Yiddos! Yiddos! 

So, today, West Ham play Spurs at White Hart Lane. So, it's the first game between them since the debate about the (chanting) use of the words 'yid' and 'yiddo'. So, one thing I've not seen in all the discussion is anything about when and how 'yid' came to be used by Spurs fans. 

So?

So . . . I happened to be there, I think, around the very time it started. I wrote about it in my book on swearing, Filthy English. Here is the section . . . it's the end of a chapter on racial slurs and I've been discussing the reclaiming of nigger and paki by, well, people of african and south asian descent who chose to judo throw a racist word and declare themselves to be, well, niggers and pakis.

I first came across another reappropriation early in the morning of Wednesday, 9 May 1984. Very early. I was on a coach, one coach in a giant convoy of coaches – an invasion of coaches – which was snaking its way through the London dawn towards Dover. And from there to Ostend harbour, the medieval city of Bruges and, finally, the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht.

By the time the coach retraced its route, almost twenty-four sleepless hours later, there had been a fatal stabbing, some violent scuffles and a 1–1 draw between Spurs and Anderlecht in the first leg of the UEFA Cup Final. On our return, as we disembarked from the ferry at Dover, we would be greeted by a dozen or so reporters, a flash of bulbs and a predictability of questions. That was nearly a day in the future, though. That would be the final stages of the ritualistic sequence of events for English football followers venturing to European away games in the 1980s: long coach journey, drink, more drink, fear, anger, confused local citizens, drink, boring match, violence, drink, long coach journey, home, hangover, work.

But, for now, in the grubby London dawn, hope and anticipation were still trumping memory, knowledge and bitter experience. For everyone on the coach apart from me, that is. They were actual fans. I was merely working. I was there on the coach to write about the experience of being on the coach. I was doing the leg-work for a piece about travelling with football fans, at a time when travelling English football fans were ‘the scourge of Europe’, a ‘blight on the beautiful game’, ‘a rabble of hooligans’ etc. That was no mere loudmouthing editorialising either. A year later, in another suburb of Brussels, at another European final, thirty-nine Juventus fans would be killed.

No-one on the coach was interested in me, not in the slightest. They were interested in being together. They were a group, a small crowd. They sang, they chanted – in dawn’s early light. They were teenagers, mostly. All boys, of course.

Polite mostly, not at all hooligany and, I soon discovered, nearly all Jewish. I probably would have figured that out anyway, for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that my own sons are half-Jewish. But I didn’t need to. The chants did it for me. This was their favourite: If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap.) If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap. Pause.) Yiddooos! Yiddooos!

I’d not heard it before. I had to stifle my giggles. I knew that none of them were Israelis. I could hear that in their London accents. The Israel thing was part joke, part identification with something powerful that was theirs – and not, say, Arsenal fans’. Tottenham was a ‘Jewish club’ and they were set on making that clear – with the assertive brittleness you’d expect of minority group teenagers.

How long Spurs has been a ‘Jewish club’ – and why – has never really been that clear. It only gets the most passing of mentions in Hunter Davies’ 1972 book on the club, The Glory Game. Even then, it’s half in code. Davies is talking to Morris Keston, a ‘Hanger-on’ as he disparagingly refers to the club’s wealthy fan. Why do so many of the Hangers-on seem to be from the rag trade? he asks, somewhat disingenuously. ‘There’s always been a big following amongst Jewish people in the East End for clubs like Tottenham and Arsenal,’ replies Keston.

Not just a Tottenham thing, then. There’s no further reference to the subject in either the 1985 or 1990 editions, either. My guess is simply that it’s the nearest club to Stamford Hill. And that its fans’ self-conscious Jewishness only started to emerge around the time I found myself sitting on a smelly coach to Belgium.
This ‘yiddoos’ thing was interesting. I’d never heard it used by Jews before, only by racists and other teams’ fans. This was the most glorious, self-conscious act of reappropriation. As rappers and hip-hoppers would take over nigger, as Coloured People and People of Colour and homosexual academia would construct (and deconstruct) queer theory, so these teenage Jewish boys had taken an insult and turned it, made a double agent of it. It was as if gypsies took to calling themselves gypos.†

