Meanwhile, on Earth Three, things get worse

These two tweets were next to each other in my timeline today. (And they're not the only ones like it.)

No wonder the young people hate us. On the other hand, they will have the interesting challenge of trying to re-site cities and ports in a land where most of the crops are having to be grown in new latitudes, most all of the trees are dead and there's no usable internet.

That should keep them busy.

Tweets are Sarah Kendzior on dismantling net neutrality in a Trump world and David Simon (quoting Eric Holthaus) on how quickly sea level rise will change coastlines.

Blues and Gospel Train: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others at Manchester station, 1964

This is the program from which that Sister Rosetta Tharpe song, Didn't It Rain, is taken. You know, the one everyone shares and says it's rare. The film also includes Muddy Waters (a bit) and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee (a lot).

Many English people study trains and train stations the same way some people study the blues. So unlike most YouTube videos, you get comments like this:

mlw61
Exactly 50 years on. The recording was made on a rainy day in Manchester (UK) on 7th May 1964. There is dispute about exactly where it was filmed, but TV producer Johnny Hamp says it was on Wilbraham Road, Chorlton Cum Hardey in South Manchester. The station was closed around 1959, but still had freight trains rolling through. I think it was closed permanently in 1967 and was knocked down. The site was used as a cycle way, with Safeway opening a store next to it (this is now a Morrisons). Over the last year or so, tracks have been re-layed and it is now part of Manchester's Metrolink Tram Station. 

mlw61Around 11 minutes in, you can hear the rain battering down. Manchester has a reputation of being a rainy city (and here's proof). This lead to Sister Rosetta Tharpe to change the song originally meant for the programme to "Didn't It Rain". Hence the hilarity at the start of the song :-) 

Neil Ferguson-LeeHi mlw61 - can I add to your observations? The station was indeed called Wilbraham Road and did close in 1958 although you are quite right that trains were still running down that line including through passenger trains. Having a TV show there that evening would have been rather disruptive and they would have had to have diverted trains off that line. As it was a Thursday, it must have been extra disruptive.Just one detail: you have got the station confused wit Chorlton-cum-Hardy which is the one next to Morrisons. That one did close in 1967 although at Chorlton Junction (which is where St. Werberghs Road tram stop is), if you turned left then the next station was indeed Wilbraham Road.What would I give to have been there on that night!

(I have no idea why one of them uses "freight" instead of "goods" train though. Maybe that's English now.)

The BBC ran an article in 2014, interviewing Johnny Hamp and an attendee. This tells the whole story. 

Dead Weather: I can't hear you (live video 2010)

House of Blues, July 2010. 

I was there!

I love the twin lead guitars. I have to say there's been some drastically crap dual lead guitar playing over the last fifty years, but this works, possibly because Dean and Jack show no signs of even knowing there's someone else on the stage. Off in their own little worlds, reacting to the music. 

I also like the way it's been filmed in B&W by a mole person with a camera that fought every step of the way to only focus on the little light on one of the amps.

Culture, jammed

I've seen this image doing the rounds on Twitter lately, and garnering quite a few "WTAF?" comments. 

It's a picture of a rather raddled looking woman in a dressing gown in a kitchen, with a glass of Smirnoff vodka (the bottle is on the table) and the caption "Every Morning's a Smirnoff Morning."

It's presented on Twitter as a real ad which common sense should tell you Smirnoff would never do. A reverse image search (through Tineye or Google images) would...eventually, after some patience, tell you where it's from.  Most of the hits are people laughing about the Bad Old Days or saying one version or another of "Jeez! Promoting alcoholism. Nowadays relegated to the bin along with tobacco and sexism in advertising. How did they every thing this was a good idea is beyond me!" 

Only one hit on the first couple of pages gives its actual provenance. The "ad" is a piece of "culture jamming" from the early 90's, a fake ad from Adbusters.  The mention is in an LA Times Op Ed from 1992, and does not include the matching picture, only a description. 

