Guardian Readers and LA Flea Market

I wrote this on my Facebook page today:

Guardian Readers: just lately it seems that people like Banks and Farage use the phrase 'Guardian readers' as if we're some kind of weird specimens from Mars or Snowflakes from Hampstead. I have read the Guardian since the 1970s for the great journalism. John Arlott was one of the greatest and Neville Cardus was too.

There they are above.

In the 1980s one of my favourite journos was James Cameron (no not that one) who corresponded with me – hand written as did the chess correspondent.

And before anybody says that was then and this is now, there are still great journalists contributing and not all from the liberal left – on Saturday there was a piece in the Journal by Katy Balls, of The Spectator (the Tory speccy), so not just one sided and they even pay 'rude boy' Owen Jones.
The greatest thing about The Guardian is that nobody owns it unlike The Telegraph which is owned by someone who owns The Ritz and one of the channel islands; and by de way - who reputedly doesn't pay tax!

The Times is owned by the Murdoch empire and The Mail – oh who cares who owns it – it supported Hitler in its day – but that was then and this is now. What they do now is bad mouth the royal family.
The greatest guy who ever wrote for The Guardian and The Observer was Clive James.

That's what I wrote or, to use an anonymous (to me) American writer 'that's all she wrote.'

Going on – in the 1920s there was a publisher in London called Grant Richards; he was a bit of a dandy, never without a monocle or a handkerchief flopping out of his top pocket (no he never had a monocle flopping out of his top pocket). He lived his life regretting the writers he either didn't or couldn't publish. He lost James Joyce's first book Dubliners as he wanted to edit it but Joyce would not let him – good old Jimmy.

Richards published works by George Bernard-Shaw and A.E. Housman - A Shropshire Lad , Housman's most famous work, was included and, when he was approached by Neville Cardus, who sent him a scruffy packet of news-cuttings, he published Cardus' A Cricketer's Book, even though he knew nothing about cricket, saying anything that came out of The Guardian stable was worth backing on general principles.

So there that's what I have to say about The Guardian today.

Now I do not want to mention the name of the famous actress who is interviewed in today's copy of the paper so I won't but there is a lot of paranoia in the article; she keeps thinking her phone is being tapped or interfered with – it's an unfortunate expression as the poor woman is one of those who was a victim of Harvey Weinstein – that Adonis of a man who women would fall over themselves to be with – I don't think.

Why is it all the ugly fat bastards think they are god's gift to women? I mean can you imagine poor Mrs Trump having to wake up each morning beside that great big lump of a leviathan – oh I think he's great for the economy – they said that about Hitler.

Hey that's twice on this page he is mentioned.

The actress was married, one time, to a restaurateur who, when I met him, was an actor and played a small part in one of David Lynch's films; he was English and when I said I saw him in it, he came out with the line we all use 'I had more than that in the movie – it was gonna be a series but ya know!'

What I found strange was that he was English and the gonna and the ya know kind of stuck out a bit.

His ex- wife – did I say they were parted? Well yes – would come to the flea market in Los Angeles and I would recognise her and wonder about him.

He was fine and spoke nicely about David Lynch but I saw him many times at that market and we never said another word to one another; I found out that he was also a song writer and I was going to mention it to him but when I saw him the next time he skulked behind a car, looked in the side/wing mirror and adjusted his hair; then he patted his head on top to see if he could get that bit of a quiff to lay down. When he did this it came back up again, just like the boy in the strip Hergé's Adventures of Tintin .

So he had to pat it down again.

This would have been enough for me but as he walked towards me he went behind another car and started slapping his head again. By this time I ducked behind another car as he came passed. I was going to throw him a comb at this point but the thought did cross my mind that I should throw a sock full of dog shit at him instead.

So there we are for today – always remember, when you are on your soap box, what Shostakovich reputedly said to Pablo Picasso “it's okay being a communist if you don't live in a communist country.”

The Sofa, the pulley and the manager.

There we are on my favourite ever sofa. I put the photo up on Facebook recently because I like it.

I'll repeat here what I said there: when Fred MacMurray, the Hollywood movie star, died, his wife was left a widow for about fourteen years and then when she died, all of their belongings were put into auction, and that was his sofa; we bought it and got it at a good rate. He was in one of my favourite films Double Indemnity where he would call Barbara Stanwick 'baby' throughout and that's what I would call my wife as we sat on that sofa, and ever since, no more than a mile or so from where the classic movie was shot and set.

I bought other things at that auction too over the years: I bought Liberace's candelabra; I didn't keep it as I bought it on behalf of someone else. I think on that day there was a piece of paper, ordinary lined exercise paper from the UK – you can always tell as their paper sizes are different – and on that paper was the lyric, written by John Lennon in his own hand, to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ; it went for a fortune, well a fortune to me. Maybe around $25,000 and well worth it too as other sales, consequently, are much higher than that. When the hammer went down on it there was a burst of applause.

I think we also bought stuff from the Anne Miller estate when she died and it went up for auction – what's that? you never heard of her? Your loss!!

