Fiona Apple’s chillingly subversive cover of Willy Wonka’s song from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , originally sung by a supremely creepy Gene Wilder in the 1970s film (if you saw this as a kid, didn’t he scare the crap out of you?), appears in a new animated ad for Chipotle which slams factory farming.
Recorded in New York on 27 August 1931 with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra: Mannie Klein (tpt) Tommy Dorsey (tbn) Jimmy Dorsey (cl, as) unknown (vln) Martha Boswell (p) Eddie Lang (g) Joe Tarto (sb) Stan King (d)
E-37112-A Shine On, Harvest Moon (Norworth-Bayes) 3:08 Brunswick 6173, [BSC1], [NWST], [IGSOY], [IY], [ITG]
E-37113-A Heebie Jeebies (Atkins-Boswell) 2:37 Brunswick 6173, [BSC1], [NWST], [ELMB], [IY]
The Boswell Sisters were a close harmony singing group that attained prominence in the USA in the 1930s.
Sisters Martha Boswell (June 9, 1905 – July 2, 1958), Connee Boswell (December 3, 1907 – October 11, 1976), and Helvetia “Vet” Boswell (May 20, 1911 – November 12, 1988) were raised by a middle-class family on Camp Street in uptown New Orleans, Louisiana. They came to be well known in New Orleans while still in their early teens, making appearances in local theatres and radio, and their first recordings for Victor Records in 1925. However, the Boswell Sisters did not attain national attention until they moved to New York City in 1931 and started making national radio broadcasts. After a few recordings with Okeh Records in 1930, they made numerous recordings for Brunswick Records from 1931-1935. These Brunswick records are widely regarded as milestone recordings of vocal jazz.
Martha, Connee and Vet Boswell, New Orleans, 1925
Connee’s ingenious reworkings of the melodies and rhythms of popular songs, together with Glenn Miller’s hot arrangements, and first rate New York jazz musicians (including The Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Bunny Berigan, Fulton McGrath, Joe Venuti, Arthur Schutt, Eddie Lang, Joe Tarto, Manny Klein, Dick McDonough, and Carl Kress), made these recordings unlike any others. Melodies were rearranged and slowed down, major keys were changed to minor keys (sometimes in mid-song) and rhythmic changes were par for the course. Interestingly, the Boswell Sisters were among the very few performers allowed to make these changes to current popular tunes as during this era, music publishers and record companies pressured performers not to alter current popular song arrangements).
The Boswell Sisters were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998.
(Info from Youtube.)
The Harvest Moon for 2013 falls on 19 September. Each full moon of the twelve months has a folkloric name of its own and that for the month of September is called the “Harvest Moon”. According to NASA, the Harvest Moon gets its name from farmers who relied on the moon and its celestial schedule to harvest their crops. Since most crops ripen in late summer and early autumn, farmers would have to harvest during this time of the year (in the northern hemisphere, this is September, but not in the southern hemisphere).
“In the days before electric lights, farmers depended on bright moonlight to extend the workday beyond sunset,” writes NASA’s Dr. Tony Phillips. “It was the only way they could gather their ripening crops in time for market. The full moon closest to the autumnal equinox became the Harvest Moon, and it was always a welcome sight.”
Info from NASA.
“The moon’s shining so brightly tonight…”
Kyle Shepherd (piano, voice), Shane Cooper (double bass) and Jonno Sweetman (drums) perform a version of this subversive traditional Cape Goema song arranged by Kyle Shepherd. Recorded live at Welgemeend, Welgemeend Street, Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa on Friday 21 May 2009.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
— From God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965)
By JOYCE MAYNARD in the New York Times, September 14, 2013
“As the mother of a daughter myself, I would say that a man who treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having done so.”
Image: Eleni Kalorkoti
In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god.
Now comes the word — though not really news, to some — that over the years when he was cherishing his privacy, Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he.
“Salinger,” a new documentary film touches — though politely — on the story of just five of these young women (most under 20 when he sought them out), but the pattern was wider: letters I’ve received over the 15 years since I broke the unwritten rule and spoke of my own experiences with the man revealed to me that there were more than a dozen. In at least one case, Salinger was corresponding with one teenage girl while sharing his home with another: me.
Like many of the others involved, I was a young person in possession of particular vulnerabilities as well as strengths — a story that began with my family, not Salinger, and inspired me to seek out an Ivy League education with the dream of becoming a writer. Nine months after I arrived at Yale, having published a story that attracted Salinger’s attention, I received a letter from him. Then many more.
