Friday, 17 May 2013
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Monday, 13 May 2013
Shepard Fairey's Going Underground...
Shepard Fairey's paintings to be displayed in Newcastle's Victoria Tunnel
The artist behind one of the best known paintings of the 21st century is heading to Newcastle – for an exhibition in an underground tunnel
12 May 2013
Skateboard artist Shepard Fairey sprang to prominence in 2008 when he produced the famous Hope poster that featured on the front became a symbol for Barack Obama’s first election campaign and was eventually bought by America’s National Portrait Gallery.
Fairey’s work has also featured in the Iron Man films and he appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons while in 2003 he designed the album cover for will.i.am’s second solo album Must B 21.
Now Fairey is one of 12 artists who will be showing off work in the Victoria Tunnel, which runs under Newcastle from Ouseburn to the Town Moor.
The Into the Dark event on June 12 will feature a dozen artists from around the world.
Curator Danny Hughes, from the Newcastle-based street art collective Unit 44, said he wanted to stage the event to introduce new people to the Victoria Tunnel.
He said: “There’s a been a few projects underground in America and that was at the back of our minds. With this project, it emerged from a meeting we had with the Ouseburn Trust.
“They’re getting a lot of people down to see the tunnel but it tends to be older people. It’s such a wonderful place and we wanted to tell its story with a modern voice.
“We always had 12 artists in mind because only 12 people can go down the tunnel at any one time. With a site like that people were really keen to get involved.
“Shepard Fairey is one of the most celebrated artists on the planet at the minute because of the Obama poster.
“We’d done a show with an artist from San Francisco who knew him and he put us in touch. There were emails back and forth and it turned out he knew Newcastle because of the Spank the Monkey show at the Baltic a few years ago. It’s great to have him involved.”
The Victoria Tunnel is a subterranean wagonway that was built between 1839-42 to transport coal from Leazes Main Colliery in Spital Tongues to riverside staithes ready for loading onto boats for export.
The colliery closed in January 1860 and the tunnel was abandoned until the start of the Second World War when it was converted for use as an air raid shelter.
The Ouseburn Trust runs regular tours of the Tunnel, which has featured on a number of TV shows.
As well as Shepard Fairey, the Into the Dark event will feature work from Australian artists Meggs and Stormie Mills, German Hendrik Beikirch, who is known for huge spray-painted murals, plus local artists Hush and Candice Tripp.
Candice, a South African-born painter who has lived in Newcastle for the past seven years, said: “It’s an exciting challenge to be able to produce something that will work with the tunnel, as opposed to just existing within it.
“I had been living in Newcastle for four years before I found out that the Victoria Tunnel existed. I’m glad I waited, although I can’t say why I did!”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/shepard-faireys-paintings-displayed-newcastles-3658869
Skateboard artist Shepard Fairey sprang to prominence in 2008 when he produced the famous Hope poster that featured on the front became a symbol for Barack Obama’s first election campaign and was eventually bought by America’s National Portrait Gallery.
Fairey’s work has also featured in the Iron Man films and he appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons while in 2003 he designed the album cover for will.i.am’s second solo album Must B 21.
Now Fairey is one of 12 artists who will be showing off work in the Victoria Tunnel, which runs under Newcastle from Ouseburn to the Town Moor.
The Into the Dark event on June 12 will feature a dozen artists from around the world.
Curator Danny Hughes, from the Newcastle-based street art collective Unit 44, said he wanted to stage the event to introduce new people to the Victoria Tunnel.
He said: “There’s a been a few projects underground in America and that was at the back of our minds. With this project, it emerged from a meeting we had with the Ouseburn Trust.
“They’re getting a lot of people down to see the tunnel but it tends to be older people. It’s such a wonderful place and we wanted to tell its story with a modern voice.
“We always had 12 artists in mind because only 12 people can go down the tunnel at any one time. With a site like that people were really keen to get involved.
“Shepard Fairey is one of the most celebrated artists on the planet at the minute because of the Obama poster.
“We’d done a show with an artist from San Francisco who knew him and he put us in touch. There were emails back and forth and it turned out he knew Newcastle because of the Spank the Monkey show at the Baltic a few years ago. It’s great to have him involved.”
The Victoria Tunnel is a subterranean wagonway that was built between 1839-42 to transport coal from Leazes Main Colliery in Spital Tongues to riverside staithes ready for loading onto boats for export.
The colliery closed in January 1860 and the tunnel was abandoned until the start of the Second World War when it was converted for use as an air raid shelter.
The Ouseburn Trust runs regular tours of the Tunnel, which has featured on a number of TV shows.
As well as Shepard Fairey, the Into the Dark event will feature work from Australian artists Meggs and Stormie Mills, German Hendrik Beikirch, who is known for huge spray-painted murals, plus local artists Hush and Candice Tripp.
Candice, a South African-born painter who has lived in Newcastle for the past seven years, said: “It’s an exciting challenge to be able to produce something that will work with the tunnel, as opposed to just existing within it.
“I had been living in Newcastle for four years before I found out that the Victoria Tunnel existed. I’m glad I waited, although I can’t say why I did!”
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Gateshead on the change...
Remember When: Images of a changing town - Gateshead
6 May 2013
The Town Hall clock
These never-before-seen pictures will spark the memories of folk in Gateshead.
