KAPUŚCIŃSKI 3: CONNECTIONS THROUGH TIME

It is fitting and also very moving that Kapuściński's last book, published in June this year should be 'Travels with Herodotus.'

Fitting because Herodotus, according to Wikipedia, was a Greek historian from Ionia who lived in the 5th century BCE (ca. 484 BCE–ca. 425 BCE) and is regarded as the "Father of History". He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories a record of his 'inquiries' into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BCE. The nine volumes include not only a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented, but also long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during his wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea.'

Moving because we learn that when Kapuściński was a novice reporter in Poland he yearned to travel and broached the subject with his editor-in-chief Irena Tarlowska . Nothing was said for a year until one day K was summoned to her office and told he was being sent to India - a country he knew absolutely nothing about it. He writes: 'At the end of our conversation... Tarlowska reached into a cabinet, took out a book and handing it to me said: "Here, a present for the road." It was a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus THE HISTORIES.'

What a strange quirk of fate - that one of the greatest traveller-reporter of our time should be so pointedly and intimately connected with the very first of his kind in such a prescient way from the outset. Thus K's first encounters with India, China and Africa - captured in his usual brilliant prose, which appears seemingly simple yet proves to be both deep and subtle - are interwoven with his readings from Herodotus and his musings of the nature of the man.

He writes: 'Man is by nature a sedentary creature, settled down happily, naturally, on his particular piece of earth...But to traverse the world for years in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, tp put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.' Of course, K was one of those uncommon ones himself.

*

As fate would have it, this book arrived just after I had finished reading another extraordinary tale of travel and adventure, 'A Fortune-Teller Told Me' which carries the following recommendation from Kapuściński on the cover: 'A great book written in the best traditions of literary journalism...profound, rich and reflective.'

Born in Florence, Tiziano Terzani spent 25 years working as Der Spiegel's Far Eastern correspondent. In the spring of 1976, he had visited a fortune teller Hong Kong who told him:
'Beware! You run a grave risk of dying in 1993. You mustn't fly that year. Don't fly, not even once.' The prophecy haunted him for the next sixteen years and when 1993 rolled round he submitted to the old man's warnings.

The book follows Terzani through that year - a year in which he travels vast distances but only by car, train and ship. He feels justified when he learns that a helicopter he would certainly have been on, carrying foreign correspondents, crashed and several were killed. He discovers the joys of not rushing from airport to airport, of seeing the landscape unfold, of adjusting his behavious to a different clock. Everywhere he goes he consults soothsayers and fortune-tellers of all descriptions. Thus there is an inner journey taking place and a constant dialogue between
Terzani's Western mind and the Eastern philosophies and mindsets that he is forced to consider.

Interestingly, Terzani travels to Mongolia in the company of a book written by a Pole 'Beasts, Men and Gods' by Ferdinand Ossendowski. who travelled the region in the 1920s, trying to escape the Bolsheviks. A former Russian naval officer who converted to Buddhism, he believed Mongolia should remain a separate republic and fought like a demon to achieve that end. His account of his epic flight through one of the most mysterious regions on earth was a bestseller when it was published in New York in 1922.

Earlier in his account, Terzani recalls when he set out to travel by ship from Bangkok to Cambodia. Looking for book to take with him on he voyage, his eyes fell on 'The Gentleman in the Parlour' by Somerset Maugham. This despite the fact that, he confesses, 'I have never been able to feel for Maugham the affection that he inspires in most of his readers.' It is only when he is sitting on deck reading that he realises that Maugham was describing an identical voyage to his own, made on a similar ship in 1929. The book begins: 'I have never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of readers.' Terzani writes: 'Maugham tells how, on the point of departure, he looks for a book to take along; his eye happens to fall on one with a greeen cover and subsequently he begins reading it on board ship.'

Incidentally, I was turned onto this book initially by reading a 2005 article in The Guardian – ‘The escape artist’ by Piers Moore Ede. It begins: ‘All of us, at some stage or another, pick up a book by pure chance, perhaps in a second-hand bookshop, or from a desultory shelf made up from what holiday-makers have left behind. Occasionally, those books can work a particular magic on us, their resonance deep enough to suggest fate itself has thrust them into our hands.’

I recommend reading the book first and then this article, where you discover how Terzani's journey through life ended.

'Travels with Herodotus' is published by Allen Lane
'A Fortune-Teller Told Me' is published by Flamingo/Harper Collins

GREENPEACE: THE RETURN TO AMCHITKA

Left: Original cover of the first edition of 'The Greenpeace Story' (first published 1989);
Above: The original Greenpeace crew on their way to Amchitka in 1971. From left (top) Robert Hunter, Patrick Moore, Bob Cummings, Ben Metcalfe, engineer David Birmingham; (bottom) Richard Fineberg, Dr Lyle Thurston, Jim Bohlen, Terry Simmons, Bill Darnell and skipper John Cormack.

Memories were triggered the other day when my dear friend Keiran Mulvaney sent me a link to his blog and I discovered that he was on a new Greenpeace boat heading once more for Amchitka. As explained below, this is where Greenpeace began. Its hard to believe its almost 20 years since we put Greenpeace's history together.

There have been many other books written before and since. These include
The Greenpeace Chronicle by Robert Hunter
Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World by Rex Weyler
Making Waves by Jim Bohlen
Shadow Warrior: The Autobiography of David McTaggart
The definitive story of this remarkable organisation still remains to be told. I hope we made a useful contribution to that end.

