My article about George Sala’s visit to the Coombe in Dublin is in today’s Irish Times, here.
Archive for the ‘America’ Category
02
Jul
A while ago I wrote an article about a visit to the house the Marx Brothers grew up in, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Since then, some of the block the house stands on has been demolished with a view to building a seven storey apartment building, and a group has formed to campaign for the preservation of the house (they linked to my article, and that’s how I found out about the story). Woody Allen’s written a letter about the issue, calling for the preservation of the building
because the Marx Brothers are among the great comic artists in history, their accomplishments are revered internationally and in countries that place a high value on cultural contributions as opposed to simply bulldozing things in the name of progress, the Marx Brothers home would remain standing and affixed with a plaque.
Quite. There’s also a NY Times article about it here.
23
Jun
There’s an interview with David Byrne about his ‘Playing the Building’ project in New York in today’s Guardian here.
06
Jun
Actor Rip Torn, of the Larry Sanders Show:
- Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him just before the filming of the film Easy Rider; Torn left the movie, and his role went to Jack Nicholson.
- Later, Hopper claimed that it was Torn who had actually pulled the knife on Hopper. Torn sued, and won $475,000 in damages, Hopper appealed the decision, and subsequently had to pay another $475,000.
- Has had a couple of drunk-driving charges against him, but has only been convicted once.
- During the filming of Norman Mailer’s movie Maidstone, Torn hit Mailer three times on the head with a hammer. Then Mailer bit Torn’s ear. In the background, Mailer’s children could be heard screaming at Torn to stop. Unbelievable. You can watch the footage here. Be warned – it’s quite insane, and, perhaps more shockingly, contains some hep-cat-isms from Torn.
24
Apr
…is this passage by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:
In the seventeenth chapter of “The Voyage of the Beagle,” Charles Darwin turned to the mating habits of the giant Galapagos tortoise. “When the male and female are together, the male utters a hoarse roar or bellowing, which, it is said, can be heard at the distance of more than 100 yards,” he wrote. This is also the most accurate description that we possess of the duet performed by Mick Jagger and Christina Aguilera in “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones.
Anthony Lane, review, New Yorker April 14 2008.
14
Apr
Some months ago, we started meeting occasionally and we’d fall into talking about how we write and what the process is and where we get stuck and when it’s easy. I would sit, rapt, as I felt like I was hearing the words of a master songwriter, a kind of magician who was going to reveal to me, over lunch, some of his best tricks. Here was a more contemporary Gershwin or Cole Porter who was going to tell me a little of how it was done. Listen up.
David Byrne writes about trying to learn a few songwriting tricks from Paul Simon here.
26
Feb
During the performance of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s song ‘Falling Slowly’ at the Oscars the other night, it was strange to see that the set design people had recreated Waltons’ music store on South Great George’s Street in Dublin (where the scene in the film ‘Once’ takes place), seemingly by nailing a bunch of Gibson Les Pauls to a wire mesh.
18
Feb
When I was a child, much of my time was spent sitting in the back of my parents’ car on a trip to visit family members, listening to compilations of classic sixties pop on the cassette deck. These compilations would always have some stone cold classics like the Byrds version of Mr Tambourine Man, but would largely consist of stuff by the likes of Billy J Kramer or Herman’s Hermits. Even then, I knew something was a little off with the latter band. Later, it was revealed to me: they were shite. Either way, these assorted singles from a bygone era coloured my knowledge of music for a long time, and perhaps inevitably my musical knowledge has since then been filtered through a 1960s lens. It’s a lens that distorts stuff and makes you see lots of cool colours, don’t you know? Whoa, man: your thoughts are kandy koloured, and, if the air was water, we’d all swim through it like fishes. You dig?
Ahem, you get the idea. Anyway, now I’m much older, but on a recent trip in the car with my dad, I was reminded of those days of yore when dodgy sixties compilations were common aural currency for any extended automobile journey. You see, he bought a compilation of Donovan’s songs, covering the period 1965 to 1969. Donovan, who would never be on my list of the most essential artists of the 1960s, nonetheless released some of the best singles of that era. He also released some of the most flaccid, jazz-tinged, wibble-inflected inconsequences which remind you that the epithet ‘swingin’ is not always the same as ‘good’. Both of these tendencies are reflected in equal measure on the CD.
But on listening to some of the stuff on the CD, I reflected that classic sixties albums could never quite reflect that decade as fully as a load of disparate singles lumped together; the seventies were the decade when the rock or pop album came to fruition; the albums still with us from the sixties were experiments which never fully dislodged the pocket-money friendly seven inch record from pop fans hearts. The singles chart occupied a unique place in soundtracking the times, one it probably never will again, what with the growing diversity of music formats and the lack of definitive indexes of sales; or just the lack of sales generally. Music has become less of a communal experience, and more an individualised one: MP3 players have largely replaced radios and record players.
A couple of great singles from sixties bands: The Lovin Spoonful, ‘Do you believe in Magic?’ (in fact, most of the singles by this band); Honeybus ‘Can’t Let Maggie Go’ (a song that was really their only significant hit).
Also, Lenny Kaye’s classic collection of sixties garage bands, Nuggets. (Although, this is probably too significant and cool – really what I have in mind is the kind of cack handed compilation put together by the likes of the K-Tel and Camden labels.)