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

Out and About with Prefab Sprout #8

Paddy near his County Durham home. Taken in 2000?

Madness

Saturday Boys

Six Sexsmiths for a Saturday Morning...

Ron Sexsmith

Ron Sexsmith: Love Shines

47-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith is a songwriter's songwriter admired by Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Feist, Daniel Lanois, all of whom contribute tellingly to this intimate portrait of a writer approaching middle-age and still striving for his commercial breakthrough.

Although his songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Michael Buble and Rod Stewart, Sexsmith has never found mainstream fame. In Douglas Arrowsmith's touching full-length film, some eight years in the making, we trace Sexsmith's life and career and join him in the studio as he enlists big-league producer Bob Rock (Metallica etc) and together they struggle with Sexsmith's diffidence and ambition to record an album that can help him move forward in his career and even 'cross over'.

This is the story of a wonderfully gifted songwriter and singer and his long and often painful struggle not only for recognition but also to make some proper money.

Available on BBC iPlayer until 12:59AM Mon, 14 Mar 2011

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/z2nby/

Gordon Lightfoot in Concert

A classic concert by Gordon Lightfoot from 1972, accompanied by Red Shea and Richard Haynes. They perform songs including Summer Side of Life, Saturday Clothes, That's What You Get For Loving Me, Affair on 8th Avenue, If I Could Read Your Mind, Steel Rail Blues, Ten Degrees and Getting Colder, Early Morning Rain, Me and Bobby McGee, Minstrel of the Dawn and Canadian Pacific Trilogy.

On BBC iPLayer until 3:14AM Mon, 14 Mar 2011

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/z2nc2/

Honoré Daumier

Jane Russell RIP

Jane Russell: 'An immense, impervious beauty'
David Thomson salutes the work of Jane Russell, star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who has died age 89

David Thomson
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 1 March 2011

For decades, wherever she went, Jane Russell was the subject of dirty jokes. She knew this in advance, and she continued to meet fate and fortune with good humour and the kind of sassy grin that keeps hope alive in the guys who tell the smutty stories. But she must have known how in Hollywood innuendo can kill you as easily as the official diseases. After all, Russell had worked with one of the great victims of the dirty joke. In Howard Hawks's gorgeous and very witty Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she had done immaculate routines with Marilyn Monroe.

You can still feel Jane's sisterly care for Marilyn on screen, and Gentlemen was one of Marilyn's happier outings. Russell had opportunities to see how Marilyn might get to be a wreck one day, yet she gave her the confidence and the cues to stride through some dazzling numbers.

Marilyn didn't last, but Jane got to be 89, dying at her California home on Monday. She hadn't done any serious screen work for a long time, and in her whole career didn't make that many movies.

There are kids who don't know who she was. But for anyone over 50 the loss of Jane is more touching than the list of her credits. That shot of her reclining in the hay is the money shot from The Outlaw, her blouse artfully off the shoulder and sustained by … well, there is a question that might have fascinated Isaac Newton and the string theorists of another day.

It was in 1940, when Jane was 19, out of Bemidji in Minnesota. She had worked in a chiropodist's office; she had modelled for photography studios; and she had studied acting. Howard Hughes, among his many interests, had it in mind to make a western in which Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett and Doc Holliday all get together. Now, in the history of the west, these three were never in the same room. But in case scholars were upset, Hughes resolved to put a lovely girl in the room (or the barn) with them, and since he had in mind not a wide-open-space western but an interior picture, with small and cramped rooms, he had the idea to find an actress who made any room feel crowded. What he wanted was a substantial, super-fortress bust, and the sexual attitude to go with it. Or, maybe he just went moony over Jane.

He hired Jules Furthman to do the screenplay and Howard Hawks to direct. And in the first instance it was Hawks who hired Russell – he liked her looks and her humour – and Jack Buetel, their Billy, and the love interest. They started to shoot in late 1940, and noticed a tall, thin man on the set just watching. This was Hughes. A few weeks later, Hawks was removed, he went away to do Sergeant York (a big hit for him) and after a hiatus, the picture resumed with Hughes himself directing.

What really happened during those years is beyond reliable discovery now, and no one really wants the facts any more.

The legend prevails, and it is that as Hughes watched Jane he became more fascinated and inched his way towards one of America's greatest studies in adoration of the breasts. Hughes wanted her to look great and natural and sexier than anyone had a right to be in 1941.

He designed a brassiere; he was a great aircraft designer, as you may know, and he loved all things that flew free. The picture dragged on then ran into great troubles with the Code [the industry censorship guidelines of the time]. It was released in February, 1943, then withdrawn. It came out again, briefly in 1946, and then again in 1950. It was the subject of lurid publicity campaigns – "How would you like to tussle with Russell?"

Hughes filmed her over and over again and he ended up paying her $1,000 a week for life. It's fairly clear that long after everyone else was bored to death, notably Jane, Hughes was not. Were they an item? Of course they were an item – and so they are in the obituaries – with a helpless, crazed and oddly innocent man beholding an immense, impervious beauty. If anything had actually happened it would have ruined the dream. Looking can be so much more naive, indecent and powerful than any real action. And in the early 1940s, the movies were all about looking and desiring and not getting there. We'll never know. But the fact that we wonder suggests to me a gaze that never knew how to be realised.

What we can be sure of is that Jane was never swayed or altered by the nonsense. She was wry, down-to-earth and fun, without pretension or heightened prospects. She married her sweetheart, the football player Bob Waterfield, in 1943 and they seem to have been happy (though his thoughts might make a paranoid novel).

If you want to appreciate Jane Russell, of course you have to see The Outlaw and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but don't ever forget the two films she made with Bob Hope – The Paleface and Son of Paleface. Hope had the lewd wit that knew he was with a national monument while being scared of heights.

She went on and on. Waterfield died. She re-married and the next husband was dead after three months. In the 70s and 80s, she did some TV commercials for bras meant for "us fuller-figure gals".

But here's the truth: she was 38 inches, which is OK but it's not Mount Rushmore. The rest was in our minds, and that's where the movies lived.

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-gentlemen-prefer-blondes

See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-outlaw-gentlemen?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/jane-russell-obituary?intcmp=239

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York: -

Love To Find*
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)
Behind That Locked Door
Up On Cripple Creek

*new song written yesterday afternoon

For those who may be interested tomorrow night's performance will be in the Big Jug, Durham

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #96