Upper Cuba Street

 

Bait your hook and keep on trying

Thursday music corner: The Marvelettes were a 1960s girl-group formed of Michigan school friends, who attained chart-topping success in 1961 with their recording of Please Mr Postman. This was Tamla Motown's first Billboard Hot 100 number one single, and was famously covered by the Beatles two years later on their second album, With the Beatles. (The Carpenters also took it to number one in 1975). 

The Marvelettes had 10 US pop chart top 40 singles from 1961 to 1968. Too Many Fish In The Sea was the Marvelettes' fourteenth single, and their most successful single release of 1964. It also appeared on their 1966 compilation The Marvelettes' Greatest Hits, which reached number four on the US R&B albums charts.  

The Marvelettes - Too Many Fish In The Sea (1964)

See also:

Music: The Marvelettes - Beechwood 4-5789 (1962)

Music: The Marvelettes - Don't Mess With Bill (1966)

Music: The Backbeat Band - Please Mr Postman (1994)

Joel Meyerowitz: the heart of the photographic moment

By way of illustration he cites the experience of walking down a street in Paris. "There was a famous bakery, Poilâne, with just a tiny doorway, and as you're walking along smelling the petroleum-laden air of the street, you walk past the doorway and you pass through a brief zone of sugar and butter on the air, and you immediately want to go in there. You take two more steps and you're out of the sugar-butter atmosphere, but in the moment I passed through it I was hungry for it, and I imagined and fantasized and wanted it! And then a step later it was gone. I remember thinking: That's photography! You are in a zone for a split second, you recognize photographic moment in the place where you are. Bang! A picture! It's as instantaneous and subtle as that. Something wakes me up! Suddenly I'm alert, and I can see everything happening around me on the street. And instantly try to put a frame around it.

And so I thought that that fragility of experience, that evanescence, is at the heart of the photographic moment. And color photography satisfies the generosity of that moment, and black and white reduces that to a kind of figuration; it's a graphic reduction. And so I had to ask myself: Do I want to work in this reductive method, or do I want the full expressiveness of the world I walk through and that I perceive and read with my entire body and all my senses? And I knew that color offered me that range, so I felt that I had to stand up for it. I made these comparison pictures to make an argument for accepting color."

- Joel Meyerowitz & Robert Shore, Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color, London, 2023, p.55

See also:
Blog: Cindy Sherman meets Cate Blanchett, 8 May 2022
Blog: Cindy Sherman: chameleon, comedian, 15 January 2017
Blog: Ans Westra: Wellington 1976, 30 June 2013

The decaying remnants of the Buran space shuttle

Only the most intrepid urban explorers have paid the survivors of the [Russian space shuttle] Buran class a visit, a mission that is itself almost intergalactic in its boldness and ambition. First, Baikonur lies in Kazakhstan's desert steppe - a full day's train journey from the largest city Almaty - at a point where both railway lines and roads terminate into a lunar-like wasteland. Second, it occupies a vast, heavily guarded site. Effectively a mini-republic leased to the Russian Federation, it was originally chosen by Soviet officials for its distance from settlements and prying eyes. The working spaceport contains relics from the glory days of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to fly into outer space, as well as launch pads for the current Soyuz programme. Somewhere in between lie site 112A and hangar MZK. Here, two incarnations of the Buran rest under a shroud of bird droppings, their cockpits stripped of instruments and their scaffolding in collapse. Explorers describe secretly hiking across the desert under cover of night, before shining their torches into this vast, echoing mausoleum to cosmic dreams.

The more important craft is OK-1K2 'Ptichka' - meaning 'little bird' - the second in the class to be built and intended for its first space mission in December 1991. Its neighbour is OK-MT, a test vehicle that was slated to be burned in the atmosphere as part of an experimental unmanned launch. Neither of these is the original Buran that made the only space flight. This was destroyed at Baikonur in 2002, when the roof of its hangar collapsed in an earthquake, resulting in the deaths of eight workmen. Broken instruments and torn blueprints are strewn around the complex. The buildings are occasionally patrolled by guards and, more regularly, by bats, which flit about the cathedral-like heights.

Where the American Space Shuttles occupy pride of place in national museums, these spacecraft have been left to decay in the desert. They are deeply ambiguous objects. On the one hand, they are a symbol of the past: of the Cold War, the space race and the former USSR, whose fragmentation left them marooned in Kazakhstan, far from Moscow. On the other, they whisper of an alternate future: of voyages never made, discoveries never celebrated, corners of the cosmos uncharted. In a small way, they offer a vision of a 21st-century Soviet Union.

