Kayla Williams - I Went to Sleep

THE MANY HATS OF MICHAEL EDWARD LOVE

Don McLean at the Sage

Don McLean at The Sage, Gateshead
Published Date: 19 May 2010
By Terry Kelly

AMERICAN troubador Don McLean could be forgiven for growing tired of American Pie.

But the New York-born songwriter invested his evergreen pop with great energy towards the close of a concert in front of a capacity crowd.

In traditional folk style, McLean reprised the song's catchy chorus several times, with fans rising to their feet to acknowledge the work of a notable musical craftsman.

Everyone from Elvis to Perry Como recorded McLean's And I Love You So, and the song was delivered with tender, loving care by its author.

Backed by a top band of Nashville session players, McLean, 64, played all his big hits, including Vincent and his emotional cover of Roy Orbison's Crying.

But he started on a sluggish note, with rather pedestrian versions of Everyday and It Doesn't Matter Anymore.

And there was a samey feel to much of the concert, until McLean picked up speed with a great version of Tulsa Time.

While his voice revealed cracks in places, McLean remains a firm favourite with his fans.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/livereview/Don-McLean-The-Sage-Gateshead.6306249.jp

Friday Night...

... at the Tyne (until nine); followed by the Free Trade and back on the bus to the Crown (or Bacchus) by 10.30?

Randy Newman at the Sage, Gateshead

Modern classic ... Randy Newman

Published Date: 19 May 2010
By Terry Kelly

MASTER of irony Randy Newman specialises in writing about freaks of nature.

Running the gamut from racists to child killers, his songs have made him one of the most distinctive singer-songwriters of the last 40-odd years.

A packed house lapped up his darkly comic songs and his acidic introductions.

It's Money That I Love, his opening salvo, pretty much set the tone, Newman crumpling mankind's charitable instincts like tender flowers in his hand.

He plundered his huge back catalogue, including movie soundtracks and songs from his earliest to latest albums.

But when Newman took his foot off the irony pedal, the concert really took off.

He finished memorably with I Think It's Going to Rain Today – written, amazingly, when he was just 22 – and Feels Like Home.

Like many of his songs, Newman remains a modern classic.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/livereview/Randy-Newman-The-Sage-Gateshead.6303619.jp

WOMEN IN MUSIC #55

Tonight's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Rescue Her Tears
Helpless
Love (Lennon)
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong
Good Phone

A balmy night in the city. The hosts did another Bobfest with a little Neil thrown in.

JIM, THE PRIDE OF PELAW, PREACHES.

PELAW JIM WITH HARVEY, his invisible five feet eight inch rabbit.

Drink Scotch whisky all night long...

Raw Spirit - Iain Banks

Raw Spirit: In search of the Perfect Dram
by Iain Banks

The view from under the table
By Cal McCrystal

Sunday, 28 December 2003

The jacket of this book credits its author with "staggering feats of imagination". This is more than publisher's hyperbole, it is true as a consequence of Iain Banks's habit of drinking "two units of whisky" daily - not excessive by modern standards, yet quite sufficient for stirring the imagination into a staggering feat.

Now, some of us may associate whisky consumption with staggering feet, but in my experience drunken dram men are rarer than gin, rum and vodka inebriates, except perhaps in Scotland, the subject of the Banks pilgrimage, and in Ireland, my own country, where an added vowel - "whiskey" - stretches the gullet agreeably. In both places, and elsewhere, whisk(e)y has been regarded benignly; as an inspiration to mankind ("Freedom and whisky gang thegither" - Robert Burns) and as a charm against the toothache. It also keeps out the cold, promotes bonhomie, allows the digestion of haggis and deep-fried Mars bars, and guards against nihilism. That it may occasionally induce collisions of dicta cannot be gainsaid, especially when, in Mr Banks's country, devotees are moved to follow inhalations of the amber fluid with exhalations of Harry Lauder in roughly balanced quantities.

The imagination is an integral part of all our experience, being the necessary condition of all perception. It is present in the simplest apprehension of the world. To exercise it is the duty of every journalist and every novel writer, and it is incumbent on them to enhance the process by partaking of a dram or two. To an unstinted degree, enhancement may be effected by a pub-crawl, being, as the author puts it, "a relatively expensive but very pleasant way of getting out of your head". In Mr Banks's case it is achieved by a higher class of journey: a distillery-crawl.

