I had to phone someone, so I picked on you

Marking 50 years to the day since this iconic Top of the Pops performance…

 

... here’s another of those lists.

books: 1960s- & 1970s-adjacent

Norman Scott, An Accidental Icon. Engaging, likeable autobiography by political scandal survivor (Jeremy Thorpe, Rinka etc), now 82: rich on social detail & unintended comedy; heartwarming that lost souls can become survivors.

Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Over five hundred AMAZING facts about Watergate, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminatus Trilogy, ultra-left terrorism etc etc. You won’t BELIEVE what Marcia Falkender said about Harold Wilson!! 

Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern   - Stimulating at intervals (e.g. politics of 1970s urban blight); other times – like postmodernity itself? ahahahahaha - it sprawled, didn’t cohere, rounded up usual suspects ‘Life on Mars’-style.

(Grand Hotel Abyss, his book about the Frankfurt School feels like a better, more coherent book - but, then, when you have a better, more coherent subject).

Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Admired this more than liked it, perhaps (not a fiction which asks to be liked); utopia as omnipresent,  at right angles to social reality. “If we could only.”

Jill Lepore, If/Then: How The Simulmatics Corporation Invented The Future. A detailed, nuanced sociopolitical-context-sensitive exploration of Simulmatics, well-known in its time (1960s) – an outfit which prefigured everything Cambridge Analytica went on to do later in a more fully realised way with better tech. 

This is good & crunchy on the irrationality of purported ‘rationalism’ (Simulmatics, RAND Corporation etc and everything that they tried to contribute both to the policing of urban districts, and to the war effort and pacification projects in Vietnam) which, as seen and theorised by Frankfurt School philosophers and campus radicals, fed much of what the later 1960s was about (think of the decade’s beginnings, with the Kennedy White House as Camelot in the States, with the “white heat of technology” as synecdochic of social democratic modernity here, and then see what unfolded; the New Right were, of course, the victors of this infra-left cultural civil war). 

There’s a case for saying that we’re still be living through the long (or interrupted) 1970s now: as Simulmatics prefigured Cambridge Analytica, so Watergate-era threats to democracy prefigure contemporary ones, except that we’re arguably in worse trouble than our ancestors were (or is this just the hindsight talking? there’s a world outside your window and it’s a word of dread and fear).

See also: James Riley’s The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties + former Dubya speechwriter David Frum's grumpy overview of the American 1970s.

See also: Sheila Rowbatham's Promise of a Dream & Nick Kent's Apathy for the Devil.

books: other

Owen Jones, This Land: The Struggle for the Left.  Clear-eyed – neither bland nor score-settling - reappraisal of the Corbyn years by someone who was both observer and… disciple? (facetiously characterised as Luke Skywalker to Jezza’s Obi-Wan).

Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue. This builds a strong case that ‘transgender issues’, so-called, are often rightwing media constructs/ reductive ‘talking points’; broad-church (obv. trans-inclusive) socialist/feminist organising and campaigning is what’s needed.

Ilya Budraitskis, Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia. Eye-opening about late USSR’s left dissidents (old Bolsheviks+ Yugoslavia-, New Left-, Eurocommunist-influenced), and mid-C20 philosopher Ilya Ilyin (white Russian émigré; conscious ‘anti-Tolstoy’), currently fashionable in pro-Putin circles. 

See also Ilya Budraitskis (interviewed by Tony Wood, who also introduces this volume), in this Jacobin media video. He discusses how the Russian state media and state ideology 'projects' this war as a defensive struggle for peace, the nature of and prospects for the anti-war movement in Russia, also positing this aggressive, imperialist war as - in fact, and this may be a stretch - a final break with the politics of the USSR rather than (as too many Western commentators would too easily wish to suggest) some kind of reversion to it.

A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism. I’d have liked slightly less on the minutiae of Argentinian Trotskyism in the 1950s, fractionally more on Che, dolphins, flying saucers and the sociopolitics of cult formation. 

See Denis Healey, senior Labour politician during the 1970s and 1980s, who - at around 18'00" of Labour: Comrades At War [BBC series], Part 2, talking about disreputable fringe elements supporting Tony Benn and disrupting meetings during the notoriously bitter Deputy Leadership contest of 1981 - says that "we even had the Posadists supporting Tony who thought that socialism would be brought to Britain by beings from outer space."

Emma Newman, Planetfall. What sticks in the mind is, one, the worldbuilding, and two, how we (gradually) take a somewhat ‘unreliable’ (Johari window?) narrator less and less at her own estimation.

books: now and next 

I haven’t read a ton of fiction just lately, but I did also re-read Wuthering Heights just lately (inspired by a family visit to Haworth); richer, stranger, nastier than I’d remembered: defies easy summary.

I may have to (re-)read other Bronte novels. Plus, I’m working my way through the Ukranian-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (has been compared to War and Peace; bears the comparison well) and also The Best of World SF Volume 1, ed. Lavie Tidhar).

Both recommended in – obviously – entirely different ways. I wouldn’t write a 27-word review of either: the first’s too monumental (and too freighted with the tragedies of the mid-twentieth century) and the second’s too various.

