Macmillan Fundraiser at the Cumberland Arms

Come along to hear the Men of the Tyne songs performed by The Men of the Tyne!

The 10 best... skies in art

From sunrise to starry, starry nights, the most heavenly depictions of the sky

Laura Cumming
The Observer
Sunday 11 March 2012

Hiroshige
Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake, No 58, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857) Brooklyn Museum

We say we see the sky, but where is it exactly? Hiroshige, Japanese master, had ways to make it appear all around us in his woodcuts, cross-fading land into sky, dark into light and air into moisture to radiant effect, partly by wiping ink from the block before printing. Here the black band at the top represents both the dark imperium of outer space and the raincloud shedding its needle-sharp striations upon the pedestrians surprised on the bridge.

Walter De Maria
The Lightning Field (1977) Dia Art Foundation, New York

The American artist Walter De Maria is best known for 1977's The Lightning Field. A rectangular grid in New Mexico measuring one mile by one kilometre and formed of 400 stainless steel lightning rods, it creates an ultra-minimalist arena for witnessing meteorological activity. That is the formal description. But for the few who have actually seen it (entrance is highly restricted, and unofficial photography banned) the point, and power, of this work of land art is the way it connects the sky directly to the world, drawing down bolts of lightning - writing on the sky.

John Constable
Study of Clouds (1822) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

It is never a sunny day in Constable country – there is always a cloud in the sky. But so accurate are these clouds that awed meteorologists can sometimes calculate the season and even the hour from his skies, which Constable famously called "the chief organ of sentiment" in any landscape. Here, the view is Hampstead Heath on a September morning. But what's remarkable is not so much the exactitude of observation as the way Constable's painted shapes materialise on the canvas without resolving into patterns or fixed forms: just like a sky full of clouds.

JMW Turner
Norham Castle Sunrise (c1845)

Dawn in Northumberland and the mist partly transmits and partly reflects the vivid yellow sunrise, forming a diffuse mirror image of the sky above. Turner shows the sun transforming matter into energy, turning the substantial world into an airy mirage in which cattle and castle almost disappear and the land is as vaporous as the sky. Practically any Turner sky could appear on this page but the late skyscapes, generally painted at sunrise, often on the spot, and very nearly abstract, are closer to the sublime than anything in English art.

Caspar David Friedrich
Easter Morning (c1828-35) Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

This is the sky as a medium of revelation through which God shows himself, or in this case his only son. The painting has a mystical symmetry characteristic of this melancholy German Romantic. Three women – think of the three Marys at the foot of the cross - walk towards a misty golden vision, a body of light rising between the skeletal arms of the wintry trees. But green shoots are beginning to appear out of the dead land, spring is dawning and humankind is going forwards. The sky is a celestial sign: an evocation of the risen Christ.

Paul Nash
Battle of Britain (1941)

What happens when mankind eventually conquers the skies? Paul Nash's Battle of Britain shows the mounting cumulus above the Channel between England and France at the end of a summer's day. The Luftwaffe are approaching in tight formation, but the war in the air is producing great blossoms of smoke, whirling vapour trails and black plumes as the German planes are hit and spiral downwards. Nash always conceives of the world as a sphere in space. Here he shows the allies creating something perversely beautiful in the world's largest battleground: the sky.

Christian Kobke
Roof Ridge of Frederiksborg Castle (1835) Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Wish you were here? The marvellous Danish artist Christen Købke climbs the palace rooftops to give you the summer sky. Here is the dark roof ridge, the cool blue water beyond, the landscape repeating these horizontals in ever hazier stripes beneath a motionless sky that fills three-quarters of the painting. Everything contributes to this hymn to warm light and panoramic skies, the kind of praise no photograph can properly muster. And it's all witnessed on the spot by strange surrogates: a solid brick chimney and an elaborate spire both face the sky amazed, as if anticipating the art of Edward Hopper.


Titian
Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-23) National Gallery, London

Eight glimmering stars, a silver lining and a faint glow from the east: it's a small corner of deep blue heaven. It is also momentous. Even if you didn't know that the scene below represented love at first sight, you would still sense some marvel dawning in the sky above – the exact transition between darkness and light. Titian is not known as a painter of skies; of all the great claims you could make for him, this would probably be the most bathetic. But the sky in Bacchus and Ariadne is as wondrous, and profound, as the whole painting itself.

