L. S. Lowry at Tate Britain

Tate Britain exhibition to pay homage to matchstick master LS Lowry
Hopes that retrospective will persuade art world to take the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life seriously

Charlotte Higgins
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 15 January 2013

LS Lowry – the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life – is among the most divisive of British artists. A household name, beloved of the public and commanding huge prices at auction, he is at the same time wildly unfashionable in the art world, derided for his apparently naive images of "matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs" set among the industrial landscapes of Salford, Pendlebury and Manchester.

But this June Tate Britain, in London, is to mount the first major retrospective devoted to Lowry since the artist's death in 1976. The show is co-curated by one of the world's pre-eminent scholars of French impressionism, TJ Clark.

According to Clark, Lowry is "an artist who is taken for granted and condescended to. The reaction from London art world friends over the last year and a half, when I have said I am working on Lowry, has been of deadpan incomprehension and disappointment."

There has, said Clark, been a "metropolitan resistance to taking the north seriously as a subject for art". He added: "It may now be possible to look beyond that condescension at a time ... when the limits of the London art world's view of art are pretty obvious." He said: "It is extraordinary to me, this image of him as an amateur, as someone who could barely paint, won't die. To me it is absolutely astonishing. And coded into this conversation by the metropolitan elite is the idea that someone who paints this subject matter can't be taken seriously."

Lowry has long been a contentious subject for the Tate, which has come under fire from figures including the actor Sir Ian McKellen for only rarely putting its seven Lowry paintings and 16 works on paper on display. In a 2011 TV documentary, McKellen said it was "a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others".

Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain's director, said the exhibition – about half of whose 80 works have never before been seen in public – will take an artist "people thought they knew and reveal that they didn't know him. At the same time Lowry needs to take his place in British art history – alongside such artists as Ben Nicholson".

Curtis acknowledged that Lowry "has been an issue for Tate: many people love his work and would like to have seen it dealt with more seriously". She was delighted when Clark and co-curator Anne Wagner had proposed an exhibition. "Whatever we did, it was important that we did it in a way that wasn't cynical but was authentic and serious," she said.

Responding to the suggestion that the work was sentimental, Clark said: "There is a difference between sentimentality and social awareness … though in the post-neoliberal era the very idea of social awareness is supposed to be wrong. I see nothing sentimental in the pictures."

Lowry was most celebrated, Clark said, in the immediate postwar era up to the end of the 1960s – "in social-democratic, postwar Britain" when, he argued, Lowry's work was more in tune with the times.

The exhibition, say its curators, will explode the myth that Lowry – who, in 1939, turned down an offer to become the Manchester Guardian's art critic – was a primitive, barely competent painter. His strong links with French realism and post-impressionism will be drawn on, and comparisons with painters such as Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat established – "though Lowry is tougher and cruder and deliberately so," said Clark.

His teacher at the Municipal College of Art, Manchester, where he took evening classes, was the French late impressionist painter Adolphe Valette and, according to Clark, Lowry "chose to show consistently in Paris from the 1920s and 30s." He was, said Clark, "truly immersed in French impressionism".

The exhibition will also show how Lowry, a rent collector with the same firm from 1916 until his retirement in 1952, recorded the "grimness and melancholia of urban life", said Clark.

"He thought hard and worked hard to find a way of doing industrial landscapes that was honest and faced up to the fact that industrialisation was, in some senses, disastrous. But he did not wallow in its misery – which is the stock charge against Lowry. He tried for an art that struck a balance between recognising the beauties of the world and what was awful in it."

Wagner paid tribute to his handling of paint and use of colour: in his picture Excavations in Manchester (1932), which shows workmen digging out the foundations of a new building, she said "he looked into the belly of modern life... building up his painting in a way analogous to the building going on apace in the scene he was depicting."

Wagner also said that Lowry should be placed in an international context, and his work assessed alongside that of peers working in the 1930s in Germany or in the postwar Soviet Union.

"Part of Lowry is that he's not kitsch. Kitsch is doing your thinking for you, telling you how to think and feel. Lowry never tells you how to feel... to have represented the lives of the working class and not become a propagandist is an astonishing achievement."

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain, London, from 26 June to 20 October 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/15/tate-britain-exhibition-homage-lowry

Last night's set list

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Happy Birthday To You*
Ghosts On The Tyne
Men Of The Tyne
Country Girl

* It was Timothy Ian Granville Fox's birthday and no other bugger had sung Happy Birthday to the poor sod, so I thought, why not?

Made a bit of a mess of Men Of The Tyne, but since nobody had heard it before, it didn't really matter.

Was glad to get through Country Girl without a net.

Groucho Marx played guitar...

The Surprisingly Serious Tale of Comedian Groucho Marx and His Lifelong Quest to Master Guitar

Jerry McCulley
01.03.2008

If Groucho Marx didn’t exactly invent rock and roll, he nonetheless embodied its irreverent, rebellious spirit in every medium he came to conquer. He and his brothers would make only 13 feature films, yet in 2000, five of them were honored by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedies of all time. Such was Groucho’s influence across the generations that he became an unlikely youth icon in his mid-80s, mobbed like a rock star at rare personal appearances, and inspiring thousands to pack what’s now Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheater to view a slate of Marx Brothers films made decades before most in the audience were even born.

