'FRIDAY BOY' SITCOM SET FOR RELEASE

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL is the title of a new comedy sitcom filmed on location in Newcastle city centre. Starring Ian Ravenscroft, Paul Kelly and a Polish lass it is set for release at the end of March, retailing at £5.99. Directed by Charlie Hedley the film follows the wacky adventures of two misfits on a search for love, redemption and tuna sandwiches in the city.
Follow the blog for further release details.

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Falling
I Am A Child
On The Way Home
4 + 20
Mind Your Own Business
I Don't Want To Talk About It

About 8 bars into the final song my mobile phone rang and being about 3 inches from the mic this was somewhat embarrassing. As I switched it off I noticed the name of the caller - Paul Kelly - to general amusement all round!

Hard Cheese!

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #98

Monday with Elliott Smith

The Birth of Popeye

Popeye almost didn't get off the drawing board
E.C. Segar, creator of the iconic comic strip character, was suffering a bad cold but decided to head to his Santa Monica studio anyway. On Jan. 17, 1929, readers were introduced to the pipe-smoking sailor with the huge forearms.

By Anthony Mostrom
Los Angeles Times
March 13, 2011

It was during the peak of another punishing cold and flu season of years past — this one in January 1929 — when one of the most recognizable heroes in comics was born in a Santa Monica artist's studio.

The flash of inspiration responsible for this American pop icon almost perished in the epidemic. As the artist's assistant would later tell it, cartoonist E.C. Segar was suffering a bad cold that day and considered staying in bed. Impelled by an austere work ethic that had served him well in life, Segar instead drove to his office at 4th and Broadway (the building is long gone) and began thinking up a week's worth of ideas for his syndicated comic strip, "Thimble Theatre."

The strip starred pint-size Castor Oyl, his sister, Olive, and her boyfriend, Ham Gravy. Round, cute and plump, Segar's bulbous characters looked as if they were fashioned out of doughnuts, hot dogs and inner tubes. Segar was plotting a story in which Ham and the Oyls traveled to "Dice Island" to do some gambling.

But first he needed to get them there, so readers opening their newspapers on the morning of January 17, 1929, saw Castor prowling a pier ("All we've got to do is find a crew and sail.... Gee, I'm glad we got rid of sis."). Pointing to someone, he shouted: "Hey, there! Are you a sailor?"

The next panel depicted a deformed-looking man with huge forearms, wearing nautical garb, smoking a pipe and squinting severely. "Ya think I'm a cowboy?" came the answer. If the original artwork for that daily — the birth of Popeye the Sailor Man — still exists, its value is astronomical.

A small, wiry man, Elzie Crisler Segar grew up in a poor family in Chester, Ill., on the banks of the Mississippi. Even as a boy he was determined to be rich, and he took jobs painting billboards and hanging wallpaper. At 17, he enrolled in the W.L. Evans School of Cartooning, which later produced Chester Gould of "Dick Tracy" fame.

At 20, Segar moved to Chicago and landed a promising gig taking over "Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers" for the Chicago Herald. When that paper folded, Segar created "Looping the Loop," a goings-on-about-town feature, for the Chicago American. "Thimble Theatre" came soon after, appearing in the New York Journal in 1919.

Segar met and married Myrtle Johnson in Chicago. They soon moved to Los Angeles and by 1926 were living in a Spanish Colonial house at 7518 Willoughby in Hollywood. Three years later the couple, now with two children, were living comfortably in a two-story house on 17th Street near Montana ("Nice fat check every week!" Segar wrote gratefully to Evans).

Segar had no idea just how fat his checks would become after the invention of Popeye. Indeed, he flirted with the idea of dropping the character after the "Dice Island" story ended. Who would have guessed that a character so grotesque of face would be so instantly loved, his fame so long-lived that he would become part of a Google logo 80 years later? Say the phrase "I yam what I yam," and people know whom you're quoting. Popeye's 1930s theme song is so universally known it rivals the four opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth and the TV show "Dragnet."

Popeye's compelling combination of bizarre image, screwy lingo, ham-fisted violence and right-versus-wrong ethic proved irresistible to Depression-era Americans. He was also, according to scholar Bill Blackbeard, the first major comics character who possessed superhuman strength (in one 1936 daily, Popeye walked obliviously through a wall).Some locals have long held that Popeye was based on a retired Norwegian sailor, Olaf "Cap" Olsen, who operated fishing barges from the Santa Monica Pier. Recent scholarship has revealed that Popeye was inspired by a character in Segar's hometown, Rocky Fiegel, a pugnacious barkeeper who left his mark on many a head with his own real-life fists.

Was Popeye for kids? Ultimately, yes. Early on, publisher William Randolph Hearst demanded that Segar tone down Popeye's violent "assaulks" with his "fisks" on his "emenies." Saccharine "moral lessons," addressed directly to children, crept in. But Popeye conquered the world and Segar worked furiously at the drawing board, usually at home and late into the night, taking occasional breaks at a billiard table he had installed (he also fished regularly with the Santa Monica Rod & Reel Club).

His salary and the royalties that piled up from dolls, toys, games, buttons, pipes, wristwatches, dime banks, comic books, radio shows and animated cartoons made him rich indeed. By 1936, he was making $400,000 a year.

Segar was happy and productive when he died unexpectedly of liver failure at the age of 44. For his teenage assistant Bud Sagendorf, it meant the end of a memorable youth. The weekly late-night trips to the Santa Monica Pier, to sit in a small boat with Segar and laugh and fish while coming up with ideas for comics, would be no more. Ghost artists of varying quality would continue the strip. In the end it was the animated movie incarnation of Popeye, he of the gravelly voice and formulaic spinach-eating, that would win the day in the nation's collective memory.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-then-20110313,0,3795023.story

This morning's set list

At Dusk, York: -

Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Long May You Run
Unknown Legend

After the jam session at The Habit I was persuaded to go along to an open mic at an establishment called Dusk. The set commenced approx 01:15am.

