Orang-utan typing on a computer asking what are you writing?

What Are You Writing?

When someone says: what are you writing? It sounds in my ears like they’re saying: I’m going to set fire to your house. Or I’m going to kill your dog. And I don’t even have a dog. It’s like asking a man: are you still beating your wife? He is condemned by the question. Asking […]

Image Shows Salvador Dali holding a seashell as he sails out to sea

Salvador Dali Brings Simon Baker to Cadaqués

An album – a feast, a spectrum, a kaleidoscope – of some of the world’s best photography opens in the streets, bars and galleries of Cadaqués on 1 October 2021 at the start of the InCadaqués International Festival of Photography – now in its fifth year – the second year of Covid.  The best? Absolutely. After […]

Poetic License and La Bohème - poster from the opera

Poetic Licence and La Bohème

Pucccini’s opera La Bohème isn’t a love story. It is a warning to women never to fall for a poet. Poets – like politicians – tell you the grey sky is blue and you believe them. It’s what they call poetic licence. Politicians we can get rid of. Poets live on with their rhymes and […]

Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan contemplating the idea that there must be some kind of way out of here

There must be some kind of way out of here

Two riders stop on a hilltop. They gaze across the valley at a castle surrounded by farmland where people labour in the fields. In the castle, princes and their beautiful women drink wine while barefoot servants come and go unnoticed. ‘There must be some kind of way out of here?’ says one rider to the […]

Image show Mata Hari – Nude Dancer, Spy, Existentialist

Mata Hari – Nude Dancer, Spy, Existentialist

Mata Hari is famous for three things: nude dancing, spying and being shot by firing squad.  Born in 1876 in Holland, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle came from a wealthy family and was removed from her élite school when the headmaster was caught flirting with her – her fault, naturally. At 18, she married Rudolf MacLeod, a […]