Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. Chapter 4, part 2)

 

                                                                                  2.

 

 

Mrs Sedgewick, England                                                         August 5^th 20-

 

Last Monday, (July 31^st) the ice surrounded and closed in on the ship from all sides, begrudging us barely the scant room necessary to keep The Sea Shepherd from continued passage and being crushed.  I am underplaying the perilous nature of our present plight for your sake Dear Mrs Sedgwick as the fact of writing to a married woman remains as impenetrable a mystery as the fog which since Monday has enshrouded us. We await a change in weather and rise in temperature to be able to navigate the narrow but shifting inky black lanes between the vast shelves of snow.

 

This morning, as the mist cleared away and on the deck of our ship we sighted coursing across the snow a sledge moving at tremendous speed over the tundra pulled by a dozen lunatics, passing on northwards, at a distance of less than half a mile. A being in the form of a miniature toy dog, apparently a Chihuahua, sat in the sledge, and guided it by goading the lunatics on with a sparkling necklace at the end of a fishing rod directly before and above the heads of the baying pack. We observed the rapid progress of the miniature canine through our telescopes, until all that could be seen was the occasional flash as the sun caught the precious stone-encrusted necklace pursued by the howls of the pack of lunatics until the vision disappeared and was swallowed up in distant configurations of ice.

  

From the window ledge of a port-hole Mitzi observed a party of inebriated bankers, who had inadvertently wandered onto the hold of the Sea Shepherd from a neighbouring party boat which was closing up for the night, distracted by over-bloated tales of over-bloated bonuses and champagne, the party were being regaled by the tale told by one their number about having pissed on a homeless person thus wasting the thousand pound Champagne quaffed, and then finding out it was his own brother. “State Schooled; the most expensive shower the fucker had ever had!” Came the punch-line to the dubious boast, as Captain Paul Watson and a skeleton crew received the news that the international injunction on the Sea Shepherd for ramming a Japanese whaling ship had been lifted as of midnight, and sealing the hold mechanically, sped off down the Thames to meet his latest urgent environmental deadline somewhere in the Arctic Circle with Mitzi and bankers fuelled by hubris, cocaine and a few crates of champers on board.

 

 

 Dear Mrs Sedge,

 

Several hours after witnessing the scene above we heard a sea with heavy swell and high waves and before nightfall the ice split and widened paths before us freeing our passage. However we decided to remain for fear of hitting icebergs in the darkness. I took a welcome rest from the near psychotic and pathologic urge to save the planet, that internal compulsive and nagging Ancient Mariner who is, sadly instrumental in making you, after a twenty-year wait, reconsider the terms of our relationship, giving me up as a hopeless cause. Is Mr Sedgewick still your butler?

 

In the morning, the vessel loosened of pack ice, I found the crew on the starboard side, staring at a sight ever more strange than that of the previous day; another sledge, but this time pulled by a fleet of disability buggies.  Perched high up on a stack of life-jackets sat a figure with a lop-sided beehive, a plate of ice above each eye; a powder blue nighty; the driver's five O'Clock shadow contrasted starkly against the general white-out. Our crew hailed the apparition, who signalled the senior gentlemen and gentlewomen drawing her carriage to a halt before our ship.

 

“Are you lost?”. We enquired.

 

“Have you seen a Chihuahua?!” The voice called back.

 

“Pulled by a pack of baying bankers in pursuit of a Swarovski necklace?... No!”.

 

“Okay, thank you!” returned the beehived apparition, and with that, Mrs Sedgewick dear, the passenger and her septuagenarian charioteers, some of whom had already  succumbed to frostbite, powered on.

 

Should fortune be on our side and I return to England, please remind me. Dear Mrs Sedgewick to make a necessary appointment with my physician on the serious matter of dementia.

 

The HMS England having several days previous stalled before the mass of ice, a drastic drop in temperature and a passenger list whose combined ages soared well into four-figures was proving a lethal mix. Ambling about the decks dressed in every stitch of clothing they could muster the passengers were fast discovering that their dream trip-of-a-lifetime might indeed be their last. All quibbles about monetary status seemed to melt away in the opposite direction of the general freeze.

 

Captain David Cameron, having an innate acute radar for, and dread of conflict of any kind, had cravenly jumped ship and was now several mile out to sea on his way to Jersey with the ship’s safe.

 

In the ensuing despair and hopelessness Mary Mary’s role as scapegoat had been subsumed in the general geriatric panic to that of leader. A tally was made of the disability buggies in the ship's hold, as it was suggested that movement was preferable to immobility; a research station was not far off, she promised with no certainty at all. Those left behind, the able-bodied, could make use of the copious amounts of alcohol and each other to keep warm. A sledge would be improvised from a lattice-work of loungers. The entertainment team would be offering bingo and line dancing to keep everyone’s minds off…well. death; she would be back in a few days with a range of polar fur.

 

The allusion to polar fur went over their collective bald pates and blue rinses as the mawkishly tanned entertainment team led them to the Crystal Lounge where Jane McDonald stood amid the ships entire supply of candles, greeting her audience with frightening effervescence.

 

Out on the snow, propelled by disability buggies, driven by pensioners fuelled by a steely-eyed will to survive, Mary Mary, looking back could still make out Jane McDonald in the Crystal Lounge amid a circle of fading candles and hear, above the motorized buggies, the strains of 'Que Sera, Sera!'

 

Some way out to sea, rounding the Faroe Isles, a Booze Cruise, The HMS Wetherspoons,- (Lidles , German-owned international and equally lacklustre supermarket chain had chartered this floating council estate),- received a distress call just before The HMS England lost power; it was totally ignored.

