More Lee Hazlewood

As a footnote to yesterday’s brief mention of Lee Hazlewood, Richard Hawley interviewed him not long before he died and asked, among other things, about producing Duane Eddy. Hazlewood replied:

It worked out good, you know, about 25 or 26 million records later. I guess it worked out all right.

After Hazlewood went to the Great Studio in the Sky, Hawley paid tribute in the Guardian. Sample:

I asked him about how he got that great reverb sound on his early records and he said they used to rent a grain store from a farmer that they knew. The funny side of it was they used to hire someone with a pellet gun to shoot the birds off it so they didn’t make any noise.

I remember asking him about his favourite cover of one of his songs because there’s so many. He just goes: ‘Well, they’re all shit. [Pause] In fact, the originals weren’t much better.’

He went on: ‘Actually, there is one that was great. My son called me from Las Vegas once and said: “Pops you’ve got to get yourself down here. There’s a girl in a club doing a cover of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’”. I said, why the fuck do I have to get on a flight from Phoenix to Las Vegas to see someone do a crappy version of one of Nancy’s tunes that I wrote? And he said, “Yeah, but dad, you’ve never seen it done with a girl playing piano with her breasts.”’

If you don’t know Hawley’s music, I thoroughly recommend investigating it. NZ crime writer Ben Sanders is a fan too, judging by the reference in his 2011 novel By Any Means. Here is Hawley with the title track of his 2005 album Coles Corner:

Project Frozen Dumbo

An unusual problem. The Economist reports that:

the gene pool among captive African elephants has grown woefully small. A single bull named Jackson has sired many of the calves born in the United States in the past decade, and scientists say new bloodlines are needed to avoid future inbreeding among his many progeny.

So the Pittsburgh Zoo, which keeps Jackson at a conservation centre a little way outside the city, has joined an international effort to establish North America’s first elephant sperm bank. The plan is to distribute from it semen collected from wild elephants in South Africa and frozen. Project Frozen Dumbo, started two years ago and led by a German researcher, has already set up an elephant sperm bank in France in the hope of resolving a similar predicament in Europe. [. . .]

Just 39 of the 213 African elephants believed to live in North America’s zoos, circuses and a few private parks are bulls, and even fewer of them are suitable for breeding. Jackson stands out for his “fantastic libido” and highly productive semen, says Deborah Olson, who heads International Elephant Foundation, a conservation group. But this means that too many of the existing elephant stock are now related to him.

So here are Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra singing “Jackson” from their classic album Nancy & Lee, recorded in 1968 when she was hotter than a pepper sprout:

And here are Jenny Morris and INXS in 1985 with the same song. If you watch closely you will understand why I always say that the worst job I have ever had is playing guitar on-stage behind Jenny. It was very difficult to concentrate on the fretboard:

What I’m reading

Nigel Williams on what it was like to work with William Golding on the stage version of Lord of the Flies. Sample:

He went backstage afterwards and said to the boys, “Did you like being little savages?” “Ye-e-eahhh!!” they shouted. “Ah,” he said, “but you wouldn’t like to be savages all the time – would you now?” They looked, suddenly, like the boys in the story do when the adult comes to rescue them at the end – cowed and, indeed, awed by what the world might hold in store.

 Mike Daisey on his hit theatre show/podcast The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs about Apple in China:

I'm not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard.

Hey, it’s worked well all these years for Winston Peters.

Via IIML, Cheryl Bernstein tweets a quote from Alan Mulgan’s Home: a New Zealander’s adventure, published in 1934. Even though he was born in Katikati, close to my hometown Tauranga,  I’d always thought Mulgan a very dull fellow – all that banging on about England being Home meant nothing to my generation – but no, he was just like the rest of us:

I used to wander about Chelsea and look for green and white doors and fantastic knockers.

David Rieff on Kony 2012 argues that “the road to hell is paved with viral videos”; Charlie Beckett of the LSE has more. Charlie Brooker has a go too on Channel 4’s 10 O’Clock Live, with a devastating selection of clips from previous Invisible Children campaigns and funny commentary. Sample:

“What the fuck?” doesn’t begin to cover that. So, in summary, Invisible Children are expert propagandists, with what seems to be a covert religious agenda, advocating military actions…

There is much more.

