14 March 2024

Now he's out in space, fixing all the problems

Thursday music corner: Welsh-born musician and songwriter Karl Wallinger, who died at his home in the East Sussex city of Hastings on Sunday aged 66, was the founder and driving force behind the group World Party. After joining Mike Scott's Waterboys as a keyboardist for the band's second and third albums, Wallinger went solo as World Party in 1986, adding other members as required. 

World Party released five studio albums from 1987 to 2000, three of which reached the UK top 40 albums chart; the most successful was Bang!, which reached number 2 in the UK album charts in 1993; it also went top 10 in Norway. World Party achieved four UK top 40 singles, and the 1987 single Ship of Fools reached number four in the Australian pop charts. She's The One, an album track from World Party's 1997 album Egyptology, was later a UK chart-topping single for Robbie Williams in 1999. Wallinger benefited from the royalties; according to the New York Times

“So we didn’t have to sell the kids to chemical experiments or anything,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2012. “I think I’m a bit of a lucky person.” 

Is It Like Today? was the first single from World Party's third album, Bang! It reached number 19 in the UK charts, and number 24 in Canada. It also reached number five on the US alternative charts.

World Party - Is It Like Today? (1993)      

See also:
Music: The Waterboys - Don't Bang The Drum (1985, Scott/Wallinger co-write)
Music: World Party - Put The Message In The Box (1990)
Music: World Party - She's The One (live, 1997)

07 March 2024

Lines To Be Read At the Casting of Scott FitzGerald's balls into the Sea

Cuba is a hell of an interesting place now and has been for last five years. Probably before too you say. But only know what I've seen. Anyway am writing a story about this next revolution. Come on down any time and I'll take you over there in the boat and you'll get a good story out of it anyway. If you really feel blue enough, get yourself heavily insured and I'll see you can get killed [...] I'll write you a fine obituary that Malcolm Cowley will cut the best part out of for the new republic and we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel, one lung lung to Max Perkins and the other to George Horace Lorimer. If we can still find your balls I will take them via the Ile de France to Paris and down to Antibes and have them cast into the sea off Eden Roc and we will get Mac Leish to write a Mystic Poem to be read at that Catholic School (Newman?) you went to. Would you like me to write the mystic poem now. Let's see. 

Lines To Be Read At the Casting of Scott FitzGerald's balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes Alpes Maritimes)

Whence from these gray Heights unjockstrapped wholly stewed he
Flung
Himself?
No.
Some waiter?
Yes.
Push tenderly oh green shoots of grass
Tickle not our Fitz's nostrils
Pass
The gray moving unbenfinneyed sea deaths deeper than
our debt to Eliot
Fling flang them flung his own his two finally his one
Spherical, colloid, interstitial,
uprising lost to sight
in fright
natural
not artificial
no ripple make as sinking sanking sonking sunk

Aw hell you'll have to get Mac Leish to write the mystic poem. I'll just give a few personal reminiscences of his Paris Period. Get that insurance now, pal. If they won't give you health or life insurance get accident insurance.

So long Scott --

Let me hear from you. Merry Christmas! Pauline sends her love.

Yours always affectionately 
Ernest

- Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 21 December 1935, quoted in Carlos Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961, London, 1981, p.428-9.

See also:

Jim Dandy in a submarine, got a message from a mermaid queen

Thursday music corner: LaVern Baker (b. Chicago, 1929, d. Queens, 1997) was a powerfully-voice R&B performer in the 1950s and 1960s who enjoyed considerable chart success. After signing with Atlantic Records as a solo artist in 1953, Baker enjoyed 20 top 40 R&B chart singles in the US from 1955 to 1966. Seven of these were also top 40 hits on the mainstream US pop charts. From 1969 until 1991 she lived in the Philippines as entertainment director at the Subic Bay US Marine Corps Staff club for non-commissioned officers.

Written by Lincoln Chase, Jim Dandy was recorded by Baker in December 1955 and released the following year. It was her only R&B chart number one, with 1955's Play It Fair and 1958's Cry A Tear reaching number two. It also cemented a move away from the kid-friendly titles of her earlier singles like 1955's Tweedlee Dee and Bop-Ting-a-Ling. Jim Dandy was the opening track of her second album, LaVern Baker (1957), and it also appeared on the soundtrack to John Waters' 1972 notorious cult classic, Pink Flamingos. Rolling Stone, in its top 500 songs list, rated Jim Dandy the 352nd greatest song of all time. 

