Sunday, 13 May 2018
Saturday, 12 May 2018
Mario Carnicelli: America in the 60s
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, 1967
Trade union workers, Detroit, 1966
Window Nurses, New York, 1966
American Voyage: Photographs by Mario Carnicelli
Beautiful portrait of America in the 1960s, rediscovered after 50 years
In 1966, Mario Carnicelli won first place in an Italian national photography competition sponsored by Popular Photography magazine and Mamiya and Pentax. The prize was a scholarship to photograph America.
Carnicelli was fascinated by the almost reckless freedom offered by America, with its mix of cultures and traditions, its fashion and individuality; while at the same time he was aware of a pervading loneliness and rootlessness in people separated from family and clan. This beautiful book features over 150 colour and black and white images of America in the 1960s. It transcends other books on a similar subject matter; the photographs are truly compelling, drawing the reader/viewer into Carnicelli’s world. He approached the country as an outsider, and yet his perspective managed to capture the essence of the American experience. His photographs are a captivating, optimistic and contemplative look at the complexity of ordinary people living the American dream.
These photographs were recently rediscovered after 50 years, and the book’s release coincides with an exhibition of this work at Morton Hill Gallery in London.
MARIO CARNICELLI (b.1937) was exposed to photography from a young age, through his family’s photography business in Pistoia, Italy. He went on to document public events, demonstrations and political meetings. His style was in uenced by the humanistic approach, photographers like Lewis Hine and the FSA-photographers. He worked for national newspapers and magazines and had several solo exhibitions of his work during the 1960s and 1970s, before retiring from photography in the 1970s to focus on running his own photography business. Many of his photographs, including his American Voyage essays, have lain forgotten until now.
ISBN: 978-1-909526-57-0
160pp; hardback; 150+ colour and b/w photographs
275 x 230mm / 10.75 x 9 in
In 1966, Mario Carnicelli won first place in an Italian national photography competition sponsored by Popular Photography magazine and Mamiya and Pentax. The prize was a scholarship to photograph America.
Carnicelli was fascinated by the almost reckless freedom offered by America, with its mix of cultures and traditions, its fashion and individuality; while at the same time he was aware of a pervading loneliness and rootlessness in people separated from family and clan. This beautiful book features over 150 colour and black and white images of America in the 1960s. It transcends other books on a similar subject matter; the photographs are truly compelling, drawing the reader/viewer into Carnicelli’s world. He approached the country as an outsider, and yet his perspective managed to capture the essence of the American experience. His photographs are a captivating, optimistic and contemplative look at the complexity of ordinary people living the American dream.
These photographs were recently rediscovered after 50 years, and the book’s release coincides with an exhibition of this work at Morton Hill Gallery in London.
MARIO CARNICELLI (b.1937) was exposed to photography from a young age, through his family’s photography business in Pistoia, Italy. He went on to document public events, demonstrations and political meetings. His style was in uenced by the humanistic approach, photographers like Lewis Hine and the FSA-photographers. He worked for national newspapers and magazines and had several solo exhibitions of his work during the 1960s and 1970s, before retiring from photography in the 1970s to focus on running his own photography business. Many of his photographs, including his American Voyage essays, have lain forgotten until now.
ISBN: 978-1-909526-57-0
160pp; hardback; 150+ colour and b/w photographs
275 x 230mm / 10.75 x 9 in
Photographs by Mario Carnicelli
Friday, 11 May 2018
Dead Poets Society #76 Stevie Smith: Drugs Made Pauline Vague
Stevie Smith - Drugs Made Pauline Vague
She sat one day at the breakfast table
Fingering in a baffled way
The fronds of the maidenhair plant.
Was it the salt you were looking for dear?
said Dulcie, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier.
Chuff chuff Pauline what's the matter?
Said the Brigadier to his wife
Who did not even notice
What a handsome couple they made.
Thursday, 10 May 2018
Last night's set lists at The Habit, York
Ron Elderly: -
Try A Little Tenderness
Dead Flowers
Da Elderly: -
Harvest
Heart Of Gold
The Elderly Brothers: -
Then I Kissed Her
Hello Mary Lou
Bus Stop
Crying In The Rain
Surfin' USA
It was a busy one on a wet night. Our host kicked off with two original songs, backed by TWO bass players (see above) - a first for The Habit and probably most other venues. Highlights included: Stan covering Slow Train Coming and singing an excellent original song; Chris getting everyone singing along with California Dreaming and some deft harmonica work by a young guy who also wielded a resonator guitar. The Elderly Brothers finished off the night and included two songs appropriate for the weather conditions!
P.S. there will be no reports from The Habit for the next few weeks as Da is away on vacation.
Try A Little Tenderness
Dead Flowers
Da Elderly: -
Harvest
Heart Of Gold
The Elderly Brothers: -
Then I Kissed Her
Hello Mary Lou
Bus Stop
Crying In The Rain
Surfin' USA
It was a busy one on a wet night. Our host kicked off with two original songs, backed by TWO bass players (see above) - a first for The Habit and probably most other venues. Highlights included: Stan covering Slow Train Coming and singing an excellent original song; Chris getting everyone singing along with California Dreaming and some deft harmonica work by a young guy who also wielded a resonator guitar. The Elderly Brothers finished off the night and included two songs appropriate for the weather conditions!
P.S. there will be no reports from The Habit for the next few weeks as Da is away on vacation.
Wednesday, 9 May 2018
W. C. Fields: the soul behind the gag
James Curtis
The New York Times
30 March 2003
Comedy, Bill Fields would say, is truth-a bit of artful reality, expressed in action or words, carefully exaggerated and brought to a surprise finish. Fields didn't think the mechanics of a gag counted for half as much as the soul behind it. You might coax a laugh from a willing audience over most anything, but a gag wouldn't be memorable without the delight of human recognition.
The comedy Fields propounded reached its apogee with a modest sixty-seven-minute film called It's a Gift. In it, he plays an everyman-hardworking, beset by life's frustrations, caring and respectful of a family that no longer appreciates him. He dreams his dreams in private. He is not brilliant, lovable, or even admirable, but his dignity never leaves him, and, in the end, he triumphs as much through luck as perseverance. When it was released, in November 1934, It's a Gift was a minor event, bound for a quick playoff in what Variety referred to as "the nabes." But the critics took notice, and a groundswell of enthusiasm for the fifty-four-year-old Fields and his work, which had been building for eighteen months, suddenly erupted. Andre Sennwald, writing in the New York Times, referred to Fields' growing legion of fans as "idolaters," and, although not necessarily one himself, he concluded his notice by sweeping away all doubt that one of the great comedies of the so! und era had arrived. "The fact is that Mr. Fields has come back to us again, and It's a Gift automatically becomes the best screen comedy on Broadway."
As Fields pointed out, the appeal of his character was rooted in the characteristics audiences saw in themselves. "You've heard the old legend that it's the little put-upon guy who gets the laughs, but I'm the most belligerent guy on the screen. I'm going to kill everybody. But, at the same time, I'm afraid of everybody-just a great big frightened bully. There's a lot of that in human nature. When people laugh at me, they're laughing at themselves. Or, at least, the next fellow."
Like Mark Twain, Fields believed humor sprang naturally from tragedy, and that it was normal and therefore acceptable to behave badly when things went wrong. One of the key sequences in It's a Gift shows an elderly blind man laying waste to Fields' general store with his cane. Afterward, Fields sends him out into a busy street, where he is almost run down in traffic. "I never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible," Fields said. "If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't."
"I was the first comic in world history, so they told me, to pick fights with children. I booted Baby LeRoy. The No-men-they're even worse than the Yes-men-shook their heads and said it would never go; people wouldn't stand for it ... then, in another picture, I kicked a little dog.... The No-men said I couldn't do that either. But I got sympathy both times. People didn't know what the unmanageable baby might do to get even, and they thought the dog might bite me."
The conniving and bibulous character Fields developed caught the public imagination at a time when the nation was deep in the throes of the Great Depression and the sale of liquor was still prohibited by law. He appeared on the scene as the embodiment of public misbehavior, a man not so much at odds with authority as completely oblivious to it. He drank because he enjoyed it and cheated at cards because he was good at it. Fields wasn't a bad sort, but rather a throwback to a time when such behaviors were perfectly innocuous and government wasn't quite so paternalistic. Harold Lloyd called him "the foremost American comedian," and Buster Keaton considered him, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon, the greatest of all film comics. "His comedy is unique, original, and side-splitting."
