tisdag, december 30
måndag, december 29
Don't Be Cruel
Psyched-out melodrama, for your mind exclusively. Be careful who you let inside, for he may cause you confusion and delusion.
(Confusion, however, is something beautiful.)
söndag, december 28
Beside The Seaside: Yvonne Cloud Variations.
"Yvonne Kapp (née Mayer) was born in London on April 17th 1903, to a German Jewish family from the Rhineland, her father being engaged in the vanilla trade. She was briefly at King's College London but in 1922, at the age of 19, she married the considerably older (by thirteen years) artist and and musician Edmond (known as Peter) X Kapp, who personally knew, drew and painted most of the literati of the day. (The "X", seemingly, signified nothing more than an attempt to distinguish himself from his father, who had the same name.)
The Kapps led a bohemian life, travelling around Europe and earning their living through art and writing, staying extensively on the Italian Riviera, on Capri, and in English country cottages. Whilst engaged in this literary milieu, she encountered many famous people, including Quentin Bell, Rebecca West, Paul Robeson, John Heartfield, Melanie Klein and Herbert Morrison, to name only a few. Some, such as D H Lawrence, sat for a portrait by Edmond. She also edited "Pastiche: A Music-Room Book", which conained 28 illustrations by Edmond X Kapp.
She found heself bringing up her daughter effectively as a young single mother, as Edmond Kapp periodically disappeared, arising from psychological disturbances from his experiences in the First World War; Yvonne Kapp turned to journalism and writing to support herself and her child. In the late 1920s she was employed as the literary editor of Vogue in France and, under the pseudonym of Yvonne Cloud, she wrote four novels, all outspoken social Comedies. (...)
...............................
"In addition to a number of works of non-fiction, she published four novels under the name of Yvonne Cloud. If her choice of name is significant, it is that the silver lining she offered became more tarnished with each publication. The novels all had a satirical streak, but outrage swells in successive books. By The Houses In Between (1938) Kapp was ostensibly a "political" writer.
Her first novel, Nobody Asked You, was self-published in 1932 after its contents had caused the projected publisher consternation. One reviewer observed: "she shows remorselessly, as life does, that to have no purpose, no standards, no altruism, no idealism, is to be damned to a hell below ordinary pain". Kapp lacked none of these qualities in the varied career that was to follow her literary apprenticeship.
In 1936 she visited the Soviet Union. The sights she saw there, and a long conversation on the voyage home with Harry Pollitt, secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, led her to joining the Communist Party. From this time on, her life was to be politically active. (...)"
.............................
"Born Yvonne Mayer, 1903; educated at King's College London; married the artist, Edmond Kapp, 1922; joined Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, following a visit to the Soviet Union; worked with Basque and Jewish refugees, 1937-1938; Assistant to Director, British Committee to Refugees from Czechoslovakia, dismissed from her post by the Home Office, 1940, and wrote pamphlet British Policy and the Refugees, 1941; Research Officer, Amalgamated Engineering Union, 1941-1946; worked for Medical Research Council, undertaking field work in the East End of London, 1947-1953; editor and translator, Lawrence and Wishart (publishers), 1953-1957; died 1999. Publications: four novels under the pseudonym Yvonne Cloud, including Nobody Asked You, 1932 and The Houses in Between, 1938; Eleanor Marx, (2 vols 1972, 1976"
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"Beside The Seaside: Six Variations. Six writers comment on the seaside towns which they were allocated to write about. An interesting aspect of social history. Yvonne Cloud wrote the introduction and also the chapter on Margate. Kate O'Brien covered Southend, Antonia White covered Brighton, Malcolm Muggeridge Bournemouth, James Laver Blackpool and V.S. Pritchett Scarborough."
Bibliography, as Yvonne Cloud:
lördag, december 27
Seaside Disco, Part 1 (Prelude).
Feet standing on a knife's edge, you watch them turn red as you jump in the water below. And the feeling is alright, as you start swimming, coloring the water with that same colour: Red.
fredag, december 26
Play It Again, Sam
Words spoken softly from a distant shore. Carried away through the night, guided by the steady hand of Slow Romance.
onsdag, december 24
måndag, december 22
söndag, december 21
Lazy Sunday's Theme: The Aged Gentleman's Story.
The strange feeling of home.
lördag, december 20
Reader's Digest, Saturday.
