|
20-11-09
NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY SEES is one of Bill Shute's thematic mini-chaps drawing impetus from a work of pop culture. This is the first chapbook in vol 2 of the cinema poetry series.
In this case it's the Barry Newman road or car movie, Vanishing Point. Kowalski is the culture hero delivering a car from Denver to San Francisco in defiance of the authorities and to the delight of hippies, a black DJ and others. The tracks of his Dodge Challenger burn and skid in diagonals across the pages of the book.
On the way Shute's take on the journey has Kowalski hailed by two real-life Kendra Steiner Editions poets, Brad Kohler and Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, and work of theirs is quoted in italics. They are there present as Kowalski caromes by. This is a wonderful idea--the two bards get cameos in the movie unrolling in your head. Kowalski is a bit like the Lone Ranger--he's gone and the townsfolk remark on him, and in admiration ask each other who he was. (Though Kowalski has no Tonto.)
This work makes you want to see the film again and enjoy the nuances. You will want to keep by you when you haven't got time for the palaver of finding the disc and firing up your DVD player. Run it in your head as you read the five poems.
Go to Kendra Steiner Editions to order your copy.
13-11-09
The 82-year-old Webb twins were let loose on the software studio. Guitar Tracks Pro played host.
First of all they tackled "Little Sir Echo" which they rendered to a shipload of commissars who had fetched up in Ipswich Docks around about 1941. (The girls did their duetting at Gainsborough Estate Labour Club and the vodka-swilling matelots with steel teeth dug it well.)
The Webbs requested a backing track laid down for something more up to date as well for the recording session, so "Can't Help Falling In Love With You" was organised.
Just think of nights with the karaoke or old footage of drunk punters giving out "My Way". Then you may realize how good the Webbs actually are--singing in tune, no problem, no sense of hurrying or contending--they were meant to sing. They didn't even need any "delay" or echo, but I added a little for the sheer hell of it.
The CD goes out to family and friends as a Christmas card and there may be more to come. May put a film of part of the extravaganza on YouTube, who knows?
The Webb twins are still killers, it's well testified to. Known as a proper crease on Gainsborough, bor.
3-11-09
Yet again the Arlington's experience, Joan and me alongside my buddies of the Boys' Brigade days: Phil, Don and Graham and their wives.
Apparently I made the waitress blush by promising a tip when she brought a bottle of vinegar. I always have a bowl of chips (french fries) on the side and they have to be soaked in plenty of the acetic.
Graham who lives in a Tudor pile that should really be listed as much as said he didn 't wish to be rich. Rich? What is he if not rich? They all had cars after all, they parked somewhere, but we came in on the bus.
But I don't query anything. These are the people I love, friends of the Woolacombe Camp Boogie days and their wives.
Phil was already at Arlington's when we arrived, had come up in the lift in his wheelchair. We found our table then I went out and found Don and Sue standing looking around near the front of the restaurant.
Well, Joan and I take full credit for finding Arlington's. None of the others knew a thing about it. Phil said we ought to rent that particular table as a regular.
Joan is the real propounder of the place though, whether just for a hot chocolate or a full lunch. Evenings are impossible for us there now, there's no bus. I did attend a lunch there for Liz when she left the Stock Unit--that was in the Darwin room. Arlington's has quite a history. It is in Museum Street and in the old days was a museum (Ipswich Museum of course being in High Street). The original Arlington's man was a colleague of Darwin's and letters from Darwin exist--they were described in a glass case but we left for the bus and didn't have time to study it. There was an article in the Evening Star about it all a while ago.
Anyway, the place is spacious and you're not hurried. Not only that, the quality piping hot food is reasonably priced. In this time of credit crunch places like to be competitive and have people like us coming back. After all I did leave a massive £2.50 tip.
21-10-09
A Richard Egan movie was on TV, The Destructors. Strikes me as a send-up of James Bond with Mickey Spillane influences. (Spillane had his secret agent, Tiger Mann, as well as Mike Hammer his detective.) Egan plays Dan Street of the "National Intelligence Agency" on the trail of a haul of stolen rubies. These stones are necessary for the manufacture of a revolutionary laser gun that will be great for mounting on a platform in space.