Fields had the courage to cast himself in the decidedly unfavorable light of a bully and a con man. He not only summed up the frustrations of the common man-he did something about them. Unlike most comedians, he never asked to be loved; he was short-tempered, a coward, an outright faker at times. Chaplin was better known, Keaton more technically ambitious, and Laurel and Hardy were certainly more beloved, but Fields resonated with audiences in ways other comics did not. He wasn't a clown; he didn't dress like a tramp or live in the distant world of the London ghetto. Indeed, for most audiences he lived just down the street or around the corner. He was everyone's disagreeable uncle, or the tippling neighbor who warned off the local kids with a golf club. People responded to the honesty of Fields' character because, like Archie Bunker of a later generation, everyone knew somebody just like him. They admired him in a grudging sort of way, and saw the humanity beneath his thick crust of contempt for the world.
"The first thing I remember figuring out for myself was that I wanted to be a definite personality," he said. "I had heard a man say he liked a certain fellow because he was always the same dirty damn so and so. You know, like Larsen in Jack London's Sea Wolf. He was detestable, yet you admired him because he remained true to type. Well, I thought that was a swell idea, so I developed a philosophy of my own: Be your type! I determined that whatever I was, I'd be that, I wouldn't teeter on the fence."
The childhood Fields exaggerated for interviewers was vividly Dickensian, and his run-ins with his father had the brutal energy of Sennett slapstick. Yet the humanity he always strived for in his film treatments failed him when dredging up details of his own early life. He invariably described his father as an abusive scoundrel, his mother as ineffectual and sottish, and his younger self as a Philadelphian version of Huck Finn. He sprang from immigrant stock-his father was British-and however American Fields seemed, there was always an element of the outsider in the characters he played. He embraced the nomadic spirit of his grandfather, whom he never met, and although he was married to the same woman for the entirety of his adult life, he was always at odds with both her and the world, embattled and solitary.
Fields moved through a career that lasted nearly half a century, acquiring slowly the elements of the character by which he is known today. Onstage, he perfected what can best be described as the comedy of frustration, building one of his most popular routines on the petty distractions a golfer encounters while attempting to tee off. His seminal pool act was similarly constructed, leading him to conclude that "the funniest thing a comedian can do is not to do it." In films, he found his voice after an abortive career in silents and became, in the words of James Agee, "the toughest and most warmly human of all screen comedians."
His time as one of Hollywood's top draws was brief-barely six years-and by 1941 his audience had largely abandoned him. Radio, where he could still find work, drained him of any subtlety, due, in large part, to his boozy exchanges with Edgar Bergen's sarcastic dummy, Charlie McCarthy. In spite of his own best efforts, he was constantly at pains to justify a character that had become so fixed in the public mind that he was widely presumed to be the same man he portrayed onscreen. The day he died, Bob Hope made a joke about him on NBC. Hope implied he had seen Fields drunk: "I saw W. C. Fields on the street and waved, and he weaved back." The audience laughed; Fields was by then the most famous drunk in the world. It no longer mattered that he had never played a drunk in his life.
In 1880, travelers approaching Philadelphia from Delaware County and points south would generally pass through the tiny borough of Darby on their way to the Quaker City. Less than a mile square, Darby was a mill town and a transportation hub, home to 1,779 permanent residents and a cluster of paper and textile factories that fairly dominated the landscape. Every day, fifteen thousand workers flooded the town, making the central business district, which ran four blocks along Main Street between Tenth and Mill, second only to Chester in terms of size and importance. There were taprooms and cafs, a funeral parlor, a dozen churches, an Odd Fellows lodge, and one of the oldest free libraries in the nation. Both the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroads passed through Darby, and trolleys connected the Philadelphia line with Wilmington and Chester. Just beyond town were cattle and horse ranches and a vast blanket of farmland that stretched toward Media. Wealthy buyers in search of prime racing stock would put up at the Buttonwood Hotel, at the terminus of the Chester Traction Co. line, or sometimes at the Bluebell Tavern, up near Grays Ferry, where George Washington was said to have stopped on his way to Philadelphia for the second inaugural. Of Darby's several inns, however, only one actually catered to the horse trade-a simple stone building at the southeast corner of Main and Mill Streets known as the Arlington House.
Older than the Buttonwood and less historic than the Bluebell, the Arlington stood directly in front of Griswold's Worsted, the largest and most modern of Darby's numerous textile mills, and a block and a half west of the town dock, the central receiving point for freight and supplies brought up the Delaware River and inland via Cobbs Creek. At the noisiest and dustiest intersection in town, the Arlington was a stopping point for dockhands, mill workers, clerks, tradesmen, and tourists on their way to or from Philadelphia. Atop its three modest stories was a fire lookout, a box- like room with windows on all sides that afforded a panoramic view of the mills along the two tidewater streams, Cobbs Creek on the east and Darby Creek on the west, and the main arteries leading off into Lansdowne, to the north, and Sharon Hill, to the south.
Locals and guests pausing at the bar on the ground floor were likely to be served by James Lydon Dukenfield, a robust Brit in his late thirties who ran the hotel with his wife, Kate, and a cousin from New York named Jim Lester. A short, stocky man with intense blue eyes, a thick moustache, and light hair he carefully parted down the middle, Jim Dukenfield broke Arabian horses for a living and obviously saw an opportunity when the little hotel, built on the site of an old flour mill, came up for lease. He was known for his flash temper, his extemporaneous bursts into song (the more sentimental the better), and the two fingers missing from his left hand. He had a ready smile that made him a congenial host, and an explosive contempt for authority that made him a difficult employee.
Jim had been a volunteer fireman in the days when such companies were like roaming bands of hooligans that would cut the hoses of rival companies for the privilege of knocking down a fire. He enlisted with the Philadelphia Fire Zouaves when the call came for three-year volunteers in August 1861. He deserted for five months-not responding any better to military authority than he had to any other kind-and was mustered out after "accidently" getting his fingers blown off while on picket duty near Fair Oaks. Four of his nine brothers also answered the call, and all survived with the exception of George, two years younger than Jim, who fell at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Jim liked to say he had been wounded at the Battle of Lookout Mountain; his eldest son said he had more likely been caught picking pockets.
Jim Dukenfield was one of thirteen children, most of whom followed their father, John Dukinfield, to the United States in the mid-1850s. John was the second son of George Dukinfield, who in turn was the third son of Lord Dukinfield of Cheshire. John Dukinfield and his elder brother George were born patricians, but the estate passed in line to a grandson who was a clergyman and vicar of the county. When he subsequently died without issue, the estate reverted to the chancery and became property of the kingdom. John moved to Sheffield-not to work in the mines but to distinguish himself as a comb maker, carving premium designs from animal horns. He married an Irish Catholic girl named Ann Lyden and began her career in wholesale motherhood with the birth of their first son, Walter, in 1835. The business grew steadily, and by 1837 John had taken George on as a partner. They established a little factory in Rockingham Street, where they made buttons, spectacle frames, and pocket knives, and installed their families in adjacent housing nearby.
John was a restless spirit, impulsive and autocratic. He had a big nose that would later inspire his niece Emily to remark that his grandson, the film comedian he never met, resembled him "especially above the mouth." In 1854, John was seized with the notion of moving to the United States, where there would be fresh supplies and a ready market for his imitation pearl buttons and tortoiseshell glasses. He packed a trunkful of supplies, enlisted his twelve-year-old son Jim for the trip, and left Ann, pregnant as usual, in George's care. The voyage was arduous, plagued by bad weather, and they were shipwrecked off the coast of Glen Cove, Long Island. John and his son made their way to Dudley, New Jersey, north of Camden, then crossed the Delaware River into Philadelphia, where they opened a dry goods store in the Kensington district, known because of its concentration of British textile workers as "Little England." Ann followed with most of the other kids; Godfrey, the youngest, made the crossing from England in his mother's arms.
