Art

R.I.P. Angelo Badalamenti

/ Poetpas

Angelo Badalamenti was an American composer, best known for his work scoring films for director David Lynch, notably Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks saga, The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti received the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for his “Twin Peaks Theme”. May he rest in peace…

Mildread

/ Poetpas

you devilish delight
always looking for a fight
all for law
and order
made sure
no one crossed your border
capped
and ready to rule
over the best
cuckoo’s finest
captured in your nest

~R.I.P. Louise Fletcher

Featuring: James Carter

/ Poetpas

Today I’m featuring a jazz musician who isn’t that well known amongst many jazz lovers but to me this saxophone beast is as good as any of the famous players.
He has a very rebellious and sometimes humorous way of playing and is never boring. An effusive, dynamically gifted jazz saxophonist I can listen to for hours and hours, for days on end…

James Carter was born on January 3 1969 in Detroit , Michigan, and learned to play under the tutelage of Donald Washington, becoming a member of his youth jazz ensemble Bird-Trane-Sco-NOW!! As a young man, Carter attended Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, becoming the youngest faculty member at the camp. He began playing at age 11 and studied early on with trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. A prodigy, he progressed quickly. He first toured Scandinavia with the International Jazz Band in 1985 at the age of 16. At age17 he joined Wynton Marsalis on tour.

On May 31, 1988, at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Carter was a last-minute addition for guest artist Lester Bowie, which turned into an invitation to play with his new quintet (forerunner of his New York Organ Ensemble) in New York City that following November at the now defunct Carlos 1 jazz club. This was pivotal in Carter’s career, putting him in musical contact with the world, and he moved to New York two years later. Carter issued no less than six recordings under his own name between 1993 and 2000, all of them with different focuses, from a set of standards, Conversin’ with the Elders in 1995, to an electric funk record, Layin’ in the Cut, to a simultaneously released set in tribute to Django Reinhardt, Chasin the Gypsy. Three years later, he honored the legendary Billie Holiday with Gardenias for Lady Day.

He has been prominent as a performer and recording artist on the jazz scene since the late 1980s, playing saxophones, flute, and clarinets. On his album Chasin’ the Gypsy (2000), he recorded with his cousin, the jazz violinist Regina Carter.

Carter has won DownBeat magazine’s Critics and Readers Choice award for baritone saxophone several years in a row. He has performed, toured and played on albums with Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, Frank Lowe & the Saxemble, Kathleen Battle, the World Saxophone Quartet, Cyrus Chestnut, Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater and the Mingus Big Band.

Carter is an authority on vintage saxophones, and he owns an extensive collection of such instruments, including one formerly played by Don Byas.

“One of the most charismatic and powerful soloists in jazz,” per the New York Times, Carter harbors a command of his instruments that is astonishingly complete, though he only employs that technique in the service of canny ideas. Even when he appears on the verge of shattering his horn, overblowing rapid-fire lines to otherworldly effect, he’s evoking early jazz, jump blues, the avant-garde and other lessons residing inside his vast, scholarly knowledge of the music of the African-American experience.

Check him out (or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Writers tears

/ Poetpas

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

~James Joyce

Telephone 📞

/ Poetpas

often left
hanging
alone
wired
to a box
you used to listen to
many hellos
laughter
sadness
lies
and frequent goodbyes
whilst swallowing
coins
for money
used
and put down
you life saver
a sacRED shelter
in every other street
in town

~image by Simon Gradwell

Bowie

/ Poetpas

shining starman
galactic eyes
this lyrical labyrinth
his myth in disguise

fallen to earth
blessed with dark voice
his majestic apparel
and intellectual poise

shy oddity
golden hair
humble chameleon
with androgynous flair

magical star lit
in a theatrical maze
graciously styled
a visual daze

talented genius
majored in Tom
gracious Jones
my musical bomb

Dear Amy

/ Poetpas

precious jazzy jewel
diamond in the rough
colourful and bright
tender and yet tough

raw voice
with innocent delight
left with struggle
lost her daily fight

afraid of fame
a broken frame
died lonely
with some to blame

a devotee she’ll find in me
dear Amy,
wine in my house
please sing for Me

Arts n Farts

/ Poetpas

potential rubble
a creative bubble
let it all out
let the wind blow it through

It may end up in a frame
it may come out with poo

Featuring: Tom Waits

/ Poetpas

Today I’m featuring this man, this musician (and actor) whom I love for his style and gravelly dark voice, his intelligence and dark humor. Not known to everybody, this extraordinary individual brings with his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to his music and acts the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs. Using his distinct voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits’ musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.

Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected greater influence from blues, rock, vaudeville, and experimental genres.

Waits was born and raised in a middle-class family in Pomona, California. Inspired by the work of Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, he began singing on the San Diego áfolk music circuit as a teenager. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records. His first albums were the jazz-oriented Closing Time (1973) and The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), which reflected his lyrical interest in nightlife, poverty, and criminality. He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe, and Japan, and attracted greater critical recognition and commercial success with Small Change (1976), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heartattack and Vine (1980). He produced the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s film One from the Heart (1981), and subsequently made cameo appearances in several Coppola films.

In 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City. With Brennan’s encouragement and frequent collaboration, he pursued a more experimental and eclectic musical aesthetic influenced by the work of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. This was reflected in a series of albums released by Island Records, including Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985), and Franks Wild Years (1987). He continued appearing in films, notably starring in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986), and also made theatrical appearances. With theatre director Robert Wilson, he produced the musicals The Black Rider and Alice, first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, his albums Bone Machine (1992), The Black Rider (1993), and Mule Variations (1999) earned him increasing critical acclaim and multiple Grammy Awards. In the late 1990s, he switched to the record label ANTI-, which released Blood Money (2002), Alice (2002), Real Gone (2004), and Bad as Me (2011).
Despite a lack of mainstream commercial success, Waits has influenced many musicians and gained an international cult following, and several biographies have been written about him. In 2015, he was ranked at No. 55 on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time”. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

There is a lot more information to be found on Wikipedia which is too much to mention here and I don’t want to bore readers with endless details. I do suggest you check him out, his music and his acting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Waits

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Snow

/ Poetpas

a virgin blanket
sewed with frozen powdered aqua
covering the lands
light and white
forsaken
at the hands
of the sky…

a soft throw;
I think it’s called snow

Some advice from Kurt

/ Poetpas

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond – and his response is magnificent:

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!”
Kurt Vonnegut

I will be doing a feature post on him another time…

Ole Dan Tucker

/ Poetpas

Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man
Washed his face with a fryin’ pan
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
And died with a toothache in his heel

Get out the way old Dan Tucker,
You’re too late to get your supper,
Supper’s over, and dinner’s cookin’,
Old Dan Tucker just stands there lookin

Old Dan Tucker come to town
Riding a billy goat, leading a hound
The hound dog barked and billy goat jumped
And landed old Tucker on a stump

Get out the way old Dan Tucker,
You’re too late to get your supper,
Supper’s over, and dinner’s cookin’,
Old Dan Tucker just stands there lookin

Old Dan Tucker got drunk an fell
In the fire and kicked up holy hell
A red-hot coal got in his shoe
An oh my Lord the ashes flew

Get out the way old Dan Tucker,
You’re too late to get your supper,
Supper’s over, and dinner’s cookin’,
Old Dan Tucker just stands there lookin

Now Old Dan Tucker come to town
Swinging them ladies all round
First to the right an then to the left
Then to the gal that he loved best

Get out the way old Dan Tucker,
You’re too late to get your supper,
Supper’s over, and dinner’s cookin’,
Old Dan Tucker just stands there lookin

Songwriter: Mister Edwards, Walnut Grove
(truthfully Dan Emmett)

Featuring: David Lynch

/ Poetpas

Today I am featuring my all time favorite director of film and series. This man needs no introduction to those who are fans of his works or art yet some may not know yet of this extravagant artist who shows us that it’s ok to get lost in dreamscapes. Anyone who has watched any of his series Twin Peaks or films like Lost Highway will know what I’m talking about. David Lynch is also a very positive person and patient with his staff and film crew, allowing them to get the best out of themselves.

David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, painter, musician, writer and actor. His films led to him being labeled “the first popular surrealist” by film critic Pauline Kael. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that ‘after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era’, while AllMovie called him “the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking”.

Lynch initially studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977), became a success on the midnight movie circuit, and he followed that by directing The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986). Lynch next created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–91), which ran for two seasons. He also created the film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the road film Wild at Heart (1990), and the family film The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on dream logic non-linear narrative structures: Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Frost reunited in 2017 for a third season of Twin Peaks, which aired on Showtime. Lynch co-wrote and directed every episode, and reprised his onscreen role as Gordon Cole.

Lynch’s other artistic endeavors include his work as a musician, encompassing the studio albums BlueBOB (2001), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013), as well as music and sound design for a variety of his films (sometimes alongside collaborators Alan Splet, Dean Hurley, and/or Angelo Badalament; painting and photography; writing the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006), Room to Dream (2018), and numerous other literary works; and directing several music videos (such as the video for “Shot in the Back of the Head” by Moby, who, in turn, directed a video for Lynch’s “The Big Dream”) as well as advertisements, including the Dior promotional film Lady Blue Shanghai (2006). An avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless, veterans and refugees.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and his mother, Edwina “Sunny” Lynch was an English language tutor. Two of Lynch’s maternal great-grandparents were Finnish-Swedish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during the 19th century. He was raised a Presbyterian. The Lynches often moved around according to where the USDA assigned Donald. Because of this, Lynch, moved with his parents to Sandpoint, Idaho, when he was two months old; two years later, after his brother John was born, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. Lynch’s sister Martha was born there. The family then moved to Durham, North Carolina, Boise, Idaho, and Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch adjusted to this transitory early life with relative ease, noting that he usually had no issue making new friends whenever he started attending a new school. Of his early life, he remarked: “I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school … for me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn’t encourage knowledge or a positive attitude”.

Alongside his schooling, Lynch joined the Boy Scouts, although he later said he only “became a scout so I could quit and put it behind me”. He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. As an Eagle Scout, he was present with other Boy Scouts outside the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch’s 15th birthday. Lynch was also interested in painting and drawing from an early age, and became intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend’s father was a professional painter.
At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Lynch did not excel academically, having little interest in schoolwork, but he was popular with other students, and after leaving he decided that he wanted to study painting at college. He began his studies at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., before transferring in 1964 to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he was roommates with musician Peter Wolf. He left after only a year, saying, “I was not inspired AT ALL in that place.” He instead decided that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union. They had some hopes that they could train in Europe with Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at his school. Upon reaching Salzburg, however, they found that Kokoschka was not available; disillusioned, they returned to the United States after spending only two weeks in Europe.

Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia, but since his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he stayed with his friend Toby Keeler for a while. He decided to move to Philadelphia and enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, after advice from Fisk, who was already enrolled there. He preferred this college to his previous school in Boston, saying, “In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there.” It was here that he began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, whom he married in 1967. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their daughter Jennifer. Peggy later said, ” Lynch definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant.” As a family, they moved to Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, where they bought a 12-room house for the relatively low price of $3,500 due to the area’s high crime and poverty rates. Lynch later said: We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street … We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in … The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.

Meanwhile, to help support his family, he took a job printing engravings. At the Pennsylvania Academy, Lynch made his first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he began discussing doing animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find. Taking one of the Academy’s abandoned upper rooms as a workspace, he spent $150, which at the time he felt to be a lot of money, to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Calling the film “57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit”, Lynch played it on a loop at the Academy’s annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1,000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $478 of that on the second-hand Bolex camera “of [his] dreams”, Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was a blurred, frameless print. He later said, “So I called up [Wasserman] and said, ‘Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I’ve done hasn’t turned out.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.’ End of story.”

With his leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment with a mix of animation and live action, producing the four-minute short The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch’s wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images of horses before dying at the end by hemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorder to record the sound of Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch found particularly effective. Later describing what had inspired him, Lynch said, “Peggy’s niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that’s sort of what started The Alphabet going. The rest of it was just subconscious
Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to filmmakers who could support their application with a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script he had written for a new short film that would be almost entirely live action, The Grandmother. The institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5,000 out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the additional $2,200. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother featured a neglected boy who “grows” a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell wrote, “this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium”.

In 1971, Lynch moved with his wife and daughter to Los Angeles, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place he later called “completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great … you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing.” He began writing a script for a proposed work, Gardenback, that had “unfolded from this painting I’d done”. In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add more dialogue, which he reluctantly agreed to do. All the interference on his Gardenback project made him fed up with the Conservatory and led him to quit after returning to start his second year and being put in first-year classes. AFI dean Frank Daniel asked Lynch to reconsider, believing that he was one of the school’s best students. Lynch agreed on the condition that he could create a project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was “wrecked”, he set out on a new film, Eraserhead.

Eraserhead was planned to be about 42 minutes long (it ended up being 89 minutes), its script was only 21 pages, and Lynch was able to create the film without interference. Filming began on May 29, 1972, at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team, which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound designer Alan Splet, to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets as well as a food room and a bathroom. The AFI gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the film, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, it was unable to give him more. Lynch was then supported by a loan from his father and money that he earned from a paper route that he took up, delivering The Wall Street Journal. Not long into Eraserhead’s production, Lynch and Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and he began living full-time on set. In 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, sister of Jack Fisk.
Lynch has said that not a single reviewer of the film understood it in the way he intended. Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of Henry (Jack Nance), a quiet young man living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. It was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, and Lynch has called it “my Philadelphia Story”.
Due to financial problems the filming of Eraserhead was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again.
Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976. Lynch tried to get it entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but while some reviewers liked it, others felt it was awful, and it was not selected for screening. Reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. He was very supportive of the movie, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977, and Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, and was later called one of the most important midnight movies of the 1970s, along with El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead. Stanley Kubrick said it was one of his all-time favorite films.

