Some of you may recall that at last year’s auction of Classic Automobiles and Automobiliana celebrated at Sotheby’s in London, lot nº 129—a powder blue 1954 Pegaso Z-102 ‘Thrill’ Berlinetta with coachwork by Touring of Milan, formerly the property of the late Contessa Zanetti (née Ilka Monteverdi) and offered for sale by her executors with a healthy reserve of £195,000—provoked a furious bidding duel before a breathless audience, the ærodynamic Spanish coupé finally being adjudicated for the astronomical sum of £470,000 to the distinguished Lesbian dodecaphonic composer Flaminia de Plunkett, ultimately more energetic with her paddle than her tenacious rival, the Munich gallery owner and former lover of the late Contessa, Carlo Kitzler, whose purely sentimental motivations—he fondly rembered one brisk late-summer evening in 1957, slumped in the passenger seat of the vehicle, his head swimming in champagne as Ilka, divinely naked and fragrant beneath a knee-length ocelot coat after having left the Count to play with his cénacle of ephebes aboard their motor yacht Parnasso, thundered along the autostrada above Portofino at 200 km/h, laughing like a lunatic—were no match for Miss de Plunkett’s iron determination, the external sign of an æsthetic passion whose intensity was unsuspected until the tragic double suicide by morphine overdose just three months later that claimed the lives of the composer—later revealed to be in the terminal phase of bone-marrow cancer—and her inseparable sentimental companion, the militant mosaicist Jacqueline Gwynne, and the subsequent revelation that for some time the two artistes had been morbidly designing and calculating down to the last detail the mise en scène of their suicide, funeral and entombment, having even commissioned the modish illustrator Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée to execute an admirable series of thirty-six cross-hatched colour drawings in his usual photographic style, each drawing supplemented by copious text containing precise directions for the actualization of their macabre project, from the chilling scene in which Flaminia and Jacqueline are seen mutually administering the lethal intravenous shots with silver syringes, through the half-dozen vignettes cinematographically depicting the funeral procession (the rustic roadside church with its black Madonna; the biomorphic ‘Siamese twin’ coffins decorated with a marquetry mosaic of rare woods and suspended sidecar-fashion between two vintage black flat-twin BMW motorcycles; the all-woman orchestra assembled to perform La Toison d’Or, the song-cycle based on poems by Diana Schnell that first rocketed de Plunkett to fame), to the final suite of drawings detailing the extravagant décor of the burial chamber itself, a subterranean vault beneath the garden of their villa on the island of Ischia, in which the two lovers are embalmed and hermetically isolated behind a vast sheet of plate glass, Jacqueline at the wheel of the Pegaso, immaculate in chauffeur’s cap with patent leather visor, tasselled cyclamen uniform and black leather driving gloves, and Flaminia seated beside her, bare-shouldered in a floral sundress, her lips vibrantly painted, her face glamorously masked by a pair of green-tinted tortoiseshell sunglasses and by her favourite vintage Hermès foulard, decorated with repeated starfish motifs and knotted beneath the chin, thereby half-obscuring what is actually a flame-red wig, custom-made to hide a scalp left bald by months of chemotherapy.

Silent Might (1916), a sombre and powerful monochromatic depiction of a fleet of British dreadnoughts purposefully cleaving the icy waters in the bluish penumbra of dawn or dusk, is doubtless one of Bernard F. Gribble’s most celebrated canvases—widely reproduced in its day (‘by permission of His Majesty the King’), the latent jingoism of the painting’s subject was reinforced by a rhetorical legend invoking ‘[the] silent and powerful guardians of the sanctity of the Empire’s island home and protectors of her commerce on the boundless deep’—, a work whose very celebrity has been fostered by its prominent exhibition in the the main wing of the Imperial War Museum, an institution whose hallowed halls recently reverberated to the unseemly scandal caused by the casual discovery that this paean to British naval prowess had been secretly tampered with and that Gribble’s gloomy brushwork had been overlaid by a foreign and—as a cursory inspection of the canvas once it was removed from the wall revealed—recent hand whose uncanny alteration of the original—imperceptible at a passing glance, the figures being secondary in the general composition—had turned the two vigilant mariners at the bow of the battleship into lovers exchanging a passionate kiss, this subtle subversion causing the IWM’s director Sir Cedric Glasscock to order an internal security investigation that soon revealed the discovery of a second altered painting (the Service Regulations Manual being confidentially passed by one slender lipsticked WAAF to another in the staff canteen in Sir Lawrence (‘Larry’) Driscoll’s brittle academic exercise of 1943 had been deadpanly tranformed into Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) and ended with the formulation of the inescapable hypothesis of a militant band of highly organized anti-war homosexuals having infiltrated Museum personnel, at which stage Scotland Yard was called in to further an inquiry that ultimately threw suspicion on a newly hired museum guard, Kelvyn Rimm, whose Bayswater bedsitter, promptly raided by the men from the Yard, threw up pamphlets, T-shirts, badges and bumper-stickers produced under the auspices of the so-called Pansy Power Putsch (PPP), a group advocating—in an arcane jargon that meant precious little to Constable Plod—‘the (re)articulation of queer representation via dadaist-cum-situationist cultural praxis’ and counting amongst its adherents the professional art-forger Icarus Lam, already sought by Europol for questioning in relation to the Cedric Quartis-Jones paedophile murder case and whose subsequent implication in the IWM affair resulted in Scotland Yard surrendering its jurisdiction in the matter and shunting the dossier over to Europol’s Detective-Inspector Duncan Stalker who, after vigorously grilling Rimm, came to the conclusion that the PPP, while indubitably vandalistic in intent, was nevertheless inspired by benign—and from a certain point of view, laudable—theoretical urges whereas Lam, whose affiliation with the ideology of the PPP was merely tangential, appeared more and more as a dark master of deceit (not for nothing had he assumed the pseudonym of ‘René Schwarz’), a pasticheur and counterfeiter of genius whose diabolical talent had for some time been stealthily subverting the markets of art, philately and numismatics.