Photographer Steve Wood recorded the demolition of the town centre during the major redevelopment years of the 1960s and 1970s.
Saturday saw the first showing of photos taken around the Riverside, High Street and West Street areas – in a talk given by librarian John Boothroyd.
They formed part of a presentation called ‘Central Gateshead disappears’.
John is in the process of restoring hundreds of slides that were discovered almost by accident – and hopes in the future to present them in book form for the people of Gateshead to enjoy.
The Town Hall clock
These never-before-seen pictures will spark the memories of folk in Gateshead.
Photographer Steve Wood recorded the demolition of the town centre during the major redevelopment years of the 1960s and 1970s.
Saturday saw the first showing of photos taken around the Riverside, High Street and West Street areas – in a talk given by librarian John Boothroyd.
They formed part of a presentation called ‘Central Gateshead disappears’.
John is in the process of restoring hundreds of slides that were discovered almost by accident – and hopes in the future to present them in book form for the people of Gateshead to enjoy.
Central Methodist Hall, Gateshead
Senior librarian at Gateshead Libraries John said: “Steve Wood’s work is similar to that of Jimmy Forsyth’s iconic pictures of Scotswood in the 1950s.
“But whereas Jimmy took pictures of people, Steve took photographs of places.
“Plus, they’re in colour and they show a town centre in the middle of an intense period of change.”
Steve Wood was a Whickham resident who managed Turner’s photographic shop near the Central Station in Newcastle.
His work covered the transformation of the townscapes he knew both north and south of the River Tyne.
Senior librarian at Gateshead Libraries John said: “Steve Wood’s work is similar to that of Jimmy Forsyth’s iconic pictures of Scotswood in the 1950s.
“But whereas Jimmy took pictures of people, Steve took photographs of places.
“Plus, they’re in colour and they show a town centre in the middle of an intense period of change.”
Steve Wood was a Whickham resident who managed Turner’s photographic shop near the Central Station in Newcastle.
His work covered the transformation of the townscapes he knew both north and south of the River Tyne.
Shephards in Gateshead
As well as the planned book, John is hoping to host a major exhibition of Steve’s work in November.
The pictures here show Shephards, the vast department store which attracted generations of shoppers until the late 70s when the new Metro system’s easy access to Newcastle saw the store fall out of favour with shoppers.
The Central Bar has recently been renovated and is attracting a whole new clientele after decades of decline.
The view down towards the Tyne Bridge with the Town Hall clock remains unchanged, apart from modern shops and Gateshead Interchange on the left.
The view of Central Methodist Hall, High West Street and Regent Terrace from the Regent Court Flats is, alas, no more.
As well as the planned book, John is hoping to host a major exhibition of Steve’s work in November.
The pictures here show Shephards, the vast department store which attracted generations of shoppers until the late 70s when the new Metro system’s easy access to Newcastle saw the store fall out of favour with shoppers.
The Central Bar has recently been renovated and is attracting a whole new clientele after decades of decline.
The view down towards the Tyne Bridge with the Town Hall clock remains unchanged, apart from modern shops and Gateshead Interchange on the left.
The view of Central Methodist Hall, High West Street and Regent Terrace from the Regent Court Flats is, alas, no more.
Central Hotel and Half Moon pub
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/remember-when-images-changing-town-3414316Saturday, 11 May 2013
Loudon Wainwright at the Sage, Gateshead - review by Terry Kelly
Loudon Wainwright III at the Sage, Wednesday 8 May 2013
AMERICAN troubadour Loudon Wainwright III likes to joke that "death and decay" are his main songwriting obsessions these days.
But in truth, there's far more to the 66-year-old musical master than jokes about the Grim Reaper.
As a fan for more than 40 years, I've seen Wainwright in concert numerous times, but his gig at The Sage revealed a new side to his stagecraft.
Promoting his latest album, Older Than My Old Man Now, Wainwright punctuated the concert with readings from his late father's columns for Life magazine.
His word-perfect recitations were not only an amazing feat of memory, but also a moving reflection on a father-son relationship which has often fed his songwriting muse.
Wainwright also delighted yours truly by pulling out some archive classics from a career stretching back to his 1970 debut album, including Prince Hal's Dirge, Whatever Happened To Us and Red Guitar.
But he also treated us to some new songs, including Man With a Dog in the City and Back In Your Town, proving his unique songwriting skills remain finely tuned.
He also dedicated Five Years Old to his now very much grown-up songwriter daughter, Martha Wainwright, who celebrated her birthday on the same day as her father's gig at The Sage.
Highlights included the haunting Dead Man, the family saga, Half-Fist, White Winos, Human Cannonball and the old Marty Robbins' song, At the End of a Long Lonely Day, where he duetted with another daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche, who was the support act and provided warm vocal harmonies throughout a very special show.
Terry Kelly
Friday, 10 May 2013
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Bryan Forbes RIP
Forbes, who began his career in film as an actor and screenwriter and became one of the most important figures in the British film industry, died surrounded by his family at his home in Virginia Water, Surrey, friend Matthew D'Ancona said.
He was married to actor Nanette Newman, who appeared in several of his films, and with whom he had two daughters – the TV presenter Emma Forbes and the journalist Sarah Standing.
