Jake Shears likes Van Dyke Parks

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From ‘Music’s secret weapons‘ in today’s Guardian. Musicians pick “their special album: the one nobody else has heard of, the one to bring out when you want to amaze people” and trot out a host of uninspiring choices, most of which are hardly albums that no one has heard of. Tells you a lot about today’s current crop of musos. Anyway, Jake came to the rescue and he didn’t go for the obvious VDP pick of Discover America either. If you want to discover more about the brilliant Van Dyke Parks, visit his site.

Jake Shears
(No 1 in the albums and singles charts with Scissor Sisters)
Van Dyke Parks – Jump! (1984)
It’s his concept album inspired by the Uncle Remus tales from Song of the South. He’s a genius arranger, producer, singer, songwriter. He also worked on Brian Wilson’s Smile. Jump! is a truly timeless record. It came out in 1984 but sounds like it could have been made yesterday or 80 years ago.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• They are Scissor Sisters and so are you

Penguin book covers

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Nice collection of old covers for Penguin Books on Joe Kral’s Flickr pages. Looking over these, many of which are very familiar even though I’ve never owned them, makes me aware of how many hours of my life must have been spent in secondhand bookshops. The David Pelham cover for A Clockwork Orange has always been a favourite Penguin design. Pelham did a number of great covers for Penguin’s SF titles in the 1970s but the Burgess volume proved the most durable, unusually for a cover design surviving many reprintings. Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

City of Light

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Back home again with enough photos to make postings for a whole year. I’ll restrain myself, however, and for now you can see the result of my quest to capture the perfect Eiffel Tower shot. This involved waiting patiently for other tourists at the Trocadero to move away from the one spot on the balustrade that allows a symmetrical view then setting up the mini tripod. For those who appreciate such details, my small Canon PowerShot was shooting at F8.0 with a 4″ exposure. The big arc lights to the left and right were part of some exposition whose construction was in progress around the fountain.

On the move

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Le Stryge by Charles Méryon (1853).

“These writings, which deal with the Parisian arcades, were begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue that curved over the arcade; even so they are covered with a dust hundreds of years old by the millions of pages in which the fresh wind of diligence, the heavy breath of the scholar, the storm of young zeal and the slow gentle breeze of curiosity rustled. For the painted summer sky, which looks down from the arcades to the study of the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale, has spread its dreamy, lightless cover over them.”

Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk.

Off to Paris again for a week to explore some of Walter’s arcades.