FRIDAY NIGHT BOYS

Van's the Man!

2012-02-15T10:26:00.001Z

Van Morrison at The Sage Gateshead

THE artist variously known as Van the Man and the Belfast Cowboy played a blinder for a sold-out house at The Sage.

Backed by a superlative eight-piece band, Van Morrison trawled through his massive back catalogue in a highly focused performance, featuring several musical highlights.

Opening with his evergreen jukebox standard, Brown Eyed Girl, the king of Celtic soul delivered the goods throughout the evening.

Swapping between saxophone, harmonica and even keyboards for Haunts of Ancient Peace, Morrison kept his faultless band in check with a series of jerky hand signals, pointed fingers and bellowed stage instructions.

But while Morrison is not noted for his easy-going personality, there was little evidence of musical aggro.

Instead, he created spine-tingling magic with what, for me, was the concert highlight- namely, a brilliant All in the Game.

The old pop standard segued into a chant about "no plan B, no safety net," Morrison building up the phrase into a kind of religious mantra.

While he can be inconsistent, such moments prove why Morrison has retained a loyal following for more than 40 years.

A highly moving version of In the Garden was the other concert standout, Morrison's voice ranging from a blues shout to a whisper.

The gig ended in traditional style with the timeless classic Gloria -
"G-L-O-R-I-A" - the Belfast Cowboy leaving the stage to a deserved standing ovation.

Terry Kelly

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #144

2012-02-14T09:08:00.000Z

Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems - review

2012-02-13T09:42:00.003Z

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here
Terry Kelly
The Complete Poems, Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett, Faber
and Faber, 768pp, £40 (hardback)

When Philip Larkin sent fellow poet Robert Lowell a copy of High Windows in 1974, his inscription read: ‘From a Drought to a Deluge’. The phrase can be read as either literary self-deprecation or – given Larkin’s naturally spiky nature and dislike of Lowell’s poetry – a thinly veiled Larkinesque rebuke for what was widely seen as the American poet’s prodigious, almost profligate output. (Lowell had published three collections in 1973 alone.) When Lowell’s bulky Collected Poems eventually appeared in 2003 it ran to almost twelve hundred pages. How ironic, then, to watch Larkin’s posthumous oeuvre similarly swell to almost Lowellian proportions in the quarter-century since his death. A substantial Collected Poems, edited by Larkin’s literary executor Anthony Thwaite in 1988 (reprinted with revisions in 1990), was followed by the highly controversial Selected Letters (1992); Further Requirements (2001), a collection of miscellaneous prose; Trouble at Willow Gables (2002), a book of early fiction; then a reordered and slimmed-down Collected Poems (2003); Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005); Letters to Monica (2010); and last year’s Poems, a long-overdue selection edited by Martin Amis.

Now, leading the heavyweight Larkin division is noted Housman scholar Archie Burnett’s fabulously annotated and much-anticipated edition of The Complete Poems. Once a neatly populated English village, Larkinland has been swollen by the literary equivalent of rapid urban growth since the poet’s death in 1985. Larkin famously said, ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ but his post-mortem output has looked anything but deprived.

Despite the wealth of Larkin material which has appeared over the last twenty years or so, it is arguable that his literary reputation still rises or falls on precisely three mature poetry collections, none of which reach fifty pages. Once described by Clive James as ‘thin as blades’, those precisiontooled volumes – The Less Deceived (1955),The Whitsun Weddings (1964)and High Windows (1974) – were meticulously ordered and orchestrated by the famous librarian-poet from the University of Hull. He commented on his poetic architecture in the following knockabout terms: ‘I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls.’ As far back as 1988, however, the poet and critic, Ian Hamilton, expressed concerns about the incremental growth in posthumous Larkin. In his perceptive review of the original Collected Poems he wrote:

The beauty of Larkin’s three grown-up books, or one of their beauties, is that you can open them at any page and find something that only Larkin could have written. And even his most light-weight pieces are consummately ‘finished’ – there is nothing slovenly or make-weight or derivative. With this Collected Poems, there is an almost fifty-fifty chance that ‘any page’ will reveal lines which you’d swear could not possibly have sprung from Larkin’s pen.

As the poet himself said about a teenage university friend in ‘Dockery and Son’: ‘Why did he think adding meant increase?’ Early Larkin affords tantalising glimpses of the later, unforgettable mature work. But it is more usually a poetic pot-pourri, a literary mixing of the likes of Eliot, Auden, Yeats and even Dylan Thomas before the poet’s life-altering encounter with Hardy’s gloomy lyrics. For the most part, Larkin’s apprentice work employs the rather hackneyed furniture of Romantic verse, with lots of solitary musing on the moon, clouds, the sea, rain, wind and so on. But he was undoubtedly a skilful imitator, immersing himself in the bleak, prophetic, Audenesque landscape throughout much of the 1930s and early 1940s. This poetic austerity was eventually supplanted by the Yeatsian fever, which imbued his work with a more bardic tone. Larkin explained how he became hooked ‘out of infatuation with his music’. Ploughing through the tyro work, however, one is apt to agree with the critic Peter Conrad, who noted how the reader ‘[wants] Larkin to grow old as quickly as possible, so that he can write the poems that really matter’.

Archie Burnett’s landmark edition, several years in the making, provides the most comprehensive picture to date of Larkin’s poetic development and overall literary achievement. Setting out his critical modus operandi in his introduction, Burnett explains that he has included those poems which Larkin ‘completed’ or which are ‘self-contained’. This means that short, satirical or even scurrilous verses from his letters make the cut but not incomplete poems of arguably greater inherent literary value. This also means the exclusion of fragments, drafts or verses with uncancelled alternative endings. (Such an editorial move can prove contentious – as Burnett admits – in the case of the late and quite haunting poem, ‘The Winter Palace’, of which more later.)

The pursuit of editorial accuracy is one of the main reasons given for this weighty volume by Burnett, co-director, along with literary critic, Christopher Ricks, of the Editorial Institute, and Professor of English at Boston University, USA. He is also the acclaimed editor of the definitive volumes, The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997) and The Letters of A. E. Housman (2007). While noting ‘a scattering of errors’ in the original Collected Poems in 1988, Burnett does not spare the rod with fellow Larkin scholar, A. T. Tolley, for the editorial standards the latter applied to his Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005). He highlights ‘72 errors of wording, 47 of punctuation, 8 of letter-case, 5 of word-division, 4 of font and 3 of format’. Tolley is also chided as ‘an uncritical follower’ of the original Collected Poems and repeatedly scolded for editorial carelessness. To some, this will smack of academic pointscoring but scholarly accuracy is one of the touchstones of this meticulous volume. Burnett maintains an editorial laser beam on his prime sources – chiefly, Larkin’s workbooks and typescripts, mostly stored in the archives at Hull, London and Oxford. The dating of Larkin’s poems is corrected so as to indicate the complete process of poetic composition rather than simply the point at which a particular poem is brought to some state of completion. The volume also represents a first in printing variant wordings for Larkin’s typescripts and manuscripts, late in the composition process, plus some previously unseen work.

Apart from representing an unprecedented Larkin poetic storehouse, the other glory of The Complete Poems is Burnett’s dazzlingly detailed commentary, running to more than three hundred and thirty pages. Easily capable of being a stand-alone critical volume for Larkin scholars, the commentary incorporates everything from the poet’s comments on individual poems to relevant historical details, people and places, echoes and allusions and linguistic usage. Burnett will often employ relevant details to contextualise a poem, without, as he stresses, attempting to say what the poem actually means. But some Larkin poems are unarguably drawn from the facts of his life. For example, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, is inspired by the death of the poet’s father, Sydney Larkin, of liver cancer, on 26 March 1948: ‘Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/Remains your final summer – sweet/And meaningless, and not to come again.’ Burnett records the fact that plum trees grew in the back garden of the Larkin home at 73 Coten End, Warwick; he quotes a contemporary letter by the poet on his father’s death; he refers to both Vernon Watkins and Housman on plum blossom; and he highlights a possible allusion to George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, spotted by the critic John Carey.

Ever the disinterested editor, Burnett is careful not to get drawn into the crossfire between traditional critics and theorists. Rather, he believes that ‘the editor’s duty ends with providing the reader with information that has some bearing on the poems, and it is for the reader to assess the pressure of that bearing’. He also concedes some ‘overlap’ between what went into the making and meaning of certain Larkin poems.

While Larkin enjoyed parading an anti-literary persona and a boorish dislike for what he sneeringly called the referential ‘myth-kitty’ school of poetry, his work is in fact often a ventriloquial literary echo chamber. A skilful pasticheur, Larkin’s early work evinces the influence of Eliot (‘Stanley en Musique’, 1939), Auden (‘Watch, my dear, the darkness now’, 1939), Dylan Thomas (‘The Returning’, 1942) and Yeats (much of his first book, The North Ship, published in 1945).

One of the inevitable outcomes of The Complete Poems will be to reveal the post-war, Parnassian Ron Glum of twentieth-century English verse as, in fact, something of a literary aesthete. The early Larkin was an accomplished poetic mimic and, while only noting specific literary allusions and references – Housman included, Burnett concedes ‘that many more traces of allusiveness remain to be uncovered in Larkin’s poetry’. Before the late 1940s, however, readers will mostly search in vain for the distinctive Larkinesque ‘voice’ in the book’s wealth of early work. 1946 was the year Larkin experienced a liberating literary ‘conversion’ from Yeats to Hardy after reading the latter’s ‘Thoughts of Phena’ (‘Not a line of her writing have I,/Not a thread of her hair’). Until that point the apprentice poet was still capable of writing, without much visible irony, about ‘the unmeasured sword/Rising from sleep’. While there are poetic dry-runs for what Martin Amis in 2011 defined as the ‘frictionless memorability’ of the mature work, the real Larkin was still mostly elusive.

Between 1945 and 1946, however, Larkin’s distinctive poetic identity begins to emerge, initially in lyrical fits and starts but eventually across whole poems. Several Larkin scholars have identified ‘Going’ as one of the turning points towards canonical Larkin. A gnomic, puzzling poem originally entitled ‘Dying Day’, noted Larkin critic, James Booth, calls it ‘a belated Imagist poem’. Burnett’s commentary tells us it was drafted between 15 December 1945 and 23 February 1946. ‘There is an evening coming in/Across the fields, one never seen before,/That lights no lamps.’ Larkin’s literary quiddity is no easy thing to define but it partly involves the merging of plain diction with great poetic resonance. The authorial voice is by turns direct and rhetorical, afflatus often rising from the quotidian, as in the famous conclusion to ‘High Windows’ – ‘the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless’ – or the earlier ‘Going’: ‘What is under my hands/That I cannot feel?//What loads my hands down?’

Reviewing the original Collected Poems (1988), poet and critic, William Scammell, defined Larkin’s mature voice as ‘every bit as assertive as Yeats’s, stuffed with X is Y formulations ... but the assertions are bedded in empirical low-life detail, hedged round with qualification, in both senses’. Although Scammell believed that ‘rapture wasn’t Larkin’s style’, a sense of Lawrentian ‘rapture’ certainly informed another poem signalling the emergence of the mature Larkin style. Drafted in September 1946,‘Wedding-Wind’ was rated by the famously self-critical Larkin. He told his long-term girlfriend, Monica Jones, in 1950 that it was ‘the best’ of a batch of six poems he had sent her. Burnett’s ever-helpful notes also suggest that it was ‘Wedding-Wind’ to which Larkin was referring in 1973, when he commented: ‘I wrote my first good poem when I was twenty-six.’ Burnett’s commentary also tells us that Larkin felt Lawrence’s The Rainbow may have influenced his only poem with a recognisably female speaker. The poem may also be unique in the Larkin canon for its unalloyed sense of joy: ‘Can even death dry up/These new delighted lakes, conclude/Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?’ Both ‘Going’ and ‘Wedding- Wind’ would later be included in The Less Deceived, Larkin’s first mature collection.

For Larkin devotees, one of the chief pleasures of The Complete Poems is tracing the emergence of one of English poetry’s most distinctive poetic voices. But this can prove a frustrating business, as the book’s wealth of immature work reveals the early Larkin often possessed literary feet of clay. We witness a long poetic apprenticeship, with genuine foreshadowing of later literary quality being generally outweighed by frequent tonal wobbles and whole poems which miss the mark.

While the ideas and poetic ambience are often present and correct, what is missing, crucially, is the later pin-sharp poetic memorability,that distinctive Larkinesque quality which Martin Amis defined in his introduction to 2011’s selected volume as ‘instantly unforgettable’. For example, ‘Unfinished Poem’, written between 1951 and 1953, reads like a rather wordy and overly philosophical dry-run for the later and much-anthologised ‘Mr Bleaney’, completed just a couple of years later: ‘I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof/And lay on the bed there with my jacket off//... That was a way to live – newspaper for sheets,/A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts/From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!/That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!’ (There is probably a thesis to be written about the links between Larkin’s poetic creativity and the rented accommodation where he lived until 1974, the year his final collection, High Windows, appeared.) Similarly, ‘Hospital Visits’, also dating from the early 1950s, explores subject matter familiar to Larkin readers, particularly in such later expansive meditations on mortality as ‘The Building’, but the earlier poem struggles to get into second gear. Apart from containing much early work, The Complete Poems reprints not /only The North Ship and Larkin’s three iconic mature collections but also restores to the canon poems published in the original Collected Poems, edited by Larkin’s literary executor Anthony Thwaite in 1988. These were later omitted from the rejigged Collected Poems of 2003 on the grounds they were not published during the poet’s lifetime. Readers can therefore welcome back such essential poems as the late and inconsolably desolate ‘Love Again’ (which Blake Morrison called ‘Larkin’s last great poem’); ‘An April Sunday Brings the Snow’; ‘The Dance’; ‘When First We Faced, and Touching Showed’; ‘Morning at Last: There in the Show’; ‘Mother, Summer, I’; ‘The Little Lives of Earth and Form’; ‘The View’; ‘Long Lion Days’; and the recently emerged, ‘Dear Jake’ (a kind of 1976 critique of Larkin’s earlier poem, ‘Posterity’). There is also ‘We Met at the End of the Party’, which is possibly addressed to Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, with whom he had an affair.

However, owing to Burnett’s editorial decision to exclude fragments or poems with variant or unresolved endings, some later and potentially /interesting and longish drafts, such as ‘The Duration’ and ‘Letters to my Mind’, are omitted. Out, too, goes ‘The Winter Palace’, a poem from 1978, known and cherished by many Larkin readers since its inclusion in the original Collected Poems. Even Burnett admits he excluded the poem ‘not without regret’ but concludes that ‘Larkin did not finish work on the poem’. Readers will nonetheless search in vain among the apprentice work for a poem with such a haunting final couplet: ‘Then there will be nothing I know./My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’

While editorial consistency is to be applauded, the result is that interesting poems are jettisoned. At the same time, poems that make the grade on the grounds of their literary ‘finish’ include such notorious extremist doggerel as ‘How to Win the Next Election’ (‘Prison for strikers,/Bring back the cat,/Kick out the niggers,/How about that?’); barbed literary squibs; salacious stanzas; and unpleasant class caricatures (‘I want to see them starving,/ The so-called working-class’, or ‘Sod the lower classes,/Kick them up their arses’). This is one case where a degree of editorial flexibility would have reaped benefits for Larkin completists. (Oddly, Burnett decides to print ‘The Dance’ – a long, introspective poem, drafted between 1963 and 1964, which ends mid-sentence, conceding in his commentary that it ‘remains unfinished’.) Larkin devotees, of course, want everything the man wrote. It would be churlish to dwell on the occasional omissions. While it is principally aimed at those same devotees and literary scholars, Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems is a landmark volume, a wonder-book of verse by one of the art form’s best practitioners of the last hundred years.

TERRY KELLY

This review originally appeared in The London Magazine:
http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Whitney Houston RIP

2012-02-12T15:42:00.000Z

Whitney Houston: the trailblazer
Whitney Houston, who died on Saturday, was the inverse of today's young female singers

Bim Adewunmi
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 12 February 2012

For little girls in the 1980s and 1990s, Whitney Elizabeth Houston was everything. Her big hair, the seemingly heartfelt lyrics, her skinny little knees in a denim miniskirt, her powerhouse of a voice – she was the supreme living doll. I have not met a single woman of my generation – white, black, brown or whatever – who did not want to be her at some point. She was perfect.

And now, with her passing, a certain kind of pop star is gone forever. Her mix of gospel vocals with unthreatening girly looks and attitude made parents comfortable – more than can be said for the likes of Rihanna. The gospel in her voice was the legacy of an early life spent singing in church, and the illustrious line of female gospel vocalists she came from: her mother is the great Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick, her godmother Aretha Franklin. It meant that Whitney was probably singing in church as she was learning to speak, perfecting the vocal acrobatics heard among black congregations everywhere. By the time she was making her first forays into pop, she was already a seasoned performer with a weekly audience. The gospel training also allowed her to straddle genres to powerful effect, as anyone who remembers her cover of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You – who doesn't? – will attest.

