Old Friends & Grievous Angels–Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell at the Palais

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell with band – Palais Theatre 25/6/15

As rare pleasures go, the Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell concert at the Palais Theatre last Thursday night was up there with best.

We missed the support act, local singer-songwriter Harmony James, so I have no idea what she sounded like.

Emmylou and Rodney took the stage at about 8.50pm and played for two hours.

Harking back to the distant past they kicked off the set with two songs written by Emmylou’s early mentor Gram Parsons, Return of the Grievous Angel and Wheels then covered two Townes Van Zandt songs  Pancho and Lefty and If I Needed You. 

Emmylou Harris has excellent taste in the songs she chooses to cover, and her versions are simply wonderful. But as the pair are touring in support of their latest collaboration The Travelling Kind, where most of the songs are co-writes, they naturally performed several songs from the album – the title track, Memphis, Weight of the World, You Can’t Say We Didn’t Try and their cover of the Lucinda Williams song  Just Wanted To See You So Bad.

Emmylou Harris live at the Palais Theatre 25/6/15

And of course Rodney Crowell treated the appreciative audience to several of his classic songs that included Till I Gain Control Again, Ain’t Living Long Like This and the superb Rock Of My Soul.

Rodney Crowell live at the Palais Theatre 25/6/15

They played a total of 22 songs in the main set, and returned to perform three more in the encore. The set varied from slow burning ballads to rocking out numbers, with the band staging longish jams. Emmylou was witnessed modestly rocking along with the livelier songs, but Rodney was in his element, jamming with band.

The band, as you’d expect, were fantastically good and included Aussie born ace guitarist Jedd Hughes who hails from Quorn, a small town in South Australia. The other band members were pedal steel player Steve Fishell, keyboardist Micah Hulscher, drummer John McTeague and Mike Rinne on electric and  upright bass.

Jedd Hughes

It was a great concert and a thrill to see Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell together. Both are legendary artists in their own right, but together they create something special, their long time friendship adding an extra dimension to the show. The audience certainly thought so. We gave them a standing ovation.

EMMYLOU HARRIS & RODNEY CROWELL SET LIST

1. Return of the Grievous Angel (Gram Parsons)
2. Wheels (Gram Parsons)
3. Pancho & Lefty (Townes Van Zandt)
4. Till I Gain Control Again (Rodney Crowell)
5. If I Needed You (Townes Van Zandt)
6. Invitation to the Blues (Roger Miller)
7. Red Dirt Girl (Emmylou Harris)
8. Rock of My Soul (Rodney Crowell)
9. Love Hurts (Everly Bros, Gram Parsons)
10. Luxury Liner (Gram Parsons)
11. The Travelling Kind ((ELH & RC)
12. Memphis (RC)
13. You Can’t Say We Didn’t Try (ELH & RC)
14. Weight of the World (ELH & RC)
15. Just Wanted To See You So Bad (Lucinda Williams)
16. Dreaming My Dreams (Allen Reynolds)
17. Chase The Feeling (Kris Kristoffersen)
18. Back When We Were Beautiful (Matraca Berg)
19. Tulsa Queen (ELH & RC)
20. Leavin’ Louisiana (Rodney Crowell)
21. Ain’t Living Long Like This (Rodney Crowell)
22. Old Yellow Moon (DeVito, Lynn Langham)

Encore

1. Stars On The Water (Rodney Crowell)
2. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (Rodney Crowell)
3. Boulder To Birmingham (Emmylou Harris)

Tatts Tiara–The Last Group 1 of the Racing Year

Catkins – Derby Day – Flemington 2014

As one of my favourite racehorses, the sweet grey mare Catkins, is running in the final Group 1 of the Australian racing year, I thought I’d pen a post about the event.