Vincent van Gogh
The Starry Night (1889) MoMa, New York

Arguably the most famous sky in art, The Starry Night gives the view outside Van Gogh's sanatorium window at Saint- Rémy by dark, although it was painted the next day from memory. With its crackling cypresses and spiral constellations, its sun-like moon and its whirling clouds, this is an ecstatic expression of country skies as "purer than the suburbs or bars of Paris", in the artist's humble words. Swirls, dabs, hyphens and speeding vectors: the electrifying brushmarks seem to channel the flow of his sensations in a surging tide. The night sky, for Van Gogh, shines as bright as day.

Georgia O'Keeffe
Light Coming on the Plains III (1917) Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Skies have obvious affinities with pictures. They fill our field of vision like a painting - figurative when sun, moon and clouds are present, abstract when emptied of all but colour, light and air. Some artists simply want to paint those truths. Enthralled by the immense skies over Texas, Georgia O'Keeffe paints everything her eyes can take in at daybreak in this great arch of a watercolour, the last in a celebrated series from 1917 made near Amarillo. The sky hovers in her art between evocative naturalism and pure abstraction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/mar/11/10-best-skies-art-in-pictures?INTCMP=SRCH

J. D. Salinger's library ticket...

Coming up for auction this week [5 December 2011) at Heritage Auctions is this library book due date slip (remember those?) bearing the penciled signature of "J. Salinger." The worn card with seventeen other signatures dates from December 1959. And what was the famous 40-year-old author reading? Norman Forrest's Death Took a Publisher, a bibliomystery from 1936. Presumably this library card comes from a public library close to Cornish, New Hampshire. Salinger moved there in the early fifties and gradually slipped into a reclusive lifestyle.

http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2011/12/jd-salingers-library-slip.phtml

Jack Kerouac - On the Stage

Jack Kerouac play to receive world premiere
Beat Generation will debut at this year's Jack Kerouac Literary festival in Massachusetts, 55 years after it was written

Matt Trueman
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 March 2012

Jack Kerouac's only full-length play will receive its world premiere this year, 55 years after it was written.

Beat Generation, a three-act play rediscovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 2005, will be staged for the first time this October in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. The Merrimack Repertory Theatre and the University of Massachusetts Lowell will deliver eight performances of staged reading as the centrepiece of this year's Jack Kerouac Literary festival.

Written in 1957, shortly after the publication of On the Road, Beat Generation shows a day in the life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's drink-and-drug-fuelled alter ego. The play draws on his own life and those of other Beat writers including Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, who subsequently starred in the film Pull My Daisy, which was based in part on the play.

Kerouac had sent his work to numerous producers and actors, including Marlon Brando, in an attempt to drum up interest for a production, but after failing to do so asked his agent Sterling Lord to shelve the script.

On its rediscovery in 2005, Lord said: "It conveys the mood of the time extraordinarily well, and also the characters are authentically drawn."

The author's biographer Gerald Nicosia said at the time: "Kerouac wrote the play in one night when he returned to his home in Florida after the publication of On the Road." The play was commissioned by off-Broadway producer Leo Gavin, but remained unpublished until 2005 and unperformed until now.

"This is a moment of literary and theatrical history," said Charles Towers, artistic director of the Merrimack.

The production was announced on Monday, coinciding with the US publication of Kerouac's "lost" first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, written when he was 21. The novel, in which two young men travel from Boston to Greenland, was published in the UK last November.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/13/jack-kerouac-play-world-premiere?INTCMP=SRCH

Last night's setlists

At The Habit, York: -

Set 1 (with Ron):-
Scarborough Fair
Chains
The Boxer
The Singer Not The Song
The Sound of Silence
Let It Be Me

Set 2 (solo): -
Tell Me Why
There Stands The Glass
Mind Your Own Business

Initially a very quiet night but the tempo improved as the evening progressed. Some excellent turns inc. Tony Jowando and Ellisif & Per.

Where's Poppa...?