The family had largely reassembled by November, when John filed a declaration of intent to become an American citizen. He also began spelling his name "Dukenfield" (with an "en" in place of the "in"), apparently considering this to be an appropriate Americanization of the name. The Dukenfield boys were all fiercely independent-not unlike the old man-and no two spelled the family name alike. According to one source, it derived from "Dug-in-field," meaning "bird-in-field," and there was (and still is) a township in Stockport Parish, near Manchester, called Dukinfield. Jim spelled it with an "en," and other variations included Duckinfield (favored by George as a child), Duckenfield, and even Dutenfield.
The older boys took jobs in and around Philadelphia. Jim, who was good with horses, became a driver. His brother John became a bricklayer, and another brother, George, became a potter. Walter, the eldest, worked as a bartender at the Union Hotel. The family business moved to Girard Avenue, west of Second, and eventually north to 625 Cumberland, where it remained into the 1890s. John Dukenfield opened a tavern on East Norris Street, and it was there that he increasingly spent his time. He managed to drink the business into a downturn, and, in 1859, with six children under the age of ten still living at home, he abandoned his wife and family. Ann struggled mightily with the business, eventually passing it to her brother-in-law George.
Excerpted from W. C. Fields by James Curtis Copyright © 2003 by James Curtis
Comedy, Bill Fields would say, is truth-a bit of artful reality, expressed in action or words, carefully exaggerated and brought to a surprise finish. Fields didn't think the mechanics of a gag counted for half as much as the soul behind it. You might coax a laugh from a willing audience over most anything, but a gag wouldn't be memorable without the delight of human recognition.
The comedy Fields propounded reached its apogee with a modest sixty-seven-minute film called It's a Gift. In it, he plays an everyman-hardworking, beset by life's frustrations, caring and respectful of a family that no longer appreciates him. He dreams his dreams in private. He is not brilliant, lovable, or even admirable, but his dignity never leaves him, and, in the end, he triumphs as much through luck as perseverance. When it was released, in November 1934, It's a Gift was a minor event, bound for a quick playoff in what Variety referred to as "the nabes." But the critics took notice, and a groundswell of enthusiasm for the fifty-four-year-old Fields and his work, which had been building for eighteen months, suddenly erupted. Andre Sennwald, writing in the New York Times, referred to Fields' growing legion of fans as "idolaters," and, although not necessarily one himself, he concluded his notice by sweeping away all doubt that one of the great comedies of the so! und era had arrived. "The fact is that Mr. Fields has come back to us again, and It's a Gift automatically becomes the best screen comedy on Broadway."
As Fields pointed out, the appeal of his character was rooted in the characteristics audiences saw in themselves. "You've heard the old legend that it's the little put-upon guy who gets the laughs, but I'm the most belligerent guy on the screen. I'm going to kill everybody. But, at the same time, I'm afraid of everybody-just a great big frightened bully. There's a lot of that in human nature. When people laugh at me, they're laughing at themselves. Or, at least, the next fellow."
Like Mark Twain, Fields believed humor sprang naturally from tragedy, and that it was normal and therefore acceptable to behave badly when things went wrong. One of the key sequences in It's a Gift shows an elderly blind man laying waste to Fields' general store with his cane. Afterward, Fields sends him out into a busy street, where he is almost run down in traffic. "I never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible," Fields said. "If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't."
"I was the first comic in world history, so they told me, to pick fights with children. I booted Baby LeRoy. The No-men-they're even worse than the Yes-men-shook their heads and said it would never go; people wouldn't stand for it ... then, in another picture, I kicked a little dog.... The No-men said I couldn't do that either. But I got sympathy both times. People didn't know what the unmanageable baby might do to get even, and they thought the dog might bite me."
The conniving and bibulous character Fields developed caught the public imagination at a time when the nation was deep in the throes of the Great Depression and the sale of liquor was still prohibited by law. He appeared on the scene as the embodiment of public misbehavior, a man not so much at odds with authority as completely oblivious to it. He drank because he enjoyed it and cheated at cards because he was good at it. Fields wasn't a bad sort, but rather a throwback to a time when such behaviors were perfectly innocuous and government wasn't quite so paternalistic. Harold Lloyd called him "the foremost American comedian," and Buster Keaton considered him, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon, the greatest of all film comics. "His comedy is unique, original, and side-splitting."
Fields had the courage to cast himself in the decidedly unfavorable light of a bully and a con man. He not only summed up the frustrations of the common man-he did something about them. Unlike most comedians, he never asked to be loved; he was short-tempered, a coward, an outright faker at times. Chaplin was better known, Keaton more technically ambitious, and Laurel and Hardy were certainly more beloved, but Fields resonated with audiences in ways other comics did not. He wasn't a clown; he didn't dress like a tramp or live in the distant world of the London ghetto. Indeed, for most audiences he lived just down the street or around the corner. He was everyone's disagreeable uncle, or the tippling neighbor who warned off the local kids with a golf club. People responded to the honesty of Fields' character because, like Archie Bunker of a later generation, everyone knew somebody just like him. They admired him in a grudging sort of way, and saw the humanity beneath his thick crust of contempt for the world.
"The first thing I remember figuring out for myself was that I wanted to be a definite personality," he said. "I had heard a man say he liked a certain fellow because he was always the same dirty damn so and so. You know, like Larsen in Jack London's Sea Wolf. He was detestable, yet you admired him because he remained true to type. Well, I thought that was a swell idea, so I developed a philosophy of my own: Be your type! I determined that whatever I was, I'd be that, I wouldn't teeter on the fence."
The childhood Fields exaggerated for interviewers was vividly Dickensian, and his run-ins with his father had the brutal energy of Sennett slapstick. Yet the humanity he always strived for in his film treatments failed him when dredging up details of his own early life. He invariably described his father as an abusive scoundrel, his mother as ineffectual and sottish, and his younger self as a Philadelphian version of Huck Finn. He sprang from immigrant stock-his father was British-and however American Fields seemed, there was always an element of the outsider in the characters he played. He embraced the nomadic spirit of his grandfather, whom he never met, and although he was married to the same woman for the entirety of his adult life, he was always at odds with both her and the world, embattled and solitary.
Fields moved through a career that lasted nearly half a century, acquiring slowly the elements of the character by which he is known today. Onstage, he perfected what can best be described as the comedy of frustration, building one of his most popular routines on the petty distractions a golfer encounters while attempting to tee off. His seminal pool act was similarly constructed, leading him to conclude that "the funniest thing a comedian can do is not to do it." In films, he found his voice after an abortive career in silents and became, in the words of James Agee, "the toughest and most warmly human of all screen comedians."
His time as one of Hollywood's top draws was brief-barely six years-and by 1941 his audience had largely abandoned him. Radio, where he could still find work, drained him of any subtlety, due, in large part, to his boozy exchanges with Edgar Bergen's sarcastic dummy, Charlie McCarthy. In spite of his own best efforts, he was constantly at pains to justify a character that had become so fixed in the public mind that he was widely presumed to be the same man he portrayed onscreen. The day he died, Bob Hope made a joke about him on NBC. Hope implied he had seen Fields drunk: "I saw W. C. Fields on the street and waved, and he weaved back." The audience laughed; Fields was by then the most famous drunk in the world. It no longer mattered that he had never played a drunk in his life.
In 1880, travelers approaching Philadelphia from Delaware County and points south would generally pass through the tiny borough of Darby on their way to the Quaker City. Less than a mile square, Darby was a mill town and a transportation hub, home to 1,779 permanent residents and a cluster of paper and textile factories that fairly dominated the landscape. Every day, fifteen thousand workers flooded the town, making the central business district, which ran four blocks along Main Street between Tenth and Mill, second only to Chester in terms of size and importance. There were taprooms and cafs, a funeral parlor, a dozen churches, an Odd Fellows lodge, and one of the oldest free libraries in the nation. Both the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroads passed through Darby, and trolleys connected the Philadelphia line with Wilmington and Chester. Just beyond town were cattle and horse ranches and a vast blanket of farmland that stretched toward Media. Wealthy buyers in search of prime racing stock would put up at the Buttonwood Hotel, at the terminus of the Chester Traction Co. line, or sometimes at the Bluebell Tavern, up near Grays Ferry, where George Washington was said to have stopped on his way to Philadelphia for the second inaugural. Of Darby's several inns, however, only one actually catered to the horse trade-a simple stone building at the southeast corner of Main and Mill Streets known as the Arlington House.
