I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.
ART NOTES— an exhibition entitled Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle— where the 26 surviving panels (of the 30 that he painted) illustrating historical moments from 1775 to 1817 are reunited — will be at the (newly re-opened) Metropolitan Museum of art in NYC through November 1st.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this excellent essay by The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland on the naiveté of Boris Johnson’s government — believing that he can scuttle part of the Good Friday peace deal without having Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi refuse to sign a new bilateral trade deal with the UK, as a result of Brexit.
YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is this February, 2018 essay (even before the midterm elections) pointing out the changes in suburban women voters in the Trumpster era — and they are not the stereotypical left-wingers our opponents portray us as: indeed, having to battle old-line Democratic party officials and their inertia.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Janie the Cat— an Ontario kitteh who was found as a newborn on the side of a road under the sun (where she had suffered burns to her body) — with an unusual color due to a mother with a stressed pregnancy (affecting the pigments in her offspring) — but who has now been adopted by a new mother at the shelter she was brought to.
From the STRANGE BEDFELLOWS file— in 2013, Georgia Power was reluctant to promote solar panels, which irked a citizen activist and who formed an alliance with the Sierra Club …. with the upshot being that Georgia’s solar capacity increasing by thirteen times since then.
This was the daughter of a preacher named Debbie Dooley, co-founder of Atlanta’s …….. Tea Party: yes, who was moved to act by what she considered excessive corporate power (as well as concentrated energy sources vulnerable to terrorism) with the resulting Green Tea Party avoiding climate change talk in order to work.
WHEN IT COMES TO distraught Republicans who are still-on-the-fence …..
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Nana the Cat— a Malaysian kitteh who visits the grave of the father (of her family) each day in the two years since his death.
THE OTHER NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a look at two non-political events: the first report from an upcoming book from a disgraced London police detective (who busted some of the Beatles and Rolling Stones) and a look at the passing of the French singer/actor Juliette Gréco— who was an influential singer and muse of the existentialism/poetry set (Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) plus had a memorable affair with the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis as well as film producer Darryl Zanuck during her (relatively short) Hollywood stint.
JUST IN CASE you haven’t seen this ….. (Sarah McLachlan, call-your-office).
BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz.
SEPARATED at BIRTH— Former Exxon CEO/Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and TV star Michael Harney (who portrayed Sam Healy on Orange is the New Black).
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...................… while I’m not a overly big fan of classical music: an exception is classical guitar works. And last month saw the death of one of the giants of classical guitar, Julian Bream— who was born in 1933 in South London in a nation where the classical guitar was thought of solely as something you would hear on a vacation in Spain (an Englishman playing a guitar, said one virtuoso, was a kind of blasphemy). And Bream (more than anyone else) helped rescue the lute from being a Renaissance legacy instrument.
His father played guitar in a dance band and when his parents divorced, Julian spent time at his grandmother’s pub where he heard records from the Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. Julian was largely self-taught, save for reading his father’s guitar manual written by the big band jazz guitarist Eddie Lang. Then he saw a concert by Andrés Segovia, setting him on his career path (despite his father’s concern that a guitarist needed to play modern music to be successful).
His debut was at Alliance Hall in London at age fifteen, and he entered the Royal College of Music the next year of 1949 to study piano. Not only was there no guitar program, he was chastised merely for bringing his guitar on campus (which eventually caused him to leave). Bream’s formal first recital was at Wigmore Hall in 1951. He was then drafted into the Army in 1952: yet by being able to be stationed in London, this enabled him to play jazz in an Army dance band, plus classical music moonlighting. After 3-½ years, he found work at the BBC, when his career took-off after that.
When he had made a name for himself, he resolved to not simply rely on transcriptions from Spanish performers, much as he loved them. He commissioned such composers as Benjamin Britten and William Walton which eventually led to a large body of home-grown transcriptions. In the end, he showed that the instrument was equally suited to German, French and English works, not solely Spanish and Latin American ones.
Reportedly his father had bought an old lute from a sailor for only two pounds, which Julian took to especially when he found at the library several scores by the Renaissance lutenist and composer John Dowland. Benjamin Britten took to this project, writing Nocturnal after Dowland specifically for Bream. In 1960 the guitarist formed the Julian Bream Consort (one of Britain’s first historical performance ensembles) with himself on lute that toured world-wide.
He was unable to persuade Igor Stravinsky to commission a work when the two met in Toronto in 1965 , but did perform a work by Dowland for him. He overcame a serious arm injury from an auto accident in 1984 and while he never recorded an album of it: his love of Django Reinhardt found him often jamming in a Hot Club of France-style band, saying that jazz gave him the opportunity to improvise. He also performed in 1963 with Indian musicians, a musical blend that was a forerunner of jazz guitarist John McLaughlin’s band Shakti, a decade later.
Julian Bream retired at the age of eighty in 2013 and died just last month at the age of eighty-seven. He made ninety recordings, won four Grammy awards, in 1985 was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth and was the subject of a 2003 documentary My Life in Music. In their fond remembrance, The Economist concluded:
Yet perfection was always two steps off. Did he feel, an interviewer once asked him, that he had removed the tag of “blasphemy” from an Englishman playing the guitar? Had he, in fact, sanctified it? The question stunned him for a moment. Then he stammered, with his flat London vowels, “Not necessarily.”
Perhaps that’s why he named his dog …. Django.
Two short pieces — one on guitar from the blind Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909)from the Romantic period:
The second short piece is Bream on lute, playing a John Dowland work.