Tonight's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

I'm Just A Loser
Long May You Run

The busiest night so far with oodles of players inc. two 3-piece bands. Some great music and crackin' company. Pity I can't make it next week - Cumberland Arms gig in aid of Macmillan nurses.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #146

Something Might Come Up

Loudon Wainwright - Older Than My Old Man Now

Loudon Wainwright III Older Than My Old Man Now Proper/Rough Trade

As his new album's title relates, Loudon Wainwright III is 'Older Than My Old Man Now' - his old man, of course, being the late Loudon Wainwright, Jr., the esteemed Life Magazine columnist and senior editor.

"Singer-songwriter contemporaries of mine have recently taken to writing memoirs and
autobiographies," notes Wainwright. "I decided I would try to tell the story of my swinging life in a three and one-half minute song."

He's speaking specifically of the album's lead track "The Here & the Now," which features jazz guitar great John Scofield and backing vocals from all four of Wainwright's children - Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Lucy Wainwright Roche and Lexie Kelly Wainwright - as well as two of the three moms, Suzzy Roche and Ritamarie Kelly. But the album as a whole reflects the stage he's reached in his life, and as he so wryly puts it, the "death 'n' decay" that inevitably accompanies it.

One track which cuts directly to the issue, "The Days That We Die," remarkably brings together three generations of Wainwright males.

"My Dad wrote the recitation, and "My Dad wrote the recitation, and I'm singing with No. 1 son Rufus," says Wainwright. "That's my grandson Arcangelo Albetta - Martha's kid I'm walking with on the beach photo that's part of the CD artwork. Not only that, but Loudon Wainwright I is referenced in the title track, so in fact there are five generations represented on the album!"

Wainwright's father, who died in 1988, also wrote the recitation that introduces the album's title track. "Please believe me when I say that collaborating with my long gone progenitor at this late date felt pretty damn big," says his son, who also lifted the opening line of "Double Lifetime" from one of the notebooks that his father used to carry around with him to write in.

Another key family member who is no longer living, Wainwright's ex-wife Kate McGarrigle (the mother of Rufus and Martha), is represented by "Over The Hill" - "the one song we wrote together, way back in 1975." Martha Wainwright accompanies her father vocally on the track, as does multiinstrumentalist/vocalist Chaim Tannenbaum, his "musical sidekick and sounding board" for over 40 years. Suzzy Roche returns to sing on "10," and even Wainwright's lab/pit/chow mix Harry, who's been featured (in the lyrics) in a number of his songs in the last few years, appears on "Ghost Blues" and the bonus download track for the album, "No Tomorrow."

But 'Older Than My Old Man Now', which was produced by Dick Connette (producer of Wainwright's 2009 Grammy-winning 'High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project'), boasts stellar participants other than family.

"One voice singing a lot about death and decay can be a bit wearing so Dick and I brought in other singers to help with the heavy lifting," says Wainwright. "The venerable Chris Smither testifies with me on "Somebody Else," for which 'High Wide & Handsome' alum Rob Moose wrote the string arrangement. Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna Everage, does a duet with me on "I Remember Sex." He and I were romantically linked in two episodes of Ally McBeal a few years back, and I've been besotted ever since. There is no greater living and performing legend than Barry Humphries, for my money. And he's even older than I am!"

Older than Wainwright, too, was another personal hero who guests on 'Older Than My Old Man Now' - folk music legend and 2 time Grammy winner Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

"After making pilgrimages to Jack's shows for half a century now, for me to sing and play with him on an album was nothing short of a dream come true," he says, referring to "Double Lifetime." "Recording this song with him - perhaps my foremost musical father figure - was a gas."

One other old friend is noteworthy: Robin Morton, a founding member of legendary Celtic group the Boys of the Lough.

"We've known each other since the early 1970s when we were young hell raising/up-chucking Turks on the folk music scene together," recalls Wainwright. "It was great fun to begin recording Older Than back in May at Robin's studio in the tiny Scottish village of Temple -- just a wee bit south of Edinburgh."

And from 'High Wide & Handsome' also came the likes of guitar and banjo player Matt Munisteri, cellist Erik Friedlander, pianist Paul Asaro and bassist Tim Luntzel. Together, the new album's personnel create song treatments ranging from basic guitar-and-vocal to sophisticated string settings - together with some swinging funk provided by Scofield.

