NZ precision telephone engineering

Glenmore St, Wellington

 

Don't fall asleep while you're ashore

Thursday music corner: Thomas Alan Waits, better known as Tom, was born in California in 1949 and has been releasing brooding, off-kilter music for 50 years. His ninth studio album, 1985's Rain Dogs, was his first to achieve Gold status in the US, and features Singapore as its opening track. The album features his first collaboration with guitarist Marc Ribot, and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards appears on three of its 19 tracks. Buried on Side 2 of the same album is the classic Downtown Train, which was the album's third single.   

Waits has also had a busy acting career alongside his music, appearing in such films as Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law (1986), Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992), Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza (2021). Waits was nominated for an Oscar for his song score for Coppola's 1982 drama One From The Heart, but lost out to Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse's work for Victor/Victoria. 

Tom Waits - Singapore (1985)

See also:

Music: Tom Waits - Tom Traubert's Blues (live, 1977)

Music: Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle - One From The Heart (1982)

Music: Marc Ribot Y Los Cubanos Postizos - No Me Llores Mas (1998)

So he flew from the pit with the moon round his waist

Thursday music corner: Virginia-born American indie-rock / alt-country singer Neko Case (b.1970) has had a rich solo career and built strong connections with Canadian musicians, including performing as part of the punk collective The New Pornographers and appearing as a trio with k.d. lang and Laura Viers under the designation 'case / lang / viers'.

Case released her first album The Virginian as Neko Case and Her Boyfriends in 1997, and in total has released seven studio albums plus two live albums, with the most recent being the largely Stockholm-recorded Hell-On, released in 2018. Case's arrangement of the traditional spiritual John Saw That Number appeared on her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. The album was recorded in Tucson, Arizona, apart from the a capella introduction to this track, which was recorded in a stairwell at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto.  

Case is performing American shows in June and July, including four co-headline gigs with the Indigo Girls in Washington and Oregon.

Neko Case - John Saw That Number (2006)

See also:

Music: case / lang / viers - Atomic Number (2016)

Music: The New Pornographers - Brill Bruisers (Live on Letterman, 2014)

Music: Neko Case - Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth (2009, Sparks cover)

Dueling billionaires are no substitute for democracy

The increasing dominance of money from the super-wealthy would be less of a problem if their attitudes were the same as those of most other Americans. The power of Democratic billionaires presumably would balance the power of Republican billionaires. But in reality the rich have quite different priorities from average Americans. Dueling billionaires are no substitute for democracy. According to a Pew Research poll, a large majority of Americans, regardless of party, are worried about jobs and wages. Yet when political scientists Benjamin Page and Larry Bartels surveyed Chicagoans with an average net worth of $14 million, their biggest concerns were the budget deficit and excessive government spending. And no surprise these wealthy individuals were also far less willing than were other Americans to raise taxes on the rich and more willing to cut Social Security and Medicare. They also opposed things most other Americans favored, such as increasing spending on schools and raising the minimum wage.

These wealthy respondents also differed from the rest of America in their political influence. In the previous twelve months, two-thirds had contributed (an average of $4,633) to political campaigns. A fifth had "bundled" contributions with others. That bought them the kind of political access most Americans only dream of. About half had recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half those contacts concerned matters of narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concern. Mind you, this is just the wealthy of one city, Chicago. Multiply it across the entire United States and you see who our elected representatives are listening to and why. The survey didn't even include the wealth and political clout of Wall Street and big corporations. Multiply the multiplier.

- Robert Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, London, 2020, p.65-66.

Cherries by pigeon-post

The historian al-Maqrizi recorded one very non­routine use of homing pigeons. In the late tenth century, the fifth Fatimid caliph al-Aziz loved the cherries of Baalbek. As a treat, his vizier -- in effect, prime minister -- arranged for 600 homing pigeons to be sent off from Baalbek to Cairo, each carrying a silk bag attached to either leg, with a single cherry inside each bag. The pigeons had 600 kilometres to fly. If they left in the morning, al-Aziz could have had fresh cherries for dessert that evening, with enough left over for his many guests.

- John Man, Saladin, 2015, p.259-261

You'll see men with no future, they were wiped out in the war

Thursday music corner: Mozart Estate formed in London in 1999 under the name Go-Kart Mozart, led by singer / songwriter Lawrence Hayward, who only goes by his first name. In 2018 Lawrence changed the band's name to Mozart Estate. Under both names combined the band has issued five albums and five singles since forming. 

The jauntily bleak Relative Poverty is the lead single from the most recent album, Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping, released in January 2023. The single was released in a special vinyl edition for Record Store Day. It had originally appeared in an earlier version on Go-Kart Mozart's fourth album, 2018's Mozart's Mini-Mart. Speaking to the Guardian's Ryan Gilbey in July 2022 from his East London council flat, Lawrence points out that the poverty he refers to definitely isn't of the ironic variety:

“There came a point where I learned to live on nothing. I’d have two pence in my pocket, and I’d find a bench on the King’s Road hoping someone would sit next to me so I could ask for a cigarette. No one ever did because I looked so rough.”

Mozart Estate - Relative Poverty (2022)

See also:

Music: The La's - Doledrum (1990)

Music: The Chills - Doledrums (1986)

Music: UB40 - Food For Thought (1980)