After Eraserhead’s success on the underground circuit, Stuart Cornfeld, an executive producer for Mel Brooks, saw it and later said, “I was just 100 percent blown away … I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. It was such a cleansing experience.” He agreed to help Lynch with his next film, Ronnie Rocket, for which Lynch had already written a script. But Lynch soon realized that Ronnie Rocket, a film that he has said is about “electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair”, was not going to be picked up by any financiers, and so he asked Cornfeld to find him a script by someone else that he could direct. Cornfeld found four. On hearing the title of the first, The Elephant Man, Lynch chose it.

The Elephant Man’s script, written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, was based on a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves. Lynch wanted to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events but in his view make a better plot, but he needed Mel Brooks’s permission, as Brooks’s company, Brooksfilms, was responsible for production. Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring, “You’re a madman! I love you! You’re in.”
The Elephant Man starred John Hurt as John Merrick (the name changed from Joseph) and Anthony Hopkins as Treves. Filming took place in London. Though surrealistic and in black and white, it has been called “one of the most conventional” of Lynch’s films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay

After The Elephant Man’s success, George Lucas, a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Lynch refused, arguing that Lucas should direct the film himself as the movie should reflect his own vision, not Lynch’s. Soon, the opportunity to direct another big-budget science fiction epic arose when Dino de Laurentiis of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group asked Lynch to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune (1965). Lynch agreed, and in doing so was also contractually obliged to produce two other works for the company. He set about writing a script based upon the novel, initially with both Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, and then alone when De Laurentiis was unhappy with their ideas. Lynch also helped build some of the sets, attempting to create “a certain look”, and particularly enjoyed building the set for the oil planet Giedi Prime, for which he used “steel, bolts, and porcelain”.

Dune is set in the far future, when humans live in an interstellar empire under a feudal system. The main character, Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a noble who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis, which grows the rare spice melange, the empire’s most highly prized commodity. Lynch was unhappy with the work, later saying, “Dune was a kind of studio film. I didn’t have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises” (to his own vision). Much of his footage was eventually removed from the final theatrical cut, dramatically condensing the plot. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be as successful as Star Wars, Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it had cost $45 million to make, and grossed $27.4 million domestically.

Lynch was contractually still obliged to produce two other projects for De Laurentiis, the first a planned sequel to Dune, which due to the film’s failure never went beyond the script stage. The other was a more personal work, based on a script Lynch had been working on for some time. Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, the film, Blue Velvet, was set in the real town of Lumberton, North Carolina, and revolves around a college student, Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field. Investigating further with the help of friend Sandy (Laura Dern), he discovers that it is related to a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly rapes her. Lynch has called the story “a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story”.

Lynch included pop songs from the 1960s in the film, including Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”, the latter of which largely inspired the film. Lynch has said, “It was the song that sparked the movie … There was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns—lawns and the neighborhood.” Other music for the film was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who wrote the music for most of Lynch’s subsequent work. De Laurentiis loved the film, and it received support at some of the early specialist screenings, but the preview screenings to mainstream audiences were very negatively received, with most of the viewers hating the film. Lynch had found success with The Elephant Man, but Blue Velvet’s controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and it became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Woody Allen, whose Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.

Around this time, he met the television producer Mark Frost, who had worked on such projects as Hill Street Blues, and while talking in a coffee shop, Lynch and Frost had the idea of a corpse washing up on a lakeshore, and went to work on their third project, initially called Northwest Passage but eventually Twin Peaks (1990–91).
A drama series set in a small Washington town where popular high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, Twin Peaks featured FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) as the investigator trying to identify the killer, and discovering not only the murder’s supernatural aspects but also many of the townsfolk’s secrets; Lynch said, “The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters.” He later said, “Mark Frost and I worked together, especially in the initial stages. Later on we started working more apart.” They pitched the series to ABC, which agreed to finance the pilot and eventually commissioned a season comprising seven episodes.
During season one Lynch directed two of the seven episodes, devoting more time to his film Wild at Heart, but carefully chose the other episodes’ directors. He also appeared in several episodes as FBI agent Gordon Cole. The series was a success, with high ratings in the United States and many other countries, and soon spawned a cult following. Soon a second season of 22 episodes went into production, but ABC executives believed that public interest in the show was decreasing. The network insisted that Lynch and Frost reveal Laura Palmer’s killer’s identity prematurely, which Lynch grudgingly agreed to do, in what Lynch has called one of his biggest professional regrets. After identifying the murderer and moving from Thursday to Saturday night, Twin Peaks continued for several more episodes, but was canceled after a ratings drop. Lynch, who disliked the direction that writers and directors took in the later episodes, directed the final episode. He ended it with a cliffhanger (like season one had), later saying, “that’s not the ending. That’s the ending that people were stuck with.”
Also while Twin Peaks was in production, the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Lynch and Badalamenti, who wrote the music for Twin Peaks, to create a theatrical piece to be performed twice in 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. The result was Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, which starred frequent Lynch collaborators such as Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage and Michael J. Anderson, and contained five songs sung by Julee Cruise. Lynch produced a 50-minute video of the performance in 1990. Meanwhile, he was also involved in creating various commercials for companies including Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and the Japanese coffee company Namoi, which featured a Japanese man searching Twin Peaks for his missing wife.

While Lynch was working on the first few episodes of Twin Peaks, his friend Monty Montgomery “gave me a book that he wanted to direct as a movie. He asked if I would maybe be executive producer or something, and I said ‘That’s great, Monty, but what if I read it and fall in love with it and want to do it myself?’ And he said, ‘In that case, you can do it yourself’.” The book was Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, about two lovers on a road trip. Lynch felt that it was “just exactly the right thing at the right time. The book and the violence in America merged in my mind and many different things happened.” With Gifford’s support, Lynch adapted the novel into Wild at Heart, a crime and road movie starring Nicolas Cage as Sailor and Laura Dern as Lula. Describing its plot as a “strange blend” of “a road picture, a love story, a psychological drama and a violent comedy”, Lynch altered much of the original novel, changing the ending and incorporating numerous references to The Wizard of Oz. Despite a muted response from American critics and viewers, Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

After Wild at Heart’s success, Lynch returned to the world of the canceled Twin Peaks, this time without Frost, to create a film that was primarily a prequel but also in part a sequel. Lynch said, “I liked the idea of the story going back and forth in time.” The result, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), primarily revolved around the last few days in the life of Laura Palmer, and was much “darker” in tone than the TV series, with much of the humor removed, and dealing with such topics as incest and murder. Lynch has said the film is about “the loneliness, shame, guilt, confusion and devastation of the victim of incest”. The company CIBY-2000 financed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and most of the TV series’ cast reprised their roles, though some refused and many were unenthusiastic about the project. The film was a commercial and critical failure in the United States but a hit in Japan, and some critics, such as Mark Kermode, have called it Lynch’s “masterpiece”.

After his unsuccessful TV ventures, Lynch returned to film. In 1997 he released the non-linear, noiresque Lost Highway, which was co-written by Barry Gifford and starred Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics.

Lynch then began work on a film from a script by Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach, The Straight Story, based on a true story: that of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), an elderly man from Laurens, Iowa, who goes on a 300-mile journey to visit his sick brother (Harry Dean Stanton) in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, by riding lawnmower. Asked why he chose this script, Lynch said, “that’s what I fell in love with next”, and expressed his admiration of Straight, describing him as “like James Dean, except he’s old”.[98] Badalamenti wrote the music for the film, saying it was “very different from the kind of score he’s done for [Lynch] in the past”.
Among the many differences from Lynch’s other films, The Straight Story contains no profanity, sexuality or violence, and is rated “G” by the Motion Picture Association of America, which came as “shocking news” to many in the film industry, who were surprised that it “did not disturb, offend or mystify”. Le Blanc and Odell write that the plot made it “seem as far removed from Lynch’s earlier works as could be imagined, but in fact right from the very opening, this is entirely his film—a surreal road movie”.

The same year, Lynch approached ABC again with ideas for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely. But with $7 million from the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch completed the pilot as a film, Mulholland Drive. The film, a non-linear narrative surrealist tale of Hollywood’s dark side, stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. It performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success, earning Lynch Best Director at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and Best Director from the New York Film Critics Association. He also received his third Academy Award nomination for Best Director. In 2016, the film was named the best film of the 21st century in a BBC poll of 177 film critics from 36 countries.

With the rising popularity of the Internet, Lynch decided to use it as a distribution channel, releasing several new series he had created exclusively on his website, davidlynch.com, which went online on December 10, 2001. In 2002, he created a series of online shorts, DumbLand. Intentionally crude in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD. The same year, Lynch released a surreal sitcom, Rabbits, about a family of humanoid rabbits. Later, he made his experiments with Digital Video available in the form of the Japanese-style horror short Darkened Room. In 2006, Lynch’s feature film Inland Empire was released. At three hours, it is the longest of his films. Like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, it does not follow a traditional narrative structure. It stars Lynch regulars Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton and Justin Theroux, with cameos by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring as the voices of Suzie and Jane Rabbit, and a performance by Jeremy Irons. Lynch has called Inland Empire “a mystery about a woman in trouble”. In an effort to promote it, he made appearances with a cow and a placard bearing the slogan “Without cheese there would be no Inland Empire”.

On October 6, 2014, Lynch confirmed via Twitter that he and Frost would start shooting a new, nine-episode season of Twin Peaks in 2015, with the episodes expected to air in 2016 on Showtime. Lynch and Frost wrote all the episodes. Since the last episode of The Return aired, there has been speculation about a fourth season. Lynch did not deny the possibility of another season, but said that if it were to happen, it would not air before 2021.

Lynch is reportedly working on a new project for Netflix under the working titles Wisteria and Unrecorded Night. He is set to write and direct 13 episodes with an $85 million budget; production will begin in May 2021 in Los Angeles.

“I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places—I mean, they’re all out there”.
—David Lynch

Lynch has said his work is more similar in many respects to that of European filmmakers than American ones, and that most films that “get down and thrill your soul” are by European directors. He has expressed his admiration for such filmmakers as Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, and Jacques Tati, along with Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. He has said that Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is one of his favorite pictures, as are Kubrick’s Lolita, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and Herzog’s Stroszek. He has also cited Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End as influences on his work.

Several themes recur in Lynch’s work. Le Blanc and Odell write, “his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas”. One of the key themes they note is the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery and structure, something they relate to the “surrealist ethos” of relying “on the subconscious to provide visual drive”. This can be seen in Merrick’s dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Cooper’s dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the “dreamlike logic” of the narratives of Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.Of his attitude to dreams, Lynch has said, “Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I’m quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don’t control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I’ve made or discovered; a world I choose … You can’t really get others to experience it, but right there is the power of cinema.” His films are known for their use of magic realism. The motif of dreams is closely linked to his recurring use of drones, real-world sounds and musical styles.

Another of Lynch’s prominent themes is industry, with repeated imagery of “the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming wood mills and smoke billowing factories”, as seen in the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawnmower in The Straight Story. Of his interest in such things, Lynch has said, “It makes me feel good to see giant machinery, you know, working: dealing with molten metal. And I like fire and smoke. And the sounds are so powerful. It’s just big stuff. It means that things are being made, and I really like that.”

Yet another theme is the dark underbelly of violent criminal activity in a society, such as Frank Booth’s gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch’s films, from The Elephant Man to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as well as death from head wounds, found in most of Lynch’s films. Other imagery common in Lynch’s works includes flickering electricity or lights, fire, and stages upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.

Except The Elephant Man and Dune, which are set in Victorian London and a fictitious galaxy respectively, all of Lynch’s films are set in the United States, and he has said, “I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films.” A number of his works, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, are intentionally reminiscent of 1950s American culture despite being set in later decades of the 20th century. Lynch has said, “It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways … there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork for a disastrous future.”

Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in “split” roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his casting Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield; in Mulholland Drive Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita; in Inland Empire Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. The numerous alternative versions of lead characters and fragmented timelines may echo and/or reference the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics and perhaps Lynch’s broader interest in quantum mechanics. Some have suggested that Lynch’s love for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which employs a split lead character (the Judy Barton and Madeleine Elster characters, both portrayed by Kim Novak) may have influenced this aspect of his work.
His films frequently feature characters with supernatural or omnipotent qualities. They can be seen as physical manifestations of various concepts, such as hatred or fear. Examples include The Man Inside the Planet in Eraserhead, BOB in Twin Peaks, The Mystery Man in Lost Highway, The Bum in Mulholland Drive, and The Phantom in Inland Empire. Lynch approaches his characters and plots in a way that steeps them in a dream state rather than reality.

Lynch is also widely noted for his collaborations with various production artists and composers on his films and other productions. He frequently works with Angelo Badalamenti to compose music for his productions, former wife Mary Sweeney as a film editor, casting director Johanna Ray, and cast members Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie, and Laura Dern.

David Lynch has recently given a Masterclass on directing which is a very interesting watch. A person could learn a thing or two if one would be interested in pursuing a career in the field of dreamscapes.

Some perceive his work to be somewhat weird or odd. I like weird and odd as it unlimits my way of creative thinking. It’s because of people like him I’ve learned to think and write “outside the box”. David Lynch, a one-of-a-kind unique persona, a great director, you gotta love the man…

Check him out(or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Poetry

/ Poetpas

blah blah blah blah blah
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Featuring: Louis Theroux

/ Poetpas

Today I’m featuring a man who has made a vast variety of interesting documentaries on unusual topics across the world and has made an impression on me by the way with the way he asks his questions: he seems to ask the right ones. One could almost call him the king of documentaries and interviewees always seem at ease and comfortable sharing things they wouldn’t share with others. This sincere bespectacled English eccentric is very nonjudgmental in his approach and he touches well on the sensitive sides of matters and seemingly bonds effortlessly with most people.