Out-and-Out Liars. Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 1)

Of Ice, Fur and Fire

Mary Mary celebrity drag chanteuse found herself on the HMS England heading for the Arctic. She awoke from her deck chair slumber to passengers interrogating her as to how much she earned and if she was entitled to be there at all. Mary Mary’s sudden appearance among them offered the assembled mob an outlet and scapegoat for their pent-up leaking and enraged elitism; although every cabin faced seawards, there pervaded on the HMS England the nagging suspicion that the next man’s view was better. When had she boarded? They asked each other. From what fraudulent act was she fleeing? Had she stowed away in Jersey, her crime even to heinous for that bandit’s haven? She wasn’t on the entertainment roster. And what was she doing in a powder blue baby doll nighty? Even worse, was she poor, a refugee from a council estate?; if they had had to save all of their lives for this cruise, for that is what it was, then how could this castaway from a sink estate, a scrounger, have even scrimped the money for a full passport. The word prostitute lingered on their collective lips.

“Two thousand pounds this trip cost me and my wife”. Said an irate man drawing his wife closer to him and consulting the crowd encircling a bewildered Mary Mary.

“Yes, two thousand”. The mob chimed in agreement; Mary Mary was as welcome as a single woman on a couples package holiday; she was an obvious threat!

“Get the Captain” Someone suggested. Mary Mary stared out to sea, the sky was a beautiful azure, a few gulls followed in the ship’s wake and their cries punctuated the general stutter of resentment that had extended, undiluted, from the seething mainland jostling for divisive trouble among the strived-for and hard-earned deckchairs and loungers.

Indeed, when Mary Mary leapt from Chelsea Bridge to escape her homophobic assailants and was blown beneath its structure and neatly on to a passing dumpster, disappearing between the bags of consumer rubbish, she momentarily threw her dressing gown over board; Mary Mary was an out-and-out liar erste class, on landing among the urban waste this presented the perfect opportunity to disappear; wealth had been a front, she was up to her eyeballs in debt. As she watched from her over-fragrant hide-out people raising the alarm as her dressing gown floated away, at first prostrate, then disappearing, dragged from sight by the Thames mighty undertows.

Mary Mary sat bemused as she and she alone saw the approaching Captain bring an extended index finger to his lips and widen his eyes in a gesture which implored Mary Mary’s discretion. The gesture was completely wasted; she had no recollection of meeting Captain David Cameron on shore leave in a transvestite bar in Southend. It had been late when they had met under the replica Czechoslovakian chandelier at the  glitter ball counter presided over by Madam Jojo, an octogenarian Asian doyen of the London tranny scene who had, curiously, retired to the dismal coastal town. Mary Mary was in the full flow of alcoholically induced amnesia, the blackout erased all memory of the bottles of champagne Captain Cameron had purchased for her and the ‘gals’ who, hung hawk-like around her punter. She could not recall the champagne she quaffed demurely in her baby-doll nighty, an attire barely out of the ordinary in this establishment where flamboyant zeal was de rigueur; under the right, or wrong light the hard edges of survival lent a sepia hothouse ambiance to the place; albeit a hothouse full of Venus fly-traps. With the volume turned down the clientele looked like flamingos, for that is what the bar was called, with the volume up it sounded like a barn yard. Taking Mary, Mary on board the docked and as yet unchartered HMS England was a career move equal only to the fateful wave-to-his-mates by the captain of the Costa Concordia. Mary Mary noticed a fat gold wedding band and a love bite peaking from the collar of  Captain Cameron's uniform.

“She hasn’t paid, she's a stowaway”. Intoned a couple from Stevenage who worked for Stena, the stair-lift company, and who had taken early retirement lest they found themselves seamlessly segueing from shop floor to the company product.

All Mary Mary could think of through the general hubbub of admonishment, was having arrived in Southend and stepping gracefully from the dumpster returning a cabbage leaf and cigarette butt to the potential landfill, she had met some lads who, despite their thuggish demeanour revealed themselves Good Samaritans and showed her, on their smart phones, how to track the chip Mary Mary suddenly remembered she had had surgically installed in her recently missing Chihuahua Mitzi, worn just beneath her Swarovski collar. She typed in the serial code specific to Mitzi in Google Pet Global Map. It was clear from that from the pulsating red dot that her beloved dog was heading for the Arctic Circle.

Even in  blackout Mary Mary was no fool, it was she who at Flamingos, on overhearing that David, was indeed Captain Cameron of the Arctic-bound HMS England, she had latched herself onto him with such subtlety that he had forgotten who and where he was. On board his ship and in between the throes of lust still in her panties she had let go a wet fart and leapt from the bed. Her spatial awareness totally delusional, the Captain face own among the pillows, she had taken the wrong exit to the bathroom. Outside in the corridor she instantly forgot not only why she was there but, faced with rows and row of cabin doors, she had forgotten the one through which she had emerged.

The Arctic Circle now appeared prematurely in the form of a huge glacier barring the passage of the HMS England and was a welcome decoy from the tyranny of gold-plated jewellery and hate. Everyone disappeared to the prow of the ship to take photos of the land mass that had now caused the engines to stall and grind to a doom-laden halt.

How Mitzi, snatched by a passing fox in sight of Mary Mary’s patio doors, had out-paced her in the race to the Arctic was a mystery. The vessel in which her pet treasure travelled was obviously faster than this non-heart-stopping gift shop. Mary Mary doubted that the fox could rob Mitzi of her life let alone her ferociously guarded Swarovski collar; Mary Mary had, during a period of financial straits attempted to divest her pet of her precious stones and lived to regret it; when the ambulance arrived the on-the-spot diagnosis was attempted suicide; to the trained and untrained eye Mary Mary had the appearance of someone who had slashed her wrists.

One thing Mary Mary knew that she shared with her pet, apart form an iron will to live, was fur. Fur coats to be specific, polar fur to be exact. Mitzi failed to understand during her long sulking stints that the very thing she wore around her neck and was loath to part with was the very thing that her owner could pawn at a New Bond Street jewellers thus allowing the price of passage for both to the Arctic to procure polar bear fur coats to compliment their…well, pawned jewellery.

