This Is Always A Bodyslam Whenever You Hear It 🤯

The Quarry Men’s banjo player, Rod Davis, recalls, “I had bought the banjo from my uncle and if he’d sold me his guitar, I might have been a decent enough guitarist to keep McCartney out of the band. I might have learnt guitar chords, I might not, and that was the big limitation really. McCartney could play the guitar like a guitar and we couldn’t, and let’s face it, a banjo doesn’t look good in a rock’n’ roll group. I only met Paul on one other occasion after the Woolton fête and it was at auntie Mimi’s a week or two later. He dropped in to hear us practising. From my point of view, I was the person he was replacing – it’s like Pete Best – you’re the guy who doesn’t know. Some things had gone on that I was unaware of.”

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

Hell Fire Club. where the ghost of Buck Whaley roams.

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Cor Klaasen

Record sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Club, designed by Cor Klaasen

Cor Klaasen was a Dutch designer who worked in Irish advertising throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, but is best remembered for the covers he designed for numerous Irish books and records, including school books for Fallons and sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Collection, the original incarnation (pardon the pun) of Mercier Press. A brief exhibition of his work, held as part of Dublin Design Week, is on show in Adifferentkettleoffishaltogether, a small gallery on Ormond Quay, until next Wednesday 10th November. It’s worth a visit, both to appreciate Klaasen’s clean, clever design and to get a feel of some of vibrancy that existed in Irish art and design between the 50s and the 70s.

As exhibition co-ordinator, Niall McCormack (who also maintains the excellent site about vintage Irish book covers, www.hitone.ie) said at a talk he gave as part of OFFSHOOT last night, we assume that 50s Ireland was all ‘Angela’s Ashes and people whipping each other’, but while Ireland was nowhere near as advanced as other European countries in art and design, there was still a number of talented, enthusiastic people who did their best to shake up the stifling social conservatism that dominated in all cultural fields for so long.

I thought McCormack was perhaps a little too dismissive about the Catholic Church’s cultural influence in this period during his talk, because the Klaasen exhibition shows that though it was largely responsible for the lack of innovative cultural activity in the country at the time, there was a surprisingly strong forward-thinking element within the Church at the time too, who provided Klaasen with a substantial portion of his employment. Some of the record sleeves he designed for Mercier are astonishingly radical, like one where the almost cartoonishly dull title ‘Building a new moral theology’ read by Rev. Albert Johnson, belies the surreal black-lined Christ-head, complete with long red spikes extending from his stylised crown of thorns. It certainly wasn’t John Charles McQuaid and his ilk who were OK-ing this and other striking cover designs.

Klaasen worked in a simple, classic style, occasionally branching out into 60s-style cartoon but overall you get the feeling he preferred the clean lines of the De Stijl style he would have grown up with in Amsterdam. One highlight is a cover for a religious book entitled ‘The Methods of Dogmatic Theology’ by Walter Kaspar, which is a plain black background broken by a simple white circle enclosing the text of the title. Smaller white bubbles extend from the large circle, but not so much so as to break the tranquil cleanness of the design. His more detailed images are successful too, particularly the abstract covers of the various schoolbooks he designed for Fallons, many of which were carved out directly on his printing surface without the aid of a pencil drawing.

He could turn his hand to political material too, evidenced by his cover for a book on the UVF, published in 1973 by Torc Press, in which a row of grotesque-looking paramilitaries, printed in lines so thick as to be almost unintelligible, line the bottom of a plain red cover, with the word UVF rendered in jarring black-lined orange above. He incorporates the symbolic orange of the Unionist paramilitaries against what would normally be a clashing red tone, perhaps to imply the blood that was on the hands of the people suggested by the images below. The grimaces of the terrorists evoke the grotesque leers of George Grosz’s villains, an artist that Klaasen admired and often imitated.

It’s easy in the 21st century to dismiss mid-20th century Ireland as a place of unmitigated drear and uncreativity, so it’s a good thing for exhibitions like this to display the often-forgotten figures who played a role in bucking that trend. I would recommend catching this exhibition before it finishes, it can be viewed in the gallery from 11am-5pm daily between now and next Wednesday.

i think about the 'john thinks certain paul songs like dear boy / hey jude are about him' thing a lot. because on one hand yes it's amusing and i get why people make fun of him for saying all this. but that said imagine being john lennon and you're like hey so long shot here but i think these songs written by the guy who i started my writing journey with and have worked beside for years and i understand better than anyone else and i know inside and out body and mind and i wrote eyeball to eyeball with yeah they are probably about me. and everyone's like no and you're crazy. like........ i know in the 70s john was paranoid in ways but i think maybe we can give him the benefit of the doubt on this one thing.

