‘The Room Was Humming Harder . . .’

 by whiteray

The death nine days ago of Gary Brooker of the British group Procol Harum reminded me of this piece I wrote about fifteen years ago. I have a sense that Brooker, despite a career in music and performing that lasted almost fifty years – his last cited contribution at Wikipedia is for some work on a 2005 album by Kate Bush – will be most remembered for being the co-composer, with Matthew Fisher, of “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” which went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and to No. 5 in the U.S. in 1967. (I've updated a few things and made a few other changes.)

It was the summer of 1967, and I was doing my normal eight-week stint in summer school, an enrichment program designed to provide kids a chance to learn things they wouldn’t be exposed to during the school year. So, just as I had for the nine months preceding, I spent another two months hauling myself every day to the bus stop a block north of our house and riding the two miles to South Junior High for mornings of enrichment. 

On one of my rides home during that summer, someone had a radio on the bus tuned to one of the two Twin Cities’ Top 40 stations, almost certainly KDWB. This might have been a regular thing, music in the back of the bus, but I’m not sure. What I am certain of is that I listened with the other kids that day as the radio played the strangest-sounding song any of us had maybe ever heard. 

It began with a ponderous and spooky organ solo, with drums and cymbals providing punctuation. And then a reedy voice entered: “We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor . . .” It was, of course, Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.” 

We looked at each other, then back at the radio as the voice went on to tell a surreal tale in a setting that combined the ancient world with the medieval, although I doubt that any of us could place it that accurately back then. We just knew it wasn’t in our time: 

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray 

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale 

She said “There is no reason
And the truth is plain to see”
But I wandered through my playing cards
And would not let her be
One of sixteen vestal virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
And although my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed 

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a white shade of pale 

And so it was . . . 

What did it mean? We had no idea, but it was strange . . . and it was cool. We liked it a lot, even I, who was still a couple of years away from digging very deeply into pop and the Top 40. Over the years, the meaning of the words – written by Keith Reid – has been assessed maybe way too many times. At its website, Procol Harum provides a page with links to various discussions of the song. And there one finds a further link to a discussion of the lyrics, where listeners and fans – who seem to call themselves “Palers” – indulge themselves in deep and far-fetched theorizing. 

The last word on the lyrics, it would seem, comes from the top of that page of theories, where one finds organist Matthew Fisher’s comment from an interview with the BBC: 

“I don’t know what they mean. It’s never bothered me that I don’t know what they mean. This is what I find rather hard, that, especially in America, people are terribly hung up about lyrics and they’ve got to know what they mean, and they say, ‘I know, I’ve figured out what these lyrics mean.’ I don’t give a damn what they mean. You know, they sound great . . . that’s all they have to do.” 

The song was so odd, so different from anything on radio at the time, that beyond its lyrics, it spawned another discussion: Where did the music come from? Was it a lift from a classical piece? If so, which one? (Something by Bach was always considered most likely.) 

I recall reading a piece about the song that included a quotation from a fellow who at the time was a classical music critic for a London newspaper. He said that he and a colleague spent an entire morning whistling the melody from “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” back and forth to each other before deciding that it probably wasn’t Bach but a theme that sounded very much like his work. 

And that’s pretty much the case. At the Procol Harum website, there’s an excerpt from a 1992 radio interview with Fisher in which he notes that the song certainly refers to two Bach pieces but is nevertheless an original work. Those pieces are “Air For The G String” and the choral piece titled in English “Sleepers, Awake!” For those so inclined, the Procol Harum website also provides a link to Bach expert Bernard S. Greenberg’s formal analysis of “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” and its links to the two Bach pieces. (That analysis is preserved – at least for the time being – at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) 

Of course, the other bus riders and I didn’t know all that as we listened for the first time to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on that bus carrying us home from summer school. It was just a cool song. And it still is.

Sundries

It's been a week, here on planet Earth. I've tried not to read too much news. War again. And while it is gearing up, for those of us not directly affected, life moves on, even if under a cloud of anxiety. We're doing the laundry, making the meals, putting children to bed.  It makes no sense that in other rooms, outrageously, war is planned. Who are these monsters? I wish more people asked that question. Because I think getting answers to that question could change things for humanity more than anything. If we could be patient and find out.

Today I read evidence that across the globe humans are doing what they can to stop it. People you might not agree with are making efforts.  One friend posted that pornhub has blocked all Russian accounts. When attempting a log in they'll see a Ukrainian flag. Other Facebook users have posted tips on how to mess up army tanks, breweries in the Ukraine are ...modifying their product to help families protect themselves from invasion.... is it possible that everyday people may somehow be able to change this frightening scenario?   I hope so. Russians are protesting in large numbers. May all of it continue and be effective. I remember in the Reagan 80's during the cold war, the TV movie, The Day After,  came out. My housemates and I watched it. I remember in the movie, medical staff were becoming sick from radiation poisoning, after a nuclear attack by global superpowers. It was harrowing to watch, but the most memorable images, to me, were the people in various daily activities suddenly becoming x-rays, before our eyes. Weddings suddenly gone, the brides, children, babies, just vaporizing.

