Friday, 15 February 2013
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Men of the Tyne - on the road again...
THE Tyne has inspired a lot of musical creativity of late
There’s Wallsend lad Sting’s long-anticipated homage to the river and The Unthanks critically-praised ‘Songs from the Shipyards.’Closer to home we have ‘Men of the Tyne’, co-written by Jarrow-born Tom Kelly
It’s a simple format, sparsely staged, but no less effective for that. Emerging out of a project at the Customs House in South Shields, the splendidly evocative songs, written by poet and playwright Kelly, in conjunction with “adopted Geordie” Ian Ravenscroft, recall a time when the river was inhabited by riveters, welders and blacksmiths.
Kelly addressed the audience through a series of monologues, interspersed with original songs and a film inspired by the arts project.
Ex-blacksmith Ted Cuskin delivered robust renditions of the title song, Building Ships on the Tyne, Ghosts on the Tyne and (If It Wasn’t For Me) There’d Be No Ships on the Tyne, ably supported by keyboard maestro Ron Smith and Ravenscroft on guitar and backing vocals.
At its heart the show, which enjoyed good to sold-out audiences on a brief regional tour, is a touching tribute to the men who worked on the river in its 1950s to 1980s heyday. This is one production worthy of a re-launch.
PAUL CLIFFORD
Shields Gazette.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
J. D. Salinger in W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe
by John Geddes
Friday, January 29, 2010
The death of J. D. Salinger prompted many to call to mind the voice of his most indelible character, Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old hero of The Catcher in the Rye.
But more than a few readers were also able to call up Salinger himself as a fictional character. The reclusive author comes to life in Shoeless Joe, the compelling 1982 novel by W. P. Kinsella that was later adapted into the hit movie Field of Dreams.
Kinsella spoke to me today from his home in Yale, B.C., about not only reading Salinger, but also writing him.
Q. When did you first read The Catcher in the Rye?
A. It came out in 1951 so I would have been 16. It was probably at least a year or two later when I read it, probably in Grade 12.
Q. Was everybody reading it?
A. God no. I was in Edmonton. We didn’t study any literature in school. One Shakespeare play and one J. M. Barrie play was the total literature of my high school years.
Q. So how did you discover Catcher?
A. I’ve just always been a reader. I went to every dramatic production that came to Edmonton, which was probably about four a year, and every high school year play. I read and worked in the library in Grade 12.
Q. Did you feel like you were Holden Caulfield?
A. It spoke to every young man who read it. You may not have acted on it but you said, yes would have liked to have done that or I felt that way. It’s pretty tame by today’s standards.
Q. But that voice…
A. Oh yes—“My stupid life…”
Q. Can you remember how you came up with the idea of writing Salinger into Shoeless Joe?
A. I was sending my character off on a quest of some kind and I had always been a fan of Salinger’s, who of course made himself conspicuous by hiding, and I just thought, “What would happen if…”, which is what writers are thinking all their lives. What would happen if he went off to New Hampshire and kidnapped Salinger and took him to a baseball game?
Q. Why Salinger? Was he a big influence on your writing at that time?
A. Of course The Catcher In the Rye is the quintessential book about growing up male in America. But his writing never really influenced mine. There’s a lot of false information out there on the Net that we were friends and that sort of thing. I never met him.
Q. You never had any contact at all?
A. His lawyers wrote my publisher’s lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media. Which was legalese for, We really don’t have enough to sue you, but we’ll try to pee on your parade if you try to take it to television or the movies. So the movie people [behind Field of Dreams] were too chicken to use Kinsella as a character, so they created Terence Mann.
Q. To me, losing Salinger took something away from the story.
A. Their feeling was that probably only 15 per cent of the movie-goers would have any idea who Salinger was anyway.
Q. That’s a sad thought.
A. Many, many people [who have read Shoeless Joe] think Salinger is a fictional character, that I invented the whole thing. They have no idea that he’s real.
Q. Did you try to make your Salinger like the real guy?
A. He was pretty much an imagined Salinger, apart from being a recluse. I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.
Q. The book’s main character is named Ray Kinsella. Many readers understandably think that must be basically you.
A. Ray Kinsella is not named for me. He’s named for a character in one of Salinger’s stories. It’s an uncollected story called “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All.”
Q. So did you start out deciding to put Salinger in your novel, or to use the name Ray Kinsella from his story?
A. I said, What would happen if I used Salinger? Then I thought, Well, I’d better know as much about him as I possibly can—maybe there’s some interesting details I can work into the book. I re-read everything of his just looking for some ideas. I discovered he had used the name Kinsella twice in his work. Richard Kinsella in The Catcher in the Rye, who is the garrulous friend of Holden, and Ray Kinsella, from this uncollected short story.
Q. Salinger was obviously a major cultural figure. You’ve had the experience of being a widely read novelist, quite famous. Do you think the era when writers of fiction can occupy that sort of place is coming to an end?
A. I don’t think it’s as possible as it was thirty or forty or fifty years ago. Somebody said Catcher in the Rye has sold 60 million copies, which is phenomenal. The publishing industry today is just—I couldn’t break into the market today if I was just starting out. The publishing industry is down to a few dozen mainly adventure and romance writers. There’s still some academic fiction out there, but it has an incredibly small audience. Nobody really cares about it.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/29/w-p-on-j-d-kinsella-talks-about-writing-salinger-into-shoeless-joe/
On a reasonably related note, here's the rather neat cover graphic for the Indian release of Kenneth Slawenski's rather excellent Salinger biography (which you ought to buy, if you haven't had the sense to get one already):
Monday, 11 February 2013
Michael Chabon on The Long Ships
The Long Ships
Unearthing a Viking treasure
June 28, 2010
Unearthing a Viking treasure
June 28, 2010
by Michael Chabon
theparisreview.org.
In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immediately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.
The record of a series of three imaginary but plausible voyages (interrupted by a singularly eventful interlude of hanging around the house) undertaken by a crafty, resourceful, unsentimental and mildly hypochondriacal Norseman named “Red Orm” Tosteson, The Long Ships is itself a kind of novelistic Argos aboard which, like the heroes of a great age, all the strategies deployed by European novelists over the course of the preceding century are united—if not for the first, then perhaps for the very last time. The Dioscuri of 19th-century Realism, factual precision and mundane detail, set sail on The Long Ships with nationalism, medievalism and exoticism for shipmates, brandishing a banner of 19th-century Romance; but among the heroic crew mustered by Frans Bengtsson in his only work of fiction are an irony as harsh and forgiving as anything in Dickens, a wit and skepticism worthy of Stendhal, an epic Tolstoyan sense of the anti-epic, and the Herculean narrative drive, mighty and nimble, of Alexander Dumas. Like half the great European novels it is big, bloody and far-ranging, concerned with war and treasure and the grand deeds of men and kings; like the other half it is intimate and domestic, centered firmly around the seasons and pursuits of village and farm, around weddings and births, around the hearths of woman who see only too keenly through the grand pretensions of men and bloody kings.
It offers, therefore—as you might expect from a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world—something for everyone, and if until now The Long Ships has languished in the second-hand bins of the English-speaking world, this is certainly through no fault of its author, Frans Bengtsson, whom the reader comes to regard—as we come to regard any reliable, capable and congenial companion in the course of any great novel, adventure, or novel of adventure—as a friend for life. Bengtsson recreates the world of 1000 AD, as seen through the eyes of some of its northernmost residents, with telling detail and persuasive historiography, with a keen grasp of the eternal bits that pebble the record of human vanity, and with the unflagging verve of a born storyteller—but above all, and this is the most remarkable of the book’s many virtues, with an intimate detachment, a neighborly distance, a sincere irony, that feels at once ancient and postmodern. It is this astringent tone, undeceived, versed in human folly, at once charitable and cruel, that is the source of the novel’s unique flavor, the poker-faced humor that is most beloved by those who love this book. Though at times the story, published in two parts each consisting of two parts over a span of several years, has an episodic feel, each of its individual components narratives is well-constructed of the soundest timbers of epic, folk tale and ripping yarn, and as its hero grows old and sees his age passing away, that episodic quality comes to feel, in the end, not like some congeries of saga and tall tale but like the accurate representation of one long and crowded human life.
Nor can blame for the neglect of The Long Ships be laid at the feet of Bengtsson’s English translator, Michael Meyer, who produced a version of the original the faithfulness of which I leave for the judgment of others but whose utter deliciousness, as English, I readily proclaim. The antique chiming that stirs the air of the novel’s sentences (without ever overpowering or choking that air with antique dust) recalls the epics and chronicles and history our mother tongue (a history after all shared, up to a point, with the original Swedish), and the setting of parts of the action in Dark-Ages Britain further strengthens the reader’s deceptive sense that he or she is, thanks to the translator’s magic and art, reading a work of English literature. Toss in the novel’s unceasing playfulness around the subject of Christianity and its relative virtues and shortcomings when compared to Islam and, especially, to the Old Religion of the northern forests (a playfulness that cannot disguise the author’s profound but lightly worn concern with questions of ethics and the right use and purpose of a life), and the startling presence, in a Swedish Viking story, of a sympathetic Jewish character, and you have a work whose virtues and surprises ought long since have given it a prominent place, at least, in the pantheon of the world’s adventure literature if not world literature full stop.
The fault, therefore, must lie with the world, which as any reader of The Long Ships could tell you, buries its treasures, despises its glories, and seeks contentment most readily in the places where it is least likely to be found. Fortunately for us, it is in just those unlikely places, as Red Orm quickly learns, that the opportunities and treasures of the world may often be found. My encounter with The Long Ships came when I was fourteen or fifteen, through the agency of a true adventurer, my mother’s sister, Gail Cohen. Toward the end of the sixties she had set off, with the rest of her restless generation of psychic Vikings, on a journey that led from suburban Maryland, to California where she met and fell in love with a roving young Dane, to Denmark itself, where she settled and lived for twenty years. It was on one of her periodic visits home that she handed me a UK paperback edition of the book, published by Fontana, which she had randomly purchased at the airport in Copenhagen, partly because it was set in her adopted homeland, and partly because there was nothing on the rack that looked any better. “It’s really good,” she assured me, and I would soon discover for myself the truth of this assessment, which in turn I would repeat to other lucky people over the years to come. Gail’s own adventure came to an end at home, in America, in the toils of cancer. When she looked back at the map of it, like most true adventurers, she saw moments of joy, glints of gold, and happy chances like the one that brought this book into her hands. But I fear that like most true adventurers—but unlike Bengtsson’s congenitally fortunate hero—she also saw, looking back, that grief overtopped joy, that trash obscured the treasure, that, in the end, the bad luck outweighed the good. That is the great adventure, of course, that reading holds over what we call “real life.” Adventure is a dish that is best eaten takeout, in the comforts of one’s own home.
