In the absence of any tales from the riverbank or an enlightening and unexpected article from one of our contributors, today you just get a taste of a few of the things that I’ve enjoyed reading, watching and listening to this week. Hopefully you’ll share the pleasure and excuse the indulgence. (JB)
I was mesmerised by this 1958 film of New York City made by Shirley Clarke and posted by Miriam Linna on her Facebook page. If you love rock ‘n’ roll and aren’t aware of Miriam there’s a treat to be had by correcting that. Her story is pure r’n’r romance and she tells it here. I also recommend you follow her on Facebook, if you do that kind of thing.
And I also very much enjoyed Julian Temple’s love letter to the city I call home, London – A Modern Babylon. It’s up on the iPlayer until the 18th.
Nicholas Lezard’s review of Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines in The Guardian. Almost breathless fan-boy enthusiasm for a book that I’ve been reluctant to let go of since it’s publication in April. A dead cert for one of our books of the year.
Pure Piscator: Father and son down by the stream and other Idle pleasures like delving into the archives of angling, field recording, photography, lighting fires, identifying wildlife and napping.
No relation to the now defunct website of the same name (archived here) which considering it’s love and respect for the traditional style of angling came as a surprise. The author is also a keen field recorder who posts his tracks on the Traveling Mongoose blog.
Death & Shit: Not everyone is cut out to be a country GP. I suspect I’m one of them.
As I watch the NHS crumble around my ears, I thought (mostly as therapy for me, rather than anything else), I should write about what it’s REALLY like to be a junior doctor. This is my story…. I hope you like it.
This is Hide Go Seek, a track by Bunker Hill from 1962, featuring Link Wray & his Ray Men. The voice you hear at the start of the recording is that of Roger Eagle, a man who regular readers of this site will know, is someone we call a folk hero (if you have no idea what I’m talking about you should click here). I have a gentleman by the name of Tom Smith to thank for giving me this. Tom is someone that I’ve enjoyed buying music from in Manchester vinyl palaces (namely, Goldmine and Beatin’ Rhythm) for many years now and who, unbeknown to me until recently reading Bill Sykes’ biography of Roger, was a good friend of the great man in the later part of his life. Tom’s passionate and knowledgeable recommendations have given me a lot of pleasure and that is something that I’m sure would make Roger very happy.
I’m not such a fan of sport that I’ve watched anything in the Olympics other than the men’s running events but I do like that Tom Daley kid enough to smile in agreement with a tweet I read last night that said, “Let’s not pretend. We don’t know a good dive from a bad one do we?”