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THE CRAZY OIK ISSUE 10 SUMMER 2011 2 THE CRAZY OIK ISSUE 10 SUMMER 2011 THE CRAZY OIK 10 ALBERT ROAD GRAPPENHALL WARRINGTON WA4 2PG Website: www.crazyoik.co.uk Published July 2011 by The Crazy Oik 10 Albert Road Grappenhall Warrington © The contributors The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of the work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers The Good Fight and For Me Boss are from Paul Tanner’s collection Dole Anthems. Bonny Scotland and Haunted are from Tom Kilcourse’s latest collection More Short Stories. Actress is from Nigel Ford’s collection One Dog Barking. 4 Front Cover –The Sirens and Ulysses (detail) – William Etty 1787-1849 William Etty’s huge painting The Sirens and Ulysses 10 ft x 15ft was last displayed in 1857. For the next hundred and fifty years it mouldered in the basement of Manchester’s Moseley Street Art Gallery. Mouldered is probably the right word since it was in bad condition with pieces cracking and falling away. But maybe Victorian sensibilities had a role in its neglect since Etty was considered almost a pornographer, fascinated as he was with flesh – usually female flesh. In 2000 restoration began and six years later it was back on view. Howard Jacobson, Manc oik and novelist, looked again at Etty, inter alia, in his TV presentation of The Genius of British Art – an episode entitled Flesh. Howard’s take on this was that it’s modern prudes who are suppressing this stuff, that the monarch, Victoria, was as horny as a horntoad and that the contemporary patrons of art were also lechers who couldn’t get enough of it. Etty did die rich and, if not famous, at least notorious. Certainly the contents of the Lady Lever gallery at Port Sunlight support this contention (see Ron Horsefield’s Salammbo on p 92) with lots of Ettys on display. Maybe a woman is required to break this taboo – just as we accept Jewish jokes from Woody Allen and the repeated “niggers” from Samuel L Jackson in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. And so it is the crusading curator of York Art Gallery, Sarah Burnage, has set up an exhibition of one hundred of Etty’s works running between June 25 2011 and January 22 2012. Etty was born and died in York but even there much of his bequest to the gallery has been hidden until now. Illustrations William James 22 Steatopygous 34 Eric Laithwaite 44 Fat Edith 53 The Greenhalghs 66 Django Rheinhardt 77 Heidegger 82 Nivea Anti-wrinkle cream 91 Salammbo 92 6 CONTENTS EDITORIAL - Ken Clay 8 THE BEAT YEARS – Ken Champion 11 BONNY SCOTLAND – Tom Kilcourse 23 MUMMY’S NEW BOYFRIEND – S. Kadison 26 ST MACHAR’S BAR – Matthew Baron 33 HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY – Zohar Teshartok 35 THE GOOD FIGHT - Tanner 37 REDEMPTION – Bronwyn Wild 38 LAITHWAITE’S SPIN – Brett Wilson 41 SIX OF ONE AND HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER- Dave Birtwistle 45 THREE UNEASY PIECES – Marie Feargrieve 52 MY LIFE IN PRINT : CHAPTER 14 – Ray Blyde 54 FOR ME BOSS - Tanner 63 DIFFERENT STROKES – Brett Wilson & Marie Feargrieve 64 HAUNTED – Tom Kilcourse 68 IMAGINE – Sean Parker 71 THE GREATEST SEX PERVERT EVER – Andrew Pidoux 78 ACTRESS PART 2 – Nigel Ford 83 SALAMMBO – Ron Horsefield 92 THE ODD COUPLE – Marie Feargrieve 96 THE CRAZY OIK COLLECTION 99 SUBSCRIBE TO THE OIK 100 EDITORIAL ETTY REDUX You may think this issue of the Oik should appear in a brown bag on the top shelf at a filling station. But I suppose if you do you’d have stopped reading the Oik long ago. We make no apologies for drawing readers’ attention to a great English artist many of whose works are in North West galleries. The Sirens is a recent addition to Manchester’s Moseley Street while the Lady Lever at Port Sunlight holds many more (see Ron Horsefield’s account on page 92). Well not quite a recent addition since it’s been hidden in the basement for the last 150 years. One wonders why. William Etty, (1787 – 1849) described as a shy bachelor, persevered against parochial prudery, became an RA and got rich. His speciality was the nude and he spent some time in Venice much influenced by Titian. They say he couldn’t draw; they said that about Titian too, but he was a genius at rendering flesh. A mate of mine quietly ogling Andromeda in the Lady Lever, was accosted by a scouse philistine who proclaimed it “pornographic”. What a compliment. Bill would have been proud. But decide for yourself at the great Etty exhibition on at York until January 2012. This intro may seem