reeling and writhing

great blog writing - Szirtes on Ian Dury

Anglo-Hungarian poet George Szirtes often posts huge chunks of his latest translation on his blog, a free universal lunch if there ever was one. For a break, he writes sizzling stuff like this, because he can.

Dury was never quite punk. Punk felt to me like an intellectual gesture, a feeling that was a thought. It immediately spawned writing and theory. In that sense - in the sense that it was theoretical - it wasn't fully English, not, at any rate, as I think of English. Dury, though an educated man - Royal College of Art, and clear references to reading - was more belly-wit and in many ways more troubling than punk. Punk aggression was a fully articulated conscious gesture. Dury's demon worked its way through the body into word, heavy blurty body-words that needed an agile body music like jazz funk.

I liked the struggle, the way the demon got smart without losing its energy. The struggle was with the chains of the body. The struggle gave him energy, and the energy gave him wit. Struggle, energy and wit made for exhilaration. The best songs - and there are probably not that many of the best ones - I find enormously exhilarating. How much of that is down to Chas Jankel and the Blockheads? A great deal.

Und so weiter.

essaying the lost and found: Robert Forster in the (old) Monthly

"When did you write that? How did you happen ... to ... uh ..." The nervous and incredulous male voice stops there on the tape. It's 1954, and Connie Converse, the singer and songwriter who has elicited this response, has just recorded one of her songs onto the reel-to-reel. Fifty-five years later the quality of the song is undeniable and the questions put to her still have a strange poignancy. How did she write these songs? How did it happen that at the great cultural crossroads of postwar New York there was a lone woman writing songs on guitar with a sophistication of lyric and melody unmatched by any other folk songwriter of the time? It stumped the man who was recording her, and her answers, if she gave any, aren't on the tape.

Lost Women Found | The Monthly by Robert Forster. Link courtesy of his excellent personal website, where you can find links to quite a lot of his writings.

Crossposted at mulberry road.

playing their own trumpets because 'they're worth it'

The Australian Chamber Orchestra is attracting some terrific reviews in the States - was I surprised, of course not. Bravo. Not only that, there's plenty of Web 2.0 goodness on their excellent blog.

ACO | Vivacious from Australian Chamber Orchestra on Vimeo.

Check out this video of Helena Rathbone, principal second violin, and director Richard Tognetti, speaking about their completed Four Seasons tour. You could do worse things with your time than click through all their videos. You could.

ur chamber orchestra is so 2.0

In my best Bill Bailey voice I said, "Pick Me, Pick Me, Pick Me". (If someone wants to find me the contraband YouTube clip to go with that, they can keep it. I do not copy 'the quality' online.)

But they didn't pick me to get free tix and do this, probably because I didn't heed the 25 word limit on the application -and rather foolishly suggested that "well, I might go anyway".

Anyway, enough about me - the Australian Chamber Orchestra's audience reviews of The Red Tree can be found here.

shelving demons

The old brain is, if not reeling this week, occasionally struggling to recalibrate. Liberals falling like mountain ash in a high wind, people openly denouncing WorkChoices in post offices - who'd a thunk it this time last week? David has written one of his finest to mark the occasion (and Ampersand Duck has drawn for it as well.)

Till the end of the year you can cast your vote for a book cover at the Book Design Review blog. Some speccies there, including Marina Lewycka's latest, Strawberry Fields. Link via Chekhov's Mistress.

From Alex Ross's blog comes this extract from a book on pop which gives some background on Roberta Flack's classical training.

I would demur, however, at this writer's claim that Flack 's 'distinctively spare arrangements, predilection for spaciousness, and cool reflective tone' stem from an understanding of Lizst - spots of Bach, yes, but Lizst?

The Free Range Librarian, K. G. Schneider, (who contrary to my earlier posting, is not interchangeable with Jessamyn West, no matter how wonderful I believe they both are) will tell you here why Library Thing is the goods, and why authors should be members. (Don't go anywhere near Shelfari.)

