Elliott Smith's Hidden Treasures...

Hidden Treasures: Elliott Smith

Max Broady
The Fly
26 Sep 2013 

Elliott Smith passed away 10 years ago next month. His body of solo work has grown in stature from humble beginnings as the side project of Smith’s day-job band, Heatmiser, to firm pillars in the indie rock pantheon,evolving from home-recorded lo-fi gems (‘Roman Candle’, ‘Elliott Smith’ and ‘Either/Or’), to major label flourishes (‘XO’ and ‘Figure 8’). The material he had been working on up until his death in 2003 was patched together posthumously as ‘From A Basement On A Hill’, not without some controversy over whether the released album represented what Smith had intended.

If you’ve read this far you’re more than likely familiar with the arc those records trace, so we thought we’d take you off piste a little. What follows are not necessarily unreleased songs, but tracks not available on Smith’s studio albums: a mix of bootleg songs, covers and singles which are less well known, even if they are readily available over the internet these days.

‘New Moon’, the acclaimed two-disc set of outtakes and alternate versions, was no odds-and-sods collection but could hold its own against Smith’s ‘proper’ albums. It contained a lot of A-grade material, with the quality of Smith’s outtakes prompting many of those “shoulda made the album” deliberations. But ‘New Moon’ was by no means exhaustive — it only covered the years 1994-1997 (arguably his most consistently excellent period, admittedly), so there’s plenty of unmined gold out there — certainly enough material to fully warrant another release that would be far from those barrel-scraping cash-cow exercises which too frequently do disservice to the legacies of artists who left us too soon. ‘New Moon’, in fact only hinted at the riches lying in the vaults, with around 100 tracks still to see official release.

As such, the selection of songs below should appeal not just to the compulsive, completist fans but to anyone who feels a pang of loss when reminded about Smith’s untimely death ten years ago.


‘Some Song’

At least three recorded versions of this song exist, illustrating how much Smith liked to rework and refine his songs. Given a dismissive, throwaway title — perhaps deliberately for one of his most straightforward songs — Some Song has a straight-strumming rhythm and a cyclical, repetitive vocal line that lacks his usual melodic twists and turns but is all the more direct and catchy for it. One of his earliest solo songs, it resembles ‘Division Day’, a later single, and is one of his most openly autobiographical songs about his early life in Texas, where he lived until he moved to Portland, Oregon, at 14.

‘Stained Glass Eyes’

A late, unreleased but fully realised song recorded during the sessions that produced the 30-plus tracks which would be pared down to produce ‘From A Basement On The Hill’ after his death. A delicate, understated waltz full of typical Smith imagery: “Rather spend the day blank as hell by the window looking out of my stained glass eyes.”


‘Living Will’

The flipside to the ‘Son Of Sam’ single, this was an unusually brisk power-pop romp, with Smith slinging out crunchy chords and high harmonies like the first Big Star album. It could even be described as fun, if it was written by anyone other than Smith, who seemed to add gravity to everything he sung.

‘I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out’

Appearing as a B-side to ‘Speed Trials’, from ‘Either/Or’, this breezy folk tune is one of Smith’s songs least weighed down with his usual worldly worries. A charming, refreshingly light-hearted piece, it serves as a showcase for his nimble guitar skills. Lyrically it mines the common Smith territory of misunderstanding and miscommunication (see also ‘I Can’t Answer You Anymore’).

‘Trouble’ (Cat Stevens cover)

“Trouble, oh trouble can’t you see you have made me a wreck now won’t you leave me in my misery?” Smith was fond of a cover, and he tried his hand at some odd choices (‘Supersonic’, ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’) alongside some less surprising ones (a whole slew of Beatles songs). But perhaps none fitted him as well as ‘Trouble’, an aching Cat Stevens tune which Smith really inhabits. He sounds thoroughly defeated, and his resigned delivery embodies all the despair of the lyric: “I don’t want no fight and I haven’t got a lot of time” which echoes his own lyric, “I’m tired of being down I got no fight” from Twilight. That this was allegedly one of the last songs he recorded before his death makes it all the more poignant.

‘Stickman’

At least two studio versions of this late-period song exist: an acoustic demo and a full band version fleshed out with some angelic harmonies that lend it a surreal, eerie edge. It’s a textbook example of Smith juxtaposing bitter words with a sweet melody: “I’m a stickman,” he sings. “I live with one dimension dead.” An unusual song, quite unlike anything else he recorded, it demonstrates the variety and ambition of the material he was coming up with at the time, and how Smith’s vision for ‘From A Basement On The Hill’ could well have been markedly different to what was actually released (producer David McConnell, who worked with Smith on the sessions, certainly thinks so). But, as with Jeff Buckley’s similarly unfinished ‘Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk’, we will forever be kept guessing.

‘I Can’t Answer You Anymore’

From a French promo EP ‘3 Titres Inedits’, released in 2000, this lurching waltz sounds like it could’ve been ripped from the Beatles’ ‘White Album’. The slow-burning bridge builds to a climax (“I did everything right for somebody that does everything wrong”) before Smith turns out some lovely George Harrison-esque guitar. Rougher than the lush sound he adopted for ‘Figure 8’, and easily surpassing most of the material on that album.

‘Cecilia / Amanda’

It’s a small wonder that Smith chose not to include this song, recorded in 1997, on any of his albums, but perhaps he thought the polished, almost ‘Abbey Road’-esque sound didn’t sit alongside the rest of his material. The obscure lyric finds Smith describing a character “Dancing on a permanent scratch in a place where lonely men pay to make their opposites match.” The vocal sweeps up an octave for the last verse as Smith sings “If you got a little baby now I don’t wanna see him round here no more.” Smith recorded a version of this song with different lyrics way back with his high school band, Stranger Than Fiction. ‘Cecilia / Amanda’, however, didn’t see light of day until it was made available by Kill Rock Stars when they reissued his debut album ‘Roman Candle’ in 2010.

‘No Confidence Man’

Part of a 1994 split single with Smith’s friend and fellow Portland musician, Pete Krebs, with whom Smith occasionally worked construction jobs in order to make ends meet. According to Krebs, the pair spent the recording session, conducted in the basement of Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss’s house, clowning around wearing masks. However, precious little of that sense of fun finds its way into the song, one of the most haunting, uncomfortable tracks he recorded, right up with ‘Needle In The Hay’. It features the same warm, intimate sound and whispered vocals of his early recordings and could slip seamlessly onto his second solo album (‘Elliott Smith’) which he would start work on shortly. The ending refrain, “You’re on it all the time”, appears to be an early example of the many ambiguous drug references that would populate his songs.

