Duncan Fallowell: US literary triumph and his cock

US edition

Delighted to see that Duncan Fallowell's How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits debuted at No 1 in Amazon.com's bestseller chart for traveller cock-cockers/cunt-cunters (but these are not exclusive labels - please!). It's time the Americans made a fuss of him as he parades his peculiarities in a variety of clever, playful ways.

Oprah: "Get it down Mr Fallowell! - "
Duncan: "I beg your pardon?"

Naturally, Madame Arcati was among the first to recognise his book's singular brilliance. Eventually, the people who dole out the PEN/Ackerley Prize saw the light and plonked their literary laurel crown upon his still-luxuriant locks.

I reviewed the book in another age - here.

Now, there's a new US review which I think soul-links to the book. Here. I like the chance angle Garth has picked up on as an unspoken sub-theme. Who's Garth? Do some work you lazy darting fuckers.

Do you want to see Duncan's penis? Oh!

Duncan Fallowell's Turin letter: Magical mysteries... and a dark porn cinema

Dear Madame Arcati

I have just returned from an intoxicating period in Turin and, since you have an Italian name and also an interest in mystery, I thought you might like the series 'Tredici Misteri di Torino' [Thirteen Mysteries of Turin] which I have to-day posted on YouTube.

Here is a taste, click here.

The city is fortresslike and of massive blocks on a stone grid with secret baroque courtyards and rococo interiors. For its size it has a greater number of bookshops than any city in the world. And its caffés are even grander than Vienna's with better food and more gymnastic waiters. You will also be interested to know that it is one of the three cities of the white magic triangle (the other two being Prague and Lyon) and doubtless even more excited to learn that it is one of the three cities of the black magic triangle too! (the other two being London and San Francisco - how on earth did Frisco get in there?).

It certainly has the darkest porn cinema I've ever visited, a cosy retreat when the weather is inclement. Not that it was inclement. Glacial blue skies, starry at night, and the Alps snowcapped as backdrop. Anyway the city is weatherproof with nearly 20 miles of glorious arcades in the historic centre and something of interest round every other pillar. You probably want to know more about my erotic adventures there - but I'm still in a secretive romantic glow so allow me to fondle my memories privately a little longer.

With best wishes, Duncan Fallowell

My Dear Duncan

Thank you so much - it's been years since I stayed in Torino. As to your intriguing film, I find that an iconic water feature in a place of worship is never so much sullied as by stigmata of its electrical power source. Don't you find? Still, your average Roman Catholic is a pragmatist. Which is just as well.

I think Turin has found its re-creator.

Love & Light (to quote the hideous New Age lingo)

MA x

Duncan Fallowell: Do you understand The Catatonic Sequence video?

Duncan Fallowell has posted a very annoying video on YouTube called The Catatonic Sequence. It features seven Tarot cards and carries a warning to those who are 'easily influenced' and mentions something called The Seventh Game.

Could the film-ette be a satire on the Tarot (my brother is a most proficient reader), or a cryptic tease of some sort, or a secret message to Al Qaeda? I seriously doubt any of you will know, but comment if you must. (Don't post anything news-worthy which you don't want noticed by the media. I shall use it. You have been warned)

Incidentally, Duncan's memoir How To Disappear has a new release date: mid-August. I understand his publishers Ditto Press took account of my astrological warning against a June 15 publishing date (wrong kind of Moon phase) and are now entirely in my heavenly thrall. I shall permit a mid-August release. It's possible Duncan, as a life-affirming agnostic secularist thingumy, is cross about my pagan intervention and has hit back with this vid. If so, I forgive him. Madame Arcati is used to being much misunderstood. And abused. (Click screen arrow once to play)

First look at Duncan Fallowell's How To Disappear memoir cover. Excellent

Love the book look of Duncan Fallowell's memoir How To Disappear due out at the end of June from Ditto Press. Or whenever! Was there ever a greater marriage of title and design? Of course, one cannot imagine Duncan disappearing (unlike Madame Arcati) and that's the intriguing lure. What can he mean? He loves the cryptic does Duncan Fallowell. I shall be reviewing it, natch.

Duncan Fallowell: At home with his many whiffs of other worlds

During my latest absence Duncan Fallowell posted a movie on YouTube, all about his library. If you love Come Dine With Me and the latest Hello! incursion into a celebrity's home, but prefer a literary flavour to your vulgar curiosity, then this is for you: pour yourself a glass of wine, sit back and wander free through Duncan's mountain ranges of books (his 'whiffs of other worlds'). He is a marvellous guide.

