Roman Polanski: Danny DeVito vs Madame Arcati ....

Actor Danny DeVito writes to Madame Arcati via Twitter, in answer to my question about whether Roman Polanski should be returned to the US, "He was forgiven. Let it be." I'm not so sure ....

I've just read the Samantha Gailey (now Geimer) transcript in the 1977 Roman Polanski sexual assault case before the LA grand jury. The details refresh one's sense of shock. I think he should go back to the US for sentencing.

The 13-year-old girl relates being plied with champagne and a Quaalude by Polanski at Jack Nicholson's house, given oral sex by him (she calls it "cuddliness") before he placed his penis inside her vagina. While they had sex "I was mostly just on and off saying 'No, stop,'" she says.

After asking her if she was on the Pill, and when she last had her period (she couldn't recall), he had second thoughts about vaginal sex and suggested sodomy, or as he put it, "Would you want me to go in through your back?" She didn't resist this "because I was afraid of him". He climaxed inside her.

His conduct was plainly predatory and abusive and I don't see that a 32-year delay in sentencing should make any difference. I also think he should get the award he's due from the Zurich Film Festival. There are plenty of cunts around who win awards - some of them are trying to get him released now.

Read the testimony

John Cleese: "I have decided to kill myself on my 70th birthday....

"I will donate my vital organs, and lush hair to the Smithsonian, and the British Library." Twitter, Sept 28 2009. The poor poppet's 70 on Oct 27. Should we have him sectioned or something?

Lana Turner still screaming beyond the grave

Lana Turner

As all the action on this site is happening over a post I put up last year on the pathetic Madeleine Foundation - its Express-reading rabble fans think I'm Dame Antichrist (titter) - I suppose I should keep things going up top. Just as I am about to give up for the day - even I am sometimes stilled by a lack of wind - a newsletter from a New York-based medium plops into my inbox. Among its many themes: the late Hollywood siren and MGM queen Lana Turner.

What a great name. The only other Lana I've ever heard of is Lana Lang, the redtop bitch rival of Lois Lane for Superman's cock. Anyone called Lana must be a case.

Anyhow, the newsletter. It's from a medium called Elizabeth Baron ("Liz"). She's quite well known in psychic circles. Her guardian angel is St Catherine of Siena, and Liz believes in aliens. In her latest epistle she tells of a seance she held at the Palace Theatre in NY before an audience of Broadway queens. The plan was to contact the spirit of Judy Garland. Unfortunately the dead diva was so fashionably late she didn't turn up at all. Lana - an old neighbour of Judy in life - did instead.

Liz reports: "Lana Turner came through screaming at her dead husband for molesting her daughter. One of the stars knew her daughter and passed on Lana's cry to her for forgiveness."

Lana was married eight times to seven men so her screaming fit must have been at her fourth hubby, Tarzan star Lex Barker. Lana's daughter, Cheryl Crane, alleged his sexual assaults in her 1988 autobio Detour: a Hollywood Tragedy - My Life With Lana Turner, My Mother. Doubtless Liz is well acquainted with this work lest we imagine Lana was offering an exclusive here.

Cheryl Crane

It's awful to think Lana's still screaming at Lex after all these years. And since Lana and Cheryl were reconciled in 1981 it seems odd that Lana seeks forgiveness through a medium, even though she threw Lex out at the point of a gun when she learnt of the abuse. And last year Cheryl wrote the affectionate Lana: the Memories, the Myths, the Movies which, as the Sunday Times put it, "is a celebration of her mother’s extreme beauty ... in a touching way, it’s also a deliberate act of forgiveness."

There, Lana. You're forgiven. No need to trouble Liz anymore.

(And here's Cheryl's estate agency website in Palm Springs. On her books is this delightful property below in Los Altos, CA. A snip at just under $5m)

Buy the essence of Cumming. Because you squirt it

Actor Alan Cumming has a new scent out ... it's called Cumming. Why not buy a bottle for grandpa while stocks last. It may make the old codger roll over his bed naked like Alan and say things like, "Cumming is sexy, earthy ... shame should not exist ... you are the most interesting thing about yourself ... I'm a man, I'm not going to change for anyone. I'm cumming. Fuck, I can't get it up." Eyeliner optional.