The record of a series of three imaginary but plausible voyages (interrupted by a singularly eventful interlude of hanging around the house) undertaken by a crafty, resourceful, unsentimental and mildly hypochondriacal Norseman named “Red Orm” Tosteson, The Long Ships is itself a kind of novelistic Argos aboard which, like the heroes of a great age, all the strategies deployed by European novelists over the course of the preceding century are united—if not for the first, then perhaps for the very last time. The Dioscuri of 19th-century Realism, factual precision and mundane detail, set sail on The Long Ships with nationalism, medievalism and exoticism for shipmates, brandishing a banner of 19th-century Romance; but among the heroic crew mustered by Frans Bengtsson in his only work of fiction are an irony as harsh and forgiving as anything in Dickens, a wit and skepticism worthy of Stendhal, an epic Tolstoyan sense of the anti-epic, and the Herculean narrative drive, mighty and nimble, of Alexander Dumas. Like half the great European novels it is big, bloody and far-ranging, concerned with war and treasure and the grand deeds of men and kings; like the other half it is intimate and domestic, centered firmly around the seasons and pursuits of village and farm, around weddings and births, around the hearths of woman who see only too keenly through the grand pretensions of men and bloody kings.
It offers, therefore—as you might expect from a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world—something for everyone, and if until now The Long Ships has languished in the second-hand bins of the English-speaking world, this is certainly through no fault of its author, Frans Bengtsson, whom the reader comes to regard—as we come to regard any reliable, capable and congenial companion in the course of any great novel, adventure, or novel of adventure—as a friend for life. Bengtsson recreates the world of 1000 AD, as seen through the eyes of some of its northernmost residents, with telling detail and persuasive historiography, with a keen grasp of the eternal bits that pebble the record of human vanity, and with the unflagging verve of a born storyteller—but above all, and this is the most remarkable of the book’s many virtues, with an intimate detachment, a neighborly distance, a sincere irony, that feels at once ancient and postmodern. It is this astringent tone, undeceived, versed in human folly, at once charitable and cruel, that is the source of the novel’s unique flavor, the poker-faced humor that is most beloved by those who love this book. Though at times the story, published in two parts each consisting of two parts over a span of several years, has an episodic feel, each of its individual components narratives is well-constructed of the soundest timbers of epic, folk tale and ripping yarn, and as its hero grows old and sees his age passing away, that episodic quality comes to feel, in the end, not like some congeries of saga and tall tale but like the accurate representation of one long and crowded human life.
Nor can blame for the neglect of The Long Ships be laid at the feet of Bengtsson’s English translator, Michael Meyer, who produced a version of the original the faithfulness of which I leave for the judgment of others but whose utter deliciousness, as English, I readily proclaim. The antique chiming that stirs the air of the novel’s sentences (without ever overpowering or choking that air with antique dust) recalls the epics and chronicles and history our mother tongue (a history after all shared, up to a point, with the original Swedish), and the setting of parts of the action in Dark-Ages Britain further strengthens the reader’s deceptive sense that he or she is, thanks to the translator’s magic and art, reading a work of English literature. Toss in the novel’s unceasing playfulness around the subject of Christianity and its relative virtues and shortcomings when compared to Islam and, especially, to the Old Religion of the northern forests (a playfulness that cannot disguise the author’s profound but lightly worn concern with questions of ethics and the right use and purpose of a life), and the startling presence, in a Swedish Viking story, of a sympathetic Jewish character, and you have a work whose virtues and surprises ought long since have given it a prominent place, at least, in the pantheon of the world’s adventure literature if not world literature full stop.
