A Feast of Posters

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aNOtHEr dIp INtO ThE mAGpIE mEMOrY pOOoL.

John Inman

Back to the serious stuff now and your token gay for today - John Inman - him off "Are You Being Served" and a song from an LP found at a boot sale or somewhere.

"Tandem Song" from "John Inman - With A Bit Of Brass" . Found vinyl on the Webb Ivory label 1978. Here John Inman is accompanied by the Webb Ivory Newall Band and the West Midlands Police Male Voice Choir. So there.

Ask Jinksy About This!

"Overtone" singing!   It's just . . . . it's just

MIND BLOWING!

Jinksy has met this artist, Christian Bollmann, and heard his astonishing talent. The "high notes" are produced by resonances in the mouth cavity. Only the continuous bass note is "sung", in the conventinal sense, in the voice box. Jinks is hiding a lotta lights under her bushel, so she is!

Many other examples on YouTube, along with Mongolian throat singing. You'll need Jinksy to explain the differences. Christian Bollmann struck me as far and away the best of the YouTube selection of "overtone" singers.

Poetry by Inches, Words by a Mile - Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.





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aNOtHEr dIp INtO ThE mAGpIE mEMOrY pOOoL.

William Burroughs

Find more videos like this on OPEN Fluxus

Krazy Kut Up King reads from "Towers Open Fire" via the magic of Crazy Talk software.


"William Seward Burroughs II was born in St. Louis, Missouri on February 5, 1914. Educated at public schools, he went on to study at Harvard. He had the same name as his grandfather, the inventor of the famous Burroughs adding machine. He traveled and studied in Europe after graduation, then worked for an advertising agency in New York City. Later, he joined the army, and took odd jobs in Chicago.

Late in his 20s, he returned to New York and got married. Through his wife, he met the writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The three friends launched the Beat Generation, a group of prominent American writers in the 1950s, later called "beatniks." He died from heart failure, August 2, 1997, aged 83."

A.1. Americana Club

Find more videos like this on OPEN Fluxus

More Crazy Talk nonsense from the archives.

"Alexandra Leaving"/Leonard Cohen

How many songs can boast a genesis like this!

1.  Roman general Mark Antony, of "Friends, Romans and Countrymen" fame, falls for the glam, manipulative Egyptian queen Cleopatra, breaks with Rome (and his wife) and becomes "the bellows and the fan to cool a gypsy's lust" ("Anthony and Cleopatra", Act 1, Sc.1, Wm. Shakespeare,)

2.  Antony and Cleopatra take on Octavius in the sea battle of Actium, which they lose. It's the beginning of the end, and leads eventually to Antony's suicide and the famous asp in Cleo's bosom.

3. The Greek historian Plutarch (very anti-Rome, and most likely one of Shakespeare's sources), writes it all up in his "Life of Antony" including a detail that Shakespeare misses out, (p279 of the previous link) -  "And now Antony forsook the city (Alexandria) and the society of his friends, and built for himself a dwelling in the sea at Pharos . . . " He chucks his hand in!

4. The Greek poet C.P.Cavafy writing at the end of the 19th. Century, publishes (in Greek) the poem "The God Abandons Antony" The poem picks up on Plutarch's detail but reverses the abandonment, imagining that Antony, during one of his many drunken revelries, feels himself forsaken by the God of Merrymaking - Dionysus - and quits the city as indicated in 3. The link here takes you to a translation  of Cavafy's poem, which is "scholarly" and about as poetic as a recipe for mixing concrete.

5.  The novelist and (woefully neglected) poet, Lawrence Durrell, great fan of Alexandria, admirer of Cavafy and all things Hellenic, makes a free but much more moving translation of the poem, which can be found amongst the workpoints and notes in his astonishing four-volume  "Alexandria Quartet" (Can't find Durrell's translation on www!)

6. Leonard Cohen's lyric reworks these ideas. "Alexandria" is transmuted into a lover, Aleaxandra, who is leaving, perhaps dying.  But all the ideas and sentiments in Cavafy's poem and Durrell's translation are retained.

