Posts Tagged ‘pop’
“A desert is a place without expectation”*…
Ed Freeman is a refuge from rock (a road manager on the last Beatle’s tour, a session guitarist, arranger, and producer, perhaps most prominently, of Don MacLean’s “American Pie”) who gave it up for a camera. Among his many continuing photographic projects is a series of pictures captured as he wandered through the small inland towns and deserts of Southern California.
See more of this series (many of which are collected into Freeman’s book, Desert Reality) here.
[TotH to This Isn’t Happiness]
* Nadine Gordimer
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As we keep an eye out for Ozimandias, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that a 16 year-old singer named Tiffany Darwish, who had a major label debut album languishing in record store bins across the nation, ignited her career by playing a concert at the Paramus Park Mall in Paramus, NJ. In a time well before Britney and Hannah, Tiffany’s aim was to supplant Debbie Gibson at the top of the pop heap; but conventional promotion just wasn’t doing it. With Tiffany’s debut album going nowhere on radio or in stores, MCA Records and Tiffany’s personal manager signed on to a radical proposal: having Tiffany join the “Beautiful You: Celebrating the Good Life Shopping Mall Tour ’87″—the kind of promotional tour of American shopping malls then associated only with consumer products like canned soup and hair coloring… The Paramus gig was so successful that Tiffany went on to play malls all across America– and her album went quadruple-platinum.
Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music…
… and not just any old way you choose it, but selected and explicated by that master of American music– both classical and popular– Leonard Bernstein:
Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution is a CBS News special, broadcast in April 1967. The show was hosted by Leonard Bernstein and is probably one of the first examples of pop music being examined as a “serious” art form. The film features many scenes shot in Los Angeles in late 1966, including interviews with Frank Zappa and Graham Nash, as well as the now-legendary Brian Wilson solo performance of “Surf’s Up.”
As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that Paul Morphy, an American chess prodigy who became the world’s leading grandmaster, just returned from a competitive tour of Europe, gave up the game. Morphy was so dominant that he’d taken to spotting his opponents– other masters and grand masters– a pawn and a move, or playing blindfolded… or both. After reviewing his games, Bobby Fischer considered Morphy so talented as to be “able to beat any player of any era if given time to study modern theory and ideas.” And Marcel Duchamp, who abandoned art to become a chess expert, found inspiration in Morphy’s open style and opportunistic strategy in crafting his theory of the endgame… which means that Morphy was indirectly a contributor to Duchamp’s friends and collaborators Samuel Beckett (whose Endgame is rooted in Duchamp’s thinking) and John Cage (with whom, in 1968, Duchamp played at a concert entitled “Reunion;” music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard).
Morphy’s retirement from chess (an amateur’s game in those days) came the day after he was hailed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as “the World Chess Champion” at a banquet in Morphy’s honor attended by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Boston mayor Frederic W. Lincoln, Jr., Harvard president James Walker, and other luminaries. Morphy attempted then to start a law practice, but was side-tracked by the outbreak of the Civil War. Still, with the resources of a family fortune, he lived comfortably in New Orleans until his death in 1884 in the ancestral mansion– the site today of Brennan’s Restaurant (at which, your correspondent suspects, several readers have breakfasted).
Morphy at the board (source)
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