My neighbours are better than yours

Craig from over the fence came bearing gifts just now. One item was a load of snapper he caught yesterday. The other was a large piece of smoked trevally: he was a bit apologetic about it as he smoked it last night using a new technique – he’d added a little maple syrup and brandy to the usual brine and wasn’t sure we would like it.

I said we would.

So here are the Rolling Stones, live in Paris in 2003, with Keef delivering the full Chuck Berry:

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Is the Pope a Catholic?

Not necessarily. The Copts have a pope too. Pope Shenouda III died last week aged 88. Before he was buried he was seated on his throne in gown and crown. They do things differently in Egypt:

Tradition dictates that a blindfolded child will decide the next pope for Egypt’s 12 million Coptic Christians.

The voters in Hutt South may like to consider this as an alternative to their usual candidate selection process.

Gauche caviar

My French is truly execrable but I like to add to my small stock of phrases when I can. From a piece by Mick Hartley quoting Richard Wolin on revolutionary tourism I learn that the French for “champagne socialist” is “gauche caviar”. (In fact the French is the original and the English is a derivation, as is the American “limousine liberal”. Pleasingly, there is a bar in East Beirut called Gauche Caviar.) Among the revolutionary tourists cited are – quelle surprise – Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva visiting Mao’s China. Sample:

Barthes observed that, since communism had cured “alienation,” psychoanalysis had been rendered superfluous in China... In Les Chinoises (Chinese Women), Kristeva went so far as to justify the traditional Chinese practice of foot-binding as merely a harmless, female variant of male circumcision. In any event, remarked Kristeva, Chinese habitudes and mores could not be judged by Western standards, since the latter were pervaded by petty bourgeois biases and prejudices.    

I wonder what the French for “useful idiots” is. Hartley says of Kristeva:

It’s a reminder that making excuses for the most extreme manifestations of misogyny, as long as they’re practiced by non-Western societies, is a form of blindness that has a long and discreditable history among sections of the feminist left.

Happy birthday, Sarah Vaughan

Born 27 March 1924, died 3 April 1990, Sarah Vaughan was imho the best jazz singer ever, with an immaculate technique – pitch, phrasing, timbre – allied to an extraordinary interpretive imagination. I sat about 10 feet behind her on-stage in the Michael Fowler Centre when she performed with piano, bass and drums at the Wellington Festival in 1989 – the same festival where Pierre Boulez, who turned 87 yesterday, conducted his Ensemble InterContemporain in Birtwistle, Boulez and someone else, probably Messiaen.

Vaughan was fantastic. Of course she was, but what I really appreciated was how often she turned around to us in the cheap seats and made sure that we were included. I could just about touch her pianist. A year later she was dead.

Here is the young Sarah Vaughan singing “Over the Rainbow” which is not her core repertoire but it shows her warmth, technique and gorgeous tone: 

And here she is a few years later with “I Got Rhythm”. Who could ask for anything more?:

Country matters

You know you live in the country when big green rubbish bins at the posh private boarding school have large labels saying:

HOUSEHOLD WASTE ONLY

No hay or manure

I have never stolen a live peacock!

Sam Leith reviews Strindberg: a life (Yale), Sue Prideaux’s biography of the 19th-century playwright August Strindberg. All I knew about him was that he was a Swede who wrote a play called Miss Julie. I figured him for a gloomy sort, Ibsen without the jokes with added misogyny. But no:  

Strindberg was attacked by feminist contemporaries not because he wanted to keep women down, but because his ideas for female emancipation went far beyond what they found comfortable. And in addition to Miss Julie he wrote 60 plays, three books of poetry, 18 novels, nine autobiographies, 10,000 extant letters, tons of journalism ... and the contents of a green flannel sack he hauled around after him, described thus by his second wife:

   “About one yard in length, with gentle billowing valleys and summits and fastened by a cord. It contained all his manuscripts. It contained his theory that plants have nerves. It contained his theory that elements can be split. It contained theories that refute Newton and God himself. ”

So, more interesting than one had supposed. Leith summarises the life thus:

Born in 1849, he had a horrible childhood, and was bullied by both his parents. He rejected his father’s snobbery and his mother’s pietism. He was, for the most part, kind. Even when he was flat broke, he bought handfuls of cherries twice a day to feed a bear in the zoo that he had become fond of. The bear was called Martin. When Strindberg behaved badly — as he did towards his first wife, Siri and their children — guilt weighed on him. Having once been falsely accused of stealing a peacock, 18 years later he startled a bookseller by exclaiming at random: ‘I have never stolen a live peacock!’

Nothing was ever simple for him. He fell in with crooks, swindlers and Satanists. When he was accused of impregnating an underage girl, he denounced his blackmailer to a policeman — who himself turned out to be being blackmailed by the same man. Strindberg was repeatedly sued for blasphemy. {. . .]