A diet of stick-thin IT girls on Russian Reality TV Shows had obviously addled their brains, but addled though they may be it seemed that misfortune in the form of a homophobic close-shave and a leg-over the garden fence out of sight of her avaricious owner and a hop onto an impounded and fortuitously released environmental vessel the Sea Shepperd the name of which Mitzi had recognized from nature programs on the Arctic, now saw them making their respective journeys towards the extreme northern hemisphere and closer to the object of their desire.

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 6)

                                                                           
                                                                           6

It was a headline in the November 2, 2012 edition of the Arts pages of The Guardian which sent Anthony Christ-Jones, founder of the Stuck-up Artists into his final sustained Hitlarian rage;' "WEST NO LONGER DOMINANT FORCE IN MODERN ART" ' This death-knell to the English art establishment and his, Christ-Jones’ deluded central role within it chimed on, " “Heretofore I never want a Turner Prize winner to be looked for in this infernal country again", ' Stated Sir Nicohlas Serota, Director of the Tate Museums, "We’re looking elsewhere; anywhere but here. Indeed if a western European wants a standing chance he or she might have to attend an art school in Africa or the Middle East, and even then…’ This pause was the chasm into which Anthony Christ-Jones, fell; it was also the day he dropped the last two syllables of his Christian name replacing it with the single syllable‘i’, and, dispensing with the last part of the double-barrel surname, he stepped back to survey and savour the appearance and sound of his new title; “Anti-Christ”, he muttered to his reflected jack-booted dopple-ganger; ‘Definite article? Yes? No? The Anti-Christ? Maybe…?”.

The Anti-Christ took the 47 bus to his work-shop in Shoreditch to prepare an art installation to end all art installations; a delivery of uranium was expected at 11.30 am. If Serota intended to build up a collection from artists from outside the UK, from, God forbid, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia then The Anti-Christ would make sure that in the post apocalyptic after-glow his own offering would be the sole and unique likely candidate for, and winner of any and all future prizes!. It was to be called ‘The Manhatten Project Mark 2 in honour of that American uber-hero of Practical Thinking Robert Openheimer and in protest against the existence of Nigerian/British 1998 Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili in general and, specifically a response to that same artist’s depiction of a black Virgin Mary (a la fin du monde, cherchez la femme!!) daubed in excrement displayed, much to the horror of the catholic Mayor Guiliano, at the 1999 Sensation Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. To get one over on a, supposedly posthumous Serota, (given the magnitude of the piece), The Manhatten Project Mark 2 would be a video installation; a somewhat churlish codicil to any apocalyptic final testament; having recently read this cinematic art-form to be Sir Serota’s least favourite .

Yes, the former Anthony Christ-Jones’ temper tantrum appeared to have no limits and if throwing a rattle, (even if a somewhat nuclear one), out of the pram was what it took to be noticed, then that is as is; it had worked for Oppenheimer, hadn’t it…? Hadn't Hitler's artwork thus come to the fore...? The alternative was impossible to contemplate; total obscurity living his life on a horse farm in Missouri, happily married, rejuvenated by the rural life, indeed looking ten years younger, fitter, resurfacing in the metropolise to exercise his brilliant enviable polymathic intellect on ‘What Type of Person Needs To Be a Gazillionaire’ and taking a modest part of the prize money back to his beloved pastoral idyll and showering his family, Great Gatsby-like, with quarter of a million greenbacks. The Anti-Christ actually contemplated this as an alternative; unalloyed envy was exhausting and besides he could not attain the desired fission necessary for the right kind of cataclysm. It could have gone either way.

It was the archival recording of one of Alistair Cooke's dispatches from America which suspended indefinitely the End of the World. Broadcast in the run up to Christmas as part of a Letters From America retrospective on BBC Radio 4.  In 1966, Cooke re-imagines Robert Oppenheimer’s last Christmas on earth; a planet to which the nuclear physicist tried so earnestly to belong, an ambition which, from the final entries in his diary, sadly and tragically eluded him. Here is a transcript of that recent pre-Christmas broadcast first recorded by a not-yet-breathless and wheezy Cooke:

BBC Archive Recording. Alistaire Cooke's Letter From America. December 21, 1966.

Christmas in the dark had, increasingly, become Oppenhemer’s favourite seasonal past-time. As the days shortened and the nights lengthened his toes curled up with glee in anticipation of the self-indulgent moroseness he might offer himself and the forms it might take. Friends, which he had been at great pains to acquire during the spring, summer and autumn months, were unscrupulously discarded like discoloured and dried up leaves and swept away in the fetid breeze of festive anorexia.

Friends were carefully selected for their dispensability and viewed up close suffered, each and everyone from the same clarion call come the birthday of Christ our Lord, “I vant to be alone”. It is to be observed that there is no point in being alone unless there is an audience aware of your martyrdom; like the man who threatens suicide yet clings on to the vain life-line of his broadcast; one should be heralded for one’s capacity to endure loneliness or aloneness and the day that finds the bulk of humanity in festive and communal conviviality offers the perfect prism for that streak of dark grey fighting its way, in the opposite direction against the general hues of merriment and mirth.

An invitation to actually join a fellow being to share all the trimmings was received, by Oppenheimer with the most facetious plan to up the stakes and to spite the intruder who threatened to leave even a hint of glitter on his tightly patrolled comfort zone. “I don’t do Christmas, too commercial, hate it. I’m going away,” he scowled. The object of his revenge would expect to hear he spent a relatively yuletide-free week in a heathen country later to feel the full force of his ire when he would casually drop in a tale of utter solitude in a single room in a chalet crammed to the hilt with five generations of the same family in Lapland.