They eat but are never satisfied.

Da and a sax player

The cast and crew relax - the second movie is in the bag.

Last night's set lists

At the newly re-opened Fulford Arms, York: -

Set 1:
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Love Song
Unknown Legend

Set 2:
Long May You Run
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Birds

Out and About with Prefab Sprout #9

Nascent Sprouts on their home turf

Lego Jim as the Green Arrow

THE MANY HATS OF MICHAEL EDWARD LOVE

Mike Unplugged

C. W. Bacon

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

I'm Just A Loser
So Close
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Falling
Love Song
Long Time Gone (David Crosby)

No Neil again!

The England of Larkin: George Shaw at the Baltic

George Shaw, Baltic Centre, Gateshead

By Rebecca Rose
February 28 2011 19:00

George Shaw’s paintings are resolutely concerned with the past. “I’m pretty upset by the notion that we have a final day,” the 44-year-old says. “I find it more reassuring to look backwards.”

The past for Shaw is encapsulated in a nondescript half-mile radius called Tile Hill, a postwar housing estate in Coventry where the artist grew up. Although he no longer lives there, for the past 15 years the pubs and pebble-dash houses, backyards, scrublands, bus stops and recreation grounds of his youth have been the sole focus of his work.

He has documented its streets, paths and sheds obsessively in several thousand photographs, now stashed in boxes in his home in Devon; occasionally, he singles one out to form the basis of a painting. Forty of these are now on show in Shaw’s mid-career retrospective at Baltic; the title, The Sly and Unseen Day, is a quote from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles about that unknown moment when we cease to exist.

These views, at once unremarkable and specific, are for Shaw a way of both measuring and dismissing the march of time. “I use it as my yardstick,” he says, “a point of departure from which I’m able to measure my own journey in life.” Yet it looks as if the estate has changed little since the artist’s youth. Shaw omits any pointers to time in his work – people, cars, shops, posters; it could be 1966, the year of Shaw’s birth, or it could just as well be 2011. If it weren’t for the dates next to the paintings, this could be a decade’s output or half a century’s.

But while his works are not easily datable, Shaw is nevertheless concerned with recording the ravages of time – intermittent bouts of vandalism; the boarding up of pubs and shutting down of community centres; the way nature eventually reclaims. In a 2009 painting, “This Sporting Life”, a goalpost in the football ground has been beaten into the earth; in “A Little Later” (2009), a roadside is strewn with plastic bags; in others, graffiti initials, terse obscenities and bloodlike splats of red paint disfigure the backs of buildings. These are the eternal in-between spaces – the sheds, bins or outhouses where we escape to as children. It is in these otherwise insignificant corners that we steal our first kiss, smoke the ends of soggy cigarettes or sob out of earshot.

Although deeply personal, Shaw’s work invites a collective experience of memory. There can’t be an English viewer who doesn’t feel the weight of Englishness in his art, whether they grew up in a Tile Hill or not. The leaden sky and those puddled paving stones in “The Library and the Back of the Triple Triangle Club” evoking the deadening boredom of another wet day; the early curfew of night falling on a dreary disused playground; a cheerful red postbox in “The First Day of the Holidays” hinting at a world beyond the stultifying parameters of childhood. If there is something poetic in his work, Shaw is the first to admit his debt to earlier celebrators of the mundane. This is the England of Philip Larkin and T.S. Eliot, of Morrissey, The Specials and Ken Loach.

The unquestionably dark side of Shaw’s work is often leavened by lurid splashes of colour – nature having its way, against the odds. The grass in “Scenes from a Passion: Pig Wood” is acid-green and bristly, like AstroTurf; in “Ash Wednesday: 7.00am” the communal green is a strangely artificial shade of jade. In perhaps his most beautiful work, “Ash Wednesday: 8.30am”, morning sunshine the colour of Bird’s custard illuminates a roadside fence, slicing through its slats on to the pavement. In another painting from his “Scenes from the Passion” series entitled “The Cop Shop”, a semiabstract array of tower blocks rendered pristine in pastel tones emits a pearly light that is almost reminiscent of the romantics, of Caspar David Friedrich or Charles-François Daubigny.

Shaw puts these startling colour effects down to the unusual paint he uses – Humbrol enamel, the sort used by boys to paint model aircraft. Glossier than oil paint, it dries to create a uniform surface, which in the bright light of the Baltic gallery gives it a sheen not unlike that of a colour photograph.

Shaw is modest about his ability as a painter, claiming that “the combination of the mundane subject matter with the enamel paint creates an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts”. His is a terrific skill, however, and his paintings, both alienating and comforting, hyperrealist and dreamy, are a refreshing antidote to the installation and video that often dominate these cathedrals of contemporary art.

As we sit in Baltic’s lively riverside café, I ask Shaw if he is planning to branch out. Or is there still mileage in Tile Hill? “I haven’t been for ages, actually,” he replies, a thoughtful expression creeping over his face. “In fact, I feel an urge coming on.”

‘The Sly and Unseen Day’ continues until May 15

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3d3da7d6-4369-11e0-8f0d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1FQVIekK7

See also:
GEORGE SHAW
18 February 2011 - 15 May 2011
The Sly and Unseen Day

This major exhibition of the work of British artist George Shaw will bring together some forty paintings from 1996 to the present day. Within a practice that has encompassed drawing, video-making, performance and writing, Shaw is best known for his expansive body of painting. Based upon photographs taken of and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, Shaw’s landscapes are at once familiar and unnerving.

More detail at:
http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/present/ExhibitionDetail.php?exhibID=149

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #97