If you have a hard time getting there, maybe you're gone

Thursday music corner: American alternative rock group the Dandy Warhols were formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1994. Members Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Peter Holmström and Zia McCabe have participated since 1994, while drummer Brent DeBoer, Taylor-Taylor's cousin, joined in 1998. They have released 12 studio albums to date, including four on Capitol Records from 1997 to 2005. Two of these major label records, ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down (1997) and Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000) were certified gold in the UK. Seven Dandy Warhols singles reached the UK top 40 from 1997 to 2003.

Get Off was the first single from the Dandy Warhols' third album, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia. Written by Taylor-Taylor, it reached number 34 in the UK singles charts in 2000. It preceded their breakthrough single Bohemian Like You, which attracted considerable attention after featuring in a Vodafone ad.

Dandy Warhols - Get Off (2000)

See also:

Music: Dandy Warhols - Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth (1997)

Music: Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You (2000)

Music: David Bowie w/ the Dandy Warhols - White Light / White Heat (live, 2002)

How the telegraph knitted the world together

The electric telegraph allowed a conversation. It connected points on the globe as messages sped through copper at nearly the speed of light.

Not everyone was welcoming. Henry David Thoreau [...] groused: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

While Texas may not have had much important to learn from Maine, in the summer of 1860 Texas had a great deal to learn from Chicago: the Republican Party National Convention meeting at the Wigwam nominated Abraham Lincoln as its candidate for president. So started a chain of events that would kill twenty-five thousand white adult Texans and maim twenty-five thousand more, and that would free all two hundred thousand enslaved Black Texans within five years. Maine may not have had much to learn from Texas, but telegraphs reporting relative prices of Grand Bank codfish in Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia were of great importance to Maine fishermen slipping their moorings.

Knowing the price of codfish is valuable, the freeing of hundreds of thousands of Americans is profound, and both only hint at the shift that came with telegraphed intelligence. Ever since the development of language, one of humanity's great powers has been that our drive to talk and gossip truly turns us into an anthology intelligence. What one of us in the group knows, if it is useful, pretty quickly everyone in the group knows, and often those well beyond the group, too. The telegraph enlarged the relevant group from the village or township or guild to, potentially, the entire world.

- J Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, New York, 2022, p.52-3.

I can tell my sister by the flowers in her eyes

Thursday music corner: Three Dog Night are a Los Angeles-formed band that were at their prime from their formation in 1967 until their initial split in 1976. The band featured three vocalists: Danny Hutton (who still leads the group in its current incarnation), Cory Wells and Chuck Negron. Three Dog Night has released 12 studio albums, the first six of which hit the top 20 of the US album charts from 1968 to 1972. The band scored 21 US top 40 singles from 1969 to 1975, including three number ones: Mama Told Me Not To Come (1970, originally written by Randy Newman for Eric Burdon), Joy To The World (1971, written by Hoyt Axton), and Black And White (1972, written by David Arkin and Earl Robinson). 

Hippie pop anthem Shambala was the first single released from Three Dog Night's 1973 album Cyan. Written by Joe Cocker songwriter Daniel Moore, Shambala sold a million copies in the US and reached number three in the Billboard charts. It also topped the New Zealand pop charts.

Three Dog Night - Shambala (1973)

See also:

Music: Three Dog Night - Eli's Comin' (1969, written by Laura Nyro)

Music: Randy Newman - Mama Told Me Not To Come (live, 1971)

Music: Hoyt Axton - Joy To The World (live, 1985)

Reporting in 1979: "We're nearly out of Bond"

We're Nearly Out of Bond!

With Moonraker, the latest James Bond movie, due for release next year film producers will soon have to look beyond the books of author Ian Fleming for further adventures of 007.

Fleming, an old Etonian and newspaper-man who died in 1964, produced 12 Bond novels and two books of JB short stories, beginning with Casino Royale.

The movie industry began its Bond run in 1962 with Doctor No and with Moonraker had used all of Fleming's material except for the short story collections, Octopussy and For Your Eyes Only.

