Strawberries

Still from Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007)

 

“There were never strawberries

like the ones we had

that sultry afternoon

sitting on the step

of the open french window

facing each other

your knees held in mine

the blue plates in our laps

the strawberries glistening

in the hot sunlight

we dipped them in sugar

looking at each other

not hurrying the feast

for one to come

the empty plates

laid on the stone together

with the two forks crossed

and I bent towards you

sweet in that air

in my arms

abandoned like a child

from your eager mouth

the taste of strawberries

in my memory

lean back again

let me love you

let the sun beat

on our forgetfulness

one hour of all

the heat intense

and summer lightning

on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates”

Edwin Morgan 

From the Domain of Arnheim

The Domain of Arnheim, René Magritte, 1962

 
 

“And so that all these ages, these years
we cast behind us, like the smoke-clouds
dragged back into vacancy when the rocket springs –

The domain of Arnheim was all snow, but we were there.
We saw a yellow light thrown on the icefield
from the huts by the pines, and laughter came up
floating from a white corrie miles away, clearly.
We moved on down, arm in arm.
I know you would have thought it was a dream
but we were there. And those were trumpets
-tremendous round the rocks-
while they were burning fires of trash and mammoths’ bones.
They sang naked, and kissed in the smoke.
A child, or one of their animals, was crying.
Young men blew the ice crystals off their drums.
We came down among them, but of course
they could see nothing, on their time-scale.
Yet they sensed us, stopped,
looked up-even into our eyes.

To them we were a displacement of the air,
a sudden chill, yet we had no power
over their fear. If one of them had been dying
he would have died. The crying
came from one just born: that was the cause
of the song. We saw it now. What had
we stopped but joy?
I know you felt the same
dismay, you gripped my arm, they were waiting
for what they knew of us to pass.
A sweating trumpeter took
a brand from the fire with a shout and threw it
where our bodies would have been –
we felt nothing but his courage.
And so they would deal with every imagined
power seen or unseen.
There are no gods in the domain of Arnheim.

We signaled the ship; got back;
our lives and days returned to us, but
haunted by deeper souvenirs than any rocks or seeds.

From time the souvenirs are deeds.”

Edwin Morgan

First published in The Second Life (1968)

Rush to Exit… Stage Left

Hugh Syme is notably responsible for all of Rush’s album cover art since 1975’s Caress of Steel. He is also a musician and has appeared in some Rush songs as a keyboard player and he has contributed as a musician with Ian Thomas Band and Tiles.

 
 

(1975)

 
 

The album cover for Caress of Steel was intended to be printed in a silver colour to give it a “steel” appearance. A printing error resulted in giving the album cover a copper colour. The error was not corrected on subsequent printings of the album.

 
 

(1976)

 
 

The Starman emblem (also known as the ‘Man in the Star’ logo) was adopted by Rush fans as a logo since its first appearance on the back cover of 2112. Peart described the Starman in an interview with Creem magazine:

“All (the naked man) means is the abstract man against the masses. The red star symbolizes any collectivist mentality.”

In 1983 Hugh Syme told Jeffrey Morgan that he never imagined the band would use the Starman as their main logo.

 
 

(1976)

 
 

The title of this album alludes to William Shakespeare‘s play As You Like It.

 
 

(1978)

 
 

Permanent Waves (1980)

 
 

The cover art sparked some controversy because of the appearance of the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline on the newspaper. Because of pressure from the Chicago Tribune, cover designer Hugh Syme changed the text to “Dewei Defeats Truman”. The billboards in the distance were changed from Coca-Cola (who objected to the use of their logo) to include each band member’s name in similar type style.

The background scene comes from a photo, taken by Flip Schulke, of the Galveston Seawall in Texas during Hurricane Carla on September 11, 1961. The woman pictured in the foreground is model Paula Turnbull. The waving man in the background is Hugh Syme.

 
 

(1981)

 
 

The title is from the signature catchphrase “Exit, stage left!” of the Hanna-Barbera pink mountain lion cartoon character Snagglepuss (coincidentally, Time Warner, former owners of Rush’s later label Atlantic Records, owns the H-B properties today). The term “stage left” is a stage direction used in blocking to identify the left side of a theater from the point of view of the performer, as opposed to the point of view of the audience.

An item from each of Rush’s previous eight studio album covers can be seen on the front and back cover of this live album, though each has been modified in some way. The owl from Fly by Night flies above Apollo, the man in the suit from Hemispheres, who stands next to the woman from Permanent Waves. The puppet king from A Farewell to Kings sits atop a box stenciled with the “Rush” logo from Rush. Next to him is a painting of the Caress of Steel album cover, held by one of the movers from Moving Pictures, with another mover standing behind. Next to this is Dionysus, the nude man from Hemispheres. Behind this scene, the starman from 2112 hangs in the background, next to an “EXIT” sign. This entire foreground scene, shot in Toronto’s then-abandoned Winter Garden Theatre, is on the left side of the stage (from the point of view of the artist), thus “Exit…Stage Left”.