That ineffable girl-next-door vibe Whitney had is something that's more or less disappeared from the pop scene in the last 15 years. Child and teenage stars endure, sure, but not like her. She was pretty – enough to be a successful model – but she was also sweet. Her persona didn't seem like an act to shift more units, though it undoubtedly helped. It reflected her upbringing, her rootedness in a certain kind of black culture. I remember my mum referring to her as a "good girl" – a ringing endorsement if ever there was one. But her safeness as a pop star didn't mean she was boring, because that voice made one thing very clear: "I may look like a milquetoast, but have you heard me sing?"

You very quickly run out of words to describe Whitney's voice. In her heyday – basically a large chunk of the 80s and 90s – it could stop you in your tracks. Today's pop stars bandy vocal pyrotechnics about regardless of their capacity to really pull it off. They are all-knowing sexuality and casually orchestrated middle finger salutes. Whitney existed in a world before all of that. She was marketed as America's sweetheart, previously the domain of blond white girls: a huge cultural shift. When she co-starred in The Bodyguard opposite Kevin Costner, one of the most famous Hollywood actors of the time, it was virtually unprecedented. Here was a black woman, a singer no less, making a worldwide smash hit movie like it was a normal thing to do.

It was Whitney's famously clean living that made her subsequent troubles – a relationship with R&B bad boy Bobby Brown (immortalised in their duet Something in Common), drug use, a reality TV programme, finally divorce – seem all the sadder. In many ways, her life was the inverse of today's female singers. While they play wild and dangerous on stage, they seem to lead focused, driven, business-led lives off it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Beyoncé. She's Sasha Fierce while performing, but Beyoncé the CEO at all other times.

Like Michael Jackson before her, Whitney Houston defined the pop landscape of her time and influenced it for years afterwards. Every time you hear Beyoncé drag out a single syllable over three or four beats, that's Whitney. And when Mariah Carey does her little hand movements to accompany a ridiculously high note, that's Whitney too. This was a talent whom others can only imitate. And for all her troubles in later life, her legacy is secure: come the X Factor this autumn, you'll hear it by the truckload.

Albrecht Durer

2012-02-11T16:41:00.000Z

J. D. Salinger: Kenneth Slawenski interviewed...

2012-02-10T16:21:00.000Z

PRINCETON: Biographer talks about J.D. Salinger, ‘Catcher’
hursday, January 12, 2012
By Charley Falkenburg, Staff Writer

The Princeton High School Performance Center was the place to be on Jan. 10 for J.D. Salinger buffs when acclaimed author of “J.D. Salinger: A Life” Kenneth Slawenski made a visit to unlock some mysteries of the man who wrote the classic “Catcher in the Rye.”

Students had the opportunity to hear the exclusive details of Mr. Slawenski’s biography prior to his evening book signing and paperback launch at the Princeton Library. Students listened intently as teen services librarian Susan Conlon interviewed Mr. Slawenski and followed up with their own questions.

Slouched comfortably with one hand in his pocket, he described the lengthy process of researching and writing the biography, which took him nearly eight years. Throughout those years, Mr. Salinger continued to surprise him.

”As I wrote the book I was finding things out,” Mr. Slawenski said. “It dawned on me that I was mostly writing a biography of ‘Catcher in the Rye.’”

For example, he was shocked to learn the extent of Mr. Salinger’s military service, where Mr. Salinger spent four years fighting in World War II and chose to spend an extra year in Germany cleaning up after the Nazis. As a result, he suffered a mental breakdown, known today as post-traumatic stress disorder.

”The war was a pivotal event in his life. It was more important to him as a man and his works,” Mr. Slawenski said. “Before he left to fight the war he didn’t question anything and just wanted to be rich and famous. But after the war he questioned the nature of living, of good and evil.”

Finding these hidden facts were not easy and Mr. Slawenski had many difficulties acquiring information on Mr. Salinger’s participation in the war. It took him an entire year to write the chapter on Mr. Salinger’s World War II service.

”It wasn’t easy,” Mr. Slawenski emphasized. “I double, triple and quadruple checked every fact in that chapter.”He also came across frustrating information gaps during the research process, leaving several parts of Mr. Salinger’s life blank. He gave the example of being unable to find details of Mr. Salinger’s work for Intelligence in the Army when he went to Nuremburg, Germany.

”The only thing you can do is acknowledge the gap and move on,” Mr. Slawenski told students.

He went on to describe similarities between Mr. Salinger and his infamous Holden Caulfield character, Mr. Salinger’s lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism and Mr. Salinger’s obsession with his Glass family characters, which he wrote about for 15 years.

”Salinger fell in love with these children, he adored them as if they were real people,” Mr. Slawenski said. “He had a winning formula with Holden and the Caulfield family and he abandoned it for the Glass family.”

He added that the Glass children are similar to Holden in that they have anxiety, but that it was more of a spiritual anxiety that caused them to look for God and the meaning of life, a theme that dominated most of Mr. Salinger’s later works.

Mr. Slawenski talked about the New Yorker’s rejection of “Catcher in the Rye” despite their tight knit relationship with Mr. Salinger and his overnight booming popularity with “Catcher in the Rye” that became synonymous with the 1960s generation.

”The anxiety of Holden represented anxiety of the generation,” Mr. Slawenski said. “‘Catcher in the Rye’ fed off a general apprehension of society because of the atomic bomb.”

However, people had misguided views of Mr. Salinger.

Mr. Slawenski said many believed he was a genius and a “one trick pony” with “Catcher in the Rye,” but this was not the case — Mr. Salinger wrote three other books and several short stories and “Catcher in the Rye” took him a difficult 10 years to write.

But instead of enjoying the limelight he sought for so long, Mr. Salinger recoiled and increasingly withdrew from society. It prompted him to move to a cottage in the woods in New Hampshire and spend 12 to 16 hours a day writing in a private bunker on the property – isolated from his second wife and two children, ultimately resulting in divorce.

”He found out he wasn’t meant for the spotlight,” Mr. Slawenski said. “Salinger didn’t think he owed us anything – he believed he owed everything to God because God gave him the ability to write.”

Mr. Salinger stopped publishing his works for 45 years, but Mr. Slawenski stressed that he did without a doubt continue to write.

”He wrote at least a dozen books. We have yet to read them because they haven’t been published,” he said. “The literary well is holding their breath.”

He added that there is a rumor that Mr. Salinger asked his son and wife to wait a number of years before publishing his writings. The reason is that he knew his fans would be happy when he died solely for the hope that they would then be able to read his hidden gems.

”I bet he’s laughing up there now,” Mr. Slawenski said. Students were surprised to learn that Princeton University has five of Mr. Salinger’s unpublished stories.

With two memoirs and two biographies already on Mr. Salinger, Mr. Slawenski felt the need to write his own to set the record straight and give a true, unbiased account. He described the other accounts as “unflattering.” Mr. Salinger had even sued Ian Hamilton’s publisher for the vindictive tone Mr. Hamilton’s unauthorized biography contained.

Ironically, Mr. Hamilton’s publisher is the same as Mr. Slawenski’s: Random House.

Mr. Slawenski’s interest in Mr. Salinger sparked in junior high school when he read “Catcher in the Rye” and was rekindled when he picked the book back up again years later.

”I enjoyed the book more in my 40s than when I was 14,” Mr. Slawenski said. “I then set out to read everything Salinger ever wrote.”

This sparked his Dead Caulfields website in 2004 where he started chronicling little known Mr. Salinger stories about Holden and his family. It wasn’t until an editor asked him if he ever thought about making the website into a book that he decided to take on the project.

”I didn’t intend for it to be a biography,” Mr. Slawenski said. “I was almost afraid that if I knew too much about him it would spoil it for me, but the more you know about the author the more you enjoy the works.”

Now “J.D. Salinger: A Life” is published in 17 countries in 14 languages.

Mr. Slawenski isn’t stopping there. He is in the process of researching and writing a historical book on World War II that focuses on the battle of Hurtgen Forest, a battle in which both Mr. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway fought. He plans on using Mr. Salinger and Mr. Hemingway as conduits – following them as they talk about the battle itself.

When asked what he would ask Mr. Salinger if he ever received the chance, Mr. Slawenski did not even hesitate.

”Like everyone else, I want to know what he has been writing for the past 45 years,” he said with a smile. “And is it any good?”

http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/2012/01/12/the_princeton_packet/news/doc4f0f51b6d2303546728935.txt

Last night's set list

2012-02-09T00:51:00.000Z

At The Habit, York: -

The Sound Of Silence
Cecilia
The Boxer
Bye Bye Love

A change from Phil & Don to Paul & Art. A cold, cold night in York, but there was respite in The Habit.

Hockney at the Royal Academy

2012-02-08T08:06:00.002Z

David Hockney is still an artist who genuinely matters
Hockney's show poses hard questions, on how and why we decide how much things matter

Martin Kettle
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 18 January 2012

David Hockney's trumpeted and garlanded landscape show at the Royal Academy is more than just the must-see art exhibition of the new year, though it is certainly that too. It is also a bold assertion about the place of skill, craftsmanship and beauty in the making of art, which sets Hockney gloriously at odds with much of art's recent past.

Hockney's show offers his own way of seeing the East Yorkshire landscape in which he now lives. There's not a swimming pool in sight. It's a show about the Yorkshire countryside, about changing skies and seasons, about trees and blossom, hedgerows and puddles. But you can tell from the very first room, in which Hockney has painted big pictures of the same three trees at four different times of the year, with the same low hills and the same bend in the road, that there are wider ruminations here too.

For this is also a show about a man, his craft and the land. It is a statement about the primacy of skilled drawing and painting in the visual arts and about the challenge of doing them with originality in the 21st century. A conversation with art history runs through the exhibition too, a dialogue with Caravaggio, Claude, Constable, Monet and Picasso among others. And though one of the show's most distinctive themes is Hockney's famous fascination with his iPad and new technologies, another is its potent respect for and celebration of tradition.

This makes the exhibition, to use a phrase Hockney is fond of, a vindication of his own eye, own hand and own heart. (And what an eye, hand and heart they are. Such energy too, thrilling in someone of 74, almost Verdian in its old man's creative fervour.) But that makes it also a set of propositions about art and ourselves, about the meaning and content of art in the Britain of 2012, and about that hardest of all questions in both art and life – how and why we decide that one thing matters more than another.

That's why the opening of the Hockney show has been taking place to a not particularly subtle descant of propaganda and provocation from the great man himself. It's as if all those interviews he's been giving, including the needling of Damien Hirst and the conceptual artists (since retracted, but we know better, I think), are intended to make us do more than look at his pictures. Hockney seems to want us to think about what the different approaches mean, as well as what they show. To use the title of the wonderful recent book of Hockney conversations with Martin Gayford, he has a bigger message.

That message is principally about the craftsmanship that, in his very different way, Grayson Perry's terrific British Museum show (catch it too, it runs for another month) also glorifies. Hockney celebrates drawing because, as he says to Gayford, drawing is an instinctive human act from an early age, and because teaching someone to draw better is to teach them to see better. He does not add that to see better is to understand better, and thus to communicate better, but it is implicit and central to everything else.

It has always been hard to tell if Hockney is interested in politics – but he is a child of his time and a product of the hard-working northern culture in which he grew up, and of the British postwar settlement. He is manifestly, as Benjamin Britten once put it, an artist who thinks it is important to be useful. Britten comes to mind a lot when thinking about Hockney, not least because they are two of those rare artists of my lifetime whose new works genuinely mattered to a large audience outside the academy.

At the risk of pushing this argument too crudely and too far, and conscious also of my own Yorkshire pride, it seems to me that Hockney and his art express and address the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were. There is something religious in his work. And when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true.

The new Hockney show is not wall-to-wall pleasure. The room devoted to hawthorn blossom is strident. Hockney's colours don't always convince. Time and again, though, something draws you in and won't let go. The light, the draftsmanship and the composition are all there, but so too is the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable.

For a few days more, on the floor above the Hockney show at the Royal Academy, you can still see a much smaller exhibition about the modernist values of Soviet art and architecture. It's a poignant show, about the failure of the revolutionary idea. The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and that the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong. They offered 20th‑century answers to 19th‑century questions. Hockney seems to know it is time to move on. This show offers one artist's own 21st‑century answer to a quest for something beyond ourselves that is truly timeless.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/18/david-hockney-artist-matters?intcmp=239

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/

Happy Birthday, Charles!

2012-02-07T19:00:00.000Z

The first 200 years are always the hardest...

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #143

2012-02-07T07:53:00.000Z

Shooting Highway 61 Revisited

2012-02-06T07:55:00.000Z

The Player:
Daniel Kramer is a renowned photographer who worked with Bob Dylan throughout the mid-1960s, shooting the covers of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. His work on Dylan is featured in Bob Dylan: A Portrait of the Artist's Early Years.

Daniel Kramer:
The Highway 61 cover made in New York, is a very short story how that came about. We had worked for hours, all afternoon, photographing at a location in front of O. Henry's Restaurant. I had done all kinds of pictures of Bob at the outdoor café.

At one point I wasn't happy with what he was wearing, so we went around the corner and we bought new clothes in a men's store. Then we put the newly-draped Bob back in the picture and we shot for another couple of hours. We even had the tags still on the shirt cuffs and sleeve, because we didn't take them off, we didn't know if we would return them afterward [laughing] so we still have all the tags on

When we finished these rolls and rolls and rolls of pictures, we all dragged ourselves back to the apartment where Bob was living; he was sharing an apartment with Albert Grossman in New York. And when we got there Bob said, "You know, I have a new T-shirt. A motorcycle T-shirt. I'd like to just have a picture of it. Of me in this motorcycle T-shirt." I think it was for himself that he wanted to have this picture. So he went in, put on the T-shirt, came out, and he said, "How's about this? Maybe we could use this for something." I said, "Well, maybe we could use it. Let's do something. What can we do?" I said, "Nothing." Because we were finished and we were all tired and we were there on the stoop of the building.

So Bob sat down on the steps and I looked through the camera, and it looked a little naked behind him. His road manager then was Bob Neuwirth. So Bobby Neuwirth stood behind him in kind of a striped shirt, and I still needed something else. So I dug into my camera bag and came up with a Nikon SP that I had done a lot of the shooting of all of these pictures that I'd done of Dylan was with this particular camera, because it's not a single lens reflex, it's a range-finder camera like a Leica, which gives a very little sound when you're shooting, and so it's more discreet. I gave Bobby that camera to hold and he held it at a level I kept ranging, so that it would just kind of fill some of the void in the background. And I shot two frames. That's the end of the story.

http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=570

Simon Callow at the Customs House

2012-02-05T15:08:00.000Z

Simon Callow
Customs House, South Shields

WRITER Charles Dickens was once drenched by the waves on the beach at Tynemouth during one of his many and highly popular reading tours of the country.

But being the human and literary powerhouse he was, Britain's most revered novelist simply shook off the salt water and dried his clothes by walking another few miles.

This was just one of the many stories related by actor Simon Callow in a two-hour performance, tracing the life of the author of such classics as Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.

With the UK and the literary world celebrating the bicentenary of the writer's birth in 1812, Callow, on the opening night of a month-long tour, read to a packed Customs House from his new and especially commissioned book about a personality who was probably the most famous man in the world in his Victorian heyday, a kind of literary Elvis.

A great actor and showman, Dickens eventually ruined his health with constant reading tours, while also wrecking his marriage through an affair with a young actress called Ellen Ternan.

Callow, without the aid of notes, skilfully traced the life and times of a writer whose literary genius was complemented by a campaigning zeal on behalf of the poor and bedraggled of society.

Central episodes in Dickens' extraordinary life, including his horrendous time in a London boot polish factory as a young boy - inexplicably, with his parents' blessing - were brilliantly recreated.

But there were times during a very engaging performance when I wanted less narrative and more Dickens, and additional extracts from the novels would have added light and shade to the evening.

However, Callow's one-man show was a sparkling evocation of a literary legend he rightly called "a blazing fire of a man."

Terry Kelly

Ben Gazzara RIP

2012-02-05T14:42:00.000Z

Ben Gazzara, Risk-Taking Actor, Is Dead at 81

By NEIL GENZLINGER
February 3, 2012

Ben Gazzara, an intense actor whose long career included playing Brick in the original “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, roles in influential films by John Cassavetes and work with several generations of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his lawyer, Jay Julien, said. Mr. Gazzara lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage — his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series “Run for Your Life.”

If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles.

“When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 interview on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”

And yet Mr. Gazzara’s enduring reputation may well rest on his film work, specifically the movies he made with Mr. Cassavetes, the actor and director revered by cinephiles for his risk-taking independent projects and a directorial style that encouraged spontaneity.

