In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *The Dreams Of Childhood… And Adulthood - The Music Of Priscilla Herdman

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Christie Moore performing "John O' Dreams".

CD Review

Moondreamer, Priscilla Herdman, Redwing Music, 1998

Sometimes you find out about a singer straight up, through a record, on the radio, a concert, or…”YouTube”. Sometimes the route is more circuitous. That is the case here with singer/songwriter Priscilla Herdman. I first hear her doing a duet with the old Wobblie, singer/storyteller/ folk historian Utah Phillips on his song “I Remember Loving You”. Of course, for this old folk devotee anyone that has Phillips’ imprimatur on him or her bears further investigation. That is part of the reason that I know about the work of Kate Wolf, for one.

So here we are. And what we have with this presentation are lullabies and other “soft” songs for adults and …children. Well, that is okay, too. Sometimes this is just the kind of “dreamy” music that fits those moments just before slumber time, for adults and kids alike. The best to do just that are “John O’ Dreams”, “Moon And Me”, and “Stars On The Water”.

John O'Dreams Lyrics

[G]When midnight comes and people[C] homeward [G]tread,
Seek out your blanket and your[C] feathered[G] bed,
Home comes the[D] rover,his journey's[G] over
Yield up the night time to old[C] John O[G]'Dreams
Yield up the night time to old[C] John O'[G]Dreams
[2]
Across the hill the sun has gone astray
Tomorrows cares are many dreams away
The stars are flying,your candle's dying
Yield up the night time to oldJohn O'Dreams
Yield up the night time to old John O'Dreams
[3]
Both man and master in the night are one
All things are equal when the day is done
The prince and the ploughman,the slave the free man
All find their comfort in old John O'Dreams
All find their comfort in old John O'Dreams
[4]
When sleep it comes the dreams come running clear
The hawks of morning cannot reach you here
Sleep is a river,flow on for ever
And for your boatman choose old John O'Dreams
Yes for your boatman choose old John O'Dreams

*In Defense Of Whimsy- In Honor Of Ms. Beatrix Potter

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of "Miss Potter" trailer for the film.

DVD REVIEW

March Is Women’s History Month

Miss Potter, starring Rene Zellweger, Mansfield Studios, 2007

Frankly, in the mist of time back to the days of my childhood, I was both fearful and delighted by the stories and illustrations of the famous English children's' book writer and illustrator who is the subject of this film, Ms. Beatrix Potter. Perhaps it was fear of the size of the animals in the editions that I would receive from a great aunt. Or because that aunt was poor but thoughtful it might have been the black and white illustrations in the editions that I received. (I was rather startled to see in this film that her work during her lifetime, at her fervent request to her publishers, was done in multi-colors.) Be that as it may be there are a couple of points that I want to make about this very interesting and well-acted film (particularly by Rene Zellweger as Ms. Potter) which on the face of it would seem outside the parameters of the kind of thing that would interest me and the kinds of subjects that I tend to write about in this space.

I am not sure how faithfully the creators of this film were to the biography of Ms. Potter's life, however, for my purpose that is neither here nor there. The story line here concerns (aside from the various romantic interests which a commercial film seemingly cannot do without even with accomplished middle class educated women like Ms. Potter or Ms. Jane Austen) the public flowering of the her story telling and illustrative talents under the guidance of a member of her publishing company (and eventual doom-struck lover) in early 20th century England.

That, of course, is a feat worthy of recognition in and of itself as this is the height of the Victorian period in that country. Her pluck and fortitude as she runs up against the ill wishes of her middle class but very class conscious parents (particularly dear Mrs. Potter) is one of the themes that drive this film. Another is the fate of a thirty-two year old unmarried woman who, moreover, is not concerned about being married if it interferes with her chances for artistic success. Fair enough, but Mother England (to speak nothing of Mother Potter) does not approve.
Finally, this film is a nice look at the fate of the creative artist who is in searching for her self-expression faces at least some condescension for being, merely, a children's' book writer (especially when she could be a ...wife and mother).

Those are the interesting themes presented in this film. The way that Ms. Potter struggles and perseveres to become an independent person with her own resources and navigate her own course through life is another in a now long series of female "uplift" films. This one is a worthy addition to that genre. As to the downside of Ms. Potter's story. The period under discussion was one of great social turmoil in England. This is, after all, the heyday of the women's suffragette movement led by the like of Sylvia Pankhurst (and her sister and mother) and of the emergence of a British Labor party led by Keri Hardie as well as other social experiments. There is no sense in this film that Ms. Potter was aware of such movements or much interested in them.

No one expects an artist, a creative artist to boot, per se to devote their talents for the greater good of their society in a political way. However it helps. Ms. Potter did begin to display a little of that consciousness toward the end of the movie, after she broke from her family and set on her own course, and set up independently in the country and attempted to preserve her Lake District surroundings. But rather than belabor that point let me end with this thought. When we fight for and get a more just society than we have now then maybe there will be time and space enough for a thousand thousand Beatrix Potters to flourish. Until then watch this film and do not be afraid to read her little books with those little animal drawings.

