New To The Collection...

Ist Evergreen Black Cat Edition, 1967...

The first book-length study...Ist Edition, Intrepid Press, 1971.

Abandoned Memories

Bangwallop - J&D Ballard (private press)

Jake & Dino Chapman crash various texts together. 
Purchased at the Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard exhibition, Gagosian gallery, 2010.

The source...

Culture

This afternoon’s cultural activity:

   Watched the pilot episode of ‘Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons’. Am I wrong to still fancy Destiny Angel? LJ spotted that the Captain’s voice is an impersonation of Cary Grant.

   Watched Bill & Ben episode, ‘The Potato Man’. Hearing them speak caused much laughter, and a warm glow of nostalgia radiated from the screen to flood our hearts.

   Watched Pinky & Perky sing ‘Let’s Twist Again’ because, and I’m sure she won’t mind me saying this, they are much-loved by LJ. At one point a duck dressed as a granny comes on and dances.

   Never let it be said that my cultural intake is not of the highest possible quality with regards to taste and refinement.

   Did The Bump to Act One’s ‘Tom The Peeper’ until we remembered that LJ has a dodgy back.

   Played The Isley Brothers’ ‘Live It Up’ which, as you know, is one of the greatest funky tunes ever made, along with their other classics from this period.

Reality Hunger - David Shields

I had this copy but the cover disgusted me, looking like a book about festivals - huh.

Then I found this one secondhand, a paperback uncorrected proof...much better.

Random House lawyers insisted on a list of citations, which Shields had not planned for the original form. Most readers, however. will probably relish looking up the sources of all the quotes. It's about plagiarism, 'reality' in fiction, and sampling of all kinds. An essential read.

80s Jazz Clubs in London

Came across these recently whilst rummaging through my memento box...brought back great memories, of course. Glad I found the one for Wayne Shorter at The Wag because all these years on I had begun to think I only imagined it. But I really did see the legend play in a little Soho club.

So in honour of those days...one of the anthems...

Some Thoughts...

MUSIC >

White Stripes – Under Great White Northern Lights. Bagpipes? So begins the show – ‘Let’s Shake Hands’. There’s a case to be made for Jack White producing the greatest series of geetar riffs since Jimmy Page – but I’m not necessarily going to make it. I get bored skipping through this album...is that my problem, or theirs?

What’s my problem with singing? I enjoy music without vocals so much more. Like techno, or any other music which mostly lacks vocals. All that jazz. And ‘ambient’, even, although I dislike the term. The only singing I can enjoy are those doing justice to the Great American Songbook, and Bowie at his best...Bryan Ferry at Roxy Music’s best...and Iggy...and all that great soul music...and classic reggae, rock steady...so I do like singing...but can’t think of one contemporary vocalist that I enjoy, which simply reflects my distaste for modern....what shall I call it? Rock? Indie? And any other genre involving singers today. Perhaps I’m spoilt by Aretha, Frank, JB (if we can call what he does ‘singing’). The peculiarities of personal taste...

Audion – Vegetables. The way this starts is fantastic, but it soon settles down into the familiar techno beat, yet Matthew Dear does embellish it with out-of–this-world sounds....so whilst the rhythm remains consistently metronomic, as the genre demands, the bubble and squeak, the klick and klang, warbling and wonkiness of machinery makes for an interesting listening experience...and to finish off, a mutated voice describes somebody cutting themselves, the juice from the pepper staining her, she washes her finger under the sink. This is the best thing I’ve heard all day. And what a day it’s been...of meanderings, adrift...unable to settle, to concentrate, so to bask in the sun whilst eating pizza, and read, and sleep, and wonder what the hell I’m doing, doing nothing...

FILM >

The Big Heat. Debby Marsh sits in Sergeant Bannion’s hotel room with blinds drawn, head down, face bandaged where it was splashed with scolding hot coffee thrown by her mobster boyfriend, Vince Stone. Debby would wind up dead. Bannion attracts death in his defiance of corruption. Nothing is really solved or resolved...

Alien. The Nostromo is the leading character? It’s endless tunnels/shafts/corridors...it’s presence? Some of the crew smoke cigarettes...as if that would be allowed in the future.‘Here, kitty...’ – why are they so concerned about finding that damned cat? (I have grown to dislike cats since seeing feathers scattered across our lawn...and having to fill plastic bags full of their shit, picked up from the garden. As I told someone the other day, Bill's 'The Cat Inside' is one book of his that I will never read.) 

Alfie. The degree of chauvinism displayed by Alfie would be unbearable if you could not laugh at it. What’s it all about? A man who, on the one hand, tells women they should do what they like, whilst on the other, keeps some of them as virtual slaves. He’s refers to at least one as ‘it’. But then, there is that Sonny Rollins soundtrack...and I could say that I do still think it's a good film, iconic, of course, but...has it aged well? How would Alfie age? Alfie updated might be an interesting project. Caine is still alive, after all...to see him single in the 21st century, using Viagra...the oldest swinger in town standing at a bar in a club...complaining about the music...about everything, as it seems we all do, the older we get...the more out of step with the Now we become... 

The Hustler - Walter Tevis

I didn’t think the book could match the film but it does. In fact, I think it’s a masterpiece.

   It’s impossible not to picture Paul Newman as Fast Eddie, of course, but this novel is every bit a testament to Tevis’s greatness rather than just the enjoyable source of a celebrated film.

   Since he worked in a pool hall Tevis knows his terminology, which adds to the authenticity of the experience. But more than that he’s able to get inside the mind of a player aiming to prove himself, master his self-defeating demons, and summon the will to triumph.

