Tauru Rd, Rahotu

 

Mt Taranaki from the west, 26 October 2021

Dollar in the Teeth

Thursday music corner: Lee "Scratch" Perry, who died aged 85 in August, issued an enormously productive and pioneering wave of what would become known as reggae from his Jamaican studio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The instrumental Dollar in the Teeth is a B-side of a single Return of Django from his sixth studio album with his house band, Eastwood Rides Again, which was part of a hugely prolific sequence of albums he released in 1969 and 1970, many of which featured ‘spaghetti western’ themes. Return of Django / Dollar in the Teeth was the Upsetters’ only UK charting single, reaching number 5 in October 1969.

The Upsetters – Dollar in the Teeth (1969)

Don't be ashamed to say

Thursday music corner: Australian singer Renee Geyer has been singing professionally since the early 1970s, and scored six Australian top 40 singles between 1975 and 1984. The lead single from her 1981 LP So Lucky, her seventh studio album, Say I Love You reached number 5 in the Australian pop charts and number 1 in New Zealand. The song topped the New Zealand charts for five weeks. Geyer was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005.

Say I Love You was written by British reggae artist Eddy Grant, and originally appeared on his 1978 album Walking on Sunshine (the title track of which is a completely different song to the 1985 hit by Katrina & the Waves). Grant had two major smashes in 1982-3 with I Don’t Wanna Dance and Electric Avenue, the former of which also achieved number 1 status in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Renee Geyer – Say I Love You (1981)

The classical film style of self-restraint

As much as I admire filmmakers with the ambition and technical virtuosity to pull off such bravura pieces of cinema as The Shining, I've come to be just as much in awe of those directors with a willingness to virtually erase their artistic signature in favour of restraint and self-effacement - the classical style of no-style, if you will. This kind of film-making has virtually disappeared in recent years, but it harks back to Hollywood's Golden Age, when directors like George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks made films in which the camera observed from an objective, discreet distance, never moving or cutting away until absolutely necessary. The action was to be found in the words and emotional interaction of the characters, their interplay so rhythmic and dynamic that the films never felt static or overly stagy. The skill here lies in knowing which stories will be enhanced by the style of no-style.

If there was a masterpiece of such cinematic understatement, it was Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film All the President's Men, which looked simple but amounted to a masterfully conceived and well-calibrated collection of canny staging and a wealth of visual detail and bravura - if not obvious - camera moves. For instance, when an overhead camera, observing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they slog through book slips at the Library of Congress, soars high to reduce them to the size of needles in the haystack they are searching, it invests this quiet scene - one that could have been deathly dull - with verve and visual interest in the subtlest way possible. "A story is told as much by what you don't see, what you don't show, as what you show," Pakula explained. "If you show everything, nothing has importance."

- Ann Hornaday, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies, New York, 2017, p.224

See also:
Movies: The refreshingly brutal candour of The RKO Story, 27 July 2021
Movies: The dream factory of old Hollywood, 17 February 2021
Movies: Technicolor fragments from the 1920s, 30 April 2018

It's only me, trying to fly

Thursday music corner: In 1968 American jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery released Down Here on the Ground as the title instrumental track of a jazz-chart-topping US album. The track, New Zealand-born Canadian singer Gale Garnett's interpretation of Lalo Schifrin’s theme from the Paul Newman-starring 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, was soon covered by fellow jazz guitarist Grant Green on his 1970 live album for the Blue Note label entitled, appropriately enough, Alive!, recorded at the Cliché Lounge in Newark, New Jersey. Growing in momentum as a modern jazz standard, it also appeared with lyrics on George Benson’s hugely popular, platinum-selling 1978 live album, Weekend in L.A., the year before Green’s death at the age of 43. 

Distinguished Detroit-born, Denver-raised jazz singer Dianne Reeves interpreted the track with great verve in 1996 as part of a Blue Note recording artist remix programme that led to the album The New Groove: The Blue Note Remix Project Volume 1. This version used Green’s impeccable guitar work as remixed by hip-hop music collective The Ummah, which included members of A Tribe Called Quest. 

Some of Reeves’ career highlights include performing at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and winning her fourth Grammy award for her jazz soundtrack to George Clooney’s 2005 Edward R Murrow biopic, Good Night, and Good Luck.

‘So if you hear a sound from way down here on the ground
Don’t you know it’s only me, trying to fly’

Grant Green – Down Here On The Ground (feat. Dianne Reeves) (1996)

Elizabeth Cook's loss & legacy

On the life of Elizabeth Cook, wife of famed explorer Captain James Cook, after his death in Hawaii in 1779:

'More tragedy followed: she was to see all her surviving sons die in succession. Nathaniel was lost at sea aged sixteen in 1780. Her youngest, Hugh, destined for the church, caught scarlet fever at Cambridge University and died in 1793 aged seventeen. James, her eldest, drowned aged thirty-one in 1794. His boat overturned as he was returning to his ship. He had been advised to wait for calmer weather but the achievements of his father put pressure on him to act boldly. At this point, Elizabeth burned all Cook's letters. Some thought it was because nothing else could efface painful memories. Yet perhaps she was determined to keep something of her husband to herself; she had already lost so much to public service. 

Elizabeth went to live in Clapham, sharing a house with her cousin, Admiral Isaac Smith, who had sailed with Cook on his first voyage. The admiral retired from the navy in his fifties, having contracted hepatitis in the East Indies. Later he inherited property in Merton [Merton Abbey], after which the two of them spent winters in Clapham and summers in Merton. Elizabeth lived in an age when the tittle-tattle of provincial ladies could break a reputation. She guarded her respectability. Every Thursday at 3 p.m. she held a sedate dinner party for her friends; she fasted on the anniversaries of the deaths of her husband and three sons, spending these days meditating and reading the Bible. She lived to be ninety-three and always wore mourning and the ring with her husband's hair in it. She treasured the coffin-shaped memento containing locks of his hair that the crew of his final voyage had made for her. She hoarded the curiosities that Cook had brought home, but in old age gave many items away as marks of esteem. Her physician of later years received the superior edition of Cook's second voyage awarded her by the Admiralty.

To the end, she guarded her husband's reputation. When pressed to comment on reports of him being severe and reserved, she always emphasized his benign qualities as a husband and father. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried in Great St Andrews, Cambridge, near two of her sons. In an eleven-page will, she bequeathed £60,000 to relations, friends and charities. Cook's gold Copley medal went to the British Museum. She left money to the Royal Maternity Charity; she knew about childbirth in difficult circumstances. In some ways, her life was typical of women who married sailors - seeing her husband at rare intervals, having (and burying) children in his absence, and outliving him after his sudden death in service. In other respects, she is highly unusual a diffident public figure who became wealthy, pensioned and a resource for folk who wanted to know about Cook'.

- Margarette Lincoln, Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook & Nelson, New Haven Conn., 2018, p.132-3.

See also:

History: A cure for scurvy, 16 June 2013

History: The tyranny of distance, 1 February 2011

History: Nauticalia in Plymouth, 12 April 2007