Embarassment at traffic lights & great summer songs: I'm black and I'm proud

THERE are fewer things more embarassing than getting caught mid air guitar or its singing equivalent, getting caught reciting lyrics that have no relevance to you or your life.
Typically that can mean being found rapping about the thug life and pimpin' bitches in the hood when you are a 35-year-old white man living in a British or Irish suburb and commuting to and from a well paid job in the banking sector.(If such a position exists anymore.)
My version of getting caught like this happened today on the way into work and features heavily the music of the Chicagoan consciousness poet of black power Curtis Mayfield.
Those of you au fait with the great man's work will be aware of the now famous refrain from the live version of Mighty, Mighty (Spade and Whitey) where he incants four times "I gotta say it loud," before being joined by his band in a gutsy, dramatic and defiant chorus of "I'm black and I'm proud."
At this juncture it is apposite to note that I could not be more removed from either Curtis Mayfield or the 1970s Chicago/ Black Rights movement he represents. I am a rapidly expanding, white Irish man with a shocking singing voice much too poor or deep to affect that beautiful, pure Mayfield falsetto. I also have absolutely no sense of rhythm, so am utterly unqualified to replicate any soulfullness of Curtis's classic songs.
Well, it was at the end of my very loud second round of "I'm black and I'm proud," that I opened my eyes, ceased my authentic polyrhythmic clapping/ air bongo combination and glanced to the car also stopped at traffic lights to the right of me.(All windows open, sun dappled Stanley Road, Bootle, near Hugh Baird College if you want to complete the picture.)
The driver, archetypical Scouse mum - magenta hair with massive knock-off D&G shades stuck in said barnet - was in bulk laughing at me, pointing out the spectacle to a barely responsive toddler, who was also laughing his wee huggies off.
The lights went to green, I sped off towards the quirky exoticism of Kirkdale and the Eldonian Basin and Curtis launched into We People Who are Darker than Blue.
Now is there a better summer trio of songs in a playlist than Move on Up followed by Mighty, Mighty (Spade and Whitey)followed by We People...?
What are the strong summery songs with positive messages that can make you feel better or make you look a big eejit at traffic lights?

The Wire's Batimore on Google Earth

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The Good Doctor reviews In the Loop

Die dog or shite the licence: Sport's greatest documentary

AS MANY a rhino and fully packed-up army regiment are 'tapering' for the London Marathon, my attention turns not to Brendan 'Bren' Foster or Steve 'Crammy' Cram's commentary but towards Northern France, Flanders, Holland and the Ardennes.
Because, it is at this time of the year where the real hard men of world endurance sport are crowned and where real sporting drama can become an art form.
In the cycling races Paris Roubaix and Tour of Flanders et al, the hardest professional riders brave strong winds and terrible conditions in a series of one day, eyeballs out, muck-and-gutters, die-dog-or-shite-the-licence endurance drags to prove who is the daddy.
Paris Roubaix, from Compeigne 60k North of Paris to the velodrome in eponymous town of the race's title, is the truest test of the biggest, hardest most powerful 'rouleurs' in the peloton.
Amid 166 miles of racing there are 20 sections of pavement, no longer used by normal traffic. The riders fight over broken cobbles either blinded by dust thrown up by support vehicles on dry days or through mud and gutters after spring downpours.
They are supported by huge crowds, glugging beer and chips, who throng the roads where once WWI raged. The race was given the savage soubriquet 'The Hell of the North' in 1919, and this race is a different kind of hell for today's riders.
It is cycling as far removed from the glamour of les Grands Tours and the sportives of modern times as can be and closest to the sport's late 19th Century roots.
Some the greats have won it several times: Eddy Merckx won it three times (once by the record margin of more than 5 minutes), Francesco Moser three times in a row (1978-80), Bernard Hinault won it once and vowed never to go near it again while my hero Sean Kelly, (below) took the trophy twice.

But the undisputed master thus far is Roger De Vlaeminck who won it four times in the 1970s.
Last week's winner, Belgian Tom Boonen claimed his third cobbles trophy and could challenge De Vlaeminck over the next couple of years. His win this year was a triumph of hard man riding, pushing the tempo over the last sections of cobble and making everyone else either fall or fall by the wayside.

