Reti Solovets
Dear Boy,
The Germans, as always, have a word for it. Ohrwurm is best translated as ‘ear worm’ and describes a tune or ditty that you can’t get out of your head. I, of course, have little interest in popular music so should not be thus afflicted, however, I have been infected for some years by an ohrwurm of my own. It was a name, lyrical in its way, that stuck in my mind and, no matter how hard I pummelled my brain to locate its origin I couldn’t place where I’d heard it. Who, I asked over and again, was Retti Solovets?
I tried all the usual routes. The web was no help, reader’s and quotation dictionaries offered no solution. The National Dictionary of Biography and LexisNexis, failed me. Was he a Finnish cinematographer; nothing in the Biographical Dictionary of Film or imdb.com. A dissident Russian author? An émigré Hungarian photographer in pre-war Paris. An abstract expressionist, writer and critic sponsored by the CIA to discredit socialist realism? Emeric Pressberger’s focus puller? The puppet dictator of the Belgian Congo between April and June 1955? To my growing frustration, all drew blanks - until this weekend.
I was at the old homestead, putting away the red with the Pater when my eyes fell upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a nine foot phalanx of brown Rexine on the shelf behind the old chap’s noble bonce. There, at the base of the spine of volume ten of the Micropaedia was the name that had haunted me ‘Reti Solovets’. My unbridled joy was followed immediately by a sense of disappointment. I had imagined such great things for Reti that it was a bitter blow to discover he was merely the sum of human knowledge bracketed by Istvan Reti [Hungarian Painter, 1872-1945] and a group of islands in the Ukraine. Even more exciting names flanked him. If Reti Solovets was suddenly lost to human history, what of Otter Rethimnon and Delusion Frenssen?
Emboldened by drink, Pater and I resolved that Reti and his cohorts would not go unremembered and so I present the cast list for my masterwork, Micropaedia - The Movie.
A-ak Bayes. Design guru of Armenian extraction. Bayes
lurks in the galleries and boites of NoHo, Shoreditch and SoMa clad from
top to toe in immaculate black. He is rumoured to wear a new suit every
day of identical cut and hand assembled by Japanese fabric technologists
to a pattern extracted from stills of La Dolce Vita by NASA rendering
programmes. His adopted first name is the nearest approximation to the
word ‘Nothingness’ in the click language of the Xan. He is
usually accompanied by a beautiful Japanese design student of indeterminate
sex - of immaculate cut but different every day
Bayeu Ceanothus. Illegitimate son of a Charleston banker
and his gorgeous, mad and ultimately doomed maid, Ceanothus saw action
with the 2nd Airborne at Na Truc before joining the New Orleans Police
Department. Falsely named by his brother officers as a key member of a
grits smuggling gang, he was suspended and turned to the bottle. He now
sits on the porch every night, playing mournful catches of Coltrane on
his saxophone and running a successful business consulting to writers
of Southern Gothic detective fiction who’ve never left their gated
communities in Charlotte.
Delusion Frenssen. Product of a brief liaison between
a Belgian industrialist and a Swedish performance artist, Frenssen was
effectively orphaned at five when his mother was crushed by a collapsing
sculpture made of fat and felt. His father left instructions for the boy
to be brought up by an Existentialist cult just inside the Arctic Circle
before taking his own life with Absinthe and a Dremel. At 18, Frenssen,
his hair turned prematurely white by years of Nausea, Gitanes and lithium,
changed his name from Olaf to Delusion, took a job as a Government assassin
and came off the anti-depressants.
Freon Holderlin. Frenssen’s lover. Ice blonde Prussian
psychopath who’s simultaneous loathing of men, raging nymphomania
and deep rooted masochism can only be satiated in a loveless relationship
with an emotionless deviant. Also drawn to orphans as she has understandable
issues around meeting the in-laws.
Krasna Menadra. Alcoholic opera singer and exotic dancer
associated with Aleister Crowley and a necrophiliac subsection of Golden
Dawn. Menadra (real name Ethel Mintz) claimed to have been a lover of
Adolph Hitler, Bela Bartok, James Joyce, Princess Grace and Jim Morrison.
Died in L.A. in 1968 of spontaneous combustion.
Otter Rethimnon. Miraculously well preserved for sixty,
George Rethimnon rose from humble beginnings to create the most successful
women’s separates manufacturing business in the Mid West. At forty-nine
he met an Italian exchange student with a pierced navel and New Age pretensions,
left his wife and three children and followed her to join a ‘personal
effectiveness course’ in Phoenix. Two weeks later, newly qualified
as, a hypnotist, aromatherapist, grief councillor, Rolfer, NLP grand master,
sex surrogate, a black hat feng shui practitioner and entirely penniless,
he wandered into the desert to undertake a shamanic ritual and discover
his inner animal. When, after three weeks of chanting, starvation, drumming
and hallucinogens, it remained, stubbornly, a gerbil, Rethimnon walked
out of the desert in disgust, took the name ‘Otter’ which
he mistakenly recalled from a Discovery Channel programme on jungle predators,
hitchhiked to Los Angeles and into history. Rethimnon’s ‘Life
Coaching’ programme now claims over seven million paying members
worldwide and is worth more than France. According to the latest communique
from his fortified HQ in Montana, Rethimnon will ascend to Godhead with
375 carefully selected ‘Handmaidens’ just before the end of
this financial year.
Reti Solovets. Our hero. Working under an assumed name
in a London PR agency, Solovets is, in reality, a secret agent, phenomenal
sexual athlete, martini connoisseur, gentleman flaneur and one of the
most promising writers of his generation.
Trudeau Zywiec. Zyweic was born in San Francisco’s
North Beach in the early fifties and thus claims an intimate connection
with the Beat Poets. Though he has, in intervening years, written fourteen
books and built an enviable academic career on this fact, his experience
is limited to having been babysat by an ex-girlfriend of Kerouac’s
while his mother popped out for a few more Ephedrine inhalers, csome clove
cigarettes and a jug of wine. Gregory Corso may once have commented ‘Christ,
what an ugly kid’, Lawrence Ferlenghetti may have passed his pram
and Burroughs claims to have been entirely oblivious to his presence.
Zywiec now runs the English department at a community college in the northwest
and is currently under investigation for questionable behaviour with a
female student.
Next month, I resolve to get out more…
T