The Madeleine Foundation website closed down

The Madeleine Foundation website would appear to have shut up shop - and not before time. The McCanns had made legal moves to remove it from the internet over various alleged libels. My posting of July 2008 on this odious organisation has recently drawn a lot of hostility from the various cranks, sofa detectives and persecutors who have made the McCanns' life a misery: it's interesting to watch an old dormant post erupt like a volcano because of all the Google searches for Madeleine stories.

Many of the letters to me - some highly defamatory and therefore unpublishable - reveal a visceral loathing of the McCanns based on a variety of personal agendas which have little or nothing to do with the missing girl or her parents. To many, they have become representative of anything from class privilege (because they're doctors) to child neglect, a sort of totem for irrational abuse. Some MF-ers, led by retired solictor Tony Bennett, have even dreamt up British government conspiracy theories.

Who needs crop circle tales when there's yet another Maddie fantasy to pore over?

Philip Levine: An artist who gives the best head

I just love Philip Levine's head designs. Artworked bonces are so sexy, so clean. I commend to A-listers, the intelligent and cancer patients. For more on Philip's extraordinary work, see his new website. "Philip started using his head as a canvas for creativity back in 2006 when he began to go bald...."

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography - judging the book by its covers

At over 1000 pages, William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography is more heavy collectible than an actual read, something to position near a west window on bright afternoons when sunlight can play on the title gold lettering. Mind the dust motes.

Certainly very few people will read it through. Aside from its weight - the osteoporotic are advised to stack up on splints - its prose is so exquisitely formal as to garrote any semblance of breathing life. It is a words vacuum for image mummification: a relic for grazers of Majesty magazine; and a posthumous and flattering gift from the Queen to the memory of her venerated mother. That's evident from the covers, so let's keep the book shut and just savour its wrapping.

Where to start? Well, royalty's pet paparazzo, Cecil Beaton, natch. His two portraits of the Queen Mother adorn front and back: both left-profile visions of a benevolent goddess. In both she smiles, a royal heresy that won over her publics long before teeth bleaching was considered necessary. The front photo rings bells if you collect royal mugs: it's how we remember the old girl in tissue paper in the commemorative box. It's a clever resonance for the sentimental ma'am-ers. The myopic may treat the background vases as a reminder to visit the optician once again, but they should be reassured that the ornaments are indeed a little out of focus: all the better to draw the eye to the sharply focused simplicity of Elizabeth and her pearls (the body) while furnishing a sense of hinted splendour (the vases in the palace).

The pic at the rear is an "intimate" and surprisingly close-up shot of Elizabeth as pretty young Queen: crowned and bejewelled. It is nonetheless, like the front pic, a formal shot of knowing, crafted intimacy - a visual suggestion here that we're about to get personal between the covers. But not that personal: absence of any qualifying or promising text makes that clear. Here's the image - let's go with it.

Which brings us back to the front cover. The book title - which is nothing more than Elizabeth's royal title in her epic widowhood - alone is a promise that whatever revelations are made, none will dishonour the subject. To emphasise this message, the embossed gold of "Queen Elizabeth" marks the value of reverence. The bulla words "The Official Biography" stamp Elizabeth II's own imprimatur. There's no sell, no sensational under-the skirts IVF promise. Here's the monument: bow or curtsey with your debit card. No wonder Shawcross writes of being "honoured" by the Queen's invitation to construct her gift to mummy. No warts 'n' all, ducky.

The funereal monochrome of the two photos subliminally repeats the Queen's own view that the royal family is not showbiz: her instinct for dullness explains her enduring neutrality as a public figure, a dullness her mother did not possess. Now open the book and learn at the feet of a master-flunky.

Bow or curtsey

The Screws' Carole Malone is a HELL of a girl

The News of the World's resident bitch Carole Malone must be paid by the number of hells she packs into her opinion pieces each tax year. Just a few samples ....

On Baby P's mother, Tracey Connelly, 16.08.2009
"Why the hell should I worry about Connelly's safety?"

On bumbling Bob Quick who inadvertently revealed an al-Qaeda plot to blow up Manchester's Trafford Centre, 12.04.2009
"Hell's teeth-we're fighting a global war on terror here!"
"Why the hell was he ever given the job in the first place?"

