Friday, 16 August 2013
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York: -
Ron: -
Autumn Leaves
Love Is The Drug
Da: -
I Believe In You
Oh Lonesome Me
The Elderly Brothers: -
I'll Get You
Crying In The Rain
You Got It
Happy Together
A good crowd saw some excellent turns including a lass who sang a song in Welsh and a passing trio who gave a rendition of Waggon Wheel on mandolin, banjo and percussion (the banjo case!!).
Ron: -
Autumn Leaves
Love Is The Drug
Da: -
I Believe In You
Oh Lonesome Me
The Elderly Brothers: -
I'll Get You
Crying In The Rain
You Got It
Happy Together
A good crowd saw some excellent turns including a lass who sang a song in Welsh and a passing trio who gave a rendition of Waggon Wheel on mandolin, banjo and percussion (the banjo case!!).
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Philip Hoare - The Sea Inside review
The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare – review
This collage of personal memoir, cultural history and travelogue is full of the ocean's strangeness and beauty
Caspar Henderson
The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/30/sea-inside-philip-hoare-review?INTCMP=SRCH
This collage of personal memoir, cultural history and travelogue is full of the ocean's strangeness and beauty
Caspar Henderson
The Guardian
Thursday 30 May 2013
A planet full of song sounds like something from a myth or a fairytale. And yet for millions of years Earth was such a place. Forest and grassland across continents was full of birdsong. At sea, great whales sang theme and variations through thousands of miles of the abyss. Man drastically diminished the realm of the birds – first with fire, axe and plough, later with guns, urban development and supercharged agriculture. Britain today has 90% fewer nightingales than it did just 40 years ago. In the ocean, over a period of a few hundred years, Europeans and Americans slaughtered sperm whales, right whales, blue whales and other species in the hundreds of thousands so that by the 1960s more than 99% of most populations had been lost. The sound and fury of engines replaced the old music of the oceans, with whales in small numbers at the margins, or in greatly shrunken sound worlds.
The last third of the 20th century saw a revolution in attitudes – at least in North America and many of the European countries from which the whaling fleets had once sailed. In the 1980s the International Whaling Commission made the conservation, rather then their exploitation of whales, its primary goal. One of the drivers of this change was the discovery by Scott McVay and Roger Payne that humpback whales sing complex and beautiful songs. Their album of whale songs, released in 1971, became one of the bestselling records of the decade and a signature sound for the rapidly growing environmental movement. Photographs of whales underwater – first taken only in 1975 – contributed to growing awareness of the extraordinary beauty and sophistication of these creatures, and by the time of the hit film Free Willy in the early 1990s whales were swimming in the cultural mainstream. The present century has produced other striking works. In 2008 the philosopher and musician David Rothenberg released Thousand Mile Song, an album of his jam sessions with whales in which jazz saxophone is relayed underwater through a loudspeaker and meets funky responses, together with a book reflecting on whale music and human-whale interaction. Bryant Austin's Beautiful Whale, published earlier this year, takes high-definition photography to an astonishing new edge of possibility.
Increasingly, and notwithstanding the unconscionable cruelty sometimes inflicted on smaller cetaceans by fishermen, whales are receiving more practical and effective protection than ever before. In recent years, marine biologists have begun to understand the contribution whales make to ocean productivity (their waste feeds plankton on which other life depends, and they mix ocean waters to useful effect). "Allowing whale numbers to recover could be seen as a benign form of geoengineering,"George Monbiot writes in Feral, his landmark book on rewilding. Viable populations of most of the great whale species, though not necessarily the more mysterious beaked whales, are still with us, balanced precariously on the edge of a recovery that may or may not be shattered by rapid changes to ocean acidity and other perturbations in this century. Meanwhile, billions of humans are bound by fossil-fuel consumption into an energy metabolism equivalent to that of a mammal of 30 tonnes – the mass of a humpback.
Philip Hoare documented the wonder of whales and their destruction in Leviathan, or the Whale. It was an extraordinary achievement, combining a history of whaling, a voyage into the life of Herman Melville, reflections on Hoare's own encounters with whales and more. Building on the success of that book, Hoare co-curated The Moby-Dick Big Read, a performance of what is, arguably, one of the defining texts of industrial civilisation.
The Sea Inside is shorter and in some ways a more digressive book thanLeviathan, but bears a clear family resemblance. It is a collage of memoir, cultural history and travelogue in which the author makes pilgrimage to ever more distant seas to swim with whales and dolphins. These encounters yield some of the most vivid writing in the book, charged with the same awe and joy that characterised Hoare's retelling in the last chapter of Leviathan of a close encounter with a sperm whale near the Azores. Off the coast of New Zealand he dives into a super-pod of more than 200 dusky dolphins: "I see their shapes, exquisitely airbrushed black and white and pearl-grey, swimming beneath me. Steadily the fins begin to gather and steer towards me, more and more, till I'm in an eddying mass of swooping, diving cetaceans. Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I'm encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus … Dolphins are breaching right by me, turning somersaults in the air. How about this? Can you do that? I reach out instinctively; they easily evade me … For a moment I think they're going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am, what I am not." This is glorious stuff, true to our nature and to theirs. For thousands of years, people have marvelled at the exuberance of dolphins. An English bestiary of the 13th century exaggerates in the letter but not the spirit: "Dolphins follow men's voices, or gather in shoals when music is played. There is nothing swifter in the sea. They often leap over ships in their flight."
The Sea Inside also describes artistic and literary figures, scientists and adventurers whose lives have left traces in the spots that Hoare visits on his quest. A day trip to the Isle of Wight from his Southampton home summons the ghosts of Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred Tennyson. In London, where he goes to see the skeletons and preserved flesh of whales and porpoises, Hoare encounters the shadow of the surgeon John Hunter, whose world is brilliantly portrayed in Hilary Mantel's excellent, neglected short novel The Giant, O'Brien. A visit to Sri Lanka brings in the self-styled Count de Mauny-Talvande, who before the second world war created his own louche paradise on a tiny private island – Paul Bowles and Arthur C Clarke were visitors. There is an extended account of the life and passions of TH White, a man "more remarkable than anything he wrote", but usually remembered today for his Arthurian adventure The Sword in the Stone and for The Goshawk, an account of his attempt to train a bird. These and other digressions will engage different readers to different extents. Especially interesting to me are those circling the lives of a Northumbrian saint, a Tasmanian princess and a Maori warrior. Around St Cuthbert, whose love and communion with wild animals is a tale that never grows old, Hoare traces the radical changes in attitude to the raven in Western history (beloved to early Christian mystics, it denoted gothic gloom by the 19th century). Reflecting on the aboriginal Tasmanian woman Truganini, who survived one of the most thorough genocides in recorded history, Hoare finds himself contemplating the fate of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger – an extinct marsupial predator with something of Pakicetus, the ancient terrestrial ancestor of whales, in its vaguely wolf-like shape. (The surprise at the end of this chapter is alone worth the price.) And in the Maori war leader Te Pehi Kupe, who travelled from Aotearoa to the English Antipodes in the early 19th century with the aim of obtaining advanced weaponry with which to destroy his enemies at home, Hoare finds the likely model of Queequeg, the fabulously tattooed harpooner in Moby-Dick.
Running like a braid of coloured water through the whirls and eddies of The Sea Inside is the author's inner struggle. Hoare's epigraph is from the great Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer": "Even now my heart / Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts / Over the sea, across the whale's domain, / Travel afar the regions of the earth …" But his starting and ending point is the family home in which he lives alone. At the beginning the vision is intense and unsettled: "Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, 24-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces."
Returning from the ends of the earth, Hoare finds that, for all the journeying, one may never hear anything so beautiful as a blackbird in a suburban garden. An easy, off-the-shelf trope at this point would be the familiar lines from TS Eliot's "Little Gidding": "The end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." But he has discovered something more ambiguous and true: "There's no such place as home. And we live there, you and me." The world is unutterably strange, and full of marvels.
The last third of the 20th century saw a revolution in attitudes – at least in North America and many of the European countries from which the whaling fleets had once sailed. In the 1980s the International Whaling Commission made the conservation, rather then their exploitation of whales, its primary goal. One of the drivers of this change was the discovery by Scott McVay and Roger Payne that humpback whales sing complex and beautiful songs. Their album of whale songs, released in 1971, became one of the bestselling records of the decade and a signature sound for the rapidly growing environmental movement. Photographs of whales underwater – first taken only in 1975 – contributed to growing awareness of the extraordinary beauty and sophistication of these creatures, and by the time of the hit film Free Willy in the early 1990s whales were swimming in the cultural mainstream. The present century has produced other striking works. In 2008 the philosopher and musician David Rothenberg released Thousand Mile Song, an album of his jam sessions with whales in which jazz saxophone is relayed underwater through a loudspeaker and meets funky responses, together with a book reflecting on whale music and human-whale interaction. Bryant Austin's Beautiful Whale, published earlier this year, takes high-definition photography to an astonishing new edge of possibility.
Increasingly, and notwithstanding the unconscionable cruelty sometimes inflicted on smaller cetaceans by fishermen, whales are receiving more practical and effective protection than ever before. In recent years, marine biologists have begun to understand the contribution whales make to ocean productivity (their waste feeds plankton on which other life depends, and they mix ocean waters to useful effect). "Allowing whale numbers to recover could be seen as a benign form of geoengineering,"George Monbiot writes in Feral, his landmark book on rewilding. Viable populations of most of the great whale species, though not necessarily the more mysterious beaked whales, are still with us, balanced precariously on the edge of a recovery that may or may not be shattered by rapid changes to ocean acidity and other perturbations in this century. Meanwhile, billions of humans are bound by fossil-fuel consumption into an energy metabolism equivalent to that of a mammal of 30 tonnes – the mass of a humpback.
Philip Hoare documented the wonder of whales and their destruction in Leviathan, or the Whale. It was an extraordinary achievement, combining a history of whaling, a voyage into the life of Herman Melville, reflections on Hoare's own encounters with whales and more. Building on the success of that book, Hoare co-curated The Moby-Dick Big Read, a performance of what is, arguably, one of the defining texts of industrial civilisation.
The Sea Inside is shorter and in some ways a more digressive book thanLeviathan, but bears a clear family resemblance. It is a collage of memoir, cultural history and travelogue in which the author makes pilgrimage to ever more distant seas to swim with whales and dolphins. These encounters yield some of the most vivid writing in the book, charged with the same awe and joy that characterised Hoare's retelling in the last chapter of Leviathan of a close encounter with a sperm whale near the Azores. Off the coast of New Zealand he dives into a super-pod of more than 200 dusky dolphins: "I see their shapes, exquisitely airbrushed black and white and pearl-grey, swimming beneath me. Steadily the fins begin to gather and steer towards me, more and more, till I'm in an eddying mass of swooping, diving cetaceans. Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I'm encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus … Dolphins are breaching right by me, turning somersaults in the air. How about this? Can you do that? I reach out instinctively; they easily evade me … For a moment I think they're going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am, what I am not." This is glorious stuff, true to our nature and to theirs. For thousands of years, people have marvelled at the exuberance of dolphins. An English bestiary of the 13th century exaggerates in the letter but not the spirit: "Dolphins follow men's voices, or gather in shoals when music is played. There is nothing swifter in the sea. They often leap over ships in their flight."
The Sea Inside also describes artistic and literary figures, scientists and adventurers whose lives have left traces in the spots that Hoare visits on his quest. A day trip to the Isle of Wight from his Southampton home summons the ghosts of Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred Tennyson. In London, where he goes to see the skeletons and preserved flesh of whales and porpoises, Hoare encounters the shadow of the surgeon John Hunter, whose world is brilliantly portrayed in Hilary Mantel's excellent, neglected short novel The Giant, O'Brien. A visit to Sri Lanka brings in the self-styled Count de Mauny-Talvande, who before the second world war created his own louche paradise on a tiny private island – Paul Bowles and Arthur C Clarke were visitors. There is an extended account of the life and passions of TH White, a man "more remarkable than anything he wrote", but usually remembered today for his Arthurian adventure The Sword in the Stone and for The Goshawk, an account of his attempt to train a bird. These and other digressions will engage different readers to different extents. Especially interesting to me are those circling the lives of a Northumbrian saint, a Tasmanian princess and a Maori warrior. Around St Cuthbert, whose love and communion with wild animals is a tale that never grows old, Hoare traces the radical changes in attitude to the raven in Western history (beloved to early Christian mystics, it denoted gothic gloom by the 19th century). Reflecting on the aboriginal Tasmanian woman Truganini, who survived one of the most thorough genocides in recorded history, Hoare finds himself contemplating the fate of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger – an extinct marsupial predator with something of Pakicetus, the ancient terrestrial ancestor of whales, in its vaguely wolf-like shape. (The surprise at the end of this chapter is alone worth the price.) And in the Maori war leader Te Pehi Kupe, who travelled from Aotearoa to the English Antipodes in the early 19th century with the aim of obtaining advanced weaponry with which to destroy his enemies at home, Hoare finds the likely model of Queequeg, the fabulously tattooed harpooner in Moby-Dick.
