One thing that the marriage of the TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex has revealed, is just how hideously racist Britons are. Naturally, as all bigots especially the most invidious racially predatory will have you know, ‘It has nothing to do with race!’ The DailyMail has made an industry of acting as a de facto wing of the EDL in its campaign of destroying the marriage of the Sussexes.
Every single day its gaggle of writers launch another volley of hate to feed their hate-filled multitude of devotees whom they simply abuse in their quest for more advertising revenue. Last week, their legions of bigots were gleeful when not only was the Duchess of Sussex not at Royal Ascot but neither was her husband. Naturally, the rumour was that Her Majesty The Queen had banned the Sussexes from attending Royal Ascot. Of course, last year when Catherine, HRH Duchess of Cambridge was on maternity leave, she did not attend Royal Ascot. Furthermore, not once did her husband attend Royal Ascot. That is the tradition.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Naturally, when these photographs of this year’s Royal Ascot emerged, the plethora of bigoted DailyMail trolls were celebratory of how happy and wholesome everyone looked. Of course, they were commenting on the homogeneity of the group; their was even talk that the RF looked so much happier without the American in their midst.
The following day, it was announced that the Royal Foundation was disbanding. This not only gave cause for wild celebration by the DailyMail trolls but in hindsight, it was speculated that the group looked as happy as they did at Royal Ascot because at that point, the dissolution of the Royal Foundation would have been known to all. This was seen as more proof that HM The Queen did not want Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex around Indeed, clearly, the Sussexes were headed for divorce and it was only a matter of time before there would be an announcement to that effect.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
By no means was tabloid culture then what it is today; however, there was no getting around the fact that there was unrelenting animus that was decidedly racist towards Yoko Ono because she was non-white. Of course, at the time as now and is always the case, there was strident denial that there was prejudice involved in the animus towards Yoko Ono. Heaven only knows that Linda Eastman was not a Briton, yet she was not reviled and hated for being an outsider as was Yoko Ono.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
So intense was the racial animus towards Yoko Ono that John Lennon had to relocate to New York City to seek peace away from being unrelentingly reviled by Britons, who were nothing more than unmasked Klansfolk; though there were three other wives, Yoko Ono was solely to blame for the demise of the Beatles. Indeed, Britons have John Lennon’s blood on their hands for having racially preyed on this man and his wife to the point where he had to flee and take refuge in a land where guns rule. Paul, Ringo nor George had to flee England because Britons did not approve of their choice of a wife.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Neither Linda Eastman nor Montréalaise Autumn Kelly were subjected to the same animus as Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex for being outsiders marrying much-loved Britons. True, every woman marrying into the BRF experiences blow-back. Sarah Ferguson, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Catherine Middleton and on and on. Truth be told, neither Linda nor Autumn were subjected to similar animus as Yoko or Meghan simply for being Caucasian and therefore, deemed acceptable.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Britons may well succeed with running TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex out of town as they did John Lennon and Yoko Ono but know this, Tungsten has got powerful players in her corner. For starters, if the Sussexes were exiled, Oprah et al have the power to have her appointed as honorary chairperson of the Academy Awards – some such title of an American-British film society – not the American wing of BAFTA – which would see Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex each year present the award for Best Film at the Academy Awards.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
More to the point, when are Americans going to stop kowtowing to Britons because of the latter’s archly over-compensatory inferiority complex, of all things, masquerading as posh, sophisticated, superior and aristocratic. Why should an American actor, after having graduated with distinction from Julliard sit by and watch yet another English actor waltz in and claim the American award for best actor in a film which was not even an American production; this has repeatedly happened in the past. And so like Britons it is; they are the only island dwellers in the English-speaking world who never lose their god-awful accent regardless how long they sojourn abroad. Whether five years or fifty, you can also count on the expat English to maintain their posher-than-though English accent. Some may be readily charmed/fooled by all that posh posturing but it is so much obvious BS.
Glenn Close did not win the Best Actress BAFTA in 2019 that honour went to Briton, Olivia Colman in The Favourite. Ever possessed of this obsequious need to suck up, the Academy and its members voted Olivia Colman Best Actress at an American Awards show when the production was not an American production and Glenn Close was not going to win the Best Actress BAFTA and did not. One thing is clear from her acceptance speech, Olivia Colman is a one-hit wonder and will never win an Oscar again, just as Matthew McConaughey never will; after all, his Best Actor award was by default – so great was the need to deny Chiwetel Ejiofor an Oscar for his masterful performance in 12 Years A Slave.
When Britons prove themselves such ugly racist boors as with Yoko Ono and now Meghan Markle, why indulge, suffer or tolerate these people overlong? Throwing Oscars at them because they talk as though they’ve got a horse’s hoof stuck up their arse, there is nothing much to celebrate when one’s claim to fame is having subjugated 2/3s the world way back when and having enslaved and or brutalised those persons.
Of course, Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex chose not to move next-door to the Cambridges at Kensington Palace. For one, there is every reason to believe that the Cambridges’ marriage currently is nine parts façade and with a numerology attitude of 9, HRH Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, apart from not being the sharpest tool in the box, is also conceited, stubborn, bigoted and intolerant and also is in tight with those pompous-arsed minor royals the Michaels of Kent et famille who with their racist perspective were none-too-shy about showing their true colours, blackamoor and all with Meghan suddenly in their midst and to whom they would have to curtsy.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
A den of racial predators is no environment in which to bring up black children and that would also include those generational members of Kensington Palace staff, who would think nothing of being openly racist towards Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex and her children, For Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex the minor royal Micheals of Kent are no different to Samantha Grant and Thomas Markle Jr. She endured the racially predatory bullying in childhood, which is precisely why she has absolutely nothing to do with them and with damn good reason. Trust you me, there is not a single black person on this planet who would suffer any such environment. It is not human, not civilised and a goddamn waste of time.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Carping on about how much better Cressida Bonas would have been as a wife to HRH Prince Henry of Wales, is a moot point. Who knows, perhaps, Harry was being forced into the relationship so that his older brother could have access to Cressida’s older sister, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. Is it any wonder why Sam Branson keeps his wife as far away from the isle of England as possible. Of course, had Harry married Cressida, this newfound media love for Catherine, HRH Duchess of Cambridge would not have eventualised. She would be portrayed, even more so, by the DailyMail as workshy and they would even up the practise of only printing photographs of her when her face is at rest, which is a decidedly hard affair. For being blonde, blue-eyed and with an artisan’s fey beauty, Cressida, had Prince Harry married her in May 2018, would currently be eclipsing Catherine, who is now being seen as a fashion icon. No matter how DailyMail repackage and champion Catherine, she is a relative dud when publicly speaking as Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex has time and again proven. The Duchess of Sussex’s commanding performance at the 2018 British Fashion Awards at Royal Albert Hall truly was a study is grace, poise, elegance and commanding stage presence. You’ve either got it or, as in Catherine’s case, you don’t. Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex is quite confidently aware that a mic is Catherine, HRH Duchess of Cambridge’s kryptonite.
The DailyMail and its gang of racist boors can vent and gloat all they want but if HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex were to have married a conservative Muslim and converted, for fear of ending up with their fetid skull on the small of their back, every one of their cowardly racist boors would know to keep their damn mouths shut. Of one thing they are certain, fucking with blacks will earn you no serious repercussions. The DailyMail‘s hacks have proven that England is the isle of the original hooded klansfolk; they are just a little bit more evolved to the point where their hoods have become invisible but no less ugly are they. In the end, who could give a fuck; the boors of the isle of England most certainly did not invent Jazz and speaking of which…
After having pored through this year’s TD Toronto Jazz Festival lineup, I knew that there was only one show that I cared to attend. The Diana Ross show at the Sony Centre though tempting, however, the centre is just too cavernous a space. Jazz needs the warmth and intimacy of a smaller venue. Besides, I knew damn well that coming the day after the Pride parade, there would be queens aplenty in the audience. Most of them would be expecting the usual Diana Ross show; however, this was going to be a Jazz show.
As ever, I did not attend Pride parade, never have. Back in 1986, Merlin and I hauled arse to a dinner party in the Annex where an artistic director associate of his, held court. Frankly, neither men liked each other but for professional reasons one endured much. Among the group of 8 souls was a redhead interior decorator from New York City who was the most vile dirty-arsed bigot conceivable. Naturally, with yours truly present, he just had to wax overlong about what a scourge on human civilisation blacks the world over were.
Merlin stealthily reached across my plate and removed my steak knife from the plate and placed it to his left as I sat on his right. Finally, when we got home by cab as Merlin sought to shift my mood by playing some Miles Davis, I went and retrieved a pair of scissors and demonstrated to him on returning to the living room, “That’s it, I am cancelling my membership in Gay society. God only knows it is not as if these blasted, motherfucking lisping, bottom-feeding people invented Jazz.” For me what really settled it, was the redhead boor’s decree, “Sorry dear but there is no black in the rainbow.”
Of course, a couple of years back the Black Lives Matter delegation, which had been invited to march in the Gay Pride parade, were booed, heckled and pelted with unopened water bottles. That very day on my way home, I was also attached and it was much fuelled by the general anger at having had the Black Lives Matter contingent in the parade. To this day, the pride community are still mad at the Police and had banned them from participating in the parade, all because they allowed the Black Lives Matter group into the parade. Even though the group had been invited, they were treated by spectators as though they did something as irresponsible as simply showed up and high-jacked the parade.
The above photograph was the look for the opening act, one of those regrettable experiences, which alas the Canada Council foists on one, god only knows why. Banal and as sexually intriguing as a live webcam set up on a couple of koala bears in repose, some things just have to be endured to get one through to the real deal. As my date, an ageing Jewish actor/writer with the most wicked sense of humour is always great company, we sat in the back row, all to ourselves, in fits of delicious giggles – we were poring through online photographs of Céline Dion parading in haute couture in Paris in the lead up to Paris Fashion Week; when asked what I thought of her whacky, over-the-top, beyond desperate behaviour, I flatly put in, “it ought damn well to be kept leashed and staked out back.”
Next, it was my turn to come undone when no sooner than having slipped in the breath mint that he whispered, “those are the new mint-flavoured super laxatives, I was telling you about.” How soul-gnawing is emulative institutional Jazz whose practitioners know nothing either of blacks or black culture? Hell, even after the bass solo, there was no applause from the house.
Finally, like a lover with the most foul breath but whose girthsome jousting simply won’t be denied – then the malodorous rogue leaves and you shudder in disgust and return to breathing like a human rather than a goddamn humpback whale – the opening act vacated the stage and when the stagehands were done, only the grand piano was left. Out then walked Cécile McLorin Salvant with a puckish accompanist and it was readily obvious that there is an indelible soul connection between the two, which speaks to intimacy most rare and also more than a dozen past-life connections. Even Cécile’s body had changed, she looked more lived in, she was getting good loving and it showed.
Before proceeding, let me just state that this was the most phenomenal and best Jazz concert that I have ever attended. From Hoagy Carmichael, to Barbara Streisand, to Bessie Smith, every song was her own and every song was a master class in musicianship and phrasing. Then two things happened that blew me even further away; firstly, she sang, Midnight Sun. This is a song that for me as long as I live, will always evoke the most pleasurable memories of living at John Hirsch and Brian Trottier’s Moore Park Home at 187 Hudson Drive in the summer of 1990 after Merlin had passed and I reinvented self and took the time to travel. Until this concert, no one had ever done a better version of Midnight Sun than Sarah Vaughan, whose version daily played at that lovely Moore Park home.
Secondly, Cécile paused and asked if anyone in the audience was French, to which there was a boisterous response and then she asked to sing a song in French. By the time she was done, I was reduced to tears, even my usual jaded friend was blown away. At the conclusion the house went wild and I was reminded of those years living in Montréal and attending all those summer festivals across the province.
Let’s see Canadian, Diana Krall sing en Français in this supposed bilingual country and I am not talking any of that tawdry attempt at French musicianship as with the likes of Emilie-Claire Barlow et al. Unlike those frauds who suffocated the blackness out of Jazz in the 90s and beyond, Cécile is the real McCoy. The primary musical instrument in human civilisation is the voice and when it comes to Jazz, not only is it a language that is the extension of the griot tradition, nothing sounds like, feels like, moves you like the instrument that is the black voice; there simply aren’t any comparisons. This is the voice, the instrument, when on walking through your door can revivify and empower you like no other instrument can and most especially so after having experienced racial animus for the 14th millionth and fifty-seventh time in this lifetime.
During the course of the show, her accompanist did something that I had never before witnessed, Sullivan Fortner got from the piano stool to reach inside and pluck on the strings, making for all intents the most beautiful mbira imaginable. Sullivan proved himself the perfect accompanist to Cécile and it was clear by the end of the concert that these two lovely, magical and gifted souls have thankfully found each other and how we are better for them being in the world. The love and harmony they share, was as rich and smooth as the warmest honey satiating the palate. Even the encores were concerts onto themselves. If there is anything that can be said to be good, to have come from Roy Hargrove’s passing, is that it created the opportunity for both Sullivan and Cécile to form a most productive collaboration.
As we left Koerner Hall, both of us giddy with joy for having been richly inspired, there was a guy outside the theatre, hawking the program for Jazz FM. Brusquely, I declined taking one, I soon explained that I had no desire to be associated with the Jazz radio when they went and hired someone whom Merlin dismissed back in his early on-air days as VJ at MuchMusic as a smug bigoted asshole. Indeed, an ageing leopard does not his spots lose. Just for writing a few hit songs and having made a few million dollars changes nothing. As Merlin always said, “a man changes clothes and nothing else.”
Though last year, there were three good concerts during the Jazz Festival; this year, one only needed to have attended one concert and boy am I richly inspired for having done so. On parting, we both agreed that it really was an awesome concert; more than that, we admitted that it was high time that we saw Rocketman before it goes to video.
For your ongoing support, I am ever grateful. Buy my glorious books, the incomparable series with Michael overleaves appendices; truly, they are human civilisation’s first dream memoirs.
After having pored through an interesting OperaCanada article that featured the opera Otello’s lead, Russell Thomas, and a predictably snide review in The Star – look there is no black lobby in Canada, so one can always be expected to be as curt and dismissive of blacks at every turn; this is after all the culture where the obsession with Jazz is almost as fever-pitched as the predatory late-night runs of Klansmen with nooses at the ready – I comfortably settled into my usual ring three seat, next to trusty Lucian Mann-Chomedy and warmly awaited the magic that is theatre to unfold.
After a month that was not soon revisited, my mind was at times distracted by the dreck that one must at times endure in order to get by. I thought of the heaviness in the air that the subject matter of the opera addressed; the quartet of retired ladies who usually chat about who has taken ill, moved to hospice or died since last they gathered, did a lot of coughing, sniffing and whispering. And as these things are as predictable as flies on shit, sure enough, I heard one of them whisper, “Meghan Markle.” Will these people ever just leave the damn woman alone and stop hunting her at every opportunity?
Otello, Verdi’s take on Shakespeare’s take on race relations did also from the row of retired and widowed ladies spirit the whisper of O. J. Simpson’s name. Some things just never change… alas. Indeed, at some moments as I looked at Otello onstage, I began to realise how we as a people are stigmatised and stereotypically projected onto. I soon got greater insight to why Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex is so reviled. Objectified, she as a black woman was only ever to have been nothing more than a bit of rough, a tryst.
Naturally, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex with his double sixness is seen as being readily taken advantage of and needed to be protected against the lascivious bit of rough who clearly conned her way into the royal family. Born September 15, 1984, Henry born in the year of the rat has quite beautifully empathetic, compassionate numbers and with his double sixness is given to OCD behaviour as displayed by his need to fidget with his clothing – right hand inside his jacket et al. Six people are awesome beings and Henry, a double six, is no exception. 15.9.1984 = 6.6.1 = 4.
With Otello, this projection of the black male as emotionally volatile, violent, easily manipulated has certainly proven an archetype that fits blind fools like Tiger Woods and O. J. Simpson to the letter. Either way, it was uncomfortable to watch this production in places as it so mirrored the warped perception of a people by persons who question our humanity and who never seem able to perceive us beyond their generationally custodial perception of a people.
Be that as it may, I so hungered to be removed from the morass through which I recently waded at the end of which, I dismissively remarked of yet another power-mad woman in the work place: “She certainly doesn’t look like a fucking horse for no good reason… Oh please, it’s just a matter of time before she rots the fuck in hell, eating every pope’s arse!” If you cannot take offence then don’t damn well give offence… Honest to god, some women in the work place are nothing but dickless faggots addicted to creating drama for the sheer sport of it and simply because they are just so drunk with power… to say nothing of being bored out of their frigging minds. Well, like a bowel movement, it did not take too long for me to sniff, flush and walk the fuck away from the BS,
This Desdemona was an earthy, warm, beautifully soulful portrayal of a wronged woman, a woman dominated by an insecure and deceived man. This production was a beautiful sweeping affair; I especially loved the dark broody look of the sets that captured the essence of the human condition portrayed. Indeed, it proved a good elixir after all the dross that I had recently endured in the work place.