On Judge Ian Trigger's disciplinary for comments made while sentencing a Jamaican drug dealer, 09.08.2009
"And who the hell cares what they [illegal immigrants] feel?"

On Anne Robinson's face lifts, 30.08.2009
"What the hell's wrong with a woman trying to look the best she can?"

On the Hell's Kitchen Antichrist chef Gordon Ramsay swearing about someone, 13.06.2009
"[He] can dish it out, he sure as hell can't take it."

On a demo by "extremist" Muslims, 15.03.2009
"Those guys from the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment sure as hell didn't deserve what they got on the streets of Luton."

Before the Screws, Carole had hell at the Sunday Mirror, too. A few samples ....

On Baby Spice of the Spice Girls, 07.11.1999
"Chris Evans rang HER nine times last week to ask her out. With friends like that, you sure as hell don't need enemies."

On the "murdering al-Qaeda bastards" who bombed London, 10.07.2005
"Where were you when you heard those murdering al-Qaeda bastards had bombed the hell out of London?"
"People lay trapped in smoking hell-holes underground, as bandaged, blood-soaked commuters ricocheted around trying to work out what the hell had happened that sunny summer's morning, the rest of us knew only too well. "

On Mary Wragg's "devastated mother" act in a mercy killing case, 18.12.2005
Headline: "CAROLE MALONE: Jacob's parents as guilty as Hell"

On Celebrity Big Brother's Chantelle, 15.07.2007
Headline: "IT'S HARDLY CHANT-HELL"

On two policewomen awarded £400k for horror witnessed at Dunblane, 21.03.1999
"If those officers didn't receive the counselling they thought they deserved why the hell didn't they fight for it in the same way they are now fighting for £400,000?"

On Sue Barker's wealth, 22.12.2002
"Just how the hell does Ms Barker afford a £110,000 Ferrari and a £2m mansion?"

My favourite piece of Carole's combines her hell-fire prose with her unerring inability to prophesy ...

Screws: On Britain's Got Talent winner Susan Boyle [or Subo], 31.05.2009
"WON? Lost? It doesn't actually matter. What matters is that Susan Boyle is on the road to hell."

This kind of hell? Global fame, a star turn on America's Got Talent (16.09.2009), riches, etc?

Or if you prefer, SuBo remixed

Princess Diana: Socialite rejects $1.6m offer for 'Diana Files'

Marie Sutton. A remarkable resemblance to Diana in her imagined middle years

Australian socialite and fundraiser Marie Sutton has rejected a $1.6 million American publisher's offer to release the so-called "Diana Files", a book of correspondence between herself and Diana, Princess of Wales, claims the Social Shuttle website.

It reports: "Earlier this year the infamous British blogger Madame Arcati revealed the story of Sutton's 'Diana Diaries'. They read like a thriller as the letters start off as a friendly exchange between Diana, Sutton and Kensington Palace secretaries and Royal aides....Within days of the Madame Arcati story Sutton was fielding offers from publishers around the world."

The exchange of letters was largely preparatory to Diana's visit to Sydney in 1996.

The Shuttle adds tantalisingly: "There are intimate stories of her various lovers and even details of some the world has never known about. The identity of these alone would shock many."

A flavour of the intimate friendship between the two women may be gleaned from an anecdote of Sutton's related on the Shuttle: "Once, as we were driving through the city ... we passed St Mary's Cathedral as a bride ascended the stairs. Diana rolled down the window in her car and yelled out 'don't do it!' to the startled wedding party."

Under what circumstances would Sutton publish the correspondence? Read The Social Shuttle to find out and for the full story.

Viagra by Molly Parkin. (Beckham nude is not enough)

"... even David Beckham with his
show-off, lolly-popper-chopper
wouldn’t find a welcome in my now-single bed."

Molly Parkin read this poem at the Poetry Olympics Enlightenment festival last Friday, September 11, at Chelsea Town Hall, marking the 50th anniversary of Michael Horovitz's New Departures - the "groundbreaking poetry publisher-cum-multimedic bardmobile". Click the link for other planned events.



