Latest Posts
Jack Johnson
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 September Death of Miles Davis, 1991 On this day in 1991, Miles Davis died. By his own estimation the Juilliard educated trumpeter, band leader and composer changed music “five or six times”. Whether that is true or not, he was there when bebop was being invented, and the same went for hard bop, orchestral jazz, modal jazz, jazz-rock and techno-funk, the last of which he tossed off almost as an afterthought, having come out of retirement after spending the late 1970s indulging his two addictions – drugs and sex. His 1959 album Kind of Blue is the best selling jazz … Read more
26 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week The Kings of Summer (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) An immensely smart coming of age film pitched somewhere between Stand By Me and Superbad (ie dark undertow, with jokes). And it’s entirely on the side of the kids, whose decision to go off and live in the woods, leaving their sarcastic, obnoxious, bullying, superior parents clueless as to where they’ve gone, is never presented as the callow act of peeved teenagers. Out in the woods, our junior heroes build a rudimentary house, set about sourcing food (sometimes from supermarket bins), grow wispy beards. Meanwhile the film sets about building a dreamy, trippy, sunny song of summer and innocence, … Read more
Trainspotting
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 September Irvine Welsh born, 1958 On this day in 1958, in Leith, Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh was born. Or was he? After a police arrest in 1996, just after fame had hit him like a heroin rush, the police revealed that he was in fact seven years older, so born in 1951. Or 1961, if the BBC’s Writing Scotland website is to be believed. But 1958 is what the author maintains (I say “maintains” though his own website is silent on the subject), so let’s stick with that. After growing up in nearby Muirhouse, Welsh moved to London in the late … Read more
Manhattan
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 September George Gershwin born, 1898 On this day in 1898, the writer of Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Someone to Watch over Me, Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess was born in Brooklyn, New York. A school dropout, Gershwin, born Jacob Gershowitz, was playing piano in clubs at the age of 15, published his first song when he was 16 and was writing shows by his early 20s. His breadth was amazing – Tin Pan Alley songs, entire Broadway and Hollywood musicals and his “folk opera” Porgy & Bess all poured from him, with Gershwin all the time … Read more
Valhalla Rising
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 September The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066 On this day in 1066, an Anglo Saxon army led by King Harold Godwinson went into battle against a Norwegian army led by Harald Hardrada. The English (ie Anglo Saxon) army numbered about 15,000, the invading army around 9,000. As the numbers suggest, the English won, though at a cost of at least five thousand men (estimates put the losses on the other side at around six thousand, or two thirds of the army). Why does this battle matter? For a start it marks the last time the Anglo Saxons would win anything … Read more
The Shop Around the Corner
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 September CompuServe launches first consumer internet service, 1979 On this day in 1979, after ten years of supplying dial-up computer timesharing to businesses, CompuServe (originally Compu-Serve) started to offer something similar to the great unwashed. The service was called MicroNET and was sold through Radio Shack stores in the USA. It proved more popular than CompuServe had anticipated and by the following year had been renamed CompuServe Information Service. By then consumers could access news stories, stock quotes and weather reports and they could book airline tickets using only their computer. They could also chat in forums and communicate via … Read more
Ray
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 September Birth of Ray Charles, 1930 On this day in 1930, Ray Charles was born. Six times married, the father of 12 children, Charles also found time to help create what is now known as soul music, a fusion of gospel, jazz and blues, a prime example being his song Georgia. Sighted at birth, Charles started losing his vision when he was five and was completely blind by the age of seven, thanks to glaucoma. Charles was playing in bars in his early teenage years, by the time he was 19 he was having his first hits. Ten years later, … Read more
Zift
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 September The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence, 1908 On this day in 1908, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declared his country to be independent of the Ottoman empire and a full country in its own right. Only a few years earlier Bulgaria had de facto absorbed the Ottoman province of East Rumelia as the Turkish empire, which had held so much power in the Balkans, started to lose its grip, particularly following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which Turkey lost. The independence of Bulgaria was to some extent the logical progression of 1878’s Congress of Berlin, a grand border-drawing exercise carried out … Read more
23 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week Byzantium (StudioCanal/cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Ah, the burden of being a vampire. It’s been done to death in the movies recently but Neil Jordan is at the helm here and knows how to spice things up. Here he adds a touch of the same mix he used on The Company of Wolves nearly 30 years ago. In other words there’s added social critique, class and gender being the targets of both Jordan and writer Moira Buffini. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton are the two vampires searching for a new home, the former a Let the Right One In waif, the latter a lusty Hammer horror vamp – both of … Read more
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 September Publication of The Hobbit, 1937 On this day in 1937, George Allen & Unwin first published a children’s story by John Ronald Ruel Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford. It was called The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, and had grown out of pipesmoke gatherings of an informal literary group of Oxford academics called the Inklings, who met at a pub on Tuesday mornings. Perhaps as a reaction against the modernist experimentation of writers such as James Joyce, the Inklings favoured strong narratives and fantasy, both of which are present by the … Read more
The Battle of the Sexes
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 September Billie Jean King plays Bobbie Riggs at tennis, 1973 On this day in 1973, a retired 55-year-old male tennis pro who had won Wimbledon in 1939 took on one of the timeless champions of women’s tennis, then in her absolute prime. The media hoopla surrounding this tennis match at the Houston Astrodome cannot be overstated. It is still regularly described as “the most watched tennis match in TV history” which can’t still be true, but nevertheless gives an idea of the interest. Riggs, a showman, gambler and wielder of a huge shit-eating grin, had shown a master’s command of … Read more
A Hard Day’s Night
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 September Brian Epstein born, 1934 On this day in 1934, Brian Epstein was born. Dead by the age of 32, the Liverpudlian who became famous as the manager of The Beatles first heard of the band while working in his father’s Liverpool record shop, NEMS. Having seen them, liked them and discovered that they weren’t really being managed, Epstein took them on and proceeeded to turn them into the publicly acceptable face of Merseybeat – nice suits, nice hair and a nice co-ordinated bow to end their set instead of jeans, leather jackets, scruffy hair and messing about on stage. … Read more
