and what will be left of them?

Walking off the job

2012-02-29T23:12:00.007Z

“You can be proud without being independent: you often have to be.”

Raymond Williams

Snow Space

2012-02-12T12:47:00.000Z

It is very cold where I am. I want to go back to work where the heating is high and carefree but I cannot do that today so I will close the curtains and write this while waiting.
This is going to be a rank confessional diatribe.

I had a thought about a book I had read a long time ago, I wanted to write about this, but writing wasn't enough, so it became a script and then it became sequential images, sounds and stories, and more writing and then it was just too much and I shelved it for a few weeks, thinking of other things, leaving the house some times.

Walking in the snow, grnush grnush grnshed ground cover and lack, the sky halogen orange all night low and thick and disturbing my sleep. The outhouse is frozen and was leaking when I went out to take a shit this morning. I don't have any ill feeling toward any of these things though, causes and effects all.

It is hackneyed to talk of the alienating qualities of snow which reterritorializes space. Hackneyed too perhaps to contrast these with the hidden feelings of immanence which the cold brings. Awareness of the body and pedestrian existential romanticism. Or romantic existentialism. Regardless of this it raises some interesting thoughts about assimilation and contact, the ability or inability to install distance.

A few days ago I was sitting in a pub listening to William Kherbek trace the history of Nixon ending the Bretton Woods system and out through the window snow just started falling.

Quintet. Dir. Robert Altman. 1979

"My analysis is concerned with what I want to call ‘epic nihilism’, a conjugation derived from Badiou’s analysis in The Century where he remarks: ‘may your force be nihilistic, but your form epic.’ I think that this conjunction and form is already encoded in the Ur-work of the Spaghetti Western genre: Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). After all it begins with the epic dragging of a coffin through the mud, a coffin, as we later find out, that contains the machine gun with which Django [will] exterminate his adversaries. And the film ends in a gunfight in a cemetery in which Django, with smashed hands, painfully and finally manages to shoot his chief tormentors after propping his gun on a grave cross. The film is bathed in mud, the allegory of the practico-inert, as Django becomes mired in the inertia that seems to afflict the supposedly decisive spaghetti western hero."
Benjamin Noys - Spaghetti Communism? The Politics of the Italian Western. 2011.

The cold slows everything down, we know that as folk lore. A few times at school we played rugby in the snow. Coming in one boy couldn't move his fingers to do up his shirt buttons and with the bell ringing and all of us leaving he appealed to the teacher for help who laughed and left also.

Galactic Pot-Healer was published in 1969 but that's really an arbitrary point. Here is that video I talked about.

Outside of Society

2012-02-02T11:59:00.006Z

The Czech music scene, in general, is not something that has impressed me greatly in the time I’ve been living here, overpopulated as it is by “revival bands” churning out turgid old blues covers or mediocre, diluted Blaxploitation-style funk. There are however notable exceptions, one of which is the legendary Dg. 307. The group took its name from a psychiatrist’s drug prescription (Dg. an abbreviation for diagnosis), carrying with it the suggestion that dissidents such as themselves were liable to be classified as mentally ill by the regime of the time, and their early work in particular is genuinely quite psychologically disturbing stuff. Along with their more celebrated sister band the Plastic People of the Universe, a group whose impact here was so immense that they merit an entire separate treatise (an excellent one of which can be found here), they formed at a particularly bleak period in Czechoslovak history: the period known here as “normalisation”, following the Soviet occupation which crushed the Prague Spring in 68.

This political context is absolutely critical – the squalling noise of Dg. 307 is the sound of a generation gasping for air in an environment where creativity has been forcibly stifled, the sound of humanity creaking under the weight of a dismally stagnant and oppressive regime. In the mid-60s, the optimism of the flower children had taken hold forcefully in liberalised Czechoslovakia, with the Beatles in particular becoming huge. I can’t pretend to be a Beatles fan, but their social significance here transcended their music and they became a symbol of liberation, of things to come. More hip, Western influences followed and a generation of beatniks was allowed to flourish, within limits, under Dubček’s “socialism with a human face”. The death of the hippy dream was thus felt all the more acutely here. It didn’t decay and fall apart from within, it was extinguished from outside by a foreign, occupying power. Sure, in the States there may have been Altamont and Nixon, but here there were Soviet tanks on the street. For a brief period anything had seemed possible, now nothing was permitted, and it is this annihilated optimism that gives Dg. 307 their twisted vitality.

Within such a situation, Dg. 307 and the Plastic People perhaps inevitably became representatives of a “second culture” of dissidents and deliberate social misfits. To an extent this may have even been against their will: Milan Hlavsa (1951-2001), a key member of both bands, once argued in a debate with Václav Havel that the Plastic People (and thus presumably also Dg. 307) were not a political or protest band. For many, the “second culture” was simply about finding a life and freedom outside of the mainstream society, rather than overtly attacking the regime. Havel countered that within such a political climate any kind of authentic expression becomes political, regardless of its intent. It is true that the lyrics of both bands are probably less explicitly political than those of the Sex Pistols, who also claimed to be essentially apolitical, at least in conventional left-right terms, but screamed that the Queen “ain’t no human being”. However, it’s not difficult to see that the fragile, morally baseless regime of normalisation, which was so dependent on hypocrisy and the perpetuation of meaninglessness for its survival, had a great deal to fear even from far less specific expressions of nihilistic frustration. And indeed, the response of the authorities, who unsurprisingly felt Dg. 307 and the Plastics to constitute a genuine threat to the status quo, was to panic. Any happenings the bands held were illegal, risking infiltration by the secret police or violent disbanding by the riot police. Dg. 307 vocalist Pavel Zajíček, also a part-time member of the Plastic People and one of the greatest rock n roll stars imaginable – a preposterously talented musician, sculptor and poet of enviably chiselled features, who oozes charisma and dignity, was eventually imprisoned for a year on a trumped up charge of disturbing the peace, an event which was crucial in inspiring the Charter 77 movement. Afterwards he went to live in Sweden and then the USA, but is now back here with a revived Dg. 307, these days somewhat more tuneful than in their dissident heyday and still thoroughly engaging.

Their influences are difficult if not impossible to pick out. The most commonly mentioned reference points for the Plastic People are the Velvet Underground, Beefheart and Zappa, from whom the Plastics took their name. In the case of Dg. 307, however, any influences they might have are warped by their disgust with the political and social environment in which they live, up to the point where they are unrecognisable, and to my ears they sound much more like Throbbing Gristle or Neubauten (this is back in 1973 – the first industrial rock band?). Their early recordings, for understandable reasons, are not of the best sound quality, but their desperate rage is very much in evidence in their shouted vocals and pulverising, tuneless din. Their lyrics, some of which were used against Zajíček in his trial as an example of the band’s “anti-social” nature, are characterised by vulgarism and intentionally inept rhymes, conveying exquisitely the atmosphere of banal stupidity that pervaded in the cultural living death of mainstream 1970s Czechoslovakia. They are not easy to translate, based as they often are on naïve rhyme and wordplay. However, the following translation, imperfect as it is, can provide some indication of what their early work was about.

Dg. 307

Utopenec (1974)

topim se ve sračkách
svýho přemejšlení
topim se vobden
nic se nemění

chci s někým mluvit
každej je z gumy
nebudu je rušit
mastěj vlastní struny

sežral sem všechnu moudrost
v podobě hovna
nemám velkou radost
z toho hovna zrovna

holky se svlíkaj
je právě jaro
ptáci zpívají
něco se stalo

peníz se ztratil v pivu
penis se válí v klidu
dlouho sem nečet knihu
zbožňuju pohled klínu
noha se lepí v klihu
netěším se na zimu

je mi 23
a mám špatný sny
sem slepec
žádnej světec

třesu se když se vzbudim
sem tam chodim
piju 10 piv
je mně špatně z nich

vim co je to nuda
nevim co je to filosofie
vim co je to onanie
vim že život neni zrůda

Drowning Man (1974)

Chorus:
I drown in the shit
of my thoughts
I drown every other day
nothing changes

I want to talk to someone
everyone's made of rubber
I won't bother them
they're looking after their own

I've swallowed all wisdom
in the form of shit
I don't feel any great
satisfaction from it

girls are undressing
spring is here
birds are singing
something has happened

Chorus

money's lost in beer
my cock swings freely
I haven't read a book for a long time
I worship the view of a crotch
my foot is stuck down with glue
I'm not looking forward to winter

I'm 23 years old
and I have bad dreams
I'm a blind man
no saint

I shiver when I awake
I wander from here to there
I drink 10 beers
then I feel ill

I know what boredom is
I don't know what philosophy is
I know what masturbation is
I know life is no monstrosity

Chorus

Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow. Funkadelic.

2012-01-25T21:20:00.000Z

“My Cadillac and My Pinkie Ring: a Diagnoses of The Rapture of Objects in The Form of a Funkadelic Review By Ralph Dorey on Friday 13th of January 2012 in Holloway”

The Funk is physical, of this we can have no doubt. We hold this truth to be self evident, as to say “beyond representation”. The Kingdom of Heaven is Within. We need only look at the Funk to encounter its corporeal being, it requires trust and not the writing of a church.

Side One: Cock Block

“what time is this?” – George Clinton

Let us look at the body of Funk as wheeled in on the gurney. Dead on arrival but twitching (because to be truly physical, to loose one’s head and become animal, one must also become meat. To free one’s mind one must loose one’s head. The Funk is a corpse of transcendence, if the soul were to move not up to heaven but down to the crotch, down to the earth and death sex of soil-systems). The title track opens this monster, opens with the dying rays of Hendrix’s unification of church and state through the banner of stars and delivers a survey of land flattened (Holy Compression), describing space through the pan from left and right and left and right. Upon the flat landscape Funkadelic build a pyramid from a thousand parts. Thousands of pieces, thousands of instances, but only a handful of types, the [it ain’t a stab it’s a slab] of bass, organ and drum chopped tight with the (all men are) equaliser and staccato like a brick or a bar of pig lead. The funk is a flat square, existing only in two dimensions. Tight. Distortion is the sound of restraint, the head against the ceiling just as Funk is the music of repression, the repression of the self, of the head, just the body in the world (buried alive). A wriggle against the belt, the hand against the mountain, the impossibility of breaching the bounds made into a sublime act like an abstract fuck. Over and over and always now on the Plateau. Like a piston, Up For The Down Stroke.

There is no time in this song, no progression. A short while later Public Enemy would push this architecture beyond its last grasp at spacial orthodoxy. The Bomb Squad build samples like sedimentary rock free from human intervention and transcription. All time and space is now and in every moment, understanding that both history and architecture are perfected in the formation of coal (the black planet). Layers and layers pile down on now, hit all the buttons and hit record and repeat till the full black stratified mass fills all space and time. My Uzi weighs a ton.

Side Two: Science Fiction

“head ache in my heart, heart ache in my head” – Eddie Hazel

The doctor leans over us, the dead and headless and strokes us with his words of comfort and the placebo of muzak. Drifting off we find we’re in the yard behind the church and down by the riverside. Sitting and leaning against a washed out marker. Shoulders to the stone we remark at how its shape now matches that of our torso and likewise the empty space above mirrors the absence of our own skull. The gravestone is too short though, to keep our back flat to it we should sit lower, out seat touching the submerged root of flat stone which carries down beneath the surface and supports the vertical weight above. Reaching up the doctor pulls on the hanging branches of Willow and Yew. The church tree and the river tree, the painkiller and the heart medicine.

Post-op: Freed of legs and stump-sunk to the belt we awake. Spine aligned to the stone and groin in the soil. A nothing above the nothing below and a horizon in between with a torso plugging the sky to the earth. Nearby the Willow sways a million repeated arcs of whale finger bones over the water like the infinite delay of the echo box through which pumps the snare. Repetition is to have one time at all times stacked up. The Yew just bends, denying the stability of form with a stretch while it in turn is denied the release of a break by layers of compression.

“from every head and ass” – George Clinton

Cross posted on The Institute for Spectralogical Audio Research

The Lost Ark

2012-01-14T17:11:00.001Z

Almost forgotten now, one of the great public events of the 1970's in Britain was the scrapping of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which seemed to cast a shadow over the national consciousness like a Moloch through the middle of the decade. At the time it felt far more historically significant than the comparatively trivial Silver Jubilee, as, being the Royal Navy's last proper capital ship, its demise was considered to mark the last line on the page of the British Empire.

The scrapping of the vessel was in political terms hugely controversial, with the Admiralty conducting a clandestine war with Harold Wilson's government through the press in order to keep the vessel in service. In the end though, aircraft carriers are enormous indulgences, and the cost for an essentially clapped-out former power like Britain was excessively high, regardless of the "prestige", always so important to Britain's ruling class, that the ship brought. Nevertheless, the loss of Ark Royal felt like another defeat, another colony lost, another nationalised industry given over to uncontrollable unrest. Most people of the era considered the ship to be, like the Titanic, a metaphor in waiting - one day, if people remembered anything about that decade, it would be the one where the UK finally entered the breaker's yard.

Public sympathy for the fate of Ark Royal was stoked up constantly on news bulletins and even childrens' shows like "Blue Peter", where the twists and turns in the story, with rumours of a reprieve stoked up and then dashed by the Ministry Of Defence, were documented breathlessly. The BBC made a hugely popular documentary, "Sailor" which followed the ship's last operational cruise. The clip below is well worth watching, as it's beautifully shot, and gives a sense of the almost psychedelic, mind-bending aura that can surround the military - all that technology, discipline and organisation that descends into chaos, confusion and destruction the moment it goes into action; a kind of reverse alchemy that turns gold into dross.

That said, Ark Royal was never the ship that the public imagined it to be. Like all the post-war British aircraft carriers, it had been originally designed to carry wartime piston-engined fighters, and struggled through a seemingly endless series of refits in order to fly off supersonic jets, for which it was simply too small to adequately cope with. You can see from the clip the high angle of attack that the jets had to adopt on take-off, before the high-powered steam catapults literally threw them off the deck. The American-built Phantom fighters had to be completely re-engined with higher-thrust Rolls Royce units in order to prevent them dropping straight into the sea. The loss rates on post-war British carriers were generally appalling, especially with the Royal Navy's perverse inclination towards huge, complex aircraft like the forgotten Supermarine Scimitar, which would have taxed even the massive American supercarriers.

If the received wisdom of the time, that Britain was finally retiring from the world stage, was proved wrong, it was because there was another nation, on the other side of the world, that was taking just as keen an interest in the fate of the pride of the Royal Navy. The Junta of Generals in Argentina calculated that the scrapping of Ark Royal marked the moment of decline when Britain would no longer be prepared to defend its remaining far-flung and isolated dominions. The resulting war, and surprise British victory, would re-ignite the dying embers of Britain's imperial zeal, with baleful consequences over the next three decades. Ark Royal had turned out not to be a talisman after all, but just another ship.

2012-01-13T12:38:00.002Z

(exerpt from work in progress)

In the Garden

The enormously expanded and integrated mediascape of the Eighties and Nineties is strung out across an increased number of nodes through the growing accessibility of portable TVs. The reduced cost of owning a TV set, the possibility of having several distributed throughout the household, always on in the background, also helps to warm up the TV, to make it a tepid medium at least, a part of the furniture, attended to fitfully, increasingly a component of consciousness itself, a prosthesis, a plug-in, whose ubiquity and multiform extension as a provider of products and entertainment slowly integrate itself into the fabric of daily life such that it is neutralized, naturalized. You turn on the TV and have it as background while you do something else, it’s a comforting presence, without the image flickering away there, without the sound, things feel wrong, something is missing. This is probably the process all “magical” technologies go through, from centralized, big-and-bulky focus of astonishment to integrated, invisible under-girding of daily life.

TVs’ full meshing into the collective psyche and the political uses and implications of this process are the central concern of Hal Ashby’s Being There. The film is an adaption of Jerzy Kosinski's last novel, of the same name. Kosinski is himself a rather mysterious, quixotic character, an escapee from Communism who married into money in the US and wrote a series of repetitive, staccato and frequently brilliant novels in the Sixties and Seventies. Controversy of all kinds followed Kosinski around and there are questions both whether he plagiarized his story from a famous prewar Polish work and whether he deserved full screenwriting credits for the final draft that made the film. But these are incidental considerations, there’s little doubt that the vision of a simple-minded gardener who understands the world only through TV and whose observations chime in with the naturalistic fallacies of American capital is highly prescient. That Chauncey is a kind of middle-aged holy innocent, lost in a semi-senile stupor in which he can not discriminate between fantasy and reality, who literally thinks and speaks TV, beautifully anticipates Reagen’s imminent Presidency.

Being There’s vision, echoing that of Network, is of the new set of relations brought about by the merging of the garden and the network, and the magical capacity that is conferred on those who have never known otherwise, in a sense Chauncey is an earlier and older version of the “digital native”, and his advantage to the elderly and declining elite scions who adopt him is his age, he is middle-aged, pliable, well-mannered, bland, talks in optimistic generalities, psychically he represents an epistemic break from the old guard, his is a new and thoroughly modern consciousness fully shaped by the most powerful medium yet devised. He literallly thinks and talks TV, yet he also has a deep appreciation of nature. This confluence between the ecologically minded and the business-minded also informs much of the alternative-culture of the Seventies, and informs another of its key films, Stay Hungry.

Being There’s mise-en-scene is appropriately wintery and subdued, it begins and ends with death, the death of the Old Man that orphans Chauncey and the death of his benefactor that allows for his possible ascension to the Presidency, and it also turned out to be Peter Sellers’ last role. Chauncey offers comforting homilies on the possibility of rebirth, a new Spring, an injection of youthful vigour and vitality, the sudden surge in potency that will be granted by deregulation and the post-Sixties entrepreneurs entering the scene. It is this sense of the Seventies as a terminal point, a generational dying-off and deregulation as a necessary pruning-back, a laying to rest of the sclerotic Fordist compact that will usher in green shoots and infuse the system with young blood that Chauncey speaks to. This is what allows the elderly Reagen to affirm a New Morning in America in his re-election campaign in 84 ( and which would allow Tony Blair to assert a decade later that England is a “young country”).