Running like a braid of coloured water through the whirls and eddies of The Sea Inside is the author's inner struggle. Hoare's epigraph is from the great Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer": "Even now my heart / Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts / Over the sea, across the whale's domain, / Travel afar the regions of the earth …" But his starting and ending point is the family home in which he lives alone. At the beginning the vision is intense and unsettled: "Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, 24-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces."
Returning from the ends of the earth, Hoare finds that, for all the journeying, one may never hear anything so beautiful as a blackbird in a suburban garden. An easy, off-the-shelf trope at this point would be the familiar lines from TS Eliot's "Little Gidding": "The end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." But he has discovered something more ambiguous and true: "There's no such place as home. And we live there, you and me." The world is unutterably strange, and full of marvels.
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
Monday, 12 August 2013
Warren Zevon remembered...
Warren Zevon: the man behind the demons
The singer/songwriter, best known for Werewolves of London, died 10 years ago next month. His family and friends, including the writer Stephen King, explain why, despite his dark side, they still miss him
Hadley Freeman
The singer/songwriter, best known for Werewolves of London, died 10 years ago next month. His family and friends, including the writer Stephen King, explain why, despite his dark side, they still miss him
Hadley Freeman
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 1 August 2013
Warren Zevon, who died a decade ago this September at the far-too-premature age of 56, was a singer, a songwriter and one of the great under-appreciated talents in modern America. But he could also be, as his friends, family and lovers will quickly tell you, a pain in the ass. He was at times intimidating, self-destructive, aloof. "He had tonnes of charisma, but when he didn't want people coming up to him, he had charisma in reverse," his ex-wife Crystal Zevon remembers. As a father, he was largely absent until his son and daughter were adults: "He had no language for dealing with children. As a teenager, I was angry that he wasn't there for me as a kid, angry at him for mistreating my mom," says his and Crystal's daughter, Ariel. And when he was drinking, he was almost unbearable: erratic, violent, emotionally absent, impossible.
This is the Zevon that became the cult legend: the hard-drinking, satire-spitting writer of biting rock'n'roll songs such as Werewolves of London, the song for which he is best known. But it's hardly the whole man and it's a version that doesn't come anywhere near to explaining why his fans and friends loved him and still love him so deeply.
Zevon was an artist's artist, relatively little known to the public but revered by the best of his contemporaries: Bob Dylan was a great admirer. Other fans included Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton and T Bone Burnett, who played with Zevon on his last album. In Crystal Zevon's 2007 biography of her late ex-husband, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: the Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Springsteen writes, "[Warren] would write something that had real meaning, and it was funny, too. I always envied that part of his ability and talent." David Crosby also writes in the same book: "He was and remains one of my favourite songwriters. He saw things with a jaundiced eye that still got the humanity of things."
When trying to describe a musician's style, the usual tactic is to compare him to other musicians. But when it comes to Zevon, because his music is so highly literate and based on storytelling, the more apt comparisons are with writers. "One thing I regret," says his friend, Stephen King, "is that we never got a chance to collaborate on a song or story." In recompense, King has dedicated his forthcoming novel, Dr Sleep, to Zevon.
Hunter S Thompson was another literary friend and there were definite overlaps of sensibility between the two men: their unforgiving satire, their hard-living, their occasionally incomprehensible dark humour. Ariel Zevon recalls once going with her dad to a gig in Colorado and Thompson was waiting for them outside in his RV: "He invited Dad in, then ceremoniously draped some huge fancy cables around his neck and handed him a Taser. Who knows why? My dad dutifully wore the cables around his neck on stage, and lit up the Taser."
"Warren was close to Thompson, and their work shared a certain twisted energy," agrees his close friend, the American writer Carl Hiaasen. "But Warren was very much his own writer, and he was more disciplined than Hunter. Warren was meticulous. Even when he was young and high as a kite, he agonised over his lyrics."
Nonetheless, the Thompson comparisons are inevitable when evoking a man who wrote song openings such as: "Well, I'm gone to Detox Mansion / Way down on Last Breath Farm / I've been raking leaves with Liza / Me and Liz clean up the yard." (Detox Mansion.) Or this: "I went home with a waitress / The way I always do / How was I to know / She was with the Russians, too?" (Lawyers, Guns and Money)
Or of course: "I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand / Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain / He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fooks / Gonna get a big dish of chow mein." (Werewolves of London)
These are the big, loud, funny songs for which Zevon is known. But for his friends, it is the slower, sweeter but still just as lyrically adept songs that show Zevon off at his best, such as Desperados Under the Eaves, which Hiaasen describes as "one of the finest, coolest rock songs ever written", and Boom Boom Mancini ("One of the coldest appraisals of the sport of boxing ever written," according to King).
"Dad's later music got smarter and had more wisdom with less craziness, but it never lost its dark humour," says his son, Jordan Zevon. "His albums are dense with stories and brilliant images," adds King. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner is more like an epic film than a four-minute song. The French Inhaler, easily one of the coldest break up songs ever written, was written by Zevon for Marilyn Livingston, Jordan's mother: "When the lights came up at two / I caught a glimpse of you / And your face looked like / Something death brought with him in a suitcase / Your pretty face / It looked so wasted / Another pretty face, devastated."
"Despite the subject matter, my mom would play that song to me after a couple of glasses of wine and laugh and say: 'Isn't that brilliant?' She knew he was a genius," says Jordan.
"He always fantasised about being a novelist and I think that's why he had so many novelist friends," says Crystal. "And, of course, the novelists all wanted to be musicians."
This was particularly true among Zevon's friends. He co-wrote a few songs with Hiaasen, as well as the poet Paul Muldoon. (Muldoon also wrote a posthumous poem about Zevon, Sillyhow Stride.) Hiaasen played with the Rock Bottom Remainders, an amateur rock group made up of writers including King, Amy Tan and Scott Turow, and he convinced Zevon to play with them a few times: "With the band, Warren was just another player. He liked to play rock guitar, but he wasn't a strutter. He'd kind of claw-hammer his guitar, and yell at me to 'Play like Keith [Richards]!'" recalls King.
He was happy to talk about music but he loved to talk about writers: his songs are peppered with references to Norman Mailer, Byron and philosophy. "He went through a Thomas Mann phase, which was almost unbearable, but even in those conversations he managed to make me laugh," says Hiaasen.
"Warren expected you to keep up with him [intellectually]," says Crystal. "He sought people who could meet him on that level – the Carl Hiaasens and the Paul Muldoons. But these people are solid, grounded people with families, and that's what Warren always craved, even if he didn't always act like that."
Zevon was born in 1947 in Chicago, the son of a young Mormon woman and a middle-aged Russian-Jewish immigrant gangster. (Warren later commemorated this improbable match in the delightful Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded, a song with a jolly rhythm but lyrics that tell of imminent doom.) The family moved to California when Warren was young and his parents split up just as he was discovering a talent for classical music. Initially, Warren lived with his mother and her new partner, but his stepfather never hid his hatred, calling him "a pansy" because he wore glasses and played the piano, and his mother didn't intervene to protect her son. So Warren, enraged, fled to his father.
"Warren's father was a gruff little guy who probably killed people, but he was there for his son. But then, this was a guy who gave his son a prostitute for his 14th birthday!" says Crystal, with a roll of her eyes. "Warren's unstable childhood affected him a lot in later life. As an adult, he could never be satisfied – he was always seeking more, whether it was drinking, sex or women. There was always a part of him the craved stability, but also ran away from it. You hear his whole history in the songs."
Zevon devoted himself to music from a young age with some success – one song, He Quit Me was included on the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy when he was 22 – and he was slowly gaining a reputation within the LA music community as a control freak and, quite possibly, a genius. He was hired as a musician for, of all unlikely bands, the Everly Brothers in the early 70s, by which point he had a son, Jordan, with his girlfriend Marilyn, and was just about to fall for Crystal who was then with a friend of Zevon's, guitarist Waddy Wachtel. The two of them broke up with their partners and in 1974 they married.
"It was pretty instant that first time we saw each other – it was fast, romantic and happy," smiles Crystal. "A lot of people ask me: 'Would you do anything differently if you could go back?' But I couldn't give any of it up, even though parts of it were really painful – maybe as much as it was really joyful. But it was a great love."
In the mid 70s, the couple met Jackson Browne, who was immediately enthralled by Zevon's music. "He was unique and, for that reason, I thought there was a chance he might not get a record deal," says Browne. He was right: David Geffen knew from the start that Zevon would never make him any money. But Browne so believed in Zevon's talent that he put himself and his money on the line and got Zevon the deal. Together, they made two albums that featured some of Zevon's best-known songs. Ultimately, both Geffen and Browne turned out to be correct: establishing the pattern for Zevon's career, the albums sold modestly but the critics loved them. The New York Times said his eponymous first album showed "a virile imagination and a gift for infectious music-making quite out of the ordinary" while Janet Maslin in Newsweek wrote that "it sounds as though Zevon is out to demolish every cliche in the Asylum bin … Zevon is that refreshing rarity – a pop singer with comic detachment."
But, as partnerships often were with Zevon at this time, his and Browne's relationship was occasionally difficult: "Working with him on the first album was exhilarating [but] second albums are always harder. He was coming to the studio drunk and it interfered with his ability to sing and stay focused," says Browne. "We only toured once [and] he drank a lot and occasionally there were some sketchy antics, like the time he puked off the balcony at the party the record company threw for us – an interior balcony, if I remember. But he was always hilarious and kind – if challenging – to those he worked with."
Aside from Zevon's increasingly debilitating alcoholism, there was another problem: "Warren would never have been able to get a record deal if it weren't for Jackson, and he knew that, and that created a tension," says Crystal. As Browne himself writes in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: "My role as benefactor took its toll on our friendship."
When Ariel was born, Zevon promised Crystal at the birth he would give up drinking. But in fact, his alcoholism worsened, and when he got drunk he would sometimes get violent with Crystal. Finally, after eight years, Crystal left him: "I never didn't love him. I left because he was playing with guns, because the alcoholism had gotten so bad and because I had a child. If I didn't have a child, I'm not sure I would have had the strength to leave. But neither of us ever ended up marrying anyone else, and we always stayed friends and expected to get back together one day, and we almost did, at the end," says Crystal, her voice starting to catch. "When I think of Warren now, I think of the good times, because we had a lot of them."
Zevon continued to make music but his addictions – mainly to alcohol – grew worse until 19 March, 1986, when he officially cleaned up. Sadly, other problems took their place. Zevon had always suffered from obsessive compulsive disorders, but they had largely been covered up by the substance abuse. Now, they came to the fore and, until he learned how to manage him, almost overwhelmed him. But they also brought him a new friend in the form of Billy Bob Thornton, who happened to be a neighbour and fellow sufferer. Zevon approached him one morning at their mailboxes when he saw Thornton taking his post in and out of his box and said quietly: "Oh, so you have that too."
"When I saw Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, it just astounded me because that's what it was like for Warren, but we didn't know what it was so it would irritate me: 'Really, you have to wash your hands again?!' And it was scary in a way, because you didn't know what it was. I learned to just go with it because I learned that arguing with it didn't work," says Crystal.
Then there were the women, who to a degree took the place of alcohol for him. To read Zevon's diary from this period to the end of his life is to read of a non-stop litany of girlfriends – Zevon was never single – and casual encounters ("God only knows where he found the time to write songs," writes Hiaasen in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead). At first he would cleave to his new girlfriends and relish the stability they provided – but then they would get too close, or start talking about babies, or make him feel guilty for his on-the-road philandering, and that was the end of it and on to the next one.
As with all addicts, fighting old temptations was a daily battle: "I offered him a cigarette once and he just stared at it, like a bird hypnotised by a snake," remembers King. "I got that completely, and never did it again. We both had our demons – the ones that come in bottles and up through straws – and we didn't talk about them. He was shy. Then again, so am I. I think we both used drugs to get on top of that."
But through it all, Zevon continued to put out albums, make new good friends – most notably Hiaasen and King – and grow closer to his children.
"I don't think my dad ever really knew how to deal with the guilt [of not being there for me when I was a child]. He made amends, but I don't think it really mended in his heart," says Ariel. "But once I got to college, everything turned around for us. We could discuss literature and philosophy, and we had a lovely relationship until the end."
"He could be difficult, but you knew what was underneath. Some musicians who are making it are assholes, and some have been in the business a long time and they don't have the time for bullshit – that sums up my dad. He had a darker side, sure, but there was light. He was a complicated man," adds Jordan, himself a musician.
All his life, Zevon was so fearful of cancer that he couldn't even say the word. He'd avoided going to a doctor for more than 20 years in case they told him something he didn't want to hear. But in 2002, he couldn't deny even to himself any more that something was wrong. All of his fears were confirmed: he had cancer, and he had months to live. He decided to spend them making a last album, The Wind, and despite falling badly off the wagon after the diagnosis, he managed to complete the record, with the help of musical friends and fans. "It was like This Is Your Life in the studio," laughs Jordan, who sang on the album.
Zevon had always written songs that referenced death, baiting the very thing that terrified and fascinated him: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Life'll Kill Ya, Don't Let Us Get Sick. The Wind contains some of his most beautiful reflections on mortality, including Knocking on Heaven's Door and Keep Me in Your Heart: "Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house / Maybe you'll think of me and smile / You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on the blouse / Keep me in your thoughts for a while."
As Zevon predicted, it would become one of his most critically lauded albums, but he barely lived to see the plaudits: two weeks after the album was released, he died on 7 September 2003.
"What I miss most is calling him up to tell him about something and relying on his weirdly cryptic perspective," says Ariel. "It was not always practical or helpful, mind you, and, at the time, I wished I could just get a more traditional fatherly answer from him. But, now, I miss it and am constantly trying to imagine what he would have to say about stuff.""It blows me away to think he's been gone 10 years," adds Hiaasen. "In my mind I still hear that deep gravelly voice on the message machine. He could be difficult. But who doesn't have demons? Warren's friends stayed loyal because he was such an extraordinary presence in all our lives, his warmth and humour. I'm just so grateful I had a chance to know the man."
"His songs carried such humour and human truth. I know more of his songs by heart than just about any other songwriter," says Browne, adding. "I think of him all the time – and that's because those songs live on."
Warren Zevon, who died a decade ago this September at the far-too-premature age of 56, was a singer, a songwriter and one of the great under-appreciated talents in modern America. But he could also be, as his friends, family and lovers will quickly tell you, a pain in the ass. He was at times intimidating, self-destructive, aloof. "He had tonnes of charisma, but when he didn't want people coming up to him, he had charisma in reverse," his ex-wife Crystal Zevon remembers. As a father, he was largely absent until his son and daughter were adults: "He had no language for dealing with children. As a teenager, I was angry that he wasn't there for me as a kid, angry at him for mistreating my mom," says his and Crystal's daughter, Ariel. And when he was drinking, he was almost unbearable: erratic, violent, emotionally absent, impossible.
This is the Zevon that became the cult legend: the hard-drinking, satire-spitting writer of biting rock'n'roll songs such as Werewolves of London, the song for which he is best known. But it's hardly the whole man and it's a version that doesn't come anywhere near to explaining why his fans and friends loved him and still love him so deeply.
Zevon was an artist's artist, relatively little known to the public but revered by the best of his contemporaries: Bob Dylan was a great admirer. Other fans included Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton and T Bone Burnett, who played with Zevon on his last album. In Crystal Zevon's 2007 biography of her late ex-husband, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: the Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Springsteen writes, "[Warren] would write something that had real meaning, and it was funny, too. I always envied that part of his ability and talent." David Crosby also writes in the same book: "He was and remains one of my favourite songwriters. He saw things with a jaundiced eye that still got the humanity of things."
When trying to describe a musician's style, the usual tactic is to compare him to other musicians. But when it comes to Zevon, because his music is so highly literate and based on storytelling, the more apt comparisons are with writers. "One thing I regret," says his friend, Stephen King, "is that we never got a chance to collaborate on a song or story." In recompense, King has dedicated his forthcoming novel, Dr Sleep, to Zevon.
Hunter S Thompson was another literary friend and there were definite overlaps of sensibility between the two men: their unforgiving satire, their hard-living, their occasionally incomprehensible dark humour. Ariel Zevon recalls once going with her dad to a gig in Colorado and Thompson was waiting for them outside in his RV: "He invited Dad in, then ceremoniously draped some huge fancy cables around his neck and handed him a Taser. Who knows why? My dad dutifully wore the cables around his neck on stage, and lit up the Taser."
"Warren was close to Thompson, and their work shared a certain twisted energy," agrees his close friend, the American writer Carl Hiaasen. "But Warren was very much his own writer, and he was more disciplined than Hunter. Warren was meticulous. Even when he was young and high as a kite, he agonised over his lyrics."
Nonetheless, the Thompson comparisons are inevitable when evoking a man who wrote song openings such as: "Well, I'm gone to Detox Mansion / Way down on Last Breath Farm / I've been raking leaves with Liza / Me and Liz clean up the yard." (Detox Mansion.) Or this: "I went home with a waitress / The way I always do / How was I to know / She was with the Russians, too?" (Lawyers, Guns and Money)
Or of course: "I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand / Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain / He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fooks / Gonna get a big dish of chow mein." (Werewolves of London)
These are the big, loud, funny songs for which Zevon is known. But for his friends, it is the slower, sweeter but still just as lyrically adept songs that show Zevon off at his best, such as Desperados Under the Eaves, which Hiaasen describes as "one of the finest, coolest rock songs ever written", and Boom Boom Mancini ("One of the coldest appraisals of the sport of boxing ever written," according to King).
"Dad's later music got smarter and had more wisdom with less craziness, but it never lost its dark humour," says his son, Jordan Zevon. "His albums are dense with stories and brilliant images," adds King. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner is more like an epic film than a four-minute song. The French Inhaler, easily one of the coldest break up songs ever written, was written by Zevon for Marilyn Livingston, Jordan's mother: "When the lights came up at two / I caught a glimpse of you / And your face looked like / Something death brought with him in a suitcase / Your pretty face / It looked so wasted / Another pretty face, devastated."
"Despite the subject matter, my mom would play that song to me after a couple of glasses of wine and laugh and say: 'Isn't that brilliant?' She knew he was a genius," says Jordan.
"He always fantasised about being a novelist and I think that's why he had so many novelist friends," says Crystal. "And, of course, the novelists all wanted to be musicians."
This was particularly true among Zevon's friends. He co-wrote a few songs with Hiaasen, as well as the poet Paul Muldoon. (Muldoon also wrote a posthumous poem about Zevon, Sillyhow Stride.) Hiaasen played with the Rock Bottom Remainders, an amateur rock group made up of writers including King, Amy Tan and Scott Turow, and he convinced Zevon to play with them a few times: "With the band, Warren was just another player. He liked to play rock guitar, but he wasn't a strutter. He'd kind of claw-hammer his guitar, and yell at me to 'Play like Keith [Richards]!'" recalls King.
He was happy to talk about music but he loved to talk about writers: his songs are peppered with references to Norman Mailer, Byron and philosophy. "He went through a Thomas Mann phase, which was almost unbearable, but even in those conversations he managed to make me laugh," says Hiaasen.
"Warren expected you to keep up with him [intellectually]," says Crystal. "He sought people who could meet him on that level – the Carl Hiaasens and the Paul Muldoons. But these people are solid, grounded people with families, and that's what Warren always craved, even if he didn't always act like that."
Zevon was born in 1947 in Chicago, the son of a young Mormon woman and a middle-aged Russian-Jewish immigrant gangster. (Warren later commemorated this improbable match in the delightful Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded, a song with a jolly rhythm but lyrics that tell of imminent doom.) The family moved to California when Warren was young and his parents split up just as he was discovering a talent for classical music. Initially, Warren lived with his mother and her new partner, but his stepfather never hid his hatred, calling him "a pansy" because he wore glasses and played the piano, and his mother didn't intervene to protect her son. So Warren, enraged, fled to his father.
"Warren's father was a gruff little guy who probably killed people, but he was there for his son. But then, this was a guy who gave his son a prostitute for his 14th birthday!" says Crystal, with a roll of her eyes. "Warren's unstable childhood affected him a lot in later life. As an adult, he could never be satisfied – he was always seeking more, whether it was drinking, sex or women. There was always a part of him the craved stability, but also ran away from it. You hear his whole history in the songs."
Zevon devoted himself to music from a young age with some success – one song, He Quit Me was included on the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy when he was 22 – and he was slowly gaining a reputation within the LA music community as a control freak and, quite possibly, a genius. He was hired as a musician for, of all unlikely bands, the Everly Brothers in the early 70s, by which point he had a son, Jordan, with his girlfriend Marilyn, and was just about to fall for Crystal who was then with a friend of Zevon's, guitarist Waddy Wachtel. The two of them broke up with their partners and in 1974 they married.
"It was pretty instant that first time we saw each other – it was fast, romantic and happy," smiles Crystal. "A lot of people ask me: 'Would you do anything differently if you could go back?' But I couldn't give any of it up, even though parts of it were really painful – maybe as much as it was really joyful. But it was a great love."
In the mid 70s, the couple met Jackson Browne, who was immediately enthralled by Zevon's music. "He was unique and, for that reason, I thought there was a chance he might not get a record deal," says Browne. He was right: David Geffen knew from the start that Zevon would never make him any money. But Browne so believed in Zevon's talent that he put himself and his money on the line and got Zevon the deal. Together, they made two albums that featured some of Zevon's best-known songs. Ultimately, both Geffen and Browne turned out to be correct: establishing the pattern for Zevon's career, the albums sold modestly but the critics loved them. The New York Times said his eponymous first album showed "a virile imagination and a gift for infectious music-making quite out of the ordinary" while Janet Maslin in Newsweek wrote that "it sounds as though Zevon is out to demolish every cliche in the Asylum bin … Zevon is that refreshing rarity – a pop singer with comic detachment."
But, as partnerships often were with Zevon at this time, his and Browne's relationship was occasionally difficult: "Working with him on the first album was exhilarating [but] second albums are always harder. He was coming to the studio drunk and it interfered with his ability to sing and stay focused," says Browne. "We only toured once [and] he drank a lot and occasionally there were some sketchy antics, like the time he puked off the balcony at the party the record company threw for us – an interior balcony, if I remember. But he was always hilarious and kind – if challenging – to those he worked with."
Aside from Zevon's increasingly debilitating alcoholism, there was another problem: "Warren would never have been able to get a record deal if it weren't for Jackson, and he knew that, and that created a tension," says Crystal. As Browne himself writes in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: "My role as benefactor took its toll on our friendship."
When Ariel was born, Zevon promised Crystal at the birth he would give up drinking. But in fact, his alcoholism worsened, and when he got drunk he would sometimes get violent with Crystal. Finally, after eight years, Crystal left him: "I never didn't love him. I left because he was playing with guns, because the alcoholism had gotten so bad and because I had a child. If I didn't have a child, I'm not sure I would have had the strength to leave. But neither of us ever ended up marrying anyone else, and we always stayed friends and expected to get back together one day, and we almost did, at the end," says Crystal, her voice starting to catch. "When I think of Warren now, I think of the good times, because we had a lot of them."
Zevon continued to make music but his addictions – mainly to alcohol – grew worse until 19 March, 1986, when he officially cleaned up. Sadly, other problems took their place. Zevon had always suffered from obsessive compulsive disorders, but they had largely been covered up by the substance abuse. Now, they came to the fore and, until he learned how to manage him, almost overwhelmed him. But they also brought him a new friend in the form of Billy Bob Thornton, who happened to be a neighbour and fellow sufferer. Zevon approached him one morning at their mailboxes when he saw Thornton taking his post in and out of his box and said quietly: "Oh, so you have that too."
"When I saw Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, it just astounded me because that's what it was like for Warren, but we didn't know what it was so it would irritate me: 'Really, you have to wash your hands again?!' And it was scary in a way, because you didn't know what it was. I learned to just go with it because I learned that arguing with it didn't work," says Crystal.
Then there were the women, who to a degree took the place of alcohol for him. To read Zevon's diary from this period to the end of his life is to read of a non-stop litany of girlfriends – Zevon was never single – and casual encounters ("God only knows where he found the time to write songs," writes Hiaasen in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead). At first he would cleave to his new girlfriends and relish the stability they provided – but then they would get too close, or start talking about babies, or make him feel guilty for his on-the-road philandering, and that was the end of it and on to the next one.