Most of her stuff was jewellery and monogrammed make up utensils etc. – one sale had an Oscar which was won by Charles Coburn. I held it, posed with it etc. but no photos. They don't sell Oscars any more as they are the property of the Academy who give them out - hang on Oscar® - that's better. 

That one would have found its way to Kevin Spacey who would buy all of them and donate them back to the Academy – there we are, you see, not a bad man after all; fancy him making a pass at another man – tut tut.

Look at the picture (above) and just passed us is our front door; it led to a walkway outside which was five floors up, looking out on to a court yard which was beautiful when we first moved in but a new owner of the building decided to dump the plants and beautiful fountains and left some false kind of plants down there on the concrete.

It took two goes at laying the concrete as it wasn't flat and in the El Niño rains, around the year two thousand, the rain water ran under some of the doors on the ground floor and ruined some of their stuff.

Us? five floors up and a flood? You wouldn't believe it but yes.

The owners did something to the French Windows so that the water out on the balcony rose above the bottom of the door and into our apartment – so our carpet was ruined and replaced.

When it was being replaced we had to put all our stuff in to the bathroom, on the balcony and through that front door. I put my guitar in to the bath with a few other things.

The chief carpet man was a keen guitarist and kept asking me a lot of questions about my guitar and I would say 'would you like to play it' and he would say 'no signor, I have to lay the carpet.'

I left the guys working on the new carpet as I had to get to rock'n'roll Ralphs and when I got back I went into the bathroom and could see he had played my guitar. Maybe he thought I was a professional and was a bit shy to play in front of me – that thought has just come to me now.

I can't believe that I sat in Arturo's guitar shop on Sunset Blvd (another post) as he very expertly played flamingo guitar to me, on an instrument he had just made with his bare hands and he would play that guitar with his nails clicking on the plectrum board and other places on the guitar and when he handed it to me, a guitar player of . . well let's put it this way - I was to a guitar what Steven Seagal is, or was, to acting.

What I can't believe is that I took the instrument from him and played. 

Played accompanying myself as I sang Robert Johnson's Crossroads and The Beatles I will! 'hey you got a great voice' said the great man; nothing about the guitar playing.

Back to that door again; that is the door that that sofa came through. It was too big for the elevator/lift so we had to haul it up on a pulley on the outside of the building.

I had a friend who had an open truck and he, me and Nobel, the manager of the building, hauled it up.

'Pull. Pull. Stop. Hold it. Lower it back down. Pull. Too far. Etc. 

Our voices echoing through the building. A building we lived in for may fifteen of the seventeen years we lived in LA.

And Nobel the manager? The first sight of Nobel was of a Sikh with long white hair in a pony tail, and a beard. But he wasn't a Sikh at all. He had an Indian accent but said he was British. He also said he was 99 years old – he wasn't but he told everybody he was and when I told him my name was Sullivan he said 'pleased to meet you, Mister Callaghan.' 

He was hard of hearing but never used a hearing aid and would cup his hand around his ears with a big 'what??' if he didn't hear what was said.

Before we moved in I called him on the phone and said 'it's Chris Sullivan here' and he said 'hello Mister Callaghan.'

Always a bit of humour.

He would always complain about The Beatles getting the M.B.E. - bloody Beatles, he would say.

I gave him a lift somewhere one day and there were others in the car too, as we had a big Chevy Nova. We went to a pharmacists and there was an old woman in there who was trying to spend her Ralphs Card as if it had any value. She was getting really upset and wanted her purchases as she called them. I found out she didn't live far so I gave her a ride home.

I said to Nobel 'the poor women was trying to use her Ralphs card in there' and he said 'what do you mean, she's your accountant?'

I have never figured out how he deduced from what I said to what he thought I said.

He was actually about 80 years old and did some work, in his youth, with Albert Schweitzer, the French theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary, in the leper colonies in Hawaii.

When he was in hospital I would go in and cut his hair and beard. He was in the same hospital, The Good Samaritan, where Robert Kennedy died after he was shot in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd.

A couple of times when I would cut Nobel's beard I would nick him on the lip and he would pull a terrible face but he was always very grateful.

He was a hoarder and would never throw anything away – his apartment was full of stuff: mattresses, shopping carts – you name it. The owners promised to clear the apartment if he would vacate it and that's what happened and he went to live in a home. But they kept taking him to hospital and I think the move – making him homeless - killed him. He just gave up.

The last time I went to cut his hair, at the hospital, he was fast asleep and two ambulance men came in and woke him up to take him back to the home. 'you can't take me away' he said 'I'm dead.”

He actually thought he was. But he did die fairly soon afterwards. I didn't have anything to do with things after that as he didn't have a funeral – he was burned by the city in the monthly cremation; that happened to a lot of people I knew in LA. Nobel knew that was where he was going.

He had two bank accounts with around $250,000 in each account as I used to draw his money out of one of them every month and put it in to another account to pay his rent – I don't know what happened to all that money but I have my suspicions.