Over the next few years, all Tottenham fans, not just the Jewish ones, took to calling themselves yiddoos or yids. When Jurgen Klinsmann joined the club, they chanted ‘Jurgen was a German but now he’s a Jew’, to the tune of the Sherman brothers’ Mary Poppins song, ‘Chim Chim Cheree’. Other European clubs in Europe – Bayern Munich, FK Austria Wien and AS Roma, for example – are similarly ‘Jewish’, for various historical and cultural reasons. Fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax wear red Stars of David and spread giant blue and white Israeli flags across their terraces. These Spurs’ fans chants and songs were never mentioned by commentators or football writers but you could hear the chants at every game. Why didn’t they mention it? Because it would mean using the word ‘yid’ or ‘yiddo’. They worried – probably rightly – that just saying it or writing it would inevitably draw them into uncomfortable areas.

This reappropriation unsettled the racist mind, of course. Slowly, over time, other fans stopped calling them Tottenham yids. Not because they didn’t still think of them that way and not because the word’s meaning had changed but because the word’s association had changed. The thought may have remained the same but the word itself had been flipped, like a pancake. What had been bad had been made good. There’s no power left in an insult when the person you’re trying to insult has ironized it into a proud self-description. At least, you’d think so. But it’s not so. Chelsea fans have long chanted: ‘Gas a Jew, Jew Jew, put him in the oven, cook him through.’ There is also a story that when Manchester City fans sang a song about foreskins, Spurs fans pulled out their penises and waved them at the Mancunians. Other fans, West Ham fans, in particular, still talk (and chant) about Tottenham yids. And their voices and hearts are still filled with hatred. As with nigger, it’s the thought that counts, not the word.

† Well, maybe not quite. ‘Gypsy’ is a result of a misplacing of that group’s origins in Egypt rather than India. Yid is, at least, a Jewish word. Similar to the German Jude, it’s derived ultimately from Judah (or Yehuda), the three-thousand-year-old name for the mountainous area which runs along one edge of the Dead Sea south from Jerusalem towards the Sinai desert. It was the bit ruled over by King David. The northern section is now usually referred to as the West Bank. It was Jews who first called themselves yids. Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, says they pronounced it to rhyme with ‘need’, though. Only racists rhymed it with ‘did’.


So . . ? 

Elvis sings the blues
 
Last week I was on the radio, Resonance FM, talking about Elvis. You can hear the show here.

As some of you may know, I wrote a book about him and his songs, Essential Elvis. Originally published in 1997, the twentieth anniversary of his death, it's being reissued later this year as an ebook, by Rocket 88, in a revised, corrected and (slightly) expanded version. (Which obviously I should be working on right now rather than this blog post.)

The radio show was an hour long and focused exclusively on something I turned up while writing the book. Elvis's taste in colour. He was a blue man. Not a blues man — though he sung some of those too. A blue man. In life: his father said the night sky was ringed with blue the night his son was born; Elvis believed that the colour blue had deep spiritual significance for him. In death: he was wearing blue pyjamas that night. After death: he was buried in a blue shirt and tie.

In song. He recorded just two songs with green in the title and one each with black, yellow and white. So five is the sum total of those coloured songs. But blue songs . . . he cut nineteen of those. That boy really could sing the blues.

I played pretty much all of them on the radio. Here's the full list. (The version of Blue Christmas I played was not the original but the one he sang at his 1968 comeback special, the one where he tells guitarist Scotty Moore to 'play it dirty'. On a Christmas song.)

English sleeve for actual 'Elvis sings the blues' album, 1983

1. Blue Moon Of Kentucky
2. Blue Moon
3. Milkcow Blues Boogie
4. Blue Suede Shoes
5. When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again
6. Mean Woman Blues
7. Blueberry Hill
8. Blue Christmas
9. A Mess Of Blues
10. GI Blues
11. Blue Hawaii
12. Beach Boy Blues
13. Something Blue
14. Blue River
15. Indescribably Blue
16. Steamroller Blues
17. Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues
18. Moody Blue
19. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

You can listen to them all right . . . here.