Chauncey isn’t exactly a parody of Reagen but of a whole tendency toward the idea of the natural man, whose power is precisely his uncluttered, uninflected apprehension of direct truths that the more sophisticated can never attain, dogged as they are by psychological and existential problems, their optimism ruined by experience. This lionization of the homespun, the good plain sense of a true American spirit uncorrupted by doubt and fancy European book-learning will reach its peak/nadir with Forest Gump. TV is the soul of America made visible and Chauncey is its word made flesh. This is why in the final sequence as the Elders discuss his candidature for president we see him guilelessly walk on water, he is superhuman, a redeemer, has a direct unmediated access to the Oversoul, incarnates it. Diana in Network may be “TV incarnate” for Chayefsky (indifferent to suffering and love alike, the phallic witch of the coldest of all cold mediums) but Chauncey incarnates TV as salvation, and what he will save is Capitalism.

In Network, Jensen’s speech is partly just Chayefsky flexing his stylistic muscles but there is a congruence between Jensens’ style and the emerging business-speak that is soon to inflate into the Gnostic professional rhetoric of the MBA. His speech, in borrowing ecological and environmental metaphors, helps to posit a humane capitalist teleology that then gains immense traction after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and informs the Third Way of Blairism and the Clintonite ethos of the 90s. Jensen’s “system of systems” is a new form of sublimity, a global vision of capital that supplants the natural world. In this way the rhetoric of capital steals something from the Romantics, this is both a more aggressive assertion of “ capitalist realism” and also a more benign vision, capital itself is the sheltering mother, the pathetic fallacy gone free-market, Chauncey is its avatar.

30th Century Boys

2012-01-10T01:07:00.020Z

As you may or may not know, Scott Walker and David Bowie (roughly) shared a birthday this weekend. Unsurprising, as they have quite a lot in common. David (Jones) was admittedly deeply influenced by Scott (Engel), not least in their respective capacity for reinvention, image modification, and (at their best) a lyrical yearning to step outside themselves. Both played with teenybop-friendly images to make their first splash; and had a far better grasp of using TV in the service of pop; unlike most of their peers, for whom it was the other way round. Both had an uncanny knack for appealing to very diverse audiences. They also built a mystique around conflicted sexual ambiguity, "that tearing ache of limitless desire" as William Burroughs would have it (note how many of Walker's own songs are crooned to boys). Bowie's would retract eventually, as he became fully embedded into the mainstream and a publicly happy marriage. Walker would go in stranger directions; emerging after long intervals with increasingly perplexed, inarticulate, and violently troubled statements. Tilt and The Drift appeared in accordance with an ever more uncertain New World Order, within which Bowie would settle into an incredibly wealthy (and musically conservative) old age. It was as though their eccentricities, and capacity for experimentation, went in opposite directions.

Both of them are also very much concerned with the idea of 'Europe'; as a much darker, lonelier, uglier, perverse place than its Hegelian ideologues would have us believe. Restless children of the Cold War, the horrors that led to it lurk around their best work. A strangely passionate inertia emerging from empires collapsed, or in stalemate. Exile would become a key word in their biographies. Walker, an American, would hit heart-throb status crooning Tony Hatch arrangements in Britain. Bowie would score his first U.S. number one borrowing from James Brown and Philly Soul. They would both go into highly-publicised meltdowns shortly afterwards, before finding the distinct 'voices' that would make them canonical - as opposed to mere stars - in the ruins of an older world. Without them, British pop could have taken a very different course indeed; remaining transfixed on the other side of the Atlantic, while ignoring the other side of the Channel, and its recent history.

Literary, theatrical and cinematic influences on both would come to the fore; with themes of stunted desire, decay, decadence, alienation, totalitarianism, sexual confusion, and the irresolvable regrets of youth; common to any number of mid-century European writers and artists, from Isherwood to Fassbinder to Bacon to Pasolini to Beckett. The queering of British pop (in performative, rather than sexual, orientation) starts with Walker's bruised and haunted solo albums; before it was repackaged by Bowie with Warholian savvy (the difference between a modernist and a postmodernist, I suppose). It was always present in the business of post-war British pop, but mainly closeted behind an almost caricatured hyper-masculinity; its poses and voices borrowed from the U.S. Behind the carefully-crafted slickness of their sound, Walker and Bowie's lyrics frequently required double takes, or entendres. Walker continued to push that beyond mainstream acceptance; long after Bowie had jumped ship into safer waters. But the series of albums Walker closed the sixties with, and those with which Bowie ended the seventies, stand outside, subvert, and move ahead of the generic rock 'movements' that lazier critics defined those years with. It wasn't all working towards a collective telos of youthful abandon. The European canon was here.

(Note: Post re-edited at a more lucid hour)

The Moon Represents My Heart

2012-01-07T05:26:00.005Z

"'The Moon Represents My Heart' [was] something completely new. So people of my generation were suddenly infected with this very personal, individual world. Before that, everything was collective..." – Jia Zhangke

It’s a measure of how little we know about Chinese culture – rather than the geopolitics of China – that this beautifully syrupy song is an obscurity in the Anglophone world. Rather than the gongs and zithers of kitsch TV sound libraries, the first music that comes to mind when we think of China should be something like this:

This song should be on karaoke playlists across the land, it should be murdered on every series of X Factor. It should take its place alongside Chinese Girl and Mao’s Little Red Book as totems of China as seen through the West’s 70s. We deserve to be sick of this song.

Luckily, unlike so much pop detritus, we don’t have to forget the received wisdom about it to recognise its beauty.

I’ll end with a brief biographical sketch. You don’t need it to enjoy the music, but here it is. Deng Lijun (aka Teresa Teng) – as intimated by the above quote from director Jia Zhangke – was one of the first of a new kind of singer that arrived after the Cultural Revolution. She not only sang individualistic love songs, she was also an internationalist, singing in Cantonese, Japanese, English, Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Vietnamese as well as in her native Mandarin. She died young, only 42, of an asthma attack.

2011-12-22T09:33:00.000Z

When I was a kid, about seven or eight, so around 1977 or 1978, I asked my Dad what the future would be like.

I remember his answer clearly as just after he’d finished telling me we had an accident.

We were driving out of Barrow-in-Furness and into the Lake District at the time, along what’s known as the Coast Road. This must have been in August because it was a beautiful day and because the shipyard had a fixed holiday in August every year known as “Vickers' Fortnight”, two weeks when the Yard closed down. The car we were in was rented, we never owned one, my parents perceiving them as a waste of money. Why would anyone really need a car in a town the size of Barrow-in-Furness?

I don’t know why I chose this particular moment to ask, certainly I had lots of questions about the future I was growing up into and, even as a child, a sort of melancholy that there were all kinds of things I wouldn’t live long enough to see, life on other planets, immortality, robots, space travel. Though now, as an adult, it feels as though these things are really possible within my lifetime. On reflection, this confluence, my father’s optimistic description of the future everyone believed to be over the horizon, our little working class family in its rented car going off on a day trip and the car that came swinging round the far bend, windshield glittering in the mid-day sun, and onto our side of the road seems too perfect to have been real. Nonetheless, it happened.

The future, my dad explained to me, would be The Leisure Society. We currently lived in what was called The Affluent Society and this would be the next stage in the forward progress of mankind. As technology and automation reduced the need for people to work and as things became more efficient and durable, so we would shift to being primarily consumers of goods and services: we would work less because we would have fewer needs in some ways. His example was the light bulb. In the future you would have light-bulbs that lasted indefinitely, meaning that you would buy one in a lifetime and that built-in-disposability would become a thing of the past. Freed from onerous work we would concentrate on the higher things, no doubt, poetry, love, the cultivation of interpersonal relationships and so on. You may well say, on reflection, that my father was naive, but this was a broadly held notion at the time, that technology was liberating and fundamentally, would liberate us from work. The machines would suffer for us, they would produce vastly more than we could manage to and we would live on the fruit of their labour.

I was thrilled to hear this of course, as a seven year old who had been past the Shipyard that seemed to be most people in the town’s destiny numerous times and seen the men coming in and out, heard the whistle in the morning that meant that work had started, the whistles at dinner time and at the end of the day, who lived and went to school near the vast, noisy sheds that dominated the road into the town. My dad didn’t like work, no-one liked it as far as I could tell and to be told that it might slowly evaporate as I grew toward it, minimising and reducing year on year until I was free of it all together lifted a lid off the future. The sun was streaming in through the car windows, the sky was vast and turquoise blue, we were on holiday and I was sitting on the edge of the back seat, straight-backed, bolt upright with attention. My dad was perhaps as caught up in this vision of what was to come as I was and this is why, perhaps, he didn’t see the oncoming car until it was almost too late.

Suddenly we were swerving wildly to the left as the other vehicle cut across the white line and into a potential head-on collision, the hedgerow came whipping in through the open window, the tyres bumping and rattling, there was a tremendous thud as the other car went into the left side of us, sent the moulded plastic ashtray that they used to fix into car doors in the Seventies leaping across the backseat and into my lap.

The other car pulled back to the right and then accelerated away. My dad made a U-turn after a few moments of recovering from the impact and checking we were all OK, then, much to my excitement, set off in pursuit. but the car eventually disappeared among the back roads and in the end, after protests from my mum, he gave up.

What happened on the rest of the day I can’t remember, probably we drove out somewhere in the Lakes and had a picnic, I swam, or threw a Frisbee around with my sister, or read a comic in the sun.

But despite the unprecedented shock of the accident and the drama of the chase, still, it wasn’t quite enough to wipe away that image of the future my father gave me.

Robert Altman's 3 Women, Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Francis Bacon's Landscape and a conversation in a hotel in 1978

2011-12-13T20:19:00.001Z

“See the cliffs again, be again between the cliffs and the sea, reeling shrinking with your hands over your ears, headlong, innocent, suspect, noxious” - Beckett

Concierge: Good evening sir, how was tonight’s event?

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Sir?

Screenwriter: I had the worst conversation with a woman at a party. Just the worst. The kind of conversation where things slip out of your control before you’ve even opened you mouth. You watch the words skip down out of reach like goats on a hillside. Your self so exposed and yet strange. Just the worst.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you’ve described, these things always sound worse to ourselves than to the other party.

Screenwriter: Yes sure, but this is different, this is important, this was at an industry party and things have a tendency to get around. No, things just do get around, you say something or do something at one of those things and it's like piss in the swimming pool, it’s everywhere, and you can’t get it back in the tube. The worst thing is, that wasn’t me last night. I don’t know what happened. I’m a writer, I control language and yet there I was talking to this girl and everything was totally, totally out of my control.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, would you like to talk about it?

Screenwriter: Maybe. I said some stupid stuff though, I was trying to impress her, talk about the projects I was doing but then I realised that no one cares about these stupid little gigs, a scene here and a scene there on some useless studio-built production so I tried to bulk it out a bit, bring it somewhere unexpected and told her I was working on a radio play that I’m also directing.

Concierge: Well done sir that sounds like a fascinating project.

Screenwriter: But it isn’t! I mean, I’m not working on one! That’s really just the start of the problem too, I don’t know anything about these sorts of things either but this talking at the party was just got out of hand. It continued to roll away from me down the hill and the words were coming from god knows where, but I started pitching this whole thing to this girl right then and there.

Concierge: Pitching the radio play which you haven’t written?

Screenwriter: Yes! It was about two characters from films last year, Altman’s 3 Women and The Last Wave directed by some Australian guy. I told her about how both of these films finished with the ending of the world in some manner, and some sort of direct transformation and obliteration of the characters.

Concierge: Obliteration sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, they go up and out and change completely. There’s a guy in one and a girl in the other and the end of each film is a merging of the world around them into something alien and unearthly and they ascend to a higher plane but that wasn’t really the concern of my radio play, it was more like the run up. In my play these people, Chris and Willie are now in a place together, like everything else has merged together and it’s just them that bob up above it, like they both came up from a sinking ship or country and here they are, in this new space.

Concierge: In the water sir? In the sea?

Screenwriter: No, in a bar, like this one in this hotel and they’re here in a booth drinking whatever, drinking cokes and above them they realise is a painting and they have a conversation about this dumb painting and what it means to them and where they’re from and where they’ve been. That’s my radio play. Sounds utterly amazing and a money in the bank right! This aboriginal rock star and this lady that does sand paintings and hardly talks having a conversation about a painting!I’m probably ruined already!

Concierge: I’m sure its… oh… What was the painting of sir?

Screenwriter: It’s a painting I saw in a magazine the other day by Francis Bacon, it was shown in France. Usually, I don’t like his stuff, it’s so incredibly drab, but this I liked because its was really blue and looked modern, it was just called Landscape which is a really modern title so I put it in the story. I think. I’m not sure, it just wound up in the story, perhaps its the first painting I thought of, I should have put something better in but this was what came out. Like I said, those goats were frolicking and bounding down the hillside, I don’t know what was going on with my mouth. I just kept talking and this stuff kept coming and the girl, well the girl to her credit didn’t look as bored as she had every right to be. I mean, two stolen characters talking about a painting on the radio? That’s what I’m going to be know for, everyone’s going to think this is hilarious, utterly hilarious. The guys are going to get a lot of mileage out of that little story when its gets around, and it will get around soon if it hasn’t already, stories like that always do, with a few extra additions I imagine, everyone’s going to want to put their little flourish on my eulogy.

Concierge: What were they talking about?

Screenwriter: What? They’re talk about how I was trying to impress some girl in a bar with a pitch for an imaginary Swedish coffee advert that’s what they’ll say!

Concierge: No sir, I meant the two in the hotel bar drinking cokes, what did they say about the painting? You said they were talking about the painting, what did they say about it?

Screenwriter: What? Oh. Yes, I can’t remember. Something about space. No I remember now. I started with a discussion about the blue in the painting. The painting is mostly blue like I said, which is one of the reasons I like it, that guy’s paintings a normally a dirty yellow which I hate. Coincidentally, that is actually one of the reasons I didn’t like 3 Women very much either, I remember telling someone that about a month ago. I thought is looked like “a piss in the prairie”. The Last Wave though, I did like the cinematography on that. It was a bit more regular and looked a bit cheap, but there were some nice moments, and I loved the underwater shot at the end, all the rushing water and bubbles like a 60s surf movie. It made me think about how when a camera films under water it is enveloped. The camera doesn’t just look at something, it’s surrounded and it has this stuff all over it, not just the lens. It is effected. Held.

Concierge: Is this what the characters talked about sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, no, a bit I think. No, really they were talking about the blue of the painting, how the blue is neither a solid depicted space or the empty space of the surface of the canvas, how it was both at once and something else entirely. I say they, but the way I pitched it to the girl, it was the girl in my story, Willie, that was saying all of this. She’s an artist in the Altman picture so it made sense to have her riff on Francis Bacon. Also I think I wanted to make her, the girl in the bar, aware that I’m all for strong intelligent female characters in my stories! Modern women! More modern than Altman’s women anyway! So she talks about this plane being a third space, neither the language of the painting ground nor the language of a pictorial space, another dimension. Then she starts talking about how this is like the film The Last Wave, which as you remember is the film that the other guy is from! I don’t know what happened there, I must have gotten confused or something but that’s where the story starting running so I just ran along side it trying desperately to keep the legs moving as fast as my body! Willie says this is like The Last Wave, that the “tribal space” of the aboriginal people in Sydney, that’s denied by the white population, is “just such a third space”.

Concierge: What does the other gentleman say about this sir?

Screenwriter: Good question! Well this guy agrees with her, he says that the whites can only comprehend there being two spaces, either the space of representation using of language of ideas, and a space of stuff, which he said was also a space of language anyway but that white people ignored that part too. I remember that at this point I nearly had him getting all righteous about the damage done to his people by the whites but I cooled it in time, I’m getting wary enough about that stuff, how it can come off ridiculous trying to write that sort of character. People are getting tired of it you know? So Chris, this aboriginal character, agrees that this third space is hidden, his explanation is that it is too large to be seen and regardless of this the whites have constructed a system for looking at the world that doesn't include it so they don’t see its there. He says they must know its there but they have an expression they use that sort of acknowledges something but then simultaneously negates it, puts it in a box to be dealt with… well the way I had this character say it in really calm tone it was as if this thing was never to be dealt with. The girl, the girl Willie that is, in my story, she pipes up here and starts talking again about the The Last Wave again. She says that this is just like the court room scene in the film. She says that the whites acknowledge the aborigine people, how they feel this guilt about displacing and killing them,but not enough to actually do anything different for them, so they make these verbal concessions that box up the problem, appearing to address it but effectively putting it into a void. She talks about how the whites can’t be seen to refute the aboriginal people’s beliefs publicly so they say that aboriginal law only applies to a certain kind of aboriginal person which they call “Tribal” and how this means an uncivilised exotic sort of person.

Concierge: Are the aborigines in that film not all “tribal” then?

Screenwriter: Not in the film no, and I had the character talk about this a bit more actually. In the film the whites can’t declare out and out that what the aborigines believe in is untrue so they have it only apply to these “Tribals”. What’s really important about the definition of a “Tribal” is that they are not here. The film takes place in Sydney and the story makes it clear that “Tribals” are always “other”, of rather, “doubly other” they are firstly not white and they are also not here. “There are no tribals in the city” is something that’s said a few times in The Last Wave, the tribal people live somewhere else. The aborigines are therefore something else and beholden to the rules that the whites put to them.

Concierge: Why is that important sir?

Screenwriter: Well this is a good bit! I’m pretty impressed with this myself, the girl Willie says something like “this is important because the aboriginal spirituality is not just a belief system but a metaphysics”. She goes on to explain that tribal people believe not just in abstracts but in physical, actual manifestations of things. They believe not just in a different ideology but in a different physical orchestration of the world. Willie talks us through a scene in the film where Chris describes how his family is able to contact him when they need his help by affecting his body. He gets asked by someone how this happens, and in response he pulls at the skin on his forearm and says it is like that.

Concierge: Like a pinch?

Screenwriter: more like a tic in the muscle. I liked that scene in the film so I had Willie talk about it some more, and so she elaborates. She says that this is like the blue space in the painting, its neither the language of representation or the language of the physical thing. Its something else entirely which isn’t language, it is the Real. She goes on a bit about The Last Wave, how it’s a development of Lovecraft’s stories but better, and how the power underneath everything, the power that’s indescribable is always this immense things beyond language of all kinds, how its too big for the words to wrap around it so they just can’t. She says we just walk around what she describes as a “huge sleeping tiger” oblivious because it’s too big for us to acknowledge it, we can’t find it’s edges. It is really quite a monologue that she launches into here, I think with the right actress it could be real award material. At one point she sticks her fingers in her Coke and dribbles the liquid on the table top and it’s a really visceral scene. Willie talks about water surface tension in order to describe the blue plane in Bacon’s painting, how it it pulls tight to the edges of everything else, rather then existing behind or in front of it. Willie says that it is a plane which can’t be broken and that actions at one point directly affect all the other edges. She says this is just like the plane which exists between Chris and his family. She says this is just like the plane that exists between all things past and future and how they all meet now.