Loudon Wainwright III came to fame when "Dead Skunk" became a Top 20 hit in 1972. Born in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1946, he had studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon University, but dropped out to partake in the Summer of Love in San Francisco.

He wrote his first song in 1968, "Edgar" (about a lobsterman in Rhode Island) and was soon signed to Atlantic Records by Nesuhi Ertegun. Clive Davis lured him to Columbia Records - which released "Dead Skunk."

His recording career now consists of 25 albums, also including last year's five-disc
retrospective '40 Odd Years' and his most recent studio album '10 Songs For The New Depression'(2010).

Wainwright's songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Earl Scruggs, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright, and Mose Allison, among others. He has collaborated with songwriter/producer Joe Henry on the music for Judd Apatow's hit movie Knocked Up and has written music for the British theatrical adaptation of the Carl Hiaasen novel Lucky You, and composed topical songs for NPR's Morning Edition and All things Considered and ABC's Nightline.

Also an accomplished actor, Wainwright has appeared in films directed by Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Christopher Guest, Tim Burton, Cameron Crowe, and Judd Apatow. He has also starred on TV in M*A*S*H and Undeclared, and on Broadway in Pump Boys and Dinettes.

http://klanderman.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/loudon-wainwright-iii-older-than-my-old-man-now-proper.pdf

At 65, Loudon Wainwright III is older than his father ever was, and it’s got him thinking, and writing, and singing. As he puts it, the new album deals with “death ‘n’ decay” and he’s approached the subject from all angles, with his customary insight, honesty, and rueful humor. But pondering the imponderables can be a lonely business, and so, like never before, Loudon has brought in friends and family to help him with the heavy lifting. The guest singers include Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Dame Edna Everage, Chris Smither, Lucy Wainwright Roche, Suzzy Roche, Chaim Tannenbaum, Martha Wainwright, and Rufus Wainwright. Producer Dick Connette, engineer Alex Venguer, and arranger Rob Moose are all back from the Grammy-winning CD set “High Wide & Handsome.” The song treatments range from basic guitar & vocal to sophisticated string settings. There’s even some swinging funk provided by jazz guitar giant, John Scofield.

Loudon Wainwright III has crafted a vibrant forty-plus year career, with over twenty-five albums, and a GRAMMY win in 2009 for “High Wide & Handsome” (Best Traditional Folk). He wrote “Dead Skunk” in 15 minutes in 1972 and it reached #12 in the Billboard chart. His songs have been covered by Mose Allison, Johnny Cash, Earl Scruggs, Bonnie Raitt, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle, among others. Loudon is also an accomplished actor and has appeared in films directed by Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Cameron Crowe, and Judd Apatow, all while remaining one of the most original and impressive songwriters and live performers of our generation. MOJO Magazine calls Wainwright “lyrically compelling and emotionally overpowering.”

http://www.lw3.com/older.php

Released in the UK on 6 April. Terry (the Freebie King) Kelly's review should be imminent...

Bob's back in the studio...

Bob Dylan Recording At Jackson Browne Studio
by Paul Cashmere on March 10, 2012

Bob Dylan has been working on his next album at Jackson Browne’s studio in Los Angeles.

David Hidalgo, from Los Lobos, told the Apsen Times this week that he has been working with Bob on the record.

Hidalgo described the sessions as sounding nothing like Dylan had ever done. “It was a great experience. And different. Each one has been different, all completely different approaches. It’s an amazing thing, how he keeps creativity. I don’t see how he does it,” he said.

David also played on the last two Dylan albums. He said on this one he gets to play his Mexican instruments. An Accordion and a Tres (guitar-like instrument) were in the studio. David started to play them, Bob heard it and invited him to add the sounds to the record.

Dylan’s last album was ‘Christmas Through The Heart’ in 2009.

http://www.noise11.com/news/bob-dylan-recording-at-jackson-browne-studio-20120310

And from http://www.expectingrain.com/discuss...hp?f=6&t=69005:

PUERTO VALLARTA, Prensa Latina, Jan 28 - The US musical
iconography (sic) Bob Dylan is to make a new LP using the tres
Cubano, an instrument similar to guitar.

