Terry Callier - Lazarus Man

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING - LONDON CAN TAKE IT

London took it and now look how amazing our beautiful city looks for
the Olympics and what a show we put on. Well proud to be British!

Eruption - I Can't Stand The Rain (1978)

                                                                                                                             

The alarm buzzes, but I don’t

Mood leaden like skies cast in concrete

Grey, such an oppressive shade of harsh
Pull the duvet up tight and hide some more

Summer’s sodden, unrelenting madness
Ruinous rain, fall hard on parched ground

Colour my world anything but cloud or slate,
silver, lead, pewter, smoke or stone or sombre.

I have an urgency to wear Red.

Django Unchained Teaser Trailer

Explosive stuff from Tarantino – can't wait to see it!

Have we really come so far?

 

 

 

 

Life magazine ran a Sun-style cover on Germaine Greer as the palatable face of feminism who appealed to men. Because of course, feminists were all bra-burning, lentil eating, man-hating lesbians. Or so the media would have us believe.

As late as 1971, women were banned from going into Wimpy Bars on their own, after midnight, on the grounds that the only women out on their own at that hour must be prostitutes. 

Eight years after that rule was lifted, Margaret Thatcher was walking into Downing Street as Britain's first woman Prime Minister. 

Today the Tories have closed 23 specialist domestic violence courts, and restricted legal aid for welfare, housing and child custody cases.

Amazingly brave Tina Nash had her eyes savagely gouged out by her violent lover. Her life has been plunged into darkness and she'll never see her children grow up. We heard lots about PC David Rathband, but hardly anything about Tina.

Sandra Horley CBE, chief executive of national domestic violence charity Refuge said: 

"I was horrified to hear about the brutal assault Tina suffered at the hands of her partner. I commend her bravery in speaking out and calling for other victims of domestic violence to seek support before it is too late.

Domestic violence takes lives and ruins lives. But sadly, with services up and down the country are experiencing severe funding cuts, thousands of women will not get the support they need and deserve.

Two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner.

Refuge hopes that Tina’s case sends a strong message to the Government and local authorities that domestic violence services are essential and must not be cut."

This Must Be The Place - trailer

Sean Penn done up like Robert Smith via campy-voiced Truman Capote.  Lives in Dublin. Fear of flying. Shares in Tesco. Wife a firefighter. Father Jewish camp survivor. Turns Nazi hunter. David Byrne cameo.

Surreal. Totally. Can't wait for release.

Vintage Trouble - Huntley Preschool - February 2012

I love the fact that this amazing band are so committed to giving back and the enthusiasm they generate in these littlies. To feel and be moved by music is a gift. And seeing how the kids respond is a lesson in joyful expression and how we should never lose this - whatever our age.

The world needs women like you

Marie Colvin, war journalist

Forget Towie and Desperate Scousewives and Made in Chelsea and every vacuous female in these inane TV shows and in the press. The world needs women like Marie Colvin to act as guiding lights for our daughters.

Women driven by a higher power than Birkin bags and Mac make-up and marrying footballers. Women who stand up for what they believe in and in doing so make the world a better place. 

Marie Colvin was just such a women.

Her religion was the importance of telling people what really happens and about "humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable". She said: "My job is to bear witness." 

Looking back to East Timor in 1999, she saved the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.

She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. "These are people who have no voice," she said. "I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so."

The people of East Timor did not forget her. 

At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: "What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette." Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been "fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound".

Marie Colvin journalist, born 12 January 1956, died 22 February 2012 – you were an incredible force for good and I'm sure the people of Homs won't ever forget your bravery either.
 

Tom Jones dances like HELL! (Treat her right, 1968)

Totally mind-blowing routine from Tom. What a mover, what a groover. Now I know why women throw their undies at him. 


Thank you R6 for bringing it to my attention and so wish 
I could wax lyrical but just don't have the time. Anyway, Tom's
amazing pelvis pushing groin talent speaks for itself. 


Enjoy this Tom time warp!

Etta James RIP

"I'm talking about singing and laying it down for 'em, y'know, making people go crazy an 'burnin' their ears up. That's the deal. That's really the direction I wanna go in."


"I don’t like places where people can’t dance"… Etta James in 1975


What a woman. What a voice. What a sad loss to soul and blues!  


Etta James – a legend 1938-2012 – died aged 73.

Fishy Business

In the murky waters of January with sinking spirits, financial markets and luxury liners, here's a little light relief of the chip shop variety. 

I have to say, Sheffield is a fryer in the premier league when it comes to puntastic names! 

