Goes to show what a little faith can do

Thursday music corner: Pulled Up is the final track on the 1977 debut album of legendary New York band Talking Heads. One of David Byrne’s deranged odes to conformity, it appears on the album’s Side B immediately following the album’s breakthrough hit single, Psycho Killer, and it was the album’s third and final single release. At the time of its release Rolling Stone reviewer Stephen Demorest (who later became an award-winning US soap opera writer) used a chemical analogy to describe Pulled Up as ‘a real champ [and] a fiercely exhilarating rush of aural amyl nitrate’. The album, Talking Heads: 77, was listed as the seventh best in the end-of-year critics’ poll in The Village Voice.

Talking Heads – Pulled Up (1977)

The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite

In 1980, the year following the demolition of Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead, the German architect Walter Segal wrote about the effects, on both communities and individuals, of building housing on a mass scale. "To humanise huge structures by architectural means is an unrewarding task,' he commented. The loss of identity, the divorce from the ground and the collectivisation of open space pose dilemmas that cannot be disguised by shape, texture, colour and proportion. A good view over landscaped spaces compensates only a few. The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite.' 

Oak and Eldon Gardens, which replaced an area of back-to-back terraces in the dock side north end of Birkenhead, suffered from their size and scale, as well as their poor design: the dank stairwells leading up to each floor invited vandalism and required a level of maintenance that was unplanned for, either by the council or the architects themselves, therefore help and repairs were not always available when needed. Tenants were, indeed, 'divorced from the ground' by means of stilts, under which their cars would be parked and passers-by would thread through on their way to other destinations. The flats showed English council tenants how it felt to live like bees in a honeycomb: as nuclear families in isolated, identical modules, collected together in a building that overwhelmed them with its size. Its scale, and the principles behind it, suggested an experiment in communal living, but people were not truly living together. At the same time that they sensed a loss of control over their private identity, tenants also had to deal with the consequences of communal services - such as lifts, postboxes and rubbish chutes - being damaged or put out of service by individuals whom they could rarely identify.

It was with equal elegance that Segal pointed out that Britain's targets for housing density that is, the number of households on each hectare of land - could just as easily have been met by building two-storey terraced houses, and that the cost of planning, building and maintaining two flats in an average tower block was roughly equal to that for three or four houses. Time and again council planners were warned of the difficulty and expense of creating new communities from scratch, by sociologists who had studied the effects of slum clearance on the interwar generation, when close-knit towns people were first 'decanted' from back-to-backs into suburban cottages. Such flats seemed to divide and rule over, and to make faceless, the people who lived there.

- Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, London, 2007, p.115-6.

South Waikato

 

You're just a bubble-blowing boy in trouble and annoyed with me

Thursday music corner: Young garage rockers from South Wales, The Bug Club are a three-piece who cite amongst their influences the sounds of Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman and Mike Bloomfield. The Fixer is sub-150-seconds chock-full of Supergrass-channeling glam-punk energy, and was released on 19 August. It's taken from the band’s upcoming mini-album, Pure Particles, due out in November.

The Bug Club – The Fixer (2021)

Priority of choice for the town sections of New Plymouth

SETTLEMENT of NEW PLYMOUTH, under the Plymouth Company of New Zealand.

The Directors of the Plymouth Company of New Zealand hereby give notice, that the priority of choice for the whole of the town sections (2,200 in number) having been decided, 600 numbers of choice, ranging from 46 to 2,199 have been selected from those which have fallen to the Company: and 100 of these choices, added to 100 50-acre rural sections, are now offered exclusively to colonists who depart with the first expedition, or within four months: second set of 100 to colonists who depart with the second expedition, or within six months; and a third set of 100 to colonists who depart with the third expedition, or within eight months from this date respectively.

Each separate set of purchasers will draw for priority of choice as between themselves, and the first set will first choose at pleasure out of 600, then the second out of 500, and lastly, the third out of 400, of the numbers above referred to.

The range of choice offered by the directors will enable purchasers drawing consecutive numbers to choose town sections adjoining, in many instances to the extent of an acre, and in some of an acre and a half. The rural sections may in all cases be chosen adjoining, to any extent, in the order of presenting the land-orders in New Zealand.

The price of each double land order for the united sections is £75, a deposit of £20 to be paid on application, £25 three days before the order of choice is drawn, of which 21 days' notice will be given, and the balance on delivery of the land order, or on embarkation. An addition has been made to the Emigration Fund, from which liberal passage allowances are made, and a special fund is set apart for extra allowance to capitalists. Printed particulars of the allowances in detail, with the numbers open for choice, and other requisite information, may be had on application to the Secretary: to John Ward, Esq., New Zealand House, London: or to any agent of the Company.

The Board have suspended sales, except to colonists, until further notice. By order of the Board, THOMAS WOOLLCOOMBE, Sec. Office of the Company. 5, Octagon, Plymouth. Aug. 31.

