Brooklyn Blogade on March 9 in Kensington

Hi, Brooklyn Blogadeers!

I'm hosting the Brooklyn Blogade on Sunday, March 9, at 12 p.m., in Kensington at the Old Brick Cafe, a little Italian/Balkan/Mediterranean restaurant on Church Avenue. Please come!

Time for "Show & Tell": Bloggers are encouraged to be brave and give a reading from one of their best blog posts. Or bring along your laptop and a screen and show us your best pics. Or just tell us about your best post. Please plan to limit your presentation to about five minutes so everybody can have a turn.

The Old Brick Cafe's owner, Eddy, and I have planned a lunch, so please arrive on time at noon.

For a cost of $15 per person (tip at our discretion), the menu includes:
--salad
--an appetizer pastry called burek
--a main course of cevapi (shish kebab), chicken cutlet or vegetarian lasagna
--dessert and coffee

We will have the place to ourselves as a private party, and you may bring in a bottle of wine if you care to BYOB.

Because Eddy's restaurant is charmingly small, it is essential that I give him a headcount. Please RSVP with me by Thursday, March 6, and be sure to tell me what you want as your main course. Send your reservation to: mybadgirlblog@hotmail.com

The Old Brick Cafe is located at 507 Church Ave. between Ocean Parkway and E. 5th Street (very close to the Church Avenue stop on the F train, and not too far from the Q stop on Church Avenue).

Bad Girls Have Daughters, Too

I've just finished reading Too Great A Lady, Amanda Elyot's historical novel that details the life of Lady Emma Hamilton as if she's writing her own memoir a year before her death in 1815. I have mixed feelings about the book. It reads a bit like a Harlequin novel, with lots of busted corset stays and heaving desire, but by the end of the story, when Admiral Lord Nelson dies aboard the Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar, it had me blubbing like a schoolgirl.

I don't want to talk too much about English history's greatest love affair ever, because it's already been done to death by many writers, including me in this blog post. Though I have to admit, I'm so fascinated by Lady Hamilton, a classic bad girl, that the next book on my reading list is Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, another novelization of Emma's life, which I'm sure will be a more literary affair than Elyot's book.

What interests me now is Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia Nelson, who never forgave her mother for being who she was.

Here's England's greatest love story ever told from the illegitimate daughter's point of view:

Horatia was born in January 1801 and lived until the age of almost five with her father, Horatio Nelson, the heroic and publicly adored commander of the Royal Navy who had won the Battle of the Nile. She was never told who her mother was, and after a time, Horatia actively sought not to learn who her mother was.

Those first few years were strange yet idyllic. Horatia and her father lived on his 110-acre country estate with a married couple, Sir William and Lady Emma Hamilton, who was constantly throwing lavish parties. Mrs. Hamilton didn't sleep with her aged husband, but she did seem to spend an awful lot of time with Admiral Nelson, giving him baths and helping him dress because he had only the one arm after losing the other one in battle. When Sir William died in 1801, the widow Hamilton kept coming round to pay increasingly unseemly visits to the admiral.

Admiral Nelson died in 1805, and Horatia's life took a bad turn. The widow kept insisting that Horatio wanted her to be Horatia's sole guardian. Which meant that when Lady Hamilton went bankrupt , she dragged Horatia along with her when she got sent to debtors' prison. And once she got out of prison, she dragged Horatia off to France to escape her creditors, when all Horatia wanted to do was live with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside.

Lady Hamilton, with all her grand pretensions, spent money she didn't have for Horatia's studies in foreign languages, drama and the dance. The widow arranged for the girl's portrait to be painted as a joyful Bacchante, just as she had done when young.

Here's Horatia as a Bacchante:
And here's Lady Hamilton:

A Bacchante is a priestess or female votary of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Horatia never wanted to be a Bacchante.

Worse, when drunk and dramatic as usual, Lady Hamilton would make dark and brooding statements to the effect that she was Horatia's only true mother, and that if Horatia wasn't careful she would fall into the same life of sin that Lady Hamilton had fallen into. It was a blessing, really, when the widow died of alcoholism-related liver disease in 1815, even though Horatia was only 14 at the time and had to look after the body all by herself in France until it could be buried.