(The image in the clip is pure autocue. No apologies!  YouTube has many other version of the song, some with images which are inappropriate, even unpleasant, and some are merely silly.)

Howard Morrison Quartet

Not sure where this audio came from- possibly a 45 I picked up somewhere. The Howard Morrison Quartet were a skiffle group from New Zealand and I imagine this was a concert recorded there in the 50's in front of an enthusiastic audience.
They remind me a bit of the Barron Knights who did that combination of terrible song parody and imitation so well back in the 60's over here. I can't quite work out if they are singing Granada for laughs or not!

New Zealand is not renowned for its comic exports and this is no exception. They redeemed themselves recently though with the fabulously talented duo Flight Of The Conchords.

There's a LUVERLY moment towards the end . . .

. . when she flicks her hair back over her shoulder! Notice she is perched 
up on a cushion. What a wee sweetie! (Or am I just an old softie?  
And no . . she's no relation.)

You can hear on YouTube how practise made perfect for Evgeny Kissin.

(Beethoven's Rondo "Rage Over A Lost Penny" carries the (late) 

Opus No.129. But not "late" Beethoven at all. Published posthumously. 
Written c1795, 3 years before the groundbreaking "Pathetique" Sonata, 
Op.13)

Jessie Mathews - For Kippers Dickie and Doc F -

Until I had seen these photos I have to confess that I didn't know what a cracker Jessie was. Of course, when you are ten fantasising (not that I did) over someone older than your mother was probably frowned upon by 1950's English society. Now, having seen the lady, I wish she had been born circa 1956 as she certainly could have parked her slippers 'neath my bed.

The following is from Screenonline:

Jessie Matthews was a gamine, graceful dancer, with a sweet, pure-toned singing voice, and waif-like sex appeal, who embodied 1930s style.

One of 11 children of a Soho costermonger, Matthews enjoyed dancing from an early age, and elocution lessons created her distinctive "plummy" accent. In a chorus line at 16, she also had fleeting dancing roles in silent films.

In London, 1930, she was in Ever Green, featuring hit song "Dancing on the Ceiling", costarring with Sonnie Hale (then husband of Evelyn Laye) which led to a scandalous divorce action, Matthews cited as the "other woman".

Her breakthrough film performance was as Susie Dean, dancing with airy grace and fluidity, in The Good Companions (1933), for Victor Saville, her most sympathetic director. The dual-role film version of Evergreen (d. Saville, 1934) opened at Radio City Music Hall, New York, and she was labelled "The Dancing Divinity", although attempts to costar her and Fred Astaire in a film never materialised.

Next came the gender-swapping musical comedy First A Girl (d. Saville, 1935), produced, like all of her major 1930s films, by Gaumont-British, which surrounded her with the best available talent: Americans, choreographer Buddy Bradley, cinematographer Glen MacWilliams and songwriter Harry Woods; art director Alfred Junge; and musical director Louis Levy.

Other, weaker films were directed by Hale, and Climbing High (1938) was directed by Carol Reed, with whom she had a brief affair, and her career at the top was over by the end of the decade.

Often temperamental and unstable, she suffered from problems originating in her difficult upbringing, with many personal tragedies and nervous breakdowns, including generally loveless marriages which ended in divorce. Hale (1931-44) was her second of three husbands.

Her only US film role was a cameo in the all-star fundraiser Forever and a Day (US, d. René Clair, 1943), and her song in tom thumb (d. George Pal, 1958) was dubbed. However, she became a celebrity again in the long-running radio soap Mrs Dale's Diary, and continued to work in regional theatre in the UK and abroad, including a triumphant one-woman show in Los Angeles in 1979, and was perfectly cast as Aunt Bessie in TV's Edward and Mrs. Simpson (Thames, 1978).

For most of the 1930s, Matthews was the most popular female film star in England: the image of her in Sailing Along (d. Hale, 1938), in a white evening gown, with a gentleman's black top hat and walking cane, performing "Souvenir of Love" in Lime Grove's art deco luxury sets, indelibly incarnates 1930s style. She was awarded the OBE in 1970.
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aNOtHEr dIp INtO ThE mAGpIE mEMOrY pOOoL.