Read more about the Bering Sea 2007 Campaign tour here
From this link you can follow the voyage on Google Earth

Below Kieran's blog entry on the first landing on Amchitka.


Amchitka

Thirty-five years, eleven months, and eighteen days later, we finally made it.

On September 15, 1971, a crew of twelve set out from Vancouver Island in an eighty-foot halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack on a daring, even foolhardy, mission: to steam to the Aleutian island of Amchitka and protest, or even prevent, the detonation of an underground nuclear test. When the plan was first hatched, the group that organized the mission went by the name of the Don't Make a Wave Comittee. By the time the Cormack set out to sea, they were calling themselves Greenpeace.

The Cormack didn't make it to Amchitka. President Nixon delayed the test, the crew put into the Aleutian port of Akutan to figure out next steps, and the US Coastguard arrested them on a technicality. But the mission was a success: although the explosion, dubbed Cannikin, went ahead, it would be the last on the island: a further four tests were scheduled but canceled in the face of the enormous protests that found a voice in the Greenpeace voyage.

And yet, ever since, a circle has remained broken, a path unfinished. Almost thirty-six years have passed, the island has become a wildlife sanctuary, and a kind of calm has returned in this most remote of realms, and yet, no Greenpeace ship had completed the Phyllis Cormack's journey and reached the shores of Amchitka.

Until today.

To the last, Amchitka seemed determined to keep its secrets. We arrived as night was reluctantly yielding its grip, and even when daylight barged its way through, Amchitka lay shrouded in thick, seemingly impenetrable fog. An initial boat ride in search of a suitable landing beach provided little of great promise, but at least one option, and after lunch we headed ashore.

The island is ringed by thick kelp beds--the reason it was once lush habitat for sea otters, all now gone, whose violent deaths as a result of the blasts angered Irving Stowe and motivated him to protest the explosions, a move that gave rise to the Don't Make a Wave Committee and thence Greenpeace. There was no doubt that the kelp could do serious harm to the propellor of the African Queen, our large inflatable, so we employed a shuttle service: from Esperanza to African Queen to the smaller Novuraina, which threaded its way uncertainly through the shallows, before we began an undignified clamber across kelp-coated rocks and finally made it ashore.

We had made it. We were on Amchitka. But the object of our attention lay a couple of miles away yet, over the intimidating-looking hillside that sloped down toward us. Undaunted, we picked and clambered and hauled our way to the top of the island, and there, of all things, stood a concrete hut at the end of a gravel road. It had been, presumably, a form of sentry post.

We stepped inside. On the floor there sat what appeared to unexploded shells. We stepped back outside.

We wandered along the road, but according to our charts and calculations, we needed to head inland a short distance. And so we marched across spongy mosses that sprang back up as our footprints left, along thick tundra that enveloped our feet as if trying to suck us into the ground, and tall grasses that hid holes into which at least some of us sometimes stumbled and fell.

Then we rose over a ridge and there, ahead of us, was what we had come to see: Cannikin Lake, created when the force of the blast caused the land to collapse, forming a crater which filled with water from nearby White Alice Creek.

It looked, frankly, disconcertingly peaceful and calm, the water gently breaking against the lush grassy coast, But its placidity is deceiving: samples have shown that the lake, the creek, and the mosses and lichens contain radioactive elements, which are still seeping into the groundwater from the blast chamber a mile below the surface.

At ground zero itself, close to the lake, the reality was more evident. Here, in stark contrast to the lush environment on the way in, the ground was all but lifeless, the remnants of scorched lichens clinging to bare earth. And there was something else, something I hadn't truly realized until talking later with Raymond back on the Esperanza. This is an island that has felt but a handful of human footprints for more than thirty years, that is an undisturbed wiildlife reserve. But there is virtually no life here. Oh, there are some seabirds, some songbirds, moths and spiders and flies here and there. But compared to the other Aleutian islands we have visited, it is lush but desolate. The place just feels wrong. It feels violated. It feels ... dead.

The crew had made it clear they had no intention of allowing us solely to come and monitor and document the site without making at least a symbolic statement, and so we stood, facing the lake, with the ship's flags tied to poles and waving bravely in the strong wind, a testament to how Greenpeace has grown globally in scope in the decades since its founding, and how, on behalf of the nations of the world, we were reclaiming this patch of inhumanity and calling for peace.

Then the flags came down, and everyone stomped back over the hill, leaving Brent, Clive, myself--and Barbara. Barbara Stowe, 14 years old at the time of the Cormack's sailing, our connection to the founding era, had sold pins and buttons on street corners for 25 cents a pop to raise money for the Cormack's voyage. And now, representing all of those who had devoted so much time, energy, and emotion into making that seminal event happen, she was here, with us, bearing witness firsthand to the place her late father had sworn to protect.

We filmed some interviews, and then again we did battle with the terrain, forcing weary limbs through unforgiving ground, and then precariously down the slopes we had earlier climbed, before once more running the gauntlet of rocks and hitching a ride back to the welcoming Esperanza.

On the beach, some of the crew had arranged driftwood to spell "Bering Witness" in honor of the campaign, a quiet message visible only from the cliff tops.

And at the test site, too, a memorial now stands: a small piece of driftwood, which Diek retrieved from the shore and tied to a short post. In the wood, he carved a simple message: Phyllis Cormack 1971, Esperanza 2007. And now it stands on the shore of Cannikin Lake, a solitary sentinel, bearing witness on our behalf to a silence broken only by the blowing of the wind, the calls of the seabirds, and the gentle lapping of the waves.

OTHER SOUTHERN DELIGHTS

Following on from my immersion in the ocean that is the blues (see previous posts) these other southern delights are highly recommended.

Originaly released in 1972, based on the novel by James Dickey who also wrote the screenplay and makes a cameo appearance in the film as a sheriff, 'Deliverance' still packs a wallop.

I well remember going to see the first press screening in London at that time and sitting down next to a female scribe, who grabbed my hand during the course of the film and dug her nails in so hard that there were visible marks when we came out, shaken, into the early evening light.

It remained from of the prime examples I would quote, when arguing over a drink, about the relativity of film viewing - when and where you see the film has a defining effect on your opinion of it. (Obviously this excludes 'dogs' that no circumstance would alter or improve).

Cos later, still remembering the nails in my hand, I got excited about seeing the first run of the movie on tv (there were no dvds in those days and VHS releases lagged way behind the release date). First-time round, we had no prior knowledge of the film, were seeing it blind in an ideal environment (plush screening room) and thus the shock factor was at maximum. Seeing it again on tv, interrupted by adverts, took all the heat and steam out of it.

This point is underlined by a short review on Amazon by L.A. Hay "Saturnicus" from Scotland, entitled '35 years too late': 'At the time of its release this film had mega hype. John Voigt and Burt Reynolds were the glamour boys of the day and had the girls drooling. At the time I probably would have liked it; or would I? We children of the sixties were notoriously fickle and gave credit when it was due. Finally getting round to see it, (cannot imagine why I was prevented seeing it in the beginning), I was disappointed. The subject of male abuse would have no doubt been lost on me in 1972 as I would not even known what it was, so perhaps that was a major stunner at the time. Over the years no doubt many other features in the movie so innovative back then, have become commonplace...The lessons it may have taught us, and horrors it showed us, have dissipated with time.'

To these eyes, watching it more than 30 years later, it looks timeless. The cinematography is stunning , the famous 'Duelling Banjos' still works as a hokey then creepy opener and Boorman's mastery of the growing sense of dread (all a question of pace) draws you in until, like the film's protagonists, you find yourself caught on a emotional ride that you cannot get off.

One thing a re-viewing brings home is how editing techniques have changed. Boorman takes his time. The camera lingers longer. One has space to absorb the stunning landscapes, the sound of the river. Compare and contrast the way the film's violent episodes are handled. Imagine how many jump shots there would be in a modern movie. The gore factor would have to be upped to compete with today's hyper-realism.

In retrospect, the 70s was a classic Hollywood period when a new generation of film-makers stormed the walls of Babylon and had a party. This point was underlined by watching the DVD of 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls' - the excellent documentary of Peter Biskin's book. Particularly stunning are the extras: a really tremendous set of beautifully shot interviews with some key characters. Check out Dennid Hopper's stories about the making of 'Apocalypse Now'.

Check out also the BBC4 web site connected to their screening of the film: audio interviews with Hopper, Altman, Scorsese and Schlesinger. Also audio link to interview with Biskind. Read critique of the book here.

Boorman is currently working on an adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's bestseller "Memoirs of Hadrian," which is written in the form of a letter from the aging emperor to his young successor, recounting the story of his early political career in the second century A.D.
Read his 2001 Guardian article 'That's All Folks': Big movies now cost $100m and that figure is going up. How can the studios afford it? They can't. Film-maker John Boorman on an industry facing meltdown.

James Dickey, who was a decorated fighter pilot and US poet laureate, died in January 1997, four days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1968 he taught as Poet-in-Residence. Audio interviews with Dickey here


'Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus', a film by Andrew Douglas, is a captivating and compelling road trip through the Southern States in the company of singer Jim White. Originally shown on BBC's Arena programme, this a truly amazing and innovative film, suffused with a strange darkness, full of exquisite music and great storytellers. The DVD is not cheap but it pays repeated viewings.











Just been up half the night reading 'Moonshine, Monster Catfish and other Southern Comforts', Burkhard Bilger's account of his investigations into such southern traditions as eating squirrels, fighting cocks, noodling catfish and playing rolley holer - a strange form of marbles. Bilger is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a brilliant reporter and stylist. Here are visions of other worlds beyond our ken. Delightful and insightful. Read an extract here.

CHASING THE BLUES

It has been a rare privilege over the last month or so to immerse myself in the roots of the blues via two detailed conversations with the authors of two recently published books:

'In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions' by Marybeth Hamliton is published by Jonathan Cape [£12.99]


‘Hand Me My Travellin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell’ by Michael Gray is published by Bloomsbury (£25.00)

The first challenges the myths surrounding the Delta Blues; the other brings to life one of the great seminal blues players. Both add immeasurably to our knowledge of both the music and the societies that spawned them.

You can hear these interviews on the Audio Generalist - for free!

Californian-born Marybeth Hamilton teaches American History at Birkbeck College, University of London and has previously written 'When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment.'

Read Mick Brown's review of 'In Search of the Blues' on The Telegraph site.