Run this year on the Gold Coast when it is normally hosted by Eagle Farm, the Tatts Tiara (formerly run as the Winter Stakes) is a race over 1400 metres for mares and fillies.  I’m hoping that this year Catkins can finally win her first, well deserved, Group 1 race. She has contested quite a few and has always come up wanting, running second or third in most of those.

The Tiara has attracted a very nice field of classy mares and a few well regarded fillies, and Catkins main rivals are Srikandi who won the Stradbroke Handicap at her last start, Hazard  who beat Catkins in the Dane Ripper Stakes recently and Najoom, a spruiked filly trained by Gai Waterhouse, if she gains a start – she’s currently 2nd emergency. Others with a chance are Real Surreal, Solicit and Avoid Lightning. Naturally I’ll be barracking for the bonny grey mare –cross fingers, touch wood, she’ll win.

In the UK, the annual Royal Ascot meeting is in train. Several Australian horses are entered in various events. Two have already run – Criterion and Shamal Wind. They both finished unplaced, Criterion performing the better of the two finishing 5th in the Prince of Wales Stakes.

This weekend two more Aussie horses are to race in the Diamond Jubilee Stakes run over 6 furlongs (approx 1200 metres) on Sunday. Three Australian horses in the recent past have won this race – Choisir, Starspangledbanner and, most notably, Black Caviar.

This year’s great Australian hopes are the handsome Brazen Beau, who won the Group 1 Coolmore  Stud Stakes and Newmarket Handicap, and Australian Guineas winner Wandjina. Both are quality gallopers, who if they have acclimatised after travelling to the UK, could well do Australia proud.

Alas we will not see Brazen Beau in action in Australia again as he is to retire to stud after running in the UK. The same goes for Wandjina and quite a few of the Spring and Autumn stars over the 2014/2015 racing season, such as Dissident, Sweet Idea, Silent Achiever, Hallowed Crown, Adelaide, Earthquake and others who don’t spring to mind at the moment.

The racing scene in Melbourne doesn’t start to get interesting until late July in the build up to the Spring racing season’s early Group races.

Update Saturday

Speaking of Australian horses who have been successful at Ascot, the news came today that the “people’s champ” Takeover Target passed away this morning. euthanised after a paddock accident. He was 15 years old.  He cost his humble taxi driver trainer a mere $1400 and won over $6 million in prize money.  He won races everywhere, at Royal Ascot, Singapore, Japan and all over Australia. His record stands at 41 starts for 21 wins, 8 of which were at Group 1 level & 10 places. 

The archetypal “rags to riches” story, Takeover Target will live long in Australian racing memory – a very talented sprinter.

And the Tatts Tiara resulted in Catkins running unplaced, being forced back through the field early in the race.  Srikandi scored a rare double (Stradbroke/ Tiara) with a solid win, holding off Avoid Lightning and Lumosty who ran the minor placings.

Further Update Sunday

Brazen Beau just missed winning the Diamond Jubilee at Ascot early this morning.  He gets a second chance in the July Cup at Newmarket on July 11.

Winter Cheer–Cats, Books & Music

Talya – the blue princess

It has been a while since I last posted about the cats and their political stance. Lucky for them they are unaware of the truly awful Government ruling Australia at present and the general state of the world. No doubt, if they knew, they would think it only their due, that cats are the most popular topic on the Internet.

In their cat world all they care about is keeping warm, filling their bellies and maintaining their cool in the presence of other cats.  This of course involves the services of their human slaves as providers of food and warming pads.

Since winter has drawn in, Willy has taken to spending more time inside and has insisted on using my lap as his resting place. He’s a real burden, a heavy, though warm encumbrance, that certainly limits a person’s movements.  If you have cats, you’ll know how they suck you in. You put up with incredible inconvenience so as not to hurt their feelings and even apologise if you have to inconvenience them.

Willy is a smart cat and has us trained to lift him off the fence when he can’t be bothered getting down by himself. He sits on the pergola outside the kitchen door and miaows. When we answer the “distress” call we have to walk out into the back yard and wait by the fence, while he clambers over the roof, onto the shed roof, then onto the water tank, then the fence, whereupon he stands in a handy lifting down position, so we can get purchase under his belly and remove him from the fence.