German sleeve for actual 'Elvis sings the blues' album, 1983

Next up A little trip to Tooting, I think

The greatest song in the world ever . . . today
 
Number four: Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie Harris
 
As you possibly know, I’m not a big lyrics man. Or rather I am a big lyrics man. So, having grown up on a mix of musical theatre (parental taste) and metaphysical poetry (schooling), I just thought most pop lyrics were just rubbish.

Not the ones that most people think of as rubbish. To me, Little Richard — or at least his writers, notably Dorothy LaBostrie — was true poetry. Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom — even Andrew Marvell or Dorothy Fields would have struggled to find such an evocation of the human soul.

What got me was the stuff people said had good lyrics. Hard as it to imagine now, once upon a time, in the days when Hal David was writing the wondrous I Say A Little Prayer, people, grown-up people with jobs, beards even, would pay serious attention to the lyrics of, say, King Crimson.

Yet here I’ve chosen a song whose true glory is its words. Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie ‘Mr Blues’ Harris — 1940s R&B star, big influence on Elvis. At one time, he had two Cadillacs all for himself, each with its own chauffeur.


The tune is fine, if hackneyed. The playing is joyous — but you wouldn’t expect anything else of a band put together by Johnny Otis.

But those lyrics. A tight story told over three verses, it’s a startling narrative — a song about alcoholism and para-violence, framed as a comedy. 

It is one of the best pop lyrics ever written. It’s coherent, it develops rather than repeats. Some things to notice along the way . . .

* The beat and mood is established in the first two words, ‘now’ followed by ‘just’. A weak, barely vocalised sound followed by a strong emphasised one which finishes on both a sibilant and a plosive. The set-up of the whole song is there. A light feint then a killer blow. Tragedy as comedy.

* The rhymes are mostly masculine ones but nor are they — as is almost invariably the case in rap — so obvious you want to slap them with a ready-floured haddock. They are certain, confident, assertive — and could be heard in the loudest juke joint.

* The use of language is consistent and demotic. A big failing of all kinds of lyrics is that words are chosen to makes rhymes rather than fitting the tone of the song. Even Sondheim makes this mistake. By his own admission, the line ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel’ (in West Side Story’s I Feel Pretty) is quite unlikely to have come from the young and uneducated Maria. (In fact, he wanted to take it out but his collaborators wouldn’t have it. He still blushes when he hears it. He was right, of course. But so were his collaborators. It’s a wonderfully life-affirming line — its buoyancy a warning of the tragedy coming her way.)

* There is only one word that wouldn’t be familiar to contemporary six year old. That is ‘spree’ and, even then, I think context makes its meaning clear. Unless, of course, you mondogreen it and think it is some kind of transport mode. Making things that simple really isn’t simple.

* The metaphors are smart. ‘Two cherries in a glass of buttermilk’: accurate, evocative, suitably revolting and very, very funny. Improved, too, by the fact that the rhyme is with ‘silk’ which as a high-toned partner to ‘buttermilk’, gets a good uptown-downtown thing going.

* It doesn’t read — let alone sound — like poetry. Just like someone with a gift for words, smart-talking his way through the sad realisation that he will never change his girl, that things are over between them, that . . . well . . .

* The final word is ‘death’ — after that there is just a repeat of the chorus. It is rhymed with ‘breath’.

Here you go, all the way, from first to last . . .

Now just because you’re pretty
And you think you’re mighty wise
You told me that you love me
Then you roll those big brown eyes
When I saw you last week
Your eyes were turning black
Go find the guy that beat you up
Ask him to take you back

Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me
I can tell you’ve been out on a spree
It’s plain that you’re lyin’
When you say that you’ve been cryin’
Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me

Now I used to spend my money
To make you look real sweet
I wanted to be proud of you
When we walk down the street
Now don’t ask me to dress you up
In satin and in silk
Your eyes look like a two cherries
In a glass of buttermilk

Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me
I can tell that you been out on a spree
It’s plain that you’re lyin’
When you say that you've been cryin’
Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me

Now I guess our little romance
Has finally simmered down
You should join the circus
You’d make a real good clown
Your eyes look like a roadmap
I’m scared to smell your breath
You’d better shut your peepers
Before you bleed to death.

And here is the track . . . I couldn't get it to embed for some reason so here is a link . . . Bloodshot Eyes.


