clients?

Well, as I said earlier, I'm a complete professional, a perfectionist and a workaholic, and I always overdo my very best on any job. Also, I really know my Paris
and how to make things work here. One of the companies who worked with me on a three day shoot to make a 30 minute documentary, said "We could never have done this in the time without your experience of filming and your knowledge of Paris."

I'm thorough. And I like the work very much.

Thank you!

For more about Nesta's new TV and movie production company, click here.

Jasper Gerard: A urinator of prose?!

Chris Klee writes of one of Arcati's favourites, The Jasper Gerard: "Gerard really can't even get elevated meanness, can he? As much as I suspect he lies awake at night hoping the prose fairy will have turned him into AA Gill in the morning, he structures even his reviews like a formulaic pseud. Apropos the restuarant review referred to below, there is, for example....

1. The opening sentence to establish intellectual superiority over "the masses" - ie a misappropriation of Kant

2. The matey simile/metaphor to introduce "the real world"

3. The ham-fisted pop-culture reference. 'Beth Ditto' - erk

4. Follows by another highbrow allusion: Mill, this time. Because although he understands, he's really not like the proles...

5. But, just so we don't lose readers entirely, why not pander to a few popular prejudices....

6. Review the food, in such a manner that the meal is evoked, but lacks all gout.

"Dungaree risotto"?! He's not even put enough work into his cliches. Has he never even heard of mung beans?

In fact, would it be entirely inelegant to point out the passing resemblance between our friend Jasper and Hector Bartlett, the "pisseur de copie" in Muriel Spark's peerless novel about London hackery, A Far Cry From Kensington?

Darling Chris
Don't be so mean about The Jasps. He's just a silly billy earning a crust to keep his wife busy with his accounts. I am impressed by his talking the Telegraph into making him its restaurant critic. As I've said before, editors respond well to sloppy seconds.
MA x

Katie Price: WH Smith today, the Booker tomorrow?

Wonderful news that Katie Price - alias Jordan - has managed to get herself onto one of the Galaxy British Book Awards shortlists - namely, on the WH Smith Children's Book of the Year shortlist for her My Pony Care Book (Red Fox). It seems entirely right that a publishing world dedicated to manufacturing books based on celebrity brands (Hello Kerry, still getting Iceland food deliveries, I see) should now begin to reward those brands while the actual author sneers in professional purdah. I do hope Katie wins the prize. She has at least 27 more “memoirs” to go before death, as I pointed out recently, and the Guardian kindly reported and properly credited.

Rowan Williams in the pink on Auden

It’s not every day that an Archbishop of Canterbury writes an appreciation of a dead rampant homo and his work. But then Rowan Williams – aka Beardie - is no ordinary Archbish.

He writes the foreword to today's Guardian’s booklet on WH Auden in its imaginative series on great poets of the 20th Century. It’s a thoughtful little piece. The dark and menacing Pennine imagery of Auden’s early poetry serves as a metaphor for ... “the sense of doubleness and loneliness ... that was bound up at this point in his life with Auden’s homosexuality,” Beardie writes. He alludes to Auden’s “deepest and longest-lasting sexual relationship” (he does not name Chester Kallman whom he modishly calls elsewhere Auden’s “partner”). One of the poems selected is Lullaby which includes the line about homophobic “fashionable madmen” and “their pedantic boring cry.”

All this is very fine. And yet I doubt that his Anglican Church would countenance the assumed tolerance of homosexuality, the academic detachment from the life that feeds the poetry, the empathy with human complexity. Beardie betrays not a scintilla of disapproval of Auden’s lifestyle, not even in convoluted code. And I only make this point because in 2006 Beardie said of the Church’s attitude to homosexual relationships: "I don't believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don't say 'Come in and we ask no questions'. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, emotions." In other words, no cock-cocking or cunt-cunting, matey.

However, Beardie – as a dual-minded Gemini – has grown used to saying one thing and then saying and doing another. I think his Guardian piece exhibits the true mind of Rowan Williams: liberal, inclusive, not bothered by trifles like homosexuality; enlightened. He’d make a great humanist. But faced by the trad beardies in his Church he pirouettes about citing the collective position rather than the personal.