Another strategy to avenge those who dared impinge on his appointment with self-pity was to look them straight between the eyes and tell them he had accepted an invitation from someone they hated. This guaranteed that they would never think of asking him to pull a Christmas cracker again, ever.

His family never asked him to share this period of twinkling lights and mulled wine as, quite frankly, they had come to the consensus that he was weird, and anyway as a child he became practised at ruining their fun by creeping down at night and carefully, without piercing the wrapping, smashing the presents with a hammer. Either that or he sat in a dark corner and succeeded in out-scowling the Siamese cat until all the guests made excuses and left and the family admitted defeat and followed the guests, leaving him free to unplug the fairy lights, bin the turkey and mince pies and, as he sailed off to bed, wrestle the Christmas tree to the ground.

As the delicious dark pall of the day approached and everyone’s coat tails flapped in the rush of air on entering Bloomingdales, Maceys, Tiffanys and other Wonder Worlds of reciprocal gift-giving, he lurched from shadow to shadow descending degrees of melancholia with each fair-ground bonanza passed. A rueful eye cast on the Christmas tree in Times Square and a murderous shower of acid glares at the carol singers below its ponderous and glittering branches found him slinking away from the bright lights down the dark and barren alley of his soul along a series of darker gullies home.

There was no escape there either; through the walls he could hear the muffled hilarity of festive radio programming as he slammed the kettle on. Testimony that nothing connected him to the gaudy pot-pourrie outside, his abode allowed no concessions whatsoever and indeed, there was evidence, should anyone be let in to observe, (and they were in the countdown to Christmas Eve for what is the point of an emotional advent calendar if there is no one to open the tiny windows to see the scratched out scenes within) – they would have observed that the dwelling of the-one-who-so-adamantly-shuns-joy-and-has-become-death-destroyer-of-worlds was moving determinedly in the opposite direction. Furniture would be removed, thrown out, for maximum discomfort, books were given to charity, not out of charity but because, for maximum effect, there should be absolutely nothing to do on the day and absolutely nothing to see or to drink; a request having been made to the respective companies that three days prior to December the twenty-fifth he would be grateful if the mains and the water supply could be cut off.

Of course everyone else was having a fabulous time in each other’s company- there was no one lonelier than him, even the cockroach that had somehow entered the room and was conspiring to cheer him up, knew that. Blinking away in the dark he had reached maximum wretchedness and a monastic-like calm descended. A calm so serene, devoid of the tiniest rustle of wrapping paper and at that moment Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the Atom bomb, looked around at the cavernous emptiness of his life and contemplating the immanent apocalyptic inferno that he knew to be the crowning glory of his particular climb, muttered. “Sod this for game of soldiers!”

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (chapter 3, Part 5)

                                                                             

                                                                              5.

Telling the truth can lead to Terror. We have all fallen in love with a technology that allows us to reach the epitome of this terror;  the mob. Prior to the internet age, only a mere ninety-nine percent of a mere ninety-nine percent of the planet was populated. That one Twin-Spirit remains to recall what the actual origins of that terror was, is amazing.

“We are talking about an age before humankind reached adulthood”, the terror was in her/his old cataract clouded eyes, “there at our genesis, way before the vulture-like scramble for words and philosophies”, seated upon a rock overlooking the Southern African plains, superior ruler, judge, Caliphate, yet none of these; two beings, both man and woman in one form, yet neither. Chewing on a root, face towards the incoming sun’s rays- ‘ah’ s/he click-talked’. ‘This is good’. The majestic palm-leaf  strands of her/his headpiece reached monstrous heights and spread out ocean-like beneath her/him, when s/he talked of “those who now make up a remarkable number who now populate the earth sent away, then, individually, as outcasts, their skin that could take no pigmentation, and too watery irises, threat to the hunt, harried to the boundaries of each early settlement and left to die”. S/he coughed “Ah, petroleum in the lungs, uranium in the hips… tske… and fracking in the bones…” s/he clicked. "Look how this outcasts have survived the rigors of their banishment, and how noble they now stand. A long time I still see one or two standing in a field, trying to return’. The old wo/man laughed. “ “oh”, she clicked “they bring things, things we have no use for, gifts made of what they have found along the way, through time, cloth, beads, things that make a lot of noise; we rejected them all”.

“It is since they have been angry these children of outcast children, they have begun to bring terror. Naughty children destroying the past, very very naughty children! They crowd together but they always will carry the memory of standing alone…this is the trouble, tske, you cannot buy your way into a group that has thrown you out.”

The ancient Kosa wo/man spat out the root juice on to a patch of red dust, parting the leaf fronds of her gargantuan headdress. ‘Eh, I am very disappointed, all the gifts, they pile up like a giant dung heap and the whole won’t melt, we will have to start all over again…tske…next time the imperfect will not be getting very far.” Mo/Father Earth clicked.

This is the extraordinary dream Anthony Christ-Jones, founder of the Stuck-up Artists, had the night black artist Steve MacQueen won the Turner Prize a mere year after Chris Ofili’s success. That same evening, to Christ-Jones’ horror the two names also came up, conjoined, in one of the questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Immediately after, to really put the boot in, the question, ‘Who wrote the Principia Tapioca?’, was correctly answered as ‘B: Fatima Whitbread’. What if, since childhood Christ-Jones had been out-and-out lied to and his crisp and polished sentences and up-bringing were a charade? We will have to delve into his nightmarish dreams and visions a little more.

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap.(Chapter 3, Part 4)

                                                                       

                                                                            4.

Standing on the edge of her patio doors in full drag celebrity chanteuse Mary Mary called out for her beloved Chihuahua Mitzi who had,- between being let out for a ‘tinkle’ in her Swarovski collar and Mary Mary attaching her six layers of eyelashes and fetching Mitzi’s customary bowl of Himalayan Spring Water,- been snatched by a passing fox; Mary Mary’s evening was about to get a whole lot worse.