 
It’s said Wynonie Harris knew whereof he sang here, too, liking to take a glass or two of hot whisky before he stepped onstage. When it came to treating women, though, he was more like the song’s villain than its singer. He told Tan magazine: ‘The women who really know also know part of my secret. We can laugh about it together for they know how women can get stirred up by a man who seems cruel, ornery, vulgar and arrogant. I’ve had them to take enough pills to kill a horse, follow me from town to town in Cadillacs, give me money and fight another like crazy. It’s all because I deal in sex  . . .

‘I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbooks. You find them mostly down south. As a matter of fact, I like all kinds of women, regardless of what colour they are or what size and shape they may have. Just so long as they’re breathing, that’s me.’

Ralph Bass, his A&R man: ‘He always had a broad. Shit, man, he didn’t have any respect. He’d walk up and insult a woman right in front of her man. He’d say: Hey, bitch, what you doin’ here, whore? And call ’em all kindsa names.’

Now, I say it’s a song by Wynonie Harris but that is not quite right. His was the big hit on the US R&B charts (1951) and a top favourite in Jamaica. There’s a bouncy version by Millie, the My Boy Lollipop girl — the gender is switched and so ‘drink’ is rhymed with ‘wink’.

It wasn’t written by Harris, though, but by the man who first recorded it, Hank Penny, a banjo-playing Western Swinger. The piano tinkles and the steel guitar swishes. It’s fun but it’s not Wynonie — of whom his producer Henry Glover said ‘This man was a concept. Hell, he was too much.’

Both Penny and Harris were on the same label, King, based in Cincinnati and James Brown’s long-time home. The idea for Harris to cut it came from King’s foul-mouthed, abusive, near-blind Jewish owner Syd Nathan. He knew, deep in his heart, that everyone had the same problems, that there was no such thing as black or white alcoholism or para-violence. It was all the same thing. Everyone shared the pain. And Syd could make money out of it.

Plus A little something else for you. Here you will a quite fascinating pair of interviews with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. If you don't know who they — or the 2000 year old man — are, you should. And will if you listen to these podcasts.

The greatest song in the world ever . . . today
Number three: Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No 3a

When I write ‘today’, in this case, I really do mean ‘today’. I have only ever heard this tune once all the way through. Just now. I’m not sure I particularly want to hear it all the way through again. Still, just as some of my favourite books are ones I haven’t so much as opened, let alone read, this Nancarrow piece has become one of my all-time favourite pieces of music.


 As in other circumstances, it’s the thought that counts. And the thought, the idea, here is a wonderful one. So innovative and wonderful, in fact, that it pretty much obviates the need to actually bother with listening to the music.

I’ll describe the idea. Take a player piano — those worked contraptions which worked without a pianist and were worked by a roll of paper with holes in it, a predecessor of early computers’ punched tape. While these paper rolls were, I guess, generally mass-produced, they could also be cut by hand.

That’s what Nancarrow did. It took him years, apparently. The two hands play independently, but moving together towards the centre of the keyboard . . . and faster and faster as they do so. So far, so academic. What makes it so much more than that is that it’s a kind of boogie-woogie — that speeds up till the two hand-patterns collide, madly, into each other.

Various songs are nominated as the very first rock and roll track. Amateurs generally say something like Rock Around The Clock. Professionals often go for Jackie Brenston’s Rocket 88 — with Ike Turner driving the band.* Awkward cusses favour the likes of Lionel Hampton’s Flying High. It’s a large field.

Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No 3 a is my new choice. It’s that good. And it’ll drive a lot of people right out of the room — which has to be a prime requisite for the first rock and roll record. No enemy, no life.

One more point. Music that speed up and up is, inevitably and correctly, often linked to sexuality. Ravel’s Bolero, that kind of thing. This, though it starts out that way, is different. It rocks but it doesn’t bounce. And then there’s that mad finale . . . Oh, well, maybe I take back what I just wrote.

Finally . . . Before today, I’d only heard a fragment of it — and a description — on a podcast, Radio 3’s 50 Great new music series.

