The wonderful world of Guitar Wolf rears its decreasingly ug-ly head at the venerable Glasgow institution that is Mono on the 4th of June (perilously close to my birthday, hipsters...).
If you like your squall with a capital Yee-Ha, then GW are for you. Bring your parents too. If you're a parent yourself - nae luck - your kids are probably near the front practising their stage misdemeanour, trying on their school teachers make-up and planning partial world domination with a collective flick of an uncultivated wrist...
Karen Dalton, whose magnificent album '1966,' has very recently been issued on Delmore Recordings is a true original. Her unique voice, her idiosyncratic interpretations of compositions by the likes of Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, and her own inflected and infected songs, marks her as an artist of the first degree.
So why do so few people know about her? It's difficult and surprisingly easy to guess. Dalton's life was one marked by personal and artistic struggle - often, with the music playing second fiddle (awful pun intended) to her personal demons - her recording career was sporadic, with only two albums released in her lifetime.
'1966' is a marvellous record. Essentially a rehearsal tape, it includes full-throated, open-armedrenditions of songs old and new - and criminally undiscovered - by an artist at the peak of her considerable powers.
2011 was a standout year for non-fiction books of all misshapes and argumentative sizes...it's even more difficult to put these into critical context than it is fiction writing.
Nevertheless...
Norton publishing released R P Crease's marvellous 'World in the Balance;' a history of weights and measures, their attribution and their adoption, or not, by various countries. Or not. Crease makes a potentially dry subject highly amusing, fun even, emphasising the differences, highlighting the similarities. Hell, there's even a section on brassiere measurement - and that's incontrovertibly no bad thing.
'Hemingway's Boat,' as reviewed by Allan Massie, is as quixotic a read as the man himself. Tremendously entertaining, the book is, in many ways, similar to Hemingway's own, 'A Moveable Feast,' written when he was a young objet d'art living in Paris (the book begins after Papa's formative years spent carousing there).
What differentiates Paul Hendrickson's book from so many other biographies is that it counterbalances the warts and the all of a man often beleaguered by life, at odds with his crucial self, with his headstrong humanity - in all its rumbustiousness.
Paul Shaw has written a delightful book about an even more delightful subject - the New York City Subway System or, more specifically, its signage. For years, New York's underground signs were an indecipherable mess; difficult to read, nigh impossible to follow. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, it's the story of how a font changed a small, imperfectly formed part of the world for the better and to a new way of seeing.
Jon Ronson has written a number of entertaining, enlightening and informative books. Ronson's latest, 'The Psychopath Test,' follows in these footsteps - albeit following them wearing a pinstriped suit, a pair of Trickers brogues and a mePad. Above all, as Ronson says and writes, it shows how eager many of us are to recognise the marks of madness in other people, and to steadfastly ignore these hallmarks in ourselves.
In closing, it would be impossible not to mention Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon's magnificent 'Day Tripper,' published by Vertigo. Undoubtedly one of THE books of this or any other year, the story, unlike so many graphic novels, grabs and gripes you from the start and never lets go - Ba and Moon have been rightly compared to another Vertigo alumnus, Neil Gaiman; both in terms of story-telling and, crucially, realisation - but their visions are undoubtedly their own.
So, finally, an end to 2011. And a beginning to 2012.