His book concerns single-malt whisky, the art of making it, the places where it is made, the business of selling and promoting it, "the pleasure to be had in consuming it", and about many other things, including Scottish geography, diet, mood, temperament and perceptions. It is a witty guide to "the land I love", narrated in a folksy mix of H V Morton, Billy Connolly (sans expletives), foodie, elocutionist (pronunciation guide supplied), and imagery of the staggering variety. Much of his search for the perfect dram is conducted in his beloved old Land Rover which rattles "like a bucket of bolts in a tumble dryer".

Even though there are occasions when, for example, he finds himself lying under a table with a drink balanced on his chest, his feats never seem to stagger his mind as he guides us from the barley to the bottle, from the malting to the mouth. "You can't use everything that comes out of a still; the first stuff to come out is overly strong and contains too many chemicals you wouldn't want to swallow, while the last bit is sort of all weak and pathetic and gets sent back to the wash still to try again." The author's personality and style - an element assumed by us to be on the whole the least calculable mode of excellence - are charming and lively throughout. His easy-going, revealing, non-judgemental approach to the subject is a far cry from, say, George Crabbe's (Sassenach) lament: "See Inebriety, her wand she waves, / And lo! her pale and lo! her purple slaves."

There remains, of course, resistance to whisky in some Scottish quarters where a "ball" of malt is as efficacious as the devil's cannonball. This hasn't changed much down the centuries. Hugh Miller, in 1879, describes (in Schools and Schoolmasters: The Story of My Education) a typical, and, on his part, censorious visit to a Scottish "dram house... into which the light of day never penetrated, and in which the gas was burning dimly in a close sluggish atmosphere, rendered more stifling by tobacco-smoke, and a strong smell of ardent spirits". Here, the liquor soon took hold of "the middle-aged workmen, whose constitutions seemed undermined by a previous course of dissipation and debauchery. The conversation became very loud, very involved, and, though highly seasoned with emphatic oaths, very insipid." In other words, no imaginative feats.

Mr Banks's sampling of the ardent spirits, on the other hand, invites no such reproaches. He begins with a conversation with a friend who, after hearing with disbelief that he's going to be paid to be driven around Scotland researching, that is drinking, the finest malt whisky, volunteers: "D'you need a hand?"

He didn't, although he almost lost one, when, after an ardent feat of research, and on his way to Glenfinnan, his vehicle went "skittery" and hit the kerb. "There was a loud bang indeed and the airbag detonated." The whisky pilgrim sustained "this terrific whack on the head" when the vehicle rolled over and skidded along the road on its roof, which caved in. Hanging upside down from a seat belt with a sore head can sometimes be as intense as a hangover, but the bruised Mr Banks pressed on, undeterred, on his liquorific quest, becoming a total expert on the subtle differences between smoky malts and delighting us with his expertise. It is a more joyful, anticipatory journey than Miller's was.

Modern tolerance for leglessness aside, it makes me wonder how the Scots achieved the miracle of making hearty whisky-drinking so respectable north of the border. I think I have it. The adjective "wee" confers to potentially troublesome objects a degree of insignificance that reduces the idea of risk, repercussions and inordinate thirst. "Will you take a wee dram?" diminishes the actual potency of Scotch whisky, just as "I'll have a wee half 'un" (half-glass, much larger than a dram, nip or tot) does for the favourite tipple of the Scotch-Irish in Ulster. Thus Iain Banks sets out along "great wee roads" to lots of wee distilleries to get a wee bellyful and give us a wee laugh in his lovely wee book, which we must applaud with bending elbows and malted breath, since it doesn't do us a wee bit of harm.


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/raw-spirit-in-search-of-the-perfect-dram-by-iain-banks-577991.html

Can this be as bad as it looks?

Up there with Skidoo?

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #58

At ease... part II

Louisiana 1927

Jim and John in Pink Lane, Newcastle.

Tears in the Morning

Loves Me Like A Rock

Happy Birthday, Stevie!

Paul Muldoon on Dylan Thomas

Dylan and Delayment: Introduction to The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
by Paul Muldoon
from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (Original Edition)

Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It's no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there's a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas's poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.