The fault, therefore, must lie with the world, which as any reader of The Long Ships could tell you, buries its treasures, despises its glories, and seeks contentment most readily in the places where it is least likely to be found. Fortunately for us, it is in just those unlikely places, as Red Orm quickly learns, that the opportunities and treasures of the world may often be found. My encounter with The Long Ships came when I was fourteen or fifteen, through the agency of a true adventurer, my mother’s sister, Gail Cohen. Toward the end of the sixties she had set off, with the rest of her restless generation of psychic Vikings, on a journey that led from suburban Maryland, to California where she met and fell in love with a roving young Dane, to Denmark itself, where she settled and lived for twenty years. It was on one of her periodic visits home that she handed me a UK paperback edition of the book, published by Fontana, which she had randomly purchased at the airport in Copenhagen, partly because it was set in her adopted homeland, and partly because there was nothing on the rack that looked any better. “It’s really good,” she assured me, and I would soon discover for myself the truth of this assessment, which in turn I would repeat to other lucky people over the years to come. Gail’s own adventure came to an end at home, in America, in the toils of cancer. When she looked back at the map of it, like most true adventurers, she saw moments of joy, glints of gold, and happy chances like the one that brought this book into her hands. But I fear that like most true adventurers—but unlike Bengtsson’s congenitally fortunate hero—she also saw, looking back, that grief overtopped joy, that trash obscured the treasure, that, in the end, the bad luck outweighed the good. That is the great adventure, of course, that reading holds over what we call “real life.” Adventure is a dish that is best eaten takeout, in the comforts of one’s own home.
Sunday, 10 February 2013
Reading Barry MacSweeney
Reading Barry MacSweeney
Essays Edited By Paul Batchelor
Barry MacSweeney was described as 'a contrary, lone wolf... [whose] ear for a soaring lyric melody was unmatched' (Nicholas Johnson, Independent). MacSweeney found fame with his first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother, which appeared when he was just nineteen years old. But he soon retreated from the publicity, and for almost thirty years his poetry appeared only in small press publications. Identifying himself with Chatterton and Rimbaud, MacSweeney developed a poetics based on experiment and excess, from the fragmented lyricism of 'Brother Wolf' to the political anger of 'Jury Vet'; from the dizzying historical perspectives of Ranter to the nightmarish urban landscape of Hellhound Memos.
In 1997, MacSweeney once again found a wider audience, with the publication of his last full-length book,The Book of Demons, which recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism. This book also included Pearl, a sequence of tender lyrics celebrating the poet's first love and his rural Northumbrian childhood. At the time of his death in 2000, MacSweeney was preparing a retrospective selection of his work for publication. WhenWolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 appeared in 2003, it brought a wealth of poetry back into print, displaying the incredible range, ambition and quality of MacSweeney's work.
Reading Barry MacSweeney is the first book of essays to assess MacSweeney's achievement. Bringing together academic critics, poets and friends of the poet, the book considers many aspects of MacSweeney's career, including his political verse, his re-imagining of pastoral poetry, his love of popular music, and his mapping of Northumberland. Contributors include Professor W.N. Herbert, Matthew Jarvis, Peter Riley, Professor William Rowe, Harriet Tarlo and Professor John Wilkinson, as well as MacSweeney's journalist friend Terry Kelly, and poet S.J. Litherland, MacSweeney's former partner.
Co-published with Newcastle University
Essays Edited By Paul Batchelor
Barry MacSweeney was described as 'a contrary, lone wolf... [whose] ear for a soaring lyric melody was unmatched' (Nicholas Johnson, Independent). MacSweeney found fame with his first book, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother, which appeared when he was just nineteen years old. But he soon retreated from the publicity, and for almost thirty years his poetry appeared only in small press publications. Identifying himself with Chatterton and Rimbaud, MacSweeney developed a poetics based on experiment and excess, from the fragmented lyricism of 'Brother Wolf' to the political anger of 'Jury Vet'; from the dizzying historical perspectives of Ranter to the nightmarish urban landscape of Hellhound Memos.
In 1997, MacSweeney once again found a wider audience, with the publication of his last full-length book,The Book of Demons, which recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism. This book also included Pearl, a sequence of tender lyrics celebrating the poet's first love and his rural Northumbrian childhood. At the time of his death in 2000, MacSweeney was preparing a retrospective selection of his work for publication. WhenWolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 appeared in 2003, it brought a wealth of poetry back into print, displaying the incredible range, ambition and quality of MacSweeney's work.
Reading Barry MacSweeney is the first book of essays to assess MacSweeney's achievement. Bringing together academic critics, poets and friends of the poet, the book considers many aspects of MacSweeney's career, including his political verse, his re-imagining of pastoral poetry, his love of popular music, and his mapping of Northumberland. Contributors include Professor W.N. Herbert, Matthew Jarvis, Peter Riley, Professor William Rowe, Harriet Tarlo and Professor John Wilkinson, as well as MacSweeney's journalist friend Terry Kelly, and poet S.J. Litherland, MacSweeney's former partner.
Co-published with Newcastle University
Don't bother with the link to Amazon - the book's not there. Yet.
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Friday, 8 February 2013
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Last night's set list
At The Habit, York (The Elderly Brothers): -
Sea Of Heartbreak
To Know You Is To Love You
Crying In The Rain
Bye Bye Love
You're Going To Lose That Girl
A packed house from 9pm saw plenty of players doing their thing and entertaining it was too; the highlight being a male/female duo doing Rainbow Connection.
You're Going To Lose That Girl was a first for the somewhat over-refreshed Elderly Brothers, but we just about made it to the finishing line without too many mishaps.
Sea Of Heartbreak
To Know You Is To Love You
Crying In The Rain
Bye Bye Love
You're Going To Lose That Girl
A packed house from 9pm saw plenty of players doing their thing and entertaining it was too; the highlight being a male/female duo doing Rainbow Connection.
You're Going To Lose That Girl was a first for the somewhat over-refreshed Elderly Brothers, but we just about made it to the finishing line without too many mishaps.
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
L. S. Lowry at Tate Britain
Tate Britain exhibition to pay homage to matchstick master LS Lowry
Hopes that retrospective will persuade art world to take the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life seriously
Charlotte Higgins
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 15 January 2013
LS Lowry – the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life – is among the most divisive of British artists. A household name, beloved of the public and commanding huge prices at auction, he is at the same time wildly unfashionable in the art world, derided for his apparently naive images of "matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs" set among the industrial landscapes of Salford, Pendlebury and Manchester.
But this June Tate Britain, in London, is to mount the first major retrospective devoted to Lowry since the artist's death in 1976. The show is co-curated by one of the world's pre-eminent scholars of French impressionism, TJ Clark.
According to Clark, Lowry is "an artist who is taken for granted and condescended to. The reaction from London art world friends over the last year and a half, when I have said I am working on Lowry, has been of deadpan incomprehension and disappointment."
There has, said Clark, been a "metropolitan resistance to taking the north seriously as a subject for art". He added: "It may now be possible to look beyond that condescension at a time ... when the limits of the London art world's view of art are pretty obvious." He said: "It is extraordinary to me, this image of him as an amateur, as someone who could barely paint, won't die. To me it is absolutely astonishing. And coded into this conversation by the metropolitan elite is the idea that someone who paints this subject matter can't be taken seriously."
Lowry has long been a contentious subject for the Tate, which has come under fire from figures including the actor Sir Ian McKellen for only rarely putting its seven Lowry paintings and 16 works on paper on display. In a 2011 TV documentary, McKellen said it was "a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others".
Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain's director, said the exhibition – about half of whose 80 works have never before been seen in public – will take an artist "people thought they knew and reveal that they didn't know him. At the same time Lowry needs to take his place in British art history – alongside such artists as Ben Nicholson".
Curtis acknowledged that Lowry "has been an issue for Tate: many people love his work and would like to have seen it dealt with more seriously". She was delighted when Clark and co-curator Anne Wagner had proposed an exhibition. "Whatever we did, it was important that we did it in a way that wasn't cynical but was authentic and serious," she said.
Responding to the suggestion that the work was sentimental, Clark said: "There is a difference between sentimentality and social awareness … though in the post-neoliberal era the very idea of social awareness is supposed to be wrong. I see nothing sentimental in the pictures."
Lowry was most celebrated, Clark said, in the immediate postwar era up to the end of the 1960s – "in social-democratic, postwar Britain" when, he argued, Lowry's work was more in tune with the times.
The exhibition, say its curators, will explode the myth that Lowry – who, in 1939, turned down an offer to become the Manchester Guardian's art critic – was a primitive, barely competent painter. His strong links with French realism and post-impressionism will be drawn on, and comparisons with painters such as Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat established – "though Lowry is tougher and cruder and deliberately so," said Clark.
His teacher at the Municipal College of Art, Manchester, where he took evening classes, was the French late impressionist painter Adolphe Valette and, according to Clark, Lowry "chose to show consistently in Paris from the 1920s and 30s." He was, said Clark, "truly immersed in French impressionism".
The exhibition will also show how Lowry, a rent collector with the same firm from 1916 until his retirement in 1952, recorded the "grimness and melancholia of urban life", said Clark.
"He thought hard and worked hard to find a way of doing industrial landscapes that was honest and faced up to the fact that industrialisation was, in some senses, disastrous. But he did not wallow in its misery – which is the stock charge against Lowry. He tried for an art that struck a balance between recognising the beauties of the world and what was awful in it."
Wagner paid tribute to his handling of paint and use of colour: in his picture Excavations in Manchester (1932), which shows workmen digging out the foundations of a new building, she said "he looked into the belly of modern life... building up his painting in a way analogous to the building going on apace in the scene he was depicting."
Wagner also said that Lowry should be placed in an international context, and his work assessed alongside that of peers working in the 1930s in Germany or in the postwar Soviet Union.
"Part of Lowry is that he's not kitsch. Kitsch is doing your thinking for you, telling you how to think and feel. Lowry never tells you how to feel... to have represented the lives of the working class and not become a propagandist is an astonishing achievement."
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain, London, from 26 June to 20 October 2013
Hopes that retrospective will persuade art world to take the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life seriously
Charlotte Higgins
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 15 January 2013
But this June Tate Britain, in London, is to mount the first major retrospective devoted to Lowry since the artist's death in 1976. The show is co-curated by one of the world's pre-eminent scholars of French impressionism, TJ Clark.
According to Clark, Lowry is "an artist who is taken for granted and condescended to. The reaction from London art world friends over the last year and a half, when I have said I am working on Lowry, has been of deadpan incomprehension and disappointment."
There has, said Clark, been a "metropolitan resistance to taking the north seriously as a subject for art". He added: "It may now be possible to look beyond that condescension at a time ... when the limits of the London art world's view of art are pretty obvious." He said: "It is extraordinary to me, this image of him as an amateur, as someone who could barely paint, won't die. To me it is absolutely astonishing. And coded into this conversation by the metropolitan elite is the idea that someone who paints this subject matter can't be taken seriously."
