Sunrise. Bloom light, and part the skies. Beat out...The heart of the day Glimmer on everything life bringer, until the days last beam, like a fading autumn breeze, is saturated by the growing dusk. Now it is the moons turn to shine.
Murphy O'Malley the alley cat Walked into town in his bowler hat In his right paw he carried his cane He bought some fresh fish and walked home again.
Murphy O'Malley the alley cat Hung up his cane and his bowler hat He cooked his fish and ate it with ale Then licked himself over from whiskers to tail.
Murphy O'Malley the alley cat Read for a while as he lay on his mat He brushed his teeth and got into his bed And dreamed kitty dreams in his alley cat head.
I found a dead Monarch butterfly lying in the garden, it's frail brilliant wings flapping in the cold winter morning breeze and I thought of the transience of all life in the universe and I was grateful for the passing moments I have experienced and all the passing moments I have yet to experience.
Vampire Vultures is a music/culture/film/art/everything you need to know blog I recently discovered. I don't know anything apart from I really like it. Who ever runs it writes great, concise little articles on all kindsa good stuff, so, next time you're board, don't go to your favourite porn site or shoe buying site or whatever...go to http://vampirevultures.wordpress.com/2008/01/ You'll find everything from John Fahey, to Carl Orff, from The Shangrila's to Elis Regina. It'll brighten up your day.
We all know the greatness that was John Peel. The original D. J. He started out in the states, then later aboard pirate radio stations off the stormy coasts of Britain, original hippie scenester, originator and presenter of the legendary "Perfumed Garden," supporter and champion to everyone from Donovan , The Misunderstood and Marc Bolan to David Bowie, The Fall and The White Sripes and all stops inbetween, ground breaking presenter of his formidable night time session shows on BBC Radio One and of course life long obsessive record collector. Well now we get to personally peruse his private and of course extensive collection at http://thespace.org/content/s000004u/albums/index.html?letter=B At the moment they have only got as far as the A's, but drop in and watch the collection grow alphabetically. Fascinating, funny, obscure and heartwarming....just like the great man himself. And he supported Liverpool. Greatness indeed.
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I command these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
As Jack Delaney walked the five minutes to his ex wives house, he felt the beginnings of a rain shower. He approached the door, knocked, and felt the old familiar tightening in his chest.
She came to the door. "You know you don't need to knock, you can just come in." she said.
"That's OK" he replied, "I don't like to just walk in, you know, unannounced."
He took his shoes off as he stepped in and handed her the bag off oranges he had picked earlier that morning. "Here, a gift" he said as he handed them to her. She took them and said thanks.
He said hi to the boy who was playing with Lego bricks on the floor. His son was concentrating hard on putting together what looked like some kind of space ship and hadn't noticed him enter.
He went over and kissed him on the head, then asked if her parents had got away OK.
"Yeah, no problems. They left at two on the dot as usual. You know what dad's like."
He replied with a weak smile, but didn't say anything.
"Do you want a tea"? she asked."No. I just came to give you the oranges and say goodnight, but, thanks anyway".
He sat down on the floor beside the boy and watched him stick the finishing pieces onto the space ship.
"Looks great kiddo", "Thanks", the boy replied without looking up.
He stood up and watched her as she worked in the tiny kitchen, making dinner.
He had been in this same house only the day before. He knew she would be out as it was a Saturday. He had a key and would come over and do odd jobs for her occasionally, when she was at work and the boy was at school.
Walking around the empty house his head was filled with images from the past, when they had lived here as a family. He had walked up the stairs to her bedroom. He sat on the bed and remembered vividly for a moment the day they had bought it. How different things had been then. A different time, different city, different lives. He touched the pillow where she slept and lay down. He felt tired, old, empty. Getting up, he saw a picture he had made for her out of magazine clippings when their son had been born. He picked it up and rubbed the dust of the frame and put it back. Then he went down stairs and left, locking the door behind him and putting the bottom bolt in place so she wouldn't know he had been there.
As he got up she stopped what she was doing. "Have you eaten today?" she asked.
"Sorry?" he replied, pretending he hadn't heard her.
"Do you want to stay for dinner?"
"No, I better go, I've got stuff to do".
He went to say goodbye to the boy who was now sitting at the dining table looking at a toy catalog, but stopped and stood for a moment.
He turned back and looked at her. She was bent over trying to find something in one of the cupboards.