So, how does her tale relate to anything so far?  The incident that night will have immeasurable unquantifiable effects on the lives of others in a manner you would not believe possible.

I will attempt to connect 6 totally unconnected things and see if you can follow how I am able to make them all relate.

Mary Mary and Mitzi

Lord Raven and his two eldest sons Amarillo and Morado

The Bank of England,

The London Stock Exchange (The Old one)

The Hidden Casino, (within and between and under The Bank of England and The London Stock Exchange...called...well The Hidden Casino.)

Floy

This is a prime example of the ‘distracted taste’ or stories for those of the internet age who have the attention span of a fruit fly; or Lord Raven’s Tale with all the daedalian vagaries and vicissitudes required to reboot a comatose imagination and allow you to meander wherever Lord Raven’s fateful fate meandered before...well, his fateful fate.

There is indeed a conundrum, a dilemma, a convergence of two roads, one Faustian, the other ultimately sacrificial yet just- one of God’s mischievous games. A crossroad of choices down which either signals a loss. I urge you to think of times in your own lives when you have been thus torn.

Below, to hammer the point of the randomness of ‘distracted tales’ home, are two objects used for the purposes of our story to replace objects described and seen in both the book and the film The great Gatsby, namely shirts:

Gold Bricks. Like a smash and grab robber Lord Raven would return from long periods away at his work, accounting the vast sums made  at the Russian roulette tables at the Hidden Casino of which he had been made treasurer, and entering the door of his palatial familial home take ten paces into the living room and hurl a dozen or so gold bricks into the air. His thirteen then young children watched in delight as the bullion crashed in slow motion through the glass coffee table and dinner service onto the floor.

Silk Blankets. No part of the house was out of bounds for Mitzi’s bed and Mary Mary had spared no expense regarding the quality of material her canine companion would slumber upon; Imperial Chinese silk; a ragged tartan blanket would not do; too Scottish, a towel was too common, no Mitzi would be dazzled by the confusing sight of Mary Mary running about singing The Sound of Music throwing slow-falling not very comfortable fabric into the air.

You don’t have to have read the life of that tycoon Gatsby to realize that to him having a pool and a walk-in wardrobe was, if somewhat strange, a statement about his libido; throwing hundreds of expensive shirts in the air in front of house guests, with insouciant abandon was better than the morbid yet dramatic thoughts he harbored of diving out of a neighboring skyscraper into the shallow end of his swimming pool. Like our protagonists Lord Raven and Mary Mary he had become so wealthy he had forgotten that shirts were supposed to be worn and not thrown about in a contemptible display of that wealth.

By no contrast whatsoever both Lord Raven and the celebrity chanteuse drag queen Mary Mary were at the peak of their game and their respective shower of gifts were displays of their ample and prodigious cash flow, though at the time Raven’s Ideation Quotient was distinctly Citizen Kane and Mary Mary’s intuitively Julie Andrews. Proper uses for:

Gold Bricks, (read also, copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, titanium, indium, rhodium, praeseodymium): To shore up, secure and act as guarantor for delayed and balanced reciprocity in the name of barter and peace; a currency under the aegis of which inferior ephemeral bartered goods such at straw mats, palm oil, yams and promissory notes such as money could be merrily exchanged with  otherwise hostile lands. Traditionally held by a person of seniority in age and rank having earned his respect through the garnered knowledge that should that currency turn out to be a mere rumor trade in goods would abruptly cease and all hell break loose.

Silk Blankets. Absolutely useless in the ensuing war and famine once a system of exchange’s basic currency has been hijacked by those not of sufficient seniority and garnered knowledge to know that a rumor of gold bricks can only go on for so long before people actually demand to see…well, gold bricks.

Where is the flow of imagination taking us in our tale? This common and dysfunctional use of both the brick and the blanket has to stop. And stop it does; Lord Raven’s two eldest sons Amarillo and Marado out with a drunken party of fellow students would meet up with Mary Mary out at night in a powder blue baby-doll night-gown and slippers looking for her Mitzi. In the coming weeks and months- as news reports of the violence inflicted on Mary Mary and the hideous witness statements of her death-by-drowning leaping from  Chelsea bridge to escape her homophobic assailants, her disappearance fueling a bonfire of horror stories of her last minutes in the public imagination, - Lord Raven’s favorite and most sensitive son Amarillo began to show signs of a nervous break down.

That Ofili’s The upper Room is based on Floy’s idea  gleaned from the description of the last supper in Lord Raven’s biography is no coincidence for it was at the dinner table at the palatial Raven residence surrounded by his thirteen progeny and in the height of his power that his son Amarillo, suffering visibly under the strain of guilt, confessed to being among the gang, which included the unrepentant Morado, who inflicted violence upon and the death of the celebrity chanteuse Mary Mary. In the interim between Mary Mary’s fateful encounter and the last supper a man she had been seeing regularly enough they were about to be civilly conjoined had been arrested, charged and found guilty of her murder.

Thus was Lord Raven’s dilemma; demand there and then that this matter never be spoken of again by the members of his family assembled and let an innocent man serve a life term for the death of the celebrity Mary Mary while watching his favorite son’s mental state decline irreparably before his very eyes, or hand his own sons over to the police. For three days he brooded in his chair in a dark corner while his family, having never seen him so drained of cheer, whispered and tip-toed about. Then, one evening Lord Raven stood up and left the house.