When finally freed from Lady Hamilton's clutches, Horatia ran as fast as she could to the bosom of the Nelson family, who arranged for her marriage to the Reverend Philip Ward just after her 21st birthday in February 1822 at Burnham Westgate Church, near her father’s home village in north Norfolk. Horatia and the vicar had eight unquestionably legitimate children together and led an exceedingly private life.

Till she breathed her last breath in 1881 at the age of 80, Horatia Nelson denied that Lady Emma Hamilton could ever have been her mother.

I recently found a photograph of Horatia Nelson. It's not a very good image, but it does give a solid impression of her preferred look in adulthood. Clearly, dancing as a Bacchante was not Horatia's idea. It was the woman who wasn't her mother's.

How Catherine the Great Got That Way

A bad girl isn’t born, she’s made. We’ve seen it over the course of Western history: a bright and pretty yet relatively unremarkable young woman finds herself stuck in an awful situation—she may come from a crazy family or crushing poverty, or perhaps she’s locked in a disastrous marriage—and she reaches a crisis point that drives her to find an exit. As she journeys alone into the world, she discovers that the things good girls are taught to shun, meaning illicit sex, dirty money and self-serving power, are the same things that will save her.

This discovery marks the moment of her becoming a bad girl.

Catherine the Great, Empress of All the Russias, is a classic example. Until the age of fifteen, she was a sweet-natured princess from a tiny German state who spent her time going to church, learning French and entertaining youthful fantasies of love and marriage. But all that changed when Her Majesty the Empress of Russia decided that the girl was the perfect match for her first cousin, the future czar.

Married to a Mental Defective
As a result, the princess found herself lost in a far-off land and married to a mentally defective degenerate who refused to consummate their union. On their wedding night in August of 1745, the Empress Elizabeth herself led the virgin bride to the couple’s bedchamber, a pink velvet fantasyland, where servants dressed her in satin and lace and tucked her into bed. The girl waited for her new husband, and she waited, and then she waited some more.

“My dear husband did not attend to me at all,” Catherine recalled later in her memoirs. “I yawned, I suffered from boredom, having nobody with whom I could exchange a word.”

In the wee hours of the morning, Peter stumbled into the room, drunk, and collapsed on the bed with his boots on. There was no sex that night, not a tender word or a kiss, and that’s the way things went for years—Catherine would wait for Peter, and Peter would come home drunk and either collapse or train his dog in the bedroom while tormenting Catherine with talk of sexual exploits with his mistresses. After years of fruitlessly waiting for her husband to impregnate her and thus ensure an heir to the throne, Catherine took matters into her own hands and went out and found herself a lover to provide what her husband wouldn’t.

Catherine’s mother-in-law got her heir, never mind who the child’s father might be, and with this item of business finally tended to, the super-fertile Catherine enjoyed many pregnancies by many lovers. It became her custom to deposit her babies in the nursery so she could quickly return to court and keep up with the political intrigue going on at the palace in Saint Petersburg. “Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant,” Peter complained to his friends after one such pregnancy. “I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to recognize it as such.”

A Good Time for Murder
Eventually, Catherine grew tired of Peter—as did Russia’s citizenry and armed forces—and she decided along with Gregory Orlov, her lover of the moment, that it would be best if she dethroned her husband, which explains why Czar Peter III was murdered in 1762. Certainly, Peter’s murder freed the Empress to live out her passions. Once he was gone, she lost any sense of shame and stretched into her true self. She discovered her talents, developed a powerful presence among her courtiers and surrounded herself with admirers.

In short, Catherine the Great was a bad girl:
• She had encountered an obstacle that forever changed the direction of her life.
• She took action to ensure that she would never feel trapped again.
• She rebelled against the established order.
• She enjoyed sex and love immensely and used men to get what she wanted.
• She found an outlet for her creative energy, which in her case involved the assumption of wealth and power.
• She defied her critics and became a star.

Catherine led a very complicated life, but she never saw it that way. By her thinking, she was merely a simple girl who needed love. “If in my youth I had found a husband whom I could have loved,” she wrote in her memoirs, “I should have remained faithful to him all my life. It is my misfortune that my heart cannot rest content even for an hour without love.”

