I post a weekly diary of the historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I featured this past week in "Cheers & Jeers". For example .....
Nepotism in political punditry? Naw, couldn't be ..... or could it ....
FATHER-SON? - pollster/Fox pundit Patrick Caddell and NBC pundit Chuck Todd.
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
CHEERS to escaping the brunt of Hurricane Irene. I live along the Connecticut River Valley (on the Vermont/New Hampshire border) and since I live on higher ground, I wasn't concerned about flooding. But I was about power: and the lights flickered on three separate occasions last Sunday ... but did not go out. Yet not 10 miles across the border into Vermont, there were bridges and dams that were breached ... I was truly lucky.
ART NOTES - a selection of Indian Kalighat Paintings are at the Cleveland Museum of Art through September 18th.
CHEERS to the 40 year-old Austrian hiker Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner - who became the first woman to reach all 14 Himalayan summits above 8,000m (26,000 ft) without using bottled oxygen - by finally scaling K2, after a few unsuccessful attempts previously.
SPORTING NOTES - the first marathon ever to be held in the African nation of Liberia took place this past weekend, with president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - at age 72 - running a short distance in an associated 10k (6.2 mile) race.
MONDAY's CHILD is Belle the Cat - who oversees the Charles & Ona B. Free Memorial Library in Dublin, Virginia.
MUSIC NOTES - hits by Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Take That are among 100 songs that have been placed on an internet blacklist by China's culture ministry, which officials say harm "national cultural security".
IN a DEVELOPMENT certain to warm the hearts of many a bored corporate business meeting attendee: Switzerland may see candidates in its upcoming October parliamentary elections from the new Anti-PowerPoint Party - which claims that €350bn could be saved globally each year by outlawing PowerPoint presentations (in favor of using a flipchart).
DISTANT COUSINS? - the late Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
........... and Walt Disney - the cartoonist and entertainment mogul.
MUSIC NOTES - the 75 year-old singer Glen Campbell is releasing his final album this week, as he has developed early Alzheimer's disease. He plans a final world tour, and this interview in The Guardian shows what he's dealing with.
ART NOTES - the exhibit Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome is at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa through September 11th.
FOR SOME TIME workers carrying out restoration work at the national archaeological museum in Naples, Italy were convinced there were supernatural forces at work: such as a wheelbarrow that keeled over on its own, a bucket full of water that mysteriously emptied itself, a strange apparition in a photo of work done and various tools that were left in one place (but reappeared elsewhere).
Now, the chief architect put in charge of restoration (by the ministry for cultural heritage) has announced that in the near future the museum will utilize a team of ghostbusters - specifically, electronic engineers bringing instruments to measure magnetic fields.
TUESDAY's CHILD has been re-named Vinny the Cat - who had been tossed from a moving car on New York City's Verrazano Bridge last month but was rescued, stayed nearly two months with the city's Animal Care & Control and has now been adopted by .... TV/film star Whoopi Goldberg.
JUSTICE NOTES - a judge in Chile has agreed to investigate the death in prison of General Alberto Bachelet - who was loyal to the deposed President Salvador Allende - as a result of a request by the general's family (including his daughter Michelle, a future Chilean president) alleging that he was tortured to death.
ART NOTES - commissioned in 2006 and made by New York students (ages 8-19) guided by quilt artist Faith Ringgold: the 9/11 Peace Story Quilt will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through January 22nd.
HISTORY NOTES - a massive bunker built in the late 1960's to house East German naval operations in the event of a nuclear attack - in the Baltic city of Rostock - has been opened to visitors for the first time this summer.
TWO DECADES after its founding by a poet: the group Friends of the Los Angeles River found that their campaign to reclaim the river first had to convince Angelenos ... that there actually is such a river.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is nicknamed Academic Cat - a stray cat who became famous for listening to lectures at China's Peking University (especially on philosophy and the arts) - and is now recovering from surgery to repair a fractured femur, after students noticed she was struggling to walk.
MUSIC NOTES - after a hiatus of a few decades, the former British model Lesley Hornby - who became famous under the name Twiggy - is to revive her music career with a new album (at the age of 61) this coming November, with cover versions of songs by Neil Young, Bryan Adams and The Kinks, as well as classics such as "Blue Moon" and "My Funny Valentine".
OLDER-YOUNGER BROTHERS? - NBA player Kris Humphries (and who is the new husband of Kim Kardashian) and film star Taylor Lautner (the "Twilight" series).
GLAD to see that a team of Serbian and Croatian artists have created a new friendship flag - that blends symbols of their countries into a new banner meant to represent a better, friendlier future.
ART NOTES - a series of woodblock prints by Gustave Baumann are at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe through the end of December.
MUSIC NOTES - the recent death of songwriter Jerry Leiber led his 78-year-old partner Mike Stoller to reveal that (in collaboration with writer Michael Bywater) the pair had recently written 11 new songs for a musical about Oscar Wilde that was nearing completion.
POLITICAL NOTES - the conservative Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen has announced elections for September 15th - and polls suggest that the Social Democratic Leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt could become its first female prime minister.
