FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #151

The birthplace of the embryonic FNB is no more...

Bert Weedon RIP

Farewell Bert Weedon, the man who helped make stars of John Lennon and Paul McCartney   
The guitarist's Play In A Day manual guided many an aspiring rock star to greatness.

By Neil McCormick

21 Apr 2012

I never used Bert Weedon’s Play In A Day book, which perhaps explains why it took me 15 years to get to grips with the guitar, and why my playing remains so rudimentary. The list of rock stars who have declared that the guide written by Weedon – who died yesterday – gave them the first grasp of their instrument is a testament to its practical genius. It is one of the sacred tomes of the birth of British rock.

The teenage John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all started off with Play In A Day, so Weedon could claim to be a key figure in the genesis of the Beatles. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Steve Hillage and Brian May were all acolytes. “I wouldn’t have felt the urge to press on without the tips and encouragement Bert’s book gives you,” Eric Clapton has admitted. “I’ve never met a player of any consequence that doesn’t say the same thing.”

It is a statement, however, that rather betrays his age. To later generations who could watch guitar heroes on video and freeze-frame chord changes, Weedon’s once revolutionary approach to the instrument is already ancient history.

Yet Weedon is a legend to that first rock and roll generation because he provided something vital to youngsters caught up in a storm of new music: immediacy. The title of his book expresses the urgency that kids felt at being confronted with the intense, primal energy of the new wave of guitar music from across the Atlantic, blowing away the horn-driven virtuosity of jazz and swing, stamping all over the solemn orchestral propriety of 1950s pop.

Faced with an electric explosion at the heart of youth culture, what teen gallant could contemplate studying for years to master an instrument? These kids wanted to form bands, play gigs, pick up girls, make a noise. Bert promised to teach you how to Play In A Day, and that’s about all the time they felt they had.

On their first session with Bert’s manual, McCartney and Harrison learnt the chords D and A together. After that, there was no stopping them.

What Weedon’s book really did was cut through the preciousness that almost inevitably grows up around any musical or artistic discipline. A guitar has only six strings, and with just three chords you can play almost every blues and rock and roll song ever written. Whether they will sound any good is another matter, but at least they’ll sound like something.

“It’s such a tactile instrument, it moulds into your personality,” says Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. “Even in people who have been playing for a short time, you can recognise their character in their playing. Watch kids play, you’ll see their attitude coming through that guitar.”

Despite its title, however, Weedon’s book is not quite the crash course it promises, which is, perhaps, why it remains a favourite of the kind of guitarists willing to put in hours a day practising their scales, with Mark Knopfler and Sting among its latterday advocates. “Bert’s approach was very much of his day,” according to Neville Marten, editor of Guitar Techniques magazine. “He presumed intelligence on the part of his reader and assumed that he or she was prepared to take a journey that might take some time to complete. It was based on reading notation and on learning 'band’ style guitar, which might involve playing rhythm or taking single-line solos. It was about learning the art of being a musician.

“Today’s learner is drawn to the internet. On YouTube, they can see players showing them how to break down this song, that riff or solo. They very rarely think about notation and there seems little intent on making people better 'musicians’.”

In fact, that change was already well under way by the late Sixties, with the popularity of rock music partly to blame. For one thing, you could see more and more guitarists playing right in front of you. My father learnt to play by following a TV series, frequently blaming his inability to master a piece on the fact that he had missed episodes two and five.

In a straw poll of musical contemporaries, I couldn’t find a single guitarist who had even perused Weedon’s book – despite its two million sales – although everyone knew it by reputation. “It was already a bit arcane by the Seventies,” says session guitarist Reid Savage. “We were learning by copying Hendrix and Page, nobody wanted to read an old book by a guy called Bert promising to teach you how to play like Hank Marvin.”

Mind you, Jimi Hendrix famously commented that “I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.” Maybe it’s time to dust Weedon’s manual down.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/9216765/Farewell-Bert-Weedon-the-man-who-helped-make-stars-of-John-Lennon-and-Paul-McCartney.html

Levon Helm RIP

Levon Helm
Levon Helm, who has died aged 71, was the percussionist with the 1960s group The Band, and drummed for Bob Dylan during the folk singer’s troubled transition to electrification; with his distinctive raw white Southern soul style, Helm also brought one of the great blue-collar voices of America to bear on many classic rock numbers.

20 Apr 2012

Regarded as one of rock’s greatest drumming polymaths — he also played mandolin, rhythm guitar and bass — Helm’s warm, dry “thuddy tom-tom” beat, underpinned The Band’s new, rootsy sound. With their stories of medicine shows and moonshine, many of his songs recalled his Deep South upbringing, notably The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek.

When Dylan decided to change his sound in the mid-1960s to “go electric”, it was to Helm and his group — then playing as Levon and The Hawks — that he turned for help. But during their first tour together, Dylan’s die-hard folk fans resisted. Slow-clapping, walkouts and constant booing so distressed Helm, surveying a scene that resembled a war-zone from “the best seat in the house” on his drummer’s stool, that this sheer level of nightly abuse caused him temporarily to drop out out in late 1965.

Meanwhile Dylan and the rest of the band came off the road, took up residence in Woodstock, New York, rented a large, pink house where they wrote and rehearsed new material, and renamed themselves The Band, the name by which they were known to the locals.

Helm rejoined them when Capitol Records awarded The Band a recording contract. Their first album, Music from Big Pink (1968) , made them household names and in the autumn of 1969 they appeared on television on the Ed Sullivan Show. Six further albums followed, including their masterpiece, called simply The Band, and one live recording in 1972, Rock of Ages.

Although The Band became closely identified with Dylan, they only backed him on one official studio album, Planet Waves (1974). The group’s blend of musical forms from gospel, mountain music, blues, R’n’B, rockabilly to contemporary rock came to define what is now called Americana.

Later in his career, Helm pursued a solo career, and three of his albums won Grammy award. Of the first, Dirt Farmer, one British critic remarked on “the thrill of his farm boy’s holler”, pointing out that Helm’s currency “isn’t perfection but raw, honest virility”.

