Obituary Sundays - Monday Edition

Mohammed Zahir Shah, called to rule Afghanistan at the age of 19 on the assassination of his father, Nadir Shah, presided over a regime which tried to continue the transition from medieval tribalism to a modern unitary state, which had begun under King Amanullah in the 1920s. In this, guided at first by his uncle who was also Prime Minister, he had a certain amount of success, given the volatile and unstable state of the country.

His reign of 40 years, from 1933 to 1973, was in sheer duration a remarkable achievement in a state whose rulers have tended to die violently. Even today some look upon it as Afghanistan’s golden age. Certainly none of the country’s successor regimes has ever seemed to have comparable legitimacy.

Zahir Shah trod the tightrope of keeping his country neutral during the Second World War and afterwards. He was one of the few leaders of any country to receive aid simultaneously from both America and the Soviet Union in the postwar period and his European education and background made him able also to encourage firms from Europe to invest in engineering projects. Nevertheless the country’s economy remained weak and its infrastructure primitive. Zahir Shah’s deposition while he was out of the country by his cousin, Lieutenant-General Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, another former Prime Minister, ushered in a period of savage faction fighting.

That Zahir Shah’s name should have again been mentioned as a potential unifying leader of Afghanistan, almost 30 years after his overthrow, was a testimony to his perceived qualities within a country which has been racked by various forms of civil strife ever since the coup which lost him his throne. In April 2002, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taleban government of Mullah Muhammad Omar, Zahir returned to Afghanistan, not, as he said, to stake any claim to reign over the country again but to be close to the process through which the country’s interim leaders would decide its destiny.

At that time it was believed in the West that he might, in fact, have the support of as many as 80 per cent of the Afghan population. His being of the majority Pashtun people was to some extent to his advantage. But at the same time it exposed him to attack from those of the anti-Taleban forces who made no distinction between being Pashtun and Taleban at any level and were strongly opposed to the involvement of Pashtuns in the interim administration. In the event the leadership of the post-Taleban Afghanistan fell to a Pashtun chief of the Popolzai tribe, Hamid Karzai, who, in June 2002, was elected President of the country by a loya jirga (tribal assembly) after a period of six months in which he had headed an interim authority, whose formation had been overseen by Zahir Shah.

Thereafter Zahir Shah gave his support to Mr Karzai, though the latter’s real grasp on power in the country remained, and remains, precarious.

Mohammed Zahir Khan was born in Kabul in 1914, the son of Mohammed Nadir Khan. He was educated in Kabul until the age of ten, when he went to Paris with his father, who had been appointed Minister there by King Amanullah, the first Afghan ruler to be to be styled King.

Zahir completed his schooling at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and later studied at the Institut Pasteur and the University of Montpellier. In this process he added fluent French to the Arabic, English and Dari (an Afghan form of Persian) of which he already had command.

In the meantime, in 1929 Amanullah, whose pace of reform was adjudged to be too wholehearted and hectic, had been driven out of Afghanistan by a coup staged by a band of outlaws who seized Kabul. Nadir returned to Afghanistan, recruited an army, defeated the rebels and was himself proclaimed king. The following year Zahir broke off his studies and returned home to join his father, who ensured that he received military training on infantry courses previously established with Turkish instructors and then appointed him an assistant in the Ministry of Defence. In 1932 he became acting Minister of Education.

Zahir's father was soon to fall victim to the political ferment of the times, shot and stabbed to death by a student in the palace gardens as he was leaving the royal harem. Propelled to the throne at 19, Zahir was lucky to find in his father’s Prime Minister, Sardar Hashim Khan, a trusted adviser who had no ambitions for the leadership. He was to stay at Zahir’s side until 1946, watching him mature into an increasingly sound and even progressive ruler.

In the 1930s a programme of development was undertaken with German financial credit, this continuing with American assistance after the war. In 1949 King Zahir returned to Europe on a six-month tour, during which he observed industrial trends and, in the process, encouraged the initiation of German and Swedish engineering projects in Afghanistan.