During Otello’s intermission, I received a forwarded Instagram post from an old dancer friend, which he labelled #everythingwasbeautifulattheballet. Of course, it was a direct response to my last blog, which highlighted the intense isolation and racial animus that I experienced for two god fuck-all maudlin years in Winnipeg. Yes, indeed, the world of art is saturated with lisping, bottom-feeding, small ‘b’ bigoted boors who see positively nothing remotely gauche about this sort of fare well into the 21st century.
On yet another too cold, rainy day, which proved all too reminiscent of Vancouver, I abandoned my art-filled lair in search of more inspiration the day after the opera. I cannot quite recall a season in recent memory that has proven both so cold and rainy as this protracted winter.
That’s right, the day before attending Otello, there was a break in the perpetual rains that gave way to snow and hail… truly, the dog days of summer cannot get here fast enough. As more of the city’s 19th century streetcar tracks were being ripped up and replaced so that the racket that is the TTC outdoor workers and the local constabulary can make a killing in overtime, it took close to 40 minutes on a bus for me and my fuck du jour to get from Yonge and Dundas to Dundas and McCaul.
My date, a lissom twenty-something with smoky hazel eyes, which were vaguely reminiscent of Merlin’s, was good company. I had for the past several hours pummelled his prostate as his daddy issues were satisfied and my angst from work place tensions were nicely dispensed with. We men when in our 20s can be so alarmingly insecure; I have often wondered how Merlin managed to stay with me during those angst-ridden and redundantly solipsistic years.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
My date on exiting the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room expressed chagrin at not having done magic mushrooms before leaving my place where incense and Jazz magically perfumed the air, intoxicating our spirits as we riotously fucked our way out of winter’s gnawing frigidity.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Without question, no trip to the AGO is completely inspiring without a visit to the galleries where the stellar art of Inuit artists are housed. There are some real masterpieces in the AGO collection.
As it was the tail end of this exhibition and I still had not visited, I simply had to make it there. Whilst walking along the long corridor to the start of the exhibition my fey-eyed beauty suggested that we take a break and go make out in a stall in the washrooms. Fingers interlaced, I assured him that there was better intimacy to be had the sooner we got through the exhibition and hightailed it back to my place by Uber.
To my very discriminating eye, the moment I saw this verbose title, I fully expected to observe a show that was curated by too much extraneous fare and not enough impressionist art. Tumescent and impatient, I had no time for reading, reading and reading more yada yada, all of which was to compensate for the lack of genuine, to say nothing of quality, impressionist art. Just as well, I was growing achingly moist by the minute as both my energetic ectomorph and I hungered to be carnally consumed with each other… yet again.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
This marvellous bronze fully captivated me; it would prove my favourite piece in the shoddily curated exhibition.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Highlights from a rather underwhelming show.
Detail featuring two of the most beautiful creatures. Their depiction is not the most masterfully executed but there is something rapturous about the look of the dogs as they ambled with their human companions on a journey which they had taken countless times before that made me stop and gaze overlong whilst being truly inspired.
Detail of what for me proved sheer magnificence… the lighting is phenomenally executed.
A masterpiece to be sure; however, where it was hung and the palette of the salon were decidedly inappropriate. This was all I needed to see to finally wink the left eye at my horny power bottom and to speed home by Uber in the rain for noisy, exhausting, passionate play.
As ever, for your ongoing support I am both deeply grateful and indebted. Sweet dreams and don’t you ever forget to push off and start flying because life is a most beautiful drink. Cheers!
Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex in Valentino Haute Couture in Morocco.
Many moons ago, in the 80s when living next-door to designer, Alfred Sung on Cabbagetown’s Amelia Street, I was more obsessed with fashion than I now am. Back then, lots of friends used to bemoan the paucity of black models appearing on catwalks of major house, in particular, Armani.
In this 1992 Fashion Television feature portrait by Jeanne Beker, the thinking model, Veronica Webb makes passing reference to the paucity of black models in ad campaigns and even walking the catwalks of some houses.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Then along came a picture-perfect day in Berkshire when Sol shone with rays that sparkled as though laced with diamonds and platinum. This phenomenal woman, this soul who had previously been Margaret Beaufort, she with an unparallelled sense of theatre, with poise, self-absorption and awareness in the space of a couple of hours proved herself a game changer. That poise, elegance and revolutionary arrival onto the world stage got everyone to sit up and take notice. Certainly, Pierpaolo Piccioli took notice. He clearly thought that if Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex were going to favour haute couture in choosing Givenchy for the elegantly minimalist wedding gown then Maison Valentino had to step up and court the Duchess.
Bored out of my mind, one day, I happened to be tune into a live event on Eva Chen’s IG @evachen212. It was the Spring/Summer 2019 Maison Valentino Haute Couture show and as Eva shouted and praised the models and creations as they walked, I began crying. Never had I seen so many black models walking in a show. Then Naomi Campbell appeared, closing the show and I was simply floored. Never had Ms. Campbell looked more radiant when walking the catwalk. There was so much tangible love in the air, in that room. This was a moment like no other. There was no denying that Piccioli was courting Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex with that show, not just the ubiquity of black models but the number of creations that featured a bateau neckline were clear homage to the latest duchess of the House of Windsor.
Listen to what Naomi has to say, near the end of the video, when speaking to British Vogue Editor, Edward Enninful. There was nothing more overwhelming that seeing the response in that salon, from Naomi crying, to the adorably eccentric Reine de Charlemagne, Céline Dion, crying her eyes out whilst sitting FROW along with Mr. Valentino himself, Valentino Garavani.
Campbell, Naomi 22/5/1970 London, England
Michael: This fragment is a second-level mature artisan — third life thereat. Naomi is in the caution mode with a goal of rejection. A realist, Naomi is in the moving part of emotional centre.
Naomi’s body type is Saturn/Mercury.
Naomi’s primary chief feature is arrogance and the secondary stubbornness.
The fragment Naomi is fifth-cast in the sixth cadence; she is a fragment of greater cadence four. Naomi’s entity is two, cadre four, greater cadre 7, pod 414.
Naomi’s essence twin is an artisan and her task companion is a sage.
Naomi’s primary needs are exchange, expression and freedom.
There are 6 past-life associations with Arvin and 4 with Merlin.
________________________________________________
Naomi epitomises what someone in the positive pole of discrimination looks like. Of course, she is an artisan soul, which gives her that kaleidoscopic, chameleonesque mystique. She also happens to be an entity mate of both John Hirsch and George Hawken; this is why George was always left speechless when she appeared on television. He was bewitched and fascinated by her, which was rare for him where adoring famous persons was concerned. As the recent trip by TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex to Morocco revealed, Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex certainly took notice of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s homage to her discriminating sense of fashion and design.
As ever, I would be remiss if I did not take this time to state how deeply appreciative of your support all these years I am… thank you. Here’s to life. Here’s to you dreaming the most lucid of flying dreams… cause you can!
As I work 7 days a week, I was debating whether or not to attend the Twelfth Glenn Gould Prize Gala at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. That morning en route home from some errands, I discovered that someone had jumped from a neighbourhood condo. I got in and realised that there was no more feet-dragging; to hell with being dog-tired. I got on the phone and called up Lucian Mann-Chomedy and said, “My darling, we are going to the Jessye Norman Gala!” As ever, always positive, Lucian chimed in, “Oh my, oh yes, how lovely. Well, I’ll be both honoured and delighted.” Indeed, life is for living!
Merlin and I met Friday, October 1, 1982 in a Hell’s Kitchen Walk-up, the following Monday evening, on his return to Toronto, Merlin called up crying. The man whom he had spent so much of our first evening together speaking of, had died; Glenn Gould had died. For the seven years that we were together, Merlin listened to Glenn Gould’s interpretation of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations at least thrice weekly. Indeed, the first gift I purchased Merlin, was a recently released recording of the Goldberg Variations at Christmas 1982: I think that it is safe to say that that gift sealed the deal, I was a keeper for sure.
As I had waited until the last minute to get seats, I was sat in Ring 4 rather than the usual Ring 3. This, alas, was my view of the stage and of course, the butterflies are from the set for Atom Egoyan’s masterful staging of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, which the moment I saw the set, I began chuckling to Lucian on recall of Tracy Dahl’s unsurpassed performance as Despina.
As I was too busy trying to throw something together for Instagram, I was heard gasping when it was announced that the head of the Glenn Gould Foundation’s Jury this twelfth prize was none other than the actor, Viggo Mortensen, who then walked out onto stage. He, indeed, who in a few days time will be attending the Governors Ball where he may or may not be holding an Oscar.
Out onto the stage arrived the Twelfth Prize Laureate, Jessye Norman. Truly, it was a shock to the very core to see Madame being ushered out in a wheelchair. Suddenly, I was reminded of the events of earlier which caused me to rush home and purchase two tickets for the event. That aside, there was no greater joy than drinking of her soul’s inspiring beauty.
This beautiful gala was so filled with touchstones for me, none more so than the moment that bass baritone, Ryan Speedo Green was in full song. When he sang, “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi” from Wolfgang A. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.
Yes, indeed, this marvellous aria’s orchestration included a harpsichord. Straight away, I was teary-eyed as memories of the truly eccentric and delightful Milan Newcombe readily surfaced; Milan will ever remain a lover like no other.
During the intermission, I ran into two old friends not seen in at least 1.5 decades; we spoke of nothing but our surprise at Ms. Norman’s entrance. Life really does march full speed ahead.
After the intermission, it was the announcement of the Glenn Gould Foundation’s Progidy Prize with the recipient being none other than, Cécile McLorin-Salvant, the most fabulous Jazz singer on the planet. Is this not an evening to remember during Black History Month indeed.
This stunningly unforgettable gala was closed out by the final recitalist being the divinely gifted soprano and Glenn Gould Foundation Prize juror, Sondra Radvanovsky in full song, singing Verdi.
The gala concluded with Ms. Norman returning to the stage and singing a duet with Cécile McLorin-Salvant. This was a moving, emotionally intense evening and my life was greatly enriched for having chosen to attend. The gala was nothing short of magical.
As a tribute to this marvellous evening in the theatre, I will include herein two dreams, which were originally audio-cassette-recorded in the 1990s. Before each deam, one of Glenn Gould, the other Jessye Norman, I will include each individual’s Michael Overleaves.
Gould, Glenn Herbert 25/9/32 – 4/10/82, Toronto
This fragment was a sixth level mature artisan in the repression mode, with a goal of growth, an idealist in the moving part of intellectual centre. He had a Mercury/Saturn body type.
Glenn’s primary chief feature was self-destruction with a secondary of arrogance.
Glenn was third-cast in his cadence and his cadence is fourth in the greater cadence. He is a member of entity four, cadre five, greater cadre 17, pod/node 819.
This fragment has an artisan essence twin who was alive during Glenn’s life but there were no plans to meet. This fragment is still incarnate on the physical plane.
The fragment who was Glenn has a scholar task companion, who was in a previous life, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach. They were not incarnate at the same time.
However, the fragment who was Glenn was exerting considerable influence on Carl Philip Emmanuel.
These two fragments had many lives together, once as luthiers, three times as court musicians, nine times as brothers of the cloth, twice as brothers in the flesh, as well as completing several important life monads, including student/mentor and master/slave.
In the immediate past life, the fragment who was Glenn had as his three primary needs: security, communion and exchange. Only the first of these was ever even partially satisfied.
So here we had a warrior-cast artisan who had seriously conflicting overleaves and a primary chief feature of self-destruction. He had a goal of growth but a repression mode which would not allow him to flourish.
He had a need for communion, but was sexually ambivalent and socially inept. Undeniably, he had great talent but took no pleasure from performing in public.
This fragment has a great deal of scholar energy that was used in the immediate past life to enable Glenn Herbert to painstakingly examine and interpret the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
He was very interested in form and structure for all of his adult life. This fragment was, unfortunately, the victim of a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, also for all of his adult life, which worsened considerably during his third and fourth decades.
This fragment did not, as popular wisdom teaches, retire from public life because of any strong beliefs in the recording industry. Glenn Herbert retired from public life because he could no longer bear to be in crowds, even if he was distanced by a proscenium.
Needless to say, this fragment did not complete work on his fourth internal monad.
________________________________________
Astral Plane Glenn Gould Recital!
Nothing is more uplifting than finding oneself at a great musical performance on the astral plane. This dream was about being richly inspired and by Glenn Herbert Gould, no less; it was truly marvellous an adventure for the spirit.
The dream occurred, on Tuesday, October 6, 1992, whilst the Moon transited both Aquarius and my ninth house.
I am in France where I leisurely browsed through a store; perhaps, it was somewhere in Paris. It seemed here like at nighttime. Whilst in one corner of the store, I noticed that there were all these big slabs of cheese in packaged containers.
There was a woman coordinating the display of the cheeses. Sometimes the cheese was being grated and other times not. There and then, I decided that I was going to buy one slab of the cheese that was packaged in a rectangular box.
The cheese was about an inch thick and about eight inches long. The cardboard box that it was in was white and almost like the size of a box of Cream of Wheat.
Surprisingly, the box was rather heavy. Though not unlike cheddar, it was a dark cheese. The smell of this cheese was really hard – quite the bite to it.
It had seemingly been opened for too long as parts of it was growing hardened and turning colour. I knew straight off the bat that I wanted to have some to take home with me.
So, off I went to purchase the slab that I liked. Everyone here was, of course, speaking French which I quite so understood and liked. Interestingly, I too was speaking very competently in French.
It was obvious that I was not too heavily accented as the others were pleasant-enough with me.
The second dream had me leaving the store; I then found myself hovering in the air. Whilst in flight, I went into a building which had a green – oxidised-copper – roof. It was part of a long set of buildings that had very, very tall stone chimneys.
These were chimneys that were not unlike the ones at the Palais du Louvre. As a matter of fact, the building was similar to the Canadian Parliament buildings though it was not those buildings.
This complex was considerably longer. These were a series of complex buildings. Here, I was easily thirty storeys up whilst in flight. I looked down at the complex which at maximum could not have been more than five storeys tall.
After having contemplatively observed the complex for awhile, I began very slowly gliding down through the air. I intently studied a procession of persons, way below, who were bailing out of very large buses; they were, as a matter of fact, tour buses.
This was all happening in a courtyard-like area and away from the bustle of the street. I next noticed some men who appeared; they seemed, in their long, flowing white robes, to be priests.
They were not Arabic or Muslims in caftans; rather, they were definitely Whites. The buildings here were long on the order of Palais Richelieu in Paris. When I finally alighted, we had to go through this incredible entrance.
This led into a wonderful sandstone building; it was very modern with a neo-classical design. On the order of being imposing, the door to this place was massive. They seemed to be the doors to a temple.
To get to the entrance, there were many steps which one had to climb. On entering, off to the right, there was a passage that one could take.
An aisle led along another passage; it seemed illumined by a skylight. The priestly men had all entered before me. They preceded a procession of adherents who had come to partake of some ritual.
I had gone to explore, off to the left, because it was the wing of the building that had reminded me of the Palais du Louvre. Going there, I wandered about being fascinated by the place.
Some women were posing for artists in this particular wing. They wore modern garb but were very exceptionally beautiful. What was most intriguing about their look was that it was exactly as they would have appeared on the finished canvases.
They were very nubile young women; they had to hold their poses for interminably long periods. Here several kids kept on going through the place; they were seemingly art students.
They were all very North American, middle class with their loud, snobbish bourgeois affectations. Right away, it was obvious that all the muses were still virgins.
Theirs was an innocence that could never be affected. They were all teenage girls whose bodies were very voluptuous and full. These were not skinny people at all.
There was one point at which one girl was holding different poses. Each girl would be painted by from three-to-five artists, at a time. Thus every pose would be captured from different perspectives.
At one point, they told her to take a break; they then reverted back to an earlier pose. This was so that they could return to that work and put some more work into finishing it up.
When she changed the pose, she had also turned some 180 degrees. This particular model, whom I was studying, wore socks with Oriental-looking sandals.
Inside her socks she kept little items of hers. Whilst she was making the transition, she simply reached up her foot and pulled up her right leg to reach down into the socks.
Hers was a pair of blue-coloured socks – pale blue. To just above the ankles was the extent to which the socks rose. Looking at her, she took out something from about her ankle which looked like a wafer.
Not the least bit self-conscious, she ate it at once; it seemed like a chocolate wafer which she favoured. She seemingly needed it to get an energy boost so that she could stay focussed on the tedious work that she did.
After having found it all very interesting, I moved on sufficiently knowledgeable of the goings on here. Walking along a corridor, I ended up going into a room where everyone was very strange.
A guy there was a lot like Galen Shim – my very beautiful, Hong Kong-born, Eurasian friend. He reclined on a bed with his head close to the door. When I came in, I noticed that he was naked. When giving him a massage, I began by oiling his body.
It was quite fragrant oil. Rubbing down his body, I began working on his toes and feet. Afterwards, I got up to leave but he very silently began coming with me.
So out we went and joined the procession of persons; among them this time were several kids. Mostly, they were teenagers – amongst whom I did not want to be.