Groucho’s brothers Harpo and Chico were long the musical axis of the act. The latter’s comic flair on the piano was an offshoot of a natural musical talent that initially found him some success as a local New York entertainer, then work as a song plugger for music publishers Shapiro-Bernstein before he joined his brothers’ struggling vaudeville act in 1912. An inveterate?and notoriously unsuccessful?gambler, Chico would reportedly lose virtually every nickel he made in Hollywood, inspiring him to make ends meet fronting the popular Chico Marx Orchestra, an outfit that featured not only a boyish Mel Torme on vocals, but became the first professional gig of legendary jazz guitarist Barney Kessel as well. Harpo also began on the piano, but lacking his older brother’s gifts, turned instead to the instrument his grandmother had played?and the one that would yield his nickname?becoming the most famed proponent of the harp since Nero.

Groucho had a musical side as well, singing as a choirboy before evolving into the manager and sharp-witted focal point of the Marx Brothers’ oft-floundering vaudeville act as it zig-zagged haphazardly from New York to Chicago to Kansas City. Somewhere along this long road to stardom Groucho bought a used guitar and learned to play it by ear, just as his more musically accomplished brothers had learned their respective instruments. As the team rose in fame to conquer Broadway in the ’20s and Hollywood soon after, Groucho’s guitar became a source of great personal solace but never a standard part of their act. While his brothers caroused until all hours, Groucho became the antithesis of his stage and screen persona, an introvert who preferred to stay home and read, socialize with intimates, and pick out tunes on his guitar. Indeed, sans his trademark greasepaint moustache, frock coat, and loping gait, Groucho Marx went virtually unrecognized in public during his Hollywood heyday.

The most public showcase of Groucho’s guitar playing is Paramount’s 1932 college-skewering romp Horse Feathers. In a rowboat, Groucho performs the film’s love theme “Everyone Says I Love You” for co-star Thelma Todd on a questionably tuned vintage Gibson L-5. In typical Marxian fashion, when finished he simply flips the instrument (actually a cheap prop stand-in) into the lake. While he’d take fleeting turns on the guitar elsewhere in his film career, Groucho’s performance of “Everyone Says I Love You” remains a favorite among Marx aficionados and has gone on to become variously a beloved staple of home pickers and the inspiration for Woody Allen’s 1996 film musical of the same name.

The instrument in the film is one of a pair of Gibsons Groucho owned?it also appears in a home photo from the era, with Marx, wife Ruth, daughter Miriam, and son Arthur posed around a piano in a family musical moment. And if Groucho’s proficiency on the instrument is deliberately poor for comic effect in Horse Feathers, it nonetheless became the target of good-natured jabs from family and friends alike. No less than Will Rogers once wrote: “Groucho can play as good on the guitar as Harpo can on the harp, or Chico on the piano. But he never does. So he is really what I call an ideal musician; he can play, but doesn’t.”

In later reminisces of his famous father, Groucho’s son Arthur recalls a musician of intense dedication, one whose chronic dissatisfaction with his abilities inspired the then 50ish star to professional tutelage and hours of dedicated home practice?much to the frequent aggravation of his wife and children. “If I have to listen to your father play one more piece on the guitar,” Arthur recalled his more outgoing mother once grousing, “I’ll go out of my mind.”

Arthur Marx remembers his father diligently practicing scales and classical pieces for as many as three hours a day, with an almost quixotic fixation on transposing Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-Sharp Minor” to the instrument. After months practicing the difficult piece, the younger Marx recalls Groucho gathering the family around to “officially” debut it?as if they hadn’t already been driven to distraction by weeks of constant practice. When his rendition was met by silence, Marx gingerly inquired of his family, “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” To which wife Ruth retorted dryly: “Why don’t you go back to playing by ear? You used to be so much better before you knew what you were doing.”

Arthur also recalls his father’s obsession with classical guitar giant Andrés Segovia. After one of Segovia’s performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Groucho went backstage to introduce himself and invite him home for dinner. The classical guitar star was reluctant to accept the invitation for fear he’d be asked to perform at the Marx home, but Groucho assured him, “I promise you won’t have to hear me play. Where could you get a better deal than that?” Segovia soon found himself supping at Marx’s home. At least partly true to his word, Marx never asked Segovia to play?just strolled nonchalantly into the living room with a Gibson under each arm. Segovia simply acted as if the instruments weren’t there for most of the evening, before a frustrated Groucho thrust one at him and implored, “Would you mind holding this for me for a while? I’m exhausted from holding both of them.” Groucho then launched into?what else??the “Rachmaninoff Prelude,” with Segovia strumming along grudgingly until finally demurring, complaining that the instrument’s steel strings were cutting his unaccustomed fingers (Segovia played exclusively on gut strings).