Lowry has long been a contentious subject for the Tate, which has come under fire from figures including the actor Sir Ian McKellen for only rarely putting its seven Lowry paintings and 16 works on paper on display. In a 2011 TV documentary, McKellen said it was "a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others".
Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain's director, said the exhibition – about half of whose 80 works have never before been seen in public – will take an artist "people thought they knew and reveal that they didn't know him. At the same time Lowry needs to take his place in British art history – alongside such artists as Ben Nicholson".
Curtis acknowledged that Lowry "has been an issue for Tate: many people love his work and would like to have seen it dealt with more seriously". She was delighted when Clark and co-curator Anne Wagner had proposed an exhibition. "Whatever we did, it was important that we did it in a way that wasn't cynical but was authentic and serious," she said.
Responding to the suggestion that the work was sentimental, Clark said: "There is a difference between sentimentality and social awareness … though in the post-neoliberal era the very idea of social awareness is supposed to be wrong. I see nothing sentimental in the pictures."
Lowry was most celebrated, Clark said, in the immediate postwar era up to the end of the 1960s – "in social-democratic, postwar Britain" when, he argued, Lowry's work was more in tune with the times.
The exhibition, say its curators, will explode the myth that Lowry – who, in 1939, turned down an offer to become the Manchester Guardian's art critic – was a primitive, barely competent painter. His strong links with French realism and post-impressionism will be drawn on, and comparisons with painters such as Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat established – "though Lowry is tougher and cruder and deliberately so," said Clark.
His teacher at the Municipal College of Art, Manchester, where he took evening classes, was the French late impressionist painter Adolphe Valette and, according to Clark, Lowry "chose to show consistently in Paris from the 1920s and 30s." He was, said Clark, "truly immersed in French impressionism".
The exhibition will also show how Lowry, a rent collector with the same firm from 1916 until his retirement in 1952, recorded the "grimness and melancholia of urban life", said Clark.
"He thought hard and worked hard to find a way of doing industrial landscapes that was honest and faced up to the fact that industrialisation was, in some senses, disastrous. But he did not wallow in its misery – which is the stock charge against Lowry. He tried for an art that struck a balance between recognising the beauties of the world and what was awful in it."
Wagner paid tribute to his handling of paint and use of colour: in his picture Excavations in Manchester (1932), which shows workmen digging out the foundations of a new building, she said "he looked into the belly of modern life... building up his painting in a way analogous to the building going on apace in the scene he was depicting."
Wagner also said that Lowry should be placed in an international context, and his work assessed alongside that of peers working in the 1930s in Germany or in the postwar Soviet Union.
"Part of Lowry is that he's not kitsch. Kitsch is doing your thinking for you, telling you how to think and feel. Lowry never tells you how to feel... to have represented the lives of the working class and not become a propagandist is an astonishing achievement."
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain, London, from 26 June to 20 October 2013
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Last night's set list
At the Fulford Arms, York: -
Happy Birthday To You*
Ghosts On The Tyne
Men Of The Tyne
Country Girl
* It was Timothy Ian Granville Fox's birthday and no other bugger had sung Happy Birthday to the poor sod, so I thought, why not?
Made a bit of a mess of Men Of The Tyne, but since nobody had heard it before, it didn't really matter.
Was glad to get through Country Girl without a net.
Happy Birthday To You*
Ghosts On The Tyne
Men Of The Tyne
Country Girl
* It was Timothy Ian Granville Fox's birthday and no other bugger had sung Happy Birthday to the poor sod, so I thought, why not?
Made a bit of a mess of Men Of The Tyne, but since nobody had heard it before, it didn't really matter.
Was glad to get through Country Girl without a net.
Monday, 4 February 2013
Groucho Marx played guitar...
The Surprisingly Serious Tale of Comedian Groucho Marx and His Lifelong Quest to Master Guitar
If Groucho Marx didn’t exactly invent rock and roll, he nonetheless embodied its irreverent, rebellious spirit in every medium he came to conquer. He and his brothers would make only 13 feature films, yet in 2000, five of them were honored by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedies of all time. Such was Groucho’s influence across the generations that he became an unlikely youth icon in his mid-80s, mobbed like a rock star at rare personal appearances, and inspiring thousands to pack what’s now Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheater to view a slate of Marx Brothers films made decades before most in the audience were even born.
Groucho’s brothers Harpo and Chico were long the musical axis of the act. The latter’s comic flair on the piano was an offshoot of a natural musical talent that initially found him some success as a local New York entertainer, then work as a song plugger for music publishers Shapiro-Bernstein before he joined his brothers’ struggling vaudeville act in 1912. An inveterate?and notoriously unsuccessful?gambler, Chico would reportedly lose virtually every nickel he made in Hollywood, inspiring him to make ends meet fronting the popular Chico Marx Orchestra, an outfit that featured not only a boyish Mel Torme on vocals, but became the first professional gig of legendary jazz guitarist Barney Kessel as well. Harpo also began on the piano, but lacking his older brother’s gifts, turned instead to the instrument his grandmother had played?and the one that would yield his nickname?becoming the most famed proponent of the harp since Nero.