Concierge: You don’t have the other chap talk very much in this script do you sir?

Screenwriter: No, you’re right, he doesn’t talk much. I liked the idea of this girl who doesn’t say word one in her own film, having all this stuff to say after the film’s over, I mean after 3 Women is over. It's like she spent that Robert Altman movie in the margins of the story as an object working something out that had nothing much to do with the other characters, and then in my radio play it’s ready to be articulated, with this other guy and with the Francis Bacon painting. One point of the triangle of 3 Women also forms another triangle in a different dimension, like a repeating pattern. That’s quite nice actually, I’ll remember that.

Concierge: So was that the end of your pitch sir?

Screenwriter: Yes. No actually, there’s a sort of coda at the end. They sit slulping their cokes for a bit longer. They play a Jimi Hendrix cover of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say on the jukebox and talk about its importance in the history of Rock and Roll along with some other things I can't remember. Old jokes mainly, they laugh a lot and it’s cozy. Then after a pause the Chris character looks at the painting again and says the pampas grass looking landscape in the centre is a figure, but not a representation of a figure made out of the land, he says it is a figure as a gesture, an “ever changing roster of forces in a state of hyper-chaos”. He says this is a bit like the instability of character in 3 Women, how no one character is able to keep their “self” constant and how they all begin to collapse and grow and merge in a non-linear manner both through misleading stories told about one character by another but also through the film’s direction which fragments the identities of the characters, leaving them uncertain by exploiting the cracks in the medium itself. He says this is what makes that film great. He finishes by saying that the use and merging of the crack in the medium and cracks within the narrative are what make Robert Altman such an important director. He says the same could be said for Bacon, and probably sometimes for the Australian guy that did The Last Wave too.

Concierge:…

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Is there anything I can get you sir?

Screenwriter: No, nothing thanks, I’ll go up to my room now I think. Good night.

Concierge: See you in the morning sir, sleep well.

Life’s A Cabaret

2011-12-08T13:44:00.005Z

"I set out to be a winner. I don't want to lose. I spent four years in a hospital but I never expected favours from anyone. I don't give sympathy because I don't expect it. Nice guys don't make it."

- Steve Harley

In many ways the 1970’s, with their energy crises and industrial and social unrest, were an exclusive preview of what I call The Crap Future - the slow, grinding, irreversible economic decline that we are currently in the early stages of. What marks the Seventies as different was that, absent a 30-year bombardment of Neoliberal growth-propaganda and 24-7 media dis-infotainment, there was a greater willingness to entertain the notion that Western culture was living through its End Times. One way this acceptance was expressed was through that most decadent of art forms, the cabaret, which exuded a kind of cadaverous frivolity, a need to eat, drink and be merry, in the face of decline.

Two bands in particular embraced the cabaret form, both based around charismatic front men who clearly saw the wreckage that surrounded them, and yet whose responses were significantly different. Cockney Rebel were fronted by the cynical, shark-like Steve Harley. Harley had contracted polio as a child, which had necessitated years of hospital treatment, and his slow, isolated recovery had helped to instill a steely, individualist streak in his character. Always an enthusiastic Tory, his proto-Thatcherite take on his bohemian surroundings, "The Human Menagerie", was pitiless and irredeemable - a world populated by the addicted, the weak, and those that prey on them. The band’s most famous hit, "Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)", is typical Harley, a poison-pen letter to his former band mates dressed up in an irresistibly catchy melody. It was this cold individualism that correctly identified Cockney Rebel as forerunners of punk, but Harley’s Game Theory attitude to the music business proved to be no more a successful strategy than any other; as the decade progressed his career entered the same ignominious decline as the majority of his peers.

Alex Harvey’s vision was often as bleak and hopeless as Harley’s, but with one important exception - Harvey did want redemption, both for himself and the world around him. Coming from a tough Glaswegian background that allegedly included a stint as a lion tamer, like many Seventies glam rock stars he had orbited around the fringes of the Sixties music scene until he hit on a flamboyant, theatrical style that was perfectly suited to the introduction of colour television at the turn of the decade (the day the world turned day-glo). Equally at home covering Jacques Brel and Tom Jones, and finding the absurdity and profundity in both, Harvey the Faith Healer was like a musical R.D. Laing, responding to the violent, traumatic death throes of a dying system with the shamanistic fervour of the Last Believer. The energetic excess of his stage shows was too much for Harvey himself, and he prematurely retired from the music business in 1976, before returning a couple of years later only to die of a heart attack in 1982, too early to see the false rebirth of a world that would think the anxieties that informed both his and Steve Harley’s work banished forever.

Britain's Secret War Memorials #4

2011-11-25T16:30:00.004Z

Britain's Secret War Memorials #3

2011-11-25T10:54:00.002Z

Britain's Secret War Memorials #2

2011-11-24T23:13:00.002Z

Britain's Secret War Memorials #1

2011-11-24T18:34:00.004Z

Please Stand By, Pt. 2 - An Inventory of Effects

2011-11-03T00:58:00.025Z

1.

Here we have the American artist Chris Burden, looking like a professional and presenting himself to the world. The above photos come from his 1971 performance art piece I Became a Secret Hippy. It was one of Burden's earliest works, executed about the time he was completing his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. For the piece, Burden stripped naked and laid down on the floor while a friend hammered a star-shaped stud into his chest. He then sat in a chair while another friend shaved his head with electric shears. Burden then donned the suit of an FBI agent and presented himself to the event's few attendees.

The real-world incidents that inspired I Became a Secret Hippy are so obvious that they don't warrant an explanation. In that respect, it was far from being a subtle work. But considering that it was done at the time that Burden was leaving the cloistered confines of academia and making his transition into the world of professional artmaking, no doubt its ritualistic, rite-of-passage mimicry held some ironic personal meaning for the artist.

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2.

By many accounts, the early Seventies were considered turbulent years -- a time of political, social, and economic upheaval. Most Americans had entered the 1960s with an optimistic vision of the future that awaited them. But a decade later, it all looked uncertain and many people were getting anxious and doubtful, not daring to guess what might happen next. A common, knee-jerk opinion on the street had it that the world was going to hell. "Shootin' rockets to the moon / Kids growing up too soon… Ball of confusion!"

Soldiers returning home after numerous tours of Vietnam reputedly experienced something akin to culture shock, finding things at home much different from when they'd departed. The rapid pace of technological change, and the societal shifts that resulted, had some in the pop-sociology realm talking of "future shock."

So when people read that somewhere a young man had someone shoot him with a rifle and then called the whole thing art, a number of people were shocked, but probably not all that surprised. This is what passes for art these days. The way things were heading, why not?

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3.

The incident in question -- the one that would become Burden's notorious "greatest hit" -- was Shoot, which followed I Became a Secret Hippy by a mere three weeks. On the evening of November 19, 1971, Burden and a few associates and a small number of attendees met in a low-rent art space in Santa Ana. It was, by most accounts, a pretty modest and casual affair, up to the point when -- at an "Okay, let's do this" moment in the evening -- Burden positioned himself against one of the gallery walls. A friend then raised a .22-calibre rifle, took aim at Burden, and fired a single shot.

The plan was a have a handful of spectators witness a William Tell-styled act of trust, with the designated shooter aiming at the wall just to the left of Burden's shoulder. At the most, Burden later claimed, the rifle slug was only supposed to graze him. But due to poor marksmanship the bullet instead hit Burden in the bicep of his left arm. Not having anticipating such an outcome, no one had thought to bring a first-aid kit, so a bandage had to be improvised.

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4.

Before we go any further, a brief overview might be in order...

Selected Works, 1971 - 1976

Chris crams himself into a small metal locker for five days.
Chris gets shot.
Chris lies in a bed for 22 days.
Chris lies down under a tarp in traffic along a busy boulevard.
Chris nearly immolates himself.
Chris dangles naked tied by a rope around his ankles.
Chris crawls over broken glass.
Chris pushes live electrical wires into his bare chest.
Chris has people use him as a human pin cushion.
Chris runs the risk of immolating himself again.
Chris gets crucified to a Volkswagen.
Chris nearly drowns himself.
Chris gets kicked down two flights of stairs.
Chris nearly sets himself on fire. (Yes, again.)
Chris lies on a shelf, just out of sight, for 22 days.
Chris lies, unmoving, under a sheet of glass for 45 hours straight.
Chris bicycles through Death Valley.

Chris does a bunch of other things during these years, but it's the more violent and alarming and supposedly masochistic things he does that everyone talks about. Thereby making him a bit infamous in the process, saddling him a reputation as the "Evel Knievel of the art world" that he grew to resent.

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5.

Chris Burden didn't consider himself a "performance artist," nor did he ever aspire to be one. He'd originally set out to be a sculptor. In the latter years of his studies, he became preoccupied with the task of creating interactive sculptures -- works that invited the audience to become a part of the piece, that were meant to be engaged and manipulated by the viewer. But he quickly became frustrated and deemed many of his works to be unsuccessful, because each time the audience balked at the invitation, choosing instead to maintain the role of distant and passive spectators.

To remedy this impasse, Burden decided to physically make himself a part of the "sculpture," if not the primary component of the work itself. He did this for his senior thesis project, which involved cramming himself into a 2' x 2' x 3' steel locker for the duration of five days. As word of the Burden's project circulated around campus, the curiosity factor brought a steady flow of visitors. People sat outside the locker, inquiring into his well-being and asking him why he was doing what he was doing. A few people sat for extended periods and -- perhaps confused by the dynamic -- treated him like a Father Confessor and divulged all sorts of personal details about themselves. During the final day of the piece, university administration were debating whether to have the locker cut open, fearing for their own liability in connection with Burden's project.

So, problem solved. But noted for future reference: How to calculate for the vagaries of interpersonal psychology? ¹

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6.

Performance art was, of course, something of a big deal in the artworld of the 1970s, and Chris Burden was regarded as one of its leading and most controversial pioneers. But performance art wasn't such an entirely new thing. It'd first been kicked around by the Futurists and the Dadaists in the early part of the century, then gone dormant for many years before being reanimated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by way of the "happenings" staged by John Cage and his disciples in the Fluxus movement.

If there was any recent historical precedence for the type of work Chris Burden was executing in the early '70s, it was probably Yoko Ono's 1962 Cut Piece, which involved the artist sitting silently on a stage and inviting the audience to cut of here clothing piece by piece with a pair of communal scissors. On the three occasions that Ono staged Cut Piece during the mid-1960s, the audience obliged her each time, in the end leaving the artist sitting on stage wearing little more than scraps and tatters.

Cut Piece is an often-cited work in its own right. Critics often speak of how the piece addresses gender dynamics and how these dynamics play out in terms of social power and status. But in a broader context, one could argue that it ultimately points to an interrogation of the codes of conduct in a supposedly polite society, one which eventually (or hopefully) leads to a critique of the nature of socialization itself. ²

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7.

On the morning of January 5, 1973, Chris Burden walked out onto a beach near the runways of LAX and fired several shots from a revolver at a 747 as it flew overheard. Burden later explained that the piece was about "impotence," since he knew in advance that the bullets would fall short of their target. Impotence in this case meaning bold but futile gestures, the inadequacy of human agency in the face of the grander scheme of things.

Still, unsurprising to learn that the FBI showed up on his doorstep with some questions about the incident a few days afterwards.

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8.

Apparently it's not an easy task getting Chris Burden to talk about his early work. He was never the most "verbal" of people in the first place. Plus, for some years now, he only allows interviews on a conditional basis -- that condition being that only a select few interviewers are allowed to ask him about him about his early career. There are lots of valid reasons for having that kind of policy. The first being that it's got to be tedious always being asked about the same things over and over again. Another being that all of that work was done decades ago, and the artist had long ago moved on to other things.

Yeah, pieces like Shootmade him famous and much of it remains controversial to this day. But that sort of thing has its downside. Such as having Genesis P-Orridge, some years later, bragging in an interview about a COUM performance piece in which he and Cosey Fanni Tutti supposedly cut each other with razors and rolled around in all variety of each other's bodily fluids, boasting that the piece's main claim to success was that it made it made Chris Burden walk out in exasperation and disgust. Or maybe, over the course of many years, having heard about countless art students doing visceral, "shocking," yet ultimately empty performance projects for their graduate theses, each time claiming Burden as a source of inspiration.

It's a lot to have to disassociate oneself from. It also demonstrates how the whole "anxiety of influence" thing can run two ways.

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9.

For 1973's Through the Night Softly, Burden sprinkled broken glass across a fifty-foot expanse of a parking lot located alongside a main drag in downtown Los Angeles. He then stripped down to his skivvies, clasped his hands behind his back, and proceeded to crawl across the glass-strewn pavement on his belly, gradually inching his way forward by rolling and rocking from side to side. The only audience for the occasion was whatever passersby happened to be strolling the avenue that evening. Burden had an associate film the action with a 16mm camera.

Shortly after staging Through the Night Softly, Burden bought 10-second blocks of advert time on a local station in Los Angeles. In these slots, over the course of several weeks, he ran a brief excerpt from the filmed documentation of the piece. There, going out over the airwaves somewhere during the late night or early morning hours, up popped a brief title-card intro identifying the piece, followed by a clip of Burden worming his way over a bed of broken glass. One can only imagine the confusion of the late-night viewer, seeing such a sight between ads for dandruff shampoo and a K-Tel mail-order collection of "THE BIGGEST HITS BY TODAY'S TOP ARTISTS!" Somewhere amid the signal-to-noise equation of television's symbiosis of entertainment and commerce, Burden had inserted an incongruous and incomprehensible factor.³

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10.

Burden would later say that he ran his TV ads because he "always wanted to be on television." Which is perfectly understandable when you consider that the 1970s marked the point that the first American generation to be raised on TV -- the generation for whom television was an integral part of their experience -- reached adulthood and became the mainstream of society.

This also explains why Marshall McLuhan was still an intellectual hot topic at the time. McLuhan, of course, had been the obscure Canadian academic who dared to point out that television was more than some magic box that offered pleasant distractions interspersed with the occasional bursts of information. Instead, he'd delved into analysis of TV's role in the expanding realm of electronic mass media, arguing that television was part of the long evolution of human communications. Far from being just some mod-con appliance, television's role as a mass-consumed medium meant that it was reshaping society -- radically altering people's perceptions of the world and their place in it.

Admittedly, these days it's not that difficult to look back on many of McLuhan's theories and shrug them off, or -- as many have done -- prove them wrong in the light of recent psychological or sociological studies. But McLuhan was a bit like Sigmund Freud is a number of ways. Yes, like Freud he can easily be proven wrong or mistaken on a number of counts. But like Freud, he was the first to venture into territory that many once thought dodgy or esoteric. And also like Freud, he came up with a number of theories in the course of his analysis that -- even after the theories themselves have been dismantled or dismissed -- still provide a rich and useful set of conceptual metaphors.

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Poem for L.A., TV Ad, 1975

11.

One of the things that McLuhan had pointed out was that the world as people knew it was effectively shrinking. Recent technological developments in mass communications and high-speed travel were bringing about a state of temporal-spatial compression -- collapsing the world's separate cultures and far-flung places into the domain of what he termed the "global village."

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TV Hijack, 1972

12.

Television casts a legitimizing gaze, so all TV is more or less "reality TV" in the end. Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Boorstin were among those who recognized this fact early in the game. Richard Nixon learned this the hard way in 1960, as did those in the Pentagon as Vietnam became "the television war" later in the decade. The same applies for the handful of Yippies who sought to hack the TV airwaves, as well as the proponents of "guerilla TV" who argued that public-access cable was a grass-roots alternative to corporate monopolizing of the broadcast spectrum. Likewise for Pat Robertson and a number of other televangelists who jockeyed to acquire airtime throughout the 1960s. Additionally for the more savvy of the era's aspiring terrorists like the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped-heiress-turned-accomplice Patty Hearst described as "media freaks" during her 1976 trail. And also Christine Chubbuck, the lonely and despondent news anchor who -- during a morning broadcast on a station in Florida in 1974 -- committed suicide by blowing her brains out on live TV.

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13.

"...If I had invited NBC to Shoot, I would have had no control. [Which] reminds me of this T.V. program from which a producer called me up and said: 'Chris, we will do anything for you blah, blah, blah!' I said to them: 'OK, I want 30 seconds of your advertising time.' And they replied: 'No! Impossible!' It was absurd. They conceived of me as Alice Cooper -- a big spectacle."

– Chris Burden, 1999 interview

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14.

In the Global Village, information travels faster and further. The same goes for images, be they from the streets of Saigon or the battlefronts of Biafra. With this newfound connectedness, the problems and conflicts of the world suddenly seem less remote and have more far-reaching affects.

Take terrorism, for example. Up to the late 1960s, Americans had very little concept of, let alone experience with, terrorism. Previously, terrorism was something that happened elsewhere -- the IRA, ETA, the bombings of the Parisian "café wars" being carried out between rival Algerian rebel factions, etc. As far as Americans had been concerned, it all had something-or-other to do with geopolitical struggles and the shrinking of former colonial empires; all very Old World and Third World, not something they had to worry about or bother to understand.

But that began to change in 1968 when the American commercial travel industry was hit by a sudden upsurge of airline skyjackings. Over the five years that followed, airline hijackings were an almost daily (sometimes twice-daily) occurrence. Flights rerouted to Havana or elsewhere. Televised news reports featuring masked gunman, headcounts of the hostages taken, the chronicling of demands and negotiations, the dispatching of tactical units and snipers. Up to the point that the Federal Aviation Administration belatedly installed new airport security measures in 1973, the spectacle of airline hijackings would be an integral facet of modern American life.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15.

Nearly twenty years later, art and terrorism would surface as thematic tropes in Don Delillo's 1991 novel Mao II. At one point in the novel, the character Bill Grey contemplates his place as writer amidst the political and historic turbulence of the contemporary world:

"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."  
"Interesting. How so?"
"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."
"I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."

