Mark Edward Bear, Globetrotting Teddy...

The reputation that Mark E. Smith usually enjoys is that of a spiky outsider.
His time as founder and frontman for The Fall has been an ongoing battle with various elements.
Clashes with bandmates, record labels and interviewers have established the idea of Smith as a monstrous figure, whose contrarian attitude has lead to constant friction with those around him.
On more than one occasion he has come to blows with members of his band.
A tour of Australia in 1982 was almost derailed when Smith saw two of his bandmates dancing to 'Rock The Casbah' in a club after a gig one night.
Smith ran onto the dancefloor and began to punch the pair of them, claiming they were 'embarrassing the band' by dancing to the work of The Clash.
In 1992 Smith ended up having an onstage punch-up in New York with the rest of The Fall and woke up the next day in a jail cell to the news that everyone else, except keyboardist Julia Nagle, had quit the band mid-tour.
That would have left Smith more prepared for the situation that arose in California in 2006 when he ended up fighting the lead singer from the band supporting them in the middle of a set. Smith had been arguing with the man for a few days and matters escalated when Smith had a banana or plantain (reports vary) thrown at him mid-set.
He immediately left the stage, removing his jacket and folding it neatly on the floor and pursued his assailant to the parking lot where a scuffle ensued.
He returned to the stage to find that everyone except his wife, keyboardist Elena Poulou, had quit the band, exasperated by Smith's attitude.
For some reason keyboardists seem to find Smith a lot easier to accept...
Smith was furious at what he saw as his betrayal by the rest of the band, particularly as he felt he was the injured party following the fruit-based assault.
He said afterwards:

'A lot of people laughed off what happened because it was a banana that was thrown at me. All I know is that at that point I felt threatened. How was I supposed to react? If that banana had landed an inch lower I'd have lost an eye...'

Smith famously quit Rough Trade Records after not seeing eye to eye with the label on a number of points.
Smith outlined some of the issues that the label had:

'They'd go, the teaboy doesn't like the fact that you slagged off Wah! Heat in this number... They had a whole meeting over the us mentioning guns in a song.
And I'd go, What's it got to do with you? Just sell the record you fuckin' hippy.'

His relationship with the music press has also been tempestuous with interviews ending with Smith getting slapped by Caitlin Moran and attempting to put out a cigarette on James Brown of 'Loaded' magazine.
When asked by Brown how he felt his fans would respond when they read what would be published in 'Loaded' after their scrap Smith, accurately, pointed out to Brown 'Fall fans don't read your magazine...'
However it would seem there is a softer side to Smith as well.
Legend has it that one day, walking through the streets of Salford, Smith saw a little girl crying. He went over to see what was the matter and the girl's mother told him that her daughter had lost her teddy bear.
Smith assured the girl her teddy wasn't lost. He'd seen her teddy the other day and he explained to the little girl that it was actually travelling all around the world.
The teddy had been meaning to write to her but he'd lost her address.
Smith took the girls address and assured her if he saw her teddy he would pass it on so he could get in touch.
Smith then proceeded to write to the girl from all around the world as he toured with The Fall.
He signed the postcards 'Mark Edward Bear' and sent a card a week until the girl was 28 years old...

Beware Jesuits in Cadillacs bearing gifts...

Father Arthur Scott drove his bright, red Cadillac up to the front of the Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, New Orleans and promptly parked across two handicapped spaces.
He got out of the car and was greeted by Lee Gray, the Museum's curator.
Father Scott had been in touch a few weeks before and had explained that his mother had recently died leaving behind quite an extensive art collection.
Scott hoped to donate some pieces from the collection to the Museum and possibly make a financial contribution once his Mother's financial affairs were settled.
Gray lead Father Scott into the Museum and gave him a brief tour of the premises after which they gratefully accepted the piece he had brought along to gift to the institution, a pastel drawing by Charles Courtney Curran.
Soon Father Scott made his farewells and left, but not before promising to pay for a frame for the drawing and blessing the Museum and it's staff with the sign of the cross and the words "Pax vobiscum".
Gray and Mark Tullos, the Museum's Director, had found Father Scott to be an eccentric character but had met plenty of those in their time in the art world. As Tullos put it:

"In my experience with Jesuit priests and wealthy donors, it's not unusual to run into someone quirky..."

