Thursday, February 17, 2011



interview with painter George Shaw
"It was – there's no other way to put it – a nice place to grow up," Shaw says, when we settle in his local on Ilfracombe's main street over Guinness and cottage pie before an open fire. "A postwar council estate on the edge of Coventry, with trees, grass and loads of woodland just beyond. The last built-up area before the countryside took over. I don't think it has ever left me, that sense of possibility and familiarity and possible danger lurking out there somewhere beyond. I haunted the place and now it haunts me."

Wednesday, February 16, 2011


every issue of Spy


Frédéric Chaubin's subversive Soviet superstructures

In his book Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed,
Frédéric Chaubin documents 90 buildings in 14 former-USSR republics
belonging to what he calls the 'fourth age' of Soviet architecture.

They
reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, a burgeoning that took
place from 1970 until 1990 and in which, contrary to the 20s and 30s, no
'school' or main trend emerges.

These buildings represent a
chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity
announces the end of the Soviet Union...

Tuesday, February 15, 2011


Watch Now: Velvet Underground, a Documentary

While it was originally broadcast back in 1986 for England’s The South Bank Show,
copies of this 52-minute Velvet Underground documentary have been hard
to come by, until now. Directed by Kim Evans and Mary Harron and
containing rare footage from avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, this
mini-doc is a great way to kill an hour, even if you consider yourself
an expert on the Velvet Underground...


Sir George Shearing - Telegraph

George Albert Shearing was born on August 13 1919, the youngest among nine
children of a Battersea coalman. An inveterate punster, he sometimes
referred to his father as "Not
the Cole Porter, but a coal
porter." His mother looked after her brood during the day and worked
cleaning trains at night...

George Shearing Quintet - Move

RIP

George Shearing Quintet - Conception

Monday, February 14, 2011



5.

Class fenced but from the
upside only
not a compound but
 
an hedgerow Maginot
a pinball's tilted
bumpers to keep the lawn

from sliding downhill
to the holler's more collar-
based trenches & redoubts, big dogs

& smaller sightlines
curved streams
with salmon-bearing couches

thickets with frogs & birds &
valentine skunk cabbages,
clotheslined yard beasts wired tight

behind a grow so obvious--
perennial mossy boat & car
plastic-sheeted dowling pyramid

the frig-o-seal
pie container lids tied with
orange ribbon

that everyone uses
to mark off
the marked off,

tidelines of floods
both frequent &
unseasonal--

that it must be a decorator choice
like lighting the torches
for the return of the DC-3's

laden with Spam & medicine
years after the storm of the century
had swept through the valley.

Anita O' Day performing "My Funny Valentine"

Bobby Darin Sings My Funny Valentine

My Funny Valentine By Nico

Miles Davis Quartet - My Funny Valentine

My Funny Valentine Bill Evans & Jim Hall_1962 Undercurrent