Viagra by Molly Parkin

I went to my doctor for Viagra.
Two years and a bit before my 80th birthday.
She suggested I may not care for the side-effects,
a chronic headache at the base of the skull
for a full week,
and (here’s where she put me off)
uncontrollable, incontinent, diarrheoa>>>
meaning to say that I could expect
a shit in the middle of the shag.
“I graciously decline, doctor”, I said
“Wise decision, dear,” she replied with a smile.
“You’ve already pleasured the male population
of entire continents, and how!
What about giving others a crack of the whip now.”

I’d gone on the suggestion of a young taxi driver
who was servicing an elderly lady, former fare
from Belgravia to Brixton, where
he’d dropped her off at her toyboy,
a teenage drummer from Illinois.
She was on Viagra, so the taxi driver
got in on the act.
Now the two of them have made the pact,
the driver and the Belgravia dame
torrid screws around the clock.
But a firm friendship, all the same
he’s tried his own Viagra share
“a stiffie up for a fortnight,
a fucking nightmare,
trying to fit it under the steering wheel,
firm as rock, hard as steel."

But, as to me, I’ve lost the sexual urge.
Since my Las Vegas screw, the final splurge.
My doctor says it’s diminishing hormones.
And I did sense sediments showering my shoes
where these hormones must have exited my extremities,
leaving no stain of former hedonistic excess,
rendering me impervious to the opposite sex.
Such that even David Beckham with his
show-off, lolly-popper-chopper
wouldn’t find a welcome in my now-single bed.
My chosen companion being cocoa instead.

September.2009

Derren Brown: How many mediums are as rich as he is?

A number of Arcatistes have emailed asking me what I make of the mentalist conjurer Derren Brown, his trick "prediction" of the Lottery numbers and his ongoing assaults on psychics, mediums, astrologers, et al. Let's put it like this: I'm not losing any sleep.

Brown's main contention is that he reads minds just the way mediums do. Ergo, all mediums are cons. As a line of logic that makes no sense at all. It's as if I were to say: "I successfully pretended to be a doctor for a few days in a hospital: that proves that all doctors are frauds." Total nonsense. It's the same line of specious reasoning.

He contends that mediums just do what he does - cold read (ie basically pick up from visual and verbal cues, body-read, etc). There is no easy way to answer that but to critically examine the nature of the information given by Brown and a reputable (ie non-Derek Acorah-type) medium.

Brown is a startlingly gifted mind reader: his ability to tell people the names of their pets and the nature of their career aspirations stuns audiences. In other words, he can only tell what audience members know themselves. No doubt his training in neuro-linguistic programming has refined his tricks.

Authentic mediums are not governed by what the sitter knows (or is suggested to them) but by what is fed by an external spirit informant. This is evident in the range of information supplied. Messages may include names of people unknown to the sitter or cited incidents which can only be corroborated by another party. Prophecy is a part of this - and I can testify as to the accuracy of certain clairvoyants. Brown and his like cannot do this.

But he can stage big-time "predictions": I know of no medium who could predict the outcome of the National Lottery. Nor do I know of any reputable medium who can routinely "foresee" numerical combinations - or tell someone the name of their dog.

I had to laugh when Brown contended on the C4 show The Enemies of Reason (with the faintly unworldly Richard Dawkins) that mediums are just magicians who've lost their way in their craving for lots of money. How many mediums are as rich as Derren Brown? Apart from a handful of celebrity TV clairvoyants, most seers I know either scrape a living or do something else besides to supplement their earnings.

Brown also recalled going to a palmist and asking her during the reading what the relationship was between hand lines and fate. He was most put out when she accused him of blocking the reading and turfed him out. The palmist was perfectly correct. He'd paid to have a reading, not a lecture; and his question was, in context, plainly hostile and disrespectful of the palmist's need to focus. Why didn't he ask her after the reading?

Or put it another way: next time you're at a Derren Brown show, interrupt his stage show and ask him to explain his illusions. You'll be out on your arse before you know it.

