
“Saint Catherine and the Demons,” by an unknown artist circa 1500 AD that hangs in the National Gallery in Poland (Wikimedia Commons photo credit to Giovanni Cerretani).
When it comes to weird tales, you really can’t beat the lives and deaths of the Christian saints. Nor can you top the fantastical artworks they inspired, like “Saint Catherine and the Demons,” by an unknown artist circa 1500 AD that hangs in the National Gallery in Poland (Wikimedia Commons photo credit to Giovanni Cerretani). In the shapes of the lusty and clasping demons, modern women may be unpleasantly reminded of the creepers, gropers and dick-pic senders of today, for the masterworks of the past frame any number of future harbingers and universal concerns.
Some five centuries later, and here I am, a different kind of scribe, living in a small town named after Saint Catherine. This is how bloodlines intersect and family histories do a 360. It’s also a testament to magical powers of the written word, to traverse 800 years in 7 paragraphs) and bind generations together with the thread and stiches of sentences and paragraphs. .

Photo of our village’s church by Jim Algie
Many of the author and musician’s best music stories, both fiction and nonfiction are included in the collection “On the Night Joey Ramone Died: Tales of Rock and Punk from Bangkok, New York, Cambodia and Norway.” The ebook and paperback are available on Amazon. The acclaimed mystery author, Timothy Hallinan, said, “The book captures the pop music world as well as, and in some cases better than, most actual rock autobiographies.”
Always interesting Jim.
rgds
Kai