Galen or the guy who seemed like him, here the guy was not wearing glasses as before nor would Galen for that matter, and I kept walking through the place. Pretty soon, after we had left the noisy kids, we started hearing the most beautiful music.
This was one of the rare times that I found the music of the pipe organ to be beautiful. Within the complex, we happened on this wonderful cathedral inside which were most of the people from the procession.
On entering the structure, it seemed more like a concert hall. We soon learnt that the hall was specifically built so that only Johannes Sebastian Bach’s music could be played there.
Never before had I heard classical music sound so beautiful. We stood there transfixed whilst listening together. Who then should I notice way at the front of the hall, at the pipe organ that sat high on the dais-like stage, but Glenn Gould. I could see his right profile as if in close-up.
My god, this was rapture and then some. He was playing with such rapt abandon that I steadied myself and whispered more to myself than to Galen,
“My god, what an incredible dream to be having…”
There seemed to be a skylight on the side of the high-ceilinged nave. Instead of there being stained glass windows, windows for that matter, there was only intense light raining down through what seemed to be a skylight system.
The centre of the halved skylight was a wonderful neoclassical, oxidised, copper-looking, greenish flying buttress. Here the look, though modern, was more in the style of Islamic mosques or even Moorish architecture rather than the classic Gothic signatures.
A series of the most intricate and complex circles intertwined, like some riotous jungle vine, in the cathedral-like, concert hall’s stonework. Breathtakingly beautiful it was. I stood there, just inside the entrance to the hall, on the left of the wide aisle.
This was a very wide-bodied structure. As you progressed down the aisle, there were different levels where one could go up and sit. These were either on the right or left. The central aisle was covered by the most beautifully designed red carpet.
This place was considerably wider than Notre Dame Cathedral. Unlike the Parisian Gothic structure, it was not a darkened affair. Here it was very intensely bright out. The light coming in on the right and left side of the flying buttress-like, central girder fell through a slightly frosted glass.
The light was an intense – almost aquatic – blue. Interestingly, there were no beams or columns, supporting the unusual central, flying buttress-like beam. For looking at the light, one became slightly languorous. I felt paralysed with pleasure; there before me, down the massive hall, sat Glenn Gould.
He wore the most thick-fabricked garb; it seemed from an earlier age. All the men in the white gowns were up at the front. They were all transfixed – as well they should have been.
Though I love Johannes Sebastian Bach, at the time, I had some reservations as I am not especially fond of pipe organs. I suppose that it is because it has always had too many religious associations during my childhood.
The persons attending the concert were there simply to recharge their batteries. They seemed, all of them, as if not quite in their bodies for being so transfixed – they were otherwise-engaged.
Eerily, I had a sense that these were all persons who were between lives as is Glenn Gould. They were in a form of processing, a form of deep meditation on the order of sleep, as they prepared for the next incarnation.
This fugue was the most complex music imaginable. Indeed, the music seemed designed for those between lives. The fugue was composed for astral plane habitués who, sans bodies, could best endure the music’s intensity.
Getting a sense that I really shouldn’t be there, plus the fact that I finally couldn’t get into the pipe organ, I started taking my leave of the place.
Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, and I then went out front. There we waited for the specific tour buses to show up and take us away. Whilst I waited with Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, I was joined by Pandora.
It seemed that most of the people who were here were very young-souled. They seemed to be on a pilgrimage, like visiting the original Gohonzon in Japan or going on the Hajj, at Mecca.
As the pipe organ played, I could hear in the tone of the place a faint whisper from the men in white robes. Their thoughts, it turned out, could be telepathically heard. Even earlier, when I had been hovering in flight high above the complex, I knew that this was more so a political institution rather than not.
This was a structure which was just as colossal as the temple at Karnak and considerably older. This place was mind-bogglingly complex and massive. The temple was posited directly in the centre of it all.
Just like La Chapelle in Paris is comparably dwarfed, by its surroundings, so too the massive concert hall-like temple was dwarfed by the complex. This architectural marvel was simply soul-inspiring.
Whilst all the buses were waiting, I took to one of the buses with Pandora. I had gotten impatient waiting to be assigned to one. We spoke in French because everyone else here did the same.
This was not unlike a Parisian bus – the seats all faced each other. Seated close to the front, we were on the left side of the aisle behind the driver.
As though getting close to Saint-Sulpice Métro, I got up and said goodbye to Pandora. I wanted to get off there then walk back to her rue de Grenelle apartment.
Pandora planned to go out then come home later so had asked me to wait for her at her place. Here it seemed as if nighttime coming on to dawn.
Speaking guardedly in French, I made sure that I was speaking properly and not just fumbling partout. Really, I rather enjoyed this experience of being together with Pandora.
I was very serene enjoying the very beautiful experience. Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, had silently slipped from my side when Pandora came and joined me.
*Of course, it would turn out that the person in question was Louka Duplessis and not Galen. I would meet Louka, who accompanied me in this dream, the day following this dream.
Just prior to meeting for the first time, it is not uncommon for me to dream of persons.
______________________________
Norman, Jessye 15/9/45, Georgia
Jessye is a first level old priest in the passion mode, with a goal of rejection – functioning for the most part in the positive pole of discrimination, a spiritualist, in the emotional part of intellectual centre.
She has a Jupiter/Saturn body type.
Jessye’s primary chief feature is arrogance, with a secondary of stubbornness.
This fragment was third-cast in her cadence and her cadence is fifth in the greater cadence. She is a member of entity five, cadre six, greater cadre 33, pod/node 212.
She has a discarnate priest essence twin whom she did know earlier in this life but this fragment died in Vietnam. She has a warrior task companion and they have worked together and continue to do so occasionally.
Her three primary needs are: freedom, expression and power.
The warrior energy gives Jessye tremendous organisational powers and her stubbornness has enabled her to stick in there when the going got very rough many times.
Jessye is a warrior-cast priest who has been a spiritual rebel in this life. This is, by the way, not the first time this fragment has sung professionally. This fragment was a well-known castrato in seventeenth century Italy and performed many times before the crowned heads of Europe.
Jessye has great need to serve her concept of the higher ideal and has done so admirably by combining the folk music of her people with her operatic repertoire.
She performs well, as do most entity five fragments. This fragment has always enjoyed her work. Singing has been an extension of her inner spirituality. It is, in fact, a form of meditation for her.
________________________________________________
Now that’s a Hollywood wife!
These rather lucidly awakened dreams were experienced with an intense sense of wonder and joy, on Monday, July 2, 1990. At the time, the Moon transited both Scorpio and my sixth house.
__________________________________________
This first dream found me in a very busy place. When going south towards the Danforth, it was not unlike being on Broadview Ave. It was at nighttime. I came there and found that there were tons and tons of Black people.
Even so, it seemed like Toronto and at Broadview Subway station because there are all these streetcars there. One of the streetcars was improperly parked, as a result, it was going to go and turn around.
Waiting for it to do what it had to do, there was another streetcar out in the street. It was really more like a red-rocket streetcar. It was not like one of the newer ones.
Everyone here was Black. There were no Whites or other non-Blacks that I saw. Everybody was in the street which was very jam-packed. They were getting ready to cross, after the streetcar had passed, to go in.
There was now a system, where you paid your fare aboard the streetcar, so that you did not have to enter the front doors of the station on Broadview.
When you got aboard the streetcar, it was mandatory that you pay a fare. So it did not matter whether you paid a fare at the proper entrance or not. There were many people queuing up to get aboard a streetcar.
Passing these people who were seated there, I went through the proper entrance. One of them seemed like Gabriella Vartan† and they were talking about me.
I came around and began going down the steps, into the nether regions, en route to the trains. There was this little old lady who was taking her time, holding up things, so I pushed her to my right.
I made my way down then had to go around taking another flight of stairs; I then kept on going. There were a whole lot of levels to this subway system.
When I got down, there was this little cul-de-sac where there were these Black guys – homeboys – hanging out. However, they were not Black American.
I found one of them very attractive and smiled at him. He, however, was very homophobic. He went running upstairs to go call the police on me.
The train then came into the subway and it was a very, very large train. It towered very high to the ceiling. It was like an Amtrak train which seemed like a double Decker train. It was mostly silver, however, it turned out not to have been double Decker.
When it stopped, I began running full speed because I did not want the guy to come back and board the same car as me. I ran to the front of the train only to find that one couldn’t board there. Instead, one could only enter this train where the cars joined each other.
You could enter the front or backdoors of each car but not the front ones of the first car. It was very sleek, round and Deco like a train from the 1930s.
The whole place did have a feel of the ‘30s to it. It was very neo-Gothic like the Chrysler or McGraw-Hill buildings in New York City, or for that matter, even the Empire State Building.
It was reminiscent of very early in the twentieth century which was all about great architecture – of things being large, mammoth and spiralling upwards, too, things getting faster and faster.
That sense of adventure about the wonderful world of commerce that one had created. It was that time when people had not yet begun to see, as we now know, the consequences of things being bigger and better and faster and all the effects on nature.
I got onto the train heading, again, towards the front. Somehow, I felt relieved because I had lost the guy. I was there and noticed a stout man who was either High-Yellow or, perhaps, even White.
The people here were very strange because they were just rather unusual. Even though they looked White, they seemed more bronzish, actual bronze, than the pinkish tonality of the waking state.
This was not a place that I knew. It was very otherworldly here, I soon realised. I did not get a seat and as I stood there I then noticed a woman. She was standing at the very front of the train.
The train progressed with unusual speeds, I immediately noticed. When the train had shaken, the stout man had tried to brace himself by putting out his foot that was already out in the aisle.
In the process, he had stomped me and I had had to pull my foot out from under his and pushed his away. He wore business attire, a suit and tie, as though en route to an office job.
The woman who was standing up was playing on a wooden flute-like instrument that was less than a foot long. However, the thing about all this was that she had unusually short arms.
They were fully functional hands with tiny little fingers that nimbly danced over the valves of the wooden, wind instrument. Her arms were like a Thalidomide-damaged child’s.
Then I noticed too that there were other people on the train, about three or four musicians, practicing as well. I soon realised that everyone on board had some sort of physical deformity.
They were just ill-proportioned people with torsos that were too long or arms that were too short. Arms too long or what have you, moreover, this also applied to the legs.
The most pronounced cases were always the musicians like the female flautist – two or three of the other musicians were male.
Someone else who was on the train began laughing and, out of nervousness, I joined in. The person was laughing at the woman. She, however, hadn’t paid them any mind.
Nobody else was paying people, who were laughing, any mind. They did not see anything wrong with the people who were being laughed at.
I then got off the train and was out in this concourse area, where the trains arrived, before I went upstairs. Before I would go upstairs I saw this child seated in the middle of this white blanket that seemed more like diaper material than flannel.
The child wore a salmon-coloured merino. He had little, white, cloth diapers on. The infant had, again, very unusually, unusually short, short legs that made it look almost like a child because it was seated upright on its bottom.
However, it had a very big torso – matured, such that the child seemed like a very big, big child for its age. Its head was very large with a very developed large and soulful-looking face.
At the time it made me thing of Jake Hudson. Jake does have a very large head and face. I was trying to connect with him. He reached out his short little arms, crying out and said,
“Dad, I want to go.”
There was this youngish man, who was blond like the child, and he seemed not unlike the guy Olaf Knight. He picked up his son and used the blanket, on which the child sat, that had these straps and put him around his shoulder.
Like an African mother would, carry her child when in the fields, thus he was carried on his father’s back. He walked off with the child, who was holding on to him, except that the child was really an adult male.
It was all very strange here in this otherworldly place.
I ended up coming upstairs and going out in the outdoors. There were people here – again, mostly Black people. I was talking to them when I heard the strains of Richard Strauss‘s Four Last Songs beginning.
I beamed and excused myself from the people, with whom I was interacting, and went running off up this plaza. It was a clay-tiled plaza and when I got there, I saw the symphony.
I went and sat in lotus position and sat very close to the front. There was a gathering of persons in a semicircle and I was, as a matter of fact, the closest to the stage.
The stage was above on a dais and it was edged by old gold juniper. The juniper was really, really nice and quite fragrant, refreshingly so, to the smell.
Along came, from around a corner walking, Jessye Norman – the high priestess herself. She had been preceded by her divine voice’s magic. She was, of course, singing Four Last Songs.
She wore a beautiful, beautiful, glistening black dress that seemed almost organic with a life of its own. It was twinkling on and off but the lights were lifelike like fireflies.
They were sequins but they seemed, somehow, to be organic. It had hues of gold, silver, bronze, and dark green hues like pine and blue hues like lapis lazuli. It was very, very intensely rich a fabric.
She started singing the first song, Frühling, and it was very hauntingly beautiful. She saw me and beamed down at me. It was so connected between us. I was so enthralled and overpowered; I was quite smitten by her.
I thought very rapturously awakened,
‘Yes! I’m having a dream of Jessye Norman. So very good to see her again, my god here she is and performing Four Last Songs.’
She then came almost to the lip of the stage and stopped as though about to sneeze. Then she held her breath and started laughing because it was so hysterical.
The look on my face was one of being truly horrified for her. This had actually caused her to crack up. Then she began singing again and began making gestures for me to move or be removed.
I was stunned and thought this some sort of betrayal.
‘Why is she snubbing me like this?’ I wondered.
Then these two huge, burly guys came to eject me out of the area. As I was leaving, I could hear her starting to sing again. I was very, very upset.
I was, in the second dream, in this large house that was a very many-storeyed place. It had many apartments. I came out and it had a very slanted roof that one could go out onto. This roof was, however, very dangerously precipitous.
I was looking about and thinking of Carl Leroiderien because, somehow, someone was talking about him. This White man was talking to me and telling me that Carl had been enquiring after me.
He then went on to ask me if I smoked dope which I denied. I can’t think of it doing anything for me except, perhaps, to make me sneeze at the most. Sometimes if mixed with hashish, I then got a massive headache.
“It doesn’t do anything for me, I don’t really like it. I don’t see the point to it and I don’t smoke it.”
At the time that he was saying this, we were climbing some very, very steep stairs. Then at that point, after she had given her performance, I encountered Jessye Norman again. She was seated on a bench and called me over.
She said hello very warmly and apologised saying,
“I hope you weren’t upset. You realise that it was a misunderstanding. I wasn’t laughing at you; it’s just that you don’t seem to realise where you were.
“You were, well there are certain degrees of protocol and you were ahead of the dignitaries.
“And you shouldn’t have been so close to the stage because one of the reasons why your nose started bleeding was, in this dimension, if you’re this close to the stage… when I’m singing, when I hit certain notes it can shatter your eardrums but also shatter your mind.
“So you see it was very crucial that I get you out of there. Also, I was having a very bad allergic reaction to the plants at the edge of the dais. They made me want to sneeze. It wasn’t at all you or exclusively you.”
In having embraced me thus, she was being most healing. I did, in fact, have quite the nosebleed. As I was being hustled out of the place, by the burly guards, it was then that I realised that my nose was bleeding.
At the time, I had thought it strange. As this dream progressed very lucidly and linearly, there was no point at which either burly guard had so much as touched me.
I was so upset. It was so very good, after the fact, to have had her explain as she did.
*This dream really does validate the notion that all persons encountered in the dreamtime, without exceptions, are separate entities and not figments of one’s imagination. END.
When I was being bounced by her, I was so stunned, upset and humiliated. Had she not explained as she had just done, I would have awakened from this dream with a totally different perception of events.
I had also no way of knowing that she was having an allergic reaction to the juniper which, at the time, I found so wonderfully soothing. What’s more, I hadn’t a clue that I had thrown the Chi of the place by having disrespected protocol.
I would never have thought that my nosebleed was due to her singing. In fact, it is possible that I could have awakened and not recalled that, indeed, I had had a nosebleed which I had totally forgotten until she had mentioned it.
Jessye Norman has indeed straddled, with great élan and diplomacy, many a dimension with great frequency and fluency.
I then began holding her hand and told her that there were times that I had dreams of her, in which there were sometimes cetacean-looking creatures that came and did formations around her as she sang hyper-dimensionally.
She was just enthralled and pleased. She squeezed my hands and laughed a healthy, really wonderful laugh. She was quite smitten by me and encouraged me to write it all down.
Her eyes here were so very large, soulfully dark and focussed right into me. It gave me a high just to have experienced them.
I was wearing, when close to the stage, a satin merino-like shirt. So at the time of being bounced out, I had passingly thought that I had been dressed too scantily for her liking.
In any event, it was quite interesting.
This third dream was truly hysterical. It seemed like on Eglinton Avenue East, between Yonge Street and Mount Pleasant Road. It was at nighttime. There was a lot of goings on.
Shirley MacLaine was there, Warren Beatty and Madonna Ciccone, as well. Warren Beatty was the man of the hour and the centre of everybody’s attention.
He had a great deal of sexual energy and magnetism. He had been performing for the camera and for everybody around. It felt very staid to me though.
One very interesting thing that happened was that he had been heavily drinking and, whilst laughing, had bent forward. He then began uncontrollably coughing and was holding his chest and faking a massive heart attack.
Next thing you knew, we were in a very crowded area and it turned out that he had not been faking the heart attack. He had a very, massive, massive heart attack.
