Random Cuts - Number 62

I have a recollection that when I was a schoolboy in Dumbarton we used to visit a shop in the High Street (upstairs I think) which had a stock of apparently esoteric ‘heavy’ rock records, of the sort that you’d only ever hear or hear of on the John Peel show. (I’m sure Robert will fill in the historical details of which shop that was).

None of us ever had any money of course - very occasionally we’d collect enough to get the new Beatles single, but that was about the stretch.

In 1970 or thereby our musical tastes were moving away from the child-oriented pop represented by the likes of ‘Chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep’ and moving towards the kind of heads-down no-nonsense satanist boogie of Sabbaff and “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses.”

We liked to go to that shop and see what we could nick browse amongst the exotic ‘underground’ music.

Thus, in or around 1970, I saw a number of LP sleeves which utterly entranced me, though they were way beyond my price range.

Miles Davis - Bitches Brew; The first Plastic Ono Band album; Santana - Abraxas; Soft Machine 3; Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die; The Trees - On the Shore; King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King; Frank Zappa - Hot Rats; Laura Nyro - New York Tendaberry; Janis Joplin - Kozmic Blues to name but the tip of a very large and excitingly arcane iceberg.

Two albums that really stood out for me, because of the outre nature of the sleeves were The Mothers of Invention - Weasels Ripped My Flesh and the album which is featured here, the truly wonderful ‘Joy of a Toy’ by Kevin Ayers.

I promised myself that the minute I joined the capitalist system and was earning money as a wage-slave I was going to buy all these records and many others too numerous to mention.

And I did.

I bought the album about 1978. I frankly didn’t have any great expectations of ‘Joy of a Toy’ - I liked the sleeve, but I knew next to nothing of Kevin Ayers. I knew nothing of his pioneering work with Soft Machine and others developing a peculiarly English psychedelia. I knew nothing of the Canterbury scene. I knew nothing of the high regard he was held in by many other musicians. I knew nothing of his working association with many musicians who would later become favourites of mine, including Robert Wyatt, Syd Barrett, Daevid Allen and Ollie Halsall.

I just put on the record and listened.

And it is great.

And it is one of my favourite albums.

And it is quintessentially English.

This is one of my favourite songs by any artiste - this would easily make my top 200. I particularly adore the reference to ‘I Am The Walrus’

This is Kevin Ayers - Song For Insane Times

People say that they want to be free
They look at him and they look at me
But it’s only themselves they’re wanting to see
And everybody knows about it

We talk all night and we’re all turned on
We believe we heard him singing his song
Telling us all there was work to be done
And we all sang a chorus of I am the walrus

Yes Disneyland has come to town
Everyone’s dressed and standing around
Alice is wearing her sexiest gown
But she doesn’t want you to look at her

Beautiful people are queuing to drown
They wait for the lifeguard to put on his crown
But he’s up at the other end of town
Trying to talk to the mirror

The scientist talks and he knows what he means
He sits on the floor and has beautiful dreams
Then he gets brought down by a woman who screams
But he knows it’s only a record… Oh yes it is

His brave new girl stops feeding the ants
And looks at him with her septic pants
She still knows how to make him dance
And forget about emancipation… it’s just imagination

And you and I we sit and hum
We know something’s got to come
And get us off our endless bum
There’s probably one in the bathroom
Or even in the hall
I don’t know anymore than you do
In fact I don’t know anything at all

High Times in New York City

Hurricane, Hard Rain and Idiot Wind

Dundee United 2-2 Rangers

Rangers won on penalties.

During my lifetime Rangers have won many domestic trophies. To me, this was one of the most satisfying triumphs, mainly because for most of the 120 minutes plus penalty shoot-out they looked likely to lose.

United should have won.

No doubt about that.

But when you get to penalties, it is axiomatic that the ‘big’ team always wins (except for those miraculous and highly unusual Raith Rovers v Celtic type anomalies).

And today my bete noire bleu, Boyd, did the bizz. Big time.

Incredible.

Well done, Rangers on a fantastic victory.

Hard lines to United.

I Shot The Law

The Mail on Sunday reports today that half the people shot by police officers in England and Wales last year were…..eh…..police officers shot by accident -

Recent accidents involving police firearms include:

• A civilian control room operator was shot in the abdomen during a firearms awareness course in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, last year. A Thames Valley Police firearms officer had been showing staff his Glock pistol, unaware it was loaded.

• A Sussex police officer accidentally shot a 48-year-old PC in the body at the range at Gatwick police station in August 2007. Body armour saved him from serious injury.

• A trainee firearms officer shot a Met instructor in the thigh as he was setting up a target in a mock-up of a night-time alley in 2003.

• A diplomatic protection officer in Central London shot himself in the leg getting into a car in September 2007.

• A firearms officer from West Mercia Police shot himself in the leg and foot in January 2006 after his gun became caught in his clothing.