‘Abused’

On this song, a labyrinthine melody in the verse gives way to a simple single-word chorus, delivered at first in a whisper, then in a cathartic scream, possibly the loudest the feather-voiced singer ever registered on record. The version which has leaked on the internet could do with remixing, but is still perhaps Smith’s greatest unreleased song, dealing matter-of-factly with the abuse he occasionally alleged to have suffered in his childhood. “Why does everyone know I’ve been abused now? Didn’t want it to show.” There is some speculation that the unflinching lyric led Smith’s family to deliberately leave the song off ‘From A Basement On The Hill’, although this remains, like so much about that album, just conjecture.
http://mamacolive.com/thefly/feature/lists/1021229/hidden-treasures-elliott-smith-lost-classics/

Jimmy Webb Wednesday Part III

  

Roger Lloyd Pack RIP

Roger Lloyd Pack obituary
Stage and screen actor best known for his roles in Only Fools and Horses, The Vicar of Dibley and Harry Potter

Michael Coveney
The Guardian
Thursday 16 January 2014

The talented and idiosyncratic character actor Roger Lloyd Pack, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 69, achieved national recognition, and huge popularity, as Colin "Trigger" Ball, the lugubrious Peckham road sweeper in John Sullivan's brilliantly acted comedy series Only Fools and Horses. He appeared alongside David Jason's Del Boy and Nicholas Lyndhurst's "plonker" Rodney from 1981 for 10 years, with many a seasonal "special" for another decade.

This success cemented a career in which, up to that point, he had played important roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Almeida theatre in north London – he was a notably anguished Rosmer in Ibsen's Rosmersholm at the National in 1987, opposite Suzanne Bertish – without recognition any wider than usually appreciative reviews.

His enhanced status led to another hugely successful BBC television comedy series, The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007), written by Richard Curtis, and starring Dawn French as the ecclesiastical new broom, Geraldine, in a sleepy Oxfordshire parish. He played Owen Newitt, the local farmer with a suspiciously ambiguous relationship with his own animals, who lusted after the breezy cleric and was not averse to misinterpreting her exiguous signs of encouragement.

Lloyd Pack described Trigger as both a blessing and a curse, as it made him susceptible to cheerily sarcastic greeting on the streets. This was not false modesty. The actor lived a full life in his local communities in north London and Fakenham, Norfolk, and was highly visible in all sorts of political and charitable activities, where his good nature and deep feeling about issues such as schools, the ambulance service and integrated traffic policies engaged him fully.

On stage he was very good at looking as though he would not hurt a fly, but his last work, in Mark Rylance's all-male company at Shakespeare's Globe (and in the West End) in 2012 revealed other facets in his apparent equability: he played the "deep, revolving" Duke of Buckingham to Rylance's Richard III with sudden revelations of shark-like attack; and paired this with a definitive Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the dim-witted, lovelorn sidekick ("I was adored once, too") of Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.

Roger's father, the actor Charles Lloyd Pack, was proud of his working-class origins in Wapping, east London. His mother, Elizabeth Ulrike Pulay, was a Viennese Jewish refugee, worked as a travel agent and later founded a kindergarten because she disapproved of what was available. Roger was born in Islington, north London. After prep school he was packed off to Bedales, in Hampshire, trained at Rada in London, made his stage debut in The Shoemaker's Holiday by Thomas Dekker at the Theatre Royal, Northampton, and joined the RSC.

Lloyd Pack made his television debut in The Avengers in 1965, subsequently appearing in many established series in the 1970s such as Jason King, Crown Court and Softly Softly: Taskforce. Still, he seemed doomed to the periphery, even when he made a film debut in Guy Green's The Magus (1968), based on the John Fowles novel and starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn, and had a minor role in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1970), adapted by Harold Pinter from LP Hartley's novel and starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

In the mid-1970s he was a committed member of the Joint Stock Theatre Company, formed by William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark. Other notable theatre appearances included Alan Bennett's Kafka's Dick (1986), directed at the Royal Court by Richard Eyre, and, 10 years later, as Albert Parker, one of the blind-sided town stalwarts, in a delightful revival by Jude Kelly of JB Priestley's When We Are Married at the Chichester Festival theatre (and the West End), both of these productions also featuring his great friend Alison Steadman.

Actually, Roger's friends were legion. Not only was he immensely respected in the theatre, he was immensely popular, and his enthusiasms for cricket (he was a member of the MCC), Tottenham Hotspur and (until recently) the Labour party defined, to a large extent, his attitude to work. Another friend, Stephen Frears, directed him in the film Prick Up Your Ears (1987), written by Bennett, about the playwright Joe Orton (played by Gary Oldman) and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell.

Even quirkier, and darker, was Peter Greenaway's dream-like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), which contains an amazing roster of the finest British actors led by Helen Mirren, Alan Howard and Michael Gambon. In one of the many take-over casts of Yasmina Reza's Art in the West End, he appeared alongside Nigel Havers and Barry Foster in 2001. In that play, Havers and Foster were witnesses to his own character's off-stage marriage and Lloyd Pack, on a sudden whim, decided to cast his colleagues in those roles in real life when he married his partner of over 20 years, the poet and dramatist Jehane Markham (herself of some theatrical pedigree: daughter of the actor David Markham and sister of the actors Kika and Petra).

He then joined forces with the director Mike Newell, another friend and neighbour, on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), the fourth film in the series, in which Lloyd Pack was Barty Crouch, and pulled another big surprise in playing a pantomime dame, Sara the Cook, in Dick Whittington, written, just as surprisingly, by Mark Ravenhill, at the Barbican in the City of London. This was not a huge success, but Lloyd Pack's view was that the critics who delivered mixed notices (all of them) had momentarily forgotten that panto was for the kids.

He had a good deal of fun as John Lumic on the reappearance of Doctor Who on television in 2006, playing opposite David Tennant, and returned to the stage in a revival of Patrick Marber's gambling classic, Dealer's Choice, at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2007. He was much praised, too, for a growly old Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker at the Nuffield, Southampton, and a fierce and transported Prospero in The Tempest at the Edinburgh festival.

His last films included Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham (2010), about the strike at the Ford car plant in Essex in 1968, and a nice cameo as Inspector Mendel in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), starring Oldman. And some of his last television, in 2009-10, was The Old Guys, in which he and Clive Swift played two ageing has-beens, focusing their attentions on the hopeless cause of Jane Asher's disobliging neighbour.

Lloyd Pack was married first in 1967 to Sheila Ball, with whom he had a daughter, the actor Emily Lloyd, and from whom he was divorced in 1972. He and Jehane had three sons, Spencer, Hartley and Louis. They, and his brother, Christopher, a stage manager, all survive him.