A source, declining to be giving his name, is saying Mr Bob Dylan
is definitely making the new record and will make wonderful
songs for a new generation of fans.

Strangely, his choice is to revisit his older songs, but to use the music
from different old songs. The source tells PV: "He said it would be
kind of fun, "you know mix it up a little man", I think that's what he
said.

The source, hailing from a different part of the continent, says he is a
big Bob Dylan fan so he wanted to get some ideas of what songs
would be appearing.

"So man, I was excited to a great extent to meet this guy, but I wanted
to know, you know, what songs?"

It turns out that one example is that Mr Bob Dylan will sing the words
of Blowing In the Wind to the tune of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door''.

"He's telling me: look I want to make it really hard, a big challenge, so
the tunes won't really fit the words but you know I can deal with that
and make it work.''

Another example is the timeful (sic) classic Hurricane slowed down a lot
and with a more obscure recent tune "Life is Hard".

Jean Giraud RIP

Jean Giraud, or Moebius, dies at 73; master comics artist
Moebius' signature became shorthand for singular and strange visions in comics. The French artist also contributed to the look of films such as 'Alien' and 'Tron.'

By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times

March 11, 2012

Jean Giraud, an enduring figure in European comics whose fantasy and sci-fi work — which he signed with his alias, Moebius — deeply influenced alien-world imagery throughout pop culture, has died. He was 73.

Giraud died Friday night or Saturday morning after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from his publishing house, Dargaud, which went on to say the comics world had lost "one of its greatest masters."

In his native France, where for decades comics have attracted an older readership, Giraud is considered his country's most important figure in cartooning. His signature creation is "Les Aventures de Blueberry," the Old West saga that debuted in 1963 and followed a peripatetic U.S. Cavalry lieutenant nicknamed Blueberry. The final edition was published in 2005.Former French Culture Minister Jack Lang told Reuters on Saturday that Giraud's legacy is a singular one. "Moebius has become a comic-book icon," Lang said. "In the '70s and '80s he was the figurehead of this unique art form in France."In America, however, he is best known for his interstellar visions, which reached these shores in the monthly R-rated pages of "Heavy Metal," the English-language version of "Métal Hurlant," a magazine Giraud helped launch in 1975. He made it a brand name with characters such as Arzach, the silent figure who glides above alien canyons astride a great, leathery bird, and the cosmically surreal story of "The Airtight Garage."

The signature of Moebius became invested with a mystique and, like Federico Fellini in cinema, became shorthand for singular and strange visions in comics. The artist's famous fans included Fellini, George Lucas, James Cameron, Paulo Coelho, Stan Lee, Hayao Miyazaki and Ridley Scott.Scott brought in the artist to contribute to the look of the 1979 space-horror classic "Alien," and Steven Lisberger, the writer-director of "Tron," sought him out to pin down the digital dreams of that pioneering 1982 Disney movie.

"It's one thing to be talented and work hard enough to put your spirit and soul in your work, and it's a totally other thing to have a spirit and soul that is so beautiful and wise that it deserves to be put into art," Lisberger said Saturday. Giraud was "a very rare man, a true master, and his life's work is a masterpiece.Giraud would go on to contribute art or design work on such 1980s films as "Willow," "Masters of the Universe" and "The Abyss" and on 1997's "The Fifth Element."

Still, he was a bit player in Hollywood and a superstar of the page and canvas. The subtle paradox that tugs at the eye of his audience is that everything portrayed — the landscapes, denizens, technologies and even physics — is totally alien but also completely unified in presentation and rendered with the confident precision of a surveyor who has walked every inch of a property.Another celebrated Moebius fan, Rick Carter, the production designer who won an Oscar for his art direction on the 2009 film "Avatar," said the effect is unsettling.

"The inspiration I always felt from the art of Moebius was that I believed he truly saw the imagery he depicted and was actually not making it up," Carter said Saturday. "His imagery appears as if it was sketched from a real-life subconscious world/existence."Even as Giraud's productivity narrowed in recent years, his stature in the creative community seemed to grow as young illustrators, digital artists and video game designers looked to his work as a key compass point. In October 2010 the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in Paris launched a lavish five-month exhibit of Giraud's work that included small, humble sketches and majestic wall-sized pieces.

