Let’s get caught up a bit with some of Petula Clark’s doings.
Petula’s interviews on radio and TV tend to be diplomatic about personal matters, but in print she can be quite frank and open about herself. What she reveals at this link is one such example.
Coming up on September 13 on PBS is “The 60’s Live!” Petula’s appearance can’t be truly live, as she will be performing in Manila that day.
On September 22 Pet will be back in New York, for the delayed appearance with Harry Belafonte at the Paley Center at the Museum of Television and Radio. Click here for more background about that.
For complete up-to-date information, check the American site PetulaClark.net, and in the UK, the Petula Blog.
Back in ‘81 a biography of The Beatles by Phillip Norman, called Shout!, was released. If I ever knew why it was given that title, I’ve long since forgotten.
“Shout!” is also the name of a song by the Isley Brothers that the Beatles performed once on the English TV show Ready, Steady, Go!. With all of the Beatles-related sites, and the many videos posted on YouTube, I’m surprised that I can’t find a good transfer of that appearance. So I’ll provide one here, taken from an 8-inch Laserdisc.
Another Beatles bit of information is that they had some of the first Philips-Norelco Compact Cassette decks in England. Fifteen years later, John Lennon was holding cassettes when he was shot.
Jerry Wexler has died. He was born in 1917, the same year as singer Jo Stafford, but Wexler preferred a different genre of music. He produced this recording in 1959. It has the sort of wide separation sound, typical of the early days of stereo, that I really enjoy hearing.
Last Sunday we were at Tanglewood, in Lenox, MA, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra plays every summer. It was an all Mozart program, and well attended, although the age of the audience skewed decidedly 40 and up. I caught some of the applause on video at the end of the concert, following Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, “The Prague.”
While waiting in line to buy a snack during intermission I happened to stand next to political consultant and former presidential adviser David Gergen, and I overheard him discussing — what else? — politics.
A few miles up the road, at the Norman Rockwell Museum, there’s an exhibit of political cartoons by leftist artist Stephen Brodner. I like Brodner’s work a lot. His style seems to show the influence of Al Hirschfeld, as well as Ralph Steadman’s earlier drawings, with perhaps a dash of Arnold Roth tossed in here and there.
And in North Adams, MA, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, aka Mass MoCA, Eric really enjoyed Jenny Holzer’s PROJECTIONS. It’s hard to say what it is. Here, watch and decide for yourself.
A kid happened to be screaming, and his echo gives you an idea of how big the room is. The museum is in the former Sprague Electric factory, and that hall is the same one I mentioned last September, about a failed exhibit. However you want to describe PROJECTIONS, Holzer took good advantage of the space. This is the view from the other end of the room.
There are huge bean bags on the floor, so you can lie back and look up at the projected poetry. A fascinating side effect of the exhibition were all of the sleeping children, totally zonked in the bean bags. Walking through the cavernous hall, with its weird lighting and echoes, it was as if the kids had become part of the exhibit.
Here is the ultimate 8-Track cartridge listening experience. Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” is ideally suited to this particular electronic audio medium. 8-Track tapes were notorious for leakage between channels, but in this case, if that were happening who could tell?
I suspect the tracks are identical, but again, who can tell? Nevertheless, here are all four of them, with the “click” between tracks left intact to simulate the 8-Track listening experience. (Four tracks in stereo, for a total of eight.)