Interviewed shortly after the novel's publication, Delillo elaborated:

"...In a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to."

It's been said (though I forget by whom) that every work of art is ultimately a glorified failure, is in some way or another testament to the author or artist's efforts to reach an envisioned goal. Perhaps this is partly what Joseph Conrad had in mind when he said that writing in English was akin to flinging mud at a wall. Or one aspect of what Chris Burden meant when he said that 747 was about impotence.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bed Piece, 1972

16.

When Burden was about twelve years old, the story goes, his parents separated and his mother took Chris and his brother away to the island of Elba. At some point in their residence on the island, Chris's foot was crushed in an accident. The accident left him bedridden for roughly nine months during his recovery, isolated from the rest of his family, and frequently surrounded by caregivers who spoke a language he didn't understand. He later claimed this was a deeply significant experience of his formative years.

Admittedly, trying to interpret an artist's work in correspondence with their personal life is always dicey business. But one has to wonder about certain pieces in Burden's early career -- particularly those works that involve the artist lying immobile for long spans of time. Crammed into a locker, lying bolted to the floor between buckets of water and a pair of live wires, lying in an alcove with a written invitation for attendees to use him as a human pin cushion, lying on a shelf just out of view of visitors in a gallery for a full month, lying immobile under a sheet of glass for nearly two day.

Burden would later say that the childhood experience of being stuck in a bed for those many weeks and the pain he experienced at the time were what he frequently drew from for his "durational" pieces -- what helped him put himself into a "mind over matter" state when a piece required it. Meaning that in choosing to execute such a work, he was returning to that point in his childhood -- repeatedly revisiting that initial state of trauma, by volition. This undoubtedly plays heavily into the accusations of "masochism" that some critics leveled at Burden's early work.

Still, at this particular moment in American cultural history when many felt like things were going off the rails and crashing, the condition of trauma was a fairly apt metaphor. Plus, psychiatry was very chic at the time; so lot of people were spending time laying around on couches, continually revisiting the shocks and psychic wounds from their earlier years.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17.

The early works of Chris Burden have often summoned comparisons to the stories of Franz Kafka. Most obvious is how the artist's public feats of endurance, deprivation, and endangerment bring to mind Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Then there are the pieces that suggest torture and self-mutilation, which might be discussed in relation to the punishment sequence from Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," as filtered through a Foucaultian discussion of the "micro-politics of power" whereby the inscribed-on-the body punishment becomes a corporeal metaphor about the human body as "site" or locus for the internalization of socially repressive and coercive processes. Or something to that effect.

But there's another element of Kafka that turns up in the work as well -- the element of absurdity. The absurdity of The Trail, and of its introductory parable "Before the Law." Case in point: Burden's Doomed, which took place Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in April of 1975. Burden's matter-of-fact description of the piece ran thusly:

My performance consisted of three elements: myself, an institutional wall clock, and a 5' x 8' sheet of plate glass. The sheet of glass was placed horizontally and leaned against the wall at a 45 degree angle; the clock was placed to the left of the glass at eye level. When the performance began, the clock was running at the correct time. I entered the room and reset the clock to twelve midnight. I crawled into the space between the glass and the wall, and lay on my back. I was prepared to lie in that position indefinitely, until one of the three elements was disturbed or altered. The responsibility for ending the piece rested with the museum staff, but they were unaware of this crucial aspect. The piece ended when [a museum employee] placed a container of water inside the space between the wall and the glass, 45 hours and 10 minutes after the start of the piece. I immediately got up and smashed the face of the clock with a hammer, recording the exact amount of time which had elapsed from beginning to end.

By "unaware of this crucial aspect," what Burden meant was that he had delineated the guidelines for the piece in a set of instructions, instructions that he had sealed in an envelope but didn't share with museum staff until the work's completion. The museum staffers had the ability to intervene and end the piece at any point, but were kept unaware of the fact.

And as it turned out, Burden hadn't thought that it would take them so long to act. At most, he expected Doomed would wind up last a few hours. In an interview given some years later, Burden said that as the hours ticked by and the work began to stretch towards its third day, he realized his miscalculation and began to wonder if the attendees were going to continue to stand back and leave him to die.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18.

One critical reading of some of Chris Burden's early work -- especially a work like Doomed -- was that it all, on some level, had to do with American involvement in Vietnam. With the violence and futility of that involvement, of the culture of public protest than sprang up around it, and of the waning of the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Burden's theater of self-directed cruelty, the argument went, put the viewer in a moral double bind, making them complicit in an atrocity exhibition. In that respect, Burden's work had less in common with "happenings" and performance art, and more in common with the politicized activities of the Living Theater and other such "guerilla theater" troupes of the 1960s.

Or so one theory had it. There are critics who've argued to the contrary, claiming that Burden's work has no socio-political subtext. Burden himself hasn't helped matters, choosing to only discuss the small and basic ideas behind his works, rarely acknowledging any type of Broader Social Context.⁴

And yet, too many of his works seem to thematically parallel the culture of the time. So which is it?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19.

Small wonder that after Doomed, Burden didn't feel like doing any more similar "durational" pieces where he bodily put himself at the mercy of his audience. Instead of his expected stuntwork, in the years that followed Burden did a number of more conceptual and metaphorical works that addressed the institutional workings of the artworld itself -- critiquing the economics of the art market, the nature of the value bestowed on artworks themselves, and the like.

It's no small coincidence that Burden started doing these works at the time that was starting to become famous for the work he'd been doing in the first half of the decade; becoming recognized as a Significant Artist of the Era, with museums and top-tier galleries now bidding to commission his next work. For one of the works, Burden recorded and then made public his backroom negotiations between his gallery reps, in another he oversaw the counterfeiting of money. At one point in the 1980s, he demanded a commission to cover a million dollars' worth of gold bars, which he then exhibited stacked as a pyramid, which in turn required the gallery to double security and insure the show for an unprecedented sum.

So Burden wasn't taking a bullet or setting himself on fire for art, anymore. But in some ways these new pieces are just as perversely self-effacing, if not self-destructive, in that it's almost as if the artist were trying to make certain art institutions regret their decision of seeking his services in the first place.

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20.

By the end of the 1970s, Burden was gravitating towards making another form of sculpture -- primarily installational works. A fair number of these artworks had to do with the subject of war, specifically with the American military-industrial complex of the latter Cold War years. Most notably, there was 1979's The Reason for the Neutron Bomb. It was inspired by a bit of anti-Soviet propaganda that had widely circulating, a claim that the Soviets had a force of 50,000 tanks enforcing its border in Eastern European buffer zone (reputedly more than twice that of U.S., European, and NATO forces combined). The number seemed incomprehensible -- if not dubious -- to Burden, so he decided to try and reproduce this "tank gap" on a micro- scale. At first he thought of hiring a toy company to cast a set of 50,000 miniature tanks for the piece; but finding the cost far too prohibitive, he instead settled for the roughest of facsimiles by using matchsticks and coins.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21.

As with most artists, there are a number of themes than run throughout the full array of Chris Burden's work. One of these themes evolved out of Burden's fascination with the fundamental laws of physics -- an area of interest he'd harbored since childhood. Perhaps his most famous work of this sort was 1979's The Big Wheel. The piece consists of a motorcycle with it rear tire propped up to engage a 3-ton cast-iron flywheel. A couple of times each day, the artist or some museum staffer comes in to start the bike, gradually revving it into full throttle over the course of two minutes or so, thus setting the larger wheel rotating. The roar of the cycle's engine nearly deafens in the enclosed space; followed by the spinning of the flywheel, which practically whispers as it takes several hours to slow to a stopping point.

Coincidentally, 1979 was also the year that the CIA devised a plan to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by covertly providing funds and training to anti-governmental forces in the Afghan Mujahideen. On learning of the operation, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was enthused and told President Jimmy Carter that the plan -- if successful – would present "the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." The strategy was quickly put into place, and met with the desired result. Once set into motion, some things take their own momentum, and their own time to wind down.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1. Burden wasn't the first or only artist to execute such work at the time. His was generally filed under the emergent subcategory of "body art," a trend that some critics regarded as a largely West Coast Thing. As with Burden's own "human sculpture" rationale, "body art" was intended as an artistic strategy for short-circuiting (or at least by-passing) the rigidly formalistic and subject-object relationships that were so endemic in Minimalism's reductivism and "aesthetics of presence."

2. Admittedly, the standard feminist reading of Cut Piece is a bit slippery in some respects. In terms of the relation between performer and audience, one could argue that Yoko Ono not only presented herself to the audience as a woman, she also presented herself as the artist Yoko Ono. It could also be pointed out that the gender-specific reading of the work is largely circumstantial, since Ono later stipulated that re-enactments of the performance could be stages with either a male or female sitter (and even pat one point proposed a version of the piece where audience members performed the action on each other).

With a piece like Shoot, Burden extended an invitation to his audience as well -- that invitation often being little more than to be at a certain place at a certain time. Beyond that, one could argue that he then took the theatrical dynamic in an opposite direction from that of Ono's, in that the piece suggested the ways in which the audience's inactivity constituted an (chosen, accepted) activity in itself.

3. It might not need pointing out that at the time, restrictions on violent content for network television were extensive. Anything of the graphic quality of Burden's film would've normally only been reserved for the national evening news, and even then only sparingly.

4. Exceptions have been rare. Burden did admit, many years after the fact, that the events at Kent State had given him the initial that would lead to Shoot.

Please Stand By, Pt. 1 - An American Folktale (Rough Draft)

2011-11-02T01:58:00.007Z

Originally he hailed from the "Cradle of Liberty," that echo of the cradle rocked out of, Boston. Historic and colonial, an Atlantic capitol of Old World once-wasness. A lovely "walking city," everyone says.

But a fucking nightmare to drive in.

Home to the reputed Worst Drivers in the Nation. Unsurprising, seeing how successful navigation requires the quickest and most aggressive reflexes -- the sort that never fail to confound and frighten non-natives. It's what's required if you' aim to get anywhere. Of bettering the illogic of the city's narrow streets, those streets that weren't designed with the idea of this sort of traffic in mind, ages removed from any modern idea of enabling vehicular progress.

And you know how progress means a lot of things. For over a century it'd meant heading west, to the land's nether shore. West over terrain once crossed by horse and by wagon, then by telegraph and railway. Much of it, thank god, now much more easily and more often flown over. All part of expansion, of a fated and manifest destiny. So westward he went. To where everything, as they said, was presently at. The whereall to which everything led, the telos of all pioneering and frontiering. To the ascendant domain of the Now, the cultural seat of powers-having-shifted, of late modernity itself. Last stop, final destination. Built for cars, for maximum traffic. To fully accommodate its flow and—the theory had it -- avoid the snarls and tangles and perpetual arterial clusterfuckage. Its skies and sun having waited all those ages to be finally tinged peripherally pink by a brume of ozone.

He found plenty of things to do in L.A., though. Like playing in traffic. Lying down on a bustling blacktop amid flares (but only to get arrested once the cops arrived). Or staging lurid roadside distractions for random passersby. Getting shot, or tortured, or dangled from on high. Or having himself nailed to one of the road-clogging four-wheeled beasts, while the beast screaming beneath him in the morning sun. All of it a means, perhaps, of becoming one with the city, of becoming part of its circulatory system.

And then one night arriving at an elevated and narrow stretch of coastal highway, and there placing twin monuments. Two cruxes soaked in the very stuff that made all such things possible. Planting them in the paths of the road's to and fro, to ignite and then vacate into the night, leaving behind a pair of blazing glyphs. Flaming totems, emblems for the name and number of the century in which all of this came to be. Dual sentinels, their limbs splayed to alert, or forewarn, or deliver reckoning. Left there for the latenight traveler who, finding his route obstructed, could only stand in the torchlit road and wonder what on earth this could possibly mean.

Just Like Witches At Black Masses (Or: Flowers In Hair Replaced With Horns)

2011-10-31T19:30:00.003Z

Update Your Browsers, and shit

2011-10-22T15:12:00.004+01:00

Because I've got my own blog now. I'll be cross-posting stuff I put on the decade blogs, and adding other stuff that doesn't belong on here. I don't know if my blog will be serious or trivial, because I never wanted to be a blogger, and I don't even like writing. So it'll be a kind of scrapbook-cum-diary thing probably. If I update it that much. Also I need to tweak the design, add more links etc.

Anyway, as we're now starting to get to the big beasts of the Seventies, such as the Sabs and Floyd, here's some AC/DC. Objectively speaking, the best band of all time, of course.

Dis-possessed

2011-10-21T19:56:00.002+01:00

"When I first saw [The Exorcist] I was pissed off because I saw it as a return to the ancient views about the Devil and the Catholic Church: part of the nostalgic disease of the 1970s, and a reactionary one at that. When I saw it a second time it was with a San Francisco clinical psychologist...who immediately saw the movie as an allegory. And that enlightened me. People flock to the movie because it is a therapeutic experience. We are all possessed -- by our addictions, our loves, our attachments, our habits, our unconscious, our guilts, our needs, our possessions, our social roles -- and they talk through us. We vomit out our bullshit. We all want to be exorcised."
-- Jerry Rubin, "I am Regan, you are Regan,"
Village Voice, May 2, 1974

"...We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It's funny, because years later Linda Blair -- who played the satanic kid in that movie -- ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn't go near me.
Not a fucking chance."
-- Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy

"They just wouldn't fuck off, those satanists. I'd walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they'd be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. So one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang 'Happy Birthday.'
They weren't too fucking happy about that, believe me."
-- Ibid.

Some people are on the pitch

2011-10-19T16:03:00.007+01:00

One of the great contrasts between 1970s and contemporary sport is the pitch invasion. Now a fairly rare sight, they were once a common ritual to celebrate an act of giant killing or particularly sweet victory. Many of the decade’s classic matches feature pitch invasions: Scotland defeating England at Wembley, Hereford knocking Newcastle out of the FA Cup, the West Indies destroying England at the Oval.

cropped with SnipSnip

It was something of craze at the time and it’s revealing how many children are involved. Not only are they allowed to gather together without adult supervision, but they can actually afford to attend international cricket matches. Perhaps the most striking difference is the TV commentary. Now any unofficial public intervention has to be met with po-faced condemnation: ‘Idiots, not real fans, spoiling it for the rest of us etc.’ There has been a policy for some years now of not showing streakers, leading to a kind of hyper-Stalinism where events are airbrushed from the record as they happen. Nothing must be allowed to interrupt the Sky Sports Continuum. This fear of unscripted public behaviour makes a mockery of TV Sport’s appalling sentimentality towards ‘the fans’ and to ‘the passion of the FA Cup/The Ashes etc’.

70s TV seems more relaxed, even prepared to have a chuckle over youthful exuberance. John Motson is surprisingly mild in his criticism of the Scottish fans breaking the goal at Wembley and then switches to explaining it away in terms of the importance of the fixture.

Compare and contrast:

cropped with SnipSnip

The decline of the pitch invasion is partly put down to the rise of the all-seater stadium, modern security practices and so on. But it must be a change within us as well, with how we think we should behave in crowds. The 70s were a period of assertive working class collective action. Mass picketing at Saltley Gate and Grunwick, the UCS work-in. It was also the time of the folk club circuit, where divisions between audiences and performers were loose.

Now we are ‘alone together’ – not just on the internet but in offline crowds too. Even worse, we self-police crowd behaviour on behalf of TV and advertisers: too many people filming live music instead of dancing; the censoriousness about talking in the cinema. There is whole genre on YouTube of hecklers getting ‘owned’ by comedians. Many hecklers may be unfunny drunks, but there is something creepy about members of the public joining in the pretentious defence of the ‘craft’ of stand up. The nadir is flash mobbing: pointless, self-referential and unthreatening.

A request.

2011-10-19T15:12:00.004+01:00

Can anyone suggest any good books on the American 70s, similar to "When the lights went out" etc

Why I don't hate Pink Floyd.

2011-10-19T08:59:00.000+01:00

I grew up on Barrow Island, in Barrow-in-Furness. I was born in 1970 and so had a 1970’s Northern Industrial town type childhood. We didn’t have any money, my Dad was a plumber, my mum was a housewife: the house didn’t exactly overflow with entertainment, in fact for any modern-day child in the developed world the 1970s would have been an unimaginable prison house of boredom and isolation. I read books and comics, played in the backstreet, rode my bike around, invented stories, and, of course, speculated widely about the future I would grow up into. Time moved at a glacial pace, the world was barren, bereft of objects and even though I knew no other world I still felt that emptiness, that lack, the imagination alone was not enough to fill it, to transform it. Imagination might mask it for a while perhaps, but eventually it faltered and the world in all its dreary, Spartan enormity crashed in, setting you a-throb with boredom, almost panicked by it. I sat at the centre of all this, I suppose: a child, not unhappy but aware of all the levels on which I was oppressed and suppressed, still growing, my body struggling for mastery of certain basic acts, language and the social world still far beyond my grasp, subject to all the kinds of painful early shocks and buffets of being among other people. Unformed, but, still, aware of my unformedness. I understood that I was a child, and I understood other things too, I understood that we were working class and at the bottom of a three-tier system, I understood that we lived in a small town in the North and that not everyone’s life was like ours, even within that town. I understood that we were socially, economically, geographically and temporally located. I understood these things in abstract ways I couldn’t quite name or visualize, huge, invisible force fields, akin probably to those crystalline rings on which the planets were supposed to sit in a pre-Copernican universe, whose overlapping and interlocking determined the ambit of my existence, where and what I was.

Sensory, sensual stimulation was thin on the ground in that town, at that time, for people in our situation, though I am of course prepared to concede that it was much the same for everyone. Interminable stretches of waiting for the few bright spots in the week, the seemingly eternal Saturday afternoons waiting for World of Sport or Grandstand to finish and the cartoons to start or Doctor Who to begin: the magic of Saturday night, staying up late to watch the Hammer Double bill and then the great yawning chasm of Sunday, more time in the backstreet, or the Docks or on the swings, or if the weather was too bad, playing with a few toys and staring again at the same old comics. The situation was made worse in our house by the fact that my Mum and Dad were saving money to move to the outskirts of town, out of Barrow Island: they wanted a house with a garden (we moved in 1981, they still live in the same place). We weren’t keeping up with the Joneses and so we had a black and white TV for years, lino on the floor, no radio that I can remember, no record player, or rather we did have one, but it was hardly used: it was for us, the kids, but we had very few records.