Visited:

Lisa Gorton's launch, Thursday 29 November and heard Chris Wallace Crabbe say that her work in her first collection is 'an achievement that glides so smoothly that you get out of winter in a day,' a line from one of the poems in her first collection, Press Release.
I am surprised it is the first, I seem to have been reading her poems around the traps for ever.

And finally, was delighted by:

this post, book designer Ampersand Duck again, at Sarsaparilla on the design of Michelle de Kretser's new book, The Lost Dog.

everybody got to swing

News of Don Burrows' recent admission to the Jazz Hall Of Fame has jogged my memory about a fabulous evening I had last year...I'm ashamed to have filed it away and forgotten about it, but it was a magnificent occasion and I was delighted to find I hadn't deleted the post I did write later that year.

In July last year Blackburn High School celebrated its 50th birthday in style at 'The Centre' in Ivanhoe (which was, I believe, more happily known in past days as the Heidelberg Town Hall and the site of weekly dances in the fifties). To mark the occasion and to acknowledge Blackburn High's unique and enduring contribution to music education in the state of Victoria, (something I have admired from a neighbouring suburb for some time) copies of some original manuscripts from the Benny Goodman music archive at Yale were made available to the school stage band and an "All-Stars" alumni band to perform for a capacity crowd.

We arrived just after opening time and walked through the lovely Deco lobby of the 'Centre' to the toe-tapping strains of Miller's 'In the Mood',  glimpsing the school band in full flow through the open doors.

My older daughter had a debutantes' ball at this hall seven years  ago, so I knew it had already been lovingly restored to something approaching its former glory. I knew there would be nibbles and drinks for our $60 tickets, that my swing- and jazz-loving younger daughter, who had alerted me just in time for us to snap said tickets up, was not really dressed for dancing but was going to have a ball all the same.

I even hoped she might take swing classes after seeing some of the Melbourne Swing Club go through their paces - and was intrigued to notice through the night that very few of them had foxtrot steps in their repertoire, preferring instead to hit the floor with remixed swing as the mood took them.

Burrows, of course, is renowned for his contribution to music education in Australia, and didn't just frontline with both bands, but spent a day working with the school band before the event, which probably helps to explain the astonishing tone a VCE trumpeter called Henrik Beasy produced in his solo excursions. Burrows didn't look anywhere near as old as he does in the photo in The Age, which does him a disservice - he was as fresh as a daisy all night long and MC'd the alumni band performance with ease and delight. He spent a good couple of hours between numbers chatting amiably to the milling crowd, without being the slightest bit precious about noises from the dance floor,  about his memories of swing, of Benny Goodman, of Dizzy Gillespie and other things I wish I'd written down the next morning.

He talked about relatives going to dances, about standing outside a dance hall as a twelve year old listening to the band through the windows and wondering what instrument he would have to learn to play to get a gig inside. There was a social, happy buzz in the air I've probably never felt at a rock gig - people mingling, looking at an amazing older couple from the swing club strut their stuff: people got up and moved without getting twisted about their jive steps, it was sweet, lively fun and all over too soon.

Burrows provided some personal photographs for the souvenir program, one showing a line of musos in dinner suits with a band leader and a couple of lady admirers, 'the boys and gals outside Sammy Lee's Restaurant, Pott's Point 1944. Don is on the left.' (The quality is not terrific or I would try to get it online.) You'll have to take my word for it that a row of Australian jazz players and their ladies in full evening dress, laughing in the street on a bright night in wartime Sydney helped put us all pretty much 'in the mood'.
The Goodman playlist included Let's Dance, Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day, Rosetta,
Life Goes to a Party, Don't Be That Way, The Earl, Roll 'Em, Flyin' Home, You Turned The Tables On Me, Gotta Be This Or That, I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart, On A Misty Night, Incognito, Seven Come Eleven, Goodbye, and Sing Sing Sing Parts 1 and 2.

