Leo Vee, on the verge of emerging simuntaneously as the leader of Fine Gee and the Big Tee of the Free Southern Stateen, has done so by majoring in a rhyming 3: the exoitc, the erotic and – the pyschotic:
-Sinn Féin continues to be the biggest threat to our Democracy.
This is set fair to become the (gulp) mantra of the main man who effortlessly managed to maneovre the mannequins of the mono-minded media into his (gasp) camp. Look no further than the courageous Pat ‘No Agenda’ Kenny who in the week of the Manchester Outrage was also on song when he opined:
-Let us not forget that Dublin also had its own Manchester…..the Stardust.
Pee Kay , of course, is the Duane Eddy of the Mid-Atlantic Twang and is always quick and ready with a quote to decry the gammy way in whch the politics of an inane Uncle Sam has (allegedly) declined.
He is justifiably renowned for the inordiante spectrum of his interests and perhaps that is what prompted Pee Kay to pick a toon from the Big Apple with his plectrum rather than a malady from the orchard of Ireland’s green land where the orange groves of the arms farm of Glenanne are located.
A Grand Canyon of gab has been talked, of late, about Making America Great Again. Of all the artistic parts which made the U.S.of A. so great during the last century high on the charts would indubitably be the Great American Song Book.
The Fopulists to whom Leo Vee first pitched his bid to become the Big Bod of the FSS when he gratuiously emerged from the Closet two and a bit years ago on the two bit Mimsy O Call Again Show are of course, notoriously anti-song. If their annual Abbey Theatre-style, prissy Panti Blissful hissy fit of dissing of the song contest which first spawned ABBA, is anything to go by.
One feels that they would even get orff by snarling at Carl if that composer’s masterpiece ‘Carmina Burana’ were to be somehow entered for the Eurovision Contest (for it is it!). This chorus was based on a medieval text and there is every indication that they would go all ‘medieval’ (in the Tarantino sense of that adjective) on that haunting chant.
Is song, so, about to come under the gong now that the musclebound J. Arthur Rankers of the newly blue shirtless are about to strike with hammer and (gulp) tong ?
This could be getting serious, folks.
Such is the importance of song: that colourful sarong of sound which should, gan dabht, around the waist of humanity perennially be wrapped. Otherwise, life could become a wasteland rather than waistband. The Blue Shirt Fopulists in the press who say yes to Leo have not shown themselves thus far to be well disposed towards even (gulp) the song sung blue.
Look under S in the index of that same Song Book and ‘Stardust’ will be found to be liberally sprinkled there.
Tin Pan Alley was indubitably the most valuable strip of New Yawk real estate in the last century and their pin-up tune smiths were a pair of sparkling guys from Victorian London.
One of the tip-top, emblematic Gilbert and Sullivan (for it was they !) show stoppers was, is and always will be:
-Take a pair of sparkling eyes.
A terrific same sound effects marriage of lyric and melody, make in hit parade heaven. Little wonder then that Tin Pan Alley took the never dull Gil and Sull as their role models for the manufacture of a mouthful of melody.
Even though the harmony of G and S on the sheet music was in D sharp contrast to their mutual antipathy off air.
-Without a song each day would be a century, opined Mahalia Jackson.
And she should know. For Mahalia Jackson, the great gospel singer, better than most anybody else recognised that a day without a song would surely drag: she was the diametric o. of a drag queen. Her signature tune was one of the top gospel anthems:
-Take my hand, Precious Lord.
It also happened to be the Rev. Martin Luther King’s favourite song and she sang it at his funeral, just as she had done at many of his rallies. Another Jackson, the Rev. Jesse, was an ear witness in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on the ill-fated day in 1968 to the Civil Rights Leader’s very last words: a verbal request from the balcony drawled down to a musician in the car park below for that gospel song to be sung at the mass rally he was to address that night.
He made this call moments before James Earl Ray fondled the trigger from the back window on the third floor of the flop house overlooking the motel. Thereby morphing Martin into a Martyr.
(Hang a left half way up the freeway between Memphis and Nashville and one comes upon a little bitty city called Tiptonville, Tennessee. Its most famous son was the blue-suede shod Carl Perkins. Unmissable signs attest to this fact of nativity both on entering and exiting the burg..
Alas, the Perkin’s legendary self-effacement forbids him from piggy-backing on a relative’s memorable contribtuon to the anthology of song quotations:
-If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.)
Take another pair of sparkling guys who were among the most renowned pied pipers with a pied a terre on Tin Pan Alley:
-Cole Porter and Larry Hart.
Each penned lyrics which the Great Shakes himself would have doffed his soft fabric and feathered flat hat to Porter’s :
Everytime we say goodbye, I die a little,
Everytime we say goodbye, I wonder why a little,
Why the Gods above me, who must be in the know.
Think so little of me, they allow you to go.
And to Hart’s
And tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July?
Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by
The great big city’s a wondrous toy just made for a goil and boy
We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy
One mentions Cole Porter and Larry Hart deliberately, for both these geniuses were (gulp) gay though unlike, say, Leo Vee, or indeed the Fopulists who prop him up, didn’t go on about it. They instinctively understood perhaps one of the greatest of all Irish sayings:
-Molann an saothar an saothrai. (The art acclaims the artist).
Moving closer to home, to say, Dame Street, Dublin 2 (which somehow got mixed up with Mott Street) take a pair of sparkling Irish guys:
-Mícheál Mac Liammóir and Joe Dolan.
Before the term ‘world-class’ was declassified by over use, both of these prodigies truly merited the term. Again, like their counterparts in Tin Pan Alley , Porter and Hart, they were gay but didn’t go on about it. Again, they instinctively sussed wihtout fuss the following phrase (see above):
-Molann an saothar an saothrai.
The whole world and its stepmother knew that Mac Liammóir and Dolan were what they were, and didn’t give a particular toss. Contemporary Fopulists of the Rainbow Republic, and other tossers off of the spontaeneous platitude, being horses of a different colour, and neigh sayers to a mankind, would scarcely have allowed them to get on with their craft-freighted art.
Speaking of horses what all this comes down to (at nose bag time) is a queston of two camps:
-Horse Frighteners and Horse Whisperers.
By coming on to the Mimsy O Call Again Show , for example, Leo Vee to the delight of the neigh-saying Fopulists, showed himself to be a Horse Frightener. And in so doing, declared himself to be profoundly unlike Porter, Hart, Mac Liammóir and Dolan – Horse Whisperers, all.
Lady Farthingale of Windgap, the perceptive politcial theorist of the 18th century, once uttered an acute observation which has stood the test of time.
Asked for her opinon of the phenomenon of the Popinjay, after due consideraton she whispered the following:
-It is a matter of sublime indifference to one what these Popinjays do, just as long as they don’t do it – whatever it is they do do – in the streets and frighten the horses.
Thus, was Lady Fathingale, unlike Leo Vee, a horse whisperer rather than a horse frightener.
That good lady, bless her, instinctively understoond that there is, is there not, one L of a difference between the PUBIC and PUBLIC.
PS All of whch is not to say that there is no place in the general scheme of things for a horse frightener like Leo Vee.
Who is on record of recognizing, for whatever reason, the imporance of the PUBLIC (with an L). By his becoming reacquainted recently with the Language called the Leprechaun .
And there can scarecly be a word with a greater claim to the L letter in the six letter word PUBLIC than the Language called Leprechaun: certainly it would seem to be so in the Six Counties as instanced by the Lá Dearg. Call it the Red Letter Day.
The streets of Dublin have been dominated differently, by the, erm, La Bándhearg / Pinkday. Not least along Dame Street which leads to the Lower Castle Yard in the Rainbow Republic, with the Pinkeens of the Pink Tank to the fore, but particularly to the aft.
Now, this is where opportunity might well knock for Leo Vee, and The Perkin’s inner, one-eyed Hughie Green means this most sincerely.
In the last few days the Serbian Womens’ Volleyball Team, after qualifying for a tournament in Japan, concelebrated their victory by posing for a photograph and putting their ladylike fingers to the sides of the eyes, thus mimicking their Oriental hosts-to-be in the manner known as mock.
This sort of uppity racism is not at all unknown on the streets of Dublin, though it is to the side of the mouths rather than the eyes that the fingers are always applied. This gesture of linguistic superiority is invariably accompanied by the G-word expressed in a grunt:
-Gaeilgeoir.
The fingers belong to the West British Border Collie Ball Team, aka, The Wannabe Horse-Protest Ants.
Leo Vee has an opportunity here to knock while simultaneously putting the frighteners on this particularly byzantine breed of the equine on the streets of Baile Átha Cliath.
He could even call his Lá Dearg after Red Rum and raise, erm, Blue Murder backwards in his Léine Ghorm, Bróga Tairní (LGBT).
Sheer genius.
Perkin hugely amusing and punny as usual. However he does seem to have a thing about gays. ‘And still he “gays”ed and still the wonder grew , that one small head could carry all he knew”. Like him I used to resent gay activists and commentators “going on” about what was essentially a private matter. Like colour. Or race. Or religion. Not necessarily in that order. Eventually I realised that as far as society was considered none of the foregoing have ever really been private matters. There were the Jim Crow laws that stigmatised colour. There were,and in some cases are, laws that stigmatised people for being Jewish or Muslim. And people burned at the stake for being hetetical. And prejudice against Irish. Or Polish or Romanian often resulting in racially motivated attacks.And Penal laws against Catholicism, and a Constitution which made Catholicism special. And people who “would not have one about theplace. And if people had not confronted and opposed these laws and these attitudes they would still have been the universally dominant attitudes. In the case of sexual orientation it is only 50 years since people were jailed for giving physical expression to their sexual orientation. Children and adults face hostility, ridicule, cyber bullying and death for their sexual orientation. So who will condemn them for proclaiming that orientation so that, bit by bit homophobia can be consigned to the dustbin of history. Pick an easier target Perkin.
Sorry, a less easy target.
Why did you correct ‘easier’?