LaVern Baker - Jim Dandy (1956)

See also:
Music: LaVern Baker & Jimmy Ricks - You're The Boss (1961)
Music: LaVern Baker - See See Rider (1962)
Music: Ann-Margret - Jim Dandy (1962)

06 March 2024

Crusader Kings 2: Some medieval doggerel

Some medieval doggerel, or,
The Ballad of the Concubine Addiena, to whit:
G*d d*mn the Patriarchy
A tale from 9th-century Ireland, from Crusader Kings 2

Tis a tale of the wanton in the far isle of Eire
A young girl had been raised who had the longest black hair
In the palace she lived, with the Queen and the King
But the name of her sire, no courtier could sing

A bastard was she, yet cared for and fed
With the grace of the Queen, though not in her bed
The Queen lent a wet-nurse and paid for another
(But surely kept quiet about being the mother)

The girl's name was Addiena, uncommon to most
And as she grew she was more often to boast
Of her silken black hair that she wove forth in tresses
And the beauty of the linens in her fine English dresses

Now later, much later, when quite fully grown
Addiena and the Queen disagreed 'bout the throne
For the Queen's husband had become quite neglected
And Addiena, the rogue, had become quite disaffected

So Add, in her wisdom, seduced the poor King
(King Coscrach, the dotard, suspected not a thing)
And bore him a child, with no expressed shame
Arnemetia she called it, her own mother's name

A fitting tribute, she reckoned, to her bastard existence
A new life on Earth and a social resistance
The King, he ashamed, did wed off the maid
And the Queen, she angered, his doom she emprayed

So be this a lesson for every Queen to know best
If ye bring forth a babe from beyond royal nest
Set a household ban on all Concubina
And don't let your husband meet the fair Addiena

See also:
Games: Crusader Kings 2 - Stayin' alive, 25 October 2018 

05 March 2024

Will Rogers in New Zealand

Legendary American performer and aphorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) became famous through the Ziegfeld Follies and went on to become an enormously popular movie star and opinion columnist, and one of Hollywood's highest paid actors. In his youth he toured the world several times showing off his spectacular cowboy rope skills, and his travels even took him through New Zealand as part of the Wirth Brother's Circus tour in 1904. Known as the Cherokee Kid, Rogers got the following write-up in the Auckland Star:

The Cherokee Kid is a gentleman with a large American accent and a splendid skill with lassoos [sic.]. He demonstrated what could be done with the whirling loop by bringing up a horse and its rider from [an] impossible position, once throwing together two lasoos [sic.] encircling man and horse separately. He also showed the spectators how to throw half-hitches on to objects at a distance, and did other clever work with the ropes. It was a very interesting performance.
- Auckland Star, 20 January 1904
The circus tour must have lasted at least six weeks in the summer of 1903/04 because Rogers was still receiving press attention in March, like these reports from Wellington:

A novel feature was the lasso work of the Cherokee Kid, a cowboy in Mexican circus-costume, who whirls his swift rope round his head and lassos horse and rider in the twinkling of an eye. This rope work is pretty to watch, and altogether a desirable addition to the programme.
- Evening Post, 8 March 1904

The Cherokee Kid is a slim chap, who toddles into the ring with a couple of lassoes, and does anything in the roping line with them, talking all the time. He gets near, fore, or off fore-leg of a galloping horse, or loops the rider — or both — with a lassoo [sic.] thrown with either hand. Also, he afterwards throws a half-hitch over each of a dismounted man's limbs. He is the most expert rope-thrower seen here to date. Moreover, his rough riding, on a grey mustang wearing a Mexican saddle, is very fine.
- Free Lance, 12 March 1904

Rogers returned to the States later in 1904 to perform at the St Louis World Fair, which opened on 30 April 1904.

See also:
History: Stagecoach travel in the Old West, 19 March 2015
AmericaAmerica's lax firearms laws, 16 December 2012

28 February 2024

The German Democratic Republic

The GDR, or The Very Shortest History of East Elbia 

East Germany didn't become different because of the Russian occupation of 1945-1989; the Russians occupied the place because it had always been different.

Otto the Great invaded across the Elbe in 935 AD; the Slavs threw the Germans back out in 982 AD; the Germans tried again in 1127 and over the next two centuries they largely (but never completely) succeeded in supplanting the Slavs up to the river Oder. The Teutonic Knights went further until the Poles smashed them in 1410. Prussia was born under Polish suzerainty as an act of revolt again Rome in 1525, rose to fame in battle against Sweden, was made a great power by victories between the Elbe and the Oder, then saved from abolition by the Tsar in 1807. The fatal inability of the western Germans to unite allowed Prussia to conquer them after a single great battle on the Elbe in 1866. Prussia smashed France in 1870; it thereafter dragooned the Germans into providing manpower and money for its bid(s) to settle the 1,000-year struggle with the Slavs. That struggle ended in 1945 with part of East Elbia lost forever and what was left, between Elbe and Oder, a helpless colony of Russia.

With the creation of the GDR, this rump East Elbia formally became what it had always really been: the odd German-speaking man out in a Slavic Eastern Europe. Until the wall went up in 1961, the East Germans - above all, the young and educated - undertook a new Ostflucht to West Germany at an average rate of about 200,000 year on year, about the same rate as in the Ostflucht from the 1850s onwards. If Russia's clients hadn't built and maintained a deadly barrier to stop the fugitives in the meantime, by 1989 there would have been hardly any Germans left beyond the Elbe.

- James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany, Devo, 2017, p.199

See also:
History: Charlemagne's passion for education, 29 March 2022
Germany: NZ posters by young German artists, 30 June 2012