Zahir was astute enough to keep countries both sides of the Iron Curtain in play. In the 1950s he visited Moscow for talks with the Soviet leadership and this led to financial and material aid to Afghanistan. Pakistan and India were, too, wooed equally and even handedly, while his neutral country sought common cause with Tito’s non-aligned Yugoslavia.

The success of these initiatives owed a good deal to the support of Zahir’s energetic cousin, Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, who had become Prime Minister in 1953. In an apparent spirit of reform, Zahir demanded Daud’s resignation in 1963, decreeing that no member of the royal family could hold office as Prime Minister. Working with Daud’s successor, Dr Yusuf, Zahir introduced a new democratic constitution, which aimed to combine Western political ideas with Islamic religious beliefs and social customs. Zahir could not really make this mental leap and continued to refuse to let political parties operate in the country. The new parliament was largely packed with the king’s nominees, rather than reflecting any of the country’s political groupings, and this stifling of political aspirations inevitably led to rising tension as time went by.

Zahir had for some years been suffering from a degenerative eye condition, which required treatment abroad. While taking the cure at the mud and mineral baths on Ischia in the Bay of Naples in July 1973, he was overthrown in absentia by Daud, who promptly proclaimed Afghanistan a republic, renounced his royal titles and assumed the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defence.

Zahir remained in Italy thereafter, periodically breaking silence to comment on the state of his country, and occasionally seeming to be on the verge of playing some role in its affairs. As the Soviet Union prepared to withdraw from the country in the late 1980s he was spoken of as a possible force for unifying Afghanistan by the leaders of several moderate guerrilla groups. The Soviet leadership also appeared to be enthusiastic about such an idea but when the Soviet Ambassador in Kabul did meet Zahir for talks in Rome in December 1988, the former king seemed lukewarm about the idea.

By the time Zahir eventually did signify an interest, in the spring of 1989, the time was past. Enthusiastic supporters clashed on the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan with hardline Afghan guerrilla leaders, determined that Zahir should never return either as monarch or in any other political guise. In 1991 Zahir was stabbed in Rome by a Portuguese convert to Islam, posing as a journalist.

Yet, with Afghanistan (and neighbouring Pakistan) in chaos once more in the wake of the terrorist suicide attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, Zahir’s name again surfaced as a potentially unifying force. Old and ill as he was, the notion seemed at first to be no more than a pipe dream.

As time went on and the American bombing campaign against the Taleban exposed the country once more to the spectre of the age-old clash between its Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek peoples, Zahir's candidature as a, perhaps interim, leader began to take on a more serious purpose. Though by now in his late eighties, he himself appeared to acquire a new lease of life at the prospect and in April 2002 he left his Rome villa to return to the country over which he had ruled for so long. Opinion within the country, which had been so utterly opposed to him when the possibility of his return had been floated a dozen years before, was suddenly much more receptive to this solution to Afghanistan’s seemingly unending miseries, though Zahir always made it clear that he had no personal ambitions to restore the monarchy.

When the 2,000-strong loya jirga — the first tribal assembly since Zahir Shah’s overthrow in 1973 — gathered to elect Afghan’s leader in June 2002, the former king cleared the air by making it quite clear that he had no intention of running for any office, and that he backed the interim Prime Minister, Mr Karzai, for the presidency. Though Pashtun delegates to the loya jirga expressed their dismay, regarding the former king as being a strong counterweight to the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who had dominated the interim authority, Zahir Shah remained as good as his word. He even demurred when it was proposed to give him the purely honorary title “father of the nation”.

Zahir's increasingly frail health would have made any active participation in government an impossibility. He had twice broken bones slipping in bathrooms while on visits to France for medical purposes and subsequently required treatment for enteric disorders.

In the event, a constitutional loya jirga of 2004 produced a constitution declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic, effectively consigning the monarchy to oblivion. But Zahir Shah remained in the country, living quietly in Kabul.