However within five minutes of Father Scott's departure the whole affair took on a whole new dimension.
Tullos received a message from Joyce Penn, the Museum's Registrar who was responsible for the cataloguing and care of the pieces donated to the institution. Having given the drawing a basic ultraviolet light scan she realised that the piece they had been given was a forgery.
It seemed most likely that someone had printed a digital image of the picture, distressed it and painted over the top of it.
Saved from the embarrassment of displaying a forgery in their Museum the next thing for the staff to determine was whether Father Scott was the perpetrator of this forgery or entirely unaware of the provenance of his donated gift.
A search of various databases and message boards used by arts institutions around the world soon revealed the truth.
There was no such man as 'Father Arthur Scott'.
They had met Mark Augustus Landis, America's most prolific and successful art forger.
For over thirty years Landis has visited museums and galleries in at least 19 states and has attempted to fool over 40 different institutions.
Often he would arrive as 'Father Scott' but he was also known to operate as 'Steven Gardiner', an art collector, and would even use his own name on occasion.
His longevity and success could be put down to a number of reasons.
The artists that Landis chooses to imitate are not the more famous names that forgers tend to go for, the Picassos, Matisses and Vermeers, but were rather more obscure names. Painters such as Curran, Alfred Jacob Miller, Louis Valtat and Milton Avery are popular enough to be accepted by the museums and galleries that Landis would target but would not attract the scrutiny that a piece apparently produced by a major name would.
The skill and range of styles that Landis presented would also help to keep people off his trail. If all he could produce were good copies in the style of Valtat then the number of pieces by one artist appearing in collections as donations would also be enough to alert the authorities.
However the factor that probably helped Landis escape detection the most was the fact that he donated his pieces and never accepted any financial reward for them. Not only would he never accept any money for the works he would also refuse to fill out forms from the institutions to allow him to record the donations as tax-deductible gifts.
Most forgers are tracked down by specialist fraud teams but Landis has never been investigated for one very simple reason.
It seems that, as he has never profited from his activities and has therefore never defrauded anyone, he has never actually committed a crime.
Once a financial angle is removed, most forgers tend to be disgruntled artists that seek to humiliate the art world and institutions that has snubbed them.
However it would appear that Landis has a much more noble aim than that.
All of his donations are made in memory of his parents and it would appear that the career as a forger that Landis has undertaken is purely to pay tribute to his mother and father.
When asked about his motives once Landis replied:

"I'd like to have had a museum named after dad or mother but I'm not a billionaire. Lots of people have pictures in museums in loved one's memories don't they? I mean, everybody's got a tombstone, that doesn't mean anything, but a picture in a museum, that really means something."

The Postal Adventures of W. Reginald Bray

W. Reginald Bray spent the majority of his life collecting autographs.

Known as the 'Autograph King' he ended up with a collection of over 15,000 autographs sourced from people from all walks of life. Bray's selection of the autographs he would hunt down was eclectic. He targeted the obvious celebrity names, film stars such as Gary Cooper, Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier as well as other notable figures such as the explorer Ernest Shackleton, cricketer W.G. Grace and even managed to get a personal reply from the Pope. The fact that Bray had written to the pontiff in Latin may have aided his cause.

His success was based around the tremendous amount of requests he sent out. He only received responses from half the people he wrote to and was especially disappointed to not manage to get autographs from King George V, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler despite repeated requests. Bray was so persistent that he eventually was sent a reply from Germany explaining that the Fuhrer was too busy to respond personally to him and he should 'refrain from further letters in this regard.'

Bray also attempted to track down autographs from more unusual places and managed to get signed replies from the first person to write while flying in an aeroplane, a policeman who stopped Winston Churchill driving the wrong way up a one-way street and John Rankin, the oldest bell-ringer in England.

The postal service was invaluable to Brays project and he had every faith in the system having tested its limits in a series of experiments before he began to collect autographs. Bray was fascinated by the scale of the operation that the Royal Mail undertook and was intrigued by the limits of what this service could provide.

Initially he experimented with the finite nature of the post, it being sent simply from one point to another, by producing a postcard that had an address on both of its sides. This allowed the card to be sent through the post and redirected an infinite amount of times through a refusal to accept the card at either address and asking it to be returned to either of its 'senders'. Bray went on to post cards that were slightly smaller and larger than the Royal Mail allowed, sent cards out to addresses that were formed partly from images he drew or stuck on the card and addressed cards in rhyme form or as a picture puzzle. He also began to send cards out to people or locations with the vaguest information. Some of his cards were sent to 'The daughter of the postman who has walked 232,872 miles', 'The deserted village of Havvanah' and 'A Resident of Hallingbury where land used to be held by handing over yearly to the King's exchequer a packet of postcards and a Silver Needle'.