This is the only thing that makes me want to go to the Olympics if I win Powerball next Saturday: the first complete performance of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light) which includes the Helicopter Quartet mentioned here before (with a YouTube clip). That’s right, the members of a string quartet perform separately in four helicopters a-hovering.

Finally, StatsChat reckons that this Herald story about World Sleep Day is a bit of a snore.

So here are Cream in 2005 with “Sleepy Time”, 39 years after they recorded it for  their debut album Fresh Cream in 1966. The guitarist may look familiar because he is Eric Clapton; the drummer is Ginger Baker, the bassist and singer is Jack Bruce, who wrote the song. Bass and drums famously hate each other, but then it was like that in almost every band I’ve been in.

Optimising Sally Ridge

Paul Litterick at the Fundy Post has a bit to say about celebs who get free entry to exhibitions at the Auckland City Art Gallery they clearly could not care less about but may possibly tweet about. Sample:

Yes, but what is Sally Ridge for? I only ask because she seems so present and yet so absent. There she goes, there she goes again: you can always find her in the camera at parties, grinning and putting her head close to that of one or several of her BFFs. But what does she do in daylight? [. . .]

She is a conduit.  She will channel the wishes of [ACAG director Chris] Saines to her audience, her teeming mass of 1309 Twitter followers. Obviously tiring of the sort of people who go to his gallery all the time – art lovers – Director Saines has struck out forcefully moving forward to optimise Ms Ridge and thus outreach her fans.

I hope to see the show From Degas to Dali on Wednesday, unless I have to queue. I am not English; I do not queue. Not even for Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard and Rouault. On the other hand: there is Bacon. Also Freud, Wyndham Lewis and Spencer. Don’t get to see them too often. Tough call.

Economist letter of the month

From the 10 March issue:

Social indicators

SIR – Your leader regarding Argentina’s dodgy inflation figures asked us to imagine a world without statistics (“Don’t lie to me, Argentina”, February 25th). In such an imaginary world, “governments would fumble in the dark, investors would waste money and electorates would struggle to hold their political leaders to account”. Please tell me: how exactly would that be different from the real world?

PAOLO BELLOMO

Scarsdale, New York

What I’m reading

The New Zealand literary magazine Sport is 40. Not in years, but in issues. The 40th one is out now and is a cracker. Thoroughly recommended as a sampler: in its 452 pages it features 23 contemporary German writers, to mark New Zealand’s role as guest of honour at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and fiction, poems and essays by 52 New Zealand writers. There are established names such as Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Damien Wilkins, Kate Camp and Andrew Johnston (yay); up-and-comers such as Pip Adam, Tima Makeriti, Helen Heath and Anna Taylor (yay). Good to see Virginia Were and Elizabeth Nannestad again; and there is an essay on Nigel Cox by André Gifkins. Last time I saw André he was in a stroller. Sport 40 is $40 in print but here you can get the ebook version for $15. Why wouldn’t you?

Advice for budding financial writers from one who knows. Sample:

How to write an investment newsletter: Emphasize everything that can go wrong.  Relate to your audience – elderly men who are being passed by in this world and need the reassurance that the world is going down the tubes, rather than evolving without them.  Gold mustn’t necessarily be the subject of each letter but it should at least be alluded to or serve as the unwritten subtext.

Home Paddock, who is a farmer, has a view on Labour’s proposed law on farm ownership which would require Johnny Foreigner to show that his purchase “would result in the creation of a substantial number of additional jobs in New Zealand or a substantial increase in exports from new technology or products associated with the purchase”. Sample:

Why don’t they just ban sales to foreigners outright?

It would be almost impossible to create a substantial number – whatever that might be – of additional jobs here from the purchase of a farm; new technology doesn’t necessarily increase exports – though it might make processing them more efficient and reduce jobs in the process.