 And we keep playing with it, war. Why? The vast majority of us highly disapprove of war. 

Can we possibly make ourselves formidable? Able to turn the mineral hunting, gas pipe swindling money grubbers away from their pursuits? Are we able to make our governments accountable to us?

I doubt it. And yet I hope so.

My Art Influences: Part 2 - Esther

Last week I began a list of artists whose work I’d been greatly inspired by. Today’s blog is the second part. Some say Wilde, but whoever coined the phrase “Talent borrows, genius steals” is a friend of mine. Well after a certain point I always wanted my drawings to have the look of Victorian book illustrations & I liked the vibe of Connie Jude, Mervyn Peake & Gustave Doré. I liked the controlled nature of their lines. I was never able to go wild & free with a mark, as in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon or Ralph Steadman, no matter how much I admire them. & although I’ve tried being a painter, I feel closer to the work with a pen than I do with a brush. I go back & dabble now & then, but it never takes hold, in spite of the horrific mistakes you can end up making with ink. There’s almost always a point in any work where I’m problem-solving my way out of an inky error. Never mind – if it wasn’t for these guys, I might never have progressed. What can I say? I’m the sum of what I encounter & I’m forever grateful…

Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), The Senseless Seven, 1911

v.

Krampus, 2015

Like Harry Clarke, Spare had a lot of strings to his bow. Not only was he a top class illustrator but his paintings reach levels of realism that are almost unbelievable. But as I’ve noted in a previous blog, he was rarely taken as seriously has he should have been due to his deep interest in the occult & esoteric. As I’ve also noted, I was aware of his work from a very young age & although it was strange & a bit frightening (it’s still pretty unsettling), it was also deeply compelling. This is how it often works, isn’t it? You know you should look away, but you are desperate to see more. & he planted something in my brain. Spare goes big on the satyrs, the mythical & horned creatures & I must admit, I like a skull myself. Many years ago, my partner said, “Skulls are fun to draw,” & he was absolutely right. They are fun to draw & I stuff them in wherever I can, as seen here. My partner & I have always taken turns to design Christmas cards each year & Krampus was a drawing for an alternative Christmas card for 2015.

Abigail Larson (b. 1988), Alice, 2010

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Tinkerbell’s Dream, 2013

I’m no colourist. I’m really not comfortable using colour & for a while, I was looking to the work of Abigail Larson for help & inspiration. I did see it largely as an open experiment – online, I’d credit her vision & admit what I was doing. I even messaged her to say so & she seemed pleased & enthusiastic that she’d inspired me, bless her. Although I like the grumpiness of my Tinkerbell (she’s a little brat), the colour still makes my teeth itch & Abigail is just so much better at it. Just be glad you’re not seeing my oil paintings.

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), Zodiac, 1897

v.

Crispian Mills, 2016

It’s about the circles. Art Nouveau is good in terms of line & but some of it’s too cheesy for me, too blousy, too colourful. If there’s no darkness with the light, it rarely speaks to me. My artwork is determinedly non-blousy, although this piece is perhaps as blousy as I get. You can probably see more borrowing from Abigail Larson’s colour scheme. But there are elements of line & shape, even a little pattern that I look to in Mucha’s work. Especially the circles. I’ve always liked the ideas & frankly the mathematics of a circle. The infinity, what happens when you overlap them, how other shapes such as stars can be made using them. Even Leonardo showed us the fun you can have with a circle.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), Title page for Haus Eines Kunstfreundes, c. 1901?

v. 

Tribute, 2014

Okay, so this was supposed to be a lift of some of CRM’s motifs & styles & was made to try to raise funds for the Glasgow School of Art the FIRST time it was burned down. But some of the sweeping lines & definitely the tiny squares (also a Wonderland thing) feature widely in lots of my artwork. CRM’s poster design work is often forgotten or placed along with his wife Margaret’s similar works, but it’s very clean & clear. For instance, this piece has quite an unusual composition for its purpose & it’s unmistakably his style. They say he had dyslexia & came up with this font as a result. It’s one of these stories I’d definitely like to be true. I remember unrepentantly overusing it when I was doing Higher Art at school. 

Richey Beckett (b. 1980), The Raven, c. 2015

v.

Sweetheart Tattoo (from the Ten Plagues series – the plague of flies), 2014

Of all contemporary artists Richey is by far the most influential on my own work. I was immediately drawn to him (no pun intended) because of the monochrome & the very, very fiddly nature of the detail. What I’ve filched from him is the concept of having layers or planes within the work to show depth. Although my own pieces are very flat & look very flat & usually have little to do with perspective at all, I like to have depth. So for instance, rather than just draw a person with a background, I’d have something passing in front of them, as if it was flitting through the air, such as an insect or raindrop or smoke. This idea of planes of space didn’t really occur to me much until I came across Richey’s work & then I wanted to incorporate it into everything else I did. He does a lot of work for bands: posters, one-off print runs, record covers & it’s all of an incredibly, consistently brilliant standard. I also admire his adherence to creating works that contain nothing “industrial” but stick to the “organic.”