• Roger Lloyd Pack, actor, born 8 February 1944; died 15 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jan/16/roger-lloyd-pack

Christopher Chataway RIP

Sir Christopher Chataway obituary
Athlete, Conservative minister and television journalist who found fame as part of the trio who broke the four-minute mile

Stephen Bates
The Guardian

Sunday 19 January 2014

Sir Christopher Chataway, who has died aged 82, was a Tory government minister, a pioneering television journalist and a successful businessman. But he will probably be best and longest remembered as a world-class runner and one of the trio, with his friends Roger Bannister and Christopher Brasher, who broke the four-minute-mile barrier for the first time in 1954.

That celebrity, as a British sporting hero at the dawn of what was optimistically seen then as the new Elizabethan age, was subsequently transferred to television, where he became the first newsreader to appear on screen for Independent Television. His political career encompassed periods as a moderate minister and as leader of the Inner London Education Authority, after which he entered business, latterly as chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority. He never lost his love of running however, competing in the Great North Run into his 80s.

Born in Chelsea, London, Chataway was brought up partly in the Sudan, where his father was a district commissioner, and he would become a doughty opponent of racial discrimination in a party where prejudice remained unrepentant. He would also be a long-time supporter of African development charities. Chataway was sent to Sherborne public school and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics and became president of the athletics club.

Christopher Chataway, right, congratulating Roger Bannister, centre, for the first sub-four minute mile, with Chris Brasher, left. Chataway acted as pacemaker in the 1954 event.

During his four-year international career as a runner, Chataway, nicknamed the Red Fox because of his ginger hair, was a fierce competitor in a Corinthian sporting tradition that seems impossibly amateur and dated now: unsponsored and part-time. "Our group was the last generation who were lucky enough just to be at the top of the sport while having it only as a recreation," he told the Washington Post 50 years later. "A very serious recreation to be sure – we worked hard at it, but we had other work as well." Chataway claimed he trained for no more than an hour a day, for six months a year. He smoked cigarettes then and, after he broke the world record for the 5,000m in October 1954, his Russian rivals were surprised to see him lighting a large cigar at the reception.

He took up competitive running at Oxford University in 1950, and within two years was in the 5,000m final of the Helsinki Olympics, where he kept up with athletes of the calibre of Emil Zátopek before stumbling on the final bend, even so picking himself up to finish fifth. Two years later he beat the Soviet champion Vladimir Kuts to set a world record of 13 minutes 51.6 seconds, a feat that won him the inaugural BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.

After two years working for Guinness – where his most lasting achievement was perhaps to suggest that the company might publish a book of records, edited by his athlete friends the McWhirter twins, Norris and Ross – he moved into television in 1955. At the newly established ITN his glamour and fame saw him briefly become a newsreader, chosen ahead of Robin Day to present its first bulletin, before joining the BBC's Panorama as a reporter for four years.

He was just the sort of dynamic young candidate the Conservative party of Harold Macmillan was looking for in the late 1950s, but rather than being parachuted into a safe parliamentary seat, Chataway chose to serve an apprenticeship representing North Lewisham on the London county council for three years – a career route that would be almost unimaginable now.

In 1959 he was elected MP for North Lewisham – a highly marginal constituency then but one he held for seven years until the Labour landslide of 1966 – and he would return to the Commons for the much safer seat of Chichester in a byelection three years later. In the later stages of the Macmillan government, he became a junior education minister and after his electoral defeat he served on the Inner London Education Authority (later to be abolished by Margaret Thatcher as a vehicle of socialist indoctrination). Chataway became the Ilea's leader during a spell when the Tories were in charge: as such he implemented, somewhat cautiously, the capital's drive to comprehensive schooling.

Following the Tories' unexpected general election victory in 1970, Edward Heath appointed Chataway to the privy council and offered him the still novel junior post of sports minister, but he declined this and opted instead to become minister of posts and telecommunications, where he was responsible for introducing commercial radio. Then he was promoted to become minister for industrial development in charge of regional aid.

As the government collapsed in the chaos of the three-day week, the tide ran out on Chataway's style of moderate, consensual Conservatism. He left parliament for good at the October 1974 election, to make money in the City, principally as managing director and then vice-chairman of Orion merchant bank, but also accumulating several other directorships.

In 1991 he became chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority and four years later was knighted for his services to aviation. He also became chairman of Groundwork, an environmental charity, treasurer, then chairman of ActionAid and treasurer of the National Campaign for Electoral Reform. He also supported a charity called Vicky's Water Project, set up in 2006 by his son Adam after his fiancee was killed in a road accident; it aimed to bring fresh water to villages in Ethiopia.

For many years Chataway served as president of the Commonwealth Games Council for England and for a time was chairman of UK Athletics. At the age of 79, preparing to take part in the Great North Run to raise money for the water project and aiming to beat 80% of the field, he mused to a journalist: "I sometimes think that running, which was a sort of tormentor in my youth, has returned to be a friendly codger in my old age."

Chataway is survived by his second wife, Carola Walker, whom he married in 1976, and their two sons; and by two sons and a daughter from his marriage to Anna Lett. His stepson, Charles Walker, is the Conservative MP for Broxbourne.

• Christopher John Chataway, athlete and politician, born 31 January 1931; died 19 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/19/sir-christopher-chataway

William Burroughs - The Naked Photographer

Brion Gysin, William S Burroughs, Danger, Paris, 1959

William S Burroughs: the naked photographer
He's a beat icon famed for being a junkie wild man. But a new exhibition shows a new, softer side to William S Burroughs

Tim Jonze
The Guardian

Thursday 16 January 2014

There are many things that spring to mind when you think of William Burroughs: the lifelong heroin addiction; the love of guns that led to him killing his second wife in a drunken game of William Tell; the wildly chaotic beat lifestyle that informed his literary style. One thing that you probably don't immediately think of is the best way to arrange chrysanthemums.

Yet a new exhibition devoted to the photography of Burroughs reveals several sides to the writer that are rarely included in the wildman mythology. Indeed, Taking Shots (you can probably see what they've done there) explores the idea of Burroughs not just as a photographer in his own right, but as a complex artist with ideas that are often extremely personal. Flowers is a case in point: a series of photographs in which a pink rose protrudes from a chrome Coca-Cola bottle. As the exhibition explains, there are personal reasons for Burroughs' choice of imagery: his mother, Laura Lee, was a renowned flower arranger who wrote a trio of books on the subject for Coca-Cola.

William S Burroughs, Untitled, 1975

You could view Burroughs's literary career as a reaction to this comfortable upbringing, but in actual fact it influenced his style: Burroughs saw a parallel between her arrangements and the way words and images could be arranged to provide new contexts and meanings. As he wrote to his artist friend Brion Gysin in 1961: "The collage is an art like flower arranging."

