Gotcha! Kelvin MacKenzie doorstepped over Hillsborough

The bloated, bullying bastard of Fleet Street lore, Kelvin MacKenzie, is doorstepped by a Channel 4 reporter over Hillsborough in this video. It is so sublime as to be (almost) sexual. This is what happens when a bully is bullied - he runs, makes excuses, boo-hoos. I never imagined I would witness such a sight. It's enough to make me religious (but not quite enough).

Doris Day seeks your support for her '4-leggers' charity

My very dear friend Doris Day has written to (the likes of) me, seeking help for her animal charity, the Doris Day Animal Foundation (DDAF). You can donate or at least vote for DDAF on Facebook; links below in her letter. While Madame Arcati prefers cats - largely because they are commitment-phobes - I recognise that dogs require our extra help, as creatures inferior to pussies. All my love, MA x

Dear Friends,

The Doris Day Animal Foundation is very close to winning a grant from Chase Community Giving,

Doris & Duffy Day

but we need a favor from you today to reach our goal. The 4-leggers, especially our beloved senior pets, need so much from us.  And any award from Chase would go a long way toward providing them the extra medications and special care they require.

Won't you please vote for DDAF today?  Voting ends September 19 at 9pm ET, so clicking today is important!

Please cast your vote for DDAF today on Facebook. And, if you are a Chase account holder, you may cast an additional vote by searching for "Doris Day Animal Foundation" at www.ChaseGiving.com - click here.

Would you please tell your friends?  By all means, forward this email to anyone who shares our dedication to the 4-leggers! 

You have my sincerest thanks! 

P.S.  The Doris Day Animal Foundation is now on Facebook and Twitter! Be sure to join us by clicking the buttons below!
  

Nesta Wyn Ellis: Three movies planned - one with a three-in-a-bed shocker

Nesta Wyn Ellis

While the world awaits the memoirs of Paris-based biographer and chanteuse, Nesta Wyn Ellis, and her conclusion therein on who, in her view, is the biggest ex-PM (Gordon Brown vs John Major - the former she used to spot in a 5* Park Lane hotel health club), I learn that she has not one, not two, but three film productions in development. These are in addition to other work undertaken by her Paris Film Productions - visit the site (click here) and enjoy sample film reels to Nesta's exquisite piano rendition of La Pluie d’Amour.

The first of the movies is €10 million Three Days In September. This will mark her debut as film director and screenplay writer. A 'passionate plot' is promised, perhaps stoked (if not poked) by a three-in-a-bed scene. Documents I have seen suggest money is being raised in Europe and the UK: principal cast requires one actress and two actors from three nations: France, Germany and the UK. I gather that the story alternates between the modern day and 1939 - we may safely conclude that if Hitler should have a walk on part, he will play himself. (As an interesting aside, Hitler is listed on movie site Imdb along with the likes of George Clooney and, er, Una Stubbs, et al; and is linked to at least 348 film productions - click here.)

Three Days is described as an 'international co-production'. Its musical director is notable theatre and cabaret composer Charles Miller. Nesta's romantic ballads and songs (in French and English) will be an 'important feature' of the movie and sung by the heroine.

Nesta also plans to turn her notorious novel The Banker's Daughter (nicknamed 'The Bonker's Daughter' by Austin Mitchell MP in a review for The House Magazine - produced for and by Parliament) into a feature film.

The third film is an Anglo-French affair, set on a tropical beach. This, and Three Days, will aim for visual gorgeousness and harness some of the cinematographic ideas of European art-house - Fellini, Antonioni, Malle (and for all I know, my distant relative, Pasolini).

Pour a glass of champagne and settle down to watch Nesta star in the short movie below, Bolsa de Huesos y Recuerdos, directed by Beatriz Ciliberto


Nesta Wyn Ellis in Bolsa de Huesos y Recuerdos by parisprod

The Colony Room bio! If you're any kind of cunty, buy now

I never had the pleasure of being called 'cunty' by Soho's Colony Room founder and proprietor Muriel Belcher. Some people have all the luck. So, I'll have to settle for second best.

Sophie Parkin's chronicle of the high culture boozing parlour, The Colony Club 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho, is due out on 10 December 2012 - and she's declared open a dedicated website where you can find more book details - click here.

The book is a huge collaboration involving a great many of the former habitués of the establishment. Memories, conversations, goss, names - they're all here. Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Tracey Emin, Princess Margaret, Molly Parkin, Lucian Freud, Jeffrey Bernard, Peter O'Toole, Kate Moss (barmaid), Christopher Hitchens, Will Self and so many other super-luminaries of stage, screen, canvas and piss contributed to the Colony legend.

Sophie is the ideal biographer. Quite possibly (or not), she trod on the dew of the vomit that Dylan Thomas projected onto the Colony carpet: she absorbed the soul of the place as a hereditary bon viveuse at her mother's knee, and for decades thereafter. Just how many of the ex-Colonists will still be talking to her post-publication?

Three editions of the title are available: Collectors, Limited and Standard (the last priced currently at £30). Without giving too much away, the Collectors and Limited editions comprise artists' prints which alone are worth the investment. Never-seen-before photographs grace all three. If nothing else, think Flog It!

Visit The Colony Room website as soon as and secure your copy - aside from my personal horoscopes, what better Christmas present is imaginable (to oneself)?

PS: For a flavour of the Colony, do read my post on writer Duncan Fallowell and the night he took off with Muriel Belcher's crutches. Be warned: the piece is illustrated by a nude photo of Duncan, cock and all. Click here.

Francis Bacon at the Colony, video

Barbara Hulanicki - 'Fashion today is so boring'

Further to my last post on the Barbara Hulanicki/Biba Brighton exhibition later this month, here's an excellent documentary interview with the fashion legend, created by Jo-ann Fortune for Visit Brighton. Unusually, she opens up and talks about early motivation (to be independent; not to have a life like her mother's), creating black nappies for her baby son ('rebellious') and how fashion today is 'so boring... it needs to be cleaned out'. I love her sci-fi jacket. Pure Doctor Who villain.

Nesta Wyn Ellis letter (2): Yes, I shed light on which ex-PM (Major* or Brown**) is 'better endowed'

Nesta Wyn Ellis
Nesta's Paris blog, click here

Dear Madame,

Thank you so much for reminding the world that the Banker's Daughter was nicknamed The Bonker's Daughter, thanks to the many and detailed sexual encounters. Yes, it was given this name by Austin Mitchell MP who reviewed the novel in The House Magazine.

You are right that my John Major biography was referred to as "an accidental masterpiece" [by AN Wilson].

As for my memoirs, two exciting volumes await world attention but I'm holding on until I can find a publisher who can actually read anything longer than a Tweet. I do indeed shed light on the question you raise about whether John Major* or Gordon Brown** is the better endowed.

Huggzz,***

Nesta

*'Better endowed' may be meant in one of a number of different ways. It is not suggested that she and Major had anything other than a professional relationship.

**It should be explained that Nesta used to spot Brown at a 5* London hotel health club - see comments in previous post, linked above.

***Nesta can be a bit of a tease....

Nesta Wyn Ellis letter: The return of The Bonker's Daughter!

Nesta Wyn Ellis: the biographer of John Major at home

Dear Madame,

Just enjoyed that YouTube piece with Barbara [Hulanicki]. She figures in my upcoming memoirs - we don't know when the world economy will up perk but I'm waiting - as the woman I interviewed in a jacuzzi in Miami Beach and who introduced me to my editor (the late and much lamented) Susan Hill at Sidgwick and Jackson, who commissioned The Banker's Daughter.

The latter is shortly to be reincarnated as a kindle edition under the imprint "Lioness Books." Those who can't wait to read the sex scenes should buy up one of the few remaining hard copies still available on the Internet if you Google for Nesta Wyn Ellis.

From your Paris Fan Club

Nesta Wyn Ellis

Darling Nesta

So delightful to hear from you! When you mentioned Susan Hill, I thought for a moment you meant that dreadful Aquarian writer who awaits her damehood for services to ghosts - if there's one thing I can't stand is a ...

But I must not permit unpleasantness to intrude on our pleasurable intercourse.

I can't wait to read your memoirs! Among other things, I hope that you will at long last deal with those hissed whispers (which blight London longueurs) on the precise nature of your relationship with former Prime Minister John Major. 

Your biography of him - all the better for the huge access you enjoyed to Number 10 - was by far the best of that genre; and I'm certain 'waspish' AN Wilson (whose voice can be heard on Nicky Haslam's debut 'pop' album) would concur: after all, he described your book as an 'accidental masterpiece'; or something like that. The image of Norma throwing crockery at bespectacled John has never left me.

