Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  Pow, Zowie, Socko, and Bam;

  Possibility of a New Inquiry; a Legal Point;

  Little Mary Mix-up Remembered.

  You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.

  Message to the Council. To be on-passed urgently. I don’t know whether your telephone answering machine can take calls from the coin-phone in the cargo hold of a Qantas 747 but I will persevere. The Council gave cargo-hold tickets to Nuuk and me to get us back from Baffin Island. Nuuk prefers the hold because it’s colder. Very much colder. We can spread ourselves out a bit and the dogs are happier. At least we can light a fire here. Nuuk is ill-at-ease with air travel and had to take one of those drugs which has the side effect of making you want to use heavy machinery. I’ve had to restrain him with rawhide straps on a few occasions. We had trouble getting the hoary marmot onto the flight from Baffin but at least it will be a way of conclusively showing any reopened inquiry why Nuuk would perhaps confuse a goat with a hoary marmot and why he hurled his ceremonial harpoon at the goat during the session I was chairing last year when the goat tore Nuuk’s ancient fur coat apart and pulled the leg off the lady mayoress’s eighteenth-century banqueting table which panicked the attendants into throwing a net over us because of the St Elmo’s Fire acid explosion and the falling scenery which caused the flooding of the lower hall. I’m calling you as a matter of urgency because the next festival approaches and I had hoped that you may at least delay making a decision re my chairing of a panel until I can return and place fresh evidence, i.e. the hoary marmot, before the Council. It’s important to keep up the dialogue on these matters and not allow them to remain under the social skin in a malignant way. The Baffin Festival of Ice Arts concluded with a flenching competition in which I participated, and while I was no match for the locals I did not let my country, or the Cabaret Voltaire, down. It should be remembered that when we writers are abroad we take on a diplomatic role. I considered my participation in the seal flench as such a diplomatic activity. I hope that goes to my credit. I have made a rather nice little film of the flenching competition and would like to introduce flenching to the next festival as a gift – in the spirit of multi-culturalism. We would need ten seal pups. My connections on Baffin Island would be happy to supply the seal pups at a very reasonable rate. A donation to Greenpeace might also help smooth things there. I am sure that for an arts festival they would turn a blind eye. All right, so Baffin Island Festival of Ice Arts may not exactly be Edinburgh. But someone has to carry the flag to the far corners. The younger generation of arts administrators lose sight of what smaller talents do for the arts at those places where the arts media spotlight may be dim. I myself have made my way, diligently and quietly, often at my own expense, to festivals not only on Baffin but in the Straits of Molucca, and even to the Poor Knight’s Island festival. While we are on the subject I want to clarify something which came up at the inquiry. I removed the speakers’ chairs from the panel discussion that I was chairing because I felt that tally clerks’ desks and high stools were more dramatically appropriate. I had the five-foot-high ladder-back Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair on loan from the National Gallery because the status of chairperson had to be emphasised. I am honestly very sorry about what happened to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair. I could hardly have predicted what the force of impact from a fire hose would do to a Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair. On the fourteenth day of the inquiry I also made a point about comics and said that the younger members of the inquiry would not remember Barney Google, Little Lulu, Skeezix, Dotty Dimples and Little Mary Mix-up. That is why I introduced into evidence examples of these strips. I was making a point. It was not a whim. Everyone is besotted by Batman and Prince Valiant but we lose sight of the rich compost of minor characters which permit a Prince Valiant or Batman to shine. We lesser talents of the arts festival world also make a compost. I see myself as a leading compost. The Cabaret Voltaire is very much for the cultivation of rich cultural compost. The stars can look after themselves. We speak for the Little Lulus and the Dotty Dimples of life. How many young arts administrators, for instance, know the origin of the words pow, zowie, socko and bam? The expressions ‘nobody home’ and ‘you said it’? No. Both those expressions, now part of the language, came from Tad Dorgan. So much is lost. How many young arts administrators recognise the use of the changeling formula in the crippled-newspaper-boy-into-Captain-Marvel jnr? By the way, Percy Joske QC, MA, LLM, is clear on the point that people may propose or second themselves as chairperson and may vote for themselves. There is no question of immodesty. I think it was one of the younger arts administrators on the inquiry who suggested that I was ‘a trifle pushy’ – her words – and that some people might have interpreted my behaviour as a form of ‘hawking or peddling’ of myself around the festival circuit. Not so. I cite the ruling by Percy Joske: objections to the appointment of a chairperson should be