Do writers have to be odd? Is there a God? What's invaded his bedroom? And has he ever boiled a lobster in his lobster pot?, now entombed by books. Which ancient civilisation was the most adult? 'Open a book and you're opening a door... they [books] are an expression of freedom.' I like his agnostic thoughts (mystery must be our salvation) and his reflections on the nature of respect. His best, most thoughtful film yet.

Duncan Fallowell directs Mary In A Coma movie

Duncan Fallowell

My return would not be complete without a Duncan Fallowell posting, New Zealand's very own pin-up.

I am delighted to see that he has directed a short movie titled Mary In A Coma, set in London's Notting Hill.

A sexy young man and a sexy young woman pass each other in the streets over and over again. Do they know each other? Hard to tell.

I commend it to pop video production companies seeking a cryptic off-the-shelf promo. Btw, I wonder if it is possible to make a genuinely witty porn film. Duncan?

Click here to view movie.

Oxford Poetry Professorship race - blazing row at health club!

Michael Horovitz - 'Very, very angry'

The race for the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University (and its stipend of £6,901 pa) has provoked a blazing row between author Duncan Fallowell and a contender for the prestigious post, poet Michael Horovitz, I learn. The ding-dong, prompted it seems by the caustic humour of one of Horovitz's rivals for the Oxford job, the mischievous Roger Lewis, took place very recently in a Notting Hill health club.

Duncan Fallowell - after his swim?

Duncan tells me: 'Horovitz verbally assaulted me in my health club for encouraging Roger - Roger wrote something mildly mocking about Horovitz in The Times apparently and Horovitz said, "I'm very very angry and it's all your fault!" And I knew nothing whatsoever about it. Mike overstepped the mark - I go to my health club to escape all that shit and relax in the beautiful swimming pool.'

So what did Lewis write in The Times? It must have been his piece of May 15 in which he set out his stall for the poetry professorship, titled 'Say No to Pompous Professors - Vote for Lewis', that caused offence. In it Lewis describes Horovitz, 75, and another heavyweight candidate, the poet Geoffrey Hill, 77, as 'nice old codgers', and their work as 'serious-minded to the point of pain and obscure of purpose.'

He added: 'Asked by a journalist what my campaign strategy might be, I said I’ll jump out from behind a bush in Hill’s garden and the bathroom door in Horovitz’s hut and shout “Boo”.'

Roger Lewis - gunning for Horovitz

Aside from his health club rant at Fallowell, Horovitz hit back at Lewis in a Guardian piece on May 28. He suggested Lewis 'waxed extremely unlyrical in trumpeting [his] pitch for the job' in the Times and nominated him for a 'Services to Dumbing Down award.' Boys, boys!

Duncan Fallowell: Graham Greene and Goan ghosts; Patricia Highsmith and love

Two literary giants interviewed by Duncan Fallowell ...

Graham Greene - "There were ghosts [in Goa] ... "


Patricia Highsmith - Has she ever been in love? ...

Duncan Fallowell and The Pedro Friedeberg Rainbow Party

I hardly ever see Molly Parkin in the flesh yet we are successfully and happily affianced. Duncan Fallowell goes one better: Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg is one of his oldest friends - and they've never met.

Sergey Stefanovich has made a short movie of this remote friendship, showcasing a selection of Friedeberg's beautifully artworked letters to Duncan. The Pedro Friedeberg Rainbow Party is set to Rainbow Party sung by Claudia Visca (from the opera Gormenghast, music by Irmin Schmidt, libretto by Duncan Fallowell).

The letters are worthy of their own exhibition.

This new portrait of Duncan was taken by Stefanovich.

The Pedro Friedeberg Rainbow Party

Duncan Fallowell: Andy Warhol in church - the movie!

Mournful, menacing, sinister: the score of a horror film, even. A camera leads us into an English parish church - Anglo-Saxon most probably with Norman add-ons (experts please advise) - as Duncan Fallowell asks Andy Warhol whether he believes in God. The eye lingers on the interiors, dark wood carvings - one resembling a pagan voodoo doll - before it is drawn to a pair of legs encased in light tan or cream drainpipes whose crotch folds set off a pronounced and artful scrotal bulge. The fly is open. In the man's leather gloved hands is a book. A book which bears Andy Warhol's name but which his Factory serfs wrote: the signature and the $ sign are at least Andy's: the sleb stamp. Church, fame. money, cock. Does Andy Warhol believe in an afterlife? The na-na-na-na-na repeat in his answer reminded me irrelevantly of this, the na-na-na-19. Now watch the flick, you hell-grazers. (Click image once to play)

Duncan Fallowell: Why isn't he in BBC4's krautrock documentary?