This is 1968 and Egan's older than he was in 300 Spartans. (What a Leonidas he made, man. And what a Wes Tancred too in Tension at Table Rock. Wow, Egan can behave, if not act. You believe him.)
In the Destructors he hardly seems involved and is practically chuckling to himself. He sees the picture of a suspected villain, the bald and mustachioed Asian fellow who plays Wo-Fat in Hawaii Five Oh and says, "That's a good picture. Is he an actor?" It's the same with the other actors, familiar faces from TV and films. They all seem to have their tongues in their cheeks. There's a Miss Moneypenny type too, with whom Dan Street spars verbally.
Egan's is the voice Rod Serling wanted for the Twilight Zone, but R.E. was unavailable so he did it himself. I must watch Love Me Tender again where Egan plays Elvis's brother.
He had something of the Victor Mature about him, a sort of grimace that was permanent. He registers emotion by turning his head to the right... or to the left. But he sure can not-act, which on screen looks incredibly authentic.
25-9-09
Had an eye test--I was still using the same distance glasses I got in 1969. Had a test in the '90s and the glasses were still correct, though the frames were a bit shaky. The optician tightened the tiny screws and that was that.
Well, I got some new glasses this week--and the prescription had only changed slightly.
When I got home the case (a soft and padded zip-up affair) had already collapsed. The zip was useless and gaping. Next day I went back and said did they have a spare case, preferably a hard one? The woman came back with a hard Ray-Ban case--no extra charge. I went my way rejoicing.
I'd said, "Have you got a case of a different design?" and she might have thought I meant, "Have you got a designer case?" Either way, she "saw me all right."
I don't use glasses for reading or computer work, but the new specs mean I can now watch the second season of "route 66" with preternatural clarity. We just got these 32 episodes. Ann Francis plays a movie star in the first one. She returns to her home town, Butte, Montana, dying of lupus. Buz and Tod are staying in the house where she was born--it's now a rooming house. Buz falls for her and wants marriage. Buys a ring. Tod looks on, knowing the truth. She collapses one night when she and Buz are out at a fun fair, and dies. Buz weeps, looking up at the sky. Dissolve into whirling fairground lights. Fantastic sad episode, great to have in a clear copy. Ann Francis is well known from appearances in "The Fugitive" and "The Untouchables".
16-9-09
Whilst in Norfolk we heard about the bells of St Lawrence's Church, Ipswich, now restored and the oldest "round" of bells in the world, dating from the 1400s and their clangour enjoyed by the boy Wolsey. They hadn't been sounding out in Ipswich for twenty-five years (in which case I must have been one of their auditors in 1974 in the disastrous Christchurch Street bedsit).
The seals are swimming now without the benefit of fish heads thrown by us around Blakeney Point. The tide waited not for us and the bus was fifteen minutes late after some fuck-up concerning a course that had to be attended by our driver. (He was replaced.)
After a coffee by the stall at Morston where they sold bacon sarnies we decided not to wait an hour and a half for the next boat and got the bus back to Holt.
Later that afternoon Joan was shortchanged in our favourite haunt where they assume apparently that everyone is so rich they never look and just fling their change into their purse or pocket. Joan handed me the coins and I saw it was £1 short. The chap apologised and didn't argue. You could see he was ready to cough up quick and not have a hassle. We still like the place, though.
And Holt as a whole we can recommend, too. There was a bat that Joan saw from the bedroom, high up on the guttering on the wall opposite, outside. I saw it too in full daylight, two furry wings palpitating and grey. We went down and got the camcorder on it-- zoomed in and lo and behold it was just an ugly patch of corroded paint.
Yes, come see the "bat" outside #4 Baronet Mews! Cinnamon Cottage is the place to stay! Indoor sanitation! Electric lighting throughout! Parquet floors!
28-8-09
The old chap we call the "Hailfella" sat next to me on the bus, asking where "she" was.
"Got the 7:30."
It turned out he has lived in the same house in Framsden for seventy-two years. Not only that, was born in a cottage not far away which can be seen across the fields as you take the bend just after the windmill.
I said we had only been living in Framlingham fourteen months.
"Where are you from, London?" he said. From this I took it that my Suffolk accent is not as broad as I supposed.