It was Stephen Fry’s favourite piece of modern music. He — or someone else on the short show — informed me that Nancarrow was a mid 20th century American composer who fell out with his homeland’s anti-communism and chose instead to live in Mexico, homeland to sloppy dictatorship and corruption.

* Once upon a time, I had a chat, on a cold, cold Mississippi November evening, with the woman who sewed Ike’s tie the night before he and the band headed up to Memphis to cut Rocket 88. (I’m almost as intrigued by that as the fact that I’ve shaken the hand of not just one but two men who, as children, had their hair tousled by Hitler. And sometime I’ll tell you about my link to Oscar Wilde and the corpse in Blow Up and . . .)

James fucking Bond, part two

When I wrote about Judi Dench, as M, swearing in Skyfall, I had no idea she had previous in this field. Considerable previous. 



Thanks to Chris Coates, I can now share some of Dame Judi's extensive contributions to the UK swearing corpus.

One Both Mathew MacFadyen and Keira Knightley have watched her on set, embroidering swear words on cushions. You Are a Fucking Shit. You Are A Cunt. That kind of (fucking) thing.

Two She played the mother in David Hare's Amy's View at the National in 1997. Knowing the playwright was notoriously touchy about critics etc, she embroidered him a cushion. (Embroidery clearly photo-finishes with swearing in the Dench psyche.) It read: Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em.

So . . . 

One JD is clearly something of an unrepentent JD.

Two Given that when JD swears in Skyfall, she's in a dark room looking down, my guess is she's now using her own embroidered cushions as secret cue-cards.

Xmas compilation track listing

As ever, there is an Xmas selection. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (only in the musical sense, this year). There is also a little new year and a touch of hannukah.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog about my rules for putting an Xmas compilation together.  I had twenty rules in all. This year, I have broken ten of them at least. Which were? Well, there is no Elvis, no Phil Spector, no White Christmas, no world music, no sexual revelation, nothing ethnic, no English folk, no reconsideration of a seemingly nauseating classic, no country music, nothing that would offend sensible opinion by its obviousness or the singer's identity.

So which ones didn't I break? 

Rule three The first track must be a familiar one . . . Well, this year's, Christmas Island, is fairly familiar.

Rule four Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about sadness, loss, separation and inevitability of death . . . Well, maybe not death but River is about loss and separation.

Rule six Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about family — its realities as well as its fantasies . . . See Xmas.

Rule nine There should be unfamiliar versions of familiar songs . . . See
Silent Night and, perhaps, River. Also even, Van Morrison's Santa Claus.

Rule ten There should be at least one quite unfamiliar new(ish) tunes. See Xmas, I'm Dreaming, Van Morrison's Santa Claus, Home For The Holidays.

Rule fourteen There should be something by Bing Crosby or Johnny Mercer . . . See Marshmallow World.

Rule fifteen There should be one or more example of the wonderful world of US black Christmas pop . . . A bit of a stretch as it wasn't a hit etc but see Riverside Drive.

Rule sixteen There should be wit . . . There's a lot of that this year. See, again, Riverside Drive. Also I'm Dreaming.

Rule nineteen There should be something that sounds like it was recorded in a cornflake factory . . . Listen to Happy New Year.

Rule twenty There should be something by a girlie indie singer with an off-putting name and shtick which is nonetheless surprisingly enticing . . . See Christmas Song, Home For The Holidays and Xmas.

I guess I have to add a few new rules, though . . .

Rule twenty-one It should reach beyond Xmas. See Happy New Year, 'Twas The Night Before Hannukah, The Latke Song.

Rule twenty-two The genuine believers should have a shake. Christmas Prayer, When Jesus Was Born, Did You Spend Christmas Day In Jail?

Anyway, here is the tracklisting.
 

