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.