As with all addicts, fighting old temptations was a daily battle: "I offered him a cigarette once and he just stared at it, like a bird hypnotised by a snake," remembers King. "I got that completely, and never did it again. We both had our demons – the ones that come in bottles and up through straws – and we didn't talk about them. He was shy. Then again, so am I. I think we both used drugs to get on top of that."
But through it all, Zevon continued to put out albums, make new good friends – most notably Hiaasen and King – and grow closer to his children.
"I don't think my dad ever really knew how to deal with the guilt [of not being there for me when I was a child]. He made amends, but I don't think it really mended in his heart," says Ariel. "But once I got to college, everything turned around for us. We could discuss literature and philosophy, and we had a lovely relationship until the end."
"He could be difficult, but you knew what was underneath. Some musicians who are making it are assholes, and some have been in the business a long time and they don't have the time for bullshit – that sums up my dad. He had a darker side, sure, but there was light. He was a complicated man," adds Jordan, himself a musician.
All his life, Zevon was so fearful of cancer that he couldn't even say the word. He'd avoided going to a doctor for more than 20 years in case they told him something he didn't want to hear. But in 2002, he couldn't deny even to himself any more that something was wrong. All of his fears were confirmed: he had cancer, and he had months to live. He decided to spend them making a last album, The Wind, and despite falling badly off the wagon after the diagnosis, he managed to complete the record, with the help of musical friends and fans. "It was like This Is Your Life in the studio," laughs Jordan, who sang on the album.
Zevon had always written songs that referenced death, baiting the very thing that terrified and fascinated him: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Life'll Kill Ya, Don't Let Us Get Sick. The Wind contains some of his most beautiful reflections on mortality, including Knocking on Heaven's Door and Keep Me in Your Heart: "Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house / Maybe you'll think of me and smile / You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on the blouse / Keep me in your thoughts for a while."
As Zevon predicted, it would become one of his most critically lauded albums, but he barely lived to see the plaudits: two weeks after the album was released, he died on 7 September 2003.
"What I miss most is calling him up to tell him about something and relying on his weirdly cryptic perspective," says Ariel. "It was not always practical or helpful, mind you, and, at the time, I wished I could just get a more traditional fatherly answer from him. But, now, I miss it and am constantly trying to imagine what he would have to say about stuff.""It blows me away to think he's been gone 10 years," adds Hiaasen. "In my mind I still hear that deep gravelly voice on the message machine. He could be difficult. But who doesn't have demons? Warren's friends stayed loyal because he was such an extraordinary presence in all our lives, his warmth and humour. I'm just so grateful I had a chance to know the man."
"His songs carried such humour and human truth. I know more of his songs by heart than just about any other songwriter," says Browne, adding. "I think of him all the time – and that's because those songs live on."
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Powell and Pressburger - A Canterbury Tale
A pilgrim's progress: on the trail of A Canterbury Tale
Seventy years after it was made, Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale remains the perfect remedy for self-pity. Xan Brooks seeks out the film's locations, still haunted by the ghosts of a film that celebrated the values and traditions of an England under fire
Xan Brooks
The Guardian
Seventy years after it was made, Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale remains the perfect remedy for self-pity. Xan Brooks seeks out the film's locations, still haunted by the ghosts of a film that celebrated the values and traditions of an England under fire
Xan Brooks
The Guardian
Friday 9 August 2013
In August 1943 the director Michael Powell came to east Kent to shoot his most ambitious and personal film to date. A Canterbury Tale took its lead from Chaucer to spin the story of three modern-day pilgrims uprooted by the war. It showed us the hedgerows and the hop gardens and the ancient road atop the downs. It celebrated the values and traditions of an England under fire. That wartime summer, the film's locations came haunted by the ghosts of the pardoner, the falconer, the garrulous wife of Bath. Today, for me, they are haunted by the ghosts of A Canterbury Tale. Seventy years on, it's as though a fresh layer of myth has been thrown across the first.
I doubt there is another film I love as unreservedly as A Canterbury Tale. I first watched it two decades ago, when I was out of college and out of work, the road-map in tatters. On balance, it was the perfect film for an imperfect time. The film reeled me in from the opening scene. It was a remedy for self-pity, a poultice for despond. There on the screen, Powell's broken pilgrims forged through the long grass, reconnected with old magic and found the things that had been lost. The ending was a heartbreaker, like Larkin's arrow-shower, somewhere becoming rain. It floored me then and it floors me now. However many times I see it, its power is undimmed.
The film's plot runs something like this. Three weary travellers (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) find themselves waylaid for a few days in the village of Chillingbourne, 10 minutes outside Canterbury. None of them want to be there, they would rather be at home, except that they are so beat-up, lonely and saddlesore that they hardly know where home is any more. The movie throws them together and has them solve a local mystery. Then it cuts the ties and turns them loose, batting the pilgrims on to Canterbury where they wander the bombsites and blank spaces, their lives a mess, their futures uncertain. Eventually, against all the odds, they each receive a blessing.
For Powell, the production marked a kind of homecoming. He had been raised in the Kent countryside, the son of a farmer, and he relished the chance to head back there again. "An artist often hesitates to use material that is too familiar to him, too near to home," he would recall in his autobiography. "But now I had this feeling no longer. I was looking forward to the great swags of laden hop vines, to the dusty lanes with the dog-rose in the hedges, to the sharp Kentish voices." His intention was to make a film about the bones and the bedrock, the elements that endure. Back in 1943, east Kent was the first line of defence against incoming bombers. And yet A Canterbury Tale reminds us that "the hills and valleys are the same". It suggests that, if we sit very quietly, we can still hear the voices of bygone pilgrims on the road at our backs.
A Canterbury Tale is a film of torpid summer heat, 90F in the shade of the chestnuts – and it's not much cooler when I drive out to find how Chillingbourne has changed. In the hills beyond Canterbury, the country roads swing back and forth, past orchards and oast houses. A wrong turn leads me up a gravel drive to a stately home and a pristine lawn where musicians are rehearsing. The sun is so fierce it frazzles the senses. The oboist pauses, totters and must be steadied by a colleague.
Where Powell followed Chaucer, I'm traipsing in the footsteps of Paul Tritton, a Kent historian who ferreted out the film's locations and collated them in a book. ("The book is self-published," he tells me. "I don't make any money.") Tritton first watched the film on TV in the 1970s. There, on screen, he recognised bridleways that he had cycled as a youth and caught a glimpse of his aunt among the throng of extras outside the cathedral. For all that, his curiosity is purely practical. "I'm more interested in where the film was made than its deeper meanings," he cautions. "I'm still a bit baffled by what it's actually about."
Sad to say, he's not alone. Not everybody shares my love for A Canterbury Tale. Contemporary audiences found it too weird, too wonky and even borderline distasteful in its focus on the "glue-man", a nocturnal predator who throws adhesive at the girls who date soldiers. Even the film's director would dismiss it as a failure. Powell blamed a compromised casting process (he wanted Deborah Kerr to play the land girl, and Roger Livesey as the glue-man). He blamed the script ("frail and unconvincing") by his regular collaborator Emeric Pressburger. At the time of its release, the duo were flushed from the success of the more convivial, conventional The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But A Canterbury Tale bombed at the box office and disappeared from view. It was only decades later, following a BFI retrospective, that they saw it reappraised as the "most original, iconoclastic" picture that Powell and Pressburger ever made.
The village of Chillingbourne turns out to be a fiction – a composite of four or five settlements that orbit Canterbury. My first stop is the Red Lion at Wingham, which once doubled as the exterior of the Hand of Glory public house. The building sits on a busy road, with a sign above the door inviting buyers to "run this fantastic pub business". I visit the watermill at Chilham, where the schoolboys staged a battle. The mill is now owned by South East Water, closed to the public and commandeered by a local angling club. The anglers eye me froggily as the car noses down the drive.
Towards the end of the film, the glue-man is revealed to be none other than Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman) – an urbane local magistrate and self-appointed guardian of the old ways, who organises history lectures for the soldiers but neglects to invite the women. The land girl, Alison (Sheila Sim), initially can't believe it. She feels a kinship with the man and covets his lifestyle. "Oh," she says on spying his house. "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that." Colpeper's house can be found off the village green in Wickambreaux. It has a porticoed entrance and bottle-green shutters. It looks, reassuringly, just as it did in the film.
Tritton explains that Kent has changed since 1943. The hedgerows and hop gardens are in steep decline. The countryside has been carved up by motorways. These days the villages are less working farming communities than affluent dormitories for city commuters. Happily, though, the place is still honeycombed with tranquil pockets; small reminders of the past. The historian used to conduct an annual August walk, revisiting the locations with fans of the film. But he's getting old, he's had to quit. "I did the walk for 15 years," he tells me. "All good things have to come to an end."
With each passing year A Canterbury Tale grows more antique. Pressburger died in 1988. Powell followed two years later. Sheila Sim (who later married Richard Attenborough) is the only surviving member of the principal cast, although she is now elderly and in poor health. "Time marches on," as the American sergeant puts it. Powell's modern-day pilgrims have slipped into the past.
"It is an awful mess," remarks a pedestrian as Alison walks the streets by the cathedral. "I don't blame you for not knowing where you are." In the bombed-out centre of Canterbury the effects of the war are nakedly apparent. Alison loses her way amid a maze of streets that are no longer streets and sees forlorn signposts ("Sun Insurance", "Singer Sewing Machine Co") perched amid the rubble. Since then the place has been sewn up, darned back into existence. Cities are more subject to change than the countryside around them, their metabolism is quicker. Redevelopment follows redevelopment and one business is written over the top of the other. The wasteland by the clock tower is now a modern shopping district, while the old Boots on Mercery Lane has re-kitted itself as a Pret A Manger. I walk in search of the "Cathedral Tea Rooms", where the US sergeant received his Canterbury blessing. These days it's a Starbucks.
What I love most about A Canterbury Tale is the way that it roots its magic and mysticism in the humdrum everyday. I love the way it casts ordinary people as vessels of greatness, unwitting keepers of the flame. The film harks back to a time of glory, the old pilgrims on the ancient road, while simultaneously reminding us that there was no time of glory, or rather that every time is a time of glory, that we live in flux and that's OK. The only world is the one that's here, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes are the people around us, frail and fearful and coping as best they can. Powell and Pressburger's pilgrims have a hat-full of troubles and no idea where they're going. They strive and they falter and leave very little trace. But along the way, they receive blessings. They come stumbling through the ruins to find salvation inside abandoned caravans and hear the voices of angels in the train whistle's yelp.
My own trip ends at Selling railway station, tucked away in the hills, behind a small housing estate and a battalion of skips. It was on this platform that the pilgrims disembarked for Chillingbourne. And was here, at the end, that they boarded the train to continue the journey. Today the sun is pounding and the place feels becalmed. After a few minutes an elderly woman walks out on to the opposite platform. Shouting across the gap, she informs me that a water‑main has burst up the lane to the village. The whole street has flooded; that's why she's wearing wellingtons. She appears to believe I am somehow to blame.
A Canterbury Tale gives us the gauche American from the Oregon forest, the hard-bitten Londoner who used to play the organ, and the lonely land girl who once worked behind a shop counter. All of them are frayed at the edges and ostensibly unremarkable. All of them, the film assures us, are utterly precious and deserving of miracles.
The train pulls in and the woman clambers aboard. She is addled and irritated, her bare legs thrust into wellington boots. I stand on the platform and watch her set out, another modern pilgrim bound for everyday glory. She's off to Canterbury, in search of shopping or blessings, whatever comes first.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/09/canterbury-tale-michael-powell
In August 1943 the director Michael Powell came to east Kent to shoot his most ambitious and personal film to date. A Canterbury Tale took its lead from Chaucer to spin the story of three modern-day pilgrims uprooted by the war. It showed us the hedgerows and the hop gardens and the ancient road atop the downs. It celebrated the values and traditions of an England under fire. That wartime summer, the film's locations came haunted by the ghosts of the pardoner, the falconer, the garrulous wife of Bath. Today, for me, they are haunted by the ghosts of A Canterbury Tale. Seventy years on, it's as though a fresh layer of myth has been thrown across the first.
I doubt there is another film I love as unreservedly as A Canterbury Tale. I first watched it two decades ago, when I was out of college and out of work, the road-map in tatters. On balance, it was the perfect film for an imperfect time. The film reeled me in from the opening scene. It was a remedy for self-pity, a poultice for despond. There on the screen, Powell's broken pilgrims forged through the long grass, reconnected with old magic and found the things that had been lost. The ending was a heartbreaker, like Larkin's arrow-shower, somewhere becoming rain. It floored me then and it floors me now. However many times I see it, its power is undimmed.