- The Times, 10 September 1840

[The first Plymouth Company settler ship, the William Bryan, had not yet departed Plymouth for New Zealand. It sailed from Plymouth in November 1840, arriving in New Plymouth at the end of March 1841] 

See also:
History: The last sight of old Plymouth, 6 April 2009
History: Old New Plymouth, 9 February 2014
History: Writing to the New Plymouth colony, 28 November 2015

I b'lieve she done lose her mind

Thursday music corner: Sonny Boy Williamson (1912-65) was a Mississippi-born blues harmonica player who began recording in 1951 and attained popular success in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with his blues standard Help Me (1963), which is in turn based on Booker T & the MGs’ famous 1962 instrumental, Green Onions. Much about Williamson's background is murky, including his name and date of birth. Born Alex or Aleck Ford, he later appropriated the Sonny Boy Williamson name of another popular Chicago blues harp player (1914-48). At various times he claimed his year of birth ranged anywhere from 1897 to 1912, perhaps to stake an earlier claim to the older Williamson’s name. 

Touring Europe in the early 1960s Williamson fell in with the British blues explosion and recorded with both the Yardbirds and the Animals. He was also something of a gourmand; according to Led Zeppelin biographer Stephen Davis, ‘while in England Williamson set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator’. Williamson died of a heart attack in Arkansas in 1965, aged 52. She’s Crazy appeared on a 1991 Williamson compilation album, Goin’ in Your Direction, and features marvellously circular reasoning in its final line, ‘She musta been crazy; if she hadn’t’a, she wouldn’t’a lose her mind’.

Sonny Boy Williamson – She’s Crazy

The No.2 to Seatoun

 

Sell my past for a way to sing and have something left to say

Thursday music corner: Labelmates Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen collaborated on this song first released as a single on 20 May 2021, which arose from a collaboration request Van Etten first made in 2020. Happily, it turned out they'd both long wanted to collaborate with each other. This acoustic version of the single was released in August 2021. 

Van Etten and Olsen have each released five studio albums, with the most recent from each artist being Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow from 2019 and Olsen’s Whole New Mess from 2020. The song was produced by John Congleton, who has also worked with many artists over the past 20 years including Amanda Palmer, Antony & the Johnsons, Bill Callahan, Blondie, Erykah Badu and St Vincent. 

Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – Like I Used To (Acoustic version, 2021)

[H/T to MF for the acoustic link!]

Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences

From a 1954 BBC radio broadcast commissioned while actor Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) was working in America, on the anti-communist witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57), which were wracking Hollywood:  

'To the outside observer there is nothing particularly striking about the Senator - there is no fire, no perceptible fanaticism, and curiously no oratorical powers. Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences, which is normal; but even words fall grudgingly from his lips - his eyes, meanwhile, having all the dispassionate intensity of a lion who is having his own private troubles gnawing a knuckle. His voice is plaintive by nature, and trembles obediently when a particularly emotional tone is ordered by the brain. On other occasions, it tries the elusive intonations of sarcasm, sounding much like a car with a dying battery, and even attempts the major key of jocularity when bonhomie is called for, but it is a sad laugh, and one which does not invite participation.

It is as though he had cheated the physical restrictions placed on him by nature, and had trained the very shortcomings of his equipment into weapons. His own evident lack of wit makes him impervious to the wit of others; his own inability to listen makes him immune to argument; his own tortuous train of thought wears down the opposition; his crawling reflexes, his unnaturally slow and often muddled delivery force quicker minds to function at a disadvantage below their normal speeds. And yet, cumbersome as is the Senator in action, his changes of direction, like those of the charging rhinoceros, are often executed with alarming ease. A mind trained in all the arts of tactical expediency urges the ponderous machinery on its provocative way.

Whenever he is compelled to admit that he doesn't know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that it isn't worth knowing. When ever he says he does know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that others don't - and won't. This then is the outward face of the man who has heard voices telling him to go and root out Communists and this is the face of a man who recognizes his potential enemy in everyone he meets. Like a water-diviner, he treads the desert with a home-made rod, and shouts his triumph with every flicker of the instrument, leaving hard-working professional men to scratch the soil for evidence.

No one who has enjoyed an argument, no one who has entertained challenging doubt, no one who relishes an unfettered view of history and of the current scene, could possibly be a communist. But anti-communism is no creed - democracy is no creed - it is a vehicle for the enjoyment of freedom, for the ventilation of thought, for the exercise of mutual respect, even in opposition. This is the heritage which has given debate its laws. This is the heritage which is traditionally so near the heart of this immense republic, and for which so many of her sons have died.

When anti-communism attempts to become a creed, it fights with the arms of its enemy, and like its enemy, it breeds injustice, fear, corruption. It casts away the true platform of democracy, and destroys the sense of moral superiority without which no ethical struggle is ever won.

This majestic land, these United States, know by instinct in fact they have often taught us from more venerable parts that democracy can never be a prison - it is a room with the windows open'.