 
Willy, looking for a lap to sit on.

I had the bright idea of buying him a cat bed as a substitute for my lap and found one that is self warming.  It has a space blanket layer that interacts with the cat’s body heat to create a snug nest, retaining the cat’s heat and warming the bed.  B thought I was mad to get it and doubted if the cats would take to it.

It arrived the other day and has been tried out by both cats, but Talya has now commandeered it for daytime use on the front verandah, and alas Willy still prefers my knee.

Talya in the self warming cat bed

The political situation between the cats is much the same; they still don’t like each other much, but don’t fight. They engage in stand offs where one cat will sit in the doorway to impede the exit or entry of the other cat. “Ooh, I don’t want to walk too close, he/she might jump me” you see them think.

Cat stand off – Talya is blocking Willy’s access to the door outside.

Monty the cat next door is always in our back garden, but the resident cats avoid him if possible. He’s super friendly, so it’s hard to shoo him away.

Monty – he doesn’t look too friendly here, but it’s an interesting pose.

My last post was about the problem with posting from Windows Live Writer to Blogger. This had something to do with Google+ security settings, which had not been taken into account by Microsoft. There was an outpouring of protest on both the Blogger forum and the Microsoft Live forum to such an extent that Microsoft and Google cooperated in working out a fix.

Let’s hope Microsoft will continue to support Live Writer as it’s the best blogging software there is. Creating posts in Blogger is a real pain it’s so clunky and user unfriendly.

As usual I’ve been reading a lot of books, and lately have read some really excellent novels, one of them being All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr which recently won the Pulitzer Prize.  It’s an outstanding novel set in the second world war, about a German whiz kid boy Werner, and Marie Laure, a blind French girl. the narration alternating between the two as they grow up in those turbulent times and inexorably meet.  Everything written about this novel is true. Highly recommended!

I also really enjoyed Kate Atkinson’s latest novel A God In Ruins, a companion piece to her previous novel Life After Life.  It follows the life of Ursula Todd’s beloved younger brother Teddy as he grows up to become a bomber pilot in the second world war, and his life after the war.  Ursula Todd was the heroine of Life After Life and makes several appearances in A God In Ruins.  I also highly recommend this book. It’s moving and very funny at times.

I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, his latest, which happens to be a disaster novel. In the first paragraph Earth’s moon explodes and sets the scene for what happens next. I’m barely a quarter of the way through the 800+ pages, but am gripped in the drama of setting up an ark of human heritage in space as the total destruction of  planet Earth draws closer.

I ordered my copy of the book from Barnes & Noble and it’s signed by Neal Stephenson, which is a big thrill as I doubt he’ll ever come to Australia.

Concurrently on my Kindle, when commuting,
I’m reading a collection of short stories called Sisters of the Revolution. I supported a Kickstarter for this collection of speculative feminist fiction by women writers, and received both a physical and digital copy of it.

The stories are all interesting and diverse in subject matter.

The edition has a forward by my friends Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Jeff won this year’s Nebula Award for his novel Annihilation, the first book in his Southern Reach trilogy. They are very strange novels, dark surrealist fiction. Annihilation is possibly going to be made into a film by Alex Garland (Ex Machina & Never Let Me Go). I have read the trilogy, but must admit found them a bit of a chore.  I’m so over weird fiction, hated all the characters and couldn’t care less what happened to them. I agree with David Mitchell, that characters have to be likeable to sustain the readers interest and sympathy – mine anyway.

On the music scene. I'm looking forward to seeing Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell at the Palais Theatre, St Kilda in a week or so. I ordered their new CD The Travelling Kind from Nonesuch Records, mainly because they were offering a limited edition autographed print with the CD. Another thing to be thrilled about – Emmylou and Rodney autographs, something unattainable in person for me.