(Still to be decided among Arcatistes is which PM had the biggest cockerdoodle - John Major or Gordon Brown) 

As for The Banker's Daughter - I wonder which 'Westminster wit' insolently retitled it 'The Bonker's Daughter'. A former political colleague I suspect - and I feel sure that your memoirs will insert a welcome micro-camera into the orifices of yesteryear's body politic.

Have to rush - keep in touch -

Madame Arcati x

Martin Amis and The Guardian: Asbo savaged not quite by all in the US

Click to enlarge

'Most of the US reviews for Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis' latest novel, are in. And they're not pretty,' wrote someone called Emma Brockes on a Guardian blog last week.

Pure schadenfreude then attended her re-heating of the most vitriolic and quotable assessments  culled from various US reviewers, each name-checked in the first instance only because of the tyranny of media branding (eg New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, et al). But a grande dame must be careful of the company she keeps: as true at the Guardian as anywhere else, in an age of reflexive conformity.

In addition to relishing the fall of a once literary hero, Brockes also had a personal tale to tell: she had actually got off her arse and seen Amis at a recent books signing in the Hamptons - and was struck by a 'certain pathos' about him, there cloud-like because of all the horrible US critiques, following all the 'Amis-bashing' in the UK. More probably he was just hung-over - rarely a happy sight, especially on Amis' fallen features.

But perhaps not all is lost for Amis. He need not check into the Dignitas Literary Skip just yet. His publisher. Alfred A Knopf/Vintage Books, has posted an ad on Facebook (above left) which sings with nothing but praise for Asbo ... from various US reviewers.

A selective sample for sure but a reminder that we should be wary of sexy-sounding commentary pitches, made to excitable commissioning editors, which get to see the light of day. As true at the Guardian as anywhere else.

And should we doubt this, we need only read the top line of the ad: 'A masterclass' - The Guardian.

Barbara Hulanicki: The Brighton Biba show, and Hurricane Isaac

Barbara Hulanicki.
Visit her website here

I do hope that Miami resident Barbara Hulanicki survived Hurricane Isaac - I hear a rumour she bravely stayed at home despite attempts to shoe-horn her out to safer climes, while other ever-greens outside (OK, trees) gave their best Exorcist impressions. She'd better have survived because she's scheduled to head to Britain shortly for the 'Biba and Beyond: Barbara Hulanicki' exhibition in Brighton, which starts September 22 and runs through to April 14, 2013. Details here.

In the 60s Hulanicki founded the seminal Biba store which helped revolutionise fashion and style. By the mid-70s, what had started as a mail-order business had metamorphosed into a vast departmental store in the old Derry & Toms building in South Ken, drawing a million 'post-war baby' shoppers a week, as well as stalwart style queens like David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. 

Biba: The Musical (2009) gives an endearing flavour of Biba-world, even if not countenanced by her - watch the video below. Hulanicki explains how the past inspired her creative work in this fascinating 'My V&A' video, here.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Barbara on two occasions - at the launch of a film about her at Kensington Roof Gardens and then at Molly Parkin's 80th at the Chelsea Arts Club in February. Behind her huge shades she's quite an enigma - I was quite convinced she's Scorpio; but Google says Sagittarius. 

Incidentally, she is not connected to the reincarnated Biba; and now designs for, among others, George, Asda - click here to see her collections.

Nicky Haslam turns pop star love god, with Greta Garbo and Rupert Everett

At the age of nearly 73, party Zelig and society interior decorator Nicky Haslam is about to make his debut as a pop star with forthcoming album Midnight Matinee, produced by David Ogilvy.

For a sample, catch Nicky's first single release from the collection, Total Control. It's easy-listening fare paced sedately to the many slow-mo moments in the accompanying video which I generously feature below. 

Among its many surprises is a sultry young woman dancing with herself in a glittery blue cocktail dress, seemingly lost in an auto-erotically charged vague de tendresse for absent Nicky, who at one point defies the laws of spatial separation and joins her in a bedside waltz. His hand runs down her back, as it might once have done in pre-copulatory preparation. His countenance bears signs of a grim determination. 

It's enough to put you off regular, romantic cock-cuntery. But one must persevere, I suppose. The video ending is a happy one. He retires to his bed in his red jimjams, alone, but with a smile on his face. No deflating pillow-talk horrors in the morning. 