Groucho’s playing eventually inspired daughter Miriam to the guitar. In 1946 (and after his divorce from her mother), Miriam wrote to ask if she could have one of his two instruments. An uncharacteristically sentimental Groucho happily complied, sending along a trove of sheet music with it as well.

Groucho Marx likely took his deep-seated insecurity over his guitar abilities to his grave in 1977. Though his passing was almost completely overshadowed by the sudden death of another cultural icon barely 72 hours earlier, Elvis Presley, Groucho’s brief, now 75-year-old turn on the instrument in Horse Feathers continues to delight film fans and musicians alike, a warm reminder that memorable performances most often come from the heart, not the fingers.

http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/Features/en-us/The-Surprisingly-Serious-Tale.aspx

New J. D. Salinger biography in 2013...

Biography of J.D. Salinger Coming in September

By Dave Itzkoff

January 29, 2013

J.D. Salinger, one of the most reclusive authors of the modern era, will be the subject of a new biography written by David Shields and Shane Salerno and released by Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, the publisher, said on Tuesday.

The book, which Simon & Schuster described in a news release as “an oral biography,” is titled “The Private War of J.D. Salinger” and is planned for publication in September. Mr. Karp said that Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno had been working on the project for eight years, conducting interviews with more than 150 people who worked with and knew Salinger or were influenced by his work.

Mr. Karp said in a statement: “We are honored to be the publisher of what we believe will be the foundational book on one of the most beloved and most puzzling figures of the 20th century. Many of us who read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ have, at some point in our lives, wished we could know the author better. Now, we finally can.”

Salinger, whose other books include “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” (containing short stories like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), died in 2010. Having sought to maintain privacy for most of his life, he was a largely unknown figure to his readers. He had not given an interview in some 30 years.

Mr. Salerno, a screenwriter (“Savages”), said in a statement: “The myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about J.D. Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. Our book offers a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life.”

A documentary film about Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, was acquired by the PBS series “American Masters” and will be broadcast as the 200th episode of that program.

Simon & Schuster said that Mr. Karp and Jofie Ferrari-Adler, a senior editor, had been pursuing the Salinger book for several years and acquired it before other publishers could read it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/biography-of-j-d-salinger-coming-in-september/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #187

Frank Sinatra - Top Ten (maybe...)

The Top Ten Sinatras

An Audiophilia Top Ten.
JANUARY 2, 2013

On New Year’s Eve, I sent a message to our own Harry Currie, the world’s foremost Sinatra scholar and an incredible singer in his own right, requesting an almost impossible task, at least for him. It’s only that I’ve known him literally my whole life (plus a little begging) that he concurred. For Harry, compiling a Ten Best list of Sinatra recordings is akin to asking him ‘who’s your favourite kid?’.

His email reply was ‘…that’s a tough one - at times he was effervescent, at times introspective, and no one has ever touched him when he was at his best in both categories. I’ll do my best. No particular order.

July 1960. Capitol.

January 1958. Capitol.

September 1958. Capitol.

April 1955. Capitol.

January 1957. Capitol.

January 1954. Capitol.

March 1967. Reprise.

August 1954. Capitol.

March 1962. Capitol.

November 1962, Reprise

Swing Easy and Songs for Young Lovers were the first recordings with his developed, mature voice, and Nelson Riddle. Come Fly with Me, with Billy May - Wow! Close to You was his most introspective and adventurous, with the Hollywood String Quartet. Point of No Return, his last Capitol LP, with Axel Stordahl as arranger. Listen to When the World Was Young. I listen, and it still moves me. The Capitol years were his very best, with a few during Reprise. The British album is a personal favourite because of arranger Robert Farnon — Bob sent me the chart of The Very Thought of You which I sang with the Kitchener — Waterloo Symphony Orchestra and Victoria Symphony, and I transcribed for Windjammers. Other albums are close, but I think these are my picks.

Cheers, Harry

http://www.audiophilia.com/wp/?p=9400

Keith Crombie of the Newcastle Jazz Cafe: a tribute on film

This is Duncan Davis's tribute to his friend Keith Crombie.

Keith Crombie created a tiny piece of Paris in Pink Lane, a small back street in Newcastle upon Tyne. His Jazz Cafe became a haven for music lovers, artists, students and eccentrics. 

Many famous actors visiting the town would unwind there after a performance at one of the cities theatres and some of the worlds greatest jazz musicians would congregate there after an official gig in the area.

Film maker Duncan Davis, a friend of Keith Crombie for 35 years, felt that the Jazz Cafe needed to be recorded.

Unfortunately Crombie died during filming,

Newcastle came to a standstill as his friends joined him on his last journey from Pink Lane, through the centre of the city, a tiny bit of which he transformed into a Parisian Jazz Cafe...

Film by Duncan Davis

http://vimeo.com/57753560#embed

Look out for Len Flynn, the genial barman from The Crown Posada!

Last night's set list



At the Fulford Arms, York: -

I'll Follow The Sun
Tell Me Why
Falling
Love Art Blues
Human Highway
Till There Was You

The night finished off with a Velvet Underground-like jam session, minus Mo Tucker and John Cale, but otherwise recognisable (see above). Continued requests from the floor for each & every performer to play Tiger Feet were met with derision.