But Paris Roubaix has thrown up the single greatest sports film of all time, A Sunday in Hell (1976), by the Danish director Jørgen Leth, an underestimated classic of the documentary genre. It is, in my opinion, rivalled only by the Canal+ TV film about the France 1998 World Cup winners Les yeux dans les Bleus by Stéphane Meunier.
Both films are given unlimited access to the most hallowed sanctums of professional sport: team meetings, hotel rooms, meal times and technical conflabs and, in both cases (particularly A Sunday), the showers.
But A Sunday in Hell, really captures the physical brutality of Spring Classics cycling and the often complicated machinations of how a team works in the sport.
It is spare in its use of music (a choir chanting Paris Roubaix at times), it has a sober and unintrusive commentary and its 20 camera and one helicopter shoot must have been revolutionary at the time. Its beautiful opening scene of a mechanic from Moser's Sansom team cleaning and lovingly assembling a bike is as articulate a scene as anywhere else in cinema.
As Nick Fraser, the BBC commissioning editor who showed it on BBC4 in 2005 says: "You can see every bead of sweat on the cyclists and every smashed-up ankle. It really makes you never want to get on a bike again. But it is an amazing film."

Take the Google Earth Tour of The Wire

GET out on them Hamsterdam corners, in the low rises or in the towers and see the hoppers slinging Death Row, WMD, Plymouth Rock or the fearsome Pandemic.
Have a smoke out the back of the Baltimore Sun office with Haynes or keep it real tight outside the rim shop with Marlo Stanfield.
Where would you rather be people? Am I taking this too far?

Have a smoke with Haynes, what would it be like to work on a proper newspaper?



Rims courtesy of Marlo?
















Prez could show anyone to play dice (Series 4)


















I went to Hamsterdam and all I got
was this lousy white T




















Bodymore Murdaland alley
from opening credits

















Bodie and Little
Kevin's Corner (Series 4)
















Barksdale Towers, burning cop car has
been towed and the scene cleaned

The Thick of It: A Tribute to Malcolm Tucker

Malcolm Tucker: Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off.

[to Ollie] If you don't go get me some cheese, I'll rip your head off, and give you a spinedectomy.

Ben Swain: Where does it leave me?
Malcolm: I guess it leaves you standing in a chamber in the House of Commons with your big flaccid dick hanging out, with a "vote for me" sticking on the end.

Malcolm: How much fucking shit is there on the menu and what fucking flavor is it?

Malcolm: [to Nick] You know what I call "semantics"? Wank!

Malcolm: Cliff fucking Lawton. Hey, nice. Was the Cillit Bang guy not available?

Lubricated horse cock in your perview

PETER Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the foul mouthed Glaswegian government spin doctor is one of the great British or Irish comedy characters of the last 20 years and he's back in his big screen debut, In the Loop. (And he's not, repeat not, anything to do with Alistair Campbell, so either come the fuck in or fuck the fuck out.)
And just as the Miscellany has been bigging up US satirist Jon Stewart and lamenting the pitiful, rictus grinning husks of light entertainment that masquerade as cutting edge comedy in Britain (Brigstocke, Rufus Hound, Mock the Week et al) we have to salute Armando Iannucci for the finest political satire of our times, by all reports.
The Thick of It, upon which In the Loop is based, was superb television and got to the media obssessed dark control freak heart of the New Labour dream, but to transfer it to the world stage and have the Brit liberals overwhelmed by the hard hitting Yanks as we plunge headlong to war is genius.
The oft-cited cliched measure of how good a comedy really is, is how many times you see the truth in any given routine or show. Given the current Smeargate controversy which is beseiging New Labour and its blogging spinners, The Thick of It must be very, very good as it flagged it up two years ago.

In the Loop's clip of government minister Tom Hollander trying not to justify war with a series of ever more ridiculous and cryptic metaphors will probably be worth the entrance price alone.
Pete Bradshaw, a notoriously difficult critic to please, gave it 5 stars in the Guardian and even the good Doctor Kermode says its hugely clever if not funny all the way through.
Anyway until the GM review next week, make do with the above trailer and (below) the funniest expose of the bullying nature of spin doctor culture in Whitehall. I think this lad loves Jolson.

Crusty Whore's paean to Ruby Walsh

THE world's best busker, Crusty Whore, Christy Moore has released another in the long line of Lisdoonvarna-style songs. And, as usual, it's brilliant. We're honoured to have the old boy rockin still.

The Clash lose out to Bowie. WTF dude?

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This US radio station's battle of the bands is highly contentious in Miscellany Towers. Whaddya reckon, cobbers? What no Wah Heat? No Proper, No Rain, No Real People or Smaller. Merseysidist bastards?

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This is the end, I promise: The best quotes from the Wire

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Print out and keep guide to writing Van Morrison

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If you are struggling to be a singer songwriter like Van Morrison, use this handy print out and keep guide to getting started. This template has stood him in good stead for 41 years.

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Kick it (harmonica solo).

Newspapers: A keypin in democracy

Please read this piece on what newspapers mean to the essential democratic structure of civil society. And silence your guffaws when you go on to read about the treatment of weekly journalists by the Guardian's own group.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/03/local-newspapers-journalism-democracy

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/03/20/nuj-release-guardian-journalists-to-back-regional-colleagues/

What are the new busking classics?

