Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -

Ron Elderly: -
My Home Town
Need Your Love So Bad

Da Elderly: -
Tell Me Why
Sugar Mountain

The Elderly Brothers: -
He'll Have To Go
Tom Dooley
You're Going To Lose That Girl
When You Walk In The Room
Bring It On Home To Me
Love Hurts

A very quiet night, so 2 early solo sets followed by a 6-song Elderlys sing-along. Some innarestin' turns including a new duo to open, a guy from Helmsley on resonator guitar, blues, country, rock, the whole shooting match, plus an excellent new song from host Mark Wynn, which would have been well at home on a Leon Redbone album.

Buster Keaton's The Blacksmith - 'new' footage discovered...

Film Historian Unearths Never-Seen Cut of Buster Keaton’s 1922 ‘The Blacksmith’

Scott Foundas
Chief Film Critic
16 July 2013

Film collector, curator and historian Fernando Pena figured he’d made the biggest discovery of his career when, back in 2008, he uncovered a complete print of the original, uncut version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The 1927 German expressionist sci-fi epic had been gathering dust in the archives of Argentina’s national Museo del Cine. But one month ago, Pena topped himself when he happened upon an equally remarkable gem: an alternate cut of Buster Keaton’s “The Blacksmith.” If “Metropolis” was Pena’s Holy Grail of lost film finds, count “The Blacksmith” as his Shroud of Turin.

One of the many two-reelers Keaton made for producer Joseph M. Schenck, the 1922 film stars the silent comic as a hapless small-town iron forger, and includes such signature gags as Keaton doing battle with a giant overhead magnet, destroying a pristine Rolls Royce in the course of fixing a tire, and getting his foot stuck in the path of a speeding locomotive. In the version discovered by Pena, half of the film’s first reel (approximately 5-6 minutes of screen time) consists of entirely different, never-before-seen Keaton gags, while the ending of the film also differs slightly.

Because it was common practice in the silent era for films to be shot with two cameras placed next to one another, resulting in two separate negatives — one for domestic prints and one for foreign export — various alternate versions of silent films have surfaced through the decades. (A print of Keaton’s own 1928 feature “Steamboat Bill Jr.” containing noticeably different takes and camera positions was discovered in 2010.)

But “The Blacksmith” is a special case because the two versions of the film vary so wildly.

Pena made the find while examining a lot of 9.5mm film prints purchased on eBay in 2008 by his friend and fellow collector Fabio Manes. Originally developed in 1922 by the Pathe company in France, the 9.5mm gauge went on to become a popular home-viewing format throughout Europe. The print of “The Blacksmith” contains French intertitles. In theory, this means that all 9.5mm European prints of “The Blacksmith” could feature the alternate footage, but until now nobody noticed.

As with the uncut “Metropolis,” which had languished undetected for decades as it was moved around from archive to archive, Pena notes, “It’s something that has always been there, but no one was looking for it.”

Most notably, the extended gag sequence in which Keaton accidentally sprays oil all over one side of a beautiful white mare is missing from the Pena/Manes print, replaced by a sequence of Keaton leaving the smithy and driving through town, where he runs over his harried boss (frequent Keaton foil Joe Roberts), followed by a madcap pursuit. Also included is a brief additional interlude between Keaton and leading lady Virginia Fox.

So far, Pena has shared his discovery with noted film historians John Bengtson and Kevin Brownlow, the latter of whom wrote in an email to Pena: “I have not seen European releases of American films which differ in any more than the odd shot, extra title or varying camera angle. Half a reel is unprecedented.” The next step, Pena says, is “to get the film restored and made available again to audiences — where it belongs.”

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/buster-keaton-the-blacksmith-video-1200563581/

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-71)

Dylan Revisits 'Self Portrait' on Next Edition of Bootleg Series
'Another Self Portrait' hits stores on August 27th

By Andy Greene
July 16, 2013

Critic Greil Marcus spoke for countless Bob Dylan fans when he began his Rolling Stone review of 1970's Self Portrait with a now-famous question: "What is this shit?" The two-LP set was a bizarre mishmash of pop covers (Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer"), pre-rock hits ("Blue Moon") and poorly recorded live cuts from Dylan's 1969 set at the Isle of Wight festival. Nearly every tune was overloaded with weird backup choirs, strings and horns. "I knew that opening was provocative," Marcus says today of his RS review. "But that's what everybody in the country was saying, and I had to reflect that."

Decades later, Self Portrait remains one of Dylan's least-loved releases. So it came as a surprise when he announced the latest volume in his ongoing Bootleg Series: a four-disc set called Another Self Portrait, drawing on never-before-heard material from Dylan's original acoustic recording sessions and outtakes from Self Portrait along with select cuts from 1968's Nashville Skyline and 1970's New Morning. A deluxe edition will feature a complete recording of Dylan and the Band's 1969 set at the Isle of Wight Festival as well as a remastered version of the original Self Portrait. Both editions hit shelves on August 27th.

The Self Portrait sessions began in New York at Columbia's Studio A in April 1969, but after just a few days of messing around with covers like "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Blue Moon," he abandoned the project for nearly a year. When they resumed in March 1970, Dylan had very little original material, and he again returned to covers, this time recording with a small band that included David Bromberg on guitar and bass and Al Kooper on organ.

"It was bizarre," Kooper tells Rolling Stone. "He wasn't writing any of the songs, which is an important part of a Bob Dylan album. He had a pile of Sing Out! magazines and he was taking the songs, as in the chords and lyrics, straight out of them. They were his main feed, then they pulled other things like 'Mr. Bojanges' and 'The Boxer.' I was like, 'Yikes!' At one point we recorded 'Come a Little Bit Closer' by Jay and the Americans. Hopefully nobody ever hears that."

They worked for about three days, cutting everything from Tom Paxton's "Annie's Going to Sing Her Song" to Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain." Producer Bob Johnston then took the tapes to Nashville and Los Angeles, where he loaded them up with back-up singers, horns and additional bass and guitar. In very few cases did the overdubs improve the songs. "The unadulterated Self Portrait songs were very stark and arresting," says Marcus, who contributed liner notes to this new box set. "It's really the kind of music that didn't surface until Dylan's acoustic albums Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong over 20 years later."

Marcus wasn't the only critic to rip into the finished version of Self Portrait, and in later years, Dylan himself essentially said that he tanked the album on purpose. He was trying to raise his new family in New York, and the hippies were literally staking out his house, trying to coerce him into once again leading the protest movement.

"I said, 'Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to," he told Rolling Stone in 1984. "They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll say, 'Well, let's go on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no more. He ain't givin' us what we want,' you know? They'll go on to somebody else.'"

It didn't go as planned. "The whole idea backfired," he said. "Because the album went out there, and the people said, 'This ain't what we want,' and they got more resentful. And then I did this portrait for the cover. I mean, there was no title for that album. I knew somebody who had some paints and a square canvas, and I did the cover up in about five minutes. And I said, 'Well, I'm gonna call this album Self Portrait. . . To me, it was a joke. It wouldn't have held up as a single album — then it really would've been bad, you know. I mean, if you're gonna put a lot of crap on it, you might as well load it up!"

