Larry Buttrose

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

DYLAN THOMAS: DEATH IN THE CHELSEA HOTEL

Although he is generally considered to have drunk himself to death, the popular Welsh poet is now believed by some experts to have died due to over-medication by a doctor. Thomas was in New York in November 1953 on a public reading tour, when after a night of heavy drinking, during which he boasted to have drunk 18 whiskies, he awoke feeling unwell in his room in the Chelsea Hotel.

He complained of shortness of breath as well as his chronic gastric and gout problems, and a doctor was called who gave him painkillers. Thomas was still in pain and experiencing delirium when the doctor was called back, and after the patient asked for something to make him sleep, he was administered with an injection of morphine.

Hospital records reveal the dosage to have been abnormally high, and hazardous given the difficulties Thomas was having with breathing. After the injection he drifted into a coma, from which he did not emerge, watched over in his hospital bed by his lover Elizabeth Reitell, and fellow poet John Berryman. He died a few days later, on 9 November, the official cause of death cited as pneumonia.

The 39 year old Thomas was one of the best known poets in the English-speaking world at the time, famed for the beauty of his imagery, and a heady lyricism acquired from the Welsh language in works such as his play for voices Under Milk Wood. He was also renowned for his poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, an angry rejection of mortality, written after the death of his father.

He was born in Swansea, and started writing during childhood. He entered journalism and moved to London where his collections of poems in the mid 1930s gained attention. He became a well-known voice on BBC radio during the 1940s, and continued publishing poems, with his Collected Poems appearing in 1952.

With his turbulent marriage to his wife Caitlin under pressure, to find income for them and their two children he started doing lecture tours of the east coast of the United States. He also contemplated the ephemeral riches of the movies in Hollywood, and like many authors watched his film plans turn to vapour in his fingers. The reading tours proved popular though, and he continued them for several years up to his death. He also came to appreciate the attentions of Elizabeth Reitell, who it was summoned the doctor to his bedside on 4 November 1953.

Despite his reputation as a successful poet, the items recovered from their room in the Chelsea Hotel, and rediscovered decades later in an old filing cabinet in Wales, reveal a life of struggle. Amid racing tips on scraps of paper, and bottles of antacids, was his publishing contract for Under Milk Wood, specifying an advance of 250 pounds, and the standard six free author copies, the document stipulating that any further copies could be purchased at “25 per cent less than the published price”.

His widow was later informed that his estate comprised the sum of eight pounds.

Although Thomas attended an early reading of Under Milk Wood, it was not produced until the year after his death. The atmospheric, comic-dramatic piece became his most famous single work, recorded with Richard Burton reading, and was later made into a feature film. Sadly, Dylan Thomas was not there to see his work on the big screen at last.

“Here's to alcohol, the cause of — and solution to — all life's problems.”

- Homer Simpson

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

Sunday, June 17, 2012

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND IN THE NIGHT GARDEN

Although the world’s major religions promise eternal life to those who faithfully follow their various laws and taboos, no-one can comprehend what eternal life would be like. This is because life’s finiteness, bounded irrevocably by death, is a key defining characteristic of what we call the human condition. But as regards the promises by religions of eternal life, all we know is that this life is all we know, and beyond it – unless we take seriously the imagery of floating on clouds playing harps, or an endless virgin orgy – we know nothing.

But what would we do forever, anyway? Go fishing? Drink Moet? Fuck? Take ecstasy? Improve our putting? Tweet? Even those delights would not seem adequate to fill all those aeons which would be, truthfully, endless. Could we stand it, if beyond death we had anything like the attention spans and boredom thresholds we have in this life? “Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” quoth Unknown. The fact is we have no possible conception of what it would be like to live forever.

In many respects, too, curiously enough, death is our friend. It is ultimate release from all we have carried through life. For those whose lives have been marked by desperate poverty, chronic illness or other suffering – and that goes for a large proportion of the human population – death may be seen as a saviour, even redemption.

It is a fact that our lives are painfully brief, and will remain for the foreseeable future (notwithstanding advances in medical science, and our inevitable physical melding with the machines of our own creation). We have barely left the womb when they are burying us in a box. Threescore and ten, and the rest is silence. It seems a pitifully short span, when all around us is the manifest immensity of space, and stars that have been burning for billions of our years. One is tempted to say that a longer span of life could enrich us, and bring us deeper wisdom as a race, but for the troubling thought that there is no fool like an old fool.