Mark Lavon Helm was born on May 26 1940 in Elaine, Arkansas, the son of a cotton farmer and amateur musician. The family enjoyed listening to travelling music shows, and took the boy to see his first live show, Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, when he was six. “This really tattooed my brain,” he recalled in his autobiography, This Wheel’s On Fire (1993). “I’ve never forgotten it.”

 Levon’s father bought him his first guitar at the age of nine. When not in school or at work on the farm, the boy could be found at KFFA’s broadcasting studio in Helena, Arkansas, watching Sonny Boy Williamson broadcast his radio show, King Biscuit Time.

With his younger sister Linda playing a string bass, Levon played harmonica and guitar in a double act called “Lavon and Linda”, which won many talent contests on the local club circuit.

After watching an undiscovered Elvis Presley perform, Levon formed his own high school rock band called The Jungle Bush Beaters. When he was 17 he was invited by Conway Twitty to share the stage with him and his Rock Housers. Helm had met Twitty when “Lavon and Linda” opened for him at an earlier show.

In 1957 he met Ronnie Hawkins, a charismatic Canadian rockabilly entertainer and front-man, who was looking for a drummer to tour Canada and recruited Helm. When Ronnie and the Hawks signed to Roulette Records, they had two hits, Forty Days and Mary Lou, sold 750,000 copies and appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

Another four Canadian musicians, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson, joined in the early 1960s. When the five decided to break from Hawkins, they called themselves “Levon and the Hawks”.

After the Dylan debacle, Helm built a barn and studio at Woodstock, which became his permanent base. This became a regular rendezvous for rock royalty, with two of the Beatles, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, joining Helm and Dylan for turkey sandwiches and beer at Thanksgiving in November 1968. In his diary the Beatles roadie, Mal Evans, recorded them meeting with Helm, and noted that he also played “great guitar”.

The Band held a farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976, featuring guests including Ronnie Hawkins, Dr John, Muddy Waters, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. The event, called The Last Waltz, was recorded as a triple album and filmed by Martin Scorsese.

Helm released his debut solo album, The RCO All-Stars, in 1977. He also embarked on a modest acting career, making his first film appearance playing Loretta Lynn’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), followed by a role in The Right Stuff (1983).

In 1998 Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer, but continued to play the drums, mandolin and harmonica, often performing with his daughter, Amy Helm, also a vocalist and instrumentalist.

In January 2004 he held the first of his Midnight Ramble Sessions, a series of live performances at his studio in Woodstock, named for the travelling minstrel shows of his youth.

He recorded two albums of The Midnight Ramble Sessions, followed in 2007 by Dirt Farmer, his first solo studio album for 25 years, featuring music from his childhood and songs handed down from his parents. “The dirt on which America was built is still running through this man’s fingers,” noted one British reviewer. 

Dirt Farmer won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in 2008 and earned Helm a place in Rolling Stone’s The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2011 Sir Elton John and David Furnish named their son Zachary Levon in Helm’s honour.

Helm was also recognised by the Recording Academy with a lifetime achievement award as an original member of The Band and was named Artist of the Year by the Americana Music Association.

In 2010 Helm’s album Electric Dirt won a second Grammy for Best Americana Album. In February this year, his live CD and DVD Ramble at the Ryman won him a third consecutive Grammy, also in the Americana best album category.

Levon Helm married Sandra Dodd in 1981. She and their daughter survive him.

Levon Helm, born May 26, 1940, died April 19 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9216288/Levon-Helm.html

Bob Dylan: April 19, 2012

In response to Levon’s passing

He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I'm going to miss him, as I'm sure a whole lot of others will too.

http://www.bobdylan.com/us/news/response-levon%E2%80%99s-passing

Watch and learn:

Loudon Wainwright III - Older Than My Old Man Now

AMERICAN singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III turns his attention to the Grim Reaper in his latest generous musical offering.

This 15-track exploration of mortality takes an unflinching look at how time will be called on all our lives - sooner or later.

Now this would be grim listening indeed, without Wainwright's trademark wit and humour.

Joined by most of his immediate musical family, including son and daughter, Rufus and Martha, plus at least one ex-wife, Wainwright hits the mark with stand-out tracks All in a Family, The Days That We Die, In C, Somebody Else, Over the Hill - written with his late former wife, Kate McGarrigle - and the self-explanatory title track.

Blessed with poignant prose introductions by Wainwright's late father, this quality album's apparently gloomy subject matter is ultimately life-affirming.

8/10.
TERRY KELLY

Loudon Wainwright III
Older Than My Old Man Now
(Proper Records)

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York: -

(with Ron)
Bye Bye Love
Words
The Price Of Love
Time Is On My Side
The Singer Not The Song

A strange night in some ways, very quiet at 9:15 but heaving later. Some interesting turns inc. a young dude who attempted Mr. Tambourine Man and almost made it.

"The slave of certain appetites..."

Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargeant
Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde: how a portrait of evil was toned down
Robert Louis Stevenson deleted "certain appetites" to make his creation Mr Hyde less sinister, an edited draft of his novella to be displayed at the British Library reveals

Dalya Alberge
The Observer
Sunday 15 April 2012

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of English literature's most famous stories: the enduring classic of a man's transformation into a monster, first published in 1886. Now the manuscript for the novella is to go on show, revealing its transformation as Stevenson toned down his more explicit ideas.

The most complete draft of the novella – Stevenson burned a first draft because his wife was so alarmed by it – is covered with corrections. Reading between its chaotic lines shows how Stevenson deleted details such as the sexual connotations of Jekyll becoming "in secret the slave of certain appetites".

It is one of two historic manuscripts whose loans have been secured from the US by the British Library. The other is an instalment of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which the author himself rescued from the wreckage of a train crash. The manuscripts will get pride of place at the library in Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, the UK's biggest literary exhibition this summer.

Stevenson's novella explores the psychopathology of the split personality in Dr Jekyll, whose development of a potion to separate good from evil transforms him into the murderous Mr Hyde.

It was written at feverish speed after Stevenson woke from a dream. He produced a draft that he showed to his wife who, it is thought, prompted him to burn it, though he brought it back to life, rewriting it twice in six weeks.

The 1885 manuscript which will go to the British Library reflects his obsessiveness. As ideas flowed, so did his pen, ignoring occasional grammatical and spelling mistakes as he struggled to get it all down.