That would have been that, except that initially I’d thought to use the following for the influence of Richey Beckett, a 2017 portrait of singer Mark Lanegan. I decided to swap it out thinking “Sweetheart Tattoo” did the comparison better. I’ve stuck with that, but Lanegan died this week. Until I looked this week though, I’d forgotten I’d given him a barbed wire crown of thorns. It’s devastating that such a wonderful voice (both in song & the written word) & an artist so full of heart has gone. Farewell to a no-patience-for-fakes-or-fools soul.

What's To Watch? - Feb 25 - ...and Pirates, Too!

 

     Locally, Friday's starting with a fresh, flash-coating of ice, being played over by a light rain with the air temperature just a degree above freezing. This is making my more front-loaded work week, horribly long work Thursday, and decision to do any data mop-ups remotely this morning, all seem wise choices.
     A quick couple of notes on last week's offerings:
         Free Guy turned out to be good, light fun, as advertised, with several, little, pop cultural elements in the mix. I wanted something ultimately feel-good, and it worked well enough as that that I was forgiving of some late-movie time-bending.
         It was good to have The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and co. back after all that time, though I found I was enjoying seeing many of the supporting characters more than the lead. I probably missed Susie (Alex Borstein) and Abe (Tony Shaloub) most of all. I'm looking forward to this week's pair of episodes once I clear some morning obligations out of the way Friday, and will then try not to lament that with the fourth episode we'll already be halfway through the current season! (Twenty six months was just too, dang long between seasons! Now I'm waiting to see if the latest "return to normalcy" lands us back into a new pandemic variant cycle.)

     Netflix continues to invest in international programming as it builds its library of content.
     In a new film from France, a corrupt cop goes to extremes to cover up an accident, only to receive threats from a witness, getting in deeper and deeper. It's Restless (2022  1h 35m)

     A little thread-pulling revealed that not only is this a remake of a 2014 Korean film A Hard Day, but that in the interim it had already been remade, in China, as Peace Breaker (2017). Clearly,  a popular story. I expect that if I dug a little deeper I'd find there's a U.S. version somewhere in the works, or that there will soon be if this latest version gets much traction on Netflix.
      Also arriving today (again on Netflix) is a 6-episode, Brazilian teen fantasy about a 30 year-old woman, returning to her childhood home, and finding her adult mind sent back in time to her 15 year-old body. She sets about trying to use her knowledge of the future to fix the lives of family and friends, but each adjustment brings unintended consequences as she finds out each time she sends her mind back to her 30 year-old self.  It's Back To 15 (2022  TV-14)

     Not sure that's really for me, though I imagine we all regularly entertain the "If I knew then what I know now..." fantasies that are at the heart of this.
    Just-arrived on HBO Max is a film that, sans pandemic, I would have happily gone out to see in a theater late last year: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch (2021  R  1h 48m).

     That's a near-certain watch for early this weekend.
     Starting next Thursday (March 3rd) on HBO Max is a period comedy adventure series (a 10-episode season) semi-based on the story of Stede Bonnet, a wealthy landowner from Barbados who - around his 29th year, and facing marital problems - decided to buy a ship, pay a crew (he had no maritime experience) and become a pirate. We've all had mental days like that, right? Becoming known as "The Gentleman Pirate" he met with mixed success, was wounded, and befriended during his convalescence by Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. It's Our Flag Means Death

     New Zealand actor and comedian Rhys Darby plays the lead. I was unfamiliar with Darby, and I must confess that when I first watched the trailer I was wondering "what in Hell happened to Hugh Jackman?!" as he looked like a curdled version. Taika Waititi, who is also an executive producer for the series and directed the first episode, plays Blackbeard. The main cast includes Kristian (Hodor!) Nairn,  Rory Kinnear, and Trainspotting alum Ewen ("Spud") Bremner. Recurring actors include former SNL players Leslie Jones and Fred Armisen. It all looks like brisk fun, with episodes set to run around the 30 minute mark.
     As it'll be premiering so close to next Friday I almost left it for next week's piece, but I'll want to jump on this right away, and so wanted to keep it in mind earlier. I know I can't be the only person with either an odd, irresponsible schedule, and/or insomnia, who may very well find themself awake just after 3am (Eastern) Thursday, ready to watch the opener before trying to get another hour or so of sleep in advance of that day's professional charade. That's how I watched probably at least half of the episodes of Peacemaker, which ended on the 17th.
     Back over to Netflix, looking down the road into the year, they're emphasizing the investment they're making in new films. They put together this fourth wall-breaking mixed trailer to showcase a cross-section of it, emphasizing productions with prominent, big-screen names. It's a nice enough sampling to look through for some items you may opt to look up to see when they'll be arriving. Almost all of them are still in post-production stages, with few having fixed premiere dates announced.