Michael Gray is best known as the author of ‘Song and Dance Man’ the first ever book-length critical study of Bob Dylan’s work, published originally in 1972. Over the years it has grown and developed to the point where ’Song and Dance Man III’, published in 2000 and reprinted five times in the years since, is now 918pp long including the index.
His excellent Bob Dylan Encylcopedia blog can be found here
He has also started one on Blind Willie McTell

Read the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song 'Blind Willie McTell'


This new CD set is one of a recently released series which includes Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson - all of which

I purchased for The Generalist's turntable. At £10.99 each they are also great value.

They are issued by Snapper Records,who have also just released 'The Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan'

A great album in the same vein that my old friend Nick gave me for my 50th birthday, which also comes highly recommended:
'Led Astray - The Folk Blues of Page and Plant'


Blues In Britain is building the most comprehensive list of blues resources on the internet.

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JONATHON GREEN - Slangmeister

The latest addition to our slowly-evolving library of audio interviews on The Generalist’s audio site, documents the work of Jonathon Green, one of the world’s leading lexicographers of slang.

Over the last 25 years, in numerous works – including the ‘Cassell Contemporary Dictionary of Slang’, ‘Slang Down The Ages’, ‘Talking Dirty’ and the ‘Slang Thesaurus’ - he has documented this underworld of language with an appetite that equals if not surpasses his illustrious historical predecessors in this field.

Their story forms part of Green’s ‘Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made.’ [Jonathon Cape 1996/Pimlico 1997].

He is currently into the editing stage of the final volume of his as-yet-untitled meisterwork – a 3-volume slang dictionary which will be the most detailed book of its kind ever published.

It will contain some 100,000 headwords; these are accompanied and underpinned by more than half a million citations. Green is hopeful it will be released in 2009. The dictionary will also be available on-line and will be kept constantly updated.

You can hear the interview here:

www.thegeneralist.co.uk

Below is an exclusive preview of the dictionary:

piss n.

[piss v.]

1 urine.

c.1386 Chaucer Wife’s Prol. 729: How Xantippa caste pisse vp-on his heed [OED]. 1440 Promp. Parv. 402/1: Pysse, or pysche, urina, minctura. 1596 ‘Misdiaboles’ Ulysses upon Ajax 42: In commendation of p——g, bringing out of Valerius the story of the Cretans who [...] drunk their own p—s. 1604 Dekker The Honest Whore pt. 1 in Works vol. II (1873) I iv: It [sc. tobacco] makes your breath stinke, like the pisse of a fox. 1610 Jonson The Alchemist II iii: With all your broths, your menstrues, and materials, / Of piss, and eggshells, women’s terms, man’s blood. a.1618 J. Harington Epigrams II no. 43: Found meanes to write his mind in excellent verse: / For want of Pen and Inke, with pisse and ordure. 1682 Radcliffe ‘A Call to the Guard by a Drum’ in Poems 64: From your crack’d Earthen Pisspots where no Piss can stay. 1699 ‘The 2nd Part of St. George for England’ in Playford Pills to Purge Melancholy I 331: As birch is soaked first in Piss when Boys are to be whipt. 1708 The Humours of a Coffee-House 16 Jan. 91: Your Sal Volatile Oleosum Man, that makes such a Noise with crying old stinking Piss about the Town. 1733 Anon ‘The Gentleman’s Study’ in The Dublin Magazine 18: Four different Stinks lay there together, Which were, Sweat, Turd, and Piss, and Leather. c.1807 Anon. ‘The Giblet Pye’ (in Bold 1979) 227: Sly Darby, being enraged at this, / Resolved when next they met to seize / The lock that scatters Una’s piss. 1820 Anon. The Bugger’s Alphabet (in Bold 1979) 42: C is the cunt all covered in piss. 1841 Anon ‘The Racehorse’ in The Gentleman Steeple-Chaser 4: What stuff is that your munchin? / Drink water too that stinks like p-ss. 1888-94 ‘Walter’ My Secret Life (1966) X 2083: As my sperm rises I love her, could drink her piss, her blood, so do I long to be incorporate with her. 1916 Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 96: That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. 1922 Joyce Ulysses 161: Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment. 1934 H. Miller Tropic of Cancer (1963) 56: The globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss. 1947 D. Davin For the Rest of Our Lives 52: The drunken back streets of Cairo where [...] the gutters stank of piss. 1953 ‘William Lee’ Junkie (1966) 138: It stinks like piss in here. 1963 Dunn Up the Junction 29: The toilet is aswim with piss. 1975 A. Bleasdale Scully 174: Y’all shitbags an’ cack merchants [...] y’all stewin’ in y’own piss. 1981 S. Berkoff Decadence (in Decadence and Other Plays, 1985) 34: He thinks his piss now tastes like wine. 1996 (con. 1970) G. Moxley Danti-Dan in McGuinness (ed.) The Dazzling Dark (1996) II v: My heart pumps piss for you. 2004 T. Winton ‘Cockleshell’ in The Turning (2005) 123: The ointment’s active consituent is urea. He knows what that is. Piss!

2 an act of urination.

1837-8 ‘Toasts And Sentiments’ in The Cuckold’s Nest 48: How very convenient are those corner places, / Which beside every gin shop one sees, / Wherein men may walk to the wall, turn their faces, / And have a good p--s at their ease. 1842 Anon ‘Sally May’ in Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Songs 8: At p-ss one day I saw the lass. 1922 Joyce Ulysses 546: Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss? 1934 H. Roth Call It Sleep (1977) 247: I godda take a piss. 1946 K. Amis letter 15 May in Leader (ed.) (2000) 66: To put a lump of sugar in his mouth or go for a piss. 1952 J. Jones From Here to Eternity (1998) 613: Every time I took a piss I thought I had the clap for sure. 1966 T. Keyes All Night Stand 58: [I] tried to amuse myself by having a piss. 1974 P. Larkin ‘Sad Steps’ in High Windows Groping back to bed after a piss / I part thick curtains. 1989 (con. 1950s-60s) in G. Tremlett Little Legs 99: I told him to stop the car [...] while I have a piss. 1997 Barlay Curvy Lovebox 166: That was that most to-tahly smashing piss I evah have. 2000 Niall Griffiths Grits 170: When wih get back t’mih car ih gors off fer a piss.

3 vaginal fluid.

1865 ‘The Love Feast’ in T.P. Lowry The Stories the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell (1994) 58: When quite undressed, the bower of bliss / Dissolved in one warm rush of piss / Whose briny jet bedewed the nick. 1973 (con. 1940s-60s) ed. Hogbotel & ffuckes ‘Heigh Ho Says Rowley’ in Snatches & Lays 31: C is for cunt all slimy with piss.

4 as drink.

a. any sort of weak or otherwise unpalatable drink, whether alcoholic or non-alcoholic.

1933 ‘George Orwell’ Down and Out in Davison (ed.) Complete Works (1987) I 153: Dat tay in de spike ain’t tay, it’s piss. 1968 K. Amis letter 11 Mar in Leader (ed.) (2000) 694: Food excellent, wine awful piss. 1974 (con. 1960s) R. Price The Wanderers 30: I ain’t drinkin’ any a that orange piss. 1989 D. Waters Heathers [film script] What did you do, put a phlegm globber in it or something? I’m not gonna drink that piss. 1999 K. Sampson Powder 115: He took a gingerly sip of Mâcon Blanc and declared it piss. 2001 N. Griffiths Sheepshagger 184: Whisky, not povo headfuck cheap piss like that.

b. (also pish) an alcoholic drink.

1925 (con. WWI) Fraser & Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 224: Pish: Whiskey. Any spirits. 1958 A. Sillitoe Saturday Night 90: You can’t stand up to ’em with all that piss inside you. 1981 J. Wambaugh The Glitter Dome (1982) 15: It’s this Glitter Dome piss you’re drinkin. Irish whiskey, my dick. 1993 I. Welsh Trainspotting 302: A couple of bottles of your best piss . . . and a table for four.

c. beer.

1945 P. Larkin letter 31 Oct. in Thwaite (ed.) Sel. Letters (1992) 110: Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss: in point of fact I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies. 1977 K. Gilbert (ed.) Living Black 220: Got forty-four gallon drums of bloody metho ‘n all the piss they want. 1999 A. O’Hagan Our Fathers 140: We’ll have two pints of yer best piss. 2004 P. Howard PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids 204: The local piss we’re drinking is called Toohey’s.

5 constr by the, a general intensifier; the essence, the ‘daylights’.

1934 H. Miller Tropic of Cancer (1963) 73: That boss of mine, he bawls the piss out of me if I miss a semicolon. 1942 H. Miller Roofs of Paris (1983) 50: He’s really fucking the piss out of her by this time. 1961 C. Himes Pinktoes (1989) 36: By God, he was going to shock the supremacy piss out of their white-livered bladders. 1972 D. Jenkins Semi-Tough 209: Who the piss wants to know? 1981 J. Bradner Danny Boy 101: How de piss you know owny black man does vote foh de Palmm Tree? 2003 C. Feldmann The Sons of Sheriff Henry 322: Heard? Who the piss hasn't heard!

6 (also pish) rubbish, nonsense, anything or anyone unappealling, worthless.

1947 K. Amis letter 24 Mar. in Leader (ed.) (2000) 123: They show us their pictures, which are UNRELIEVED BAD NINETEENTH CENTURY ANECDOTAL ACADEMY PISS. 1950 K. Amis letter 27 Nov. in Leader (ed.) (2000) 249: Have you read Eliz. Taylor’s A wreath of roses? Piss, but two or three sodding funny scenes. 1963 K. Amis letter 2 Apr in Leader (ed.) (2000) 623: Bawled ‘piss’ and other unspeakables at a young British poet and globe-trotter, who I thought was a great piss-talker. 1974 C. Eble Campus Slang March 5: piss [...] Billy’s getting an A on that test was a real piss. 1991 O.D. Brooks Legs 44: If you dump that swamp piss like I told you, I’ll fill that pot with the best alky you ever drank. 1998 I. Welsh Filth 227: The telly is fuckin pish as usual. 2000 T. Udo Vatican Bloodbath 66: ‘We, as prodisents, don’t believe any of that shite’ ‘Aye,’’ said one of the gang members. ‘It’s pish.’

7 in fig. use, high spirits.

1964 Jim Thomson Pop. 1280 in Four Novels by Jim Thompson (1983) 381: ‘Fellas would get all full of piss an’ high spirits and take right off after them.’ 1994 T. Willocks Green River Rising 161: His time in the infirmary had taken all the piss out of him.

C.1 attrib.

piss-burned discoloured, esp. of a grey wig which has turned yellow.

