“If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the part would be too much. Besides, no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real, so if you can’t get someone who’s perfectly right, it’s more satisfying to get someone who’s perfectly wrong. Then you know you’ve really got something.”
Andy Warhol, “Fame”, 1975.
“The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s.
The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s.
The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s.
America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live.”
Andy Warhol, “Fame”, 1975.
“I don’t really care that much about ‘Beauties’. What I really like are ‘Talkers’. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It’s not ‘talkies’. Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something. Which isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that I don’t know what it is their being. It is more fun to be with people who are doing things.”
Andy Warhol, “Fame”, 1975.
“It’s very easy to make faux pas when you’re talking to a person who’s in love, because they’re more sensitive about everything. I remember once I was at a dinner party and I was talking to a couple who looked so happy together and I said, “You are the happiest looking couple I’ve ever seen.’ That was okay and then I went that little bit further to score my nightly faux pas. ‘It must have been like a storybook dream story. I just know that you were childhood sweethearts.’ And at that point their faces fell and they turned away and avoided me for the rest of the evening. I found out later that they had deserted their husbands and wives and families to go after each other. When people are in love all their problems are in strange proportions and it’s hard to know when you’re saying the wrong thing.”
Andy Warhol, “Fame”, 1975.
“People’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there. But then you wouldn’t have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it. A friend of mine always says, ‘Women love me for the man I’m not.”
Andy Warhol, “Fame”, 1975.
The Singapore Times Exclusive: THE ABDUCTION OF RORY DYLAN STEPHEN: MURDER ON THE EASTERN & ORIENTAL EXPRESS?
It was our last night aboard the Eastern & Oriental Express with a gala black-tie dinner planned but given the Malay Tiger battle and the PTSD of Sir Reginald Nicomshire after the tiger attack no one was in a particularly celebratory mood. The buzz of the Singaporean Truth Network news helicopter dogging the train created an annoying atmosphere.
The gala night was a tepid and lacklustre affair. Bobby Jr, and I joined by his girlfriend the beautiful Malay, Amira, had a quiet dinner in our State Cabin, listened to some jazz afterwards and retired early.
Waking up on our final morning there was a great deal of pounding up and down the corridors of the train. In fact, it augmented into a great commotion.
Keith, our bribe taking butler, breathlessly pounded on our door and shouted, “Nicomshire is dead!”
Given the adventures I had undergone of late I had a strong suspicion of foul play. This was confirmed by the Coroner General of Singapore, a passenger on the train, whose opinion, nonofficial at that without an autopsy, that certain telltale marks of a poisoning were evident!
Wait a minute! I recall that telephone conversation in our room at the Singapore Shangri-La where Bobby Jr. had told his mother Madame Fong he was arranging “for the poison”.
“How Elizabeth loathed that pension! The patronne was an old black-clad sneak who spent her life in tiptoeing up and down the stairs in hopes of catching boarders washing stockings in their hand basins. The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows pursued the only man in the establishment, a mild, bald creature who worked at La Samartine, like sparrows worrying about a bread-crust. At meals all of them watched each other’s plates to see who was given the biggest helping. The bathroom was a dark den with leprous walls and a rickety verdigrised geyser which would spit two inches of tepid water into the bath and then mulishly stop working.
George Orwell, “Burmese Days”, 1935.
“Elizabeth was sent for two terms to a very expensive boarding-school. Oh, the joy, the joy, the unforgettable joy of those two terms. Four of the girls at school were ‘the Honourable’; nearly all of them had ponies of their own, on which they were allowed to go riding on Saturday afternoons. There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever, with Elizabeth, it was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly”) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious”.
George Orwell, “Burmese Days”, 1935.
The Singapore Times Exclusive: THE ABDUCTION OF RORY DYLAN STEPHEN: BEGINNING TO CONTEMPLATE MY HOME BACK IN TORONTO AND WHAT I MISSED
Thoughts of my possible freedom turned my mind to what I missed back in Toronto.
It has been a little over a month since my abduction masterminded by that bitch Madame Fong. Taken from my home in Toronto and smuggled through North Bergen, New Jersey and Hong Kong ending up in Singapore. Can you imagine this experience for a puppy barely in this world to be ripped from it and plopped into Southeast Asia being “cared for” or was it “managed” by strangers.
Madame Fong stole the remainder of my puppyhood. As a puppy it was fair to say I was lost, delightfully for the most part, in my puppyhood. Now as I sit on the Eastern & Oriental Express on the rails in Malaysia I feel my puppyhood was lost or better said stolen from me.
I have been exposed to violence, murder, corruption, beauty contests, exotic foods, luxurious accommodations, threats, battles with tiger, a near fatal spider bite, new cultures and languages, politicians, dog-by-law enforcers and Viking cruise passengers with protruding stomachs.
It would seem I grew up quickly and witnessed and experienced in a few weeks what few West Highland Terriers before me and after me have or will see and experience.
Being mindful there is little sense in lamenting what could have been but rather experiencing what is, trying my best not to be judgemental. Living in the moment is what I did and hoped my destiny would change.
Don’t call me a cad but I have enjoyed my experiences with the exception of certain violent aspects of my kidnapping particularly the threats shoved across my snout in that process such as being forced to sniff for landmines in Cambodia. It was what it was.
I miss Bob and Fay. They gave me the heart and discipline to persevere. They gave me hope.
I miss the daily walks and puppy fighting with Billy and Emma. I enjoyed so much our special walks in local parks and even the car rides to get there.
I miss the disciplinary successes like potty training.
I miss chasing birds, squirrels and rabbits.
I miss my backyard and rolling in the grass.
I miss the simple treats of bagel and whole wheat bread treats. Pieces of meat. Blueberries.
I miss little children asking me if they could pat me.
I miss so many people saying I am so cute.
I miss barking, occasionally of course, like a silly puppy. I loved barking at animals on television.
I miss snoozing and listening to jazz and classical music or just snoozing when the mood presented itself.
Always I knew I would be returned home all fortified by Bobby Fong Jr.’s promise to that effect if I carried up my mission of cozying up to Sir Reginald Nicomshire.
I thought when I return home it will not be the puppydom I left but on the other hand if none of this abduction stuff happened, I would be losing my puppydom anyways.
I couldn’t believe that I was thinking perhaps this misadventure was for the better. It would make me more savvy, worldly and yes even more useful to the world in some way. Perhaps in a literary way my suffering was going to make me a stronger West Highland Terrier.
If you have read “Reggie the Egyptian Rescue Dog” the exploits of dogs there were extraordinary and with my knowledge on how they survived and thrived on adversities made me realize we dogs can dig deep down and surprise not only ourselves but humanity.
“Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to the right of you, Pink’un to the left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that those bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called “greasy little babus’, and you admit dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native uprising to drown their Empire in blood.”
George Orwell, “Burmese Days”, 1935.
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