The film's plot runs something like this. Three weary travellers (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) find themselves waylaid for a few days in the village of Chillingbourne, 10 minutes outside Canterbury. None of them want to be there, they would rather be at home, except that they are so beat-up, lonely and saddlesore that they hardly know where home is any more. The movie throws them together and has them solve a local mystery. Then it cuts the ties and turns them loose, batting the pilgrims on to Canterbury where they wander the bombsites and blank spaces, their lives a mess, their futures uncertain. Eventually, against all the odds, they each receive a blessing.
For Powell, the production marked a kind of homecoming. He had been raised in the Kent countryside, the son of a farmer, and he relished the chance to head back there again. "An artist often hesitates to use material that is too familiar to him, too near to home," he would recall in his autobiography. "But now I had this feeling no longer. I was looking forward to the great swags of laden hop vines, to the dusty lanes with the dog-rose in the hedges, to the sharp Kentish voices." His intention was to make a film about the bones and the bedrock, the elements that endure. Back in 1943, east Kent was the first line of defence against incoming bombers. And yet A Canterbury Tale reminds us that "the hills and valleys are the same". It suggests that, if we sit very quietly, we can still hear the voices of bygone pilgrims on the road at our backs.
A Canterbury Tale is a film of torpid summer heat, 90F in the shade of the chestnuts – and it's not much cooler when I drive out to find how Chillingbourne has changed. In the hills beyond Canterbury, the country roads swing back and forth, past orchards and oast houses. A wrong turn leads me up a gravel drive to a stately home and a pristine lawn where musicians are rehearsing. The sun is so fierce it frazzles the senses. The oboist pauses, totters and must be steadied by a colleague.
Where Powell followed Chaucer, I'm traipsing in the footsteps of Paul Tritton, a Kent historian who ferreted out the film's locations and collated them in a book. ("The book is self-published," he tells me. "I don't make any money.") Tritton first watched the film on TV in the 1970s. There, on screen, he recognised bridleways that he had cycled as a youth and caught a glimpse of his aunt among the throng of extras outside the cathedral. For all that, his curiosity is purely practical. "I'm more interested in where the film was made than its deeper meanings," he cautions. "I'm still a bit baffled by what it's actually about."
Sad to say, he's not alone. Not everybody shares my love for A Canterbury Tale. Contemporary audiences found it too weird, too wonky and even borderline distasteful in its focus on the "glue-man", a nocturnal predator who throws adhesive at the girls who date soldiers. Even the film's director would dismiss it as a failure. Powell blamed a compromised casting process (he wanted Deborah Kerr to play the land girl, and Roger Livesey as the glue-man). He blamed the script ("frail and unconvincing") by his regular collaborator Emeric Pressburger. At the time of its release, the duo were flushed from the success of the more convivial, conventional The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But A Canterbury Tale bombed at the box office and disappeared from view. It was only decades later, following a BFI retrospective, that they saw it reappraised as the "most original, iconoclastic" picture that Powell and Pressburger ever made.
The village of Chillingbourne turns out to be a fiction – a composite of four or five settlements that orbit Canterbury. My first stop is the Red Lion at Wingham, which once doubled as the exterior of the Hand of Glory public house. The building sits on a busy road, with a sign above the door inviting buyers to "run this fantastic pub business". I visit the watermill at Chilham, where the schoolboys staged a battle. The mill is now owned by South East Water, closed to the public and commandeered by a local angling club. The anglers eye me froggily as the car noses down the drive.
Towards the end of the film, the glue-man is revealed to be none other than Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman) – an urbane local magistrate and self-appointed guardian of the old ways, who organises history lectures for the soldiers but neglects to invite the women. The land girl, Alison (Sheila Sim), initially can't believe it. She feels a kinship with the man and covets his lifestyle. "Oh," she says on spying his house. "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that." Colpeper's house can be found off the village green in Wickambreaux. It has a porticoed entrance and bottle-green shutters. It looks, reassuringly, just as it did in the film.
Tritton explains that Kent has changed since 1943. The hedgerows and hop gardens are in steep decline. The countryside has been carved up by motorways. These days the villages are less working farming communities than affluent dormitories for city commuters. Happily, though, the place is still honeycombed with tranquil pockets; small reminders of the past. The historian used to conduct an annual August walk, revisiting the locations with fans of the film. But he's getting old, he's had to quit. "I did the walk for 15 years," he tells me. "All good things have to come to an end."
With each passing year A Canterbury Tale grows more antique. Pressburger died in 1988. Powell followed two years later. Sheila Sim (who later married Richard Attenborough) is the only surviving member of the principal cast, although she is now elderly and in poor health. "Time marches on," as the American sergeant puts it. Powell's modern-day pilgrims have slipped into the past.
"It is an awful mess," remarks a pedestrian as Alison walks the streets by the cathedral. "I don't blame you for not knowing where you are." In the bombed-out centre of Canterbury the effects of the war are nakedly apparent. Alison loses her way amid a maze of streets that are no longer streets and sees forlorn signposts ("Sun Insurance", "Singer Sewing Machine Co") perched amid the rubble. Since then the place has been sewn up, darned back into existence. Cities are more subject to change than the countryside around them, their metabolism is quicker. Redevelopment follows redevelopment and one business is written over the top of the other. The wasteland by the clock tower is now a modern shopping district, while the old Boots on Mercery Lane has re-kitted itself as a Pret A Manger. I walk in search of the "Cathedral Tea Rooms", where the US sergeant received his Canterbury blessing. These days it's a Starbucks.
What I love most about A Canterbury Tale is the way that it roots its magic and mysticism in the humdrum everyday. I love the way it casts ordinary people as vessels of greatness, unwitting keepers of the flame. The film harks back to a time of glory, the old pilgrims on the ancient road, while simultaneously reminding us that there was no time of glory, or rather that every time is a time of glory, that we live in flux and that's OK. The only world is the one that's here, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes are the people around us, frail and fearful and coping as best they can. Powell and Pressburger's pilgrims have a hat-full of troubles and no idea where they're going. They strive and they falter and leave very little trace. But along the way, they receive blessings. They come stumbling through the ruins to find salvation inside abandoned caravans and hear the voices of angels in the train whistle's yelp.
My own trip ends at Selling railway station, tucked away in the hills, behind a small housing estate and a battalion of skips. It was on this platform that the pilgrims disembarked for Chillingbourne. And was here, at the end, that they boarded the train to continue the journey. Today the sun is pounding and the place feels becalmed. After a few minutes an elderly woman walks out on to the opposite platform. Shouting across the gap, she informs me that a water‑main has burst up the lane to the village. The whole street has flooded; that's why she's wearing wellingtons. She appears to believe I am somehow to blame.
A Canterbury Tale gives us the gauche American from the Oregon forest, the hard-bitten Londoner who used to play the organ, and the lonely land girl who once worked behind a shop counter. All of them are frayed at the edges and ostensibly unremarkable. All of them, the film assures us, are utterly precious and deserving of miracles.
The train pulls in and the woman clambers aboard. She is addled and irritated, her bare legs thrust into wellington boots. I stand on the platform and watch her set out, another modern pilgrim bound for everyday glory. She's off to Canterbury, in search of shopping or blessings, whatever comes first.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/09/canterbury-tale-michael-powell
A couple of relevant pieces: http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/44_ACT/ACT12.html
http://www.sterlingpictures.com/Loop_Press_3.html
Saturday, 10 August 2013
Woody Allen: Blue Jasmine and Standup...
Woody Allen, Standup Guy
Among the more unexpected screen combinations that result from Woody Allen’s new movie, “Blue Jasmine,” are the sights of Cate Blanchett facing off with the risqué standup comedian Andrew Dice Clay as a man who has been laid low by her character’s deceptions; and the British actress Sally Hawkins pairing up with the comic and television star Louis C.K. as a potential suitor who becomes (in his words) “one of those awful stories that women carry around.”
The appearance of these two prominent comedians in “Blue Jasmine” is also a reminder of how Mr. Allen got his start as a performer of self-deprecating but intellectual standup comedy, long before he was writing and directing films and producing Marshall McLuhan from just off-camera. Mr. Allen spoke recently to The New York Times for an Arts & Leisure article about the creation of “Blue Jasmine” and the evolving tradition of female characters in his movies. In these edited outtakes from that conversation, he explained how the comics came to be cast in the film, and how recent experiences got him thinking about revisiting his old nightclub act.
Were you specifically looking at standup comedians for the roles in “Blue Jasmine”?
No, I wasn’t at all. We had a hard time finding someone to play the Andrew Dice Clay role. One person was too old, one person was a little too mafia, one person had something else wrong. We couldn’t find anybody. Years ago I had seen Andrew Dice Clay do his standup act on television for a few minutes, and I thought, this guy would be a very good character for a movie. It’s a good bet that comedians can act. The other way around doesn’t work so much. If you see Marlon Brando or the greatest dramatic actors, they can’t always do comedy. But I thought he would be great. Andrew Dice Clay was more sympathetic than I imagined writing the husband. When it got into his hands, there’s something about him – your heart goes out to him.
Did you know Louis C.K.’s work before you cast him in this movie?
I didn’t know Louis C.K. at all. But someone showed me a tape of Bobby Cannavale – it was to see Bobby Cannavale, and he was in a skit with Louis C.K. Cannavale, I thought, yes, he’s great and right for this part. And I said but who’s that guy with him? He’s wonderful. So we had him in originally for the Andrew Dice Clay part. And he read it, and he read it very well. We thought, he’s so likeable. He’s clearly such a sweet guy. I was dying to use him in something, so we used him to play the sweeter guy. I’d love to do a movie with him and me, a comedy. I’m looking for some idea that would work, for the two of us to do. Of course I hope that people aren’t disappointed that I don’t act with him [in "Blue Jasmine"], and he doesn’t have a commensurately comic part with his talent. But some day, I will get something that we could do together, because I do think it would be fun. I’m such a great fan of his.
What prevented this team-up from happening?
When I finished this picture, I went into my room and thought, What would be a fun picture? My first thought for a while was, Can I come up with something at the moment that I could do with Louis C.K.? But I wasn’t able to get the right idea, and time was starting to move. And I thought, well, here’s an idea that would make a very fun movie, so I started writing it, and I finished it, and I thought, this is a perfect movie for Colin Firth and Emma Stone, so that’s what I did.
Does working with comedians ever inspire you to revisit your own career as a standup?
I was inspired the other night – in the other room here where I play [the Cafe Carlyle at the Carlyle Hotel], I saw Mort Sahl. He flew in from San Francisco, and he worked three late shows and he was wonderful. He’s slowed up a little now because he’s 85. He’s not as rapid as he was when was he was 35. But all the stuff is still there. Watching him, I had the same feeling now, in 2013, as I had when I saw him in 1950-something. Of, “Hey, I’d like to get back onstage and do standup again.” He inspired me then to be a standup comic, and all these years later, I thought of it again because of him. He makes that phenomenon so enticing.
Could you fit a standup tour into your schedule when you’re making a new movie every year?
I was thinking of it. Since I saw him, I’ve just been toying with the idea. I would love to see if I could. Just getting together an hour of stuff to talk about would be a lot of work.
I would think you’ve had an experience or two to draw from since your days at N.Y.U.
Yes, yes, I’ve had some things to talk about. Learned nothing.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/woody-allen-standup-guy/?_r=0
By Dave Itzkoff
July 17, 2013
July 17, 2013
Among the more unexpected screen combinations that result from Woody Allen’s new movie, “Blue Jasmine,” are the sights of Cate Blanchett facing off with the risqué standup comedian Andrew Dice Clay as a man who has been laid low by her character’s deceptions; and the British actress Sally Hawkins pairing up with the comic and television star Louis C.K. as a potential suitor who becomes (in his words) “one of those awful stories that women carry around.”
The appearance of these two prominent comedians in “Blue Jasmine” is also a reminder of how Mr. Allen got his start as a performer of self-deprecating but intellectual standup comedy, long before he was writing and directing films and producing Marshall McLuhan from just off-camera. Mr. Allen spoke recently to The New York Times for an Arts & Leisure article about the creation of “Blue Jasmine” and the evolving tradition of female characters in his movies. In these edited outtakes from that conversation, he explained how the comics came to be cast in the film, and how recent experiences got him thinking about revisiting his old nightclub act.
Were you specifically looking at standup comedians for the roles in “Blue Jasmine”?