D'Ancona said: "Bryan Forbes was a titan of cinema, known and loved by people around the world in the film and theatre industries and known in other fields including politics. He is simply irreplaceable and it is wholly apt that he died surrounded by his family."
Forbes, who was made CBE in 2004 for services to the arts and the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, was born John Theobald Clarke in Stratford, London in 1926. He began acting in the late 1940s after changing his professional name, playing a number of supporting roles in notable British films including An Inspector Calls and The Colditz Story. But he soon became better known as a screenwriter and director.
His notable screenwriting credits included I Was Monty's Double (1958) and The League of Gentlemen (1959), about a group of former army officers who use their wartime skills to plan a daring bank robbery.
His directing debut was the acclaimed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), about three Lancashire children who believe a criminal they discover hiding in their barn is a reincarnation of Christ.
In 1969 Forbes became chief of production and managing director of film studio Associated British. Although the venture produced a few classics, including The Railway Children (1970) and The Go-Between (1970), many other projects were either disappointments or were frustrated due to financial problems and Forbes resigned in 1971.
But Forbes had enjoyed success in Hollywood in 1965 with the film King Rat, a prisoner of war drama, and 10 years later he returned to the US and directed The Stepford Wives (1975), based on the novel by Ira Levin.
In his later years, Forbes turned to writing novels, including his latest, The Soldier's Story, published last year, and two volumes of autobiography.
He was awarded the Dilys Powell award for outstanding contribution to cinema at the London Film Critics' Circle Awards in 2006.
Interviewed by the Daily Mail last June, Forbes said he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1975 but doctors later told him it was a misdiagnosis.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Ray Harryhausen RIP
Ray Harryhausen obituary
Special effects master on fantasy films including Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans
Sheila Whitaker
The Guardian
n 1933, the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at the cinema and was hooked – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre "stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done." It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen, who has died aged 92, was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. He created the special effects for fantasy films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958); Jason and the Argonauts (1963), with its famous army of skeletons; and Clash of the Titans (1981).
Special effects master on fantasy films including Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans
Sheila Whitaker
The Guardian
Tuesday 7 May 2013
n 1933, the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at the cinema and was hooked – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre "stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done." It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen, who has died aged 92, was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. He created the special effects for fantasy films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958); Jason and the Argonauts (1963), with its famous army of skeletons; and Clash of the Titans (1981).
He was born in Los Angeles to Frederick and Martha Harryhausen, Americans of German ancestry. As a young boy he had an interest in prehistoric animals and created clay models. He began to experiment with a borrowed camera, working around the fact that it did not have a stop-frame mechanism, and he showed his experiments to Willis O'Brien, who had done the visual effects for King Kong. O'Brien's verdict – that Harryhausen's models did not have any character and that he should study anatomy – was a turning point in Harryhausen's approach to his craft.
He attended Los Angeles City College and continued his experiments with a new stop-frame 16mm camera. When, in 1940, George Pal, the puppeteer film-maker, fled to Hollywood from Europe, Harryhausen showed him his work and was subsequently hired to work on Pal's Puppetoon series for Paramount alongside O'Brien. Its unjointed wooden figures did not really suit either Harryhausen or O'Brien.
Harryhausen made room to begin his dream project: Evolution of the World, a history of the planet. Surviving footage and sketches show a debt to Gustave Doré and to King Kong, but the time it would take to complete, combined with the release of Fantasia (1940) – in which the Rite of Spring sequence covered much of the same ground – stopped the project. In 1942 Harryhausen enlisted in the army, was assigned to the Signal Corps and got himself drafted into Frank Capra's unit to work on propaganda films. He also contributed to the Army-Navy Screen Magazine as an assistant photographer.
Unemployed after demobilisation in 1946, he began a series of animated two-minute fairy tales using out of date 16mm Kodak stock that he had found. Tied together with a Mother Goose prologue and epilogue, the resulting short film was successfully sold to schools and libraries.
O'Brien, who was working on Mighty Joe Young (1949), then called on Harryhausen to be his assistant. The film did not do well commercially, but O'Brien won an Oscar for the special effects. Harryhausen returned to his fairy stories, using the pseudonym Jerome Wray for his photography, and then began work on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), inspired by Ray Bradbury's short story The Fog Horn. He devised a dynamic split-screen technique which enabled him to eradicate the then expensive system of inserting miniatures or glass paintings to combine stop-motion with live action. This process was eventually named Dynamation for the marketing campaign for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and subsequent films.
He attended Los Angeles City College and continued his experiments with a new stop-frame 16mm camera. When, in 1940, George Pal, the puppeteer film-maker, fled to Hollywood from Europe, Harryhausen showed him his work and was subsequently hired to work on Pal's Puppetoon series for Paramount alongside O'Brien. Its unjointed wooden figures did not really suit either Harryhausen or O'Brien.
Harryhausen made room to begin his dream project: Evolution of the World, a history of the planet. Surviving footage and sketches show a debt to Gustave Doré and to King Kong, but the time it would take to complete, combined with the release of Fantasia (1940) – in which the Rite of Spring sequence covered much of the same ground – stopped the project. In 1942 Harryhausen enlisted in the army, was assigned to the Signal Corps and got himself drafted into Frank Capra's unit to work on propaganda films. He also contributed to the Army-Navy Screen Magazine as an assistant photographer.