off the point for a literary mag but the Oik seeks to widen your horizons – to become more eclectic. To this end we have Brett Wilson introducing us to the ideas of that crazy electrician Eric Laithwaite (Newton was wrong said Eric) and then collaborating with Marie Feargrieve to explore the mysteries of art authenticity – particularly apropos the Greenhalghs, Bolton oiks who managed to fool many in the art establishment. Mysteries? Hardly; it’s what happens when rich git meatheads scrabble for a unique object. Among others the Greenhalghs fooled the Wildenstein Institute with a fake Gaugin. As I write this a Monet, agreed by all the top jockeys to be the real thing has been given the thumbs down by the same institute. It was on TV (Fake or Fortune BBC1 June 19th) Are they discredited, shamed, exposed? No. Seems like the art industry is as corrupt as banking. 8 Elsewhere, in a purely literary vein, we have great stories by Ken Champion and S. Kadison and two new crazy oiks Andrew Pidoux and Zohar Teshartok. Sean Parker, much mentioned in the Oiklet as the distinguished author of Junkyard Dog, shows us a mode unlike his usual Raymond Chandler and Bronwyn Wild turns in a sensitive piece on the Holocaust. The Wild family now have four contributors. Stalwarts Dave Birtwistle, Tom Kilcourse, Tanner and Nigel Ford prove there’s no lack of authenticity here. Ray Blyde’s autobiography is nearing its end – the next chapter will be the last. Ray himself is in fine fettle but shows no inclination to pursue immortality any further. Ken Clay June 2011 9 10 THE BEAT YEARS Ken Champion The same battleground. Smells of cooking fat, polish, disinfectant, oven heat and new coconut matting filled the cramped scullery and pushed their way around the living room. The sounds of slippered feet, a moist hand agitatedly brushing a brow, then the same hand using an apron as a towel, the squeal of a fork inside a saucepan, the knocking of crockery, all became a whole, unutterably familiar. My mother, tall, angular and in her mid-forties, with a thin face, long nose, worried eyes, and clothes which in spite of their obvious age still retained a neat, well pressed appearance, scuffled from the kitchen with two laden plates and placed them hurriedly on the tablecloth, almost dropping them. She drew her breath sharply and putting a hand to her mouth urgently sucked her fingers. Shaking her hands quickly she wiped them heavily down the front of her apron, went back to the kitchen again, reached up and pulled the window sash down. She returned and seated herself and with quick nervous gestures patted her black, greying hair. Sitting opposite her was my father. His eyes were small but rather bulbous, his nose creased, causing his upper lip to bare an expanse of gum and a ragged line of nicotine-stained teeth. He looked like an angry rabbit eating cabbage. ‘Len, must you make so much noise?’ She tried to ask the question pleasantly, only a glimmer of disapproval showing. She waited for a response and when none came she leaned forward with her wrists resting on the edge of the table and her knife and fork raised at the same angle as her body leaning toward him. ‘Must you make so much noise?’ A disinterested mumble came from under his nose at this carefully enounced repetition and the munching noise increased. She leaned back with a sigh of fatalistic acceptance and began eating. It did not then occur to me that she was an unwilling captive. It was 1958. I was seventeen years old. 11 THE CRAZY OIK ISSUE 10 My father was a caretaker at a local factory, my mother a cleaner at a city bank. They were both proprietorial; it was ‘his’ factory, just as it was ‘her’ bank. He had one of the previous Sunday’s papers spread out on the table to the side of him and in between scooping large mouthfuls of food into himself he inclined his head to one side and read the cartoon page slowly and carefully, his cheeks bulging and lips silently forming the captions. Occasionally he stopped chewing and frowned, his mouth hanging open. Understanding would come and with an infantile, sucking laugh he shook his head, tutting with pleasure as he looked down at his plate, flicking small particles of food from his bottom lip and, sticking a fork through a new potato and a cube of meat, would guide the heaped piece of cutlery into his mouth as he turned his attention to the paper again. After a few minutes his head jerked up and he frowned once more, looking across the space between them.

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