This wasn’t true of one of my friends, however, who lived just up the road. In his house they had both a colour TV and a few years later, miraculously a video-player, as well as a stereo with four wall-mounted speakers. My friend was called Stuart and Stuart’s older brother, probably about fourteen at the time, when we were nine or ten years old, had started buying records. The distinction between Mods and Rockers still existed to some extent in my backward town at that time. He defined himself as a rocker, was a fan of Status Quo and Nazareth, had shoulder length hair, a cut off denim jacket and a precocious wispy moustache to prove it. He also owned a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

On Saturday night Stuart’s parents went out to the local Labour club and we had the house to ourselves. Ritually, we turned down the lights in the living room and put The Wall on. The Wall had several advantages and levels of appeal over listening to Quo or Nazareth or the Ram Jam Band, but most immediately because it was cinematically rich and complex, filled with studio tricks and techniques, narrative, literary, dark and frightening, suffused with the cruelty of all the institutions we probably felt we were already suffering under to some small degree, school, the family, or were due to suffer under, work, the State, relationships, the adult world. From the moment it started, with the sheer bombast of “In the Flesh?” resolving into the sound of a dive-bombing Stukka and the cry of a new-born child we were transfixed. Here was an enormous multiform richness that promised to both fill the world and deepen it. TV was small and cold and linear but the stereo effects and the phasing back and forth between the speakers, the found sounds, snatches of dialogue, the different characters, the Operatic pomp, the cryptic lyrics and symbolism, the references to things we could only guess at, the sheer beauty of some songs and the desolation of others seemed not just to come at us from another world, but overtake and overwhelm our own world. The speakers were above the bevelled, smoke glass sliding doors that separated the dining room and living room and there was no limit on the volume we could play the record at, sitting in the semi-dark, silently sunk, rapt, in all its mysteries. If we’d been five years older we might well have abjured it, been punks, but we were children still, waiting to go onto Comprehensive School and had nowhere else to go, no nightlife, no peer group as such, no attitude toward anything, no stance. We needed to be entertained more than anything, but not in a frivolous way, we wanted access to all the dimensions of experience that were still beyond us, we wanted something as inexhaustible as our desire to grow, something as varied, fulsome and dense as our own worlds were monotonous and bare. And so we listened to it again and again, in a kind of stupefied amazement, luxuriating in its pyrotechnics, aghast at its scale and drama. This is what music promised us and gave us in a way that no other forms seemed capable of, a multivalent wealth of detail, a shared, concentrated rapture, relief. Outwardly you might be hedged, circumscribed, caged by class, geography, discourse, experience, connections, but that there was a world within the world, an always open door through which you could slip and on the other side, somehow, all these constraints melted away.

I haven’t heard that album actually since I was a child, or early teens at least. Probably the last time I heard it was when I went to see the film, sometime back in the early eighties. I got self-conscious about what was and wasn’t fashionable for people who wanted to be seen as, to feel themselves to be, smart. You know how it is.

Nonetheless, if you were to play it to me today, I’d know every word.

On The Corner

2011-10-12T17:06:00.000+01:00

It’s hard to imagine now that Third World War ever existed. They are a singular proposition, Communist (or at least communist-leaning) insurrectionary Yobo Pub-rock as tough, sparse and scathing, as funky and rhythmically driven as anything produced in post-punk, or America’s mid- eighties Hardcore scene, yet their two albums were first released in 1971 and 1972.

There’s plenty of punk-before-punk theorizing and cataloguing going on, but you’d be hard pressed to find a punk band, or indeed any band that doesn’t sound anaemic next to Third World War, the only other band of roughly the era that sound as authentically dangerous are The Sex Pistols and even they can’t quite boast Third World War’s invigorating class-war rhetoric and sheer, driving groove. A large part of their propulsion derives from Third World War’s being unashamedly sunk in the blues and rock and roll while at the same time rejecting heavy rock or prog in favour of an amped up, wired, spit and sawdust, goodtime boogie. The guitar sound, serrated, bright and sharp, the nagging, sinuous bass, the rolling piano and the caustic vocals all tell you one thing: this is a speed band, a pub band, a band that feeds on negative energies, invokes them and uses them to sharpen and hone its already formidable edge, a band that wants to needle, that thrives on confrontation and anti-social energies.

In some sense Third World War feel quintessentially British in their remorseless focus on violence, class and politics. Few bands can have engaged so fundamentally with the underlying tensions of their times as Third World War, few bands feel as though they documented an era as concisely or anticipated the strife to come in the mid-seventies more presciently: it’s hard not to think of Third World War as the real voice of the early Seventies, unfashionable, aggrieved, up for a good Saturday night out (fighting/ drinking/ heads down, no-nonsense mindless boogie) but even more up for the revolution they see just around the corner. In their celebration of politicised, boot-boy thugishness they might also be said to anticipate OI, but there’s a control of tension and dynamics, a muscular, musical intelligence that grants Third World War’s work a kind of cinematic scope: these boys can play and the records seethe with a barely restrained power that occasionally erupts into flailing white-noise jams or clenched, coruscating solos. Few bands have ever swaggered or been so adept at poised violence as Third World War, feeding on the eternal, and endlessly replenished manna of British life, class antagonism. Listening to Third World War almost forty years later, the question as to just why the past fifteen years (with the exception of Grime) has been so dull in British music can partly be ascribed to this, not enough hate, not enough politics, too pretty, too vapid, too keen to make friends. For a moment, under the spell The Great Moderation we forgot who and where we are. Ugly, unsophisticated, angry, pitted against each other, trapped on a lopsided, dank little island.

For Third World War the revolution is inseparable from the power of Unions and the revolt against work, it’s also impossible to achieve by peaceful means. In contrast to many of the overtly polemical Left-leaning bands of the Eighties (The Redskins etc) Third World War’s message is less one of amelioratory, earnest positivity (“go get organized!”) than a revelling in a death-or-glory violent overthrow of the class system (“Load your magazine clip! I’ll be loading mine”). In this sense Third World War understand class relations as a war, and one in which decisive resistance can only take place through fighting fire with fire, that as committed they are to our destruction, so, equally must we be committed to theirs' (“Pull your hand grenade pin/I’ll be pulling mine”). This is of course the “fanatical” character of the 70’s working class that Neo-Liberalism sort to redress. Appeasing it by enfranchising (some of) the working class as part of a share-owning, popular capitalist, property-owning pseudo-middle class on the one hand while also more aggressively attacking the UK industrial base. Anti-union legislation, de-industrializing in the progressive shifts toward becoming a “knowledge economy”, applying downward pressure on wages through reforms in Labour laws and high unemployment.

A large part of what makes Third World War so valuable in a documentarian sense are Terry Stamp's lyrics, which articulate not just all the suppressed anger, the glowering resentments and unhealthy lusts of the age, but pay a singular and specific attention to the political character of the time. At his best Stamp is a superb lyricist, mordantly funny, balefully ironic, sharply focused on the (sometimes indistinguishable) miseries and pleasures of 70’s working-class life, revealing of it’s prejudices as well as its progressive character. The aim is to provoke, sometimes it’s fatuous, “Coshing Old Lady Blues” (which contains the hilarious line, “Hey grandma/hide your money in your shoe/ I’ve got those/ coshing old lady blues) sometimes both intoxicatingly polemical and wryly hilarious, as in the wonderfully titled “I’d rather cut cane for Castro” (Working in the fields/Fidel’s my neighbour/I’m genuine U.K/Semi-skilled labour.) Perhaps best of all is “Factory canteen blues” (you don’t sit near/ the management’s table/so educated, mathematically able/with their figures on graphs /and Hoi Polloi chatter/you’ll work 5% harder/and they’ll grow 5% fatter) a long tale of industrial discontent that threatens to boil over into “factory burning”. This is social realism from the ground up, in which it’s necks, not hands that are being wrung. Social realism as a mailed fist, exhortatory, lunatic, uncompromised, a report from the Seventies of the Angry Brigade, Saltley Gate, the industrial relations bill and Who Governs Britain?

“I’ve got just the thing for you/ a real cop beater/a sawn off twelve gauge/5 shot repeater.”

This is a band far too good, far too important, to be sidelined as proto anything.

Youtube playlist here.

Didn't he do well?

2011-10-12T15:06:00.003+01:00

The Ballad Of Ruby Flipper

2011-10-06T22:00:00.006+01:00

Those of you enjoying the current re-runs of every 1976 'Top Of The Pops' will almost certainly have noticed two things: that the charts have always been shit, and the inexplicable and occasionally mindscramblingly cryptic performances of mixed sex, interracial dance troupe Ruby Flipper.

The Flipper, as they have never been known, were only on the show for five months,and never managed to warm the nation's cockle and loins in the same way that their immediate predecessors, Pan's People, had done, despite featuring two former People in their line up. The precise reasons for this may never be known, although BBC Head of Light Entertainment Bill Cotton tried to put his finger on the problem in a meeting with legendary choreographer Flick Colby - 'Flick, no-one in England wants to see white girls dancing with a black man'. Cotton's most notorious programme was, of course, 'The Black & White Minstrel Show'.

Here are some select moments from their short reign of terror.

The Flipper were quite good at the disco stuff, but then, after all, disco is designed to dance to. What they were able to do on a number of occasions is to communicate the energy of the music to the traditionally rather lumpy studio audience, upping the tempo of their shuffling considerably. In this routine, they demonstrate the dual nature of Colby's routines - a confusing mix of lacivious grinding and infantile pantomime.

This routine is as much avant garde theatre as Thursday night pop variety, with a colour scheme pinched from a Czech New Wave film and a concept that has echoes of Dante Alighieri . It's baffling and frightening and the shaking, banging wrists are vaguely pornographic. In my nightmare, the song never ends, and I end up watching them walking in and out of these wobbly doors for all eternity.

Finally, here's their interpretation of Bowie's 'TVC15'. It always reminds me of a fly on the wall documentary set in a secure unit. I keep expecting R.D Laing to wander in with a clipboard. Bizarre, although I'm sure Dame Dave would have approved.

Ruby Flipper,

March 1976 - October 1976.

Unmann-Wittering.

Open Letter To The BBC

2011-10-06T21:45:00.001+01:00

Dear Marmaduke Hussey,

I know you have to make a 20% budget cut over the next five years, might I suggest the return of this old favourite?

It's better than 90% of your output, and little Carole Hersee and Bubbles are far more charismatic than 99% of your presenters.

Unmann-Wittering.

"Everyone was Smoking..."

2011-10-06T04:36:00.005+01:00

And nearly three decades went by. And then we were told that it was neither here nor there, because there was no spoon in the first place. So we that non-spoon and ran with it.

And then about a decade later, a lot of people had to shrug and say, "Well, fuck me...turns out there was a spoon there all along."

Assemblage

2011-10-06T02:16:00.009+01:00

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet

The scream of terror, of pain, of death, still fills my ears as I contemplate the heap of crumpled bedclothes spread like so many rags on the floor, an improvised altar whose folds are gradually dyed a brilliant red, in a stain with distinct edges which, starting from the center, rapidly covers the entire area.

The fire on the contrary, once the match has grazed a shred of lace soaked in gasoline, spreads through the whole mass all at once, immediately doing away with the lacerated victim who is still stirring faintly, the heap of linen used in the sacrifice, the hunting knife, the whole room from which I have just had time to make my escape.

When I get to the middle of the corridor, I realize that the fire is already roaring in the elevator shaft, from top to bottom of the building, where I have lingered too long. Luckily there remained the fire escapes, zigzagging down the façade. Reversing my steps, then, I hurry toward the French window at the other end. It is locked. No matter how hard I press the catch in every direction, I cannot manage to release it. The bitter smoke fills my lungs and blinds me. With a sharp kick, aimed at the bottom of the window, I send the flat of my sole through four panes and their wooden frames. The broken glass tinkles shrilly as it falls out onto the iron platform. At the same time, reaching me along with the fresh air from outside and drowning out the roar of the flames, I hear the clamor of the crowd which has gathered in the street below.

I slip through the opening and I begin climbing down the iron steps. On all sides, at each floor, other panes are exploding because of the heat of the conflagration. Their tinkling sound, continuously amplified, accompanies me in my descent. I take the steps two at a time, three at a time.

Occasionally I stop a second to lean over the railing: it seems to me that the crowd at my feet is increasingly far away; I no longer even distinguish from each other the tiny heads raised toward me; soon there remains no more than a slightly blacker area in the gathering twilight, an area which is perhaps merely a reflection on the sidewalk gleaming after the recent shower. The shouts from a moment ago already constitute no more than a vague rustle which melts into the murmur of the city. And the warning siren of a distant fire engine, repeating its two plaintive notes, has something reassuring about it, something peaceful, something ordinary.

I close the French window, whose catch needs to be oiled. Now there is complete silence. Slowly I turn around to face Laura, who has remained a few feet behind me, in the passageway. “No,” I say, “no one’s there".

... And Saturday night, once you allow yourself to think about it, isn't that much better than any of the other ones.

2011-10-04T02:20:00.006+01:00

In 1976, there was no getting away from Peter Frampton. Seemed like you couldn't go very far without seeing the cover of Frampton Comes Alive. Wherever you went, there he was -- looking all illuminated and holy like some Byzantine icon. Saint Peter fuckin' Frampton, Bestower of the Communal Good Vibes, with frets held aloft to bless the flock with and whatnot. Staring out at you from record store windows; or from the ads for the Columbia Record Club that appeared in all the magazines; or from posters on the bedroom walls of your friends or their older siblings; or -- most often -- laying at the top of the stack of records propped up next to someone's stereo, where the album itself was in frequent rotation.

Rarely does a live album attain that sort of ubiquity. Because let's face it, nine times out of then live album are dodgy business. No matter how it's marketed, the live album is usually the equiv of low-end product in any given artist's catalog. Not to say that live albums universally suck, but they almost never rise to any level of consequence, let alone -- except for rabid completists -- rank as "essential." But in the U.S. during the 1970s, there were two big exceptions. The first being Frampton Comes Alive, with Cheap Trick's At Budokan following in second place.*

In the latter instance, good timing had a lot to do with it. At Budokan arrived in 1979, right about the time that disco's hegemonic grip on the culture was finally waning and a lot of people were ready to hear something else. The album's lead single "I Want You to Want Me" rapidly climbed the charts. People heard all the girls in the audience shrieking and chanting along and wondered how they'd previously missed out on the band -- how it was that the band could be so wildly popular elsewhere, yet why haven't I ever heard of these guys before? It was a classic example of the "big in Japan" scenario.

* * * * *

But yeah, Cheap hailed from the midwest -- Rockford, Illinois to be exact. What is there to say about Rockford, Illinois? Probably not much, either for or against. It's just some middling, nondescript town you drive past if you're en route between Chicago and Minneapolis. It ain't cornfields, but it isn't what you'd call "civilization" either -- it's just industrial in the blandest of ways. Probably the sort of place -- like almost all places -- where it sucks to be a teenager. Where there's little else for you to do but drive around aimlessly, keeping an eye out for something that might be going on or someone you might know. Another night measured by the distances between stoplights, tunes in the tapedeck, getting out of the house and away from your parents for a while is enough.

And about those tunes: Most times they sound like the standard waist-down bombast of the whole '70s "boogie" sensibility, the sort that was so popular across the broad swath of the midwest. Yowling about Kicks and all the usual stuff, but at the same time seeming to be about something else -- about the sorts of things that make you want to get out of the house in the first place, that send you out in search of something else. About being in a place like this, a place so numbingly boring that it makes you perpetually restless, births that set of desires that'll so doubtlessly go unsatisfied, point toward a bleakness that often seem to mockingly undercut and mock the over-arcing narrative. It hints that fun is something most often pursued but only rarely attained. Inasmuch as it has to do with bumping uglies, it also naggingly reminds you the times you've placed a late night call, waiting for her to pick up, telling yourself your only going to let it ring JUST ONE MORE FUCKING TIME before you finally hang up, as you picture the phone on the receiving end chiming away in a dark and empty apartment. It's even got a song on it about the time your mom got plastered and told you that you were the reason your dad never finished high school.** And in some ways it reassures you that "Normal" ain't nothing but a smaller and even shittier town somewhere downstate.

* * * * *
At Budokan was also perfectly timed by the way it captured Cheap Trick at the height of their creativity. Recorded as they were touring to support Heaven Tonight, by which point (some argue) the group already had the bulk of their "classic," first-rate sings behind them. Dream Police, their fourth studio effort, would arrived later in 1979; and while it sported its fair share of winners, it sounded like they were treading water through half of it. By the time the tepid, George Martin-produced All Shook Up was released the following year, it was clear that band had already started to flounder.

But hey, enough of my yapping. Let's boogie...

At some point, you might wonder if they stole that riff from the Ramones; bit it's more likely they copped it from the opening of "Gimmie Some Lovin'" instead. And ten the Ramones would eventually own up to plundering the riff from this tune in short order.***

Aside from the deliciously unhinged portion of the latter half, there's nothing here that'd rank as phenomenal. Still, it trots a lot of raw craftiness that'd get smothered by all the overplaying and overproduction on later discs.

In which the bass player shows just how much of the load he can carry. Zep-style heaviness (or something) streamlined in way that would sound much more de rigueur about a decade later. And perhaps you're better off paying no attention to the lyrics, because they're unforgivably crass and lazy. As in: If you've ever known anyone who's killed themselves -- suddenly, unexpectedly, without (as is most often the case) giving any prior indication that they were having trouble, thereby leaving all their friends and loved ones to carry around all sorts of unanswerable questions for the rest of their years -- you might just have the urge to haul off and punch the smirk off the songwriter's smug, pasty-faced gob. You might. Yet you find yourself singing or humming along with the chorus anyway.

One of the two songs by the band that most everyone knows -- their calling card, the karaoke favorite, the tune for which they'll be most remembered, and blahblah. The one that includes those deeply peculiar details from suburban life, including the bit about the parents that the narrator'd rather not be party to. Also the one in which the drummer who looks like a a chain-smoking CPA very solidly demonstrates what all he brings to the outfit.

Having grown up in Alabama during the years that these records came out, I was never sure what Southern girls Rick Nielsen was writing about. Probably just as well that I never found out.