Burroughs and Brion Gysin

Gysin is famous for inventing, with Burroughs's help, the "cut-up" technique, used in the writer's masterpiece Naked Lunch. Yet Burroughs used this method for things other than writing. Running through these photographs, which span the 1950s to 70s, is a desire to chop and rearrange images – using collage, shadow, wordplay, magnification and reflection – in a quest to generate new meaning. Burroughs likened the effects of cut-up to time travel: by slicing through order and chronology, he was attempting to break the space-time continuum itself.

Midtown Manhattan, 1965, by William S Burroughs

Indeed, time and loss are consistent themes. Infinity Photographs involves a painstaking process of photographing, then rephotographing, his own library of photos in order to produce a single image that contained the entire collection (an ultimate act of hoarding that seems prescient of the digital age, not to mention at odds with someone who so often lost and discarded his own work).

William S Burroughs, Untitled, 1972

Perhaps the most moving sequence is What Was, What Isn't, which documents the aftermath of a passionate encounter with his lover John Brady. Ordered chronologically, it begins with a messed-up bed and then a closeup of a stain on the sheets, before moving on towards a fully made-up bed. It's intimate but also sad, exploring how moments of joy are transient and soon to be covered up by something more ordinary. The emptiness of the original image – nobody is present on the messy bed – reminds you that the scene no longer exists and tantalises you with the thought of what might have gone on there. No wonder Burroughs wished he could time travel.

William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Tangier, 1957

Beyond a small section dedicated to more conventional portraits of Burroughs's friends and collaborators (including an effortlessly cool shot of Jack Kerouac in Tangier around the time On the Road was published), Taking Shots is an exhibition that doesn't dwell on the writer's celebrity pull. For those who crave to have their Burroughs myths reaffirmed, however, there are traces of his punkier side. In true DIY style, his photographs were developed not in expensive studios but at drugstores – something unheard of for a photographer at the time. There's also an amusing sequence called Moka Bar, in which Burroughs plots a "multimedia attack" on London's first ever espresso bar, on Frith Street. Upset with their rude service and a "poisonous cheesecake", he set out to see if he could alter reality with photography: turning up every day for several weeks to document the cafe with photography and audio equipment, in a manner that allegedly drove customers away. The final photograph in the series implies he was victorious: Moka Bar has been replaced by Queens Snack Bar.

It underlines the fact that Burroughs saw photography not just as art but as a powerful and provocative tool. Indeed, 1960s underground chronicler Barry Miles believes he viewed the camera as a weapon – "one as powerful as the .38 he was habitually in possession of". You might think this is a million miles away from flower-arranging, but as Burroughs once said: "The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flowerpot from a high window."

• Taking Shot is at the Photographers' Gallery until 30 March. The associated book is published by Prestel (http://www.randomhouse.de/book/Taking-Shots-The-Photography-of-William-Burroughs/Patricia-Allmer/e445617.rhd?mid=1&pub=58500)

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/16/william-s-burroughs-photographs

http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/taking-shots-the-photography-of-william-s-burroughs

Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs from The Photographers' Gallery on Vimeo.

The Coen Brothers and Inside Llewyn Davis...

The Coen brothers on losers, likability and Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis - a melancholy movie about the early 60s New York folk scene - is another tale of failure from two of the world's most feted auteurs. Why are the Coens so drawn to losers and sceptics?

Catherine Shoard
The Guardian
Thursday 16 January 2014

For 30 years, Joel and Ethan Coen have been fond of failure. On trashing plans and turning hopes belly-up. On folks coming face to face with fate, then fate socking them round the chops and burying them alive in their own backyard.

Thirty years in which the Coens themselves have been endlessly, remorselessly successful: showered with respect and love and awards. The morning after the premiere of their new film, they seem close to untouchable. Cannes has always had a thing for woe-bros (see also the Dardennes) but right now the intensity of its crush makes you giddy.

Inside Llewyn Davis, though, is another sad epic of dud luck. A Jenga tower of hard knocks that takes its hero (a folkie in 1961 Greenwich Village), piles pain upon pain upon him, then hangs him out to dry. Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) starts out homeless and bereaved and goes downhill from there.

"It's more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser," says Ethan. "Who wants to make a movie about Elvis, y'know? Or – well, it'd be a very different kind of movie."

Llewyn is the man who isn't Elvis, or, more accurately, the man who wasn't Bob Dylan (he's loosely based on Dave Van Ronk). He has talent but not genius. He needs either a lucky break or to accept defeat. His tragedy is to keep trying, even as his hunger is eaten away.

It's not a movie nostalgic about the early days of an artist. "Oh no," says Ethan. "To not be starting out is fucking great. There's a lot of anxiety associated with that."

What about the worry of keeping it up? "No, not really, I can't think of a lot of downsides. No, things get a little easier."

Joel, kind behind dolefulness, isn't sure: "But they also get more like a job. When you're starting out the first time everything is new and stimulating. And that's the experience you're never going to recapture, so it's all downhill in a sense. You learn stuff, you mix it up, but it'll never not be a job."

And how does that make you feel?

"Well, not great. But I'm resigned to it."

Ethan chips in. "There would be something sad about being old and still having to do that thing. But then there's something sad about everything. So: what the fuck!"

Talking to the Coens can feel like speaking to one polite hybrid brother, and, at other times, like talking to a whole host of them. Ethan – who does the bulk of the scriptwriting – turns out to have a habit of conducting conversations, back and forth, within his own answers. At 56, he's the younger and reedier, voice amiably strained, posture slightly similar. Joel, 59, long and lugubrious, sounds like a clarinet and acts like a sax. They reply in sync, a united front. Even subconsciously, the presence of the other seems to police the hymn sheet.

Yet in some ways Inside Llewyn Davis feels like nothing so much as a Coen brothers film – a movie one of them might make after the other had died, or, at least, they'd been irreparably separated. Its aesthetic is drenched in melancholy; film stock so washed-out that it feels as it it's grieving. The story is haunted by a ghost – Llewyn's former musical partner, Mike, who threw himself off a bridge (we never learn why) – leaving our hero struggling to reinvent himself as a solo act.

But no, they say, it isn't a hymn to the creative collaboration. Yes, they liked the idea of a man who wasn't there, but that's not what they cared about. "It was just more baggage for him to schlep around," says Ethan.

"Yeah," says Joel, "we gave him a lot of crosses to bear."

Ethan continues: "The movie is about how everything's hard for him. Why is it hard? Is it something in him? Yeah, partly, certainly. At least partly. Wholly? Partly? I dunno."

What makes Llewyn likable is his precarious mix of self-belief and self-loathing; a whipping boy resigned to polishing other people's ammo. People forever tell him he's an asshole; he chimes in with agreement.