1686 A. Behn The Lucky Chance II i: A cloak to skulk in a-night, and a pair of piss-burned shammy breeches. 1691 N. Ward ‘The Authors Lamentation’ in Writings (1704) (2 edn) 23: My coat it is turn’d, with the Lappets Piss-Burn’d. 1742 H. Fielding Joseph Andrews (1954) III 274: A long piss-burnt beard served to retain the liquor of the stone-pot. 1788 Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (2 edn) n.p.: Piss-burned. Discoloured: commonly applied to a discoloured grey wig. 1796 in Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (3 edn). 1811 in Lex. Balatronicum [as Grose 1796]. 1823 in Egan Grose’s Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue.

piss-easy (orig. N.Z.) very easy.

1988 Viz Oct./Nov. 2: Oh, fuck that Tom! It’s piss easy. 2000 J. Connolly Layer Cake 9: I reckon it [i.e. drug dealing] must look very inviting, like piss-easy money, which it is when all goes well. 2003 in McGill Reed Dict. of N.Z. Slang.

piss-in-the-wind pointless, time-wasting.

1997 Simon & Burns The Corner (1998) 474: The politicians and profesionals are still offering up the kind of piss-in-the-wind optimism that compels any rational mind to recall another, comparable disaster.

piss over teakettle head-over-heels.

1998 in Guardian Sport 2 Oct. 16: A nice sharp right-hander on the chin, sent him piss over teakettles, spark out on the greensward.

DAZED & CONFUSED

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RAMBLIN' JACK REVISITED

'Later it was a long happy dream of the back yard in Phebe Avenue and Jack Elliott the Singin Cowboy has made a record which is selling a million copies and we're all together in the happy yard, a new house there, at one point there are three thin mattresses on the floor of a cold hut and happily I pick mine out (narrower but thicker) leaving no other choice to the other two guys, Jack & Someone — All forgotten by now, afternoon, saved so I could write "more completely" and this is the sad result.

My mind, the Mind, is too Vast to keep up with.'

Jack Kerouac - Book of Dreams.

[Source: www.ramblinjack.com]

[Above: Jack sketched this on a napkin during our interview. It is to precisely indicate where he went with Jack Kerouac and a girlfriend to see a show at the Cherry Lane Theatre, off Bleeker Street in New York. one time. 'Where they helt hands' he writes.
Notice the compass]

      Hear this interview with Ramblin' Jack on the Audio Generalist

Here is the original Telegraph article using quotes from the interview

Woody, Bob and Me

Who taught Bob Dylan to sing like Woody Guthrie? Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

John May met him

The Telegraph 19 February 2005

Ramblin' Jack Elliott cuts an unmistakeable figure. In the London hotel lobby, he's sporting cowboy boots and hat, check jacket and shirt, bandana and little wire-frame glasses. At 73, he may be feeling less spry than in younger years ("Winter has me feeling like a dead body. Bring on the undertaker," he says) but his eyes twinkle and the songs and stories flow as of old. On Monday, Elliott received a lifetime achievement award at Radio 2's Folk Awards and tomorrow he begins a short UK tour. The world is finally catching up with this most legendary and elusive of cowboy poets.

Last year's best-selling Bob Dylan autobiography, the artful and elliptical Chronicles, recounted how, while a teenager in Minneapolis, Dylan first discovered Woody Guthrie ("It was like the land parted"). Shortly afterwards, he met Ramblin' Jack, who had got there first. He already had Guthrie's style down to a tee, was leaner and meaner, and was beginning to take his music beyond pure mimicry. "I was cast into a sudden hell," wrote Dylan.

The tale of Guthrie the father and his spiritual sons is worthy of a Steinbeck novel. It's the story of two Jewish boys, Elliott Adnopoz and Bob Zimmerman, both from stable, middle-class backgrounds, who changed their names to Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan and left home in pursuit of the roots and spirit of American music – and who met for the first time at Guthrie's bedside.

As a child, Elliott was fascinated by cowboys. In his teens, he ran away from home and joined a rodeo for three months, where he met a rodeo clown named Brahma Rodgers who gave him his first exposure to cowboy and hillbilly music.

Suitably inspired, and having heard his first Woody Guthrie record, Elliott tracked down his hero to 3520 Mermaid Avenue, Coney Island, only to discover that Guthrie was in the hospital, having almost died of acute appendicitis. Bedridden and medicated, Guthrie was not in the best state to receive anyone, says Elliott's biographer Hank Reineke, "much less a strange 19-year-old kid with an unfamiliar face topped off with a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar case".

Elliott ended up moving into the Guthrie family house and began a five-year apprenticeship and friendship: "We'd get up every day about five in the morning. His son Arlo would wake me by throwing toys at me. We'd feed the kids breakfast and Woody would make a fairly tall glass of whisky and soda and I got to drinking some, too. We would play music, tell stories and drink until it was about 12 o'clock, when he would start to get these dizzy spells and he'd lie down and take a nap."

In 1955, Elliott took off to Europe with his new wife June, spending six years there as a "guitar bum" before returning to New York, in January 1961. He immediately went to see Guthrie at Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where he was to lie incapacitated with Huntington's chorea, the hereditary disease that had killed his mother, until his death in October 1967.

In a spooky echo of his own first meeting with Guthrie, Elliott found that Guthrie already had a visitor: "a kid wearing a funny hat. I thought he was strange, but really interesting – good-looking in an odd sort of way, with a peach-fuzz beard." It was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. He had arrived, Jack said later, "right on schedule".

Didn't he find that eerie?

"It's fantastic. It's like a movie. That's the way they want it in the movies. Supposedly doesn't happen that way in real life."