Whether or not he truly intended to make a bad album at the time, many fans shared Marcus' take that the album was "shit." "In those days, when a new record came out by a major performer, they played the whole thing on the radio," says Marcus. "As I wrote in my original review, a DJ came on maybe a quarter of the way through and said, 'Gee, maybe I shouldn't keep playing this. I've been getting a lot of calls saying, in essence, 'What is this shit?'"

Self Portrait quickly moved to the cut-out bin, and has been largely ignored by the massive Dylan cult ever since. Bob Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin labeled it "an album of outtakes and live oddities from one of the least interesting periods of Dylan's career" in his definitive biography Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited.

Another Self Portrait began a year ago, when people in Dylan's office found a previously unknown two-track mix reel of Self Portrait-era material. "We were going through all the tapes at Sony," says a source close to the Dylan camp. "We figured that as record companies shrink, some things might get lost. We were trying to exhume everything. This tape was located under a number that would indicate it was a master, but it wasn't. It was a mix of these songs in their raw, undiluted form. When we heard it, we were like, 'This is something we should really think about putting out. We should reexamine that period.'"

The set is fleshed out with outtakes from 1969's Nashville Skyline and 1970's New Morning. "What's clear on the set is that Bob is one of the best singers in the world, hands down," says the source. "His interpretations of those folk songs are great. 'Pretty Saro' will break your heart. They are recontextualized oddly, but the raw material there is phenomenal. . . We included the Nashville Skyline songs because we thought this was a journey of Bob Dylan discovering his voice, so we included a couple of those because we happened to like them as well."

A deluxe edition of the set will contain a complete recording of Dylan and the Band's complete 1969 set at the Isle of Wight. It was his first real concert since a motorcycle crash prematurely ended his 1966 world tour. "The concert has been bootlegged many, many times," says the source. "There were four songs from it on the original Self Portrait, but we always hated the way they sounded. They were mixed a long time ago and they put Bob's voice way high in the mix and the band is somewhere in the back. They were treating him like he was Tony Bennett or something. This new version has the vocals down and more of the audience sound. It sounds great."

Two of the songs, "Time Passes Slowly" and "Working on a Guru," come from Dylan's one-day session in New York with George Harrison in May 1970. "Most of the songs from that day suck," says the source. "The story we heard from the engineer is that they were just messing around as they waited for Elvis, and Elvis never showed up. They were just treading water. But these two songs are very nice."

The legendary George Harrison session also marked the first day of recording for New Morning, an album of original material that hit shelves just four months after Self Portrait. There are eight songs from the New Morning sessions on Another Self Portrait. "He was trying to clean up what happened with Self Portrait," says Al Kooper. "The sessions were very hurried. Bob Johnston disappeared halfway through, and I took over as producer. They're finally releasing a version of 'New Morning' I cut with horns and a version of 'Sign On The Window' with strings."

Another Self Portrait wraps with a previously unheard piano demo of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" that Dylan cut in 1971. "Not only is it a nice capper," says the Dylan source, "but he cut that song 10 years into his career. At this point, he's tried country. He's tried old songs. He's tried new songs. He's still searching. He's just a guy searching for different sounds. He's 10 years in and he's thinking about painting his masterpiece. There's a little lyric change on the bridge of this version. Instead of 'Sailing around the world in a dirty gondola/ Oh to be back in the world of Coca Cola" he sings, 'Sailing around the world in a dirty gondola/ Sure to love that old rock and rolla/ Sure wish I hadn't sold my old Victrola.' We though that would be a cool thing to end with."

Since launching the Bootleg Series in 1991, Dylan has released eight sets, but has withheld much of the material that fans are most eager to hear. "We're trying to put this stuff out in an intelligent way," says the source. "Sets for Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde will eventually come out. When fans hear the Blonde on Blonde set, they'll realize that the real hero of the sessions was pianist Paul Griffin. . . There will also be a Basement Tapes box one day. We're trying to get the best sources on all the Basement Tapes. That'll happen one day, absolutely."

Speaking of the Basement Tapes, the new box reveals that "Minstrel Boy," a Self Portrait original, was actually written during those famed 1967 sessions. "This was never even rumored," says Marcus. "That's a tantalizing thing. We have no idea what's out there. If we all live long enough, maybe we'll find out."

Bob Dylan, 'The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 - Another Self Portrait'
Courtesy of Sony Music

Complete track listing for The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 - Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)

CD 1

1. "Went to See the Gypsy" (demo)
2 "In Search of Little Sadie" (without overdubs, Self Portrait)
3. "Pretty Saro" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
4. "Alberta #3" (alternate version, Self Portrait)
5. "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
6. "Annie's Going to Sing Her Song" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
7. "Time Passes Slowly #1" (alternate version, New Morning)
8. "Only a Hobo" (unreleased, Greatest Hits II)
9. "Minstrel Boy" (unreleased, The Basement Tapes)
10. "I Threw It All Away" (alternate version, Nashville Skyline)
11. "Railroad Bill" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
12. "Thirsty Boots" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
13. "This Evening So Soon" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
14. "These Hands" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
15. "Little Sadie" (without overdubs, Self Portrait)
16. "House Carpenter" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
17. "All the Tired Horses" (without overdubs, Self Portrait)

CD 2
1. "If Not For You" (alternate version, New Morning)
2. "Wallflower" (alternate version, 1971)
3. "Wigwam" (original version without overdubs, Self Portrait)
4. "Days of '49" (original version without overdubs, Self Portrait)
5. "Working on a Guru" (unreleased, New Morning)
6. "Country Pie" (alternate version, Nashville Skyline)
7. "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" (Live With the Band, Isle Of Wight 1969)
8. "Highway 61 Revisited" (Live With the Band, Isle Of Wight 1969)
9. "Copper Kettle" (without overdubs, Self Portrait)
10. "Bring Me a Little Water" (unreleased, New Morning)
11. "Sign on the Window" (with orchestral overdubs, New Morning)
12. "Tattle O'Day" (unreleased, Self Portrait)
13. "If Dogs Run Free" (alternate version, New Morning)
14. "New Morning" (with horn section overdubs, New Morning)
15. "Went to See the Gypsy" (alternate version, New Morning)
16. "Belle Isle" (without overdubs, Self Portrait)
17. "Time Passes Slowly #2" (alternate version, New Morning)
18. "When I Paint My Masterpiece" (demo)

Bob Dylan & the Band at Isle of Wight - August 31st, 1969
1. "She Belongs to Me"
2. "I Threw It All Away"
3. "Maggie's Farm"
4. "Wild Mountain Thyme"
5. "It Ain't Me, Babe"
6. "To Ramona"/"Mr. Tambourine Man"
7. "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine"
8. "Lay Lady Lay"
9. "Highway 61 Revisited"
10. "One Too Many Mornings"
11. "I Pity the Poor Immigrant"
12. "Like a Rolling Stone"
13. "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"
14. "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"
15. "Minstrel Boy"
16. "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-revisits-self-portrait-on-next-edition-of-bootleg-series-20130716?utm_source=dailynewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

See also: http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/bob-dylan-dylan-and-bootleg-series-vol.html

Lyons Teashops and postwar British Art...