It’s a funny thing but the people I know who are opposed to foreigners buying New Zealand farms live in places like Grey Lynn and Herne Bay and wouldn’t know a Friesian from a Romney. People who live and work on farms are more relaxed about it – the Crafars were not a great advertisement for the benefits of local ownership. One city friend urges me to support the Save Our Farms campaign, but people who live and work on farms tend to regard their farms as their farms, not “ours”. It’s that private property concept.

Architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly, one of our exports to Oz, begins her latest column in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Last Thursday, the conjunction of Australian Women's History Month and International Women’s Day, was also the day of Sydney's Great Deluge. Nature wept. She stormed and stamped her feet. Yea, and mightily she flooded. What was she trying to tell us?

Tim Blair suggests:

“Go inside”, probably.

Elizabeth’s column goes on to talk about Australian women architects and how they are all, frankly, rubbish. How unsisterly. Professor Rosseforp comments:

Women architects may not have achieved much, but perhaps they have scaled greater heights than women architecture writers.

Ouch.

So here is a song about architecture from Neil Hannon who trades as the Divine Comedy. It’s about the enthusiasts who spend their weekends visiting Georgian houses. These be the verses:

Slip on your Barbour jacket, jump in my old MG

We’re off to the depths of Somerset to see what we can see 

We don’t wanna drink the cider, we don’t wanna walk for miles

We just want to go to a stately home built in the Georgian style

[. . .] Crunch up the gravel driveway, gasp at the grand facade

Just for today we’re lords and ladies, oh what a gay charade!

Lavinia loves the lintels, Anna the architraves

Ben’s impressed by the buttresses thrust up the chapel nave

[. . .] We’ll walk the grounds by Capability Brown

Get lost for days inside the manicured maze

We'll bump our heads jumping on a four-post bed

And we’ll ride for free

On the ladders round the walls of the circular library

One doesn’t often hear a  reference to architraves or Capability Brown in a pop song. The song is “Assume the Perpendicular” from the 2010 album Bang Goes the Knighthood and it goes like this:

Carp diem

Do you want “smooth and attractive feet”? I live in the country so do not keep up with beauty treatments but apparently fish pedicures are all the rage overseas now. More popular than fish, even. Harry Wallop reports that some English towns – Newbury, Windermere, Kidderminster, Aylesbury, Brentwood and Wakefield – have a fish pedicure salon but no fishmonger:

There are 268 fish pedicure salons, according to an analysis of business directories by the Daily Telegraph. Though this is fewer than the 992 fishmongers, as calculated by the Grocer magazine, it represents an explosive level of growth, considering the first salon opened in the UK just two years ago. [. . . ]

The procedure, which is meant to leave clients with smooth and attractive feet, has become very fashionable and many salons hire themselves out for hen nights.

It involves customers placing their feet and ankles in a tank full of about 200 fish, usually Garra Rufa, a type of tiny carp, which nibble away at dead skin.

Earlier this year the Health Protection Agency said it was concerned the procedure could spread diseases from person to person through open wounds, though it said it was unaware of any cases of infection.

So what does Nursing Times say?

Although the Sun has been carping on about warnings and alerts, the newspaper seems to have overestimated the scale of the risk, which health experts have described as being “extremely low”. [. . .].

While the report did acknowledge that the risk of infections could not be completely ruled out, it is important to view this in context and not be reeled in by fishy headlines.

Puntastic. New Zealand’s own intrepid beauty investigator Stephanie Kimpton tried it out in Thailand – that is her foot in the photo above:

I had read about fish pedicures somewhere and when on holiday in Thailand, I saw them. 100 Thai Baht (NZ$4) for 10 minutes. Sold!

Fish therapy has been in Asia for years. The Garra Rufa fish don’t have teeth. They suck at the skin and lift away dead cells revealing nice smooth skin underneath.

Being ticklish and known to boot my pedicurist in the head on the odd occasion, I knew procrastination would be dangerous. I paid my money and got my feet into the tank.