Says Ethan: "We wanted a nice dick. We wanted that tension: kind of is, kind of isn't, kind of is …" Joel: "He's the guy who blows his top or speaks out of turn or says something really dickish, but then, three minutes later thinks to himself: I'm a dick for doing that. Some dicks are just not self-aware."

It's curious, I say, that artists only have a free pass to behave that way once they're successful. They nod. Then I wonder if Llewyn's scepticism about the folk scene – with all its phoney artisan stylings – was meant to reflect that of a modern audience. His songs hark back to the reign of Henry VIII, but his gaze is almost 21st-century.

There's a pause and the temperature drops. Ethan bristles a bit.

"Through our eyes? Eeee-wy. Contemporary eyes? Our eyes? Is he? He has a kind of jaundiced eye, but in my mind that's just a kind of professional disdain for a lot of his colleagues, like a lot of real professionals have – do you know what I mean?"

Joel harmonises backup: "He has a very particular taste; he thinks that the pop aspect of that song they sing in the studios [a novelty record called Please Mr Kennedy] is a little bit inane. But I don't see that as being anachronistic to the period."

In fact, Llewyn has more genuine empathy with the lyrics he's singing than many of his peers. He is a bona fide hobo, water streaming from his shoes. And, unlike the Irish folk quartet who take to the stage at the Gaslight club in immaculate fishermen's jerseys and warble about trawling, Llewyn was actually in the merchant navy.

Such eager devotion to authenticity, says Ethan, "was a mark of that specific scene … and the seriousness and piousness that went with it. I'm sure they did consider themselves folklorists trying to preserve a tradition. More than that specifically, it's kind of a hallmark of the period – against convention, not wanting to sell out, not wanting to be bourgeois."

These days, he continues: "The whole authenticity versus compromise question just seems unasked. It isn't even an issue now, strangely."

And is that a good thing?

"I don't know. Is it?"

Probably not; it sounds bad.

"Maybe the question is: does it matter?"

Well, a bit. The reason the Coens suggest that some artists in that scene foundered while others became superstars is that they adhered rather than innovated. "Bob Dylan came along and did different things," says Joel. "He was vilified for it because he wasn't authentic, but in fact he did respect the folk traditions. He also felt free to do what he wanted with them."

The Coens kicked off their own career giving a bloody spin to crime noir, before larkily ruffling the feathers of a variety of genres. Lately, though, there has been a change. The comeuppance their characters face does not have to have a cause. Life is just like that.

Llewyn's closest cousin is the hero of A Serious Man, whose descent into the abyss ended only in abrupt apocalypse. That film was their most biblical in terms of sheer misery (it was based on the Book of Job), and their most autobiographical in terms of setting (Jewish households in 60s Minnesota). Inside Llewyn Davis may unfold in a more apparently glam location, a little further east, but it has the same DNA, the same doomy drive. The same focus on psychological catastrophe, rather than violent assault.

This, perhaps, is why the Coens needed to be pushing 60 before making it. It's a movie whose jaundice comes from its makers having spent three decades at the top of their trade, the scales well and truly fallen from their eyes. It romanticises neither the artist's vocation nor the realities of showbiz. In one scene near the start, Llewyn watches from the audience at the Gaslight as Jean (Carey Mulligan), with whom he's in love, performs a ballad with her husband, Jim (Justin Timberlake).

The club's manager joins him. "That Jean," he says, taking a seat. "I'd like to fuck her." He later explains how a lot of the punters have coughed up following the same impulse.

What the Coens care about is what star wattage actually amounts to, and who fixes the wiring behind it. Today, on top of the world, what animates them most is discussing early 60s venue loopholes – not needing a liquor licence for gigs on account of being able to pack the place with high-school kids; getting a cheaper cabaret licence so long as you don't have more than three performers on stage.

"And that's tailor-made for folk," says Joel, delighted. "And, well, this group works better because they've got this cute girl – that's his theory – and they all want to come in and fuck her. Right?" They both smile.

Outside, Cannes continues. Within, the Coens keep cooking up beautiful movies to undercut it.

Inside Llewyn Davis is released on 24 January

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/16/coen-brothers-inside-llewyn-davis-interview

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #235

Harry Nilsson - 20 Years...

When the World Lost a Touch of Schmilsson
Harry Nilsson died twenty years ago today.

Aaron Goldstein
15 January 2014

Before I woke up on the morning of January 15, 1994, I had the most vivid dream. In this dream, Harry Nilsson was standing right in front of me. His heart was melting and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

My own heart leapt into my throat when I learned later that day Nilsson had died of heart failure. My dream completely spooked me out.

I would be spooked out again 48 hours later when an earthquake hit Los Angeles that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. My Dad had arrived in L.A. the previous evening for a visit to his eldest sister. Fortunately, he was not the worse for wear. Interestingly, shortly after his arrival Dad asked my aunt, “When earthquakes occur what time of the day do they usually take place?” “About 6 a.m.,” my aunt replied. So sure enough when the earthquake happened Dad awoke and said, “Oh, it must be 6 a.m.” He then promptly went back to sleep.

While my father was in bed during the L.A. earthquake, Nilsson was being laid to rest. Apparently he wasn’t going gently. As Alyn Shipton wrote in his 2013 biography Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, “More than one mourner at the graveside joked that the earthquake and its aftershocks were the consequence of Nilsson getting to heaven and finding the bars closed.” To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, “When God turns a singer loose on the world, the earth trembles.”

All things considered, it is amazing that Nilsson lived for as long as he did given the copious amounts of cigarettes, cocaine, and cognac he consumed. As Eric Idle of Monty Python fame noted in the 2010 documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?), “He spent most of his life in pursuit of a good time and he caught it and it caught him in the end.”

Although the documentary and the biography as well as last year’s re-release of his entire RCA catalogue have helped Nilsson remain in the recesses of public consciousness, his inconspicuous consumption was such that he is best remembered by some as John Lennon’s drinking buddy who got him thrown out of the Troubadour after they heckled the Smothers Brothers in the midst of Lennon’s “Lost Weekend.” To the extent, Nilsson is remembered for his music it is for songs he didn’t write namely “Everybody’s Talkin” (Fred Neil) and “Without You” (Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger).

But the people who do remember Nilsson’s music know why the Beatles considered him their favorite artist. Songs like the autobiographical “1941,” the now politically incorrect “Ten Little Indians” and his interpretation of Beatles songs like “You Can’t Do That” and “She’s Leaving Home” from his Pandemonium Shadow Show album caught the ears of the Fab Four with his incisive lyrics, clever arrangements, and his three and a half octave range.)