David Gentleman - Cornish Pilchard Boat

The Lyons teashops lithographs: do you take fine art with your tea?

A fascinating show at Eastbourne's Towner gallery tells the story of how tea company J Lyons commissioned the top British artists of the 1940s to record life in postwar Britain – and brighten up the famous teashops left dilapidated by the hardships of the second world war. The result was a poignant and beautiful record of a nation redefining itself.

The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity runs from 13 July to 22 October at the Towner gallery, Eastbourne, West Sussex

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jul/12/lyons-teashop-art-exhibition-gallery

 
 John Piper - Elizabethan Dance

The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity 1946 – 1955

13 July – 22 September 2013

Post-war British artists including Edward Bawden, John Piper, David Gentleman, John Minton, William Scott, Duncan Grant, John Nash and L .S. Lowry form part of The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity. The exhibition celebrates Towner’s collection of the complete set of 40 lithographs commissioned by catering giant J. Lyons & Co. to combat the wartime decline in the interiors of their famous Lyons Teashops, compounded by a post-war lack of decorating materials. Through the company’s enterprising approach to arts patronage and interior decoration, the cream of modern British art was for the first time accessible to a wider public in 200 Lyons Teashops nationwide.

William Scott - The Bird Cage

Towner’s exhibition presents all three series of lithographs – commissioned between 1946-1955 – together with a selection of the original paintings and working drawings. Whilst some of the artists were able to produce their own lithographs, others created watercolour, oil, gouache, pen and ink, or collaged works that were then turned into the final lithograph. The works were produced on a large enough scale to conceal the faded teashop decors. War artists, Royal College of Art alumni, and well-known and emerging practitioners were chosen to produce tasteful works of art that would appeal to the typical Lyons Teashop customer.

Edward Bawden - The Dolls at Home

Presenting a very particular British idyll, the lithographs depict urban, industrial, rural and coastal landscapes, domestic interiors, street scenes and still-lifes. Pictures of leisure pursuits such as billiards, cricket, fishing, punting, boxing and piano-playing vie with scenes of a railway station, a hotel lobby and fishmonger’s shop; and apple pickers in a Kent orchard contrast with yeoman warders at the Tower of London and afternoon tea in Henley. Anthony Gross’s Herne Bay pier was declared a best-seller and used on the film set of Carry on Cruising, and John Piper’s stage sets and costumes for Benjamin Britten’s new opera Gloriana became the inspiration for his Teashop lithograph. An oil painting of Barnett Freedman’s Music – Still Life, produced from his lithograph, was later gifted to the Tate gallery.

John Nash - Landscape with Bathers

Together with the artistic innovations developed by London Underground, Shell-Mex, the General Post Office and others, the Lyons Teashop Lithographs established a distinctive post-war vernacular and a high profile demonstration of how Britain could thrive during the austerity years. The Lyons Teashops Lithographs are a key legacy of these pioneering times, the last Teashop having closed its doors in 1981.

http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/press-releases/the-lyons-teashops-lithographs-art-in-a-time-of-austerity-1946-1955/


Barnett Freedman - People

Bawden and battenberg: the Lyons teashop lithographs
After the second world war, John Piper, Edward Bawden and other artists were commissioned to spruce up Lyons teashops. Michael Prodger reflects on a halcyon time of 'art for all' – and a project that could never happen today

Michael Prodger
The Guardian
Friday 12 July 2013

The first half of the 20th century was a halcyon time for British public art. The common cultural mantra "Art for all" inspired more than just lip service; it lay behind initiatives aimed at democratising art and spreading a taste for it beyond its customary audiences. Unusually for an ideal of social improvement, the driving force was not government but business.

Frank Pick, the guiding light at London Underground, was the first corporate patron properly to understand that presenting the consumer with high-end art could be mutually beneficial. When he commissioned artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland to produce designs for tube posters, passengers started to imbibe modern art as they travelled. At the same time, the tone of the company's image was raised. Shell-Mex followed Pick's lead with its advertising: out went the commercial artists, in came the fine artists. The "You can be sure of Shell" slogan was seen on the work of a host of artists including Ben Nicholson and Edward McKnight Kauffer. The School Prints scheme, meanwhile, hoped that putting prints by Lowry, Henry Moore and other painters into the nation's classrooms might foster a taste for art alongside the three Rs.

One of the most interesting of these initiatives was, however, born for more prosaic reasons. Lyons teashops were a staple of the British high street; the first one opened on Piccadilly in 1894, and the chain eventually came to number about 200 cafes. Lyons also owned restaurants and hotels and produced own-brand goods such as tea and their celebrated battenberg cake, but it was the teashops – selling good food at reasonable prices – that remained its mainstay
.
Edward Ardizzone - Shopping in Mysore

By the end of the second world war, the teashops were looking rather tired. A shortage of decorating materials meant many were in need of sprucing up. Paint remained in short supply in the years immediately following the end of the war, so the Lyons directors came up with an imaginative way of covering up patches of peeling wall and distracting the eye: they commissioned a series of lithographs. The scheme was designed to be temporary, nothing more than "a novel and intriguing method of decoration … with no other purpose in mind than that of giving the teashops themselves an interesting and homely appearance". The prints were a sizeable 30 by 40 inches, to cover as much worn decor as possible. These lithographs and the postwar world they convey are the subject of a new exhibition at the Towner gallery in Eastbourne.

Between 1946 and 1955 the company commissioned three series of prints, some 40 in all, from most of the leading British artists of the day. The lithographs were not advertising per se (the Lyons name only appeared in small type at the bottom of each), but they were branding by association. The man chosen to direct the scheme was Jack Beddington, who had previously worked on the Shell-Mex posters and, during the war, at the Ministry of Information. He became project manager, selecting the artists and directing the choice of subject matter. Previously Lyons's publicity had been marked, he said, "not so much by the common touch … as by the commonplace". Beddinton was determined to change that.

Michael Ayrton - The Spectators

To help, he brought in the artist Barnett Freedman as the technical director. He had long experience as a lithographer and had been both an official war artist and a teacher at the Royal College of Art. The last member of the triumvirate was Frank Oppenheimer, MD of the commercial printing firm Chromoworks in Willesden. The company printed the Heinz baked beans labels, among other things, but Oppenheimer took on the Lyons lithographs and kept the unions sweet when they bridled at artists producing their own prints.

For the first set of lithographs, he drew up a list of 29 names, most of whom had been war artists. It included Lowry, Moore, Cedric Morris, Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Edward Ardizzone and Nash (who died before he could take part). The subsequent series, of 1951 and 1955, included Michael Ayrton, John Piper, John Minton and David Gentleman. The artists were not told to modify their styles or tone down their work but they were, by and large, unthreatening to a tea-and-cake audience.