Dear Madame Arcati

I'm answering the enquiry about me and krautrock which appeared on your comment board. No, I did not know anything about the BBC4 documentary which I see is being broadcast this Friday. Yes, I did introduce krautrock to the UK and spent a lot of time in Germany at the beginning of the 1970s.

I'd like to boast: I am the only person in history who bought the first albums of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and Can upon their release, so when I became the Spectator's rock columnist in 1970 one of the first things I did was go to Cologne and connect up with Can who became good friends and I wrote a lot about them. I also hung out in Berlin with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel and told Tony Stratton-Smith of Charisma Records to sign up the former but he was too slow and Polydor got them, later Virgin Records.

David Bowie arrived in Berlin much later at the end of the 70s and of course was never in on anything seminal. In Munich I was with Amon Duul and Popol Vuh (re last, see video below). The latter was the brainchild of Florian Fricke who was the first person I ever knew to sleep under a fur blanket. Fur was popular at the time - see the film Performance for a graphic illustration of this and remember too the famous fur-topped bar at the Byblos Hotel in St Tropez (since removed). Florian was a delightful man, quiet, intense and generous, and a wonderful pianist. He already knew Herzog and Popol Vuh subsequently provided the music for all Herzog's major films. Sadly Florian died early from a stroke.

I hope Friday's documentary mentions him because I'd call him the inventor of 'ambient music' in the current sense of the phrase. As we know, ambient music as an idea was the invention of the Franco-Scottish genius Eric Satie.

With best wishes, Duncan Fallowell

Popol Vuh - Improvisation (1971)

Roger Lewis: Why he sucked his trousers up his arse

Has the Daily Mail run the extract from the funniest book of the year yet - Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as It Is Lived by Roger Lewis? I can't be bothered to look, and I'm awfully busy, so please be a duck and check it out. Last I heard, the paper bought the serial rights then got the wally-wobbles. Editor Paul Dacre was horrified by the book's venomous refrains (foreign to him as we know), spiked it, and ran something toothless by Janet Street-Porter. Very foolish. (Yes! The Mail has run the extract, a commenter claims. Now I can't be bothered to rewrite this par. Mr Dacre has proven to be more pliant than legend allows. He also has good taste in property. Longer[er] may he reign!)

While we await news (no longer), have a slurp of Lewis' glorious book from Christopher Hart's great review in the Sunday Times. Lewis, a journalist and biographer of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, reveals himself to be an authentic, wildly comic, splenetic misanthrope: a hater, among many other things and persons, of Clive James (let's start a club on this fraud), bad manners and Andrew Roberts who has the “grimace of a baboon with diarrhoea trying to hold it in." He's also the first writer to allude to the late film critic Alexander Walker's homosexuality: for some reason it's a complete no-go area in some quarters.

Thanks to Lewis' poor health “I’ve been coughing so much I sucked my trousers up my arse.” And when his father died in 2004 of “cancer of the bumhole… My sole inheritance is to comprise spare bumper packs of Coloplast Direct Wetwipes”. Oh yes, please. Buy now.

Click pic for large version. My thanks to Duncan Fallowell for this photo of the Roger Lewis book launch at Zippo's Circus on Hampstead Heath last week - Roger's son Tristan is a clown and juggler with Zippo's. Duncan Fallowell is in the white trousers and Beryl Bainbridge is offering him money - he can't remember what for. Paul Bailey is in the background (my apologies for trying to kiss you once, Paul ...)

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

Duncan Fallowell: 'My druggy inner landscape orgies at Oxford'

While Duncan's in mind (the companion piece is the posting just below), see him in the present flesh in this documentary Rush: Drugs Uncovered. Fascinating to me as I've never once taken a non-prescription drug, even when a certain Sunday Times journalist pinned me to the ground at a party and attempted to rub coke onto my gums. He failed of course.

Duncan Fallowell: 'MJ just wanted to be deeply fucked'

Duncan Fallowell writes in response to my Disneyfied cockless-cuntless Michael Jackson posting below this:

Dear Madame

I don't think his songs are asexual. Many of the later ones seem to be coded confessions. Didn't he do one In The Closet? His whole act, I think, came to embody an intense yearning to be cherished and deeply fucked. Was sexual passivity ever more vocal?

Duncan Fallowell

Dear Duncan

Still trying to get a copy of your 20th Century Characters for your Jacko piece. I recall how astute you were.

I don't think his songs were asexual, either. Like many singers he masked his true romantic interests in conventional garb. His later stuff may be coded confessions. But his persona was disneyfied-asexual - as a refuge from the feared consequences of being himself.