The artist visited Los Angeles while the exhibit was underway and, in an interview with The Times, said he couldn't put a name to the restless nature of his imagination or the persistent disdain for repeating his past accomplishments."I have no explanation, but I am interested in being alive.… Art is the big door, but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new," he said.

"You don't always need to go far. If you are in the space station Mir and you need to fix something, you go outside, but not too far. If you travel too far you'll die. Outer space is not human, but you can visit. You need to be a little bit out there but you need to stay close to human."Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born in May 1938 (the month before Superman arrived in a small rocket from another planet in the pages of "Action Comics" No. 1) in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne.

Although he had little formal training, his cowboy adventure tales were being published in Far West magazine by the time he was 18.In his early 20s he became an apprentice of the Belgian artist Jije, best known for his work on "Spirou et Fantasio" and the western adventure that clearly informed "Blueberry."

The long journey from protege to titan left Giraud dizzy at times, and last year he said the adulation was a mystery in and of itself."They said that I changed their life," he told The Times. "'Your work is why I became an artist.' Oh, it makes me happy. But you know at same time I have an internal broom to clean it all up. It can be dangerous to believe it. Someone wrote, 'Moebius is a legendary artist.' A legend — now I am like a unicorn."

The artist's survivors include Isabelle Giraud, his wife and business partner.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-moebius-20120311,0,3697696.story

Paul Simon at Webster Hall 2011

Philip Madoc RIP

Philip Madoc obituary
Actor with a flair for transformation, from Doctor Who aliens and the Dad's Army U-boat captain to Lloyd George and King Lear

Michael Coveney
guardian.co.uk
Monday 5 March 2012

The actor Philip Madoc, who has died aged 77 after a short illness, became one of Wales's best-known faces through playing villains and officers on television for half a century. His rich, sonorous voice was heard to marvellous effect when he took the role of King Lear in a 2007 BBC radio broadcast: it was as ideal for Shakespeare as it was for light comedy or reciting the prose of Dylan Thomas, at which he was masterly.

His television work brought him four different roles in Doctor Who, but he really made his name as the vicious Huron warrior Magua in the 1971 BBC series The Last of the Mohicans. He swaggered dangerously, semi-naked, in dark body make-up, and a shaven hairstyle with Mohican brush that pre-empted punk by several years.

Accepting with good grace that his dark eyes and deep voice would rule him out for romantic leads, he set about playing, for instance, the SS officer in Manhunt (1970) – the LWT second world war series that set him up for stardom – with relish and great skill. He never descended into caricature.

Well, almost never. He himself said his grave would carry an inscription referring to his captured German U-boat captain in a 1973 episode of Dad's Army. The scene features on every comedy highlights programme as, superciliously interrogated by Arthur Lowe's Captain Mainwaring, Madoc's tame Nazi, in peaked cap and white polo-necked sweater, whips out a notebook to make a list of his captors' names.

Ian Lavender's callow Private Pike makes a witless but insolent remark from across the room. Madoc, enraged: "Your name vil also go on zee list. Vot is eet?" Lowe: "Don't tell 'im, Pike." Madoc, immediately: "Pike!" (writes name on list). Although the joke comes from the old formula, "Who wrote Beethoven's Seventh Symphony?" it is doubly hilarious because in the previous few minutes Mainwaring has, as usual, been reasserting his complete control of the situation.

Madoc was born in Merthyr Tydfil, where he attended Cyfarthfa Castle grammar school, and read classics and modern languages at Cardiff University. A natural linguist, he then went to the University of Vienna to train as an interpreter, becoming proficient in Russian – the most beautiful of languages, apart from Welsh, he always thought – German and even Albanian.

But his passion for drama diverted him to Rada, where he was an older than usual student at the age of 24. This no doubt contributed to those natural assets – voice, imposing physical presence, a certain gravitas – that already marked him out for senior and authoritarian roles. Starting in rep in 1959 on a salary of £8 a week, he quickly moved into television, making his screen debut in the 1961 BBC Sunday Night play Cross of Iron – as a German officer, natürlich.