By the time all the prints had been completed, they offered an overview of postwar Britain as seen by almost all of the period's most renowned artists. It was a view that mixed the bucolic, the nostalgic, the subfusc urban world, and an occasional hint of exoticism. The prints effectively offered 40 different glimpses of one subject – the British way of life in an age of austerity.

George Hooper - Hotel Entrance

The lithographs also convey a palpable sense of a clubbable generation. When Gentleman was invited to contribute a print to series three, he was not long out of art school. "I couldn't imagine a greater delight when I was asked. I knew the prints quite well and John Nash, Bawden, Minton … all those people taught me in different degrees at the RCA." He was on familiar terms with most of the artists involved with the series. It was, he felt, "a real honour to be asked. It was the first big thing I had been asked to do and it put me in company I admired very much."

Gentleman was one of the artists who produced an auto-lithograph, an image drawn directly on to the lithographic plate; some of the others, such as Bawden, handed over a completed picture (in his case a collage) for the Chromoworks staff to translate into a print. "Lithography was difficult," Gentleman says, "but I don't remember fearing being told, 'Forget it, it's no good'." Because the prints were produced by a commercial company, reproofing was "nightmarish … if you got it wrong you were lumbered with it". Eric Ravilious had called the glutinous lithographic inks "beastly stuff".

Getting mucky was worth the artists' while, however. They were paid between £50 and £150 each ("I got £150," Gentleman says, "an astonishing amount for me"), but the prints were also put on sale to the public "at a price within reach of the slenderest purse", the artists receiving sixpence for every print of theirs sold. The lithographs were produced in editions of 1,500, so a popular print could make real money. It was part of Beddington's plan both to popularise and support British artists.
The Shire Hall by Lynton Lamb

He also had a highly developed eye for publicity. He encouraged national institutions such as the V&A and the British Council to buy sets of the prints, and organised modern PR events to spread the word. In 1947, the first series was shown privately to Queen Mary, then to the artists and the press at a cocktail party, before a public exhibition was opened by Ralph Richardson. The third series was launched by Kenneth Clark, who made an exception to his "absolute rule not to open exhibitions" for his "old friend" Beddington and described the Lyons project as "an eyeful as well as a mouthful". The idea of a picture gallery for Everyman was well‑received by both critics and the public (although one customer said of William Scott's Bird Cage that it was very good considering "it was painted by a child of eight years old"). The prints dovetailed with the prevailing mood exemplified by the 1951 Festival of Britain.

The lithographs outlived their original purpose and remained on display until the teashops closed in the 1970s. Relatively cheap to buy, many of the prints have also proved disposable. The bulk of the original artworks were sold at auction in 1975; the Towner exhibition, with its preparatory drawings and original paintings, is the largest gathering of Lyons material since this dispersal.

The teashop project is not one that could be repeated today, partly because cultural mores have shifted – the link between patronage and profit is no longer such an innocent one – and partly, as Gentleman points out, because "today's equivalent artists would simply be too expensive". While some of the artists have now slipped from sight – George Hooper, Lynton Lamb, Clifford Frith – the Lyons lithographs nevertheless brought together a remarkable gathering of talent. Almost every significant artist of the period took part – "a good bunch", as Gentleman puts it – with Sutherland and Stanley Spencer among the few illustrious absentees. The Lyons prints remain an evocative snapshot of a distinctive moment in time – a period when utility and invention worked together – and a reflection of Britain's undemonstrative but confident postwar self-image.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jul/12/bawden-battenberg-lyons-teashops-lithographs

Prefab Sprout - new album - with tracklist!

WORLD EXCLUSIVE – NEW ALBUM!

John Birch and Scott McPherson (The Prefab Sprout Project) have been invited by Icebreaker LLP to a low-key private hearing of the upcoming album recorded by Paddy McAloon in London. Since 2004, Icebreaker has been bringing together investors, entrepreneurs and creative talent. There is a particular emphasis on commercial projects in the creative and technology industries. Income from these projects is shared between the relevant Icebreaker LLP and the individuals and companies involved.

Icebreaker will be behind the release of the album under licence, scheduled for release on 7 October 2013, in a deal brokered by Keith Armstrong.

The business of each LLP has involved acquiring licences from writers, inventors and other third parties. The LLPs have paid further third parties to exploit these licences, with a view to sharing in the revenue generated from the worldwide distribution of products based on the licences and other commercial arrangements.
Paddy will be meeting with Icebreaker in London next week for a photo session to start off the album promotion. There is album artwork right now, which we will share once it has been approved, together with more information from the press pack.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Prefab-Sprout-Project/341013602578533

Tracklist:

1. The Best Jewel Thief In The World
2. The List of Impossible Things
3. Adolescence
4. Grief Built The Taj Mahal
5. Devil Came A Calling
6. Billy
7. The Dreamer
8. The Songs Of Danny Galway
9. The Old Magician
10. Mysterious

New Steely Dan Album...

New Steely Dan Album? 'It's In the Air'

By Gary Graff

July 12, 2013

Walter Becker says he and Donald Fagen can "smell" a new Steely Dan album coming, the first since the 2003 Top 10 entry "Everything Must Go."

"It's in the air, it really is," Becker told Billboard during a good-naturedly sarcastic conference call with reporters to advance the group's Mood Swings 2013: 8 Miles To Pancake Day tour. "It's just a smell now. The next thing is then you taste it, then you start to feel it. You know how this goes."

Fagen, meanwhile, noted that the duo does have "some songs, these really good ones that we only half-finished back in, like, 1984 that we keep threatening to work on," to which Becker added, "Actually we did finish a couple of those. We have a bunch of things. Put it this way; any other band in the world would have finished or mixed these old things that were lying around and issued them with a great ta-da fanfare. But we just don't. We don't play it like that, necessarily. It's not the way we roll."

If Becker and Fagen are gearing up to create something new, they say it probably won't happen during the tour. "I have a really hard time writing on the road," said Fagen, who released his fourth solo album, "Sunken Condos," in 2012. "Usually writing is done, whether with Walter or not, it's when I'm really at home and have very little to do. You need to be in a kind of stasis, I think, to do that..or else you're just sleeping. Actually, the time you could be writing songs you're probably sleeping, on the road."

The Mood Swings 2013 tour kicks off July 19 and closes with a six-night run starting Sept. 30 at New York's Beacon Theater. Some show will feature performances of "The Royal Scam," "Aja" or "Gaucho" albums in their entirety, while others have been dubbed Audience Request Nights or Greatest Hits Nights. The trek also marks 20 years since Becker and Fagen regrouped as Steely Dan and began taking the once road-shy group on tour on a regular basis.

"It's great fun to play with a really good band -- that goes without saying, right?" Becker noted. "I think that's the essence of it, right there, for me." Fagen added that "everything has gotten better" since Steely Dan's limited run of touring during the 70s. "Now it's much more fun to play. I'm glad we turned into a big-time touring band later in life. In fact, it's almost like we planned it out that way."

During the chat the duo also shed some light on rapper Kanye West's use of their 1976 hit "Kid Charlemagne" for the track "Champion" from his 2007 album "Graduation" -- revealing that they initially turned down his request for the sample.