Jamie Andrews, the exhibition's co-curator, said: "This is an incredibly interesting active draft. There's a sense of it stemming from a dream, the depths of the self. So the idea of this primal eruption of text is certainly there in the story, but then to publish something Stevenson really had to work it through to make it into that final version." Andrews believes that explicit references to Hyde's sexual "vices" might have concerned Stevenson's wife because of his reputation as a writer of children's novels.Andrews said of this draft: "It's a lot darker than the final version. This is the great psychological novel about a divided city and a divided self." He added that, because Stevenson was hard up, it was suggested that he should write a chilling shocker, as they called them.

Commenting on Stevenson's softening of his original ideas, Andrews said that sometimes individual words, lines or paragraphs were deleted. "There's a sense of bits being too sensitive to be published." For example, Stevenson deleted the following line: "From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites." He replaced it with: "And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition… hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public."

One of the exhibition themes examines how British landscapes permeate great literary works. Marking Dickens's bicentenary are pages from Our Mutual Friend – its first public show in the UK. Tanya Kirk, exhibition co-curator, said Dickens presented the Thames as a menacingly gothic place sustaining life but bringing death.

The pages to be displayed at the British Library come from the instalment saved from an 1865 rail crash by Dickens, who was hailed a hero for his role in rescuing the injured. The carriage in which Dickens was travelling through Kent with his mistress was derailed and suspended over a collapsed bridge. He risked his life in clambering back into the wreckage for passengers and the manuscript, its pages spattered with stains.

Both manuscripts are being lent by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. It purchased the Stevenson manuscript in 1909 for $1,500 and the Dickens in 1944 for $17,000.

The exhibition, from 11 May to 25 September, will celebrate a superlative collection of literary works at the British Library spanning more than 1,000 years by writers from Chaucer to Hanif Kureishi. Exhibits will include letters penned by John Keats, Charlotte Brontë and Ted Hughes never before displayed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/15/jekyll-hyde-stevenson-explicit-manuscript?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/writingbritain/index.html

Last night's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

One More Time
How Can We Say Goodbye?
Till There Was You

An eclectic mix of musicians and punters. A very entertaining evening all told, including a seldom heard Scoundrels song.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #150

Rufus Wainwright - Out of the Game...

Hugo Williams interviewed

Published: 12 April, 2012
by ANDREW JOHNSON

Hugo Williams looks surprisingly well, considering he needs a kidney transplant. The winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry and the TS Eliot prize is sitting on a well-worn sofa in his home in Canonbury having just got in from dialysis at St Pancras Hospital.

His wife, the artist and former tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane, is there watching over him.

His skin, which belies his 70 years, is full of colour and he looks lean and trim.

But, he warns, I shouldn’t be fooled.

“It’s very funny,” he says. “If you lose a lot of weight people tend to say you look well. I think it’s because they’re secretly horrified. They think: ‘God he looks thin, and ill and old and unwell – better say he looks well’.”

He laughs, before adding: “I have a fairly youthful skin, so for 70 I’m doing well. But I have lost two stone, so for me I look ghastly.”

Williams first learned he had a failing kidney three years ago and describes talking about it as a sort of out-of-body experience.

“It’s a shock, [a feeling that] this can’t be me,” he says.

“There are all kinds of reactions you go through. One is a slight sense of shame, another is depression and a shrinking of the world. People who have been through it before say you just have to get a grip really.

“It’s interesting why one feels shame,” he adds. “I suppose it’s because one is no longer quite the physical specimen one was before. And also feeling ashamed at being so self-obsessed and self-pitying.”

There are moments he forgets he’s ill but these are inevitably followed by the awful recollection.

A bit like waking from a pleasant dream. “In a sense the better time you have, the more of a shock it is to remember what’s really going on in your life,” he says.

“Sick people tend not to be with well people very much because they remind them about being ill too much. Whereas if you’re with sick people you can say, well, I’m not as sick as him.”

The psychologist he was referred to – “a young chap who was doing his best to comfort this old geezer” – had one bit of wisdom, he adds, which was to keep the dialysis separate from the rest of his life.

This is why he troops down to St Pancras three times a week armed with a laptop, CDs and Akira Kurosawa and Curb Your Enthusiasm DVDs.

“It’s five hours there, and four hours on the needle. It takes an hour to get there, so the whole thing is about seven hours. But it is containable in that it’s three times a week. I’ve got my mornings and my weekends.”

Williams was born into a theatrical family, and has the kind of easy charm and sense of humour that public schools – he went to Eton – tend to provide to some of their more sensitive pupils.

His sense of humour is still intact, and he explains that his wife Hermine is also a part of the treatment for the comfort she provides.

He is now on the waiting list for a kidney and looking for a donor. Hermine isn’t compatible but she may be able to join a kidney exchange programme.

In the meantime, there’s a likelihood of three years of painful dialysis.

That’s the average wait, he explains, although it’s not a list you move steadily up.

The computer throws in other factors, such as age, and whether or not you have young children.

“But would I do it myself?,” he wonders of donating an organ. “The dialysis is going all right – sometimes it’s not too painful putting the needles in.”

The laptop is one of the concessions to modern technology he has had to make – he still uses a manual typewriter. Another is buying a mobile phone so the hospital can call should a kidney becomes available.

“Otherwise they’ll offer it to someone else,” he says.

Being a poet, however, has proved to be a “sav­iour” he adds, because to write means going to a mental state where he is neither ill nor well.

He is thinking of writing a long poem about his condition and has a first line, inspired by St Pancras Cemetery, the grounds of the Old Church in St Pancras Road where he kills a bit of time before going for dialysis next door.

“The first line would be: ‘This is where the Great Western railway cuts through the cemetery of St Pancras Old Church’ to momentarily treat the cutting through of the cemetery as the news of this cutting through of my life.

“Poetry reminds you who you really are and what you do,” he says.

“I’ve never thought of poetry as being self-expression. I’ve always thought of it as a making job, making something that will last. It’s much more of a search than an expression – like trying to find out something you didn’t know. I start working with phrases and see what they can be made to say, rather than making them say things.