Unemployed after demobilisation in 1946, he began a series of animated two-minute fairy tales using out of date 16mm Kodak stock that he had found. Tied together with a Mother Goose prologue and epilogue, the resulting short film was successfully sold to schools and libraries.
O'Brien, who was working on Mighty Joe Young (1949), then called on Harryhausen to be his assistant. The film did not do well commercially, but O'Brien won an Oscar for the special effects. Harryhausen returned to his fairy stories, using the pseudonym Jerome Wray for his photography, and then began work on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), inspired by Ray Bradbury's short story The Fog Horn. He devised a dynamic split-screen technique which enabled him to eradicate the then expensive system of inserting miniatures or glass paintings to combine stop-motion with live action. This process was eventually named Dynamation for the marketing campaign for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and subsequent films.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had an original budget of $65,000, which spiralled to $210,000. Warner Bros struck 500 prints in "glorious sepia tone" and, on some copies, tinted the underwater scenes green. The marketing led to the film supposedly taking more than $5m worldwide.
Harryhausen made a couple more fairytales and some TV commercials, and then met the producer Charles H Schneer and began work on It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), the start of their lengthy collaboration. In the film a giant octopus rises from the sea to destroy the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge, though because of the expense Harryhausen reduced the number of the octopus's tentacles to six. Permission to photograph the bridge was refused in case it undermined public confidence in the structure, so stock footage was used.
On The Animal World (1956), Harryhausen worked for the last time with O'Brien before returning to work with Schneer on Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956). There later followed further forays into space – First Men in the Moon (1964), from the novel by HG Wells, was the only time in which Harryhausen worked in wide screen and used humans wearing suits (children in insect outfits) to avoid the endless animation.
Harryhausen made a couple more fairytales and some TV commercials, and then met the producer Charles H Schneer and began work on It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), the start of their lengthy collaboration. In the film a giant octopus rises from the sea to destroy the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge, though because of the expense Harryhausen reduced the number of the octopus's tentacles to six. Permission to photograph the bridge was refused in case it undermined public confidence in the structure, so stock footage was used.
On The Animal World (1956), Harryhausen worked for the last time with O'Brien before returning to work with Schneer on Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956). There later followed further forays into space – First Men in the Moon (1964), from the novel by HG Wells, was the only time in which Harryhausen worked in wide screen and used humans wearing suits (children in insect outfits) to avoid the endless animation.
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was Harryhausen's first foray into colour. It involved front and rear projection, and Sinbad's swordfight with a skeleton was considered too frightening for children by the British censor.
During the pre-production of The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Harry hausen and Schneer moved to the UK, where travelling matte facilities (the technique used to combine scenes separately photographed) provided by Rank were superior to those in Hollywood.
Jason and the Argonauts had a stunning variety of creatures – Talos, the man of bronze, the Harpies and the army of skeletons among them – populating the hero's mythical quest. The Valley of Gwangi (1969) – an abandoned project which O'Brien had originally worked on for RKO – was somewhat unjustly underrated. The sequence of cowboys attempting to rope a dinosaur took five months to film.
Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans were generally accepted, including by Harryhausen himself, to be his most successful pictures, but his career is littered with many other memorable creations – among them, the space monster Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).
Sadly, however, Harryhausen's wonderful worlds of fantasy were rarely equalled by strong scripts or actors. He was "heartsick over some of my pictures and I could kick myself when I think of how I didn't insist on more from the director or the studio". It was only on his last film, Clash of the Titans, that his creative imagination was finally matched by the castlist, which included Laurence Olivier, as a sardonic Zeus, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. In 1992 he received the Gordon E Sawyer Academy Award for technical achievement. As with all film-makers he had innumerable unrealised projects, in his case Baron Munchausen and Dante's Inferno, both inspired by Doré's illustrations.
A modest and charming man with a delightful sense of humour and ineffable courtesy, Harryhausen was always good company. He published his Film Fantasy Scrapbook in 1972, dedicating it to O'Brien. It also included a preface from Bradbury, whom he had met as a teenager at the Los Angeles Science Fiction League; he was best man at Bradbury's wedding.
Harryhausen laid the groundwork for many special effects techniques today and clearly influenced, among other films, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). His admirers include Steven Spielberg, whose special effects dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) are in stark contrast to Harryhausen working alone with a small process screen, a vintage Mitchell camera, a pair of sliding matte glasses, partial miniature sets and glass paintings.
He published his autobiography, An Animated Life, in 2004. In retirement he had also returned to sculpting, and lectured and toured the world with exhibitions, culminating with one at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at the London Film Museum in 2010 to celebrate his 90th birthday, together with a special event at the National Film Theatre hosted by John Landis. In 2012 the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan was released.
Once, when asked if he had a favourite among his creatures, Harryhausen replied: "It would be Medusa. But don't tell the others."
He married Diana Livingstone in 1962. She survives him, along with a daughter, Vanessa.
• Raymond Frederick Harryhausen, special effects creator and technician, born 29 June 1920; died 7 May 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/07/ray-harryhausen-dies
A modest and charming man with a delightful sense of humour and ineffable courtesy, Harryhausen was always good company. He published his Film Fantasy Scrapbook in 1972, dedicating it to O'Brien. It also included a preface from Bradbury, whom he had met as a teenager at the Los Angeles Science Fiction League; he was best man at Bradbury's wedding.