Louis Sebastian Theroux (May 1970) is a British-American documentary filmmaker, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received two British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.
Born in Singapore to an English mother and American father (the writer Paul Theroux), Theroux moved with his family to London when he was a child. After graduating from Oxford, he moved to the U.S. and worked as a journalist for Metro Silicon Valley and Spy. He moved into television as the presenter of offbeat segments on Michael Moore’s TV Nation series and later began to host his own documentaries, including Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, When Louis Met…, and several BBC Two specials.

Louis Sebastian Theroux was born in Singapore on 20 May 1970, the son of American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and his English then-wife Anne (née Castle). His paternal grandmother, Anne (née Dittami), was an Italian-American grammar school teacher, and his paternal grandfather, Albert Eugène Theroux, was French-Canadian and a salesman for the American Leather Oak company.[8] He holds both British and American citizenship. His older brother, Marcel, is a writer and television presenter. His cousin, Justin, is an actor and screenwriter. Theroux is the nephew of novelist Alexander Theroux and writer Peter Theroux.
Theroux moved with his family to England at the age of one, and was brought up in London. He was educated at Tower House School and then at Westminster School, a public school within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. While there, he became friends with comedians Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish,and the Liberal Democrat politician Nick Clegg, with whom he travelled to America. He also performed in a number of school theatre productions including Bugsy Malone as Looney Bergonzi, Ritual for Dolls as the Army Officer, and The Splendour Falls as the Minstrel. Theroux later read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford (1988–1991), graduating with first-class honours.

Theroux’s first employment as a journalist was in the United States with Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992, he was hired as a writer for Spy magazine. He also worked as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on off-beat cultural subjects, including selling Avon to women in the Amazon Rainforest, the Jerusalem syndrome, and attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people.
When TV Nation ended, Theroux was signed to a development deal by the BBC, through which he developed Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. He has guest-written for a number of publications, including Hip Hop Connection, and he continues to write for The Idler.

In Weird Weekends (1998–2000), Theroux followed marginal (mostly American) subcultures such as survivalists, black nationalists, white supremacists, and porn stars, often by living among or close to the people involved. His documentary method often subtly exposed the contradictions or farcical elements of some seriously held beliefs. He described the aim of the series as:
Setting out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it’s almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended. The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don’t have to play up that stuff. I’m not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd.

In the series When Louis Met… (2000–02), Theroux accompanied a different British celebrity in each programme in their daily lives, interviewing them as they go. His episode about British entertainer Jimmy Savile, When Louis Met Jimmy, was voted one of the top documentaries of all time in a 2005 survey by Britain’s Channel 4. Some years after the episode was filmed, the NSPCC described Savile as one of the most prolific sex offenders in Great Britain.
In an interview in 2015, Theroux expressed his intention to produce a follow-up documentary about Savile for the BBC to explore how the late entertainer had continued his abuse for so long, to meet people he knew closely, and examine his own reflections on his inability to dig more deeply into the first case. This follow-up documentary, with the title Savile, aired on BBC Two on Sunday, 2 October 2016, and lasted 1 hour, 15 minutes.
In When Louis Met the Hamiltons, the former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine were arrested during the course of filming, due to false allegations of indecent assault.
In When Louis Met Max Clifford, Max Clifford tried to set up Theroux, but he was caught lying as the crew recorded his live microphone during the conversations.
After this series concluded, a retrospective called Life with Louis was released. Theroux made a documentary called Louis, Martin & Michael about his quest to get an interview with Michael Jackson. Selected episodes of When Louis Met… were included as bonus content on a Best-Of collection of Weird Weekends.

In these special programmes, beginning in 2003, Theroux returned to American themes, working at feature-length and in a more natural way. In March 2006, he signed a new deal with the BBC to make 10 films over the course of three years. Subjects for the specials include criminal gangs in Lagos, Neo-Nazis in America, ultra-Zionists in Israel. He also visits child psychiatry, and the prison systems in California and Florida. A 2007 special, The Most Hated Family in America, received strong critical praise from the international media.

In October 2016, Theroux premiered a feature length documentary entitled My Scientology Movie. Produced by Simon Chinn—a schoolfriend of Theroux’s—and directed by John Dower, the film covers Theroux attempting to gain access to the secretive Church of Scientology. The film premiered at the London Film Festival in 2015 and was released in cinemas in the UK on 7 October 2016.

Theroux published his first book, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, in Britain in 2005. In it he recounts his return to the United States to learn about the lives of some of the people he had featured in his television programmes.Theroux also released an autobiography titled Gotta Get Theroux This in September 2019.

In April 2020, during a lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Theroux started the BBC Radio 4 podcast Grounded with Louis Theroux, recorded at his home, where he interviews well known people that he finds particularly fascinating, who he would not necessarily have had a chance to speak to before the pandemic

Theroux makes a few appearances on The Adam and Joe Show DVD and has been a guest many times on Adam & Joe’s radio shows as well as on The Adam Buxton Podcast.
As part of the Weird Weekends episode “Porn”, Theroux agreed to film a cameo in the 1997 gay pornography film Take a Peak. He did not perform sexual acts in the film, but made a brief appearance as a park ranger in search of a criminal. In the Weird Weekends episode “Infomercials”, he was featured as a live salesman for an at-home paper shredder for the Home Shopping Network.
In December 2015 Theroux captained the team representing Magdalen College, Oxford, on BBC Four’s Christmas University Challenge. In their first-round match the team beat University of Exeter by 220 to 130 and Theroux’s team went on to win the tournament.

Theroux’s first marriage was to Susanna Kleeman from 1998 to 2001; he later told Sathnam Sanghera of the Financial Times, “What happened was that my girlfriend was living with me in New York. She was having trouble finding work … legally. So we got married, to make it easier for her. We never really considered ourselves married in the full sense – there were no wedding photos or anything like that. It was really a marriage of convenience.”
While filming a 2011 BBC programme, Theroux was asked “Why pose a difference between religion and ethics?” He responded, “Because I don’t believe in God.” In his 2011 documentary, The Ultra Zionists, he confirmed his atheism. In a 2012 masterclass, Theroux spoke of the challenges of combining family life with the need to go away to work on projects.
Theroux married longtime girlfriend Nancy Strang on 13 July 2012. They have three sons. He and his family lived in Harlesden, London until they temporarily moved to Los Angeles, California in early 2013, allowing him more time to focus on his LA Stories series. In August 2017, Theroux again relocated to Los Angeles.
In 2018 Theroux was targeted by cyber security firm Insinia to highlight a longstanding security flaw in Twitter’s system.
During a 2018 interview with The Guardian, he revealed that he was a nervous flyer.
Theroux has stated that while he acknowledges that it is an intoxicant and can be a trigger to mental health issues, he supports the legalisation of cannabis.

This incredibly good journalist knows there are boundaries and things he shouldn’t cross. He blends in well and is an easy confidant to all. There is a sense, watching Theroux talk to the people in his interviews, that he’s not putting words in their mouths but is instead drawing out something they already want to say. This geeky, nerdy-looking Brit is a national treasure.

Check him out(or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, Radio Times, interweb, poetpas
~photo by The Telegraph

Featuring: Karl Pilkington

/ Poetpas

Today I’m featuring Karl Pilkinton, a sidekick of Ricky Gervais (whom I will feature on another occasion) for some time. This man always makes me laugh with his dry sense of humor and his sober look on things. He says what he thinks and in a deadpan kind of way. The good thing is he’s actually just being himself.

Karl Pilkington is an English television presenter, author, comedian, radio producer, actor and voice actor.
Pilkington gained prominence as the producer of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s radio programme on XFM. He appeared on The Ricky Gervais Show, presented the Sky travel comedy series An Idiot Abroad, and made his full acting debut (following a cameo appearance in the final episode of Extras) on Gervais’s 2012 comedy–drama series Derek. Pilkington is a co-founder, along with Gervais and Merchant, of RiSK Productions, a television production company. Pilkington also starred in the Sky 1 travel documentary comedy series The Moaning of Life (2013–2015). In 2018, Pilkington starred in a new scripted comedy series, Sick of It.

Pilkington was born in 1972 in Manchester. He grew up on the Racecourse Estate in Sale, Greater Manchester along with his siblings, and attended Ashton on Mersey Secondary School on Cecil Avenue, Sale. Pilkington moved to London from Manchester to work with XFM as a producer, where he was later promoted to head of production. While there, he unintentionally caused Gail Porter to leave the station in tears after only one show; he criticised her performance, which Pilkington defended as an attempt to encourage improvement. After several years he began work on The Ricky Gervais Show. Initially, Pilkington was solely the programme’s producer. As Gervais and Merchant began to frequently invite him to make a cameo appearance, Pilkington’s quirky persona came to light and his popularity increased. Pilkington was eventually included as a main presenter of the broadcasts, with large amounts of airtime devoted to his unusual thoughts on various subjects, or various childhood stories. He also increased in popularity due to the many features he created for the XFM shows, including Monkey News, Rockbusters, 15 Taiwan, Educating Ricky and many others. In December 2005, Pilkington stood in for two BBC 6 Music shows for Nemone, and co-presented the shows with Russell Brand.

Pilkington’s presence on The Ricky Gervais Show podcasts significantly increased his fame. He has often been mentioned in interviews given by Gervais, and is often the victim of Gervais’ practical jokes. After Pilkington said, “I could eat a knob at night” rather than for breakfast on the podcast (in relation to I’m a Celebrity contestants eating a kangaroo penis), Gervais encouraged his listeners to sample the sound bite and mix it into dance music. The phrase spawned several dance music mixes, T-shirts, and other merchandise. Many of Pilkington’s quotes have since gained publicity, particularly on the Internet. Reuters, commenting on this issue, described Pilkington as a “phenomenon” who had made “Internet history”.
On 23 November 2010, while appearing live on Richard Bacon’s Radio 5 Live afternoon show, Gervais surprised Pilkington with an on-air phone call. This led to a conversation where Pilkington, who claimed to have been interrupted while grouting his kitchen, said he had not yet been paid for his work on An Idiot Abroad and concluded the interview with an off-the-cuff link into the hourly news.
Pilkington has worked independently of Gervais and Merchant on several projects. He appeared as a guest on the shows Flipside TV and The Culture Show, and appeared in several short films as part of the Channel 4 project 3 Minute Wonders.
Merchant and Gervais have repeatedly denied claims that Pilkington’s persona is their creation. In an on-air response to similar claims made by Chris Campling during a broadcast on XFM, Merchant stated that he would be “ashamed” if the radio show was scripted, and added that “I would not have squandered a character that good on this poxy radio station”. Gervais concurred, pointing out that writing a single series’ worth of six half-hour episodes of shows such as The Office and Extras took the two of them up to a year. An interviewer for The Daily Telegraph concluded that Pilkington’s persona is genuine.

Pilkington appeared in an interview on Ricky Gervais’s live stand-up comedy DVD, Politics. The DVD of Gervais’s film The Invention of Lying contains a special feature called Meet Karl Pilkington which documents his participation in the movie as a non-speaking caveman in another special feature, The Dawn of Lying. He was given a small role in the final episode of Extras.
In September 2010, Pilkington presented An Idiot Abroad, a light-hearted travel documentary series that aired on Sky1 and that was produced by Gervais and Stephen Merchant, in which he visits the New 7 Wonders of the World while being directed by Gervais and Merchant into various activities along the way. He wrote a book to accompany the series.
Following the success of the first series, Pilkington starred in the second series subtitled The Bucket List, which debuted on 23 September 2011 on Sky 1. The premise of the series involves Pilkington trying to experience “ultimate things to do before you die” except that the list of activities is not entirely of his choosing. In June 2011, he won the Best Presenter award for An Idiot Abroad at the Factual Entertainment Awards. The third series of the show, An Idiot Abroad: The Short Way Round premiered in November 2012 and showed Pilkington and Warwick Davis travelling the Marco Polo route.
Pilkington has performed voiceover work for such clients as One Stop Office Shop, FreeView, Vodafone, HMV, Sony PSP, WHSmith, Wickes, and Unilever.
He made his acting debut on 12 April 2012 in the Channel 4 comedy-drama Derek, portraying caretaker and bus driver Dougie. He left the show after the first episode of the second series.

In 2013–2015, he starred in a two-series Sky 1 documentary called The Moaning of Life.
In 2018, he co-wrote and starred in a Sky 1 scripted sitcom called Sick of It, a very funny deadpan comedy show.

In 2014, Pilkington designed and signed his own card for UK charity Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. The campaign was launched by crafting company Stampin’ Up! UK, and his card, along with those designed and signed by other celebrities, was auctioned off on eBay in May 2014.

Pilkington has been in a long-term relationship with Suzanne Whiston, a former producer at the BBC, since the 1990s.He has supported Manchester United since the 1990s, having previously supported Manchester City as a child.

Check him out(or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Featuring: Amy Winehouse

/ Poetpas

Today a tribute to potentially one of the greatest female singers of all time, Amy Winehouse moved, and moves me still, with her improvisational skills. A diamond in the rough, a rarity to see a young woman having a jazz soul and who sadly died far too young. I wrote a poem about her, called Dear Amy, which you can read at the end.

