Happy Birthday, Mr S.

... and many happy returns.  65 today, and just getting better and better.

Woody

Woody Guthrie, July 14 1912-October 3 1967

I'd planned to write something about this today when I heard Billy Bragg on Today earlier in the week, but in the end was writing it while listening to a wonderful Archive on 4 broadcast tonight.  If they're going to make it available, it'll be at this link.

It seems strange to be celebrating the "100th birthday" of a man who was robbed of so much of a century of life (including a number of the years he was actually alive), due to  Huntington's. and had so many hideous tragedies along the way, but it's certainly worth commemorating.

As a small child I remember my Dad playing "Take you riding in my car car" and "Hard Travelin'" on the banjo, and when I started listening to Dylan in my teens, of course, there was Woody.

Later on, I listened to music which was completely different, I thought - Billy Bragg, bard of the Thatcher era, evolved into thoughtful social commentator, and Bruce Springsteen, bellowing about the same period of Reaganomics and continually moving and learning....  But then, of course, Billy becomes the curator of the Woody Guthrie archive; and, of course, Springsteen stands with Pete Seeger and Seeger's grandson Tao Rodriguez to salute Obama (please, I pray you, don't click on the offered links; but do enjoy President-Elect Obama singing along at 3:18 or so) by singing This Land is Your Land.

I've no idea what Woody would think about all the Establishment recognition, given that he was once rejected from membership of the US Communist Party.  But he wrote the stories of poor people having a hard time, and he passed that on to other songwriters who influenced my generation, and then influenced the next generation, via the magnificent Indigo Girls, if P¡nk's Dear Mr President is anything to go by (join in at 1:44 or so if you're not up to people you don't know congratulating each other)...

RIP Woody. Thanks for the songs and the fury.

Happy Birthday, Boss

Hard to believe, but happy 60th to Bruce Springsteen - still touring, still rocking, and fresh from a live performance of the whole Born to Run album in Chicago.

I can't believe it's been 27 years that I've been listening to the music, and if anything it keeps on getting better. It's only when you see a picture like this, of proud daddy Bruce introducing his son to Barack Obama in October last year, that you realise time is passing...

Happy birthday, Boss, and many, many more to come.

3:15 project, update 16

Photos 1 and 2 have nothing to distinguish them this week; all "move away, nothing to see..." Here's pic 3. There are clearer areas down both sides...


And pic 4. Apart from the fennel and lilies on the left, there's the dyed tops for the Tour de Fleece [Ravelry link] on the right...

Lilies have happened! without being completely eaten by the utterly disgusting lily grubs...

And there are pretty things in pots...


A chunk of this week's progress - some ground elder pulled out...

Meanwhile, at the other side of the garden, the flowering currant I thought I'd killed is making a comeback. I'm not unhappy about this - as long as I can control it... I really like the smell, the look and the early flowering. And BoyNextDoor has removed all the dead stuff from the top of the fence, so there's a lot more light...

Self-satisfied cat is also making her appearance...



The other thing I've been doing today is boggling at the Boss's appearances at Glastonbury last night. Go to iPlayer for the main thing...; but I also loved his appearance with Gaslight Anthem

After all the Michael Jackson business over the last few days (I loved Thriller, and it's a very sad day for pop, but I was glad Springsteen's tribute was to Joe Strummer) it's so good to see someone a decade older looking cool, sharp, fit, healthy and totally enthusiastic about what he's doing... And love the leather wellies, Bruce...

Portmanteau post...

Well, all that NaBloPoMo stuff went out of the window last week, what with the Inauguration brouhaha, and being completely knackered, and all that - and then this weekend Sue and I went to Hove (actually) to see Jan. Sue brought the weather on Saturday

so it was fine and lovely (I had my usual WeatherGoddess effect on Sunday and it hurled it down all day); and after lunch at Hove Museum we went off to the seafront for a walk. The sun descended pretty quickly as we did so, and I got this photo

which has also been stuntblogged at the Hove Daily Photo site today!

In other news - Neil Gaiman has won the Newbery Medal for the wonderful Graveyard Book! This is just about the best award you can win for fiction for young people - and he's in extremely good company. [And any author who tags a blog post GOD I LOVE LIBRARIANS needs a mention on any librarian's blog]... Definitely one of the best books, if not the best book, I read last year - Terry Pratchett's Nation might just have edged it out at the time, but I find myself remembering more snippets from The Graveyard Book. Interesting that they're both YA titles.

I also got my copy of the new Springsteen CD through the post today - haven't listened to it yet because that'll be a treat for tomorrow morning's train journey... I don't know, a new US administration, a new Springsteen production and a new Newbery winner in one week - it's all seriously testing my British sense of moderation... And there's knitting tomorrow night at the Blue; my cup runneth over.

Finally got the prizes out in the post today to those people who won things in the blog contest. That was another reason for not blogging - I really needed to spend the small amount of time I had at home packing parcels etc. - but instead I did Bad Things like sleeping and feeding the cat instead...

Lady Chapel

It's going to be a month for seeing sights and meeting and re-meeting people - part of the reason I thought this NaBloPoMo thing was a good idea... So, last night, Anna, Chris and Suzanne and I went over to Ely to see Show of Hands perform.

Yes, I know I've bored anyone who might be reading this about Mr Knightley and Mr Beer (and Ms Sykes) before; but I'm bending you gently to my will here (and that's a Phil Beer anecdote and a half...). And if you have seen them, you'll know why I go on about them...

They were at the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral as part of their Spires and Beams tour.

