west cromwell road
"As you well know, there are some who do not think well of the Glass Bead Game. They say it is a substitute for the arts, and that the players are mere populizers; that they can no longer be regarded as truly devoted to the things of the mind, but are merely artistic dilletantes given to improvisation and feckless fancy."
I heard the Rolling Stones were going to play the Royal Albert Hall and immediately wrote to the European distributors for Portable Gallery Press asking them to get me a ticket. They did procure a fine ticket and offered a place to stay for the visit as well. Ike and Tina Turner were the warm-up group, my seat was excellent, and after watching Tina and then Mick move on stage I felt I didn't want to do any more sculpture. No way to beat that dazzling kinetic sculpture, foolish even to try. Yoko Ono was probably the only person in the local London art scene who could understand that.
Even more than in NYC, the London art world was about making merchandise and marketing it. Aside from a small group of sculptors, there was little innovative work being done, very few exhibitions of the international stars of the time, and only a fraction of the galleries to be found in NYC. Compared to the music world, it was deadly boring and uninteresting. I was more than ready for a break from having art world concerns a daily part of my life, so had little complaint and made no special effort to participate in what little was happening aside from Yoko's extraordinary exhibitions and the eccentric antics of Derek Jarman who became a good friend and whose studio on the banks of the Thames was a favorite place to visit.
I rented the ground floor of a Victorian row house in the West Cromwell Road, with a walled garden. The road had not yet been widened and the block still had much of the character it retained from the post-War years when it had been a cul-de-sac. The two main rooms had 14-foot ceilings and each had a small fireplace with marble mantle. I had not been living there for long before a Canadian artist and dilletante extraordinaire named Michael McKibbon moved in with me, an arrangement which continued for over five years.
I raised the floor of about three-quarters of the front room, with recessed cutouts forming a long sofa space and chair around the fireplace. The raised platform was covered in dark gray carpet and the walls painted a matching color, leaving the only spots of color the few paintings given space in that room. The large bedroom, as mentioned in another Tale, was lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling and painted a deep red. Only the kitchen and bathroom looked anything like the usual English decor and, combined with the velvet trousers and embroidered jackets we were generally wearing, the establishment served to give us something of a classic English eccentric reputation which pleased us both.
There was sufficient income from the occasional sale of a painting and the continued activity of Portable Gallery Press to support our lifestyle without any need to take outside employment, and the place was equipped with an excellent sound system, large color television set, and ever-growing library. There were two cats, Fred and Adele. When Crosby, Stills and Nash released the record our house is a very very fine house, with two cats in the yard, it seemed as if it had been written about Number 80 West Cromwell Road.
Michael liked to sleep late, often until noon, so I would spend most mornings in the front room listening to music via headphones. I worked my way through almost the entire operatic catalogue, following with libretto, sometimes listening to different versions of the same work for days. I subscribed to a rental library which would send me a parcel of recordings several times a week, so everything which was currently available could be borrowed and I would take the Schwann catalogue and work my way through a composer's recorded output, adding many new favorites to my list of admired works and composers.
I did little painting, mostly small portraits of friends, no longer using a folded-canvas technique, but still drawing with paint poured from a plastic bottle, then blotted with drawing paper, which yielded both the canvas, colored in, and a drawing in reverse which was left as plain line. To my own way of thinking, some of my best work was done during that time and the portraits often captured the essence of the person in a way which was uncanny for such a sparse, decorative style.
I wrote two novels. The Sandman was set in a future time when a worldwide grid controlled the populace by manipulation of dreams, so that all conflicts were nipped in the bud and antisocial tendencies eliminated via dreams rather than being played out in real life. An elite group of people were chosen to be exempt from the Sandman's contact, forming an academy partly modeled on Hesse's Castalia, and a major plot line involved a young man who rebelled and escaped the Sandman's influence even though being rejected for the academy. I was never fully satisfied with the book and did not submit it to a publisher; the manuscript burned in the Chelsea Hotel fire some years later. The other book was set in a lighter future fantasy world and was accepted by a publisher on condition I padded out the ending; I lost interest.
We were a part of a local scene of young English men and women who were on the fringe of the true "high society" of London but often mingled with those who were; weekends at country houses with Princesses and Dukes were interspersed with following musicians around to out-of-the-way pubs, frequent little gatherings for dinner in small Chelsea or Victoria restaurants, attending almost every new theatrical production. It began as a lifestyle based on alcohol consumption, but changed dramatically when psychoactive drugs replaced the beer and whiskey, as did the lifestyles of many of the musicians when they, too, began to explore alternative refreshments.
Our best friend, a member of the illustrious Grosvenor family, was a keen enthusiast of British history and under his influence, I read many books I might not otherwise have opened, including much of Victoria's writing which in turn led to acquiring quite a large collection of Victorian memorabilia. Our friend led many expeditions over the years to all the historic sites of England and I do not think there is a prehistoric site, castle, museum or Great House in all of England that I have not visited at least once. I feel especially fortunate to have visited Stonehenge at a time when it was isolated, little visited, and reaching it required tramping across muddy fields; to have attended the festival when the largest of the White Horse figures is refreshed, amid early English music and dance; and to have visited Victoria and Albert's tomb, open so rarely, with its magnificent white marble angels.
We rarely left England, but did spend several months one summer in Amsterdam, living on a Rhine barge berthed in a canal in the center of the city. There was no water on the barge, so taking a shower involved a walk to the Municipal Baths, in a summer which was so hot that the effort was somewhat wasted in the sweat of the return trek. Those months in Amsterdam are a haze in the memory, a kaleidoscope of sex and drugs and buying exotic carpets and objects in the flea market.
That summer made a major change in our lives. Michael leaned more and more to the Kesey School of Psychedelics, I was firmly in the Leary camp. Eventually the incompatibility made living together too difficult. He decided to experience living in New York City for the first time and, after a stormy and difficult transition to solo living with many unsatisfactory stabs at finding a new partner, I sold or gave away most of the contents of the apartment and left on an extended visit to America.
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