Cyclist With Five Cows.

Sorry I haven’t written anything for a few days, I have been a bit busy with one thing and another. Also, I am quite lazy. I did actually do some real work on Tuesday. A couple I know asked me if I would polish their furniture for them, bookcases, chests of drawers, that sort of thing. I used to do antique furniture restoration for a living many years ago. I quite enjoyed it and they are very nice people. A lot of the time I was at their house involved sitting in the garden, drinking tea, and chatting. I enjoyed it so much that yesterday I even did some work on my own house. I repaired my front door, which was beginning to disintegrate at the bottom, and gave it a coat of varnish. I also stained the bench in my yard. It looks a lot better. There has been some sad news on the music scene recently. Firstly, Nanci Griffith passed away aged only 68. I called one of my recent blogs From A Distance after one of her most famous songs, little realising that she was ill. Nanci was a great singer. I remember seeing her at Glastonbury in 1997. I always used to play her song On Grafton Street at Christmas time. Another great singer was Don Everly who died aged 84. I listened to my only Everly Brothers album on Sunday, Everly Brothers In Concert which was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983. Another legend who has passed away is Charlie Watts. He was a great drummer, perfect for The Stones and a wonderful person with a dry sense of humour. It is hard to imagine The Stones without Charlie. 

I finished reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara about a week ago and I wrote some notes meaning to write a review, but it was so long ago now, I can’t make much sense of my notes. I wrote down words like aphorisms, nourastinia, insouciance, naphtha, au courant, and metier, but I can’t remember why. I was probably trying to show off by using posh words or jotted them down meaning to find out what they meant. I did enjoy the poems though. The book was published in 1964, but the poems still sound fresh today. You can almost date the day he wrote them because they read like diary entries and he mentions events that were happening, such as Khrushchev visiting New York, Lana Turner has collapsed, or Billie Holiday dying. It was very educational reading the poems. In one poem called In Alma he mentions Judas Priest. I always thought that name was invented by Bob Dylan on his John Wesley Harding album. This made me think that Bob stole the name from Frank after reading Lunch Poems. However, when I looked it up, I discovered that Judas Priest is a well-known American expression, and it appears in a book by Sinclair Lewis called Babbitt published in 1922. 

August is a Wiki month because I also had to look up Norman Bluhm, Mal Waldron, Adolph Deutsch, Helmut Dantyne, Bill Berkson, Mary Destri, Vincent Warren, Fanny Elsser and other names that litter the poems because O’Hara was such a name dropper. Northern Pursuit is a 1943 film starring Errol Flynn. Cyclist With Five Cows turned out to be a painting by Jean Dubuffett. I must say some of the humour in the poems did remind of Bob Dylan and his book Tarantula. Lunch Poems was published by City Lights which is why I bought it when I saw it on eBay for only £2.00. I thought it might be a bit like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Corso, or Ginsberg. Although Frank O’Hara was loosely associated with these people, he isn’t really a Beat writer, he had his own witty unique voice, and it is a shame he died in a freak accident in 1966 aged only 40. I think that has cleared my backlog of things I wanted to tell you about. I got a new CD a couple of days ago which is a lost psychedelic classic from 1967. I’ll tell you all about it this weekend hopefully. 

Cyclist With Five Cows.

The Guardians.

Sunday morning, the sun is trying to shine, Anne Briggs is singing in my kitchen, and I have just made a cup of tea. All seems well, as long as I don’t think about the news from Afghanistan which is awful. I haven’t been up for long because I was watching a film last night until 2.00 in the morning. I stumbled across it on BBC4 when I was flicking around the channels for something to watch. It was a French film called The Guardians made in 2017 starring Nathalie Baye and Iris Bry. It is set during World War 1 on a farm in the Limousin region of France. The men have gone off to fight, get killed, injured, or go mad in the war and the women are left to do the arduous work on the farm. The farm owner Hortense hires an orphan girl Francine to help her on the farm. The story develops very slowly. All goes well at first, but tensions develop. What I particularly liked about the film was the beautiful cinematography and the attention to detail. It was almost like a painting by a French landscape artist. They used authentic farm tools of the period, and one could feel how tedious and back breaking the work must have been. Slowly, you can see how the lack of workers for farming during the period helped the development of farm machinery and the pleasure the women felt as combine harvesters and tractors were introduced. The acting of the two main characters was excellent. I read that Iris Bry had never acted before and was only discovered by chance by the casting director. That fact makes her performance all the more remarkable. I think some people might find the film too slow, but I enjoyed it. 

Iris Bry.

Apart from that, I didn’t do much else yesterday. I had to go to the Post Office because I sold two books, the Monty Don and the Ian Rankin, so it was good to get them off my land. I finished reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. I might tell you about that tomorrow when I have made some notes. I spent some time just staring out of the kitchen window. A family of starlings have moved in. I like watching them and the sparrows flying around. They go around in gangs. It is like the collective unconscious. I have seen some amazing films of starlings in a murmuration, but I haven’t got enough for one of those!. Anyway, I can’t think of anything else to tell you now. Enjoy Sunday.

Starlings Murmuration.