Amy Jade Winehouse (14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011) was an English singer and songwriter. She was known for her deep, expressive contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres, including soul, rhythm and blues and jazz.
A member of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra during her youth, Winehouse soon recorded a number of songs before signing a publishing deal with EMI. Winehouse’s debut album, Frank, was released in 2003. Many of the album’s songs were influenced by jazz and, apart from two covers, were co-written by Winehouse. Frank was a critical success in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. The song “Stronger Than Me” won her the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.
Winehouse released her follow-up album, Back to Black, in 2006, which went on to become an international success and one of the best-selling albums in UK history. At the 2007 Brit Awards it was nominated for British Album of the Year, and she received the award for British Female Solo Artist. The song “Rehab” won her a second Ivor Novello Award. At the 50th Grammy Awards in 2008, she won five awards. Winehouse was plagued by drug and alcohol addiction. She died of alcohol poisoning on 23 July 2011, at the age of 27. After her death, Back to Black temporarily became the UK’s best-selling album of the 21st century. She was ranked 26th on their list of the 100 Greatest Women in Music.

Winehouse was born on 14 September 1983 at Chase Farm Hospital in north London, to Jewish parents. Her father, Amy had an older brother, Alex and the family lived in London’s Southgate area, where she attended Osidge Primary School. Winehouse attended a Jewish Sunday school while she was a child. During an interview following her rise to fame, she expressed her dismissal towards the school by saying that she used to beg her father to permit her not to go and that she learned nothing about being Jewish by going anyway. In the same interview, Winehouse said she only went to a synagogue once a year on Yom Kippur “out of respect”.
Many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer and dated the English jazz saxophonist Ronnie Scott. She and Amy’s parents influenced Amy’s interest in jazz. Her father, Mitch, often sang Frank Sinatra songs to her, and whenever she got chastised at school, she would sing “Fly Me to the Moon” before going up to the headmistress to be told off. Winehouse’s parents separated when she was nine, and she lived with her mother and stayed with her father and his girlfriend in Hatfield Heath, Essex, on weekends.

After toying around with her brother Alex’s guitar, Winehouse bought her own when she was 14 and began writing music a year later. Shortly afterwards she began working for a living, as an entertainment journalist for the World Entertainment News Network and also singing with local group the Bolsha Band. In July 2000, she became the featured female vocalist with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra; influenced by Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, the latter of whom she was already listening to at home. Winehouse’s best friend, soul singer Tyler James, sent her demo tape to an A&R person. She signed to Simon Fuller’s 19 Management in 2002 and was paid £250 a week against future earnings.
While being developed by the management company, Winehouse was kept as a recording industry secret, although she was a regular jazz standards singer at the Cobden Club. Her future A&R representative at Island, Darcus Beese, heard of her by accident when the manager of The Lewinson Brothers showed him some productions of his clients, which featured Winehouse as key vocalist. When he asked who the singer was, the manager told him he was not allowed to say. Having decided that he wanted to sign her, it took several months of asking around for Beese to eventually discover who the singer was. However, Winehouse had already recorded a number of songs and signed a publishing deal with EMI by this time. Incidentally, she formed a working relationship with producer Salaam Remi through these record publishers.

Beese introduced Winehouse to his boss, Nick Gatfield; the Island head shared his enthusiasm in signing the young artist. Winehouse was signed to Island, as rival interest in her had started to build with representatives of EMI and Virgin starting to make moves. Beese told HitQuarters that he felt the excitement over an artist who was an atypical pop star for the time was due to a backlash against reality TV music shows, which included audiences starved for fresh, genuine young talent.
Winehouse’s debut album, Frank, was released on 20 October 2003. Produced mainly by Salaam Remi, many songs were influenced by jazz and, apart from two covers, Winehouse co-wrote every song. The album received critical acclaim with compliments given to the “cool, critical gaze” in its lyrics. Winehouse’s voice was compared with those of Sarah Vaughan and Macy Gray, among others.
The album entered the upper reaches of the UK album chart in 2004 when it was nominated for the Brit Awards in the categories of “British Female Solo Artist” and “British Urban Act.” It went on to achieve platinum sales. Later in 2004, she and Remi won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song, for their first single together, “Stronger Than Me.” The album was also shortlisted for the 2004 Mercury Music Prize. In the same year, she performed at the Glastonbury Festival – Jazzworld, the V Festival and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. After the release of the album, Winehouse commented that she was “only 80 percent behind the album” because Island Records had overruled her preferences for the songs and mixes to be included.

In contrast to her jazz-influenced former album, Winehouse’s focus shifted to the girl groups of the 1950s and 1960s. Winehouse hired New York singer Sharon Jones’s longtime band, the Dap-Kings, to back her up in the studio and on tour. Mitch Winehouse relates in Amy, My Daughter how fascinating watching her process was: her perfectionism in the studio and how she would put what she had sung on a CD and play it in his taxi outside to know how most people would hear her music. In May 2006, Winehouse’s demo tracks such as “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab” appeared on Mark Ronson’s New York radio show on East Village Radio. These were some of the first new songs played on the radio after the release of “Pumps” and both were slated to appear on her second album. The 11-track album, completed in five months, was produced entirely by Salaam Remi and Ronson, with the production credits being split between them. Ronson said in a 2010 interview that he liked working with Winehouse because she was blunt when she did not like his work. Promotion of Back to Black soon began and, in early October 2006 Winehouse’s official website was relaunched with a new layout and clips of previously unreleased songs. Back to Black was released in the UK on 30 October 2006. It went to number one on the UK Albums Chart for two weeks in January 2007, dropping then climbing back for several weeks in February. In the US, it entered at number seven on the Billboard 200. It was the best-selling album in the UK of 2007, selling 1.85 million copies over the course of the year. The first single released from the album was the Ronson-produced “Rehab.” The song reached the top ten in the UK and the US. Time magazine named “Rehab” the Best Song of 2007. Writer Josh Tyrangiel praised Winehouse for her confidence, saying, “What she is is mouthy, funny, sultry, and quite possibly crazy” and “It’s impossible not to be seduced by her originality. Combine it with production by Mark Ronson that references four decades worth of soul music without once ripping it off, and you’ve got the best song of 2007.” The album’s second single and lead single in the US, “You Know I’m No Good,” was released in January 2007 with a remix featuring rap vocals by Ghostface Killah. It ultimately reached number 18 on the UK singles chart. The title track, “Back to Black,” was released in the UK in April 2007 and peaked at number 25, but was more successful across mainland Europe. “Tears Dry on Their Own,” “Love Is a Losing Game” were also released as singles, but failed to achieve the same level of success.

On 10 February 2008, Winehouse received five Grammy Awards, winning in the following categories: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the single “Rehab,” and Best Pop Vocal Album. The singer also earned a Grammy as Best New Artist, earning her an entry in the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of Records for Most Grammy Awards won by a British Female Act. Additionally, Back to Black was nominated for Album of the Year. Ronson’s work with her won the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, in the non-classical category. She ended her acceptance speech for Record of the Year with, “This is for London because Camden town ain’t burning down,” in reference to the 2008 Camden Market fire. Performing “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab” via satellite from London’s Riverside Studios at 3 a.m. UK time, she couldn’t be at the ceremony in Los Angeles as her visa approval had not been processed in time.
After the Grammys, the album’s sales increased, catapulting Back to Black to number two on the US Billboard 200, after it initially peaked in the seventh position. On 20 February 2008, Winehouse performed at the 2008 Brit Awards at Earls Court in London, performing “Valerie” with Mark Ronson, followed by “Love Is a Losing Game.” She urged the crowd to “make some noise for my Blake.” A special deluxe edition of Back to Black topped the UK album charts on 2 March 2008. Meanwhile, the original edition of the album was ranked at number 30 in its 68th week on the charts, while Frank charted at number 35.
In Paris, she performed what was described as a “well-executed 40-minute” set at the opening of a Fendi boutique in early March. By 12 March, the album had sold a total of 2,467,575 copies—318,350 copies had been sold in the previous 10 weeks—putting the album on the UK’s top-10 best-selling albums of the 21st century for the first time. On 7 April, Back to Black was in the top position of the pan-European charts for the sixth consecutive and thirteenth aggregate week. Amy Winehouse – The Girl Done Good: A Documentary Review, a 78-minute DVD, was released on 14 April 2008. The documentary features interviews with those who knew her at a young age, people who helped her achieve success, jazz music experts, and music and pop-culture specialists.
At the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards in May, Winehouse became the first-ever artist to receive two nominations for the top award: best song, musically and lyrically. She won the award for “Love Is a Losing Game” and was nominated for “You Know I’m No Good.” “Rehab,” a Novello winner for best contemporary song in 2006, also received a 2008 nomination for best-selling British song. Winehouse was also nominated for a 2008 MTV Europe Award in the “Act of the Year” category.
Although her father, manager and various members of her touring team reportedly tried to dissuade her, Winehouse performed at the Rock in Rio Lisboa festival in Portugal in May 2008. Although the set was plagued by a late arrival and problems with her voice, the crowd warmed to her. In addition to her own material she performed two Specials covers. Winehouse performed at Nelson Mandela’s 90th Birthday Party concert at London’s Hyde Park on 27 June 2008, and the next day at the Glastonbury Festival. On 12 July, at the Oxegen Festival in Ireland she performed a well-received 50-minute set which was followed the next day by a 14-song set at T in the Park.
On 16 August she played at the Staffordshire leg of the V Festival, and the following day played the Chelmsford leg of the festival. Organisers said that Winehouse attracted the biggest crowds of the festival. Audience reaction was reported as mixed. On 6 September, she was Bestival’s Saturday headliner, where her performance was described as polished—terminated by a curfew as the show running overdue, after Winehouse started an hour late—and her storming off stage.
A clip of Winehouse’s music was included in the “Roots and Influences” area that looked at connections between different artists at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, which opened in December 2008. One thread started with Billie Holiday, continued with Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, and then finished with Winehouse.
Back to Black was the world’s seventh-biggest-selling album of 2008. The album’s sales meant that the market performance of Universal Music’s recorded music division did not drop to levels experienced by the overall music market.

Winehouse and Ronson contributed a cover of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” to the Quincy Jones tribute album Q Soul Bossa Nostra, released in November 2010. She had agreed to form a group with Questlove of the Roots but her problems obtaining a visa delayed their working together. Salaam Remi had already created some material with Winehouse as part of the project. According to The Times, Universal Music pressed her for new material in 2008, but as of 2 September that year she had not been near a recording studio. In late October, Winehouse’s spokesman was quoted as saying that Winehouse had not been given a deadline to complete her third album, for which she was learning to play drums.
In May 2009, Winehouse returned to performing at a jazz festival in St. Lucia amid torrential downpours and technical difficulties. During her set, it was reported she was unsteady on her feet and had trouble remembering lyrics. She apologised to the crowd for being “bored” and ended the set in the middle of a song. During her stay in St. Lucia, however, she worked on new music with Salaam Remi. On 23 August that year Winehouse sang with the Specials at the V Festival, on their songs “You’re Wondering Now” and “Ghost Town”.
Island claimed that a new album would be due for release in 2010. Island co-president Darcus Beese said, “I’ve heard a couple of song demos that have absolutely floored me.” In July 2010, Winehouse was quoted as saying her next album would be released no later than January 2011, saying “It’s going to be very much the same as my second album, where there’s a lot of jukebox stuff and songs that are… just jukebox, really.” Ronson, however, said at that time that he had not started to record the album. She performed “Valerie” with Ronson at a movie premiere but forgot some of the song’s lyrics. In October, Winehouse performed a four-song set to promote her fashion line. In December 2010, she played a 40-minute concert at a Russian oligarch’s party in Moscow, with the tycoon hand selecting the songs.
In January 2011, Winehouse played five dates in Brazil, with opening acts of Janelle Monáe and Mayer Hawthorne. The following month she cut short a performance in Dubai following booing from the audience. Winehouse was reported to be tired, distracted and “tipsy” during the performance.
On 18 June 2011, Winehouse started her twelve-leg European tour in Belgrade. Local media described her performance as a scandal and disaster; she was booed off the stage due to her apparently being too drunk to perform. It was reported that she was unable to remember the city she was in, the lyrics of her songs or the names of the members of her band. The local press also claimed that Winehouse was forced to perform by her bodyguards, who did not allow her to leave the stage when she tried to do so. She then pulled out of performances in Istanbul and Athens which had been scheduled for the following week. On 21 June, it was announced that she had cancelled all shows of her tour and would be given “as long as it takes” to sort herself out.
Winehouse’s last public appearance took place at Camden’s Roundhouse on 20 July 2011, when she made a surprise appearance on stage to support her goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield, who was singing “Mama Said” with the Wanted. Winehouse died three days later. Her last recording was a duet with American singer Tony Bennett for his latest album, Duets II, released on 20 September 2011. Their single from the album, “Body and Soul,” was released on 14 September 2011 on MTV and VH1 to commemorate what would have been her 28th birthday.