If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t do it. Those toothless piranhas are hungry little suckers. They swarmed at my feet, between my toes and up my legs. The nibbling/sucking sensation was not pleasant. It didn’t hurt. It was just very strange. [. . .]

I spoke to a New Zealander on holiday whose husband gave it a go and shared the same tank as her. She said the fish had a party on his feet and completely ignored hers. Could be the fact that his presented a feast, whilst hers were a famine. So, if you’re going to try it, don’t share with someone who has neglected feet or you won’t get your money’s worth.

Modern romance, Labour style

Does this sort of thing ever happen in Bellamy’s? The Evening Standard reports that:

Labour MP Eric Joyce has been banned from every pub in Britain after he admitted head-butting two Tories in a drunken rampage at the House of Commons.

Joyce, 51, escaped jail but was handed a 12-month community order, a weekend curfew and a three-month ban from anywhere selling alcohol.

[. . . In the Strangers Bar he] head-butted Tory MP Stuart Andrew and Conservative councillor Ben Maney.

In an unprovoked attack, he also struck Tory councillor Luke MacKenzie and fellow Labour MP and party whip Phillip Wilson. He also swung a punch at Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke which missed but grazed his head.

When the police arrived he told them, “You can’t touch me I’m an MP”, and said he had hit Mr Andrew because “He deserved it”. [. . .]

The brawl started when Stuart Niven, a leading amateur opera singer, who was with Joyce, began singing in the bar around 10.30pm.

There were a number of Conservative MP and the guests at surrounding tables and Joyce appeared to think they objected, announcing: “There are too many Tories in this bar.”

Mr Andrew described Joyce as being “more drunk than anyone I have seen in my life”.

Joyce is in trouble again and is possibly even more embarrassed. The subhead on this Daily Mail story says it all:

Teen lover of headbutt MP Joyce reveals his ‘clumsy and surreal’ attempts at seduction

In short, two years ago he was bonking Meg Lauder, a 17-year-old party activist who for some reason has now gone public with the tale. Sad and bad behaviour, yes, but the story fascinates for the insight it gives us into English courtship and the decorating instincts of Labour’s young activists. First, the home décor:

Back in her bedroom at home, its walls decorated with political posters, featuring Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Chairman Mao and Alistair Darling…

Now for the MP’s seduction technique:

Three days later, she duly turned up at his flat during a free period from school, still wearing her school uniform. She claims Joyce told her to take off her school tie because ‘it made her look so young’. After a quick lunch of filled rolls in front of the BBC news, he suddenly started kissing her.

That seems to be all that happened as Meg had to go back to school for a religious  studies class. However, three days later she returned to his flat:

where she stayed overnight after telling her parents she was going to a party and sleeping over with a friend. She says: ‘I knew what I was doing and accepted what was going to happen. We started kissing on the couch and then he said he had “something to show me”.

‘I knew what he meant, but I felt like cringing at his attempt at humour. We went through to the bedroom: one thing led to another, and we had sex.

‘There was no romance, it was almost formal and functional – nothing like I expected and nothing to write home about. It didn’t feel like it was a new boyfriend or lover.’

Afterwards, Joyce ordered a pizza and they watched a documentary.

Isn’t that last sentence depressing. At least neither of them had a cigarette.

What I’m reading

Most of us will have seen or at least received a link to that half-hour “Get Kony” viral video from Invisible Children via email or Facebook. Kony is (possibly was – one hopes that he is past tense) a horrible, horrible man but there are big questions about the video’s accuracy, whether it is helpful and also about the money involved. Mick Hartley takes an austere view: to see why, just follow his link to the photo of the Invisible Children chaps posing with guns: wankers, frankly. Grant Oyston of Acadia University has a massively detailed post with many links about what is wrong with Invisible Children (sample: “people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away”). Even the Sydney Morning Herald has weighed in. Sample quote:

Others take issue with the amount of money Invisible Children dedicates to officer salaries, filmmaking costs and travel, as opposed to on-the-ground programs to help rebuild the lives of people traumatised by decades of conflict. Some have called the video a pitch-perfect appeal to so-called slacktivism, a pejorative term for armchair activism by a younger generation, often online.