     In the mix I was reminded that I still haven't gotten around to the first Enola Holmes, and that I forgot they were making a Knives Out 2. I'll be interested to see how they've chosen to adapt Winsor McKay's early 20th century Little Nemo in Slumberland material into the Jason Momoa-starring Slumberland; the most immediate changes being the gender-flip for the child lead, and a horned Momoa playing Flip, who was a top-hatted, red-nosed Irish clown in the strip.

     Another stressful week for me, personally, almost down - each day the potential for so much more damage! - I've in part found myself revisiting films I hadn't watched in a while. Three of note, with no immediately obvious to me linkage between them:
     Fail-Safe (1964) was a more intense revisit than I recall ever having with it. For some reason this may have been the first time I just casually gave myself over to the Sidney Lumet-directed adaptation of the 1962 novel, where I wasn't constantly juxtaposing scenes and elements with the same year's Dr. Strangelove.
     Likewise, it was almost like a temporary, selective amnesia that I was allowing the characters to be the characters they were, and to not impose later roles and genres on the various actors as I tend to do reflexively most of the time. General Black, played by Dan O'Herlihy, for instance, whose nightmare bookends the film. Larry Hagman as Buck, the linguist assisting the president is another. Walter Matthau as the academic, vehemently anti-communist Professor Groeteschele was permitted to exist cleanly in this role, without my memory overlaying sarcastic, comedic flourishes. Even Sgt. Collins played by Dom DeLuise, an actor we came to associate almost exclusively with comedies, was allowed to play a serious, dramatic part without heckling from my brain. It was a good state to take it all in with surprising freshness. I plan to try to cultivate this faculty more for a variety of personal projects in the years to come, to allow me to experience something familiar with some temporary sense of novelty, shedding the flippancy of presumed familiarity.
     Here's the trailer from 1964:

     Of course, the desire now to rewatch Strangelove sometime soon is pretty strong, too. I'm also (mildly) interested in a Fail-Safe remake done in 2000 that I was either unaware of or otherwise hid from myself for some reason. I haven't tried tracking that down as yet.
     The folk mockumentary (or faux folk music documentary) A Mighty Wind (2003 PG-13 1h 32m) was also a highly successful, fresh rewatch situation for me. I'd remembered it favorably, but had generally thought of it as yet another project to pull most of the main cast from This Is Spinal Tap and Best In Show together, rather than appreciating it for the wonderful piece of work that it is. The largely improvised work, and singing performances from the cast, were all brilliantly, humanly delivered, the comedic notes sharp, and in general I came away from the rewatch with a far higher opinion of the film than I'd had from back in 2004 or so when I'd first seen it.

     A Mighty Wind is currently, formally, on Cinemax, but I also seem to have it available on demand because of my HBO subscription.
     A third film I'd almost randomly found my way back to this week also happened to be from 2003, and, again, was something I likely only saw late that year or in the following year, when it came to cable. It was the dramatic comedy The Station Agent (2003  R  1h 30m). A modest production, it was almost certainly the first thing I saw Peter Dinklage in. Here he plays Finbar McBride, a train enthusiast who is willed a railway station by an old friend and co-worker, and relocates there. Protectively introverted, a survival mechanism as a dwarf in a society where too many people fail to see and treat him as a person, it's mostly a story about the people he ends up connecting to in this new life. Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale round out the core trio of the main film, with Michelle Williams becoming an important supporting character, along with (then) child actress Raven Goodwin, and Paul Benjamin as Henry, the friend whose bequest set the stage for the story.

     The Movie Channel and Showtime currently have The Station Agent, though it should also be more widely available for sale or rent.
     Late additions: Not that there's much time to work with on the first item, but I wanted to remind people that with the close of the month, midnight Monday, all of the original Marvel series (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and The Defenders) will be leaving Netflix. It's entirely too much to take in in the time remaining, but I had to say something.
      Here in the U.S., odds are high that they'll end up over on Hulu, which is where Disney puts any of their content that exceeds PG-13 material for the U.S. market, but I haven't seen any announcement. There may be some "Disney Vault" fuckery in play, where they'll want to keep them out of reach for a little while so it's more of an "event" when they make them available again. That used to be the play when they were focused on selling physical media, but now it can be used to help drive subscriptions to streaming services. There's also the lesser element that they've become unofficially non-canonical for the MCU.
     Over on TCM, their annual 31 Days of Oscar spotlight will begin Tuesday. If you follow that link, you'll see the schedule for their channel, and info on how as of this year it's expanded to fare over on HBO Max.
     That seems to be enough for this week. Knowing that next Tuesday will be March 1st I almost rolled into more items that'll be appearing before next Friday, but time's fleeting and they'll keep. I already have more things waiting for me than I'll have the time for before then!
     Stay safe, well, and if any of the above caught your attention, I'd be happy to hear about it. - Mike

Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday, everyone!  Still winter here in the US and now it's snowing, but there's only 6 days until spring in the Northern Hemisphere and it will warm up.  So let's get to what I found this week!