Does he remember that moment?

"Bob was there visiting Woody with this great aura of a young man who was full of respect and admiration for this very sad, tragic, pathetic man. Woody was really beginning to show the effects of his disease, to the point where he could barely play the guitar any more. He could still walk and talk, but his speech was very garbled. He was in this horrible place that was like a mental hospital.

"After an hour, we took a bus over to East Orange, New Jersey, and on the way over Bob said [cue Elliott's killer Dylan voice]: `Been listening to some of yer records. I got all six of yer records, Jack. I like yer singing and I like yer style.' He was very shy and muttered and mumbled, which he still does. He perfected the art of mumbling.

"I thought his guitar style was really interesting. It was awfully rough but very good and I could tell by his angle of attack, his attitude and the way he sang that he was going to be great. Other people could see he was imitating me but I couldn't see it at first. I was imitating Woody, and I was helping Bob to learn how to do it."

Jack and Bob hung out for a year or two, even living on the same floor of the same hotel along with rodeo cowboy Peter La Farge for a time. "We were best of friends and I could go on and on about the good times we had at the Gaslight and Gerde's Folk City [Greenwich Village clubs], where the crowds were always rude, noisy and inattentive."

Inevitably, their paths and careers diverged. Jack lost contact when Dylan moved to Woodstock, but in 1975, Dylan invited Jack on the anarchic first leg of The Rolling Thunder Review tour, only to effectively drop him from the second tour of bigger stadiums the following year.

But Jack's affection for Dylan remains undimmed and the spirit of Guthrie lives on in them both. "I thought he paid me a very nice compliment in the book and a lot of other people too," says Elliott. "He sent me a birthday telegram when I was 70, which I got at a party at my manager Roy Roger's house. It said: 'Happy Birthday Jack. This Land Is Your Land. Bob.' It's plagiarism – but who cares."

Read the story behind the interview here

Tom Waits talking about hanging and recording with Ramblin' Jack Elliott

NEW ORLEANS/ALAN TOUSSAINT

Above: A beautiful message and a splendid signature
on the title page of the booklet from the 'Our New Orleans' CD.

Meeting Allen Toussaint at the Brighton Dome last Friday was a rare privilege - particularly post-Katrina. He and the other musicians seemed charged by the tragedy that has hit the Crescent City. 'It was a baptism more than a curse', says Toussaint. We are happy to be able to broadcast our conversation at the Audio Generalist.

Listen up to these two great records: 'Our New Orleans', a benefit album featuring some of the city's greatest artists, and 'The River in Reverse', a brilliant collaboration between Toussaint and Elvis Costello. T & C are touring the album throughout Europe next month. I'm booked in for the Tower of London show.

NEW ORLEANS PRESERVATION BAND

Here is the New Orleans Presservation Band in action at Brighton Dome on 15th June 2007.

Above 5 of the 7: From left: Ben Jaffe (sousaphone); Shannon Powell (drums);John Brunious (trumpet/vocals); Walter Payton (bass); Rickie Monie (Piano)

Left: Ben Jaffe parades through the audience.

Photos: John May

Preservation Hall is on 726 St Peter's Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was originally built in 1750 as a private residence and has since housed many businesses including a bar during the Civil War and, more recently, as an art gallery, when the owner Larry Bornestein began to hold informal jazz sessions.

Allan Jaffe was a tuba player and main organiser of these events and in 1961 took over the running of the Hall with his wife Sandra. They envisaged it as a sanctuary for original New Orledans jazz - and so it has remained to this day.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band was also formed at this time and have been playing in various forms ever since. They currently play about 200 dates a year. For periods, there were several bands touring under that name at the same time. Most of the original band members played with pioneer New Orleans musicians Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.

Ben Jaffe is the son of the founders and John Brunious's father composed many of the songs that the band still plays today.

Hurricane Katrina did not damage Preservation Hall physically. Its stone walls and thick wooden shutters were designed to survive such winds. But their business has suffered due to the downturn in tourism post-Katrina and the band personally have fared less well.
Brunious and Rickie Monie lost their homes. Brunious escaped the city but ending up on the floor of the New Orleans convention centre for four days - 'hungry, thirsty and in constant fear of being attacked by marauding youths', according to an Associated Press report.

You can take a virtual tour of Preservation Hall and find out more about the Band here

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JON SAVAGE

Your exclusive chance to listen to a interview with writer Jon Savage on his new book 'Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, published by Chatto & Windus. This major new work by the author of the fabulous 'England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' (1991) is throughly investigated in this exclusive recording.

Listen to it here


'Teenage' has been widely reviewed. The best of all of these, to my mind, is 'The Young and the Restless' by Camille Paglia in the New York Times (May 6,2007).











(Above): Jon Savage at the office of Chatto & Windus on June 1st 2007 [Photo/John May]; (Right) Photobooth portrait Spring 1977

Two interesting interviews with Jon Savage appeared in 3:AM Magazine, both conducted by the magazine's Editor-in-Chief Andrew Gallix. The first dates from 2002 and is entitled 'London's Outrage'; the second from May 2007 - 'Juvenilia and Other Delinquences.'

Jon has sold a large quantity of his punk material to the Liverpool John Moores University, who have created the 'England's Dreaming Punk Archive.'

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JULIEN TEMPLE

(Below): Julien Temple doing a Q&A session at the Duke of York's in Brighton, May 2007. (Right): Julien Temple in central London, June 1982. Original photo by Adrian Boot.