Molly Parkin: A new poem on cock size

SIZE-ING THE SITUATION

Much too much fuss is made about size
when it comes to sex
one of the very best times
i’ve shared with an ex
was when he wiggled his prick
(the length and width of a matchstick)
round my orgasmic c l i t
by-passing the stroll
up my c unt’s larger hole,
easing four fingers instead
past the old maidenhead.
having licked on each tit,
at the nipples’ outer-tip

good lovers with petite pricks
learn to pick up these tricks
transforming straightforward pokes
into shared, glorious jokes

whilst cocks hung like a horse
can feel brutally coarse,
relying mainly on force
propelled by male ego
at source

molly parkin. 9.9.09

Poetry Olympics

Paul Dacre's holiday estate: Madame Arcati's booking up

Langwell Lodge: not the main residence, however

All this talk of Duncan Fallowell's mystery English country house - the presumed setting of his new ghost fiction - reminds me that the Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre has reportedly just bought a much grander property in the Scottish Highlands.

At least I assume Private Eye has got its facts right. The West Highland Free Press, cited as the source of the piece, has nothing about the purchase of the Langwell Estate, in Ross-shire, on its website. Indeed none of the local media has deemed this event worthy of a nod, though the 15,355-acre estate was snapped up for a reported £3.5m. Celebrity subjects of the Mail must envy Dacre's media invisibility.

Before the sale, the Telegraph and Country Life had featured Langwell as one of a number of premium properties hard to shift in these straitened times. It was put on the market in September 2008. Its chief attractions are shootin' and fishin': 35 hinds and 25 stags a year are reluctantly culled on average by tourist riflepersons (regular tenants mainly) in the interests of conservation. Non-cullers may just appreciate the natural beauty: "The coastline here is spectacular as are the beaches or you can take advantage of sea trips to the Summer Isles and Handa Island - a very special bird sanctuary," the site promises.

Langwell's Loch a Chroisg - with boat for brown trout fishing

I love the Langwell Estate! I'm thinking of holidaying there for meditative purposes next year - it has four estate cottages, including Langwell Lodge (pictured) for paying guests. Sadly, the 8-bedroom Langwell House, overlooking the River Canaird, is a private dwelling - still, click here for pics and extensive spec. That's where I'd prefer to shack up.

Movie Time: The Visitor by Duncan Fallowell

Weirdness and spookiness in a mediaeval English house in the country. A teaser for his mysterious ghost story....

New Zealand calling

God, tarts and a misleading Sunday Times story

Dr Andrew Newberg: Not quite the know-all atheist the Sunday Times would have us believe

"We are born to believe in God" is the headline of a Sunday Times story today. Various quoted research studies suggest that natural evolution requires us to have faith in a deity for the betterment of social bonds. Put another way, and leaving aside any independent paranormal, religious or mystical experience, people end up believing in God because our brains are hard-wired tarts, and a healthy tart will opt for whatever promises a good time. God-belief is a sort of john/client/punter/trick that delivers a benefit after the fantasy-screw. Yum yum.

The faith of Atheism appears to be going the way of all other religions: sinking into the pit of dogmatic fantasising. Having failed to disprove the existence of gods/afterlife/paranormal whatever, the salaried secularists in their uni labs are resorting to a form of academic Lego to construct theories from their experiments which are essentially unprovable (or essentially speculative). The agenda is to ignore countless subjective experiences of the mystical and explain them away in biological terms. Professorial livelihoods boom or bust on the dismissal industry.

Yet a closer inspection of at least one of these supposed apostles of Atheism reveals a more interesting and complex picture. Take Dr Andrew Newberg. for example.

He is quoted in the Sunday Times story. He's an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of Why God Won't Go Away and other works, he uses brain-imaging techniques to show how religious and spiritual experiences are the result of "belief networks" operating across different parts of the brain.

You would think from the article that Dr Newberg has reduced all mystical or religious experience down to mechanistic brain function - it's all in the head. That is not the case. In a Q&A on Newberg's website, he states plainly: "Whether or not God exists 'out there' is something that neuroscience cannot answer."

He goes onto explain: "For example, if we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture 'out there' or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part."

It didn't suit the Sunday Times and its Atheism agenda to flesh out this subtlety.

Tom Wolfe: The rich do have feelings - and he should know

The Tom Wolfe short story that extravagantly kicked off Geordie Greig's editorship of the London Evening Standard several weeks ago has proved to be upwardly mobile by migrating to Vanity Fair.