Note: No, Catherine the Great and her horse did not engage in...erm, how you say...sexual congress. That's just a myth invented by people who like to mock powerful women--the same people who accuse Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian or Britney Spears of being crazy. True, Catherine the Great liked to ride, and she loved cavalrymen (the younger the better). So there was no equine sex, although it must be said that the Empress did enjoy dressing like a man and riding a horse astride her thighs.

Brooklyn Blogade on Jan. 20 in Clinton Hill

Hello. I'm sober now. And blogging again from Brooklyn.

Please come to this January's ultrachic, supertrendy & lovelyfriendly Brooklyn Blogade, hosted by the Clinton Hill Blogger, on Sunday, Jan. 20. The Blogade will start at 11 a.m. at the Frank White Cafe + Gallery, 936 Atlantic Ave., at St. James.

According to the Clinton Hill Blogger, "Frank White isn't located on the prettiest corner of Clinton Hill, but the space inside is absolutely gorgeous. Plus, in addition to the regular coffee and pastries, they'll be serving waffles and toppings!"

Blogging and waffles! How can you resist a combination like that? To RSVP, please send an email by Jan. 16 to: clintonhillblog-at-gmail-dot-com.

I really recommend meeting other bloggers in the flesh. While in London over the hols, I stayed with a screenwriter friend who writes a blog called My Forehead Is Bleeding. She dragged me to a lunch where a group of British screenwriters all met for the first time, and it was really fun! See the sexy writeup on this LA dude's blog (he was the other Yank at the lunch, in addition to me).

Christmas in England

Have tripped down the rabbit hole. Here in England for Christmas, and spent first jet-lagged weekend at a free party, properly sprinkled with happy fairy dust and ear-scorching techno beats.

Oh, you ask, do they still throw these free-party raves in London, then?

Yes, love, they do. And they go something like this, just as they did 5-10 years ago: yer mate tells you there's a party planned for Saturday, wait for details, you'll get a text. And then the organisers send word that they've busted into an abandoned Sunbeam Corp. plant in Acton, and the mob descends on the empty industrial building, hoodies, dreads, floppy jeans, girls n boys n boys n girls, no commercials, no branding, no cameras, no bouncers, and a minimum of security at the door, not a single cheap authority figure's jacket in sight, no sticks, no tasers.

The sound has assaulted your ears, painfully, even before you've entered Sunbeam, but in the main hall there's a crowd round the sound deck and speakers because this is where the party is, and off your head as you is, you want to be near the sound. In the center of the light and the smoke, and never mind the dark hooded boys wandering in the back of the cavernous space, don't really want to know what they're doing and you just want to be near the light, the music, the party & the people & the light, the light, the light.

You take a break, drift upstairs and past heaving faces in the stairwell, oh the humanity, descending into a Hieronymous Bosch hell or is it heaven, but not sure that you should seek eye contact considering the state you're in. Christ this place is dirty, and keep your eyes closed when you go to the toilets. For a change, it's lovely to see drug deals conducted so openly, which slakes one's curious thirst, but still you do make friends on the dance floor, Virginie the beautiful French girl and Kojo from Ghana, who are also there for the light and the music.

It may just be that you're feeling all loved up, but these are two of the most beautiful people you've ever met, and you're lit up by Virginie's devil nostrils and freshwater pearly teeth, and Kojo's tender nature so clearly above the brooding darkness of this transient squatters' ball. Two of the most gorgeous people you've ever met, and then you go and lose the freakin' phone number for Virginie, don't you?, that she's scribbled on a scrap of paper and you shoved in your graywool coat pocket. And now they're lost to you forever and you can only fantasise about them, Virginie's swaying moves and slouchy jumper on the dance floor, Kojo's gentle touch as he wipes the soot off a drunk boy's puss, and in return, headed back to Glen's flat near Hackney at noon, all sleeping on the train, you suddenly wake up at Bethnal Green and dash out of the car without a goodbye to him, asleep beside you.

Back at the flat, you sleep for 16 hours, eat a good meal with some lager from the off-licence, and you catch a cold.

On to the next stop, a sane and civilised place in the English countryside, where little girls decorate Christmas trees and men in tweed caps take their dogs for a walk.