IN LIVERPOOL, on Saturday, in the heart of the Cavern Quarter (where it all began, folks!) I saw a brilliant, insanely good looking lad busking Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire, note perfectly.
I didn't have camera capable of high quality video footage, but it was a great scene. He was surrounded by a load of Geordie stag trip drunks all tunelessly and enthusiastically joining in.
Allied to the fact that Liverpool now has its own version of kora genius Toumani Diabate (above film) and the blind lad who does Shadows-style instrumentals of YNWA (among others), maybe one of our Capital of Culture dividends is an increase in quality in the busking community.
But it has got me thinking, what are the new busking classics?
An old Q magazine (probably in the Du Noyer editorship era, 1990ish) did a round-up of old busking classics, Cavatina, Streets of London et al.
But what are the songs that have become the new busking classics and what are the songs that could never become busking songs, within reason obviously.

£13 haircut and what it tells you about music

FIRSTLY, when did a barbershop haircut get to being the £13 I paid yesterday in downtown Liverpool? However that might just have been worth it given the music that I listened to on the shop's iPod dock.
The hairdresser, early 20s, (looked a bit new Romantic-like), had a fantastic iPod on shuffle, reggae, bit of good hippity hoppity and then a load of Depeche Mode.
And here's the thing that threw me - it was hers. I asked said (less than talkative)hairdresser if it was an iPod owned by a boy, she replied I was a cheeky sod and that it was hers.
I made the sweeping generalisation because I have always associated reggae and the hard core hippity hoppity as essentially boyish, fan boy, male pursuits, along with elements of soul and prog, and just as hi NRG and torch songs, Eurovision, some singer songwriters and modern indie were essentially straight female and sometime gay pursuits.
How wrong I was.

Stevie Wonder's Superstition broken down

What a brilliant video, but one for the completists, Mrs Miscellany was left somewhat cold with it. Thanks to the wonderful Word magazine blog for this.

How to write a Van Morrison song

(picture by Michael Romanos)
HIPPY MYSTIC and curmudgeonly 50s pop cultural warrior Van Morrison is rightly lauded as one of the finest songwriters of his generation or any other. A troubled Celtic troubadour locked in the fug of 1970s Northern California despite living in North Down for many years, his style is enigmatic and difficult to emulate. Or is it?

Intro
Strum malevolently... on a ukulele. A complex circular chord structure of C, F & G is the best framework.

Verse
It is vital to set up the essentially utopian nature of the past while establishing the essential Celtic nature of the piece, I suggest something like:
“Way back, back, back, way back/
Way back/ back in days gone by,

At this point add a reference to a semi-obscure jazz/ blues/ country figure whose American roots authenticity clashes with Celtic soul of the initial lamentation. Something like:
“When Big Joe Turner rumbled from the radio/
Woody and Wolf and Buck Wheat Zydeco
(Ignore the fact that Big Joe Turner, Woody Guthrie, Howling Wolf or Buckwheat ever, erupted from any Ulster Radio)

Now, despite the fact that the song has been sung in a mid-Atlantic drawl thus far, one needs now to insert a couple of geographically and colloquially specific Ulster references in a VERY thick East Belfast accent. Perhaps:
“I was eatin’ a pasty bap and Paris buns/
By the cinema down the Creggagh Road”

Another temporal reference (passing seasons, perhaps) and one more matriarchal reference, and it's nearly time for the chorus. Maybe:
“Now there’s brown leaves rustling in the trees/
I can still see mama’s bitter tears for me”

Chorus
Move towards a self piteous lament for how crap it is being successful, but, most importantly, link all three previous factors utilised in the verse: reminiscence, Northern Ireland psycho-geography and perhaps a hippyish pop cultural reference.
Pay no attention to scan or syllable structure. Scat sing like a mother lover.

‘Not as good now as it was then (kick it)
Dharma Bums and Kerouac’s Zen (uh huh)
Flute bands and Woody Guthrie (C’mon)
Mama , mama, Lord, lord, lordy lord,
Why am I so lonely?’

Break now for a gratuitous harmonica and/or saxophone solo augmented by the most under valued but expensive session band money can buy.

Finish with a dash of Georgie Fame and/or Brian Kennedy harmony.