He was dead just like that. He was gone within moments. It was just incredible. Shirley MacLaine became utterly hysterical. Her bawling was like from some Greek tragedy.
She went into a trance-like frenzied state and began calling on astral guides and her Pleiadean guides. Pulling out a very impressive clutch of crystals, she threw herself onto him and tried healing him of death.
She was placing them all over his body – at the chakras and elsewhere. It was too humourous for words.
Meanwhile, as Warren Beatty died, Madonna came rushing up to the scene. It had all been too late and they couldn’t rush him to a hospital. There was no way that he could have been revived.
They had been out in some desert area having a big party; there were no doctors around. There was nothing that they could do; he couldn’t be saved. He was dead… he was gone.
Shirley MacLaine started cursing to the gods, saying,
“This is so unfair.
“He hasn’t even been able to make the sequel to Dick Tracy. And right when he’s at the top of his career this is happening?”
“Well you know this will really immortalise him now. Definitely, this is great publicity, right at this point in his career.” someone had dryly said who was not attached to his whole entourage.
I had heard this but Shirley MacLaine hadn’t heard it. Madonna came and whatever she thought about I could telepathically hear it. Her immediate response was,
‘Oh shit! This is just going to fuck up my goddamn career.
‘If only I’d gotten a child by him. Shit why did I have to have that abortion of his child. Shit!’
She was thinking fast. She was someone who knew how to manipulate the media. She was really pissed off because it would have meant immediate Hollywood sainthood for her, were she to go on and have Warren Beatty’s only child, after he had tragically died.
She was really pissed off because this was media manipulation beyond her wildest schemes,
‘I’ve got to get him out of here. I’ve got to have the best genetic engineers flown in immediately…’
I was stunned when I read her thoughts because, of course, she intended to harvest his seed and impregnate herself and then have a premature love child of Warren Beatty’s.
I was stunned by this woman’s phenomenal megalomania.
‘During the autopsy, I’ll have his sperm taken out and I’ll have it copyrighted. It’ll be my possession. I’ll have it engineered so that I’ll have a child… a son. God we can even have twins…’
She, all the while, was cowering over his face… kissing him and doing the wailing widow number,
‘…Can you imagine, Madonna?’
She privately squealed to herself – unaware, of course, that she was broadcasting to someone like me. She was so triumphant at having had that idea because all she knew was that people who so loved Warren Beatty would take to her now.
She was insecure as to whether or not she would endure through time. However, with this, she knew that she would automatically become iconic. She would become truly the virgin mother!
She would be actually giving birth to some dead man’s child – he of course being, Warren Beatty. It was destiny. After all, she was ‘the’ Madonna.
She had this flash that this was why she had always been so drawn to crucifixes. She was going to capitalise on the whole drama by making sure that it would be a son.
Of course, not to be outdone by that old, other Holy Mother with the virgin birth, she would eclipse that Madonna by having twin sons. Again, La Stupenda squealed with delight to herself.
I passingly wondered if I were the only one to be privy to her thoughts. Then I realised that from my detachment, as everyone bawled and was truly horrified as though these were Olympians and not mere mortals, that I was the only one.
‘What could be better than having two Warren Beatty lookalikes crawling around the planet and who were his twins? And his only heirs! With today’s genetic engineering it will be a great coup.
‘Think of the press! I’ll be guaranteed perpetual immortality. I’ll be iconised for all history…’
I thought then and there,
‘My god, this woman is monstrous.’
In any event, the funeral was upon us and by some strange quirk of the dreamtime, I was very much so a part of the funeral. I was as though a fly on the wall, as it were, and aren’t you lucky?
Why, was I participating? I do not know?
In any event, I was dressed to the nines. I had on a wonderful, lace outfit with a mantilla with my veil covering my face. I was part, somehow, of the funeral party.
It turned out that Warren Beatty had had five wives and, at the point at which he died, his fifth wife was a High-Yellow woman. She was part Black, part White, partly Latina.
He had had all these wives. They had always been paid and kept to remain silent. They were never brought out in the public or media. It was one of Hollywood’s biggest secrets.
People, obviously, never knew about it. It had never once been spoken about. There was an interesting turn to all of this… I had been going along Eglinton East on the south side. It was as though I was going towards Yonge Street; however, it was not Eglinton Avenue East.
Madonna was going to be late because, luckily, it was that time of the month for her. She was off having herself impregnated, by way of a turkey baster, with Warren Beatty’s frozen sperm – the planet’s most expensively rare caviar fertiliser of sorts.
I was attending the funeral with a short woman who was the fifth wife’s mother. She seemed a lot like Sybil Ben-Daniel and wore a brown coat over her dress. I walked with my right arm embracing her as she was on my right.
I had burly bodyguards all about me, before, beside and behind me. They were real Mossad-goon-cum-Wrestlemania types. My pants were those flare-legged Giorgio Armanis that allowed me to stride throwing my legs.
There was a lot of train to them and I had such utter style. I had enormous energies about me and great flare. My eyes were bedazzling even though mantilla-veiled.
They were what were, of course, fuelling my high spirits. The onlookers were lapping up my entrance; I felt wonderful.
We then went into the church and the mother was talking about,
“We want the money to go to the Church because the Church is really the staple of society and civilisation. The Church does so much good.”
I just decided to let her babble on and kept my tongue in check. However, I cussed her under my breath saying,
“You demented old fool. What Church are you talking about?”
The church had a metallic-silver front and it looked not unlike York Cinemas on Eglinton Avenue East. It was not a very big church on the inside. As we got inside, I turned around and hissed at one of the bodyguards because he had earlier stepped on my train.
Of course, we were surrounded then by the paparazzi and the little people. His Bigfoot’s footprint was there on the pant’s train. I reached back and slapped his face real hard calling him a fucking asshole.
Of course, I knew that it was safe to do it here because everyone here knew, only too well, that side of me. However, I couldn’t wreck my public image doing so outside.
As we got closer to the church, I began striding firmer with each step in anticipation of getting his oafish arse. I was really careful not to show that side of me when in public.
I started going down the aisle and there at the end was Warren Beatty’s corpse in the open casket. It was a pure black casket that glistened. It was a dark black wood and a really gorgeous casket.
Escorting the mother-in-law, I came all the way down the aisle. I decided that I would go into the first pew on the right. The first pew on the left actually went further down the aisle and did go past the casket.
It held men in white flowing robes; they were priest of whatever denomination this was – very cream, ivory-coloured and obviously very Catholic.
I went and sat down and immediately behind me was the fifth wife’s family. They were very Hispanic-looking more so than Black. They were very handsome in that family.
I turned around and smiled at one of the men and the energies coming from them weren’t as I had expected – I had thought that they would hate me.
I knew Madonna; I was apparently part of her hangers on. Somehow, I had known her through dance. I thought that, for that association, they would hate me. However, they displayed no such hostilities towards me.
Finally, the fifth wife came and was walking very slowly, regally. She carried a globular bouquet consisting of tiny, little white roses that were sprinkled in amongst some baby’s breath. There were one or two little red roses as well.
She wore a white, lace outfit. Deliberately dressed as though attending her wedding, she was not though veiled. She came down to the casket and knelt before it, like Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis at the rotunda, staking her claim on history by her performance.
She sobbed in a controlled breath and then got up and walked around to the right end of the casket. Facing the church, she was now behind it and up on the altar. She was before the pews on the left side of the aisle.
She knelt down again and this time began wailing and ululating. She was doing ritual port de bras with her torso and head as well. She kept on holding on to the bouquet.
It was a very Latin; a very emotional display; definitely, not Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. It was very soulful and moving. One really felt for her.
Finally, Madonna made her entrance and began slowly progressing down the aisle. There was utter silence in the place because everybody was thinking,
‘Oh dear, poor Madonna was slutting with Warren Beatty at the point of his death. Here is the fifth wife and is she going to create a scene or not?’
Well, of course, she is. The fifth wife is Latin so, of course, there will be theatre.
When the fifth wife had been crossing the casket, I took in her body which was very wide-beamed. I knew then, in a flash, that she was pregnant with Warren Beatty’s child and four months pregnant.
It was clearly no Immaculate Conception as per Madonna’s little trick. She was a very big-boned woman. She got up when Madonna entered the church and stopped crying.
Madonna saw her and avoided her glance as I turned and watched this fascinating bit of theatre unfold. Everyone was really excited at the potential fireworks about to go off.
She started coming down to confront Madonna. I immediately and intuitively knew that there was a gun inside the bouquet that the fifth wife so firmly clutched.
Positioning the gun, the fifth wife began holding the bouquet to her stomach. Madonna, staying her ground, kept on proudly walking down the aisle.
She wore black; it was an outfit that was not dissimilar to mine. She wore a short veil and not a mantilla like I did.
She came walking down towards the casket staying closer to the left pews. The fifth wife came around the right side of the casket and was walking down the right side of the aisle looking at Madonna.
She had a very, very vexed and determined – an almost trance-like, expression of self-absorption on her face. All the energy in her body was directed at Madonna.
When she was about five feet away from Madonna, she held up the bouquet and callously said,
“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out!”
It was filled with so much venom that it reverberated throughout the very high-ceilinged-though-tiny church. It was also very Gothic an interior.
Madonna stopped truly catatonically horrified. You could see it beyond the veil. She had no entourage or bodyguards. She showed up alone, so confident was she of the coup that she had just scored at the geneticist’s.
She was so flustered that she gallantly stuttered back,
“I dare you…”
She was very nervous and said very quickly with a weak, little laugh. She was also vamping à la Breathless Mahoney – the character she played in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy film.
She was, however, visibly ashen. Madonna was visibly shaken with fear.
Those persons in the left pews automatically screamed out and crouched down for cover because the fifth wife had held up the bouquet in both her outstretched arms like the gun that it so obviously hid.
“Come on. You wouldn’t want to do that. That’s just stupid…” Madonna bravely said.
“…You can’t do that. Besides Warren’s already dead. What are you trying to prove? You can’t do this to me! Don’t be stupid.”
The woman, however, started slowly walking towards her not buying her bullshit. At that, Madonna turned around and started to bolt and she fell down over her long-trained dress.
She had already made it to the back of the pews on the left. She was much too vain, to run outside and possibly be murdered in front of the little people. So she got up and began running around the far side of the pews.
Of course, as she ran away, the fifth wife could easily have shot her in the back. Then Madonna got really pissed off, stopped against the far left wall of the church, holding out her palm at her attacker saying,
“Stop it! You don’t want to do this. This is stupid. You can’t kill me. I’m Madonna!”
She was just winded; the expression on her face was unbridled rage, fear, terror, chutzpah, all in one. Then the fifth wife pulled the trigger, which was the only sound in the place, releasing the magazine.
Madonna cried out and began pleading with her. It was truly a spectacle. It was really pathetic. The fifth wife then pulled on the trigger and there was a loud plopping sound.
Everybody just screamed and the place became flooded with blinding blue light. It turned out to have been an older-model camera and the flashbulb from the camera as it went off.
At that, the fifth wife laughed this loud, truly callous, heavy-from-the-womb, ripe, wicked, vindictive, victorious-all-in-one laugh. It echoed throughout the church.
When her echo collapsed, as Madonna stood there truly disempowered, the fifth wife uttered in a weary breath,
“I always said to Warren that you’re an ugly slut. This picture will prove it.”
At that the fifth wife turned and came and sat down on the pew next to me. Her Latina family members were just going wild clapping and hysterically shrieking.
Now that’s a Hollywood wife!
Poor Madonna was still standing there involuntarily shaking. She was holding her chest and gasping for air like an asthmatic. Her left hand placed on her chest, with her right hand holding on to the pew, thus she stayed her ground.
Although her hand was on her chest, she was being most clever. However I knew that really where it should have been was at her pussy because what the fifth wife instinctively knew, as did I, was that she had just miscarried. Madonna was profusely bleeding.
Poor Madonna was so humiliated. The look on her face was truly sad; she was sweaty and runny-nosed. She soon collapsed and had to be taken away. Of course, she would be beaten out of having Warren Beatty’s heir by the fifth wife.
The whole thing was so funny and hysterical. I was so stunned that the fifth wife was going to pull this stunt. I really thought that it was a gun; I had, at least, gotten this flash that it was a gun.
The idea to have a bolt release, affecting a gun, was truly ingenious. The picture turned out to be truly horrific. It was all a joke being played on Madonna by Hollywood’s film elites who could not have cared less about her and her parvenu ambitions.
The whole affair was so very wickedly political. The whole thing was so hysterical. I wondered as to what next was going to happen.
Is the fifth wife going to come forward and produce the first Warren Beatty heir – the true child? A child that would look like Warren Beatty – more like a child of the future being of multiracial heritage and a bronzed version of Warren Beatty would the fifth wife bear.
What then will she do about Madonna’s copyright of Warren Beatty’s sperm? Will the fifth wife, for producing the heir, win the legal rights to them and have them destroyed if she chooses to?
Will this not, in fact, begin a Pop Religion rivalling the King, Elvis Presley’s, if Madonna had won custody of the sperm and gone on to impregnate herself and bear those miscarried twin sons because of her bonds to Warren Beatty and his two pseudo-virgin-birthed children – sons at that?
Truly, this is iconography for the new millennium, indeed.
*A very, very interesting dream. Certainly, that I would be dreaming about these people is interesting enough. I don’t pay much attention to any of them beyond the passing.
I had seen Dick Tracy three weeks ago. That the whole thing would evolve the way it did was rather insightful. I was totally surprised, as much so, as was Madonna in the church.
I really did think that she was going to be shot. I thought that it would be so messy.
You know, I just did not want having anybody’s can’t-wash-out bloodstains on my Giorgio Armani pants.
*What can I say, dreams are purely experiential. I dream it and awaken, immediately bringing forth the dream experiences, committing those experiences to audio-cassette tapes.
I rather enjoyed being alone and visiting with Jessye Norman in the earlier dream. Clearly, those dreams were set on a parallel Earth in another dimension and one in which the mostly Black population is differently proportioned than we humans of waking state Earth are.
On the eve of the Oscars, I thought this a fitting offering. I could never have fathomed the outcome of the fifth wife’s agendum until it unfolded. Ingenious, to say the least, was her use of the bouquet.
As ever, sweet dreams and don’t forget to push off and start flying… and so what if you bump into a wall, just attempt doing so again and this time believe that you can effortless transcend the barrier. Perception is, alas, everything.
________________________
As ever my dear sweet ennobled friends, I am ever grateful for your continued support. Please do spread the word, far and wide about this happening dream joint on the cosmic wide web. Always remember to push off and start flying… I love you more.
Opening nights are always such fun… Tuesday night past, I was reminded of all the opening nights that I would attend with a slightly neurotic Merlin as some show or other that he had directed was being presented to the world… As ever, it was great to see my plus one, Lucian Mann-Chomedy as the ideal partner for these occasions. Always reserved, pleasant and just the right amount of chatter and wit.
Whilst Lucian enjoyed the pre-show lecture in the Four Seasons Centre Amphitheatre, I slipped next door into the warmth of the Sheraton Centre Hotel and warmed myself on a glass of sherry whilst finishing off 2018’s Scotiabank Giller Prize winner on my KOBO.
What an utterly stunning tour de force. It was a moment to reflect, this Black History Month on just where we blacks are in the scheme of things. God only knows, it has been bruising to watch Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex become the print media’s most reviled and hunted fugitive from justice of that most vile creature, the racial predator.
I was still smarting at the events of a week earlier during the winter season’s first major snowstorm. I had been recalling to friends how strange it now was, compared to my first winter in Canada. December 1, 1974 and it snowed that day more than 8 inches. Back then it generally was guaranteed to snow once if not twice weekly. Now at end of January, 2019 and we were finally having our first major snow. This was not like snow from years past… Now it was a dirty, sooty-looking hard mess that lingered, largely in part because the city has contracted out its snow removal services.
As there are no windows in my apartment – Sol’s too damn bright by far and besides, boarded up windows afford me more art-hanging space – I got down in the early afternoon that Monday with my bike, only to be met by falling snow and several accumulated inches. Back up I went, retired the trusty chrome steed and returned and hopped into a snazzy Audi A6 Uber ride with a Macedonian whose spirit was as smooth and elegant as matchingly was his car. The mood set the tone for my day. As I am known to work 16-hr days, I called another Uber at the end of gig one whilst hoping to get to gig 2 in good time. The snow was still coming down; it was also bitterly cold and windy.