Harryhausen laid the groundwork for many special effects techniques today and clearly influenced, among other films, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). His admirers include Steven Spielberg, whose special effects dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) are in stark contrast to Harryhausen working alone with a small process screen, a vintage Mitchell camera, a pair of sliding matte glasses, partial miniature sets and glass paintings.
He published his autobiography, An Animated Life, in 2004. In retirement he had also returned to sculpting, and lectured and toured the world with exhibitions, culminating with one at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at the London Film Museum in 2010 to celebrate his 90th birthday, together with a special event at the National Film Theatre hosted by John Landis. In 2012 the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan was released.
Once, when asked if he had a favourite among his creatures, Harryhausen replied: "It would be Medusa. But don't tell the others."
He married Diana Livingstone in 1962. She survives him, along with a daughter, Vanessa.
• Raymond Frederick Harryhausen, special effects creator and technician, born 29 June 1920; died 7 May 2013
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Last night's set list
At the Fulford Arms, York: -
Hey Babe
Motion Pictures
Through My Sails
Up On Cripple Creek
Mind Your Own Business
Crazy Arms
My last visit to the Fulford for some time (following the permanent move to Tyneside on Wednesday) prompted a run through some obscure Neil Young songs and a trip down memory lane with The Band.
Finishing off with Hank Williams and Ray Price felt good.
Said goodbye to some good friends but may bump into them again "down the road".
Hey Babe
Motion Pictures
Through My Sails
Up On Cripple Creek
Mind Your Own Business
Crazy Arms
My last visit to the Fulford for some time (following the permanent move to Tyneside on Wednesday) prompted a run through some obscure Neil Young songs and a trip down memory lane with The Band.
Finishing off with Hank Williams and Ray Price felt good.
Said goodbye to some good friends but may bump into them again "down the road".
Monday, 6 May 2013
J. D. Salinger: Nine Letters...
The Young Salinger, Mordant Yet Hopeful
By Dave Itzkoff
Published: April 23, 2013
On Nov. 18, 1941, a struggling Manhattan author wrote to a young woman in Toronto to tell her to look for a new piece of his in a coming issue of The New Yorker. This short story, he said, about “a prep school kid on his Christmas vacation,” had inspired his editor to ask for an entire series on the character, but the author himself was having misgivings. “I’ll try a couple more, anyway,” he wrote, “and if I begin to miss my mark I’ll quit.”
He ended the letter by asking for her reaction to “the first Holden story,” which he said was called “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” and signing, simply, “Jerry S.”
The writer was J. D. Salinger, then just 22, with works like “The Catcher in the Rye” still ahead of him and his literary success hardly assured. When Salinger died in seclusion in 2010, at the age of 91, he remained a mystery to his millions of readers, having shared little of himself with the world beyond the few fictional works he had published.
But this elusive author comes vividly to life in a series of letters he wrote from 1941 to 1943, which few people have seen in the 70 years since.
In this correspondence, which has been acquired by the Morgan Library and Museum and shared with The New York Times, the unsettled young Salinger reveals himself to be as playful, passionate and caustic as Holden Caulfield, the self-questioning adolescent who would become his most enduring creation.
“He’s just at the threshold of his career, but his voice is there,” said Declan Kiely, the Morgan’s curator and department head for literary and historical manuscripts. “It’s a wonderful opening onto his earliest years as a writer.”
The young Salinger also shows an aptitude for self-mythology and misdirection in these letters, as he obfuscates difficult truths about his personal life, his professional accomplishments and his entrance into World War II.
“It was a good time for bravado,” said Kenneth Slawenski, the author of “J. D. Salinger: A Life.” “That’s probably all he had at that point.”
In the summer of 1941, Salinger began exchanging letters with Marjorie Sheard, a Toronto woman about his age, who had been reading his earliest short stories in publications like Esquire and Collier’s.
An aspiring author herself, Ms. Sheard asked Salinger for advice, and he encouraged her. “Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl tripe,” Salinger wrote in a letter dated Sept. 4, 1941, suggesting some smaller literary magazines where she could submit her work.
“You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay,” he wrote, “but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Over the next two years, Salinger sent Ms. Sheard a total of nine letters that were often humorous and occasionally flirty. “What do you look like?” he wrote to her on Oct. 9, 1941, asking that she send him a large photograph. One month later he apologized for his brazen request: “I wrote from a mood — and not a nice one.”
But when Ms. Sheard complied nonetheless and sent along a picture, Salinger replied: “Sneaky girl. You’re pretty.”
Ms. Sheard, now 95, stored these letters in a shoe box in a closet. About six years ago, she moved to a nursing home and gave the letters to a relative, who kept them in a dresser drawer.
More recently, as the cost of Ms. Sheard’s care increased, she and her family decided to sell the letters to the Morgan, which collects and displays Salinger correspondence. (The museum declined to say how much it paid for the letters.)
Liza Sheard, a niece of Ms. Sheard’s, said in a telephone interview that the letters held a strong sentimental value, particularly because her aunt never became a published writer and lived most of her life as a housewife in a modest apartment.
“It’s fantasy-like, because this was not her life at all,” Liza Sheard said. “It’s a young woman writing to a superstar and talking to him as if they were peers.”