Oddly, one of the main obstacles to readers immediately reaching the speed of sound, maybe even of light, is Dylan Thomas's own tabloidian history. Like some of his poems, Dylan Thomas had a habit of putting some things off, be it getting a job or paying the rent. It was, however, his not postponing an eighteenth straight whiskey in the White Horse Tavern that would lead to his death on November 9, 1953 at the age of 39. Paradoxically, it confirmed his already legendary status as the artist as old dog, the poet as shaman-bard. One's reminded of Michael Drayton's notion, expressed in his Poly-Olbion, of the furor poeticus which he associates with the Welsh bards in their "sacred rage," singing to a harp accompaniment "with furie rapt."
That sense of the history of the Welsh bard was instilled from the start in Dylan Marlais Thomas, born on October 27, 1914 in Swansea. The "Marlais" was the name used by his great uncle, William Thomas, in his own bardic forays and means something like "great blue-green." It's a name shared by two Welsh rivers, and along with the meaning of Dylan itself ("son of the sea") might be thought of as predisposing the poet to an extraordinary combination of fluency and force. We read the last line of "Fern Hill" ("Though I sang in my chains like the sea") with quite a new attentiveness.

"Fern Hill" was written in 1945, when Dylan was at the height of his powers, and might be said to be typical of his "mature" style:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

Read the rest at http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_muldoon.php

The Sprouts go West - yee-hah!

I ain't no cider drinker - Jim

Time To Get Alone

THE MANY HATS OF MICHAEL EDWARD LOVE

Will The Real Avatar PLease Stand Up - Woody Allen

by Woody Allen
May 10, 2010

I suppose gods in human form may well have dropped in on this blue marble from time to time, but I strongly doubt that one has ever tooled around Rodeo Drive in a T-bird with the aplomb and good looks of Warren Beatty. Reading “Star,” the new biography by Peter Biskind, one can’t help but be blown away by the actor’s overwhelming accomplishments. Think of the movies, the grosses, the reviews, the Oscars, the endless nominations springing from this quadruple-threat voracious reader and marketing maven, who is nimble at the Steinway, savvy in the ways of politics, and a full-time Adonis, with accolades accruing from divers ones who believe he belongs not just up on the silver screen but in the Oval Office. More spectacular than a Tinseltown résumé that would humble Orson Welles are the star’s legendary exploits on the bedsprings. Here recounted are innumerable love affairs, with women of every heft and feel and station in life, from actresses to models, hatcheck girls to First Ladies. It seems that endless varieties of pulchritude salivated to plunge into the kip with this virtuoso of the percales. “How many women were there?” asks the author. “Easier to count the stars in the sky. . . . Beatty used to say that he couldn’t get to sleep at night without having sex. It was part of his routine, like flossing. . . . Allowing for the stretches when he was with the same woman, more or less, we can arrive at a figure of 12,775 women, give or take.” As a supplicant who has yet to achieve double digits when it comes to bedding the juicy gender, and those conquests requiring the aid of my Hypno-disk, I could not help imagining the following account of one gal’s irresistible swoon into the Guinness Book. But let her speak for herself.

What a morning. I had to pop two Valiums to zone out the monarchs, graylings, and cecropia moths that were using my stomach to practice aerial maneuvers. My first actual assignment as a reporter, and it’s this fantastic coup. Why would Hollywood’s most charismatic actor, Bolt Upright, who eschews the limelight à la Howard Hughes, grant an interview to an unknown nineteen-year-old with shoulder-length blond hair, long tanned legs, Ming Dynasty cheekbones, a great top shelf, and an overbite that wreaks havoc with the Y-chromosome crowd? If this Sun Belt Casanova has any idea of hitting on me like the myriad hapless starstruck tomatoes he’s drilled, he’s got another think coming. My goal in life is serious reportage, and I’d frankly rather go one on one with Joe Biden or the Dalai Lama, except those highfalutin face cards never wrote back, while Bolt, who accidentally lamped me last month in Playboy’s nude spread on the best-built Columbia Journalism majors, not only answered but scented his reply.

Just to make sure his industrial-strength libido wouldn’t give him the wrong idea I was careful to dress conservatively, in an unprovocative micro-skirt, black mesh hose, and a tight but tasteful see-through blouse. Covering my lips, which are rather pillowy and sensual, with a discreet suggestion of dark-ruby lipstick, I felt sufficiently mousey to discourage any little familiarities Mister Testosterone might toss my way. All this fussing caused my fiancé some apprehension, but Hamish knows there’s nothing to worry about, despite the fact that no man, not even one as rodentine as Hamish, could ever compete with Lotusland’s greatest stud.