Winehouse joined a campaign to stop a block of flats being built beside the George Tavern, a famous London East End music venue. Campaign supporters feared the residential development would end the spot’s lucrative sideline as a film and photo location, on which it relies to survive. As part of a breast cancer awareness campaign, Winehouse appeared in a revealing photograph for the April 2008 issue of Easy Living magazine. Winehouse had an estimated £10m fortune, tying her for tenth place in the 2008 The Sunday Times listing of the wealth of musicians under age 30. The following year her fortune had dropped to an estimated £5m. Her finances are run by Mitch and Janis Winehouse. It was reported she earned about £1m singing at two private parties during Paris Fashion Week as well as another £1m to perform at a Moscow Art Gallery for Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Winehouse loaned a vintage dress used in her video for “Tears Dry on Their Own” as well as a DVD to the British Music Experience, a new museum dedicated to the history of British pop music. The museum, located at the O2 Arena in London, opened on 9 March 2009.
In January 2009, Winehouse announced that she was launching her own record label. Her first album, featuring covers of classic soul records, was released on 12 October 2009. Winehouse is the backing singer on several tracks on the album and she performed backing vocals for Bromfield on the BBC’s television programme Strictly Come Dancing on 10 October.
Winehouse and her family are the subject of a 2009 documentary shot by Daphne Barak titled Saving Amy. Winehouse entered into a joint venture in 2009 with EMI to launch a range of wrapping paper and gift cards containing song lyrics from her album Back to Black. On 8 January 2010, a television documentary, My Daughter Amy, aired on Channel 4. Saving Amy was released as a paperback book in January 2010.
Winehouse collaborated on a 17 piece fashion collection with the Fred Perry label. It was released for sale in October 2010. According to Fred Perry’s marketing director “We had three major design meetings where she was closely involved in product style selection and the application of fabric, colour and styling details,” and gave “crucial input on proportion, colour and fit.” The collection consists of “vintage-inspired looks including Capri pants, a bowling dress, a trench coat, pencil skirts, a longline argyle sweater and a pink-and-black checkerboard-printed collared shirt.” At the behest of her family, three forthcoming collections up to and including autumn/winter 2012 that she had designed prior to her death will be released.

Winehouse was known for her deep, expressive contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres, including soul, (sometimes labelled as blue-eyed soul and neo soul), rhythm and blues, and jazz. The BBC’s Garry Mulholland called Winehouse “the pre-eminent vocal talent of her generation”.[146] According to AllMusic’s Cyril Cordor, she was one of the UK’s premier singers during the 2000s; “fans and critics alike embraced her rugged charm, brash sense of humor, and distinctively soulful and jazzy vocals”. In The Guardian, Caroline Sullivan later wrote that “her idolisation of Dinah Washington and the Ronettes distinguished her from almost all newly minted pop singers of the early 2000s; her exceptionally-susceptible-to-heartbreak voice did the rest”. Soon after Winehouse’s death, a number of prominent critics assessed the singer’s legacy: Maura Johnston from The Village Voice said, “When she was on, Winehouse had few peers—she wasn’t an octave-jumper like other big divas of the moment, but her contralto had a snap to it that enriched even the simplest syllables with a full spectrum of emotion”; Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker proclaimed, “Nobody can match Winehouse’s unique transitions or her utterly weird phrasings. She sounded like an original sixties soul star, developed when the landscape had no rules. But now untrammeled traditionalism is in the lead and her beautiful footnote has been cut short. American soul—through visionaries like Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae and Jill Scott—had moved on. But Winehouse was a fine shepherd of the past.”
By contrast, Robert Christgau dismissed Winehouse as “a self-aggrandizing self-abuser who’s taken seriously because she makes a show of soul”. In his opinion, the singer “simulated gravitas by running her suicidal tendencies through an amalgam of 20th-century African-American vocal stylings—the slides, growls, and melismatic outcries that for many matures are now the only reliable signifiers of pop substance”. In March 2017, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan said he was enjoying listening to Winehouse’s last record (Back to Black), and called her “the last real individualist around.”

Winehouse’s greatest love was 1960s girl groups. Her hairdresser, Alex Foden, borrowed her “instantly recognisable” beehive hairdo and she borrowed her Cleopatra makeup from the Ronettes. Her imitation was so successful, as The Village Voice reports: “Ronnie Spector—who, it could be argued, all but invented Winehouse’s style in the first place when she took the stage at the Brooklyn Fox Theater with her fellow Ronettes more than 40 years ago—was so taken aback at a picture of Winehouse in the New York Post that she exclaimed, “I don’t know her, I never met her, and when I saw that pic, I thought, ‘That’s me!’ But then I found out, no, it’s Amy! I didn’t have on my glasses.”
The New York Times style reporter, Guy Trebay, discussed the multiplicity of influences on Winehouse’s style after her death. Trebay noted, “her stylish husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, may have influenced her look.” Additionally, Trebay observed:
She was a 5-foot-3 almanac of visual reference, most famously to Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, but also to the white British soul singer Mari Wilson, less famous for her sound than her beehive; to the punk god Johnny Thunders…; to the fierce council-house chicks… (see: Dior and Chanel runways, 2007 and 2008) … to a lineage of bad girls, extending from Cleopatra to Louise Brooks’s Lulu and including Salt-n-Pepa, to irresistible man traps that always seemed to come to the same unfortunate end.
Former Rolling Stone editor Joe Levy, who had put her on the magazine’s cover, broke her look down this way: Just as her best music drew on sampling – assembling sonic licks and stylistic fragments borrowed from Motown, Stax, punk and early hip-hop – her personal style was also a knowing collage. There was a certain moment in the ’90s when, if you were headed downtown and turned left, every girl looked like Bettie Page. But they did not do what Winehouse did, mixing Bettie Page with Brigitte Bardot and adding that little bit of Ronnie Spector.
Winehouse’s use of bold red lipstick, thick eyebrows and heavy eyeliner came from Latinas she saw in Miami, on her trip there to work with Salaam Remi on Back to Black. Her look was repeatedly denigrated by the British press. At the same time that the NME Awards nominated Winehouse in the categories of “Best Solo Artist” and “Best Music DVD” in 2008, they awarded her “Worst Dressed Performer.” Winehouse was also ranked number two on Richard Blackwell’s 48th annual “Ten Worst Dressed Women” list, behind Victoria Beckham.

By 2008, her drug problems threatened her career. As Nick Gatfield, the president of Island Records, toyed with the idea of releasing Winehouse “to deal with her problems”, he said, “It’s a reflection of her status [in the US] that when you flick through the TV coverage [of the Grammys] it’s her image they use.” Post-Grammys, some questioned whether Winehouse should have been honoured with the awards given her recent personal and drug problems, including Natalie Cole, who introduced Winehouse at the ceremony and who herself battled substance-abuse problems while winning a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1975. (Winehouse was prevented from travelling to and performing at the Grammy Awards ceremony in the US due to failing a drug test. In a newspaper commentary, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said that the alleged drug habits of Winehouse and other celebrities sent a bad message “to others who are vulnerable to addiction” and undermine the efforts of other celebrities trying to raise awareness of problems in Africa, now that more cocaine used in Europe passes through that continent. Winehouse’s spokesperson noted that “Amy has never given a quote about drugs or flaunted it in any way. She’s had some problems and is trying to get better. The U.N. should get its own house in order.”
In January 2008, her record label stated it believed the extensive media coverage she had received increased record sales. In an April 2008 poll conducted by Sky News, Winehouse was named the second greatest “ultimate heroine” by the UK population at large, topping the voting for that category of those polled under 25 years old. Psychologist Donna Dawson commented that the results demonstrated that women like Winehouse who had “a certain sense of vulnerability or have had to fight against some adversity in their lives” received recognition.
In July 2008, BBC Radio Scotland’s head, Jeff Zycinski, stated that the BBC, and media in general, were complicit in undermining celebrities, including Winehouse. He said that public interest in the singer’s lifestyle did not make her lifestyle newsworthy. Rod McKenzie, editor of the BBC Radio One programme Newsbeat, replied: “If you play [Amy Winehouse’s] music to a certain demographic, those same people want to know what’s happening in her private life. If you don’t cover it, you’re insulting young licence fee payers.” In The Scotsman, British singer and songwriter Lily Allen was quoted to have said – “I know Amy Winehouse very well. And she is very different to what people portray her as being. Yes, she does get out of her mind on drugs sometimes, but she is also a very clever, intelligent, witty, funny person who can hold it together. You just don’t see that side.”

Winehouse dated chef-musician Alex Clare (sometimes referred to as Alex Claire) in 2006, while on a break from her on-off boyfriend and future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. She and Clare lived together briefly, and in a pattern that Fielder-Civil would later repeat, Clare sold his story to the News of the World, which published it under the headline “Bondage Crazed Amy Just Can’t Beehive in Bed.”
Fielder-Civil, a former video production assistant, had dropped out of Bourne Grammar School and, aged 16, moved to London from his native Lincolnshire. He married Winehouse on 18 May 2007, in Miami Beach, Florida. In a June 2007 interview, Winehouse admitted she could sometimes be violent toward him after she had been drinking, saying: “If he says one thing I don’t like, then I’ll chin him.” In August 2007, they were photographed, bloodied and bruised, in the streets of London after an alleged fight, although she contended her injuries were self-inflicted. Winehouse’s parents and in-laws publicly reported their numerous concerns, the latter citing fears that the two might commit suicide. Fielder-Civil’s father encouraged fans to boycott Winehouse’s music, and Mitch Winehouse said this would not help. Fielder-Civil was quoted in a British tabloid as saying he introduced Winehouse to crack cocaine and heroin. During a visit with Mitch Winehouse at the prison in July 2008, Fielder-Civil reportedly said that he and Winehouse would cut themselves to ease the pain of withdrawal.
From 21 July 2008 to 25 February 2009, Fielder-Civil was imprisoned following his guilty plea on charges of trying to pervert the course of justice and of grievous bodily harm with intent. The incident, in July 2007, involved his assault of a pub landlord that broke the victim’s cheek. According to the prosecution, the landlord accepted £200,000 as part of a deal to “effectively throw the [court] case and not turn up,” and he testified that the money belonged to Winehouse, but she pulled out of a meeting with the men involved in the plot, to attend an awards ceremony. Mitch Winehouse, as manager of his daughter’s money, has denied the payoff came from her.
When Winehouse was spotted with aspiring actor Josh Bowman on holiday in Saint Lucia, in early January 2009, she said she was “in love again, and I don’t need drugs.” She commented that her “whole marriage was based on doing drugs” and that “for the time being I’ve just forgotten I’m even married.” On 12 January, Winehouse’s spokesman confirmed that “papers have been received” for what Fielder-Civil’s solicitor has said are divorce proceedings based on a claim of adultery. In March, Winehouse was quoted in a magazine as saying, “I still love Blake and I want him to move into my new house with me—that was my plan all along … I won’t let him divorce me. He’s the male version of me and we’re perfect for each other.” Nonetheless, an uncontested divorce was granted on 16 July 2009 and became final on 28 August 2009. Fielder-Civil received no money in the settlement.
She was in a relationship with a British writer and director of films, Reg Traviss, from early 2010 until she died. According to media reports and a biography written by Winehouse’s father, Traviss and Winehouse had planned to marry and intended to have children.
After Winehouse’s death, Pete Doherty said that he and Winehouse had been lovers at one point. However, in July 2008, when Rolling Stone reporter Claire Hoffman asked Winehouse about her relationship with Doherty, Winehouse replied: “We’re just good friends”, and added: “I asked Pete to do a concept EP, and he made this face, he looked at me like I’d pooed on the floor. He wouldn’t do it. We’re just really close”.

Winehouse’s battles with substance abuse were the subject of much media attention. In 2005, she went through a period of drinking, heavy drug use, and weight loss. People who saw her during the end of that year and early 2006 reported a rebound that coincided with the writing of Back to Black. Her family believes that the mid-2006 death of her grandmother, who was a stabilising influence, set her off into addiction. In August 2007, Winehouse cancelled a number of shows in the UK and Europe, citing exhaustion and ill health. She was hospitalised during this period for what was reported as an overdose of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol. In various interviews, she admitted to having problems with self-harm, depression, and eating disorders.
Winehouse told a magazine that the drugs were to blame for her hospitalisation and that “I really thought that it was over for me then.” Soon afterward, Winehouse’s father commented that when he had made public statements regarding her problems he was using the media because it seemed the only way to get through to her. In an interview with The Album Chart Show on British television, Winehouse said she was manic depressive and not alcoholic, adding that that sounded like “an alcoholic in denial”. A US reporter writes that Winehouse was a “victim of mental illness in a society that doesn’t understand or respond to mental illness with great effectiveness.”
In December 2007, Winehouse’s spokesman reported that the singer was in a physician-supervised programme and was channelling her difficulties by writing a lot of music. The British tabloid The Sun posted a video of a woman, alleged to be Winehouse, apparently smoking crack cocaine and speaking of having taken ecstasy and valium. Winehouse’s father moved in with her, and Island Records, her record label, announced the abandonment of plans for an American promotion campaign on her behalf. In late January 2008, Winehouse reportedly entered a rehabilitation facility for a two-week treatment program.
On 23 January 2008, the video was passed on to the Metropolitan Police, who questioned her on 5 February. No charges were brought. On 26 March 2008, Winehouse’s spokesman said she was “doing well”. Her record company reportedly believed that her recovery remained fragile. By late April 2008, her erratic behaviour—including an allegation of assault—caused fear that her drug rehabilitation efforts had been unsuccessful. Winehouse’s father and manager then sought to have her detained under the Mental Health Act of 1983. Her dishevelled appearance during and after a scheduled club night in September 2008 sparked new rumours of a relapse. Photographers were quoted as saying she appeared to have cuts on her legs and arms.
According to her physician, Winehouse quit using illegal substances in 2008. In an October 2010 interview, speaking of her decision to quit drugs, Winehouse said, “I literally woke up one day and was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.'” However, alcohol emerged as a problem, with Winehouse abstaining for a few weeks and then lapsing into alcohol abuse. Her physician said that Winehouse was treated with Librium for alcohol withdrawal and anxiety and underwent psychological and psychiatric evaluations in 2010, but refused psychological therapy.