New Cod on the Block, Sheffield

Frying Nemo, North Humberside

Codrophenia, Sheffield

The Frying Squad, Northern Ireland

A Fish Called Rhondda, Mid-Glamorgan

O'my Cod Fish and Chips, Majorca

A Salt & Battery, New York

The Frying Scotsman, Portland, Oregon

The Fish Plaice, London

The Codfather, West Cumbria

Northern Sole, Broomhill, Sheffield

Mister Chips, Whitby

The Rock n Sole Plaice, London

Killing me softly

The Kills: The Last Goodbye on Nowness.com.

Directed by the sublime Samatha Morton. A song of great depth and beauty. 

I Am Nobody's Nigger by Dean Atta

I Am Nobody's Nigger by Dean Atta

A poignant response to the Stephen Lawrence case and the homophobia of rappers from a black, gay poet. Written in under 30 minutes, proving you don't have to spend days crafting to come up with arresting poetry.

Antony Worrall Thompson in The Lambshank Redemption

I never cease to be amazed by how speedy and inventive viral spoofs are and this one from Eagerbeaver films is pant-wettingly great!

She captured the soul

The wonderful photographer, Eve Arnold lived her life at full tilt until a ripe old age. She died 4 January, aged 99.

A truly inspirational woman and one of nine, from a poor Brooklyn family of Russian immigrants. Fiercely talented, she was the first woman to join Magnum in 1951, among photographic luminaries Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson.

I love that she was a force of nature, an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, apartheid, poverty and social injustice, who lived with hippy communes and the Black Power movement. My favourite shot, this one of Malcolm X as its captures the soul of a beautiful man. Listen to her on Desert Island discs.www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/.../Desert_Island_Discs_Eve_Arnold -

Vinnie Jones' hard and fast Hands-only CPR (funny short film) (full-leng...

Vinnie Jones works his East End gangster schtick to the max for the British Heart Foundation. Apparently in the UK, 30,000 people a year have heart attacks (good reason to stay off the Big Macs) and I'm damn sure most people (me included) haven't the foggiest how to help. But with the beat of 'Staying Alive' in your head, it makes the hands-only CPR bit feverishly memorable. Good work Grey, London!

Velocity

Velocity, inspired by Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre’s evocative tableaux shots of Detroit in ruins. Revealing once magnificently beautiful buildings, abandoned. Often with breathtakingly ornate interiors and everyday fittings surprisingly intact. Left in a broken state of suspension http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html 

I was particularly drawn by the melted clock at Cass Technical High School. It reminded me of Dali’s surreal Time painting and gave me the idea of someone calling time on Detroit – my central theme.

Perhaps the most poignant shot, the files of the missing and murdered left scattered, spilled on the floor of the Highland Park police office. Chiming with the sudden abandonment of Chernobyl, both cities built on industrialisation and equally destroyed by it. Albeit Detroit’s a more slow burn, less catastrophic destruction. Both cities, once beacons of success, sadly left to decay. A reminder that nothing lasts forever, buildings crumble, beauty fades, bodies weaken and in the end, all is dust. 

Velocity

Someone clocked out the assembly line of Detroit
Henry Ford’s motor city and dynamo of the American Dream
The nation’s fourth largest city in its 50’s glory days

Someone drove away the auto factories and plants
New highways and out of town plants splayed the landscape
Just as fast as Detroit’s workers moth’d to the flame, they left 

Someone took their foot off the city’s gas
After the riots of ’67, once vibrant neighbourhoods vanished
As the rich foot-to-the-metalled-it out to the suburbs

Someone crushed the spirit of a million migrant workers
Fuelled by a burning desire for money and success
Sparking the city's plugs with their sleek, shiny vision

Someone abandoned the grandiose buildings,
the extravagant theatres, the great schools and libraries
Even the murdered and missing lay scattered in forgotten files

Someone wrecked that once magnificent city of dreams
Now a sad, sorry tableau of rot, ruin and decay
Preserved, mummified like a long lost empire

Someone scrapped any sense of permanence
As the piston of industrialisation fired fast, ever faster
That which created Detroit also destroyed it.

Fisher Body 21 plant

 United Artists Theatre

Ballroom Lee Plaza hotel

Files of the missing and murdered at Highland Park Police office 

TS Eliot got it wrong

http://youtu.be/g7KlIepLsE4

April is NOT the cruellest month
The wasteland month is January
Mixing hope and regret
Stirring dead feelings with winter rain
A duvet-day month of emotional hangovers
Where life is measured in bill upon bill
A month of dull promise and empty resolutions
Where crowds flow to the sales with dead eyes
A nation Prozaced by consumerism
A Government devoid of ideas
What shall we do tomorrow, what shall we ever do?
Watch TV and forget your dreams
Live them vicariously through inane celebrities
Poverty will undo so many as the Wheel turns
Here is the card – the Hanged Man
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
At the violet hour, I shall walk with my hair down
Am I alive, or not? I see nothing, feel nothing
Once I swam naked in the clear, dark waters
Then I felt free
TS Eliot got it wrong.