I was 18 when he wrote to me in the irresistible voice of Holden Caulfield, though he was 53 at the time. Within months I left school to live with Salinger; gave up my scholarship; severed relationships with friends; disconnected from my family; forswore all books, music, food and ideas not condoned by him. At the time, I believed I’d be with Jerry Salinger forever.
His was a seduction played out with words and ideas, not lovemaking, but to the young girl reading those words — as with a few million other readers — there could have been no more powerful allure.
Salinger wasn’t simply brilliant, funny, wise; he burrowed into one’s brain, seeming to understand things nobody else ever had. His expressions of admiration (“I couldn’t have created a character I love more than you”) were intoxicating. His dismissal and contempt, when they came, were devastating.
I was 19 when he put two $50 bills in my hand and sent me away. Years after he dismissed me, his voice stayed in my head, offering opinions on everything he loved and all that he condemned. This was true even though, on his list of the condemned, was my own self.
This was not made easier by Salinger’s unwritten edict on secrecy: if Salinger wrote you a letter, you must never say you received it. If he broke your heart you must never mention it happened. To do anything else constituted more than the violation of the privacy of a great writer; it was proof of one’s own reprobate soul, the exploitation (a word with which I’ve grown familiar over the years) of a man so much purer than the false and shallow world around him, an artist who wanted only to be left alone.
To a stunning degree, for a period of over half a century, Salinger managed to convince a significant portion of the reading population that his words and actions should be exempt from scrutiny for the simple reason that he wrote those nine stories, and “The Catcher in the Rye.” And because he said so.
Now the story well known to me is known to the world, though there are voices raised up still, decrying the violation of Salinger’s legendary privacy. But while this recent burst of disclosure might seem to demystify the man (or call his role as sage into question), a troubling phenomenon has surfaced along with the news.
It is the quiet acceptance, apparently alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive treatment of those who serve the artist and his art. Richard Schickel, writing of Salinger’s activities, expresses the view that despite the disclosures about Salinger’s pursuit of young women he lived “a ‘normal’ life.”
“He liked pretty young girls. Stop the presses,” writes the film critic (and father of daughters) David Edelstein. The implication being, what’s the fuss?
One of these girls, 14 when Salinger first pursued her long ago, described him in terms usually reserved for deities, and spoke of feeling privileged to have served as inspiration and muse to a great writer — though she also reports that he severed their relationship the day after their one and only sexual encounter.
Some will argue that you can’t have it both ways: how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it? How can a consensual relationship, as Salinger’s unquestionably were, constitute a form of abuse?
But we are talking about what happens when people in positions of power — mentors, priests, employers or simply those assigned an elevated status — use their power to lure much younger people into sexual and (in the case of Salinger) emotional relationships. Most typically, those who do this are men. And when they are done with the person they’ve drawn toward them, it can take that person years or decades to recover.
Continue reading this New York Times article HERE.
Trained as a sculptor as well as an animator, Piotr Dumala calls his innovative stop-motion technique in which an image is scratched into painted plaster, then painted over and the next image scratched on top “destructive animation”. He devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i Kara), Dumala’s expressionist half-hour long Dostoevsky adaptation, is a succession of shadowy, minimalist tableaux that emerge slowly from darkness and return to it. Stripping the Russian masterwork down to two scenes — the murder and Raskolnikov’s meeting of Sonia — Dumala interprets the novel’s themes with chiaroscuro intensity, choosing to highlight just a few strands of the story:
“It was not my aim to copy the book. I was really close to the book. I took one level of the book. It’s not possible to show everything from this book… This is about love and how obsession can destroy love. In our life we are under two opposite influences to be good or bad and to love or hate.”
In the worlds Dumala sketches, the lines between light and darkness are stark, but also shifting and mutable.
Read more about the background to Dumala and this film in Chris Robinson’s article for Animation World Magazine, HERE.
From Our Bright Future (Elektra, 2008).
“Face Deep is an experimental, animated (stop motion) film that allows for a free-flow of thought and exploration of self within an otherwise overly produced, technical and character driven practice. This sequentially photographed film looks at animator as lead character, allowing internal personalities/burning stories to emerge on skin surface whilst a sense of play within the medium is explored.