Mohammed Zahir Shah married, in 1931, his cousin, Princess Homaira, daughter of Sardar Ahmed Shah. She died in 2002 in Italy, while preparing to join her husband in Afghanistan, but her body was taken to Afghanistan to be buried in a Kabul cemetery. There were five sons and two daughters of the marriage

Wish It Were Sunday

Queeny

Obituary Sundays - Tammy Faye Bakker Messner

Tammy Faye Messner, the mascara-laden former wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, the charismatic TV preacher with the choir-boy face with whom she appeared on their popular Christian talk-variety show until his downfall amid scandal in the late 1980s, has died. She was 65.

Messner, who underwent surgery for colon cancer in 1996 and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004, died Friday, her booking manager, Joe Spotts, told the Associated Press on Saturday night.

In a letter posted on her website in May, Messner said that doctors had stopped treating her cancer and that her weight had dropped to 65 pounds. "Now," she wrote, "it's up to God and my faith."

She revealed that she had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer during a March 2004 appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live." That Messner would publicly announce her diagnosis on King's talk show underscored her status as a faded yet enduring pop culture icon.

Indeed, her radiation treatments even became part of a 2005 documentary, "Tammy Faye: Death Defying."

"During radiation," she said at the time, "I did not lose my hair, but I lost my eyelashes, which is the funniest thing in the world to me, because it's my trademark."

As Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1970s and '80s, she was known as "the first lady of televangelism," a high-profile pioneer of the "electronic church."

At 4 feet, 11 inches tall (not counting 3 1/2 -inch spike heels) and with her red hair and heavily made-up eyes, Messner was described in the media as a "human kewpie doll" and someone who seemed to "ooze kitsch."

As prone to giggling as she was to crying mascara-stained tears on camera, Tammy Faye Bakker proved to be irresistible fodder for late-night comedians.

"She was the most laughed-at woman in the Western world," Fenton Bailey, codirector of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a largely sympathetic documentary on Messner's life, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000.

"I don't know of any woman in our time who has been so ridiculed, put down, maligned," singer Pat Boone said in the 2000 film. "Really, I equate her with Hillary Clinton, because these two women have both suffered tremendously by the things that their husbands may have done, and yet she just keeps going."

During the heyday of the Bakkers' television ministry, "The Jim and Tammy Show" reportedly was carried on more than 1,400 stations and their PTL ministry took in millions of dollars a month.

The centerpiece of their evangelical empire — Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre Christian theme park, resort and ministry headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C. — reportedly attracted some 6 million visitors in 1986. Those who stayed at what was often described as "a Christian Disneyland" could buy eight different Tammy Faye record albums, not to mention items from the Tammy Faye line of cosmetics and pantyhose.

PTL stood for "Praise the Lord" and "People That Love," but critics insisted it stood for "Pass the Loot" and "Pay the Lady."

The downfall of Jim Bakker began in 1987 with the revelation that he had had a one-time sexual encounter with a former church secretary from New York, Jessica Hahn, in a Florida motel room in 1980 — and that $265,000 in ministry funds were later used to keep Hahn quiet.

In March 1987, the scandalized Jim Bakker resigned as president of the $129-million-a-year PTL ministry and turned it over to the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Three months later, Falwell placed the ministry, which was more than $60 million in debt, in bankruptcy and turned financial records over to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 1988, Bakker and former top PTL associate Richard Dortch were indicted on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy. The 24-count indictment, returned by a federal grand jury, charged that Bakker and Dortch had fraudulently oversubscribed at least $158 million worth of $1,000 "lifetime partnerships" that guaranteed contributors three nights lodging per year at Heritage USA to help maintain Bakker and Dortch's "lavish and extravagant lifestyles."

The indictment further alleged that at a time when the PTL was in poor financial shape, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker received bonuses totaling some $3.5 million for their personal use.

Messner, who was treated at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Desert in 1987 for prescription drug dependency, was not named as a defendant in the indictment.

She publicly defended her husband, who pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, and she complained that the media vilified both her and her husband unfairly. "We lived no differently than any of the other evangelists," she told People magazine in 1996.

Dortch pleaded guilty to four fraud and conspiracy counts in a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony against Bakker. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted on all 24 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy. He ultimately served about 4 1/2 years of an eight-year sentence and was released from prison in 1994.