In their earliest, playful exchanges, Salinger says he is rereading “Anna Karenina,” which he says is not as good as “War and Peace” but “a far craftier job.” (Of Tolstoy, he writes cheekily, “I think he’ll go places.”)
In addition to recommending his own stories, he suggests that Ms. Sheard read “The Great Gatsby” and “The Last Tycoon,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She replies that both Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway “annoy me in the same way — one feels oneself tricked into feeling sympathy for entirely undeserving and rather tiresome people.”
But at the start of 1942, Salinger’s correspondence takes a sardonic turn, and he asks Ms. Sheard not to bring up his as-yet-unpublished Holden Caulfield story. “God and Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script,” he writes, referring to the founding editor of The New Yorker.
In fact, Salinger had recently learned that the magazine was postponing publication of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in view of the recent attack on Pearl Harbor — it would not be published until 1946 — and he knew that he too would soon be drawn into the war.
In later dispatches from Fort Monmouth, N.J., and Bainbridge, Ga., Salinger jokes about his initiation into military life, closing his letters with comical pseudonyms like “Fitzdudley,” “Wormsley-Bassett” and “Flo and Benjy.”
But other details that Salinger volunteers about himself at this time are ambiguous, if not fictitious. “I was supposed to get married on furlough,” he writes in a letter from Nov. 28, 1942, “but she wanted it all said and done at her Daddy’s house in Hollywood. So I picked up where I left off with an old typewriter.”
Mr. Slawenski, the Salinger biographer, said he could not be certain if this was a veiled reference to Salinger’s relationship with Oona O’Neill, the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, or to some other matrimonial near miss.
Though Salinger and Oona O’Neill dated briefly in the early 1940s, Mr. Slawenski said she did not return his affection and broke his heart when she married Charlie Chaplin.
It is more likely, he said, that Salinger was puffing himself up to Ms. Sheard while privately nursing his romantic wounds.
“He makes himself feel better in the process, because he’s secretly hurt,” Mr. Slawenski said. “Romantically, he’s really been crushed.”
Elsewhere, Salinger mentions that he is trying to forge ahead on his short-story series for The New Yorker, and makes tantalizing references to other unpublished and presumably lost works from this period.
One piece, titled “Harry Jesus,” comes “straight from the belly,” he says.
“It will doubtless tear the country’s heart out,” Salinger writes, “and return the thing a new and far richer organ.”
The possibility that he could succeed on such a scale was apparently too outrageous a dream for the young Salinger. After making this boast, he adds: “(I’ll probably fail completely with it.)”
Sunday, 5 May 2013
Saturday, 4 May 2013
Last night's set list
At the Rook & Gaskill Songwriters' Circle, York: -
I'm Just A Loser
Ghosts On The Tyne
How Can We Say Goodbye?
Falling
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Four singer songwriters performing their songs in a pub. Nothing more, nothing less. A most enjoyable evening of musical fun. All ended off with a Blues in E (mayhem ensued)!
Afterwards the landlord kindly played several Neil songs on the digital jukebox, much to my delight.
See yous all next week!
P.S. Tom Kelly did get credit for the lyrics to Ghosts On The Tyne
Love SongI'm Just A Loser
Ghosts On The Tyne
How Can We Say Goodbye?
Falling
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Four singer songwriters performing their songs in a pub. Nothing more, nothing less. A most enjoyable evening of musical fun. All ended off with a Blues in E (mayhem ensued)!
Afterwards the landlord kindly played several Neil songs on the digital jukebox, much to my delight.
See yous all next week!
P.S. Tom Kelly did get credit for the lyrics to Ghosts On The Tyne
Friday, 3 May 2013
Thursday, 2 May 2013
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York (The Elderly Brothers): -
Set 1: -
Singing The Blues
Wake Up Little Susie
There'll Never Be Anyone Else But You
I'm A Believer
Daydream Believer
Funny How Love Can Be
Lola
Set 2: -
Things We Said Today
Misery
I'll Get You
He'll Have To Go
To Know You Is To Love You
The Price Of Love
Love Hurts
Crying In The Rain
Very quiet until about 10:15 then the night finally got going. A dearth of players meant that The Elderlys got to close proceedings yet again.
Highlight of the night was the ever-wonderful Mr Mark Wynn completing his opening set despite busting his D-string after about 3 songs - and he did about 12 in total!
Set 1: -
Singing The Blues
Wake Up Little Susie
There'll Never Be Anyone Else But You
I'm A Believer
Daydream Believer
Funny How Love Can Be
Lola
Set 2: -
Things We Said Today
Misery
I'll Get You
He'll Have To Go
To Know You Is To Love You
The Price Of Love
Love Hurts
Crying In The Rain
Very quiet until about 10:15 then the night finally got going. A dearth of players meant that The Elderlys got to close proceedings yet again.
Highlight of the night was the ever-wonderful Mr Mark Wynn completing his opening set despite busting his D-string after about 3 songs - and he did about 12 in total!
Wednesday, 1 May 2013
Monday, 29 April 2013
Last night's set list
At the Queen Vic, Roker: -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Falling
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Mind Your Own Business
The Paul Jackson Musicians & Buskers Night is up and running once more following a fallow period since the days of The Big Jug, Durham. Some excellent turns including Tony Bengtsson, who will be presenting his new band at The Cumberland Arms on 6th June.