Nilsson recorded some of the most original albums of the second half of the 20th century.Nilsson Sings Newman, The Point! and A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night were ahead of their time and remain so to this day. Recording an album of Randy Newman songs might not seem like a daring thing to do, but it was in 1970 when Newman was relatively unknown. Nilsson’s interpretation of songs like “Vine Street,” “I’ll Be Home,” and “Cowboy” with a little help from Newman on piano would give Newman’s recording career the kick start it needed.

On the surface, The Point! appears to be a children’s album. But that would miss the point. Nilsson tells the story about the land of Point where everyone and everything has a point; everyone that is except for a little boy named Oblio. Because of his condition, Oblio and his dog Arrow are banished to The Pointless Forest. Songs like “Me and My Arrow,” “Think About Your Troubles,” and “Life Line” help tell the story. The Point! was subsequently adapted into an animated film which over the years has been narrated by the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Ringo Starr, and Robin Thicke’s Dad.

Standards albums are, well, standard fare these days. But in 1973 the idea of a rock star recording an album of standards was square. Richard Perry, who had produced the hit albums Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson, wanted no part of a standards album. Derek Taylor, the man who introduced The Beatles to Nilsson, had no such reservations. Nilsson and Taylor recruited arranger Gordon Jenkins who had worked with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. The result was A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night which included songs such as “It Had to Be You,” Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?” and “As Time Goes By.”

I must confess that I didn’t always get Nilsson’s musical sensibilities. When I first heard A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night nearly 30 years ago, I was so put off by it that I demanded that my mother turn it off. She acquiesced. But as soon as I turned off I felt badly. I had acted like a teenaged brat and had struck a sour note.

In the years that followed, my ears opened and matured. Nilsson was an acquired taste, but I grew to appreciate the sheer variety of his music and I am glad to say I was able to appreciate his work while he was still alive and have shared that enthusiasm with others.

Occasionally, this enthusiasm has been reciprocated albeit sometimes reluctantly. The year after Nilsson’s death a tribute album titled For the Love of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson was released. Canadian folk singer Ron Sexsmith contributed with “Good Old Desk” to For the Love of Harry.

When I saw Sexsmith perform at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa back in 1999, he told the audience he would play requests. I immediately requested “Good Old Desk.” Sexsmith replied that it had to be song he wrote. But I wouldn’t let it go. Eventually, Sexsmith gave in and played the song. It soon became apparent why he was so reluctant to play “Good Old Desk.” He went blank in the middle of the second verse. Fortunately, I was there to save him when I shouted, “Such a comfort to know.” Sexsmith finished the song and there was much joy and merriment. So for several years after that night, every time I would see Ron Sexsmith in concert I would request “Good Old Desk.” He did not forget the lyrics again.

A few years back, the Toronto based indie band The Golden Dogs (which at one time included my younger brother Micah) played “Me and My Arrow” when I attended a couple of their gigs in Boston. I also remember a young musician dedicating “Mournin’ Glory Story” to me during an open mike night at Club Passim in Cambridge. Had I not embraced the music of Nilsson then none of these stories would have come to pass and I would be the poorer for it.

Twenty years have now passed since the earth trembled and lost of a touch of Schmilsson. I will continue to do my part to turn Harry Nilsson’s music loose on the world.

http://spectator.org/articles/57423/when-world-lost-touch-schmilsson

Jimmy Webb Wednesday Part II

Old Photographs of New York

Constructing Brooklyn Bridge, 1914


Constructing 28th Street, 1930


Third Avenue Elevated Train


View from the George Washington Bridge, 1936


"Naxi Army Now 75 Miles From Paris." Corner of Sixth Avenue and 40th Street, 1941



42nd Street, circa 1890


Delancey Street, 1908


Grand Central Station, 1937


Construction of the Manhattan Bridge, 1908


Murder victim syuffed in a fuel drum, Brooklyn, 1918


Astoria Public Pool, 1940


Lower East Side during the 1930s

http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/gallery/home.shtml

Dave Van Ronk - The Mayor of MacDougal Street

Inside Llewyn Davis: the book behind the Coen brothers film
Bob Dylan called him his first New York muse, yet Dave Van Ronk never gained the recognition he deserved. Inside Llewyn Davis draws on his story

Richard Williams
The Guardian

Friday 10 January 2014

Poor Dave Van Ronk. He was in the right place – the Greenwich Village coffee-house scene – at the right time, doing all the right things, singing the right songs to the right people. But he just didn't have the magic. And he didn't have the luck, either.

Sometime in the 1950s, when he was a young man trying to become a folk singer, he had learned a traditional song called "House of the Rising Sun" from a pre-war field recording on which it was sung without accompaniment by a Kentucky miner's teenage daughter. Van Ronk changed it around a bit, keeping the tune and most of the words, but adding a distinctive chord sequence that made an already plaintive lament even more arresting. As his reputation grew, it became the highlight of his stage act. "It was Dave's song," a witness to the era recalled. "He owned it."

One night in 1962, a younger singer approached him with a request. "Hey, Dave,"Bob Dylan said, "would it be OK for me to record your version of 'House of the Rising Sun'?" Dylan had just signed a recording contract with a major company, while Van Ronk was preparing his own debut for a small folk label.

"Jeez, Bobby," he replied, "I'm going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can't it wait until your next album?"

"Uh-oh," Dylan said, immediately arousing Van Ronk's suspicions.

"What exactly do you mean, 'Uh-oh'?"

"Well," an embarrassed Dylan said, "I've already recorded it."

So he had, and the song became a key track on his first album, which reached only a limited audience that year but helped lay the foundations of his career. "House of the Rising Sun" was its most immediately striking track; on both sides of the Atlantic, aspiring folk singers even younger than Dylan avidly learned the song from his recording.

For Van Ronk there was no credit, and there were certainly no royalties. There was only the measure of grim satisfaction that came three years later when the Animals copied Dylan's recording and took "House of the Rising Sun" to No 1 in the US and UK pop charts, crediting the arrangement to their organist, Alan Price. Now Dylan himself could no longer perform the song, because people would assume he had stolen it from the British group.

Van Ronk told the story in his autobiography, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Published in 2005, three years after his death at the age of 65, it describes the glory days of the Village, and is full of amusing character studies and pungent opinions. It also forms the platform on which the film directors Joel and Ethan Coen constructed their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, a portrait of a New York singer during the period in which folk was taking over from jazz as the music of the hip intelligentsia.

The Coens' focus is sharp. The time is early 1961 and the streets of the Village are covered with snow. Folk singers who can't afford winter coats perform in starkly furnished coffee houses to audiences of college students swiftly discovering alternatives to conventional Eisenhower-era ideas of progress towards adulthood. This is a world in which idealism battles against careerism, and, in the case of Llewyn Davis, a veneer of one barely conceals a core of the other.