Truly a night to remember - if that was the Saturday dance of yesteryear, why would you miss it?

preoccupied (and blogging the day away)

I''ve had a seriously tense morning. Jory Desjardins and I had a conversation about human legacy a while back - a family is one hell of a legacy sometimes. One wonders how bad writing a book could possibly be...

I'm winding down from a session with the day centre, planning for my son's next 12 months there, which took all the diplomacy I could possibly muster - and then some. The adult training industry sends me reeling sometimes. So this is a grab bag of the last week's snatches and titbits.

From Elisa Camahort's blog, this link to Hip and Zen about testing out Starbuck's fair trade coffee assertion. I wouldn't give them the custom myself, as we like our coffee here in Melbourne (snark snark), and we also like our shops to be small and personable - but if you usually go there, do ask them for the fair trade blend and let other bloggers know what answer you get. Create some buzz out there...

I'm just about over coffee myself, having realised four lattes a week is also four cups of full cream milk I didn't really need, and it's making me thirsty in my old age. Tea - Russian Caravan, English brekky, camomile after lunch, and for very special occasions, Terry's Mix from a magnificent mail order service in Sassafras here, is all hitting the spot. However I am absurdly, foolishly choofed with myself as I have always considered Atomica on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, to serve some superb stuff - and a food guide has recently suggested theirs is the best coffee on the strip. So snobby snob coffee snob.

In other news, here's a great link from Robert Nagle at Idiotprogrammer to a lovely piece on Brian Eno, and (among other engrossing things), how he came to write the start up music for Windows.

And just in case anyone gives a shit, I've been amassing a page of links for a professor of media studies up in Sydney who is not amused at the somewhat capricious way bloggers distinguish between what they publish on their blogs and what is written in the paper or online. And that's all I want to say about the squirrel, the nut, the barber and the campus right now. She is also still working as a print journo, so in a few weeks time I'm sending her a mass of material to look through and draw her own conclusions.

I'm also going to tell her that I'll use the same material myself if the mood takes me, to write something here or in another publication. I think how we both approach the matter would make for an interesting comparison - also I want to make sure she does her own research! (Whether I get around to it, or fail to be tough enough over her information seeking strategies, is quite another question altogether.) It is rather fascinating, though, that both these blogging hullabaloos blew up at the same time across two different continents - and that I have links to both of them. Not many degrees of separation there.

late night bill should introduce himself, is he a man of wealth and taste?

There's a brand new blog in town which has posted the entire article I just read in today's Green Guide (The Age TV guide) about what is most probably the Stones' last blast, "Sweet Neo-Con". (Late Night Bill is either a media hack or he's a Victorian who is stalking the Stones.)

Sandwiched in between posts on the first concert of their tour, the article is followed by a review of said concert with a nice remark on the stage pyrotechnics:

Playing on the band's new CD, "A Bigger Bang," the live show starts with an animated video of a molten core exploding. After an initial shower of rocks and debris, it starts firing out guitars and a Rolling Stones tongue.

At a time when anti-evolutionists are pushing a notion called "intelligent design," this video reminds us that, whomever is credited with creating the world must at some point explain the Rolling Stones. In the case of the intelligent-design crowd, I want a tape of that presentation.

The Stones will not go gently into that good night - but they're not exactly lining up to play Baghdad either. In fact they are not even performing the inflammatory ditty on the US leg of their tour for fear of being 'Dixie-chicked' as one commentator put it.

Late Night Bill's blog has only been up for two days, yet came up as third search result when I went into Technorati to look for 'Rolling stones sweet neo-con'. Glory is sweet but brief - it is pretty old news now, having just made it into print in Australia.

Here's another post from the shades of Callimachus, on a different kind of protest song ( a fair way down the page, after the Rolling Stones stuff).