I can’t think why Rowan Williams would want to be part of a Church of fashionable madmen, listening to their pedantic boring cry. Perhaps he just likes dressing up.

Nesta Wyn Ellis: Now a movie and TV producer!

I learn with great interest that Paris-based journalist Nesta Wyn Ellis – the celebrated biographer of former Prime Minister John Major, novelist, chanteuse, actress, etc – has now moved into TV and movie production.

She has joined forces with PR and event manager Tara Byrne to found Paris Production Services. “We can help you with all the arrangements for your Paris filming and recording. We provide hands-on help with pre-production, production and post-production for film and tv companies,” the company says.

I wish them all the best with this most intriguing venture and I shall of course find out more. But to see their site for yourself click here.

McGowan: 'Are all Spanish people racist?'

In an extraordinary art performance the famous and controversial London artist Mark McGowan is to stand dressed as a MONKEY with a large sign around his neck, asking in English, ARE ALL SPANISH RACISTS? The event is to start on Friday, March 28, 2008, at 10am and is to last for seven days non-stop: it will take place in Plaza del Triunfo, outside the Seville Cathedral.

The project is in response to numerous high profile sporting occasions such as the recent Lewis Hamilton incident in Barcelona; and when England played Spain, large sections of the Madrid crowd directed monkey chants at Shaun Wright Phillips and Ashley Cole. Also, the Barcelona manager Frank Rikyard had to beg one of his players Samuel Eto into staying on the pitch after racist abuse in Zaragoza.

McGowan says: "Obviously this is a provocative stunt, but I have been asked to do a piece of art work in Spain by the gallery Suffix in Seville and I wanted to tackle this question and go out onto the streets of Seville and ask them are they racists. This is not an attempt to get an answer but to the Spanish people, how can you tolerate this? I will be there every day for a week, I hope my project raises some debate."

Mr McGowan's funeral to be announced ... For more info, click here

Telegraph: Celia's upgrade, Jasper's lesbian soup

A darling reader of Arcati draws my attention to career peregrinations at the Telegraph – and for a change I find myself awed by its commonsense.

First, my congratulations to Celia Walden who has been divested of her Spy editorship and promoted to Senior Features Writer – I had heard of this, but mention here brings closure to my heartless assessments of her goss gathering abilities (basically hopeless). Celia’s true talent lies in the smiley mano-a-mano of the in-person celeb interview wherein she can fillet out a news story. Her pieces in Glamour best exemplify this – she it was who got Simon Cowell to reveal his declined opportunity to become the face of Viagra – even if the magazine’s Q&A format makes no demand on literary or critical ability.

Ms Walden should be thankful to the litigious Nicole Kidman for her career uplift as well as to Arcati for her attentive rigour. It is only ever my intention to steer people to where I think they belong, natally.

The migration of her old Spy deputy Jonathan Isaby to become the Telegraph’s very own Guido Fawkes is also an inspired move. To be blunt, the poppet does not have quite the right type of gravitas for the flim-flam of A-list slebrity. Nature gives her physiognomic hints to mortals as to career destination, and Mr Isaby is well placed in the Gothic environs of Westminster Palace.

Mandrake will replace Spy as a seven-day operation, a forerunner of things to come at the company generally, I suspect. I totally approve of its editor Timothy Walker, an excellent gosser, and he was very sweet to my friend Nesta Wyn Ellis in her John Major period. Arcati’s memory is long as you all know.

My informant adds in his note: “So was Celia 'promoted' or moved out of harm's way? In either case it looks like the Telegraph's risible diary column is no more. First Jasper Gerard, now Celia. You're gaining quite a headcount. Can you please fix it for that odious snob Ben Brogan to be tipped into the hack dumper, please? For all his (alleged) faults as Speaker, Michael Martin's suffering at the hands of La Brogan for the crime of being working class and Scottish makes for an unpleasant read.”

Well, Jasper has recovered from his Observer dumping and is now the Telegraph’s restaurant critic. I note he visited Brighton's veggie eaterie Terre à Terre a few days ago. In his review, he reminds himself of vegetarianism’s old associations, “with schoolboy jibes about lesbian soup and dungaree risotto.” Lesbian soup? Oh dear. I fear that war will have to be re-declared on Jasper. He’d better get his rollerskates on (again).