Repeat for 4mins 56secs

You can make hope out of folding papers

The following brilliant piece by Peter Preston was in today's Observer

MEDIA GLOOM? It sometimes seems like a norovirus surging round Heston Blumenthal's kitchen. Great American papers cut salaries (on the New York Times) or slice away a third of their staff (in Atlanta). British groups, from Northcliffe to the Guardian's own regionals, announce hundreds more redundancies. Advertising falls off a cliff. Polly Toynbee and other mainstream columnists suddenly scent a hammer blow to democracy - and, in Polly's case, want local ratepayers to chip in and help out. We're between perfect storm and perfect panic. So there's nothing to do but calm down.
"Don't write off newspapers. They aren't finished," said Sly Bailey, CEO of Trinity Mirror, the other day. "This is absolutely not facing oblivion. We believe in the future of newspapers."
Well, she would say that, wouldn't she? She runs 140 or so titles around the UK - but she's closed 27 of them in the past 14 months, sold four more, and made 1,300 staff redundant. Ad revenue at Trinity plunged 30% in the first two months of 2009. And her share price - once the be-all-and-end-all for misty-eyed investors - has followed suit, from 314p to 25p over 12 months.
Yet she's not part of the rather long pundit queue crying doom via internet bloodbath. She's much more hopeful about real business and real recovery prospects - and she's not alone. Read the authoritative Pew Center annual report on the future of American journalism and you'll discover that "the death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures. The industry still took in roughly $38bn last year, and earned profits in double digits. Some 48m newspapers are sold everyday in the US. Even newspapers whose companies are in bankruptcy are profitable."
In short, Bailey - reminding us, along the way, that 140m newspapers are bought in the UK every week - is right to point out that there's a hell of a lot left. Better to analyse rather than wail.
High-profile papers closing? The Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one total and one print-version casualty from 2009 thus far, also have one thing in common: they were both one of two papers in town. Denver still has the Post; Seattle still has the Times. And in San Francisco, despite the problems afflicting its Chronicle, Hearst is negotiating cost cuts, not closure. When you look at the victims on both sides of the Atlantic, you see a clear enough pattern.
Those 27 Trinity Mirror closures mostly affect third or second papers in their markets, too, many of them freesheets that couldn't keep an ad revenue stream flowing. Evening newspapers in the US are on their last legs, killed by different commuting patterns, deserted city centres and suburban traffic jams: nothing to do with the net. And many of the same imperatives increasingly apply in Britain.
Factor in simple changes in the way we live. Factor in 30% advertising revenue drops over two brutal months, and blame the crunch, not the net, for that, because web advertising is drooping, too. Factor in the mounds of debt that chains like Johnston Press have wrapped round their own necks, plus extraneous investments unhinged by recession. And what have you got?
Not death by the net, or salvation by the net, but something a little more complex. The really significant US news of the past few days, in fact, has been good, not bad: the purchase, after a year in limbo, of one of America's top 30 newspapers, the Union-Tribune in San Diego, bought by equity capitalists - and clearly bought cheap. Conclusion: print still has a price and is still worth buying if that price is right (which it hasn't been through 20 silly years). Now, as the price goes down, recovery prospects rise.
That won't prevent much evident pain and loss in print's shrinking ranks, but it will begin to rebalance perceptions. Is the 20-person website that now serves Seattle as a residual Post-Intelligencer up to snuff? No, it's thin and ordinary and - above all - short of reporting resource: it direly needs more of the 145 or so print journalists it couldn't afford to keep because average ad takings on the net are only 10% to 15% of what they remain on paper.
"We have an absolute belief in our print brands, but alongside a growing, profitable digital business," says Bailey. Crucially, she's talking not one or the other, but both: a transition of shared necessity. It isn't a future that will comfort those 1,300 who have lost their jobs; bitterness and blame inevitably flow free across recession's landscapes. But it is a future with evidence - not self-feeding hysteria - attached.

The myth about the death of newspapers

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

THIS brilliant video to some extent shows the lunacy of those in charge of running newspapers in the modern age and the human tragedy when one shuts down.
Let's start examining more closely the business model of newspaper chains hungrily sucking profits from still successful titles to pay executive bonuses while laying off journalists and crying wolf about the internet.
Let's look at the unsuccessful grand lies of centralised systems etc of the late 1990s and early 2000s which robbed us of cash which could have been used to ward off the current downturn.
Let us talk about the groups run mostly by people from weekly newspaper advertising departments who have no inherent belief in the contribution of editorial to what the insultingly call 'the product'.
Let's talk about how these groups have yet to go their staff to try and innovate in any way.
Let us talk about groups that are still fundamentally talking to their communities rather than having a conversation with them.
Let's look at the groups still looking to generate ad revenues from that one large print circulation rather than recognising the thousands of smaller overlapping communities the net offers us.
Let's get back to thinking of our readerships as valued, breathing, human communities with stories to tell rather than as demographics or potential figures on a ledger and then maybe we will fix this without closing any more papers.

A Twisted Love Story

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GM NOW ONLINE IN PRINT, LA

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