When finally, Uber #2 arrived, cold and dark with icy pellets mixed in with the snow, the driver rolled down his passenger side window and declared, “Sorry Buddy but I am going to have to cancel this ride…” Already running late, with my wheeled suitcase at the ready, he edged along as I tried to open the door and raised his voice, his eyes almost feral-looking beneath his turbanned, narrow skull. “I said I am cancelling you. One: I never take people like you in my car. Two: you have a shitty rating… Sorry, not sorry. Fuck you Buddy.” With that, he stepped on the gas and I had to swiftly haul me and suitcase out of the way as the rear of his red older model car whose interior did have that blasted malodorous melange of curry, dirty armpit, dirty arse, smegma and whatever the fuck else that passes for immigrants of choice these days. Finally, after having struggled out onto a still-not-ploughed Bay Street, I managed to hail the fourth cab whose West African driver insisted that I call Uber and report him… Days later, I was afforded assurances that the racist Dravidian was no longer part of Uber’s fleet. Similarly, when calling a Beck Taxi with a fairly generic name as Arvin, on coming downstairs the Indo-Canadian drivers on several occasions as though staying on script would feign obsequiousness and state that they were deeply sorry but owing to a family emergency, they were having to take the cab out of service. No sooner than having refused me a ride, they would then be observed heading out to Wellesley, turning on their unoccupied light and picking up a fare off the road. As if the blasted motherfuck, the likes of your overbred arse invented Jazz.
Each and every time that one experiences racial animus, is preyed on racially, it always harks back to that first winter in Toronto. My best mate from two summers earlier, when I would come to Canada to visit with my dad during school break, had been sick. After Sunday church service at Knox Presbyterian at Harbord and Spadina before returning to our beautiful home at 122 Mortimer Avenue, I would visit – my dad and I – with Tommy who was holding up at Toronto Sick Kids Hospital on University Avenue. My father explained that Tommy was sick with the winter flu, which sometimes could last for months and well beyond winter. I was a scrawny little fourteen-year-old who looked like most ten-year-old Canadian kids as I crawled the halls at Harbord Collegiate where among my mostly Italian-Canadian chums was future lawyer, Rocco Galati. As Tommy, who was a couple of years older than me, had gladly shared books with me the two summers prior that I would take to Knox summer camp and read then have a good stroke off, lusting after my inamorato, Tommy, I readily agreed to do his newspaper route for him until he came home. My first Saturday, the cart was overflowing with the thick Toronto Star newspaper and there was a good foot of snow everywhere. It was hellish but for Tommy, I was game to go the distance – who knows what hot frottage, docking and more was in the offing for having done his route for him! When I got to the northeast corner of Floyd and Bater Avenues that first Saturday to collect the funds, the door opened to a woman whose response to me was the most hideous display of the displaced madness that is white bigotry. Screaming at the top of her lungs, the woman in her upper seventies, vituperatively cursed my black bugger arse off and laid down the law. Never again, “you dirty little nigger” was I to set foot on her verandah.., I was to put the paper between her screen and front doors, knock then return to the top of her steps and wait for her to pay the bill. That first Saturday, she ripped the paper from my hand, flung the money at me. She was terrifying, in her faded blue A-line dress, black spectacles that had those upturned pointed edges at the sides; she wore faux pearls. Most of all, she wore the most hideously terrifying eyes. I remember how much they looked like eyes of a rooster, especially so for being such puffy eyes. Like the evolved, winged and feathered reptilians that roosters are, her eyes truly did look not the least bit human. She was so consumed with racial animus that it was truly frightening. By the time I made it home, I found myself regurgitating. Thereafter, every Saturday, I would take my spot at the top of the steps and consistently she would hurl out pennies mostly at me rather than the verandah where that first winter I had to suffer the indignity of picking through inches of snow on the verandah, steps and lawn to collect my money. Naturally, without fail she called most Saturdays to the Toronto Star, complaining of either not having received her paper on time or that it was missing altogether. This would mean having to buy her a replacement at the corner store, take it and only to be fed on by the hideous-of-spirit racial predator. Like a true cockhound many an indignity I suffered in hopes of my spectacled, full-lipped and scholarly inamorato, Tommy hooking up with me for having been so loyal to him. The summer prior, I had ventured to the public pool on Broadview at Riverdale Park with him and a couple of others and thrilled beyond belief was I to spy his large pendulous balls and that hammer-headed girthsome salami that pummelled his bikinis. Indeed, for Tommy I would suffer much indignity. There was a low-rise apartment building at 1111 Broadview where on the ground floor, there was another predator, this one equally septuagenarian who lived alone, smoked incessantly and always answered the door in various stages of undress, mostly ever only wearing a soiled merino. He was always a generous tipper; a whole 2$ bill in 1974/75 was serious cash. Naturally, in the pre-Ciaslis epoch old anorexic, drunken paunched predator would sometimes tug on the old bulbous semi-flaccid/semi-tumescent, though, pendulous but perfectly useless appendage, trying to lure me in. Sitting there in all that squalor and acting as though he was sugar daddy material… indeed. He was always keen on trying to grab me when giving me the “tip” and I was ever sly and crafty enough to get away from him each time. He, too, lead me to regurgitate, which I had not done since age nine and suffering my first racial attack. Of course, to this day, neither academia nor medicine will concede that there is any such a thing as the racial predator and the effects it has on those preyed on – mostly blacks – and the psyche/mental illness of those who prey on others chiefly non-blacks in varying degrees of severity based on otherness.
Finally, the house lights went down and I was met by the whimsical vista of the COC’s production of W. A. Mozart’s glorious opera, Cosi Fan Tutte. Previously, I had caught productions of this Mozart gem in Chicago, Montréal and New York City. I was not expecting much at this rate. The Frida Kahlo connection was a bit of a stretch but the butterflies fast won me over.
From the moment that she stepped onto stage, my spirit soared aloft higher than Mozart’s glorious music to that point had spirited me. Never before had there been so captivating a Despina. My eyes teared up and I was ever on the cusp of explosive giggles. Then what made me truly come undone was the moment Tracy Dahl took to the stage as the notary… by now, I was losing tears and beginning to emit choked snorted chuckles. Each Saturday back in 1974/75 when doing Tommy’s newspaper route, I would end off taking the Saturday Star to Giovanna an octogenarian Italian, who was plump, charming and more adorable than any mere mortal ought to be. Soon, we were fast lovers and she loved fussing over me, baking me each Saturday nice, warm, oven-fresh biscotti washed down with a glass of ice-cold “gingah raleh”… her thick Italian accent was part of her charm. Hers was a large black and white cat, simply known as pussy gatto, who always sat nesting on the armchair. Each week, Giovanna sat transfixed as I read her the newspaper; her vision was to that point fairly deteriorated. As a way of better forging our bond and because most of my mates at Harbord were Italian, for three years, I studied Italian and that really impressed Giovanna, who was simply known as “Mama Mia.”
As the opera progressed, Ms. Dahl as the notary, dashed and took cover beneath the table at which point, I buried my face in the program with explosive laughter. Straight away, I was reminded of each Saturday when the ever silent pussy gatto would bolt from the armchair and take cover beneath the sofa where I sat as Giovanna began an explosion of long-winded farts. Even the singer’s voice sounded much like Giovanna’s as she sang the role of notary. Remarkably, it was as though she was channelling Giovanna. In that moment, I was healed of the bile, which the recent Uber incident had caused to surface, bile that dated as far back as 1974.
In the end, Tommy’s parents sold their house and it was not until a couple years later that I discovered from the neighbour next-door that Tommy, who had never returned to their Mortimer and Logan home, had died of Leukaemia. Indeed, the winter flu was my dad’s way of protecting me from the callousness of having to lose a friend so early in life.
Apart from the catharsis that Tracy Dahl’s performance personally effected, I don’t think that it would be biased of me to state that hers was the runaway performance in the COC’s fantastic, and fast-paced I might add, production of Cosi Fan Tutte.
_________________________
As ever, mischievously push down and melt with laughter in celebration of the joy that is life and start having yourselves a most glorious of flying dreams. Thanks for your ongoing support of this happening astral joint on this side of the astral plane. I love you more.
So horrid has been the unbridled racial animus at TRH Duke & Duchess’ interracial marriage that it is past the point of being alarming, to merely being plain hysterical. Fuck these idiots; just get on with your miserable lives, which clearly were not made miserable by that weak, dimwitted race traitor, Harry, being bullied and hoodwinked into marriage by that Z list, pole dancing, unsuitable, twice-divorced Compton ho.
Naturally, Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex an American divorcee, is being compared to her predecessor, Wallis Simpson who was also a divorcee. She was said to be domineering sort and Edward VIII, her lover, a weak-willed sort who was totally controlled by her.
Similarly, as with Wallis, Meghan who is erroneously being compared to her American predecessor, Henry is seen as pussy-whipped and controlled as was deemed Edward VIII. Be that as it may, of one thing one can be certain, unlike Meghan, Wallis was not skilled in the arts of the Kamasutra… so there is that.
This shot of Henry during his aunt, Baroness Fellowes’ reading of scripture is seen as proof of his being controlled and foolishly controlled by the lowest of muggles. Be that as it may, here is a man who is completely besotted and having upped his game, did win his bride in the end.
Of course, a sceptic to the core, there was Henry fixing a shrewd eye on his brother, William who everyone has failed to realise is the real Edward VIII in all this, rather than Henry. William has more in common with the abdicated Edward VIII than does Henry.
Granted, Rev Curry was a blasted buffoon who embarrassed no one but himself and it was nothing the royals had seen – to his dying day the right reverend will think himself to have been a hit… American conceit is staggering – but there were Camilla and Charles trying to make sense of what they had just seen,
Returned from having signed the registry with his son’s gracious mother-in-law, Doria Ragland, there was William whilst the cellist weaved his magic, openly ridiculing and throwing shade.
There could be no doubt of William’s loathing of Rev. Curry and all that he represents. Trust you me, if Henry had taken a Jewish wife and there was some aspect of the ceremony after Henry had converted that was bizarre, there is no way in high hell that William would have sat there and openly ridiculed the rabbi. This display, only demonstrates William’s open bigotry. This among other things exposes him further at having been cognisant of the “blackamoor brooch” incident. This is the same William who has seen fit to stridently decline going on tour to any predominantly black Commonwealth nation; this has been left to his father and his wife, Camilla to undertake instead. Scholar souls when in the negative pole of their overleaves happen to be the smog, arrogant, prejudicial persons going. Sadly, William will never change his outlook for the remainder of his life and it will cost him dearly down the line.
This august woman, Camilla who does not gladly indulge hostilities declined to attend Andrew’s daughter HRH Princess Eugenie’s wedding last October to Jack Brooksbank; he had always been openly hostile towards her. Similarly, she declined to attend Christmas Service 2018 at Sandringham as she is clearly not pleased with how the senior royals, namely William and Catherine are being frosty towards Henry and his American wife.
Just as Wallis was the centre of everyone’s vitriol, as time always lays bare all secrets, Edward VIII would be exposed for the vile, bigoted, Nazi sympathiser that he was. So, too, William has proven himself a bigoted boor on par with his great-great uncle Edward VIII. I think it interesting that so many of the souls who have reincarnated after the Me generation have turned out to be such petty, bigoted boors, which they love smugly terming conservative.
The same is seen in the current Canadian PM who has thought nothing of repeatedly running off to India to act like a buffoon in a Bollywood flick, attend every town in the land’s Gay Pride parade; however, he flatly refused to attend the 50th anniversary Caribbean Carnival celebrations in 2017. Instead, he went kayaking. Naturally, the same social butterfly tried his damnedest to score an invitation to the royal wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex but was justifiably decline. He also saw positively nothing odd in excluding either blacks or Chinese from his cabinet in 2015. Enough about Bathhouse Pierrette and his über Ketaine, just-a-tad-too-eager fag hag.
For any and all sceptics (Princes Philip and Harry – and yours truly) what we pay attention to is details. We don’t focus on what you say but we are ever keenly focussed on what you do not say and more importantly what you do. This can sometimes have us come off as slightly on the paranoid side but, trust you me, nothing escapes our shrewdly focussed gaze.
William has emerged as Edward VIII’s bigoted reanimation rather than Meghan, Wallis’s reanimation. Not a single tour to a predominantly black Commonwealth nation, turning away during the scarf incident this past Christmas when Meghan tried to engage him in conversation.
Charles and Camilla standing at the end of the receiving line of Westminster Abbey clergy to greet senior royals, who in this case would be HM The Queen and Prince Philip. Naturally, The Sovereign exchanges pleasantries then greets her son, father of the groom and they share a congratulatory kiss at the occasion of TRH Duke & Duchess of Cambridge’s 2011 wedding.
Westminster Abbey, this past Armistice Day for the service of remembrance. Though, I was then in London, I did not attend outside the Abbey to observe; rather, I was attending a commemoration concert at Barbican Centre by the London Symphony Orchestra. Here, TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex wait, as is customary, at the end of the receiving line of the incoming senior royals.
TRH Duke & Duchess of Cambridge deliberately stayed overlong, greeting and chatting up the Westminster Abbey clergy; they were making a point of snubbing the Sussexes. Naturally, another betrayal of his role of instigator in the “Blackamoor Brooch” incident, William has no qualms about dismissing his brother and his otiose wife as he and by now his equally curt wife see things. Her reaction on entering the Abbey and noticing the Sussexes spoke volumes.
As it was plainly obvious to sceptic Harry that he was being snubbed by that conceited, thick-as-a-plank, bigoted brother of his, he simply walked away and was followed by his wife, rather than continue suffering the indignity of being made to wait overlong. William is a bigoted arse of the first order and where the Duke & Duchess of Windsor are concerned, the parallels are to William the bigot and Edward VIII the Nazi sympathiser rather than Wallis the divorcee and Meghan also an American divorcee.
The Cambridges no more wanted to talk to the clergy and PM Theresa May than they want to have to tour some predominantly black Commonwealth nation. They were snubbing the Sussexes because Meghan has draw and mass appeal and is not a mousy little whimp when speaking publicly like the bigot’s mare who looks frightfully severe when not grinning like a semi-feral gibbon en chaleur.
Oh well, there was Meghan ascending the steps of St. George’s Chapel with John & Brian Mulroney, doing their parents proud, to say nothing of Ivy in her own right. Thank god for Jessica Mulroney, for her role in that wedding as she helped to strike it straight out of the park – and she also happens to have the most deliciously vulgar laugh that tickles the soul every time. A wedding like no other and that will always have sphinctered, drivelfest, bigoted boors seething with grudge because… well, petty humans can be expected to behave no differently.
These dreams are from the upcoming third volume of my dream memoirs. I share them here and now as within there is at least one dream which is set at Spencer House, which I finally visited in this lifetime on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of Merlin’s passing.
The dreams were recorded on audiocassettes over the course of a decade following Merlin’s passing as he had requested that I stay tuned on his passing as he intended however possible to get through to me from the other side. 250 audiocassette tapes later, at the end of that decade in among them were the most glorious dream encounters with Merlin on his passing. These dreams in their rich pandimensioality were dreamt in lucid astral plane realism in late October 1991.
As this is an excerpt from the as-yet published third volume all the dreams are in italics and everything else in normal script. Observations after the fact about dreams are not in italics and conclude with END at the end thereof. At the time, though I did not know it, the dream was set at Spencer House.
Before ecstatically flying off in search of lives up ahead, it is oftentimes good to know where one has been. These next dreams occurred during the second or ‘B’ cycle of sleep and dreamtime that day. Prior to sleep, I had been meditating with crystals in the pyramid and was inordinately focussed in my intention. After having adequately fortified myself, I was clear in my intentions to dreamquest in search of past lives. Thus, I would vicariously revisit two past lives which were complementary. During the first life in question, I was male and Merlin was then present with me and female. We were musicians at the court of King George III where also present was the Prince Regent and future King George IV. The second life seemed to have been longer-lived and in that one I was female.
The dreams of both lives overlapped and it was good to have acquired the past-life information of those lives through Michael channeller, Sarah J. Chambers‡. Of course, there was a dream of a third past life, it was that of my immediate past life.
This having been the first dream, it was an extremely involved odyssey. A dream it was in which I had gone off to a performance, at nighttime of course, but it was as though it had been onscreen. Before the performance had begun, there had been a comedian onstage. There had been many wings to this performance because it had been set in a house. In fact, it was a period piece. The people who had been watching this had been, as it were, very much so out of time. This was set in the late eighteenth century. There had been a very nasty racist, in fact, send-up of ‘the savages in the jungle’.
This was all in British accents and very eighteenth century language.
*As I had meditated before sleep, I had opened myself up to experiencing insights into past-life reincarnational monads. As it had turned out, I would end up gaining much insight to my reincarnational past. This was set in the parlour of a very affluent Georgian residence. There was a white comic onstage, not unlike Tom Kneebone† — who was possibly one of the most loathsome pieces of bigoted shits that I have ever met. Otto Dix† arsehole that he is; Tom was a vile, pinched, sphinctered nobody-arsed faggot. Whilst looking at the comic onstage, I realised that one of the reasons why I loathed Tom Kneebone — on meeting him — was because he bore such strong resonance to the past. The comic was uncannily like Tom Kneebone. By that I mean that my visceral connection to the very racist performer was because, he was me in a former life in Britain — lived at court as a white male performer.
Of course, it was not Tom Kneebone but he had the same racist, pinched, WASP lack of tolerance and awareness as the Otto Dix arsehole — such an ill-evolved piece of shit that one. END.