   Eddie’s relationship with Sarah pans out differently. Presumably director Robert Rossen and his co-writer Sidney Carroll thought that the film would benefit from the drama of Sarah’s demise. Tevis, though, plays with the ambiguity of a seemingly futile romance and Sarah does not wind up dead in a bathroom.

   Bert, Eddie’s new manager, is a cruel, ruthless character played by George C Scott, but in the novel his hard-nosed side is only really revealed at the end.

   It’s no mean feat to make a game of pool exciting to read about, whereas it helps when you’re watching Newman and Gleason, brilliantly lit in a real New York pool hall. But the games are genuinely gripping, especially when Eddie plays the aristocratic hustler before the final showdown with his nemesis, Minnesota Fats, who is portrayed as very fat, almost obese, with a facial tic and ponderous movement until he moves around the table, ‘his motions like a ballet’.

   The dialogue is perfect, concise but loaded with meaning, and the atmosphere of the pool hall is described so well as to place you right in there amid the smoke and tension.

   Eddie is coached in the art of winning big, but ultimately can’t defeat the system that runs big money games. As an outsider in every way he seems destined to lose, but he can always say about pool, as he tells Fats during their first encounter, ‘I’m the best. Even if you beat me, I’m the best.’

   A great novel.

Writers - A Spotify Playlist

From Graham Greene to Mickey Spillane, I've not excercised any quality control here, but thought it would be interesting to see how many tracks I could find that are named after writers. There are no doubt more, but, you know, life is too short. My favourite is Zorn's tribute to Spillane.

http://open.spotify.com/user/slimjenkins/playlist/2dQDWqBu66CIkdLOphYNhO

My 10 Favourite Films – Part 2: Hollywood's West, Wild and Wilder

It was a tough choice between ‘new wave’ Westerns such as a Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (if this was a list of Favourite First 20mins of a Film, that would win) or The Missouri Breaks, but I opted for a late classic-era treasure, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The other big contender was The Searchers, of course.

   There are three main duels going on in here...between who is the lead (James Stewart or John Wayne?), the gunman and the attorney to see who wins the woman’s heart, and the Old West survival-of-the-quickest scenario and the new, civilised, democratic world. To this day, it’s hard to tell which triumphed. Some would say America still lives by the gun, and every soldier abroad is somehow John Wayne, reinforcing law by violence. There is no law in Shinbone. Does that make Liberty Valance a tyrant with a weapon of destruction slung around his waist...?
   Stewart as ransom Stoddard finally gets a ticket to Washington, partly on the back of his supposed bravery in the face of evil. As with Hollywood, the legend, not the fact, gets promoted.

   Wayne as Tom Doniphon is at his best, berating the ‘Pilgrim’ for his naive idealism and ultimately applying the only law he knows to save him. In Shinbone (the world?) there’s still a place for law reinforced by the bullet as opposed to the book. But for Doniphon, there is no glory and there is no domestic bliss at the end of the dusty, blood-soaked trail, only loneliness until death.

Another vision of the American West comes in the form of No Country For Old Men, New Mexico rendered majestic and menacing by cinematographer Roger Deakins. Here a wounded dog trailing blood leads Llewelyn Moss into a shortened life of violence, all for money, that old lure. It leads him into the path of Anton Shigurh, the psycho who allows people to live or die by the spin of a coin, as demonstrated in the gas station scene, just one of the brilliant episodes in what must surely be the bleakest of Oscar-winners.

   Tommy Lee Jones was born to play the world-weary sheriff for whom the seemingly random, modern way of death is beyond his comprehension. Other Coen Brothers vied for inclusion in my list of favourites but I’m compelled to keep on returning to this, just as Moss had to go back to the scene of the shoot-out.

  

  
Elements of Film Noir creep into a lot of the Coen Brothers’ work (especially The Man Who Wasn’t There, their ultimate homage) but amongst all the examples of the real thing I’ve chosen Double Indemnity. It’s from James M. Cain’s novel, adapted by Raymond Chandler, directed by Billy Wilder and acted to perfection by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. When such elements are fused, the result is unbeatable. Stanwyck may not have been the most beautiful female lead, but here she plays the sexual predator in magnificent defiance of the Hays Code that wished to neuter Hollywood at the time.

   Chandler naturally soaks the script with his special brand of intoxicating wit, innuendo and cynicism. It was nominated for several Oscars and received none, but time has revealed just what the judges couldn’t see; namely, that this is one of Hollywood’s greatest creations.

'I'd rather shake the Black Hand of the Mafia than beat the bongo drums with the beatniks.'

New arrivals...

Sun Ra 45 That's Not By Sun Ra

I was given this years ago by a friend who saw it at a market and thought of me. It's not by the Sun Ra. I've looked for info and found none. Someone in 1974 recorded a one-off awful Rock 'gospel' plea for change and thought 'What shall we call ourselves? I know - Sun Ra!'. You work it out. 

Dark Passage - David Goodis (1946)

Vincent Parry, talks to his dead friend and frustrated trumpet-player George Fellsinger.

   “You had ideas, George.”

   “I had ideas that I thought were great. But I was always afraid to let them loose. Once you were up here and I put my entire attitude toward life into the trumpet riff. You told me it was cosmic-ray stuff. Something from a billion miles away, bouncing off the moon, coming down and into my brain and coming out of my trumpet. You told me I should do something with ideas like that. And I agreed with you but I never did anything because I was afraid. And now I’m dead.”

I like to imagine George sounded something like this...