Most of those seeing the film's title for the first time will think of Dylan, who branded his new identity with a Welsh poet's name. Those scenes set in the snow-covered Village streets are a direct translation of the cover photograph from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the 1963 album with which the singer's career began to take off. And, rather naughtily, the cinema trailer is set to a soundtrack of Dylan's "Farewell".

But Llewyn Davis is not Bob Dylan. He is not Dave Van Ronk, either, despite the borrowing of mood, texture and many salient incidents fromThe Mayor of MacDougal Street. But he does occupy a place that history reserved for Van Ronk, as the man who preceded Bob Dylan and was destined to find himself completely overshadowed.

At 20, Dylan was only four years younger than Van Ronk when he arrived in New York in January 1961, but it was a significant four years: one was a pre-war baby, the other a baby boomer. Different sensibilities, different expectations. Dylan had come from Minnesota and was intent on escaping the comfortable existence offered by a stable, relatively prosperous family and remaking his life, starting with the invention of a colourful backstory for the benefit of his new friends and new audiences.

Van Ronk had actually lived the sort of life Dylan made up. Born in Brooklyn to parents of Swedish origin who separated soon after his birth, he never knew his father and "never felt a twitch of curiosity about him". His mother, a stenographer, shared the job of bringing him up with a succession of aunts, one of whom had been a rum-runner for the gangster Legs Diamond and managed a speakeasy during prohibition. "She loved jazz," Van Ronk writes, "and in that house the radio was always playing: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie …"

Later in childhood he would spend time with a grandfather who had been a hotel pianist and could play "The Maple Leaf Rag". His Brooklyn-Irish grandmother was a great singer, and taught him songs that would become staples of the folk repertoire. (It was to one of her favourites, "The Chimes of Trinity", that Dylan would pay particular attention: "He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into 'Chimes of Freedom'. Her version was better.")

By the time Van Ronk got to high school he had decided to become a musician, and increasingly regular visits from the truant officer put an end to his formal education at the age of 15. By then he had acquired a ukulele and learned his first blues, "St James Infirmary", from a copy ofThe Fireside Book of Folk Songs kept on another aunt's piano. The first guitar came in a schoolyard swap, and Van Ronk devoted himself to mastering the instrument, a task made more demanding by having been forced in childhood to "correct" his natural left-handedness. Lessons came from a neighbour who had played guitar with Jean Goldkette's band, and had known Bix Beiderbecke.

In his teens when he made his first visit to Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was expecting to find "half-timbered Tudor cottages with mullioned windows and thatched roofs, inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters and nymphomanics". He was shocked, as he emerged from the West 4th Street subway station, to discover something that looked disconcertingly like Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, the Village became his natural home, a place of kindred musical, political and social spirits where he could drop by the White Horse Tavern to hear Dylan Thomas read his poems, spend afternoons at the Five Spot listening to Thelonious Monk rehearsing with John Coltrane, or make friends with surviving exponents of early jazz, whose wisdom he absorbed as he began playing with Dixieland bands in and around New York. In between times there were spells as a merchant seaman and road trips across America.

The switch from jazz hound to folknik came after Van Ronk had acquired the habit of spending Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park, listening to kids with banjos and guitars singing songs they had learned at "progressive" summer camps. One of them taught him the art of fingerpicking. For Van Ronk, it was "a change that defied the general rule that things evolve from the simple to the more complex.

"In this case I made a move that was technically retrogressive, but it was about the only thing I could do to survive … much as I loved traditional jazz, I was sick to death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing 'Yes, Sir, That's My Baby'."

But elements of his background clung to his new identity, and even after he embraced the folk repertoire – soaking up the material collected on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, sitting at the feet of Mississippi John Hurt and the Rev Gary Davis – his own performances featured a broader swath of material than most of his contemporaries could muster, played with a greater musical sophistication. "The joke in the early 1960s," he recalled, "was that I was the only folk singer in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord." This turned into a disadvantage when Dylan appeared, with an approach so tightly focused that it made the older man's eclecticism sound dated.

The folk world also suited Van Ronk's desire for political engagement. He joined the Trotskyite Young Socialist League and the International Workers of the World, and his apartment on Waverly Place became, as Suze Rotolo, then Dylan's girlfriend, recorded in her own memoir, A Freewheelin' Time, "the living room of a new generation of bohemians".

Other Village haunts of the folk crowd included the Cafe Bizarre, the Kettle of Fish, Gerde's Folk City, Izzy Young's Folklore Centre and the Gaslight, a coffee house in a Bleecker Street basement where the musicians – including Van Ronk and Dylan – were not paid but passed a collecting basket around the audience. In Rotolo's words, Van Ronk became its "gatekeeper": it was his job "to have the tourists stay in their seats for a few sets on a quiet night, or hustle them in and out quickly in order to take in as much money as possible on weekends." The Coens create a somewhat sanitised version of the Gaslight's ambience, with its small audience of rapt young listeners and highly variable cast of performers. ("Even in the dark," Van Ronk recalled, "the Gaslight was pretty horrible.")

As Llewyn Davis, a regular at the Coens' version of the club, Oscar Isaac sings, plays and wears a beard and battered clothes with commendable authenticity, blending aspects of several personalities, including Dylan's selfishness and ambition and Van Ronk's fate as a man who would never quite make it. An unsuccessful audition for a Chicago club owner is taken directly from Van Ronk's encounter with Albert Grossman, later to become Dylan's manager. The book is also the source of an amusing scene in which Davis tries to prise royalties from the tight-fisted owner of the small label on which his album has appeared.

A year or so after Dylan had "gone electric" and achieved pop success, Van Ronk briefly tried to follow suit with a band called the Hudson Dusters. No luck there, either. But he continued to perform and record, giving guitar lessons and encouragement to younger performers, until cancer surgery was followed by a fatal heart attack.

Unlike Dylan, Van Ronk never backed away from the political beliefs that he had espoused during the years when protest songs were spilling out of every Village coffee house. Interviewed for No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's filmed portrait of Dylan's early years, he said of the man who usurped his position as the Village's leading troubadour: "We thought of him as hopelessly politically naive – but in retrospect he might have been more sophisticated than we were."

The scenes of Davis performing – and a fleeting glimpse of a younger rival – are a reminder of how that sophistication, or whatever it was, enabled Dylan to rise above and so swiftly distance himself from a parochial scene, his youthful intensity transforming traditional material in a way that Van Ronk – however impeccable his intentions and the quality of his performance – could never begin to match. Inside Llewyn Davis is not one man's story, but it proceeds from the pain of that historic disappointment.

• Inside Llewyn Davis is released on 24 January. Down in Washington Square, a collection of Van Ronk's recordings from 1958 to 2001 is on the Smithsonian Folkways label.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/inside-llewyn-davis-dave-van-ronk

The Anthony van Dyck Show...