"We usually say yes but we didn't like the general curve of the way that one sounded," Fagen recalled. "We thought it was too repetitive. But then he sent us a handwritten letter, which was so heartfelt that we finally gave in and acceded to his request."

Becker remembered that West "basically said that ('Champion') is a song that meant a lot to him. It was written about his father and his feelings for his father," though Fagen said "I didn't get that at all from the music." "No," Becker agreed, "I've had occasion to wonder since then whether that's the same Kanye West." "Maybe it was a prank," Fagen concluded.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1572967/new-steely-dan-album-its-in-the-air

One Less Whicker...

Alan Whicker, globetrotting TV presenter, dies aged 87
Broadcaster and journalist best known for his long-running TV series Whicker's World

Dennis Barker
The Guardian

Friday 12 July 2013 15.56 BST

In a 1969 television documentary about Haiti, Alan Whicker, who has died aged 87, asked the notorious dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, in kindly, innocently interested and rather baffled tones: "But Papa Doc, they say you torture people?" It was a succinct example of the former Fleet Street journalist's ability to ask the most piercing questions while giving those being questioned no personal provocation or excuse to break off the interview – an ability that, if not unique, was certainly less common among other interviewers in a world often dominated by inflated egos.

As long ago as the early 1970s, some of the young turks of TV were writing Whicker off as out of date. Instead, the thick spectacles, immaculate blue blazer, neat military moustache, and persistently unjudgmental and blandly phrased questions, plus a commentary in alliterative tabloidese, gave him a career that outlasted those of many of his rivals. He kept travelling the world for 60 years in search of exotic and humanly interesting material, often about the rich.

He flew 100,000 miles a year for British audiences of up to 15 million and his programmes also sold well abroad. In 1978, he flew the 7,000 miles back to London from Singapore to receive a Bafta Richard Dimbleby award – and immediately flew back again. He won many other awards, including the Screenwriters' Guild best documentary script in 1963.The secret of Whicker's ability to appear unthreatening in the most fraught and unpromising interviews was long debated in media watering holes. Was it his short stature and modest looks, at a time when the age of appearances usually dictated great height and good looks as a necessity for interviewers and presenters? Did he truly have the mind of the average viewer? Did one or all of these aspects of Whicker explain why, when he interviewed the American oil billionaire J Paul Getty in 1963, he was able to suggest that Getty's success in business was matched by his failure as a human being – without being thrown out?

Whicker was usually civil about the younger hands who tried his sort of game, but could be catty when attacked or compared unfavourably with younger professionals. He declined to make Around the World in 80 Days, the series that brought the actor Michael Palin a new career as a TV traveller. Afterwards, Palin asked him on camera why he had turned it down. Whicker replied that he wanted to see who the makers would go to when they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. "That will hit the cutting-room floor," laughed Whicker. He stated that Clive James "can't interview to save his life".

Whicker always maintained that the best view the cameras had of him was the back of his neck. He created the series Whicker's World in 1959; and its title was a good definition of what all his programmes were about. There were many variations of the essential Whicker trademark – Whicker's South Seas, Whicker Way Out West, Whicker Down Mexico Way, Whicker's Orient, Whicker's Miss World and so on – but he made sure that he did not appear too much in them, letting the interviewees be the stars.

Californian recipients of multiple breast implants or owners of pink-dyed poodles were treated with the same merciless deference as pot-bellied and cigar-smoking billionaires on world cruises. It worked better than hectoring would have done. Whicker regarded himself as a professional's professional, one who continued to look for "human interest" stories while the attention span of many around him in his later years narrowed more to sleaze.

Whicker's background had certainly not made it easy for him to be warmly human. His father, Charles, a captain in the Hussars, was serving in Cairo at the time of Alan's birth, and died three years later. Alan returned to Britain with his mother, Anne, and sister, and they settled in London, where Alan attended Haberdashers' Aske's school. His sister died shortly afterwards.

He became, in effect, an only child who found himself at ease nowhere – or equally at ease everywhere. His relationship with his mother grew more intense. "We adored one another," he would claim, explaining that this was what made him appreciate women, one of the "great pleasures" of his life. During the blitz, the only things his mother took down to the air-raid shelter were Alan's letters home. He was devastated by her death.

One of his satisfactions as a schoolboy had been going on a school camp at Teignmouth, Devon. While there, he would set off on a bus along the coast road to see how far he could get to that mecca, Torquay. It was the beginning of his love of travel. As a captain in the Devonshire Regiment during the second world war, he was seconded to the Army Film and Photographic Unit, then became a war correspondent in Korea.

After the war, he worked as a reporter for the Exchange Telegraph news agency – but never (although he was often described as such) as a reporter for the cult magazine Picture Post. This often repeated mistake was an irritation both to him and to old Picture Post hands who thought he was trespassing. He was doing odd jobs for BBC radio when Alasdair Milne, then working for its flagship current affairs programme Tonight, spotted his ability to ask "impertinent" questions without giving offence.

Whicker had found his metier. In 1957 he joined Tonight and from then on insisted on seeing the footage first, then writing his own commentary. The technique served him well as he looked all over the world for kinks in human character and behaviour for Whicker's World.

One of his younger colleagues, Peter Salmon, commissioned Whicker's World programmes on Hong Kong and Spain for the BBC in the 1990s, despite feeling that Whicker's manner and interests were not those of a new generation: he simply felt that, as an interviewer, Whicker was without peer, able to get more than anyone else out of a one-to-one interview.

In 1993 Whicker was the first to be named in the Royal Television Society's Hall of Fame for an outstanding creative contribution to British TV. A fanclub was formed, consisting of members who dressed up as Whicker and discussed their hero once a month. His singular style also gave rise in 1972 to Monty Python's celebrated Whicker Island sketch, with all of the team doing impressions.

Whicker remained active into old age, continuing to make TV and radio series until recently, and publishing volumes of memoirs. He had become wealthy, with a Nash flat in Regent's Park and a handsome home in Jersey. In 2005 he was appointed CBE.

After ending a four-year engagement to the heiress Olga Deterding, in 1969 he began a lasting relationship with Valerie Kleeman, a neighbour in Regent's Park. They travelled the world together, she as his research assistant offering her observations and advice, which he usually took.

Valerie survives him.

• Alan Donald Whicker, journalist and broadcaster, born 2 August 1925; died 12 July 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jul/12/alan-whicker-tv-world-dies

If you can get hold of it, watch the excellent Whicker's War, made in 2004,  about his experiences in Italy during World War II.

Alan Whicker RIP

Journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker has died at the age of 87 after suffering from bronchial pneumonia.

His spokeswoman said he died in the early hours of Friday morning at his home in Jersey.

With a TV career that stretched nearly six decades, he was best known for his long-running documentary series, Whicker's World.

The show, which ran from 1959 to 1988 on both the BBC and ITV, saw him travel all over the world.

The series featured Whicker reporting on the unusual and bizarre, interviewing all types of people from millionaires and monks to gangsters and dictators.