"You must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never have known-well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do. And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it. When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you, and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder, then you must plant your well-shaped oar in the ground, and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon, one ram and one bull, and a mounter of sows, a boar pig, and make your way home again and render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, all of them in order. Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. Your people about you will be prosperous. All this is true that I tell you.” The Odyssey

fuckkkkkkk offffffffffff

Chapter 1: Dead in the morning

Chapter 2: This cross is your heart, this line is your path

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

Master of a new medium

Eadweard J. Muybridge, Yosemite Creek: Summit of Falls at Low Water, 1872, mammoth-plate albumen print. California State Library, Sacramento

Tate Britain’s latest exhibition is an exploration of the work of the oddly named but immensely talented Eadward Muybridge, whose Studies in Animal Locomotion explored the idea of the moving image two decades before cinema was invented. Born Edward Muggeridge in Britain in 1830, he first emigrated to America in 1855 and built his career photographing San Francisco and the Yosemite national park in the years after the Civil War. He proved in 1878, using a sequence of photographs, that a horse’s hooves do indeed all leave the ground during a gallop, and he used the same technique to explore human movement in his seminal work in the 1880s, for which he remains most famous.

The Studies in Animal Locomotion remain interesting, revealing a particularly Victorian combination of science and voyueurism; attractive male and female models performed endless movements for Muybridge who captured the images using multiple cameras, since shutter speeds were not up to the task in the 1880s. Plenty of the ‘studies’ have no apparent scientific purpose, including one curtly titled ‘[Model] 8 pouring bucket of water over 6′, which shows one naked woman dumping a chilly stream over her squealing companion. Though indicating that Muybridge’s intentions were not always in the name of pure science; the more whimsical studies are still charming, especially one of a model leaning back in a chair smoking a cigarette and looking utterly relaxed.

Less ground-breaking, but frequently more beautiful, Muybridges’s earlier images of Yosemite and the lighthouses of the Californian coast form a substantial part of the exhibition. The photographer was hired to collect images of lighthouses in the 1860s for a federal authority, but the results are far from dry documentary: gorgeous albumen prints reveal sea spray turned to smoke by slow shutter speeds and cliff faces leaping out in almost 3D clarity. Elsewhere, he reveals the lives of people in transition; the exhibition contains photos from new coffee plantations in Guatemala and of rebellious Native Americans in California. San Francisco is captured in all its pre-1906 earthquake glory in a 17-foot panorama made up of several large photographs laid painstakingly end to end. The effect is somewhat distorted by the flatness of what should be a 360 degree view, but this aberration, along with the seemingly empty streets (the long exposure could not capture moving people in the photographs) gives the view an unearthly beauty a more accurate image would lack.

Muybridge’s work indicates a photographer who succeeded in bridging the gap between scientific accuracy and painterly aesthetics in the new medium. Even where the beauty of his images is unintentional, their preservation indicates an appreciation on his part of perfect imperfection. His motion studies and the zoopraxiscope, a prototype of the film projector he invented, have assured his place in history, but his landscape work and photojournalism are what really stand out for the modern viewer.

“MCGOUGH: There are poets who believe that when a poem arrives you write it down, catch the moment, as it were, and then that is it. Whereas other poets revise and rework until something shines through. What is your method? PAUL: For me, how art works is I get a mood, a desire to do the thing, usually writing songs, but sometimes this passion to paint. The feeling has to be there. I do it for pleasure. I’m not a great one for, as Linda used to put it, “Beating myself with a wet noodle.” So with a poem, a line comes to me and I sort of doodle with it in my head. I can’t stop it. I realised the other day that the great thing about being a composer is that you are doing nothing. What a doss! I was recently on holiday in India, having a fabulous time doing nothing, and I wrote three songs that I’ve just recorded. It’s a lovely thing to be able to say in my profession, “I have to be doing nothing.” MCGOUGH: Do you use a computer? PAUL: Pencil and paper. I’m not a typist. Funnily enough, John became a red-hot typist towards the end of his life. He had always had this “Arts Correspondent in Kowloon” kind of dream. But for me it’s pencil and paper by the bed… those moments between falling asleep and just before waking are good. I’ve got this little book that Stelly [his daughter, Stella] gave me and it’s full of scribbles and drawings. MCGOUGH: Are you interested in poetic forms? Have you tried your hand at writing a villanelle or a sonnet? PAUL: I really haven’t got into structure yet, but I can see how it can be effective from reading other poets. Like a mantra. Allen [Ginsberg] always used to say, “First thought, best thought.” And I’d think, “Oh, brilliant.” But the joke is, of course, that Allen was always revising. I think he was the first person I showed my poetry to. He came over to the house in Sussex to ask me if I knew anybody who would accompany him on guitar at a gig he was doing at the Albert Hall. So I suggested Dave Gilmour and Dave Stewart and a few others. Then when he’d gone it dawned on me that he wanted me to do it, so I rang him and said OK. So we met up and I stuck a little Bo Diddley jinkity-jink behind his Ballad of the Skeletons, a really cool poem, and he introduced me to the audience as his accompanist. He loved to be the Don, did Allen, the controller, and I loved to give him that. Anyway we sat down with my poems and he knocked out all the “thes”, and any word ending in “-ing”. And I said, “Allen, you’re going to make me into a New York Beat poet, and it’s just not me.” In the end I thanked him for going over them, and it was good to have an annotated version in my drawer, The Ginsberg Variations, as I called them, but I wouldn’t be using them. It was a lovely process, though, and I should be so lucky.”

— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Roger McGough for the Telegraph. (March 10th, 2001)