Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 50
August 27, 2016
The Book
Matthew Tonks (Twisted Roads of Madness), short story writer on a mission, puts his spin on the book from the charity shop
One of the first people I met when I started this blog, was a man by the name of Dermott Hayes. His blogPostcard From A Pigeon is a self styled magazine of ideas, discussions, stories and self discovery, basically, you don’t know from each day to the next how he will entertain you, you just know, he will. One of his latest posts called Sylvia’s Letter was a fascinating story that was taken from a card he found in a secondhand book he had purchased at a charity event. His story and that of another blogger Fijay of Blog On! opened up the idea of multiple realities, and the ideas a simple card, lost inside a book could give to someone. This, is my version of events, how the book wound up in Dermott’s hands.
He slams his fist into the door four times, four times, his mind races…
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Unposted letter 2
Letter 2 from Blog On!
Dear Heather
I recognised your handwriting when I took the delivery
I just stuffed the parcel in my workbag so no’one would see
I told you my marriage was over… that I was seperated awaiting divorce…. truth is….yes its a relationship long gone cold…partly my own doing… betraying her trust…
But we limp on… keeping up appearances for the sake of the children… I just hang on… wishing for the day she would smile again ….anything
I am wracked with guilt and shame….it tears me apart inside sometimes
Because dear Heather…. you are just one in a long line…. its what I do…. a kind of twisted self validation
I seduce to satisfy a deep yearning…. for sex?…. partly… but its much deeper than that….its a yearning to fill this empty void I have become….a validation of myself as a man
And it is satisfied………. temporarily
So I’m sorry Heather……
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Unposted letter 1
Letter 1 from Blog On!
Dear Ethan
At the small bistro table by the window I sit, elbows rested, chin cupped in hands.
As I subtley shift position the half drained teacup rattles, belying the solid elegance of the bentwood furniture.
The view is obscured by the raindrops smattering the pane on this grey, blustery late summer afternoon.
I watch a droplet making its stop start vertical journey…. halted in its tracks for a moment by another… then continuing on its way
I’ve sat here a lot the last couple of days… browsing old magazines for images… patterns… snip, snip, snipping…arranging the shapes… .gently sliding them around like jigsaw pieces.
You see I know its your birthday soon and I remember last year….
I wanted to create something…. something which will stir your memory… a reminder of the times we spent together…. when just for a while time seemed to stand still
When we first…
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Unposted letters 1&2
Fijay (Blog On!) and I decided to have a go at writing something about a birthday collage found in the inner sleeve of a book I bought in a charity show. Mine can be found here https://dermotthayes.com/2016/08/27/sylvias-letter/ while Fijay’s will follow. Anyone else who’d like to have a go, please do. The artwork prompt is at the top of Sylvia’s Letter
Still have no wifi so using phone which appears to have intermittent connection at the mo weirdly…as it should have no relation to my general wifi but there you go
Apparantly its going to be upvto 2 weeks before I’m fully up and running again
So…. the inspiration for the previous 2 posts came from fellow blogger Dermott Hayes of Postcardfromapigeon.com….. buying a book in a charity shop which he later found had a collage stuck on the inside sleeve signed by someone called Heather.( see his site for more info)
This intrigued me…. I love browsing vintage shops and flea markets…and always wonder about the old photo’s you often see in tins at these places… wondering who the people are and who would throw such photo’s out
My most treasured possession is an evening bag belonging to my great aunt containing letters between her and my grandmother when they…
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Rules of Social Media, teen style
LIKE. FLIRT. GHOST. A JOURNEY INTO THE SOCIAL MEDIA LIVES OF TEENS
For teenagers these days, social media is real life, with its own arcane rules and etiquette. Writer Mary H. K. Choi embedded with five high schoolers to chronicle their digital experiences. There’s twin sisters Lara and Sofia in Atherton, California; Ahmad in New Haven, Connecticut; Mira in San Francisco; and Ubakum in Houston. As with most teens, they’re elusive creatures. But when Choi asked them targeted questions, they were able to deconstruct their own behavior in exhaustive detail. You’ll 
what Choi discovered.
Truth! Stranger than fiction
By Duncan Fyfe
Thanks, Rasputin.
Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?
For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.
Here’s the story. In 1916, the fabulously wealthy, Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov was one of several Russian aristocrats agonizing over the unseemly influence that Rasputin—the magical healer, charismatic lech, and peasant—had over the Tsar and, particularly, the Tsarina. In December, Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace, where he offered him cyanide-laced cakes and then shot him.
Although the Tsarina was distraught, the Tsar let Yusupov off lightly, exiling the prince and his wife Irina. (In doing so, he inadvertently spared them from the impending slaughter of the revolution.)
Sixteen years later, MGM produced Rasputin and the Empress, based on those events. Its big coup was casting the three Barrymore siblings—stars of stage and silent film—in the lead roles. Lionel played Rasputin, Ethel the Tsarina, and John (grandfather of Drew) was “Prince Paul Chegodieff,” a composite, who murders Rasputin.
Book cover
Yusupov, now penniless in Paris, heard about the film and thought it defamatory. He argued audiences would recognize him in the fictional assassin—in part because he’d publicly cashed in on his infamy, penning a braggy memoir about killing Rasputin. He wasn’t wrong: The New York Times, in its review, noted that Chegodieff was “really intended to represent [Yusupov].”
But having copped to being a murderer, Yusupov couldn’t build much of a libel case. Instead, he alleged that Rasputin and the Empress in fact defamed his wife.