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some-100 Top Summer Books- A NationalPublic Radio Survey

Click on title to link to the results of a National Public Radio (NPR) survey about the 100 favorite summer books that interest its listeners. I have read many of them, have you? Some I would never think of reading, others they missed.

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some

CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures. It describes Hemingway's relationship with Soviet intelligence.

Click on link for a piece of Papa Hemingway’s link with the Soviets during World War II  

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/520631331/chronicling-ernest-hemingways-relationship-with-the-soviets

***The New York Review Of Books" Graphic Artist Extraordinaire David Levine Passes Away

Click on the title to link to a "Daily Beast" obituary for the great graphic artist from "The New York Review Of Books", David Levine.

Markin comment:

Many a smile came around this blogger's face when thumbing through the pages of the "The New York Review" over the years seeing how David Levine skewered the famous, and not so famous. The big question, however, is what will next year's calender look like. I have come to depend on Levine's creations to spruce up my office space.


David Levine, Biting Caricaturist, Dies at 83

His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by prostate cancer and a subsequent combination of illnesses, his wife, Kathy Hayes, said.

Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.

Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times, depicting him as the Godfather, as Captain Queeg, as a fetus.

With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008, during an exhibit of his work called “American Presidents” at the New York Public Library.

Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg.

“They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.”

David Levine was born on Dec. 20, 1926, in Brooklyn, where his father, Harry, ran a small garment shop and his mother, Lena, a nurse, was a political activist with Communist sympathies. A so-called red diaper baby, Mr. Levine leaned politically far to the left throughout his life. His family lived a few blocks from Ebbetts Field, where young David once shook the hand of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became a hero, as did his wife, Eleanor. Years later, Mr. Levine’s caricature of Mrs. Roosevelt depicted her as a swan.

“I thought of her as beautiful,” he said. “Yet she was very homely.”

As a boy he sketched the stuffed animals in the vitrines at the Brooklyn Museum. He served in the Army just after World War II, then graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in education and another degree from Temple’s Tyler School of Art. He also studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and with the Abstract Expressionist painter and renowned teacher Hans Hofmann.

Indeed, painting was Mr. Levine’s first love; he was a realist, and in 1958 he and Aaron Shikler (whose portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House) founded the Painting Group, a regular salon of amateurs and professionals who, for half a century, got together for working sessions with a model. A documentary about the group, “Portraits of a Lady,” focusing on their simultaneous portraits of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was made in 2007; the portraits themselves were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.

Mr. Levine’s paintings, mostly watercolors, take as their subjects garment workers — a tribute to his father’s employees, who he said never believed that their lives could be seen as connected to beauty — or the bathers at his beloved Coney Island. In a story he liked to tell, he was painting on the boardwalk when he was approached by a homeless man who demanded to know how much he would charge for the painting. Mr. Levine, nonplussed, said $50.

“For that?” the man said.

The paintings are a sharply surprising contrast to his caricatures: sympathetic portraits of ordinary citizens, fond and respectful renderings of the distinctive seaside architecture, panoramas with people on the beach.

“None of Levine’s hard-edged burlesques prepare you for the sensuous satisfactions of his paintwork: the matte charm of his oil handling and the virtuoso refinement of his watercolors,” the critic Maureen Mullarkey wrote in 2004. “Caustic humor gives way to unexpected gentleness in the paintings.”

Mr. Levine’s successful career as a caricaturist and illustrator took root in the early 1960s, when he started working for Esquire. He began contributing cover portraits and interior illustrations to The New York Review of Books in 1963, its first year of publication, and within its signature blocky design his cerebral, brooding faces quickly became identifiable as, well, the cerebral, brooding face of the publication. He always worked from photographs, reading the accompanying article first to glean ideas.

“I try first to make the face believable, to give another dimension to a flat, linear drawing; then my distortions seem more acceptable,” he said.

From 1963 until 2007, after Mr. Levine received a diagnosis of macular degeneration and his vision deteriorated enough to affect his drawing, he contributed more than 3,800 drawings to The New York Review. Over the years he did 1,000 or so more for Esquire; almost 100 for Time, including a number of covers (one of which, for the 1967 Man of the Year issue, depicted President Johnson as a raging and despairing King Lear); and dozens over all for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and other publications.

Mr. Levine’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Hayes, his partner for 32 years whom he married in 1996, he is survived by two children, Matthew, of Westport, Conn., and Eve, of Manhattan; two stepchildren, Nancy Rommelmann, of Portland, Ore., and Christopher Rommelmann, of Brooklyn; a grandson, and a stepgranddaughter.

“I might want to be critical, but I don’t wish to be destructive,” Mr. Levine once said, explaining his outlook on both art and life. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.”