A string of early 1960s television roles called on his classical talents: Von Koren in Chekhov's The Duel; Lord Byron in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real (adapted by Hugh Leonard) with Pamela Brown and Diane Cilento; and man-about-town Charles Lomax, or "Cholly", in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, with Judi Dench and Brewster Mason. His run as a star turn in Doctor Who started with a physically unrecognisable warlord in 1969 and the Frankenstein-like Solon, creator of a monstrous "thing", in 1976. Madoc possessed a remarkable ability to transform his appearance; indeed this may account for the fact that, although well known, you might not always put his name to the face he had adopted, not even in Dad's Army.

And of course he could play almost any nationality – notably his own, in the title role of Elaine Morgan's The Life and Times of Lloyd George (1981). He was also seen as Leon Trotsky in a film about Trotsky's daughter, Zina (1986); another German, Freddi von Flugel, in Fortunes of War (1987) with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; and Pierre D'Armacourt in a television series of The Bourne Identity (1988) before it became a Hollywood blockbuster. One of Madoc's most interesting characters was DCI Noel Bain in A Mind to Kill, a television detective series made simultaneously in Welsh and English between 1994 and 2002.

His stage career came back into impressive focus, too, when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Professor Raat in The Blue Angel and the Duke in Measure for Measure. These productions, both directed by Trevor Nunn, opened the new Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1991, a comfortable brick building replacing the old tin shack without losing the old atmosphere.

Both plays explored the tragic effects of awakening sexual obsession in a moral climate of distorted respectability; Madoc's humiliated professor was a beautifully modulated performance of a pathetic creature, while his "duke of dark corners" launched a long-range, cunning assault on Claire Skinner's sweet but innately priggish Isabella before coming clean with his immodest proposal.

Always fit and physically adventurous, Madoc went walking in the Himalayas, camel-trekking in the Gobi desert and motor-cycling in south-east Asia. His first marriage, to the actor Ruth Madoc, ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by his second wife, Diane, an interior designer; by the two children, Rhys and Lowri, from his first marriage; and by a younger sister.

• Philip Madoc, actor, born 5 July 1934; died 5 March 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/mar/05/philip-madoc?INTCMP=SRCH

A Night at the Egyptian

If you should happen to be in Los Angeles over the next few days...

Classic Hollywood: American Cinematheque's Marx Brothers slate
'A Night at the Opera: The Marx Brothers on the Big Screen' is an American Cinematheque retrospective at the Egyptian.

By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

March 5, 2012
There are two schools of thought (or laughter) when it comes to the Marx Brothers.

Marx Brothers purists prefer to see the comedy team in the low-budget, wild-and-crazy comedies they made at Paramount such as the seminal 1933 political satire "Duck Soup." Other fans who were raised on their bigger budget MGM vehicles such as 1935's "A Night at the Opera" believe the siblings were never funnier than when they were at the studio.

The new American Cinematheque retrospective, "A Night at the Opera: The Marx Brothers on the Big Screen," which opens Thursday at the Egyptian and continues through Sunday, should appeal to both camps.

The festival includes three of the films Groucho, Harpo and Chico made at MGM that made them into superstars, including "A Night at the Opera," and three of their early outrageous, rapid-fire comedies they made at Paramount, including "Duck Soup," and 1929's "The Cocoanuts," based on their Broadway stage hit, which was the first film they made. The Paramount vehicles also feature the youngest Marx, Zeppo, who usually played the romantic lead.

"The real purists maintain that any given Paramount is better than the finest MGM," said Steve Stoliar, author of "Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House." He will be at the Cinematheque on Friday to sign books and introduce "A Night at the Opera." Stoliar became Groucho's assistant in 1974 and worked for him until the comic's death in August 1977.

(Stoliar will also be appearing March 14 at Hollywood Heritage's "Evening@at the Barn," presenting "Remembering Groucho," featuring rare clips and reminiscences.)

"I like 'Night at the Opera,'" Stoliar said. "It is a tipping point, some consider it the zenith of their artistry and others consider it past the golden period. There is no right answer because it's so subjective."

Robert Bader, author of "Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales: The Selected Writings of Groucho Marx" believes there definitely is a right answer.