The Bakkers had divorced two years earlier, after three decades of marriage and two children, Tammy Sue and Jay.

Tammy Faye married former PTL contractor Roe Messner, the chief builder of Heritage USA, in 1993. Three years later, he was sentenced to 27 months in prison for federal bankruptcy fraud, and Tammy Faye once again found herself standing by her man.

Jim Bakker also remarried, and he and his second wife, Lori, now live in Branson, Mo., where they have started a new television ministry.

Tamara Faye LaValley, the eldest in a family of eight children, was born in International Falls, Minn., on March 7, 1942. Her parents divorced when she was 3 and she was raised by her mother and stepfather.

When she was 10, she underwent a life-altering experience during an Assemblies of God church service after the preacher asked "everyone who wants God to touch them" to come forward. She later related that she practically ran down the aisle and threw herself down on her knees by the front pew. She then found herself flat on her back, her "hands up in the air toward the Lord," as she spoke in tongues.

"As that language flowed from my innermost being, I actually felt the presence of God within me," she wrote in her 1996 autobiography "Tammy: Telling It My Way." "I have never in my whole life experienced such love. Liquid love pouring over my entire being!"

Her "encounter with God," she wrote, let her know what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

In 1960, she entered North Central Bible College, the Assemblies of God school in Minneapolis, where she met and fell in love with fellow student Jim Bakker. Unknowingly violating the school's rule against student marriages, Jim and Tammy Faye wed in April 1961. Forced to leave school, they were soon traveling the Deep South preaching from one Assemblies of God church meeting to another. That ended when a puppet show they had been putting on for children after their Sunday services caught the eye of an aide to Pat Robertson.

In 1965, the Bakkers joined Robertson's fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network in Portsmouth, Va. When the Bakkers first made their commitment to do what became a very popular children's puppet show, Messner recounted, one of their conditions was that Jim someday would be allowed to host a "Tonight Show"-type program for Christians, something that he felt would "change the face of Christian broadcasting."

The result was Christian television's first talk show, "The 700 Club," hosted by Jim Bakker. The show quickly attracted a large audience and generated considerable donations.

But Robertson began taking over as host of "The 700 Club" several nights a week and, according to Messner, he and Jim Bakker had differences over Robertson's ideas for bringing secular programming to the network to broaden its financial base. In 1972, the Bakkers left CBN.

They moved to Orange County, where Jim Bakker teamed up with Paul Crouch, his former youth pastor in Muskegon, to launch the Trinity Broadcasting Network in Santa Ana in 1973.

With Jim Bakker as president and Crouch as business administrator, Bakker began hosting the PTL (for "Praise the Lord") show, with his wife as the featured co-host and singer. The show was soon being syndicated across the country. But, according to Messner's account, the board of directors voted Jim Bakker out as president.

Shortly thereafter, however, Jim Bakker received a call from friends in Charlotte, N.C., saying they needed his help to start a new Christian TV ministry.

Within only a few months after launching "The PTL Club" in a storefront in Charlotte, Jim Bakker's new show went into syndication and the viewers began pledging financial support. By 1979, donations reportedly totaled more than $27.6 million, compared with revenue of $255,000 four years earlier, and Jim Bakker had survived an FCC investigation of allegedly improper fundraising practices.

But eight years later came the fall.

Since then, Messner never strayed far from the spotlight. She wrote books, including "I Will Survive … and You Will Too!" (2003), and she made talk show and game show appearances. She also hosted an infomercial for her "You Can Make It" motivational tapes, appeared on the TV sitcom "Roseanne" and marketed Tammy Faye Celebrity Wigs (in 16 colors).

In 1996, she co-hosted a short-lived nationally syndicated daytime talk show with comedy actor Jim J. Bullock. More recently, she appeared on "The Surreal Life," a reality series on the WB in 2004 in which she shared a house with five other celebrities, including actor Erik Estrada.

