Cookridge Street Swimming Baths, a Victorian edifice dedicated to the splendid cause of teaching schoolchildren to swim for 70 years and scene of a crime of indescribable proportions when I was a child, not perpetrated by me, but witnessed by me and unspoken by me for forty years – until now.
When I was ten years old our school decided that all of us young oiks needed to learn to swim, fair enough we thought, and once a week we would be loaded onto a bus and transported into Leeds to partake of free swimming lessons at the Victorian Cookridge Street swimming baths – a beautiful building in the style of a turkish emporium of steam and water (a similar, restored building remains at Bramley in Leeds) which was demolished in the late 1960’s and replaced by a shite concrete block of a swimming pool which leaked from day one and is now also destined for demolition any day soon.
Memories of being dragged around Leeds City Centre on the weekly shop in the 1960’s, and then, just when you thought it was all over we’d enter the “top” door of the Leeds Kirkgate Market, one of the largest indoor markets in Europe, when you walked through those doors you knew you were on the last lap for down at the opposite end was another identical set of doors that led to the bus station and home – it could take another hour to traverse the market though…
Yes, yes, I know, its another Bruce Springsteen song, “can’t you find anything else to use ?” you all cry – well no, frankly I can’t, for when I need solace or when I need a musical accompaniment to my all night painting sessions then invariably I turn to Springsteen.
Fortunately Napster has a huge, a magnificently gargantuan collection of Springsteen tracks, with or without the E Street Band and its easy to select five hours worth of his music to paint-along-a.
“4th July Asbury Park, Sandy” originally recorded in 1973, still one of his best, but in this video it has a different meaning to it, for in this video you’ll notice that the accordion player seems to be given a lot of attention – there’s a good reason for that.
Danny Federici was one of the original E Street Band members in the early 1970’s, a personal friend of Springsteens from childhood he was ever present whenever and wherever the band played for the next 30 years, until in November 2007 he announced that he would be stepping aside from the band to have treatment for the melanoma that he had been diagnosed with two years earlier.
On 20th March 2008 he rejoined the band in Indianapolis for this short appearance, he died on 17th April 2008 leaving a son and two adopted daughters.
The Danny Federici Melanoma Fund web site is here and somewhere on the web is a site where you can download an EP of four songs, including “Sandy”, in aid of the Fund, but I’m buggered if I can find it…
Late Edit … the link to the EP is on the front page of BruceSpringsteen.net and is available from all the legal music download web sites…
For no apparent reason at all other than the article appeared on the headline page of Wikipedia yesterday, I started reading all about Frank Lloyd Wright.
Like most children of the Sixties my introduction to his name came when I played the family’s compulsory copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” – it was illegal in the UK for any household not to own a copy – and the track “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright”, I wouldn’t even have known at that point that he was an architect had it not been mentioned in the lyrics.
But over time I grew to appreciate his art, that whole Bauhaus/Art Deco simplicity that influenced his work and spawned his own genre “Prairie School” movement, its simple, casual and easy on the eye so that even though most of Wrights stuff was designed 80 or so years ago it still looks very modern.
Reading this blog yesterday about how a photographer travels light to Australia got me thinking as to what the lightest is that I have ever travelled.
And I realise that I don’t.
In the days before my self imposed ban on using airports because of their general arsey-ness, I have been turned away at a check-in desk because I had too many library books in my hand luggage, she was probably right, there’s no way on gods earth that I could lift that bag above my head to put it in the overhead lockers but I’m sure that two or three other people would have helped.
The Three Legs and The Vine stand shoulder to shoulder on Leed’s main thoroughfare, The Headrow.
Now although they have always had a “certain reputation” for, shall we say unruliness, I will not be the one to cast aspersions here, I’m sure the clientele are very nice in that roguish sort of way and I’m sure its not true that a fight will be ongoing in either (or both) of these pubs at any time of any day (or night) that you care to call, oh no, I wouldn’t say things like that.