The two had had bit parts in the 1969 comedy “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” but it was in “Husbands” (1970), directed by Mr. Cassavetes, that they, along with Peter Falk, really made an impression as unhappily married men out for a drunken night on the town together. As Mr. Gazzara wrote in his autobiography, “In the Moment” (2004), the on-camera camaraderie was so convincing that people assumed the three men had been lifelong friends; in fact they had barely known one another when the filming began, though they became friends during it.

Mr. Gazzara’s most important role for Mr. Cassavetes was in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), in which he played a strip club owner in debt to the mob. “It’s a thoughtful, intelligent interpretation of a role that just may not have as much depth to it as he’s ready to give it,” Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Gazzara’s performance.

In 1977 Mr. Gazzara had a supporting role behind Mr. Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, in the backstage story “Opening Night,” with Mr. Cassavetes again directing. Speaking of Mr. Cassavetes recently, Mr. Gazzara said, “He set the climate for an actor to feel free to give whatever, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.” Mr. Cassavetes died in 1989.

Two years after making “Opening Night,” Mr. Gazzara joined forces with another important director, Peter Bogdanovich, who gave him a rare leading role in “Saint Jack,” an adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel about an American who operates a brothel in Singapore. He worked again for Mr. Bogdanovich in “They All Laughed” (1981), as a private detective who falls in love with the woman he is assigned to follow. The woman was played by Audrey Hepburn, with whom Mr. Gazzara had a brief romance after they met on the set of the 1979 film “Bloodline.”

Mr. Gazzara worked with numerous other notable directors, among them Otto Preminger, whose courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) featured Mr. Gazzara as a military man who is tried for killing his wife’s rapist and defended by James Stewart’s small-town lawyer. In David Mamet’s 1997 film, “The Spanish Prisoner,” he played the possibly duplicitous boss of an inventor who has come up with a valuable idea. Wearing a slick white suit, he was a producer of pornographic movies in the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” in 1998. In Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” in 1999, he was a mobster.

Beginning in the early 1980s Mr. Gazzara spent substantial stretches of time acting in movies in Italy, where he had a villa in Umbria. He appeared in Marco Ferreri’s 1981 adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness”; “Il Camorrista” (1986), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore; and Stefano Mignucci’s “Bandits” (1995).

“You go where they love you,” he said in a 1994 interview with Cigar Aficionado, explaining his work in Italy.

Mr. Gazzara had parallel careers on the stage and in television. His first significant stage role was as a two-faced bully named Jocko in “End as a Man,” about life in a Southern military academy. Developed at the Actors Studio, it opened on Broadway in 1953. “Jocko is attractive, clever and alert on the surface, but evil at the core,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times, “and Mr. Gazzara’s acting perfectly expresses this ambivalence.”

Then, in March 1955, came “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in which he played the alcoholic son Brick to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Tennessee Williams classic, with Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Elia Kazan directed. The play ran till November 1956, but Mr. Gazzara left the cast early to take another Broadway role, in “A Hatful of Rain,” which opened in the fall of 1955. He played a dope addict named Johnny Pope, and the performance earned him a Tony Award nomination.

But his next Broadway venture, “The Night Circus,” closed in less than a week in 1958, and he did not return to Broadway until a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1963. His other Broadway work included a 1976 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opposite Colleen Dewhurst, which earned him another Tony nomination, as did his dual roles in a 1975 double bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and David Scott Milton’s “Duet.”

Mr. Gazzara also acted in Off Broadway and regional productions, among them “Nobody Don’t Like Yogi,” a one-man show about Yogi Berra, which Mr. Gazzara began performing in 2003 and took all over the country for two years.

He was a familiar presence on television. “Run for Your Life,” in which he played a terminally ill man, was seen on NBC from 1965 to 1968, earning him two Emmy nominations. He was nominated again for his role as the father of a young man with AIDS in the 1985 television movie “An Early Frost”; his old friend Ms. Rowlands played his wife. He won a supporting-actor Emmy for his work in the 2002 HBO film “Hysterical Blindness,” playing the romantic interest of a character again played by Ms. Rowlands.

Mr. Gazzara was born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on the East Side of Manhattan on Aug. 28, 1930, the son of Antonio Gazzara, a laborer who did carpentry and laid bricks, and the former Angela Cusumano. Both his parents had immigrated from Italy, and they often spoke Italian at home, giving Mr. Gazzara a language skill that served him well when he began making films there. He grew up in a building at 29th Street and First Avenue, where, he wrote in his autobiography, he slept on the fire escape in summer and occasionally heard screams from the patients at Bellevue psychiatric hospital.

When he was about 11, he saw a friend act in a play at the Madison Square Boys Club and was bitten by the acting bug himself. He performed in shows there and, when he was older, found his way to the Dramatic Workshop in Midtown. A radio actress he met there, Louise Erickson, who would become his first wife, told him about the Actors Studio, and in 1951 he successfully auditioned for it.

That marriage ended in 1957. In 1961 he married the actress Janice Rule, whom he had met in 1958 when they appeared in a short-lived production of “The Night Circus.” They had a daughter, Elizabeth. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, not long after Mr. Gazzara met a German model, the former Elke Stuckmann, while filming the war movie “Inchon” in Seoul in 1979.

They were married in 1982; she and his daughter survive him, as does another daughter, Danja, his wife’s child from a previous relationship, whom Mr. Gazzara adopted. A brother, Anthony, also survives.

Mr. Gazzara was treated for oral cancer in 1999, but he said his bigger health battle was against depression, lasting on and off for decades. In a 2005 appearance before a group of mental health professionals, he recalled dealing with the condition 25 years earlier while shooting “They All Laughed.”

“I was in a depression during the whole shooting, and I was terrific in that film,” he said. “And I don’t remember doing it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/movies/ben-gazzara-actor-of-stage-and-screen-dies-at-81.html

Burne Hogarth

2012-02-04T18:14:00.000Z

Larkin on the Run...

2012-02-03T16:25:00.003Z

Philip Larkin dons Sport Relief T-shirt for charity mile

Thursday, February 02, 2012

It stands proudly in Hull's Paragon Interchange, a monument to one of Hull's most famous residents.

On his way to catch a train, Philip Larkin is holding a hat in one hand and a manuscript in the other.

But bus and rail passengers' heads turned this week when the statue was adorned with a Sport Relief T-shirt.

A banner was also draped around his hat in the promotion for this year's Sport Relief mile, which takes place from Queens Gardens, city centre, on Sunday, March 25.

Events manager Jess Kirke said: "Men, women and children across Hull are really excited about entering the mile, so it's great to see iconic local landmarks are behind the campaign too.

"We think he looks fantastic in his Sport Relief outfit, although I don't know how far he will get on the day."

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/Philip-Larkin-dons-Sport-Relief-T-shirt-charity/story-15106798-detail/story.html

Last night's set list

2012-02-02T01:26:00.000Z

At The Habit, York: -

Walk Right Back
Crying In The Rain
You Really Got A Hold On Me
Bye Bye Love

The Everlys & Smokey Robinson strike again. Half way through Walk Right Back a fuse blew, but being seasoned troopers Ron & I kept playing (unplugged as it were). Such is the lot of the open-mic-er. An enjoyable evening all told.

Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man....

2012-02-01T08:06:00.000Z

Pre-Dan: A Little With Sugar

2012-02-01T07:53:00.002Z

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #142

2012-01-31T07:47:00.000Z

Nicol Williamson RIP

2012-01-30T19:02:00.000Z

Nicol Williamson obituary
Actor whose unpredictability never undermined his electrifying talent

Michael Coveney
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 26 January 2012

Nicol Williamson, whose death of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73 has been announced, was arguably the most electrifying actor of his generation, but one whose career flickered and faded like a faulty light fitting. Tall and wiry, with a rasping scowl of a voice, a battered baby face and a mop of unruly curls, he was the best modern Hamlet since John Gielgud, and certainly the angriest, though he scuppered his own performance at the Round House, north London, in 1969, by apologising to the audience and walking off the stage. The experience was recycled in a 1991 Broadway comedy called I Hate Hamlet, in which he proved his point and fell out badly with his co-star.

Williamson's greatest performance was as the dissolute and disintegrating lawyer Bill Maitland in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence at the Royal Court theatre in 1964. It was a role from which he never really escaped, reviving it on the stage and making the 1968 movie. The play was seen again last year at the Donmar Warehouse, with Douglas Hodge in the leading role.

After a couple of chaotic performances in his own one-man show, and as the equally wild and unreliable actor John Barrymore in A Night on the Town at the Criterion theatre in London in 1994, Williamson was last sighted on the stage at the Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold, Flintshire, as King Lear in 2001.

Its director, Terry Hands, a one-time colleague at the Royal Shakespeare Company, allowed him free rein to wander through the play, but many of the speeches were misplaced. Like Eric Morecambe playing the piano, he knew all the notes, but not necessarily in the right order. Still, the performance was fretted with moments of golddust and heartbreak, and you would not willingly have exchanged it for many a more competent or predictable performance.

Hands had taken the sensible precaution of cancelling the second-night performance as the first one was followed by the mother of all first-night parties, with Williamson banging out the jazz standards he loved to sing with a group of willing musicians, including the film critic Ian Christie.

Williamson's talent for acting and lust for life were brilliantly recorded in a 1972 essay by Kenneth Tynan for the New Yorker which charted his haphazard preparation for a concert at the White House for President Richard Nixon. When it was published, warts and all, Williamson was furious and never spoke to Tynan again.

He was born in Hamilton, near Glasgow, the son of Mary (nee Storrie) and Hugh Williamson. He trained for the stage at the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama and made his professional debut at the Dundee Rep in 1960. In the following year, he appeared as Flute in Richardson's Royal Court production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He was at the Arts theatre in Women Beware Women and in Henry Livings's Nil Carborundum in 1962. With Page directing, he played Vladimir at the Court in the first major London revival of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, partnered by Alfred Lynch as Estragon.

He took his performance of Bill Maitland to New York in 1965, where he was nominated for a Tony award and came to blows with the producer, David Merrick. Although his reputation for unpredictability grew, his talent was recognised in Bafta best actor nominations for his film performances in Inadmissible Evidence, The Bofors Gun (1968) and a 1972 television film of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

When Trevor Nunn presented a season of Shakespeare's "Roman" plays at Stratford-upon-Avon, and later at the Aldwych in London, in 1973, Williamson gave a coruscating performance as an unusually virulent and misanthropic Coriolanus. He returned to Stratford in 1974 as a sour-faced, vinegary Malvolio in Twelfth Night and a wolverine, prowling Macbeth in the studio theatre, the Other Place. Nunn had started that production (Helen Mirren was Lady Macbeth) on the main stage in London, but cut out the Gothic excess for Stratford in a journey with the play that took him to the defining chamber version of it soon afterwards with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.

Williamson was never as much a part of the RSC as some of his leading contemporaries, but he did "muck in" with a small-scale production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Other Place, with his wife, Jill Townsend, in 1975. He had married Townsend when she appeared as his daughter in the Broadway production of Inadmissible Evidence (they divorced in 1977).

His best-known film roles included Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976, in which Watson, played by Robert Duvall, persuades Holmes to visit Sigmund Freud, played by Alan Arkin); and Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981, with Nigel Terry as Arthur and Helen Mirren as Morgana). "I enjoyed playing Merlin," Williamson told the Los Angeles Times. "I tried to make him a cross between my old English master and a space traveller, with a bit of Grand Guignol thrown in."

He had lived mostly in Amsterdam since 1970, but could sometimes be seen in various north London pubs, where he was quite happy to mind his own business and leave the pursuit of glamour and glory to other, less deserving performers. No one who saw him on stage will ever forget him, but it is difficult to see his career as anything but unfulfilled.

He is survived by his son, Luke.

Jack Gold writes: Friends made me fearful when they heard I was making my first feature film, The Bofors Gun, with Nicol Williamson. He had a reputation of a dangerous disposition combined with a staggering talent. The part of a near-psychotic squaddie was written by John McGrath with Nicol in mind. My fears were groundless. He was totally professional, exacting, volatile and provocative in his work, both with myself and with tremendous actors including David Warner, Ian Holm and John Thaw. His performance was justifiably acclaimed.

We worked together several more times, each one with a mixture of excitement and not a little trepidation on my part: The Reckoning in 1969 (he was Michael Marler, a protagonist red in tooth and claw from working-class Liverpool, succeeding in the City and Berkshire), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, aka The Gangster Show (Brecht's comic, sinister take on Hitler), Macbeth (for the BBC, 1983) and Richard Nixon in a David Edgar version of the Watergate tapes, I Know What I Meant (1974); all strong, often dangerous, unlikeable characters.

Nicol never kowtowed to an audience or tried to charm them. Film crews adored him for his understanding and respect for their craft. He worked as strongly with other actors when he was off-camera as when on. His comic improvisations of the people around him were brilliant and often uncomfortable. He liked "stirring"; at the end of filming The Reckoning, we presented him with a 6ft wooden spoon.

Directing him was a constantly surprising process. He was quick to understand even a hint of a suggestion. There were rapid and subtle changes of expression, his antennae as finely tuned as his performances. He liked the challenges, the technicalities, the rigours of filming (Barry Jackson remembers Nicol filming repeated takes stripped to the waist during a freezing night shoot), but if ever there was a piano handy, he was immediately seated there, singing ballads, blues, rock, jazz. He loved the great musicians and improvisation. I think that, latterly, that is where his heart truly lay.

• Nicol Williamson, actor, born 14 September 1938; died 16 December 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/26/nicol-williamson?intcmp=239

What Can I Do For You?

2012-01-30T07:45:00.000Z

Frank R. Paul

2012-01-29T17:59:00.001Z

The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin

2012-01-28T10:35:00.000Z

The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett - review
An exhaustive, awe-inspiring monument to Philip Larkin

John Banville
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 25 January 2012

A "Complete Poems" is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet's official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner's report. The Larkinesquely named Archie Burnett conducts a forensic examination of the poet's imaginative venture, and in the process leaves no headstone unturned. The result is awe-inspiring, exhaustive and faintly risible. Larkin himself would have made merciless fun of it, but the poet, and the librarian, in him would have been immensely pleased and proud.

Burnett, professor of English at Boston University and the editor of AE Housman's poems and letters, is a scholar to his pencil-tips; one suspects he was born with the word "definitive" stamped on his brow. A poet once Burnetted will stay Burnetted. In his introduction here he writes, managing to sound both defensive and well pleased with himself: "A major justification for a new edition is to provide, for the first time, a commentary on the poems. It covers: Larkin's many comments on his work; closely relevant historical contexts; persons and places; echoes and allusions; and linguistic usage."

Larkin is in what is probably the unique position of having two separate Collected Poems published after his death, one in 1988 and the second, for good or perhaps better measure, in 2003, both edited by Anthony Thwaite. The first time round Thwaite had come in for some stick from reviewers because of what they saw as his eccentric presentation of the poems, though all he had done was arrange them in chronological order of completion, thus mingling published and unpublished work and ignoring Larkin's own arrangements in the four slim volumes that he brought out in his lifetime. On the second go he sought to set all to rights. There are some of us who still prefer his original effort, eccentric or not.

Burnett in his acknowledgments pays rich tribute to Thwaite – "who over the years has done more than anyone for Larkin" – while taking, as he delicately puts it, "a different editorial view". The Burnett view is both panoptic and microscopic. The critical apparatus he erects approaches the shaky heights of Babel, yet the wealth and profusion of detail within it would purblind Larkin's own shivering sizar. There are moments too of unintentional mild comedy. Larkin, the most politically incorrect of poets, would have enjoyed, and snarled at, the citation Burnett offers from a fellow critic who, warning against a too literal linking of the poet's life and the poet's poems, "correctly insists that 'An April Sunday Brings the Snow' does not specify the sex of the 'you' addressed, the relationship of the speaker to that person, or indeed details of skin colour and ethnicity". True, of course, and a valid point, yet one finds it hard to resist the urge to respond as Larkin would have done in one of his outrageous letters to Kingsley Amis, by saying: "Bum".

However, we must settle down, here at the back of the class, and grant that The Complete Poems is an almost fanatically painstaking and altogether admirable piece of work. The publishers, though betraying a hint of desperation in their efforts to make the volume seem attractive to the common poetry reader – is there such a creature? – are right when they urge that "Archie Burnett's commentary establishes [Larkin] as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected." That it does, and much else besides.

Larkin had such an acute, anarchic and bleak sense of humour, or of the comic, at least – the comical and the humorous not being always synonymous – that we might be forgiven for taking him at his own face value. Although he produced some of the most delicately beautiful works of art of the 20th century, it amused him to present himself to the world as a cross between Colonel Blimp and The Archers' Walter Gabriel of old, and to adopt in his public utterances the baleful tones of an apoplectic stockbroker complaining about immigrants on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Self-depreciation was not second but first nature to him. Here he is in his rueful but not unfond Introduction to the 1966 Faber reissue of his first collection, The North Ship:

Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several – the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to "old-fashioned" poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterised as "Dylan Thomas, but you've a sentimentality that's all your own"; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school.