I'm not at all sure he wanted to be deeply fucked, at least not literally. I can recall reading Jordy Chandler's court deposition: he described how MJ would blow him and eat his cum. In the sense that he wished to ingest "masculinity", this is the nearest to being "deeply fucked" I guess. But he might have needed yet more pain killers after a bout of penetrative loving. I'm not sure he wanted that level of sexual or emotional engagement. A gobble with a boy-man was as much as he could deal with. It was playtime followed by the famed sleepover.

Of course he should have gone to prison: Genet's sweaty jailhouse fantasies might then have been brought to life in MJ. Who can say?

Love as ever, MA x

Quentin Crisp and Arnold Schwarzenegger: When they met on a date

An Arcatiste in the post two below asks where he or she can read about Duncan Fallowell's mad lunch at San Lorenzo with his companions Quentin Crisp and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Duncan replies: "Yes, it's in my collection 20th Century Characters published by Vintage, now out of print, but available secondhand on Amazon. Perhaps I should post it on my site since it has a wildness about it you don't come across in journalism today. Richard Davenport-Hines cites that particular lunch as one of the greats in his book on Proust at the Majestic. Even then the Governor of California was an unstoppable force of charm and ambition." To buy click here

Duncan Fallowell: Footballers must strip off their Lycra!

Dear Madame Arcati

I don't want to overplay my welcome on your website but I wonder if, on a quiet day, you might find a space to air this issue - which has been provoked by your recent rugby posts. It's this: I think the time has come to ban the hideous long Lycra underwear increasingly worn by footballers underneath their shorts. These items of dress come way below the level of the shorts and look disgusting. They are fine in athletics where they originated (with Linford Christie) and look appropriate, but if 'the beautiful game' wishes to adopt them I think managers must insist that football shorts are NOT also worn over the top. Since this ugly practice is now spreading from football to rugby, it is time to call a halt and stop the rot.

With best wishes, Duncan Fallowell

Dear Duncan

You are always welcome. I must say that but for your observation I would not have noticed these Lycra corsets that footballers have taken to wearing - perhaps because I very rarely watch the game. I assume they're worn to avoid damage. But I also suspect shyness lies behind this fashion development. Certain types of person have taken to posting "boner" videos on YouTube for aficionados of sporty bouncing bulges: I can well imagine that subjects of this craze - started by the "lunchbox"-obsessed Kelvin MacKenzie when he edited the Sun - despair at the trivialisation of their sporting prowess and, inspired by the Victorian tablecloth, have donned Lycra for its disguising effect. Lycra does at least avoid embarrassments such as this.... MA x

Duncan Fallowell: 'My Russian Eurovision failure'

Dear Madame Arcati
Alas my attempts - with your help - to give the queens of Russia a jokey anthem in time for the Eurovision Song Contest have failed. In the event not one of the Russians who contacted me dared set those lyrics to music, not even for a laugh. In the light of current events one can see why and the lyrics remain as relevant as ever.
With best wishes, Duncan Fallowell

Dear Duncan
This is sad news to be sure. With Putin (or the Puta as I prefer to call him) around, is it any wonder? Consider yourself lucky that he didn't kiss you on the tum or burn your house down. My success in ridding Eurovision of Terry Wogan was some kind of service to humanity. But the installation of Graham Norton was the last straw: plainly the BBC still fails to invest sufficient seriousness in its coverage: we must prepare ourselves for a drone of witticisms as the Gin Sours take effect. The UK/Lloyd-Webber entry is beyond pathetic. Long live Russia!
Love MA x

Moscow riot police breakup gay demo prior to Eurovision, click here

Duncan Fallowell: The (weeping) tears and erections query

Dear Madame Arcati

I've just returned from the south of France to discover this warm-hearted posting [just below]. Many thanks. A friend and I, half an hour ago, were discussing whether it's possible to weep tears and have an erection at the same time. I said it had never happened to me - and I don't think it could. He said it had happened to him several times. Feedback from your readers on this interesting question would be welcome.

With best wishes, Duncan Fallowell

Sam Leith: 'I suffer from shrinkage!'

Yes, further to my posting on the London Evening Standard yesterday, I had Twitter intercourse with the paper's new Monday columnist Sam Leith. To the claim of some of my ribald readers that he possesses an enormous manhood, I suggested he post a pic of it on xtube. He replied: "I'm afraid it shrinks when I get shy. Xtube will have to make do with Duncan [Fallowell] for the moment." Does he mean this pic? ...
Duncan all over

What's the paper like today? I'm out of the city.

Ooh, I hate all this white space, seems such a waste. It's like the re-designed ES. White space brings out my readerly agoraphobia. Let's fill it up with something. Sam, how big it is again? I've nearly filled all the white space, awful weather today innit?, and those MPs' expenses, dreadful, and Speaker Martin - what a nasty brute. There, space filled.