Five days after the Emmylou & Rodney concert I’m going to see The Milk Carton Kids at the Athenaeum Theatre. I was really impressed with them when they toured here a couple of years ago, so look forward to their show. And in July my favourite singer-songwriter Ryan Adams is performing two shows at the Forum Theatre.

So despite winter’s chill, there are several reasons to be cheerful.

Testing

Windows Live Writer and Google have not been friends over the past week. I’m checking to see if it’s fixed

It’s Fixed!

The Words & The Melody - Iris DeMent at Thornbury Theatre

Iris DeMent live at Thornbury Theatre 28/5/15

 



Iris DeMent last played at Thornbury Theatre in December 2013 to an enthralled sold out show. I didn’t really expect her to return so soon, considering that 15 years had passed since her previous tour in 1998.

Obviously Iris was impressed by the response to her music on her last tour. and appeared to be delighted to be back on these shores. And we who had tickets to her show this time were thrilled to welcome her back.

Concerts at Thornbury Theatre are normally seated at large tables and chairs, cabaret style, but this time it was arranged in concert mode with rows of chairs.  No doubt they could accommodate a larger audience in this mode.

I’d booked reserved seats early so was pleased to be seated in the fourth row, which turned out to be good for testing the G16 in the circumstances. Despite heads impeding my view, I managed to get much more glamorous photos of Iris DeMent this time.  And she was certainly dressed more colourfully this time in a dress she had just bought from a fashion house in Brisbane.

There were two support acts, the first being local duo Andy Wigglesworth and Laura Coates who perform as The Weeping Willows.

The Weeping Willows at Thornbury Theatre 28/5/15



They performed a short pleasant set of songs from their debut album Till The North Wind Blows. They’re into traditional old time music, influenced by Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Emmylou Harris, etc.

The second support was Pieta Brown, daughter of Iris DeMent’s husband, singer songwriter Greg Brown. She grew up steeped in music, and follows in her father’s footsteps as a songwriter, musician and singer.

Pieta Brown live at Thornbury Theatre 28/5/15

 

Pieta’s musical taste extends beyond the folk and country spectrum into rock n roll and she is a brilliant guitarist. I have no idea what songs she played, but one was a tribute to Loretta Lynn.

Iris DeMent took the stage at about 9.00pm, and for most of the show played the piano as the accompaniment to her songs. It was only in the latter stages of her set that she took up her guitar and faced the audience directly.

Iris DeMent live at Thornbury Theatre 28/5/15

 

Iris was in a cheerful mood, despite her jet lag which she admitted she was treating with coffee, and gave a mesmerising and moving performance that lasted for well over an hour and a half and included 18 songs, including a two song encore.

 

Most of the songs she sang were drawn from her latest album Sing The Delta, and from a forthcoming record entitled The Trackless Woods, a collection of 18 songs that are poems of Anna Akhmatova,  Iris has set to music.

She explained that on discovering the poetry of Akhmatova, she felt compelled to create music for the words, stating that being used to expressing her own poetic vision in song, the words make more sense when set to music. “It’s like the melody is part of the language,” she added.

I was somewhat disappointed that she didn’t sing any of my favourites from her back catalogue, except “My Life” in the encore, but then again the Akhmatova poems sounded gorgeous.

Pieta Brown joined her on stage for the last two songs of the main set, where they sang a wonderful version Greg Brown’s “My Home In the Sky” and “Let The Mystery Be” from Iris’s second album Infamous Angel.

It was a low key night of beautiful soulful music and a rare pleasure to hear Iris DeMent sing again in her unique voice, her lovely melodies.



More Literary Luminaries – David Mitchell & Jonathan Lethem at The Edge

David Mitchell with Suzanne Donisthorpe – Deakin Edge 19/5/15

When David Mitchell last visited Melbourne in May 2011, a big crowd turned out to see him at the Athenaeum Theatre. The venue this time was Deakin Edge at Federation Square, a modern and edgy space – a startling contrast to the old fashioned charms of the Athenaeum -  but an equally large number of fans were present last night.