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I'm always a little fascinated by how Jean Renoir, fantastic French director through the '70s, was also the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, fantastic impressionist painter.  One a master of portraying groups of people forming shifting and contradictory group activities and one a master of using combinations of color and poses to portray people in all sorts of situations.  Back in 2018, I saw a wonderful exhibition focusing on their linked works at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

For instance, this is Pierre-Auguste's painting of Jean around 1900.  (One of the joys of the Art Institute here in Chicago is how the robber barons of Chicago bought Impressionist works for a song when it was still out of style, resulting in it having the greatest collection of it outside of Paris, so I grew up on paintings like this.)

La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) came out in 1939 and is the story of a weekend hunting party at a country home in France.  A comedy of manners on the surface, as the movie deepens it turns more and more sour as you see how much these upper class twits are ignoring the gathering storm in Europe.  They're also ignoring what's going on with their servants, who have a much better idea of just how much the shit is about to hit the fan.  If any of this sounds familiar, congratulations, you might have seen Gosford Park, the later Robert Altman movie that takes place at a British country house in the same general time period and tosses in a murder.  

(Not quite the same, but Remains of the Day has a bit of a similar feel and also has Christopher Reeve as a US Congressman who explains very clearly  to his hosts that they're a bunch of appeasers who are keeping their heads in the sand over the NAZI threat).

 La règle du jeu is streaming on Criterion Channel and Kanopy as well as being for rent and sale at the usual outlets and is an absolute must watch.

Gosford Park is available for rent and sale.

The Remains of the Day is on Tubi with ads and available for rent and sale.

And hey, here's a bonus, Jean Renoir as an adult in Hollywood.  Still, that painting is adorable, right?

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I've never quite started a section for them on my bookshelves, but I do have a good weakness for novels (especially mysteries) that take place around bookstores and authors and the like.  For instance, the fun anf nasty Murder at the AMA, where Isaac Asimov killed off a fictional version of Harlan Ellison as a good on his friend (who could be very abrasive to people); Sharyn McCrumb pulled off the same joke with her sci-fi con set Bimbos of the Death Sun.  This appears to be the 5th in a series of bookseller mysteries so yippee, new mystery series to read!

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Now here's a director I'm completely unfamiliar with.  Marcel Pagnol was a director of the same time as Jean Renoir and this loose trilogy of films, two of them based on plays written by Pagnol.  Pagnol is apparently not especially popular these days but I'm always for rediscovering someone who was apparently well-regarded in his day. (And in looking him up, I like that he also had a fun side gig of translating Shakespeare and Virgil into French; his Hamlet is apparently still being performed.)

Marius, Fanny and César are all streaming on the Criterion Channel and available for rent and sale at the usual places.

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I'm a sucker for Little Women and variations on it.  So learning about this variation, involving an African-American family of sisters and set in the Freedman's colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolin in 1863, is absolute catnip for me.  I'm very curious to see how Bethany Morrow reworks this for a modern YA audience.

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Schlock of the week time!  I so love finding weirdness at the Dollar Tree and hoo boy can it be a source of tossed-off horror terribleness.  Doll Face has exactly one review on Rotten Tomatoes and hoo boy, is it succinct:

"We don't know who wrote or directed Doll Face, but we do know that whoever did, can neither write nor direct a film."  

Frankly, the whole review is a joy.  It's been a while since I've run across a serious piece of trash to enjoy and this looks like exactly my speed.

Doll Face is cheap as hell on Amazon and Vudu.

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This week's recommendation is from yet another French director, Julia Ducournau.  Grave (Raw, 2016) was such a fantastic debut, a movie about coming of agee and college and hazing and oh, also cannibalism.  It was one of the craziest going-in-blind experiences I've ever had in a movie theater.  But now I'm recommending her followup, Titane, which is now on Hulu.  It's not quite as great as Grave but boy howdy does Ducournau still leave nothing off the table.  And fair warning, it's insane, it's foul and has body horror on a Cronenbergian level but it never feels salacious or gazey; it's just weird.  And my god, the performance by Vincent Lindon in this is amazing.  He apparently won the Cesar in 2015 for La Loi du marché (The Measure Of A Man) and I'm 100% going to see that soon.

Warning again: this trailer is NSFW.

Freedom Island, Episode 3 -- Garbo

 Every other Books & Authors Day (Wednesday), I've been posting episodes of an ongoing suspenceful audio story called "Freedom Island."  I do them as YouTube videos, with a slideshow accompanying the audio portion. We're up to the third episode. Links below this one to previous episodes. 

