See also, Ten Old Songs .. In a year marked by the bowing out of unusual talent, Leonard Cohen’s death is for me the most poignant. In January I wrote a post on David Bowie in a couple of hours, … Read More »
Thanks to Vaska for the Shakespeare insult link. Thanks to Caroline for the Mailer-Vidal story. At a Manhattan soiree attended by writers with egos the sizes of small planets, one Norman Mailer, displeased with a stinking review by Gore Vidal, … Read More »
Most if not all the major religions born of the neolithic revolutions – Hinduism, the Abrahamic faiths and the myths of Classical Greece – feature a Great Flood. “One hypothesis argues for a catastrophic deluge about 5600 BC from Mediterranean into Black Sea”, says … Read More »
‘Kid, next time I say “let’s go some place like Bolivia”, let’s go some place like Bolivia ..’
A villanelle has nineteen lines and just two rhyming sounds, in this case “ain” and “art”. Frank Scott’s Villanelle for Our Time was set to music by Leonard Cohen on one of his more unusual albums, Dear Heather. Years ago I heard Cohen tell BBC Front … Read More »
Today on BBC Radio 4, told from the alternating perspectives of family members where dad is laid low by clinical depression: a moving and creative exploration in prose monologue and rhyming verse. It even ends well. One of those rarities … Read More »
… the impossible, the outrageously and stratospherically talented Artist Known as Prince has died this day. Sometimes it snows in April. I just heard someone on the radio offer that “he played guitar as well as Hendrix, wrote songs as … Read More »
Guy Lombardo was first in with this Sigman & Magidson song in 1949, but it was too good not to be followed by others: Doris Day and Bing, for instance, and much later The Specials. For life affirmative chutzpah, though, … Read More »
We all know Stalin’s Soveit Union was unrelievedly grim and sexually repressed, right? So what would you expect when Sergey Merkurov, People’s Artist of the USSR and creator of the three biggest statues ever of Uncle Joe, was asked in … Read More »
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]A friend asked: were my images of Burbage Photoshopped? Absolutely. I edit all photos in Lightroom and/or Photoshop. In my days of teaching photography at the University of Sheffield, when students boasted that they never edited images after exposure … Read More »