If you haven't been to the Lady Chapel, it's pretty spectacular. It was also one of those buildings that Cromwell (Richard, not Oliver) knocked about a lot - all the friezes around the edge have figures with no heads, and none of the statues in the niches survive now - and I understand that it was the most vandalised/whatever-they-thought-they-were-doing of any chapel in England, because of the sheer numbers of 'idolatrous' statues in it. There's been some controversy about the new Lady statue (who does, in all fairness, look as if she's about to jump...); but I like her, and it's a beautiful space and I was very curious about what SoH would do with it...

As ever, my pictures of the event are a bit awful. I have a history of bad SoH pictures and this was never going to be any different (I don't like this camera much and didn't manage with success with the previous two!). I spent a lot of time trying to take a picture of Phil Beer who was looking even more than usually like Rosso Fiorentino's Angelo Musicante but it didn't work... So here are two pictures of what happened during the set with the lighting during The Dive

and during Roots

They'd tailored the set to the space, and there were some wonderful moments - Down in Yon Forest was one, the new Steve Knightley song Poppy Day another (drawing parallels between Flanders field, the poppy fields of Afghanistan and small-town heroin-dealing in the West Country in a way that only he could, really). Steve's slightly scary version of Widdecombe Fair (sung from from the back of the chapel) was another, but one I'd seen done acoustically before. But Phil Beer did a solo acoustic combination of an Irish tune blended with a cover of Bruce Springsteen's Factory, from the centre of the chapel, which was wonderful; and everyone had a good singalong to Roots, Cousin Jack and Country Life - all seemed a little subdued because, slightly, we were in church...

The only combination I don't like of SoH's (in the last god-knows-how-many-years), which starts with The Train and improves rapidly thereafter, appeared before the interval, so there was a small 'Oh thank goodness we've got that over with...' factor for me ... I'd have loved to hear The Setting/Mary from Dungloe in that space... But we got The Crow on the Cradle, and blimey, they were good.

I don't think it's the best Show of Hands gig I've ever been to - I think that will have been at a festival. I think that sometimes their respect for the place, and what had happened there, almost overwhelmed their musicianship; although the music was always superb.

It did whet my appetite for their gig at the Junction on November 26; but I'll be at this at the time; and it was a really interesting experience, watching three superb musicians exploring a space; it was certainly everything I'd hoped for from the evening... And I also came out with a copy of Phil Beer's wonderfully titled solo album Rhythm Methodist, which I'm intending to play today...

Magic

Gosh, it's been a long time; I hadn't realised...


And all of a sudden, it's autumn... My veg. box has started arriving with interesting squash in it; and while I was heading off to Sew Creative after work on Thursday, I found five beautiful shelled conkers under one of the horse-chestnut trees on Christ's Pieces. Either I was never that good a conker connoisseur (very probable) or I can feel very old and blame Kids These Days. Either way, I couldn't resist bringing them home... (Who shells conkers and then just leaves them there? someone more public-spirited than me, anyway...)


My Knitting from Your Stash ended at the end of September. I must confess here that I started falling a month or so before, but it's been a very trying summer, and towards the end I needed Treats... But they still had Apache in the £1 stand outside Sew Creative, so I picked up the last half dozen balls, and some Sirdar Click DK to make up something for my cousins' baby Oliver for Christmas.


The trying time is, however, over. I've never blogged much about my job, and I'm not intending to start now; just to say that I'm about to go back to actual Libraries, and more specifically the one here. So I will become a Commuter with a Proper Job, and with any luck I'll get some dedicated knitting/reading time on trains too... It'll be almost exactly 4 months from the offer date to the start date, and I've been living in limbo between the two all summer... I'm intending to take a week's holiday between jobs; I'm still trying to decide between a couple of days away on a cheap flight somewhere, and a week at home knitting, drinking tea, reminding the cat of who I am before I take off again...


I've knitted a couple of things I can display (I've knitted quite a lot of stuff, in fact, but either I've failed to photograph it or it's still secret): a BSJ for my ex-boss Sophie's baby Linus (I had a very beautiful blanket in the wings, but somehow, giving a blanket to a baby called Linus?...) This is a ball of the rainbow Trekking with a couple of strands of a very fine navy blue machine-knitting yarn from a cone; makes about a 19" chest measurement when combined, and I had the buttons in stash...




and tonight while watching The West Wing with Sue, who was finishing the curly edging on another beautiful scarf, I finished the main body of the knitting on Fiona's birthday bag (Gryffindor bag from here).

Completely addictive. I started this at about 9pm last night, and cast it off about 24 hours later. I think I've got a two-colour circular knitting thing going on. Endpaper mitts next, I think - they've been in the queue for some time and I can think of a giftee... And I may need to revise some of the kids' Christmas present ideas...

But the title of this post is because of this which I picked up at the miraculously-revived Cambridge Fopp on Thursday lunchtime - and which is, in my opinion, extraordinarily fine, even by the Boss's standards. I was a bit scared when january one was a little lukewarm about it; but there are only three artists whose CDs I'll buy sight unseen, and I'm glad I went with my instinct again this time. It's got a new Big Sound about it, to be sure, but it's also got a combination of the out-of-season-walking-the-boardwalk-looking-at girls element; the slightly-scary-guy-Nebraska element; the I-wish-I-were-Elvis element; the what-the-hell's-he-on-about-here-I-need-to-listen-to-the-interviews element; the religious-sexual-imagery element; and overarching everything, some beautiful melodies; and the E-Street Band... so you've got Clarence's sax floating across it all at just the point you hope for it; and the mad keyboards, and even the bloody sleigh-bells sound appropriate... Oh well. It's been on autorepeat here for two days. I'm not sure the cat's as keen on it as I am but maybe there's just a colony of endangered tiny rodents nearby she's intent on wiping out... that'd do it...

Anyone doing Ally Pally on Saturday?