No, I wasn’t at all. We had a hard time finding someone to play the Andrew Dice Clay role. One person was too old, one person was a little too mafia, one person had something else wrong. We couldn’t find anybody. Years ago I had seen Andrew Dice Clay do his standup act on television for a few minutes, and I thought, this guy would be a very good character for a movie. It’s a good bet that comedians can act. The other way around doesn’t work so much. If you see Marlon Brando or the greatest dramatic actors, they can’t always do comedy. But I thought he would be great. Andrew Dice Clay was more sympathetic than I imagined writing the husband. When it got into his hands, there’s something about him – your heart goes out to him.
Did you know Louis C.K.’s work before you cast him in this movie?
I didn’t know Louis C.K. at all. But someone showed me a tape of Bobby Cannavale – it was to see Bobby Cannavale, and he was in a skit with Louis C.K. Cannavale, I thought, yes, he’s great and right for this part. And I said but who’s that guy with him? He’s wonderful. So we had him in originally for the Andrew Dice Clay part. And he read it, and he read it very well. We thought, he’s so likeable. He’s clearly such a sweet guy. I was dying to use him in something, so we used him to play the sweeter guy. I’d love to do a movie with him and me, a comedy. I’m looking for some idea that would work, for the two of us to do. Of course I hope that people aren’t disappointed that I don’t act with him [in "Blue Jasmine"], and he doesn’t have a commensurately comic part with his talent. But some day, I will get something that we could do together, because I do think it would be fun. I’m such a great fan of his.
What prevented this team-up from happening?
When I finished this picture, I went into my room and thought, What would be a fun picture? My first thought for a while was, Can I come up with something at the moment that I could do with Louis C.K.? But I wasn’t able to get the right idea, and time was starting to move. And I thought, well, here’s an idea that would make a very fun movie, so I started writing it, and I finished it, and I thought, this is a perfect movie for Colin Firth and Emma Stone, so that’s what I did.
Does working with comedians ever inspire you to revisit your own career as a standup?
I was inspired the other night – in the other room here where I play [the Cafe Carlyle at the Carlyle Hotel], I saw Mort Sahl. He flew in from San Francisco, and he worked three late shows and he was wonderful. He’s slowed up a little now because he’s 85. He’s not as rapid as he was when was he was 35. But all the stuff is still there. Watching him, I had the same feeling now, in 2013, as I had when I saw him in 1950-something. Of, “Hey, I’d like to get back onstage and do standup again.” He inspired me then to be a standup comic, and all these years later, I thought of it again because of him. He makes that phenomenon so enticing.
Could you fit a standup tour into your schedule when you’re making a new movie every year?
I was thinking of it. Since I saw him, I’ve just been toying with the idea. I would love to see if I could. Just getting together an hour of stuff to talk about would be a lot of work.
I would think you’ve had an experience or two to draw from since your days at N.Y.U.
Yes, yes, I’ve had some things to talk about. Learned nothing.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Karen Black RIP age 74
Hollywood star Karen Black, who
featured in cult films such as Five Easy Pieces and Nashville, has died aged
74.
Hugely prolific, the Illinois-born actress appeared in more than 100 movies
over a career spanning 40 years. She shot to fame in 1969, starring as a prostitute in Easy Rider opposite Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
She died at a clinic in Los Angeles, three years after she was diagnosed with cancer.
Black, who was raised in a Chicago suburb, almost always played troubled, neurotic characters.
She earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award for her role as Rayette Dipesto in 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, opposite Jack Nicholson, as a waitress who dates an upper-class dropout.
She again starred with Nicholson a year later in Drive, He Said, which Nicholson also directed.
Black went on to star with Robert Redford and Farrow in 1974's The Great Gatsby, for which she won a best supporting actress Golden Globe for her role as Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle Wilson.
She later scored a Grammy nomination in 1975 after writing and performing songs for Robert Altman's musical drama Nashville, in which she played a country singer.
The actress also starred as a jewel thief in what turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, Family Plot, released in 1976.
"We used to read each other poems and limericks and he tried to catch me on my vocabulary,'' she later said of Hitchcock.
"He once said, 'You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.' I said, 'Oh, you mean keenly perceptive?'
"So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said Diction-Harry, at the end of the shoot."
By the end of the 1970s, Black struggled to find quality roles and appeared mainly low-budget horror movies. In the 80s she moved into television, filming roles in series such as Miami Vice, Party of Five and Law and Order.
In 1993, she acted in a film which would turn out to actor River Phoenix's last, following his death from a drug overdose. Dark Blood was finally completed last year and was shown at a number of international film festivals.
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York: -
Ron: -
Streets Of London
Love Is The Drug
Da: -
Too Far Gone
I Don't Want To Talk About It
The Elderly Brothers (1): -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Crying In The Rain
Things We Said Today
I'll Get You
Bye Bye Love
The Elderly Brothers (2): -
The Price Of Love
Sea Of Heartbreak
Walk Right Back
The place was very quiet until about 11pm and then finally came alive. Not too many players either, hence the two solo sets. Highlights included Mark Wynn's new song about wine, Tony Jawando doing a cover of Polk Salad Annie and a German lad who sang his own songs in German!
At the close The Elderys were brought back for a rather booze fuelled encore. A splendid night!
Ron: -
Streets Of London
Love Is The Drug
Da: -
Too Far Gone
I Don't Want To Talk About It
The Elderly Brothers (1): -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Crying In The Rain
Things We Said Today
I'll Get You
Bye Bye Love
The Elderly Brothers (2): -
The Price Of Love
Sea Of Heartbreak
Walk Right Back
The place was very quiet until about 11pm and then finally came alive. Not too many players either, hence the two solo sets. Highlights included Mark Wynn's new song about wine, Tony Jawando doing a cover of Polk Salad Annie and a German lad who sang his own songs in German!
At the close The Elderys were brought back for a rather booze fuelled encore. A splendid night!
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Paul Muldoon Review by Terry Kelly in The London Magazine
Songs in the Key of Rhyme
The Word on the Street - Rock Lyrics, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 96pp, £12.99 (hardback)
Songs and Sonnets, Paul Muldoon, Enitharmon Press, 48pp, £9.99 (paperback)
Horse Music, Matthew Sweeney, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £9.95
Here is a stanza, plucked at random from Paul Muldoon's new book of rock lyrics, The Word on the Street:
Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime
What do I care?
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner, honey, I'll be there
Actually, I'm fibbing. The lyrics above are taken from Bob Dylan's groundbreaking country album, Nashville Skyline, released in 1969. I can't imagine that even Dylan devotee and noted literary critic Professor Christopher Ricks would rate those lines from 'Country Pie' as a significant literary addition, but they work in the context of a charming country bagatelle. Dylan was simplifying and cleansing his previous lyrical style in Nashville Skyline, dispensing with acid street symbolism in favour of the emotionally open, blue-collar verse of the working man. Lyrical context is everything. Instead of the brooding symbolism of Blonde on Blonde in 1966, in which 'The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face,' country Dylan's language was a form of demorative factory floor verse, as in this central couplet from 'Lay, Lady, Lay':
His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean
And you're the best thing that he's ever seen
Former poetic wunderkind Paul Muldoon has been drawn to the creative traffic between words and music for many years. As early as Quoof (1983), the poet was namechecking the album The Songs of Leonard Cohen. His sequence, 'Sleeve Notes,' in Hay (1998) includes a poem dedicated to the Canadian troubadour - 'his songs have meant far more to me/than most of the so-called 'poems' I've read' - and others inspired by Dylan, Paul Simon, and Warren Zevon, Muldoon admitting that the latter's sardonic songs 'are inextricably part of the warp and woof/of the wild and wicked poems in Quoof. ' Muldoon famously collaborated with the hard-living Zevon on songs for the latter's penultimate album, My Ride's Here (the title song was later covered by Bruce Springsteen) and the late songwriter's lyrically jaundiced musical manner remains a big influence. But while many of the lyrics in The Word on the Street have been put to music by Princeton-based band, Wayside Shrines, it's a fair bet that most readers of Muldoon's latest collection won't experience these lyrics as anything other than words on the page. And there's the rub. Again, lyrical context is everything. Words - even those produced by Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prizewinners - need to be anchored to familiar melodies to resonate in our hearts and minds. Shorn of their musical settings, even the lyrics of Dylan, Simon or Cohen (Muldoon's book carries the rather pointed dedication, 'For Paul and Leonard') can occasionally look flimsy or nakedly pretentious outside their musical settings. And Muldoon sometimes wants to have his lyrical cake and eat it. When not indulging in allusive, collegiate cleverness, like a post-modern Princeton version of Cole Porter, the author of such landmark poetry collections as Why Brownlee Left and The Annals of Chile can create a heady cocktail of heavily ironic, Springsteen-style blue-collar poetry and high table talk:
I think of Botticelli
When he juxtaposes
In the Sistine Chapel
The foundling Moses
With Jesus in the creche
Jersey fresh Jersey fresh
It's not allusiveness or lyrical complexity that are the main concerns here, but more simply: how genuine or singable are these verses as lyrics? And a related question: can some rock lyrics be too clever for their own good? Similar concerns were raised in the 1970s, when Clive James produced dozens of lyrics for singer and talented musician Pete Atkin. For all their 'poetic' qualities, lyrical complexity and positive reviews, the albums produced by the unique literary-musical duo never troubled the charts. Reviewing Muldoon's Songs and Sonnets, a companion volume from Enitharmon of 'poems and lyrics,' with a title inspired by Donne, Alan Brownjohn in the Sunday Times felt 'the book soon begins to resemble an exclusive post-modernist club that demands a lot of passwords for admission,' adding: 'There's an absence in these songs of the relaxed appeal of the many lyrics of the past that encouraged you to sing along with references you didn't understand as long as you picked up the general drift. A feeling creeps in here that these don't often qualify as popular lyrics at all.' Brownjohn prefers 'the clearer or gentler love lyrics,' with 'Hey Rachel' from the awful diner appearing to fit the bill: 'Hey Rachel/If That's your name/The light under your bushel/Is dying of shame.'
Songwriting is generally an organic art practised by bona fide musicians, but poets outside that process - even fabulously gifted ones like Muldoon who play guitar on stage - can often seem aesthetically isolated, supplying polished but ultimately contextless words, rather than true song lyrics. In fact, this is not Muldoon's first appearance in print as a song lyricist. In 2006, he published General Admission (Gallery Press), a chunky book of lyrics for Rackett, the other so-called 'music collective' with whom Muldoon has played 'three-car-garage rock.' That collection seemed to garner little critical attention, but the Faber and Faber imprimatur and Muldoon's literary standing - 'Winner of the Pulitzer Prize' is trumpeted on a golden hardback cover resembling a star sign on Hollywood Boulevard - means The Word on the Street will be widely noticed. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Adam Newey welcomed the fact that Muldoon's lyrics widen the scope of most mainstream rock music - exploring everything from the war in Afghanistan to Albert Einstein and T.S. Eliot - but voiced this reservation: 'The difficulty with reading these pieces is that you don't quite know whether to read them as song lyrics...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.' Indeed, when Muldoon turns down what Michael Donaghy once characterised as 'the obsessive wordplay of a demented philologist,' the reader can, conversely, feel slightly undersold, as though one of the most technically resourceful verse technicians since the Second World War, Princeton professor and the New Yorker poetry editor is slumming or submerging his genius for rhyme in heavily ironised, over-familiar and repetitious rock tropes, as in 'I Don't Love You Anymore' and 'It's Never Too Late For Rock 'N' Roll.'
Muldoon, of course, is well aware of the issues raised by the poetry v. song lyrics aesthetic debate. Interviewed by Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian earlier this year, he admitted: 'The tradition of reading lyrics on a page is a little bit iffy...You can see how people might be slightly disconcerted - these things are not quite poems, and yet they are sort of like poems.' Last year, Muldoon delivered the Poetry Society Annual Lecture on 'The Word on the Street Parnassus and Tin Pin Alley,' during which he identified the boundary lines between poetry and song: 'The song lyric is designed to be heard once and understood almost immediately. The pressure per square inch tends to be a lot less than it is in most poems. As we've heard more than once, for it's been true more than once, the poem brings its own music while the song needs music to become what it was destined to be.' And later on: 'While one would never say that the poem can't take in everything and anything in its hold, I can't help but think that the song lyric may often be even more capacious, allowing... of various ragbag, rough and ready registers.' Muldoon also welcomes the fruitfully creative two-way traffic between song lyrics and his poetry. But artistic tensions remain in Muldoon's song lyrics. The poet's trademark whimsicality, comparison-making impulse and juggling of 'high' and 'low' cultural references often displace the simple emotional honesty we expect from rock songs. Perhaps the linguistically hyperactive elements of Muldoon's poetry, when transferred to his lyrics, also leave too little space for the essentially collaborative business that is listening to rock music. Muldoon seems to be searching for a literary third way in the cross-fertilisation of poetry and rock lyrics. But The Word on the Street and Songs and Sonnets suggest his lyrics are still struggling to narrow that aesthetic gap.
