Some time ago I thought of trying to write a chamber opera on the life of the artist Modigliani but have never found a way to do it. Maybe I just wasn’t really that enthusiastic. Other people have been though because in a newspaper article I read there have been nine novels, a play, a documentary, three films and, of course, biographies so I doubt this late in the day I will ever get around to it. It’s truly amazing when one thinks that in his lifetime he could not sell his art and gave away paintings to pay for meals and the moment he was dead they couldn’t go quickly enough at ever increasing prices. Admittedly his art is not everybody’s cup of tea but nowadays in the heyday of what is called conceptual art we have so called artists making fortunes in the most ridiculous fashion; fashion probably being the word for it. Do the emperor’s clothes come to mind?
The two journalists I miss who write for The Sunday Times are India Knight and A.A.Gill but I am compensated somewhat by another journalist whose column I read every Friday in The Daily Mail, the one English paper I take for reviews since boycotting The Times. This is Jan Moir who not only talks a lot of sense but who does it with panache and is always worth a chuckle somewhere down the line. The manager of a shop complained about a woman breast feeding her baby which has resulted in a positive furore; but if I may quote Miss Moir without breaching copyright, “This small incident has been the starting gun for a blast of instant maternal affront and Curse of the Mummy style fury. Emphasising once more that it takes a brave man – or woman – to get between the modern young mother and her perceived statutory rights. These include, as if we all didn’t know, the right to mow you down with a buggy if you don’t get out of the way quickly enough; the right to behave as if they have just given birth to the second coming of Christ instead of a farty little squirt called Sam.” I love it. She could have called it any one of a hundred boys’ names but Sam just fits the bill, like Coward’s “brittle”, and the description of “farty little squirt” is just perfect. I look forward to her column every week, that is when we can get The Mail. In the winter it’s not always available as the distributors in Xania seem sooner or later to fall out with every shop in Kalyves prepared to sell foreign newspapers. Silly really considering the hundreds of ex-pats how now live on Crete especially, or so it would seem, in this area called the Apokoronos.