I managed to get a seat in the front row, as is my wont with music shows, i.e. my favourite spot to be. So my view was unimpeded.  I took along the Canon G16 this time and shot some decent photos.
David Mitchell bounced onto the stage greeting the audience with a friendly hello as he took his seat. The topic of discussion was of course his latest novel The Bone Clocks, a mind teaser of a novel that involves several different narratives like his earlier novel Cloud Atlas. The Bone Clocks however has a central character, Holly Sykes, who appears peripherally in the various other character’s stories. There is a supernatural thread running through the novel, and indeed there’s a terrific supernatural battle towards the end. The prose is dazzling and pleasurable to read.

It was an engrossing conversation and David Mitchell presents as charming and unaffected, funny as well.  It was thrilling to be present in person at the event, seeing one of my favourite writers in the flesh again.

There was some discussion about whether Mitchell is writing an “uber” novel as in each of his books characters from previous books reappear. There is a scholarly work entitled  A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell by Patrick O’Donnell, a study of all David Mitchell’s fiction up to The Bone Clocks which explores this idea. I have a copy of it, which I have yet to read in full. It’s somewhat abstruse and hard to read, I must admit, but I’ll persevere with it when I run out of more engaging reading matter.

The video of the interview with David Mitchell is now available on the Wheeler Centre website:


David Mitchell reading from The Bone Clocks –note: the protrusion on David’s lip is the remote mike.

I had taken along a big bag of books – it weighed a ton –  with five Mitchell novels and some of my collection of Jonathan Lethem novels.

One of the disadvantages of sitting in the front row, is getting out of the venue quickly enough to get a forward spot in the book signing queue.  It was a long queue and moved fairly slowly, but after hanging on for at least half an hour, I was able to get the rest of my David Mitchell collection signed, and express my appreciation for the care he takes in creating beautiful sentences, which was something he talked about in the session.


Jonathan Lethem & Chloe Hooper - Deakin Edge 19/5/15

It would have been a perfect occasion seeing just David Mitchell, but Jonathan Lethem was the icing on the cake.

His latest novel is Dissident Gardens, a “multigenerational saga of revolutionaries and activists, the civil rights movement and the counterculture, from the 1930s Communists to the 2010s Occupy movement, and is mostly set in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens and in Greenwich Village” from Wikipedia.

I recently read this novel and identified with the period and its leftist sympathies. It took me back to my revolutionary days in the 1960s and 70s.

The two leading characters are Rose Zimmer and her daughter Miriam and their strong personalities are portrayed vividly, Rose in particular.  Jonathan Lethem said in the discussion that Rose was based on his Communist grandmother and Miriam on his activist mother, who died when he was 13 years old.

His novel The Fortress of Solitude is semi autobiographical, set as it is in Brooklyn, where Jonathan Lethem lived as a child.

He had an unconventional bohemian childhood and originally wanted to be an artist like his father. However, from an early age he steeped himself in counterculture falling in love with books and music of all genres, and spent 12 years working in second hand bookstores whilst writing his early novels. He said he loved old battered second hand books and unfashionable writers of whom nobody, these days, has heard.  


Jonathan Lethem reading an excerpt from Dissident Gardens

Not as many people attended the Jonathan Lethem event, so the signing queue was shorter. Jonathan was friendly and pleasant in person, and obligingly signed the six novels I’d brought along, remarking on my old paperback copies of his first two books. He’d be pleased to know that three of the novels I took along were second hand copies.

A video of Jonathan Lethem's interview is also available on the Wheeler Centre website.

The four literary events that I have attended in the last week, were all different and interesting, from the old school literati of Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, to the young bloods of the Internet age  in the persons of David Mitchell and Jonathan Lethem, they were more than worth the cost of entry.