An icon in the gay community, she had been the only member of the televangelist community to embrace AIDS patients, interviewing a gay man on her PTL show, "Tammy's House Party," during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the '80s.

She openly championed gay civil rights, and some years ago hosted Drag Bingo in Durham to raise money for Alliance of AIDS Services Carolina.

In the end, she had permanently tattooed lip-liner, eyebrows and eyeliner, along with those famous false eyelashes.

"Without my eyelashes," she said in her namesake documentary, "I wouldn't be Tammy Faye. I don't know who I'd be."

On Thursday, an emaciated Tammy Faye appeared with her husband on CNN's "Larry King Live" to provide an update on her condition, for which she was receiving hospice care and taking morphine to ease the pain of swallowing food.

"I talk to God every single day, and I say, 'God, my life is in your hands, and I trust you with me,' " she said. Asked if she had any regrets, she said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

Added Messner: "I believe when I leave this Earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven."

A private family service was held Saturday.

Learning Computers

Josh forced me to learn SQL today. I felt a little bit like this:

My One Shot At Stardom

Here is a scene from a script that really needs to be made into a full length feature film starring me, courtesy of the brilliant mind behind kim jong il's hilarious blog.

THE TERROR

INT. NATIONAL KOREAN ORPHANAGE FOR ORPHANS – NIGHT

The room is dark with two rows of six beds lined against the side walls. Two children sleep soundly in each.

A grotesque man, BORGE GUSH, creeps slowly between the rows of beds. He is seven feet tall with green, boil-covered skin, and he reeks of whiskey and feces. He wears a baseball cap, a t-shirt, frayed jean shorts and work boots, and his sweaty hands are alternating between patting his engorged belly and rubbing the stubble on his chin.

BORGE GUSH

(Laughing maniacally)

Looks like I’m going to be having orphan bolgogi tonight. HAHAHA! Little does the world know that I need the souls of these Korean orphans to keep my worldwide military industrial complex afloat. Once I devour the spirits of these children, there will be no stopping Borge Gush, and my evil worldwide criminal organization: the Anited States of Umerica.

Outside the door to the room our hero, FANTASTIC KIM, leans casually against the door frame. He is just taller than six feet, wearing a bomber jacket and male capri pants. An unlit cigarette is nestled behind his right ear and aviator sunglasses rest on his head.

KIM

(Sighing)

Just when I thought I had a few days off …

In a fluid motion, FANTASTIC KIM flips the cigarette to his lips and drops the aviator sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose. He strikes a match against the wall tossing it in the air and letting it light his cigarette as he pulls two submachine guns out from behind his back. With his elbow he smashes the “IN CASE OF NUCLEAR WAR” alarm and turns to kick the door open.

KIM

(Aiming the submachine guns at BORGE)

Surprised to see me, Borge?

The alarm triggers the bright lights of the room and BORGE GUSH is temporarily blinded but he knows the voice of his most feared adversary. The children instinctively roll under their beds, safe, for the time being …

BORGE GUSH

(Taken aback)

Fantastic Kim! But … it can’t be! I thought you were dead!!

KIM

Oh, but it is, Borge. It is. Now you have two choices. One: I can fill your bloated green carcass with lead right now. Or two: I can drop the guns and just rip your head off with my bare hands. Your choice, cowboy.

BORGE GUSH

(Pleading)

Wait. Kim, my friend, can’t we just … talk about it?

KIM

Talk?! Ha! You had your chance to talk, Borge. The time to talk is over. I know all about your plan to use the souls of these Korean orphans to fuel your war machines.

BORGE

Oh yeah? But did you also know about … this!

BORGE shoots six bullet-quick poison darts from his fingertips. KIM dives to his left behind the nearest bed and turns it on its side to use as a shield for himself and the two children behind it. He hears the next round of poison darts hit the thin mattress. The sheets sizzle and disintegrate.