The sleepy tranquillity of the French spa town of D… was clamorously disturbed recently when a gang of so-called Holy Rollers—ritually tattooed anarchist girls from the outlying suburbs, their nipple-rings perversely profiled beneath tight latex bodysuits, their nerves taut from ingesting massive doses of homemade crystal methedrine fabricated in their clubhouse (a deconsecrated presbytery left immaculate in the wake of frequent amphetamine binges)—thundered into town on their souped-up Vespas and lobbed a brash brick through the window of V8, a store specializing in ‘20th century artefacts’ (the proprietors, Randy Pfister and Todd McQueen, having for some years been at the forefront of their field in New York with a store of the same name, had moved its contents virtually holus-bolus to the pilgrim town when AIDS-stricken Randy, an ardent Roman Catholic tired of the depressing diet of drugs he was being administered, opted for the obscure promise of faith healing), from which they proceeded to loot various randomly selected items, including an irreplaceable collection of fifty-three postcards of motorcades, formerly in the possession of King Farouk; a child’s kite from Weimar Germany, its plywood frame colourfully papered with billions of inflated marks; a drawing by Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée depicting a desktop scattered with pens and ink pots, on which an art deco statuette of a female figure-skater functions as a paperweight holding down one of Daubigny-Daubrée’s own unfinished sketches, a meticulous cross-hatched representation of a philatelist, tweezers in hand, seated at an ornate desk in a book-lined study; the first commercially produced Biro; a gouache dated 1937, bearing the stamp of the Winston Craven industrial design studio and illustrating a delirious proposal for a high-speed covered chrome and aluminium moving footway linking Brooklyn and Manhattan; and unique color super 8 footage of the 1961 tragedy involving the Black Hornets, the precision flying team of the Royal Nigerian Air Force, a crack British-trained élite under the command of Squadron Leader Edward Oldibiri, a brilliant ex-Oxonian who reluctantly interrupted a promising thesis devoted to—ironically enough—the Icarus myth in 20th century English literature in order to join the RNAF, a decision that did not spell total disengagement from his first love, as was demonstrated in somewhat tragic circumstances on 13th January, 1961, date of the first annual aerial display in Lagos and, incidentally, the twentieth anniversary of James Joyce’s death, a coincidence that inspired Oldibiri to conceive and execute an unusual homage in the form of an aerobatic skywriting demonstration, a display described by the verbally agile airman as ‘supersonic and boustrophedonic’ and that was to consist of the four Black Hornets in their Hawker Hunters simultaneously tracing allotted portions of the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake from alternate directions in the serene azure sky high above the Gulf of Guinea, explicit instructions being given to ignore punctuation marks unless they wanted to ‘comma cropper’, a warning taken to heart by both Tunji Gabangida and Ibrahim Abiola but studiously ignored by the youngest Hornet, William Abayomi, who, while impeccably inscribing his assigned text, insisted upon vaingloriously supplying a mid-line pause, a flourish that caused his wingtip to brush Gabangida’s and thereby precipitate the fiery plunge earthwards of both jets before a horrified crowd of spectators conservatively estimated at 25,000.