Lord Raven returned late at night to his tall-backed chair. He sat motionless for days wrapped in an ever darkening pall, his eyes stared out in a fevered glaze as his personality seemed to dim and shift out of focus along with his posture which seemed to crack and shrink into, and become part of the skeletal structure of the frame itself.; his work phoned on several occasions, still he did not move. It was the news,- the words of which, like a dull thud, somehow filtered down the extending corridors to the startled inmates of the institution in which he had his mind committed,- that Amarillo, in prison, had attempted to take his own life that sent Lord Raven into his penultimate tail-spin. His remaining children and wife around him, he stood up slowly and then, proceeded to cry out. A long wounded keening welled up from a source his scrawny frame belied. As suddenly  he rushed about the house smashing everything he could lay his hands on, things he had worked so hard to acquire for his beloved family and now, in his rage, grief and madness would have annihilated them too had his wife not gathered them up and ushered them out of the house never to return again. When Lord Raven’s tormented whirlwind had subsided he stepped through the debris of his empire and retreated to the upper-most room of his house.

The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap (Chapter 3, Part 3)

                                                                              3.

On December 6, 2006 The Stuck-up Artists reached new fits of apoplectic peak at Tate Britain’s £705.000 purchase of the glitter and dung Turner Prize winning Nigerian/British artist Chris Ofili’s thirteen paintings of a Macaque-crested monkey, named Floy. Entitled ‘The Upper Room’- due to the fact that an exact replica of Floy’s room on the upper-most floor of Silly Home Valley for the Insane had to be copied and rebuilt in an upper wing of the Tate before Floy would consent to pose as his recent alter-ego, Lord Raven, (a defunct English aristocrat complete with faded grandiose surroundings, hanging by an old Etonian tie above a camp bed littered with Y-fronts, cheap gin and genealogies) - the collection would be the gallery’s proud new acquisition.

The Stuck-ups, who had had to get buses to the demo, were incensed. They donned monkey masks and threw dung at anyone entering; this had the curious effect of turning the staunchly anti-conceptual-art protestors into...well, conceptual art. We might try to fathom the mystery as to what it was exactly in the thirteen portraits of the real-life Lord Raven that so offended the Stuck-up artists.

A: The portrayal of Lord Raven, an establishment figure in sad alcoholic demise, by a monkey.

B: The elevation of Chris Ofili to giddier heights of fame through the Tate’s £705-000 purchase of a work of art the Stuck-ups deemed lacking in artistic merit.

C: The fact that The Upper Room also happened to be a reconstruction of the interior of The Chelsea Arts Club down to the very beam from which Lord Raven aka Floy swung.

D: The raw truth that since the closing-down sale that was the British Empire Raven’s end was the likely end for those trained to administrate colonies that no longer existed.

E:  Unalloyed envy.

F: The original and brilliant use of elephant dung the Stuck-up artists wish they had thought of first (See option E).

G: Floy’s refusal to relinquish the Eton tie on loan to the gallery.

H: All of the above.

The fact that the right reply is B, I am forced to admit to not having a clue why. I figure you haven’t a clue what I am talking about either. Chris Ofili does not have a clue either; neither does he need to, endowed as he is with such rare artistic brilliance. Being such a humble, kind man he would be puzzled as to why anyone would be mean enough to harbor grudges that fell into any of the above categories.

In the ensuing years Stuck-up founders Tabitha Galsworthy and Anthony Christ-Jones have put a great deal of effort into undermining both Ofili’s and Floy’s involvement in The Upper Room, discrediting them both as originators of the work through the same small-minded logic that still seeks to discredit both Shakespeare his works because he lacked a university education and Barack Obama his autobiographies because...? They sought to prove the deceased real-life Lord Raven as the only possible fit for a Success Ideation Quotient the Stuck-ups could handle. As Lord Raven lacked the advantage of being able to defend himself this – in the eyes of the Stuck-ups- gave them an advantage elevating his Ideation Quotient in the eyes of the public to Above Reasonable Doubt. Basically the more dead you are the easier it is to make up lies about you-whether you like it or not-and raise your name on the shoulders of other people’s giant dung heaps to everlasting fame.

There is indeed a huge gulf between God-like Ideation Quotient one can aspire to  while still on earth and that which can be attained when dead; the Dictator Ideation Quotient is actually an opaque glass ceiling of limitation that is only shattered once you have been hunted down and executed; the Rarity Ideation Quotient,-your transformation into actual ether- surreally, increases your real-world value.

Indeed there is no point in being a catch when you are dead. The chasm between real success and imagined success depends indeed on your Ideation Quotient. As the late and great queen Quentin Crisp pronounced, “ If you imagine you are a victim, then victim will be your style! If you imagine you are undeserving of success when you get there then ingratiating sycophant, my dears, will also be your style! “.

“There is no point in climbing on the shoulders of the unsuccessful or moderately successful to accelerate your rise”. The  psychopathically ambitious British financial rogue-trader Nick Leeson said in evidence at his hearing “Blue-Sky-thinking is all well and good but Blue-sky can be experienced very close to the ground and one is in fear of rubbing shoulders with the ‘Gormless,’ or those ‘Without-Sky, your Honour. I sought out friendships and connections with Jet-Stream-Thinkers to raise my profile and help my plan mature to its ultimate aim of reaching those who breathe the rarefied air of Outer-Orbit-Thinking”.

“Those who attain giddy heights tend to become a little light headed”, said the Judge as he sentenced Leeson and a whole raft of bankers to twenty years of solitary confinement to limit their contact with any sky whatsoever, metaphorical or real.

Science: Giants tend to imagine themselves to be well over six foot, if they are not do they have a realistic chance of entering the professions ?We don’t suppose so. The requirement of being a giant is six times six feet, thirty-six feet to be a serious player, though those giants who are, say, fifty or sixty feet tall have the best views of all. Those below a particular height should really and truely stop muttering incessantly in the back of New York cabs and anywhere else for that matter. “I could’ve been a contender”. This disgruntled world-view has become automatic in those who seek to promote intelligence over height.