made forthwith as acquiescence may cure any irregularity. I point out that no objections were made at the time to my appointment last year. Another matter of procedure: a vote of no confidence is not the proper motion if you want to get rid of a chairperson. If you want a new chairperson you should move that another person take the chair – and that person’s name should be stated. If you don’t state the name of the proposed chairperson and simply remove the incumbent chair person you will find that the result is that the meeting is closed. Now, what happened when I was forcibly removed from the chair by the attendants with the net is that the meeting was not formally closed. No motion was moved. Therefore, as far as Joske is concerned, my panel discussion from last year is technically still in session! I do not wish to be legalistic about this, but unless I receive a chairpersonship appointment to a panel at next year’s festival, I hereby give notice that I will appear at the festival next year to continue, unadjourned, from last year. The Council may do what they will. It should be remembered that in Eskimo folklore if a meeting is not formally closed or adjourned the souls of those at that meeting continue arguing into all eternity. Because my panel is legally still in session I could rule that the inquiry is de facto a part of my panel under my chairpersonship and I could very well ask the members of the inquiry and the hall attendants and all the rest to apologise or withdraw. But I do not intend to be silly about this. Common sense will prevail. I intend to appoint my own stewards and sergeants at arms. Too right I do. Sorry, I digress, we have a small problem here in the hold of the 747. Gareth Powell in his Passionate Traveller advises travellers to cut their costs by making their own meals in the hotel using a metal cup and a portable immersion heater. Nuuk forgot to check on the baby dolphin stew and consequently his metal cup and the immersion heater fused together, causing the aircraft’s electrical system to fail temporarily and a small electrical fire to break out. I have no dispute with Gareth Powell and we follow his advice assiduously, but I do suggest that travellers who adopt his methods also carry a small bag of sand when travelling (unless staying at a beach resort, of course) so that electrical fires can be readily extinguished. We found that throwing Nuuk’s ancient fur coat over the fire worked badly because of the animal fats accumulated in it over five hundred years. The coat had, as you know, passed through the digestive system of the goat at last year’s festival but was in good shape regardless of that. It’s worth remembering that if you have an old fur coat with accumulated animal fats ingrained you should not use it to extinguish fires. Gareth Powell might well include that advice in the next Passionate Traveller. The dense black smoke filled the aircraft and unsettled some of the older passengers seated above. Nuuk and I, as an act of compensation, are putting on an inflight concert. I have made a proposal to the IATA that they reintroduce inflight concerts. In the days of sea travel the ship board concerts were very popular. We will also show the flenching championships film. And by the way, I think that it is lau
ghable that people should now be suing the festival because they claim to have been ‘almost asphyxiated’ by the art students’ wrapping of the festival hall in homage to Christo. I designed the wrap, which was, as you know, a reproduction of the wrapping paper from the famous department store Harrods, and the store had made a small donation to help with the costs. I intended that the art students should wrap the festival hall during the panel discussion and tie it with string. Hence the two-hundred-metre-high cherry-picker. I wanted to say something about the art of parcel wrapping, which had died out with the coming of the plastic carry bag. But no one seems to have taken my point. The seven hundred school children dressed in Grecian costume was something of a joke but they were meant to deliver a giant-sized statement of account to the community as a way of pointing to the debt owed by society to the arts. I could not be expected to foresee the trouble at the swing-opening bridge. All the children were eventually accounted for. Looking back on some of the rulings made by the inquiry, it occurs to me that some of the younger members did not fully understand the history of meeting procedure and did not understand the Previous Question or the Closure Motion. If I may go over that to clarify the situation. The Previous Question is moved to prevent a vote being taken, to shelve a motion. So you move That the Question Be Not Now Put. It is the only exception in meeting procedure to the rule that a motion must be in the affirmative. The Closure is a situation which arises when the motion is moved That the Question Be Now Put. This is used to terminate debate and to prevent undue obstruction. It cannot be amended. If it is affirmed, a vote must be taken on the original motion without further discussion. I thought I explained all this at the time but I assumed a wider knowledge of meeting procedure than was the case. I wanted to point out that the chair person has discretion to decide when a closure motion is acceptable. I refer you to the case of Wall versus London and Northern Assets Corporation in 1898. It is worth having a look at the judge’s summing up. I must go now.