Eventually Bray realised that, as long as the postage was correct, the Royal Mail would send more than postcards. The official line was that the Royal Mail would deliver anything as 'small as a bumblebee and as large as an elephant.' This was a policy that Bray would exploit to the full. Over the years he posted a bowler hat, a turnip with the address carved into the surface of the vegetable itself and a rabbit's skull with the address written across the nasal bone and the correct postage attached to the surface of the skull itself. Eventually Bray hit upon the absolute limit of what the Royal Mail would be prepared to do.

He posted himself.

Presenting himself at his local Post Office with his home address tied to his wrist on a label he paid the correct postage to be delivered to his house. He was then taken to the local sorting office, processed and accompanied home by the postman.

Fortunately his delivery wasn't redirected or refused…

Bill Jarrett and the Orientation debate.

For most of us toilet paper orientation is a small matter of personal preference.
Some prefer to leave the roll with the final sheet ‘over’, reducing the risk of brushing their hand against the bathroom wall and making it easier to locate the end of the roll.
Others will opt for leaving the final sheet ‘under’, giving a tidier look to the roll as the sheet can be rolled out of sight and making it less likely that children or household pets could unravel the roll while playing with it.
For Bill Jarrett it is an obsession.
He has spent years, working out of his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attempting to organise a national vote on the subject that would then allow a democratically chosen orientation to become law in the United States.
Jarrett is hopeful that once a decision is taken, which would been enforced by police officers and a failure to adhere to the new regulations be punishable in law, it would settle an argument that has raged for decades:

“Next to the wall, or away from the wall. This argument has been going on since 1882 when roll toilet paper first came on the market. That’s when people found out there was two ways to hang it, and started arguing.”

For a man so tied up in the issue Jarrett has refused to reveal his own preference for fear of ‘affecting the vote.’ When journalists visit his home to discuss the progress of his mission he removes all the toilet paper from the dispensers in his home and leaves them on the floor.
Jarrett makes it clear that what drives him isn’t a desire to see his own choice of orientation become law but rather to save confusion.
By his estimate each citizen in the United States spends half an hour a year looking for the end of toilet roll as there is no predetermined location.
He calculates that a universal agreement on orientation will save Americans 90 million hours per year at home and save employers $300 million dollars per year in lost productivity in the workplace.
Jarrett has devoted all of his energies in retirement to this cause. He remains optimistic of a positive result:

''My final goal in life is to put an end to this most winnable debate and declare a 'National Toilet Paper Hanging Way,' '' he writes. ''I am 79, feel good, but at this age, who knows.''