1 Christmas Island Bob Archer & The Dinning Sisters

2 Marshmallow World Bing Crosby

3 Skating Vince Guaraldi

4 It Must Be Christmas Gerry Mulligan & Judy Holiday

5 Xmas Shelby Lynne

6 River Tracey Thorn

7 I'm Dreaming Randy Newman

8 When Jesus Was Born Sons Of Heaven

9 A Christmas Prayer Solomon Burke

10 How I Hate To See Xmas Come Around (Christmas Blues) Jimmy Witherspoon

11 Christmas On Riverside Drive August Darnell

12 Getting Ready For Christmas Day Paul Simon

13 Christmas Song Jenny Owen Youngs

14 Home For The Holidays Emmy the Great & Tim Wheeler

15 Silent Night Slow Club

16 Van Morrison's Santa Claus Rich Chambers

17 Happy New Year Lighnin' Hopkins

18 The Latke Song (Live) Debbie Friedman

19 Twas the Night Before Chanukah Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne

20 Did You Spend Christmas Day In Jail? Rev. J.M. Gates

21 Holiday I.D Lou Reed 

I might do some sleevenotes etc. I might not. I'll let you know next week.

If you didn't get an email inviting you to download the tracks from Dropbox, drop me an email or put a comment on this page and I'll send you a link. 

Naked women: why?

To the Donmar Warehouse, for the heralded all-female production of Julius Caesar. As politeness requires, I’ll start with the positive and praiseworthy.

 

One It was short, two hours, with no interval. Not a minor point at the Donmar which must have the most uncomfortable seats of any internationally renowned theatre.

(This might also help stoke the slight but unmistakable air of smugness in the crowd. They have not just managed to get tickets for such a famous little house but they have suffered for their art. They exhale the same air of entitlement that plumes from the mouths of the people queuing outside this month’s most hippest no-reservations restaurant. Pitt Cue, say. Oh, I know, I am so early 2012. Slap my wrist.)

Two They did a great job of editing it down. The story shone through and was easy to follow, even if you didn’t know much or any Roman history. Again, not a minor point. It’s an unwieldy play. The guy in the title is dead half-way through. There’s not much in the way of sympathetic characters. There is no surprise about either the murder or the denouement. All that stuff about divination etc makes no sense to modern minds. Etc, etc (to drop suitably into a little Latin).

Otherwise? Well, it wasn’t very good. When asked at the end, I replied: one star. And, feeling poncey, added: jejune. Later, I also said: same kind of half-dead tropes there had been in guff like my school’s student production of Titus Andronicus. Neon lights! Paramilitary uniforms! Shouting! (Even! More! Than! Usual! For! A! Shakespeare! What is it about actors and Willie the Shake? Why do they have to shout lines that should be spoken? My first theory: they, like memsabs addressing foreigners, are convinced that volume enhances comprehension. My second theory: they know not what they do — or what the lines mean.)

Okay, okay, I hear you say. So far, so usual, what’s your point and can’t you get to it quicker?

So: nakedness. Naked women, in particular. One naked woman, in this case. She was wandering around at one point. It was a bit of a shock. Mostly because, well, it made no sense. At all.
Why, oh, why do directors persist in prevailing upon actresses to take their clothes off in the name of art? Obviously, it does make sense some times. I remember a production of Sondheim’s Passion in a theatre even smaller than the Donmar. The show starts with a couple rising from a bed where they have just had sex. We had front row seats. The singer-actors were naked. As singers, they were wonderful. They also had singers bodies. I couldn’t make up my mind whether their lack of beauty enhanced the humanity of the story or merely distracted the audience into physical critiquing.

I asked one of the two women who came to Julius Caesar with me about the naked woman. Yes, she said, I couldn’t work out what it might have signified either. Also, she added, it wasn’t as if the actress was the . . . Then she said something that if I’d said it, I would have had angry stares at least. She was, let’s put it this way, less than enthusiastic about the actress’s physique.
I’d thought that, too, obviously. I’d had another thought, too. That the director and the other actresses might well have pushed her into it. Its pointlessness whiffed of bullying. Women, almost invariably, are far, far more judgmental of other women’s bodies than men are.

So, for me, that was the only moment that the all-femaleness of the show made sense. Just as a gang of senators gang up on JC, so here a gang of gals gang up on another gal. That the parallel of this untethered emotional violence was unseen by its perpetrators made it all the more poignant but also genuinely tragic. Julius Caesar meets Mallory Towers.

Meantime, here is some decent female nakedness, in a short fashion film made by my daughter.

PS I didn't want this text to be centred but there is something that goes wrong in blogger when you paste in an image. The text centres itself and you can't reset the alignment. At least, I can't. Any thoughts etc welcome.