Older than the Buttonwood and less historic than the Bluebell, the Arlington stood directly in front of Griswold's Worsted, the largest and most modern of Darby's numerous textile mills, and a block and a half west of the town dock, the central receiving point for freight and supplies brought up the Delaware River and inland via Cobbs Creek. At the noisiest and dustiest intersection in town, the Arlington was a stopping point for dockhands, mill workers, clerks, tradesmen, and tourists on their way to or from Philadelphia. Atop its three modest stories was a fire lookout, a box- like room with windows on all sides that afforded a panoramic view of the mills along the two tidewater streams, Cobbs Creek on the east and Darby Creek on the west, and the main arteries leading off into Lansdowne, to the north, and Sharon Hill, to the south.
Locals and guests pausing at the bar on the ground floor were likely to be served by James Lydon Dukenfield, a robust Brit in his late thirties who ran the hotel with his wife, Kate, and a cousin from New York named Jim Lester. A short, stocky man with intense blue eyes, a thick moustache, and light hair he carefully parted down the middle, Jim Dukenfield broke Arabian horses for a living and obviously saw an opportunity when the little hotel, built on the site of an old flour mill, came up for lease. He was known for his flash temper, his extemporaneous bursts into song (the more sentimental the better), and the two fingers missing from his left hand. He had a ready smile that made him a congenial host, and an explosive contempt for authority that made him a difficult employee.
Jim had been a volunteer fireman in the days when such companies were like roaming bands of hooligans that would cut the hoses of rival companies for the privilege of knocking down a fire. He enlisted with the Philadelphia Fire Zouaves when the call came for three-year volunteers in August 1861. He deserted for five months-not responding any better to military authority than he had to any other kind-and was mustered out after "accidently" getting his fingers blown off while on picket duty near Fair Oaks. Four of his nine brothers also answered the call, and all survived with the exception of George, two years younger than Jim, who fell at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Jim liked to say he had been wounded at the Battle of Lookout Mountain; his eldest son said he had more likely been caught picking pockets.
Jim Dukenfield was one of thirteen children, most of whom followed their father, John Dukinfield, to the United States in the mid-1850s. John was the second son of George Dukinfield, who in turn was the third son of Lord Dukinfield of Cheshire. John Dukinfield and his elder brother George were born patricians, but the estate passed in line to a grandson who was a clergyman and vicar of the county. When he subsequently died without issue, the estate reverted to the chancery and became property of the kingdom. John moved to Sheffield-not to work in the mines but to distinguish himself as a comb maker, carving premium designs from animal horns. He married an Irish Catholic girl named Ann Lyden and began her career in wholesale motherhood with the birth of their first son, Walter, in 1835. The business grew steadily, and by 1837 John had taken George on as a partner. They established a little factory in Rockingham Street, where they made buttons, spectacle frames, and pocket knives, and installed their families in adjacent housing nearby.
John was a restless spirit, impulsive and autocratic. He had a big nose that would later inspire his niece Emily to remark that his grandson, the film comedian he never met, resembled him "especially above the mouth." In 1854, John was seized with the notion of moving to the United States, where there would be fresh supplies and a ready market for his imitation pearl buttons and tortoiseshell glasses. He packed a trunkful of supplies, enlisted his twelve-year-old son Jim for the trip, and left Ann, pregnant as usual, in George's care. The voyage was arduous, plagued by bad weather, and they were shipwrecked off the coast of Glen Cove, Long Island. John and his son made their way to Dudley, New Jersey, north of Camden, then crossed the Delaware River into Philadelphia, where they opened a dry goods store in the Kensington district, known because of its concentration of British textile workers as "Little England." Ann followed with most of the other kids; Godfrey, the youngest, made the crossing from England in his mother's arms.
The family had largely reassembled by November, when John filed a declaration of intent to become an American citizen. He also began spelling his name "Dukenfield" (with an "en" in place of the "in"), apparently considering this to be an appropriate Americanization of the name. The Dukenfield boys were all fiercely independent-not unlike the old man-and no two spelled the family name alike. According to one source, it derived from "Dug-in-field," meaning "bird-in-field," and there was (and still is) a township in Stockport Parish, near Manchester, called Dukinfield. Jim spelled it with an "en," and other variations included Duckinfield (favored by George as a child), Duckenfield, and even Dutenfield.
The older boys took jobs in and around Philadelphia. Jim, who was good with horses, became a driver. His brother John became a bricklayer, and another brother, George, became a potter. Walter, the eldest, worked as a bartender at the Union Hotel. The family business moved to Girard Avenue, west of Second, and eventually north to 625 Cumberland, where it remained into the 1890s. John Dukenfield opened a tavern on East Norris Street, and it was there that he increasingly spent his time. He managed to drink the business into a downturn, and, in 1859, with six children under the age of ten still living at home, he abandoned his wife and family. Ann struggled mightily with the business, eventually passing it to her brother-in-law George.
Excerpted from W. C. Fields by James Curtis Copyright © 2003 by James Curtis
Buy the book!!!!
Tuesday, 8 May 2018
Film Noir Posters #12 The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
A coule of Italian posters intent on spicing it up!
A gothic reimagining?
The 'Naked City' version:
A reminder that Huston's wasn't the first version:
Monday, 7 May 2018
Pari: J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey in Iran
Sasha von Oldershausen
The Paris Review
5 April 2018
I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. —J. D. Salinger
To understand J. D. Salinger’s opinion of Hollywood, one needn’t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye. Of his brother D. B., Holden says, “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D. B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”
Salinger’s own profound aversion to the industry began when he sold the film rights to his short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” to the producer Samuel Goldwyn. The story, first published by TheNew Yorker in 1948, offers a scathing portrait of upper-middle-class American society. In Salinger’s opinion, Goldwyn missed the point entirely in the campy and hyperromanticized 1949 Hollywood feature My Foolish Heart.
From that moment on, Salinger vowed to never have his work adapted to the screen again. He refused to sell any more film rights, and he successfully fought a series of copyright-infringement lawsuits over the unauthorized adaptation of his works in film and in any other medium. The current trustees of the Salinger estate include his widow, Colleen M. Salinger, and his son, Matthew R. Salinger, who have been just as unyielding as the author himself. The infamously litigious estate has fought off the many Western filmmakers who have wanted to adapt Salinger’s work and likely will continue to do so for some time: U.S. copyright law ensures that intellectual property is protected for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. Yet in the nineties, a gap in international copyright laws enabled one unlikely director to slip through the cracks.
The virtually nonexistent relations between the United States and Iran extend to their copyright relations. While many countries have agreed to international standards such as the Berne Convention, which affords foreign artists the same copyright protections countries offer to their own artists, Iran has not. And this is how the Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui—one of the premier auteurs of Iran’s New Wave cinema—seized the opportunity that no Western filmmaker could.
In 1995, Mehrjui released his film Pari, a composite of Franny and Zooey and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” from Salinger’s Nine Stories. Mehrjui, who was educated in the United States and studied at UCLA, no doubt read Salinger throughout his schooling there, if he hadn’t already done so in his homeland. In Iran, certain Western artists are exalted to mythic proportions. It’s almost impossible to find any one of the small smoke-filled Tehran coffee shops that hasn’t played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at least once this week. And at any given bookstore, one would be likely to find translations of Salinger, Steinbeck, and Sontag nestled among Iran’s own literary giants—Forough Farrokhzad, Sadegh Hedayat, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Rumi.
In classic Iranian New Wave fashion, Mehrjui’s visual retelling of Salinger’s stories is allegorical and poetic. He uses symbolism to translate the incisive and dialogue-heavy characterizations for which Salinger is famous. Due to the Islamic regime’s rules about the expression of modesty, Mehrjui could not shoot his Zooey character steeped in a bathtub, as he appears in Salinger’s work, and so the director explores the symbolic potential of water and submersion elsewhere. The film opens with a waterlogged dream sequence in which Pari, the Iranian Franny, is forced underwater by a band of her classmates. In the book, Franny only mentions the dream in passing. In the film, it sets the tone, and the perpetual symbol of murky water recurs throughout.