Chad Taylor on copyright in France. Good links.

Tyler Cowen, an economist, asks, “Did Oprah steal book sales with her reading club?” As always, at his blog Marginal Revolution a non-economist can learn as much from the comments as from the original post.

The UK cabinet minister and arts grandee Norman St John-Stevas has died. The English do good obituaries and the Daily Telegraph does not disappoint:

Irrepressible, witty and disarmingly immodest, Lord St John was an expert on much else besides aesthetics. In the 1990s, during the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, he became known for his frequent television appearances in which he would give the nation the benefit of his expertise on the attendant constitutional implications, a role in which he claimed extensive knowledge of the inner workings and private thoughts of the Royal family.

It was never entirely clear how much direct access he had, though he was certainly a great friend of Princess Margaret, whose framed likeness, prominently displayed behind him, graced many an official photograph.

He was also a great friend of Dorothy:

He liked to tell the story of how he asked to be excused from a meeting because he had a reception to go to. “But I’m going to the same function,” protested Mrs Thatcher. “Yes, but it takes me so much longer to change,” replied St John-Stevas. Yet it seemed that Mrs Thatcher did not see the need for a licensed jester — particularly one so well-known for his indiscretions with the press over lunch.

For St John-Stevas did not so much leak as gush, providing an entertaining running commentary on the foibles of his colleagues (on whom he bestowed nicknames), spiced up with fruity society tittle-tattle. “The trouble with you, Norman,” one listener complained, “is that you’re such a compulsive name dropper.” “The Queen said exactly the same to me yesterday,” came the rejoinder.

At the other end of the political spectrum, David Thompson quotes Guardian columnist Laurie Pennie’s Twitter feed:

In a café. Being chatted up by aggressive lesbian waitress. My analysis of gender, privilege and travel has not prepared me for this.

Next tweet hastens to add:

Hasten to add: not all lesbian waitresses are aggressive. This one is. She’s making lewd comments about me to her colleagues in Spanish.

Fair enough. Spanish is the loving tongue.

Peter Phillips, founder and conductor of the Tallis Scholars, writes in the Daily Telegraph on William Byrd and the power of song. Money quote:

But it wasn’t just the practicalities of performance which led to Byrd’s manner of composition, it was also his way of thinking. He described how in his favoured texts there is such a deep and hidden force that the right notes would occur to him spontaneously. The same could be said about Purcell’s and Britten’s response to texts, but whereas with them the result was solo singers standing on a stage projecting outwards, Byrd thought of small groups – vocal ensembles or voices with viol accompaniment – turning inwards. He liked to strip meaning to its essence, and then express it through the interraction of several melodic lines in a polyphonic web – a method which compares sharply with the solo, hummable, melodic lines of opera and oratorio so beloved of Purcell and Britten.

Astonishing, if you can bear to watch (not recommended), how quickly even at the Daily Telegraph comments on a blog descend into abuse. Let us avert our eyes and instead watch and listen to the Tallis Scholars sing the heavenly Kyrie from Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices:

Brahms and Liszt

Harry Hutton brings news of a stoush where one would least expect it:

It gets so quiet during the second movement of the Brahms Symphony No. 2, you could almost hear a pin drop.

Or a sneeze. Or a fist hitting a face. 

Such was the case Thursday night at Orchestra Hall in a ruckus the Chicago Symphony Orchestra officially described as “an incident” between “two patrons.” But shocked concert-goers and police called it a fist fight in one of the boxes — where the elite typically sit and expect a more refined experience. 

Just as the second movement was drawing to a gentle close — with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the podium — a man in his 30s, according to police, started punching a 67-year-old man inside one of the boxes.[. . . ] 

The concert never stopped, but Muti shot a glance over his left shoulder toward the box where the punches were thrown. One concert-goer described the look as “dagger eyes.”

I wonder what the Italian for “dagger eyes” is. Riccardo Muti was born in Naples. The fighters are lucky he wasn’t born in Palermo.