MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark ...

... all the sweet green icing flowing down ---
Someone left the cake out in the rain ---
I don't think that I can take it,
Because it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe agaaaaaaain ....

[ahem]

Yes, I know it should be MacArthur Park, but who am I to argue with the original Richard Harris recording? All seven-and-a-half minutes of it?

The song is forty years old this month^*. It is cheeseball, overblown, sentimental, and preposterous: and still, there's a part of me that loves it. Harris was not exactly the best singer in the world, but he was an excellent performer, and this recording is a great performance. If the song is an epic: go epic.

UPDATE (28th May): It appears that Chris Noth, a.k.a. Big a.k.a. Mike Logan, is a big fan of Harris' recording.

^* [I've had trouble establishing a date for the album, A Tramp Shining, looking around in the web. April 1968 is the best I've managed, based on this website on the Dunhill label.]

One year on

This blog is a year old: I wish the occasion were a happier one. By the way of a good-news story, though, let me point you to an effort to remember students and faculty through relief work in poor parts of Virginia.

The following posts have been popular:

All together now! (30-Jul-07)
Blinded by the light (05-Jan-08)
Easter for grownups (27-Mar-08)
The end of the affair (01-Jul-07)
Four reactions to an apology (17-Feb-08)
A German beer trail (22-May-07)
Kermode on Vermes on the Resurrection (23-Mar-08)
The love that dare not speak its name (25-Jun-07)
Midgley on rights and social ethics (14-Sep-07)
Miserere mei, Deus (18-Nov-07)
Of giants and crockery (17-Oct-07)
Perks? (19-Apr-07)
Pheasant Plucking (24-Jun-07)
She is a very bad girl (12-Jul-07)
sushi and sashimi (23-Dec-07)
Talk is cheap (24-Oct-07)
Tambourines and elephants (16-Dec-07)
Tangled up in (quantum) blue (05-Oct-07)

Let me also put in a shameless plug for Silver on the Tree (30-Mar-08) and Europa Rising (08-May-07)

Give the man his due

Olivia Judson (a.k.a. Dr Tatiana) blogs on the NYT side concerning Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution's Other Guy. It was his birthday on January 8th (OK, so I missed it), and in five months it will be a hundred-and-fifty years since his letter to Charles Darwin that, by showing that someone else was onto the idea, prompted him to publish The origin of species by means of natural selection.

Second in time and in profundity to the sainted Charles, Wallace has missed out both on being a scientific pin-up and on being the scapegoat for a million social and conceptual ills. (Heads up, people: "it" is not Charles Darwin's fault. Or Alfred Russel Wallace's. Or the fault of biology. If you want someone to blame for whatever dreadful thing you think has been unleashed, you might more accurately try Herbert Spencer.) Of course, I should not wish the latter fate on anyone's memory. But as for Wallace's scientific standing: this is a man who, whatever his other weaknesses, independently hit upon the idea of evolution by natural selection, one of the great concepts of any age, and the key in the lock of natural history. Let's give him his due.

Blinded by the light

It's thirty-five years since the release of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen's first album and an eternal member of my top-ten-disc list: an album I could not bear to part with.

Let's begin at the beginning, with Blinded by the light, which you may know from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version of 1976. Mann is bright, full, polished, and somewhat over-processed; Springsteen's original version is a rangy, burstingly articulate shaggy-dog revelation of a song, overstuffed with internal-rhyming lyrics but somehow still loose and jangly. The other album highlight is Lost in the flood, a lush triptych of apocalyptic stories that proceed from dream-horrors to the truly terrifying: the casual cruelty and indifference of ordinary people. At the other end of the scale, I have a personal fondness for the quietest and least typical entry, The Angel, which is merely a poem set to sad music. (But what a poem!) There is not a dull song on the album, although there are some strange ones, and in all of them surprises of music, of image, or of sheer poetic beauty.

Greetings is one of those first-published-works with a coltish energy, what Lester Bangs described (in his Rolling Stone review) as "reveling in the joy of utter crass showoff talent run amuck and totally out of control". Springsteen's next album, a bare eight months later, has a similar zest but more polish, and was a bit more popular; his 1975 album, Born to Run, set the world on fire. And for the wider public, "Bruce Springsteen" pretty much begins in 1975, the song Rosalita excepted. But for those who have ears to hear, all of the talent and poetry and promise and joy is there in January '73, together with that utter-crass-showoff edge that the mature albums --- for all their wonders --- don't quite recapture.

Like others of my generation I got interested in Springsteen because of the Born in the USA tour: it was one of my English teachers, possibly the only person at my high school who shared the interest, who put me on to the early albums. My schoolfriends listened in incomprehension as I obsessed and enthused about the poetry and the energy of this work, and it wasn't until years later that I discovered I shared the love with critics, fans worldwide, and the entire state of New Jersey. But since the knowledge isn't general, the least I can do on this anniversary is to pass on the good news. If you haven't heard Greetings: you must. And Mr Buchan --- if you're out there --- thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The Anniversary Party

The independent film The Anniversary Party was released six years ago today (in Australia, anyway). The party of the title is to celebrate the sixth wedding anniversary of Joe, a rising author, and Sally, a (slightly older) film actress whose star is --- as they say --- beginning to fade. I guess you've already worked out that neither the party, nor the relationship, go especially smoothly.

Written and directed by the lead actors, the excellent (if unsmiling) Jennifer Jason Leigh and the all-too-appropriately named Alan Cumming, the film was shot in 19 days on digital video at a friend's house; the directors got their mates to play the other roles, with DIY makeup. It shows you what you can do with a little initiative, although it surely helps if the friend with the house is Sofia Coppola, and your mates include Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (and their real-life kids), John C. Reilly, Jennifer Beals, Parker Posey, and Jane Adams. (I must re-watch it and see what the glorious Mary-Lynn Rajskub was doing back then, before 24.) They got Gwyneth Paltrow to play an emotive starlet who's actually a fair bit sharper than people suppose ... a lot of the roles sail similarly close to the wind.

It is rather well written and very well (and fearlessly) acted. But you maybe don't want to see it if you only recently reconciled with your spouse.

Fifty years ago today ...

... Sputnik went "beep, beep, beep", and the world changed.

It's Space Week from 4-10 October in celebration; there is probably a series of events on near you.

Normally, I only post on the planetary programme, but of course Sputnik was the public beginning of human effort in space, so it's only right to join in the party.

Happy birthday ...

UPDATE: There is an article in The Australian today on a push to establish an Australian space programme.