Why Anthony van Dyck was Britain's first art star
The National Portrait Gallery is trying to drum up millions to buy a Van Dyck self-portrait. So why is this Belgian artist so important to British art history?

Jonathan Jones

the guardian.com

Monday 25 November 2013

£12.5m for a self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck? That's what the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Fund are trying to raise in an appeal launched today. Is it worth it?

Absolutely. I think this is one of the most worthwhile campaigns in years to "save" a work of art for the nation. Van Dyck's Self-Portrait would make a spectacular addition to the National Portrait Gallery. Quite frankly, it could make the place. It would give a gallery stuffed with pictures of primarily historical interest a true artistic masterpiece, by the man from Antwerp who gave birth to British art.

Van Dyck was fascinated by the English face. His paintings are full of pale faces, with quirky physiognomies and flaccid skin – the faces of the English upper class in the reign of Charles I. You can see how intrigued he was by this northern island just by looking at his portrait of the art collector George Gage doing business in Italy. Van Dyck shows this elegant art lover as a quintessential Englishman abroad, his long white hands and face looking raw and even sickly in the light of Rome.

Charles I ruled over an art-loving court and Van Dyck, a painter who could and did work all over Europe, came to Britain to get paid for portraits. His images of Stuart ladies and gentlemen have immense panache and cavalier style. They are at once real and down to earth – those pasty faces – yet magnificent in their silken garments and rich settings.

When British art took off in the 18th century, it was Van Dyck that artists like Gainsborough looked back to as the father of British painting –Gainsborough's painting The Blue Boy is his tribute to his art hero.

The painting the National Portrait Gallery wants to buy is the last known self-portrait by Van Dyck. He was very conscious of his talent – this portrait shows it. He stands sideways to the mirror he is looking at while he paints, and turns his head lightly towards it in a nonchalant, aristocratic pose.

Yet his world was falling apart. This was painted in 1640 to 1641 as Britain descended into a civil war that would leave many of Van Dyck's subjects and patrons, including Charles I, dead.

Meanwhile, Van Dyck himself had died by December 1641. The king said – as praise – that he spent all his money living "more like a prince than a painter".

Van Dyck was Britain's first art star. For once, a campaign to save a painting is not just hype. This gifted Flemish student of the English face belongs in this country, at the National Portrait Gallery, among all those people whose bad skin and bad teeth and cockeyed smiles he had such a good eye for.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/nov/25/van-dyck-national-portrait-gallery

National Portrait Gallery launches campaign to keep Van Dyck in UK
Poet Andrew Motion and artist Gillian Wearing back NPG's fundraising effort to buy £12.5m self-portrait of Flemish painter

Mark Brown
theguardian.com
Monday 25 November 2013

A £12.5m fundraising campaign to buy for the nation a work that ranks as one of the finest of all self-portraits has been launched by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The Van Dyck portrait, painted a year before he died in 1641, will leave the UK for an anonymous private collection unless the money is raised.

The largest fundraising campaign for a work of art the gallery has undertaken is a reflection of the work's importance, said the NPG director Sandy Nairne. "Yes it's a large sum but we are not daunted. We feel this is absolutely the right thing to do."

He said the self-portrait was up there with the best and no other painter had had such a dramatic impact on British portraiture as Anthony van Dyck. "He decisively turned it away from the stiff formal approach of Tudor and Jacobean painting developing a distinctive fluid, painterly style that was to dominate portraiture well into the 20th century," Nairne said.

This self-portrait shows the artist brimming with confidence and is all the more poignant given his death, at 42, so soon after he painted it.

The poet Sir Andrew Motion said it was a "beautiful and extraordinary" painting that should belong to everybody. "It is a picture that belongs to all of us because it is about something that all of us feel and worry about," he said.

The artist Gillian Wearing is also supporting the campaign. She said: "This is a fantastic and evocative Van Dyck self-portrait painting that would enrich our whole culture if it can be made available to the public."

A total of £1.2m has already been raised including a grant of £500,000 from the charity the Art Fund and £700,000 from the NPG's own portrait fund.

But the clock is ticking. The arts minister Ed Vaizey has placed on an export bar on the painting which gives the NPG three months to demonstrate a serious ability to raise the funds. If it does then the timescale will be extended.

It is a painting that has rarely been seen in public, part of the earl of Jersey's family collection for nearly 400 years. The NPG tried to buy it when it came up for auction in 2009 and it was instead bought by the London dealer Philip Mould and the US dealer Alfred Bader for £8.3m. They now have a £12.5m foreign buyer – hence the reason for the export bar.

The work, now on display at the NPG, is one of only three self-portraits Van Dyck painted while in Britain. One is in the Prado museum in Madrid and the other is owned by the duke of Westminster.

Van Dyck may have been Flemish but he was at the centre of English court life, invited to the country by his greatest patron, Charles I, in 1632. The artist was rewarded with a knighthood and the title of principal painter and made London his home until his death.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/25/national-portrait-gallery-campaign-keep-van-dyck-uk

Reading Barry MacSweeney - review by Terry Kelly

Poet’s life is brought to book


Terry Kelly
Shields Gazette

03 January 2014

A BOOK about the life and work of a former Shields Gazette journalist is out now.

Barry MacSweeney, once deputy editor at the Gazette, died at the age of 51 in 2000 after a long battle with alcoholism.

Despite working as a journalist all his life in the North East and elsewhere in the UK, MacSweeney is better known as a poet.

Reading Barry MacSweeney, published by Northumberland-based Bloodaxe Books, examines the work of the Newcastle-born poet, including collections such as The Book of Demons and Pearl.

His first book, The Boy From the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, published by Hutchinson in 1968, sold thousands of copies, but as a 19-year-old, MacSweeney was put forward for the Oxford chair of poetry, a publicity stunt which backfired.

MacSweeney afterwards developed a distaste for the literary establishment, and most of his subsequent books were published by non-mainstream presses.

But his later poetry won a Paul Hamlyn Award and glowing reviews in leading UK journals, and an archive dedicated to his writing was created at Newcastle University in 2001.

Leading academics and friends contribute to Reading Barry MacSweeney, which looks at different aspects of his poetry, plus his personal life and love of rock music.

Editor Paul Batchelor writes: “A diverse range of writers – academics, poets, journalists and friends of MacSweeney – have been brought together to offer perspectives on this most protean, prolific and contradictory of poets.”

Contributors include his former Gazette colleague Terry Kelly.

Reading Barry MacSweeney is published by Bloodaxe Books, priced at £12.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/what-s-on/poet-s-life-is-brought-to-book-1-6348290

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #234

/