Here's Episode 1. The audio quality is unusual but you'll quickly figure it out. 

And here's the second episode. This one and the ones after it are shorter than the pilot episode. 

Library Book #1: Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood, 1914 -- "Falling Apart"

In this new series of blog posts, I'll be sharing items I checked out of my local library, including books the librarians get for me from the statewide library system. Today, Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood. 

 

Algernon Blackwood was an English author famous for his tales of ghosts, human-caused horror, and The Weird. He's most famous for his story "The Willows," but he was very prolificBlackwood was well-known in the U.K. as a personality on radio and television. 

Why did I choose this particular Blackwood book? I've read a number of his stories, and I'd heard the ones in Incredible Adventures were extra weird. I like weird so I reserved the book and waited a week or two till it was time for pickup. 

This 1914 volume was so fragile that the librarian wasn't sure if I would want it. I said I would like to take it with me, but having just recently dealt with being asked if I was the person who returned a book with water damage (I wasn't), I asked the librarian to note the condition of the book. She went full-on, as you can see.

 

Fragile yes, but still a treasure. Thank you, Anonymous Donor to the Bowdoin College Library!

 

 

This 1914 book has deckle edges, which you can read about  HERE. Sometimes with these books, it's necessary to use a sharp paper knife to cut apart attached pages if the trimmer didn't come in quite close enough.

 I recently read a short story in which a writer who is courting a young woman is disappointed to find that the copy of his book he previously brought her still has uncut pages. His would-be lover didn't bother to read his stuff. I found a short demo online on how to separate uncut pages, preventing future romantic difficulties.

Click here to see how to cut book pages

My local library hasn't used the date stamp at checkout for years, so it's hard to know if the  last date on the sheet is really the last time the book was checked out before I got it.  I also don't know how many times the book was checked out before the staff attached the current  sheet, which starts with a 1998 date. Someone checked it out right before  Halloween, 2004 (fitting!) and then it has a due date stamp the following summer.  Nothing till the end of 2011. I moved to Maine in 2012, and I'm trying to remember  if the library was still stamping the date in as well as offering a printed slip. I can't recall.

The actual content of the book? Oh, that.

 This particular copy was too fragile for me to really interact with, but some of the content is available online, as are recordings of Blackwood from radio and TV.

Here's Blackwood reading "A Pistol Against a Ghost" for the BBC in 1948.

 

 

 

Blackwood was the host of the popular British television program "Tales of Mystery."

 I got some information about the show from this blog.

Now for some of the material found within the covers of Incredible Adventures: 

 The volunteer reading service LibriVox, for which people record audiobooks of material old enough to be in the public domain, offers an audio version of the first selection in Incredible Adventures, a novella called "The Regeneration of Lord Ernie."

The folks at Project Gutenburg, bless 'em, have put an e-book version online, and it you can find that HERE.

While I prefer a real person to narrate audiobooks I listen to, I will settle for an AI narrator with imperfect inflection, There's such a read-aloud video for "The Damned," another selection from "Incredible Adventures."

That's it for today. Next week? Something else! :)

Note:  I found the image for "Tales of Mystery" at the site Celluloid Wicker Man

Recent Arrivals

 by whiteray

When the Texas Gal and I first set up housekeeping in 2001, she asked me if I had a list of all the LPs I owned. (At that time, there were about 3,000 of them.) I said I didn’t, and she said it sounded like a good day-time project for me. (I’d left the workforce in 1999 due to health concerns). 

So I fired up Excel and got to work, researching and entering, and when I was done with that, I moved on to our much smaller collection of CDs (about 200 at the time). And I’ve continued to do that, with our collection of CDs now numbering not quite 1,400. That’s actually the number of CD albums and not the number of discs; a multi-disc CD album like, say, the complete collection of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band includes six discs but is counted only once. 

But I’ve fallen behind. I’ve run out of the labels I use to tag CDs before I enter them in the database. So I have twelve CDs sitting on a TV tray by my desk, waiting for attention, and I thought maybe Consortium readers might like a snapshot of what a few months of mostly scavenging at the thrift store or the library bookstore brings me. 

On December 27 at the library, I found both CDs of the two-disc anthology of the work of Todd Rundgren, covering the years 1968 to 1985, and I found a CD titled Russian Favorites, offering various classical pieces as performed by several Central and Eastern European orchestras. 

Not that much earlier, the Texas Gal and I had noted that there are two singles by Rundgren from the early and mid-Seventies that we both liked: “Hello, It’s Me” and “I Saw The Light,” and I told her I’d keep an eye out for an anthology. I got lucky, and we’ll see if we like any Rundgren beyond those two singles. As to the other disc, I’ve been fascinated by the music of Russia and Eastern Europe since high school when our orchestra director often chose pieces from those traditions. 