• An airport security officer from the Met shot the top of his thumb off when he put it in front of his MP5 sub-machine gun during training in 2005.

The Cyclone Ride at Coney Island

Where Merriment Is King

I’ve previously posted about Coney Island

http://almax.wordpress.com/?s=%22coney+island%22

I’ve now come across this 1940s film that gives some idea of what it was like in its heyday.

My Favourite Books

No 69 - The Collection Volume 1 by Raymond Chandler

If you read only certain parts of this blog, particularly the entries in relation to President Bush, and any postings in relation to American foreign policy, particularly its bloodthirsty invasion, bombing, machine-gunning, torturing, killing and maiming of much of the world’s population, together with postings regarding right-wing nutballs and religious fanatics and the death penalty etc etc, you might gain the impression that I was a pinko commie anti-American.

In relation to all these things, perhaps.

But if you read other bits of the blog you will quickly realise that I am utterly besotted by huge swathes of American culture - jazz and blues, Dylan, Bukowski, Lenny Bruce, Ginsberg, Whitman, the Beats, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, Mark Twain, Thelonious Monk, Bill Bryson, Damon Runyon, Neil Young, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Marlon Brando, bluegrass, Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Don De Lillo, country, Philip Roth, Todd Rundgren, HP Lovecraft, Francis Ford Coppola, JFK, Hunter Thompson, James Lee Burke, Stephen King, Charles Mingus, the moon landings, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Philip Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Robeson, Elvis Presley, the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, Muhammad Ali, doo-wop, Phil Spector to name but the merest tip of the Yankee iceberg.

Without America, life is so much more monochrome. Without America, this blog barely exists.

Approximately 28 of the first 68 entries in ‘My Favourite Books’ are by American authors.

And here’s another.

And this is archetypically American. This is quintessential American pulp fiction. This is the hard-boiled Private Eye raised to the status of modern American hero.

American as apple pie and mass slaughter on the school campus it may be, but you may be surprised to learn that Raymond Chandler lived in Britain (where he received a classical education) when he was between the ages of 7 and 24. In fact, he passed the Civil Service exam when he was 19 and spent a year working in the Admiralty Department.

He returned to the land of his birth in 1912 and settled in Los Angeles.

In effect, he was an Englishman living in America.

In time he found that pulp fiction was the area where he could best exploit (ie make money from) his writing talents. Pulp magazines (or pulp fiction; often referred to as “the pulps”) were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were widely published from the 1920s through the 1950s. The term pulp fiction can also refer to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s. The name “pulp” comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called “glossies” or “slicks”. Pulps were the successor to the “penny dreadfuls”, “dime novels”, and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century.

Chandler published his first novel, ‘The Big Sleep’ in 1939. That is one of the featured stories in this volume. Even if you haven’t read the novel, you will probably be familiar with the detective Philip Marlowe, who is the book’s main character, and you will be even more familiar with the 1945 film featuring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as the statutory pulp fiction femme fatale.

The plot of the book is incredibly convoluted, but it features the, now standard, motifs of the hard-boiled detective genre - Marlowe is a Private Eye commissioned by a wealthy client to sort out a blackmailer who is blackmailing the client’s nymphomaniac daughter by use of pornographic photos. In no time at all the blackmailer is dead, murdered by a person or persons unknown, and his homosexual lover is looking for revenge. The client’s chauffeur is next for the Big Sleep, being biffed on the head and then having his car driven into the harbour (with him still in it).

And then it gets difficult to follow or explain.

Gangsters, bribes, adultery, murder by cyanide, gunfights, the lot.

One of the murders (that of the chauffeur) remains entirely unexplained at the end. When the novel was being filmed, neither the director nor the screenwriters knew who had killed the chauffeur or if he had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler who told this to a friend in a letter: “They sent me a wire… asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either“.

Chandler is clearly heavily influenced in the hardboiled style by the great Dashiell Hammett (the Maltese Falcon etc), but he added refinements of his own and his literary style was much admired by contemporaries. Wikipedia notes that -

Critics and writers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired the finely wrought prose of Raymond Chandler. Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, his sharp and lyrical similes are original: “The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel”; “The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips”, defining private eye fiction genre, and leading to the coining of the adjective Chandleresque, which is subject and object of parody and pastiche. Yet, Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical “tough guy”, but a complex, sometime sentimental man of few friends, who attended university, speaks some Spanish and, at times, admires Mexicans, is a student of classical chess games and classical music. He will refuse a prospective client’s money if he is ethically unsatisfied by the job.

It’s great stuff and required reading for students of 20th century America.

The other two novels in this volume are the slightly lesser-known ‘The Lady in the Lake‘ and ‘The Little Sister‘. In the former, a wealthy client hires Marlowe to find his estranged wife. Murder, mayhem, gigolos, alcoholism, murder and mayhem follow. In the latter, a client hires Marlowe to find her missing brother. Murder and mayhem ensue.

Quite wonderful.