No doubt there will be no shortage of screen writers ready to dream up new dangerous assignments for Bond, perhaps expanding the Fleming short stories into full-scale epics. But will they be the same?

On past performances and estimated total of 1000 million admissions to Bond pictures world-wide Moonraker is likely to be one of the major box-office attractions of 1979.

Cameras began turning in Paris on August 14 and the five-month shooting schedule is to be completed next month.

In addition to France, sets for Moonraker include the canals of Venice, the jungles of Central America, Rio de Janeiro, the falls of Brazil and (created in Britain's Pinewood Studios) an outer space set.

For Roger Moore who, incidentally, will be appearing on TV next year in his Saint guise, Moonraker will be his fourth 007 stint, following his successes in Live and Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun and, last year, The Spy Who Loved Me.

In keeping with Fleming tradition Moore, and Sean Connery before him, have had a different playmate for each movie. The line-up has included Ursula Andress (in Doctor No), Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore in Goldfinger), Diana Rigg, Jill St John, Britt Ekland and most recently, Barbara Bach as Major Anya Amasova.

Theatre-goers have an opportunity to size up Moonraker co-star Lois Chiles. The Texas-born actress, who once modelled for Elle magazine covers, is appearing as Linnet in the Agatha Christie story Death on the Nile. Previously she appeared in The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby and Coma.

No other book character has made a greater impact on the motion picture business than James Bond, but there is no mystery about it.

Fleming, who had an honest commercial approach to the 007 books, once wrote: "The target of my books lies somewhere between the solar plexus and the upper thigh. "I write for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes and beds."

- 'Talking pictures with John Berry', NZ Truth, 9 January 1979, p.24

[To date there have been 14 Bond movies since Moonraker]

Japan meets the West

While Japanese experimented with bustles, bonnets, and beef, on the other side of the world, Westerners were discovering a new and enchanting culture. In 1858, after Japan opened to trade with the West, Japanese goods suddenly became widely available. Poverty-stricken samurai sold their heirlooms, often at reduced prices, and swords, helmets, armor, kimonos, and exquisite porcelain found their way into the curio shops of the West.

Everyone was intrigued and charmed by the delicacy, precision, and beauty of Japanese art and artifacts. Trendsetting women wore kimonos, fashionable people collected woodblock prints, and filled their homes with screens, fans, lacquerware, blue-and-white porcelain, vases, curved swords, netsuke, and artifacts inspired by Japanese art. Audiences flocked to see Japan-inspired plays and operas, from The Geisha with Marie Tempest to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado and David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly, which opened in March 1900 and inspired Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

Japonisme, as the craze was dubbed, swept the West, inspiring artists, architects, and interior designers and spawning Art Nouveau. In 1856, the artist Félix Bracquemond discovered a collection of manga engravings by Hokusai in Paris (manga simply means "whimsical drawing," the same term used for manga comics today) and soon a generation of Western artists were collecting, being inspired by, and sometimes copying Japanese woodblock prints. In 1876, Monet painted his wife Camille in an extraordinary Japanese kimono. Van Gogh had six hundred woodblock prints and wrote that he yearned to visit Japan or at least learn to see with Japanese eyes.

- Lesley Downer, The Shortest History of Japan, New York, 2024, P.163-4

See also:

Japan: Affordable Tokyo studio living, 15 January 2021

Japan: Hutt Japan festival, 19 November 2017

Japan: Ueno Park Tokyo, 14 January 2009

Maybe I love you 'cos I'm thick & you make me feel clever

Thursday music corner: Amelia & The Housewives are a Brighton band formed in May 2024, offering sunny female-fronted indie pop. Maybe is their debut single, released on 11 April 2025. They played Dust in Brighton yesterday, and on 29 April will be playing Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes in London along with Scattered Ashes and Camber.

Amelia & The Housewives - Maybe (2025)

See also:

Music: Amelia & The Housewives - Pantomime (2024, via Soundcloud)

Music: The Courettes - Shake! (2024)

Music: The Pipettes - Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me (2006)