Groucho had a musical side as well, singing as a choirboy before evolving into the manager and sharp-witted focal point of the Marx Brothers’ oft-floundering vaudeville act as it zig-zagged haphazardly from New York to Chicago to Kansas City. Somewhere along this long road to stardom Groucho bought a used guitar and learned to play it by ear, just as his more musically accomplished brothers had learned their respective instruments. As the team rose in fame to conquer Broadway in the ’20s and Hollywood soon after, Groucho’s guitar became a source of great personal solace but never a standard part of their act. While his brothers caroused until all hours, Groucho became the antithesis of his stage and screen persona, an introvert who preferred to stay home and read, socialize with intimates, and pick out tunes on his guitar. Indeed, sans his trademark greasepaint moustache, frock coat, and loping gait, Groucho Marx went virtually unrecognized in public during his Hollywood heyday.
The most public showcase of Groucho’s guitar playing is Paramount’s 1932 college-skewering romp Horse Feathers. In a rowboat, Groucho performs the film’s love theme “Everyone Says I Love You” for co-star Thelma Todd on a questionably tuned vintage Gibson L-5. In typical Marxian fashion, when finished he simply flips the instrument (actually a cheap prop stand-in) into the lake. While he’d take fleeting turns on the guitar elsewhere in his film career, Groucho’s performance of “Everyone Says I Love You” remains a favorite among Marx aficionados and has gone on to become variously a beloved staple of home pickers and the inspiration for Woody Allen’s 1996 film musical of the same name.
Jerry McCulley
01.03.2008
01.03.2008
If Groucho Marx didn’t exactly invent rock and roll, he nonetheless embodied its irreverent, rebellious spirit in every medium he came to conquer. He and his brothers would make only 13 feature films, yet in 2000, five of them were honored by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedies of all time. Such was Groucho’s influence across the generations that he became an unlikely youth icon in his mid-80s, mobbed like a rock star at rare personal appearances, and inspiring thousands to pack what’s now Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheater to view a slate of Marx Brothers films made decades before most in the audience were even born.
Groucho’s brothers Harpo and Chico were long the musical axis of the act. The latter’s comic flair on the piano was an offshoot of a natural musical talent that initially found him some success as a local New York entertainer, then work as a song plugger for music publishers Shapiro-Bernstein before he joined his brothers’ struggling vaudeville act in 1912. An inveterate?and notoriously unsuccessful?gambler, Chico would reportedly lose virtually every nickel he made in Hollywood, inspiring him to make ends meet fronting the popular Chico Marx Orchestra, an outfit that featured not only a boyish Mel Torme on vocals, but became the first professional gig of legendary jazz guitarist Barney Kessel as well. Harpo also began on the piano, but lacking his older brother’s gifts, turned instead to the instrument his grandmother had played?and the one that would yield his nickname?becoming the most famed proponent of the harp since Nero.
Groucho had a musical side as well, singing as a choirboy before evolving into the manager and sharp-witted focal point of the Marx Brothers’ oft-floundering vaudeville act as it zig-zagged haphazardly from New York to Chicago to Kansas City. Somewhere along this long road to stardom Groucho bought a used guitar and learned to play it by ear, just as his more musically accomplished brothers had learned their respective instruments. As the team rose in fame to conquer Broadway in the ’20s and Hollywood soon after, Groucho’s guitar became a source of great personal solace but never a standard part of their act. While his brothers caroused until all hours, Groucho became the antithesis of his stage and screen persona, an introvert who preferred to stay home and read, socialize with intimates, and pick out tunes on his guitar. Indeed, sans his trademark greasepaint moustache, frock coat, and loping gait, Groucho Marx went virtually unrecognized in public during his Hollywood heyday.
The instrument in the film is one of a pair of Gibsons Groucho owned?it also appears in a home photo from the era, with Marx, wife Ruth, daughter Miriam, and son Arthur posed around a piano in a family musical moment. And if Groucho’s proficiency on the instrument is deliberately poor for comic effect in Horse Feathers, it nonetheless became the target of good-natured jabs from family and friends alike. No less than Will Rogers once wrote: “Groucho can play as good on the guitar as Harpo can on the harp, or Chico on the piano. But he never does. So he is really what I call an ideal musician; he can play, but doesn’t.”
In later reminisces of his famous father, Groucho’s son Arthur recalls a musician of intense dedication, one whose chronic dissatisfaction with his abilities inspired the then 50ish star to professional tutelage and hours of dedicated home practice?much to the frequent aggravation of his wife and children. “If I have to listen to your father play one more piece on the guitar,” Arthur recalled his more outgoing mother once grousing, “I’ll go out of my mind.”