“So it’s a collaboration with words. It sounds pretentious. I’m always going on about this and hating myself at the same time. You need lots of peace and sunshine and music and coffee and all that. I was listening to a programme about Chopin the other morning and he was deeply crippled toward the end of his life and when started to play his body relaxed and became recognisably the way it had been before.

http://www.camdennewjournal.com/feature-andrew-johnson-speaks-award-winning-poet-hugo-williams

Susan Hill - writing The Woman in Black...

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
I set out to write a ghost story in the classic 19th-century tradition'

Susan Hill
guardian.co.uk
Friday 17 February 2012

When I am emailed by pupils studying The Woman in Black for GCSE and A-level, many refer to it as "gothic", and indeed it forms part of a university course in gothic literature. But although the book has something in common with the pure gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is really only a distant cousin of the genre. It is a ghost story – not a horror story, not a thriller – and not a gothic novel; although the terms are often used very loosely, they are not by any means the same thing.

I set out to write a ghost story in the classic 19th-century tradition, a full-length one. There have never been many, writers perhaps having felt the form would not stretch successfully. By the time I began mine, in the 1980s, full-length ghost stories seemed to have died out altogether. I read and studied the Jameses, Henry and MR, and Dickens, and I also had beside me the "bible" – Night Visitors by Julia Briggs (still the best study of the form).

The list of ingredients included atmosphere, a ghost, a haunted house and other places, and weather. A footnote to "ghost" was a) of a human being; and b) with a purpose. There are dozens of little books of "true" ghost stories, usually sorted by geographical location, but almost without exception the ghosts have no purpose and so the stories are ultimately unsatisfying. A headless horseman rides by, a phantom coach clatters down a dark road, a veiled lady drifts up a staircase and through a wall, a pale and misty child's face is glimpsed at a window – and that is all. The ghosts are there and they apparently go through the same motions again and again. It is ultimately uninteresting. There has to be more to fiction than that. There also has to be more than an easy manipulation of the reader's superficial emotions – unless making someone jump out of their skin is the writer's only aim. Not that trying to induce a delicious thrill of fear is bad – it is another form of entertainment, and what is wrong with being an entertainer? Dickens certainly considered himself to be one.

I knew my ghost story, like all my fiction, had to have a serious point and it was this that must sustain the length and underpin the sense of place, the creation of atmosphere and the events. But moral points come out of character, and I kept asking myself the question: "Why does a ghost return to this life?" Perhaps to give information that they have withheld in life – the whereabouts of a will, say, or the identity of a murderer, or to warn. But my ghost returns to exact revenge and it is the nature of revenge that it is never satisfied; and so, loss and grief lead the woman in black on, trying to exact revenge for her child's accidental death by causing those of others. She cannot let go, and her revenge is an evil that continues to be visited on Crythin Gifford. The grief and craving for revenge must be released or she cannot find resolution and peace on either side of the grave. So here was my central character. Why a "woman in black"? I must have had Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in mind but it was more than 25 years since I had read his novel. Otherwise, I have no clear idea where she came from.

Thomas Hardy believed that places are as important as people in fiction, because people are formed by the landscapes in which they are born and bred, though that is probably less true now than it was in his day, when, especially in rural areas, they tended to remain rooted in one place. But a harsh climate and a hard landscape toughen people. A low-lying, dank place tends to be lowering to the spirits, and we all know that constant wind drives people mad. I think the pathetic fallacy is less fallacious than is often supposed.

I don't know where the plot of the book came from, partly because I never do know, partly because it is too long ago. But I remember one thing. In the early 1970s I worked by the sea, behind which were the marshes. Walking there at dusk, the light making the dykes gleam and the low wind rattle the reeds, was when I began to think seriously about ghosts.

It seemed natural to adopt a rather formal style and that came along with the point of view. I had to write in the first person. The narrator, Arthur Kipps, is the living key to the book, just as the woman in black is the dead one.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/17/woman-in-black-book-club-susan-hill?INTCMP=SRCH

See also http://www.susan-hill.com/

Carl Wilson...

Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell at The Sage Gateshead

By TERRY KELLY
Published on Thursday 12 April 2012 09:11

NEWCASTLE-based folk duo Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell have bags of charm.

Delivering original and traditional material with equal delicacy, the pair - who met while studying folk and traditional music at Newcastle University - quickly won over an attentive audience which included family members of both performers, in the intimate setting of The Sage’s Hall 2.

There were several highlights, including Lucy’s haunting unaccompanied version of Peggy Gordon - a traditional song long associated with the late and great Luke Kelly, of The Dubliners - plus Green Leaved Trees and Down in Adairsville.

But as good as the duo are, I started to have nagging doubts about how they will develop, once their youthful charm wears off.

Kearney is an interesting, offbeat singer and songwriter, but his little-boy-lost stage persona could have a short shelf life.

Farrell, meanwhile, has a voice and a personality which could develop in several musical directions.

It will be intriguing to see what lies in store for this talented, quirky duo, who only released their debut album in October.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/lifestyle/entertainment/music/live-review-jonny-kearney-and-lucy-farrell-hall-2-the-sage-gateshead-1-4439730#

The Keel Row Bookshop...

See http://www.keelrowbookshop.co.uk/

Thanks to the great http://oldnovocastrian.blogspot.co.uk/

A face in the crowd...

Last night's setlist

At The habit, York (with Ron): -

World Without Love
All My Loving
Words
Walk Right Back

A packed Habit for once. Some great turns including a young dude who gave amazingly accurate renditions of Peggy-O and The Times They Are A-Changin' complete with harmonica.

Paul and Terry: The Early Years...

Life is a Carnival - Winterland (San Francisco) Nov 25, 1976...

Albeit a fairly dark one...

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #149

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters - review by Terry Kelly

Wandering Star

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, edited by Michael Hofmann, Granta,
512pp, £25 (hardback)

Joseph Roth’s life possessed all the predestined sadness of a classic blues song. An anxious, peripatetic spirit, Roth spent most of his short and constantly harassed existence living out of two or three suitcases, in Hopperesque hotels, pursuing money, drink, brief love affairs – and the journalistic commissions to keep his precarious life afloat. Some of the other constants revealed in poet and translator Michael Hofmann’s stark and frequently dispiriting volume of Roth’s letters were an almost mystical yearning after his lost Austro-Hungarian ‘fatherland’ and his prescient warnings about the rise of Nazi Germany. Often demonstrating a flinty indifference to the feelings of others, particularly in the area of sexual relations, these letters also show there was much to dislike about the scrounging, dyspeptic and self-contradictory author of The Radetzky March. But there was also something almost existentially heroic about the self-destructive Roth as he hurtled towards an early death, in Paris, at the age of forty-four. Often equipped with little more than despair, his chaotic life unravelled.

