Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit, the first protest song

The finest arts feature I have read for some time is this backgrounder to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, which the Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey cites as the first great protest song. The technique in the feature is exemplary, note how Lynskey projects the atmosphere of the song’s first ever performance, through the clever use of the present tense, to describe a night at the infamous Cafe Society, a speakeasy in New York, in 1939.

The song was based on a poem by Abel Meeropol in response to the lynching of two black men in Indiana in 1930. It is harrowing to say the least.

Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit [via hypem]
Nina Simone – Strange Fruit [via hypem]
Sub Sub – Southern Trees [YouTube]

Thanks to my good friend Phil Simms for …

Thanks to my good friend Phil Simms for sending me this cutting of one of George Orwell’s (real name Eric Blair) first ever pieces of published writing. The Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard (now simply the Henley Standard was the first paper Blair ever wrote for.

This poem, a fascinating snippet of jingoism, was written when he was 11. I think he described himself as a “Tory anarchist” in those days.

Incidentally, this is new to me, The BBC’s Orwell Archive, full of memos and other ephemera from his time as a war time broadcaster. No audio though, none remains.

Black swans seen

I recently returned from a weekend in London where Anna and I found this delightful pair of black swans in St James’s Park. They are beautiful birds, as tame as pets, with long, looping necks and bright red beaks the colour of post boxes. They reminded me of the poem by the late James Merill:

Illusion: the black swan knows how to break
Through expectation, beak
Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,
And move across our lives, if the lake is life,
And by the gentlest turning of its neck
Transform, in time, time’s damage;
To less than a black plume, time’s grief.

The Agrippa Files : William Gibson’s poem reflects on the fleeting nature of memory

William Gibson in San Francisco

Originally uploaded by
FredArmitage

In 1992, William Gibson wrote a 300-line poem and published it on a magnetic disk which was programmed to erase itself upon exposure to air.

Collaborating with the Dennis Ashbaugh and award-winning journalist Kevin Begos, Jr they put it in a handmade book and filled it with disappearing ink.

It was “performed” at the Americas Society in New York and transmitted across “the wilds of the internet” later that year, but has since been lost to time.

Now the Universities of Maryland and Santa Barbara have recovered the original file from one of the discs and published it as the Agrippa Files.

A deep and complex website, the Agrippa Files contains “emulations” of the poem, a facsimile of the book and exhaustive documentation

(via Me-Fi)

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The deification of Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson RIP. Manchester. So much to answer for…

Originally uploaded by Jason Slack

It’s a year since Tony Wilson, the cofounder of Factory Records, died of cancer in Manchester.

Fellow Mancunian Mike Garry has written this poem dedicated to him. An ode to St Tony of Manchester. I won’t republish the whole thing here – but please click through as it’s an excellent poem. The first six verses give you a good flavour. You can also watch a spoken word performance of the poem here, it’s from the end of the recent Tony Wilson Experience. Factory’s design guru, Peter Saville, gives a little speech; Wilson’s son gets on the stage in for an emotional moment and then Garry comes on.

A poem for Anthony H Wilson

Saint Anthony
Saint Anthony
Please come round
Something is lost that can’t be found

Talk to me of Albion Anderton
Albrecht and art
The Arndale
Alan Turin
Acid House
Alexandra Park

Bez the Buzzcocks bouncing bombs
The beautiful Busby Babes
Curtis
Cancer Christies Catholicism
Crack and Curt Cocaine

Talk to me of all these things and one thing is for certain
I’ll see the face I’ll hear the voice of Anthony H Wilson

Dance Design Devotto Durrutti
Development of an industrial dirty Northern City
De La Salle
Dignity
And how in the end you hated the pity

Elvis Engels ecstasy
A girl called Emmeline
The hours I spent watching you on my black and white TV.
From So It Goes To Sunday Roast
Enchanting
Endearing
Extreme
Elephants washed by dwarves on 1970’s TV

Factory fame financial fuck ups
Poetic Form
The Fall
4 June 1976 at the Lesser Free Trade Hall

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Judging poetry by its cover

Penguin Books

Originally uploaded by His Majesty Andre (Myopia Pix)

There’s been a revival of interest in Penguin Book covers of late, partly due to the influence of things magazine (tagline: print is not dead, it’s merely sleeping). I have never been such a fan of the “classic” Pelicans of the 60s that are so much back in vogue, but love the warmer charms of the Penguin Poets. I’m not the only devotee, Mr B, a London-born resident of Belfast has created a wonderful series of posts dedicated to the various different editions.