The Generalist

CZECH 2: NME ARCHIVE/PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE 2

2012-01-09T15:56:00.001Z

Following my previous post, found the following article I wrote for the NME under the name Dick Tracy, published in the issue dated 6th September 1980

PLASTIC PEOPLE 1969

Bohemian Raps

A reader recently wrote to NME asking 'Who hasn't heard of The Plastic People?' Answer: A lot of Czechs who aren't allowed to.

"GENUINE artists have always been those who have drawn attention to the fact that things are not in order. This is why one of the highest aims in art has always been the creation of unrest." - Ivan Jirous.

ON 1st July 1980 Karel Soukup was arrested in Prague and charged with "singing various songs of anti-socialist content, ridiculing the police, especially the State Security, and using vulgar expressions in his songs" at the wedding party of a friend.

Far from an isolated incident, Soukup's arrest was the latest in a solid onslaught of such incidents stretching back ten years, which have centred round a group of musicians who have refused to conform.

The Plastic People Of The Universe, despite harassments, arrests and imprisonments, have succeeded in maintaining a true underground culture in Czechoslovakia. Their message is clear: it is better not to play at all than to play as the establishment demands.

The first Czech band was The Primitives in 1967, who drew on The Fugs, Zappa, Beefheart and The Doors as inspiration. The Plastic People themselves came together only a few weeks before the Russian invasion in 1968 and have been a thorn in the side of the establishment ever since.

For a while they were tolerated but in 1971 a crackdown began and a new licensing system for bands was introduced. The following were not allowed: English lyrics, English names for groups, long hair, eccentric dress, high volume, pessimism, funk.

Rather than compromise, the Plastic People went underground, even to the point of building their own sound equipment. Around their creative centre, singers, poets and artists got together to produce a stream of samizdats, clandestine exhibitions, secret concerts. One statement reads:

"The aim of the underground here in Bohemia is the creation of a second culture. A culture that will be totally independent of official channels of communication, social recognition and the hierarchy of values dictated by the establishment."

PPU ve zkušebně v Holešovicích, roku 1972

In 1973 two new groups were spawned — Midsummer Night's Dream and DG307 (named after Diagnosis 307, a term used by the official regime for 'psychiatric disturbance') — but that same year saw the first arrests.

Ivan Jirous, artistic director of The Plastic People, was jailed for 10 months — for "insulting a member of the secret police in a pub".

The first big bust came in February 1976 at Jirous' wedding. Police raided the party, searched homes, seized tapes and arrested 19 people, who were charged with breach of the peace. Twelve were released after six months investigative custody while seven others were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to eighteen months, in the case of Jirous. He was arrested again in October 1977 and sentenced to eight months in April 1978. This was increased to 18 months upon appeal.

Further official restrictions on music were revealed in Document 13 from the famous group of Czech dissidents known as Charter 77. This states: "A number of magazines dealing with popular music have been banned outright. Certain popular music critics ... are not allowed to publish articles or lectures on pop music. All newspapers are provided with lists of performing artists that they may or may not write about, and they are even told, in some cases, how they must write about them."

The first Plastic People album, recorded in a Czech castle, produced in France, pressed in Ireland and printed in England, is now available through Rough Trade.

Called 'Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Band' (after the radical Czech poet whose work is featured on the album), it's disturbing music. The LP also contains a fat booklet entitled The Merry Ghetto which comprises poems and samizdats from the underground.

The sleeve notes read: "This record is not a cry of protest. It is a deliberate statement of what is possible, even in what seems an impossible situation." We need messages like this in these frightening times. Hopefully the People's second album, 'Passion Play', will also find a way to the West.

DICK TRACY

Pictures sourced from the official Plastic People of the Universe site, which is in Czech: http://plasticpeople.eu/index.html

CZECH DELIGHTS: JIRI MENZEL, BOHUMIL HRABAL; VACLAC HAVEL, JOSEF SKVORECKY, PRAGUE SPRING, VELVET REVOLUTION, PLASTIC PEOPLE

2012-01-08T18:42:00.001Z

THE GENERALIST has been bewitched by a movie, which has opened up a kind of Pandora’s box of thoughts and connections which this post will try and explore.

‘Closely Observed Trains’ (aka Closely Watched Trains). directed by Jiří Menzel. This Czech film was released in 1966 and won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1977.

The movie is set mainly around a small provincial railway station, peopled by a wonderful cast of characters, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The principal part of the plot concerns the almost heart-breaking saga of the new recruit to the station, who is trying lose his virginity. Sex and trains are a marvellous combination. There’s a spoiler entry about the film on Wikipedia which explains the outline of the plot but I’d recommend just seeing it. The black and white cinematography is really beautifully framed and lit. The film unfolds in an almost magical fashion. I like Bosley Crowther’s co0ntemporary crit:

"What it appears Mr. Menzel is aiming at all through his film is just a wonderfully sly, sardonic picture of the embarrassments of a youth coming of age in a peculiarly innocent yet worldly provincial environment. ... The charm of his film is in the quietness and slyness of his earthy comedy, the wonderful finesse of understatements, the wise and humorous understanding of primal sex. And it is in the brilliance with which he counterpoints the casual affairs of his country characters with the realness, the urgency and significance of those passing trains."

Its Ken Loach’s favourite film.

See also: Czechoslovak New Wave: ‘a term used for the early films of 1960s Czech directors Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jaroslav Papoušek, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Jaromil Jireš, Vojtěch Jasný, Evald Schorm and Slovak directors Juraj Herz, Juraj Jakubisko, Štefan Uher, Ján Kádár, Elo Havetta and others. The quality and openness of the films led the genre to be called the Czechoslovak film miracle.’