He worked on a farm most of his life, then the farmer died and he enrolled on a firm that drained the fields. It went bust after a few years. He ended up as odd job man at a refrigerator factory. He'd been retired for years now of course but unfortunately his pub had gone downhill of late (maybe he meant the smoking ban).
"You don't want to go there no more for a game of darts or cards," he sighed.
The Hailfella would make a great interview subject. Of course, you can't take the camcorder on the bus, or at least can't use it there.
Since getting into the Power Director software I sigh at the million chances missed.
One is definitely that Sunday of the go-kart races through the streets of Framlingham with hay bales piled on the pavements, all roads closed and people climbing lamp posts and perching on walls. These "cany wagons light" (as Milton said of the Chinese) shooting by, mere lads and craggy greyhairs in crash hats. Mun, what a beat-heavy fast blues sound track I coulda clipped to that!
Should I have gone back for the camcorder? If it had been charged up, yes.
20-8-09
Took Monday off as there would be no "system" up--they are installing the new "Open Galaxy" and there can be no receipting of books, CDs and videos. So I was thinking it would be slow and I took a leave day. Then when I got back there was such a lot of boxes of leaflets for me to send out I could easily have stayed till midnight.
But all right, teach, you ask what I did on my day off?
Rediscovered Proust. P----- V---------- when he retired from our midst had the whole of Remembrance of Things Past as a gift. (Now he would find the time to get into it.) I was ahead of him because I already had the twelve books in hardcover in custom dust wrappers. So I pitched right in where I had left a bookmark last time, towards the end of the first volume of Cities of the Plain. It's where Marcel is grieving for his grandmother and tormented by suspicions that Albertine may be a "lover of women." He also encounters the bell boy who says "Madame de Camembert" instead of "--Cambremer."
I also watched a DVD about The Da Vinci Code we made that I thought was lost. The priest who represented Opus Dei was a good choice, a laughing cove albeit with steel teeth biting into his upper thigh probably. He explained that there were no monks in the organisation--so forget Dan Brown's albino killing machine in the books.
Also watched a disc we made of a programme about Rider Haggard--great. If I'd had another day I'd have watched the ones on Buchan and Dennis Wheatley. Could even have started the Michael Wood progs on Alex the Great.
12-8-09
I was getting together a collection of poems to send to a publisher I had found on the internet. A magazine with a a publishing 'arm', like. I'd heard of the Press before but the writers associated with it were never much of an incentive. Still, reading the no-nonsense splurge on the website it seemed that the prime mover had had several changes of heart and direction. His spurge sounded interesting and reasonable, so I'd give it a whirl.
Considerably relieved when I saw that he would like to see ten poems in the first instance, and he could then work out from that whether it was a good idea to go on.
And then. And then I started to look at some of the books they produced which were available as downloads.
It was the sort of stuff that you can understand not many people would wnat to shell out for. The poets were panicking at their own verbosity and the stupidity of what people were acquiescing in letting them get away with. Actually buying that stuff would have had to be a considerable wrench-for me,. for anybody. It was leaden, dead, 'cleverly unclever' stuff. I didn't want it, and I didn't want to be it. I'll go away from your window, Mr Man, go away from your door. It would be better to print an edition of a hundred with my own Appliance Books or go with Lulu and be print on demand.
The thing is, the books look quite presentable. It's the gloop-gloop stuff inside. And he complains that his press is ignored when the awards come up! That is the one thing he's said that make s me feel a little bit better about the state of poesy in these isles.
5-8-09
Arlington's take two, with Gwen, Peg, Tam and Joan
Thursday mid-day we'd all been in the Darwin Room, that is the Stock Unit and Stock Team contingent, and then Saturday lunch time saw me back there with Mum, Aunt Peg, my daughter Tam and not forgetting my 'life', Joan, who had her credit card.
I went for an OK thing with chick peas and stuff and rice but swimming in gravy which I don't really like, I like some. Also, it helped not when I asked the waiter for vinegar and he presented what turned out to be a cruse of olive oil. I soon rectified THAT.
Tam was only about five minutes late, fresh from her latest job, a stint in a summer school at Plymouth reaching Italian kids English. TEFL, like.
There with 4 ladies I happen to have a high regard for I was like a 'man of roads'. (As opposed to a 'Man of Rhodes' or colossus.)
