James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
At 1’13” in the video below, a young man in black pulls himself off the wall to the right and crosses the road in front of the car. It’s an anxious gait he has, and a disassociated, almost dazed expression. I can remember feeling like that once. As well I might, because that young man…
Now that we have access to sound recordings going back as far as the 1860s, it’s time to acknowledge that we need the internet, apps and ebooks to make the best use of the new media that the Victorian French invented and Gilded Age America made perfect. Previous means of distribution – sound and video…
The room was right out of a book and I began to say to myself I guess dreams do come true.. Because here I am, living in a Paris garret, writing poems and having champagne for breakfast (because champagne is what we had with our breakfast at the Grand Duc from the half-empty bottles left…
One of the things that first strikes a newcomer to the hot dance bands of the 1920s is the sheer amount of lead-in on each record before we get to the vocal. If there is a vocal, of course, and it isn’t long before you realize that songs like That’s My Weakness Now are stronger…
Bar Kohl on Edinburgh’s South Bridge is one of those multi-faceted drinking places whose character changes dramatically according to circumstances. It’s handy for the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Central Library and the University of Edinburgh alike, so during the day it attracts researchers and scholars, who make way in the evenings for a…
This was the era when the tones of Bunny Berigan’s record of ‘I Can’t Get Started’ seemed to come floating out of every window between Beaumont Street and Wellington Square (Kingsley Amis, Memoirs 1991 p.48) Kingsley was writing of 1941 and 1942 in wartime Oxford. At the same time that the students were putting off…
“Stopping the diary”, wrote Philip Larkin, “Was a stun to memory/Was a blank starting”(1), and for the British at least, World War II performed the same function. It brought a great forgetting down, and now the world before it is a blank starting, a home for every dream for the future that the British hold,…
Of course, jazz writ large is now an ancient “world” music, having as much in it today of the sound of the kasbah as it always has of New Orleans, Harlem and Chicago. But that great first flowering of jazz that we’re focussing on at the Garreteer had a distinct beginning and a definite end:…
In 1928, Louis Armstrong took his band into a recording studio and emerged with what Ken Burns would later describe as the most sublime 4 minutes in the history of music: West End Blues was the start of an astonishing 18 month run in recording studios in New York which would produce what Kingsley Amis…
Does revolutionary music always go hand in hand with revolutionary technology? The experience of the twentieth century would point to that: no rock recordings precede the invention of the electric guitar, but thereafter almost every single studio innovation of the next forty years would be driven by popular music. But rock’s ability to inspire innovation…
It was one of those changes that made the modern world: the arrival, in the middle of the 1890s, of fast photographic emulsions. And the reaction was immediate: the next five years heralded the Kodak box camera, the back page football action shot, cinema! and, not least of all, amateur railway photographers taking pictures of…
It’s a matter of personal regret that I don’t keep books at my desk. There isn’t room; not if I want to write. Even the little netbook that comes with me to the National Library of Scotland leaves me nowhere to prop books, not really, and one glance around is enough to tell me that…