That "local girls' school" is a quintessential Larkin detail, an interjection from his "Brunette Coleman" persona.

Yeats was one of Larkin's earliest and most compelling exemplars, thrust to his attention in a talk at Oxford by the poet Vernon Watkins – "impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats" – yet many other voices twitter in the backgrounds of his poems, early and late. For instance, what a soft surprise it is to come upon the Eliotian languishings of "Femmes Damnées" from 1943:

But the living room is ruby: there upon
Cushions from Harrods, strewn in tumbled heaps
Around the floor, smelling of smoke and wine,
Rosemary sits. Her hands are clasped. She weeps.

And who would have expected a little ode to, of all people and poets, Hart Crane – "At night / A thin mist blurred the Hudson, and he sought / Bell-bottomed sex, and the saloons like birds" – or a poem with a title in French, "(À un ami qui aime)"? And there are many other revelations. Indeed, the volume overall is one vast revelation.

Page-counting is always a vulgar and dispiriting exercise, but in this case the results are truly impressive. The book is divided roughly in half, into two large sections, "The Poems" and "Commentary", followed by a couple of brief appendices, the first devoted to Larkin's early collections that he made in 11 typescript booklets, the second to dates of composition. Of the 700-odd pages of text, a mere 90 accommodate the four volumes that Larkin published when he was alive – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – while nearly 300 are given to poems published but not collected, poems not published, and undated or approximately dated poems. As Burnett squarely declares: "This edition includes all of Larkin's poems whose texts are accessible," so that even "verses from letters, mainly short, and by turns sentimental, affectionate, satirical and scurrilous, are included." And yes, by the way, you will enjoy the satirical and scurrilous ones.

In the matter of publishing, Larkin was the most frugal of poets. One readily understands why he should wish to suppress or at least not display the bulk of his early work, in which, like so many (male) poets in their youth he spends so much of the time mirror-gazing. The pre-1945 poems throb with forced passion, as he struggles to give a metaphysical cast to his youthful lusts and longings for romance. But even after 1945, when he had discovered Hardy's poetry and forged his own voice, he left scores of wonderful poems undisclosed to public view.

At the same time, he made sure to preserve these pieces. Burnett quotes another Larkin scholar, James Booth, writing that "from 5 October 1944 to November 1980" – Larkin died in 1985, after five sadly fallow years – "he wrote (and carefully dated) virtually all his complete and incomplete drafts." From an early age, then, he was confidently looking forward to that "posthumous volume" that Thwaite, in his introduction to the 1988 Collected Poems, has him referring to often, even "if jocularly". As one goes through the uncollected and unpublished poems, one is confronted on every other page with first-rate work. Consider, for instance, the sonnet "And Now the Leaves Suddenly Lose Strength", a glorious evocation of autumn and one of Larkin's finest "death" poems. Only a major poet could have afforded to leave such a masterpiece unpublished. The Complete Poems reveals Larkin as a poet of great and rich abundance, and for this, and for so much else, we owe a debt of gratitude to his surely "definitive" editor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/25/complete-poems-philip-larkin-review?newsfeed=true

Son of a ....

2012-01-27T19:43:00.001Z

The Fountain of Youth...

2012-01-27T19:30:00.001Z

Onan...on?

Happy birthday, Ernest Borgnine : 95 this week!

Men of the Tyne - If It Wasn't For Me There'd Be No Ships

2012-01-27T13:32:00.001Z

Another new song for the Men of the Tyne project

Last night's set list

2012-01-26T01:39:00.001Z

At The Habit, York: -

Mellow My Mind
Everybody's Talkin'
Out On The Weekend
Too Far Gone
Unknown Legend

An enjoyable night with great songs from Mark Wynn & Colin Rowntree. Losts of post-gig discussions re politics, philosophy, blues music and Frank Zappa - plus a rather unsavoury story about Stevie Nicks.

Paul Schrader - Notes on Film Noir Part 3

2012-01-25T08:03:00.000Z

This essay was originally written to accompany and support a short season, The Film Noir, at the First Los Angeles International Film Exposition and it was reprinted in Film Comment, Spring 1972). In the final part, Schrader discusses seven films shown at the Exposition.

The selection of the following seven films by the Los Angeles International Film Exposition reflects a desire to select not only the best noir films, but also some of the less well known.

Kiss Me Deadly. Made in 1955, Kiss Me Deadly comes at the end of the period and is the masterpiece of film noir. Its time delay gives it a sense of detachment and thoroughgoing seediness—it stands at the end of a long sleazy tradition.

The private eye hero, Mike Hammer, undergoes the final stages of degradation. He is a small-time “bedroom dick,” and makes no qualms about it because the world around him isn’t much better. Ralph Meeker, in his best performance, plays Hammer, a midget among dwarfs.

Robert Aldrich’s teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest, and most perversely erotic. In search of an “eternal what’s-it” Hammer overturns the underworld, causing the death of his friend in the process, and when he finally finds it, it turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb. The cruelty to the individual is only a trivial matter in a world in which the Bomb has the final say. Hammer can be seen struggling to safety as the bomb ejaculates, but for all practical purposes the forties private eye tradition is defunct. Written by A. I. Bexerides. Photographed by Eenest Laszlo. Produced by Victor Saville. With Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Nick Dennis, Gaby Rodgers, Juano Hermandez, Paul Stewart, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman, Jack Elam.

Gun Crazy. An early Bonnie and Clyde variant, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy incorporates both the black widow and on-the-run themes. John Dall and Peggy Cummins play a winsome couple spinning at a dizzyling rate into the exhilarating world of action, sex, love and mudder. Dall is confused, innocent and passive, Cummins is confused, vindictive and active; together they make an irresistably psychopathic pair. And their deadliness is sanctified by the fact that they know they are special people and will be given the right by the American ethic to act out their symbolic fantasies.

Gun Crazy’s lighting is not as noir as other films of the period, but its portrayal of criminal and sexual psychopathy very much is. There are no excuses for the gun craziness—it is just crazy.

Gun Crazy has three tour de force scenes: the brilliantly executed Armour robbery, the famous one-take Hampton heist, and the meeting at the carnival which is a ballet of sex and innuendo more subtle and teasing than the more famous sparing matches of Bogart and Bacall or Ladd and Lake. 1949. Written by MacKinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Produced by the King Brothers. Photographed by Russell Harlan. With John Dall, Peggy Cummins, Barry Kroeger, Annabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Nederick Young.

They Live By Night. Made in the same year as Gun Crazy, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night is another Bonnie and Clyde/on-the-run film. Ray’s heroes, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, as the title implies, really do live by night, and the choreography is strictly noir.

Unlike Gun Crazy, Granger and O’Donnell are not psychopathic; rather, the society is, as it makes them into bigger and bigger criminals and finally connives to gun down the unsuspecting Granger. There’s an excellent bit by Ian Wolfe as a crooked Justice of the Peace, and Marie Bryant sings “Your Red Wagon” in the best noir tradition. Written by Charles Schnee.

Photographed by George E. Diskant. Produced by John Houseman. With Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, Ian Wolfe, Harry Harvey.

White Heat. There was no director better suited to portray instability than Raoul Walsh, and no actor more potentially unstable than James Cagney. And when they joined forces in 1949 for White Heat, they produced one of the most exciting psychosexual crime films ever. Cagney plays an aging oedipal gangster who sits on his mother’s lap between bouts of pistol whipping cohorts, planning robberies and gunning down police.

In an exuberantly psychotic ending Cagney stands atop an exploding oil tanker yelling, “I made it Ma! Top of the World!” We’ve come a long way from Scarface where Paul Muni lies in the gutter as a neon sign ironically flashes, “Cook’s Tours. See the World.” Cagney, now the noir hero, is not so much interested in financial gain and power as he is in suicidal showmanship. Cagney tapped the same vein the following year when he produced and starred in Gordon Douglas’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, one of the best of late noir films. What Douglas lacked as a director, Cagney made up in just plain craziness. White Heat. 1949. Written by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts. Photographed by Sid Hickox. Produced by Louis Edelman. With James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmund O’Brien, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, John Archer.

Out of the Past. Jacques Tourner’s Out of the Past brilliantly utilizes the noir element of narration as well as the themes of black widow and on-the-run. A gangster (the young Kirk Douglas in one of his best roles) sends his best friend Robert Mitchum to retrieve his girlfriend, Jane Greer, who has run off with his money. Mitchum, of course, teams up with Greer and they hide from Douglas.

Mitchum narrates his story with such a pathetic relish that he obviously draws comfort from being love’s perennial fool. Tourner combines Mitchum’s narration, Jane Greer’s elusive beauty and a complex chronology in such a way that there is no hope for any future; one can only take pleasure from reliving a doomed past. 1947. Written by Geoffrey Homes. Produced by Warren Duff. With Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Rhonda Fleming, Steve Brodie.

Pickup on South Street. Sam Fuller’s 1953 film sacks in with an odd noir bedfellow—the red scare. The gangsters undergo a slight accent shift and become communist agents; no idealogical conversion necessary.

Richard Widmark, a characteristic noir actor who has never done as well outside the period as within it, plays a two-time loser who picks the purse of a “commie” messenger and ends up with a piece of microfilm. When the state department finally hunts him and begins the lecture, Widmark replies, “Don’t wave your flag at me.”

The scenes on the waterfront are in the best noir tradition, but a dynamic fight in the subway marks Fuller as a director who would be better suited to the action crime school of the middle fifties. Written by Samuel Fuller. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. Produced by Jules Schermer. With Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley.

T-Men. Anthony Mann’s 1947 film was photographed by John Alton, the most characteristically noir artist of the period. Alton also photographed Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo eight years later and the cinematography is so nearly identical that one has momentary doubts about the directorial difference between Mann and Lewis. In each film light only enters the scene in odd slants, jagged slices and vertical or horizontal strips.

T-Men is a bastard child of the post-war realistic school and purports to be the documented story of two treasury agents who break a ring of counterfeiters. Complications set in when the good guys don’t act any differently from the bad ones. In the end it doesn’t matter anyway, since they all die in the late night shoot-outs. 1948. Written by John Higgins. Photographed by John Alton. Produced by Edward Small and Aubrey Schneck. With Dennis O’Keefe, Alfred Ryder, Mary Meade, Wallace Ford, June Lockhart, Charles McGraw, Art Smith.

http://i.mtime.com/Noir/blog/1433838/2/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #141

2012-01-24T08:00:00.000Z

Etta James

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000Z

Dean Cornwell

2012-01-22T09:53:00.000Z

Etta James RIP

2012-01-21T11:28:00.000Z

Etta James Dies at 73; Voice Behind ‘At Last’

By Peter Keepnews
January 20, 2012

Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit, “At Last,” died on Friday morning in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.

Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said that the cause was complications of leukemia. Ms. James, who died at Riverside Community Hospital, had been undergoing treatment for some time for a number of conditions, including leukemia and dementia. She also lived in Riverside.

Ms. James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records like “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” She is in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.

She was also comfortable, and convincing, singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with “At Last,” which was written in 1941 and originally recorded by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. And among her four Grammy Awards (including a lifetime-achievement honor in 2003) was one for best jazz vocal performance, which she won in 1995 for the album “Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday.”

Regardless of how she was categorized, she was admired. Expressing a common sentiment, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that she had “one of the great voices in American popular music, with a huge range, a multiplicity of tones and vast reserves of volume.”

For all her accomplishments, Ms. James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960s; after she overcame it in the 1970s, she began using cocaine. She candidly described her struggles with addiction and her many trips to rehab in her autobiography, “Rage to Survive,” written with David Ritz (1995).

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.

She began singing at the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles at 5 and turned to secular music as a teenager, forming a vocal group with two friends. She was 15 when she made her first record, “Roll With Me Henry,” which set her own lyrics to the tune of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ recent hit “Work With Me Annie.” When some disc jockeys complained that the title was too suggestive, it was changed to “The Wallflower,” although the record itself was not.

“The Wallflower” rose to No. 2 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1954. As was often the case in those days with records by black performers, a toned-down version was soon recorded by a white singer and found a wider audience: Georgia Gibbs’s version, with the title and lyric changed to “Dance With Me, Henry,” was a No. 1 pop hit in 1955. (Its success was not entirely bad news for Ms. James. She shared the songwriting royalties with Mr. Ballard and the bandleader and talent scout Johnny Otis, who had arranged for her recording session. Mr. Otis died on Tuesday.)

In 1960 Ms. James was signed by Chess Records, the Chicago label that was home to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and other leading lights of black music. She quickly had a string of hits, including “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me” and “At Last,” which established her as Chess’s first major female star.

She remained with Chess well into the 1970s, reappearing on the charts after a long absence in 1967 with the funky and high-spirited “Tell Mama.” In the late ’70s and early ’80s she was an opening act for the Rolling Stones.

After decades of touring, recording for various labels and drifting in and out of the public eye, Ms. James found herself in the news in 2009 after Beyoncé Knowles recorded a version of “At Last” closely modeled on hers. (Ms. Knowles played Ms. James in the 2008 movie “Cadillac Records,” a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Chess.) Ms. Knowles also performed “At Last” at an inaugural ball for President Obama in Washington.

When the movie was released, Ms. James had kind words for Ms. Knowles’s portrayal. But in February 2009, referring specifically to the Washington performance, she told an audience, “I can’t stand Beyoncé,” and threatened to “whip” the younger singer for doing “At Last.” She later said she had been joking, but she did add that she wished she had been invited to sing the song herself for the new president.

Ms. James’s survivors include her husband of 42 years, Artis Mills; two sons, Donto and Sametto James; and four grandchildren.

Though her life had its share of troubles to the end — her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death — Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/arts/music/etta-james-singer-dies-at-73.html?_r=1

Paul and Artie Eddie!

2012-01-20T16:22:00.003Z

Nine Pound Hammer...

2012-01-20T16:21:00.000Z

John Burnside wins the TSE...

2012-01-20T16:18:00.001Z

John Burnside wins most controversial TS Eliot prize in decades
Scottish poet's Black Cat Bone beats strong shortlist in contest mired in protest over City funding

Maev Kennedy
guardian.co.uk
Monday 16 January 2012

The Scottish poet John Burnside has won the most controversial TS Eliot poetry prize in years, for a collection described as "haunting", after two of the original shortlisted poets dropped out in protest over funding from the hedge fund Aurum.

Burnside, a former winner of the Whitbread poetry prize, took the £15,000 prize for his 11th collection, Black Cat Bone. He beat a notably strong surviving list, including the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy; Sean O'Brien, for his first collection since winning both the TS Eliot and the Forward prizes in 2008; and David Harsent, also a previous Forward winner.

The Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, chair of the judges, said: "Amongst an unprecedentedly strong and unusually well-received shortlist, John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness. In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading."

Burnside was presented with the cheque by Valerie Eliot, widow of the poet, at a ceremony in London. She has funded the prize itself since it was launched 18 years ago but the Poetry Book Society, which organises the competition, will lose all its Arts Council grant this year, and its search for replacement funding proved bitterly divisive.

The three-year sponsorship deal from Aurum was announced at the same time as the shortlist – at the height of the Occupy London protests, when protests were also swelling about the Tate and other major museums and galleries accepting sponsorship from the oil group BP.

Alice Oswald, nominated for Memorial, a retelling of the Iliad, promptly pulled out, saying: "Poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions." She was followed by the Australian poet John Kinsella, nominated for Armour, describing himself as an anarchist, pacifist and anti-capitalist, "and hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism".

Poets being notably contrarian, the arts world was agog for further walkouts, but the remaining eight stayed put.

Clarke staunchly defended the prize, the Poetry Book Society and the sponsorship, pointing out that Valerie Eliot remains the biggest funder, and blaming the Arts Council cut – "for no apparent justifiable reason" – for forcing the society to seek sponsorship from the City. "Take it from the rich, give it to a poet and reader," she wrote. "The TS Eliot prize cleans the money."

Burnside, born in 1955, has worked as a factory hand, a gardener and a computer systems designer, before returning in 1995 to his native Scotland, where he teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is acclaimed both as a poet and novelist, and in 2000 The Asylum Dance, which won the Whitbread, was nominated for both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes.

Siôn Hamilton, manager of Foyle's Bookshop, said: "His profound appreciation for the stylistic possibilities of language is married to haunting and almost dream-like imagery, resulting in an elegant collection of poems that greatly reward re-reading."

In his Guardian review, M Wynn Thomas, professor of Welsh writing in English at Swansea, called the collection "a tour de force of liminal expression", and "an engrossing collection".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/16/john-burnside-wins-ts-eliot-prize?newsfeed=true

Last night's set list

2012-01-19T01:30:00.000Z

At The habit, York: -

Falling
I'm Just A Loser
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Love Song
I Am A Child
Sugar Mountain
I Don't Want To Talk About It

On a night when I wasn't feeling at my best, the music had a healing effect.
Sugar Mountain was a a request from the host; IDWTTAI was a sort of encore, but I left them wanting more. Healed my blues with music.