Arthur Marx remembers his father diligently practicing scales and classical pieces for as many as three hours a day, with an almost quixotic fixation on transposing Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-Sharp Minor” to the instrument. After months practicing the difficult piece, the younger Marx recalls Groucho gathering the family around to “officially” debut it?as if they hadn’t already been driven to distraction by weeks of constant practice. When his rendition was met by silence, Marx gingerly inquired of his family, “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” To which wife Ruth retorted dryly: “Why don’t you go back to playing by ear? You used to be so much better before you knew what you were doing.”
Arthur also recalls his father’s obsession with classical guitar giant Andrés Segovia. After one of Segovia’s performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Groucho went backstage to introduce himself and invite him home for dinner. The classical guitar star was reluctant to accept the invitation for fear he’d be asked to perform at the Marx home, but Groucho assured him, “I promise you won’t have to hear me play. Where could you get a better deal than that?” Segovia soon found himself supping at Marx’s home. At least partly true to his word, Marx never asked Segovia to play?just strolled nonchalantly into the living room with a Gibson under each arm. Segovia simply acted as if the instruments weren’t there for most of the evening, before a frustrated Groucho thrust one at him and implored, “Would you mind holding this for me for a while? I’m exhausted from holding both of them.” Groucho then launched into?what else??the “Rachmaninoff Prelude,” with Segovia strumming along grudgingly until finally demurring, complaining that the instrument’s steel strings were cutting his unaccustomed fingers (Segovia played exclusively on gut strings).
Groucho’s playing eventually inspired daughter Miriam to the guitar. In 1946 (and after his divorce from her mother), Miriam wrote to ask if she could have one of his two instruments. An uncharacteristically sentimental Groucho happily complied, sending along a trove of sheet music with it as well.
Groucho Marx likely took his deep-seated insecurity over his guitar abilities to his grave in 1977. Though his passing was almost completely overshadowed by the sudden death of another cultural icon barely 72 hours earlier, Elvis Presley, Groucho’s brief, now 75-year-old turn on the instrument in Horse Feathers continues to delight film fans and musicians alike, a warm reminder that memorable performances most often come from the heart, not the fingers.
Groucho’s playing eventually inspired daughter Miriam to the guitar. In 1946 (and after his divorce from her mother), Miriam wrote to ask if she could have one of his two instruments. An uncharacteristically sentimental Groucho happily complied, sending along a trove of sheet music with it as well.
Groucho Marx likely took his deep-seated insecurity over his guitar abilities to his grave in 1977. Though his passing was almost completely overshadowed by the sudden death of another cultural icon barely 72 hours earlier, Elvis Presley, Groucho’s brief, now 75-year-old turn on the instrument in Horse Feathers continues to delight film fans and musicians alike, a warm reminder that memorable performances most often come from the heart, not the fingers.
Saturday, 2 February 2013
New J. D. Salinger biography in 2013...
By Dave Itzkoff
J.D. Salinger, one of the most reclusive authors of the modern era, will be the subject of a new biography written by David Shields and Shane Salerno and released by Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, the publisher, said on Tuesday.
The book, which Simon & Schuster described in a news release as “an oral biography,” is titled “The Private War of J.D. Salinger” and is planned for publication in September. Mr. Karp said that Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno had been working on the project for eight years, conducting interviews with more than 150 people who worked with and knew Salinger or were influenced by his work.
Mr. Karp said in a statement: “We are honored to be the publisher of what we believe will be the foundational book on one of the most beloved and most puzzling figures of the 20th century. Many of us who read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ have, at some point in our lives, wished we could know the author better. Now, we finally can.”
Salinger, whose other books include “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” (containing short stories like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), died in 2010. Having sought to maintain privacy for most of his life, he was a largely unknown figure to his readers. He had not given an interview in some 30 years.
Mr. Salerno, a screenwriter (“Savages”), said in a statement: “The myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about J.D. Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. Our book offers a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life.”
A documentary film about Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, was acquired by the PBS series “American Masters” and will be broadcast as the 200th episode of that program.
Simon & Schuster said that Mr. Karp and Jofie Ferrari-Adler, a senior editor, had been pursuing the Salinger book for several years and acquired it before other publishers could read it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
January 29, 2013
The book, which Simon & Schuster described in a news release as “an oral biography,” is titled “The Private War of J.D. Salinger” and is planned for publication in September. Mr. Karp said that Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno had been working on the project for eight years, conducting interviews with more than 150 people who worked with and knew Salinger or were influenced by his work.
Mr. Karp said in a statement: “We are honored to be the publisher of what we believe will be the foundational book on one of the most beloved and most puzzling figures of the 20th century. Many of us who read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ have, at some point in our lives, wished we could know the author better. Now, we finally can.”
Salinger, whose other books include “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” (containing short stories like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), died in 2010. Having sought to maintain privacy for most of his life, he was a largely unknown figure to his readers. He had not given an interview in some 30 years.
Mr. Salerno, a screenwriter (“Savages”), said in a statement: “The myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about J.D. Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. Our book offers a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life.”
A documentary film about Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, was acquired by the PBS series “American Masters” and will be broadcast as the 200th episode of that program.
Simon & Schuster said that Mr. Karp and Jofie Ferrari-Adler, a senior editor, had been pursuing the Salinger book for several years and acquired it before other publishers could read it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Friday, 1 February 2013
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