The comic was entertaining the guests in this salon. He was doing this whole thing about, ‘the Pickaninnies’, ‘the darkies’. Also, he had had to have an accompanist to show the ‘natives’ and their gargantuan, elephantine dicks. Clearly, from the way that he had been holding it, the cock had not even been yet erect. He was all bulging eyes that had rolled with wide-opened mouth. Everyone was just spellbindingly charmed by his wicked witticism. I, however, had not been in the least entertained by it. In fact, I had felt greatly embarrassed to have seen him.
This was like having to have faced embarrassing skeletons in one’s reincarnational closet. After his routine, it then led into this performance that they had been putting on. In point of fact, the performance actually was quite funny. Everyone would leave the salon and then come back in but they would all have on Regency dress and wore makeup specific to that era. At one point, all the women had come back in. From where I had seen the performance, through an open door, there were people off to the left in a smaller room who were not performing. They were crowded around on divans. There was a large open space on the floor where the exquisite rug sat.
There was one woman there who had had a bad sniffle; she had kept on sniffling and was near consumptive. Why does she not just get up and get lost? I was quite impatient with her. At the time, I was closer to the main players. These were people who had been sitting in the salon in front of me. There was a whole cluster of them immediately before me and to the immediate right of the large white doors that led you from room to room. Exiting that particular room into which I had looked, where the performance was taking place, were more doors. The door half, which was close to us, was open and served as the wings to the stage.
Up in front of the mantelpiece was where the performers had come on to perform their scenes. They were quite funny. There were parapluies that had wonderful little floral designs on them. The performers were made-up in such a way that their faces looked like bouquets that resembled large English white and faded yellow roses — very oversized roses. The faces of the persons were very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of the late-Georgian era. This was the look that was proper in that time. As a result, the souls that had been incarnate at that time, were wearing those faces. At two separate occasions, everybody seated in the salons had had to get up and leave then come back in.
The last time that they had come back in, all the women were dressed in long, flowing tangerine-coloured dresses that had dragged on the floor. All the dresses had little flowers on them. The tangerine colour was muted by a sheer fabric of white silk overtop the tangerine bodice. The silk had left it a seemingly faded colour. All along the grid patchwork were these tiny roses that were the colour of the fabric underneath the tangerine-coloured material. The look was very beautiful. As they had spoken, there was wonderful repartee going around the room. This one woman was croaking away, saying, “Oh why don’t they go to church, anymore?
“Doesn’t anybody go to church anymore?” She had gotten up, going around the room, to make the point. She had then come back and sat down on the arm of the chair. Her husband was very stout and he had remained seated there in an armchair. One chap, who was on one of the chaise longues where some of the other spectators were seated, was bantering away. He was very dynamic, in a sage-souled sort of way. The costume changes between sets went on almost forever; at such times, the salon would become abuzz with lively discussions about whatever socially or politically was au courrant. Of course, that had meant anything that was superficial and that they, at their level of society, had found très amusant.
This particular costume change was quite long and some of the players, who were going to have been participating in the next piece, were seated on that particular chaise longue. They were talking, amongst themselves, when this one man had said, “Well, I certainly hope that you don’t go, looking like that…” His was a very cutting double entendre because, though the dowager was quite the frump, it was really a comment on her horrid-looking face; this, in an age, long before plastic surgery could have come to the assistance of women of her class. The woman’s face was very puffy and dowdy and, also, full of makeup.
She, so without a clue, had replied, “Well, what’s wrong with me going like this?”
“In a dress, there is certainly something wrong going like that.” This was very, very witty racy banter and much filled with double entendres.
The poor frump was daft and had not quite gotten it. She was wonderfully being sent up by everyone. “Oh dear me, I never quite seem to know what to wear. The fashions changing all the time, I can hardly ever keep up…”
This had only made for more cutting, though hushed, laughter. I do not even know but it was at this point, as she had spoken, that I had seen her in close-up. I had wondered if, perhaps, she were not Francesca — the name of a past-life of mine lived in Georgian England. Just as in that last dream encounter with Francesca, during the onset of menopause, I experienced the same visceral connection with the subject. Then, as now, I was seeing her face in keen close-up. Now, I was experiencing her at a much later stage in her life. She was a late septuagenarian. Still, though, she was very much so into the heavy makeup but at this point, she had suffered from senility and was pronouncedly neurotic.
Afterwards, everybody had looked out at me and asked me if I had ever seen the performance presented like this before. One of the things that they were talking about was an expedition that had just returned from, ‘Deepest, darkest, Africa, in the Jungles.’ This was, in fact, a production of Romeo and Juliet that had been set in colonial Africa. They had openly wondered, specifically of me, if I had ever seen so racy a production. All these people were very sophisticated, sagely persons, of whom it was safe to say, they were all very much so artisan-like — in essence, they were the glitterati. More to the point, they possessed goals of discrimination and predominantly were in repression mode.
“Well actually, I had seen the original classic production.”
“Yes but have you seen any modern updates of it?” she had asked, by which she meant a production from the Georgian era.
“Well, no. Well I did but it was when I was at school, in Sandy Point.”
Of course, they did not get it at all and found my accent far too queer for words. Besides, it was all very post-modern as far as they were concerned. At that point, the lights in the salon went down, in this beautiful, large high-ceilinged place. A movie screen then appeared and Diana Ross was going to be the mother to Juliet and the Juliet was a beautiful, beautiful, long-haired High-Yellow heroine. She had seemed East Indian but was not. She had gotten up and gone running to the window because Romeo was calling her. Clearly, it was a filmed version. She was wearing a black and white checkered dress that had no sleeves.
The dress really was more like a jumper — an A-line dress. She was so gorgeous; the young actress was stupendously radiant. Presently, she was praying and the camera was a slow, sweeping crane shot that had kept on rising up and away from her left profile. Filled with so much earnestness in her face, she was quite beautiful. A teenager, she was quite the stunning little actor. The actress was not Diana Ross‘s daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross but someone who had a stunning High-Yellow resemblance to Diana Ross with those stunning eyes and with very, very gorgeous long, long wavy hair. To just above her arse, her hair was thick and beautifully cascaded down. She was very gorgeous.
When she had run to the window, she was as if a ballerina by the way that she had held out that beautiful, delicate tiny face. An exquisitely beautiful face it was that sat on that long neck of hers. Looking out the window, she had dreamily called down, “Oh Romeo. Romeo. Romeo.” Truly, it was sheer spellbinding magic.
In this the second dream, I had gone off and was walking in Crab Hill, Sandy Point. Whilst there, I had seen these unfamiliar persons. One of them had had one of the most interesting faces. She had a very unusually large face and very beautiful teeth that were somewhat compacted. She was very lovingly dark-skinned. She was unusual-bodied; her head was very, very large and her body, in comparison, very squat – unusually so. To be precise, her body was like a dwarf’s. Her legs were very stubby and bulky.
My goodness, this woman could run. She had had a great deal of physical power. A lot of Earth planets that were fixed, to be sure, were part of her makeup. I found it very, very interesting to have watched her. On having passed her, I had said hello and noticed that she had shut her eyes. That was when I had realised that this woman had almost never looked at anyone. Then, finally, I had commanded her attention and directly looked into her eyes. To have looked into her eyes was tantamount to looking into her soul.
Her eyes were so large. Hers were as if seeing, up close, the eyes of a giant cetacean. Yet, these stellar eyes were on a human face. These eyes were extremely large with the lids half-collapsed over them. The brown of the eyes was dappled and mixed in with some blues with little streaks in the blues. Talk about beauty. Nonetheless, they were very, very old-souled and very, very powerful eyes. At the time, I had thought of how much they reminded me of the eyes on the totemic cranes that I have seen throughout my life.
She had just laughed and turned her head away. She was a woman of substance and great grace; not unlike Jessye Norman°, in that sense, was she. I had specifically focussed on her right eye. Hers were not unlike the dappled blue-green colour that Owen Hawksmoor°‘s eyes take on, of course, when he is wearing his coloured contact lenses. However, her eyes were quite gorgeous. Predominantly brown but there were lots of brown and red streaks in the white of the eyes. These were from very large bulbous blood vessels. The whites of them were very white, almost caramel-coloured on closer inspection, from the timeworn passage of their agedness.
Boy, this woman had a lot of strength of character in that body. Hers was a solid, solid body. Following after this guy, I had then come back over this little barbwire fence. We clearly, I realised, cannot go getting ourselves scraped. As we had been passing, there had been a window to our right that had looked into a house. Whilst looking at the screen, on which Romeo and Julie was supposed to have been playing, we had gone and sat down. Protesting, I had said that this could not have been the case because it would only have meant that I had missed so much of the performance. In all this time, of having gone and wandered off, one would have missed too much of the production.
At that point, there had been someone on the screen performing a Shakespearean soliloquy. This clearly was an updated version of the text. I had started watching it and got back into the film. The one thing that I had not liked about it, was that there had been lots of flies on the set. After having been made uneasy by the bugs, I had gotten up and walked about for a while. When I had gotten back into looking at the production again, it was as if looking at it from the Georgian salon again. However, now it was slightly different. To myself, I had remarked that it had seemed so much like Toronto.
That was because this production, like Toronto does in summertime, had all these damn flies. All the people around me in the Georgian salon had not gotten what Toronto had meant at all. As well they understandably would not have, they had looked at me very strangely. There were flies in the air which I had kept on swatting out of the air. There was a whole scene in progress, when I had decided that I would just have to have seen the production again or, perhaps, get it on videocassette. At that point, I had simply missed too much of the production. I had realised, too, that I could easily have seen it when it made it to the Revue second-run cinemas about Toronto. At that point, I had turned and left.
*This heavy-lidded young girl could well have been me, Theresa, in my immediate past life. That life was lived in Brazil and I had a goal of dominance. Of course, on Tuesday, September 17, 1991(39), I would dream of Theresa in her adult years. Similarly, she also could have been Merlin reincarnated. In December 2006, Merlin was reborn female in the Netherlands; however, at the time of the channelled session, the female reborn Merlin’s ethnicity was not shared. Thus, this could well be Merlin reborn in early 21st century Netherlands about whom I was dreaming. END.
I had next, in this the third dream, been up on this rise with Isha where she and I had been doing something. We had discussed the fact that I had needed more money. I had told her that my PIN number, for some bank card that I had had, was 8411. She had called up the bank and was being pushy with them. Isha was telling them that she had been very ill and incapacitated. For being bedridden, they would therefore have to let her have the money in cash with me acting on her behalf. She had assured them that I would be right over and to let me have the funds. As she had spoken on the phone, this black woman and her white husband had come by.
The man wore glasses and they were, very much so in love, embracing each other. There was a little girl with them to whom I had meltingly said, “Come here sweetheart. My goodness! You have American money and you have a 10.00$ Canadian note there, I see and a 20.00$ too. Why don’t you let me have an American bill? And some of those Canadian bills because you’re not going to need the Canadian bill.”
“Why? It’s my money.”
“Okay then, fine. Come on over here and give me some sugar,” I tried charming her as she had been off to my left. On having wrapped my left arm around her, I had kissed her on the cheek saying, “Return the kiss, please.” We had kissed and had done so, on both cheeks, in the French style. I had looked down at her parents and they were quite sweet and in love. At the time, I had been thinking of Pandora. I could not, though, have made out the mother’s face all that well from the table; I had been seated there with Isha. A square, black metallic affair with a glass top the table proved.
As a result, the table was covering the face of the woman and I could not make out who she was. At the time, I had thought of Pandora and her present beau. This child had then appeared but it was like a doll; she was so tiny and was, in fact, as if a pygmy. She proved to be Barry Thomas‘ younger sister. Every time that she had bawled, her neck had extended and craned up into the air and was pinkish-coloured like a white doll. She, though, was actually a black baby — you could tell from her facial features. She was very much so alive but she was in this rubbery body that was like a doll’s. I had put her up on a mantelpiece to sit because she had been so damn noisy and obstreperous.
Penina had come and disputatiously confronted me about what I had done to the poor little girl. Whilst Isha had been on the phone, I had gotten up and gone to take a pee. On entering into the bathroom, I had been shocked and horrified. On looking in the mirror, I had noticed that Isha had cut my hair. I had let out the most enraged scream, “Isha! How could you do this to me?” What had happened, was because of the way that I had been lying on my back, she had managed to cut off all the hair on the side of my head up to the top and on the other side as well. This was the most ludicrous haircut.
In the back, leaving the length in place, my hair was still long. “I don’t want my hair looking like some bloody Mohawk warrior’s,” I shrieked. To have seen the roots of my hair, which were unpermed, I was truly pissed off. Having my hair chopped off, was not something that I had wanted and I definitely did not want this frigging fascistic cunt fucking with me. I had been truly incensed at her. Truly enraged, I returned to confront her and found her lying down in bed. Immediately, she went on the blind defensive, “I don’t see anything wrong with it. Besides it’s already done and you might as well cut off the rest,” she had laughingly dismissed me.
“Isha how could you do this? This is exactly like when you destroyed my writings.”
Impatient with her indifference, I had launched through the air at her and begun beating the living shit out of her: hitting, slapping and kicking her. Grabbing anything that I could find, I had beaten her with it. All the rage that I had felt at her, for destroying my writings back in the mid-eighties, had come flooding out.
*Back then, when she had been confronted, she had launched into a clawing defensive attack on me as we rode home in a blinding rainstorm from Solomon King‘s wedding in Rochester, New York. END.
Earlier, I had gone to get my brush, to brush my hair and, on not having found it, had borrowed hers. On brushing my hair, I had noticed that the brush was really scraping my scalp. On having looked at things in the bathroom mirror, I had been left horror-struck. On seeing what she had done, I had sucked my teeth and decided then and there to kick her arse. I had known then and there that this would not have happened had I taken her to task, blow-for-blow, back in 1985. Also, I had seen this brown bag, a large, black canvas bag and a shoulder bag — they were all mine. In the travelling bag were these two tickets because I was going to be travelling. I had really been upset and pissed off at Isha as she had laid there under green sheets.
Penina had come into the room and tried intervening on Isha‘s behalf. Penina had tried to get me to accept the fact that what had been done, was final and to just get on with things. That had only more infuriated me. Turning on her, I had screamed, “Oh Penina, why don’t you shut up? You’re so damn stupid! Of course, you would agree anyway.”
This woman had then shown up who was Jewish and it had turned out to have been, Ariel Gothberg. She had worn this dark purple turtleneck bodysuit — over that, she had worn a brown very, very thick, woollen jacket. The jacket had lots of gold zippers that showed down the front and the length of it. The jacket had no collar. On either side of the sleeves, there were gold zippers that went midway up the arm. There were two on the breast, one zipper each, over each breast for pockets. They had little golden tassels that held the zipper. The outfit was quite nice and was in brown and black.
Ariel Gothberg had looked quite smart. I had asked her what she had thought of my hair looking like that. “Well it’s your hair and it’s natural. I think the natural version looks kind of nice, anyway. Well, you’ll decide what you have to do with it,” she had then gone off, up these stairs. Yeah, right; fuck you, you bitch, I rudely dismissed the thought of her. Whilst there, she had joined two or three other smartly dressed persons. I had come around and begun leaving then went out into the outdoors. There, I had stood by a shed whilst talking with somebody about things in St. Croix, U. S. Virgin Islands. Just then, a large plane had gone by directly overhead.
At the time, I had thought this plane too unusually close to the ground. We also were close to the ocean. The building was a long white shed, like a greenhouse, beyond a sandy slope. Generous clumps of long grass held the sand from drifting too much. We were standing just beyond a stand of palm and sea dates trees. The ocean was rather tranquil and gently breaking. The ambiance here was rather beautiful. I had then seen a large plane come by that was like an American Airlines plane; except, on the back of it, it had had this large caboose.
This was a large unusual extension that had flared out. To say the least, this was most unusual and there seemed to have been no exhaust. The bottom of the craft was very silver. Also, there were the red and blue stripes along the sides like an American Airlines carrier would bear. However, nowhere were there any demarcations, indicating that it was an American Airlines craft. Unusually so, the craft was very long. Long and sleek, like a Boeing 727, except that it had had no mid-fuselage wings; way at the back of the plane, there were some smaller wings. As it effortlessly sailed through the air, I figured, oh dear no, it is going to crash.
As it had flown by, it had bizarrely veered off to the left and head first. Next, it had shot up into the air and then come down. I had screamed aloud, horrified for the passengers aboard. Immediately, of curiosity, people had begun running towards its obvious crash site. To check things out, I had gone running around the corner of the building. There was smoke in the air but it was general pollution from the community; also, there had been no smoky fireball as with an obvious crash.
“Oh dear. I think it crashed…” I had helplessly said to a man who had reminded me much of my uncle Michel King, rather than his brother Marcel King°.
“No, it didn’t,” he had confidently said. Another plane had then come in and that was when I had suddenly remembered that I had had a flight to catch. At that, I had gone running, hurrying out of there, and gone around the building. This was a wonderful large hangar-like building. In this building, there were many persons. I had seen several travellers there. Once outside, I had had to go up an immensely long flight of stairs to have gotten up to where the plane was. On the outside, it was a pure white aircraft with two propeller engines on each its wing; the propeller engines were running at the time that I had arrived.
