Boy Ray

Man Ray was an American Dada and Surrealist artist. Boy Ray, on the other hand, was an English realist and pop artist, a singer and songwriter with the Kinks, the band that invented the clangy riff, perfected the power chord, and unlike its native contemporaries, thoroughly used British vernacular, accents and subject matter in their early bittersweet, romantic, and homely compositions. (By homely, I mean both the American and British definitions.)

But Ray Davies in 1965 was only a boy chronologically. The young man looked and sounded old, like he was born standing up, but hunched over. His crooked, gapped teeth mocked his Carnaby Street fringe, and his smiling eyes betrayed premature wisdom. There was nothing graceful about him – he was really kind of an oaf – but he was cool nonetheless.

"I Gotta Move" was the b-side of "All Day and All of the Night", the Kinks' fourth single, released in October 1964 on Pye. The record reached Number Two in the UK chart. Sounding a bit more like the Yardbrids than the Kinks' own previous records, with its continuous maraca-shaking up-tempo groove, it contains one of Boy Ray's most memorable throwaway lines, if that makes sense, in the last line of Verse Three. When the vagrant dandy protagonist worries that his girlfriend won't be at home waiting for him ("And if my baby isn't there..."), his Plan B is simply to get back out there and play the field ("...I'm gonna brush my boots and comb my hair").

Rose of Sharon

The Steinbeck “Exodus story of Okies”, the Grapes of Wrath, features a rich assortment of characters which, transcribed in John Ford’s film treatment, are portrayed by “actors … submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film.” But before that Hollywood treatment, and even before Steinbeck wrote his epic novel, Horace Bristol took this and other compelling documentary images of American migrants in the 1930s. Steinbeck was engaged as essayist for a book based on these photographs that never came to light. Instead, the pictures helped inspire his fictional story, and it is not difficult to see how. The Rose of Sharon, Ma Joad, and Tom Joad shots, along with Retarded Man with Fanatic Sister, express immediate drama, with shadows, wind, grime, and a strange fixation on hands and arms conveying a highly visible kind of stoic tension.