The talk was easy, the living was easy. Gwen and Peg are funny, twins who have just celebrated their 82nd birthdays.
Gwen and Peg both chose fishcakes. I don't eat fish any more, nor does Joan and we'd probably both be covered in a rash like a cheap suit if we tried, but those fishcakes did look tempting with a stack of fries.
82 and they came in on their own. They got the bus, no lift. Of course they only had one bus to catch, from Gainsborough Estate to Tower Ramparts. We thought afterwards we should have escorted them up Lloyds Avenue to get the bus home, but we had to get a few things then catch our own 2:45 at the Cattle Market. Those two old girls who sang to a submarine crew of Russian sailors during WWII could get up Lloyds Avenue all right.
2-8-09
Up in the Darwin Room at Arlington's, mid-day, Thursday 30th July. Liz's farewell do. I got there punctual and they were all in their places, wondering if I had biked from Fram.
'I coulda if I'd set out at 7:00am,' quipped I.
Sitting next to Alex I poured her water from the carafe and later her tea and discussed the merits and one or two demerits of FaceBook which she is thinking of joining. Also asked about her son's thesp progress (an infant Olivier of verse and prose reciters).
My choice was roasted vegetable lasagne plus salad and the salad didn't have too much dressing which suited me.
I had no starter, just sat sipping water and chewing corners of bread and butter. No dessert either, but still felt pleasantly bloated. Alex had fruit crumble and 'universal' custard which seemed very pale. (She confessed a preference for Bird's.)
Liz was in good fettle and at the end had a tear in the eye when she saw the great card made by the artist amongst us, Robin, with many a knowing inscription.
I just stuck to water. While red and white wine was going the rounds I nevertheless decided to keep a a clearer head for the fag end of the afternoon which I would have to work. (As it was I had to do just over an hour, count up the stuff to be sent to Whitehouse Enterprises ship a few leaflets into the brown skips and that was about that.)
Yes, I had Sheila on my right, Alex on the left. Really I found little to say, though I pretentiously explained that it was called the Darwin Room after a colleague of Charlie's who had a museum on this site-in Museum Street, right? Also muttered as we chatted about yesteryear and yestermonth, 'you can't step into the same river twice,' which was received with blank looks. No way I dominated the talk on this occasion, I the cream-faced loon who hadn't rubbed in his sun block (as I discovered in the Stock Unit toilet afterwards). It wasn't my field in a way, unlike at Nacton with Gillian's poetry parties where I was always the resident expert on Gainsborough Estate and the world of the Suffolk gutter.
When Robin asked if I intended to do any work when I got back I didn't dare say 'as little as possible' so kept silent, just grinning witlessly.
There I sat with a silly grin, happy enough amongst these good folk who mean me well. That time of day I didn't really get fired up, and it wasn't really my field, man.
Liz got some green ear rings, a bottle of champagne, a book about the garden and kitchen.
When we got back Paul was there wondering why there had been nothing for him to collect all afternoon. I said we'd all be at Liz's leaving do.
'Leaving? Where's she going, then?'
'Into the garden, mate.'
29-7-09
There were Slim Sherman, Jess Harper and young Andy Sherman in the b/w days, and the bowler-hatted odd-job man and piano player Jonesy, played by Hoagy Carmichael.
In the first few episodes there was a heavy emphasis on the fact that Jess was until very recently a gunslinger. In the first epiisode he is shown teaching Andy how to be clever at, perhaps cheat at, cards.
Slim the well-meaning head of the ranch, having to be older than his years, is a bit solemn, but takes Jess Harper on trust as much-needed help at the ranch which also doubles as a relay station 8 miles out of Laramie. (There the stage can get a fresh team for the run in to Laramie--and beyond?)
These Sherman ranch personnel (and little Mike Williams too, and Miss Daisy, when they arrive) became family to us in the dream life.
Where would the Western especially the TV western have been in those days without Dan Duryea? He was in episode 1 and at least one other. A somewhat deadly and charming rogue with an element of slime. Also in an early monochrome programme was Eddie Albert, creating a horrendous paranoid. Clu Gullagher was a misunderstood cavalryman gone AWOL. Thomas Mitchell as a hangin' and burnin' judge. Great, man.