The wings were extended; they were actually quite long. I had demanded that they cut out the engines so that I could safely make my way to the man who had been at the gate. He was an older, dark-skinned man in uniform. He could have been Egyptian, Hispanic, East Indian or Arabic. I had had to pay him to get aboard the plane and it had come to 14.00$ for the flight. Incidentally, as he told me that, I had recalled that the PIN number was 8411, which coincidentally does add up to 14. I had given him a 20.00$ bill. He had told me not to worry, that it was already running late, and assured me that I could get my change on board the flight. I had boarded the plane which, oddly enough, was unusually low to the ground. On having entered inside the plane, it was as though you were outside again and had to go up a further flight of stairs — just like the ones that had earlier gotten me to the tarmac.
A truly dream surreal moment this proved. Penina had been concerned because, on this flight that had just come in, there was supposed to have been a little boy that we were supposed to have met. He had been coming from Nevis. I had told her that I still was really frigging pissed off — at having had my hair cut off by Isha — and could not have cared less about any little boy. So we had gotten into the plane and it was again unusually interiored. There was a wide enough single aisle with all the passengers in seats that had faced each other. This had immediately reminded me of when I was a child, prior to having taken my first flight, I had always envisioned the seating arrangement on board an aircraft to be like this. There are, of course, no such seating arrangements in conventional aircraft.
As we had moved down the aisle, we had passed a number of little boys. There was a little boy on the right of the aisle and I had thought that, perhaps, that was him. However, we had gone down with Penina having followed after me. There were, incidentally, lots of potted plants here on board the highly unconventional aircraft. The aircraft was white-interiored, as outside, and there was a lot of sunlight coming through the top of the aircraft which was completely glass-topped. The ceiling was really like a long trough in a greenhouse because there was a drain in the ceiling that had run the length of the aisle. Lord knows, we were definitely well beyond the Kansas City city limits. Also, it had been very humid inside the craft.
Many, many potted hibiscuses were present and some of them were in bloom. Just where the stem had exited from the pot, one plant had fallen over and broken. On righting the pot, I had felt for it. The plant had sadly kept on dangling over. I had called the boy’s name which was something like, ‘Orello’, to which he had immediately answered an alert yes. He had been way in the back. I had pointed him out to Penina and told her to go and take care of him. Furthermore, I had told her to get off the plane with him because she was not supposed to have been travelling anyway.
I had then gone up to the front of the craft and there I noticed that there was a large opening. Here at the front of the craft, it was as though one was in a hangar or large indoor room. Whilst other people were lost in reading, what had clearly been scripts, there was a girl doing some homework. The studious girl was very stout and wore a school uniform. Early teenaged and definitely black, she was very light-complected. A tall, gangly white male had come in; this man was very much so old. He was incredibly gentle and soul-soothingly so. He was as if a gardener or caretaker.
He had sat next to me and warmed me further when he asked, “Do you have piece of paper, please? Just something to write on.”
“Well, I don’t even know…” I had really wanted to help him out and been of service to him. He was so sweet-spirited like Catherine Angelica (‘Lica) or as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon°, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother seems — that kind of evolved grace of spirit. I could not immediately find anything and, in the meantime, the girl had not been prepared to part with any of her school paper. There, I had told him, pointing in front of me to a little desk on which were some clothes and my bag. I had gotten out my bag and started talking to him. He was very, very wonderful and very old-souled in feel. He was very healing to have been around. He had reminded me of James Tramble or Merlin’s guide as I had seen in those dreams — the tall shaman.
He had commenced writing on this piece of paper and he had asked me my name to which I had replied, “Arvin da Braga.”
“Oh really?” he good-naturedly replied.
I had then given him my statistics. Continuing on, told him that I was born on August second, nineteen sixty. We had talked on some more and then he had asked, “And what about your friend?”
“Oh Merlin? Merlin Ben-Daniel. Merlin B.” When he had asked me my name, I had initially said, “Arvin M. M, as in Merlin, spelt ‘lin’ not ‘lyn’ and which, incidentally, was my lover’s name. Merlin; spelt the same as my middle name.” As we had spoken, I had grown more and more intensely lucid and light-headed; it was as though I was channelling. “Merlin B. B, as in Bechbache, which is his mother’s family name.” We were talking about Merlin and he was doing this write-up about Merlin and me.
He had then turned to me and said, “Well anyway, I’m leaving you now and I want you to write this down.”
“Is it a number you’re giving me?”
“Just some important information. But you must remember it and you must never forget it.” What he had said was, “Proper posture leads to purpose and prosperity in time.” He had said it with the greatest enunciation and slowness.
There was a woman who had stood out in my mind as he had spoken. She was very much so like Francesca who was down below and outside an opening in the airplane. She was inside the building at a window, looking up at me and saying, “I will be with you, don’t worry. And I’ve remembered it. I’ve recorded it. And I’ll keep reciting it to you if you need me to.”
The gracious gentleman had then left. His was not unlike the yogic centred serenity of Yehudi Menuhin. At that, I had had a sense of motion and that we had travelled. The sensation was not for very long but you just knew that we had covered massive distances in what had seemed a mere breath. As I had watched him write with the greatest of care, he was right-handed. At one point, he had stopped and disruptively said as I had spoken of Merlin and me, “You’ve a very distinctive accent and it’s so layered. You can see so many languages in it.”
“Well, yes that’s because I’ve lived all over the place, actually. My upbringing was very middle class in the West Indies with maids, in fact. I like speaking this way because it’s who I am. It’s about intellect.”
“Right you are,” he had said whilst warmly smiling.
We had then gotten to where we were going but he was no longer with us. We had deplaned and come down the flight of stairs. Everybody had gathered about this courtyard and was walking around. Most people who had deplaned had been white. All the kids were in the rear and we were separated — the kids and I. I had then left everybody and started walking ahead because I had wanted to go and get Penina. She had shown up and was running to go and get Orello now that he had arrived. She had on this long, floral-printed dress that had proven to be a jumpsuit that had turned into culottes.
Her outfit was brown, yellow and green which were all one-inch slats of colour. The jumpsuit was a predominantly off-white, faded yellow number that had these yellow, brown and green horizontal slats that were crammed together and haphazardly spaced. They had created a wonderful motif on the fabric. Somehow, it seemed that I was supposed to have been deplaning. Seemingly, I had to get aboard a larger plane and continue on with my flight. For having interacted with Penina, I had missed the connecting flight. This had mightily upset me. Initially, when she had come aboard the first flight with me, I had turned to her as we had progressed down the aisle and asked if she had remembered to get all my bags.
A second flight, not unlike an American Airlines carrier, had come in through the air and landed. This had proven my signal, to have started moving and get aboard the initial flight. When I had deplaned, I was supposed to have gone to another flight. For some strange reason, everybody was marching in a circuitous route. They had gone down this street and turned off to the right; they then had gone down this wide boulevard into another courtyard. That courtyard had contained another plane which one had to board. A sareed, East Indian woman had looked back at me and energetically said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry because the engine has already started.”
“Don’t worry…” I had evenly replied. She was a really sweet gracious soul.
You could have seen the engine and when it had started, the wing that had been turned horizontally then swivelled and turned to the vertical position. This was set in a compound that was surrounded by a large white fence. Going up to the courtyard, the steps were white and the interior of the building and all the low-lying buildings around were all pure white. The look was that of permanent whitewash paint.
“…I’m coming. I’m supposed to be on this flight,” I had called out.
When I was making my way there, there was a large wooden gate that had a glass in it. One of the things that had kept me distracted, was that I had gone into this room, where Penina had been and wanted to look at the Romeo and Juliet drama again. Instead of having been able to get it on television again, there was a video music station on. The music video was set in a large room. Irene Cara was singing a song in said music video. Natalie Cole° was there, as well, as some other black entertainers. She was in a living room in that segment of the video, which was for a love song. Natalie Cole was participating in the video but not singing. Irene Cara had worn a black tunic overtop black narrow-legged pants.
Natalie Cole had worn black and white; they were very much so enjoying themselves. Soon, I had caught myself when being distracted and had gone running out of the place. I suddenly remembered the petite, beauteous East Indian woman; she had a striking resemblance to the author and socialite, Geeta Mehta. She had been telling me that I was supposed to, in fact, have been getting onto the other flight. So off I had gone, running down the road; it was a narrow stretch of earthen road. Even though it had long been closed, I had opened the door to the craft. The stewardess was slowly closing the door when I had leapt through the air and pulled it forcefully open. At the time, the engines were already running — all of them.
They had had to stop the engines so that I could make my way past them and safely get aboard the flight. I had shown her my ticket and very cleverly said, “Here’s my ticket. I’m supposed to be on board this flight; thank you very much.” Again, the interior was much like a waiting area and a greenhouse at that. There was a sense, once again, of light coming through the glass-topped ceiling of the craft. The craft’s interior was all whitewashed. There were lots of persons, mostly guys, standing about. The first thing that I had noticed, was that they were all dressed in white and were dressed in clothing from another age.
They were dressed as in the latter half of the eighteenth century — the age of Wolfgang A. Mozart§. I had passed the flight attendants; they were off to my left and up towards the cockpit. There was the familiar large open area, as well, off to the right of the skylight. There was a narrow door that had gotten you back to the main cabin of the plane. The 18th century persons were in the open, which had an earthen floor. Here, it was very humid and damp. These were all young and white males, who wore white clinging tunic that went down to just below the knees. They wore tight breeches, really tight, with white stockings that came up to above the knees.
They wore white shoes; large ones with white buckles. Large-sleeved white shirts, most of them, although some wore shirts whose sleeves were those of the conventional style of the waking state. They were, all of them, very young and very dark-haired. These persons had the faces that were exactly peculiar to their age. The hairstyles, the makeup and the expressionism; it exactly was what the aristocrats of late eighteenth century Vienna looked like. On having entered this craft, I had immediately noticed that there were little rooms as in a salon in eighteenth century Vienna. There were these white doors with glass panes for two-thirds of them. There were little concert hall boxes that were set up; all this occurred inside the cabin of the plane no less.
I could distinctly have heard the engines whirring away, outside the craft, whilst drinking in this most unconventional of plane interiors. We were going to take this flight and whilst in flight, there would be a performance. Everybody was an actor and like that man on the chaise longue, with the wicked tongue, also very much so sage-souled. I then went and took my place. There was a box where the performers would sit, as in an opera house, but it was on the ground. This was not a Boeing 747 series type airliner. The opera house-interiored craft had been lined with red carpeting and red velvet. The seats were all one embankment and quite plush.
There was a doorway there with a man who had been crouched down. He was dark-haired and had a mole just below his left eye. He was most handsome and looked like the soulfully august aristocrats, of the court of King Joseph II of Hapsburg-Lorraine, in the age of Wolfgang A. Mozart. His face was very, very unusually large. He had worn a ponytail that was tied back with a black ribbon. Just inside the door to my right, he had been crouched down. I had looked off and on having seen him, had smiled. He had looked up at me and was quite smitten by me.
I realised that I had found my place and had come in to the box to sit. We were obviously about to witness a drama that was clearly Romeo and Juliet that was set, in the Mozartean era, in the city of Vienna, Austria. I had gotten so energised for having been in the company of these people, whom clearly I had known at the level of soul, and thus had squealed and laughed aloud. Also, my response was in anticipation of the great fun that we shortly would share. At that, I awoke in bed.
*I was not chagrined to have awakened at that point. Already, I had been refamiliarised with all these persons. There was something very much so familiar about the handsome-moled man. We did look at each other as I took my seat and I was passingly reminded of Merlin. Beyond the eighteenth century energetics that he wore in that life, he was familiar, intimate and a companion. That was all I had needed of the very layered, very enriching and very, indeed, pandimensional aspects of this dreamquesting odyssey into a past life. This was very real and I was very much so in my element. That dream initially was definitely set in the Georgian era and the people there were all familiar.
They were all white and very much so alive. I guess that this was an astral plane projection in time, to experiencing aspects of past lives. I was able to have used the astral plane, to have transited the spiral arms of time and enter two different time frames in which I was clearly incarnate. Also, it was very much so the eighteenth century and the height of the colonial era. Here was someone who had just returned from an expedition to deepest, darkest Africa. Down to the accent and the language as it existed then, they were very much so British. The most important insight that I learned, for having revisited that lifetime, was the lasting effects of racism to which I was exposed, engaged in and was much informed by. To say the least, in this life, I am truly repulsed by racism’s ubiquity and its effects.
This explains why I am so passionately impatient with and can see and understand, so clearly, my hypersensitivity to racism. I see it for what it is and where it comes from. The second flight’s exposé into Mozartean Austria was, I am certain, more about getting insights to a past life of either Merlin’s or someone with whom I share as strong a soul connection. Perhaps, it was someone on the order of my essence twin. I am not convinced that this was Merlin, in a past life, even though I did not see the eyes in close-up. I knew them not to be his eyes. The eyes are always the dead giveaway in these instances. Though packaging changes from life to life, the eyes do not; except to change colour and grow older and softer with the reincarnational maturation of the soul, the eyes are always recognisable as self’s in past life dreams.
**Further insights that I would like to add at this time, I do believe that the latter dream of the Mozartean era, harkened back to when Merlin and I were incarnate together, again lovers, and were court musicians. This, however, was during the court of one of the English rather than Austrian monarchs. During the reign of George Hanover, King George III, which was during the 1700s to early 1800s, Merlin and I were then incarnate. Also, the Prince Regent and later King George IV was also familiar to both of us. The latter monarch would have been instrumental in the flourishing of the arts, which is why Merlin and I had creatively blossomed in that life. King George IV, when the Prince Regent and during his brief reign, had been a great patron of the arts — life at court would have been artistically fulfilling and that it clearly was. In any event, I also sang during that life. Usually, my performances were to smaller audiences of aristocrats; Merlin, then female, played the harpsichord and was my accompanist.
I guess that the Francesca lifetime could have been a complement to that lived at court during King George III’s reign — whose father was rather German and caught up in the Austrian succession intrigues during the early 18th century. There was a late Georgian to early Victorian sensibility to the first dream; it featured a septuagenarian Francesca who rather than me in a past life, was Merlin when a harpsichordist and my then lover. These are insights gleaned from Michael Overleaves by Sarah J. Chambers who, prior to passing in 1999, channelled the Michael. What’s more, at that time, also present and likely participant in this dream was the Duke of Bronté. Of course, said duke was also the 1st Viscount Nelson, none other than Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson†. Naturally, in the late 18th century, Horatio Nelson had spent much time at court whilst trying to get himself positioned after the American war of independence, which left the admiral and many others out of work. At the time that he spent at court, both Merlin and I, knew and socialised with the young, dashing admiral – the 2nd Earl Spencer was the Lord of the Admiralty, which would have made him an invaluable contact to Earl Spencer and a frequent guest to Spencer House. No doubt, it was his tales of his adventures and especially his time spent in Nevis that served as a source of wonderment for me.
As Merlin and I were then cohabiting as lovers and professional associates, it is likely that I then expressed some interest in going off to an exotic isle like Nevis. Indeed, perhaps, the reference to deepest darkest Africa was really to the West Indies. Either way, it is obvious that the fascinating Duke of Bronté, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson planted a seed, which would lead to my choice to reincarnate three lifetimes later in Nevis.
***I should also think that the man with the extra-large head and the striking, large mole below his left eye, should have been more readily discerned. Merlin’s dear friend, the actor, Joe Morton°, is the one who would fit this bill. Indeed, Joe does have just such a large mole below his left eye. The only difference between these two — Joe Morton and the moled actor in the dream — was their disparate races. The white male’s in the dream was the exact same large mole at the exact same position as is Joe Morton’s. Further, this Caucasian male’s teeth exactly were like Joe’s as they are in this lifetime. Again, apart from their disparate races, there was one other difference between Joe Morton and his past-life counterpart. Joe’s mouth and lips are bigger and fuller respectively and Joe’s comparably was, to say the least, a more elastic and expressive face.
To say the least, that was rather insightful a past-life dreamquest. Joe, of course, is in the fifth/sage position in his cadence which not surprisingly would leave him inclined to being so sage-like and regal in essence. Naturally, this regal energy is due to the power mode energy, which innately infuses all fifth-cast fragments, especially in cadences 1, 5 and 7. Joe, of course, is in the first cadence in his greater cadence.
****I should also like to add here that the large-moled gentleman may well have been in London; at that the time of mid-to-late 18th century, there was a large Austro-German community in London. King George III was, of course, German. At that time that Merlin and I were then incarnate, we were rather familiar with one such German patron who happens also to be an entity mate, Arianna von Reinhard†. Wealthy, the German patron of the arts very likely could have funded a trip to Austria and German, during which time Merlin and I could have been on a concert tour to royal courts of those countries. Who knows, perhaps, at that time, we even met and attended concerts for stellar creative genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart§. END.
