Suzane von Richthofen and the Bloody Red Baron

Mike's Pith & Wind - The Return of the Bloody Red Baron
A small piece in The Age caught my eye a couple of weeks back as I sipped my jasmine tea at the Gusto Bakery. It told of the daughter of the great-nephew of Baron von Richthofen, one Suzane von Ricthofen, who, with two young male accomplices (one her former lover), had been convicted by the Sao Paulo Court of murdering her parents in 2002. The case had apparently enthralled the Brazilian public, not so much for the legendary WWl fighter pilot connection, but for the salacious poor-little-rich-girl mixing it with lower-class bad boys angle.
The case interested me and sparked a couple of trains of thought: the first being that in this contemporary Brazilian domestic tragedy there was the faint resonance of a famous murder that occurred in Christchurch in 1954; and it also reminded me of the ludicrous censorship during the sixties of a pop song about Baron von Richthofen and Snoopy, Charles Shulz’s famous cartoon dog.
I seem to remember being in the Phantom Gang’s secret hideout in a large macrocarpa hedge just a couple of doors down from home with brother Dick and our Latvian friend Romi when we first heard about the murder. We lived in the Cashmere Hills only a couple or so miles away as the crow flies from Victoria Gardens where the murder took place, so it loomed particularly large in our psyches - not to mention that in those days we’d never seen a TV or read a newspaper for that matter, and so the very concept of murder, or even worse, murdering your own mother, was utterly alien and shocking to us.
There was no escaping this lurid story read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Just a Stage of Life
The Arts are far more fun than business, and usually personally rather than financially rewarding. I painted for many years and have tried most other ways of expressing myself without actually getting arrested. It is fair to say that my singing or playing of any musical instrument is only approximate, but I don’t inflict actual physical pain - that I know of. Perhaps not true, as I my mother told me that my piano teacher’s happiest moment was when at age ten, I decided that dull rote of piano lessons was not for me. His lessons were predicated on the idea that I should practice and take the trouble to learn the basic principles of rhythm and notation - my idea was that a miraculous transfusion of ability would occur just from being in the same space. It is also true that my wife and daughter leave the room when they see me reaching for a guitar, though I blame that on my perverse liking for the more maudlin of country and western songs, “Me and Little Andy” being a read more