Coallated encounters from the past week:

Bakala

While walking back from the office at midnight last week, I stopped at a local bakala (a kind of small, general shop). Retrieving some milk from the fridge, I heard a groan. Turning, I saw the Iranian shopkeeper sitting behind the till, arms folded, and staring at a pair of large breasts on a small TV in the corner.

He gestured to the TV and said “I have never seen them big like this”. Not knowing the proper response I gave him a non-committal nod. He asked if this was British pornography. I said it wasn’t, the accents were American. The TV repair man, or plumber was at least. The breasts remain stateless.

Great Apes

On another trip back from the office. I passed a group of young men in the street. Forgettable, except that when I passed the second group about a hundred yards later, one gent stepped forward and emitted a loud monkey call. The first group responded in the same kind. It basically sounded like this, except at a full bellow.

I read this morning, completely by accident when browsing his song catalogue on the iTunes store, of the death of Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, legend of Nigerian* highlife music. He passed away in the US on May 11th at the age of 71 after a career that spanned five decades.

It’s a shame Osadebe is so unknown over here, as I consider his music fairly fabulous and have been listening to it somewhat obsessively ever since discovering it late last year. His stuff is arguably the best of a great genre: Highlife, the musical form pioneered by E.T. Mensah that combined calypso, jazz, rock and roll, tribal rhythms and sundry other influences into a heady and joyous mix that swept the clubs of post-independence Nigeria and Ghana. Osadebe’s highlife was different from the standard fare, consisting largely of long (typical track clocking in at about 18 minutes), leisurely and sometimes complex tunes, but was always melodic and danceable. I can vouch for its soothing qualities too: his Sound Time is one of the few albums I can listen to while working and is a pretty effective de-stresser.

Generally the lyrics are in one of the Nigerian languages, I think Igbo, so I’ve got no idea what he’s singing about most of the time. This is possibly just as well, as much of the content apparently consisted of religious entreaties, praise songs for patrons or influential social clubs, or satirical put-downs of personal foes of the kind you really had to be there to ‘get’. Nevertheless Osadebe’s music was hugely popular, more so in the latter half of his career with hits like ‘Makojo’ and ‘Osondi Owendi’. His ‘breakthrough’ of sorts into Western markets happened as late as 1996 with his album ‘Kedu America’, which I’m listening to right now and very fine it is too.

If you want to hear some Osadebe for free, check out the great World Passport podcast blog, which usually includes some of his stuff in the ‘Golden Days Highlife’ series. I’d recommend starting here with Onu Kwube, possibly my favourite track of his. You can also buy a lot of his stuff very cheaply on AudioLunchbox.com, who don’t seem to have twigged that his songs are so long and have priced them the same (99c) as any other track. The available videos (at least, those on YouTube)are probably only of comedy value to Western sophisticates, consisting mostly of unsynched shoestring efforts filmed in the nearest available car-park or leisure complex.

Some obituaries and tributes from Nigerian media can be found here and here.

* Not Ghanaian, as iTunes seems to think.

To follow up yesterday’s post about the Cushman collection, here’s a brilliant post from johnnygunn of Daily Kos with a wealth of great colour photos of ‘America before Pearl Harbour’, including some of Cushman’s.

It includes some interesting detail on early Kodachrome:

As the 1930s came to a close, Kodak came out with Kodachrome film – the first commercially viable color film available to the general public. In 1937 and 1938, the colors were still not stable and accurate, but by 1939 Kodachrome was producing color images of remarkable precision.

Now, not just anybody could buy this film. It cost $5 per roll and had to be sent back to Rochester, New York for development. By comparison, in 1938 Congress established the first minimum wage at 25 cents per hour.

Over the course of three decades from the late 1930s on Charles W. Cushman of Indiana traveled the world and photographed what he saw on colour Kodak slides. On his death some 14,500 of these were bequeathed to Indiana University, who have made the collection available online.

By any standards this is an amazing body of work: for colour and quality they already stand out from most photography of that era, but throw in the range of locations and subjects, and Cushman’s eye for composition and interesting detail and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here.

Cushman went all over: there are thousands of photos from the US, and hundreds from the UK. Best of all, there are a few dozen from Ireland, including some fantastic shots from a June 1961 visit to Dublin.

[edit: Forgot to say, you can get a much bigger version of each photo by clicking the links provided]

Here is College Green, not much changed apart from the traffic:

O’Connell Bridge and the Liffey:

On O’Connell Bridge (complete with flags, green bus and Bolands delivery van):

On O’Connell St itself (they didn’t seem to go in for road markings much in those days):

Cyclists at the bottom of Great Georges St:

And further up Georges St (the Long Hall hasn’t changed much!):

And lastly for Ireland, here’s one from the Vico Road looking over Killiney Beach and up to the hill, so bright and clear it could have been taken yesterday:

Then there’s London, also in the early 1960s. There are great shots here of Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus at night, a ‘huckster’ in Aldgate market, a couple of authentic urchins, the Hippodrome when it wasn’t such a dive, and Covent Garden when it was still a working market (with old-school market men who could balance stacks of pallets on their heads). I love this shot of the South bank of the Thames east of London Bridge, when an area that is now a mix of offices (featuring insufferable yuppies like me) and various cultural activities was solid working docks.