At the conclusion of audiocassette-recording these dreamquests to past lives, in late October, 1991, I got about the business of choosing an appropriate musical complement. Naturally, I would end up playing some Joseph Haydn° symphonies. Back in 1987, whilst being a muse to Olaf Gamst, I was introduced to Joseph Haydn in great detail as he was a composer whom Olaf favoured. When sitting for the artist, often were the times, when he would play selections from his formidable Haydn collection. Without doubt, I would come to favour Haydn’s London Symphonies. That is why, I had crawled through a couple of secondhand record shops in a bid to build my own Haydn collection. To that end, I got out an old recording from 1977; it was still in fairly good condition. Released on the Philips label, Neville Marriner conducted the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
For the rest of the day, I repeatedly listened to Symphony No. 104 in D Major Op. 21 ‘Londoner’. This symphony truly made my spirit soar and allowed me to remain resonant with the past-life to which I had so lucidly dreamquested.
__________________________
As ever, thanks for your ongoing support, sweet dreams.
By now the effects of the stewed fruit at breakfast has seen my waist shrink; I am grateful. The morning after the night that was, I am still elated and humming away that catchy melody from Ludwig Minkus’ greatly composed ballet.
After breakfast I decamped at Leicester Square where it was time to enjoy the bright, cool sunlight and catch a movie. The Vue cinemas are rather interesting; I was keen to know if I would have a repeat of what had transpired last winter.
Back then, I was upstairs at the same cinemas watching, Darkest Hour, which proved a real tour de force performance from Gary Oldman. Sat in the back row, soon I became bloated and expansive. Though not the least bit drowsy, I felt wide-open and lucidly self-aware. Next, as the film progressed, I watched as several pure white humanoid forms simply stood up and walked to the sides and quite seamlessly walked through the very real walls of the cinema.
One of the things that Merlin and I always loved doing, was seeing a film during its opening weekend. Naturally, so close to the anniversary of his passing, I was keen on seeing a film. J. K. Rowling is among my favourite contemporary writers and having seen the first film in this series, it only made sense to go.
Whilst waiting for the cinema to open, I caught a series of items; all are favourite actors of mine, especially Sir Kenneth Branagh.
The first screening of the day was a special affair with about one third of the theatre occupied. A lovely Chinese couple sat to my right with their precocious son of about ten years stuck between them. We chatted briefly and I thought it so strange that conversation with strangers is almost unheard of when attending a Canadian movie.
I emerged into the crisp Saturday morning in Leicester Square a bit teary eyed as thoughts of Merlin at one point during the film overwhelmed me. It was after all the eve of his passing some 29 years earlier.
Slipping inside this tiny joint – I always favour hole-in-the-world, ma-n-pa joints, I got a couple of really good slices of pizza whilst pouring through the Times of London. There was conversation close by, which struck me as interesting; it went from Theresa May and Brexit to Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex. I soon realised that both persons were openly criticised chiefly for being women; in the case of the Ms. May, she is dismissed and not taken seriously chiefly for being female. As for Meghan, like every woman who marries into the BRF, she is readily reviled, though, some of this has bordered on racial hysteria and seriously threatening.
In a bid to cleanse my very soul, after all that, I slipped from Leicester Square for the uplifting sophistication of the National Gallery where I deftly moved through my favourite salons with usual mercurial speed, taking the time to pause and admire the key works of art that bring me the greatest pleasure.
Well, after all that art, it was time for more prowling the decidedly unCanadian wintry streets of London. Along Shaftesbury, I strode my Crockett & Jones booted and blistered feet into Neal Street where my favourite hippy-dippy (as Merlin would remark) New Age store, The Astrology Shop in Covent Garden. Though, it most definitely does not have the best choices, I still love the feel of the place and their sagebrush collection is second to none.
Along with marvellous pieces of crystals and a wonderful Citrine, I really connected with this gorgeous agate ring. The moment that I saw it, I really resonated with me and it felt so right.
After a rather warm conversation with a green-eyed, redhead, she was fascinated by my custom Reuben Mack messenger bag.
I then headed back to The British Museum for more shopping. As it was the weekend, there was now a sizeable lineup to gain entry. As though my impatience with crowds were not enough but soon, I had two Torontonian women doing what Canadians do best; they spent much of their time gawking at me, talking about me and cultural appropriation for wearing the custom Reuben Mack messenger. Standing there in line, I was reminded of what petty, small-minded bigoted jackasses the average Canadian can be and god do they love being openly racially predatory towards blacks.
Never once had I experienced a scintilla of racial animus from a Briton or for being in London to that point; there you have it, the land where racism is enshrined in law: employment equity law of Canada: All employers must employ, Caucasians, First Nations persons, Disabled persons and visible minorities and therein is the framework of Canada’s own form of Apartheid – state sanctioned racism. All employers, in particular crown corporations (government agencies – federal and provincial) employ visible minorities to the exclusion of blacks and if and when they do employ blacks, they then hire blacks only as casual workers which means they are not entitled to benefits, pension and guaranteed hours.
So smugly established is this state of affairs that the current prime minister refused to attend the 50th anniversary of Caribana – the nations West Indian community’s gift to Canada on its 100th birthday in 1967; however, he attends ever Gay pride parade in the same city as Caribana, Toronto, and has repeatedly been to India, to dress up and act a right clown because who gives a damn about blacks in Canada. As one friend said, blacks over the past three decades have become as marginalised as First Nations persons. But enough about aggressive young souls and their racialised worldview. Meanwhile, as they were openly rude towards me whilst queueing to enter the British Museum, I grabbed my phone and pretended to film them to which one of them suddenly became enraged, demanding that I not film her… You have to laugh or truly you would go mad. In any event, I got the feisty Buster a nice but scary Egyptian stuffed cat – he is actually afraid of it.
On my return to the hotel, a couple of blocks from The British Museum, I slumped into bed and decided that my aching feet needed a break from the rest of the day’s planned events. To that end, I stayed in that night rather than return to Barbican Hall to catch a celebration of the Windrush Migration. At that concert were to have been Calypso Rose and The Mighty Sparrow; though it had been years since last seeing either performer, I just was not into it. Moreover, I wanted to take the time to be with myself and reflect on the eve of Merlin’s passing some 29 years earlier.
As ever, thanks for your ongoing support and ever remember to push off and start flying.
Strangely, though the major part of Armistice Day celebrations were long concluded, there were still more persons moving westward towards the Cenotaph than easterly towards Trafalgar Square. My companion, a spectacled, freckled guy in his early 30s, was keen on having me come back to his flat in South Bank – We were headed towards Charing Cross Station to take the Bakerloo Line towards his place.
Stalling for time, as I really was not feeling him, I firmly suggested that we go tour Banqueting House as I had never been, which was the truth. Of course, it did not help that the only thing at Banqueting House was the great ceiling art and the throne; the rest of it was just as empty as clearly, James, my “Mate” was dense. Long years ago, a channeller of dubious skills stated rather imperiously that I would meet someone named James, who would prove rather loyal and a long-term affair.
Somehow, this nebulous bit of arcana seemed to be the only sane reason why I was suffering this oaf overlong. His constant bitching about “Nutmeg,” as he referred to the Duchess of Sussex, was not winning him any favours in my books. I had hoped to have found much more archival fare associated with the spot where HM King Charles I was executed. Alas, there was nothing save a throne and an impressive ceiling.
With the toilets at Banqueting House fully occupied and alarmingly foul-smelling, back outside we dashed in hopes of finding a toilet. A pub, whose name I did not even catch a few door towards Trafalgar Square, proved the right spot. He ordered a couple of lagers – I never drink beer, and off I went to the toilet to relieve myself. I waited overlong, waiting for him to possibly come in then use the stalls so that I could make a mad dash for it. No such luck. However, on rejoining him, he lustily talked about what he wanted me to do to him. Never one to miss an opportunity, I suggested he go unclog his plumbing so that I could give it to him good, long and hard when we got back his place.
Naively quick to take the bait, out I dashed into the larger-than-usual crowds when he eagerly bolted to the toilet; once outside, I then caught the tail end of the latest regiment to go moving from the roundabout as they made their way from the Strand and onto Whitehall. With that, I swiftly made it across Pall Mall, crossed Canada House and made my way to the new entrances to the National Gallery – this James clearly was not the one.
Taking the time to avail myself of the museum’s free wi-fi, I sipped on a boost of Pret A Manger’s little magic, yellow potion, Hot Shot. I then decided against the Bellini show – Italian art is way too religious for my liking and it strangely enough has never once addressed the fact that the Church of Rome has, in its role as civiliser, proven the most disruptive terror group this planet has thus far known. For me, there is something alarmingly dangerous about a culture, which would completely and utterly eclipse this rather crucial aspect that has decided their place in the world – but enough about that for now.
Having dodged James, I decided to do the Courtauld exhibition as it would beat having to attend the museum on this trip. Whilst standing in one of two long queues, along came Ms. Thang, who simply looked at us and grandly walked up to the next sales rep as though she had exited St. George’s Chapel on Ginger’s arm on the gloriously sunny early afternoon of May 19, 2018.
As I was next in line, I just as imperiously declared to her and the rep, “Take you, the weave and that blasted fake channel handbag to the back of the line; there are not two lines of invisible persons waiting to buy tickets.” Before she could turn nasty with me, the lovely Dravidian lady informed her that I was next in line and, more importantly, she intended to serve me next. Fake boobs that looked like flotation devices and feet that were too big to fit any glass slippers and, of course, there was a bulky turtleneck to hide the Adam’s apple.
Though “she” was prepared to do drama, I came to do me and look at art and that I did. I was really wowed by some of these works, which I previously had not seen.
Naturally, this Degas masterpiece only warmed my soul. Straight away, I was left humming the music from the grand pas de deux in Act II of La Bayadère, which I could not wait to see at week’s end.
Shades of Canada’s Group of Seven, to be sure. I like the fact that the artist did not include the entire tree in the portrait.
Ah yes, and who doesn’t love the sublime soulfulness of a Gauguin tableau.
Trees, trees and even more trees. What’s not to love!
After having been greatly inspired by the Courtauld Impressionist show – well worth the price – I bailed outside; there were too many parents using the free admission to the museum as a place to come in out of the elements and babysit their way too young children. Once outside, I hailed a cab, though, not the above – wrong day and time of day. This cab proved one of the most memorable journeys. As The Mall was closed, we took the roundabout from in front of Trafalgar Square and headed along Pall Mall. I wanted just then to get to The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace but did not want to use the underground; it was way too glorious a day out.
Finally, I laid down the law to the driver, who was a burly soul and looked like the quintessential slave soul. Soon enough, we got into a conversation when we began chatting about Canada, which I shared that I would give anything to flee in hopes of living in London. Soon, the topic turned to sex and whatever one would have to do to get by. Ha! Said he, he would give up this gig of 22 years and counting by marrying a fat, ugly rich broad to which, without so much as missing beat, I chimed in, “Don’t stop there, if you can find rich, fat, ugly and toothless, now you’ve got it made. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra from The Best Is Yet To Come, you ain’t been blown until you’ve had a gum job!” Never in long ages had I heard a grown man laugh so hard and for so long – a fellow cab driver going in the opposite direction even honked at him and asked what was so funny.
After having sat in traffic for far too long, though the metre read 12£, he asked for a 10£ note and thank me, saying he ought to have paid me for the company and humour. With that, I dashed past St. James Palace en route for The Mall which, of course, was closed. Finally, I made it up to the Queen’s Gallery and took in the Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs exhibition, which did offer some truly inspired gems from the Royal Collection.
Well, of course, he ruled something.
I was reminded in this portrait of Tsar Nicholas I of the 1970s when the goods were readily on display; however, along came AIDS and all that display and ogling readily evaporated. Instead, men were morphed into true peacocks with long blow-dry locks, which really did become tiresome after a season or two. Now, of course, it is the great and truly civilised age of the Internet, which lest you forget, is saturated with more than 80% pornography.
The Vladimir Tiara which is not dissimilar to the Cambridge Lover’s Knot Tiara, which always looked truly handsome when worn by the ravishing, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Set in the green drawing room at Windsor Castle, where on May 19, 2018, Alexi Lubomirski took the official photographs of the wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex, you cannot possibly begin to imagine the overwhelming scope and grandeur of this tableau. Truly, one is left in awe of the fact that HM Queen Victoria was a tiny acorn who matured into a mighty oak who, through her womb, extended her empire far and wide across the continent. This was a ravishing exhibition and one of the most stunning paintings that I have ever seen from the Royal Collection.
After all that inspiring art, I needed to ground anew; thus, I opted to take a brisk walk, cutting through Green Park where the light fast shifted and danced below the horizon… never to be experienced again. With that, I hopped onto the Piccadilly Line at Green Park Station and made my way back to Russell Square Station; there, I resorted to my hotel room and took a lucidly awakened, dream-sodden nap before getting on with the final celebrations of this poignant Armistice Day.
Before making it to Barbican Station on the Circle Line, I had had the most awakened flying dream, which had me spirited across the spiral arms of Time to a past life in London.
To reflect, celebrate and give thanks, how could I not indulge in an evening of music and song with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Nice, plush comfortable seats with a troika of gay Jewish dancer/actors seated ahead of me. The evening was beautiful, the singing stellar.
As there was an empty seat on either side of me, I offered to move to the left and afforded the lovely young couple from Paris to sit together – she had been sat a row ahead and away from her spectacled, fey lover – he had more than a passing resemblance to Merlin. Leaning in, I whispered to him, “The universe always conspires to accommodate lovers…” he blushed, they both blushed sweetly and were pleasant company that added a certain magic to the evening. Here’s to lovers… indeed.
En route back to the hotel… a little late night smoothie snack was in order.
As ever, sweet dreams, don’t forget to push off and start flying and as always, thanks for your ongoing support.
Whilst Lucian Mann-Chomedy took in the pre-opera lecture, I sat on a bench in the middle of University Avenue, enjoying a rather exquisite four-cheese macaroni and cheese baked to perfection as I read a very good biography of Tudor matriarch, Margaret Beaufort. Before me was the glass palace to the city’s high arts, beautifully lit. There were no doubt in my mind that I was shortly going to be enjoying a beautiful night at the theatre.
Once inside, I got situated next to Lucian who chatted away in that way that scholar souls tend to drone on about all manner of data that others may find tedious at best but, for having a scholar task companion (Merlin), I have grown comfortably accustomed. Close by, a tall silver-haired man kept on admiring me, even none too discreetly making bodily contact as legs relaxed and splayed open wide; in years past, I would gladly have explored and indulged.
After having made the obligatory Instagram post, I turned off the phone as the house lights faded into nothingness and the magic was begun. Tchaikovsky, you say, how could one go wrong there. The curtain ascended and the most glorious lucid dream this side of the dreamtime then unfolded. The sparse set design courtesy of Michel Levin’s creative genius was both stark and beautiful. Just the right lighting and the desired mood readily effected.
Leaves leaves leaves everywhere, the lighting of which matched the set and costumes. Last week’s production lacked melody, apart from the fact that Tchaikovsky’s music was well-known, there was nothing to that soulless, dissonant affair that drew you in or proved memorable – save it was really god-awfully bad.
During intermission, I stepped outdoors into the cool autumn air to return a couple of calls and pre-order an Uber meal. On my return, Lucian rightly so remarked on what a changed vibe there was in the house to the week prior. Indeed, there was stillness that hung in the air after each aria before the house would break into applause.
The prince’s aria was especially sublime a performance. The familiarity of glorious Tchaikovsky music, melodies long associated with the world of dance were welcome in the world of opera as Alexander Pushkin’s vision was handsomely realised.
After intermission the stark scene was beautifully animated as chairs, costumes and dancing ruled during the ball scene. The ball scene was dominated by classic Tchaikovsky music that choreographers the past century have relished celebrating in dance.
In the final act, one of things that struck me was how void of emotion the opera, Hadrian, the week prior was. Watching Onegin’s love finally profess her love for him after all these years, yet, insisting that she had to carry on with her life, her comfortable life and not leave it all for the man who pined for her was truly captivating. Ahead of me, two rows, were a couple of ladies who during that duet looked at each other, one even wiped her eyes.
This duet totally captured the human condition; it was about love, passion, longing, loss and dashed dreams. We could all relate to it. The passion and emotion tugged at your heart centre. Last week, not only was the music the most irritatingly banal but there was emperor Hadrian seemingly love struck, yet there was never any passion and emotion in scenes between him and Antinous. If you had no clue that this was one of the greatest love stories in gay history, you could be forgiven in assuming that it was an emperor bereft at the loss of his only son and heir, leaving him without the will to carry on. There simply was no connection, between them and by extension the audience… no passion whatsoever. Regardless their homoerotic love, the opera failed to have aroused emotion, passion and thereby causing you to lose yourself and identify completely with Hadrian, Antinous… or both.
That’s what one goes to the theatre for. At curtain call, rather than jump up and flee the theatre horrified as last week, I shot to my feet, clapped and howled my face off. Everyone leaving the theatre was enrobed in warmth and had been inspired to believe anew in love… that’s what great art does. What a truly memorable night in the theatre, this beautiful, passionate opera is with great melodies to spirit you along, long after you headed out into the world in the cool autumnal night air.
As ever, dream with the greatest passion for it is a true love affair indulged with self each and every day. Love yourself with new abandon and push off and start flying because you really are a truly spectacular work of art. As ever, thanks for your ongoing support. I love you more than you know.