BORGE

You can’t defeat me, Fantastic Kim! I have devoured too many orphan souls for you to match my strength. Give yourself up, and maybe I will let half of these children live …

KIM snuffs his cigarette out of his forearm, a practice he maintains to erase the tattoo of a loved one who betrayed him long ago. He checks the cartridges of his weapon as he hears the third round of poison darts hit the bed behind him. Soon the bed will have completely disintegrated leaving him exposed. Suddenly ORPHAN ONE taps him on the shoulder. (Ed. Note: Ideally ORPHAN ONE would be played by Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

ORPHAN ONE

Fantastic Kim! Fantastic Kim! I can help you!!

KIM

No way, Orphan One. This is my fight. I don’t want you getting hurt.

ORPHAN ONE

But I want to help, Fantastic Kim. If I sacrifice myself to Borge Gush, while he’s devouring my soul you can get a clear shot!

KIM

(Remembering something from his past)

I … I can’t let you do that, Orphan One. I just … I can’t.

ORPHAN ONE

(Undeterred)

Fantastic Kim, this is my chance to fulfill my duty to both you and the great People’s Republic. I have the opportunity to give the ultimate sacrifice! Please let me do it!!

KIM

(Thinking for a moment)

Ok, Orphan One, OK

(rubbing his head and smiling).

If only more Korean children were as courageous and strong-willed as you.

ORPHAN ONE jumps out from behind the bed, waving his arms

ORPHAN ONE

Hey, big scary man! Over here!! Fresh Korean orphan soul for you to –

Before he can finish his sentence, BORGE GUSH thrusts his spiked tongue through the torso of ORPHAN ONE, recoiling it with ORPHAN ONE’S heart in tow. What he doesn’t realize is that Fantastic Kim has stood up with both guns cocked.

KIM

(Gritting his teeth)

Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it’s impolite to stick out your tongue!

With one gun he severs the tongue in half, and with the other he blasts off BORGE GUSH’S legs at the knees.

BORGE GUSH

(Almost incoherently, as he has no tongue)

Oh no, my legs!!

KIM walks over to BORGE GUSH, stepping through the oozing green blood which is raining from his stumps. He places a foot on both shoulders, pinning BORGE GUSH to the floor.

KIM

Any last words, Borge?

BORGE GUSH

Yeah, Kim. Go to he-

Before he can finish his sentence, Kim unloads four rounds into his skull. He sticks the guns into the back of his pants and slips a cigarette in his mouth from a silver cigarette case. The kids all emerge to gather around him. But as all this happens he hears someone slowly clapping from the door behind him…

UNSEEN STRANGER

Congratulations, Fantastic Kim.

KIM

(Pulling out his guns)

Show yourself.

UNSEEN STRANGER

Haha. Put those toy guns away. Conventional weapons cannot hurt me. But I will say they’ve done quite a number on my protégé.

The UNSEEN STRANGER walks into the light and he is revealed to be no other than CHICK DENEY…

END SCENE

I can already smell the Palm D'or.

Obituary Sundays

AMONG his many unguilty pleasures—Marlboro Lights, Irish whiskey, bacon and eggs, blue jokes, smoke-filled dives where the music wandered on till four in the morning, voracious sex with good-looking men and women—George Melly especially liked to fish. The man famous for red, green and cream striped suits, red fedoras and a huge, rude, laughing mouth could often be found quite still, thigh-deep in the Usk or the Teifi, preparing to cast as soon as a bold trout tickled the surface of the water. And the singer whose party piece, when touring with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, was to scamper round the stage and groom the clarinettist's head during his rendition of “Organ Grinder Blues”, would admit that his thoughts on the river bank were of poppies, midges, Magritte and clouds.

And sex. This had been his driving force since his first schoolboy fumbles at Stowe, first rampantly homosexual, then generously heterosexual, among anchor chains and on Hampstead Heath, in the backs of vans and in glorious pulsating piles on the floors of stately homes. And there was, he confessed (being the most shockingly confessional of writers), sheer orgiastic pleasure in the tug of a bloody great fish, the line screaming off the reel, the catch leaping from the water in a shower of diamonds, the net sliding under it and the fish laid, beautifully marked, on the grass. Phew! Time for a ciggie.