I hope to attend more in the future.

The Warm Glow of Literary Lights

Last night I attended the first of the literary events I had booked for at the Wheeler Centre, that being the double header of married literary lights Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn.

They are now both 81 years old, but they certainly don’t look it nor had their mental acuity been tempered by age. Both events were interesting in different ways.

Claire Tomalin is a noted biographer of such literary figures as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. She created a storm of controversy when she revealed in her biography of Dickens, that he had long term mistress, for whom he abandoned his wife and children. Claire Tomalin also wrote a biography – The Invisible Woman - of said mistress, Ellen Ternan,  a young actress, who by all accounts led a very interesting life, ending up, after Dickens death, as a respectable woman, managing to keep her relationship with Dickens and her previous less than respectable life a secret until her death.

Claire Tomalin was interviewed by local writer Toni Jordon and spoke at length about her life and works.

She wrote her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft in her late thirties, her life up to that time being busily filled with her career as Literary Editor for New Statesman and The Sunday Times as well as bringing up her children.

The Wollstonecraft biography was a great success and won the Whitbread Book Award in 1974. I have a copy of the hardcover, but it is not the first edition, which according to Claire Tomalin, was a small issue. My copy is the second edition published in 1975. However I did take it along last night and got it signed by the author.

A somewhat out of focus Claire Tomalin signing books.

The discussion evolved into the question of how Claire Tomalin chooses her biographical subjects. She remarked that in the process of researching and writing a biography she felt as if she was obliged to live their life and she was attracted to subjects that she could love. Her emotional engagement with her biographical subjects was profound and she admitted to weeping when she wrote of their deaths. She makes a point of literally walking in her subjects shoes, traversing on foot the locations in which they lived their lives.

Her favourites, she stated were Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys.

It was an engrossing hour of conversation and I was delighted to have been present for it.

The event was pretty well booked out and was held at the Wheeler Centre in the former Barry Hall in the South Wing of the State Library in Little Lonsdale Street. The audience was mostly in the older age group, though I did spot a few young faces.

The Michael Frayn event was a completely different kettle of fish. He was introduced by Chris Mead , the Literary Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, so his emphasis was more on Michael Frayn’s theatrical creations, though the acclaimed literary light is noted for his journalism , novels and screen writing as well as his dramatic works. His segment was titled “How To Begin”, so Michael Frayn began by talking for at least twenty minutes on how he came to a writing career.

Also out of focus, Michael Frayn speaking on the podium.

He was a humorous and entertaining speaker, having a fine sense of irony and an appreciation for the ridiculous things life throws up, relating several stories where he was the butt of the joke.

This year, 2015, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first novel The Tin Men, and he has 10 other novels to his credit. His plays include Copenhagen, Democracy and Noises Off.

He didn’t start to write for the theatre until the 1970s, eschewing the literary form out of prejudice caused by a rejection of his first attempt at theatre in his University days. 

I notice on the Wheeler Centre website that events are recorded for posterity, so you can view some past events about a month after they occurred, should you be interested in checking them out.

It was a chilly day yesterday, Melbourne shivering under an early onset of winter, so it was good to venture out and bask in the warm glow of literature. It’s a pity my photos didn’t turn out well, but I was nervous about taking photos in the venue, so the two photos above are sneak shots hastily snapped on my smallest and not very good camera.

Next Tuesday I am looking forward to seeing the David Mitchell - Jonathan Lethem double header at Deakin Edge in Federation Square.

The horse racing scene is rather dull in Melbourne at the moment with the Group 1 action happening in Adelaide this weekend and in Brisbane throughout late May and June, but I have booked for several concerts over the coming months, the first being Iris Dement on 28 May.

I’m particularly delighted that my favourite artist Ryan Adams is coming in July. Both his Melbourne shows have already sold out, but I managed to get tickets for both nights.

I’ve got winter covered, entertainment wise at least.