CREATING A BOOK

Not the writing of it, or digital dissemination, but actually manufacturing a hardback:

Yet the video itself fights its own subject-matter. You barely glimpse each part of the process and never see the finished book. Being so impatiently jump-cut speedy, so ADD, so desperately contemporary, it treats viewers' brains as if they'd be incapable of reading a hardback.

QUAINTESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 16

Neil Young with his first girlfriend, Pam Smith, at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, August 1964; photo by Jack Harper, published New York Times online Sept 21 but datelined “September 23, 2012”

FREDDIE SCOTT SINGS VAN MORRISON

One of my favourite 1960s soul records is the widely ignored, wonderfully slow version Freddie Scott cut of Ray Charles' ‘I Got A Woman'  -  but that hasn't been uploaded onto YouTube. Nor has Scott's version of Dylan's ‘I Shall Be Released', nor his version of Van Morrison's ‘My Brown-Eyed Girl' from the Vanthology album. But this is his version of another of Van's Bang sessions songs, ‘He Ain't Give You None'. (Scott, too, worked with Bang's Bert Berns.)

Freddie Scott was born in 1933 and died five years ago, aged 74.

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 15

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING RATHER DIFFERENT

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 14

Dublin, 1961 © Charles Cushman