Linda Lovelace (dec'd) to dine with Felix Dennis?

I had to laugh at some mischief by Rob McGibbon during his video interview with Felix Dennis (see below). He asks the mega-millionaire magazine publisher whom he'd like to invite to his fantasy dinner table. Once we're past Freud we get to a woman who once worked with Charles Babbage (creator of the programmable computer back in the 19th Century). "What's her name?" struggles Felix, "Ada ... Lovelace ... is that it?" Actually, it's Augusta Ada Lovelace he's thinking of, the mathematician daughter of Byron, who in effect first conceived the idea of computer software. Alas, Rob mishears him thinking he said Linda Lovelace ("No!" barks Dennis) before flashing up on the screen a Deep Throat movie poster featuring the notorious actress cocksucker. Tsk.

Pour yourself a drink and watch a tremendous interview, click here. (The Lovelace bit's on the third video)

Felix Dennis: 'I spent $100m on whores and drugs'

Sensational video interview by Rob McGibbon with the God of Debauch (and magazine publisher) Felix Dennis on Access Interviews. When Dennis is not confessing to unloading $100m on whores and drugs over 12 years he's slagging off the movie Hippie Hippie Shake (out this year), starring Sienna Miller, supposedly about the hedonistic times of those (including Dennis) involved in the Oz magazine trial. I love his comment about Working Title that's made the movie - it trades on being a credible indie studio but is ultimately owned by General Electric - and accuses co-founder of the studio Tim Bevan of "selling out". What should Germaine Greer not have been doing in 1971 ("I have the photograph - ha ha ha")? View here.

Anthony Blond - the Marks & Sparks sea Venus

Dear Madame,

I thought the following might amuse you.

Your devoted reader.

Anthony Blond, the publisher and son of a manufacturer of underwear for Marks & Spencer, who sadly died recently, was an unwelcome house guest of a late friend of mine at his summer house on Fire Island. Blond arrived in a seaplane wearing a white suit, accompanied by a pimpled male youth. Blond stepped out onto the seaplane’s float, fell off the float face down into the sea. He emerged from the sea like Venus. Without missing a beat he said, “These Marks & Spencer shrink-proof suits are really wonderful, aren’t they?”

'Newspaper blogs are worthless'

Dear Madame Arcati

A friend of mine recently left a message on Ben Brogan's Daily Mail blog pointing out that journalists ought to ring the people they write about to check stories. The point is that Brogan and co don't do basic journalism, and they ought to, when they're blogging rather than reporting for the print papers. Needless to say this didn't get put up (it went to Brogan himself for approval, if the Mail still employs the blogging structure it used to). If you look at Brogan's blog you will see several recent stories have what are essentially corrections appended to them, all of which would have been saved by simple journalism. It boils down to the fact that the blog, and others like it, are just worthless.

Anon

Tony Parsons: 'Mmm, I just lerve guns. Yum yum'

The hideous Tony Parsons pens a paean to guns in British GQ. “The first time you hear gunfire is like losing your virginity, but without the sex,” he writes. Excitingly he finds himself caught up in a “violent coup in Southeast Asia”. Bang, bang. In a tropical place (as opposed to British streets) “there is no denying the glamour of guns”. Thinking of his big butch soldier daddy who fought at Monte Cassino he reflects: “My father always thought me a lesser man than he because I had never heard that sound [gunfire]. And he was right. I have no doubt at all that he was right. We are forever lesser men than those who have heard the guns because we have not been tested.”

I should have thought that marriage to the goddess Julie Burchill would have sufficiently tested his sentimental sense of masculinity, hewn from comic books and John Wayne movies and the midget Norman Mailer and his big-cocked sense of his own big cockedness, now just another husk of nothing. Masculinity as defined by Parsons can only be sustained at the expense of others: it draws its energy parasitically from dreamt challenges made flesh. Someone else must lose something for masculinity to feel fulfilled. At its lowest it is expressed in domestic violence. At its most handsome, it resembles George W Bush. The sense of redundancy it trails behind itself is explored in a huge literature of bitter and disappointed experience, so easily forgotten by copycat sons of copycat men who wank in front of mirrors.