Roth was born into a Jewish family on 2 September 1894 in Brody, East Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Ukraine). His home life was relatively comfortable. However, he fabricated a much more wayward father-figure and a starker early existence, revealing an early taste for myth-making and a lifelong distaste for domesticity and bourgeois ideas of cleanliness and etiquette. (‘I shit on furniture. I hate houses,’ he declares in one of his final letters.) Following spells at the universities of Lemberg (Lviv) and Vienna, Roth was initially a pacifist but volunteered for the army in 1917 and later exaggerated much of his military career. Roth was a walking contradiction. While he was a cultural nostalgist with a hunger for ‘my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary’, he later offered his services as a kind of political conduit between the Left and the Catholics, to help smash Nazism. He married Friedl Reichler in Vienna in 1922, but the illstarred union was dogged by his wife’s descent into schizophrenia. The sadness that was Roth’s marriage seemed to set the tone for the downward spiral of a life that nonetheless saw him zigzag across mainland Europe, taking in Austria, Germany, France and Russia in a single year. Despite his alcoholism, battles with newspaper editors and supporting a range of dependants, Roth somehow managed to produce a novel or two a year, plus a wealth of short fiction and outstanding journalism.

Hofmann introduces his landmark epistolary volume – arguably the nearest we are going to get to a definitive Roth biography – with a string of negatives, telling the reader what the book does not contain. So: no Roth letters to his parents, wife, his lovers, most of his best friends or the companions of his final years; nothing, even, especially confessional or aesthetic, nor anything laying out the bare bones of Roth’s writing life. Instead, Hofmann argues the letters allow us to trace Roth’s route from Frankfurt to Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Amsterdam. This, he suggests, gives the reader a sense of a ‘westward trajectory’ or ‘swarming movement’ from the writer’s birthplace in the old Habsburg Empire to ‘the locus of exile, disappointment, trepidation, punishment’ that was, finally, Paris in the late 1930s. Hofmann notes that even the masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was written on the move, in no fewer than eleven locations.

Hofmann has proved an indefatigable champion of Roth’s work through a series of translations. At the same time he is known for his dislike of Roth’s well-heeled literary friend, Stefan Zweig, whom he slams as a ‘pedagogically minded patron’. Hofmann’s frequently voiced antipathy towards Zweig seems harsh given that Roth spent much of his time scrounging from the ever-obliging novelist, whom was often repaid with scorn for his financial and personal kindness. While funding his drink habit, however, any cash Roth managed to hang on to also supported several friends and his poor wife Friedl, whose worsening mental state may have precipitated Roth’s alcoholism. It is hard not to feel sympathy for a man who described his fate in almost Kafkaesque terms: ‘I am wriggling in a hundred nets.’

While Roth remained a restless, unhappy spirit, he seemed to find temporary spiritual respite in Paris. Within the generally gloomy context of these letters, it is unusual to encounter Roth’s lyrical rhapsody to the French capital in a letter to fellow journalist, Benno Reifenberg, on 16 May 1925:

I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European. Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos. Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors.

It was as if Roth had found in France a place and a culture to fill the spiritual and imaginative void left by the loss of his beloved Austro-Hungarian ‘fatherland’. In an interview about Roth at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on 17 February 2012, Hofmann said: ‘In his mind, I think he married his provenance, his origin; he married Jewish Galicia with the Catholic south of France, with Catholic Marseille.’ And it was also in the French capital, while working as the Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), that Roth seemed to turn definitively against Germany. Hofmann describes Roth’s distasteful comment that Germany had ‘the ugliest prostitutes’ as matching ‘the sarcastic horror paintings of Otto Dix’. Roth’s squabbles with FZ from 1925 onwards seem to signal his growing disenchantment with both Germany and his own life: 'The whole FZ looks to me like a microcosm of Germany. My loathing for it is growing all the time ... the world looks like a German bakery, sugar-sweet and sickening.’ As Hofmann notes at one point in his illuminating running commentary, ‘Roth was ... a great and passionate hater’.

Fortunately, however, Roth’s professional squabbles with Germany and its newspaper editors eventually segued into a much more prescient analysis of the country’s drift towards Nazism. By 1934 he tells Zweig that he is prepared to act as a ‘bridge’ between the ‘Leftists’ and the Catholics in any potential plans to unite forces against Hitler. Frequently given to rhetorical flourishes, Roth loftily declares that ‘what I want to do is protect Europe and humanity, both from the Nazis and from the Hitler Zionists’. He accuses Zweig of political obtuseness, warning his long-suffering literary friend-cum-creditor in August 1935 that ‘the urge to humiliate Jews didn’t begin yesterday or today; it’s been part of the platform of the Third Reich from the very start ... The founding principle, so to speak, of National Socialism, is none other than contempt for the Jewish race!’

A bundle of human contradictions, Roth was a constant cadger, on the run from despair, debt, unhappy love affairs and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. But he was also a gregarious man and a sensualist. Writing from Russia in October 1926 he feels the absence of female company like a wound: ‘No women. Hence the isolation. Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand.’ As his wife grows distant through mental illness, Roth pursues several love affairs, partly to reawaken his numbed senses. Falling for a twenty year-old girl in Antibes in early 1931, he calls his actions ‘cretinous stupidity’, but is in thrall to Eros, confessing that ‘for the first time since my wife’s illness, I feel alive again’. Roth’s erotically charged letter to Zweig about the affair also reveals an almost clinical distance from the sexual act: ‘Three Catholic hymens before the real one, a shouter, and I practice the art of deflowering whilst feeling little pleasure.’ It is almost as if Roth has developed a second or third skin to protect him from the frazzled chaos of his life. He signs off that his wife ‘is doing badly’ before offering this callous coda: ‘I may be a sonofabitch, but defloration in a literary setting, that’s worth something to me.’