- Peter Ustinov, Dear Me, Harmondsworth, Middx., 1977, p.248-9

One vast and magnificent flood of rosy and half-fiery light

This week was the 162nd anniversary of the strongest recorded geomagnetic storm to have struck Earth. Known as the Carrington Event after one of its discoverers, a coronal mass ejection caused major disruptions to world telegraphic systems. In New Zealand, however, electric telegraphy had yet to be introduced - this would not appear until 1862 - so the effects of the Event and its associated solar activity were instead witnessed in a spectacular auroral display, as recorded by the newspapers of the day, particularly the Taranaki Herald:

---

All lovers of nature were charmed last Monday evening by the rare occurrence of the Southern Lights. This mysterious phenomenon, commencing about half-past six p.m., bore at first the singular appearance of daybreak. Extending to an elevation of about 30 degrees, the gradually increasing light was seen to quiver at intervals, and then vanish from the eyes like a dissolving view. The rays emitted, at first almost indistinct, afterwards formed themselves into coruscations shooting up from the south and south-western horizon. These becoming after a little time still more clearly defined against the evening sky presented the shape of luminous bars with an (apparent) edge plainly marked on the western side. In the meanwhile a reddish tint was observed to be spreading almost imperceptibly over the southern portion of the heavens, and gathering a deeper colour about 7 o'clock, was seen to sink, and as it were to change its position, but only to rise again with equal brilliancy by the snow capped head of Egmont. But the crowning sight was to come. After little more than a quarter of an hour the red light was observed to shift again towards the south-west — the glow became brighter and brighter — and at last the Aurora poured forth one vast and magnificent flood of rosy and half fiery light, sometimes hiding sometimes only faintly concealing as with a gauze veil the stars around. Lasting apparently about 50 seconds it gradually sunk down, and the same glorious effulgence was seen no more. The white light still continued to brighten the sky but became totally extinct before 9 o'clock.

- Taranaki Herald, 3 September 1859


The beautiful phenomenon called the Southern Lights or Aurora Australis has frequently been visible of late. Last evening the spectacle was peculiarly attractive, the vivid lights at times shooting in rays and pencils across the southern heavens, and again spreading over almost the whole sky, dyeing the atmosphere of a bright roseate hue.
- Lyttelton Times, 3 September 1859


August 29. [Wind] S.W. ; a.m., heavy rain; evening, brilliant aurora.
- Daily Southern Cross, 2 September 1859

Morbid beauty, the skull of the school, the apple of Daddy's eye

Thursday music corner: psychedelic rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, originally of Auckland and now domiciled in Portland, Oregon, have released five studio albums, mostly on the Jagjaguwar label, which also features Sharon Van Etten, Dinosaur Jr, Okkervil River, Bon Iver and Angel Olsen. 

Released on 4 August 2021, 'That Life' is the second UMO single released this year, and its off-kilter puppet-themed video by Lydia Fine and Tony Blahd is a particular highlight. UMO lead singer Ruban Nielson has described 'That Life' as an attempt to channel Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ in the landscape of America, ‘somewhere on holiday under a vengeful sun’. To date, all UMO albums have been released on cassette as well as the more conventional CD, LP and digital formats.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – That Life (2021)

The roots of New Zealand urbanism

[F]or much of the nineteenth century living conditions in cities were primitive, with muddy streets, rickety buildings, bad drainage, mounds of filth and high rates of infectious disease. For some settlers this was encouragement enough to go onto the land. As city streets were paved, eliminating putrid mud and blinding dust; pipes put down, delivering clean water and removing disease causing waste; and frontier-era buildings demolished, making room for more permanent and elegant piles, cities became more modern and alluring. This was enhanced by their richer and more diverse cultural and social life, and the wider work opportunities available in the cities' secondary and tertiary industries. The perennial cry that work was going begging in the country belies any assumption that country dwellers were flocking to cities because there was no work on the land. It was more the case that the attractions of city life meant that, for some workers at least, it was better to be out of work in the city than in work in the country and removed from civilisation. The ethos for these people was less 'rigidly rural' (after Fairburn) and more obstinately urban.

In a last-minute effort to hold back the tide, the Attorney General, Dr John Findlay, warned in 1911 of 'national decay' if urbanisation continued. Enlisting the urban degeneration theory, he proclaimed not only that country folk were stronger and healthier than townspeople, but that city life made women both unfit for and disinclined towards motherhood. He asserted the birth rate in rural districts was a third higher than in cities - official statistics show otherwise - and that much more should be done to 'draw people to the land'. It was to no avail. The April Census showed two demographic milestones had been reached: New Zealand's population had passed the one million mark, and a few more Pākehā lived in urban than rural areas. (If the Mäori population had been included in the count, New Zealand became an urban society in 1916, but the official transition date has remained 1911.)

- Ben Schrader, The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840-1920, Wellington, 2016, p.395-6.