But eternity? Could we stand eternity? After all, could we live with others, for all time? As Sartre might have noted, that would not be eternal Heaven, but Hell. Even worse than that, we would have to live with ourselves forever, and how few of us enjoy spending time with that particular individual too? Yet still we long for an afterlife, for eternal life, deliverance from the grave, for Heaven, Valhalla, release from the karmic wheel. So, for what, really, are we longing?

Parents with young children get a tiny, nightly foretaste of what eternal life could be like, through a television show called In The Night Garden. It is the brainchild of a clever Englishman named Andrew Davenport, who also dreamed up its renowned precursor, Tellytubbies. The characters of In The Night Garden - headed by a bright blue Gumby-like creature with a lop-sided grin called Igglepiggle, a doll with a wild rainbow of hair and an inflatable skirt named Upsy-Daisy, an OCD rock-collecting pre-tech head called Makka-Pakka, and the trousers-losing cuddly trio the Tombliboos - inhabit a charming, twilit, woodland domain. In each episode they wander around, sublimely happy, thinking of nothing more taxing than whether it’s a “dancy day” or not. They snuggle, kiss, chatter on in squeaks and squawks of even fewer than 140 characters, and generally dream their time away. Even if something potentially untoward does happen, and the green puffer zeppelin called the Pinky Ponk that they are flying in strikes a tree, the worst thing that the kindly narrator Derek Jacobi ever utters is “Isn’t that a funny Pinky Ponk, bumping into that tree!”, and ends the episode with the trademark, “Isn’t that a pip!”

The characters of In The Night Garden appear to possess little or no memory, and thrive in the bliss of an eternal present, puttering about their little patch of woodland singing, dancing, collecting stones, and engaged in other eternally repetitive acts. Memory, of course, is the enemy of eternal bliss, even eternal sanity. Because if we have no recollection of what we did half an hour ago, or even five minutes ago, every hour can be filled with discovery, forever renewed, which we might happily go on with, well, forever. None of the characters can speak very much – in fact most of them can hardly speak at all – which would place them under the age of three average human years. Three is the age at which “individuation”, or the sense of one’s self as separate from the world around, is usually thought to occur, so that in the case of the show’s characters, there is a sense that they remain linked to one another, and to their world, on a deep and abiding level. The sense of complete immersion in something greater than one’s self is woven deeply into the psyche of In The Night Garden: the world it evokes is a virtual reality unto itself.

Curiously enough, we all lived the first few years of our lives in much the same way that Igglepiggle and Upsy-Daisy do, that is, taking each moment for what it is, something new and wonderful, and never looking back at the ever widening wake of hours, weeks, months and years that we leave behind us, which is the increasing habit of humans as we accrue our revolutions around the sun. In adulthood we retain little or no memory of those earliest years, yet despite this we know that we most surely lived them, and each and every moment of them as if it were a tiny eternity of its own. Could this be what eternal life might be like?

As we grow older, we tend to perplex ourselves with death more and more. This is not surprising: after all, its inevitable arrival becomes more imminent by the hour. But we do not worry ourselves so much, if at all, about who, where and what we were before we were born and lived, which is surely just as mysterious as when we die and live no more. If one deep mystery does not concern us, and we simply accept it - then why not the other? The suspicion, which is a fair one, that they are linked in some way – that is, our state pre-birth and post-death – should suggest to us that if nothing untoward appeared to be happening to us before we were born, why should we worry that it will after we die?

But it is this very uncertainty that religion, and all manner of hucksters of the soul and self, trade upon. But do we really need the abracadabra and hocus-pocus of religion to get us through the end of this life, that is coming for us all? Does any one of them truly know any more of death than any one of the rest of us? No matter what we tell our preachers, the answer, we know in our bones, is no.

As for God, a deity of some kind - who are we to know either way? We are puny specks of dust pumped up with very grand ideas. Could we ever know what or who is behind Everything? We are hardly down from the trees, still mass murder each other at will and celebrate it with pomp and spectacle, hardly know what day it is, and can't even make up our minds between a shiraz and a cabernet. In the immortal words of Sergeant Shultz, "I know nah-think!"

Everyone before us has gone through death. And so shall we, each of us in our own singular circumstance and manner. And, should we arrive on the other side of this scrim of a world, in a pleasant patch of woodland where we happily collect cool, rounded stones until the end of time, then as the last ember of the cosmos sputters and burns out like a candle on the wick, perhaps we shall go on happily collecting our stones, beyond space, beyond time, all the while thinking, “Isn’t that a pip!”

Sunday, June 3, 2012

SHOPPER BEWARE OF FOODS GROWN IN JAPAN, SAYS DR HELEN CALDICOTT. “EAT FOODS GROWN IN AUSTRALIA THE SAFEST ANSWER,” SHE SAYS.