Muldoon's fellow Irishman, Matthew Sweeney, originally from Donegal, sticks to poetry for the page in his latest and tenth collection. But his macabre tales still sing. For more than thirty years, since his 1981 debut, A Dream of Maps, Sweeney has been creating what the late Mick Imlah called 'lugubrious fables, in which domestic rituals are intruded on, and sometimes overtaken, by the surreal...His chief concern is mortality.' Death and the business of dying, often filtered through a darkly comic imagination shaped by German and east European poetic models, remain constants in Sweeney's work. In the Spring 2013 bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (PBS), which made Horse Music a Recommendation, Sweeney explains: 'All our experiences inevitably affect the way we write. My father dying, for example, then my younger sister, then my mother. How could I not let that stuff into the writing? The problem was finding a way to do so. Exploring form gave me ideas on how to do that.' Sweeney filters and shapes life's raw materials through both form - there's a moving villanelle to his sister, 'A Princess' - and via the darkest, furthest recesses of the imagination. Spirit creatures (specifically, crows), drunken dwarves, sick cows, glass eyes and anti-social gnomes populate the collection, often accompanied by a John Coltrane soundtrack. In the Jack B. Yeats-inspired title poem, spectral horses sing 'a wrenching lament/for a red-haired woman.' Human beings are often sidelined or subsumed by the dark forces of the natural world in Sweeney's macabre but plainly stated fables. Having divested himself of lyrical richness in his later work, Sweeney produces narrative-driven poems of hard won simplicity, which still remain mysterious and constantly open to the possibilities of imaginative adventure - or the nightmares of 'The Poison Dwarfs':
The poison dwarfs are in the room,
getting closer, though they never move.
Their shadows are their reinforcements.
Their stare is mutating into a scream.
Starkly stated but conversational, Sweeney's obsessive tales from the mind's darkest hinterland have carved out their own imaginative terrain. But away from the macabre, the poet is still capable of open-hearted tenderness ('Little Flower') and a lyrical insouciance shadowed by grief ('Doodle Doo'). Horse Music is one of Matthew Sweeney's most emotionally charged and imaginatively various books to date.
The Word on the Street - Rock Lyrics, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 96pp, £12.99 (hardback)
Songs and Sonnets, Paul Muldoon, Enitharmon Press, 48pp, £9.99 (paperback)
Horse Music, Matthew Sweeney, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £9.95
Here is a stanza, plucked at random from Paul Muldoon's new book of rock lyrics, The Word on the Street:
Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime
What do I care?
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner, honey, I'll be there
Actually, I'm fibbing. The lyrics above are taken from Bob Dylan's groundbreaking country album, Nashville Skyline, released in 1969. I can't imagine that even Dylan devotee and noted literary critic Professor Christopher Ricks would rate those lines from 'Country Pie' as a significant literary addition, but they work in the context of a charming country bagatelle. Dylan was simplifying and cleansing his previous lyrical style in Nashville Skyline, dispensing with acid street symbolism in favour of the emotionally open, blue-collar verse of the working man. Lyrical context is everything. Instead of the brooding symbolism of Blonde on Blonde in 1966, in which 'The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face,' country Dylan's language was a form of demorative factory floor verse, as in this central couplet from 'Lay, Lady, Lay':
His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean
And you're the best thing that he's ever seen
Former poetic wunderkind Paul Muldoon has been drawn to the creative traffic between words and music for many years. As early as Quoof (1983), the poet was namechecking the album The Songs of Leonard Cohen. His sequence, 'Sleeve Notes,' in Hay (1998) includes a poem dedicated to the Canadian troubadour - 'his songs have meant far more to me/than most of the so-called 'poems' I've read' - and others inspired by Dylan, Paul Simon, and Warren Zevon, Muldoon admitting that the latter's sardonic songs 'are inextricably part of the warp and woof/of the wild and wicked poems in Quoof. ' Muldoon famously collaborated with the hard-living Zevon on songs for the latter's penultimate album, My Ride's Here (the title song was later covered by Bruce Springsteen) and the late songwriter's lyrically jaundiced musical manner remains a big influence. But while many of the lyrics in The Word on the Street have been put to music by Princeton-based band, Wayside Shrines, it's a fair bet that most readers of Muldoon's latest collection won't experience these lyrics as anything other than words on the page. And there's the rub. Again, lyrical context is everything. Words - even those produced by Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prizewinners - need to be anchored to familiar melodies to resonate in our hearts and minds. Shorn of their musical settings, even the lyrics of Dylan, Simon or Cohen (Muldoon's book carries the rather pointed dedication, 'For Paul and Leonard') can occasionally look flimsy or nakedly pretentious outside their musical settings. And Muldoon sometimes wants to have his lyrical cake and eat it. When not indulging in allusive, collegiate cleverness, like a post-modern Princeton version of Cole Porter, the author of such landmark poetry collections as Why Brownlee Left and The Annals of Chile can create a heady cocktail of heavily ironic, Springsteen-style blue-collar poetry and high table talk:
I think of Botticelli
When he juxtaposes
In the Sistine Chapel
The foundling Moses
With Jesus in the creche
Jersey fresh Jersey fresh
It's not allusiveness or lyrical complexity that are the main concerns here, but more simply: how genuine or singable are these verses as lyrics? And a related question: can some rock lyrics be too clever for their own good? Similar concerns were raised in the 1970s, when Clive James produced dozens of lyrics for singer and talented musician Pete Atkin. For all their 'poetic' qualities, lyrical complexity and positive reviews, the albums produced by the unique literary-musical duo never troubled the charts. Reviewing Muldoon's Songs and Sonnets, a companion volume from Enitharmon of 'poems and lyrics,' with a title inspired by Donne, Alan Brownjohn in the Sunday Times felt 'the book soon begins to resemble an exclusive post-modernist club that demands a lot of passwords for admission,' adding: 'There's an absence in these songs of the relaxed appeal of the many lyrics of the past that encouraged you to sing along with references you didn't understand as long as you picked up the general drift. A feeling creeps in here that these don't often qualify as popular lyrics at all.' Brownjohn prefers 'the clearer or gentler love lyrics,' with 'Hey Rachel' from the awful diner appearing to fit the bill: 'Hey Rachel/If That's your name/The light under your bushel/Is dying of shame.'
Songwriting is generally an organic art practised by bona fide musicians, but poets outside that process - even fabulously gifted ones like Muldoon who play guitar on stage - can often seem aesthetically isolated, supplying polished but ultimately contextless words, rather than true song lyrics. In fact, this is not Muldoon's first appearance in print as a song lyricist. In 2006, he published General Admission (Gallery Press), a chunky book of lyrics for Rackett, the other so-called 'music collective' with whom Muldoon has played 'three-car-garage rock.' That collection seemed to garner little critical attention, but the Faber and Faber imprimatur and Muldoon's literary standing - 'Winner of the Pulitzer Prize' is trumpeted on a golden hardback cover resembling a star sign on Hollywood Boulevard - means The Word on the Street will be widely noticed. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Adam Newey welcomed the fact that Muldoon's lyrics widen the scope of most mainstream rock music - exploring everything from the war in Afghanistan to Albert Einstein and T.S. Eliot - but voiced this reservation: 'The difficulty with reading these pieces is that you don't quite know whether to read them as song lyrics...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.' Indeed, when Muldoon turns down what Michael Donaghy once characterised as 'the obsessive wordplay of a demented philologist,' the reader can, conversely, feel slightly undersold, as though one of the most technically resourceful verse technicians since the Second World War, Princeton professor and the New Yorker poetry editor is slumming or submerging his genius for rhyme in heavily ironised, over-familiar and repetitious rock tropes, as in 'I Don't Love You Anymore' and 'It's Never Too Late For Rock 'N' Roll.'
Muldoon, of course, is well aware of the issues raised by the poetry v. song lyrics aesthetic debate. Interviewed by Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian earlier this year, he admitted: 'The tradition of reading lyrics on a page is a little bit iffy...You can see how people might be slightly disconcerted - these things are not quite poems, and yet they are sort of like poems.' Last year, Muldoon delivered the Poetry Society Annual Lecture on 'The Word on the Street Parnassus and Tin Pin Alley,' during which he identified the boundary lines between poetry and song: 'The song lyric is designed to be heard once and understood almost immediately. The pressure per square inch tends to be a lot less than it is in most poems. As we've heard more than once, for it's been true more than once, the poem brings its own music while the song needs music to become what it was destined to be.' And later on: 'While one would never say that the poem can't take in everything and anything in its hold, I can't help but think that the song lyric may often be even more capacious, allowing... of various ragbag, rough and ready registers.' Muldoon also welcomes the fruitfully creative two-way traffic between song lyrics and his poetry. But artistic tensions remain in Muldoon's song lyrics. The poet's trademark whimsicality, comparison-making impulse and juggling of 'high' and 'low' cultural references often displace the simple emotional honesty we expect from rock songs. Perhaps the linguistically hyperactive elements of Muldoon's poetry, when transferred to his lyrics, also leave too little space for the essentially collaborative business that is listening to rock music. Muldoon seems to be searching for a literary third way in the cross-fertilisation of poetry and rock lyrics. But The Word on the Street and Songs and Sonnets suggest his lyrics are still struggling to narrow that aesthetic gap.
Muldoon's fellow Irishman, Matthew Sweeney, originally from Donegal, sticks to poetry for the page in his latest and tenth collection. But his macabre tales still sing. For more than thirty years, since his 1981 debut, A Dream of Maps, Sweeney has been creating what the late Mick Imlah called 'lugubrious fables, in which domestic rituals are intruded on, and sometimes overtaken, by the surreal...His chief concern is mortality.' Death and the business of dying, often filtered through a darkly comic imagination shaped by German and east European poetic models, remain constants in Sweeney's work. In the Spring 2013 bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (PBS), which made Horse Music a Recommendation, Sweeney explains: 'All our experiences inevitably affect the way we write. My father dying, for example, then my younger sister, then my mother. How could I not let that stuff into the writing? The problem was finding a way to do so. Exploring form gave me ideas on how to do that.' Sweeney filters and shapes life's raw materials through both form - there's a moving villanelle to his sister, 'A Princess' - and via the darkest, furthest recesses of the imagination. Spirit creatures (specifically, crows), drunken dwarves, sick cows, glass eyes and anti-social gnomes populate the collection, often accompanied by a John Coltrane soundtrack. In the Jack B. Yeats-inspired title poem, spectral horses sing 'a wrenching lament/for a red-haired woman.' Human beings are often sidelined or subsumed by the dark forces of the natural world in Sweeney's macabre but plainly stated fables. Having divested himself of lyrical richness in his later work, Sweeney produces narrative-driven poems of hard won simplicity, which still remain mysterious and constantly open to the possibilities of imaginative adventure - or the nightmares of 'The Poison Dwarfs':
The poison dwarfs are in the room,
getting closer, though they never move.
Their shadows are their reinforcements.
Their stare is mutating into a scream.
Starkly stated but conversational, Sweeney's obsessive tales from the mind's darkest hinterland have carved out their own imaginative terrain. But away from the macabre, the poet is still capable of open-hearted tenderness ('Little Flower') and a lyrical insouciance shadowed by grief ('Doodle Doo'). Horse Music is one of Matthew Sweeney's most emotionally charged and imaginatively various books to date.
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Monday, 5 August 2013
Tom Kelly - I Know Their Footsteps
Published on 21 Jul 2013
'I Know Their Footsteps' - Published by Red Squirrel Press, will be launched on Monday 30th September 2013 at 7pm at the Lit and Phil Library, Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne.
http://www.tomkelly.org.uk/
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/KellyTimeOfficeBIOG.html
http://www.litandphil.org.uk/events.shtml
http://www.tomkelly.org.uk/
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/KellyTimeOfficeBIOG.html
http://www.litandphil.org.uk/events.shtml
Sunday, 4 August 2013
Ten 'Best' Sea Paintings...
