The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Calling Real Estate fans

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Real Estate singer and guitarist Martin Courtney has released a delightful solo album called ‘Many Moons’. I’ve been listening to it this morning and can report that It’s a natural companion to last year’s ‘Atlas’. Like Real Estate he works with a small but perfectly formed canvas. He is a song-writer who is happy to carve out songs from the same solid piece of wood time and again, it’s the bark and the grain of each carving that provides the subtle variations on a constant theme. Or to put it another way the only stretching going on here is from the listener rousing themselves from the calm repose the album manifests across its 37 minutes. His lightness of touch as singer, guitarist and arranger is his greatest asset because the unassuming approach allows his simple but beautiful melodies to take centre-stage.

Song in the video is called Vestiges.

The Redhead from Wyoming (via Dublin)

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Maureen O’Hara has passed away at the ripe old age of 95. Both my parents are Irish and she was one of their favourites, her fiery temperament and fiery red hair qualities that appealed to them both. The first time I saw her was in The Quiet Man (“I’ll take you home again Kathleen”, a song my mum would often sing to herself), the John Ford epic set in Ireland with John Wayne as the suitor from America returning to his roots.

I’m trying to think who would be today’s equivalent of Maureen O’Hara. Christina Hendricks? She was one of those actresses of that era who simply had to be in front of the camera for men to get hot under the collar. What was surprising about her was how little her beauty got in the way of her talent. She didn’t ever appear to playing on her looks to carry her performance.

The clip is of her fighting another great redhead, Lucille Ball, in 1940’s ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’.

#hashtag

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Also makes a great

– giant noughts and crosses mat – temporary picket fence panel – shit present

http://imgur.com/baKU1sq

Billy The Kid

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The Guardian (http://bit.ly/1MoTYhp) is reporting the unearthing of only the 2nd known picture of Billy The Kid. Bought for $2 in a junk shop in Fresno, California it’s expected to fetch a 7-figure sum at auction. That’s Billy on the left playing croquet. The picture was taken in Mexico in 1878. Billy would have been 18. 3 years later he was shot dead by James Coburn..er..Pat Garrett. Obviously cue Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzAN5qkVOZY

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Ken & Dolly Live Review

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Critics have accused Kenny Rogers of miming his words on stage and of putting in a wooden performance despite the plasticity on display. They also claim there is evidence that his endless (islands in the) stream of face lifts coupled with the accumulated effects of endless plastic surgery operations have reduced his overall body mass.

What do you think?

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Mean Tweets

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My eldest daughter has started high school and is quickly starting to learn that some people in the world are just nasty because they can be, particularly online and on social media. Luckily she’s made of sterner stuff and has bounced back into her groove. To help her on her way I showed her some of Jimmy Kimmel’s mean tweets, a section of his show where celebrities read out a mean tweet that has been written about them. She soon cottoned on to the idea that this very public display of something that could be dispiriting and upsetting for the recipient was a cathartic way of blowing the nastiness projected back up the perpetrator’s own fundament. Like me she also thought some of the original tweets were funny. I told her it was OK to laugh but I was pleased that she took her lead from the reactions.

There’s quite a few clips online for Mean Tweets. The reactions of celebs vary with some looking quite shocked at the vitriol being thrown at them. My all-time favourite reaction is from Chris Pratt in this clip which I think is the perfect combination of “I don’t give a shit” and “Wow, » Continue Reading.

Station Eleven

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Author:Emily St. John Mandel

The wonder of this book is its facility to use a future post-apocalyptic Earth principally as a motif-like backdrop and global “prop” to remind us individually how precious today is and how equally important and significant our memory of it is tomorrow and the next day, and the next. This book easily criss-crosses genres to deliver, at its heart, a simple paean to the importance of the simple details in life – especially those small acts of kindness and tenderness, often random and instinctual – in a complex and troubled world that is unable to prevent catastrophe despite our narcissistic amazement with ourselves. The butterfly effects of an actor dying of a heart-attack on stage gradually and convincingly outweigh the devastating effects of a global flu epidemic that wipes out over 99% of the population. The story is told episodically, jumping backwards and forwards in time, but Mandel cleverly and artfully explores her characters and their significance in the context of one man’s death before the Apocalypse in a way that is a marvel of the art of story-telling as a slow and profound reveal of humanity’s capacity to survive and adapt; her writing is like » Continue Reading.