Paul Schrader - Notes on Film Noir Part 2

2012-01-18T07:58:00.000Z

Film noir can be subdivided into three broad phases. The first, the wartime period, 1941-46 approximately, was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf, of Chandler, Hammett and Greene, of Bogart and Bacall, Ladd and Lake, classy directors like Curtiz and Garnett, studio sets, and, in general, more talk than action. The studio look of this period was reflected in such pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Gaslight, This Gun for Hire, The Lodger, The Woman in the Window, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound, The Big Sleep, Laura, The Lost Weekend, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, To Have and Have Not, Fallen Angel, Gilda, Murder My Sweet, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dark Waters, Scarlet Street, So Dark the Night, The Glass Key, The Mask of Dimitrios, and The Dark Mirror.

The Wilder/Chandler Double Indemnity provided a bridge to the post-war phase of film noir. The unflinching noir vision of Double Indemnity came as a shock in 1944, and the film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office and star Fred McMurray. Three years later, however, Double Indemnitys were dropping off the studio assembly line.

The second phase was the post-war realistic period from 1945-49 (the dates overlap and so do the films; these are all approximate phases for which there are many exceptions). These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster and Charles McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway, Dassin and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as The House on 92nd Street, The Killers, Raw Deal, Act of Violence, Union Station, Kiss of Death, Johnny O’Clock, Force of Evil, Dead Reckoning, Ride the Pink Horse, Dark Passage, Cry of the City, The Set-Up, T-Men, Call Northside 777, Brute Force, The Big Clock, Thieves’ Highway, Ruthless, Pitfall, Boomerang!, and The Naked City.

The third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-53, was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse. The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to get bananas. The psychotic killer, who had in the first period been a subject worthy of study (Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror), in the second a fringe threat (Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death), now became the active protagonist (James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye). There were no excuses given for the psychopathy in Gun Crazy—it was just “crazy”. James Cagney made a neurotic comeback and his instability was matched by that of younger actors like Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. This was the phase of the “B” noir film, and of psychoanalytically-inclined directors like Ray and Walsh. The forces of personal disintegration are reflected in such films as White Heat, Gun Crazy, D. O. A., Caught, They Live By Night, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Detective Story, In a Lonely Place, I’ the Jury, Ace in the Hole, Panic in the Streets, The Big Heat, On Dangerous Ground, Sunset Boulevard.

The third phase is the cream of the film noir period. Some critics may prefer the early “gray” melodramas, others the post-war “street” films, but film noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing, the later noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and, finally, psychic stability. The third-phase films were painfully self-aware; they seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from that fact. The best and most characteristically noir films—Gun Crazy, White Heat, Out of the Past, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., They Live By Night, and The Big Heat—stand at the end of the period and are the results of self-awareness. The third phase is in rife with end-of-the-line noir heroes: The Big Heat and Where the Sidewalk Ends are the last stops for the urban cop, Ace in the Hole for the newspaper man, the Victor Saville-produced Spillane series (I’ the Jury, The Long Wait, Kiss Me Deadly) for the private eye, Sunset Boulevard for the Black Widow, White Heat and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye for the gangster, D. O. A. for the John Doe American.

By the middle Fifties film noir had ground to a halt. There were a few notable stragglers, Kiss Me Deadly, the Lewis/Alton The Big Combo, and film noir’s epitaph, Touch of Evil, but for the most part a new style of crime film had become popular.

As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the “mobile unit” careening down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life. Technically, television, with its demand for full lighting and close-ups, gradually undercut the German influence, and color cinematography was, of course, the final blow to the “noir” look. New directors like Seigel, Fleischer, Karlson and Fuller, and TV shows like Dragnet, M-Squad, Lineup and Highway Patrol stepped in to create the new crime drama.

Film noir was an immensely creative period—probably the most creative in Hollywood’s history—at least, if this creativity is measured not by its peaks but by its median level of artistry. Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western and so on. (A Joseph H. Lewis “B” film noir is better than a Lewis “B” western, for example.) Taken as a whole period, film noir achieved an unusually high level of artistry.

Film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors. Again and again, a film noir will make the high point on an artist’s career graph. Some directors, for example, did their best work in film noir (Stuart Heisler, Robert Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway); other directors began in film noir, and it seems to me, never regained their original heights (Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Richard Fleischer, John Huston, Andre de Toth, and Robert Aldrich); and other directors who made great films in other molds also made great film noir (Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, Robert Rossen, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick). Whether or not one agrees with this particular schema, its message is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every director’s career. (Two interesting exceptions to prove the case are King Vidor and Jean Renoir.)

Film noir seems to have been a creative release for everyone involved. It gave artists a chance to work with previously forbidden themes, yet had conventions strong enough to protect the mediocre. Cinematographers were allowed to become highly mannered, and actors were sheltered by the cinematographers to distinguish between great directors and great noir directors.

Film noir’s remarkable creativity makes its longtime neglect the more baffling. The French, of course, have been students of the period for some time (Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama du Film Noir was published in 1955), but American critics until recently have preferred the western, the musical or the gangster film to the film noir.

Some of the reasons for this neglect are superficial; others strike to the heart of the noir style. For a long time film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral primitivism, and the gangster film, with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more American than the film noir.

This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that film noir was ideally suited to the low budget “B” film, and many of the best noir films were “B” films. This odd sort of economic snobbery still lingers on in some critical circles: high- budget trash is considered more worthy of attention than low-budget trash, and to praise a “B” film is somehow to slight(often intentionally) an “A” film.

There has been a critical revival in the U. S. over the last ten years, but film noir lost out on that too. The revival as auteur (director) oriented, and film noir wasn’t. Auteur criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is concerned with what they have in common.

The fundamental reason for film noir’s neglect, however, is the fact that it depends more on choreography than sociology, and American critics have always been slow on the uptake when it comes to visual style. Like its protagonists, film noir is more interested in style than theme; whereas American critics have been traditionally more interested in theme than style.

American film critics have always been sociologists first and scientists second: film is important as it relates to large masses, and if a film goes awry it is often because the theme has been somehow “violated” by the style. Film noir operates on opposite principles: the theme is hidden in the style, and bogus themes are often haunted (“middle class values are best”) which contradict the style. Although, I believe, style determines the theme in every film, it was easier for sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for film noir.

Not surprisingly it was the gangster film, not the film noir, which was canonized in The Partisan Review in 1948 by Robert Warshow’s famous essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Although Warshow could be an aesthetic as well as a sociological critic, he was interested in the western and gangster film as “popular” art rather than as style. This sociological orientation blinded Warshow, as it has many subsequent critics, to an aesthetically more important development in the gangster film—film noir.

The irony of this neglect is that in retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are inferior to film noir. The Thirties gangster was primarily a reflection of what was happening in the country, and Warshow analyzed this. The film noir, although it was also a sociological reflection, went further than the gangster film. Toward the end film noir was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style. That very contradiction—promoting style in a culture which valued themes—forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists and turns. Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions, and, by the close of the noir period, created a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was by far more a creation than a reflection.

Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems. And for these reasons films like Kiss Me Deadly, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Gun Crazy can be works of art in a way that gangster films like Scarface, Public Enemy and Little Caesar can never be.

http://i.mtime.com/Noir/blog/1433838/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #140

2012-01-17T07:57:00.002Z

Twelve Questions for Woody

2012-01-16T07:42:00.003Z

Edward Hopper

2012-01-14T18:12:00.001Z

Laurel and Hardy in Tynemouth. In Italian...

2012-01-13T18:53:00.002Z

Last night's set list

2012-01-12T00:50:00.001Z

At The Habit, York: -

Let It Be Me
Walk Right Back
Crying In The Rain
Bye Bye Love

Everlys' stuff with Ron on lead & Da on harmony vocal.

An amazing night. In the audience was the one and only (a new resident in the City of York) David Guest - yes it was he.

When I hailed a cab after the gig, what was playing on the radio but Love Minus Zero/No Limit - bliss!!!!!

Paul Schrader - Notes on Film Noir Part 1

2012-01-11T08:15:00.001Z

In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.

The French cineastes soon realized they had seen only the tip of the iceberg: As the years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic and the tone more hopeless. By 1949 American movies were in the throes of their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films dared to take such a harsh uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years.

Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics. The fascination film noir holds for today’s young filmgoers and film students reflects recent trends in American cinema: American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical film noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

Film noir is equally interesting to critics. It offers writers a cache of excellent, little-known films (film noir is oddly both one of Hollywood’s best periods and least known), and gives auteur-weary critics an opportunity to apply themselves to the newer questions of classification and transdirectorial style. After all, what is film noir?

Film noir is not a genre (as Raymond Durgnat has helpfully pointed out over the objections of Higham and Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties). It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film “noir”, as opposed to the possible variants of film grey or film off-white.

Film noir is also a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave. In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the Forties and early Fifties which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.

Film noir is an extremely unwieldy period. It harks back to many previous periods: Warner’s Thirties gangster films, the French “poetic realism” of Carne and Duvivier, Von Sternbergian melodrama, and, farthest back, German Expressionist crime films (Lang’s Mabuse cycle). Film noir can stretch at its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), and most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 1953 contains some noir elements. There are also foreign offshoots of film noir, such as The Third man, Breathless and Le Doulos.

Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up. Personal and descriptive definitions, however, can get a bit sticky. A film of urban night life is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption. Since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?

Rather than haggle definitions, I would rather attempt to reduce film noir to its primary colors (all shades of black), those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition must return.

At the risk of sounding like Arthur Knight, I would suggest that there were four conditions in Hollywood in the Forties which brought about the film noir. (The danger of Knight’s Livliest Art method is that it makes film history less a matter of structural analysis, and more a case of artistic and social forces magically interacting and coalescing.) Each of the following four catalytic elements, however, can define the film noir; the distinctly noir tonality draws from each of these elements.

WAR AND POST-WAR DISILLUSIONMENTS. The acute downer which hit the U. S. after the Second World War was, in fact, a delayed reaction to the Thirties. All through the Depression movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and, for the most part, they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious. Toward the end of the Thirties a darker crime film began to appear(You Only Live Once, The Roaring Twenties) and were it not for the War film noir would have been at full steam by the early Forties.

The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema, and the film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the first uniquely film noir appeared: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire, Laura, but these films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the War would bring.
As soon as the War was over, however, American films became markedly more sardonic—and there was a boom in the crime film. For fifteen years the pressures against America’s amelioristic cinema had been building up, and, given the freedom, audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things. The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film.

This immediate post-war disillusionments was directly demonstrated in films like Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Dead Reckoning, and Ride a Pink Horse, in which a serviceman returns from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting for. The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.

POST-WAR REALISM. Shortly after the war every film-producing country had a resurgence of realism. In America it first took the form of films by such producers as Louis de Rochemont (House on 92nd Street, Call Northside 777) and Mark Hellinger (The Killers, Brute Force), and directors like Henry Hathaway and Jules Dassin. “Every scene was filmed on the actual location depicted,” the 1947 de Rochemont-Hathaway Kiss of Death proudly proclaimed. Even after de Rochemont’s particular “March of Time” authenticity fell from vogue, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir.

The realistic movement also suited America’s post-war mood; the public’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The post-war realistic trend succeeded in breaking film noir away from the domain of the high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people. In retrospect, the pre-de Rochemont film noir looks definitely tamer than the post-war realistic films. The studio look of films like The Big Sleep and The Mask of Dimitrios blunts their sting, making them seem more polite and conventional in contrast to their later, more realistic counterparts.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE. Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates in the Twenties and Thirties, and these filmmakers and technicians had, for the most part, integrated themselves into the American film establishment. Hollywood never experienced the “Germanization” some civic-minded natives feared, and there is a danger of over-emphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.

But when, in the late Forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of expressionist lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, and it is not surprising, in film noir, to find it bursting out full bloom. Neither is it surprising to find a large number of Germans and East Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Braham, Anatole Litvak, Karl Freund, Max Ophuls, John Alton, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolph Mate.

On the surface the German expressionist influence, with its reliance on artificial studio lighting, seems incompatible with post-war realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors; but it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform style. The best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings. In films like Union Station, They Live By Night, The Killers there is an uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism.

Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary. No cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism, and his black-and-white photography in such gritty film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, I’ the Jury, The Big Combo equals that of such German expressionist masters as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund.

THE HARD-BOILED TRADITION. Another stylistic influence waiting in the wings was the “hard-boiled” school of writers. In the Thirties authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John O’Hara created the “tough”, cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from the world of everyday emotions—romanticism with a protective shell. The hard-boiled writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism, and their protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code. The hard-boiled hero was, in reality, a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart (Camus is said to have based The Stranger on McCoy), but he was a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen.

When the movies of the Forties turned to the American “tough” moral understrata, the hard-boiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hard-boiled writers had a style made to order for film noir; and, in turn, they influenced noir screenwriting as much as the German influenced noir cinematography.

The most hard-boiled of Hollywood’s writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose script of Double Indemnity (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most characteristically noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic; it made a break from the romantic noir cinema of (the later) Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep.

(In its final stages, however, film noir adapted then bypassed the hard-boiled school. Manic, neurotic post-1948 films such as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., Where the Sidewalk Ends, White Heat, and The Big Heat are all post-hard-boiled: the air in these regions was even too thin for old-time cynics like Chandler.)

STYLISTICS. There is not yet a study of the stylistics of film noir, and the task is certainly too large to be attempted here. Like all film movements film noir drew upon a reservoir of film techniques, and given the time one could correlate its techniques, themes and causal elements into a stylistic schema. For the present, however, I’d like to point out some of film noir’s recurring techniques.

------The majority of scenes are lit for night. Gangsters sit in the offices at midday with the shades pulled and the lights off. Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were all suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count Dracula at noontime.

------As in German expressionism, oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition of Griffith and Ford. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes-jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light. The Anthony Mann/John Alton T-Men is the most dramatic but far from the only example of oblique noir choreography.

------The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, and, more obviously, his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks. These shadow effects are unlike the famous Warner Brothers lighting of the Thirties in which the central character was accentuated by a heavy shadow; in film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow. When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist can do; the city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.

------Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action. The beating of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, the gunning down of Farley Granger in They Live By Night, the execution of the taxi driver in The Enforcer and of Brian Donlevy in The Big Combo are all marked by measured pacing, restrained anger and oppressive compositions, and seem much closer to the film noir spirit than the rat-tat-tat and screeching tires of Scarface twenty years before or the violent, expression actions of Underworld U. S. A. ten years later.

------There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain (even in Los Angeles), and the rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points.

------There is a love of romantic narration. In such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past and Sunset Boulevard the narration creates a mood of temps perdu: an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness. In Out of the Past Robert Mitchum relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.

------A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time. Such films as The Enforcer, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The Dark Past, Chicago Deadline, Out of the Past and The Killing use a convoluted time sequence to immerse the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly stylized world. The manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.

THEMES. Raymond Durgnat has delineated the themes of film noir in an excellent article in British Cinema magazine (“The Family Tree of Film Noir,” August, 1970), and it would be foolish for me to attempt to redo his thorough work in this short space. Durgnat divides film noir into eleven thematic categories, and although one might criticize some of his specific groupings, he does cover the whole gamut of noir production (thematically categorizing over 300 films).

In each of Durgnat’s noir themes (whether Black Widow, killers-on-the-run, dopplegangers) one finds that the upwardly mobile forces of the Thirties have halted; frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster has now made it big and sits in the mayor’s chair, the private eye has quit the police force in disgust, and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a ride.
Durgnat, however, does not touch upon what is perhaps the most over-riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead, but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to the past. Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler described this fundamental noir theme when he described his own fictional world: “It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it.”

http://i.mtime.com/Noir/blog/1433838/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #139

2012-01-10T08:11:00.003Z

Eve Arnold RIP

Fleischer Studios

2012-01-09T07:57:00.000Z

http://www.fleischerstudios.com/charcters.php

Beware - some of the site is still under construction...

The Weight...

2012-01-08T17:15:00.000Z

Ronald Searle

2012-01-07T11:58:00.002Z

Eve Arnold RIP

2012-01-06T16:00:00.000Z

Eve Arnold obituary
Celebrated Magnum photographer who documented 'the poor, the old and the underdog', as well as the stars

Amanda Hopkinson
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 5 January 2012

The longevity of Eve Arnold's career as a photographer matched the heterogeneity of her work. Despite the success of her portraits of the rich and famous, Arnold, who has died aged 99, was equally well known for photographing "the poor, the old and the underdog". She said: "It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is."