Paul Muldoon reads "For Barack Obama: his second inauguration"

Paul Buchanan Interview in The Vinyl District

By Jon
Published: January 9, 2013

If you’re like me, perhaps you take to Facebook a wee too often some evenings sharing music. And perhaps this shared music strikes a chord with a friend who is equally as effusive with the “like button.” And perhaps the invitation arises that affords an opportunity to put said friend—Chad Clark of Washington, DC band Beauty Pill—in contact with the musician inspiring the evening’s muse, Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, whose brand new US release, Mid Air is in stores now. Well, perhaps you’re reading that conversation at present. —Ed.

Chad Clark: One of the things that attracted me (and many others, I’m sure) to The Blue Nile was the band’s daring and imaginative use of sonic texture. There was always a delicate, elegant, painterly quality to the records that seemed deeply felt, deeply considered. Some of the early sounds were almost non-musical: the sound of bicycles wheels spinning and such. Always at the center of it was your voice and your imagistic words.

This is something that influenced me greatly as a musician to experiment and explore textures in the studio. This “texturalism” (for lack of a better word) leads me to a few different questions. It seems to me that The Blue Nile was sort of is its own impossible-to name genre. Would you agree?
Paul Buchanan: I suppose we pursued our own shared imagination. What was important was the sense of the song, so recognisable licks were out. We tried to create the world in which the person in the song belonged.

I can’t really think of “peers” who worked in a similar terrain. Did you regard yourselves as having peers or did you feel like you were working in a field of your own? If so, was that lonely? Or did you enjoy the feeling of making your own world?
Yes, we were in our own world, and just doing the best we could to capture the idea. We had no money, no phone.

The Blue Nile’s sonic adventurousness proved to be subtly groundbreaking. Did you have conscious ambitions to break ground, to innovate? Or, were you just following your instincts? Did you just innocently happen upon those ideas or was there a sense of deliberate design to the path you chose?
Circumstance and limitations shape what you do as much as your imagination, don’t they? Marrying the two is a step forward. You’re right—we stumbled on ideas and followed our instincts. We played the way we could play.

From a certain perspective, the minimalism of Mid Air seems like the most austere departure from The Blue Nile’s densely layered, appointed aesthetic. For the most part, Mid Air is just your voice and piano and there’s a strongly solitary, plaintive character to the record.
Yes, we talked a lot about depth, height, distance, etc. in the band. For Mid Air, the important overall picture was different, the frame of the imagination was solitude, separation from the city outside in that moment.

You’ve done spare song arrangements, but would you agree that Mid Air is the farthest you’ve gone in this direction? What inspired that? Sometimes artists react to their past; was the spareness of Mid Air a way of “shedding” the Blue Nile’s sound? Or was it purely about what suited these songs?
I didn’t plan it, it’s just what came out; I suppose it reflected how I was feeling. I don’t envisage doing this again – but you never know. For now, I want something more candy stripe, but for Mid Air, it was important the sound and the music were consistent with the title.

The brevity of the new songs seems like a deliberate choice. Most of these songs are just over two minutes long! The Blue Nile was known for its extended cinematic overtures, hypnotic, repeating songs. Many of them were two or three times the length of the songs on Mid Air.
When I listened back to the dictaphone, the ideas seemed compact and complete. I didn’t elaborate on them; I hoped all together there was a sense behind the record, and each chapter played it’s part.

Was it a conscious struggle to keep these songs lean in length? Was it to accompany the sparseness of the arrangements? It seems “humble” in a way. Or was the length just natural to this set of songs? Having previously worked with longer forms, did you find that it demanded discipline? Did the brevity take more work or less work?
I hoped that within the time of each song there was another geography, if you accepted the importance of each note, and the spaces, then time would change.

There’s a paradox in your work and it seems even more acute on this album. Your songs have great mystery, but the words are often very plain. You seem to mostly adhere to common spoken language. It is pretty rare that you will use an overtly intellectual or exotic word, but still there’s an enduring literary quality.

You seem to work in inference and suggestion. The unadorned simplicity seems honed and carved, hard-fought-for. This is in contrast to, for example, Elvis Costello—someone who frequently entangles the listener in dense wordplay. Your songs seem the opposite: perfectly distilled.

The opening line of “Buy A Motor Car” is this: “Buy a motor car and drive somewhere you believe…” It’s not fancy language, but there’s a lot of emotional information there. There’s the choice to use the somewhat antique word “motor car,” which suggests nostalgia. And then there’s the graceful abstraction of “drive somewhere you believe…” Does this stealthy simplicity come naturally to you or do you work to keep the language plain in your writing? Or is this just a gift?
Somehow the plainness works better—I don’t want to get in the way of someone listening, and prefer to find expressions we all use. Using “motor car” is to suggest a timelessness or location, or more precisely a sense that the memory is not absolutely in the present moment, which I try for at times. Mostly, I am trying to keep the ground open in the hope of suggesting shared or collective emotional experiences and feelings, so I don’t like to interrupt that with specifics.