Physician and environmentalist Dr Helen Caldicott says Australians should beware of buying any food products from Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Nobel-prize nominated Australian physician made the comment at a public meeting in Katoomba last Wednesday (30 May 2012), organised by the Blue Mountains Food Co-op. She said the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima and subsequent explosions at the plant had resulted in the release of massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and ocean, even far greater than released in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

The accident was rated two and a half to five times worse than Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst industrial accident of all time. Of particular relevance to Australians is that the uranium in the Fukushima plant came from Australia, she said.

Radioactive elements such as iodine, caesium and strontium had been released into the food chain across Japan, and were being circulated by wind and rain and then concentrated in the food chain. Elevated levels of radioactivity had been found in food products from as far south as Okinawa, she said. As well, products from less contaminated regions were being mixed with more contaminated ones, so that consumers had no idea how dangerous foods from any part of Japan might be.

“Once radioactive elements enter the body, you can’t get rid of them, and they can trigger mutations that lead to cancer, over a time scale from two up to 70 years.”

Many foods from Japan are popular with Australian consumers, and are on many supermarket shelves. These include rice, shitake mushrooms, green tea, soy milk, soy sauces, miso, udon and soba noodles, nori and other foods from the sea.

She said fish were at particular risk, with reports of contaminated tuna being caught as far away as the coast of California. While the northern and southern hemispheres have separate air circulatory systems, that is not the case with the oceans, she said, and contaminated fish could migrate throughout the Pacific, including to Australia.

Dr Caldicott also warned that foods from many parts of Europe were contaminated still from the Chernobyl disaster - and would continue to be so for hundreds of years.

“In Germany there are wild boar so contaminated they almost glow in the dark, and have to be disposed of like nuclear waste,” she said.

“The safest solution for Australian consumers is to buy foods grown in Australia.”

Monday, May 14, 2012

THE STRANGE LIFE AND STRANGER DEATH OF MARK ROTHKO

Like many artists, Mark Rothko was many people. He was the European emigre enjoying a better life in America; he was the impoverished adolescent from a political family who met anarchist Emma Goldman; and he was the young anarchist who studied at Yale. He repudiated abstraction and colour field, yet became known as the most famous of abstract artists and colour field painters.

Rothko was born in Russia and migrated to the US with his family in 1913. After leaving Yale he studied art in New York where he lived like most young artists, on very little, and in the 1930s began showing in New York galleries. His works of the late 1930s and early 1940s delved into mythology and symbology, typified by pieces such as The Omen of the Eagle (1942). During the latter 1940s he evolved his best-known painting style, of large-scale blocks of colour stacked upon each other, usually sombre in tone, which to some viewers represented an emotional landscape, while to others they were more “apocalyptic wallpaper”. He eschewed titling works for the most part, as well as explanation, allowing viewers their own reactions to his work.

Strangely enough though, he gained most attention though for a work he did not do. In 1959 he had been commissioned to create a set of large-scale murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York. The epitome of high modernist urban block design, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the dark monolithic skyscraper had only just opened, and the Four Seasons was being touted as the city’s most lavish new eating house and playpen for the rich.

Rothko had completed the paintings, but confided to John Fischer, an editor with Harper’s magazine, that the restaurant was “a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off”, adding that he wanted to make them feel “they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up”. Fischer quoted him as saying: “I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”

British commentator Jonathan Jones remarked that in holding these views, Rothko was “trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions”. Nonetheless, Jones adds, “Rothko must have felt he had been deluded - that the wealthy diners were not going to be harrowed. That art could not change anything.”

Whatever the case, Rothko decided against handing over the murals, and gave back the money - $35,000, a very large sum for almost any artist, then and now.

He went on to be one of the most collected of the painters of the 1950s and 1960s, in major collections in the US, Britain and Europe, and the paintings he did for the Four Seasons now hang in London’s Tate Modern, having arrived, eerily enough, on the day of his suicide, in 1970.

He was found dead in a pool of blood on the floor of his Bowery studio, having hacked deep into his arms and shoulders with his paint knife. It was remarked at the time that the sombre, dark red pool of blood in which he lay, approximately six feet by eight, was in some ways akin to one of his own canvases, a colour field. Rothko might have repudiated that too, but he might not have resiled from the notion of its being his last work of art.

While it has been argued that Italian masters took grubby money from Medicis and popes without its hurting them or their work, the contradictions for Rothko of his Four Seasons experience may have been too much for the one-time anarchist and lifelong leftist who once met Emma Goldman.

“Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough.”

- last words of Karl Marx, died 1883