A picture of me twanging…

But first…
Dulltown, UK: Today’s quotation is from A confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole:
…Ignatius winked wildly at a woman leaning on the bar, a fortyish Latin who leered a terrifying response with a gold tooth or two. She pried herself loose from the bar before the bartender could stop her and came over to Ignatius, who was huddled against the stage as if it were a warm stove.
“You wanna dreenk, chico?”
Some halitosis filtered through his moustache. He ripped the scarf from his cap and shielded his nostrils with it.
“Thank you, yes,” he said in a muffled voice. “A Dr. Nut, if you please. And be certain it’s frosty cold.”
“I’ll see what we have,” the woman said enigmatically and clopped back to the bar in her straw sandals.
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Speaking of stages, I used to be in a band, we played blues and rock ‘n’ roll songs; I twanged a guitar in it; we were called the Rialtos. I thought that we were quite good, people would dance and sweat to our music and would sometimes shout praise at us towards the end of the night. It was a good thing to do.
These days we of the band are all old, we occasionally rise, joints creaking, from the ivy-clad tomb of the past, like some flickering apparition from a 1950s black and white horror film, prop ourselves up, and try to do it all again…
That’s what I was doing last Saturday night, at a dark, slightly austere city centre venue here in Dulltown. I thought that we played quite well considering, and the audience were suitably drunk (on unusually expensive drinks) and were quite appreciative of our efforts.
My friend Julia took a picture of me during the performance; there wasn’t much light, so it is rather blurred due to the long exposure, and the colour is a bit strange too. She popped it onto Facebook a couple of days ago.
I like it. I generally don’t like pictures of me playing, I tend to look even older and more crumbly that I actually am, but I took to this one immediately, it’s nicely indistinct…
Julia remarked that she thought it looked like a Francis Bacon painting – I agree, and even though I don’t like Francis Bacon much, I asked her permission to use the image here.
Here I am, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a thin 1960s brown/gold tie, narrow blue-reflective sunglasses, and white ‘brothel creeper’ crepe-soled (ill-fitting) shoes. Oh, and I’m playing my nice Gibson SG ’61 reissue guitar.
So, what’d you think?…

Photograph: Julia Roach 2017.