The Audio Generalist is proud to present an exclusive interview with Julien Temple, director of 'Strummer' the new feature-length documentary on dear Joe. You can hear it here.






[From the detailed research for the interview I would single out these two pieces as being of particular note:
'Joe Strummer: the film' by Stephen Dalton (The Times May 12, 2007). The strapline reads: 'Julien Temple's life uncannily reflected Joe Strummer's. No wonder he has filmed the biography.'
The immaculate punk' by Alexis Petridis (The Guardian, 10 May 2007)

Julien and I had not seen each other since 1982, when I interviewed him for Time Out magazine about his recently cancelled project 'Teenage', made for Granada with Jon Savage and Peter York. (I was, I believe, one of the few outsiders to see it). 'Three big egos in one small video box' is his comment on the episode 25 years later. Here is the original Time Out piece.

CULTURAL CURRENCIES

(Time Out June 11-17, 1982)

At the age of 28 Julian Temple has already made some 30 promotional videos; he has also directed two feature-length films, the Sex Pistols, 'The Great Rock and Roll Swindle' and 'The Secret Policeman's Other Ball'. A graduate of the National Film School and of the somewhat less institutionalised Malcolm McLaren Charm School, Temple is popularly regarded as being in direct contact with the Zeitgeist of modern youth, and was centrally involved in the production of 'Teenage', a TV series on teenage culture made for Granada that has since been shelved.

Temple regards the development of teenage culture since the war as 'an incredibly illuminating window on the historical process in Britain', but ironically believes that teenage, having become obsessed with the trappings of style over content, has ceased to be relevant as a social phenomenon. In other words: Teen­age Is Dead.

'The Sex Pistols were the first people to say that in 1976,' says Temple. 'That's where it comes from. The Sex Pistols said there was no future. Teenage has been very identified as an idea with pop music. I think the whole frontal assault on the Sex Pistols on the notion that that idea is timeless and can go on for ever was the key thing in everyone's development.

'If you went to the Club For Heroes you see 49-year-olds still des­perately trying to be teenagers. If you visit your uncle you see little kids aged four desperately identi­fying with Adam Ant. The kind of spectrum that exists now just makes total nonsense of the defined idea that the years 13 to 19 are anything very special.

'The other thing that rams it home now is the economic situation. In market terms, the people who have money to spend are older people who spend it on their young kids or themselves. The teenage thing has been isolated and age groups either side are actually con­suming more.

'Kids did begin to have a certain spending power in the late 1950s but have now lost it. It's been interest­ing researching the programme, how many of the parents of the kids to­day — who were involved in the first wave of teenage culture in Eng­land — were saying how much better off they were as kids in terms of having a good time, having money to spend and things to do, than the kids of today.'

Temple believes that teenage cul­ture is also linked 'with the absence of a defined left-wing political tradition that is exciting to young people'. This differentiates Britain strongly from countries like Italy and France. Furthermore, over the last 25 years teenage culture has become less and less rebellious: 'The act.of being a Teddy Boy in 1953 was a heroic one compared with being a Nazi SS Guard in 1982.'

The fact that youth today has no understanding of its place in this cultural tradition is what concerns Temple most: 'If they don't under­stand that it's all been done before, that it's the endless recycling and re-exhumation of old ideas, then they won't reject it.'

This rejection, he feels, is impor­tant if youth and its culture are to progress into the modern age. But Temple's version of events not only differs from the official view, it sub­verts it. It is not widely realised to what extent there is an official his­tory of youth, passed down by rote from one writer to another, from one paper to another, endlessly repeated and enshrined, repackaged and resold, and in which large vested interests are at stake.

Temple says: 'It's like a litany. It's based on the received biblical theory of rock & roll that has emphasised the music and icons of guys with guitars for 25 years. It's amazing how it's gone on that long.

'The whole idea of what we were doing (in the TV series) was to re­write that history from the perspec­tive of the thing now being over. Hindsight is a very useful perspective that hasn't really existed until now.

'What is killing any really new development in music is this old car­cass of pretension and art, with NME theorists like barnacles all over the thing. They need to be cut off and music just needs to be like any other creative function in society. You dance to it and enjoy it but you don't have to read Paul Morley's ideas about it anymore.

'The notion of teenage now is a notion of controlling people, packaging people into a loop. It's like joining the army almost. You're fed in, you go round in a loop and every three years the rockabilly style comes up. It's just endlessly repeating itself and stopping people seeing beyond this stupid little whirligig.'

While many of today's pop figureheads have adopted a much more practical modus operandi than that of their predecessors, Temple believes that there's still a disturbing level of pretension in the manner in which they present themselves to the public.

'I didn't like the New Romantic style of music, thinking or videos. They all seemed to go hand in hand. "Let's run up to the attic and get out the dressing-up trunk." Every Ultravox mini-thing was more pre­tentious than the last one and further away from any kind of meaningful statement. It's very pre­dictable in its decadence.

'I just think there's something a bit cleaner and healthier in the kind of one-finger synthesizer music that has replaced it, the Depeche Mode thing or the Human League. It actually seems one step nearer to the end to me, because anyone can do it.

'If you dial a push-button phone you can play your own tune. If you add up your royalties, you're actually writing your next song on your melodic calculator. Very ter­minal exercise but it's fun and less pretentious.'

See previous post: NME: The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music
This was the first major piece on the first Sex Pistols film, published in late 1979.