Meet the New Boss--leaves from Pete Townshend's Diary

"7 July

Michael Moore has been making some claims-- mentioning me by name - which I believe distort the truth.

He says--among other things--that I refused to allow him to use my song WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN in his latest film, because I support the war, and that at the last minute I recanted, but he turned me down. I have never hidden the fact that at the beginning of the war in Iraq I was a supporter. But now, like millions of others, I am less sure we did the right thing.

When first approached I knew nothing about the content of his film FAHRENHEIT 911. My publisher informed me they had already refused the use of my song in principle because MIRAMAX the producers offered well below what the song normally commands for use in a movie. They asked me if I wanted to ask for more money, I told them no.

23 May

The trip has been a good one. We played for the CBS presentation of their forthcoming season and introduced the song they are going to use for their CSI New York series - 'Baba O Riley'

Coincidentally Hewlett Packard have just started to use an original version of the backing music for the same song for their great new TV commercial. My brother Simon produced it from my original home demo recording.

In a very real way the use of Who music in this manner keeps it alive, and brings it to a new audience in an era when our music would otherwise never be heard on the radio or TV. "

listening to the GREAT Hoagy Carmichael anthology First of the Singer Songwriters, Key Cuts 1924-46 which has not only Hoagland but Fats Waller, the Boswells, Mildred Bailey, Al Bowlly etc... 

Mnemosyne
"A group of researchers (historians, art historians, and programmers) devoted to the idea of studying the history of images with the help of the computer. Their main topic of research: The emblematic game. Their instruments: Iconclass, topicmaps, XML, and the computer. Their favorite platform for publications: Dynamic, collaborative websites around collections of words and images." 

Which film guide is best?

Edward the Confessor cut penny, from The Portable Antiquities Scheme 

pf
"An accurate and correct linguistic usage therefore associates anxiety and the future. When it is sometimes said that one is anxious about the past, this seems to be a contradiction of this usage. However, to a more careful examination, it appears that this is only a manner of speaking and that the future in one way or another manifests itself. The past about which I am supposed to be anxious must stand in a relation of possibility to me. If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then this is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i.e., become future. If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way or another prevented it from being past. If indeed it is actually past, then I cannot be anxious but only repentant. If I do not repent, I have allowed myself to make my relation to the offense dialectical, and by this the offense itself has become a possibility and not something past.

[Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson] " 

recipe for Limoncello--yum! (via) 

John le Carre on Alec Guinness as George Smiley--

"But even in this flawed thing, Tinker, Tailor, with its good and bad scenes, what you see in Alec is some kind of dramatic extension of a religious belief. I think that his view of his role as that person was almost as a Jesuitical moderator in a sinful society. There was no talk of pleasure, not for Alec. His own life was forfeit. I think there was something at that age in Alec that was very, very moving and identifiable for him in the character. It was a very personal thing.

There's something called the actor's guilt, the feeling that you're playing with life - you're acting life but you're never living it. It can amount to a kind of puritanical self-hatred. I think part of the amazing range Alec produces in his face, and everywhere else, derives from that genuine, internal concern about his own identity." 

amazing Polish Film Posters (via Coudal Partners) 

Say it ain't so, John
"McCain is a figure of character and charm, but he cannot leave the Republican Party, as his idol Teddy Roosevelt once did, and strike out against the big-business lobbyists and theocratic demagogues who now dominate the GOP. He won't be making history or remaking politics. He will stand up dutifully, like Colin Powell, in the service of inferior men who would gladly ruin him -- and leave us to wonder why. "

list of 50 best rock intros won me over by remembering "Monkey Man", which also has the best bridge...

"I want a Nixon-type pardon!"
Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn in "Q: The Winged Serpent" 

Larry Cohen's "God Told Me To" "Bone" and "Q: The Winged Serpent" (containing truly "the best performance ever given in a monster movie" by Michael Moriarty, and co-starring the Chrysler Building and David Carradine) in lovingly restored versions on DVD... 

Play The Armonica! 

greatly looking forward to Michael Mann's Collateral 

Oh I wore a 15 pound beard of bees for that woman, but it just wasn't enough!

(PDF's of Rae Armantrout, Jacques Roubaud and more) 

Althea Gibson wins Wimbledon, 1957 

I was convinced it'd be G. too--nice tradecraft from the Kerry camp... 

pretty good essay on
The bicentennial of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
(JOHN not Paul Bunyan, though)

The Old Manse

"...they left their cares behind them as they passed between the stone gateposts at the entrance to our avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and all around us. Others could give them pleasure and amusement or instruction - these could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest..." 

nice little article on Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte --
"On the last page of his Memoirs he describes how customers sometimes entered his New York bookstore, mistaking it for the pastry shop next door. 'I am thinking', says Da Ponte, 'of placing a placard in my window with the words, 'Italian sweets and pastry for sale.' Then if that jest should chance to bring someone to my shop, I will show him Petrarch or some other of our poets, and hold that ours are the sweetest of sweets for such as have teeth to chew them.'" 

a word from Col. Kurtz: "To raise a stench, a stench so strong as to break the stride of...of a pack of jackals. To be familiar with death as maggots are with manure. The world needs us now, and we will stay here until mushrooms grow out of our faces. These men, these tired ticks that crawl across...across the anvil of history. A time for giants, and they send us pygmies armed with chalk, computers, tennis rackets, Santa Monica hotlines to human misery. The eager students of suffering and violence. The sick and twisted hippies, long haired hypocrites, rotting with decay.
In every powerful civilization, violence stills those inner ancient passions, that primordial slim that lies in the bottom of our minds waiting aeons and aeons to be ... only to be stirred and - what? And the silkworms...the silkworms writing those fawning reports of victories while we die out here like blind martins. The experts, the air-conditioned priests, who only look for the breaking point in human misery. McNamara ... Bunker ... Rostow ... Bundy ... Bunker ... Bunker ...Johnson." 

Prime Minister Diefenbaker (who Jack Spicer saw on Vancouver TV --"Diefenbacker addresses us with a parched face..." and who JFK called "that son of a bitch") fishing (and wearing a Cowichan sweater) in 1967. Via wood s lot, a brief history of minority rule

"With the possibility of no hockey season this fall, history shows that a minority government can provide plenty of nifty stick work, hard hits, and close calls to sate our appetites. "  

to celebrate my 1776th post occuring on the 4th of July, here are Howard Da Silva, Blythe Danner & William Daniels in the film of Sherman Edwards & Peter Stone's musical "1776". 

S/FJ on the new Beastie Boys--
"The bad engineering is one thing, the lack of hooks and boom-drop moments is another, but here's the spicy Cajun rub: The Three Stooges could have gone gold in a week with anything, including a hellacious dose of hateration, name-calling, political drop-kicks. What did we get? Fucking iTunes exclusives! exclusives! and 'Kumbaya.' And their traget demo is going to be running companies within 10 years, so just marinate on that."