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Falling
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Mind Your Own Business
The Paul Jackson Musicians & Buskers Night is up and running once more following a fallow period since the days of The Big Jug, Durham. Some excellent turns including Tony Bengtsson, who will be presenting his new band at The Cumberland Arms on 6th June.
Sunday, 28 April 2013
Paul Muldoon - The Word on the Street review
The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon – review
Muldoon's exploration of the connection between poetry and song results in pieces that fall somewhere between the two
Adam Newey
The Guardian
Here we go, one more time, with feeling – the old song/poetry debate comes roaring back to life, courtesy of Paul Muldoon. Back in the 1990s, Christopher Ricks stirred it up by applying the techniques of academic literary criticism to the study of Bob Dylan's songs. Paul McCartney has had lyrics published by a leading poetry imprint (Faber), and Tom Waits has recently put out a volume of verse. Last year, Glyn Maxwell argued that it's essentially a sterile debate, with a simple answer: "Bob Dylan and John Keats are at different work. It would be nice never to be asked about this again."
Muldoon used his 2012 Poetry Society lecture – which shares a title with this new collection – to argue for a reconnection between poetry and song. Fair enough: there's a reason why songs have "lyrics"; if you're a bard in antiquity you pluck your lyre and you sing your poem. That shared tradition is by no means confined to the distant past, either – listen, for instance, to Eddi Reader singing Robert Burns, or, indeed, to Muldoon himself performing with his band (or "music collective", as the blurb for this book describes them), Wayside Shrines.
So there's something of an agenda here; though, as Muldoon admitted in these pages recently, he's well aware of the difficulties it raises: "The tradition of reading lyrics on a page is a little bit iffy. Some of us of a certain age will remember lyrics on album sleeves … One took them somewhat seriously, but maybe not completely seriously. I'm a bit conflicted myself." Nonetheless, the project is carried through with typical Muldoonian vim and gusto, from the book's non-standard format (essentially the same proportions as a CD case), to the subtitle on the title page ("Rock Lyrics"), to the blocky, stencil‑style sans font used for the contents (I want to say "track listing"). Curiously, it lends the book something of a country and western feel.
Muldoon's exploration of the connection between poetry and song results in pieces that fall somewhere between the two
Adam Newey
The Guardian
Friday 26 April 2013
Muldoon used his 2012 Poetry Society lecture – which shares a title with this new collection – to argue for a reconnection between poetry and song. Fair enough: there's a reason why songs have "lyrics"; if you're a bard in antiquity you pluck your lyre and you sing your poem. That shared tradition is by no means confined to the distant past, either – listen, for instance, to Eddi Reader singing Robert Burns, or, indeed, to Muldoon himself performing with his band (or "music collective", as the blurb for this book describes them), Wayside Shrines.
So there's something of an agenda here; though, as Muldoon admitted in these pages recently, he's well aware of the difficulties it raises: "The tradition of reading lyrics on a page is a little bit iffy. Some of us of a certain age will remember lyrics on album sleeves … One took them somewhat seriously, but maybe not completely seriously. I'm a bit conflicted myself." Nonetheless, the project is carried through with typical Muldoonian vim and gusto, from the book's non-standard format (essentially the same proportions as a CD case), to the subtitle on the title page ("Rock Lyrics"), to the blocky, stencil‑style sans font used for the contents (I want to say "track listing"). Curiously, it lends the book something of a country and western feel.
The words, though, are a different matter. Like some post-punk, blues-inflected Cole Porter, Muldoon adopts the manoeuvres of the standard song lyric to access the sort of territory where most mainstream song-writing rarely, if ever, ventures: war in Afghanistan, the US housing bubble, the west's over-reliance on the oil industry, and so on. "Badass Blues", for instance, brings together Charlton Heston, the Jewish crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein, TS Eliot and Albert Einstein, and ends up in Tahrir Square for the Egyptian revolution.So there's something of an agenda here; though, as Muldoon admitted in these pages recently, he's well aware of the difficulties it raises: "The tradition of reading lyrics on a page is a little bit iffy. Some of us of a certain age will remember lyrics on album sleeves … One took them somewhat seriously, but maybe not completely seriously. I'm a bit conflicted myself." Nonetheless, the project is carried through with typical Muldoonian vim and gusto, from the book's non-standard format (essentially the same proportions as a CD case), to the subtitle on the title page ("Rock Lyrics"), to the blocky, stencil‑style sans font used for the contents (I want to say "track listing"). Curiously, it lends the book something of a country and western feel.
That said, there's also plenty of lovelorn yearning, bittersweet break-ups, and sex and drugs, too. Muldoon, one senses, is never happier than when subverting a cliche, and he has plenty to draw on: phrases such as "so long" and "over you", for example, are picked over, turned round and made to enact the linguistic reversal that concludes several of the pieces.
There's some clever stuff going on, as you'd expect from a writer as sharply playful as Muldoon. After Charlton Heston, the next piece, "Big Twist", references Planet of the Apes; and the 60s singer Eddie Falcon in the previous poem morphs into The Maltese Falcon here. The poem's rolling allusiveness scrolls through Hollywood – Star Wars, Chinatown, Psycho, Blade Runner – to interrogate the mirror-world of American cultural identity, via a conventional love-song trope in which the constructed "you" is as unclear as any could wish for: "Your falling for me that first day / Was the first clue I missed / And that you've loved me all along / Is clearly the big twist".