That the Stuck-up artist Anthony Christ-Jones had a higher opinion of himself on the day of the Tate’s purchase of The Upper Room by Chris Ofili, is clear.  Christ-Jones took bitter umbrage that as a trustee of the Tate, Ofili should benefit from in-house financial advantages while the Stuck-ups were at pains to sell a painting at Portobello Road market at a 30% discount let alone get the whole cannon of work  accepted by the Tate for free; The idea that Ofili could be 30.000%  richer than Christ-Jones was ridiculous.  All that can be said is that, like the hardening process of the elephant dung with the use of a hairdryer, but in reverse; as we shall see, the winds of a thousand solar flairs would not be enough to soften a constipated Anthony-Christ-Jones.

I am of the opinion that an individuals’ Ideation Quotient towards an institution can be brought to a tipping point. I once again challenge you to deny that the Turner prize winners, one and all attain a decent score on the Imagination Ideation Quotient, and the Turner accolade proved the fact that, perfect examination results at art college, corporate sponsorship and interstellar fame notwithstanding, there was no pooper-scooper large enough to eradicate them from Christ-Jones tormented inner landscape.

Let’s peruse the list here-below of the first fifteen Turner Prize winners since 1984 and meditate on the mendacious demise of the underachievers omitted.

Malcolm Merling

Howard Hodgkin

Gilbert and George

Richard Deacon

Tony Cragg

Richard Long

Anish Kapoor

Grenville  Davey

Rachel Whitbread

Antony Gormley

Damien Hirst

Douglas Gordon

Gillian Waring

Chris Ofili

Steve MacQueen

The last name on the list, Steve MacQueen an artist of African decent and consecutive 1999 Turner Prize winner after Ofili, was another brutal kick to an already agitated hornets nest and the Stuck-ups proverbial wings beat like the fans a thousand Southern belles on the verandas of a thousand plantations at the news of emancipation. That same year, one coup de grace of many coups de grace  was the emergence and pre-eminence of Christ-Jones ex-girlfriend into the public eye with her installation My Fucked-Up Head.

Here are the rest of the Turner Prize winners which includes the cross-dressing artist from Pottersbarn, Graceful Perrier for his site-specific installations of National Heritage Blue Plagues sign-posting the residences of all nineteen former Turner Prize winners; a curiously innovative, if annihilating concept, as the plaques are traditionally awarded twenty years after death.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Martin Creed

Keith Tyson

Graceful Perrier

Jeremy Deller

Simon Starling

Tomma Abts

Mark Wallinger

Mark Leckey

Richard Wright

Susan Philipsz

Martin Boyce

Apparently, to win the Turner Prize a sense of entitlement is not enough, and those smarting at the entrance of the Tate Britain year on and year out worshiping Our Lady of Universal Ill-will, know this all too well.

The idea of creating a repeating triptych of thirteen differently coloured simians around the unressurrectible central patriarch Lord Raven was influenced by an admixture of the biography of the real-life Lord Raven written by his social worker, the lugubrious poem The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and the various shady intentions of family members in the famous Last Supper film Festen. These three works, a biography, a poem and a film were the only entertainments allowed Floy in the upper room of Silly Home Valley for the Creatively Unhinged.

For years The Raven, the complete antithesis to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, promised Floy the curiously comforting prospect of a unending void of nothingness after death, the biography the means to get there, and Festen allowed him respite from the grim past time of contemplating...well, nothingness. He re-enacted each of the thirteen characters with the use of variously coloured light bulbs strangely allowed by his carers.

His psychiatrist Abel Blumental condoned the practise as a form of Gestalt; the identification with thirteen different personas with the use of a lottery of ambient lighting was seen as a welcome distraction from Floy’s previous obsession. As long as he was prevented from re-enacting the final moment of the adventurous Lord Raven’s  grandiose demise, the therapy might work. Somewhere in the midst of his research began Floy writing and re-writing the sentence, “Your paintings are stuck up, You are stuck up - Stuck up, Stuck up, Stuck up”, on the walls of his room with coloured crayon.

The Midwychians, those midheaven albino extra-terrestrials who taught Floy binary code were, it appears, once again in contact; they had traced him after scouring America’s loftiest educational institutions recruiting a few more socially anorectic types along the way. Their presence in Floy’s addled brain first manifested itself as background white-noise until he, once again was able to receive every TV and Radio station and Broadband within a phenomenally wide radius; He had joined the sociopathic hive mind, and the voices of those races accidently abducted from loving family backgrounds who lived together, if somewhat noisily, could be heard distinctly crying for home above those malevolent races who shove their children into private schools at seven and their old into homes, who droned, “There are only so many hours in a day,” incessantly. Through this din Anthony Christ-Jones’ ex girlfriend’s now legendary rant “Your paintings are stuck up…” traced an enervating leitmotiv through Floy’s days and nights; no space was left uncrayoned. Somewhere a deluded mixed-race statistician was insidiously promoting the pernicious doctrine of Popular Eugenics and Gilded Spawn while a Nigerian/British artist and a Macaque Crested Monkey were beating a path to each other’s door.

Out-and-Out Liars;The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 2)

                                                                   2.

Way before the Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and The Mug Factor!, as a young man, Lenny Mulch who had already embraced the uselessness of adopting a high-minded attitude, made his first tentative step towards heights of universal mediocrity when he met an equally unremarkable lad called Sly Green. Green had been brought up surrounded by wonderfully creative hippies; he hated them. His progressive parents taught him from home. On a daily basis he daydreamed of becoming a mercenary and having them herded into one room and slaughtered. Green’s mother enrolled on an Open University course studying from home so that she might eventually make her own money.  Green cleverly fabricated an elaborate system whereby her laptop lid, spring-loaded, slammed shut when she hit the ‘save’ icon, breaking his mother’s beautifully tapered fingers and stopping her earning power, (and later that of others who might wish to work for a wage), forever.