How does something like this compare with the music cut in a comfy studio - 'Tenting Tonight', by the way, was more of a concert song which was adopted by the Union soldiers who heard it performed at the battlefield by its  composer, concert ballad singer Walter Kittredge, who was deferred from army service. My source says it was so popular in both armies that 'officers had to restrain their men from singing it at night because they would divulge their positions on the field' (Singing Soldiers: A History of the Civil War in Song, Paul Glass and Louis Singer).

let's face the music and dance

Firstly let's thank Anne for this interlude, which has taken me most agreeably from less pleasant activities. Six questions to answer, five people to pass them on to. Sounds reasonable enough...!!They're in small print because you really shouldn't get me started on music, my inner Cameron Crowe should just stay right where he is.

1. The person who passed the baton to you.

Anne of Fernham ( which is sounding Anglo-Norman to me this evening, but she’s not. Well, not as far as I know, anyway.)

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

Not sure actually – I’m not into downloading, there have to be some of us around to keep Malvolio alive and kicking you know.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

That is a very good question, I think it could have been Return of the Grievous Angel, a tribute album to Gram Parsons by the likes of Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Emmylou Harris and Beck. Surprisingly, wonderfully good, check out the 'noughties version of ‘Las Vegas’. UP LOUD.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.

If music is playing I prefer to listen to it or engage with it in some 'meaningful' way –  that means foxtrot, jig about in an unseemly fashion, or sing along. I’m a failed muso, really, writing is my mistress as Bud might say. If it's playing while I'm writing I don't hear it - and if it's playing when I'm cleaning the shower, God help the shower because I won't.

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)

I used to sing a lot, ( in church for God’s sake – literally), and would love a dollar for every time I sang Paul Stookey’s 'Wedding Song' in the 70s and early 80s. Now I am really embarrassed as I find that he would have liked a dollar too – sorry Paul, we sang for peanuts. Treely ruly. Once I received a makeup mirror as payment for my services ( yep, we were that bad).

So the concept of musical favourites, like books, is pretty alien to me really. How does one choose?

One of the only real tear-jerker arias I know is ‘Ebben, lo cantando’ from Catalani’s opera, La Wally. We have the music in a collection of art songs in the house - needless to say, I’m not in training right now. But it is an aria that will never be sung professionally completely in character, shall we say – the speaker is a 15 year old ‘wild child’ who is running away from home. And the opera contains an avalanche, which makes it difficult to stage as well.Truly a corker. Time I bought the ‘Diva’ soundtrack, as Wilhelmina Wiggins-Fernandez does not seem to have released it in any other collections. “O mio madre..”

I love dancing, have been known to shuffle my shoes in clothing stores, no less, and have a tape of special warmup tunes for cold days ( or shower -cleaning ones) – favourite jives include Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’, James ‘Sit Down’ and The Vines ‘Gotta Get OuttatheWay’.

I really enjoy 'Return of the Grievous Angel,' (preferably Gram and Emmylou), I have to say, that’s a damn good tune.

That man on the radio won’t leave me alone…

Shit, man, that’s five already – see what I mean? That’s impossible, I could write about music all night. Did I mention Schumann’s Dichterliebe op. 42? Jimmy and Robert ‘Unledded’ playing “Since I’ve Been Loving You” with an orchestra? Radiohead , Polly Harvey (yup, seen them both live)?? That chorus from The Gondoliers, ‘Then away they go to an island fair, That lies in a southern sea…’ Oh, and did I mention that our high school’s Duke of Plaza Toro is now a political analyst? And that my personal requests for funeral music include the Beatles 'Blackbird' and Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'Lennie'? Ah, well, whatever, never mind...

6.The five people to whom you will ‘pass the musical baton.’

Fran from library school because we are both of uncertain age, as the French say, and possess a rich musical heritage thereby; Lauren Snyder of Jewishy Irishy, who may already have done such a thing and have to pass; Kent, a history student from Adelaide who is bound to have something interesting up his sleeve to share; Ron from the Blue Mountains. Also Perry Middlemiss and Georgina –safety in numbers and all that.

* And can I just say that the spacing in this post is giving me a hard time. Believe me, I tried, I really did.