In 2006, Winehouse admitted to punching a female fan in the face for criticising her having taken Blake Fielder-Civil as a husband. She then attacked her own spouse as he attempted to calm her down, kneeing him in the crotch. In October 2007, Winehouse and Fielder-Civil were arrested in Bergen, Norway, for possession of seven grams of cannabis. The couple were later released and fined 3850 kroner (around £350). Winehouse first appealed the fines, but later dropped the appeal.
On 26 April 2008, Winehouse was cautioned after she admitted to police she slapped a 38-year-old man in the face, a “common assault” offence, her first of two. She voluntarily turned herself in and was held overnight. Police said, at her arrival she was “in no fit state” to be interviewed. Ten days later, Winehouse was arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs after a video of her apparently smoking crack cocaine was passed to the police in January, but was released on bail a few hours later because they could not confirm, from the video, what she was smoking. The Crown Prosecution Service considered charging her, but cleared her when it could not establish that the substance in the video was a controlled drug. Some members of Parliament reacted negatively. Two London residents were subsequently charged with conspiracy to supply cocaine and ecstasy to Winehouse. One of the pair was sentenced to two years in prison on 13 December 2008, while the other received a two-year community order.
On 5 March 2009, Winehouse was arrested and charged with common assault following a claim by dancer Sherene Flash that Winehouse hit her in the eye at the September 2008 Prince’s Trust charity ball. Winehouse’s spokesperson announced the cancellation of the singer’s US Coachella Festival appearance in light of the new legal issue, and Winehouse appeared in court on 17 March to enter her plea of not guilty. On 23 July, her trial began with prosecutor Lyall Thompson charging that Winehouse acted with “deliberate and unjustifiable violence” while appearing to be under the influence of alcohol or another substance. She testified that she did not punch Flash, but tried to push her away because she was scared of her; she cited her worry that Flash would sell her story to a tabloid, Flash’s height advantage, and Flash’s “rude” behaviour. On 24 July, District Judge Timothy Workman ruled that Winehouse was not guilty, citing the facts that all but two of the witnesses were intoxicated at the time of the incident and that medical evidence did not show “the sort of injury that often occurs when there is a forceful punch to the eye.”
On 19 December 2009, Winehouse was arrested for a third time on charges of common assault, plus another charge of public order offence after assaulting the front-of-house manager of the Milton Keynes Theatre after he asked her to move from her seat. Winehouse plead guilty to the charges and was given a conditional discharge.

With the paparazzi taking photographs of her wherever they could, Winehouse obtained an injunction against a leading paparazzi agency, Big Pictures, under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997; the resultant court order issued by the High Court in 2009 banned them from following her. Photographers were also banned from following her within 100 metres of her London home and photographing Winehouse in her home or the homes of her friends and relatives. According to a newspaper report, sources close to the singer said legal action was taken out of concern for the safety of Winehouse and those close to her.

On 23 June 2008, Winehouse’s publicist corrected earlier misstatements by Mitch Winehouse that his daughter had early stage emphysema, instead claiming she had signs of what could lead to early-stage emphysema. Mitch Winehouse had also stated that his daughter’s lungs were operating at 70 percent capacity and that she had an irregular heartbeat. He said that these problems had been caused by her chain smoking crack cocaine. The singer’s father also reported that doctors had warned Winehouse that, if she continued smoking crack cocaine, she would have to wear an oxygen mask and would eventually die. In a radio interview, Mitch Winehouse said the singer was responding “fabulously” to treatment, which included being covered with nicotine patches. British Lung Foundation spokesman Keith Prowse noted this type of condition could be managed with treatment. Prowse also said the condition was not normal for a person her age but “heavy smoking and inhaling other substances like drugs can age the lungs prematurely.” Norman H. Edelman of the American Lung Association explained that if she stopped smoking, her lung functions would decline at the rate of a normal person, but continued smoking would lead to a more rapid decline in lung function.
Winehouse was released from the London Clinic 24 hours after returning from a temporary leave to perform at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday and at a concert in Glastonbury, and continued receiving treatment as an outpatient. In July 2008, Winehouse stated that she had been diagnosed with “some areas of emphysema” and said she was getting herself together by “eating loads of healthy food, sleeping loads, playing my guitar, making music and writing letters to my husband every day.” She also kept a vertical tanning bed in her flat. Winehouse began precautionary testing on her lungs and chest on 25 October 2008 at the London Clinic for what was reported as a chest infection. Winehouse was in and out of the facility and was granted permission to set her own schedule regarding home leave. She returned to the hospital on 23 November 2008 for a reported reaction to her medication.

Winehouse’s bodyguard said that he had arrived at her residence three days before her death and felt she had been somewhat intoxicated. He observed moderate drinking over the next few days, and said she had been “laughing, listening to music and watching TV at 2 a.m. the day of her death”. At 10 a.m. BST on 23 July 2011, he observed her lying on her bed and tried unsuccessfully to rouse her. This did not raise much suspicion because she usually slept late after a night out. According to the bodyguard, shortly after 3 p.m., he checked on her again and observed her lying in the same position as before, leading to a further check, in which he concluded that she was not breathing and had no pulse; he said he called emergency services. At 3:54 p.m., two ambulances were called to Winehouse’s home in Camden, London. Winehouse was pronounced dead at the scene at the age of 27. Shortly afterwards, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that she had died.
After her death was announced, media and camera crews appeared, as crowds gathered near Winehouse’s residence to pay their respects. Forensic investigators entered the flat as police cordoned off the street outside; they recovered one small and two large bottles of vodka from her room. After her death, the singer broke her second Guinness World Record: for the most songs by a woman to simultaneously appear on the UK singles chart, with eight. A coroner’s inquest reached a verdict of misadventure. The report released on 26 October 2011 explained that Winehouse’s blood alcohol content was 416 mg per 100 ml (0.416%) at the time of her death, more than five times the legal drink-drive limit. According to the coroner, “The unintended consequences of such potentially fatal levels was her sudden death.”

Winehouse’s record label, Universal Republic, released a statement that read in part: “We are deeply saddened at the sudden loss of such a gifted musician, artist and performer.” Many musical artists have since paid tribute to Winehouse including U2, M.I.A., Lady Gaga, Marianne Faithfull, Bruno Mars, Nicki Minaj, Keisha Buchanan, Rihanna, George Michael, Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Courtney Love, and the punk rock band Green Day, who wrote a song in her tribute titled “Amy”. In her 2012 album Banga, singer Patti Smith released “This Is the Girl,” written as a homage to Winehouse. Mark Ronson dedicated his UK number one album Uptown Special to Winehouse, stating: “I’m always thinking of you and inspired by you.” There was a large amount of media attention devoted to the 27 Club once again. Three years earlier, she had expressed a fear of dying at that age. Winehouse did not leave a will; her estate was inherited by her parents. Winehouse’s parents set up The Amy Winehouse Foundation to prevent harm from drug misuse among young people; her brother Alex is an employee.

On 17 December 2012, British authorities reopened the probe of Winehouse’s death. On 8 January 2013, a second inquest confirmed that Winehouse died of accidental alcohol poisoning. In a June 2013 interview, Alex Winehouse revealed his belief that his sister’s eating disorder, and the consequent physical weakness, was the primary cause of her death:
She suffered from bulimia very badly. That’s not, like, a revelation – you knew just by looking at her… She would have died eventually, the way she was going, but what really killed her was the bulimia… I think that it left her weaker and more susceptible. Had she not had an eating disorder, she would have been physically stronger.

Family and friends attended Winehouse’s private funeral on 26 July 2011 at Edgwarebury Lane Cemetery in north London. Her mother and father, Janis and Mitch Winehouse, close friends Nick Grimshaw and Kelly Osbourne, producer Mark Ronson, goddaughter Dionne Bromfield and her boyfriend Reg Traviss were among those in attendance at the private service led by Rabbi Frank Hellner. Her father delivered the eulogy, saying “Goodnight, my angel, sleep tight. Mummy and Daddy love you ever so much.” Carole King’s “So Far Away” closed the service with mourners singing along. She was later cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. The family planned to sit a two-day shiva. On 16 September 2012, Winehouse’s ashes were buried alongside her grandmother’s, Cynthia Levy at Edgwarebury Lane Cemetery.

Dear Amy

precious jazzy jewel
diamond in the rough
colourful and bright
tender and yet tough

raw voice
with innocent delight
left with struggle
lost her daily fight

afraid of fame
a broken frame
died lonely
without shame

a devotee she’ll find in me
dear Amy,
wine in my house
please sing for me!

Poetpas

Check her out(or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Featuring: Erroll Garner

/ Poetpas

Today I am featuring a man who I consider to be the best jazz piano player that I’ve ever heard, Erroll Garner, famous for creating the song Misty that was played in Clint Eastwood’s film Play Misty for Me (1971). However, he deserves way more recognition and credit than a link to a white man’s fim. It’s actually sad to learn so little is written about him whilst he was one of the best, or maybe even “the best”.

Erroll Louis Garner (June 15, 1921 – January 2, 1977) was an American jazz pianist and composer known for his swing playing and ballads. Garner was born with his twin brother Ernest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 15, 1921, the youngest of six children in an African-American family. He attended George Westinghouse High School (as did fellow pianists Billy Strayhorn and Ahmad Jamal).

His best-known composition, the ballad “Misty”, has become a jazz standard. Scott Yanow of Allmusic calls him “one of the most distinctive of all pianists” and a “brilliant virtuoso.” He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6363 Hollywood Blvd. His live album, Concert by the Sea, first released in 1955, sold over a million copies by 1958 and Scott Yanow’s opinion is: “this is the album that made such a strong impression that Garner was considered immortal from then on.”

Garner began playing piano at the age of three. His elder siblings were taught piano by Miss Bowman. From an early age, Erroll would sit down and play anything she had demonstrated, just like Miss Bowman, his eldest sister Martha said. Garner was self-taught and remained an “ear player” all his life, never learning to read music. At age seven, he began appearing on the radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh with a group called the Candy Kids. By age 11, he was playing on the Allegheny riverboats. In 1937 he joined local saxophonist Leroy Brown.
He played locally in the shadow of his older pianist brother Linton Garner.

Garner moved to New York City in 1944. He briefly worked with the bassist Slam Stewart, and though not a bebop musician per se, in 1947 played with Charlie Parker on the “Cool Blues” session. Although his admission to the Pittsburgh music union was initially refused because of his inability to read music, it relented in 1956 and made him an honorary member. Garner is credited with a superb musical memory. After attending a concert by the Russian classical pianist Emil Gilels, Garner returned to his apartment and was able to play a large portion of the performed music by recall. Garner made many tours both at home and abroad, and regularly recorded. He was, reportedly, The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson’s favorite jazz musician, appearing on Carson’s show many times over the years.

Short in stature (5 feet 2 inches [157 cm]), Garner performed sitting on multiple telephone directories. He was also known for his vocalizations while playing, which can be heard on many of his recordings. He helped to bridge the gap for jazz musicians between nightclubs and the concert hall.
Called “one of the most distinctive of all pianists” by Scott Yanow, Garner showed that a “creative jazz musician can be very popular without watering down his music” or changing his personal style. He has been described as a “brilliant virtuoso who sounded unlike anyone else”, using an “orchestral approach straight from the swing era but … open to the innovations of bop.” His distinctive style could swing like no other, but some of his best recordings are ballads, such as his best-known composition, “Misty”, which rapidly became a jazz standard – and was featured in Clint Eastwood’s film Play Misty for Me (1971).
Garner may have been inspired by the example of Earl Hines, a fellow Pittsburgh resident but 18 years his senior, and there were resemblances in their elastic approach to timing and use of right-hand octaves. Garner’s early recordings also display the influence of the stride piano style of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. Fats Waller had been the one Erroll had looked up to and was his prime example of how and what he wanted to be like. He developed a signature style that involved his right hand playing behind the beat while his left strummed a steady rhythm and punctuation, creating insouciance and tension.

The independence of his hands also was evidenced by his masterful use of three-against-four and more complicated cross-rhythms between the hands. Garner would also improvise whimsical introductions—often in stark contrast to the rest of the tune—that left listeners in suspense as to what the piece would be. His melodic improvisations generally stayed close to the theme while employing novel chord voicings. Pianist Ross Tompkins described Garner’s distinctiveness as due to ‘happiness’. Erroll Garner often muttered, moaned and grunted along his solos, so much so that it felt a humorous distraction from the music to some. His would sometimes be a sheep like sound which was rather comical yet most possibly a musical expression.

In 2012 a film on Garner was released by Atticus Brady called No One Can Hear You Read, which Garner used to say when asked why he had never learned to read music. Footage of the piano prodigy playing and speaking was intercut with interviews: with admirers (including Woody Allen, Steve Allen and his fellow musicians Ahmad Jamal, also from Pittsburgh and Ernest McCarty, his bassist for many years); with family members, including his big sister Ruth Garner Moore and daughter Kim Garner; with George Avakian, the producer of Concert by the Sea; and with Jim Doran his biographer. The film attempts to address Garner’s fall from prominence after his death, reminding viewers how popular and original he was in his day as well as why he is considered in many quarters a legend, one of the true greats of jazz. On June 15, 2015, the estate of Martha Glaser, Garner’s longtime manager, announced the formation of the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, a major new archival and musical celebration of Garner. The project includes the donation of the Erroll Garner Archive—a huge trove of newly discovered historical material from Garner’s life—to the University of Pittsburgh.
On September 18, 2015, Concert by the Sea was re-released by Sony Legacy in an expanded, three-CD edition that adds 11 previously unreleased tracks.
On September 30, 2016, Ready Take One was released on Sony Legacy/Octave featuring 14 previously unreleased tracks. In 2016, Downtown Music Publishing entered an exclusive worldwide administration agreement with Octave Music Publishing Corp. The deal covers all of Garner’s works including “Misty”, as well as Garner’s extensive archive of master recordings, many of which remain unreleased.On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Erroll Garner among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Garner sadly died at the young age of 56 of cardiac arrest related to emphysema on January 2, 1977. He is buried in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery. May he play in heaven with all the other great ones. (I personally would have loved hearing or seeing him play with Django Reinhardt).