The hawk-eyed will not fail to notice Nicky's personalised alphanumeric car licence plate - 'LIBRAS', a knowing reference to his star sign.

Nicky has proved to be quite a draw to other icons and singers. Cilla Black (friends again with Nicky), Bryan Ferry, Bob Geldof and others feature on the album. There are spoken passages by Rupert Everett, Tracey Emin, AN Wilson, et al. Even the late Greta Garbo and Noel Coward live again on vinyl (or download) for Nicky, making a nonsense of mere death.

The album is out 'soon'.

The Pope and 'messages of guidance' from Mary Beard's fortune-telling trick

Prof Mary Beard

Back in the spring, Madame Arcati drew your attention to Prof Mary Beard's party fortune-telling trick.

To find an answer to a question, she opens a book at random and blindly sets her finger down on a sentence. Quite often the chosen words - usually unrelated to the topic in hand - appear to offer a solution or forecast. The 'trick' is called bibliomancy - and to read more about her divinatory experiences (and mine, using the Bible), click here.

If you don't know who Mary Beard is - oh dearie dear! She brought us BBC2's masterly Meet The Romans series. The Cambridge don channelled the voices of Ancient Roman chavs, not by seance but by translation of Latin bio-inscriptions on their tomb stones. We also learnt of the rent boys who serviced the paunchy elderly men of the empire.

Now, here's a funny thing. I'm reading a little-noticed book about Pope Benedict XVI; or Pope Ratzi as I call him. It's called God and the World and is based on extensive interviews with Ratzinger by German journalist Peter Seewald from 10 years ago when Ratzi was just Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Turn to p158 and what do we find? A conversation on bibliomancy, though the word is not used. Seewald reminds the Cardinal that St Francis 'did not just read the Bible, he played a kind of roulette with it. When he was founding his order... [he] opened a page at random and said: "This is how we'll do it!"'

I expected Ratzi to denounce this pagan practice. But how wrong was I! Instead he virtually gossips about the topic.

'That's a very old way of doing it,' the Cardinal says matter-of-factly. He describes St Francis' biblical answer as a 'message of guidance'. Then: 'The King of Belgium, Baudouin, once told me that he used to do that sometimes and that it was incredible how it helped him and amazing how it gave him just the message he needed. In one serious cabinet crisis, when he could hardly see any way he could get another government formed, he went into the chapel, took his Bible in his hand, and found a text  that suddenly told him what he had to do. So it does happen.'

While the Cardinal sniffs at the risk of 'turning Scripture into an oracle', he concedes that the practice works 'to a certain extent.'

What interesting company Prof Mary Beard and Madame Arcati find ourselves in.

Mary Beard's TLS blog, here

Duncan Fallowell and Andrew Logan: Prize-winning memoir seeks a home!

Party pasodoble: Andrew Logan and Duncan Fallowell

Two of my favourite men - y'know, the two mentioned in the caption - were snapped in friendly embrace at the launch party for Duncan Fallowell's latest book, How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits. Andrew Logan is in 'praying mantis mode' (according to DF) while Duncan himself asks Arcatistes 'how I might tighten my neck - I'm doing well elsewhere but the neck needs a tighten.'

I deplore any kind of cosmetic intervention, except for the most gruesome accidents and war injuries. Failing that injunction, 90-year-old Jackie Stallone's recent attempt to claw back time must stand as my graphic advisory - click (best not to eat first) here. 

On other matters, Madame Arcati finds herself more than a little surprised to learn that How to Disappear is not due a second edition or re-issue, either by original publisher Ditto Press or anyone else. This despite the title winning Duncan the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Memoir 2012, the UK's only literary prize for autobiography/memoir genres - as heralded here.

As things stand, your best hope of acquiring a copy is to find £5,000 to snap up the one used copy at that price on Amazon. Actually, for £5,000 you could bankroll a 3000-hard copy reprint even before consideration of much cheaper e-publishing options for all those juicy Kindles. Penguin, where are you, poppets?

And don't forget, Andrew's 'Phenomenal Elizabeth Taylor Portrait' can still be yours for an amazing £22,250 (+ £500 postage) on eBay - details here.

Come to think of it, both book and portrait offer substantial returns on outlay. Surely there's a European Lottery winner out there with vision.