(Linda Grant on Life and Fate). 

My daughter also gave me a couple of good books for Father’s Day. Punk Fiction (ed. Janine Bullman) I’m already sampling – there’s a happy, messy, benefit-gig feel to this as various musicians, writers, artists (including both Billys, Bragg and Childish), some of whom were around ‘back in the day’, some of whom come to this as ‘heritage’ each submit a short stories spun-off from a favourite track. There's also Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (Timothy Leary introduces), which looks fun.

Memoirs (I like a good memoir: real life, innit): keen to read Rosemary Woodruff Leary's The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run (editor David Philips says: "while most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time") and also Rossana Rossanda's The Comrade from Milan, about her life and times in the PCI.

films 

Smokescreen (1964, dir. Jim O'Connolly, starring Peter Vaughan) - This quirky, likeable British B-movie - which makes a claims adjustment man its hero - also makes virtues out of his doggedness, parsimoniousness and paradoxically charming lack of overt charm.

Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes, starring Jonathan Rhys Myers, Toni Collette, Christian Bale, Ewan McGregor, Eddie Izzard, feat. Lindsay Kemp) - I have to watch this endlessly-quotable sort-of history of glam rock (which begins in 1850s Dublin) every few years: richer, more life-affirming, funnier each time.

Dogtooth (2009, dir. Yogos Lanthimos, starring Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Christos Passalis) – A disquieting, affectless sort-of horror movie: three siblings raised within a single-family secure compound, who lives are thereby a lie (like a nastier, more claustrophobic Truman Show). 

The Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-3 (2010, dir. Alec Lindsell). Angie Bowie’s the de facto star of this account of how the three influenced (formed?) one another during the years in question: just like Mandy Slade, only real.

Beginners (2010, dir. Mike Mills, starring Christopher Plummer, Ewan McGregor, Mélanie Laurent) – Plummer (dad) ‘comes out’ to McGregor (son) when already 75 and terminally ill, in a generous warm-hearted comedy-drama. Superb performance from Cosmo, as Arthur the Jack Russell. 

Greenland (2020, dir. Ric Roman Waugh, starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd) – Wide-screen American disaster movie about comet expected at first not to impact, then it’ll be fine, then we wait for extinction within days (semi-subliminal metaphor for you-know-what).

Adult Life Skills (2016, dir. Rachel Tunnard, starring Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Ozzy Myers). Sad-funny-quirky-indie fun set in the Pennines and starring Jodie Whittaker - and Ozzy Myers is a compelling screen presence as a troubled youngster with an 'old soul'. 

 

music, television

I’ve been watching some 1970s British genre television – The Changes, Beasts (series of one-act TV plays by Nigel 'Quatermass' Kneale), Survivors, An Englishman’s Castle – and I’ll be writing at greater length for Focus (BFSA magazine) about some of it soon.

The Owl Service was perhaps the strangest – a drama about a blended upper middle-class English family with servant trouble, quietly going mad in their Welsh second home (unresolved sexual tension and ancestral land-spirits from the Mabinogion are helping them).

As sometimes happens when you get to about fifty, my listening choices have been somewhat influenced by who happens to have recently died. Just lately we’ve lost Julee Cruise, the perfect musical collaborator with David Lynch as he sought to make American easy listening creepy (I used to fall asleep to the album Floating Into the Night on cassette tape – I’m almost wanting to add, ‘while sleeping in a coffin’ like Bela Lugosi as depicted in the Tim Burton movie ‘Ed Wood’ though not, alas, in real life... it's not like we had ASMR back in the day) … and also Vangelis, whose music was omnipresent when I was an SF-reading pre-teen whenever a filmmaker or documentary producer wanted to connote ‘the future' [you could start with the album Albedo 0.39, or just the track Heaven and Hell - which may make you want the whole of Carl Sagan's Cosmos again].

Putting the two together, there’s plenty to be said about 1970s genre soundscapes – the folk in folk horror, Paddy Kingsland’s score for The Changes (working with the legendary BBC Radiophonics Workshop), the way that folk influences and early electronica combine. I may need to read Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music again, but if you know anyone else who's written well about this stuff (as well as Rob does, or as Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds do), please do let me know. 

WOMAD memory

Talking of music, we’ll be at WOMAD as a family in a few weeks: first festival in three years, far too long.

WOMAD memory, 2019: I (solo adult that year; S. had a prior commitment) took daughter and friend to WOMAD, they were twelve, I was also helping out as part of the World of Children area. One evening, Orbital opened with  There Will Come A Time a song sampling astronomer Brian Cox and themed around the eventual heat-death of the universe; as they created this vast soundscape, the sun began to set behind them, flooding the sky with orange and red. It was wonderful as well as deeply eerie – daughter (bless ‘er) wanted to be nearer the stage but friend was a little spooked so wanted to be, ideally, a quarter of a mile away; of course, we did the right thing and distanced ourselves.

I attribute daughter’s greater tolerance for the cosmological sublime entirely to Doctor Who, but that’s another story… 

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