Check him out:

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, Nocturne, Erroll Garner Jazz Project, poetpas

Featuring: J.R.R. Tolkien

/ Poetpas

Ronald Tolkien was an amazing writer who can not go unnoticed in my series featuring those that have made an impact or impression on me. Although I am not much of a reader, the films Lords of the Rings and The Hobbit got me interested in this Einstein of lingo (as I would call him) and these wonderful translations of some of his finest works. So check him out if you want (or not).

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. Forbes ranked him the fifth top-earning “dead celebrity” in 2009.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in South Africa which was later annexed by the British Empire, to Arthur Reuel Tolkie, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel both with German roots.

As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some think later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult.
When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien’s mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane’s farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.
Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards.

In 1904, when J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes. She was then about 34 years of age. After his mother’s death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and later St. Philip’s School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward’s. In Edgbaston, Tolkien lived there in the shadow of Perrott’s Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery had a large collection of works on public display.

While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed “The Book of the Foxrook”, a sixteen-page notebook, where the “earliest example of one of his invented alphabets” appears.Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.
In 1911, while they were at King Edward’s School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow’s Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a “council” in London at Wiseman’s home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo’s journey across the Misty Mountains (“including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods”) is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially studied classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright.

At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior. With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love.
On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt “on the shelf” and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien’s letter, everything had changed.
On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien’s proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was “dreadfully upset at first”, and the Field family was “insulted and angry”. Upon learning of Edith’s new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, “I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different.” Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien’s insistence. Jessop, “like many others of his age and class … strongly anti-Catholic”, was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings. Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St. Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, on 22 March 1916. In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife’s willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.

In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien’s relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”
Instead, Tolkien, “endured the obloquy”, and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were “becoming outspoken from relatives”. He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: “Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed.” On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem entitled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army’s postal censorship, he also developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements.
Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien’s time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband’s death. Edith could track her husband’s movements on a map of the Western Front.The Schwaben Redoubt, painting by William Orpen. Imperial War Museum, London
On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by the lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916. Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the same battle when a German artillery shell landed on a first aid post. Tolkien’s battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.

During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien’s attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife’s death in 1971, Tolkien remembered, I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire. In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos. On 16 July 1919 Tolkien was officially demobilized, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.

On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest professor there. While at Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.
In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s College, given that the women’s colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been. During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name “Nodens”, following Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.

In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was finally edited by his son and published in 2014, more than 40 years after Tolkien’s death and almost 90 years after its completion.
Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is “widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism”, noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: “Beowulf is among my most valued sources”, and this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting “with a great cry of Hwæt!” It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but “a powerful piece of dramatic poetry”.
Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the “unforgettable experience” of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating “The voice was the voice of Gandalf”.

In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked whether he would be prepared to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. He replied in the affirmative and, beginning on 27 March, took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Dublin, for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland. Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that “even the nose of a very modest idol … cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!”
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien’s status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other’s health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their 4 children and grandchildren.
In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for the Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.

Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city. Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave. God rest his soul..

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, poetpas

The mirror of my pond

/ Poetpas

on this late
summer’s
dusk
I
peacefully
gaze and stare
at
the magical flow
of tiny waves
dancing
trancing
on the ceiling
of my bedroom
as the sun
reflects
a precious
tranquil diversion
bright dazzling light
of which I’m fond
the mirror of my pond

Featuring: Charles Bukowski

/ Poetpas

By chance and coincidence, after watching the movie Barfly, I learned that the story was based on the life of Charles “Hank” Bukowski. I started to get interested when I read some of his poetry and became a fan of his writing. Alcohol seemed to be the fuel and inspiration for most of his works. His poetry has always inspired and motivated me and has definitely had a big influence on the way that I write.

Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambiance of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. As noted by one reviewer, “Bukowski continued to be, thanks to his antics and deliberate clownish performances, the king of the underground and the epitome of the littles in the ensuing decades, stressing his loyalty to those small press editors who had first championed his work and consolidating his presence in new ventures such as the New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, or Slipstream.” Some of these works include his Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and better known works such as Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. These poems and stories were later republished by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press as collected volumes of his work.
In 1986 Time called Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife”. Regarding Bukowski’s enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, “the secret of Bukowski’s appeal … [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.”
Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings, despite his work having received relatively little attention from academic critics in the United States during his lifetime. In contrast, Bukowski enjoyed extraordinary fame in Europe, especially in Germany, the place of his birth.

Charles’ father Henry Bukowski was German-American and a sergeant in the United States Army serving in Germany after Germany’s defeat in 1918. Afterwards, Henry Bukowski became a building contractor, set to make great financial gains in the aftermath of the war. However, given the crippling postwar reparations being required of Germany, which led to a stagnant economy and high levels of inflation, Henry Bukowski was unable to make a living, so he decided to move the family to the United States. On April 23, 1923, they sailed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore, Maryland, where they settled.
The family moved to Mid-City, Los Angeles, USA in 1930, the city where Charles Bukowski’s father and grandfather had previously worked and lived. Young Charles spoke English with a strong German accent and was taunted by his childhood playmates with the epithet “Heini,” German diminutive of Heinrich, in his early youth. In the 1930s, the poet’s father was often unemployed. In the autobiographical Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski says that, with his mother’s acquiescence, his father was frequently abusive, both physically and mentally, beating his son for the smallest imagined offense. During his youth, Bukowski was shy and socially withdrawn, a condition exacerbated during his teen years by an extreme case of acne. Neighborhood children ridiculed his German accent and the clothing his parents made him wear. In Bukowski: Born Into This, a 2003 film, Bukowski states that his father beat him with a razor strop three times a week from the ages of six to 11 years. He says that it helped his writing, as he came to understand undeserved pain. The depression bolstered his rage as he grew, and gave him much of his voice and material for his writings.
In his early teen years, Bukowski had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by his loyal friend William “Baldy” Mullinax, depicted as “Eli LaCrosse” in Ham on Rye, son of an alcoholic surgeon. “This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time,” he later wrote, describing a method (drinking) he could use to come to more amicable terms with his own life. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, taking courses in art, journalism, and literature, before quitting at the start of World War II. He then moved to New York to begin a career as a financially pinched blue-collar worker with dreams of becoming a writer.

By 1960, Bukowski had returned to the post office in Los Angeles where he began work as a letter filing clerk, a position he held for more than a decade. In 1962, he was distraught over the death of Jane Cooney Baker, his first serious girlfriend. Bukowski turned his inner devastation into a series of poems and stories lamenting her death. In 1964 a daughter, Marina Louise Bukowski, was born to Bukowski and his live-in girlfriend Frances Smith, whom he referred to as a “white-haired hippie”, “shack-job”, and “old snaggle-tooth”.
E.V. Griffith, editor of Hearse Press, published Bukowski’s first separately printed publication, a broadside titled “His Wife, the Painter,” in June 1960. This event was followed by Hearse Press’s publication of “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,” Bukowski’s first chapbook of poems, in October, 1960.

In 1969 Bukowski accepted an offer from legendary Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin and quit his post office job to dedicate himself to full-time writing. He was then 49 years old. As he explained in a letter at the time, “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Less than one month after leaving the postal service he finished his first novel, Post Office. As a measure of respect for Martin’s financial support and faith in a relatively unknown writer, Bukowski published almost all of his subsequent major works with Black Sparrow Press, which became a highly successful enterprise owing to Martin’s business acumen and editorial skills. An avid supporter of small independent presses, Bukowski continued to submit poems and short stories to innumerable small publications throughout his career.
Bukowski embarked on a series of love affairs and one-night trysts. One of these relationships was with Linda King, a poet and sculptress. Critic Robert Peters reported seeing the poet as actor in Linda King’s play Only a Tenant, in which she and Bukowski stage-read the first act at the Pasadena Museum of the Artist. This was a one-off performance of what was a shambolic work. His other affairs were with a recording executive and a twenty-three-year-old redhead; he wrote a book of poetry as a tribute to his love for the latter, titled, “Scarlet” (Black Sparrow Press, 1976). His various affairs and relationships provided material for his stories and poems. Another important relationship was with “Tanya”, pseudonym of “Amber O’Neil” (also a pseudonym), described in Bukowski’s “Women” as a pen-pal that evolved into a week-end tryst at Bukowski’s residence in Los Angeles in the 1970s. “Amber O’Neil” later self-published a chapbook about the affair entitled “Blowing My Hero”.
In 1976, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurant owner, rock-and-roll groupie, aspiring actress, heiress to a small Philadelphia “Main Line” fortune and devotee of Meher Baba. Two years later Bukowski moved from the East Hollywood area, where he had lived for most of his life, to the harborside community of San Pedro, the southernmost district of the City of Los Angeles. Beighle followed him and they lived together intermittently over the next two years. They were eventually married by Manly Palmer Hall, a Canadian-born author, mystic, and spiritual teacher in 1985. Beighle is referred to as “Sara” in Bukowski’s novels Women and Hollywood.
In May, 1978, he returned to Germany and gave a live poetry reading of his work before an audience in Hamburg. This was released as a double 12″ L.P. stereo record titled “CHARLES BUKOWSKI ‘Hello. It’s good to be back.'” His last international performance was in October 1979 in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was released on DVD as There’s Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here. In March 1980 he gave his last reading at the Sweetwater club in Redondo Beach, which was released as Hostage on audio CD and The Last Straw on DVD. In 2010 the unedited versions of both The Last Straw and Riot were released as One Tough Mother on DVD.
In the 1980s and 1990s, cartoonist Robert Crumb illustrated a number of Bukowski’s stories, including the collection The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship and the story “Bring Me Your Love.”
In the 1980s, he collaborated with illustrator Robert Crumb on a series of comic books, with Bukowski supplying the writing and Crumb providing the artwork.
Bukowski has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal.

Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, aged 73, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. The funeral rites, orchestrated by his widow, were conducted by Buddhist monks. He is interred at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. An account of the proceedings can be found in Gerald Locklin’s book Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet. His gravestone reads: “Don’t Try”, a phrase which Bukowski uses in one of his poems, advising aspiring writers and poets about inspiration and creativity. Bukowski explained the phrase in a 1963 letter to John William Corrington: “Somebody at one of these places […] asked me: ‘What do you do? How do you write, create?’ You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or, if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.”
Bukowski was an atheist.

Bukowski’s work was subject to controversy throughout his career, and Hugh Fox claimed that his sexism in poetry, at least in part, translated into his life. In 1969, Fox published the first critical study of Bukowski in The North American Review, and mentioned Bukowski’s attitude toward women: “When women are around, he has to play Man. In a way it’s the same kind of ‘pose’ he plays at in his poetry—Bogart, Eric Von Stroheim. Whenever my wife Lucia would come with me to visit him he’d play the Man role, but one night she couldn’t come I got to Buk’s place and found a whole different guy—easy to get along with, relaxed, accessible.”
In June 2006, Bukowski’s literary archive was donated by his widow to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Copies of all editions of his work published by the Black Sparrow Press are held at Western Michigan University, which purchased the archive of the publishing house after its closure in 2003.
Ecco Press continues to release new collections of his poetry, culled from the thousands of works published in small literary magazines. According to Ecco Press, the 2007 release The People Look Like Flowers at Last will be his final posthumous release, as now all his once-unpublished work has been made available.

Bukowski often spoke of Los Angeles as his favorite subject. In a 1974 interview he said, “You live in a town all your life, and you get to know every bitch on the street corner and half of them you have already messed around with. You’ve got the layout of the whole land. You have a picture of where you are…. Since I was raised in L.A., I’ve always had the geographical and spiritual feeling of being here. I’ve had time to learn this city. I can’t see any other place than L.A.”
Bukowski also performed live readings of his works, beginning in 1962 on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles and increasing in frequency through the 1970s. Drinking was often a featured part of the readings, along with a combative banter with the audience. Bukowski could also be generous, for example, after a sold-out show at Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Illinois on Nov. 18, 1975, he signed and illustrated over 100 copies of his poem “Winter,” published by No Mountains Poetry Project. By the late 1970s, Bukowski’s income was sufficient to give up live readings.
One critic has described Bukowski’s fiction as a “detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free”, an image he tried to live up to with sometimes riotous public poetry readings and boorish party behavior.A few critics and commentators also supported the idea that Bukowski was a cynic, as a man and a writer. Bukowski denied being a cynic, stating: “I’ve always been accused of being a cynic. I think cynicism is sour grapes. I think cynicism is a weakness.”

Over half of Bukowski’s collections have been published posthumously. Posthumous collections have been known to have been ‘John Martinized’, with the poems having been highly tampered and edited, at a level which was not present during Bukowski’s lifetime.
One example of a popular poem, “Roll the Dice” (when comparing the original manuscript to “What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire”), themes such as alcoholism are removed. The creative editing present includes changing lines from “against total rejection and the highest of odds” to “despite rejection and the worst odds”.

Check him out(or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Featuring: Stephen Fry

/ Poetpas

I first saw Stephen Fry in a series called Blackadder in which he played a role as an officer alongside the main character Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) Much later I found out he wasn’t only an actor/comedian but also an accomplished writer and an academic. He is an extremely intelligent man and wisely opinionated. I am never bored when I hear or watch this man talking about life and philosophy. So here is some more about this fascinating and smart individual.

Stephen John Fry (born 1957) is an English actor, comedian and writer. He and Hugh Laurie are the comic double act Fry and Laurie, who starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. Fry’s film acting roles include playing his idol Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (1997), Gosford Park (2001), and Mr. Johnson in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship (2016). He also made appearances in Chariots of Fire (1981), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) as well as V for Vendetta (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), and The Hobbit film series.