But,
The Headrow is four lanes wide at the point that I took the reference photographs for this painting and on that day, an innocuous Tuesday afternoon in June, I ensured that I had all four lanes betwixt me and the two pubs, yes I took the photo’s from across the road with three pedestrian barriers and fifty yards of highway inbetween us, and I was still on my toes and ready to make a run for it should any of the clientele spot me photographing them.
The thing about both of these pubs is that they have clear glass in their windows, not for them the opaque or obscured glass of your more “normal” pub, The Three Legs and The Vine like to show off their human zoo to the world – and each time I’ve walked past and glanced in the window I have never seen one of their clients have a full compliment of teeth, ears, eyes or fingers, or all.
There has been a pub on the site of The Three Legs for over 300 years, the current version being extensively renovated and having its terracotta facade added between 1902 and 1914, its a very handsome building, just like its clientele, its neighbour The Vine does not appear to have one single Internet article written about it, so, erm, enough said.
The Jerrychicken Diaries – risking life and limb to bring you art…
I have won £10 once, but then again I have only bought a ticket with my own money on a handful of occasions, Suzanne usually buys one and she has won £10 several times and on one head-spinning glorious life-changing day she got four numbers to win £46, boy did we break out the champagne that evening.
At fiftyfest the other night I met up with someone who we used to share a lot of childhood holidays with, Beverley is our Uncle Ralphs eldest daughter (not our real Uncle, but closer than our real ones) and most of our family holidays were spent with their family.
We got to talk a lot about how different things were in the 1960’s and early 70’s and in particular about how our parents would be arrested for child cruelty or abandonment if they did the things now that they did back then…
Because dogs couldn’t hold a drivers licence his owner had always told Pippin, “If you ever get stopped by the police, just give them my name”, but now that it was happening he wasn’t quite sure whether or not he could pull it off…
This weekend sees the annual Leeds Festival, a three day music extravaganza held in several muddy fields outside the city where around 100,000 people set up camp over the bank holiday weekend to listen to their impression of what music is, Thursday was the day the camp site opened and traffic chaos ensued as all of those people tried to arrive via one of two motorways, blocking both for several hours in a Woodstock stylee.
They are all missing the main event this weekend.
The main event this weekend is Fiftyfest, a music extravaganza of real music played by real bands that no-one has ever heard of and the worst news is for all of those people is that Fiftyfest is held just a few miles away from their quagmire of a festival, but they are not invited.
This week my little brother Ned was fifty years old.
I bought him a Spoon Puppet set, a box with four wooden spoons inside and all the bits and pieces you need to make four little wooden spoon puppets, he spent Tuesday afternoon (his birthday) in the office gluing bits of fuzzy felt and wool hair to the spoons and painting faces on them – its probably the best present he’s ever had.
He has two lifelong friends, they grew up together, went to school together, have stuck together for fifty years, they have their own little band going and hire a studio every Thursday to practice – they are all fifty within this next month or so and as one of them happens to have a large house with a very large garden they have decided to hold a festival of music and invited several other local bands that they know to come and celebrate.
Around 250 invites have been sent out, a huge marquee erected, portaloos hired, hopefully they’ve arranged some car parking or we’re all buggered, a stage has been erected and beer bought, tonight promises to be, in the words of our old dad, “a bloody good neet”, they have consulted with the law people around these parts and been told that they can make as much noise as they like up until 11pm as the police do not consider noise nuisance to be nuisance until after that time.
So today I play John Lennon for my little brother Ned, mainly because John Lennon always was and always will be a hero for him, but mainly because he’s going to need something to get him thro’ the night…
The Official Blogsite for our fundraising cycle rides planned for 2010, and the depository for the 2009 C2C articles.........................
ITS ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE LADS
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The continuing adventures of the two inch high cheese addicts and their Trap o'Doom conflicts...........
THE MEECES
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