"Can you believe we were once in Love with each other?" he said.
She looked at him and he saw a slight nervous smile appear around her mouth. She didn't say anything. He continued, feeling his breath quickening, "I mean, can you believe how we couldn't bear to be apart, to be away from each other, how much in love we were"?
She looked away. "What is it? Do you need to talk?" she asked.
They looked at each other for a brief moment. He felt his stomach drop and he purposely exhaled and took a sharp breath. "No, no I don't want to talk. What is there to talk About?" She stood in silence looking at him.
He turned to the boy and said goodnight, asked him for a kiss, put on his shoes and went to leave. He heard her say something as he opened the door, but he wasn't listening and didn't reply. He closed the door lightly and stepped out onto the path that led to the street.
By now the rain was coming down heavy. He wrapped his coat around him, noticing the bottom button was missing, and started walking home.
Am I surfacing,
becoming lighter, slow
and still drink sodden.
Coming up for air,
rising, rising, dizzy,
everything spinning
in the dimness,
a diver with the bends,
a bestial, filthy wretched thing,
face stuck to carpet,
in three day drunk
tortured clothes.
Pure, black pain
everywhere, no
prayers or tears will
save me. A victim
of myself, beaten
by my own hand,
bruised and battered,
broken and mad.
No amount of water
can wash away this thirst.
Everything is dried
and petrified.
Horror piles upon horror,
delirium Tremens!
I swat imaginary
flies and they
dissapear, nothing
left, but they
keep coming and
buzzing all night,
visions and voices.
This room is dark
but I can't get it
dark enough to ease
the pain in my skull,
in my soul. I need
to dissolve into
the night, into oblivion.
Shaking, and shocked,
solidly I try to breath,
with a huge, humming
sound in my ears
and I sweat and sweat
and still sweat.
My brain feels like
a day old turd,
floating in a bowl of piss,
and I drop and vomit,
my lungs emptied out
crushed and breathless,
and I faint momentarily,
my legs have gone, knees
buckled and useless.
I come around
freezing cold but cleansed
and pure, if only
for a moment,
like the saints,
all their names
charging through
my brain finishing
with Francis, the
great sufferer,
and his prayer...
"Lord make me a vessel,
off thy peace..."
that's all I can
remember, and I laugh stupidly
with my head resting
on my hand, slowly
sliding to the floor.
And a tiny flower floats
down from the open
window, but with no
breeze behind it.
It is purple
and yellow and I
hold it, and it
seems like it is
enough to help me
through this terrible,
endless night.
I tear off my angry,
soaking, slept in clothes
and fall on the bed.
It is too hot and too cold
and those awful words, raging
in my head, with guilt,
and fear and madness...
never again! never again!
but I'm really saying
never enough...
I know I am destined,
doomed to repeat this
insanity and repeat
it again and again
and it will BE me
and it will be my hell.
We were lying on our stomachs face to face
playing a game of battleships.
It was America versus the Japs, he was America
and I was the Japs (as always when it came to the
Pacific campaign).
As I went to place a dud,
white peg on my attack radar board,
he asked, "How did you get those purple scars
on your arms dad, was it in a war?"
He's past seven years old now, a tricky age.
I had read in a parenting book, that at this
age with boys, honesty was always the best
road to go down. I decided to be honest.
"I did those scars myself, when I was crazy
and sad. You where very young then," I explained.
"How?" he asked.
"Well, you know that sharp sharp knife that you
aren't allowed to use unless a grown up is helping
you? Well that's how."
"Why? he asked.
"Because I was crazy and sad at the time. I cut myself
to stop being crazy and sad."
"Do all grown ups make scars, will I make scars?" he asked.
"I don't know." I replied. "Maybe other grown ups do other things
when they are crazy and sad, but I don't think you will do it."
"Did it hurt dad?" he asked.
"No, not at the time, but it did hurt later," I replied.
"Does it still hurt?" he asked.
"Yep, but in a different way than when I actually cut myself, it hurts
more inside than outside," I tried to explain.
"Can I kiss it better, like when you kiss it better when I hurt
myself playing?" he asked.
"Sure thing," I replied. "That would help."
As he leaned over the two opposing battleship boards,
he took a long good look at my fleet.
He kissed the dark red scar on my bi-cep and returned to his side
of the game.
Two moves later he sank my destroyer!
Kids are much sharper than we give them credit for...he won the game.
This dark star is all sadness, all sorrow.