Not quite a month later, January 22 brought me five finds at the largest of the thrift stores in the area: An anthology of the work of Tommy James & The Shondells; an anthology of the work of the late reggae genius Bob Marley; an anthology of some of the best work by Benny Goodman; the 1992 album Fat City by singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, and Just Like You, a 1996 album by bluesman Keb’ Mo’. 

Tommy Jame, with and without the Shondells, provided great AM radio fare in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though I would not have admitted it back then during my infatuation with album rock. I don’t know the albums by Colvin and Mo’, but I’ve liked pretty much everything the two have done, so I expect to like them. And the Marley and Goodman anthologies fill gaps once filled by LPs that were sold about five years ago when I downsized from 3,000 LPs to about 1,000. 

A few days later, on January 27, I was back at the library, and the racks had been refreshed. I grabbed The American In Me, a 1992 album by folk/rock/Americana artist Steve Forbert, a greatest hits collection by pianist Peter Nero, and the second hits collection by Barbra Streisand. 

I’ve liked Forbert since his 1979 album Jackrabbit Slim, which included the delightful single “Romeo’s Tune,” and although I have a lot of his stuff digitally, I have very few actual CDs, so I thought I’d give The American In Me a try. I got the first Streisand hits CD a couple of months ago (also at the library bookstore), so the second one seemed like a good idea. Released in 1978, it covers the first two-thirds of the Seventies, from 1971’s “Stoney End” to 1977’s “My Heart Belongs To Me.” And I love 1960s and 1970s easy listening instrumentals, so the Nero album was a no-brainer. Besides, Nero once left a comment at my blog on a post about “The Summer Knows,” the theme from the movie Summer of ’42. (He disagreed with me about the worth of the lyrics to the song, and he persuaded me I was wrong.) 

The only CD I’ve purchased anywhere else in the past six months or so showed up in the mail a little more than a week ago: Carole King’s 1976 album Thoroughbred. During the pandemic lockdown, I realized that our collection had only one Carole King album, It’s Too Late. I quickly sent off for a slipcase collection that included five of her first seven albums (excluding It’s Too Late and Thoroughbred). The arrival of Thoroughbred the other day gave me her work through 1976 in CD form (though there is much stuff from later years on what I call my digital shelves). And, as her work became less and less interesting over the years, I think the only additional King I need on the CD shelves is Pearls from 1980, on which she takes on songs she wrote in the 1960s with then-husband Gerry Goffin. 

So there’s two-and-a-half months’ worth of collecting, perhaps not the most interesting piece you’ll find at this blog this week, but it’s a look into one of my compulsions. And to close, here’s one of the best pieces in the twelve-CD haul (though I would not have said so when it came out in 1971), Tommy James’ “Draggin’ The Line.”

Florida, oddly enough

Who knows, but there's a story here... Mike and I joke when we go to Naples and walk past it, that the long delay getting this practically beach front renovation finished, is a new wife with grudges....redoing the whole thing. "I'm not stepping one foot in there until you put down a new floor!" ... and more drama ensued. Coastal Florida hyperbole, but you see it out and about occasionally, these stereotypes.

And after being in Florida 3.5 years, I feel like this house, sort of. Not its imaginary inhabitants. At different phases of rewiring, rebuilding, deconstruction, and renewal. When we are young we think we can evade the situations our elders face, that things will be different for us, we're perhaps cooler than they were and times are different. We don't think about the duties and trials of our later decades. We don't think about the realities of caretaking when our parents age, about how strange it is to begin thinking of yourself as older. A major pull will become digging around in your own life. What was a facade? What needs an overhaul? Hidden treasures in the attic, contraband in the basement, it's a definite need to see what it is you've been living in and as, all these years.

When you get to a certain stage of life, you recall it wasn't that long ago that you looked back upon your past, at your idea of soundness, and you thought you had sized it up clearly. You thought you had a wide lens view of your life and yourself and how you stood. It was a too short window, in reality. A brief clear moment when the past seemed as clear as a new mirror, and the future a morning sidewalk stretched out for your saunter and energetic ministrations. 

You remember the footsteps of loved ones in the hallways. Children all asleep, safe and sound under your roof. Parties, music, laughter, raked leaves and window fans.  Time spent in living rooms, reading the novels, daydreaming in your kitchen, clocks ticking. Now you want time to reflect on those years, a portrait on the wall with moving eyes seeing everything.

It's hard to not rattle around, while making your appraisals, hard to not make noises. Hard to not groan in dissatisfaction and sorrow. To not feel trapped when you realize perhaps there was a world you'd disapprovingly participated in, like a ghost in the hallway. On the other hand, that simple recognition is a freedom and a privilege. Maybe realizations such as these will cause that hidden treasure to appear in the attic, and wisteria to climb the trellis.

There is only so much time left, you are conscious of that. We try to make it worth something by understanding it. It doesn't matter if we share it or not, but I've always loved the stories of old people. I hope you will share yours, no matter your age. Tell your stories. At least give them room to come to you. 