Although Michael Hofmann harbours a seemingly personal dislike of Zweig, it is Roth’s old friend who provides one of the most revealing and heartfelt passages in the book. In fact, the friendship between the two writers – however fraught and fractious – is arguably the great love affair revealed in these letters. Zweig writes to his combative, imperious and often ungrateful old friend in the autumn of 1937. Their relationship is apparently disintegrating into sourness and protracted silences, yet he is both eloquently forgiving of Roth’s attempts to ‘diminish’ him in the eyes of others and perceptive about the source of Roth’s despair:

Push me away all you like, it won’t help you! Roth, friend, I know how hard things are for you, and that’s reason enough for me to love you all the more, and when you’re angry and irritable and full of buried resentments against me, then all I feel is that life is torturing you, and that you’re lashing out, out of some correct instinct, perhaps against the onlyperson who wouldn’t be offended thereby, who in spite of everything and everyone will remain true to you ...

Ironically, in Roth’s last extant letter to Zweig, dated 10 October 1938, he exhorts his friend not to submit to pessimism, telling him: ‘You are a defeatist.’

One of Roth’s novels is called Flight Without End. In terms of his restless life, it is an instructive title. A tragic hero, Roth was perhaps only really at home within his own imaginative life. Writing was a respite from the pell-mell of his existence, as the shadows gathered around him and Europe in Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’. In Hofmann, Roth has found a literary champion of the first order who has raised his profile and reputation by translating ten of his books over the last twenty-four years. The poet’s footnotes (which, Hofmann told his Bristol audience, became ‘addictive’) represent a telling critique of both a wandering spirit of the 1930s and the
art of writing itself.

TERRY KELLY

http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Book Marx...

Groucho Lives! (In Two Places)

By DICK CAVETT
March 30, 2012

For the Groucho Marx fans of this column who continue to plead for more, the information contained herein, if new to you, might just make your day.

There are two very different books out, both of which are musts to grace the bookshelves of the Groucho addict: Robert Bader’s “Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales: Selected Writings of Groucho Marx” and Steve Stoliar’s “Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House.”

Those who may have read these books when they first appeared need not feel left out. Both are updated and expanded editions. Both contain abundant new stuff.

Woody Allen has said that of the greats, Groucho had the richest number of gifts. He could sing, dance and act, and beyond those fairly common gifts, when you add the distinctive voice, faultless instinct for wording, genius wit, hilarious physical movement, rich supply of expressions and physical “takes” — and the list goes on — it arguably adds up to the most supremely gifted comedian of our time.

And there’s one thing more. He could write. A born scribe. And many a Groucho fan is unaware of the degree to which this was true.

This problem has been put to bed by Bader’s book. (Full disclosure: I know Rob from the masterful job he did putting together the “Dick Cavett Show” DVD sets.) Bader, too, can write, and in a fresh, humorous, scholarly and entertaining way, with shrewd analysis and observations about the products of Groucho’s pen and typewriter.

If your reaction to this is, “So what did he write?” this book holds the answer. In his early years, and aside from his books, Groucho’s written pieces appeared widely, including in the beloved magazine College Humor and, yes, The New Yorker. Bader has found and retrieved priceless specimens of Groucho’s impressively large output from all over, some of the pieces early enough to have been bylined “Julius H. Marx,” Groucho’s vrai nom. Open the book to any page and try not to laugh.

Prime among the delights for me are speeches Groucho gave at colleges and elsewhere through the years. As you read them, it’s almost like having him present. So tone-perfect are these pieces that you can’t help hearing the famous voice and its witty inflections in your mind’s ear. It’s a wonder.

A Marx Brothers fanatic virtually from birth, Bader is an intrepid researcher and gets stuff nobody’s got. For another, coming book, he can be found one day in the Lincoln Center Library or, on another, in local newspaper files in, say, Red Oak, Iowa, sleuthing out yellowing, local Marx Brothers clippings, reviews and material from their vaudeville days.

Groucho preferred the company of writers to that of actors. In Los Angeles, when he took me to the Hillcrest Country Club for lunch, he steered us past a table of beckoning movie faces to the writers’ table, where I met fabled “names” from a lifetime of reading screen credits. He told me once, “I’d rather be known as an author and remembered for my writing than for all the rest of it.” (He told others that, too, of course.) He was immensely proud of having been a houseguest of his pen pal T. S. Eliot. The only problem, he said, was that Eliot kept addressing Groucho’s then-wife, Eden, as “Mrs. Groucho.”

Groucho was a well-read, well-educated man (the “self-” method) and the only 9th-grade dropout I ever met who had read all of Iris Murdoch’s novels. I think he was quietly delighted when I, with my (envied) Yale degree, had to confess to having read not one.

Steve Stoliar, while still college-age, was part of the successful campaign to force the 1974 re-release of “Animal Crackers,” the Marxes’ 1930 film, then inexplicably in mothballs and in danger of being lost, deteriorated and forgotten. This brought him to Groucho’s attention. Sufficiently impressed by Steve’s knowledge of the world of Marx, Groucho offered him a job and he “woke up” inside his hero’s house, transformed from mere fan into archivist, general amanuensis and companion to his personal god. A dream that he hadn’t dared to dream had come true. How many of us can say that?

“Raised Eyebrows” is an invigorating read. A gulping Stoliar got used to opening the front door to a who’s who of the arts and letters: S. J. Perelman, Bob Hope, Steve Allen, Morrie Ryskind, Jack Lemmon, George Burns and many more cherished friends.

Guests, after dinner, were treated to a cabaret with their host by the piano singing, with perfect pitch, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” “Father’s Day,” “Show Me a Rose,” “Omaha, Nebraska (In the Foothills of Tennessee)” and other favorites, often with Marvin Hamlisch volunteering at the keyboard.

“Raised Eyebrows” could easily have been written as a delightful memoir only. It is that, but much more. There’s no way Stoliar could have avoided dealing with the rhino in the room: the enigmatic, half-mad Erin Fleming, the young woman who came into Groucho’s life at a crucial time and who became, in a complex and bizarre way, his Lady Macbeth. As you’ll see, she was equally adept at doing wondrous things for Groucho, and appalling ones.