It is blinding, deafening and unforgiving,
offers no light, no sound and no relief,
to the one caught in it's orbit.
Like a door of thick, heavy glass.
Frosted and warped, distorting all reality,
it reduces the entire cosmos into
a single dot of pure black pain...an atom of despair.
a black hole that sucks everything into
an eternal and endless night,
shooting cold shards of ice
to pierce the heart and freeze the soul.
This dark star is always present,
it has no future and no past.
It is the weight of the whole of creation
pressing and diminishing everything
into a drowned nothing,
in a soulless and drowned world.
"My secrets are of the grave, and must be kept, and this is how I sometimes think of myself...as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world. But the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course, but in the heart..."Extract from "Under The Volcano".
Malcolm Lowry was born near Liverpool, Cheshire, England in 1909 and educated at The Leys School and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He came from a family of four boys all of whom described their mother as cold and distant, something Lowry would carry with him for the rest of his adult life.
Between school and university at the age of 17, Lowry enrolled as a deckhand and sailed to the far east. This experience provided the material for his first novel Ultramarine which was published in 1933. It is the story of a privileged young man and his need to be accepted, by his shipmates. The story takes place during 48-hours on board a tramp steamer, the Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for Hell.” The ship is caught in a furious tempest and the experience of the terrified animals aboard ship, being transported to western Zoo's from the far East brings to life for the first time Lowry's extraordinary prose and his relationship with subjects of death and the descent to hell. Like most of Lowry’s work it is a semi - autobiographical work, and contains themes he would later develop in "Under the Volcano"(1947).
By the time Lowry came to start work on "Under The Volcano" he was 27, living in Mexico, separated from his first wife, and already an alcoholic on the slow hellish slide that would end with his suicide at the age of 48 from an overdose of gin and barbiturate sleeping tablets.
"Under The Volcano" was published in 1947 after many rejections and re-writes, and at the time was hailed as the successor to James Joyces "Ulysees". Lowry was described as a genius, but all of this merely added to his unabated alcoholism and mental instability. He re-married and moved to British Colombia, settling in a lakeside cabin which eventually burnt down. Lowry was a haunted man and it was this interior, hellish landscape that he couldn't escape from no matter where he settled.
Despite the agonies of his addiction to alcohol, Lowry wrote and worked nearly constantly. In many ways, the only other artist to compare Lowry to, in his self destruction and constant seeking for salvation from himself, is the painter Jackson Pollock. The difference being that it is regarded Pollock created his best work during a long period of abstinence from alcohol, where as alcohol fueled and fired Lowry's writing. Indeed it has been said of "Under The Volcano", that no other book captures the life of the alcoholic quite as acutely and in such raw and unnerving detail.
Of Lowry's other work, the novella "Lunar Caustic" really brings home the true cost of Lowry's alcoholism. It’s the story of Bill Plantagenet who, after a long night’s drinking, awakens to find himself in New York’s notorious Bellevue psychiatric hospital (based on events taken from Lowry's earlier life in New York) surrounded by the truly dispossessed and insane. The story is as much about Lowry as it is about the “anxieties of the age he lived in.” Early versions were published in literary magazines, and Lowry eventually created a novella he thought too painful to publish in his own lifetime.
Malcolm Lowry seems to have slipped into obscurity when compared to other writer's of his generation, perhaps owing to his short life and relatively small amount of printed work, but it is undeniable that "Under The Volcano" is indeed a work of genius, to be read and re-read, and that no other work exists like it to this day.
In 1976, Malcolm Lowry's life and his greatest work were the subject of an Oscar nominated documentary, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. It is a brilliantly paced and unflinching look at the man, his life, his work and the demons that possessed and drove him. With readings from the late Richard Burton and interviews with family members, colleagues, friends and his second wife Marjorie Bonner, the film brings Lowry's pain and neurosis to life in vivid and unsettling detail. To truly understand the work and life off this great writer, and his 'dark night of the soul', read "Under The Volcano", then read it again.
He stands at the mirror and doesn't like what he sees, hates it and turns away. After a few minutes he drops his shoulders and turns back and faces himself, looks himself in those grey green eyes for a long time and sees nothing.
He rubs his coarse chin, picks up the toothbrush and starts to clean his teeth. The water brings a sharp pain to the broken tooth, the decaying tooth, a thought passes through his mind "You deserve this pain, this decay. You deserve THIS".