He once said he counted himself one of the luckiest men in the world because he enjoyed his work so much.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #210

Yesterday's set list

At The Habit, York (The Elderly Brothers): -

Love Hurts
Wagon Wheel
Things We Said Today
You Got It

A busy one once again, with an eclectic mix of musical madness, guaranteed to get the good folks of York into The Habit on a Wednesday night. Pity about the beer! 3 pumps, one ale (5%) and that ran out! Had to make do with Black Sheep - it's a hard life.

Johnny Storm rediscovers Paddy McAloon...

Trapdoor Melancholy, indeed...

The Bird Man of South Tyneside...

Art and the Mexican Revolution

Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910 - 1940 - review
The Royal Academy, London

Laura Cumming
The Observer
Sunday 7 July 2013

Four Zapatistas in sombreros sit astride the cow-catcher on the front of a steam train. One has no boots, two have no bullets and all are darkened by the blazing heat and dust. But these nameless fighters cock their rifles at the future, fearlessly facing whatever fate awaits them down the line. They are literally the revolutionary vanguard.

The Mexican revolution began in 1910 with an armed charge against the long-term dictator Porfirio Díaz, and continued to convulse the country with massive loss of life and many changes of president for almost 10 years. You can see this happening before your very eyes in the terrific time-lapse sequence of paintings, prints and photographs assembled at the Royal Academy. This classic photograph was taken in 1911 by the German emigré Hugo Brehme. It's a tremendous image, and it generated others, including a famous print by Jesús Escobedo in which the same train hurtles forward, dogs barking, women waving, steam pouring from this great engine of modernity, which now carries not just the original band of brothers but several hundred others.

Chandeliers shiver in the shoot-out. Newspaper offices are blown to smithereens. Firing squads work their way through the countryside.Walter Horne's photographs of street executions show the victims are still momentarily upright, pale and ghostly as the bullets enter their bodies in the unfurling chaos of smoke. Life echoes art, and vice versa, for these pictures immediately recall Manet's paintings of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian some 40 years earlier.

The Mexican painter Francisco Goitia, who spent his 20s studying El Greco and Goya in Spain, was so shocked by the political situation on his return that he offered himself as a war artist to the revolutionary general Pancho Villa. His paintings of decomposing bodies hanging from the trees of Zacatecas as the vultures circle have something of the Spanish influence but are wholly Mexican in their arid and thorn-pricked landscape.
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It was a revolution captured in images as no other before it. Villa struck a deal with the Mutual Film Corporation, giving them the motion rights to his battles in return for cash and propaganda. He timed his onslaughts so that they began during the daylight that was crucial for the cameras. An anonymous photograph shows him in moustache and bandolier, momentarily still while others move in rapid blurs around him: shrewd, watchful and reserved, quite different from the exhibitionist portrayed by the American Horne.

Photography didn't just capture the hero, it became the source for more popular icons. Brehme's famous portrait of Emiliano Zapata with sabre, sash and sombrero* was transformed by the great print-maker José Posada into a darkly imposing warrior, inspiring even at the size of a stamp and a haunting figurehead after his assassination in 1919. Diego Rivera's painted version of the hero looks like a daintily picturesque bandito by comparison.

Posada also satirised corrupt politicians and plutocrats as calaveras, or skeletons, a device picked up by Rivera and other painters that remains embedded in Mexican culture.

Goitia's parched man on his parched rock seems to become one with the ancient landscape, a vision enhanced by the cracks that have developed in the cheap paint subjected to a century of Mexican heat. Ancient gods awaken and dance in cubist frenzies. Mexican women process in profile, silent and shapely, bearing urns on their heads. They look like characters in a Greek frieze, except that the mountains of Oaxaca are rising high and rocky behind them.And this complex relationship between painting and graphic art becomes a subtle theme of the show. The revolution had its counterpart in art, specifically in the gigantic murals of "los tres grandes": Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Clearly their major works cannot travel, but each painter is represented, Rivera by one of his folksy friezes of swaying Mexican dancers, Siqueiros by a yet more potent image of Zapata walled into a cell and hieratic as an Aztec statue. One has a strong sense, even on this modest scale, of the new wave of Mexican art emerging out of a strange fusion of modernism and pre-Columbian art.

Mexico drew left-leaning artists from all over the world in the wake of the revolution. Its red lands and mountain peaks appear bizarrely reprised as geometric abstracts in the paintings of the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, and in the blockish landscapes of the American modernist Marsden Hartley, who turns the Popocatépetl volcano into a massive blue diamond.

The show has a rarity, too, in one of Philip Guston's arduous socialist allegories of civil war and strife played out by street children with wooden swords. Guston visited Mexico in 1934, where he was given an immense wall of Emperor Maximilian's former summer palace to paint his huge anti-fascist mural The Struggle Against War and Terror. Look closely at the picture in the Royal Academy and you see hints of the hoods and hands that figure in his late, great works.

But the prints and photographs are the true stars of the show. Cartier-Bresson travelled through the country recording the street life of Mexico: itinerant musicians, cripples picking their way through the markets, prostitutes appearing like puppets above the half-doors of brothels. Tina Modotti's celebrated Hands of the Puppeteer, massive and tangled in fine strings like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, shows her gift for capturing the sensual materiality of life.

Her lover, the American photographer Edward Weston, portrays DH Lawrence hot under the collar and sly-eyed in Mexico. Like so many of the writers who passed through – Malcolm Lowry, Hart Crane, Graham Greene – Lawrence's fascination with the country curdled into disillusion, which in turn yielded one of his most pungent novels, The Plumed Serpent.

One looks into these small images to find a vast country convulsed and ever changing, in triumph and lament, bleeding and resurgent. The gringos come and go – Weston abandoned Modotti and returned with a different love to California; Modotti was deported; Hartley left suffering from serious depression. Rivera, in turn, went to work for the capitalists in New York.

But one great legacy of all this internationalism was the encouragement given by Modotti and Rivera to a young tax inspector called Manuel Alvarez Bravo who had been too young to photograph the revolution but took up the camera Modotti gave him. His images – of miners as monumental as standing stones, of masked dancers in a doorway that seems to echo the shape of Zapata's moustache – show another world, almost inconceivably remote. Alvarez Bravo is the revelation of this show.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jul/07/mexico-revolution-art-review-royal

*There is evidence to suggest that Brehme was NOT the photographer. See http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mystery-of-Zapata-photo-Who-took-it-3207092.php#photo-2032768

Prefab Sprout: Crimson/Red - review...

We Will Rock You: The Mysterious Prefab Sprout Album You Might Never Hear

by Jon Hunt
Wednesday 3 July 2013

On June 8th, a user named “ExitSomeone” (number of posts — 1) appeared on SproutNet, the online home of Prefab Sprout fandom, with a link to a Soundcloud page (originating from an equally-mysterious someone named “ICIMUSIC”) containing songs that purported to be a new Prefab Sprout record. “Do my ears deceive me?” he asked, knowingly, “Or is this really what I think it is?” He then buggered off and posted nothing more. Predictably, the fan firestorm began immediately. Was this real? A clever pastiche? Where did this mysterious user come from, where did these songs come from, and could this really be the work of reclusive genius Paddy McAloon?