Are there other songwriters you admire?
The list of songwriters I admire is endless—I don’t know how they do it. In some ways I am doing the same drawing over and over, trying to get it right.

Is it ever important to you to be “understood” in a linear, literal sense? Or would you consider yourself always an abstract impressionist?
At best, I would be hoping to invoke the unconscious, that life cannot be boiled down to straight lines.

I have, for example, no precise understanding of what exactly transpires or has transpired in “The Wedding Party.” I don’t know whether it’s confessional/ personal or whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. The words are almost as elliptical as a haiku and the picture is slightly out of focus. 

There’s no way for me to precisely understand what happens in that song, but I do get a strong feeling of sadness from it.

Are you comfortable with this mystery? Are you okay if people only leave a song with a general sense of tone and not specific story or text?
Yes, that is what I want…for someone to apply the general colours to their own life and experience. To their own love story.

“Two Children” has a rosy, sweet hopefulness to it. It took me by surprise until I gave it further thought and realized that you have many songs that are brightly optimistic and grateful in The Blue Nile canon. There is even ecstasy there.

When people characterize you as a melancholic/anguished singer, do you feel that this is fair? Or do you feel that it is overly narrow? Have people have overlooked the happier aspects of your work?
I understand and can see that it is true. I don’t think there is anything wrong with admitting the things that advertising misses out, but in the end I hope there is a belief in our spirit, and our capacity to love and imagine love. Ecstasy is a perfect word for unconditional love, or liberation from what oppresses.

There seems to be a faintly devotional character to some of your lyrics, but it is very rarely made explicit. My sense as a fan is that you’re a person of faith—I could be wrong about this, of course! I only know you through your music—but this is usually only very faintly insinuated in your songs.

Do you consciously limit or craft the presence of spirituality in your songs? Or do you just write what you feel and not worry about whether it pushes the songs closer to or farther from that kind of expression?
I believe in the way people used to believe we could land on the moon. I don’t know the physics, but I suppose there is evidence of humanity yearning. Describing God causes so much trouble—the hope for better, and an awareness that some things lift you out beyond yourself is as much as I can express.

The Blue Nile had a song called “Sentimental Man” and I kind of regard you as being defiantly proud of that characterization. Would you agree? Do you think that the modern world undervalues or disparages the word “sentiment?”
I think commerce often shifts sentiment off to the side, except a very base kind to elicit reaction. People are more complex and refined in their empathies and feelings for others I think. Watching TV with the sound down is an example; you still react, because you are getting the information you need without the distraction of words. I find it sad music is sometimes played beneath the news. People’s sentiments are far more advanced than that.

Because of time between releases, many fans perceive you as a perfectionist, but I don’t. I feel that the value of so much of your work—and certainly this is the case for Mid Air—is in the vulnerability. I feel like there has always been a vulnerability in your voice and you don’t try to sing “perfectly.” If you did sing “perfectly,” your singing would be boring. And it’s not, it’s compelling!

So, speaking for myself, I regard you as someone who pursues truth more than perfection. How do you feel about being regarded as a perfectionist? Have you struggled with perfectionism?
I struggle with my own inabilities, but have come to regard work as a learning process; simplicity and keeping the mind clear is good. When I’m an old man I’ll remember all the trials and failures and that’ll save time! At times I’ve got mixed up, but always in pursuit of the shape that is already in the stone of the idea. I wouldn’t know what perfect is really, except in terms of how much any song manages to be true to its self. Besides…it almost always eludes me.

You have one of the world’s most beloved singing voices. Do you have influences on your singing? Were you always aware of the power of your voice? Did you sing as a child? Do you sing often? Or just when you’re writing or recording?
I am blushing. I could never seem to fit in the key in school, and I guess at home now I sing, sitting around in the kitchen playing the guitar or in the living room with a piano, and of course sing hopelessly along with records.

I can’t sing the way singers I love do, so I just try to make sure there is no affectation, and sing like I was talking to someone. It also depends on the person I’m seeing saying the things. I suppose the most important things are the meaning of the words and the tone of how they are being said. People register honesty, so to gain that trust you have to make sure the singing is not about you singing.

You have very boldly built Mid Air on just two chief elements; your voice and piano. It seems to me this takes confidence to be so exposed. Would you self-regard as a confident singer?
No, I hope for the best ! Plus, I’ve heard some of the outtakes…

The Blue Nile’s music seems to be dating very well—time has been kind to those records and they still sound fresh and classic. Is this something that’s important to you? Are you conscious of building a body of work that will last? Walk Across The Rooftops and Hats are being reissued and your bandmates oversaw the remastering process. Have you heard those albums recently? What are your thoughts on those albums now?
We tried to make something that wasn’t obviously of a certain time. When I heard those records recently, I was struck by the love and hard work that had gone into them. The best of it, somehow, happens when you forget yourself, and almost go beyond the thoughts that have got you there.