Culture jamming. A new dance fad? No, the new dissent in America.
How does it work? Simple. Take a commercial message and turn it against itself. Sabotage advertising, sabotage television.
Just as the entertainment-consumption complex filched America's most cherished images, language and values, so now culture jammers use the same tactics to obstruct their adversaries' ideology. To defend culture jamming as a First Amendment freedom is to support an insurgent idea--and that's precisely what these new radicals want.
Their strategy is to meet the enemy on its own turf. They take space on billboards, in magazine ad slots and on commercial television--they even distribute T-shirts--to plant critical messages in the style of the targeted offenders. Some examples:
* Magazine ad of a riderless horse in a cemetery with the caption "Marlboro Country."
* Billboard ad showing a bedraggled woman sitting at a breakfast table with a glass of vodka in hand. The caption: "Every morning's a Smirnoff morning." [...]

Another source a bit harder to find, Culture Jamming in the Carnival, gives an exact reference for the image:

ADBUSTERS Q., Winter 1989 ­90, at inside cover. Consider another such example: an advertising photo of a high­ gloss and expensive coffin with the caption "Absolute Silence" and the subtext "The birthdays, the graduation, the wedding day ... we were there to toast them all. So from one great spirit to another, here's to the most enduring ritual of all." 

And so there you have it. It's a splash page at Adbusters, a magazine I never bought but often eagerly read in one of those bookshops that had racks upon racks of magazines and a cafe, so you could read the magazines without buying them. Younger people don't remember those because they all went bust in the oughties for some unknowable reason. Adbusters itself is still going strong.

Adbusters' aim - to get people to think about consumer culture, by any means necessary - was admirable and still is, though of course, since it's not possible to do anything about consumer culture it's very irritating.  However, the current air of mild disbelief about this "ad" - were the Bad Old Days really that bad? I guess so! - reveals that the persistence of the memes outside their intended context simply shores up the status quo. Culture is now so distorted, and 'truth' is now so kaleidoscopic that this "ad" becomes just another brick in the wall. Culture jamming just jammed the culture tighter into place.

"Ad"dendum September 12, 2021.

With regard to the comment posted below, the so-called ad is from Adbusters Quarterly 1989-1990, vol1 issue 2.  There is a reference to it in The Death of Discourse by Ronald Collins and David Skover, 2005:

There's a second reference to it in Contested images: the politics and poetics of appropriation by Michael Alan Glassco (thesis), 2012 at the University of Iowa:

(I guess the Skover book is derived from the webpage I quoted above.)

Edgar Varese: Deserts (documentary 1966)

An hour long documentary on Edgar Varese.

Described as (translated by Google):

Movie of Gérard Patris and Luc Ferrari. "Great Rehearsals" Ionization, Deserts

This show is primarily a tribute to the musician Edgar Varèse who died in the United States on November 6, 1965 at the age of eighty-two years, a few days before the scheduled date for the filming of the repetition of one of these works. Through the testimonies of personalities who have known him, the extraordinary vitality of this composer has evolved for more than forty years, in an almost total isolation, a revolutionary sound research. Ferdinand Ouelette, his Canadian biographer, traces the life in Paris and New York of the musician. Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Hermann Scherchen, André Jolivet, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez and Marcel Duchamp evoke the personality and work of this sound architect. All these insider witnesses also recall how much this brutal music 
In the second part of the show, Bruno Maderna conducts a rehearsal of "Desert". The conductor wrestles with the score, striving, with great skill, to bring the orchestra's instrumentalists to a proper understanding of the required sound materials and their temporal organization. Finally, he directs the execution of a fragment developed from this rigorous, aggressive, powerful, and revolutionary work of the sixties. 

http://www.ubu.com/film/varese_documentaire.html

(Can't embed so you'll just have to click the link!)

Koi at the Mission, San Juan Capistrano

The Mission, San Juan Capistrano, has huge koi in ornamental fountains who live in their little world forever cut off from us. (And us from them.)

Grasshopper

A grasshopper on a sage plant in my garden.