In the film, Chegodieff’s wife is “Princess Natasha,” a supporter of Rasputin. But the mystic, wary of her husband, hypnotizes and rapes her, rendering Natasha—by his logic, with which she agrees—unfit to be a wife. Yusupov contended that as viewers would equate Chegodieff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Irina. But while Yusupov was portrayed more or less accurately, Irina and Rasputin had never met. (The scene also libeled Rasputin, but him being dead, you could say anything, then as now: “Rasputin sucks,” “Rasputin liked to caress his big beard and give it little kisses,” etc.)
An MGM researcher had pointed out this factual discrepancy to the studio during production and warned that the Yusupovs could sue; they fired her. MGM was satisfied, dramatically, with the rape scene, despite there being no basis for it in real life. If it was shock they were interested in, one could imagine them constructing a similar scene around Rasputin and the Tsarina—about whom there were prurient rumors, which Rasputin himself encouraged by whipping his dick out in a restaurant and boasting of giving it to “the old girl”—but MGM couldn’t do that after casting a real-life brother and sister in those roles.
Poster
Irina Yusupov sued the studio, and the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time.
What proved to be MGM’s undoing was its lack of deniability. Unwisely, they’d prefaced the film with this: “This concerns the destruction of an empire … A few of the characters are still alive—the rest met death by violence.” From that, audiences could logically infer that the Yusupovs, being the only relevant characters still alive, were represented as the Chegodieffs.
A justice in the case told MGM that the studio might have stood a better chance had they incorporated a disclaimer stating the exact opposite: that the film was not intended as an accurate portrayal of real people or events.
Apparently overcautious in the wake of the landmark lawsuit, the film industry slapped that wording on everything. For decades, films disclaimed absolutely any relationship to reality—even when it was patently untrue. The Jake LaMotta biopic Raging Bull credits LaMotta as a consultant and cites his memoir as a source text just minutes before asserting that he is the film’s entirely fictional invention.
The disclaimer as it appears before an episode of South Park.
Comedy Central
It’s only recently that studios have relaxed the disclaimer to allow that certain films are inspired, in part, by real events—maybe that’s because, in 1967, Felix Yusupov finally died. Now, blessedly, you can say whatever you want about him.
Duncan Fyfe is a freelance writer based in London. Find his work at duncanfyfe.net.
BIG BROTHER’s HERE
Since January, police have been testing an aerial surveillance system adapted from the surge in Iraq. And they neglected to tell the public.
By Monte Reel | August 23, 2016
Photographs by Philip Montgomery
Video by Drew Beebe
From [image error]
Wrong Number
Ring, ring…ring, ring
He listens to the ringing tone, the crumpled, handwritten note on the shelf.
A female voice answers.
Hello?
Honey, I’m sorry. I took the money. I needed to pay for something. Mary’s pregnant. It’s my fault…
Who is this?
It’s Johnny. Sadie?
No.
Sorry, my mistake.
Sylvia’s Letter
When I bought a book in a charity shop I found a mysterious birthday collage inside the cover. Fijay from Blog On! and I decided we would both do our own versions of the story behind the message in the book.
I bought a book by Shel Silverstein in a charity shop. He wrote Sylvia’s Mother. It was a book of his drawings and poetry for children. I remembered buying the same book once, in New York, and bringing it home and reading it for my children. There was a birthday message, pasted as a collage, inside the book and a cryptic note to whomever it was intended. I mentioned this to fellow blogger, Fijay who has many theories about what was going on. So, I suggested she post a blog about her interpretation and I would post mine.
Now my first experience of Shel Silverstein was as a songwriter. He wrote A Boy Named Sue for Johnny Cash and a string of classics for Dr Hook and The Medicine Show, like I Got Stoned and I Missed it, Freakers’ Ball, Queen of the Silver Dollar and, of course,that great, tongue in cheek, country weepie, Sylvia’s Mother.
A person’s mind can work in strange ways so I thought of Sylvia, for some reason or other, on that 9 O’Clock train to Galveston and how she might’ve left a message for that boy on the phone whom her mother wouldn’t let speak to her. What kind of message did she leave him and what did it mean? You can read the other side of this story by tapping the link to Blog On!, Fijay’s blog, later this evening.
Sylvia sent a letter to Scott
She paste it in a book
so he could never
say he forgot.
It’s a memoir of poems,
of when he was young
and cared not a jot
about rules and regulations,
balancing books
Sylvia’s on a train south,
she’s leaving for good.
He told her he loved her
then left with that tramp
so she’s off to the Gulf
to stroll in the sand,
to surf in the waves,
attend a few raves
She left him a message,
to teach him a lesson,
about karma that’s bad
and karma that’s good.
He’s a black hearted fool
who left her to cry
while he broke the rule,
she wished he could die
Scott got the book,
read her bitter, sad note
She signed it from Heather
but he knew it was her
a memo to him
about when he was young,
wrote nonsense poetry
and left chocolate kisses
on her pillow at night
Life got too serious,
the bills just piled up.
He worked and worked
to keep them afloat.
He wanted a family.
She wanted to party.
They argued and fought,
he blamed her
for sinking the boat
So there they are
at the end of the road
his mistakes, he knew,
drove her away,
but to balance the scales
there are always two sides
to this sad story
that may never be told
where the sidewalk ends.
August 26, 2016
Postcard from a Pigeon
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