Do you expect you will continue in the stark, plaintive direction suggested by Mid Air or do you feel that this is a “one-off” project?
I’m glad I recorded Mid Air. It must have been how I was feeling because I didn’t set out to write or make a record, it came out pretty direct and directly out of circumstances. I didn’t add to the structures or arrangements because it came from somewhere true, and I just followed it.

Is there a possibility of another lushly designed Blue Nile album? What do you think the future holds?
I keep saying the next record will be a comedy, and it will. I am following the songs I have, which seem to me joyful and affirmative, and tender but with strength in them. I would love to reaffirm some ideals that were lost and challenged along the way. I would like it to have some golden light in it, and good feeling.

Paul Buchanan Official | Facebook

http://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/2013/01/paul-buchanan-the-tvd-interview-in-conversation-with-chad-clark-of-beauty-pill/

How's that again?

Ron Sexsmith - Forever Endeavour - streaming

At http://www.ronsexsmith.com/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #186

Keith Crombie's Newcastle Jazz Café to reopen?

Club would be music to Keith Crombie’s ears

by Joanne Butcher

Evening Chronic
Jan 17 2013

EFFORTS are being made to re-open Newcastle’s Jazz Cafe following the death of Keith Crombie.
The cafe closed following his death just before new year.

At his funeral on Monday, hundreds joined a New Orleans-style procession through the city’s streets

Now, regulars are coming together to try to carry on Mr Crombie’s vision for the jazz venue, which attracted performers from across the globe over its 20-year history.

The Pink Lane Jazz Co-op group on social networking site Facebook asks for members and investors to join a community-led bid to re-open the cafe.

The building has been closed for over a week since the landlord cancelled the lease.

“A group of local residents, jazz lovers, musicians, poets and others are forming a community co-operative with the aim of running Newcastle’s iconic Jazz Cafe, which closed following the untimely death of the proprietor Keith Crombie,” the group says.

“We plan to preserve the commitment to live jazz and poetry and the unique ambience of the venue established over the last 20 years.

“Our first objective is to negotiate with the landlord and any relevant authorities to re-open the Jazz Cafe as soon as possible.”

It was standing room only on Monday as Mr Crombie, nicknamed ‘The Jazz Man’, was laid to rest at St Thomas the Martyr Church in the Haymarket.

Musicians played a final farewell to the 74-year-old as they followed his coffin, in a horse-drawn carriage, from the Pink Lane cafe through the streets.

Mr Crombie had run the Jazz Cafe for more than two decades, turning it into a mecca for visiting performers and music aficionados.

He died on December 29 after being admitted to the city’s RVI with a lung infection on Boxing Day.

Last week, locks were changed at the venue and a possession notice appeared on the doors.

But landlord Mike Tilley, the founder and managing director of nearby Newcastle Arts Centre, said it did not spell the end of the cafe and welcomed moves to reinstate it as a jazz venue. He said the lease had been forfeited in order to secure the building.

Mr Tilley said: “In its current condition it cannot operate.

“Our aim would be to see a live jazz venue there again, as Keith put his life and soul into making the Jazz Cafe work.

“But it needs major investment.”

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2013/01/17/club-would-be-music-to-keith-crombie-s-ears-72703-32620884/

Keith Crombie vents:

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

(solo): -
Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Southern Man

(The Elderly Brothers): -
Cry To Me
Proud Mary
Let It Be Me
Sorrow
When You Walk In The Room
You Got It

A crazy night in The Habit - quiet to start with, but very busy later. Some great music from Sarah Horn, Colin Rowntree and Simon Micklethwaite. A trip to Bar 1331 was unnecessary but delightful.

Art and Winter...

Tales of Winter: The Art of Snow and Ice

Winter was not always beautiful. Until Pieter Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow, the long bitter months had never been transformed into a thing of beauty. This documentary charts how mankind's ever-changing struggle with winter has been reflected in western art throughout the ages, resulting in images that are now amongst the greatest paintings of all time. With contributions from Grayson Perry, Will Self, Don McCullin and many others, the film takes an eclectic group of people from all walks of life out into the cold to reflect on the paintings that have come to define the art of snow and ice.

Available to watch on BBC iPlayer for seven more days  http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01q6qj6/

John Burnside: Something Like Happy review

Something Like Happy by John Burnside - review 
A short story collection with a chill in its bones

Stuart Kelly
guardian.co.uk
Saturday 19 January 2013

Readers familiar with John Burnside's poetry, novels or memoirs will be well aware of the unique mythology that he has been assiduously, slyly and persistently building across his creative work. Burnside's is a world of secrets, disappearances and silences, of cautious redemptions, misunderstood epiphanies and surreptitious joy, where what we think of as reality is always fraying into the surreal, the insane and that which is beyond our understanding. As such, Something Like Happy, his first collection of short stories since Burning Elvis, puts the reader into familiarly unfamiliar territory, but in an unsettling way. For those unacquainted with his sublimely terrifying oeuvre, this is the place to start.

