DIANA HOME CAMEL JOCK STREET RACE HOSPITAL HELL DWI BS
JAMES BOND SWISSAIR 111 FIRE SALE DODI2DI4 CARMILLA POWMIA
DODI TO DI FOR: 'TIS THE SEASON FOR REVOLUTION
by John Lee
"It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman—they remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils."
—Sir Winston Churchill, KBE
News headlines just prior to the fateful crash proclaimed "Dodi To Di For," with photos of the doomed interracial couple taken by the now-despised "stalkarazzi." In his 1998 C.D. NU BLAXPLOITATION, jazz musician Don Byron and Existential Dred eulogized the billionaire "playboy" with spoken word:
 |
Dodi (Morning 97)
Let us not forget
That Egbert united Cornwall to Essex;
The first Saxon to ascend to the bloody throne.
Spears and axes brought plenty of taxes.
Money can't change the color of your blood,
And even Othello found the cure for his nightmare;
Power can't change the color of your blood.
How subtle the chill when you first discover
You and the fair Princess are doing it under cover.
Egbert was spinning in his grave
At the thought of you ascending to stepfather
Of the Empire's future king.
You, who built the Pyramids.
You, who invented the written language.
You, who created Greece,
Were just a rich Camel Jockey,
Would never see that infamous day.
Money can't change the color of you blood.
Pop-Pop-Pop-Parazzi caused your demise
We have been so advised.
They caught seven
But some got away.
There are those who believe
It was royalty's most fortunate day.
Were those cameras behind the shield
Of motorbikes in hot pursuit?
Or a few pistols in their belts to boot?
Dodi, your daddy owned a hotel;
There was no need
To speed off to the Gates of Hell.
Again, a puzzle with some pieces askew;
If there were a stepfather
It wouldn't be you.
Money can't change the color of your blood;
And what is Royalty but that?
The Icon known as Di
Will live forever in England's eye.
And you will find yourself
In the shadow of history's purgatory,
Never attaining your intended glory.
And like the unforgivable Crusades,
They will relegate you to the shades.
Peace be unto you, Dodi Al Fayed,
'Cause we ain't heard the whole story yet.
Money might buy you love, my friend,
But it can't change the color of your skin.
ALFAYED.COM - Tribute CD
Memorial at Harrods in London  |
A specially recorded tribute CD, composed and recorded by the legendary jazz guitarist and pop/soul singer George Benson, has been launched as a memorial to Diana Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed.
The tribute songs, My Father, My Son and I will Keep You in My Heart, will directly benefit Diana's former boarding school, New School near Sevenoaks in Kent (England), which offers specialised teaching to traumatised children.
Both Mohamed Al Fayed and George Benson have suffered the tragic death of a son, George having lost three sons in seperate incidents. A chance meeting at Harrods resulted in this moving project.
The arts column: Give us sex and jokes - but truth, too
Sarah Crompton on why historical dramas prefer frolics to fact
Daily Telegraph
10/12/2003
When I was young, there was a wonderfully vivid historical drama on television called The First Churchills, about the rise of John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough. It starred John Neville and Susan Hampshire - and I became obsessed with it.
It so fascinated me that I ploughed my way through Winston Churchill's four-volume history of the life and times of his famous ancestor, poring over maps of the strategies employed at the battles of Oudenarde and Blenheim. But it wasn't the Duke's prowess in war that first captured my attention. It was the scene in which he returned home exhausted from the field and flung himself into bed with his wife. With his boots on.
I thought about that scene when watching BBC1's Charles II - the Power and the Passion. This four-part series, starring Rufus Sewell, has featured huge amounts of bed - indeed, its first instalment gave every impression that all Charles did was flounce around with women. As it progressed, however, the romping grew more restrained, even as the wigs grew more unwieldy, and I found myself compelled once again to watch a version of history being played out on my television screen.
Historical fiction has been huge on TV this year. After years when the genre has been in the doldrums, we have been treated not only to the Merry Monarch but also to Boudicca (best forgotten) and two swipes at the life of Henry VIII - BBC2's riveting The Other Boleyn Girl and ITV's broad-brush but enjoyable Henry VIII. A life of Pepys, starring comedian Steve Coogan, is unveiled next week.
The reason for this renaissance is obvious. Television dramatists noticed the popularity of documentary histories and so felt encouraged to dip their toes once again into the deep sea of History as Drama.
But these are treacherous waters. While 21st-century viewers are sophisticated enough to understand that history is not written in stone, but depends on the view of it you take, the constraints of drama mean that factual verities are often thrown out of the window.