Some of the best stuff comes from the Moorgate area. I’m including this one because I’ve actually been up in that tower (Pat works in the offices below):

And then there’s this one, probably the shot of the collection for me, looking north from London Wall over land still lying waste after the devastating bombs of WWII to the church of St Giles-Without-Cripplegate:

Five years later Cushman returned to find them building the Barbican around St Giles:

The earliest photos are American, and the effect of seeing things from such an early age in such vivid colour is pretty jarring. Here is a New York City street scene from 1941:

Here’s a hot-dog stand and here’s McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th St, which is still there today, more than can be said for many of the lower Manhattan neighbourhoods Cushman photographed.

Finally, proof that times really have changed: in 1941 even the bums were well-dressed:

So, guess what I forgot I had a ticket for this evening:

The Stanley Kubrick Masterclass with Wong Kar-Wai

A rare opportunity to hear from one of cinema’s greatest living filmmakers as he passes through London after a trip to Cannes to unveil My Blueberry Nights, his first English language feature.

Thu 24 May 6.20PM NFT1

That’s … really annoying.

Go see the new Julien Temple film about Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten. I suppose it will appeal far more to Clash fans, but I thought it worked very well on a human level too. It shows Strummer as ultimately an ordinary enough guy who achieved what he did not because of incredible gifts but because of his relentless energy (”We’re not particularly talented, we just try hard”), charm and unfashionable devotion to his principles. He had a funny kind of moral career in that there was always an idealistic hippy trying to get out, one which eventually conquered, sadly not very long before he died, the punk nihilist and the insensitive git who sometimes screwed over his friends, loved ones and bandmates. Ultimately, no matter how much he tried at times to fight it, empathy was written through him like the words through a stick of Brighton rock.

Here’s the trailer for the film. Much of the soundtrack (which is brilliant, and much more than just Clash songs) comes from the radio show Joe did for BBC World Service in the late 1990s. Copies are very hard to get hold of, but I’ve found four episodes online and have uploaded the first two here if anyone’s interested.

Jayne Mansfield in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” I’m not used to things from the 1950s being this funny or strange.

Marlon Brando interviewed by Larry King

The long-lost classic finally surfaces! I’ve long seen this as a litmus test for YouTube and the Internet at large: all that processing power, information and social networking doesn’t mean much if it can’t bring me Marlon Brando wearing red braces and kissing Larry King.

Feeding orphaned alpaca

Doesn’t get much cuter than this. I’ll be seeing these strange, lovely creatures when I visit the farm in July. And the alpaca.

Sometimes you’ve just got to let the music do the talking. Yih, c’mon, check:

For those of you who still don’t get it, Wikipedia explains:

The song begins with close-up shots of a Porsche 911 being driven around. We next see Speak walking amongst tombstones in a graveyard, singing about his dislike for war. Shots of him sitting on the Porsche are interspersed throughout, as well as scenes of war and and people dying. His singing leads into an emotional chorus with four backup singers. As Speak makes it through the graveyard, we see the people from the war scenes mourning around tombstones. He eventually joins the four other singers as they enter into a second, more emotional chorus. As the singers proclaim that they “don’t know what it’s [the war] for”, Speak emphasizes the role of “Business” as a causal factor. During this sequence Varga Miklós elevates into a coloratura soprano vocal performance, as his voice becomes much higher, lighter and more emotional than the other backup singers. The video ends with Speak sitting under a cross holding a pigeon. As the pigeon is released, Speak ends the song by saying “peace”, underlining the core message of the song.

Here is a great thing: ‘15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will’, from the Onion AV Club. My favourite:

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

This is a sure sign that the football season is coming to a close, when such nonsense rushes to fill the void:

The study, involving 2,000 fans of Premiership clubs, found that the average football fan contemplates football 80 times a day. Being a supporter, in other words, is a full-time preoccupation.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the fact that we Evertonians ranked lowest in the study:

Of all the supporters surveyed, Everton’s were most preoccupied by other matters, turning to contemplate their team a mere 43 times a day.

Does this mean we’re disloyal, or just spend our cogitation time on more urgent matters?

I think there’s some sort of catch.

NCTS is currently sending NCT Booking letters to eligible customers, offering them a provisional booking for their NCT test.

If you do not hear from NCTS and think your car may be eligible for the NCT… you can check our on-line service by simply typing in your car registration number + Booking I.D. number (which can be found at the top of your NCT Booking letter).