We shouldn't forget the theme tune either, by Cyril Mockridge, an Englishman. It conjures up Wyoming all right and a lump in the throat.
22-7-09
I always said that the black and white episodes of Laramie (Seasons 1 and 2) were better than the colour ones. Now, watching the interview with Robert Fuller on the new DVDs of Season 3, I discover that after a while they had had to water the stories down. Only so many gunshots per show, and you could slap a guy but not kick him, etc. This is bad news for those involved in making a Western, which must depict a fairly rough era.
So that was why it went off a little. But not too much--it's impossible to believe that Miss Daisy, Mike, Jess and Slim are not still running the Sherman ranch out in Wyoming today.You still want to be out there with them.
But the quality of the episodes clearly had nothing to do with any metaphysical pish posh about the superiority of the old noirish b/w. The colour episodes do look washed out, though. But the first two seasons, in monochrome, which we have watched on very cloudy copies of copies, certainly move faster and go for the knockout with more determination than the others.
Season 4 is due out in September, and after that they may get around to bringing out the first and second seasons. Jess Harper was the role that Robert Fuller was born for, all right. He'd worked for years around Hollywood as an extra. (I recall as a boy seeing Jess Harper in one of the Bob Hope films, maybe the last 'Road' picture. But Jess had a lot of dark make up on and was one of three feathered savages shaking their spears at Bob and Bing.)
12-7-09
Dee Sunshine was on Facebook deploring the fact that his novel had got nowhere, then in the Sunday Times there was the news that Paul O'Grady was offered £2 million for his next book.
Well, the dream has long been over for us here. The reverie of being another Rider Haggard or Colin Wilson by that 'so potent art'. It's no longer in requisition, mate. The editors don't want it--and worse, the readers don't either. They get their reading on Facebook or the extremely concise Twitter and they're watching YouTube. So that's where I'm hanging out at, that's where I'll get my commerce with like minds, bubba.
Paper is not where it's at and is not everything. The main thing is to get in through the eye, into the brain. Haggard and Buchan did it via paper, but today's means are different.
Yeah I finished one novel, HAILFELLA PANDEMONIUM and had done 60,000 words of the follow up. But hold on a minute, who wanted the first one? It was hard getting it read on authonomy. So if the first, finished and sewn up and the riddles anwered, couldn't 'do', why bother with the other one? It seemed better to put odd chapters on webzines.
The time is come now, brothers, that we should write with light. I'm bringing out this thing, 'The Casual life of the Derz' which will be my artistic statement. I'll not bank on a 100,000-word novel that takes 2 or 3 years to write and no one gets to look at. Facebook and Youtube for me.
5-7-09
Who Is this Charlie Potatoes and Where is The Green Fingernail?
Report by Joan Chevous
Monday afternoon and we catch the train down to Liverpool Street. A piano at the top of the escalator has the notice Play Me - a brainwave from Mayor of London Boris Johnson. These pianos are all over London, I was dying to have a go but there was somebody playing, and we did not have time to wait. Walked on to Convent Garden and then on to Drury Lane to our digs for the night at the Travel Lodge. Had a tea, unpacked and then went out to find The Green Fingernail, where Keith was to do a reading.
We should have noted the number in Romilly Street, but we just assumed there would be a huge pub sign saying 'Green Fingernail'. We walked up and down asking in pubs and restaurants - could you tell us where the Green Fingernail is but to no avail. Nobody had heard of it. At last we were directed to No.23, it was actually in Dick's Bar. We went down the stairs to a room under a pub, a very atmospheric place, good stage, lighting, music. Michael Curran was launching his journal, 'Dwang' - Keith is one of the writers in it. We met Michael for the first time, a very nice man who welcomed us, also Adrian Manning whom Keith had also been published with in Next Exit: Six a chapbook published by Kendra Steiner Editions of San Antonio, Texas. Adrian had never read in public before, but you would never have known--he gave a very good performance. Salena Godden opened the evening with a rhythmic chat to a catchy bass line, very professional. There was a good crowd, obviously there because they enjoyed poetry and music. Keith read with gusto, took to the stage with his usual calm but told it like it was. His first poem 'Who Is this Charlie Potatoes?' (requested by Michael Curran) went down well - and yes we do now know where The Green Fingernail is and we will be going again.
HOME