The 10 best sea pictures
From Da Vinci's imagined Italian coastline to Turner's abstractions – Observer art critic Laura Cumming chooses her favourite seascapes
Laura Cumming
The Observer
Bird’s Eye View of the Sea Coast
Leonardo da Vinci (c1515)
The sea covers almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, but few artists before the age of flight ever thought of its immense geographic spread across the globe. Leonardo, as in so many other ways, is a pioneer. Here he imagines the sea off the coast of Italy, fitting snugly into the curving bays, meeting the land like a fitted carpet of blue. The image is partly a map, partly a relief – the land is wavy with mountains – but mainly a vision of how the sea-covered world might look from high above in the air.
Ocean
Vija Celmins (2005)
The Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins holds the waters of the ocean still for a moment with her immense graphite drawing, a million exquisite marks to elaborate a few feet of rippling surface. She seems to be right out there, hovering just above the deep. Pencil turns out to be perfect for the ocean, monochrome on a grey day, its ceaseless and irregular movements registering in an almost infinite range of tones. Celmins’s image appears almost photographic in its hard-won detail, yet it feels as alien as a moonscape, shadowed with unfathomable secrets.
The Monk by the Sea
Caspar David Friedrich (1808-10)
Earth, water, sky: the elements are stacked in three bands, radically abstract. But the horizontals are countered by the tiny upright figure of the monk, who stands alone on the edge of the Earth. A black ocean extends immeasurably before him, opening like an abyss without comforting pictorial borders. The German romantic Caspar David Friedrich spent two years working on this alarming vision of a sea of darkness, with only the slightest hope in the hint of blue sky above the leaden clouds. The monk stands between the two sins against hope: presumption and despair. This is a sea of faith.
Baie des Anges, Nice
Raoul Dufy (1927)
Painting the Baie des Anges is like painting Venice: everyone has done it before you. But the fauvist painter Raoul Dufy made the view his own to an exceptional degree with his joyfully sensuous views. The Mediterranean is not just blue in his paintings, it is a blue so deep and intense as to be counterintuitive – a hot blue, instead of its opposite. Dufy painted the bay over and over again, variously framed by striped parasols, fringed palms and little white buildings, but the sea remains the same brilliant blue. He is for ever associated with this stretch of the Mediterranean – his pictures have literally become postcard views.
The Great Wave
Hokusai (c1831)
Hokusai’s stupendous work shows the great azure wave rising and flexing its claws over a dauntless little Fuji in the distance. The eternal mountain is frozen in that split second before the wave crashes down. Three boats struggling with the heaving tide are partially visible, in a pictorial game of hide and seek, and the scattering of foam doubles as snowfall over Fuji. Hokusai got the new colour of Prussian blue from the west, and in return presented a radical new idea – that foreground and background could be dramatically juxtaposed with out any need to fill in the dull middle distance.
West Point, Prout’s Neck
Winslow Homer (1900)
The sea is stranger than any of us can imagine. That is the revelation of the many paintings Winslow Homer made off the coast of Maine, where he lived alone in a shore cottage for quarter of a century. The sea is wild, wind-torn and dangerous in his art. He often paints fishermen in peril, their boats disappearing between gargantuan dark waves. But it is also volatile and mysterious. In this painting, the ocean throws up a spectre of foam, an “S” curve so shapely it might be a female figure: the spirit of the Atlantic.
Sunset
John Kensett (c1872)
The sea is exquisitely tranquil in the art of the 19th-century luminist painter John Frederick Kensett. Stippled clouds brighten as storms pass, the water lies steady, mooring posts twinkle on the wide horizon. Here the sea is a mirror to the sun’s last rays, and the opal-coloured water ripples in the warmth of a summer’s evening. This was one of Kensett’s last paintings, made on Long Island where he lived and painted the Atlantic shores. It feels elegiac but absolutely peaceful. The sea stretches away into a world of pure light.
Rhyl Sands
David Cox (c 1854)
The sea recedes even as we travel towards it: that is so often the experience of a trip to the seaside. We arrive at the beach, longing to plunge straight into the waves, and are confronted instead by a great sweep of sand. David Cox’s wonderful painting shows the Welsh coast and surprisingly not the French, which it so resembles, just as his style prefigures French impressionism several years in advance. He painted the sea, in his 70s, just as it appears in life – remote, withdrawn, a distant bar of liquid colour far away across a strand.
Waves Breaking
Claude Monet (1881)
Monet visited the Normandy coast many times, painting the English Channel from the same spot at different hours of the day, in all weathers, clambering over the rocks with his easel. Here he seems to be standing on the last strip of sand on the beach at Etretat as the tide races straight towards him. The image is so radically cropped that the picture contains nothing but waves foaming up to the sky – exactly what filled his field of vision at that moment. It is a painting of rushing waves and of the experience of visibility.
Storm at Sea
JMW Turner (c 1820-1830)
JMW Turner, the great sea dog, painted more than a thousand seascapes. He manages to depict the sea’s ever-changing effects in almost every single image. Here the waves meet the sky in a rolling vortex of air and water, the two elements melting into one in this superbly rapid study. “Pictures of nothing, and very like,” was Hazlitt’s barbed remark; which, turned on its head by modern critics, makes Turner a pioneer of abstract art. And what is the sea but a perfect abstraction of motion, colour and light? In Chelsea, where he lived, Turner’s nickname on the streets was Admiral Puggy Booth – after his supposed profession.
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/jul/13/10-best-sea-pictures#/?picture=412636761&index=9
From Da Vinci's imagined Italian coastline to Turner's abstractions – Observer art critic Laura Cumming chooses her favourite seascapes
Laura Cumming
The Observer
13 July 2013
Bird’s Eye View of the Sea Coast
Leonardo da Vinci (c1515)
The sea covers almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, but few artists before the age of flight ever thought of its immense geographic spread across the globe. Leonardo, as in so many other ways, is a pioneer. Here he imagines the sea off the coast of Italy, fitting snugly into the curving bays, meeting the land like a fitted carpet of blue. The image is partly a map, partly a relief – the land is wavy with mountains – but mainly a vision of how the sea-covered world might look from high above in the air.
Ocean
Vija Celmins (2005)
The Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins holds the waters of the ocean still for a moment with her immense graphite drawing, a million exquisite marks to elaborate a few feet of rippling surface. She seems to be right out there, hovering just above the deep. Pencil turns out to be perfect for the ocean, monochrome on a grey day, its ceaseless and irregular movements registering in an almost infinite range of tones. Celmins’s image appears almost photographic in its hard-won detail, yet it feels as alien as a moonscape, shadowed with unfathomable secrets.
The Monk by the Sea
Caspar David Friedrich (1808-10)
Earth, water, sky: the elements are stacked in three bands, radically abstract. But the horizontals are countered by the tiny upright figure of the monk, who stands alone on the edge of the Earth. A black ocean extends immeasurably before him, opening like an abyss without comforting pictorial borders. The German romantic Caspar David Friedrich spent two years working on this alarming vision of a sea of darkness, with only the slightest hope in the hint of blue sky above the leaden clouds. The monk stands between the two sins against hope: presumption and despair. This is a sea of faith.
Baie des Anges, Nice
Raoul Dufy (1927)
Painting the Baie des Anges is like painting Venice: everyone has done it before you. But the fauvist painter Raoul Dufy made the view his own to an exceptional degree with his joyfully sensuous views. The Mediterranean is not just blue in his paintings, it is a blue so deep and intense as to be counterintuitive – a hot blue, instead of its opposite. Dufy painted the bay over and over again, variously framed by striped parasols, fringed palms and little white buildings, but the sea remains the same brilliant blue. He is for ever associated with this stretch of the Mediterranean – his pictures have literally become postcard views.
The Great Wave
Hokusai (c1831)
Hokusai’s stupendous work shows the great azure wave rising and flexing its claws over a dauntless little Fuji in the distance. The eternal mountain is frozen in that split second before the wave crashes down. Three boats struggling with the heaving tide are partially visible, in a pictorial game of hide and seek, and the scattering of foam doubles as snowfall over Fuji. Hokusai got the new colour of Prussian blue from the west, and in return presented a radical new idea – that foreground and background could be dramatically juxtaposed with out any need to fill in the dull middle distance.
West Point, Prout’s Neck
Winslow Homer (1900)
The sea is stranger than any of us can imagine. That is the revelation of the many paintings Winslow Homer made off the coast of Maine, where he lived alone in a shore cottage for quarter of a century. The sea is wild, wind-torn and dangerous in his art. He often paints fishermen in peril, their boats disappearing between gargantuan dark waves. But it is also volatile and mysterious. In this painting, the ocean throws up a spectre of foam, an “S” curve so shapely it might be a female figure: the spirit of the Atlantic.
Sunset
John Kensett (c1872)
The sea is exquisitely tranquil in the art of the 19th-century luminist painter John Frederick Kensett. Stippled clouds brighten as storms pass, the water lies steady, mooring posts twinkle on the wide horizon. Here the sea is a mirror to the sun’s last rays, and the opal-coloured water ripples in the warmth of a summer’s evening. This was one of Kensett’s last paintings, made on Long Island where he lived and painted the Atlantic shores. It feels elegiac but absolutely peaceful. The sea stretches away into a world of pure light.
Rhyl Sands
David Cox (c 1854)
The sea recedes even as we travel towards it: that is so often the experience of a trip to the seaside. We arrive at the beach, longing to plunge straight into the waves, and are confronted instead by a great sweep of sand. David Cox’s wonderful painting shows the Welsh coast and surprisingly not the French, which it so resembles, just as his style prefigures French impressionism several years in advance. He painted the sea, in his 70s, just as it appears in life – remote, withdrawn, a distant bar of liquid colour far away across a strand.
Waves Breaking
Claude Monet (1881)
Monet visited the Normandy coast many times, painting the English Channel from the same spot at different hours of the day, in all weathers, clambering over the rocks with his easel. Here he seems to be standing on the last strip of sand on the beach at Etretat as the tide races straight towards him. The image is so radically cropped that the picture contains nothing but waves foaming up to the sky – exactly what filled his field of vision at that moment. It is a painting of rushing waves and of the experience of visibility.
Storm at Sea
JMW Turner (c 1820-1830)
JMW Turner, the great sea dog, painted more than a thousand seascapes. He manages to depict the sea’s ever-changing effects in almost every single image. Here the waves meet the sky in a rolling vortex of air and water, the two elements melting into one in this superbly rapid study. “Pictures of nothing, and very like,” was Hazlitt’s barbed remark; which, turned on its head by modern critics, makes Turner a pioneer of abstract art. And what is the sea but a perfect abstraction of motion, colour and light? In Chelsea, where he lived, Turner’s nickname on the streets was Admiral Puggy Booth – after his supposed profession.
Saturday, 3 August 2013
Prefab Sprout - Crimson/Red cover art
And ALL the songs ae currently up on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=prefab+sprout+crimson&oq=prefab+sprout+crimson&gs_l=youtube.3..35i39.270857.275620.0.276018.21.16.0.5.5.0.144.1398.12j4.16.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.1kdH_Bgf9nE
Friday, 2 August 2013
Thursday, 1 August 2013
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York: -
Ron: -
You Better Move On
My Hometown
Da: -
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Love Song
The Elderly Brothers: -
Love Hurts
Let It Be Me
The Sound Of Silence
I'll Get You
A packed night with an attentive audience made it a pleasure to play them some choons. Early on there weren't too many players so The Elderlys got to play a couple of solo spots. Later the place was overflowing with musicians, so only 4 songs when we returned for the main event.
There was real magic in the room when Dave Ward Maclean, accompanied by Kieran White on the 'new' piano, sang Summertime. The door was open and even people across the street stopped to listen. Time stopped!
Excellent stuff too from regular and new players alike. A lass who shall remain nameless bravely sang Going To Get Along Without You Now after announcing that she had just been cruelly dumped. Lovely voice and great ukelele playing too.
Ron: -
You Better Move On
My Hometown
Da: -
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Love Song
The Elderly Brothers: -
Love Hurts
Let It Be Me
The Sound Of Silence
I'll Get You
A packed night with an attentive audience made it a pleasure to play them some choons. Early on there weren't too many players so The Elderlys got to play a couple of solo spots. Later the place was overflowing with musicians, so only 4 songs when we returned for the main event.
There was real magic in the room when Dave Ward Maclean, accompanied by Kieran White on the 'new' piano, sang Summertime. The door was open and even people across the street stopped to listen. Time stopped!
Excellent stuff too from regular and new players alike. A lass who shall remain nameless bravely sang Going To Get Along Without You Now after announcing that she had just been cruelly dumped. Lovely voice and great ukelele playing too.
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