Back in his village in Devon, Mulch was irritated by anyone he saw as intelligent which, thankfully wasn’t often.  His Ideation Quotient (IQ, a measure of which social and cultural group you aspire to belong to), compared with millions of people tested all over the planet in the last half decade, was non-existent. He did not see intelligence as a must. His Ideation Quotient level was no higher or lower than getting teenagers together and enrolling them in work placements, internships and other bogus apprenticeship schemes which ensured they would be no better than indentured slaves. Mulch would one day make us all sit fascinated and bewildered for hours and hours, mezmerised at his expertise for producing a show graduate unemployed contestants paid to appear in with the anti-climatic fanfare finale of life-long work experience as a road sweeper as the main prize.

In 2012 Mulch made a decision to shut himself away and make a life-long study of himself, which he thought, would be a gift to the world. Like middle-class Fringe theatres around the UK, he applied for grants by using photos of and pledges to include local ethnic minorities and when the money arrived, reverted to ‘jobs-for-the –boys-thinking’; in the case of the theatres i.e. those with a high Entitlement Ideation Quotient, and in Mulch’s case, himself.

The eminent social-anthropologist Professor Nohair sums up the phenomena he calls National Sleepwalking Ideation Quotient “The Ideation Quotient test among the English middle-classes is invariably not only off the scale class-wise but, increasingly, in the wrong time. When interviewed, ten percent revealed themselves to be urban-cyclist-with-wicker-baskets who not only went about London in a perpetual daze and fixed grin but had the amazing faculty to be able to edit out those they did not wish to see in particular and the city landscape in general and emerge, in their imagination, on an Edwardian country lane. A group of Nigerians re-imagined as a gaggle of geese, a drunk as a stray pony, a riot as swirling autumn leaves and the bloody of traces of that morning’s mugging could become a spilt punnet of strawberries if one’s Ideation Quotient was English Pastoral enough. By the end of testing the real Ideation Quotient of England and the English, it was  found that what lay beneath was an escapism on xenophobic proportions  ; 25 million people in England could only cope with its multicultural reality if their Ideation Quotient dial was tuned permanently to Downton Abbey. Another 30 million’s Ideation Quotient saw them submerged in the comforting world of the contemporary crime series Midsommer Murders; they were able to ignore the weekly genocide placed before them and focus lovingly on the thatched cottages, cricket lawns and privet hedges of a fictional racially-cleansed post bi-millennial village they yearned to believe was still here.”

"That this Halcyon England Ideation Quotient", Profressor Nohair observed, " initially a marketing tool to sell reruns of Agatha Christie’s England abroad, has backfired horribly and is now selling itself back to itself is still ignored, and remains clear only to those whose Ideation Quotient includes the anti-monarchist call ‘We’re-fed-up-living-in-a-fucking-museum!’ ".

At a low-impact environmentally friendly Levellers community’ in Totnes, Devon, at a Yard Sale advertised to raise travel money to send a daughter to New Zealand, a middle-aged, middle-class woman with an extremely high Above-Stairs Downton Abbey Ideation Quotient concealed by an Environmental Earth Mother  Ideation Quotient looked over her hand-crafted gypsy clothes pegs like a mother hen.; it was never realized how much the Ideation Quotient, or utter collective self-delusion was at play here. Yet not only had the community at the top of the hill bought into it with the fervour of ragged sleepwalkers in hand-crafted natural fibres, but so did the self-deluded town below. The fact is the yard sale was pure Greenwash; each member of the community had bought out-right their converted stable houses surrounding a grander house and like children were now playing poor on the lawn. The comment shouted out by a passerby regarding the money raised’ That’ll be enough for a few Cappuchinos at the airport!”, was ignored.

“There is nothing more telling about the morale of a nation than its Ideation Quotient”.  Continued Professor Nohair,“ Political correctness is a natural enemy of how one chooses to see oneself and National Displacement Ideation Quotient, where a whole nation side-steps this issue by identification with somewhere else, (like New Zealand’s appropriation of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth) allows long-haul flights of national fancy without offending anyone in the real world. That it is a major symptom of malaise is obvious; sub-titled Scandinavian crime dramas allows the English to escape into a racially pristine landscape without incurring the wrath of the Political Correct and from their sofas, quaff deeply at the well of an Aryan  idyll. It’s damage limitation really”.

Ideation Quotient is central to success, without the unseemly stampede of those who have been given the notion that they are elite, gift-aid for top private schools would be impossible to acquire, hence the IQ Test (Ideation Quotient test). High in the Texas Hills companies are using this test to sort the wheat from the chaff scrupulously measuring a perspective employee’s self-belief by asking. “How certain are you to reach the top?” The surprise second part to this question could make or break an applicant. “...of a giant dung heap?”

It would be a major miracle if any one could raise one’s Ideation Quotient above the rest of humanity. You would say that is impossible-divine right notwithstanding? You would be right by assuming that to get to the top we need to scramble up on the shoulders of giants; and when we hear about Chris Ofili our gut instinct is the same as Lenny Mulch's and Sly Green's; is he worth using to further my ascent? Out-and-out liars are indeed those whose no-holds-barred attitude to climbing up the backs and onto the shoulders of giants to succeed is nothing more than ingenuous.

Summarizing Out-and-Out Liars we have seen that an outstanding amount can be done without talent by opportunists. In this section, we will be sending a whole battalion of diggers out to solve the cases of what happened to those who slipped through the crust of their own private dung heap and disappeared into failure in its purest and concentrated form- social compost. How we have been tricked into running to our sofas cued by mass recession Shadenfreude into gawping at the They-Shoot-Horses-Don’t-They despair that is Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and the Mug Factor!, Mulch and Green may never rise to a level of intelligence to tell us. Had Lenny Mulch met the sixteen year old Chris Ofili it would be him, not Ofili cashing in, but he would have been cashing in on the same misunderstanding; Mulch does not understand what a true out-and-out liar is and that is a misunderstanding he will carry with him to the gargantuan mulch that will be his grave.