A short story collection, ideally, should have a sense of internal cohesion without its contents becoming variations on a theme, and a sense of the unexpected without the stories becoming a display of separate virtuosities. Burnside negotiates a sure‑footed path through these different traps. Some stories suggest that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies; others are resolutely in the here and now. There is a clutch of stories about older women and the way they feverishly control their desires. Others have a more obvious connection: late in "Lost Someone", the reader realises that they already know how the story will end, since it is a different perspective on the events narrated in "Godwit". Some of the connections are so subtle as to be like an itch.

"Slut's Hair" is almost archetypal Burnside. A woman, in a Dundee tenement, is stuck in a relationship where her husband's aggressive interrogations about her happiness are a form of torture. When she reveals she has toothache, and they can't afford a dentist, he resorts to whisky and a pair of electrician's pliers (a typically sharp-eyed detail). He then goes off to the pub, leaving her alone: the classic miserabilist Scottish short story would end there. But in Burnside's version, it segues into her finding a creature – "at first she thought it looked like a tiny, malnourished cat, only it was blue and too small even for a kitten; then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw that it was a fox, or something like a fox, with that keen clever face a fox has in children's books". Just as her husband returns home drunk, she realises it has escaped her grasp – if it ever was there – leaving behind what some call dust bunnies and what is sometimes called in Scotland slut's hair. The very next story – a far more "realistic" affair – uses the phrase "slut's hair" in describing the contents of a schoolboy's desk. That hazy, horrid uncertainty of connections makes the individual stories chime and resonate with each other in a re‑readable way.

There are lots of readers in Burnside's stories, but only two named authors stand out. In "Perfect and Private Things", the university lecturer specialises in Weldon Kees, a poet whose life story is a miniature of Burnside's obsession with strange disappearances. "The Deer-Larder" features an aging, ill narrator who receives emails seemingly unintended for him, from a man writing a biography of Maupassant. The narrator – both more clever and more stupid than the reader – thinks it an elaborate online game around Maupassant's "The Horla", his correspondent's attempt to do a Lovecraftian "Weird Tale". The truth is far more eerie.

Violence simmers under the surface of every story, breaking out in the kind of stark detail that becomes unforgettable (in "Roccolo" there is the puncturing of a bird's eye with a needle, in "A Winter's Tale" the narrator's illness is put in perspective with him giving a lift to a young man wearing make-up and fishnets with a gash in his leg). Almost all the stories have a wintry setting or a nip in the air or a chill in the bone.

As mentioned, one story is even called "A Winter's Tale", and the whole brings to mind the Shakespeare scene that gives that play its title: the child, Mamillius, tells his mother "a sad tale's best for winter", and she asks him to "do your best / to fright me with your sprites; you're powerful at it". He whispers a story the audience never hears. Burnside is powerful at it, and yet the reader feels the whole time that they too might have missed the whispered real story, and that they are just eavesdroppers on an unmentionable tragedy elsewhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/19/something-like-happy-john-burnside-review

Winners & losers

Michael Winner, who has died aged 77, was one of Britain’s few commercially viable film directors; he also followed a late-flowering vocation as a belligerent restaurant critic, becoming one of the country’s most outrageous and opinionated food writers.  

In the course of a film career lasting some 40 years, he made more than 30 pictures, among which were sharp social comedies such as The System (1963) and The Jokers (1966). But he derived his wealth and lasting reputation from later Hollywood hokum such as the frenzied and graphically violent Death Wish series.

Preceded by his faux film noir capers such as The Mechanic (1972) and The Stone Killer (1973), “all long on gore,” as one observer put it, “and short on sense”, Winner’s controversial blockbuster Death Wish (1974), starred Charles Bronson as a middle-class architect on a gory mission of vengeance after street muggers murder his wife and rape his daughter.

Many critics complained that Winner’s film exploited American paranoia over rising urban violence. “Michael Winner stacks the deck to make vigilante justice the only recourse against widespread crime,” declared one. The public, on the other hand, could scarcely get enough of the action; cinema audiences burst into applause each time a mugger was shot on screen, and even the celebrated American reviewer Judith Crist, admiring its theme of “Aristotelian purgation”, confessed to numbering the film among her guilty pleasures.

Most American film writers took Winner seriously as a director, admiring his swift efficiency and unerring knack of coming in on, or under, budget. But in Britain he was widely regarded as a flaky, loud-mouthed show-off. Certainly Winner was always larger-than-life. He drove a Rolls-Royce, paid no attention to his appearance (he was notorious for his jumble sale jackets and single pair of battered shoes) and was rarely seen without an enormous Monte Cristo cigar.

Portrayed as “offensive, loud and bumptious”, Winner’s egregious manner provoked comparison with Genghis Khan and even close friends found him “cherubic, cheerful and dreadful”. Flamboyant, often boorish, he was, in many ways, his own worst enemy. 

Woody Allen - Hypochondria: An Inside Look

Hypochondria: An Inside Look

Woody Allen
Published: January 12, 2013 

WHEN The New York Times called, inquiring if I might pen a few words “from the horse’s mouth” about hypochondria, I confess I was taken aback. What light could I possibly shed on this type of crackpot behavior since, contrary to popular belief, I am not a hypochondriac but a totally different genus of crackpot?