 He lived, gregariously, in Stockholm, Paris and Berlin — everywhere he went cultivating a more or less drunken salon of some sort. His love life was a non-stop disaster, and his finances were always precarious — a clue to the reason for which can be discerned in a triumphant letter he wrote to his wife: ‘I’ve succeeded in borrowing some money, so we are debt-free!’

Leith ends by saying:

you can see in the prose how much fun the author is having with Strindberg. Anyone reading her marvellous book will have that much fun too.

I so want to read this.

What I’m reading

Terence Blacker seems a good egg – writes books for adults and children, active member of PEN, helped publish Jerzy Kosinski, writes and sings amusing songs such as “Sad Old Bastards with Guitars”, and has a lively blog. A recent post suggests that the truth about creative writing is that, as William Goldman said of Hollywood, nobody knows anything: Blacker goes on to offer a wonderfully contradictory selection of quotes from writers on writing. 

Paul Litterick reads the Auckland University student newspaper Craccum so you don’t have to. It’s not like it used to be, and the new editor plagiarises Chairman Mao, possibly a first for Craccum and New Zealand journalism in general. Sample (from the editor, not Paul or Mao: sorry, can’t find it online but Paul swears the spelling, punctuation and grammar are as in the original):

If  you ever try and do something serious and yet slightly outside of the perimeters of normality’s boundaries, if you ever try and address an issue that is of vital and immediate importance yet feel as if a petition or operating within the usual beurocratic process won’t quite be sufficient, you can be sure when mainstream media come to ‘report’ on your activities they will be quick to interview the man in the dress.

Parnell/Remuera has the NZ Herald’s Shelley Bridgeman (full background via Cactus Kate here) who recently revealed that she was having trouble reading text on an iPhone so thought she needed to get her eyes tested:

Having always enjoyed excellent eyesight, I wasn’t sure where to begin. I made an appointment at my GP. . .

Taranaki/Waikato has Fairfax’s Rachel Stewart, who as a provincial lesbian feminist is perhaps the Platonic ideal of an anti-Shelley Bridgeman. Her latest column in the Taranaki Daily News, Waikato Times and who knows where else complains that the wrong sort of lesbian i.e. Alison Mau is popular with the public, and ordinary women are stupid. That’s not actually what she says, but is what she means. Sample:

Hey sister. If you see me sporting a curled lip and vague sneer while squinting at you in the supermarket checkout line, know this. I am actively judging you.

It won’t just be your heaving trolley stuffed full of processed, sugary, tooth-decaying death that I am condemning you for. It will also be because you boldly and proudly placed its close partner in crime on the top of your junk pile. Just what is the perfect condiment to your toxic take-home fodder? The women’s mag, of course. [. . .]

It’s a really strange world, don’t you think, when people know more about Angelina Jolie’s right leg than the plight of the 200-plus species going extinct every day?

Or why hairdressers can’t even begin to conceptualise the fact that some of their female customers might actually prefer to read a National Geographic or a New Yorker while their hair is being coloured?

Maybe I’m missing something. Does my intellectual snobbery just need a good dose of lightening up and chilling out?

Rachel, Rachel. Don’t tempt us.

Sorry, sister, but I guess I’m just an uptight, all-knowing harridan. Might I be so bold as to suggest your mindless escapism doesn’t bring you joy. You want fluff? Go and stroke a real live whio rather than just foolishly handing over the $10 note to buy this rubbish. Get outside and see some non-human wonders before they’re gone.

Above all, stop buying something that makes you feel worse about yourself every time you pick it up. Follow my sage advice for free. Three words. Just for you. Here they are.

Get a life.

Superb. How long before Rachel Stewart gets a column in the Sunday Star-Times?

Steve Jobs on why the Kindle will fail

Randall Stross in the New York Times of 27 January 2008 quoted Mr Jobs as saying that Amazon’s Kindle book reader would never fly:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read any more,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

Philip Stone in The Bookseller of 2 November 2011 reported that:

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs sold 379,000 copies in the US in its first week on bookshop shelves, BookScan US data has revealed. [. . .]

Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. [. . .]

Earlier today (2nd November), The Bookseller revealed that the UK edition of the book became one of the fastest-selling non-fiction books since records began thanks to a sale of 37,244 copies in its first week on release.

Monitor: Private Eye

Carry that weight

Paul Litterick says that Nick Lowe will be on Kim Hill tomorrow.

So here is Nick Lowe with Wilco and  Mavis Staples rehearsing the Band’s classic song “The Weight” backstage at the Civic Opera House in Chicago in December 2011. Jeff Tweedy claims in the March issue of Word magazine that this was their first run-through: 

The rogue apostrophe strike’s again

Holiday’s in Victorian England: images of the past has had it’s cover image photoshopped on Amazon to remove the errant apostrophe but as you can see the book itself definitely feature’s it.

According to Amazon the author, Gordon Thorburn, is a former advertising copywriter but the rest of his bio is possibly a pack of lie’s. Its so hard to know whom to trust these day’s, isnt it.  

Monitor: Francis Wheen via F/B