The best sleevenotes ever:
"The spirit of St Etienne resides in several select sites and states of mind. The smell and sheen of a dismayed seaside town the day after summer; anticipation, the straight, shiny, swinging hair of the perfect sixties girl as she jumps ceaselessly in slo-mo into the perfect MG; sorrow, often so sumptuos that it feels like pleasure; the lonely splendour of the first Model Home in Milton Keynes; The sheer heart-stopping unimpeachable joy of waking up in the morning and still being English.
Add to all this the fact that they are the music heard on the edge of sound, and it always was a foregone conclusion that you would surrender to this most mellifluous of menage a trois. Because if God truly is in the details, then St Etienne sit at his right hand holding his slide rule.
Pop music, in all its squalid splendour, has always had a horrible habit of making one less than one is, boiling you down to the lowest common denominator of the big black throbbing bottom bass-line; what's his name, what's his number and how do I get him? But St Etienne always made you more. You'd put on the Saints and sit around for hours musing on what it meant to be a girl, to be of the English blood royal, to be alive, to be duplicit, to be living after the fall of Communism, to be living at the end of the century, to be human. And then, and only then, would you genuflect with L'Heure Bleu and leave the house by the fire escape when all were sleeping to meet him by the Waltzer and snog him on the beach.
Long before the current and thoroughly admirable habit of Brit beat bands writing soundtracks for films no one would ever make, St Etienne were writing the new improved soundtrack for the once and future cinema Renaissance. They sound silver; silverer than any screen could ever be. And they cast a giant shadow, a Pale Movie itself. Like A Motorway expands on Two Into Three Won't Go; Hug My Soul sees into Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, You're In A Bad Way blows the whistle on Billy Liar; Hobart Paving collects the debris outside the L-Shaped Room. Just close your eyes and you can see Pearl & Dean's eternal blue sky.
Like coming from a cinema matinee into daylight, St Etienne strand you blinking and disorientated, but happy. And already you miss them, before they even leave. And yet you want them to leave, so that you can get on with the serious business of missing them. Too late to say goodbye, but too young to die; remember them this way.
Julie Burchill"
"The spirit of St Etienne resides in several select sites and states of mind. The smell and sheen of a dismayed seaside town the day after summer; anticipation, the straight, shiny, swinging hair of the perfect sixties girl as she jumps ceaselessly in slo-mo into the perfect MG; sorrow, often so sumptuos that it feels like pleasure; the lonely splendour of the first Model Home in Milton Keynes; The sheer heart-stopping unimpeachable joy of waking up in the morning and still being English.
Add to all this the fact that they are the music heard on the edge of sound, and it always was a foregone conclusion that you would surrender to this most mellifluous of menage a trois. Because if God truly is in the details, then St Etienne sit at his right hand holding his slide rule.
Pop music, in all its squalid splendour, has always had a horrible habit of making one less than one is, boiling you down to the lowest common denominator of the big black throbbing bottom bass-line; what's his name, what's his number and how do I get him? But St Etienne always made you more. You'd put on the Saints and sit around for hours musing on what it meant to be a girl, to be of the English blood royal, to be alive, to be duplicit, to be living after the fall of Communism, to be living at the end of the century, to be human. And then, and only then, would you genuflect with L'Heure Bleu and leave the house by the fire escape when all were sleeping to meet him by the Waltzer and snog him on the beach.
Long before the current and thoroughly admirable habit of Brit beat bands writing soundtracks for films no one would ever make, St Etienne were writing the new improved soundtrack for the once and future cinema Renaissance. They sound silver; silverer than any screen could ever be. And they cast a giant shadow, a Pale Movie itself. Like A Motorway expands on Two Into Three Won't Go; Hug My Soul sees into Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, You're In A Bad Way blows the whistle on Billy Liar; Hobart Paving collects the debris outside the L-Shaped Room. Just close your eyes and you can see Pearl & Dean's eternal blue sky.
Like coming from a cinema matinee into daylight, St Etienne strand you blinking and disorientated, but happy. And already you miss them, before they even leave. And yet you want them to leave, so that you can get on with the serious business of missing them. Too late to say goodbye, but too young to die; remember them this way.
Julie Burchill"
fredag, december 19
torsdag, december 18
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One day in mid-June, a young man walks into a bar. His eyes gaze at the ceiling as he enters a tall room, almost empty, displaying only a few chairs, also tall, and a wooden desk crammed with dust and fingerprints. As the young man starts to walk towards this ragged scene, he detects a worrying feeling that he, as he recalls it, never felt before: Age.
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