Advice For The Young At Heart

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There is a magazine called Glamour. Alas, not a bible for all things Marc Bolan and The Sweet but a magazine for Women. Said magazine recently ran a piece entitled ’13 Little Things That Can Make Men Fall Hard for You’. I’d imagined a stray foot from a Word Bird at the top of a flight of concrete stairs or a quick shove in the back on an ungritted icy pavement would do the trick until Ma Bisto explained that this was an advice list for women looking to go the extra mile to keep their man happy. Or the dating equivalent of Viz’s Top Tips. Apparently the list has made many despair at its insistence on putting the onus on women to revert to a 1950’s level of submissiveness. Ma Bisto and I decided to try out all 13 of the ‘Little Things’ to see if I would fall hard or simply collapse flaccid.

Images

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Year: 1971 Director: Robert Altman

The psychological horror film, Images, is one of Robert Altman’s lesser-known films. It was released in 1971, between more familiar and popular films from the director; his revisionist Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and his revisionist and ironic treatment of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

Images is not typical Altman. In many respects it is a more conventional and commodified film to the style of film-making closely associated with him: multi-layered stories, characters cross-talking, a withering and languid “anti-establishment” gaze that suggests everyone involved, including the viewer, is gingerly working their way through a stalled recovery from a bad 60’s trip.

Images is a tight chamber piece, filmed mostly with interiors and with a limited cast. The plot, such as it is, is simple and functional. So far so normal. The conventionality and simplicity of plot and setting are important because what Altman wants to do is to warp our perceptions of normality. What we witness in Images is how different another person’s normality can become over the course of the film. That person is Cathryn, portrayed by Susannah York. She is a children’s author, married without children and living what appears at first » Continue Reading.

Hey Kurt! You read lips?

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Rodney Dangerfield specialised in gatecrashing films, even the ones he was headlining.

In Caddyshack he played nouveau-riche property developer, Al Czervik, with all the understatement of a psychotic bull on heat. He’s Groucho Marx channelling Tony Montana (think, “Say hello to my little putter”). Small wonder Scarface’s writer, Oliver Stone, cast him as Mallory’s abusive father in Natural Born Killers. Groucho famously quipped that he’d refuse to join any club that was prepared to accept him as a member. Dangerfield’s Czervik has no such scruples but then again no one is prepared to accept him, on any level. Dressed permanently like a clown’s idea of a porn star on a first date Dangerfield doesn’t so much chew the scenery in Caddyshack as dry hump it, eyes permanently bulging in extremis as he ejaculates each punchline. There are few scenes with him alongside his comedic co-stars Bill Murray and Chevy Chase. Perhaps their agents took the decision to keep the young turks away from the old lion on career health and safety grounds. Dangerfield physically dominates scenes, walking and twitching into view like some kind of jive-ass artillery prior to verbally razing everything to the ground; other characters, no matter » Continue Reading.

I was walking down this road the other day…

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A chance conversation with a neighbour earlier included him more or less saying the words in the title. I was transported back 30 odd years to the time I saw Ted Chippington. I think The Sea Monster (Jo Brand) might have been on the same night. Like Frank Sidebottom Ted was someone guaranteed to polarise an audience. A quick Google and I found this clip of Ted on Pebble Mill which illustrates that schism in how people responded to his act. Incredible to think that back then there were real-life equivalents of Viz characters you could see on a comedy night or as the support act for some indie band or maybe on some late night C4 yoof programme. I wondered if knowing who Ted Chippington is is the comedy equivalent of knowing who the musicians Woody Woodmansey or “Fletch” are; people I assume are common knowledge on The Afterword but nowhere else.

Apparently Ted is performing again and is on Twitter. Here’s one of his tweets:

“Fruit and urinal give a bad name to cakes everywhere”

Have Afterworders any other examples of lesser known heroes from the world of comedy?