The bard gives us advance notice of his upcoming medieval K-pop releases
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Passing the hat
TONY BURKE enjoys a rare history of those who play music on the street
Street musician playing drums, North Fourth Street, Ann Arbor Michigan
GORDON PARSONS steps warily through the pessimistic world view of an influential US conservative
HENRY BELL takes issue with the assertion that basic income is a remedy for poverty when it doesn’t address the inbuilt inequality of capitalism
RON JACOBS welcomes an investigation of the murders of US leftist activists that tells the story of a solidarity movement in Chile
RITA DI SANTO surveys the smorgasbord of films on offer at this year’s festival
Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
Down On The Corner – Adventures In Busking & Street Music
Cary Baker, Jawbone Press, £16.95
BORN and raised in Chicago, Cary Baker’s interest in street performers was first sparked in 1971.
“My father told me he wanted to take me to Maxwell Street,” he writes, “the decrepit Chicago district at which his parents — Jewish European immigrants — bought, sold, and traded in the 1940s. By the 1960s and ’70s, the neighbourhood was predominantly African-American and a hotbed for blues artists like Big John Wrencher, Walter Horton, Hound Dog Taylor and many more.
“We’d barely parked our car across Roosevelt Road when I heard the strains of a slide guitar played by a street singer named Blind Arvella Gray. We stood there and listened for an hour. I introduced myself, got his phone number, and ended up writing an interview feature on him for the then-brand-new Chicago Reader. They published the piece. Aged 15 my career as a freelance writer had begun.”
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