I pulled up at Bolt Upright’s Bel Air home, which is modest by neighborhood standards, built to duplicate the Parthenon with a few architectural flourishes cribbed from Notre Dame and the Sydney Opera House. Bolt, who not only acts but writes, directs, and produces, had just opened his latest film, “Requiem for a Schnorrer,” to raves. He has total artistic freedom and has been dubbed a cinematic genius by both Variety and The Poultryman’s Journal. One Hollywood mogul said, “If this guy wants to burn down the studio, I’ll give him the matches.” Ironically, when he tried they called Security.

As I parked, I noticed several young starlets coming out the front door, giggling, their faces radiant with fulfillment. “I’m still vibrating,” the brunette said. “He made passionate love to me while at the same time accompanying himself on the piano.”

“All I know is I showed up early,” the redhead said. “I was given a number and waited my turn, and when I was called we had sex again and again and again. Next thing I remember was waking up in the recovery room and a nurse was giving me tea.”

I rang the bell and the sleek, white-jacketed Chinese houseboy, Hock Tooey, let me in. The house is furnished in masculine dark woods, with signed photos of adoring females on the walls of the den. Actresses and models hang at eye level; congresswomen, TV anchors, and a photo of Golda Meir on a bearskin rug are above. The bottom row is reserved for dental hygienists, airline stewardesses, and a group of gratefully moist-eyed women from a leper colony. There were some tchotchkes, too, like a pair of gold handcuffs on the coffee table, a gift from Margaret Thatcher. The star’s proudest possession, I learned, is the engraved Rolex he was given for Valentine’s Day by Mother Teresa.

As I browsed I suddenly felt two burning orbs scoping out my anatomy and turned to see America’s No. 1 box-office attraction clocking my callipygian.

“Great wheels,” he said, his gaze segueing to my legs. “Clearly you work out. Can I sell you a little apéritif? To lubricate the abs?” He was gorgeous. It was easy to see why his hair and makeup people have both been recipients of the Irving Thalberg humanitarian award. “The vibrations I get from that shade of Revlon and the subtle hint of Anaïs you’re wearing tell me your beverage of choice would be a Stoli Martini with a twist of lemon. Tell me if I’m warm,” he inquired.

“But how could you know I go totally ape over that precise admixture?” I asked as a primitive sense of arousal kicked in at the base of my medulla.

“Call it intuition,” he replied. “Let’s just say I can feel a woman’s deepest desires. It’s how I know your favorite poem is ‘Recuerdo,’ your favorite painter Caravaggio, and your favorite song ‘Goofus.’ ”

“Variety’s right,” I said. “You do look like a young Alain Delon.”

“Only because I’m just getting over stomach flu,” he said, handing me my vodka. “Actually, I’ve modelled my looks on Michelangelo’s ‘David.’ ”

When somebody phoned, I could pick up enough of the talk to hear that it was one of Bolt’s political cronies. The star, whose insight and sagacity are not confined to creating celluloid masterpieces, is also known to be the wily puppet master behind some of our highest government officials. Here certain key Democrats vetting a woman for a Justice Department job had called to check with Bolt about whether she was lying about the location of her G-spot.

“I loved your film version of ‘Macbeth,’ ” I said when he hung up. “Did you ever settle that business with the Guild over the writing credit?”

“Thurston Lamphead, my lawyer, got into it with all those carping microbes from Stratford-Upon-Avon,” he replied. “Finally agreed on co-authorship.” Draining a second Stoli, I took out my pad and pencil, and adjusted my garter belt, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

“I’ll cut right to the chase,” I said. “How are you able to be incredibly productive artistically and still find time to go to bed with so many women?”

“At first it was difficult,” he confessed. “It wasn’t so much the actual sex that infringed on my schedule. It was after—the postcoital cigarette and the pillow chat. The day it dawned on me I could hire somebody to take my place for the cuddling time everything changed. Not having to lie there and listen to all that maudlin drivel about how the earth shook freed me up to work on film scripts and develop new breakthrough concepts.”

Just then Hock Tooey entered and announced that a bus had arrived from Seattle carrying a group of young suburban housewives, apparently contest winners. “Put them upstairs,” Bolt told him. “Have them remove all their clothes and give them each a paper gown. Tell them to tie it in the front. I’ll be up in a while.”

“And to what do you attribute your inordinate sex drive?” I asked. “I mean, more than twelve thousand women. Sometimes several a day.”

“Basically I do it to prevent cavities,” he told me. “It’s like flossing. Years ago, I noticed that if I go to bed without sex I begin to pick up some decay along the gum line.”