He begins the routine, washing his hands. The icy water is a shock, he starts to turn on the hot water tap but turns it off again. "You don't deserve hot water, You don't deserve warmth or comfort. You're a bastard, you're a drunk, you're a waste. You don't deserve anything"!
He washes his face in the cold water and as he rinses he sees his sons tiny toothbrush in the cup on the edge of the sink, "You're a bad father, you're a failure, a shit, a selfish, impatient asshole, not a man, not a person, you're nothing"
He rubs his face dry and feels a familiar wave of heavy remorse settle on his chest. He sighs loudly, turns off the light and moves towards the bedroom. Their is a weight now in his stomach, a ball of pure black hate. Hate for this bed, hate for this night, hate for this body, hate for this life. "You are unlovable, you are ugly, unbearable. You'll be alone forever, live alone, die alone and it's all you deserve".
"Stop...stop"! he says out loud, and then, "Just stop" in a quiet, defeated voice. He turns out the light and gets into bed, staring into the darkness and the silence for a long time. Finally he closes his eyes and allows himself to sleep.
From the title it's pretty obvious what it's about. Take a stroll down 'rock's' many highways and discover the role of the acoustic guitar in the making of modern music. Everyone from Donovan to Albert Lee to Ray Davies have their say. Excellent documentary, and as Johnny Marr says, "If you can't play acoustic, you're not a guitarist!
Nik Cohn’s written the best pop books ever. I Am The Greatest, Says Johnny Angelo, Awopbopaloobop, Today There Are No Gentlemen, and so on. That’s not news. What did surprise people though was his 2005 book, Triksta, on life and death and New Orleans rap. It was an unexpected treat, and it worked ridiculously well.
There’s a lovely bit in Triksta where Cohn describes hearing the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ for the first time on a cool, bright morning in 1979 – “I thought it was inspired the freshest thing I’d heard in years and started rocking to that ‘Good Times’ beat in front of the Planter’s Peanut shop.” His girlfriend is appalled, and by the end of the day is no longer his girl, but Nik’s got a new love.
Now in many ways the person to blame for all this is Sylvia Robinson. There’s a lot of stories out there about this, but the best one explains how sometime in 1979 at a family birthday party at a Bronx disco Sylvia witnessed the kids rocking to DJs chatting over records, and decided there might be something in this. She put together her own rap group, called them the Sugarhill Gang, put together a label Sugarhill with her husband, got a single called ‘Rapper’s Delight’ recorded, stuck it out on a 12”, and it sold like hot cakes. Rap and hip hop never looked back.
Sylvia Robinson is one of the great pop figures. She would still be one of the great pop figures if the only thing she’d been involved in was the ‘Love Is Strange’ hit for Mickey & Sylvia back in the r’n’r ‘50s. What a song! One of the great moments of cinema history is Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen on the run in Badlands, dancing away to ‘Love Is Strange’. The guitar wheedles and needles, and the singers vamp it up, with Sylvia coolly coquettish. And like Barry Gifford wrote about the film Badlands, “it meanders but it’s meaningful as hell”.
After a string of great pop-light Bo Diddley-esque hits as part of Mickey & Sylvia, we’d next see Sylvia again in the late ‘60s when with her husband Joe Robinson she started the All Platinum group of labels, releasing a fantastic flurry of soul/disco records for years to come. There were hugely successful and highly influential compilations of All Platinum singles, that contained absolute classics like ‘Hypertension’ by Calender, ‘I Dig Your Act’ by the Whatnauts, Brother to Brother’s cover of ‘In The Bottle’, and the phenomenal deep soul of Linda Jones’ ‘Your Precious Love’. Many of the All Platinum hits were written by Sylvia. Maybe her finest moment as a writer was the contagious ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ by Shirley & Company (and incidentally Shirley too was an r’n’r survivor being the Shirley of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ fame). But her closest association was with the close harmony soul group, the Moments, for whom Shirley wrote many gems before their fantastic populist-disco hits like ‘Girls’, ‘Jack In The Box’, and ‘Dolly My Love’. Sylvia herself would score a string of hits with what can best be described in the words of one of these as Soul ‘Je T’Aime’s.
So Sugarhill took off in a way that could not have been expected. Hip hop scholars will no doubt explain how what Sylvia put out initially on Sugarhill was not exactly cutting edge, was indeed shamelessly stolen, and that they did not go about their business in an upright and admirable way, but the fact remains she had the vision to get on and do something. And there’s no disputing the fact that the great Sugarhill releases stand the test of time, and indeed have grown more charming, in the same way the rawest of rockabilly or garage punk records have.