Depending on whom you ask, she was either the best or worst thing that could have happened to the aging star, who provided her a pass into a world of fame and the big time that she could never have otherwise achieved. In my view, she was both: the worst and the best. Young and pretty and vivacious when Groucho met her, Erin and her ambition worked — some would say wormed — their way into his home and she became, in effect, his life-manager. Her story as told by Stoliar is the stuff of one swell hair-raising novel or movie.

On the plus side, she got Groucho up and out of near despair at a time when he was feeling forgotten. (A woman who lived near Groucho described how, in a deeply lonely period of his life following a divorce, he would walk his dog in front of his neighbors’ homes, hoping, she said, to be invited in for a drink, a visit or a meal. That gets to me.)

Another paradox about Groucho was the contrast between his claim to be shocked by the dirty talk and material of the 1960s and ’70s and his own propensity for the hilarious, filthy remark.

“I don’t belong in this age,” he said once on my show, where he also discussed the Broadway musical “Hair” and its then-shocking nudity. “I was going to go buy a ticket,” Groucho said, “but I went back to my hotel room, took off my clothes, looked at myself in the mirror and saved eight dollars.” (He’d have saved a lot more today.) Would-be comedy writers: Note the perfect ad-lib wording, syllable count and cadence.

Bader did some bowdlerizing of Groucho’s stuff in the original edition of his book, and has kicked himself for it. In the interval he decided to restore everything, feeling it was not his duty to deny the reader Groucho unadulterated. (Congratulate me for not using the phrase “letting it all hang out.”)

Did I mention that both books are updated from previous versions and that both contain enough rich new stuff to delight the heart and mind of the earlier reader? Stoliar’s update on Erin Fleming re-visits the old question about whether she eventually attained the state of genuine madness.

Long-memoried viewers of Ted Koppell’s “Nightline,” on the very night the verdict in the crazy “Erin Fleming vs. Bank of America” trial came down against her (there is much to Google on this case), would not need a degree in psychiatry to diagnose what appeared to be someone certifiably unhinged. Imagine the lack of charm and appeal it would take to cause a jury to decide against a young woman, in favor of so revered an institution as a bank! At one point, news-coverage viewers of the trial got to see Fleming point across the courtroom and shriek at a Bank of America attorney, “That man murdered Groucho Marx!”

Stoliar’s update section also includes some fascinating information about Erin’s mystery-enshrouded demise.

The truth is, Marx devotees will need to get both books. And if you’re not a devotee, get them anyway. Fix a drink, light a fire (I won’t add “only if you have a fireplace”), put one book on each side of you and dip alternately. There are so many worse ways you could spend your time.

Trying as usual to think of how to close this off, a problem Groucho never had in his letters, I remembered an example. He once ended:

Well, Richard (I’d say “Dick” but my secretary is a spinster), I’m running out of things to say. And they should be running out of me.
Anyway, good-bye ’til hell freezes over. And if you’ve read this far, there’s something wrong with you.
Groucho

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/groucho-lives-in-two-places/

Crazy Love...

Upside Looking Down...

You're Telling Me...

Jackie Blue...

Love's Melody...

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress...

Knockin' Lost John...

Mary Skeffington...

Adrienne Rich RIP

Adrienne Rich, Influential Feminist Poet, Dies at 82

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: March 28, 2012

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, a doctor and assimilated Jew, was an authority on tuberculosis who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, a Christian, was a pianist and composer who, cleaving to social norms of the day, forsook her career to marry and have children. Adrienne was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library — all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

When Ms. Rich was in her last year at Radcliffe (she received a bachelor’s degree in English there in 1951), W. H. Auden chose her first collection, “A Change of World,” for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series, a signal honor. Released in 1951, the book, with its sober mien, dutiful meter and scrupulous rhymes, was praised by reviewers for its impeccable command of form.

She had learned the lessons of her father’s library well, or so it seemed. For even in this volume Ms. Rich had begun, with subtle subversion, to push against a time-honored thematic constraint — the proscription on making poetry out of the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.

A poem in the collection, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” depicting a woman at her needlework and reprinted here in full, is concerned with precisely this:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life. It opens this way:

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time. ...
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

Though the book horrified some critics, it sealed Ms. Rich’s national reputation.

She knew the strain of domestic duty firsthand. In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys. When Professor Conrad took a job at the City College of New York, the family moved to New York City, where Ms. Rich became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

Ms. Rich effectively came out as a lesbian in 1976, with the publication of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” whose subject matter — sexual love between women — was still considered disarming and dangerous. In the years that followed her poetry and prose ranged over her increasing self-identification as a Jewish woman, the Holocaust and the struggles of black women.

Ms. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include “The Dream of a Common Language” (1978), “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far” (1981), “The Fact of a Doorframe” (1984), “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) and, most recently, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” published last year.

Her prose includes the essay collections “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” (1979); “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (1986); an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” published as a slender volume in 1981; and the nonfiction book “Of Woman Born” (1976), which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct.

For Ms. Rich, the getting of literary awards was itself a political act to be reckoned with. On sharing the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 (the other recipient that year was Allen Ginsberg), she declined to accept it on her own behalf. Instead, she appeared onstage with two of that year’s finalists, the poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker; the three of them accepted the award on behalf of all women.

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

Ms. Rich’s other laurels — and these she did accept — include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She taught widely, including at Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Ms. Rich’s survivors include her partner of more than 30 years, the writer Michelle Cliff; three sons, David, Pablo and Jacob, from her marriage to Professor Conrad; a sister, Cynthia Rich; and two grandchildren.

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”


Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” reprinted from “Collected Early Poems” by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1993 by Adrienne Rich. With the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company Inc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?pagewanted=all

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

The Singer Not The Song
Bye Bye Love
Chains
World Without Love
Words

A very busy evening, something that hasn't happened for quite a while. And a landmark for me - a lad called Andy who plays regularly on the York open mic scene covered Falling - and gave me a name-check. A humbling experience.

21st Century Newcastle - on video...

Woman's ear bitten off in Newcastle street brawl
by Michael Brown
Evening Chronicle Apr 4 2012

ROLLING in the middle of the road, two women brawl in broad daylight in a city centre street.

The scene unfolded in Newcastle when two couples clashed.

One of the women had half her ear bitten off.