“You must be an incredible mechanic in the boudoir,” I persisted, trying to imagine just for a nanosecond what it would be like to be made love to by a combination of Heathcliff and Secretariat.

“Try me,” he said, taking me in his arms and signalling for a mariachi band to enter.

“I have a fiancé,” I protested.

“Yes, but can your fiancé do this?” he said, executing a perfect back somersault and landing on his feet with a grin.

“The truth is Hamish and I have an arrangement,” I whispered. “I’m free to sleep with whomever I choose and he gets to hold the channel changer.”

The next thing I knew, he’d pressed his lips to mine and my underpants were removed arthroscopically. After that everything was a blur. I recall someone, either Bolt or his assistant, nibbling my ear. Later I learned that in addition to a cuddling stand-in Bolt uses a warmup boy so that he doesn’t have to squander precious minutes on foreplay. I remember being locked in Bolt’s embrace while he ravaged me and for the first time in my life during sex I actually saw fireworks. Hamish called on my cell while I was making love. I lied and said I was working, but when he said, “I hear fireworks, are you in Chinatown?” somehow I knew he knew. After our lovemaking, Bolt told me how special the experience had been for him and that of all his women I was the one he truly cared for. Then I was told to please sit in a chair by an open window while he pressed something marked “Seat Ejector Button.” I exited the premises rather rapidly, but not before I was handed a Lucite globe as a memento, which someone had engraved quite romantically with the number 12,989.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/05/10/100510sh_shouts_allen?printable=true

Larkin's Here!

Here is a contemporary cinematic interpretation of Larkin's poem of the same name, which depicts a journey east "from rich industrial shadows" through an initially bleak but increasingly fecund rural landscape and on to a large and bustling town, whose inhabitants (and their lives) are brought into sharp focus in uncompromising but affectionately honest terms before the journey continues eastwards beyond the town, to where "Ends the land suddenly" in an ethereal and unattainable "unfenced existence".

But best of all, Tom Courtney reads the poem.
http://www.philiplarkin.com/content_media.htm

And...

Philip Larkin poem 'Here' hits the big screen

A NEW film has been made to accompany one of Philip Larkin's most famous poems.

Here was written in 1964 but has been given a contemporary cutting-edge 21st century visual twist by East Yorkshire-based film production company Classlane Media.

Premiered last night at the Hull International Short Film Festival, the poem is narrated by Hull-born actor Tom Courtenay.

The film will be used to promote this year's Larkin25 festival which marks the 25th anniversary of the death of the Hull-based poet.

Larkin25 chairman Graham Chester said: "I think it will become the signature film for the festival.

"I am very impressed by it."

The poem, which is the opening work in Larkin's popular Whitsun Weddings collection, depicts a journey through an unspecified landscape, although it is almost certainly based on his time in and around Hull.

The Classlane team spent a year on the project, shooting footage on location in January and February this year.

Director Dave Lee said: "The poem never mentions Hull by name but Larkin stated that it was a celebration of the city.

"We tried to mirror the poem's imagery and tone and to be true to the picture it paints of the region without specifically tying the film too literally to the city."

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Philip-Larkin-poem-hits-big-screen/article-2044240-detail/article.html

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Song
Falling
Cowgirl In The Sand
Too Far Gone
Like A Hurricane

Despite losing a night's sleep - throat infection - and having the day off work to recover, I just had to get my fix at the mic. I was shocked when the audience began singing the choruses to Love Song and Falling.

Kayla Williams

WOMEN IN MUSIC #54

Picasso work fetches record price

A Pablo Picasso painting has set a new record for the most expensive art work sold at auction, fetching $106m (£70m).

The Spanish artist's 1932 picture Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie's auction house in New York.

It had belonged to the late Los Angeles collectors Frances and Sidney Brody since the 1950s.

The winning bid was made by an unnamed telephone bidder.It breaks the record held by Giacometti's Walking Man I, which sold in February for $104.3m.

Another work by Picasso, Garcon a la Pipe, had previously held the record when it sold for $104.1m in 2004.
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust had been expected to sell for $70m-$90m.

The record-breaking sum, which includes Christie's commission, is being taken as a sign that the art market has recovered from the global financial crisis.

"The Brodys bought it in the 50s. It was only exhibited once in 1961," said Conor Jordan, the head of Christie's impressionist department.

"When we got into Brody's house in November it was quite an experience," he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8661338.stm

TYNESIDE TERRAIN (good and bad)