Right, their indebtedness to the Lennon/McCartney schools of songwriting ran so deep that it doesn't even merit discussion. The version of this tune that appeared on In Color sported an arrangement that didn't quite take, sounding a bit fussy and self-conscious and cloyingly cute. Bootleg and reissue culture has shown us that the group reworked the song at various tempos throughout their early years. But the live version from Budokan was the one that put it over, finally getting it right in terms of matching energy with the aching urgency of the lyric; driving its bubblegummy sentiment home with plenty of deftly casual blooz-boogie riffage, and showing that the band were most in their element on stage anyway.

And then there's this version, recorded nearly 20 years later in an unreleased session with Steve Albini, which reveals a good song can be stretched any number of directions without losing its appeal.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* If you were trying to be ironic (or Chuck Klosterman) you might make the case that for Kiss Alive and Kiss Alive II. Personally, I'd make a case for Donny Hathaway's Live being the best of the decade. But for the topic at hand, I'm narrowing the discussion down to top-40 rock/pop, Billboard-sales figures criteria.

** Okay, that's actually not what the song is about, maybe it's just how you choose to hear it.

*** As at least one critic has pointed out, there's something wonderfully ironic than hearing an artist proclaim "I'm a whore!" on their major-label debut.

Let It Be Written

2011-10-02T07:03:00.000+01:00

Second Rule of Musical Thermodynamics: Whenever the elements of fire and water are brought together, they often -- surprise, surprise -- only make steam. At best some good anecdotes might come of it. (At least so long as none of of the involved parties decide to lawyer-up.)

Proper Bo

2011-09-28T23:13:00.003+01:00

Limited Availability

2011-09-26T16:21:00.002+01:00

Fantastic record, this. I wonder how long it'll be before WMG twig what's going on....

Desecration Acts (or, Retromania, Take 2: Y'know...the Version That Sort of Plays Out Like Peter Fonda's Film Career)

2011-09-17T02:36:00.001+01:00

Part One: Tanz mit mir, Eva!

It's all a bit dodgey, isn't it, this matter of breaking things down by decade. As if historical or cultural developments so tidily fit into calendrical boxes and whatnot. Yet here we are.

But yeah, it's a common enough way of thinking about things. For instance, the whole matter of Americans during the 1970s looking back and getting nostalgic for the 1950s. And how the 1970s were — for a time, at least — considered a decade not worth talking about, too dismal and inconsequential to bother with. And then there's the matter of the eruptive 1960s, which has its own mixed legacy. That decade that the 1970s backed away from in many respects, the same decade that became the touchstone for the backlashing "cultural wars" that have raged on these shores ever since.

The Sixties had been — by some reckonings — a cultural apex. Which is why, if you take the mythology at face value, the dudes who would eventually become known as The Residents uprooted themselves from Shreveport, Louisiana to move to Haight-Ashbury — to where things were really "happening" — in the latter half of the decade in question. They reputedly moved there looking to be their own network of filmmakers and artists, but eventually wound up being a band, or some "multi-media collective" for whom music was the central component. But initially they arrived in the Bay Area just in time to witness the very thing they were seeking fade into a dismal travesty of its former potential.

This being the Residents, you never know what to take at face value. Maybe the whole backstory part is a load of horseshite, who knows for sure? At any rate, the cover of their 1974 debut album seemed to send a fairly clear signal about how they felt about the matter...

Further driving the message home, they followed in a couple years later with Third Reich 'n Roll. The cover, with its depiction of Dick Clark as a Gestapo commandant, was a first-rate stoke of audacity and provocation; especially seeing how the punk-rock cliché of playing ironic and light with Nazi imagery was still a year or two away. Likewise for the album's opening overture, in which Chubby Checker's exhortations from "The Twist" are barked out in German, sounding for all the world more like a set of drill instructions than an invitation to party. But beyond that, the Third Reich theme puts in few appearances, save for a couple of spates of battlefield sound effects that crop up between songs. The album itself contained a medley of tunes that had been, as the liner notes testified, "shamelessly lifted from their memory of top forty radio of the Sixties" — often rendered in the most creepy or horrendous way possible, if not turned completely inside-out. "96 Tears," "Light My Fire," "Hey, Jude" and about twenty others are all duly massacred, to say nothing of the band's sinister rendition of The Syndicate of Sound's "Little Girl," and the passing nod given to "The Ballad of the Green Berets."

True, this sort of thing wasn't wholly without precedent, since Third Reich 'n Roll chiefly it owed its "pop satire" premise to the "freak-out" excursions of Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart had pioneered some years previously. But with Zappa and Beefheart, you always had the impression that no matter how loosely they played with established pop genres or formulae — be it Zappa's doo-wop parodies or the Captain's fractured blues — the artists harbored some love for their inspirational sources. With Third Reich 'n Roll, it's a far murkier matter, and the listener has a difficult time gauging how the Residents felt about the songs they chose, let alone the era those songs represented. One detects, at the very least, a deep and darkly-tinged sense of ambivalence. The "atrocities on parade" violence the band does to its source material, the acts of musical dismemberment committed, all seem a little too wanton. Sentiment and nostalgia, the listener might conclude, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Residents would have a long, perplexing, cultish career in the decades that followed. But in retrospect, the timing of Third Reich 'n Roll couldn't have been more appropriate. Sure, rock'n'roll had been the soundtrack of the youth culture of the 1960s, the product and the embodiment of a massive cultural and demographic shift. Still, many had figured (or hoped, perhaps) it was passing fad. By the time the '70s had rolled around, the major labels were mobilizing huge amounts of resources into the trend that had proven itself Commercially Viable for the long haul. The music gained a central presence on the FM airwaves — especially as college stations sprouted up in less metropolitan locales, devoting much of their programming to a proto-AOR format. And in 1972, Elektra Records released the original Nuggets compilation, a collection of '60s garage-rock classics sported a number of tunes that would later helped inspire punk's "back-to-basics" musical ethos.

[ Part Two >>> ]

Day Of Infamy

2011-09-10T20:54:00.001+01:00

Homeland Security

2011-09-10T01:33:00.003+01:00

When They Were Kings (Or: When Stars Were More Than Mere Celebrities)

2011-09-07T23:31:00.013+01:00

He Survived

2011-09-07T18:45:00.004+01:00

Just a tribute to the great Sonny Rollins, whose birthday it is today. A true survivor of the 60s, and practically every other jazz legend of his generation (a genre not exactly renowned for the longevity of its greatest performers). Incredibly, at 81 he's in great shape and still plays damn well too. He's largely avoided commercial bandwagons or embarrassing attempts to woo the youth audience; sticking to a distinctively joyous style with quiet integrity throughout his very, very long career. Here's two clips from the 70s, where he does what he does better than anyone, refreshingly free of the stodgy/coke-addled/indulgent/rock-pandering/discofied/prog-bloated/cod-mystic/desperate 70s career moves that doomed so many jazz greats into unlistenable gatefold landfill. And anyone remaining so effortlessly cool over an acclaimed career spanning seven decades demands respect. Saxophone Colossus indeed...

I Heard A Rumour.....

2011-08-29T20:26:00.005+01:00

So there we were on the 90's blog, discussing antecedents to Hard-Fi, as you do, and not coming up with much of a consensus, when the other day, while inspecting a refrigerated packet of Polish sausages in Sainsbury's (because I'm classy, like) I suddenly thought "ahhhhh, Graham Parker And The Rumour".

Almost forgotten today, at least in his home country, Parker was considered a seminal figure in his day, and, along with Dr. Feelgood was seen as one of the crucial antecedents of Punk. Emerging from the Pub Rock scene, his career preceded the likes of Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, whose fame would eventually far outstrip his own.

With his rasping vocals and bug-eyed sunglasses, Parker looked and sounded like an angry wasp. Fully equipped with chips on both shoulders from a background of dead-end jobs (he was once, famously, a petrol pump attendant) his gnarly, class-conscious lyrics were at times almost sneered out, ever in danger of tumbling over themselves into incoherent rage. On the other hand, when he slowed things down, he sounded pleasingly like Dave Angel, Eco Warrior.

It's a shame posterity hasn't found a place for him alongside his better-known peers. That said, they're probably making a film about him even as we speak....

Nothing Is Forever

2011-08-26T09:01:00.001+01:00

Through a series of "projective" psychological questions, meant "to draw out a respondent's innermost feelings about diamond jewelry," the study attempted to examine further the semi-passive role played by women in receiving diamonds. The male-female roles seemed to resemble closely the sex relations in a Victorian novel. "Man plays the dominant, active role in the gift process. Woman's role is more subtle, more oblique, more enigmatic...." The woman seemed to believe there was something improper about receiving a diamond gift. Women spoke in interviews about large diamonds as "flashy, gaudy, overdone" and otherwise inappropriate. Yet the study found that "Buried in the negative attitudes ... lies what is probably the primary driving force for acquiring them. Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status and success." It noted, for example, "A woman can easily feel that diamonds are 'vulgar' and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry." The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence—and the diamond.

For advertising diamonds in the late 1970s, the implications of this research were clear. To induce men to buy diamonds for women, advertising should focus on the emotional impact of the "surprise" gift transaction. In the final analysis, a man was moved to part with earnings not by the value, aesthetics, or tradition of diamonds but by the expectation that a "gift of love" would enhance his standing in the eyes of a woman. On the other hand, a woman accepted the gift as a tangible symbol of her status and achievements.

By 1979, N. W. Ayer had helped De Beers expand its sales of diamonds in the United States to more than $2.1 billion, at the wholesale level, compared with a mere $23 million in 1939. In forty years, the value of its sales had increased nearly a hundredfold. The expenditure on advertisements, which began at a level of only $200,000 a year and gradually increased to $10 million, seemed a brilliant investment.

Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public's hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

In developing a strategy for De Beers in 1953, N. W. Ayer said: "In our opinion old diamonds are in 'safe hands' only when widely dispersed and held by individuals as cherished possessions valued far above their market price." As far as De Beers and N. W. Ayer were concerned, "safe hands" belonged to those women psychologically conditioned never to sell their diamonds. This conditioning could not be attained solely by placing advertisements in magazines. The diamond-holding public, which includes people who inherit diamonds, had to remain convinced that diamonds retained their monetary value. If it saw price fluctuations in the diamond market and attempted to dispose of diamonds to take advantage of changing prices, the retail market would become chaotic. It was therefore essential that De Beers maintain at least the illusion of price stability.

In the 1971 De Beers annual report, Harry Oppenheimer explained the unique situation of diamonds in the following terms: "A degree of control is necessary for the well-being of the industry, not because production is excessive or demand is falling, but simply because wide fluctuations in price, which have, rightly or wrongly, been accepted as normal in the case of most raw materials, would be destructive of public confidence in the case of a pure luxury such as gem diamonds, of which large stocks are held in the form of jewelry by the general public." During the periods when production from the mines temporarily exceeds the consumption of diamonds—the balance is determined mainly by the number of impending marriages in the United States and Japan—the cartel can preserve the illusion of price stability by either cutting back the distribution of diamonds at its London "sights," where, ten times a year, it allots the world's supply of diamonds to about 300 hand-chosen dealers, called "sight-holders," or by itself buying back diamonds at the wholesale level. The underlying assumption is that as long as the general public never sees the price of diamonds fall, it will not become nervous and begin selling its diamonds. If this huge inventory should ever reach the market, even De Beers and all the Oppenheimer resources could not prevent the price of diamonds from plummeting.

S elling individual diamonds at a profit, even those held over long periods of time, can be surprisingly difficult. For example, in 1970, the London-based consumer magazine Money Which? decided to test diamonds as a decade long investment. It bought two gem-quality diamonds, weighing approximately one-half carat apiece, from one of London's most reputable diamond dealers, for £400 (then worth about a thousand dollars). For nearly nine years, it kept these two diamonds sealed in an envelope in its vault. During this same period, Great Britain experienced inflation that ran as high as 25 percent a year. For the diamonds to have kept pace with inflation, they would have had to increase in value at least 300 percent, making them worth some £400 pounds by 1978. But when the magazine's editor, Dave Watts, tried to sell the diamonds in 1978, he found that neither jewelry stores nor wholesale dealers in London's Hatton Garden district would pay anywhere near that price for the diamonds. Most of the stores refused to pay any cash for them; the highest bid Watts received was £500, which amounted to a profit of only £100 in over eight years, or less than 3 percent at a compound rate of interest. If the bid were calculated in 1970 pounds, it would amount to only £167. Dave Watts summed up the magazine's experiment by saying, "As an 8-year investment the diamonds that we bought have proved to be very poor." The problem was that the buyer, not the seller, determined the price.

The magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.

In 1976, the Dutch Consumer Association also tried to test the price appreciation of diamonds by buying a perfect diamond of over one carat in Amsterdam, holding it for eight months, and then offering it for sale to the twenty leading dealers in Amsterdam. Nineteen refused to buy it, and the twentieth dealer offered only a fraction of the purchase price.

Selling diamonds can also be an extraordinarily frustrating experience for private individuals. In 1978, for example, a wealthy woman in New York City decided to sell back a diamond ring she had bought from Tiffany two years earlier for $100,000 and use the proceeds toward a necklace of matched pearls that she fancied. She had read about the "diamond boom" in news magazines and hoped that she might make a profit on the diamond. Instead, the sales executive explained, with what she said seemed to be a touch of embarrassment, that Tiffany had "a strict policy against repurchasing diamonds." He assured her, however, that the diamond was extremely valuable, and suggested another Fifth Avenue jewelry store. The woman went from one leading jeweler to another, attempting to sell her diamond. One store offered to swap it for another jewel, and two other jewelers offered to accept the diamond "on consignment" and pay her a percentage of what they sold it for, but none of the half-dozen jewelers she visited offered her cash for her $100,000 diamond. She finally gave up and kept the diamond.

Package Tours In The Sun

2011-08-24T07:23:00.002+01:00

(Note: This post was kindly submitted by regular reader Mr. Carl Morris, who blogs here at Quixotic Quisling)

Public Image Ltd.'s seminal 1979 album Metal Box is a landmark record for all kinds of reasons. Obviously there’s the music itself. It puts the disco into discontent. Like anything described as “ahead of its time” it is, in truth, a direct influence for later artists. It’s the source of a throb and pulse which goes through a surprising amount of music which follows it. (For instance, listen to the tune Death Disco with bands such as LCD Soundsystem in mind, or for that matter certain other bands on DFA Records.) I’d hesitate to call it “experimental”, as that might put you off. Let’s just say that, unlike most things which carry that word, it’s in no way an artistic dead-end.

Metal Box dates from a time when ALL recorded music had tangible packaging. And wow, what packaging. Even though these were the days when physical media had a hope of being sustainable, this was a brave move. Virgin Records (at that time a maverick independent label) released it in the UK as three separate vinyl records in a metal film canister, hence the title. The whole thing has a heightened sound quality. Six sides in total playing at 45rpm certainly did justice to Jah Wobble’s cavernous basslines, as well as each scraping guitar sound and every shriek and wail from Lydon.

Once you managed to prise the thing open, that is. Metal Box, in its original form, celebrates the awkwardness and clumsiness of the vinyl format. You can’t listen to it on your morning jog, nor your daily commute on the train. Listening to it is a fully engaged activity. You can’t even do things around the house because the need to flip it over or change the record will keep interrupting you. Although not too difficult to track down, it’s a cherished item for record collectors. (Overheard: “I just scored an original Metal Box on eBay!”, “Cool. How oxidised is yours?”)

Since the original, there have been several ways to listen to Metal Box. For the USA version, the track list was rearranged and remastered it on to just two records in a cardboard sleeve. This made it look like any other album. Sound quality also suffered. Then in the compact disc era, we were treated to a single CD housed in a little version of the metal box. Cute. But that’s not really a word you use when discussing anything associated with John Lydon.

At some point in recent years it made an appearance on iTunes. (And DRM was probably not the kind of contempt-for-audience the band originally had in mind.) Now we can dip into it on Spotify, the licensed free music streaming service, adverts and all. Often the music formats debate can come down to which is the more convenient. CD or vinyl? Or digital files? No question, digital is ALWAYS more convenient. But so is looking at the Wikipedia page for any given work of art, when compared to actually visiting a gallery. The original version of Metal Box is a perfect marriage of content and packaging. And who said content and packaging were even separate things?

New Maps of Purgatory

2011-08-23T04:00:00.009+01:00

Since ~~Phil's~~ Carl's yet to pipe up with his unpacking of Zardoz, I thought I'd kill off a few lower-tier candidates in the meantime. So here's a random selection, in no particular order...

Logan's Run (1976)

We've seen the future and it's a shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. And yeah yeah -- it's better to burn up than to fade away. Effectively what we have here is the previous decade's generational war slogan of "Never trust anyone over thirty" extrapolated in to an extreme, resulting in the dystopic dénouement of the premise for Wild in the Streets.

Yet how humbling, how Romantically fatalistic -- in this, the year of the American bicentennial -- to see the nation's capitol as ruins, strewn with vines and all sorts of flora, patinaed by the elements to which they've returned. And Sir Peter Ustinov's wrinkles are a marvel to behold and to touch; the very embodiment of nature itself, if not of the authority and experience so thoughtlessly discarded by the cult of youth.

But nevermind the ageism angle, because Richard Pryor has the last word: "Looks like white people aren't counting on us being around."

Rollerball (1975)

The excesses of empire, sans vomitoriums. Key concept: Blood sport.

Westworld (1973)

The excesses of empire, alternate take. One of the advantages of this empire being that -- artificially, and merely for the sake of leisure -- one can colonize the past. Key concept: Hostile objects.

Phase IV (1974)

Effectively this borrows a premise that was put forth some years earlier in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the human race is overdue to make an developmental leap, and that it need help from an outside party -- of extraterrestrial origin -- in order to take that next step in its evolution. And as in 2001, it puts that thesis across in a confusingly oblique way.

Exactly what the nature of this impasse might be, who can tell? But noted that the mathematician believes that everything can be quantified in numbers, and the ants -- in their own way -- prove him correct by demonstrating the power of collectivity. But don't look to a movie that pilfers much of its "action" from a nature documentary for any sort of clarity or coherence.

Silent Running (1972)

In which Deep Ecology meets deep space. With all plant life on earth being choked off by (we're to assume) pollution, Freeman Lowell would sooner kill a man than a tree. This of course is bound to stretch the borders of pathos for most viewers, as much as the plot stretches those of scientific plausibility. For starters: The spaceship survives a passage through the rings of Saturn with all but the most minor of damage. Which is ridiculous enough to start with, exponentially moreso when you note that the spacecraft bears the American Airlines logo.

