Monday, February 20, 2012 at 05:08PM 
Every month of the 2012 Cliff Richard calendar provides its own unique delight. Taken together, they’re simply too much pleasure for the average human heart to bear without exploding down your chest. So, I’ll take them one at a time, or two at a time if I’ve been lazy.
Cliff Richard, funny Monday, February 20, 2012 at 02:09PM 
One of the many imponderable aspects of living in São Paulo is how fiercely proud its inhabitants are of their home-town. When you first move here, you can perhaps be forgiven for wondering why this is. Unlike its nearby cousin and arch-rival, Rio de Janeiro, it is miles from the sea, lacks an enormous fresh-water lagoon, retains very few of its picturesque old buildings and has almost no open spaces. And yet Paulistas remain adamant: their city is not merely the equal of Rio, it is superior.
Monday, February 20, 2012 at 12:45PM That’s Not My Tractor – A Tragedy in Four Parts.
Piglet’s 123: A Harrowing Tale of Lust, Betrayal and Fiscal Accounting.
Old Bear – The Most Searing Exposé of Care for the Elderly Since Mog the Forgetful Cat.
The Snail and the Whale – Inter-Species Love with a Twist in the Tail.
How Much Do I Love You? – Not Very Much.
The Tiger Who Came In From The Cold – The Secret Life of Spy Cats.
funny Monday, February 20, 2012 at 09:45AM The first really good bit is on ‘Gimme Shelter’ when Mick Jagger whoops off-mic in response to Merry Clayton breaking her voice in the ‘just a kiss away refrain’. It happens at 3:01 on this version:
The second really good bit is Paul McCartney’s cry of ‘yeeaay’ at the end of ‘Twist & Shout’, which happens on this video at about 2:40.
These are really good bits because they capture forever, on those silently unwinding spools of magnetic tape, the moment when someone felt the pure spontaneous joy of what they were doing. The former is particularly cool because it captures Jagger being so bowled over by the power of someone else’s performance that he forgets all his usual front-man insecurity*.
But it’s the end of ‘Twist and Shout’ which has the real significance. It was recorded at the end of The Beatles first and only day at Abbey Road to record Please Please Me, and Lennon was suffering from a bad cold, drinking honey and lemon all day for his throat. As a result George Martin decided to schedule ‘Twist and Shout’ for the end of the final session as a means of saving Lennon’s voice, because the vocal, as interpreted by Lennon, was a notorious throat-shredder.
When it finally came time to record ‘Twist and Shout’, after nine straight hours of recording, Lennon’s voice was nearly shot and they were almost out of studio time. Everyone knew they only had one chance to get their traditional show-stopper on record – and boy did they make it count.
So that’s what you hear in that ‘yeah’: McCartney exalting in his mate’s reckless, exhilarated tearing-up of his vocal chords combining with his own spontaneous amazement and delight at what they’ve managed to create – perhaps not merely in that song but over the whole course of that day. It’s a moment which not only nails the fundamental Lennon-McCartney dynamic of the affable McCartney encouraging Lennon’s misanthropic genius, but which also shows four guys on the brink of transforming their lives forever. Finally, it’s a moment which captures the ageless, juvenile thrill of being four blokes in a band, a moment which was destined to be played and replayed in millions of little bedrooms by lonely kids needing to dream of a way out of their lives.
All of which brings us to this song, in which you can hear the compressed echo of all those hours kids like me spent playing those classic albums to death, listening to every riff and hiss and squeak for the hidden knowledge which would one day allow us to play like that.
* The horrible flip-side to the exhilaration of this moment is the rumour that Merry Clayton pushed her voice so hard during the session that she went home and miscarried; the Stones were never too far from tragedy.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:24PM Having thought about it, I don’t think you can say that the postmodern structure of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is, per se, its meaning. Rather it’s the vehicle for the meaning, the vehicle by which David Mitchell takes something very simple – a love story – and recreates it without the influence of cliché or sentiment. All those switchbacks in the narration serve to do is conceal the outline of Jacob and Orito’s story, before revealing it again in the book’s final chapter, in stark relief, silhouetted against the patterns of all that came before. Viewed objectively, their story, of two people separated by circumstance (and a gulf of cultural incomprehension), is only too mundane and common. Where this book takes off is in its ability to make us see afresh how love erupts within the boredom and waste of the everyday, and feel again that tremendous body-blow by which we experience love and its loss in the space of a single heartbeat.