A little background: if you’re not familiar with the Sprout, do take a moment (well, a month, at least, if you’re being fair) to acquaint yourself with them. They’re perhaps most known for the cult 80s record Steve McQueen (called in the States, for legal reasons, Two Wheels Good), a glorious combination of Bacharachian pop songwriting and pure British soul, but their career contains many highlights (the underrated gem From Langley Park to Memphis, the comprehensive Jordan: The Comeback, the recently-released-but-recorded-in-the-early-90s Let’s Change The World With Music among them). Honorifics such as “our best living songwriter” are frequently applied to McAloon, and quite fairly so, but he is perhaps equally known for his eccentricities — like Prince, he has, supposedly, dozens of finished but unreleased albums lying around his house, and he’s become somewhat reclusive of late — health problems (encroaching sight and hearing problems primarily) have kept him at home, and reports that he was “finished with music entirely” continue to crop up. His last new album — fully new, rather than a release of something from the 90s — was 2003′s solo turn I Trawl The Megahertz, a strange (but fascinating) album that bore little resemblance to the Sprout of old.

Fans had all but given up hearing another peep from McAloon when this album cropped up, so naturally, many were skeptical. Cries of “pastiche” were heard amongst the praise being lavished upon the album — was this just a clever imitator who’d drawn from his obviously deep knowledge of McAloon’s songwriting and lyrical quirks? And who possessed a clearly McAloon-ish voice besides? If so, came the reply, it’s the best pastiche artist ever, and he’s written a batch of songs that are melodically and lyrically the equal of anything McAloon himself had ever penned. More likely, says Occam’s Razor, it’s simply an unreleased Sprout album, leaked by whomever (McAloon himself? A “friend?” A record label exec?) to an underused corner of the internet, and when nobody stumbled upon it, pointed at quite loudly in the most likely place for it to generate hype and excitement. Confirmation of its legitimacy came when SproutNet was politely asked to remove all links to the work by someone (possibly former Sprout member Wendy Smith, who is still close to McAloon) close to the band. All Soundcloud files subsequently vanished, and all but one song (“Billy“) were removed from YouTube as well...

Read the rest at http://www.letoilemagazine.com/2013/07/03/we-will-rock-you-the-mysterious-prefab-sprout-album-you-might-never-hear/

Woody Allen at 77

How Woody Allen Sees It
Even as he approaches 80, Woody Allen remains one of the most prolific filmmakers working today. With the release of his 48th feature, "Blue Jasmine," the celebrated director opens up about playing the romantic lead, the hit-flop trap and why he just can't quit the business.

Charles McGrath

The Wall Street Journal
June 28, 2013

IN REAL LIFE, WOODY ALLEN isn't much different from the character he plays in his movies. He has the same reedy Brooklyn accent he uses on-screen and wears the same dorky, black-framed glasses he's worn since he was 17. He's shy, meek, insecure, a little phobic. When he showers, he makes a point of standing away from the drain, and he's not crazy about tunnels. Too much like the womb.

That such a person manages the existential crisis of getting out of bed in the morning, or accomplishes anything at all, let alone becoming a celebrated filmmaker, seems miraculous. But Allen's nebbishness disguises immense willpower and Stakhanovite work habits. Not long ago, Marshall Brickman, an old friend and collaborator (he cowrote Manhattan and Annie Hall, among other classic Allen movies), was reminiscing about Allen's career. They first met, he recalled, in the early '60s at The Bitter End, a club in Greenwich Village, where Brickman performed with the Tarriers, a folk group, and Allen, a stand-up comic, was the nervous opening act. Though Allen was an inspired joke writer, stand-up did not come naturally to him then. He didn't have the temperament and was often terrified and miserable. Yet he kept at it, even attempting stunts like boxing with a kangaroo if Jack Rollins, his longtime manager, thought it would help the act. "Some hole in his persona needed it so badly that he was willing to endure all the anxiety and humiliation of getting out in front of an audience and bombing," Brickman said. "And to think he went from that to being thought of in the pantheon along with people like Bergman."

These days, every month or so, Brickman and Allen go for a walk in Central Park. They follow the same route and have the same conversation every time. "We talk about the business"—the film business, that is—"and how awful it is," he said. "We talk about women. Years ago we'd see a couple of old guys unwrapping a sandwich on a bench, and now it's us—we're the old guys. We also talk about hearing."

But though he has gone gray and is a little stooped, Allen, who is now 77—how can that be?—doesn't look or act like an old guy. He's so busy you could say it's a little neurotic, a little overcompensating. Most Thursdays he rehearses with his jazz ensemble, and every Monday he plays clarinet at the Carlyle hotel. He frequently writes "casuals"—or humor pieces—for The New Yorker. He's working now with the theater director Susan Stroman on a Broadway musical version of his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway, and he just finished making a movie written and directed by John Turturro in which he plays the owner of a failing bookstore who turns to pimping to make ends meet. And Allen continues to write and direct his own movies at an assembly-line pace, just as he has for five decades. Some are better than others, but there is no such thing as a really bad Woody Allen movie, and they come along—a new one every year—as reliably as the taxman. The critic Peter Biskind once called Allen the Joyce Carol Oates of moviemaking.

Allen's 48th feature, Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin, opens in July. It's based on a story Allen's wife, Soon-Yi, told him about a woman she knew whose lifestyle became suddenly downsized after a financial disaster. Blanchett plays a pill-popping, vodka-swigging East Side sophisticate married to a Waspy version of Bernie Madoff (Baldwin). When he's found out, she loses everything and has to move into the San Francisco apartment of her adoptive sister—a bagger at a grocery store—and her two mouth-breathing sons. The story is more serious than comic, and though it's hard to take your eyes off her, the Blanchett character isn't always likable. Will it work at the box office? Allen can't stop to worry about that. He's already at work on the next one.

Chaplin, whose career in many ways resembles Allen's, stopped making movies in the late '60s. Fellini quit when he was 70. Allen, who used to say that filmmaking was a young man's game and that he would be done by the time he was 50, is edging into the rarefied territory occupied by Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, who both made movies into their eighties. After a brief slump, he is even on a bit of a roll now. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and To Rome With Love (2012) were well received, andMidnight in Paris (2011) was, by Allen standards, a big hit, making more than $150 million worldwide.

But despite his enormous body of work, Allen no longer occupies the place he once did in the moviemaking firmament. He might be more highly regarded, in fact, if he'd made fewer films. There are so many you can hardly keep track. Broadway Danny Rose, Mighty Aphrodite, Radio Days, Sweet and Lowdown: They're all packed away in the attic of our movie-going memory.