Fry is also known for his roles in television such as Lord Melchett in the BBC television comedy series Blackadder, the title character in the television series Kingdom, and Absolute Power, as well as a recurring guest role as Dr Gordon Wyatt on the American crime series Bones. He has also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award-winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, which saw him explore his bipolar disorder, and the travel series Stephen Fry in America. He was also the long-time host of the BBC television quiz show QI, with his tenure lasting from 2003 to 2016 for which he was nominated for six British Academy Television Awards. He also appears frequently on panel games such as Just a Minute, and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

Besides working in television, Fry has been a prolific writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines and having written four novels and three volumes of autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me. Fry is also known for his voice-overs, reading all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the UK audiobook recordings,[5] narrating the LittleBigPlanet and Birds of Steel series of video games, as well as an animated series of explanations of the laws of cricket, and a series of animations about Humanism for Humanists UK.

Fry has bipolar disorder. His first diagnosis was cyclothymia, which he refers to as “bipolar lite”. Fry has spoken publicly about his experience with bipolar disorder, which was depicted in the documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. In the programme, he interviewed other sufferers of the illness including Robbie Williams, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss and Tony Slattery. He is involved with the mental health charity Stand to Reason and is president of Mind. In 2013, he revealed that, in the previous year, he had started taking medication for the first time, in an attempt to control his condition. In 2018, alongside Nadiya Hussain and Olly Alexander, Fry was part of Sport Relief’s attempt to raise awareness of mental health.

Stephen Fry married comedian Elliott Spencer in January 2015 in Dereham, Norfolk. Fry is friends with Prince Charles, through his work with the Prince’s Trust. He attended the Prince’s wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Fry is a friend of comedian and actor (and Blackadder co-star) Rowan Atkinson and was best man at Atkinson’s wedding. His best friend is Hugh Laurie, whom he met while both were at Cambridge and with whom he has collaborated many times over the years. He was best man at Laurie’s wedding and is godfather to all three of his children. Fry became a vegetarian in 2017,having earlier expressed a desire to become so.

Fry has repeatedly expressed opposition to organised religion, and has identified himself as an atheist and humanist, while declaring some sympathy for the ancient Greek belief in capricious gods. In his first autobiography he described how he once considered ordination to the Anglican priesthood, but came to the conclusion that he “couldn’t believe in God, because [he] was fundamentally Hellenic in [his] outlook.”He has stated that religion can have positive effects: “Sometimes belief means credulity, sometimes an expression of faith and hope which even the most sceptical atheist such as myself cannot but find inspiring.”

There is so much more to say about this interesting and funny man and his achievements but I do not want to bore you with endless details. There’s more on Wikipedia. Here’s a few videos for you to check him out (or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

I had to get married

/ Poetpas

I had to get married
to expression
I had to get married
to words put in succession

I had to get married
to writing wry wit
I had to get married
to every last bit of it

I had to get married

Featuring: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

/ Poetpas

My all time favorite movie this is. It has everything in it: drama, comedy, good story and plot, great actors and solid acting. I personally think that this is Jack Nicholson’s best performance. He was well casted and personified a perfect McMurphy. And so was Louise Fletcher who played nurse Ratched. I must have watched it over 100 times.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a 1975 American drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Kirk Douglas acquired the rights to the screenplay and Micheal Douglas was the producer. The film stars Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, a new patient at a mental institution, and features a supporting cast of Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson, Sydney Lassick, Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in his film debut.

Filming began in January 1975 and lasted three months, taking place on location in Salem, Oregon, and the surrounding area, as well as on the Oregon coast. The producers decided to shoot the film in the Oregon State Hospital, an actual mental hospital, as this was also the setting of the novel.

Considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director and Screenplay). It also won numerous Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards. In 1993, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot: (contains spoilers!)
In 1963 Oregon, recidivist malefactor Randle Patrick McMurphy is moved to a mental institution after serving a short sentence on a prison farm for several charges of assault, and statutory rape of a 15-year-old. Though not actually mentally ill, McMurphy hopes to avoid hard labor and serve the rest of his sentence in a relaxed environment. Upon arriving at the hospital, he finds the ward run by nurse Mildred Ratched, a cold, passive-aggressive tyrant who uses her rules and authority to intimidate her charges into a restrictive, joyless existence.
The other patients include anxious, stuttering Billy Bibbit; Charlie Cheswick, who is prone to childish tantrums; delusional and innocent Martini; the well-educated, paranoid Dale Harding; belligerent and profane Max Taber; epileptics Jim Sefelt and Bruce Fredrickson, the former of whom gives his medicine to the latter; quiet but violent-minded Scanlon, “Chief” Bromden, a very tall Native American deaf-mute, and several others with more chronic conditions. Ratched soon sees McMurphy’s lively, rebellious presence as a threat to her authority, and she confiscates the patients’ cigarettes and rations them, and suspends their card-playing privileges. During his time in the ward, McMurphy gets into a battle of wills with Ratched. He steals a hospital bus, escaping with several patients to go on a fishing trip, encouraging his friends to discover their own abilities and find self-confidence.
After learning that the judge’s time sentence doesn’t apply to the hospital, and he could remain there indefinitely, McMurphy makes plans to escape, encouraging Chief to throw a hydrotherapy console through a window. It is also revealed that McMurphy, Chief, and Taber are the only non-chronic patients sentenced to staying at the institution, as the rest are self-committed and could voluntarily check-out at any time, but are too afraid to do so. McMurphy, Chief, and Cheswick get into a fight with the orderlies after the latter becomes agitated over his confiscated cigarettes. Ratched sends them to the “shock shop”, where McMurphy discovers Chief can actually speak and hear, having feigned his deaf-muteness to avoid engaging with anyone. After being subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, McMurphy returns to the ward pretending to have brain damage, although he reveals the treatment has made him even more determined. McMurphy and Chief make plans to escape, but decide to throw a secret Christmas party for their friends after Ratched leaves for the night.
McMurphy sneaks two women, Candy and Rose, into the ward, bringing bottles of alcohol, and bribes the night guard. After a night of partying, McMurphy and Chief prepare to escape, inviting Billy to come with them. Not ready to leave the hospital, he refuses. Billy asks for a “date” with Candy and McMurphy arranges for him to have sex with her. Ratched arrives in the morning to find the ward in disarray and most of the patients passed out drunk. She discovers Billy and Candy together, and aims to embarrass Billy in front of everyone. Billy manages to overcome his stutter and stands up to Ratched, until she threatens to inform his mother about his escapade. Billy’s stutter returns and he cracks under the pressure. Nurse Ratched has him placed in the doctor’s office to wait for the doctor to arrive. Moments later when McMurphy is trying to escape, Billy commits suicide. McMurphy flies into a rage and pins Ratched to the floor, choking her with both hands until Washington knocks him out. Some time later, Ratched comes back with a neck brace and a scratchy voice, and Harding now leads the now-unsuspended card-playing. Rumors spread that McMurphy has escaped in order to avoid being taken “upstairs”. Later that night, Chief sees McMurphy being returned to his bed. When McMurphy is utterly unresponsive and physically limp, Chief discovers lobotomy scars on his forehead. In an act of mercy, Chief smothers McMurphy to death with a pillow. He then finally is able to lift the hydrotherapy foundation out of the floor, throws it through the window, and escapes into the night, cheered on by Taber.

I feel that this is a movie that everyone must have seen at least once in their lives. You can’t not watch it; it’s too good not to…I also have a top 10 list of movies if anyone’s interested 😊

Check it out (or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, interweb, poetpas

Featuring: Django Reinhardt

/ Poetpas

Not known to everyone, this guitarist has changed my life in a way that is impossible for me to put into words. His compositions, play and melodies are beyond explanation, and even comprehension I might add. In my view, he is technically the best guitarist I have ever heard (with the use of only 3 fingers). His music influenced my life and writing and changed my view on music. It was also my introduction to the world of jazz, which made me discover other great musicians which I will feature in other posts.

Django Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953) was a Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant.
With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. The group was among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument. Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1946. He died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 43.

Reinhardt’s most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology”, “Swing ’42”, and “Nuages”. Jazz guitarist Frank Vignola claims that nearly every major popular-music guitarist in the world has been influenced by Reinhardt. Over the last few decades, annual Django festivals have been held throughout Europe and the U.S., and a biography has been written about his life. In February 2017, the Berlin International Film Festival held the world premiere of the French film Django.

When Django was 18 he nearly died. On the night of 2 November 1928, Reinhardt was going to bed in the wagon that he and his wife shared in the caravan. He knocked over a candle, which ignited the extremely flammable celluloid that set his wagon on fire. Reinhardt survived but suffered extensive burns over half his body. His ring finger and pinky of his left hand were badly burned. Doctors believed that he would never play guitar again. Reinhardt applied himself intensely to relearning his craft, however, making use of a new guitar bought for him by his brother Joseph.
While he never regained the use of those two fingers, Reinhardt regained his musical mastery by focusing on his left index and middle fingers, using the two injured fingers only for chord work. During the years after the fire, Reinhardt was rehabilitating and experimenting on the guitar that his brother had given him. While developing his interest in jazz, Reinhardt met Stéphane Grappelli, a young violinist with similar musical interests. He and Grappelli frequently jammed together and formed the band Hot Club de France in 1934. Reinhardt also played and recorded with many American jazz musicians, such as Adelaide Hall, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, etc. He participated in a jam session and radio performance with Louis Armstrong. Later in his career, Reinhardt played with Dizzy Gillespie in France.

During WW II Django was fortunate enough to be able to survive and play as Roma and Sinti, or better known as gypsies, were deported by Nazis and jazz music was prohibited. Yet some German officers were impressed by Django’s virtuosity leaving him to travel and play in France.

Many guitar players and other musicians have expressed admiration for Reinhardt or have cited him as a major influence. Jeff Beck described Reinhardt as “by far the most astonishing guitar player ever” and “quite superhuman”.
Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, both of whom lost fingers in accidents, were inspired by Reinhardt’s example of becoming an accomplished guitar player despite his injuries. Garcia was quoted in June 1985 in Frets Magazine: His technique is awesome! Even today, nobody has really come to the state that he was playing at. As good as players are, they haven’t gotten to where he is. There’s a lot of guys that play fast and a lot of guys that play clean, and the guitar has come a long way as far as speed and clarity go, but nobody plays with the whole fullness of expression that Django has. I mean, the combination of incredible speed – all the speed you could possibly want – but also the thing of every note has a specific personality. You don’t hear it. I really haven’t heard it anywhere but with Django.

Django had a son Babik who was also an accomplished and talented guitar player. Bireli Lagrene, Angelo Debarre are amongst many interpreters that play the Gypsy jazz music style still today.

Check him out (or not):

Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, poetpas

Featuring: John Cooper Clarke

/ Poetpas

This man has been my main and ultimate inspirer for writing poetry. From my (post) punk days I have developed a taste for his poetry which is full of wit and sarcasm. His rapidfire delivery system attracted me to explore his work and occasionally try to apply some of his style to my own.

John Cooper Clarke is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a “punk poet”. He released several albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continues to perform regularly.

Clarke was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1949. He became interested in poetry after being inspired by his English teacher. He began his performance career in Manchester folk clubs, working with Rick Goldstraw and his band the Ferrets. Clarke has attributed his early success in part to the influence of the English poet Pam Ayres. Her run of success on the British TV show Opportunity Knocks led both Clarke and his mother to believe that he could make a living at poetry.

In 1979 he had his only UK top 40 hit with “Gimmix! Clarke toured with Linton Kwesi Johnson, and has performed on the same bill as bands such as the Sex Pistols, the Fall, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elvis Costello, Rockpile and New Order. His set is characterised by lively, rapid-fire renditions of his, usually performed a cappella. Often referred to as “the bard of Salford”, he usually refers to himself on stage as “Johnny Clarke, the name behind the hairstyle”.

In July 2013, Clarke was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts in “acknowledgement of a career which has spanned five decades, bringing poetry to non-traditional audiences and influencing musicians and comedians” by the University of Salford. Upon receipt, Clarke commented: “Now I’m a doctor, finally my dream of opening a cosmetic surgery business can become a reality.” His poem “I Wanna Be Yours” was adapted by Arctic Monkeys and frontman Alex Turner for the band’s fifth album, AM.

I love this man, the bard of Salford, his work, his intelligence, looks and appearance, free spirit, wit, sarcasm, etcetera, etcetera…Without having known him I wouldn’t have written what I’ve written, so far…

Check him out (or not):

johncooperclarke.com

Photo: Gerald Jenkins.
Sources: Wikipedia, YouTube, johncooperclarke.com, Amazon, poetpas

Traces

/ Poetpas

I see
miserable faces
in different places,
all looking unhappy,
in their eyes,
despairing traces

traces of sadness,
remorse
and pain;
will they ever
be jolly
and smile again?

Dance to the radio 📻

/ Poetpas

Radio, live transmission
Radio, live transmission
Listen to the silence, let it ring on
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun
We would have a fine time living in the night
Left to blind destruction
Waiting for our sight
And we would go on as though nothing was wrong
And hide from these days we remained all alone
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time
Touching from a distance
Further all the time
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Well I could call out when the going gets tough
The things that we’ve learnt are no longer enough
No language, just sound, that’s all we need know, to synchronise
Love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

~Transmission – Joy Division

Con artist

/ Poetpas

painting
a pretty picture
on a canvas
of hidden lies
the con artist
replaces
bright colours
with layers
of dark shadows
covering evil
in a broken frame