~Dorothy Dolores 

My Art Influences: Part 1 - Esther

It was St Valentine’s Day this week & although it’s not a big deal round our place, you can’t escape it. Shops, businesses, TV, online…little pink & red hearts as far as the eye can see. Now, I wear my heart on my sleeve as far as many things go, in particular art influences. There are things I like, things I love & things that find their way into my own artwork. Sometimes it’s more obvious than others, like the spell I went through of painting portraits of Gustav Klimt in the style of…well, Gustav Klimt. See more of this kind of thing below. 

You might think this is an excuse to simply post some of my own art, but it’s more about the love & the process. I do always love the process more than the finished piece so I thought it might be interesting to write about it. I’ve also been thinking about a couple of works I’m going to be making & haven’t got to starting yet, so art is on my mind in all kinds of ways. All my pieces are ink & paper. Here is the first of a two-part blog about artists whose work has influenced mine & I’m endeavouring to explain what they’ve done for me. I hope you feel the love.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Portrait of Fritza Riedler, 1906

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Captain Sensible, 2018

Now & again, I’ll “collect” shapes, patterns, decorations from specific artists, i.e. sift through a mound of their works & sketch out (in pen) the individual motifs I find. Sometimes these will make their way into a drawing I’m doing & I often go back to these little sketched pages for ideas, inspirations or springboards. There are only a handful of such pages, but they nevertheless always offer something up for gentle pilfering. Klimt is one of the artists who never fail to provide me with inspiration, even since my school days. At first, I was interested in the patterning & I read a great description once that Klimt would surround his subjects with a “nest of decoration.” I’ve often done this, making sure the decoration represents the subject in some way. I then got into using gold & silver paint which was fiddly & doesn’t show up well when photographed or scanned (see also gel pen).

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), The Coiffing, 1896

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In Our Need, 2012

I get very bored when people compare artists I like with Beardsley & it happens a lot. I adore Beardsley – he was one of my first true art loves – & I it’s likely he was the one that taught me that monochrome is best… But comparing any artist with Beardsley is frequently an idle assessment made by people hoping to show off. There. I said it. You can tell Beardsley a mile off. He’s there in what he leaves out as much as what he puts in. He lurks in vast empty spaces in a composition, where others wouldn’t dare. In any case, I made this image for a book of poetry I was illustrating & I was shamelessly ripping off Beardsley as a kind of response to all that lazy comparison. Shamelessly. 

Alasdair Gray (1934-2019), Homage to Bill Skinner, 

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Blackstar, 2016

It’s fair to say my own art is very line-oriented. Apart from an insistence on careful line & attention to detail, there might be little to link Alasdair’s pictures & my own, but I was very interested in his use of brown wrapping paper pasted onto board as a medium. It gives the works a transparent but visible line pattern across each piece. I’ve looked for it in his work ever since. You used to be able to get huge rolls of brown paper, which must have been useful to get sizes he wanted. I have a pad of rough brown paper which I don’t like much – it’s larger than standard measurements (a nuisance for framing), it has flaws (you can see some here) & I like my paper smooth – so it’s taking ages to use up. In any case, Alasdair was the reason I used the brown. It’s one of several portraits I made of David Bowie after his death.

Harry Clarke (1889-1931), Vision of Bernadette at Lourdes (two details), 1925

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Dark Star, 2015

Another “star” in more ways than one. I regard this as my best work & it’s stuffed with love. Harry Clarke, my ultimate art hero in the style of Harry Clarke. It wasn’t the first time I’d attempted such a thing, but I made the mistake of adding colour in the past & it wasn’t as successful. It rarely is. Like Klimt, I’ve doodled many of Harry’s little shapes & motifs & there are so many to find both in his illustrations & his stained glass windows. Plenty of them can be found in this drawing. Here I was going for making a portrait of Harry in the style of one of his stained glass windows, where he’d make the black leads part of the image. The reference for his head is from a group photo with Harry as a young man. At the time I didn’t have the photo anywhere on paper so whilst watching one of the films about him on DVD, I paused it when this picture came up & took a picture on my phone. At least now you can do that. In the days of VCR & no mobile phones/digital cameras, I used to pause a clip & have to draw from the TV. More difficult than it sounds…

Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Racing Thoughts, 1983

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Rapunzel, 2021

This is one of my most recent pieces & it was for a Grimm exhibition. I was reading an excellent book about Jasper Johns at the time & we were locked down again. It made sense to go for Rapunzel as a subject, since she was locked away too. I was trying to convey a sense of being trapped by falling apart, simultaneously claustrophobic & scattered. Johns’s Racing Thoughts suggested a feeling of being broken apart & that feeling being part of an overall composition. I got the sense of having someone on the outside, controlling everything at that time – not paranoia, just not having any power over our circumstances, hence the hand (model: my own) pulling at the hair…