Day of the Dolphin (1973)

Directed by Mike Nichols, directly following the warm press he'd received for Catch 22 and Carnal Knowledge. The only interesting thing is about this film is that Nichols took the project after (reputedly) Roman Polanski was slated to helm the project. But Polanski, who was dealing with the aftermath of Sharon Tate and his unborn child's murder at the hands of the Manson clan, decided that making a screen adaptation of Macbeth was more suited to his mood at the time. Discuss.

The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

With which the director, having missed out on a pile by turning down the first film in order to make Zardoz, doubles back and tries to recoup his losses by agreeing to tackle the sequel.

Should we be surprised to learn that the forces of the Prince of Darkness directly link back to the heathen hordes of the "Dark Continent"? Or should we be more surprised that, in a supposedly more enlightened age, such a plot twist was expected to go uncontested?

No matter. The result was universally ranked as one of the decade's worst films. Still, between its gloriously unenlightened post-colonial confusion, its jumble of popular paranormal phenomena, and its bizarre efforts at glamorizing its pubescent female lead, it's also one of decade's most perversely & hilariously enjoyable movies.

A.D. 21/8/1971: "Gentlemen, The Dragon Has Come."

2011-08-21T02:14:00.003+01:00

George Jackson - 40 year commemoration from Freedom Archives on Vimeo.

If Any One Can, Cannon Can

2011-08-19T11:36:00.005+01:00

Of all the Seventies TV detectives, my favourite show is probably the one I last saw the longest ago. I was rarely able to get past the answerphone intro to The Rockford Files (the concept of the answerphone being so cool, you didn't need to see the rest of the show), and Kojak, well, for all Telly Savalas' awesome mana-charisma, it was just a bit too pedestrianly-paced for us under-tens. Fortunately, we had the action-packed Cannon to compensate.

Frank Cannon was the original fat, middle-aged gazelle. Combining the acceleration of Usain Bolt with the staying power of Paula Radcliffe, no athletic young hood could expect to escape his clutches for long. Undoubtedly the inspiration for The Bill's beer-bellied cheetah DC Tosh Lines, the Los Angeles private detective has suffered from the fickleness of fate, (or rather fickleness of licensing rights) and been away from our TV screens long enough to fade into the barest fringes of collective memory.

A shame.

Preservation Acts (or: Retromania, Take 1: The Unpromising Pilot Edition)

2011-08-19T05:12:00.014+01:00

Despite the fact that he hadn't been able to convincingly pass for Mexican, Charlton Heston had become something of a top-tier American screen icon by the early 1970s. Yeah sure, there were his wonderfully overwrought deliveries in those revelatory moments of Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green; but personally, I was always more fond his performance in The Omega Man. As the second of three attempted screen adaptations of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, it is one of the decade's most deliciously WTF films.*

Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is the part where -- between taking time out from grilling steaks in his townhouse fortress to casually mow down encroaching vampire-zombies with a machine gun, never shedding his smoking jacket the entire time -- Heston's character decides to take in a matinee. With the vampires dormant during the daytime, he breaks into a movie theater, spools a film in the projection booth, and then sits back in the best seat in the house to take in a viewing of the documentary Woodstock. And as the film slogs on, he sits there gnashing his teeth and weeping. O, what might've been, is the anguished sentiment we're meant to take from this. We were on the brink of paradise. If only things hadn't gone so horribly, unexpectedly wrong.

Knowing what we do about Heston's own politics, it makes for -- among Omega Man's many surreal and nonsensical moments -- the film's most ironically enjoyable and deeply bizarre scene.**

* * * * * * * * *

The Kinks didn't have the most stellar commercial run in the 1970s. Among their many efforts that floundered in the marketplace was the band's Preservation Acts 1 & 2; a pair of albums released in 1973 and the following year in which Ray Davies attempted to revisit and expand the group's 1968 masterpiece The Village Green Preservation Society.

Village Green may arguably be among the top five most perfect pop albums ever recorded, the result of Davies hitting his stride and fully finding his voice as a songwriter. All of that aside, the album didn't meet with the hugest success in its day, at least not when stacked aside the mind-blown accolades that were heaped on, say, Sgt Peppers or Beggars Banquet. It especially didn't fare greatly in the U.S.. One reason being that The Kinks couldn't tour stateside to support the album, on account of being banned over alleged business disputes. The other reason being that the album's lyrical content was just way "too English" to register with many American listeners.

But there also were issues of form that probably counted as strikes against the album. Part of Davies' maturation as a songwriter meant branching out into a number of different styles, a good many of which harkened back to the popular music of years gone by. As Davies would later admit, he never saw anything wrong with writing a song his parents might like -- in fact, it's something he ften aimed to do. In the context of the youth culture of the 1960s, this was probably one of the most egregious act an artist could commit. How "counter-revolutionary" could you get? Pure anathema to the temper of the era, and to many of its criterial imperatives (or whatever).

* * * * * * * * *

The Who played Woodstock, and they reportedly loathed every minute of it. Apparently there was one moment they did enjoyed -- that being when Pete Townshend planted a boot in Abbie Hoffman's ass and sent him sailing headlong into the photographers' pit.

By some accounts, Woodstock was hardly all it was cracked up to be; a far cry from the "Paradise Now" that its later enshrinement would have many believe. Among other things, there were a fair number of crap acts shoved onto the bill, padding out the roster and marking time between the scattered greatest-hits highlights. One such aspiring act was a group that would actually go on to have a modest career in the 1970s was the doo-wop revivalist group Sha Na Na -- a novelty act and admittedly odd choice as last-minute bill-filler, especially seeing how they'd yet to record an album and wound up playing directly before Jimi Hendrix. To hear some tell it, the group's act didn't go over so well with a number of people in the audience, who booed throughout the band's set.

Nostalgia was, to a certain degree, an uncommon sentiment at the time. The 1950s and 1960s had little use for it. If you were born before WWII, what did you have to look back to -- the Great Depression? If you were that generation's offspring, why look back to the previous decade, to a time of bomb shelters and not being allowed to view Elvis from the waist down? Modern life, as typified by the 1950s and 1960s, meant just that -- it was all about the present, and about the future that was being made in the present, a future that could only be better, brighter, faster. All the promises and potential of today coming to full realization...so why bother looking back?

Sha Na Na would a fairly popular act, having --- for a time -- a "wholesome" and moderately successful syndicated TV show, a handful of albums to their credit, and the group's frontman Bowzer making the rounds as a guest celebrity on Hollywood Squares and a number of other afternoon game shows. All of which makes sense perfect sense in a certain context. As the country's postwar industrial boom waned and the economy went to shit, nostalgia became a central figure on the cultural landscape -- American Graffiti, Happy Days, Grease, etc.

An ironic fantasy scenario: If only the members of Sha Na Na had returned a little of the atavism they'd received from those disapproving members of the Woodstock audience, perhaps slipping into the attitude of the New York blue-collar street tough costumes they'd later adopt, and heckled back: "Oh yeah? Well how 'bout you all go fuck yourselves? You people think you know where it's at? You don't. The future ain't now, the future was yesterday...you buncha fuckin' morons."

If only. But hey, I guess we'll always have Altamont, right?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* Admittedly, competition is a bit heavy in this category.
** But Heston got to carry an ace gun around through most of the movie; so I reckon as far as he was concerned, it all balanced out in the end.

Not Long Now....

2011-08-06T21:22:00.003+01:00

Think he's being a bit optimistic about the outcome, though.

Squelching & Farting

2011-07-25T22:03:00.005+01:00

Bit of a parish notice this one, as you surely don't need the likes of me to tell you how good The Who were. That said, my opinion of them is somewhat unorthodox, in that I think they only started to get really good from 1971 onwards, and that what makes them so enjoyable is not their individual prowess as musicians, or even their much-vaunted dynamic interaction, but the thick, soupy, synthesized belching that formed the swampy underlay of their sound.

"Relay" is a classic example, blinking and buzzing and blowing steam like the kind of comedy mainframe computer owned by The Goodies, or the villains of Sixties spy movies like "The Billion Dollar Brain". The cameraman won't show their feet because they're all wearing wellies.

"Join Together" is another romp in the sewage bed, the thick clots of rhythmic effluent tugging at their ankles as they splatter themselves with fragrant clumps of harmonica and Jew's harp. I'm guessing that the mods had long abandoned them by this point...

"Who Are You" was their stinky masterpiece, a five-minute journey down the lower intestine, and perhaps the most flatulent record ever made. Contrary to popular belief The Who were at the absolute height of their putrescent powers when Keith Moon tragically died in 1978, and with the band thus debilitated, it was left to George Clinton alone to carry the methane-fuelled flame of colonic funk-rock into the Eighties.

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As we say so often on this blog, we shall never see their like again....

As a good socialist I’m going where the money is

2011-07-21T12:11:00.012+01:00

A common reaction of conservatives to the trade union militancy of the 1970s was to complain about ‘greedy unions’: ungrateful workers, causing chaos for a few quid more in their pay-packets. An extended version of this argument pointed to the supposed hypocrisy between the socialist ideals of equality and solidarity and the ‘selfish’ materialism of union members’ demands.

Kenneth Williams once expounded this view on Parkinson and got slapped down for his troubles. (A rare moment of Parky not being a crawling brown noser)

A more sophisticated depiction of this conflict was the character of Roy Bland, ex-socialist turned jaded spy, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Bland will only co-operate with George Smiley’s attempts to stop the power struggles in ‘The Circus’ (a fictionalised Mi6) if his demand for £5, 000 is met. He has no shame about this blatant horse-trading – this is the way Britain is now he tells Smiley, ‘You scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag’:

cropped with SnipSnip

Contemporary leftists looking back on 70s militancy tend to focus on its socialist aspects over the material ones - the common belief in the power of collective action, the respect for picket lines, secondary picketing and so on. Owen Hatherley recently quoted a shop steward interviewed in Huw Beynon’s Working for Ford who rejected the company’s efforts to get the workforce into car or home ownership:

“[The workers] get made up, earn a lot more money and then the company starts encouraging them to buy a house, to get a car on the company's scheme. I know this for a fact. Then when they're up to their neck in debt they put the screws on them, and they've got no chance. A shop steward should never be in that position, where he can't afford to go on strike pay. I'd never buy a house when I was a shop steward. I don't think any steward should."

But we can forget that at the heart of most 70s dispute were basic wage demands, either as compensation for Fordist drudgery or to combat the inflation following the 1973 oil crisis. Speaking on the BBC’s 1974 election coverage an NUM official, hotly denying the Miners’ Strike of that year was political, makes the very opposite point to the shop steward at the Ford Plant, “I don’t envy the man who has two Rolls-Royces or two £20, 000 houses, what I want our members to have is the right to buy one of each.”

No political group in Britain at the time really found a way of taking this materialism further in a radical direction. The bureaucratic language of the TUC and corporate-Keynesian (‘Phase Three’ ‘The Social Contract’) couldn’t express the failures of the welfare state to remedy inequalities of wealth and power, as experienced on the shop floor. In Italy however, Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) with its slogan ‘More money, less work’ placed wage demands at the centre of political strategy. They were the way to overthrow capitalism:

“[R]aising the price of labour-power was a working-class act of force which coincided for a moment with a necessity of capital, and then overthrew it, surpassing and upsetting it ... the imbalance between wages and productivity is a political fact, and must be understood as a political fact and utilised as such”

[Mario Tronti, Operai e capital (1971) quoted in Steve Wright, Storming heaven (2002) p.66]

With Maria Rosa Dalla Costa’s call for ‘Wages for Housework’ they even saw extending monetisation as an anti-capitalist measure. The Autonomia group also addressed the other side of the coin: working class consumption. Leading a series of direct actions against rising prices, they encouraged people to ride the subway for free or to take part in ‘proletarian shopping’ where protestors forced supermarkets to cut prices. [Phil Edwards, More work! Less pay! (2009) p.73]

Back in Britain, Parkinson invited Kenneth Williams back to debate with Jimmy Reid, then riding high after leading the victory at the UCS working.

Reid bested Williams and showed he was more the capable of handling the tension between political ideas and material necessity. Reid stood for Parliament several times but tied to a well-past its peak Communist Party, never made it into full time politics. Watching him ‘going down fighting’ you get a real sense of a lost opportunity for the British Left.

Suburban Salvation

2011-07-12T13:09:00.005+01:00

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

The Press

2011-07-11T14:45:00.004+01:00

"Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum Of Rome, drew the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the "contemporary" English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against statics, Faustian against Appollonian world-feeling, the passion of the third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak to man; the press and its associate, the electrical news service, keep the waking consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence.

Gunpowder and printing belong together - both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought - as the two grand means of Faustian distance tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of the Late period witnessed the first flysheets and the first field-guns, the French Revolution in the beginning of the Civilisation witnessed the first tempest of pamphlets in the autumn of 1788 and the first mass-fire of artillery at Valmy. But with this the printed word, produced in vast quantity and distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that, and deliberately seeking to produce impressions in the reader. The war of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, that was waged form London on French soil against Napolean, is the first great example.

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going slavery that has ever existed.

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds on which to determine "the truth" - but what it obtains is just its truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact-world, is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of press-work, and the "truth" is acknowledged by everybody.

With the political press is bound up the need of universal school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element - quite unconscious - of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the newspapers’ power area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education as enlightenment pure and simple, and even today one finds here and there weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom Of The Press - but it is precisely this that smoothes the path for the coming Caesars of the world-press. Those who have learnt to read succumb to their power, and the visionary self-determination of Late democracy becomes a thorough-going determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.

No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organised arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty."

Oswald Spengler - "The Decline Of The West"

Cold Turkey

2011-07-02T22:49:00.002+01:00

This is a great film, though changing social mores make it a bit of period piece.

If they remade it, they'd have to swap cigarettes for Blackberries and iPads.

Got Carter

2011-06-30T09:52:00.003+01:00

It was Carter, not Reagan, who brought the religious right into national politics. Even though they turned against him later, Carter won the Southern evangelical vote in 1976 by advertising himself as a born-again Christian. Like Reagan later, Carter, the folksy farmer and veteran from Plains, Ga., appealed to the nostalgia of white Americans in the 1970s for a simpler, more rural, more traditional society.

Carter, not Reagan, pioneered the role of the fiscally conservative governor who runs against the mess in Washington, promising to shrink the bureaucracy and balance the budget. Early in his administration, Carter was praised by some on the right for his economic conservatism. Ronald Reagan even wrote a newspaper column titled "Give Carter a Chance." The most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland, Carter fought most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives.

Carter, not Reagan, presided over the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory system in airlines, railroads and trucking. Intended to reduce inflation by reducing the costs of essential infrastructure to business, Carter's market-oriented reforms have backfired, producing constant bankruptcies and predatory hub-and-spoke monopolies in the airline industry, an oligopolistic private railroad industry that has abandoned passenger rail for freight, and underpaid, overworked truckers.

Well You Sure Don't Fuckin' Look Hip!

2011-06-28T15:33:00.003+01:00

Was on the brink of doing a post on one of the key movies of the 70s (so key, I'm surprised it hasn't been done here already. It's lurked around a fair few other posts). However, I'll instead direct your attention to this excellent piece by Philip Matthews. If he's reading, can I make it clear that he'd be more than welcome as a contributor to these blogs? I attempted an invite, but can't seem to access his email with my senile computer.

Oh, Before You Go Sir, There's Just One More Thing I Need To Ask...

2011-06-27T04:23:00.002+01:00

The Belgians!

2011-06-26T13:32:00.004+01:00

You see, this is what we're missing nowadays - serious silliness. Because there's a time when all the analysis must stop, and we must lose ourselves in play.

Not The Blues, Man

2011-06-24T22:28:00.004+01:00

I bet you didn't know there was a white Robert Johnson, did you? He was fugging brilliant. This record was the party-starter in Sheffield in the early nineties. No matter whose house we went to, the same scratched, tatty vinyl copy would magically appear, and, when the needle touched the groove, you knew it was only a matter of time before the furniture was burnt in the garden and firearms were discharged into the ceiling.

Show Me The Way

2011-06-24T11:17:00.003+01:00

Does anyone know where I can get hold of some free, easy-to-use graphics software? I want to create a graph for classic-era Seventies rock acts in which the bottom axis will be "Contempt Levelled By Punks", and the left-hand axis will be "Actual Brilliance".

Peter Frampton will be in the very top right-hand corner.

SHUT UP!!!!!!

2011-06-19T23:13:00.006+01:00

Of course, what really differentiates a Seventies blog from an Eighties or Nineties blog is that the former has to deal with social attitudes and assumptions, and therefore cultural products, that may have been worthy on their own terms, but totally unacceptable decades later.

The above song, which was a number one hit during the long hot summer of 1975, was performed by two regulars of the most popular World War II based comedy of the 1970's, written by "Dad's Army" writers David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Only it wasn't the rather lame and over-polite "Dad's Army" that they came from; it was from a much more prickly, class-conscious show. Alas, it was also a show in which the common racial stereotypes of the 1970's were upheld. That said, much of the rather treacley over-fondness that is now ladled over "Dad's Army" is partly due to a sense of guilt over the deliberate forgetfulness applied to "It Ain't Half Hot Mum".

The military is always a good medium to examine and ridicule class relations, and "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" was a more acidic dissection of the underlying tensions of British society than "Dad's Army". Like the latter programme, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" offered a gallery of British class stereotypes - from blithering idiot upper class officers to the resentful members of the lower ranks, all held together by Windsor Davies' Sergeant Major Williams; the classic foreman, elevated from the working class to lord it over the rest of them, his small advance in rank provoking a torrent of gleefully malevolent abuse on those who were now below him.

Set on the Burma Front of 1945, Williams was forced to oversee an ENSA concert party full of female impersonators, intellectual Oxbridge-graduate musicians, and physically stunted tenor sopranos; all terrified of the Japanese and unanimous in their desire to escape Army life. Windsor Davies' Shut Up Williams was the most memorable character in the show, and indeed one of the great comic characters of the 1970's. The sheer physicality of Davies' perfomance was on a par with Leonard Rossiter's Rigsby in "Rising Damp"; both were minor-league bigots whose slight social advantage was turned into a gleefully malignant sense of schadenfreude.