Come on Tony, throw a sheet over the triptych and give your over-used cock a rest.

Nelson Mandela in London for his 90th

Nelson Mandela is celebrating his 90th birthday at a Hyde Park rock concert on June 27, organised by his 46664 Aids/HIV charity. To pre-register for tickets click here. I suppose bloody Bono will be there. Mandela's actual birthday is on July 18.

Myleene Klass has a Rupert moment

That versatile violinist-cum-TV personality Myleene Klass had a nasty, Rupert Everett moment when she opened her school leaving book once upon a time. She tells me: "There was one guy at school who was mental - everyone else signed my leaving book but he cut off some of his pubes and stuck them in my book. I think he might remember me!"

Some Monkey business from The Guardian

The Guardian's mischievous Monkey media goss column says that one of the unlikeliest stories on the internet was that Heat editor Mark Frith was moving to Mojo. It was of course Arcati that authored that rumour based on a conversation overheard (by an Arcati spy) between two Emap suits in a London coffee shop. We now know that Frith is leaving Heat but not going to Mojo. So you could say that Arcati was 50% right while the Guardian was 100% nowhere. I know the paper checked out my original story and was told by Emap that Frith wasn't moving. You can have churnalism by omission ...

Ming Campbell on Bush and the Guantánamo charade

I fear that Menzies "Ming" Campbell (the UK’s former Lib Dem leader for the benefit of my majority overseas readers) is not sufficiently unbalanced to produce a bestselling memoirs. Decency is the enemy of sales. His My Autobiography, out March 10, however is at least a lightly whipped soufflé of a read and froths along unencumbered by intriguing solipsism or lucrative vengeance. He is in danger of being thought of as an honourable politician. One imagines good stories were extracted from him in the dentist's chair.

One in particular interested me - it's not new but worth repeating. In November 2003 he and Charles Kennedy met with President George W Bush at Buckingham Palace. They debated Guantánamo Bay, and when the Scotties said that Brits were in illegal detention there Bush made the “throwaway remark: ‘As far as we are concerned, if the British government wants the British detainees back again, they can have them. Just send us the airline tickets.’"

I love Bush's way with words. To buy Campbell's book, click here.

NME Awards - just ever so slightly chaotic

Last week's NME Awards were sooooooo much better than The Brits (the latter had three more Osbournes than was strictly necessary, I felt). But the NMEs could have been a bit better organised. I’ve just found out that poppet journalist Paul Stokes couldn’t get access to the NME Big Gig at the O2 straight afterwards (starred Manics, Kaisers, Klaxons) and was part of the Awards hoopla. Paul Stokes is, er, the NME’s news editor.

Cock-cunter reviews cock-cocker's New Zealand book

It's about cocks and cunts really, this book review, and the relative merits of cock-cocking as against cock-cunting. A lot of the former is "sleazy". A lot of the latter is presumably a good time. Click here for the larky review in the Sunday Telegraph of Duncan Fallowell's Going as Far as I Can - click here to buy. The reviewer Rory MacLean is a travel writer I'd never heard of hitherto, but here's his website. "Rory ... lives in Dorset with Katrin, their son Finn and Tess ... " Who's Tess?

Miss Lola: the woman who became a man who became ...

Katherine Dalton was once a straight blonde model. But the green-eyed beauty, who also appeared in pop videos, felt that she was a gay man trapped in a woman's body. She would go to gay clubs and sometimes sleep with gay men. She then spent £30,000 on a gender realignment op and became Adrian. He is now a gay man with a boyfriend. And Adrian has now launched himself on the stage ... as a drag act, Miss Lola. Part of Adrian's story can be found here, the rest I know.

Stephanie Mastini - send your healing thoughts to her

My friend Stephanie Mastini - Kevin Spacey's former sister-in-law - is having surgery on Monday. My thoughts are with her. She writes: "I am very scared and stressed but I am strong and have so many more adventures to experience and my book to finish ... not to mention all the paintings! Don't forget me ... love, Steph x."

How could we forget you, Steph! See her blog - a friend of hers has penned a song in her honour, click here.