But Mr Melly liked fishing for another reason. As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”. Chance might give him a fish with the next cast; and chance shaped his drifting, exuberant, deep-drinking life, from Stowe to the wartime navy to art-dealing to journalism on the Observer, through a rich cast of queens, hoodlums, sailors, old trouts, whores and martinets, until in 1974 the career of a risqué jazz singer finally hooked him for good.

He sang for 30 years, stoutly and louchely fronting the Feetwarmers at Ronnie Scott's and round the country, until he had to growl his Hoagy Carmichael numbers from a wheelchair. Mr Melly was possibly the most popular jazzman in Britain, and certainly the most outrageous.

Like all the addictions of his life, jazz burst on him at school. A friend's study; a gramophone; an old 78, and the voice of Bessie Smith, straight out of Harlem.

Mr Melly sang Bessie, “Empress of the Blues”, more than anyone else. He would entreat her to possess him before a performance. But the Bessie that emerged from that quivering, beer-wet throat was partly a white, English, middle-class creature, drawn from music-hall turns and end-of-the-pier shows, dressed in bowlers and blazers, and with the plunk-plunk of a banjo never far away. Trad jazz, in the person of Mr Melly, Humphrey Lyttleton and a few others, limped through the 1960s and 1970s until out of sheer graft, longevity and good humour it came back into favour. He helped it survive.

Classlessness and anarchism drew him to jazz also. Though his background was wealthy Liverpudlian, his inter-war fling with left-wing politics stayed with him for life. So, too, did other flirtations. On shore leave from the navy in “amusing” bell-bottoms in his roaring homosexual years, he admired a pimp encountered in Leeds in a mauve silk shirt and kipper tie, and the way Quentin Crisp's painted toenails accessorised his golden sandals. The gay fetishes faded, though as “an old tart” he could always have his head turned by pretty boys; but sharp tailoring in eye-watering colours became his stock in trade.

This aesthetic streak pointed to yet another side of his sprawling personality. He knew about art, and had an eye for it, ever since his inclusion as a wide-eyed petit marin in the Surrealist circle round E.L.T. Mesens in Soho in the 1950s. On impulse he made surreal objects himself (a dead starfish caught in a mousetrap, a nude with Carnation Milk tins as her breasts), but he also learned to buy cleverly in a difficult market. One train trip back to Liverpool from London was spent in silent adoration of two new acquisitions by Max Ernst, propped on the opposite seat.

As old age advanced, Surrealism became an increasing comfort to him. It gave an aesthetic purpose to his multicoloured lines of pills, and to the hours spent in limbo in the scanner. Deafness reminded him of Surrealist word-games in which question and answer were unrelated, or only incidentally and wonderfully so:

What is reason?
A cloud eaten by the moon.

Fishing, too, was still a comfort. He imagined his cancer—for which he refused all treatment so that he could go on performing—as a tiny fish dangling at the end of his lung, wrinkling its whiskers, ready perhaps to be caught. And he often said that his favourite end, other than collapsing in the wings of a theatre with wild applause still ringing in his ears, would be to be discovered smiling on a riverbank with a big beautifully marked trout beside him, death and sex together.

Get Your Freakum Dress On

So everybody's been talking about Galliano's 10'th anniversary couture show for Dior. Now don't get me wrong, its pretty darn good, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Spring/Summer couture collection he showed last season. Mr Galliano is at his best when he has a dominant narrative to work with, like his Egyptian collection or the Psychedelic raver vibe he channeled in the late 90's. The most recent collection seemed to be a bit like a greatest hits album. You know all the individual components are good, but it never seems to amount to something greater than the sum of its parts. Judge for yourselves:

Autumn/ Winter 2007/8







And now for the truly transcendent Spring Summer collection:







These dresses still make me gasp, despite the fact that they are in a crappy youtube video. The construction and draping is just fucking breathtaking. To take heavy silk gazar and press it into delicate origami pleats and folds is just bloody genius if you ask me. This is the kind of stuff that really makes you stop and dream about different proportions and drape. It also reminds us how boring and disingenuous all these chain store collaborations are. Stop buying loads of poorly made crap people! Save your pennies and get something exceptional instead!

