Gloria Grahame- manifest-manifestly-manifesto.

A clip for our July digital release. The music starts at about 1:39.

Here's a picture of Gloria Grahame and Nicholas Ray. They were married in 1948 when she was 25. He cast her in the film, In A Lonely Place, opposite Humphrey Bogart. This is quite an adult, sophisticated and disturbing movie, filmed in LA and set among backroom Hollywood writers and workers. A post ward filmfull of that weird searching for the bottom, falling morality ound in the best UK and US films of the time. Everything was still all mixed up and new voices were being heard. In the UK it produced beautifullly bitter films like The League Of Gentlemen where every character seems to feel like they've ben cheated and they're already looking back to the war as being the sweet time oftheir lives. In In A Lonely Place there's been a  killing and Humphrey Bogart is a writer who just doesn't seem right. The film and story seem close to Camus' The Outsider.

Gloria and Nicholas were married for four years. Their story seems so mad , to write about it is to retell dark , nylon gossip and innuendo. I wrote this song after reading an encapsulation of it in the London Review Of Books.I you don't want to read it, I'll leave a greasy detail. He hired a private dick and found her in bed with his 14 year old son from his first marriage. They divorced, eight years later, she married her erstwhile stepson and their relationship was the longerst she ever had.

 

Thats her on the left in a war time shot with Ava Gardner on the right.  I wrote vaguely around Ava in the song Mogambo in late 1992.

"shit you could really wear a white towel

the mysterious woman from out of town

a swaggering pirate

a rolling stone

a wild girl

you saw my ship

my life was a storm

I felt you move with me along the shore

I'd hear things about you

people would talk

got a kind of phantom picture of you

I learned your nickname

what you were called by the crowd

I learned what your mother called you in a  conversation about MOGAMBO

I walked around

picking up your trail

picking out your  shape

lovers and catfights overlaid the map

treasure island

MOGAMBO

I was like a private eye who couldn't move couldn't ask a  question

Phillip Marlowe waiting for another door to open by itself

I learned your nickname

what you were called by the crowd

I learned what your mother called you in a  conversation about MOGAMBO"

I was thinking of her movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and MOGAMBO.  She was the focus of thrilling gossip and infamy as well. Her relationship with Frank Sinatra as well as marriages to Micky Rooney (?) and Artie Shaw. She left Frank for a Spanish bullfighter and he made most of his greatest recordings while holding a torch for her. Like Gloria, she also made no effort to fit the role of how a female actor should conduct herself. Yes, they wore FUCK YOU shoes.

We are heading into the studio next week and I am looking forward to that immensely. I have plenty of music I could make, just feeling full of inertia about the ways to get it to peoples ears. We get so little support from any kind of media or radio. (Though that is common with older musicians and Australian musicians in general). Nothing holds in Australia. It's a perrenially light topsoil. I have always liked music to be abstract, unresolved and full of suspension but it also has to belong to some kind of territory. Doesn't have to be earthed or earthy, but it needs to be part of a culture. In the mainstream, Australian culture is pretty International in a timid, beige non committal kind of way. Beards, Brooklyn, Indie shit by 40 year olds.

Hey, I'm just worrying out loud. Melbourne all of a sudden has 5 million people in it. It has grown by a million in the last seven years.  You got to keep moving, right? 

I put all of my lyrics in one place on our website. The Moodists part is incomplete and will probably remain so.As Lee Marvin kept saying in Don Siegels version of THE KILLERS, "Lady I don't have the time..." (Then he'd - very satisfyingly - shoot someone)

David McClymont, who invented indie rock while a member of Orange Juice in the late 70s, early 80s Glasgow post punk scene and was later in the Moodists, has been releasing music of late. (He lives in Melbourne) . Here is his latest.

Clare Moore and I performed the other night as a  part of MEL&NYC at the Atheneum theatre. (also part of an exhibition at the NGV) The event was organized by the Wheeler Centre and featured writers and musicians talking about their times in New York. Stu Thomas was unavailable so we were joined by Bryan Colechin on bass to play a version of DIAMNONDS, FUR COAT, CHAMPAGNE by SUICIDE to close the night. It was a really nice evening and I wish I could perform exclusively in old theatres for the rest of my life. 

 thanks to Janenne Cosier for the photos.

Here is our 2006 recording of this song.

July 7th Dave Graney and the mistLY play - The Cabaret Club - Ballarat.

4/9367 Western Highway Warrenheip, Ballarat 33520353348150 
 

Tuesday July 17th - Dave Graney and Clare Moore will be playing 6-10pm at the Public Brewery - 13 Lacey st, Croydon

Tuesday July 24th - a screening of Donna McRaes film LOST GULLY ROAD at Cinema Nova in Carlton. Dave Graney and Clare Moore did the soundtrack for this film and will be part of a Q&A after the show.

Dave Graney and the mistLY play ADELAIDE at the Wheatsheaf Hotel August 10th/11th/12th

Dave Graney and the mistLY play the FIREFLY (Newmarket Hotel) St Kilda August 17th.

In the last month or so I have read Doris Lessings "A Ripple From The Storm" and "Landlocked". Both are parts of a FIVE NOVEL series called Children of Violence. It was amazing to get a sense of the difficulties of women in my mothers and Clare late mothers generation to express themselves in public life. How diplomatic and politically astute they had to be in a  world of strutting, self important men. How they had to lead their horses to water and get them to drink. How frustrating it must have been.

I also read THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Incredibly good novel of a communist agent leaving Vietnam with other Southerners at the end of the war and living in the USA. It features a story line where he works as an advisor ona film project not a  million miles away from APOCALYPSE NOW. If you read that, you will be embarased if you were ever impressed by Hollywoods Vietnam. 

Right now I am reading John Cowper Powys's third novel, AFTER MY FASHION. Uncharacteristically, parts are set in New York among 1930s bohemians. I love to read of experimental living decades before it becomes identified. Like the character played by Tyrone Power in THE RAZORS EDGE. A man seeking wisdom from the East in the 40s, decades before the hippy trail led people there.

If you know anybody in Ballarat, send them to our show. That place has a history of taunting and torturing us.