There are further deliberate slippages of thought in "Black Box", where the aeroplane isn't invented, as everyone thinks, by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but has an oddly essential life of its own: "an airplane flew low over your bed / Concocting itself as it flew / I don't know what happened along the way / To make me come up with you". As for the naming of things, that's more often than not misleading, or a downright lie, the result of a conspiracy of wilful blindness: just as the black box "is often orange or red / That in itself is a clue", so, in "Cleaning Up My Act" "There are no gentlemen / In a gentlemen's club" and "Nothing is a problem / To a problem child". The refrain has a distinctly Cole Porterish tone: "I'm hoping to be filthy rich / That's why I'm cleaning up my act".
Like Porter, Muldoon delights in reaching for an absurd rhyme: "Hegel" and "bagel", say, or "tendency" and "Southend-on-Sea". And at times, the freewheeling juxtapositions of classical or highbrow references with pop culture and Americana do bring the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited to mind: "Delilah was a Delaware dame … As for Jezebel / She put her horse / Before the cartel / And the drug task force / Even the dogs in the street could tell / Jezebel was a Jersey belle".
The difficulty with reading these pieces is that you don't quite know whether to read them as song lyrics – in which case you subconsciously try to supply your own rhythmic beat, even though you can't tell for sure where a syllable might best be sung short or long – or as poetry, in which case you find yourself tripping up on some of the repetitive refrains, and quickly become aware that they don't display anything like the full range of inventiveness of his best verse. Better, perhaps, to listen to them being performed – which, happily, is possible at the Wayside Shrines website, where, as the book's cover says, you can hear "music inspired by these lyrics". Having done so, however, I'm not sure that they're wholly successful as songs, either – their provenance as poetry first makes some of the settings seem awkward, or it may simply be that Muldoon is less practised as a lyricist than as a poet for the page. Well, no doubt there are as many ways of writing a great song as a great poem, but I'm reminded that, when he began writing "Yesterday", Paul McCartney used the words "Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs" as placeholder text before he came up with the final lyrics. Sometimes there's a lot to be said for scrambled eggs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/26/word-street-paul-muldoon-review
That said, there's also plenty of lovelorn yearning, bittersweet break-ups, and sex and drugs, too. Muldoon, one senses, is never happier than when subverting a cliche, and he has plenty to draw on: phrases such as "so long" and "over you", for example, are picked over, turned round and made to enact the linguistic reversal that concludes several of the pieces.
There's some clever stuff going on, as you'd expect from a writer as sharply playful as Muldoon. After Charlton Heston, the next piece, "Big Twist", references Planet of the Apes; and the 60s singer Eddie Falcon in the previous poem morphs into The Maltese Falcon here. The poem's rolling allusiveness scrolls through Hollywood – Star Wars, Chinatown, Psycho, Blade Runner – to interrogate the mirror-world of American cultural identity, via a conventional love-song trope in which the constructed "you" is as unclear as any could wish for: "Your falling for me that first day / Was the first clue I missed / And that you've loved me all along / Is clearly the big twist".
There are further deliberate slippages of thought in "Black Box", where the aeroplane isn't invented, as everyone thinks, by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but has an oddly essential life of its own: "an airplane flew low over your bed / Concocting itself as it flew / I don't know what happened along the way / To make me come up with you". As for the naming of things, that's more often than not misleading, or a downright lie, the result of a conspiracy of wilful blindness: just as the black box "is often orange or red / That in itself is a clue", so, in "Cleaning Up My Act" "There are no gentlemen / In a gentlemen's club" and "Nothing is a problem / To a problem child". The refrain has a distinctly Cole Porterish tone: "I'm hoping to be filthy rich / That's why I'm cleaning up my act".
Like Porter, Muldoon delights in reaching for an absurd rhyme: "Hegel" and "bagel", say, or "tendency" and "Southend-on-Sea". And at times, the freewheeling juxtapositions of classical or highbrow references with pop culture and Americana do bring the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited to mind: "Delilah was a Delaware dame … As for Jezebel / She put her horse / Before the cartel / And the drug task force / Even the dogs in the street could tell / Jezebel was a Jersey belle".
The difficulty with reading these pieces is that you don't quite know whether to read them as song lyrics – in which case you subconsciously try to supply your own rhythmic beat, even though you can't tell for sure where a syllable might best be sung short or long – or as poetry, in which case you find yourself tripping up on some of the repetitive refrains, and quickly become aware that they don't display anything like the full range of inventiveness of his best verse. Better, perhaps, to listen to them being performed – which, happily, is possible at the Wayside Shrines website, where, as the book's cover says, you can hear "music inspired by these lyrics". Having done so, however, I'm not sure that they're wholly successful as songs, either – their provenance as poetry first makes some of the settings seem awkward, or it may simply be that Muldoon is less practised as a lyricist than as a poet for the page. Well, no doubt there are as many ways of writing a great song as a great poem, but I'm reminded that, when he began writing "Yesterday", Paul McCartney used the words "Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs" as placeholder text before he came up with the final lyrics. Sometimes there's a lot to be said for scrambled eggs.
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