Shoppers also saw one man hit the women with a metal chair while they threw punches and wrestled on the ground in front of a Stagecoach bus.

The incident took place in Newgate Street – officially branded the most crime-heavy street in the city.

As dozens of passers-by looked on, one man repeatedly smashed the chair into the women with a sickening thud.

Holly Bradshaw, 18, from Wardley, Gateshead, works at Subway and was about to take in the chairs and tables from the sandwich shop’s outside area when the violence flared.

“I was heading outside to clear away the tables and chairs when I saw the fight,” she said.

“The lads came running across the road, then one picked up a chair and swung it at the other.

“The chair missed him and went right across the road.

“All this fighting seemed a bit heavy for a Monday night.”

Another eyewitness, who asked not to be named, was walking from a nearby Chinese supermarket at around 7.25pm when he heard shouting.

“The two women had grabbed each other by the throats and were wrestling each other to the ground in the middle of the road,” he said.

“They were properly scrapping.

“At the same time, a guy in a light top and trousers was chasing another man across the road towards Subway – wildly swinging punches as he went.

“They wheeled round, and as the chased man began to retreat back across the road, the other chap grabbed a metal chair from outside Subway and threw it at him. It missed, so he picked up another and threw that too.

“The two men then confronted each other in the road and were arguing with each other in front of a Stagecoach bus that had pulled up and found its path blocked by the chairs.

“All the time the women were still going at it.

“The chased man walked away across the street and the guy in the lighter trousers picked up one of the chairs from the road and walked towards the women.

“After a moment’s hesitation, he laid into them with the chair, swinging it up above his head and down into them two or three times.

“It must have had some force because even from 30 yards away you could hear an awful thwacking sound.

“Eventually a passer-by plucked up the courage and tried to separate the women, which they eventually did. But then the two pairs just kept arguing from a distance as they walked up Nun Lane – and then the cops showed up.”

Last night police said they were holding a 35-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman on suspicion of assault, while the woman who had her ear bitten was believed to be receiving hospital treatment.

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2012/04/04/woman-s-ear-bitten-off-in-newcastle-street-brawl-video-72703-30690732/

Tonight's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Falling

A magical evening of music - that's all I can say; tremendous stuff.

Didn't intend to play Falling, but the host demanded it.

19th Century Newcastle in photographs...

A secondhand clothes seller at Newcastle cloth market reads as customers inspect her goods.

A set of original glass negatives showing street scenes of 19th century Newcastle has been found by Aaron Guy, who works at the city's Mining Institute
Photograph: NEMiPA – Collection of the Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/picture/2012/mar/30/eyewitness-newcastle-upon-tyne?INTCMP=SRCH

Victorian Newcastle brought to life in photographic treasure trove
Newly discovered collection of photographic plates shows meat markets, rag sellers and street scenes from 1880s

Ciara Leeming
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 March 2012

When Aaron Guy peered into a forgotten box in an ancient Newcastle building, he could not have guessed the treasures contained inside. The curious photo archivist had stumbled upon a remarkable set of original early glass negatives, detailing everyday street scenes of 19th-century Newcastle.

Meat markets, fairs, rag sellers, small corner shops and larger than life street characters are among the subjects which feature in the high-quality, 300-image collection.

Guy, who works at the city's Mining Institute, was helping to shift old furniture for the Society of Antiquaries when his attention was diverted to the box.

"The society were moving to a smaller building and were passing some of their belongings to other organisations," he said. "I was just being nosy really, peering into boxes, when I happened to spot that one contained some really old glass negatives. I thought they seemed interesting so we asked for permission to bring the plate boxes back to our office to have a proper look."

The work seems to date back at least to 1880 and the cohesion of the images suggests at least a third of them may have been created by a single photographer. His deliberate documentation of working-class life was unusual for the period, perhaps more in tune with the celebrated street photographers who followed in his footsteps almost a century later, in the 1960s and 70s.

The most arresting images are from the Newcastle streets, but the collection also contains work from other parts of the north-east, most recognisably Tynemouth and Lindisfarne.

By 1871 Newcastle industrialist Joseph Swan had devised a method of producing dry photographic plates, which meant there was no immediate need for a darkroom and chemical processing, and made photography more convenient and commercially viable. Within a few years his city factory was the largest and most successful manufacturer of dry plates in the world.

By the 1880s, Newcastle was prosperous and sophisticated. It had a thriving cultural and intellectual scene, with frequent lectures, debates and scientific demonstrations. Yet this photographer chose to point his lens at ordinary people.

"We know very little about where these negatives have come from," Guy said. "They were never catalogued and the society doesn't recall how or when it came by them. We aren't even completely sure whether they are one photographer's archive, or if they were produced by several individuals. Photography would have been a very expensive hobby at that time, but this person was shooting in a very contemporary way.

"Despite the cumbersome equipment he would have been using – a large plate camera, probably on a tripod – I would describe this as observational documentary, almost photojournalistic in style.

"The work doesn't look staged, but if it was then the photographer was doing things very differently from his contemporaries. This work feels less distant and more engaged than other series I have seen.

"It may have been someone with means, or a commercial photographer with quite a distinctive viewpoint, who decided that Joe Bloggs on the street was more interesting to photograph in his spare time than the high society of Newcastle. He was really quite ahead of his time in that respect."

Guy and his colleagues are still scanning the work and researching locations and possible identities of the photographer. They are also keen to find another 15 boxes of plates which were sent by the Society of Antiquaries to other places.

"I was really quite lucky to find this box," he said. "I don't know if someone forgot it or planned to pick it up later. The aim now is to date and catalogue the work, and then to put it out to other organisations in the city and hopefully get it seen, because it really belongs to the people of Newcastle."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/29/19th-century-newcastle-photographic-plates

Street scenes of 19th-century Newcastle – in pictures

A remarkable set of original early glass negatives detailing everyday 19th-century street scenes has been found by Aaron Guy, who works at Newcastle's Mining Institute. Most are from Newcastle, but some in the collection are from other parts of the north-east. The photographer is unknown

• All images from NEMiPA - Collection of the Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle







http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/mar/29/19th-centrury-newcastle-in-pictures#/?picture=388048802&index=0

See also http://www.mininginstitute.org.uk/

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