Some of his fans deserted Allen after the tabloid debacle of 1992, when Mia Farrow—with whom Allen had a son and two adopted children—discovered that he was also romantically involved with Soon-Yi, her 21-year-old adopted daughter with André Previn. Farrow's custody suit, in which she alleged, though it was never proven, that Allen had molested their adopted daughter, Dylan, made headlines for weeks. (Allen and Soon-Yi married in 1997 and have two adopted daughters, now teenagers. Meanwhile, Allen's son with Farrow, Ronan, remains estranged from him, claiming it's not possible to have a relationship with someone who is both your father and your brother-in-law.) And with younger moviegoers Allen has never established the kind of following he enjoyed in the '60s and '70s. By now, his movies—small, talky, with no action scenes or special effects, owing less to Hollywood than to arty European masters like Bergman, Fellini and Luis Buñuel—may even be a bit of an acquired taste.

None of this bothers Allen very much. His main regret these days is that he's getting too old to play the romantic lead. "It's an inevitable disaster of aging, and there's nothing I can do about it," he said recently, sitting in the cutting and screening room he rents in a swanky East Side apartment building. (It says "Manhattan Film Center" on the door, but in fact the place used to be a bridge club.) "I can't play the scenes where I'm sitting opposite Diane Keaton or Mia or Dianne Wiest or Judy Davis. If I think of parts for myself now, all I can be is Pop, the lovable doorman backstage at the theater who takes phone numbers for the guys, or the psychiatrist, or the amiable dad at the wedding." He sighed. "I like to be the lover."

Allen is fond of saying that the only thing standing between him and greatness is himself, and likes to come across not as a grand old director but as a self-taught schlepper. He insists, for example, that his characteristic use of long master shots—ones that record an entire scene from a single camera angle—is the result of laziness, not conscious technique. "I don't have a technical attention deficit disorder, but I have an honorary one," he said. "I don't have the patience or the concentration to shoot hours of us talking in a two-shot, and then your single and my single and from over your shoulder and over my shoulder. I like to do as many pages as I can in one take."

"It's an inevitable disaster of aging. If I think of parts for myself now, all I can be is Pop, the lovable doorman, or the amiable Dad at the wedding. I like to be the lover."—Woody Allen

But Brickman maintains that Allen is in fact very canny about every aspect of the filmmaking business. "Some instinct told him what choices to make, like not going to the Academy Awards, keeping himself apart a little, and yet so often delivering on the promise," he said. "He's figured out how to survive in a very hostile and competitive environment."

One of the things Allen is shrewdest about is money. His films typically cost about $18 million to make, which is next to nothing these days. Most of them go on to make a modest profit—if not in the United States, then when they're shown worldwide—and once in a while he has a hit on the order of Midnight in Paris. It's a fairly foolproof formula, even if it seems to have little appeal to the studios now, who would rather make bigger bets in hopes of bigger payouts. Allen's modest budgets enable him to retain total control of his films, something that's seldom granted to directors anymore, and to be flexible when it comes to probably his greatest strength as a director: casting memorable actors in memorable parts. "I'm not in the hit-flop business," he explained. "I make a film and if it's a big hit it's not going to do anything special for me. If it's a disaster it won't ruin anything, because I'll already be working on the next. The people who play the hit-flop game suffer a lot when they have the flops. I don't, but then I don't get the highs either."

Juliet Taylor, Allen's casting director, who has been with him since Love and Death (1975), pointed out that because he makes movies so cheaply, Allen doesn't have to find the kind of bankable star on whom you hang all the financing. "He's very cognizant of how some people like to see certain actors," she said, "but that's not required of him in terms of putting a deal together. He doesn't get too attached to any one idea. He'll want someone, and if it doesn't work out, he'll just pick himself up and go on to someone else."

Allen doesn't pay star salaries. His actors get the union minimum, with no dickering. And yet he has no trouble finding stars to work for him. Actors—women especially—love to appear in Woody Allen films because he makes them look great, writes interesting roles for them and, based on his track record of 11 best actress or best supporting actress nominations so far, there's a decent chance they might get some Oscar attention. "We have very good luck because actors aren't always offered a lot of stimulating things," Allen said. "The kinds of films that get made now don't always have great acting roles. So when people get a chance to really act, even if it's for no money, which it is, they grab it."

Blanchett said she had been hoping to work with Allen for years, and when the phone call came she said yes immediately. Talking about her part in Blue Jasmine, she said: "This kind of opportunity doesn't come along all the time. The character's like a combination of Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare. There's such electricity in the gap between her knowing and not knowing."

"Woody is incredibly restless, and that creates nervous energy on the set. He wants to get it done now." —Cate Blanchett

Though he's good at it, Allen actually hates casting, and his process is so eccentric that, Taylor said, "We warn people beforehand." The whole interview typically lasts about a minute, and in most cases the actors aren't even asked to take a seat. "I find the whole experience very awkward, because I am socially awkward," Allen said. "I don't like meeting people. Once in a while a star will come in and Juliet will say you have to let this person sit down for a minute. This is an argument she and I have all the time. She thinks they want to talk. To me, the person always seems to be relieved. They're happy to be in and out."

On the set, Allen is famously nonintrusive. He doesn't meet the actors beforehand, doesn't discuss their characters with them and doesn't believe in rehearsing. The cast simply shows up on the first day and goes to work. "I've worked with amazing people over the years," Allen said. "Meryl Streep, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Judy Davis and Gena Rowlands, one after the other, these fabulous women—what do I have to teach them? If Cate, or anyone, is doing it too fast or too slow, or too theatrically or not theatrically enough, I might go over and say, 'Why don't you try that a little faster next time?' They do it, and that's the extent of my direction."

By now there is a certain mystique about working with Allen. Actors want desperately to please him, and more often than not, by saying very little he gets exactly the performance he wants. He is always encouraging the actors not to stick to the script, for example—to change, cut or add to their lines however they see fit—and the more he does so, the more they tend to deliver their parts verbatim. Saying that she would do it again in a heartbeat, Blanchett called the experience of working with Allen "brutal and electric." "Everyone is on tippy-toes," she said. "I think he thinks the more he says, the more he screws it up. He wants to get out of the actors' way, and they want as much as they can get of him." She added: "He's incredibly restless, and that creates a sort of nervous energy on the set. He wants to get it done now. He wants all the energy of that day and then he wants to go and have dinner."

"Why does Woody still make movies?" Brickman asked. "Because he can. Because they still let him." He laughed and added: "I don't think people understand the degree to which Woody is relentlessly middle-class. From what I gather he's a good family man. He's a very good father, perhaps surprisingly so. He has a very strong, perhaps overwhelming work ethic. I don't think he knows how not to get up in the morning, get on the treadmill, practice the clarinet, write."

Allen ventured a slightly different explanation. "You know in a mental institution they sometimes give a person some clay or some basket weaving?" he said. "It's the therapy of moviemaking that has been good in my life. If you don't work, it's unhealthy—for me, particularly unhealthy. I could sit here suffering from morbid introspection, ruing my mortality, being anxious. But it's very therapeutic to get up and think, Can I get this actor; does my third act work? All these solvable problems that are delightful puzzles, as opposed to the great puzzles of life that are unsolvable, or that have very bad solutions. So I get pleasure from doing this. It's my version of basket weaving."

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FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #209