Where have all the icons gone?

You know you are getting older when even the photographers of pop stars, long dead, are dead themselves.

Noel Brodsky the photographer, who took the iconic shots of Jim Morrison bare-chested and Christ-like, died on Saint David’s Day in Stamford, Connecticut.

It was this shot more than any other that prompted an editor of a book of pop song lyrics I read to comment something to the effect that Jim Morrison, “looked like a street urchin who had died, gone to heaven and had been reincarnated as a choirboy.” Brodsky himself commented that, “You know, Morrison never really looked that way again . . . I think I got him at his peak.”

Thinking about the way he went on his sad decline leading the way to Père Lachaise Cemetery, you look at that gaunt hair framed face with a little more intensity. His truncated body seems pictorially brutal, a savage mutilation, which makes his broodingly neutral stare at the viewer unsettling to say the least. There is a vulnerability which is emphasised by the (implied) nakedness. His look is ambivalent: staring at or through the spectator. Brodsky’s description of the shoot when he took the picture describes Morrison as “so drunk he was tumbling into the lights” while “his equilibrium wasn’t too terrific” which could explain the feeling of instability in the attention of those dark eyes: the shadow of the left side of Morrison’s face looks as though it could develop like an eclipse and shroud the whole of his head in darkness.

The hairs on his chest look as though they are corralled by the thin loop of the necklace and leave the nipples isolated on the rib defining stretched skin. The look is one of tension in the face of some obscure torture: a brooding stoicism; a sexual invitation with no admission.

When you see the actual photograph as opposed to the cropped image used on the cover of The Best Of The Doors album, the waif like appearance of Morrison is emphasised by the hollow arch of the ribs and the sense of authority in the pouting stare is lessened: this is a man lost in that square of cutting definition rather than someone commanding it - for however short a time.

It’s a long time since I have seen this image, but it still has the ability to unsettle and it certainly defines a whole aesthetic that a host of lesser musical personalities have copied but never bettered. Power in vulnerability is a difficult balancing act to achieve: in a static image it is a possible stance; but in an actual real-time life a via dolorosa to destruction.

How pretentious (portentous?) that sounds! But given the self destruction that became a key note of Morrison’s life and using the wonderful advantage of hindsight, it’s very tempting to see the seeds of darkness where previously one only saw vibrant life!

Vibrant life, well, rather sluggish life at the moment, is the governing principle of my SSSI Pond at the moment. The exhausted frog (see a few days ago) who according to Paul is, in fact, now deceased has obviously done his/her/its job in his/her/its amphibious, androgynous, ambisexual way and the end of the pond now looks as if someone has emptied a sachet of wallpaper paste into the water to produce a gelatinous, bumpy, slimy mess with tiny black specks of nascent tadpoles.

The fish are coming to the surface more and showing their increased friskiness which probably means that they are licking their bloodless lips and sharpening their non-existent teeth in preparation for the massacre of the innocents – because we never see many frogs at the end of the season!

If we have decent weather tomorrow morning, before I take Louise to Swansea, I shall take a photo of the pullulating mass and tract its progress to free swimming life – perhaps I ought to weigh the goldfish now resident and lazily swimming in the waiting room of what is going to be one vast restaurant. I shall merely record nature red in tooth and fin and make fatuous metaphorical comparisons with the torrid life of Rumney.

My visit to the Job Centre was enlivened by the person I saw being a cheerful man who was married to an American from Baltimore who regaled me with sympathetic stories of the insularity of Americans. Most refreshing!

I am coming to the end of my Jobseekers period which has been characterised by the complete dearth of jobs that I would like to take up. I hope that the promised insert about Archie Rhys Griffiths comes to something. I will have to remind Steve. Hope springs eternal.

I have been given a letter which invites me to another interview with the staff at the Jobcentre. The last time I was threatened with a two day course teaching me how to write a letter of application and how to construct a CV. I look forward to that experience. I wonder who teaches these courses and I also wonder what sort of class there will be. I would have thought that the class will be a very interesting selection of individuals spanning the whole age range: a challenging class for a single teacher.

Such delights to be anticipated!