I am very pleased indeed that this poem has been published in The High Window. Thanks to the editor David Cooke for all the final sleuthing that it needed.

https://thehighwindowpress.com/2022/08/15/anthony-howell-envelopes/

Here is a video of Lombardi at work and discussing his death. Since his drawings showing interlocks between clean and dirty money are very large, they do not reproduce very well.

However there is a brilliant book – Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi by Patricia Goldstone that goes into his drawings in detail.

There is also an excellent obituary of Lombardi in Adrian Dannatt’s Doomed and Famous.

A sort of ‘Brief Lives’ for the twentieth century, this book is a wonderful selection of obits which includes such luminaries as the elusive James Lee Byars, the unique performance artist Stuart Sherman and the wonderful painter Larry Rivers – all of whom I knew – and the experience of knowing them was formative for my own creative thought. 

Oh, well, anyway, Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick!

Mind you, it is worth noting that this documentary was completed in January 21, before we realised how weak NATO actually is – because so corrupted by the CIA and the Mafia – yes – and by US weapons costing an exorbitant amount to the US tax-payer because of the huge profit margin the middlemen demand (which means the weapons aren’t actually worth the dollars they cost). To imagine Russia and China are weak today is false. Russia is winning hands down against oligarch-corrupted Ukraine and sleepy Joe and his son, heroin-happy Hunter, who was in the pay of Kolomoisky’s Burisma energy company. So I take the conclusion of this documentary with a pinch of salt, and I get irritated with its knee-jerk equation of fox-hunting with the upper classes, a sentimentalisation which underscores that tendency to turn socialism into an empathy notion which has damaged country sports, the rural nature of the counties and workers’ employment in the countryside.