 
 

(1982)

 
 

(1984)

 
 

(1985)

 
 

(1987)

 
 

(1989)

 
 

(1991)

 
 

“…The essence of these songs is: if there’s a chance, you might as well take it. So what if some parts of life are a crap shoot? Get out there and shoot the crap. A random universe doesn’t have to be futile; we can change the odds, load the dice, and roll again…. For anyone who hasn’t seen Groucho Marx’s game show You Bet Your Life, I mean that no one but Groucho knows the secret word, and one guess is as good as another… Anything can happen. That is called fate.

Neil Peart

 
 

Counterparts (1993)

 
 

(1996)

 
 

Retrospective I (1997)

 
 

Retrospective II (1997)

 
 

(1998)

 
 

Vapor Trails (2002)

 
 

(2003)

 
 

(2004)

 
 

The album features eight covers of songs that were influential for the band members during the 1960s.

 
 

(2006)

 
 

(2007)

 
 

According to drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, inspiration for the title of the album was conceived after considerable research from several sources; the 2000-year-old Buddhist game called  Leela, the Game of Self Knowledge, the related children’s game Snakes and Ladders (also known as Chutes and Ladders), and Hamlet‘s quote “slings and arrows.” This information helped convince bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson to adopt the original painting of the age old game board as the cover for the new album.

 
 

Alternative cover

 
 

(2009)

 
 

(2012)

 
 

The album’s cover depicts a clock marked with alchemical symbols instead of numbers. It displays the time as 9:12 (21:12 in 24-hour time),  in reference to the band’s 2112 album and its title suite. Other symbols are incorporated into the band name and album title.

The Man Who Would Be Gatsby

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

 
 

While a teenager, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was collecting ideas about the goings on in West Egg and not just those of the community but those of a specific man: W. Gould Brokaw, a now-forgotten Long Island socialite, playboy and gentleman automobile racer. He literally could not escape his shadow.

 
 

W. Gould Brokaw

 
 

Brokaw was the son of hugely successful New York clothier Vail Brokaw of Brokaw Brothers, and grandson of a railroad tycoon; he inherited a fortune of around $4.5 million and never needed to do anything in particular for work. His circle of friends was the cream of New York society: Astors, Whitneys, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Morgans, all of them interested in speed, whether horses, greyhounds, yachts or cars. Brokaw was an elder statesman for that set of young millionaires, having been born a decade or more before most, in 1863. In later legal proceedings–of which there were oh so many, he was described as “a rich and fashionable clubman.”
 

According to Some Sort of Grandeur, Matthew Bruccoli’s biography of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the character Jay Gatsby is based on the bootlegger and earlier World War I officer Max Gerlach. In the 1920s, when Gerlach knew the Fitzgeralds, he operated as a bootlegger and allegedly kept Fitzgerald topped off with booze. Born in Yonkers as Max A. Stark (or possibly Max A. Stork), he claimed direct German ancestry and went by the names of Max Stark Gerlach and Max von Gerlach later in life (his gravestone reads Max Stork Gerlach). Nevertheless, Gatsby is a composite, as are all Fitzgerald’s characters, and there’s a certain amount of Scottie himself in Jay.

 
 

Robert Evans and Ali MacGraw

 
 

About the filming adaption of The Great Gatsby directed by Jack Clayton in 1974, it was originally conceived and developed as a wedding present vehicle for Ali MacGraw (formerly Diana Vreeland’s assistant at Harper’s Bazaar magazine) from her then-husband Robert Evans. The project was derailed from its initial purpose when MacGraw fell in love with her The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972) co-star Steve McQueen and divorced Evans.

 
 

Evans in his home Woodland, built by architect John Woolf

 
 

The producer with Tatjiana Shoan. Harper’s Bazaar, 2004

 
 

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw

 
 

Stills from The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974)

 
 

Automobiles are almost treated as a character in the plot of Fitzgerald’s book. Myrtle Wilson was knocked down by a car and this sad event unchains the climax of the story. Plus, Fitzgerald to his editor Maxwell Perkins that the name of Jordan Baker (a character based on the golfer Edith Cumming) is a combination between the two then-popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, as an allusion to Jordan’s “fast” reputation and the freedom now presented to Americans, especially women of 1920s.

 
 

Ralph Lauren

 
 

Ralph Lauren who (as we know) made the costumes for Jack Clayton’s The Great Gastby, has a penchant for cars. His collection of classic automobiles is another dimension of his own persona. An amazing lineup of 50-plus dream machines that have all been restored to glory, the convoy is a portal to the past, when men like Brokaw drove their race cars home from the track at the end of the day and manufacters were the manifestations of their designers: Jean Bugatti, Enzo Ferrari, Ferdinand Porsche… RL’s gateway drug was a white ’61 Morgan convertible with red leather seats, which he bought in 1963- back when he was a travelling salesman for the Boston-based tie company A. Rivetz & Co.- and was later forced to sell when he couldn’t afford a garage in Manhattan.

 
 

Steve McQueen

 
 

And it’s a little bit curious and probably not coincidental that one of Ralph Lauren’s cottages is adorned with black-and-white photos of Greta Garbo, Johnny Depp and Steve McQueen, a man who also loved engines and made himself just like Jay Gatsby and Lauren did.