The Rich Have Feelings, Too is a wanly satirical monologue on all those poor rich CEO financiers who've cost taxpayers billions in whichever currency and been tragically reduced by the recession to flying with the "commercial-aviation herd" after yonks of coking it on private jets.

"We would be lounging lushly in what was designed as a living room, not an airplane cabin," the writer nostalgically recalls of former Learjet heaven. "There were mahogany, walnut, and amboyna inlays all over the place … You never had to sit next to anybody. You had your own virtual easy chair and all the legroom in the world … and cantilevered tabletops made of the same rich, spectacularly grained woods." [Pause to dab eyebags]

If there's a lack of Swiftian rage at this excess - as opposed to a lipsmacking curiosity about how the rich live - then may be that's because Wolfe, who's forever white-suited, is closer to the spirit of his fallen financiers than his fiction might lead us to believe. Commenter MikeyCee recalls on the Wall Street Journal blog The Wealth Report: "Tom Wolfe cannot talk about eccentric rich people, he’s one too. I know someone who customized Wolfe’s Cadillac. He had them do everything in white including the whole interior [for $7,500]. Pretty cool but still a bit over the top."

Yes indeed. Wolfe a little out of touch with the zeitgeist? Commenter King Cash on the same blog answers that with this: "I once heard [Wolfe] go on and on how punk music originated in England to prove a point he was arguing. Sorry, Tom, that you never took a cab to CBGBs [NY] in the time. It was under your nose." Along with the rest of real life.

Ally Ross: Wit like this can give you haemorrhoids

Simon Cowell and Ally. A satsuma slice would have heightened the experience

I'm awwwwwwwfully sorry to hear that the Sun's TV critic Ally Ross is off sick with haemorrhoids - or so Private Eye claims. I hadn't noticed his absence myself. There he is, kicking each column off with a showtime - like a diary entry. Well, deadlines, darling, deadlines. Call it his signature. Whatever gets the words to flow. We can at least comfort ourselves that his condition is not the result of arse sex, for as his columns constantly and tacitly remind us, he is a hard-wired cock-cunter to be sure.

Here are a few of these reminders (not to be confused with any latent homophobia, natch) which I am told are supposed to be ironic:

Of John Barrowman
"There are side-splitters from the moment Barrowman — 'The man who can do everything', except impersonate a heterosexual — opens the show singing I’m So Excited by The Pointer Sisters."

Graham Norton
"The name of Graham Norton's producer, Alex Bender. Marvellous."

Coronation St
He is disturbed that "The thoroughly heterosexual Todd Grimshaw is set to start wrestling with his sexuality and blah blah blah..." He declares that when Corrie "jabbed us in the chest with issues at every turn" viewing figures plummeted. "So put your leaflets away. Give us stories. Give us laughs". And none of this depressing camp crap.

Ricky Martin's girlfriend is fed up of being asked if he's gay.
''Why? Is he a bender or something?''

A Ricky Martin look-a-like on TV's Stars In Your Eyes:
''Ricky Martin gave an awful poof-homance''.

Time for a nice musical interlude

TV
"TV is way too camp, i.e. gay and rubbish, for its own good". Worth a read.

Elton John's Oscars bash for his Aids Foundation
"An event described offensively and incorrectly, by me, as '400 Poofs And A Piano'. (It's probably more like 500.)." That I will concede sounds ironic.

Of TV contestants
"They're the usual camp show-offs, mainly. Proof that anyone who wants to be on TV should be banned from TV. "

Christopher Biggins
"Christopher Biggins and his civil partner sharing a small cubicle on the same show (just like old times)." [In the gents, geddit?]

And on it goes. Witty-lite jibes concentrated into tabloid Wildeisms by the Sun's flattering micro-pars. Still, here's Madame Arcati's suggested cure for haemorrhoids. Click here.

Jonathan King: 'I sent Simon Cowell to Max Clifford'

Dear Madame Arcati

You clearly have a fan in Alice over at the wonderland that is Pandora's Independent; Max Clifford is quoted in her piece calling me an attention seeker. This coming from the man who represented Jade Goody, Kerry Katona and to whom I sent Simon Cowell when he needed attention. Funny old world.

Jonathan King

JK's memoirs
Pandora
Arcati