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…