Mehrjui’s film projects Salinger’s original postwar narratives onto an Iran still reeling from the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. Mehrjui’s version of Zooey, here known as Dadashi, is an aspiring actor who for much of the film is dressed for the part of a soldier wielding a gun—a sober reminder of a not-too-distant past. The film’s final scenes culminate in a metanarrative in which Dadashi, acting on set as a fallen soldier who lies dying on a hill, cranes his neck to see women carrying jugs of water up and over the other side.
Yet there are also scenes that seem almost directly lifted from the original stories, with just a touch of Iranian flair. In Salinger’s original, Franny sits across from her boyfriend, Lane, at an upscale restaurant in New Haven, where she’s barely touched the chicken sandwich she ordered, and tells him about the book she is reading, The Way of a Pilgrim, about a monk in Russia who finds solace in a prayer. In Mehrjui’s rendition, Pari does the same opposite her fiancé (lest the Islamic regime come down on the film for its depiction of extramarital relations), telling him about a Sufi book while her chicken kebab grows cold.
Pari struggles with the same critical questions of identity and belief as Franny, only within a much different sociopolitical and cultural milieu. In fact, Salinger’s stories provide Mehrjui with a strange but fitting framework through which to depict the condition of the modern Iranian woman, which in the nineties was rapidly changing. By the year 2000, more women in Iran were attending universities than were men. Pari, like Franny, is depicted as educated and outspoken and vehemently challenges the academic patriarchy. Even her fiancé, who speaks highly of his own work, is bent on getting Pari’s approval. He is visibly injured when she does not sufficiently stroke his ego, but Pari could not care less.
Conversations about belief and spirituality function as a through line in Franny and Zooey. In Pari, the Iranian city of Esfahān provides an idyllic and sacred backdrop for that negotiation. Pari imbibes the silence and space in Esfahān’s most beautiful, iconic mosques.
Child protagonists are as much a key feature of Iranian New Wave cinema as they are of Salinger’s stories. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and in Mehrjui’s adaptation, Seymour—Assad in the film—has encounters with a little girl, who acts as the dulcet foil for the adult tragedy to come. The narrative builds to Seymour’s/Assad’s psychological undoing and eventual suicide. In the story, he shoots himself; in the film, he self-immolates.
It’s possible that Salinger might actually have liked Pari had he watched it. The Iranian film industry is decidedly not Hollywood, and Mehrjui’s sensibilities are subtle and self-aware. But Salinger never did. He was oblivious to the film’s existence until 1998, when Lincoln Center planned to screen the film during a three-week festival celebrating Iranian cinema. Publicity around the event brought the film to Salinger’s attention. Representatives of Salinger responded immediately with a letter, stating that the screening would constitute a copyright breach. Though Lincoln Center might have contested the warning, they decided instead to cancel the screening, perhaps wary of the legal track record of past Salinger adaptations.
In a New York Times article published in response to the controversy, the Iranian director expressed bewilderment over the decision. “I don’t want to distribute the film commercially,” Mehrjui said. “It’s kind of a cultural exchange. I just want to let the film be seen for the critics and the people that follow my work.”
He added, too, that he had written the reclusive author seeking permission to use the material for his movie and, when he hadn’t heard back, decided to move forward with the project. “In our country, we don’t have copyrights,” he said. “We feel free to read and do whatever we want.”
This is, of course, not entirely true. Iran does indeed have domestic copyright laws in place, though they are nearly half a century old, and in many ways, they have failed to provide artists and businesses with the protections they require. These laws, however, do not extend to any work produced outside the country, and Iran boasts a bustling market of pirated films. In busy corridors of Tehran, young boys sell stacks of pirated DVDs in plastic sleeves, their cover art badly photocopied, for less than a dollar. Truth be told, I’ve probably seen more Hollywood blockbusters during my stints in Iran than I have in my lifetime in the United States.
The so-called intellectual freedom Mehrjui described has come at a major cost for Iran in recent years—most especially for Iranian software developers, who, because of the country’s abstention from these international copyright standards, have struggled to target an international market. Recently, Iran has been forced to reconsider and reconfigure its laws. In November 2017, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced that it would draft a new copyright bill for submission to Parliament, which could bring the country one step closer to joining the Berne Convention. Even if Iran does enter these agreements, U.S.-based artists will still likely have a hard time reaping their royalties thanks to ironclad economic sanctions that have made financial transactions with the country impossible.
But were it not for the lack of copyright relations between the United States and Iran, this oblique dialogue between two major artists from seemingly disparate cultures would not exist at all. A couple of years ago, the film was available in its entirety on YouTube, though that’s since been taken down. At Columbia University’s library, an uncirculated copy of Pari has an aggressive-looking FBI sticker slapped across the front that warns of copyright infringement, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
If you really want to find the film, though, you just have to look. But I won’t tell you where. With all due respect to Mr. Salinger, I, for one, would like to live in a world where both the stories and the film they inspired can coexist.
I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. —J. D. Salinger
To understand J. D. Salinger’s opinion of Hollywood, one needn’t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye. Of his brother D. B., Holden says, “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D. B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”
Salinger’s own profound aversion to the industry began when he sold the film rights to his short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” to the producer Samuel Goldwyn. The story, first published by TheNew Yorker in 1948, offers a scathing portrait of upper-middle-class American society. In Salinger’s opinion, Goldwyn missed the point entirely in the campy and hyperromanticized 1949 Hollywood feature My Foolish Heart.
From that moment on, Salinger vowed to never have his work adapted to the screen again. He refused to sell any more film rights, and he successfully fought a series of copyright-infringement lawsuits over the unauthorized adaptation of his works in film and in any other medium. The current trustees of the Salinger estate include his widow, Colleen M. Salinger, and his son, Matthew R. Salinger, who have been just as unyielding as the author himself. The infamously litigious estate has fought off the many Western filmmakers who have wanted to adapt Salinger’s work and likely will continue to do so for some time: U.S. copyright law ensures that intellectual property is protected for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. Yet in the nineties, a gap in international copyright laws enabled one unlikely director to slip through the cracks.
The virtually nonexistent relations between the United States and Iran extend to their copyright relations. While many countries have agreed to international standards such as the Berne Convention, which affords foreign artists the same copyright protections countries offer to their own artists, Iran has not. And this is how the Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui—one of the premier auteurs of Iran’s New Wave cinema—seized the opportunity that no Western filmmaker could.
In 1995, Mehrjui released his film Pari, a composite of Franny and Zooey and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” from Salinger’s Nine Stories. Mehrjui, who was educated in the United States and studied at UCLA, no doubt read Salinger throughout his schooling there, if he hadn’t already done so in his homeland. In Iran, certain Western artists are exalted to mythic proportions. It’s almost impossible to find any one of the small smoke-filled Tehran coffee shops that hasn’t played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at least once this week. And at any given bookstore, one would be likely to find translations of Salinger, Steinbeck, and Sontag nestled among Iran’s own literary giants—Forough Farrokhzad, Sadegh Hedayat, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Rumi.
In classic Iranian New Wave fashion, Mehrjui’s visual retelling of Salinger’s stories is allegorical and poetic. He uses symbolism to translate the incisive and dialogue-heavy characterizations for which Salinger is famous. Due to the Islamic regime’s rules about the expression of modesty, Mehrjui could not shoot his Zooey character steeped in a bathtub, as he appears in Salinger’s work, and so the director explores the symbolic potential of water and submersion elsewhere. The film opens with a waterlogged dream sequence in which Pari, the Iranian Franny, is forced underwater by a band of her classmates. In the book, Franny only mentions the dream in passing. In the film, it sets the tone, and the perpetual symbol of murky water recurs throughout.
Mehrjui’s film projects Salinger’s original postwar narratives onto an Iran still reeling from the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. Mehrjui’s version of Zooey, here known as Dadashi, is an aspiring actor who for much of the film is dressed for the part of a soldier wielding a gun—a sober reminder of a not-too-distant past. The film’s final scenes culminate in a metanarrative in which Dadashi, acting on set as a fallen soldier who lies dying on a hill, cranes his neck to see women carrying jugs of water up and over the other side.
