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.