The most famous of the early rap releases are probably those of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the holy trinity of ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster on the Wheels of Steel’, ‘The Message’, and ‘White Lines’. ‘The Message’ still has the power to shock. As Nik Cohn rightly writes: “For rap, all roads lead back to this. In the course of its three minutes and ten seconds, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, with Melle Mel on the mic, mapped out the hip hop universe. Everything that’s come since can be measured against the vistas it opened up, the promises it implied. More than party music, here was a world. ‘The Message’ was lived, every grimy, suffering bar of it”. This, after all, was what punk was supposed to be.
But Sugarhill was about more than rap, and the early days of hip hop. Sylvia maintained her connections with soul traditions, and the label issued many sides that could have been on All Platinum too. These included recordings by the great soul singer Candi Staton, in one of the several stages of a great career that has broached deep country soul, glorious disco, straight gospel, through her regular reappearances in the charts with the magical ‘You’ve Got The Love’, to her renaissance with Honest Jons in 2006. Another soul singer who also found her voice at Sugarhill was Angie Stone, then a member of the femme-rap trio Sequence. Sugarhill also provided a temporary home for Washington go-go outfit Trouble Funk, and took advantage of hip hop’s diversion into electro experimentation, courtesy of her son’s involvement in the West Street Mob.
Should anyone be brave enough to look down on the populism of Sugarhill they should be reminded that the label’s house band would continue to send ripples through the most adventurous outreaches of music for years to come. The musicians on many a Sugarhill release included Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbush, and Skip McDonald, who would go on to work most importantly with Adrian Sherwood as part of Tackhead, and on many of the On-U Sounds recordings. The three would also play together as the Mafia, backing Mark Stewart on his post-Pop Group recordings.
Mark Stewart still talks excitedly how he was lucky enough to spend time in New York as the ‘70s became the ‘80s, rubbing shoulders with No Wavers like DNA and James Chance and the Contortions, and the hip hop pioneers like the Sugarhill crew and Afrika Bambaataa, and the areas where these cultures collided as captured in the Jean Michel Basquiat film Downtown 81. You could cite Grandmaster Flash’s ungracious but highly effective appropriation of Liquid Liquid’s ‘Cavern’ for the (ahem) phenomenal ‘White Lines’, but that may lead into discussion of the more unpleasant business practices of Sugarhill, and indeed the legal dispute over the use of the ‘Cavern’ rhythm led to the demise of the great New York underground 99 label.
There at the end of Downtown 81 there is ‘Beat Bop’ by Rammelzee vs K Rob, a taste of the future, described in the liner notes to the Depth Charge compilation Beat Classic by David Toop as a “unique immersion into a cyberian echozone of 808 beatbox, latin percussion, slow funk bass and guitar, soaring droning violin and Rammelzee’s streaming unconscious word cutting, swooping in and out of reverb, in and out of perfect nonsense and street reality”. Within a short space of time Sugarhill was overtaken in the hip hop stakes, and Sylvia decided the fun was gone. But the echoes resonate still. (Text source "Caught by the River")
Sylvia Robinson, March 6, 1936 – September 29, 2011
Where it all began.."Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia
You are a well fed, bold and barking Mallard duck, and you approach at an alarming speed. I give you bread, I give you banana, and that's all I have to offer. You gobble up the bread, and hesitantly eat the banana from my hand, lightly nipping my finger, snapping your beak for more. That is all I have to give you Mallard, so, I read to you from a book of poetry by Raymond Carver. You "quack quack" and turn away. "Harsh critic", I say, as you waddle to the next customer. Poetry will never feed a duck.
They were the best, they still are the best and always will be the best. The Beatles on The David Frost show in 1968. David's a bit lost as John chants David Frost at him while the rest of the boys generally do what they like. This footage is priceless, the song itself, the crowd singalong, Paul's vocals, Ringo's lime green suit, George's Fender 6, the old guy in the uniform and the girl in the white dress standing beside Paul, the eye contact between John and Paul and John's obvious enthusiasm as he sings a strums along...timeless and utterly joyous.
Jackson Pollock. "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement"
Andy Warhol. "Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide wether it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it and while they're deciding, make even more art"