Yet there are also scenes that seem almost directly lifted from the original stories, with just a touch of Iranian flair. In Salinger’s original, Franny sits across from her boyfriend, Lane, at an upscale restaurant in New Haven, where she’s barely touched the chicken sandwich she ordered, and tells him about the book she is reading, The Way of a Pilgrim, about a monk in Russia who finds solace in a prayer. In Mehrjui’s rendition, Pari does the same opposite her fiancé (lest the Islamic regime come down on the film for its depiction of extramarital relations), telling him about a Sufi book while her chicken kebab grows cold.
Pari struggles with the same critical questions of identity and belief as Franny, only within a much different sociopolitical and cultural milieu. In fact, Salinger’s stories provide Mehrjui with a strange but fitting framework through which to depict the condition of the modern Iranian woman, which in the nineties was rapidly changing. By the year 2000, more women in Iran were attending universities than were men. Pari, like Franny, is depicted as educated and outspoken and vehemently challenges the academic patriarchy. Even her fiancé, who speaks highly of his own work, is bent on getting Pari’s approval. He is visibly injured when she does not sufficiently stroke his ego, but Pari could not care less.
Conversations about belief and spirituality function as a through line in Franny and Zooey. In Pari, the Iranian city of Esfahān provides an idyllic and sacred backdrop for that negotiation. Pari imbibes the silence and space in Esfahān’s most beautiful, iconic mosques.
Child protagonists are as much a key feature of Iranian New Wave cinema as they are of Salinger’s stories. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and in Mehrjui’s adaptation, Seymour—Assad in the film—has encounters with a little girl, who acts as the dulcet foil for the adult tragedy to come. The narrative builds to Seymour’s/Assad’s psychological undoing and eventual suicide. In the story, he shoots himself; in the film, he self-immolates.
It’s possible that Salinger might actually have liked Pari had he watched it. The Iranian film industry is decidedly not Hollywood, and Mehrjui’s sensibilities are subtle and self-aware. But Salinger never did. He was oblivious to the film’s existence until 1998, when Lincoln Center planned to screen the film during a three-week festival celebrating Iranian cinema. Publicity around the event brought the film to Salinger’s attention. Representatives of Salinger responded immediately with a letter, stating that the screening would constitute a copyright breach. Though Lincoln Center might have contested the warning, they decided instead to cancel the screening, perhaps wary of the legal track record of past Salinger adaptations.
In a New York Times article published in response to the controversy, the Iranian director expressed bewilderment over the decision. “I don’t want to distribute the film commercially,” Mehrjui said. “It’s kind of a cultural exchange. I just want to let the film be seen for the critics and the people that follow my work.”
He added, too, that he had written the reclusive author seeking permission to use the material for his movie and, when he hadn’t heard back, decided to move forward with the project. “In our country, we don’t have copyrights,” he said. “We feel free to read and do whatever we want.”
This is, of course, not entirely true. Iran does indeed have domestic copyright laws in place, though they are nearly half a century old, and in many ways, they have failed to provide artists and businesses with the protections they require. These laws, however, do not extend to any work produced outside the country, and Iran boasts a bustling market of pirated films. In busy corridors of Tehran, young boys sell stacks of pirated DVDs in plastic sleeves, their cover art badly photocopied, for less than a dollar. Truth be told, I’ve probably seen more Hollywood blockbusters during my stints in Iran than I have in my lifetime in the United States.
The so-called intellectual freedom Mehrjui described has come at a major cost for Iran in recent years—most especially for Iranian software developers, who, because of the country’s abstention from these international copyright standards, have struggled to target an international market. Recently, Iran has been forced to reconsider and reconfigure its laws. In November 2017, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced that it would draft a new copyright bill for submission to Parliament, which could bring the country one step closer to joining the Berne Convention. Even if Iran does enter these agreements, U.S.-based artists will still likely have a hard time reaping their royalties thanks to ironclad economic sanctions that have made financial transactions with the country impossible.
But were it not for the lack of copyright relations between the United States and Iran, this oblique dialogue between two major artists from seemingly disparate cultures would not exist at all. A couple of years ago, the film was available in its entirety on YouTube, though that’s since been taken down. At Columbia University’s library, an uncirculated copy of Pari has an aggressive-looking FBI sticker slapped across the front that warns of copyright infringement, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
If you really want to find the film, though, you just have to look. But I won’t tell you where. With all due respect to Mr. Salinger, I, for one, would like to live in a world where both the stories and the film they inspired can coexist.
See https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/21/movies/iranian-film-is-canceled-after-protest-by-salinger.html
Sunday, 6 May 2018
Saturday, 5 May 2018
Friday, 4 May 2018
Dead Poets Society #75 Robert Frost: Mending Wall
Mending Wall by by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Thursday, 3 May 2018
Last night's set lists at The Habit, York
Ron Elderly: -
Buddy Can You Spare A Dime
I'll See You In My Dreams
Da Elderly: -
Long May You Run
Midnight On The Bay
The Elderly Brothers: -
The Boxer
The Sound Of Silence
Walk Right Back
Bird Dog
The Habit was almost empty at 9pm, but by 9:30 was quite full and packed by 10. The audience was attentive and welcoming to new and not so new acts. The duo pictured gave us a great version of The Beatles' I'm A Loser. Another duo gave The Elderlys a shock by saying they would be playing a Simon and Garfunkel song (we'd already chosen our set list) and then surprised us with El Condor Pasa. My Neil Young album selection for this week was 1976's collaboration with Stephen Stills Long May You Run; I guess not many in the audience had heard Midnight On The Bay before, it was my first ever rendition! Another enjoyable acoustic jam followed the open mic, with plenty of contributions from players and punters alike.
Wednesday, 2 May 2018
John Prine: Everything is still cool...
Life, Death, and John Prine
The 71-year-old’s songs soundtrack moments of deep pain and joy for many, including writer Jayson Greene.Jayson Greene
Pitchfork
25 April 2018
When my wife had been in labor for 16 hours, I played her John Prine’s “Everything Is Cool.” She’d begun gasping instead of breathing, climbing into the tub to gather herself. As Prine’s fingerpicking rang out from a tiny speaker, she closed her eyes and smiled.
The song is simple, like all Prine songs, a folk lament with a deliberate pace ideal for slow breathing. Over three chords, the singer-songwriter pines for a loved one who has traveled beyond reach—“Across the sea to an island where the bridges brightly burn/So far away from my land/The valley of the unconcerned.” The valley of the unconcerned—that felt like where our daughter was at that moment. We were stuck somewhere else, whatever you would call such a place: the cul-de-sac of the flustered. Together, we beckoned her: join us. The song looped, my wife’s labor progressed, and our daughter slowly moved closer. The midwife and nurses gathered around my wife, and she started pushing. Everything is cool. Everything’s OK.
When my daughter died two years later, the song rang out again into the stricken silence at her service. This time, it felt like a hymn. The song is pierced halfway through by an image of grace and purification: “I saw a hundred thousand blackbirds just flying through the sky/And they seemed to form a teardrop/From a black-haired angel’s eye/And that tear fell all around me/And it washed my sins away.” A message from our daughter, perhaps, a dispatch from the valley of the unconcerned, to which she returned. Everything is cool here, guys, she was reassuring us. Everything’s OK.
I tell all of this to John Prine, and he listens gravely, attentively. His wife Fiona has just brought me into his Manhattan hotel suite and left us alone. “Well, since you’ve been through what you’ve been through, you deserve to know what the song is about,” he says, his voice so gravelly it sounds broken up by radio static. “It wasn’t about death, so much as about the death of a relationship. You just met the ‘black-haired angel,’” he says, nodding in Fiona’s direction. “I met her chasing after my soon-to-be ex-wife. I had malice in my heart, as angry as I could be, like I was going to find somebody and hurt them. It wasn’t like me at all; I wanted to get rid of that feeling. And while I was running around after my ex, I ran into Fiona, and she washed my sins away. I don’t know if I ever told her that. I think she knows it though.”
I ask if it surprises him that his divorce song would be my death song, that it would speak to me so clearly of grief and grace, redemption and transfiguration. He thinks for a second, then smiles. “Well, there’s only two things,” he says. “There’s life, and there’s death. So it’s a 50/50 shot.”
My wife grew up with John Prine. Even after her parents divorced, angrily and at length, they would check in when he released a new album. I had barely heard of him, and my mother-in-law, shocked at my ignorance—“aren’t you supposed to be a music critic?”—urgently pressed two of his songs upon me.
The first was “Hello in There,” a tender, perceptive song about the loneliness and indignity of old age that Prine somehow wrote when he was 23 years old, when he was a mailman humming tunes to himself. It’s one of three songs he sang at an open mic night in Chicago for his first-ever performance in 1970. When he finished, the crowd went silent, and at first he thought he must have done something wrong. Then they started applauding. Soon after that, he had a record deal with Atlantic. He quit the post office.
The version my mother-in-law wanted me to hear, though, wasn’t the 1971 studio version. It was from 2001, when Prine was in his fifties, his already sandpapery voice further degraded by throat cancer followed by radiation and surgery. Suddenly a tender song peeking into the heads of the elderly became a first-person testimonial, an unlikely youthful flash of insight ripening into lived experience. The ability to write this song at the age of 23, and then sing it for 30-plus years, seemed to split the difference between empathy and telepathy. I was transfixed.
The other song my mother-in-law sent me was “Everything Is Cool.” Four years before my daughter died, “Everything Is Cool” also played at my father-in-law’s funeral, where I sat next to my wife and mother-in-law. They started crying openly as the song rolled out over the crowd. By now, the song couldn’t be any closer to me than my breath in my chest.
I’m not unusual or notable among Prine fans—most have had one of his songs at their side at a profoundly intimate moment. “It’s a familiar story, actually,” Prine remarks, when I tell him how I discovered him. “It’s a big part of how my music has gotten around since I got started. A lot of it had to do with families—car trips and sing-alongs. Some people told me it was the only thing that their family did as a family. It would’ve been nice to be like the other boys and girls and have a hit, you know, but it’s more honest to have your music passed down through families and friends and loved ones. I’m proud of it. ”
Prine has been steadily and quietly accruing diehards like me for his entire career. At the outset, he was a Chicago phenom, a local hero, and thus had weird champions for a country or folk artist: Roger Ebert famously wrote the first piece on him, and John Belushi kept nagging “Saturday Night Live” to book him. His songs have been covered by everyone: Bette Midler, Bon Iver, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan.
Prine grew up in the Midwest, and his songs are full of very white, Middle-American sounding folks, people with names like Donald and Lydia and Loretta and Davy who drive trucks and serve in the Marines. But he doesn’t fetishize the lives of those he grew up around, or blow them up into gaudy myth like Springsteen. The people in his songs are never allegories for his own thoughts; they are just people, living with their own complications, and Prine takes pains to get them just right. In his songs, life is one long exercise in ambivalence, and the only honest point of view is a squint.
Prine and I are talking in part because he has just released his first album of new songs in 13 years. It is called The Tree of Forgiveness, and there are hints of a wry, skeptical soul reckoning with the idea of an afterlife. The final song is called “When I Get to Heaven,” and it paints the beyond as the place you can misbehave all you want, fulfill every desire—drink and eat as much as you like, and take off your wristwatch, because “what are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?” In the chorus, Prine smokes a cigarette “nine miles long” with palpable relish.
“If there is a heaven, and I’m going there, that’s the way I want it,” Prine tells me, grinning. He quit smoking after his first bout with cancer in 1997, but he never lost his taste for it: “I got to thinking,Where am I gonna have that cigarette? Well, in heaven. There couldn’t be any cancer there, and why would they have ‘No Smoking’ signs in heaven?”
Prine’s idea of the afterlife seems much like his view of Christianity writ large: pretty good, not bad, but with room for improvement. “I can’t really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that’s man-made,” he says. “I’m a writer, too; that’s how I look at the Bible. Like, ‘I could’ve written a better version than that,’ you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.”
Listening to the album, I hear an unbroken thread running all the way back to the beginning of his catalog. From “Hello in There” to 1978’s “Bruised Orange,” about an altar boy Prine saw struck by a train; from the young girls’ bodies washed ashore in “Lake Marie” to the joky “Please Don’t Bury Me,” where he requests that the deaf be given both of his ears, “if they don’t mind the size”; from the “rainbow of babies draped over the graveyard” in “He Was in Heaven Before He Died” in 1975 through to “When I Get to Heaven”; Prine has always gazed at death a little differently than everybody else who writes about it. He might not have written “Everything Is Cool” from within the grip of death, but I heard something real in it, evidence of a worldview perched somewhere between fatalistic and serene.
Death, it turns out, is ideally suited to Prine’s narrative gifts: He is sanguine, a little doleful, funny, and then so poetic you might topple over. He wrote about the crucifixion with the same understatement he brought to the train hitting the altar boy: “I’m a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood/They’re gonna kill me, mama/They don’t like me, bud.” His touch is light as his tongue is sharp, and he gets away with just about anything because he’s so genial.
“I guess I just process death differently than some folks,” he admits. “Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you. And then you’re this great, awful candy bar, walking around in a pair of shoes.”
I ask him if he ever talks to the dead people in his life. He tells me his mother sometimes comes to him as a red bird. He saw her two months ago, when he and Fiona moved into a new house. He was parked out front, and “all of a sudden I see a red bird flash by the car. I said, ‘Hey ma, how you doing.’ I knew she was checking out my new abode.”
She’s done the same thing in other places, he says. “I remember the last house I lived in, I was standing by the kitchen sink about three days after moving in. Red bird lands right on the windowsill, looks at me, checks me out, takes off. Could be a coincidence, but wouldn’t it be nice to think it’s something else?”
My wife got pregnant with our son six months after our daughter died. We started thinking about a song for him. The problem seemed almost theological, beyond the range of human capacity. It had to be something tinged with grief, but still hopeful. Something true. Early on in the pregnancy, I tried “Here Comes the Sun” (“It’s been a long cold lonely winter/It feels like years since it’s been clear”). When he was overdue and we were waiting for him, I sang him “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (“When are you gonna come down? When are you going to land?”).
I finally settled on another Prine song, “In Spite of Ourselves.” The song is a duet between Prine and Appalachian folk singer Iris DeMent. He is wry, croaky, and barely tuneful; she sounds like someone’s loopy aunt. The verses are nothing but dirty jokes. But the chorus feels like another message from the beyond, putting words to a vast, nameless feeling. “In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sitting on a rainbow,” they sing. “Against all odds, honey we’re the big door prize.”
My son was born in a blind rush, 12 days late, nothing like my daughter’s slow, patient buildup. He was in our arms, squalling with his eyes shut, before we could collect ourselves. We clutched one another as if we had all been shot out of a cannon. As his face went scarlet, I leaned over and shakily sang the chorus of “In Spite of Ourselves.” He quieted, slowly and by degrees, just as I reached the end. The last line is the kind of promise that you can’t technically keep, more prayer than promise: “There won’t be nothing but big old hearts dancing in our eyes.”
https://pitchfork.com/features/overtones/life-death-and-john-prine/
When my wife had been in labor for 16 hours, I played her John Prine’s “Everything Is Cool.” She’d begun gasping instead of breathing, climbing into the tub to gather herself. As Prine’s fingerpicking rang out from a tiny speaker, she closed her eyes and smiled.
The song is simple, like all Prine songs, a folk lament with a deliberate pace ideal for slow breathing. Over three chords, the singer-songwriter pines for a loved one who has traveled beyond reach—“Across the sea to an island where the bridges brightly burn/So far away from my land/The valley of the unconcerned.” The valley of the unconcerned—that felt like where our daughter was at that moment. We were stuck somewhere else, whatever you would call such a place: the cul-de-sac of the flustered. Together, we beckoned her: join us. The song looped, my wife’s labor progressed, and our daughter slowly moved closer. The midwife and nurses gathered around my wife, and she started pushing. Everything is cool. Everything’s OK.
When my daughter died two years later, the song rang out again into the stricken silence at her service. This time, it felt like a hymn. The song is pierced halfway through by an image of grace and purification: “I saw a hundred thousand blackbirds just flying through the sky/And they seemed to form a teardrop/From a black-haired angel’s eye/And that tear fell all around me/And it washed my sins away.” A message from our daughter, perhaps, a dispatch from the valley of the unconcerned, to which she returned. Everything is cool here, guys, she was reassuring us. Everything’s OK.
I tell all of this to John Prine, and he listens gravely, attentively. His wife Fiona has just brought me into his Manhattan hotel suite and left us alone. “Well, since you’ve been through what you’ve been through, you deserve to know what the song is about,” he says, his voice so gravelly it sounds broken up by radio static. “It wasn’t about death, so much as about the death of a relationship. You just met the ‘black-haired angel,’” he says, nodding in Fiona’s direction. “I met her chasing after my soon-to-be ex-wife. I had malice in my heart, as angry as I could be, like I was going to find somebody and hurt them. It wasn’t like me at all; I wanted to get rid of that feeling. And while I was running around after my ex, I ran into Fiona, and she washed my sins away. I don’t know if I ever told her that. I think she knows it though.”
I ask if it surprises him that his divorce song would be my death song, that it would speak to me so clearly of grief and grace, redemption and transfiguration. He thinks for a second, then smiles. “Well, there’s only two things,” he says. “There’s life, and there’s death. So it’s a 50/50 shot.”
My wife grew up with John Prine. Even after her parents divorced, angrily and at length, they would check in when he released a new album. I had barely heard of him, and my mother-in-law, shocked at my ignorance—“aren’t you supposed to be a music critic?”—urgently pressed two of his songs upon me.
The first was “Hello in There,” a tender, perceptive song about the loneliness and indignity of old age that Prine somehow wrote when he was 23 years old, when he was a mailman humming tunes to himself. It’s one of three songs he sang at an open mic night in Chicago for his first-ever performance in 1970. When he finished, the crowd went silent, and at first he thought he must have done something wrong. Then they started applauding. Soon after that, he had a record deal with Atlantic. He quit the post office.
The version my mother-in-law wanted me to hear, though, wasn’t the 1971 studio version. It was from 2001, when Prine was in his fifties, his already sandpapery voice further degraded by throat cancer followed by radiation and surgery. Suddenly a tender song peeking into the heads of the elderly became a first-person testimonial, an unlikely youthful flash of insight ripening into lived experience. The ability to write this song at the age of 23, and then sing it for 30-plus years, seemed to split the difference between empathy and telepathy. I was transfixed.
The other song my mother-in-law sent me was “Everything Is Cool.” Four years before my daughter died, “Everything Is Cool” also played at my father-in-law’s funeral, where I sat next to my wife and mother-in-law. They started crying openly as the song rolled out over the crowd. By now, the song couldn’t be any closer to me than my breath in my chest.
I’m not unusual or notable among Prine fans—most have had one of his songs at their side at a profoundly intimate moment. “It’s a familiar story, actually,” Prine remarks, when I tell him how I discovered him. “It’s a big part of how my music has gotten around since I got started. A lot of it had to do with families—car trips and sing-alongs. Some people told me it was the only thing that their family did as a family. It would’ve been nice to be like the other boys and girls and have a hit, you know, but it’s more honest to have your music passed down through families and friends and loved ones. I’m proud of it. ”
Prine has been steadily and quietly accruing diehards like me for his entire career. At the outset, he was a Chicago phenom, a local hero, and thus had weird champions for a country or folk artist: Roger Ebert famously wrote the first piece on him, and John Belushi kept nagging “Saturday Night Live” to book him. His songs have been covered by everyone: Bette Midler, Bon Iver, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan.
Prine grew up in the Midwest, and his songs are full of very white, Middle-American sounding folks, people with names like Donald and Lydia and Loretta and Davy who drive trucks and serve in the Marines. But he doesn’t fetishize the lives of those he grew up around, or blow them up into gaudy myth like Springsteen. The people in his songs are never allegories for his own thoughts; they are just people, living with their own complications, and Prine takes pains to get them just right. In his songs, life is one long exercise in ambivalence, and the only honest point of view is a squint.
Prine and I are talking in part because he has just released his first album of new songs in 13 years. It is called The Tree of Forgiveness, and there are hints of a wry, skeptical soul reckoning with the idea of an afterlife. The final song is called “When I Get to Heaven,” and it paints the beyond as the place you can misbehave all you want, fulfill every desire—drink and eat as much as you like, and take off your wristwatch, because “what are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?” In the chorus, Prine smokes a cigarette “nine miles long” with palpable relish.
“If there is a heaven, and I’m going there, that’s the way I want it,” Prine tells me, grinning. He quit smoking after his first bout with cancer in 1997, but he never lost his taste for it: “I got to thinking,Where am I gonna have that cigarette? Well, in heaven. There couldn’t be any cancer there, and why would they have ‘No Smoking’ signs in heaven?”
Prine’s idea of the afterlife seems much like his view of Christianity writ large: pretty good, not bad, but with room for improvement. “I can’t really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that’s man-made,” he says. “I’m a writer, too; that’s how I look at the Bible. Like, ‘I could’ve written a better version than that,’ you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.”
Listening to the album, I hear an unbroken thread running all the way back to the beginning of his catalog. From “Hello in There” to 1978’s “Bruised Orange,” about an altar boy Prine saw struck by a train; from the young girls’ bodies washed ashore in “Lake Marie” to the joky “Please Don’t Bury Me,” where he requests that the deaf be given both of his ears, “if they don’t mind the size”; from the “rainbow of babies draped over the graveyard” in “He Was in Heaven Before He Died” in 1975 through to “When I Get to Heaven”; Prine has always gazed at death a little differently than everybody else who writes about it. He might not have written “Everything Is Cool” from within the grip of death, but I heard something real in it, evidence of a worldview perched somewhere between fatalistic and serene.
Death, it turns out, is ideally suited to Prine’s narrative gifts: He is sanguine, a little doleful, funny, and then so poetic you might topple over. He wrote about the crucifixion with the same understatement he brought to the train hitting the altar boy: “I’m a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood/They’re gonna kill me, mama/They don’t like me, bud.” His touch is light as his tongue is sharp, and he gets away with just about anything because he’s so genial.
“I guess I just process death differently than some folks,” he admits. “Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you. And then you’re this great, awful candy bar, walking around in a pair of shoes.”
I ask him if he ever talks to the dead people in his life. He tells me his mother sometimes comes to him as a red bird. He saw her two months ago, when he and Fiona moved into a new house. He was parked out front, and “all of a sudden I see a red bird flash by the car. I said, ‘Hey ma, how you doing.’ I knew she was checking out my new abode.”
She’s done the same thing in other places, he says. “I remember the last house I lived in, I was standing by the kitchen sink about three days after moving in. Red bird lands right on the windowsill, looks at me, checks me out, takes off. Could be a coincidence, but wouldn’t it be nice to think it’s something else?”
My wife got pregnant with our son six months after our daughter died. We started thinking about a song for him. The problem seemed almost theological, beyond the range of human capacity. It had to be something tinged with grief, but still hopeful. Something true. Early on in the pregnancy, I tried “Here Comes the Sun” (“It’s been a long cold lonely winter/It feels like years since it’s been clear”). When he was overdue and we were waiting for him, I sang him “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (“When are you gonna come down? When are you going to land?”).
I finally settled on another Prine song, “In Spite of Ourselves.” The song is a duet between Prine and Appalachian folk singer Iris DeMent. He is wry, croaky, and barely tuneful; she sounds like someone’s loopy aunt. The verses are nothing but dirty jokes. But the chorus feels like another message from the beyond, putting words to a vast, nameless feeling. “In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sitting on a rainbow,” they sing. “Against all odds, honey we’re the big door prize.”
My son was born in a blind rush, 12 days late, nothing like my daughter’s slow, patient buildup. He was in our arms, squalling with his eyes shut, before we could collect ourselves. We clutched one another as if we had all been shot out of a cannon. As his face went scarlet, I leaned over and shakily sang the chorus of “In Spite of Ourselves.” He quieted, slowly and by degrees, just as I reached the end. The last line is the kind of promise that you can’t technically keep, more prayer than promise: “There won’t be nothing but big old hearts dancing in our eyes.”
https://pitchfork.com/features/overtones/life-death-and-john-prine/
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Tuesday, 1 May 2018
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