Henry Darger and the Vivian Girls

Having endured a difficult childhood, Henry Darger spent his adult life determined to help children that had fallen on hard times and protect them from the perils he saw all around him.
Born in Chicago in 1892 Darger lost his mother, who died giving birth to his sister, when he was four years old and was taken away from his from his father, who was physically and financially unable to raise his children, when he was eight years old.
He was initially placed in a boy’s home but he exhibited a range of behaviours and disciplinary problems that proved to be beyond the ability of the home to cope with.
His actions, which included a compulsion to make strange noises, would seem to indicate the possibility of his suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome but this diagnosis was never made and instead he was institutionalised in an asylum in nearby Lincoln in 1905.
Darger hated life in the asylum, which mostly involved intensive work and harsh punishments for the smallest transgressions. After a series of attempted escapes he was eventually successful in 1908 and returned to Chicago where he found work in a hospital as a cleaner.
In this manner he managed to support himself until he retired in 1963.
Once Darger had secured employment and found himself a place to live he decided to dedicate his life to ensuring that other children never had to suffer the trials of the institutions he had been placed in.
His initial plan was to adopt a child but, despite his many attempts, the authorities were unwilling to trust a single man with a small income and a history of mental illness with the welfare of a child.
Darger also attempted, with the help of a friend called William Shloder, to establish an organisation called the ‘Children’s Protective Society’ which would be dedicated to helping abandoned and neglected children to find adoptive parents.
This plan also came to nothing.
Darger was obsessed with the welfare of the children of Chicago and amassed a huge archive of clippings from newspapers about children who he felt he could have helped.
He became particularly interested in the case of Elsie Paroubek, a five year old murder victim, whose picture Darger carried with him until it disappeared from his locker at work.
Darger was distraught by the loss of the picture and tried an elaborate series of prayers during his daily visits to Church to try and ensure its return. This didn’t work and his lack of knowledge of the particular edition of the paper he had clipped it from meant that a visit to the newspaper archive was also a waste of time.
At this point Darger determined that he would use the inspiration of the memory of Elsie Paroubek to create a personal memento that could never be taken away.
He had recently started work on a novel which was based on the idea of a holy war between Christian forces and a godless race known as the Glandelinians.
Darger knew that he wanted the Glandelinians to be the epitome of evil but was still unsure what their particular transgressions would be. The story of Elsie Paroubek helped him to decide.
The Glandelinians would be child murderers.
The novel would be the story of a war between the Glandelinians and the people of Abbieannie who are led by the Vivian Girls, the seven daughters of Robert Vivian and princesses of their nation. The war is sparked by the murder of Annie Aronburg, a child labour rebel, by the Glandelinians.
The Vivian Girls lead an army of children in a bloody war against their oppressors in the hope that their valiant deeds and holy purity will defeat the Glandelinians and bring freedom to Abbieannie.
Darger himself was unsure how the war would end. He wrote two different endings for the story, one where the Vivian Girls are triumphant and another where the Glandelinians manage to suppress the rebellion.
It seemed that Darger was determined that, even if he couldn’t help the children around him, he could create a world in which they at least had a fighting chance.
The full title of the novel was ‘The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.’
Darger worked on it for over forty years and also produced hundreds of drawings and watercolour paintings to illustrate the story.
By the time it was finished the entire manuscript was 15,145 pages long.
This work, along with Darger’s other projects which included a book called ‘A History of my Life’ which spends 206 pages covering his early life before transforming into a work of fiction about a tornado called ‘Sweetie Pie’ that goes on for another 4,672 pages and a sequel to ‘The Story of the Vivian Girls...’called ‘Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago’ and details the life of the Vivian Girls in contemporary Chicago and runs for over 10,000 pages, were discovered by the landlords of his apartment in 1973 and they ensured that it found its way into the world where it became celebrated.
Darger himself would never know of the fame his work would enjoy.
He died shortly after his work was discovered, in the same Catholic mission that his own father had died in sixty-eight years earlier.
Darger is buried in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois.
His headstone is inscribed ‘Artist ‘ and ‘Protector of Children.’

William Sharp and his Seeress

William Sharp was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1855 and was a writer and editor who played a vital, if unorthodox, role in the Celtic Revival of the 1890's.

Having studied Literature, Sharp left University without a degree in 1872.

He initially took a position in a lawyers office in Glasgow and was employed there from 1874 to 1875. Poor health forced him to travel to Australia for a year in 1876 and on returning he found work in a bank in London.

Once in London his literary life began to flourish. Introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sharp became a noted member of Rossetti’s literary circle and began to find work as a poet, journalist and editor. His cousin Elizabeth had been a childhood companion that shared many of his interests and they married in 1884. With Elizabeth’s support Sharp found that his literary work became more and more popular and eventually he devoted himself fully to writing from 1891 and took the flexibility of this new employment to travel widely.

On a journey to Italy in 1891 the Sharps met Edith Wingate Rinder, the niece of one of one of Elizabeth’s childhood friends. Although William and Edith were acquainted in London they had never spent any real time in one another’s company. In Italy they did and eventually fell in love.

There is nothing to suggest that the relationship was consumated but for William the experience was life-changing. In Italy he wrote and privately printed a slim volume of love poems, ‘Sospiri di Roma’ that was of significantly greater quality than anything he had previously produced.

He also began work on a novel called ‘Pharais, A Romance of the Isles.’

Set in the Western Isles of Scotland, it was the tale of a doomed romance with the inspiration seemingly being his own situation with Edith.

William had some concerns about the new direction his work was taking though.

Firstly he was sure that critics would not take a work of romantic fiction by William Sharp seriously and, more importantly, he felt sure that anyone who read the novel and knew of his friendship with Edith would be able to trace the roots of the story.

William decided the safest route would be to publish under a pseudonym and named his literary alter ego ‘Fiona Macleod’. He felt using a woman’s name would throw people of the scent a little more and would confuse even further the aliases of the characters in the book from their real-life counterparts.

There is also a possibility that Sharp was working with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at this point. The Order, a gathering of practising magicians largely drawn from literary and theatrical circles, were doing a great deal of work on the concept of the ‘divine feminine’ during this time and it would have been seen as a major magical working to produce such successful novels with a mystical element under the guise of a woman.

In his own writings Sharp described Macleod as an ‘ancestral seeress’.

‘Pharais’ was published in 1894 and in 1895 Fiona Macleod produced ‘The Mountain Lovers’ another West of Scotland romance. Both books attracted an enthusiastic readership and no little critical acclaim.

Fiona Macleod became a minor literary phenomenon.

Sharp began to live a literary double life. He continued to write and edit and helped to produce significant works on Ossian and Walter Scott that were key to the Celtic Revival.

This served to confuse matters somewhat when W.B. Yeats, another important figure in the movement, declared that he didn’t enjoy Sharp’s work but did like Macleod’s.

The more Sharp became immersed in the Macleod deception the more complex it became.

He acted as her agent and declined meetings and public appearances on the grounds of Fiona’s desire for privacy and a quiet life in the Highlands.

When it was necessary for Fiona to correspond with someone Sharp would dictate the letters to his sister so that it would be written in a feminine hand.

Later in life Sharp even refused to reveal the subterfuge to the Prime Minister.

When Lord Salisbury offered Fiona Macleod a Civil List pension Sharp had to regretfully decline, fearing that it would reveal his deception.

Poor William Sharp would never be considered for such an honour...

An African in Greenland

Born in Togo in 1941 Tété-Michel Kpomassie was an unremarkable boy.

One of twenty-six children that his father and eight wives had produced Kpomassie, having enjoyed six years of elementary education, was expected to perform the duties of any other young man in his village.

This included such mundane chores as collecting coconuts which is what Kpomassie was doing on the fateful day that transformed his life forever.

While high up in the tree, collecting the coconuts as normal, he was surprised by the appearance of a massive python on the branch he was sat on. Startled, he slipped and fell from the tree and was seriously injured in the fall.

While he recovered reasonably well physically, Kpomassie remained lethargic and feverish long after the accident.

His father decided that the incident with the python had a spiritual element and decided to consult with the priestess of a python cult who was based nearby.

The priestess confirmed the family’s worst fears. Kpomassie had been cursed by the python as he fell from the tree and without her intervention he would surely die.

She informed them that she could lift the curse and save Kpomassie’s life, but there would be a price. Once cured Kpomassie would have to join the cult and live in the jungle, alongside the snakes that terrified him, for seven years.

His family saw no alternative and so agreed to the arrangement.

Incredibly, the cure worked and Kpomassie was sent back to his village to recover and prepare himself to pay off his treatment in service to the cult.

While convalescing Kpomassie visited the local library, ran by Jesuit missionaries, and found a book that would inspire the rest of his life.

It was a children’s book on Greenland and specifically the lives of the Inuit people who lived there. Kpomassie was intrigued by this land that was so different to his own.

Not only did Greenland not have snakes, it didn’t even have trees that snakes could hide in...

As soon as he was fully recovered Kpomassie ran away from home. He had decided that his destiny lay away from the jungles of Togo with it’s perilous wildlife and cults that would claim him for years of his life. His destiny was Greenland.

He travelled for twelve years across Africa and Europe, mastering as many languages as he could on the way and working his passage mainly as a translator.

Eventually, in the mid-1960's, he found himself on a boat to Greenland and arrived there to live among the Kalaalit people.

He was fascinated by their lifestyle, so alien to his own background but with many echoes.

While the diet and many of the customs of the Kalaalit tribe held little appeal to Kpomassie he felt comfortable to be among a community based around hunting and found that both his native tribe and his hosts shared a belief in the ability of the soul to travel independently of the body.

Kpomassie himself was a revelation to the Kalaalit themselves. Unused to visitors generally, they had never seen a Black man before and were flattered by the determination of their visitor to reach the land he had read about so many years before.

Eventually Kpomassie settled in France and published an account of his adventures, ‘An African in Greenland’, in 1977.