What I am is an alarmist, which is in the same ballpark as the hypochondriac or, should I say, the same emergency room. Still there is a fundamental difference. I don’t experience imaginary maladies — my maladies are real.

What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumor. Or maybe lung cancer. In one instance I thought it was Mad Cow.

The point is, I am always certain I’ve come down with something life threatening. It matters little that few people are ever found dead of chapped lips. Every minor ache or pain sends me to a doctor’s office in need of reassurance that my latest allergy will not require a heart transplant, or that I have misdiagnosed my hives and it’s not possible for a human being to contract elm blight.

Unfortunately, my wife bears the brunt of these pathological dramas. Like the time I awoke at 3 a.m. with a spot on my neck that to me clearly had the earmarks of a melanoma. That it turned out to be a hickey was confirmed only later at the hospital after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sitting at an ungodly hour in the emergency room where my wife tried to talk me down, I was making my way through the five stages of grief and was up to either “denial” or “bargaining” when a young resident fixed me with a rather supercilious eye and said sarcastically, “Your hickey is benign.”

But why should I live in such constant terror? I take great care of myself. I have a personal trainer who has me up to 50 push-ups a month, and combined with my knee bends and situps, I can now press the 100-pound barbell over my head with only minimal tearing of my stomach wall. I never smoke and I watch what I eat, carefully avoiding any foods that give pleasure. (Basically, I adhere to the Mediterranean diet of olive oil, nuts, figs and goat cheese, and except for the occasional impulse to become a rug salesman, it works.) In addition to yearly physicals I get all available vaccines and inoculations, making me immune to everything from Whipple’s disease to the Andromeda strain.

As far as vitamins go, if I take a few with each meal, over time I can usually get in quite a lot before the latest study confirms they’re worthless. Regarding medications, I’m flexible but prudent because while it’s true antibiotics kill bad bacteria, I’m always afraid they’ll kill my good bacteria, not to mention my pheromones, and then I won’t give off any sexual vibes in a crowded elevator.

It’s also true that when I leave the house to go for a stroll in Central Park or to Starbucks for a latte I might just pick up a quick cardiogram or CT scan prophylactically. My wife calls this nonsense and says that in the end it’s all genetic. My parents both lived to ripe old ages but absolutely refused to pass their genes to me as they believed an inheritance often spoils the child.

Even when the results of my yearly checkup show perfect health, how can I relax knowing that the minute I leave the doctor’s office something may start growing in me and, by the time a full year rolls around, my chest X-ray will look like a Jackson Pollock? Incidentally, this relentless preoccupation with health has made me quite the amateur medical expert. Not that I don’t make an occasional mistake — but what doctor doesn’t? For example, I once convinced a woman who experienced a mild ringing in her ears that she had the flesh-eating bacteria, and another time I pronounced a man dead who had simply dozed off in a chair.

But what’s this obsession with personal vulnerability? When I panic over symptoms that require no more than an aspirin or a little calamine lotion, what is it I’m really frightened of? My best guess is dying. I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life, and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on every light in the house and play my recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at top volume till the sun comes up.

I sometimes imagine that death might be more tolerable if I passed away in my sleep, although the reality is, no form of dying is acceptable to me with the possible exception of being kicked to death by a pair of scantily clad cocktail waitresses.

Perhaps if I were a religious person, which I am not, although I sometimes do have the intimation that we all may be part of something larger — like a Ponzi scheme. A great Spanish philosopher wrote that all humans long for “the eternal persistence of consciousness.” Not an easy state to maintain, especially when you’re dining with people who keep talking about their children.

And yet, there are worse things than death. Many of them playing at a theater near you. For instance, I would not like to survive a stroke and for the rest of my life talk out of the side of my mouth like a racetrack tout. I would also not like to go into a coma, to lie in a hospital bed where I’m not dead but can’t even blink my eyes and signal the nurse to switch the channel from Fox News. And incidentally, who’s to say the nurse isn’t one of those angel of death crazies who hates to see people suffer and fills my intravenous glucose bag with Exxon regular.

Worse than death, too, is to be on life support listening to my loved ones in a heated debate over whether to terminate me and hear my wife say, “I think we can pull the plug, it’s been 15 minutes and we’ll be late for our dinner reservation.”

What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable, and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like. And yet is it really so great to live forever? Sometimes in the news I see features about certain tall people who reside in snow-capped regions where a whole village population lives to 140 or so. Of course all they ever eat is yogurt, and when they finally do die they are not embalmed but pasteurized. And don’t forget these healthy people walk everyplace because try getting a cab in the Himalayas. I mean do I really want to pass my days in some remote place where the main entertainment is seeing which guy in town can lift the ox highest with his bare hands?

Summing up, there are two distinct groups, hypochondriacs and alarmists. Both suffer in their own ways, and traits of one group may overlap the other, but whether you’re a hypochondriac or an alarmist, at this point in time, either is probably better than being a Republican.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/hypochondria-an-inside-look.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1&