In fact she achieved the reverse, showing us the often pathetic and banal in the lives of the glitterati she always shot without the benefit of artificial lights, as well as how ordinary daily lives, from Afghanistan to Zululand, were never mundane. As the war photographer and Magnum co-founder Robert Capa put it: "[Arnold's work] falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Arnold was the first woman to join the Magnum photographic agency, and much of her work fell within its tradition of in-depth editorial photography. She held characteristically trenchant views on the minority – and at times marginalised – status of female photojournalists, while being acutely aware of the role played by female stars as well as by unrecorded women the world over. The whole of the Magnum agency went on location to shoot John Huston's filming of The Misfits (1961), but it was Arnold's intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, fragile and poised by turn, (including one incredible image, where she emerges from the black of a nightclub into the white glare of the spotlight, boogying uncertainly with a smiling Arthur Miller) that endured. Arnold not only befriended many of her subjects, including such greats as Monroe, Joan Crawford, Isabella Rossellini and Dietrich, but increasingly wrote about them as well as photographing them.

Travel formed a cornerstone of her life's work. While much was published in picture magazines during their heyday from the 1950s to the 1980s, Arnold often developed her themes so extensively that they merited full-length books. She took the subject of women further in her books The Unretouched Woman (1976) and All in a Day's Work (1989), and, using her long stays abroad, in the series In China (1980), In America (1983) and The Great British (1991).

The daughter of Russian immigrant parents, she was highly conscious of a worldwide legacy of pogroms and diasporas. As she told me in 1991: "I don't feel at home anywhere. I feel at least as much at home here [in London] as any place else. I tell myself we're all world citizens. There's a kind of displacement that takes place, and friends and colleagues become your family."

Arnold was born in Philadelphia, the middle of nine children of William Cohen (born Velvel Sklarski), a rabbi, and his wife, Bessie (Bosya Laschiner). Her mother had initial doubts about her daughter's choice of career. "I remember how she struggled all her life, raising all these children, and how her English always remained quirky. Eventually she accepted what I did, but grudgingly. When I did the Life magazine story on the first five minutes of a baby's life, she said: 'What's to be proud of?'"

Arnold's father was more impressed with her first career choice, medicine, but she abandoned this to take up photography at the suggestion of a boyfriend who presented her with a Rolleicord in 1946. At the time she was working in a photo-finishing plant in New York, and began documenting the city from what was then a radically different angle. This was a boom period for documentary photography in general, and the birth of "concerned" or "humanitarian" photography, still very much black-and-white "mood"-influenced. This tradition was epitomised at Magnum, founded by Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David ("Chim") Seymour in 1947, which Arnold would soon join.

In 1948 she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York. Taught by the art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, she applied the set subject of a fashion show to document a catwalk, set up in a deconsecrated Harlem church. She was unusual not only in being a female photographer, but even more so in being a white woman, working in what was then widely referred to as a ghetto. The fashion show, too, was something else, devised extravagantly in deliberate defiance of the formal lines and stiff styles of the haute couture of the day. The response of Arnold's class (which included Richard Avedon) was so overwhelmingly positive that Brodovitch told her: "You go back to Harlem and stay with it."

She continued working in Harlem for the next year and a half, as the fashion project grew into a unique documentation of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, but no one else seemed particularly interested. By this stage she had moved to Long Island, where she lived with her husband, Arnold Arnold, and their son, Frank. Wearied by press rejections in the US, her husband helpfully sent a selection of her prints to Picture Post in London.

It was Picture Post's publication of the story in 1951 that launched her career. The effects were immediate. She joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1957, and covered such high-profile news stories as Republican conventions and the McCarthy hearings, as well as conducting a 10-year study of a founding family of Brookhaven Township, and photographing the then largely taboo subject of births. (Later, Arnold was to say that this assisted her own recovery from the trauma of miscarriage.) Her marriage did not survive, however, and she gradually transferred to a London base, ostensibly for the sake of her son's education. She lived in the same flat in Mayfair until ill-health forced her to move to a nursing home in her 90s.

In the 1960s and 70s Arnold travelled back to the US, where she documented the civil rights movement, and to such "closed" regions as the Soviet Union and China. In 1971 she made a film, Women Behind the Veil, going inside Arabian hammams and harems. Regular features continued for Look, Life, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Geo, Stern, Epoca, Paris-Match and – especially – the Sunday Times colour supplement, under the picture editorship of Michael Rand.

Although she worked for all the great colour picture magazines, then in their heyday, her preference stayed with black-and-white. Around her, however, the mood was changing. She found the beginnings of "swinging London" and the new British photography (dominated by the male names of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Anthony Armstrong-Jones) "as a mainly commercial thing, something grafted on to society". Her black-and-white selection for The Great British includes images from the 1960s light years away from hotpants and Beatlemania. It also shows a country where class divisions are still rife, from "Lord Bath on his Longleat estate, Wiltshire, during a Saturday morning shoot for pheasant" to an old war veteran, being bathed in a rundown Salvation Army hostel; from a surprisingly vulnerable Margaret Thatcher on the campaign trail to images of the new multiculturalism of the cities.

Arnold increasingly alternated between colour features on people's daily lives and glamorous silver screen portraits. She became more and more interested in cinema. Brought on to the set of White Nights (1985) to shoot stills, she compiled a book, The Making of White Nights, with a fellow Magnum member, Josef Koudelka, the following year.

Her portraits have the air of a caught shot, while in fact being the fruit of a long experience, a period of waiting while trust is built. They include Crawford wrestling with the "iron" girdle; Andy Warhol lifting weights astride a toilet; Dietrich from the legs up. While there was always a steady demand for the shots of James Cagney, Clark Gable, James Dean and Paul Newman, she reckoned that her 10-year-long documentation of Monroe evinced more constant and lasting interest than the rest put together. Certainly, those taken on the set of The Misfits were the high point of a major dual auction of Arnold's work, held in California and London in November 1993.

Arnold was a self-professed workaholic. At times she extended her remit into making films and writing her own picture stories. Later, her work and life became a regular postgraduate research subject. Loth to be boxed in as a "female photographer", still less as one of the rare "Magnum girls", she was one of five women included in the catalogued touring exhibition Magna Brava. Having been asked to write 10,000 words to accompany the pictures for In Retrospect, by 1993 she had reached 100,000 and was still writing. The book was eventually published in 1995. And in the preface to her "other autobiography", All in a Day's Work (1989), she celebrated photography's potential as "a kaleidoscope through which to view the way we relate to our world, the way we work to live and live to work".

Ever courteous, neat and soft-spoken, Arnold brought much of her own calm and gentility to her work, however anguished the subject matter. At first annoyed at being turned down as a Vietnam war photographer, photographing in the South African shantytowns brought home how hard it was to be inured to the world's outrages. This sense of injustice was the sand in the shell that prevented complacency, either at the world or at her own part in it. Asked if she were ever satisfied, she replied: "Never. I think if I ever get satisfied, I'll have to stop. It's the frustration that drives you."

In 2003 she was made OBE. Eve Arnold's People, edited by Brigitte Lardinois, was published in 2009. In 2010 she received a lifetime achievement prize at the Sony World Photography awards in Cannes, accepted by her grandson, Michael, on her behalf. Her negatives, films and videos are now at Yale University and the Tosca Fund has acquired the vintage prints, all signed and dated. She is survived by Frank and grandchildren, Michael, Sarah and David.

• Eve Arnold, photographer, born 21 April 1912; died 4 January 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold

RIP x 2

2012-01-06T14:14:00.004Z

Bob Holness age 83

Harry Fowler age 85

Happy birthday, Sir Alex...

2012-01-05T08:11:00.000Z

Ronald Searle RIP

2012-01-04T07:53:00.000Z

British cartoonist Ronald Searle, best known for creating the fictional girls' school St Trinian's, has died aged 91.

His daughter Kate Searle said in a statement that he "passed away peacefully in his sleep" in a hospital in France.

Searle's spindly cartoons of the naughty schoolgirls first appeared in 1941, before the idea was adapted for film.

The first movie version, The Belles of St Trinian's, was released in 1954.

Joyce Grenfell and George Cole starred in the film, along with Alastair Sim, who appeared in drag as headmistress Millicent Fritton.

Searle also provided illustrations the Molesworth series, written by Geoffrey Willans.

The gothic, line-drawn cartoons breathed life into the gruesome pupils of St Custard's school, in particular the outspoken, but functionally-illiterate Nigel Molesworth "the goriller of 3B".

Searle's work regularly appeared in magazines and newspapers, including Punch and The New Yorker.

'Unabashed ambition'

Aside from his schoolday stories, he was a savage satirist, and some of his darker material was informed by his time as a prisoner of war during World War II.

There, he worked on the infamous "Railway of Death" - a Japanese project to create a rail link between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which led to the death of more than 100,000 labourers, including 16,000 Allied prisoners.

Some of the work he created whilst being held captive is displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe paid tribute to Searle, whom he described as his "hero".

He said: "He was clever and he was funny and he could draw. A lot of cartoonists come up with an idea first but Ronald could really draw."

However, he added that Searle's most famous creations were a "millstone around his neck".

He told the BBC: "He created St Trinian's, which we all loved, and he despised it because he couldn't get away from it and of course he did many, many other things."

Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell said Searle's work stood out for its "genuine wit, intelligence and unabashed ambition".

Anita O'Brien, curator at the Cartoon Museum, said Searle was "absolutely unique".

She added: "He really was one of the most important cartoonists, not just in Britain, but in the rest of the world.

"Many people were influenced by his work. He did so many things, he was so versatile, so talented, so prolific. He will be incredibly missed and there was no one else like him."

Chris Beetles, who held several exhibitions of Searle's work at his gallery, said: "He had become the yardstick by which all those professionals in his trade judged themselves, and his witty draughtsmanship was the standard to which they aspired.

"Over my 40-year collecting and art dealing lifetime, I have never encountered a cartoonist with his consistency of drawing ability, and such an inventive range of humour from burlesque to surrealism."

'Comic anarchism'

Across his career, Searle won a number of awards, including prizes from America's National Cartoonists' Society and France's prestigious Legion d'Honneur in 2007.

But St Trinian's was his most enduring work - spawning five films between 1954 and 1980.

After a 27-year hiatus, the series was revived in 2007, with Rupert Everett in the headmistress role.

The movie also starred Talulah Riley, Jodie Whittaker and Gemma Arterton, making her film debut.

A sequel, St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, was released two years later.

Simon Winder, from Penguin the company that published St Trinian's said: "We are all extremely sad to hear of Ronald's death. He was a marvellous, remarkable man and a great artist.

"I can think of nobody who did more to ridicule and undermine 1950s Britain and St Trinian's and Molesworth will endure forever as masterpieces of comic anarchism."

A full statement from Searle's family read as follows: "Ronald William Fordham Searle, born 3 March 1920, passed away peacefully in his sleep, after a short illness, with his children, Kate and John, and his grandson, Daniel, beside him, on 30 December 2011 in Draguignan, France.

"He requested a private cremation with no fuss and no flowers."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16391857

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #138

2012-01-03T07:40:00.001Z

EU copyright on Joyce works ends at midnight

2012-01-02T09:47:00.000Z

TERENCE KILLEEN
The Irish Times
Saturday, December 31, 2011

COPYRIGHT ON James Joyce’s works in the EU expires at midnight tonight.

From tomorrow, January 1st, writings published during Joyce’s lifetime – Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – are available for publication and quotation without reference or payment to the James Joyce estate.

Joyce died on January 13th, 1941; originally, copyright in these works in Britain and Ireland extended for 50 years, until 1991. However, some two years after that date, EU copyright law was harmonised to bring it into line with German practice and the period was extended to 70 years.

The end of copyright protection will enable creative artists and theatre companies to stage adaptations and re-enactments. Public broadcast will also be possible. Joyce’s solitary play, Exiles , can also be freely staged, and productions are likely.

The Pan-Pan theatre company is interested in an Exiles -related project around next Bloomsday, while the play Gibraltar by Patrick Fitzgerald, which opens in the New Theatre, Dublin, tomorrow night, draws heavily on the text of Ulysses . Another project well in train is publication of a special edition of Joyce’s short story The Dead by the James Joyce Centre.

Despite the freedom offered by the change, grey areas remain.

Some of Joyce’s manuscripts were reproduced in 1979 in the James Joyce Archive, but others have never been published. The National Library of Ireland is directly involved in this issue, since it is the holder of the largest collection of unpublished Joyce manuscripts in the world.

The legal position over these manuscripts remains unclear. Recently a group of scholars wrote to the library seeking clarity on the issue, while well-known Joycean Senator David Norris has tabled a motion in the Seanad calling for a statement on the issue.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1231/1224309673276.html

Last night's set list

2012-01-01T13:49:00.000Z

At The Habit, York: -

Things We Said Today
Long May You Run
Teach Your Children
After The Gold Rush
Only Love Can Break Your Heart*
Baby What You Want Me To Do*
Heart Of Gold

* with the excellent Mark Wynn on lead guitar. Music, beer and good company; what more could you ask for on an evening of revelry?

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T10:28:00.000Z

The FNB invite you to join with Cheetah in welcoming in what we hope will be a peppy and peaceful New Year!

They also served...

2012-01-01T10:23:00.000Z

Some RIPs:

Vaclav Havel: president, playwright, poet and friend of Lou Reed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/18/vaclav-havel

Joe Simon (standing, with Jack Kirby): "one of the architects of the golden age" of the comic book and co-creator (with Kirby) of Captain America, a WASP superhero, written and drawn by two American Jews, to fight Hitler before America even entered the war.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/joe-simon

Christopher Hitchens: author, essayist, journalist, polemicist, gadfly and "left-wing" intellectual (until he supported the war in Iraq and pissed off a lot of people with more limited defintions of "left" and "right").

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/christopher-hitchens-dies-aged-62

Gil Kane

2011-12-31T10:39:00.002Z

Cheetah RIP... again?

2011-12-30T12:16:00.000Z

Claims of Cheetah the Chimpanzee's Death Are Questioned

Associated Press
PALM HARBOR, Fla.—A Florida animal sanctuary said Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan movies of the early 1930s, has died at 80. But other accounts call that claim into question.

Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, said Wednesday that her grandparents acquired Cheetah around 1960 from "Tarzan" star Johnny Weissmuller and that the chimp appeared in Tarzan films between 1932 and 1934. During that period, Weissmuller made "Tarzan the Ape Man" and "Tarzan and His Mate."

But Ms. Cobb offered no documentation, saying it was destroyed in a 1995 fire.

Also, some Hollywood accounts indicate a chimpanzee by the name of Jiggs or Mr. Jiggs played Cheetah alongside Mr. Weissmuller early on and died in 1938.

In addition, an 80-year-old chimpanzee would be extraordinarily old, perhaps the oldest ever known. According to many experts and Save the Chimps, another Florida sanctuary, chimpanzees in captivity generally live to between 40 and 60, though Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, Fla., says it has one that is around 73.

A similar claim about another chimpanzee that supposedly played second banana to Mr. Weissmuller was debunked in 2008 in a Washington Post story.

Writer R.D. Rosen discovered that the primate, which lived in Palm Springs, Calif., was born around 1960, meaning it wasn't oldest enough to have been in the Tarzan movies of Hollywood's Golden Age that starred Olympic swimming star Weissmuller as the vine-swinging, loincloth-wearing Ape Man and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane.

While a number of chimpanzees played the sidekick role in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and '40s, Mr. Rosen said in an email Wednesday that this latest purported Cheetah looks like a "business-boosting impostor as well."

"I'm afraid any chimp who actually shared a soundstage with Weissmuller and O'Sullivan is long gone," Mr. Rosen said.

Ms. Cobb said Cheetah died Dec. 24 of kidney failure and was cremated.

"Unfortunately, there was a fire in '95 in which a lot of that documentation burned up," Ms. Cobb said. "I'm 51 and I've known him for 51 years. My first remembrance of him coming here was when I was actually 5, and I've known him since then, and he was a full-grown chimp then."

Film historian and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osbourne said the Cheetah character "was one of the things people loved about the Tarzan movies because he made people laugh. He was always a regular fun part of the movies."

In his time, the Cheetah character was as popular as Rin Tin Tin or Asta, the dog from the "Thin Man" movies, Mr. Osbourne said.

"He was a major star," he said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577126404050399694.html

Last night's set list

2011-12-29T01:01:00.001Z

At The Habit, York: -

On The Way Home
Blackbird
There Stands The Glass
I Don't Want To talk About It
Harvest Moon

A wonderful evening of musical fun. And Da was top of the bill!

P.S. Rumours about me and Sinead O'Connor have been fabricated by the Tory press.

Laugh-along-a-Laurel...

2011-12-28T13:25:00.000Z

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #137

2011-12-27T12:05:00.001Z

Thomas Bewick

2011-12-26T11:58:00.000Z

Merry Christmas!!!!

2011-12-25T13:02:00.001Z

Merry Christmas from the FNB!

2011-12-24T12:03:00.001Z

The FNB at their 2011 Christmas gathering. Missing is our regular 'lensmith' Paul 'Richard Avedon' Kelly, who, working without a net as usual, was perched perilously on a chair to capture the essence of the occasion.