Where "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" (rightly) falls foul of modern sensibilities is in its portrayal of the Indian manservants employed to keep the British soldiers' lives comfortable. Partly functioning as a kind of Greek chorus of comparative normality in observing the eccentricities of the British (especially the perceptive Punkah Wallah Rumzan), their role was rendered grotesque by Michael Bates' performance as Rangi Ram. Although raised in India and speaking fluent Hindi, Bates's grease-painted Bearer was too much of a caricature to withstand the soul-searching examination of racial attitudes that followed the urban riots of the 1980's. And of course the programme's racial outlook was much closer to that of the mid-1970's than to that of the war that had finished 25 years earlier, which had necessitated a much more pragmatic and respectful view of the cultures of the Indian frontier.

Simultaneously crass, brilliant and stupid, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" is a classic example of the kind of priceless yet objectionable entertainment that the era threw up. There's a full episode below - make of it what you will.

Rhythm Of Cruelty

2011-06-08T17:12:00.003+01:00

There are few more relentlessly tragic and depressing stories in the history of showbusiness than that of Lena Zavaroni. Born and raised in Rothesay, a town on the Western Isle of Bute in Scotland, and a star as soon as she entered her teens, she would die alone at the age of 35 in a council flat in Hoddesdon, a claimant of disability allowance, plagued with a neurological illness that defied all attempts at diagnosis and cure.

Zavaroni’s career began, ominously enough, when in 1973, at the age of ten years old, she won "Opportunity Knocks", the premium television talent show of the day, hosted by Hughie Green, a man who made the likes of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh appear comparatively mild. Green was probably the most psychotic individual in the history of post-war British entertainment (and believe me, there’s some stiff competition there) after himself suffering a traumatised youth as a deeply reluctant child star. Green’s appeal largely consisted in professing his sincerity in the grotesque tones of an American huckster, an act that went down oddly well in an era before the emergence of irony as the dominant national sentiment. Unfortunately he was also something of a jinx, and spent his adult life both wittingly and unwittingly destroying all those around him.

The following year, Lena had her first top ten hit with "Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me", and was the youngest person to ever appear on Top Of The Pops. Over the next five years, her career as a wholesome light entertainer was spectacularly successful, with her own TV shows, international tours, and even an opportunity to sing before the US President, Gerald Ford. By 1977, having moved to London to join the Italia Conti stage school, she was estimated to be Scotland’s richest teenager.

In 1979 she spent her 16th birthday in Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, complaining of stomach upset and listlessness, the early signs of the anorexia with which she would battle over the next two decades. Lena herself was convinced that her problems were neurological, and referred to the overall complex of symptoms, which also included agoraphobia and chronic depression, as "static". Throughout the 1980’s she would vacillate between futile attempts to restart her career, attempts to live a "normal" life (such as a short-lived marriage to a computer programmer) and inevitable regressions back into her illness. Numerous family tragedies, including the suicide of her mother, would also take their toll. Her rare television appearances were memorable chiefly for the shocking impact her appearance had on the audience, especially as her most appealing trait, her genuine sweetness, was all too apparent. Despite dogged efforts from herself and on the part of others to effect a cure, she died of pneumonia in 1999, having stated "I feel as though I’ve given away my soul, I don’t have it any more, I’m dead inside."

Ultimately what Lena Zavaroni lacked was what Wilhelm Reich called "character armour". For Reich, character armour was the tell-tale posturing and formation of the body that a person accumulated over their life both to protect themselves from external emotional threats and the expression of culturally inappropriate internal desires. Reich considered all character armouring to be psychologically unhealthy - the distorted signature of repression. For him, Western culture created an excessive amount of armouring from the moment a baby left the comfort of the womb to the alien hands of the nurse and the sealed isolation of the incubator, and it was Reich’s (often physically) shocking approach to the breaking of his patients’ armour that would lead to his disastrous encounters with the authorities.

However, in a culture as impersonal and hard-driving as that of the West, to be one of the few who is without such armour can make one extremely vulnerable indeed. For Zavaroni, who claimed never to have seen traffic lights or escalators before visiting London, full exposure to the insistent demands of an entertainment world that was in itself evolving into an ever-slicker, ever-crueller spectacle was unbearable. Lena Zavaroni, like Karen Carpenter, was an anachronism, their careers flowering at a time when showbusiness could still pretend to support such tender blooms. Nowadays such an illusion can no longer be maintained.

All dying civilisations have their theatres of cruelty, and ours is the media matrix of digital radio, satellite television and the internet. Celebrities are the gladiators of our age, and the most elite corps of these warriors are female vocalists. Artists like Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, Beyonce and Lady Gaga must be some of the psychologically toughest people who have ever lived. Nominally in competition with each other (because of course Capitalism mandates competition) their real opponent is the vicious contemporary superego that subjects them to 24-7 surveillance and mercilessly punishes any display of weakness. Make no mistake, the concentrated venom that tabloid newspapers, gossip magazines and 24-hour infotainment channels can direct against you is lethal. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can give you bulimia.

With these women, with their physiques sculpted like a centurion’s breastplate and their sexuality projected like a mailed fist, the Reichian character armour is explicit. The model for this new type of woman (and occasional man) was of course Madonna, the first megastar to intuit that the secret to survival in the age of New Media lay in disciplining the body; that the shape you were in was an outward manifestation of The Will. And of course it is the body that the media superego is always seeking to attack, searching for patches of cellulite as though searching for chinks in the armour, exactly because they are chinks in the armour; the first sign of a lapse in willpower, of potential psychic confusion, of the opportunity for a story.

Protection is also afforded by the channeling of events through choreographed rituals. Splits with dim, unreliable boyfriends are coordinated during transatlantic flights, so that the tipped hat and mascara-covering Jackie O sunglasses, symbolic of "heartbreak", can yield the requisite photo-op on touchdown. Disputes with their svengalis, often the Senators who first raised their thumbs to them in the talent show arenas, can provide reliable storm-in-a-teacup coverage, with both disputants invariably returning to their prior dependent relationship. These ritualised dramas are effective in dissipating superego pressure by providing a media narrative that ends in satisfying closure.

In its death phase, Western culture has constructed an entertainment culture populated by individuals in the mould of one of it’s prime symbols; beings with the soulless invulnerability of an Apache helicopter, both equally dependent on a complex technostructure that has no future.

A Memo from the Standards & Practices Dept. (Re: Last Night's Revolution)

2011-06-04T03:06:00.008+01:00

{Author's note: Below you'll find my own efforts to put down some thoughts on the recent passing of Gil Scott-Heron. It wasn't an easy task, which is why I initially balked at posting them here, opting instead to save it for my own personal blog. But judging from the feedback I've received (including from one of this venue's contributors), perhaps it merited posting here instead. So here it is. }

Bluesology: Evolution and Flashback

Truth be told, some of us had been expecting to receive the news for some time. Hearing what we'd heard, knowing what we knew, we figured that the word would come any day now, and it had been like that for a good many years. And then finally, word arrived.

I don't know if there's much I can say about Gil Scott-Heron's music or his passing that won't prove redundant to what's already been said elsewhere. While there was a point in his life where his work almost faded into obscurity, that certainly hasn't been the case for some years now. It is (thankfully) very much the stuff of an ackowledged history by now.

Gil Scott-Heron had a tremendous run in the 1970s. It wasn't until the 1980s that I encountered his music, about the time that his public profile had begun to dwindle and fade. Dropping off the register, dropped by his label, continuing to tour and play live but less and less often as the years wore on, and then all but disappearing somewhere in the back streets of New York during the 1990s. The explanation, we would later learn, was on account of his having succumb to a particular fate.

As narratives go, the story seemed too numbingly banal, lent itself a little too predictably and conveniently to the insidiousness of a shrugging cynicism. But cynicism was the order of the day, one reckons, especially considering the decade when all of this began to unravel – amidst the shallow, self-serving cultural tide of the Reagan era. Sure, he probably didn't do himself any favors by letting egotism and "creative differences" poison his relationship with his longterm creative partner. But the whole enterprise might've already been doomed, perhaps, because it went so wildly against the temper of the times. For some, such words and music seemed like little more that a peculiar remnant from another era.

Almost, but not quite. It wasn't too much later that a new generation of artists took up the banner, and in doing so helped place the music of Gil Scott-Heron in the cultural canon. The artist himself, admittedly, was never wholly comfortable with his newfound status as the "Godfather of Rap." Partly this was due to aesthetic reasons, but also because he saw himself a merely one among many upholding a long line of discursive and artistic traditions. And what do such designations amount to, anyway? In the end, one could argue that he as much the offspring of Nina Simone as he was of -- say -- Langston Hughes or Amiri Baraka.¹

As far as what happened to him in his later years – yeah, it was shocking, tragic, disheartening to learn. Still, I can't say that I ever felt it tarnished or eroded his legacy. If anything, the fact that he eventually fell victim to very same things that he'd previously warned and written about only served to underscore the urgency of his original message. He may have started out with literary aspirations, but what he chose to write about wasn't the stuff of mere myth or fable. It was, and remains still, just a little too real.

* * * * * * * *

But about the music. Everyone has their favorites, often they're the same handful of tunes -- the ones that shook them or smacked them upside the head the first time they heard it. No need to mention them by name, I suppose, because chances are they're the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of Gil Scott-Heron. But the discography runs deep. Wading through that discography, despite its unevenness, I always found there were a good many other tracks that stood out, that shone brightly, but seemed to have been often overlooked or undercited. Were I to compile a collection of personal favorites, it would easily fill four discs, perhaps five.

So here's a few favorites of my own...

"Pardon our analysis, America..." These later spoken-word/monologue pieces constitute a category all their own in the way that they framed the events of the era, the way they put things into perspective. As such, many of them rank among my favorites. "H20 Gate Blues," "Bicentennial Blues," "The Ghetto Code," etc.

Aside from the words, there's that voice -- especially when it slides into speaking mode. The grain of the voice, plus the prosody and cadences and tone -- the delivery. Sharp in the early days, mind you; but once he put all the barking and proclamating aside, his voice took on a more direct and personable quality. Casual and offhanded, friendly and direct, warm even in the way the speaker leans in -- with a slight, wry smile and a bemusedly arched eyebrow -- and intimates to the audience/listener in an among-friends lowered register, "I'm sharing this with you, because you and I both know that all of this is bullshit." Part standup comedy, part street-corner punditry, part agitprop, always killingly on-target.

The two-parter that bookends Winter in America. "You're my father, you're my uncle, and my cousin, and my son. / But sometimes I wish you were not." Part lament, part tribute, the song's a testament to the frailty and fallibility of human nature. As the years would play out, this one took on additional layers of meaning; as it seems that Scott-Heron might as well have been writing to his later self -- rebuking the demons and personal failures that were as much his own as anyone else's.

But all of that aside, it shows Scott-Heron and Jackson slipping into a rare "celestial," "cosmic," invocational mode. While part of the tune is rooted in a bluesy here-and-now, the stunningly lovely backing vocal on the chorus opens the song up, stretches out into a more expansive domain.

Perhaps one of the most ambivalent songs of praise I can think of, written as a response to the famous "Drop Dead" verdict of 1976. America's long had a love-hate relationship with its cultural capitol. Judging from the variety of comments circulating in the public domain in the days following the attacks of September 11, I'd say that this is no less the case now than it ever was. Which is probably what prompted this song to spring to my mind at the time.

It's of no small significance that Gil Scott includes gay rights among the litany of fundamental equal rights in the lead-in monologue of "B Movie." What, considering that it amounted to him turning his back on his own previously and altogether different position on the matter a few years earlier. That in many ways represents what those peak years of development and productivity were for the artist -- broadening the frame, connecting the dots, discovering how things aligned and diverged to form the bigger picture, a more universal and fundamental struggle. An extended and open critique that was prone to self-correction and revision.

Which brings us to this song, from an album that often got short shrift over the years. Yeah sure, the anti-nuke stance of "Shut 'Em Down" wasn't such a controversial one to hold in the days following the Three Mile Island incident. Considering the political climate of the day, this can hardly be said of the album's pro-immigration anthem "Alien." And in terms of taking unpopular positions, this applies triply so to the song above, written in honor of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Putting it in the context of a larger, global struggle of "power to the people," it offered:

My name is what's your name / I am the voice of same,
Remembering things that I told me yesterday.
My name is what's your name / I am inside your frame.
We knew the devils, had to make them go away.

Soon followed by the chorus...

You only take it as a symbol.
But look closely, tell me who does it resemble?

Which now seems all-too-prescient as we sort through the conflicted and inherently contradictory rah-rah discussions of the events of the so-called Arab Spring.

* * * * * * * *

At any rate, I could go on at great length. And I suppose I could do a lot more to make all of this more comprehensive and coherent, if not a more fitting tribute. Having spent the better part of three decades seeking out the man's music, wading through it, it's a difficult task to impose order on, to attempt with any hopes of doing thoroughly or properly.²

Gil Scott-Heron often spoke of the blues, usually situating and emphasizing his own music as being firmly of that continuum. To my mind this brings LeRoi's Jones's 1966 critical essay, "The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music)." In the course of discussing the relationship between "avant-garde" jazz and more traditional or colloquial blues-based music, Jones wrote:

"The Blues, its 'kinds' and diversity, its identifying parent styles. The phenomenon of jazz is another way of specifying cultural influences. The jazz that is most European, popular or avant, or the jazz that is Blackest, still makes reference to a central body of cultural experience. The impulse, the force that pushes you to sing...all up in there...is one thing...what it produces is another. It can be expressive of the entire force, or make it the occasion of some special pleading. Or it is all equal...we simply identify the part of the world in which we are most responsive. It is all there. We are exact (even in our lies). The elements that turn our singing into direction, reflections of our selves, are heavy and palpable as weather.

We are moved and directed by our total response to the possibility of effects. [...]

The differences between rhythm and blues and the so-called new music or art jazz, the different places, are artificial, or they are merely indicative of the different placements of spirit."

Part of this realm of cultural experience included what Chester Himes was referring to when he spoke of "the quality of hurt," of what Scott-Heron was talking about when he asked, "Why should the blues be so at home here? / Well, America provided the atmosphere." But it includes a number of other things too -- love, hope, the promises of a better day, the joys of music, etc. -- that Gil Scott-Heron often wrote and sang about.

"What we do with the truth is the key to our freedom," he once said. Indeed. And peace go with you.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1. Being asked, sometime in the early 1990s, by a hiphop magazine if he had any words of advice for aspiring emcess, Scott-Heron crustily responded, "I'd tell them to learn to play an instrument, that way you can make what you do your own. And while you're at it, keep your hands off of my shit."

2. For instance, I hope that in acknowledging the darker passages of Gil Scott-Heron's later years, that none of this aligns itself with a particular type of insidious narrative. That being the sort that I've repeatedly encountered over the years whenever it comes time to eulogize some former counter-cultural figure. The sort where you often find, tucked away somewhere in the middle or later passages of the thing, a comment to the effect of: "In the final years of his life, he became increasingly unhappy/depressed/frustated/erratic in his behavior...". Tedious, that...but more often more than a little unctuous, as one senses the author(s) taking their revenge on the deceased by decreeing: if only he'd just been able to accept things the way they were, hadn't criticized or gone against the tide, then perhaps he might've found happiness and stability. Ultimately it's the backlash narrative, or the self-serving and -congratulatory voice of the status quo, effectively declaring the subject to have been on the "wrong side of history" for having chosen another, more difficult path. And I hope that none of my comments or thoughts above might be interpreted as lending themselves to that sort of account.

Pieces Of A Man (1)

2011-05-28T09:58:00.003+01:00

Continued

Tomorrow Belongs To Them: The Powell Manifesto

2011-05-28T04:08:00.003+01:00

The Apathy and Default of Business

What has been the response of business to this massive assault upon its fundamental economics, upon its philosophy, upon its right to continue to manage its own affairs, and indeed upon its integrity?

The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors' and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded -- if at all -- by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem. There are, of course, many exceptions to this sweeping generalization. But the net effect of such response as has been made is scarcely visible.

In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it. The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens. They have performed these tasks very well indeed. But they have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate.

A column recently carried by the Wall Street Journal was entitled: "Memo to GM: Why Not Fight Back?" Although addressed to GM by name, the article was a warning to all American business. Columnist St. John said:

"General Motors, like American business in general, is 'plainly in trouble' because intellectual bromides have been substituted for a sound intellectual exposition of its point of view." Mr. St. John then commented on the tendency of business leaders to compromise with and appease critics. He cited the concessions which Nader wins from management, and spoke of "the fallacious view many businessmen take toward their critics." He drew a parallel to the mistaken tactics of many college administrators: "College administrators learned too late that such appeasement serves to destroy free speech, academic freedom and genuine scholarship. One campus radical demand was conceded by university heads only to be followed by a fresh crop which soon escalated to what amounted to a demand for outright surrender."

One need not agree entirely with Mr. St. John's analysis. But most observers of the American scene will agree that the essence of his message is sound. American business "plainly in trouble"; the response to the wide range of critics has been ineffective, and has included appeasement; the time has come -- indeed, it is long overdue -- for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.

Click on link for full text.

Sois Chic!

2011-05-23T13:19:00.000+01:00

OK - it's starting to bother me. This and the other 'decade' blogs need female contributors. Not just for the sake of 'quotas', and not for want of trying. We're in need of a broader perspective here. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, if not more so, but at times the faint odour of cheap aftershave in locker rooms emits from the screen. There's also the homosocial male tendency to drift towards team consensus, even if entirely unintentional. A wider variety of experience and approach may be in order at this point, so c'mon - if you're female and interested in contributing, let us know via the comments box or email, to me or anyone else posting here. Don't let previous subject matter put you off. If it applies to the past four decades, fine. It's more open-minded than it may appear... but no Tories or Republicans please. Or Nazis. Or anyone who insists that we let Your Personal Lord and Saviour into our hearts by sundown. Apart from that, anything goes. To any newcomers, I must emphasise that these three blogs aren't just about pop'n'rock, despite how things may appear. Nor are they just about pop-culture products.

I'll now sign off with the timeless sound of Labelle. Please don't think I'm trying to suggest anything via this song's lyrics. It's here because it's not yet another hairy-knuckled guitar axeman, alpha male oligarch or macho catchphrase movie clip. And just because I'm in a glamdiscofunkboogie mood. As should we all be, if we're honest with ourselves.