| lyric references. |
| [home] |
| BEN HOY (Quiet Crown) Not a place or a mountain, just an in-joke. BLAKE, WILLIAM (There's Glory In Your Story) Poet, and also a painter BARRET, SYD (When I Argue I See Shapes) "And when I argue, Syd Barret makes me laugh..." Syd Barret, born 1946, was the leader and creator of the first psychedelic rock band to come out of England, Pink Floyd. He was a heavy user of LSD, which probably lead to his 'insane' lyrics and songs: "Barret vintage Pink Floyd is unavoidably insane, swimming in that glorious estatic madness that is undeniably, disturbingly real" (qtd in Encyclopaedia of Pop 400) However, his drug use lead to the deterioration of his mental state and increasingly erratic behaviour. He became an 'Acid Casualty' and left the band, he spent some time in hospital, disapeared for a bit, and later recorded some solo albums. IDLEWILD taken from the book 'Anne Of Green Gables', by L.M. Montgomery 'Idlewild' is the place where Anne has her playhouse. "We call it Idlewild.Isn't that a poetical name?" MILLER, HUGH (Idea Track) Hugh Miller was a leading journalist, a popular writer on the science of geology, a social commentator and campaigner and one of Scotland's early folklorists- his collection is an important source of Scottish tradition. Miller recorded around 330 legends, stories and customs, mostly from his home town of Cromarty and the surrounding area. Most of his collection can be found in Scenes And Legends Of The North Of Scotland (1835, 1850), in his autobiographical My Schools And School Masters (1854) and Tales And Sketches (1863) which was published after his death. POLLACK, JACKSON (video for '...Shapes') (b. USA 1912-1956) Jackson Pollack was interested in the Surrealist idea in making art from the subconcious mind. He adopted increasingly free and improvisatory ways of painting. In the late summer of 1947 Pollack made a change to his way of painting. He began to work the canvas on the ground, trailing and dripping paint onto it. He woked on a large scale, moving around the canvas like a dancer in an almost trance like state. His major early drip painting, Summertime is purely abstract. From 1948 to the end of 1950 Pollack produced a sucession of such works, until a return of his chronic alchoholism brought a haitus then another change of direction. He resumed paiting in the summer of 1951, with his 'black paintings', Number 14 is the best example. Sinister figures seem to lurk in the painting, maybe reflecting his mental state. This was the last consistant group of work he made. He died at the wheel of his car on 11th August 1956. ROTHKO, MARK (1903-70) (b. Russia 1903-1970) Mark Rothko is one of Roddy's favourite artists, and his birth/death date is checked in the B-side (1903-70). Rothko's family emigrated from Russia to the States when he was ten. From 1925, Rothko lived in New York, where with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem De Kooning he achieved pre-eminence as a leading Abstract Expressionist. His work was considered to be of vital importance becasue it shows painting stripped down to its essential state, without representational content. However, Rothko himself understood his abstract forms to be charged with symbolic meaning. Psychoanalytical interpretations have proposed that works such as his Seagram paintings are unconciously 'maternal' in character: enveloping the viewer in a both comforting and overwhelming manner, replaying tensions felt by an infant's experience inside its mother's body. The sombre colours used by Rothko to relive that experience are deeply evocative of sadness and loss. Rothko commited suicide in 1970, and months later the Tate Gallery, London, displyed his Seagram paintings, arranged according to a plan approved by the artist before his death. ROSEABILITY (Roseability) There is no 'roseability', Roddy made it up. but it is inspired by Gertrude Stein. STEIN, GERTUDE (Roseability, her picture was also used on Colin's bass drum during 2000/2001) "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" Born in the USA, Gertrude Stein studied psychology and experimented with automatic writing under the direction of William James before relocating to Paris in 1903. She later said: "America is my country and Paris is my hometown.". On arrival in France she set about collecting paintings and arranging a circle of up and coming artists around her, including Matisse and Picasso. When a new generation of American expats settled in Paris during the twenties, Stein -with her salon at 27 Rue De Fleures- was the bohemian guru to whom they looked for advice, and sometimes, money. But Stein was a writer of note as well as a high-class hostess. Three Lives (1909), her first prose work, is clearly influenced by the Jameses (novellist Henry and psychologist William) and the French novellist Gustave Flaubert. Tender Buttons (1911) is a collection of still lives in prose. For example: "APPLE. Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, coloured wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind ham. This is use." The Making Of Americans was written before the First World War but not published until 1925. In it, Stein tries to translate Cubist painting into a prose form. Her aim was to produce "a whole present of something that it had taken a great deal of time to find out". In other words, like the Cubists, she wanted to present an object or an experience from every angle simultaneously; to this end her writing eschews linear narrative for simultaniety and alogicality. Moreover, the effect of her prose is dependant on repetition and verbal patterns which accumulate. The cumulative effect is reinforced by unconventionally minimal use of punctuation. Stein later recalled "When I first began writing, I felt that writing should go on, I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on, what had colons and semi-colons to do with it." Stein's other works include The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas(1933), ostensibly the life story of her sexual partner and companion, and Paris France(1940). Although her output is characteristic of high modernism, she also had a strong influence on more popular, less difficult writers. Ernest Hemmingway, onetime habitue of Stein's Paris circle, combined her use of repetitive patterns with vernacular speech to arrive at a style that is both modern and streetwise. On the other hand it is wrong to claim that William Burroughs and other practitioners of the cut-up technique were her direct decendants. Although Stein played around with logic and rationality, her aim was to re-present rather than destroy them, as Burroughs sought to do. Stein's champions claim she is 'dazzeling'. The usual counter-claim is that her prose is impenetrable'. Stein is often referred to by historians of modernism, but apart from The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas very little of what she wrote is read nowadays. She may well be remembered as the woman who coined a phrase which was originally applied to suburbanised American cities, but is increasingly used to describe the de-centered Internet: "There's no there, there." (taken from 'Cult Fiction') WEST HAVEN The name of the beach at Carnoustie. (Roddy lived there for a while) |