THURSDAY's CHILD was formerly named Boots but now known as Fat Boy the Cat - one of three resident felines at the Humane Society of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan - who are now chronicling his strict diet on Facebook to reduce his weight from 23 to 14 pounds.
IN a RECENT SURVEY conducted by the group Irish Business Against Litter: Killarney was voted the cleanest city in Ireland - with Waterford and Galway also passing muster - yet Wicklow, Tipperary and Dublin received lower marks (with the rise in vacant/derelict properties contributing to the problem).
TRAVEL NOTES - a noted Australian travel journalist notes that only his country and Britain have fully privatized their airports - on the idea that governments have no place running commercial businesses - but which he believes has created disasters of high costs and poor service for its traveling public.
FATHER-SON? - two athletes: the late great distance runner Steve Prefontaine ...
........... and Andrew Miller - a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.
KITTEH NOTES - for those who want the ease of having a cat flap in your home, but are concerned that another critter might also find it useful: a new Microchip Cat Door can be programmed to let only pre-approved micro-chipped animals access into your home.
FRIDAY's CHILD is mighty glad that the animal shelter in Fort Benton, Montana now has an outdoor run for cats (thanks to donations and construction work by a local businessman).
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... of all of the acoustic blues guitarists who came out of the South in the first part of the 20th Century, few were as admired for their advanced finger-picking (as compared to their singing or songwriting ability) as the Reverend Gary Davis – who became a street busker as an adult, a minister after age forty and later a guitar teacher to many a modern guitarist. With the loss of blues pioneer David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards this week at age 96: we need to remember our great bluesmen as a link to our musical past.
Gary Davis was born in 1896 in Laurens, South Carolina and lost his sight as a young child. Raised by his grandmother, he was self-taught on guitar and mastered the Ragtime music of his youth – Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag was a song he played for much of his life. As a teenager, his family moved to Greenville where he learned from Willie Walker and Sam Brooks. By the time he settled in Durham, North Carolina in his twenties: he was a full-time street musician, working with other noted guitarists such as Blind Boy Fuller.
In the 1930’s, a store manager who championed local musicians did so to the owner of the American Record Company label – and so that was the first recordings Davis made. But in a familiar occurrence of the time: payments for his work were inadequate and he became a street performer again. In 1937, he became an ordained minister and decided to switch his musical focus away from the blues and towards spirituals. In practice, though, his songs were not all that different in style from the blues. In the late 1940’s, he and his wife Annie moved to the New York area (after the music scene in Durham began to fade) where his Piedmont fingerstyle playing first garnered him some notice.
It wasn’t until the mid-1950’s when he began to gain some popularity – first, recording with Moe Asch’s Folkways label, and then with Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside jazz label. Finally, he became a star with white audiences during the folk music revival of the late 50’s-mid 60’s (in the second photo he is shown with the late folksinger Phil Ochs' daughter Meegan). He became a popular performer at the Newport Folk Festival, with Peter, Paul & Mary later popularizing Samson & Delilah - his signature song. And his tours in Europe were quite popular with fans.
As noted, he was not only an inspiration to many an aspiring guitarist, he gave lessons to several - who recorded several songs he either wrote or popularized. Among them were Roy BookBinder and Ramblin' Jack Elliott ("Candy Man"), David Bromberg ("I Belong to the Band", "Tryin’ to Get Home"), Dave Van Ronk ("Lovin’ Spoonful"), Stefan Grossman ("Cincinnati Flow Rag", "Twelve Sticks"), the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir ("Samson & Delilah") and Ry Cooder ("Twelve Gates to the City"). And he was a big influence on the Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen ("Hesitation Blues" plus "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning") as well as Townes Van Zandt and the modern bluesman Keb’ Mo.
The Reverend Gary Davis died in May 1972, just a week after his 76th birthday and is buried in Lynbrook, New York (just a few miles from where I grew up). His wife Annie maintained his church services in storefront locations in New York City and stayed in touch with his former pupils. She died in 1997 at the age of 103.
For someone whose success did not arrive until he was nearing age 70, his legacy seems assured. There is an excellent compilation album of his most important works, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and his work is not only well-known to blues purists – there are many folk singers who owe more than a debt of gratitude to the Reverend Gary Davis.
Of all of his work it is the song Death Don’t Have No Mercy that I find the most compelling (and the partial lyrics below never stayed the same in each performance). Among those who have performed the song: on the Grateful Dead’s 1969 Live Dead album the song is played as almost a dirge, but Jorma Kaukonen in Hot Tuna performed a more uptempo version. And below you can hear the Reverend Gary Davis sing it himself.
Death don't have no mercy in this land
Death don't have no mercy in this land
He'll come to your house and he won't stay long
You'll look in the bed and you'll find your mother gone
Death don't have no mercy in this land
Death will go in any family in this land
Death will go in every family in this land
He'll come to your house and he won't stay long
You'll look in the bed and you'll find your father gone
Death will go in any family in this land
Death will leave you standin' and cryin' in this land
Death will leave you standin' and cryin' in this land
He'll come to your house and he won't stay long
You'll look in the bed and you'll find everybody gone
Death will leave you standin' and cryin' in this land