Last night's set list

2011-12-24T00:24:00.002Z

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Heart Of Gold
Long Time Gone
Mellow My Mind
Roll Another Number (For The Road)
Out On The Weekend

An enjoyable open mic night with an amazing variety of music.

And a Happy Christmas viewers (as Benny Hill would have said).

The Great Loudo - Newt Gingrich is Running For Pres

2011-12-23T15:52:00.000Z

Loudon Wainwright sings 'Newt Gingrich Is Running For Pres

Randy Lewis
December 20, 2011

Singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has tossed off numerous topical ditties over his 40-year career on subjects including war, O.J. Simpson, Christmas, Olympic figure-skating anti-heroine Tonya Harding and millennial panic, among others, so it’s no surprise he’s come up with one pegged to the 2012 presidential campaign.

He’s posted the song and accompanying video for “Newt Gingrich is Running For Pres” on YouTube, a cheerfully barbed number set to the tune of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.”

A writer who often has used sharp-edged satire in his music, Wainwright sings:

He’s no longer naughty
Newt’s gonna make nice
Newt didn’t lobby
Just got paid for advice
Newt Gingrich is running for Pres

In previous interviews Wainwright has said he enjoys the challenge of crafting songs linked to a moment, a practice more common early in the 20th century than in recent times. He sees them as analagous to news dispatches sent from the front — something that may be lodged in his DNA as the son of longtime Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright II.

Several of his earlier topical and political tunes are collected on two albums, “Social Studies” from 1999 and last year’s “10 Songs for the New Depression.” Many are also sprinkled across the '40 Odd Years' box set released earlier this year.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/12/newt-gingrich-president-loudon-wainwright.html

New Macca tune

2011-12-22T21:51:00.002Z

http://soundcloud.com/paulmccartney/my-valentine-paul-mccartney

The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

2011-12-22T19:42:00.000Z

Avalanche in the Grisons!
JMW Turner paints up a stormContinuing his December-long series of favourite wintry artworks, Jonathan Jones is blown over by the sublime force of JMW Turner's Swiss snowslide – The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

Jonathan Jones
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 15 December 2011

The overwhelming power of nature crushes trees and smashes rocks in Turner’s wintry vision of disaster. In the Romantic era when this was painted, artists and poets alike succumbed to the ‘sublime’, the fascination of what scares us. The huge weight of Alpine mountain snow that plummets downwards in this avalanche is sublime; it thrills us with terror. But somehow that seems an inadequate description of this painting’s force. It is a great painting because Turner observes, with almost scientific precision, the way the snow shifts – its mass, acceleration and impact.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/picture/2011/dec/15/avalanche-in-grisons-jmw-turner?INTCMP=SRCH

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #136

2011-12-21T16:48:00.001Z

FRIDAY BOY LEPRECHAUN

2011-12-20T14:04:00.001Z

Lay Lady Lay (early take)

2011-12-20T10:16:00.001Z

http://youtu.be/aTGObcjaSnQ

Yesterday's set list

2011-12-19T12:56:00.000Z

On the Magic Music show, NE1fm102.5: -

There'll Never Be Anyone Else But You
Is It Only The Moonlight?
I Shall Be Released
The Needle & The Damage Done

An enjoyable 2hrs in the company of Jim Bennett on his Magic Music show. He also played one of the new Men of the Tyne songs, By The River With The Bairns.

Robert Riggs

2011-12-18T19:02:00.000Z

Far Away Eyes...

2011-12-17T12:11:00.001Z

The Garner Files...

2011-12-16T16:05:00.000Z

Book review: 'The Garner Files'
At 83, James Garner pulls no punches in this candid account of his acting career.

November 01, 2011
By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times

Many actors have breathed life into a memorable or even iconic role but only a few are capable of reconstructing an archetype. In "Maverick" and then again "The Rockford Files," James Garner stepped into two of TV's most calcified genres — the western and the detective series — and set a new standard that others have been chasing down since. Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford were different in many ways — Maverick was a fast-talking con man in the Old West, Rockford a modern L.A. private investigator with motivation issues — but they shared an important trait: They were reluctant heroes. Each would much rather wisecrack his way out of a jam, but if you pushed him hard enough, you would invariably find yourself counting angels on the ceiling.

So it's not surprising that it's taken Garner, now 83, this long to write a memoir. But having made up his mind to write it, with the help of Jon Winokur, Garner follows his own heroic dictum: Plenty of self-deprecating, humor, a general air of live-and-let-live, but when it comes down to it, no pulled punches.

For Garner fans, "The Garner Files" is catnip; Winokur perfectly captures and sustains the actor's voice, which includes a penchant for digression, intentional understatement and occasional declarations of war (against bullies; against studio bookkeeping; against certain directors, certain actors and certain studio heads). For industry aficionados, it is a candid accounting, sometimes literally, of a process that is too often over-glamorized and under-chronicled. Two of the most fascinating chapters involve his suits against Universal over syndication of "The Rockford Files" and a description of the physical damage caused by being an action star (he eventually had to have both knees replaced).

For the rest of the world, including and especially those too young to remember even "The Rockford Files," Garner's memoir offers a rare glimpse of a certain type of man, an archetype in itself. In her introduction, Julie Andrews describes Garner as a "man's man," but that has too brutish a connotation. Garner, like his characters, is first and foremost a gentleman, the sort who lives by a personal code that preaches patience and tolerance, up to a point. "When I'm pushed, I shove," Garner writes, quoting one of his own characters, Murphy Jones of the movie "Murphy's Romance."

There are more than a few fistfights in "The Garner Files," as well as thrown furniture and golf clubs, but usually there's a reason, as when costar Tony Franciosa actually punched stuntmen during fight scenes: "… he kept doing it despite my warnings to stop … so I had to pop him one."

Garner comes by his voice and his persona naturally enough. Born James Baumgarner in Norman, Okla., he lost his mother when he was 4; he and his two brothers were split up among relatives. The Baumgarners survived the Depression better than many Oklahomans, but when James' father, Weldon, remarried and reunited the family, the result was disaster. Weldon drank and his new wife Wilma beat the children viciously. Finally, James fought back. The marriage fell apart, but Weldon left again. James was 14.

After working a series of jobs, he joined the Merchant Marine; undone by chronic seasickness, he headed to California to live with his aunt, Grace Baumgarner, and enrolled at Hollywood High, where he was recommended for a Jantzen bathing suit ad. "I wasn't interested until I heard they were paying $25 an hour. That was more than the principal made!" He was soon kicked out of high school ("There was a slight problem: I never went to classes"), drafted into the Army and headed to Korea, where he was wounded twice and developed an antiwar mentality that would later make Charlie Madison, the dog robber in "The Americanization of Emily," his favorite role.

Garner became an actor the old-fashioned way — a soda jerk he met while working at a Shell station once told him that with his good looks he could be a big star. By the time Garner returned from Korea, that soda jerk was a stage producer, who quickly gave him a non-speaking role in the stage production of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial." There, Garner sat as part of the jury, night after night watching Henry Fonda and learning how to act.

"The Garner Files" tells the story of Garner's career with many entertaining backstage stories and Garner's opinion of his luminous costars, but the kid who survived his own childhood is always present and accounted for. After falling in love with Lois, his wife of 55 years, at first sight and marrying her almost as quickly, he accepted a contract with Warner Bros. at a less than commensurate salary because he had a family to support.

That contract took him off the big screen and into "Maverick," a move he was not thrilled with, partly because it was so ill paid. When it became a hit, he dug his heels in and after he was laid off because a writers strike shut down production on "Maverick," he dug them in further. He and his lawyer, a young man by the name of Frank Wells (who would eventually run Disney), sued Warner Bros. for breach of contract. The judge ruled in his favor and despite all the predictably dire warnings, he did work, and sue, in this town again.

Garner is a self-described curmudgeon and there are times when "The Garner Files" wobbles dangerously toward the querulous. But it never topples because he is unfailingly candid about his own desires — which are to make money and do the roles he believes he is best suited to do.

By those standards, he is a wildly successful man, and by more ephemeral ones as well. Thirty pages at the end of the book are titled "Outtakes" and filled with anecdotes, memories and testimonials from Garner's friends, family and colleagues, including Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, James Woods and David Chase (who got his start on "The Rockford Files"). Although there is an air of Tom Sawyer creeping back to hear his own funeral about this chapter, it is a fine, frank and fun collection.

More than that, it provides proof that the man the reader has just spent several hours listening to does actually exist outside his own narrative. Just in case you were wondering. Like James Garner knew you were.

The Garner Files
A Memoir
James Garner and Jon Winokur
Simon & Schuster: 282 pps., $25.99

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/entertainment/la-et-book-20111101/2

THE SNOW ON THE TYNE

2011-12-16T10:28:00.002Z

Billie Jo Spears RIP

2011-12-15T23:24:00.001Z

Age 74.

The Return of Harry Lime...

2011-12-15T07:44:00.000Z

Last night's set list

2011-12-15T01:14:00.000Z

At The Habit, York: -

Mellow My Mind
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Long May You Run

A busy night. Loads of players inc. 1 poet. Managed to get on before folks were reduced to 2 songs. Crackin' night all told.

For the movie obsessive in your life...

2011-12-14T18:51:00.002Z

Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' Oscar for sale

By Alan Duke, CNN
December 12, 2011

Los Angeles (CNN) -- The Oscar given Orson Welles for "Citizen Kane" some 70 years ago goes on sale in an online auction this month, a Los Angeles auction house announced Monday.

The best screenplay award for 1941 was the only Oscar for the legendary writer, director, actor, although he was given an honorary award "for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures" nearly 30 years later.

Welles was 25 when he wrote, directed and starred in "Citizen Kane," which the American Film Institute picked in 2007 as the top film of the previous century.

The golden statuette's controversial history includes a court fight with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which tried to stop another auction in 2003. An academy official testified then that the award's value was at least $1 million.

A judge cleared the way for auction with a ruling in 2004 that Welles never signed the academy's agreement not to sell the trophy, according to Nate D. Sanders Auctions spokesman Sam Heller.

The academy, which aggressively challenges efforts to sell Oscar trophies, was successful three years ago in stopping the sale of two Oscars awarded to silent film star Mary Pickford. A Los Angeles jury ruled the descendants of a woman who was married to Pickford's third husband could only sell the statuettes back to the academy for a price of $10.

Heller would not identify the seller, although it was known to be in the hands of Beatrice Welles, the actor's youngest daughter, after she recovered it from a planned auction in 1993. It had been "assumed to be lost" for decades but was apparently in the hands of a cinematographer who got it from Welles, Heller said.

An attempt to sell it at auction in 2007 failed to draw a buyer, Heller said. It was included in a lot of historical manuscripts, not movie memorabilia, he said.

"Citizen Kane," Welles' first feature film, was nominated for nine Oscars but won just for best screenplay, which Welles shared with co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Welles, who portrayed a fictional media tycoon, lost to Gary Cooper in "Sergeant York" for the best actor award. John Ford's direction of "How Green Was My Valley" beat Welles for best director.

The bidding in the online auction will end on the evening of December 20, Heller said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/12/showbiz/orson-welles-oscar/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #135

2011-12-13T07:45:00.001Z

Richard Dawkins begone!

2011-12-12T08:06:00.000Z

"Everyone has to believe in something... I believe I'll have another drink"

Make 'em laugh...

2011-12-11T15:19:00.001Z

MGM musicals: more stars than the heavens
Watching the best of the studio's output – Singin' in the Rain, Meet Me in St Louis – is to indulge in pure joyous artifice

Bee Wilson
guardian.co.uk
Friday 9 December 2011

Fred Astaire strolls into a toyshop with a walking stick and spats, whistling. He snatches an oversized Easter bunny from a small boy and proceeds to do a tap dance using a series of conveniently positioned props that happen to be lying around on the shop floor. "I'm plumb crazy for drums," he sings, for no obvious reason. Then he takes his bunny – without paying – and nonchalantly strolls out again.

This – a scene from Easter Parade (1948) – is the sort of thing that could only happen in the fantastical Technicolor world of the MGM musical. Such trifles as logical plot development and plausible human motivation have no place here. What matters is getting as quickly as possible to the next song and the next dance and letting the stars do their thing. In an MGM musical, every sidewalk is made for dancing and every woman has cherry-red lips and high-kicking legs. When you're in the right mood, the formula is absurdly effective. The comfort seeps in from the moment you hear that MGM lion roar. You find your mouth involuntarily turning up at the corners, your toes twitch and your heart feels as if it's being pumped full of candy floss. Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! is the title of the current BFI celebration of the genre, which offers the chance to revisit Singin' in the Rain and Meet Me in St Louis alongside lesser known gems such as The Band Wagon, worth it just for the scene in Central Park where Astaire and Cyd Charisse twirl and clinch to "Dancing in the Dark".

The genius and the oddness of the MGM musical is largely the product of the sensibilities of one man, Louis B Mayer (born Lazar Meir in Ukraine in 1884), who combined sugary sentimentality with a ruthless focus on the bottom line. The star system of the golden era was Mayer's creation. Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn all owed their careers to him.

After MGM production chief Irving Thalberg died in 1936, Mayer was able to push MGM even more towards crowd pleasers. Which meant musicals. Much of the genre was shaped by Mayer's gut instincts. In 1939, at the preview screening of The Wizard of Oz, the director Victor Fleming got jittery and wanted to cut "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", arguing it was too long and difficult. Mayer made a snap decision to keep it. In that moment, sitting on a bale of fake Kansas hay, the 16-year-old Judy Garland stopped being a child star and became a real star, whose voice seemed to make all our troubles melt like lemondrops. "There's no place like home," said Dorothy. Oh yes, there is: there's a place even better – the homes created on the MGM backlot, peopled entirely by stars. Mayer liked to say that MGM had more stars than the heavens. At their best, the MGM musicals gave the stars a perfect hermetic space in which to perform: shimmering curtains, yellow brick roads and an aura of homeliness more potent than anywhere people might really live.

"She can't act, she can't sing and she can't dance … The triple threat," says Donald O'Connor's Cosmo of the dreadful silent film star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in Singin' in the Rain (1952). As with so much else in the film, it's self-referential. MGM was an efficient machine that showcased talents in a highly targeted manner, depending on how much of a "threat" the particular star might be. There are the single-threat pretty faces, the chorus girls who flash across the screen for a single lovely moment, or the barnstorming male ensemble dancers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, whose muscular cartwheels and jumps speak louder than words.

Then there are the double threats. Ann Miller was a fantastically leggy and charismatic brunette dance prodigy with Cherokee ancestors. Her publicists claimed that she could tap her feet 500 times a minute. Miller could sing, too, but was no great actor, which made her hard to position in conventional pictures. Her career went nowhere much at RKO or Columbia Pictures before she finally found her form with an MGM contract. MGM gave Miller a way to shine that had nothing to do with characterisation and everything to do with talent. In her set-piece solo dance sequences, Miller was given three minutes of freedom in glamorous outfits to shimmy and tap to her heart's delight, with the camera trained only on her. No dancing woman, not even Rita Hayworth, has ever looked quite so sure of her own power as Miller in Easter Parade, "Shakin' the Blues Away" in yellow elbow-length gloves. Virtuoso doesn't even cover it. Miller later said she had to pour blood from her high heels after all the relentless takes. But all we see on the screen is Technicolor perfection. As someone says at the beginning of "Too Darn Hot", Miller's hottest number in Kiss Me Kate: "Go, girl, go!"

Singin' in the Rain, meanwhile, is a film starring three all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting "triple threats" in the form of Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly, who also co-directed. To see the three of them, perky and bright-eyed, linking arms and singing "Good mornin', good mornin', we talked the whole night through" is to participate in a deeply wholesome version of the American dream. It's almost Nietzschean in its polished will to power. You feel: these people have fought their way to the top as performers in the most competitive society in the world. They have been dressed by the finest costumiers (Debbie Reynolds's cute neckerchief deserves its own Oscar), slathered in greasepaint by the finest make-up artists and lit and shot by the most talented technicians. And they are still smiling! If the routine were even a tiny bit less crisply rehearsed, it would seem horribly trite. But somehow the three are such pros that they take all the artifice – the gimmickry with raincoats and sofas – and make it loveable and spontaneous.

The formula wasn't always so winning. In the 50s, the studio continued to churn out expensive musicals, with all the trademark MGM polish, after public tastes had moved on. Mayer's biographer Bosley Crowther noted that his "authority as a showman relied upon insistence on qualities of sentiment and make-believe that were nothing short of 'corny' in the postwar age". Mayer himself was ousted from MGM in 1951, replaced by a supposedly grittier chief of production, a kid from RKO called Dore Schary. But still the sentiment and make-believe continued, except now they often had a desperate air of cynicism.

