Reading about rubber bananas while really very hungry.

Oh, I've been sitting in this café for so long. The large capuccino glass has been empty for .... is it hours? That cookie -- a large cookie, admittedly -- is the only solid food I've eaten all day. I have every intention -- and have had every intention for an hour -- of relocating to a restaurant. I'm thinking sesame chicken. But somehow I keep finding one more thing to read. And so there's this, a little diary by Donovan, part of a promotion of his autobiography, "Hurdy Gurdy Man," and when we drove over to the café -- hours ago -- we were playing "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the CD player and talking a lot about Donovan and how much we love the song "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (which, John argued, Prince ripped off in "Sign O' the Times").

An excerpt from the Donovan diary:

I went to Capital Radio, where I'd earlier sent around two dozen rubber bananas. You put your mobile phone in them, a cute idea taken from the Marx Brothers movie where they'd pick up a banana and say, "Hello?" My song Mellow Yellow means I am forever associated with bananas so I thought I'd give them away on air. That night I played the beautiful Café de Paris in front of 600 fans.

Must get food.

UPDATE: Eating sesame chicken now. Really feeling much better. Still love Donovan....

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a nice long piece about Donovan's book. Some excerpts:

His sexual libertarianism was also shaped by teenage reading of the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac. “When I read On The Road it seemed like there were gals in the bohemian world who were willing to break the conditioning of their background, and refused to be pushing a pram, refused to marry in the normal way, and wished to be artists. These gals were not just sexual objects, they had freedom and an artistic bent. I was fascinated by those liberated females – not just because of the sexual freedom but because they had left society.”....

He also had the misfortune to appear on the national stage in the very year – 1965 – that Bob Dylan was abandoning folk and pushing forward the frontiers of pop and rock . They met when Dylan toured Britain that year, and Donovan appears in DA Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back. Conventional thinking on the film is that Dylan is sneering at Donovan, who performs a song for him, but Donovan doesn’t see it that way. “Absolute bullshit,” he snaps. “If you actually look at the movie, Bob is honouring my work.”

The allegation clearly hurts. I hadn’t even asked about Don’t Look Back; he brought it up himself. I do want to know, however, what it’s like for Donovan, trying to celebrate his 40th anniversary when suddenly 2005 turns into the year of Bob Dylan. Surely it must be frustrating that even after all these years he can’t escape the man’s shadow? “I’m going to have a pee,” he says, “but I’ll be back, and we’ll address that.”...

There is a scene in the book where he has gone to bed with the American folk singer Joan Baez, but when she reminisces about sex with Bob Dylan his ardour is considerably dampened....