- Oliver Smith, Atlas of Abandoned Places, London, 2022, p.154

See also:
Blog: Russians in Queen Charlotte Sound, 15 December 2023
Blog: Mr Putin departs Brisbane, 16 November 2014
Blog: Under a fire that seemed pouring from all sides, 9 October 2012

The UK general election under proportional representation

"Labour gained over 200 seats but their vote share increased by less than two percentage points to 34%"

The UK general election is just a periodic reminder of how unfair and distortional the UK first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system is. While Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party have stormed to a large parliamentary majority, it is not bolstered by the knowledge that a large proportion of the British electorate have actually voted for them. The above quote is from the BBC, which also notes that Reform won 14 percent of the vote but only five seats, which is 0.8 percent of the total seats. Notably, the Green party also won 6.8 percent of the vote, but only four seats (0.6 percent of the total seats).

Fortunately the Electoral Reform Society has produced a simulated UK general election conducted under proportional representation, which illustrates that to form a government comprising a majority of voters, Labour (236 seats under PR) would need to form a coalition or other similar arrangement with both the Liberal Democrats (77 seats) and the Greens (42 seats), giving a government of 355 seats. The Conservatives (157 seats) could equally form a coalition with Reform (94 seats) and the Liberal Democrats to give a government of 328 seats. The latter would be a flimsy majority, though.

Source: Electoral Reform Society, 2024

Robert Cecil's Elizabethan intelligencers

For more than a century, it lay undisturbed in the National Archives: a single sheet of paper, headed The names of the Intelligencers, with the power to unveil a hidden network of secret Elizabethan spies.

Now, the 428-year-old secret dossier of Robert Cecil, spymaster to Elizabeth I and the man who discovered the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, has been pieced together using this key document. It reveals how Cecil set up and used a clandestine espionage network to spy on European monarchs for the English throne.

The network was so extensive that the historian Stephen Alford – who has been hunting down Elizabethan spies and painstakingly reconstructing Cecil’s illicit files about each “intelligencer” ever since he found the list in the archives nearly 15 years ago – thinks it was “the first properly organised secret service” in England.

“There were lots of names listed – some I recognised, people in or close to the privy council of Elizabeth I, and lots I didn’t know. Eventually, I realised that the numbers next to their names were folio numbers and that this was really a contents page. That was a lightbulb moment,” said Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds. He has written a book on his discoveries, All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil, which is being published by Penguin. The previously overlooked document, which Alford thinks Cecil began to write in 1596, had been placed in a “miscellaneous” folder by Victorian archivists.

“I think I was probably the first scholar to take an interest in it,” said Alford. “The Victorians had a habit, where if they came across papers that didn’t make sense to them, that were a little mysterious and couldn’t be filed away in a neat and tidy way, they would scratch their heads and then stick them in a miscellaneous folder and ignore them. And that’s where historians now find really interesting stuff.”

He began scouring the archives for any paper which looked relevant and had “a little number in the corner” that matched the intelligencer’s number on the contents page. “I just had to hope that the edges of the paper hadn’t been torn. And because the manuscripts were so poorly kept before the 19th century – often stuffed into the chambers in the Tower of London – rats and mice got to some as well. Often, they were stained, sometimes you see teeth marks. It’s a miracle these papers survived at all.”

As he gradually built up each intelligencer’s folio, he began to see a pattern. “Each was like an office file, I think. It was on hand in Cecil’s office for when reports came in, or to keep a record of payments made.”

Most spies in the 16th century worked for courtiers and were normally “a bunch of rogues”, Alford said, who would turn up haphazardly and volunteer information on an ad hoc basis. The intelligencers on this list were different: “These were serious individuals, a lot of them international merchants, who were on the payroll.”

Previously, scholars thought that Cecil, whose official role was secretary of state to Elizabeth, had a “few spies, here and there”. But Alford’s research indicates that he had an organised network of more than 20 spies, in Lisbon, Calais, Brussels, Seville, Rome, Amsterdam, Scotland, Sweden and unspecified locations elsewhere. “He chose merchants because they travel, can read and write, speak European languages and have networks of their own.”

Each agent was paid to secretly send coded reports to Cecil, who decrypted them using the individual, bespoke cypher in each of their files, which also contained a record of their payments and all their secret communications. “By modern standards, the cyphers are pretty unsophisticated – they’ll suggest different letters for letters of the alphabets, or symbols or diagrams for the Queen or King of Spain, for example,” he said.

- Donna Ferguson, 'Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies', Guardian, 29 June 2024