As majority shareholder in Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres, a prosperous funeral business founded by his maternal grandfather Alois Graber in 1919, Felix Zeichen (1949-2007) combined wealth and eccentricity in equal degree. Packed off to California by his father to study state-of-the-art undertaking methods in the early 1970s, Zeichen did his best to comply with the paternal injunction while at the same time contriving to spend a considerable portion of his time on Catalina Island where, following an enthusiastic initial visit, he purchased Holly Hill House, a quaint hillside dwelling with a green- and red-striped conical cupola, built in 1889 by one Peter Gano with the assistance—as legend would have it—of his blind horse Mercury. (more…)

Sound the bugle, don’t come near.
Mr. Newton is sick beyond description.
Do you understand English?
Mr. Newton is sick beyond description.
In my head there is great pain.
Come at once, apply the butter.
Where is the motor? Have you any tea?
Note it down, note it down :

Ruby giddiness is coming
Spider there is great pain
Ink in the North
Coal in the South
Blind in the East
Wound in the West
Darkness from London to Paris
Swelling the Ganges and the Indus
Thunder one-by-one
Lightning two-by-two

Get the motor ready. Light the lamp.
Mr. Williams is sick beyond description.
God preserve you! There is no God.
There is God. There is no God.
In my head the air is motionless.
In that manner the fire goes out.
The water is dirty. The sky is clear.
Note it down, note it down :

Signature she speaks the truth
Crocodile the sky is clear
Steel my friend is ugly
Throat your daughter is beautiful
Cup the horse is vicious
Heaven it is under consideration
Saucer the knife is blunt
Hell you have a gun
Telegram milk is white
Mosquito you begin to write

In Germany, the phenomenon of Geistfahrer (literally ‘ghost drivers’), those disenchanted citizens of our soulless consumer society who find a therapeutic outlet for their lack of mental equilibrium by driving at maximum velocity on the wrong side of the autobahn, thereby seeking to provoke devastating head-on collisions or simply scare the living daylights out of motorists travelling in the opposite direction, claimed another three victims in mysterious and somewhat atypical fashion late last year in Babelsburg when a bright-blue bubble-car, a droning insect scuttling along at its modest top speed of eighty-five kilometers per hour, both puny glow-worm headlights extinguished, strayed blithely into the flight path of a thundering Maserati Mistrale Spyder estimated to be travelling at three times the speed, thereby provoking a monstrous accident in which the quaint three-wheeler virtually disintegrated on impact, while the klaxonning Italian convertible left the road in a violent sideways skid that catapulted it into the scenery, instantly killing both the driver, identified from documents in the glove box (the remains of which concealed, just incidentally, €35,000 in hard currency and several grams of angel dust) as Bruno Kitzler, son of the Munich gallery owner Carlo Kitzler, nightclub denizen, and creative director of the avant-garde fashion brand UN|AVAILABLE, along with his glamorous passenger, actress Sylvie Lartigue, familiar to cinephiles as the deadpan erotic protagonist of such films as Nitroglycerine, Babyslitter, Sexy Safari, Comme Tu Me Veux and Arse Poetica, and more recently director herself of Near Misses, a wise, brave, funny, insightful and ultimately award-winning documentary about transsexuals in the final phase of gender reassignation that gave the lie to the cynics who said she was just another pretty face, an assertion they would hardly have dared to uphold in the aftermath of the accident, given that Mlle. Lartigue was unequivocally decapitated in the collision, an event whose consequences the artist has depicted with the same frigid and obsessive attention to detail perceptible in his rendering of the broken steering wheel against which Bruno Kitzler’s bloodstained forehead has come to rest (the trident motif of the Maserati marque can actually be deciphered—or perhaps intuited rather than deciphered), in the bloodstained chrome and leather of the gran turismo dashboard, in the ocelot-patterned fur coat that has slipped from Mlle. Lartigue’s headless shoulders to morbidly reveal the generous contours of what is or was quite possibly a surgically enhanced left breast, and last but not least, in the painter’s signature itself, the name ‘Victor Stamp’ being executed in a painstaking calligraphic style and artfully duplicated, signwriter-fashion, by its own drop shadow, a detail which lends it an illusory three-dimensionality and which provided Darby Brady, the Bystander art critic standing by me on the evening of the vernissage, with an occasion for much portentous and loud-voiced theorizing, conducted largely for the benefit of the tousle-haired, leather-clad ephebe accompanying him and subsiding only momentarily when he imperiously halted a white-jacketed waiter and scooped his umpteenth glass of mediocre chablis from a silver tray.

ESTOY EN CONTRA
DE TODOS EN GENERAL
Y DE CUALQUIERA
EN PARTICULAR

—Victor Stamp