By listening to the songs of local low-fi Cape Town band Tape Hiss and Sparkle on loop, the raw and honest lyrics/sounds from Simon Tamblyn lead the animator deeper into herself to explore her own raw and honest inner spaces. The film allows one orator to evoke new stories in another orator, and for their different methods of story telling (sound/visual) to co-exist together; sometimes it is another person’s truth that helps us explore our own.”
— Meghan Judge, Simon Tamblyn
More of Meghan’s work is HERE.
“Hang my slips out with the words between the lines…”
From The Pirate’s Gospel (Holocene Music, 2006).
From Faces in the Rocks (Grass Roots Records, 2007).
Karen covering Fred Neil’s classic – from an album of a friend’s reel-to-reel recordings of her rehearsing in her living room, entitled1966, which was released in 2012.
Record Label: Delmore Recording Society
Karen Dalton: Voice; 12-String Guitar
Richard Tucker: Guitar
Download the whole album HERE.
An unusual version of this bluesy 40s jazz standard (penned by Fred and Doris Fisher), from this legendary folk artist’s third album, Like an Old-fashioned Waltz (Island, 1974).
My favourite track from This is the Ice Age (Virgin, 1981).
A protest song from the triple album Orphans – Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (ANTI- Records, 2006). Tom Waits at his most direct is devastating.
The first track on Side 2 of the 1976 prog rock album, The Roaring Silence, by South African-born keyboardist Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
“Liars rule the world…”
“Treason” and “End Beginnings” — tracks from the album End Beginnings (Shifty, 1991). This is the sound of South Africa in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Of course, I never got to hear this until years later.
Music: Warrick Sony
Words and voice: Lesego Rampolokeng
Download this album HERE.
From one of the most arresting albums of the twentieth century, Maxinquaye (Island Records, 1995). I bought this CD in my final year of high school, and spent hours and hours in its company over the next few years, lying prone, alone, on the floor, curtains drawn, drowning. The album’s fractured claustrophobia felt so exactly right for the time, particularly in South Africa… its heart of darkness festering quietly while the rainbow nationalist rhetoric raged outside.
“It was the most bizarre record I’ve ever worked on,” says Mark Saunders about Maxinquaye, the 1995 Tricky album that, with the exception of the previously released singles ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Ponderosa’, he co-produced with the artist, in addition to taking care of the engineering, programming and mixing. “It was a complete un-learning experience and it was also a total re-learning experience. Think of how to make a record, then forget everything you’ve learned and start completely backwards and upside down. I could write a book about Tricky. He’s such a great character.”
Read more about the highly unorthodox way in which Maxinquaye was made, HERE.
“Everyone in the World Is Doing Something Without Me” and “My Kingdom”, from the 1996 release on Astralwerks, Dead Cities. The quintessential sound of nineties dystopia.
From the soundtrack to the 2004 documentary, Be Here to Love Me.
I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.
― Stephen Fry, from his autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot (Random House, 1997)
Cake Hotel – by Tate & Lyle
The world’s first “hotel” made entirely from cake is to welcome guests for one night only with room service in the form of vanilla sponge cushions and a hand-stitched meringue rug. The hotel within a hotel in Soho, central London, is the creation of more than 14 artists who spent 2,000 hours baking and 900 hours decorating with more than 600 kilos of sugar.
Guests will be encouraged to eat their way through windows and walls clad with 2,000 macaroons, a rug made from 1,081 meringues hand-stitched together, 20 kilos of marshmallow garlands, windowsills built entirely from fudge and a bath filled with caramel-coated popcorn.
The bedside table even features edible books.
Read more HERE!
Hello, reader :)
It’s Fleurmach’s first birthday! To celebrate, here is a ground-shifting text, a manifesto of sorts, from Hélène Cixous back in 1976 (the year punk broke). If you haven’t ever read Cixous (and even if you have, once upon a time), do yourself a favour and plough through this, SERIOUSLY. I tried to excerpt chunks from it (and may still), but decided that it’s really important and enriching to read the piece in its entirety.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and contributions to the Fleurmach community.
Much love,
Cherry Bomb
I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.
Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l’ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.
I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say “woman”, I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the “dark” – that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute – there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes – any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another.
Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.
I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?
Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naïveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?
Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great – that is, for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty – so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.
Live performance, 28 July 2012, Madrid.
Original version was from Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Duophonic, 1996) – but this is a incredibly immersive alternative version, and the video is the bomb, too (har har, sorry).
The third track on Side A of the VS album, released in 1982 on Ace Of Hearts Records – AHS 10010. Listen to the whole album HERE. If you are into post-punk, this is really one of the essential albums.
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