"The five Paramounts are the best and it's downhill after that," said Bader, who will also be at the Egyptian on Friday and Saturday to sign books and introduce the films. Bill Marx will also be appearing at the Cinematheque to sign his book, "Son of Harpo Speaks," and introduce films on Saturday.

"I loved 'Night at the Opera' and 'Day at the Races,'" Bader said. "But the Paramount films were so irreverent and haphazard and the pacing is incredibly quick. You look at 'Duck Soup' and it's 77 minutes long."

MGM "boy wonder" producer Irving Thalberg brought the Marx Brothers to the studio in 1935. "Thalberg was their champion," Bader said. But after Thalberg died in 1936, the Marx Brothers were in trouble because studio chief Louis B. Mayer didn't like them.

"Thalberg took them on as a pet project and when he died they put a guy named Larry Weingarten on 'Day at the Races,'" Bader said. " The story goes that Groucho was walking across the lot and he ran into Louis B. Mayer who said, 'How is the picture going?' And Groucho said, 'I don't think it's any business of yours.' That pretty much was the end of the Marx Brothers. He loaned them out to RKO to do 'Room Service."'

Bader and Stoliar fell in love with the brothers Marx watching them on TV as youngsters. "The Marx Brothers had a seamless blending of genuine literary humor and broad physical comedy," Stoliar said. "You had broad physical comedy with the Three Stooges and some funny dialogue and slapstick with the Ritz Brothers, but when you have George Kaufman and S.J. Perleman writing material for Groucho, you get this really witty, clever stuff and the physical stuff."

Said Bader: "I remember seeing 'Monkey Business' for the first time and seeing Harpo interrupt the Punch and Judy puppet show for children and just roaring. The more cerebral stuff got to me a bit later. Kids have to keep discovering the Marx Brothers because anybody who has a feeling for rebellion or frustration with the system gets to see Groucho deal with it."

For information on the Cinematheque showings go to http://www.americancinematheque.com/; for "Evening@the Barn," go to http://www.hollywoodheritage.org/

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-classic-hollywood-20120305,0,3396444.story

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York: -

Set 1 (with Ron): -
Chains
Scarborough Fair
Crying In The Rain
Bye Bye Love

Set 2: -
Mind Your Own Business
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Some great turns including bluesman Colin Rowntree and songsmith Tony Jowando. Set 2 brought proceedings to a close.

Tom Kelly reads his poem, Geordie

A film by Charlie Hedley and Paul Kelly

Tonight's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

I Need Lovin' Too
So Close

Two songs from the archives, which seemed to go down rather well. There were many more players than last week, so no 2nd set tonight. A wonderful range of musical styles from a-ha to Willie Nelson.

Old Movie Posters

Beautiful Pre-Code Movie Posters Unconvered in a Pennsylvania Attic

by Jason Bailey
Thursday Mar 1, 2012

There’s something refreshing about the warmth and artistry of vintage film art, particularly when compared to the focus-grouped, Photoshopped, floating-heads nightmares that pass for movie posters today...

Here’s the story: 30 or so vintage posters from the “Pre-Code” era (that strangely lenient period of early talking pictures released before the active enforcement of the Motion Picture Code, which stringently censored implications of sexuality, violence, and abject morality) were discovered last fall in an attic in Berwick, Pennsylvania. The posters had been displayed in a local theatre; they had been glued on top of each other as new posters (and films) arrived at the venue, and then the whole stack was — get this—stuffed into the walls of the attic as insulation. And there they remained, until the contents of the house were sold in an estate sale.

According to MUBI, “They had survived in such good condition for a number of reasons. First of all, a movie theater in the early 1930s would have used a water-soluble wallpaper paste to put up the posters, so it was possible, even eight decades later, to steam them apart with no damage to the paper. And Smith [Grey Smith, Director of Heritage Vintage Movie Poster Auctions] thinks that the cool climate of Pennsylvania may have helped, as well as the temperature in the attic itself. According to Smith, the colors on the posters are ‘astoundingly bright.’”

The posters are being auctioned off individually by Heritage Vintage Movie Poster Auctions, and the online bidding starts today. Let’s take a look at a few of the choice items — and feel free to head over and place a bid, if you’ve got a few thousand bucks to burn.







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