Obituary Sundays

I love reading obituaries. Hard. They have all the pathos and epic sweep of a Danielle Steele novel crammed into a single page. I'm going to try to post an interesting one at least once a fortnight. Here's a cracker from the London Telegraph to start the series off:


Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders club. Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Von Bismarck's university career ended in catastrophe in June 1986, when his friend Olivia Channon was found dead on his bed, the victim of a drink and drugs overdose. Von Bismarck admitted that his role in the affair had brought disgrace on the family name; five years later he told friends that there were still people who would not speak to his parents on account of it, and who told his mother that she had "a rotten son".

In the reunified Germany, von Bismarck managed several telecoms businesses and, armed with a doctoral thesis on the East German telephone system, oversaw the sale of companies formerly owned by Communist East Germany to the private sector.

By the late 1990s von Bismarck was working for Telemonde, Kevin Maxwell's troubled telecoms firm based in America, with responsibility for developing the business in Germany; the company collapsed in 2002 with debts of £105 million. Von Bismarck eventually returned to London, where he became chairman of the investment company AIM Partners, dabbled in film production and promoted holidays to Uzbekistan.

Never concealing his homosexuality, von Bismarck continued to appear in public in various eccentric items of attire, including tall hats atop his bald Mekon-like head. At parties he would appear in exotic designer frock coats with matching trousers and emblazoned with enormous logos. Flitting from table to table at fashionable London nightclubs, he was said to be as comfortable among wealthy Eurotrash as he was on formal occasions calling for black tie.

Although described personally as quiet and impeccably mannered, von Bismarck continued to live high on the hog, hosting riotous all-night parties for his (chiefly gay) friends at his £5 million flat off Sloane Square. It was at one such event, in August last year, that von Bismarck encountered tragedy for a second time when one of his male guests fell 60 ft to his death from the roof garden. While von Bismarck was not arrested, he was questioned as a witness and there were those who wondered - not, perhaps, without cause - whether he might be the victim of a family curse.

Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen was born on September 19 1962 in Brussels, the second son of Ferdinand, the 4th Prince Bismarck, whose own father had served in the German embassy in pre-war London until a feud with the ambassador, von Ribbentrop, ended his career.

As a talented young scholar, Gottfried had studied at what he described as "an aristocratic Borstal" in Switzerland and worked at the New York stock exchange before going up to Christ Church, Oxford.

Von Bismarck never fully recovered from the death in June 1986 of Olivia Channon, the striking 22-year-old daughter of Paul Channon (later Lord Kelvedon), then one of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet ministers.

To celebrate the end of their finals, von Bismarck and Olivia Channon had taken part in a drinking bout involving excessive amounts of champagne, Black Velvet and sherry before she overdosed on heroin. At the inquest her cousin, Sebastian Guinness, described how he and other revellers had repaired to von Bismarck's bottle-strewn rooms, where Olivia was found dead the following morning.

Von Bismarck himself was charged with possessing cocaine and amphetamine sulphate and was later treated at a £770-a-week addiction clinic in Surrey. Following Olivia Channon's funeral, at which he was said to have "wept like a child", von Bismarck was ordered home to the family castle near Hamburg by his father.

His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds of von Bismarck's favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor bearing a chequebook.

The tabloids quoted words of repentance from von Bismarck himself - "My days of living it up are all over. This past week has just been too much" - but although he was reported to be leaving to finish his studies at a German university and eventually to enter German politics, in the event he was treated again for alcoholism at a German clinic.

He returned briefly to Oxford, where local magistrates fined him £80 for drug possession; he wiped away tears as his lawyer offered mitigation, pointing out that since the Channon affair von Bismarck had received a bad press in Germany.

Doubting whether he would be able to find work in his own country, von Bismarck was said to be planning to study at a university in Los Angeles while continuing to receive treatment for his drink problem. Olivia Channon's death, his barrister said, would prove to be a shadow over von Bismarck's head "probably for the rest of his life". So it proved.