You may hate me for saying this, because this movie has a bewildering number of fans, but a nadir was reached with High Society (1956), a film so much smaller than the sum of its starry parts. Take Grace Kelly's beauty in a white swimming costume, Bing Crosby's crooning, Frank Sinatra's worldliness, Louis Armstrong's humour and jazz, Cole Porter's songs, and what do you have? A cold-hearted, self-regarding mess of a film. The various classy elements never really gel. High Society lacks the emotional punch of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals of the late 50s and 60s, and does not have the pure joyous artifice of 1940s MGM.

The one person who could have made it work had sadly lost her contract with MGM back in 1950, after one too many nervous collapses. The actor who found her truest form in the MGM musical was Garland, the original quadruple threat: she could dance, she could act, she could be funny; and oh, she could sing. Garland took the most preposterous lines that Irving Berlin could dream up – "I was born in Michigan / And I wish and wish again" – and imbue them with heart-stopping resonance.

It is no accident that Garland was the star of the finest MGM musical of them all, the only one so brilliant and human that it surpasses the genre, 1944's Meet Me in St Louis. It's showing from 16 to 29 December at the BFI, the perfect Christmas treat. Directed by Garland's future husband Vincente Minnelli, it tells the story of an affluent St Louis family during the four seasons of a single year, 1903, the year before the World's Fair. Garland plays Esther, the second of four sisters (there is also a brother). The family is thrown into turmoil when their father is offered a job in New York. You wouldn't think that having to leave St Louis for New York was the stuff of tragedy, but it is. The critic David Thomson calls it "the most satisfying story ever told as a musical", comparing it to a Chekhov play, though here the sisters want to stay in their home, not leave it.

For once in an MGM musical, the bits between the songs are good enough to sustain a film by themselves. Minnelli gives us a non-mawkish picture of family life at the turn of the century, when five-year-olds might stay out all day riding the milk float and grown-up daughters suffer the embarrassment of having to conduct a long-distance phone conversation with a man trying to propose in front of the entire family. The cast are all excellent, from Mary Astor as the mother to Tom Drake as the boy next door. For stretches, you almost forget it's a musical. Then Garland as Esther opens her mouth to sing and you are transported to a higher plane. "The Trolley Song" is sublime, as is "Under the Bamboo Tree", where Garland pulls off the trick of dancing with a child – her little sister Tootie – and making it look completely natural.

It all culminates in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". This song has been ruined by a thousand smug, easy listening versions. But the original, as sung by Esther to her distraught little sister, trying to console her for the fact that they are leaving the place they love, is almost unbearably sad. Garland's lustrous voice is not saying: "Isn't it jolly? It's Christmas." She is saying: "Yes, things are miserable, but one day they might not be" – a powerful message in 1944, and still resonant now, in this recession Christmas.

"Someday soon, we all will be together / If the Fates allow / Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow." We are a long way from Fred Astaire and the Easter bunny, but also not so far. Like all the other studio's musical stars, Garland was simply parading her talent, in this case, a talent for wringing tears from a willing audience. It took all the artifice of MGM to create a moment of such purity and truth.

Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! The MGM Musicalis at the BFI Southbank until 30 December.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/09/mgm-musicals-bee-wilson?INTCMP=SRCH

Saul Bass

2011-12-10T16:10:00.000Z

Saul Bass titles sequence

2011-12-09T18:40:00.000Z

The Title Design of Saul Bass from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Haunted, Frightened Trees.

2011-12-08T09:47:00.002Z

Harry Morgan RIP

2011-12-07T20:00:00.000Z

Harry Morgan, Colonel Potter on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 96

By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: December 7, 2011

Harry Morgan, the prolific character actor best known for playing the acerbic but kindly Colonel Potter in the long-running television series “M*A*S*H,” died Wednesday morning at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96. His son Charles confirmed his death, saying Mr. Morgan had been treated for pneumonia recently.

In more than 100 movies, Mr. Morgan played Western bad guys, characters with names like Rocky and Shorty, loyal sidekicks, judges, sheriffs, soldiers, thugs and police chiefs.

On television, he played Officer Bill Gannon with a phlegmatic but light touch to Jack Webb’s always-by-the-book Sgt. Joe Friday in the updated “Dragnet,” from 1967 to 1970. He starred as Pete Porter, a harried husband, in the situation comedy “Pete and Gladys” (1960-62), reprising a role he had played on “December Bride” (1954-59). He was also a regular on “The Richard Boone Show” (1963-64), “Kentucky Jones” (1964-65), “The D.A.” (1971-72), “Hec Ramsey” (1972-74) and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986).But to many fans he was first and foremost Col. Sherman T. Potter, commander of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit in Korea. With a wry smile, flat voice and sharp humor, Mr. Morgan played Colonel Potter from 1975 to 1983, when “M*A*S*H” went off the air. He replaced McLean Stevenson, who had quit the series, moving into the role on the strength of his performance as a crazed major general in an early episode.

In an interview for the Archive of American Television, Mr. Morgan said of his “M*A*S*H” character: “He was firm. He was a good officer and he had a good sense of humor. I think it’s the best part I ever had.” Colonel Potter’s office had several personal touches. The picture on his desk was of Mr. Morgan’s wife, Eileen Detchon. To relax, the colonel liked to paint and look after his horse, Sophie — a sort of inside joke, since the real Harry Morgan raised quarter horses on a ranch in Santa Rosa. Sophie, to whom Colonel Potter says goodbye in the final episode, was Mr. Morgan’s own horse.

In 1980 his Colonel Potter earned him an Emmy Award as best supporting actor in a comedy series. During the shooting of the series’ final episode, he was asked about his feelings. “Sadness and an aching heart,” he replied

Harry Morgan was born Harry Bratsburg on April 10, 1915, in Detroit. His parents were Norwegian immigrants. After graduating from Muskegon High School, where he played varsity football and was senior class president, he intended to become a lawyer, but debating classes in his pre-law major at the University of Chicago stimulated his interest in the theater. He made his professional acting debut in a summer stock production of “At Mrs. Beam’s” in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and his Broadway debut in 1937 in the original production of “Golden Boy,” starring Luther Adler, in a cast that also included Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.

After moving to California in 1942, he was spotted by a talent scout in a Santa Barbara stock company’s production of William Saroyan’s one-act play “Hello Out There.” Signing a contract with 20th Century Fox, he originally used the screen name Henry Morgan, but changed Henry to Harry in the 1950s to avoid confusion with the radio and television humorist Henry Morgan.

Mr. Morgan attracted attention almost immediately. In “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943), which starred Henry Fonda, he was praised for his portrayal of a drifter caught up in a lynching in a Western town. Reviewing “A Bell for Adano” (1945), based on John Hersey’s novel about the Army in a liberated Italian town, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Morgan was “crude and amusing as the captain of M.P.’s.”

He went on to appear in “All My Sons” (1948), based on the Arthur Miller play, with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster; “The Big Clock” (1948), in which he played a silent, menacing bodyguard to Charles Laughton; “Yellow Sky” (1949), with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; and the critically praised western “High Noon” (1952), with Gary Cooper. Among his other notable films were “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, and “Inherit the Wind” (1960), with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, in which he played a small-town Tennessee judge hearing arguments about evolution in the fictionalized version of the Scopes “monkey trial.” In “How the West Was Won” (1962), he played Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

After a personable performance as Glenn Miller’s pianist, Chummy MacGregor, in “The Glenn Miller Story” (1954), starring James Stewart, he often played softer characters as well as his trademark hard-bitten tough guys. There were eventually a number of comedies on his résumé, among them “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” (1965), with Shirley MacLaine and Peter Ustinov; “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967), with George C. Scott; “Support Your Local Sheriff!” (1969), with James Garner and Walter Brennan; and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975), a Disney movie with Tim Conway and Don Knotts.

He returned as Bill Gannon, by now promoted to captain, in the 1987 movie “Dragnet,” a comedy remake of the series starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks.

Mr. Morgan’s television credits were prodigious. He once estimated that in one show or another, he was seen in prime time for 35 straight years. Regarded as one of the busiest actors in the medium, he had continuing roles in at least 10 series, which, combined with his guest appearances, amounted to hundreds of episodes. He reprised the role of Sherman Potter in “AfterMASH” (1983-85), a short-lived spinoff.

Among the later shows on which he appeared as a guest star were “The Love Boat, “ “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “You Can’t Take It With You,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “The Jeff Foxworthy Show.”

Mr. Morgan’s first wife, Eileen Detchon, died in 1985 after 45 years of marriage. He is survived by his wife, Barbara Bushman, whom he married in 1986; three sons from his first marriage, Christopher, Charles and Paul; and eight grandchildren. A fourth son, Daniel, died in 1989. Mr. Morgan lived in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

His son Charles, a lawyer in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview that he would marvel at his father’s photographic memory. “My dad would read a script the way somebody else would read Time magazine and put it down and be on the set the next day,” he said.

But Harry Morgan never sat as a guest on a talk show, Charles Morgan said ; it did not seem appropriate or necessary. “Appearing on a talk show to focus on himself because he was Harry Morgan,” he said, “was not nearly as natural as appearing in a role as Pete Porter or Bill Gannon or Colonel Potter, or as the cowboy drifter who wandered into town with Henry Fonda and got wrapped up in a vigilante brigade in ‘Ox-Bow Incident.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/arts/television/harry-morgan-mash-and-dragnet-actor-dies-at-96.html?_r=2

Christopher Logue RIP

2011-12-07T19:20:00.001Z

Come to the edge

Come to the Edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and we pushed,
And they flew.

CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

My hero: Christopher Logue
'He seemed unquenchable. You felt even death wouldn't get a word in edgeways'

Craig Raine
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 6 December 2011

It's difficult to believe that Christopher Logue has died, because he seemed unquenchable. You felt even death wouldn't get a word in edgeways. His voice had a posh rasping edge, like an improvised saw. He was one of the liveliest people I've ever known. Ebullient, impatient, peremptory, candid, rude on occasion, opinionated, funny, surprising, widely loved. He was also a very great poet. His version of Homer's Iliad is one of the glories of literature, a pacifist's paean to a brutal warrior culture. The very taste of war is in his words, the flavour of carnage in all its fullness.

And the flavour of Christopher? Singular. Various. He had an eye. (Literally, because he had lost the sight of the other in an army prison.) The cover image of War Music was chosen by him: a glistening Nuba warrior photographed by Leni Riefenstahl. The US edition had a still from Metropolis – a futuristic robot as archetypal armoured warrior. The US cover for Husbands was an Arab fighter walking along a brick wall with a missile launcher over his shoulder. Christopher could have worked for Magnum.

He was an autodidact, a village explainer. As Gertrude Stein wrote of Ezra Pound, "fine if you were a village; if not, not". I was happy to be a village. He was habitually under-awed. (I'm writing this from Venice, dismissed by Christopher as "provincial".)

I was privileged to be his editor. At first, we were both a bit nervous. Rosemary Hill, his wife, after prolonged foreplay: "That's enough lunch, you two. Get on with it, Ed." It was all-day, exhilarating, exhausting, hand-to-hand stuff. Christopher generally had a nap halfway through, while I prostrated myself on a sofa.

He knew as much about email as Homer. This is a postcard to my son Isaac. Twenty years on, Isaac knows it by heart: "That's the third time you've failed to pass on my phone message. Next time, don't say 'I'll tell him', say 'shut up, you boring old man, I'm not interested'." Christopher could make even a postcard "memorable speech".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/06/christopher-logue-poetry?newsfeed=true

See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/dec/03/poet-christopher-logue-dies?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

War Music [Down on your knees, Achilles]
An account of books 16-19 of the Iliad by Homer.

Down on your knees, Achilles. Farther down.
Now forward on your hands and put your face into the dirt,
And scrub it to and fro.
Grief has you by the hair with one
And with the forceps of its other hand
Uses your mouth to trowel the dogshit up;
Watches you lift your arms to Heaven; and then
Pounces and screws your nose into the filth.
Gods have plucked drawstrings from your head,
And from the templates of your upper lip
Modelled their bows.
Not now. Not since
Your grieving reaches out and pistol-whips
That envied face, until
Frightened to bear your black, backbreaking agony alone,
You sank, throat back, thrown back, your voice
Thrown out across the sea to reach your Source.

CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

Dylan. England. 2011.

2011-12-07T14:52:00.001Z

RIP Barbara Orbison. At 60.

2011-12-07T14:49:00.000Z

Terry - In a wide-ranging interview the new Loadsamoney admits to using £20 and £10 notes as toilet tissues.

2011-12-07T14:28:00.005Z

That time of the year again...

2011-12-06T16:11:00.001Z

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #134

2011-12-06T08:00:00.003Z

Bob's Broadcasts

2011-12-05T07:55:00.000Z

Dylan on the Airwaves

Bob Dylan - Life and Life Only - Radio & TV 1961-1965 (Leftfield Media, 2011) is a handy mop-up of some Dylan appearances from the first half of the 1960s. The CD kicks off with Dylan's appearance at the Riverside Church, Manhattan, NY, as part of the 12-hour Hootenanny Special, on July 29, 1961. A hesitant, often stumbling performance, as Dylan attempts to fashion a harmonica holder from a coat hanger, his set includes Handsome Molly, Omie Wise, Poor Lazarus, support for Danny Kalb on Mean Old Southern Railroad and the ramshackle comedy doo-wop of Acne, on which he shares vocals with Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

Next up are two Dylan performances involving Oscar Brand, one featuring Sally Gal and Girl I Left Behind from October 29, 1961, and the second from a spring 1963 broadcast, where the songs are Girl of the North Country and Only a Hobo. There follows Dylan's strong reading of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll from the Steve Allen Show on February 25, 1964. Finally, and most interestingly, there is Dylan on the Les Crane Show on February 17, 1965. Accompanied by Bruce Langhorne on second guitar, Dylan sings It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding.) But Dylan's off-the-wall chat with Les Crane is of equal interest, sounding like a dry run for his later surreal Playboy interview. Asked by Crane to provide his main 'message,' Dylan shoots back: "Eat." Featuring a 10-page booklet of notes, a fairly rare cover shot, and selling for under a tenner in the UK, the CD is an attractive bargain.

Terry Kelly

American Diner

2011-12-05T07:49:00.000Z

America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner

Writer and broadcaster Stephen Smith re-envisions the story of 20th century American culture through its most iconic institution - the diner. Whether Edward Hopper's Nighthawks or the infamous encounter between Pacino and de Niro in Heat, these gleaming, gawdy shacks are at the absolute heart of the American vision.

Stephen embarks on a girth-busting road journey that takes him to some of America's most iconic diners. He meets the film-makers and singers who have immortalised them, and looks at the role diners have played not only in America's greatest paintings and movies, but also in the fight against racial oppression and the chain restaurants' global takeover.

For Stephen, it is because the diner is the last vestige of a vital part of the American psyche - the frontier. Like the Dodge City saloon it is a place where strangers are thrown together, where normal rules are suspended and anything can happen. And it is this crackle of potentially violent and sexual energy that have drawn so many artists to the diner, and made it not a convenient setting but an engine room of 20th century American culture.

Available until 8:59PM Sun, 11 Dec 2011

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b017ss8x/

The Welsh Hill Country

2011-12-04T10:21:00.000Z

Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.

Too far for you to see
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight,
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.

Too far, too far to see
The set of his eyes and the slow pthisis
Wasting his frame under the ripped coat,
There's a man still farming at Ty'n-y-Fawnog,
Contributing grimly to the accepted pattern,
The embryo music dead in his throat.

R. S. THOMAS

Harry Clarke

2011-12-03T14:48:00.000Z

Larkin on the slates

2011-12-02T19:27:00.001Z

Philip Larkin poems on slates at Hull railway station

Five slate plaques featuring the poems of Philip Larkin have been unveiled at Hull railway station.

The metre-wide roundels are the work of sculptor Martin Jennings, who created a statue of the Hull-based poet which is located on the station's concourse.

The slates sit beneath the 7ft tall (2.1 metre) sculpture, which was installed last year to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the poet's death.

Larkin lived in Hull for more than 30 years.

He worked as the head librarian at the University of Hull and produced most of his published poetry and other writing while living in the city.

Many of the poet's works were inspired by locations around the region.

Hull's Paragon Station was mentioned in one of his most famous pieces, the Whitsun Weddings

The vice-chairman of the Philip Larkin Society, Professor Graham Chesters, said: "These roundels will be intriguing and what they say about the poet, the station and the city that he loved to return to, will be unique to each passing reader.

"Paragon is a gem of a station and these features will make it even more attractive."

The sculptures were organised by the Philip Larkin Society, which ran a year-long series of events in 2010 to mark the 25th anniversary of his death.

Activities included a poetry prize and a tourist trail featuring Hull locations featured in Larkin's life and works.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-15999296

Men of the Tyne: another new song - By The River With The Bairns

2011-12-01T17:52:00.001Z

A sentimental journey with the bairns.

Ballad of a Thin Man: Hammersmith Odeon, November 21.

2011-12-01T10:01:00.002Z