When Philippa Gregory (who wrote the book The Other Boleyn Girl) was asked which bits of her new historical novel The Queen's Fool were true and which imagined, she replied that she had just spent a very long time interweaving the two so that they were indistinguishable. That was her job as a historical novelist.
The same blurring of boundaries applies to television. The most graphic image in Charles II was of the young Charles standing under the scaffold, and being spattered with the blood of his father. But in fact he was in exile by the time Charles I met his fate in 1649. Challenged about this inaccuracy, the writer Adrian Hodges was unrepentant.
"It is more important to be convincing than authentic," he said. On the whole, I am with him. In the context of drama the impression of an era is probably more important than the detail. Television will always favour the personal and psychological over the political and sociological, but Hodges gave enough sense of Charles II's troubled times to justify the serial's hours on screen.
It grappled with the complexities of the Test Act (which barred Catholics from public office) and of Charles's difficult relationships with his parliaments and the secret treaties that ensued. In its bleached-out images of the plague pits, it brought history to life in a way no textbook or documentary could.
If it used facts for its own purpose, it did not completely traduce them - and, with a bit of luck, it was good enough to inspire a few of its four million viewers to go off, as I did after The First Churchills, to read around their subject and find out more. That all falls within television's role to entertain and to inspire.
What is more worrying is when television presents a version of events that bears so little relation to reality that it completely distorts the truth. This is the case with Guy Jenkin's The Private Life of Samuel Pepys, to be shown on December 16. Jenkin creates an amiable drama.
But he makes you believe, for example, that Pepys was tried for treason, when in reality the case never came to court. He further eggs his pudding by suggesting that his hero's famous diaries were part of his undoing, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the accusations that were laid at his door.
There's lots of sex, of course, and a few good jokes. But the play gives no sense at all of why Pepys was important, why his diary and his life matter. If Jenkin and Coogan wanted to serve up a historical black comedy, they might more usefully have presented a spoof Alan Partridge of the 17th century.
We the viewers would be better off reading Claire Tomalin's definitive life of Pepys - or indeed the honest, outspoken diaries themselves. It is one thing to put an imaginative vision of history on television, and quite another to subvert it for pointless ends. If TV is to have our trust, then it must be clear where the boundaries lie.
The demon drink
Fresh grounds for coffee-loving
The Times Online
October 14, 2003
Coffee has had centuries of bad press. It all started promisingly enough, when an Arabian goatherd called Kaldi noticed that his goats became more frolicsome after eating a certain type of berry. He tried the berries himself, and felt exhilarated. Roasted and ground, the berries became the stimulant that Arabs knew as "qahvah" and what we call coffee. It was only 1,000 years later, when the drink reached the West, that the negative propaganda really got going. Coffee-houses opened all over Europe, ending the befuddling reign of beer and bringing free-thinking democracy and financial matters in their wake. Yet the possible danger of the drink has filled pessimistic Western minds ever since.
That coffee made men think worried their masters. Charles II wanted to close down the coffee houses of Restoration London. He thought their round-the-clock discussion of politics, frenzied writing of pamphlets and poems, and general wide-awake independence of spirit — not to mention the fortunes that the frequenters of coffee-houses amassed as these meeting-places became the world's first trade exchanges — were dangerously seditious. Frederick the Great of Prussia also suspected that coffee and feudal loyalty were incompatible. Armies must drink beer, he ruled; coffee drinkers could not be relied on to give their lives for their king. The Italian clergy fretted that Satan must be behind the new evil from the East. But Pope Clement VIII secretly liked the beverage, so he compromised by baptising it and, he explained, cheating the Devil.
Women worried most about the effect of coffee on their men's bodies. In 1674, the women of London published a pamphlet denouncing the "Drying, Enfeebling Liquor" that kept husbands out excitedly talking — instead of getting drunk and coming home to make love, as nature intended. Male Londoners counter-petitioned, "Vindicating their own Performances, and the Vertues of their Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon Them in a Scandalous Pamphlet". French women (and wine merchants) also panicked, blaming coffee for impairing the male libido. In 1695, a report published by the Ecole de Médicine in Paris, argued that coffee hindered procreation.
Yet coffee-drinking and coffee drinkers survived. Democracy spread; new generations of imbibers were born. The phrase "come up for a coffee" even developed aphrodisiac associations. Now research from Brazil (admittedly a coffee-producing nation) — showing that coffee makes men more, not less, fertile, by making sperm swim faster towards female ova — adds to the centuries of anecdotal evidence. More grist for the mill.
| 