The film was based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), who also co-wrote the screenplay. Hrabal is a major writer of prodigious talent who is still little-known in the wider world. Much of his work has yet to be translated. These two are both short pithy works of great power, lashed with humour, full of vivid and unexpected scenes and remarkable flights of fancy.

There’s a lovely piece of writing about Hrabal by James Wood in the London Review of Books, which you can read online. These are three short exciting extracts:

Hrabal kept his ear close to the pub table. He sat for hours in his favourite Prague establishment, the Golden Tiger, listening to beer-fed stories foam. Those who knew him recall a man who liked to pass himself off as a beer-drinker rather than a writer, content to sit silently and gather – the community’s generous beggar.

…..a new way of writing, whereby heterogeneous elements could be forced against each other, in a natural, comic manner, arising out of ordinary human business rather than the obviously surreal.

Hrabal began to experiment with an unlimited, flowing style, almost a form of stream-of-consciousness (he admired Joyce, Céline and Beckett) in which characters associate and soliloquise madly. He called it pabeni, to which the closest approximation, according to Skvorecky, is ‘palavering’. This palavering is really anecdote without end. The lovely truancy with which Hrabal’s work vibrates has to do with its hospitality to an abundance of stories. Often, one senses that Hrabal has taken a brief comic tale heard in the pub, and exaggerated its comic essence.

On 3 February 1997, Bohumil Hrabal, sick and in despair, haunted by what he called his own ‘loud solitude’, and obsessed by the idea of ‘jumping from the fifth floor, from my apartment where every room hurts’, fell from the fifth floor of a hospital while he was trying to feed the pigeons.

Then what happened over the last eight weeks during which I not only watched the film twice but also got hold of Hrabal’s books and read them excitedly – while I was in the spell of all this – Vaclav Havel died and his state funeral was held and then, just yesterday, read this obituary of Josef Skvorecky in The Independent. For those who were there at the time and for those who weren’t, some history.

1968

THE PRAGUE SPRING

‘In the long run, the most noble of the "1968's" where not the French, German, British or American students and intellectuals; the real heroes of that time were Sakharov, Bonner, Landsbergis, Milosz, Kuron, Karpinski and Havel. They helped create a human rights movement that would spread throughout the Soviet bloc and discredit the tyranny. The 1989 revolution would not have been possible without them.’

Source: Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected the First Secretary of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were an attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel.

Czechoslovakia remained occupied until 1990.

1989

THE VELVET REVOLUTION

Vaclav Havel In Wenceslas Square in Prague

The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that took place from November 17 to December 29, 1989. Dominated by student and other popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, it saw to the collapse of the party's control of the country, and the subsequent conversion from Czech Stalinism to capitalism.^[1]

On November 17, 1989, a Friday, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swollen from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated 500,000. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

With the collapse of other Warsaw Pact governments and increasing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 that it would relinquish power and dismantle the single-party state.

. On December 10, President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on December 28 and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989.

In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946.

VACLAV HAVEL

Vaclav Havel and Lou Reed (2005)

Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

A Nobel Peace Prize nominee,^[2] he was the ninth^[3] and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Dissident

During the first week of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel assisted the resistance by providing an on-air narrative via Radio Free Czechoslovakia station (at Liberec). Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active. He was forced to take a job in a brewery, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience.

This play, along with two other "Vaněk" plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vaněk, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia, and greatly added to Havel's reputation of being a leading dissident (several other Czech writers later wrote their own plays featuring Vaněk).^[12]

This reputation was cemented with the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto, written partially in response to the imprisonment of members of the Czech psychedelic band The Plastic People of the Universe.^[13] (Havel had attended their trial, which centred on the group's non-conformity in having long hair, using obscenities in their music, and their overall involvement in the Czech underground).^[14]

Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979. His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police, (Státní bezpečnost). His longest stay in prison, from June 1979 to January 1984, is documented in letters to his wife that were later published as Letters to Olga.

PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE

Plastic People of the Universe. (Retrieved from http://new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/lc-ood-images)

Source: Without Shoes blog

The Plastic People of the Universe was formed less than a month after the Soviet invsaion.

Bassist Milan Hlavsa formed the band which was heavily influenced by Frank Zappa ("Plastic People" being a song by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) and the Velvet Underground in 1968.^[2]

Czech art historian and cultural critic Ivan Jirous became their manager/artistic director in the following year,^[1] fulfilling a role similar to the one Andy Warhol had with the Velvet Underground. Jirous introduced Hlavsa to guitarist Josef Janíček,^[1] and viola player Jiří Kabeš. The consolidated Czech communist government revoked the band's musicians license in 1970.^[3]

Because Ivan Jirous believed that English was the lingua franca of rock music, he employed Paul Wilson, a Canadian who had been teaching in Prague, to teach the band the lyrics of the American songs they covered and to translate their original Czech lyrics into English. Wilson served as lead singer for "the Plastics" from 1970 to 1972, and during this time, the band's repertoire drew heavily on songs by the Velvet Underground and the Fugs.

The only two songs sung in Czech in this period were "Na sosnové větvi" and "Růže a mrtví", lyrics of both being written by Czech poet Jiří Kolář. Wilson encouraged them to sing in Czech. After he left, saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec joined the band and they began to draw upon Egon Bondy^[2] whose work had been banned by the government. In the following three years, Bondy's lyrics nearly completely dominated PPU's music. In December 1974, the band recorded their first "studio" album, Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned (the title being a play on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), which was released in France in 1978.

In 1974, thousands of people travelled from Prague to the town of České Budějovice to visit the Plastics' performance. Stopped by police, they were sent back to Prague, and several students were arrested.^[1] The band was forced underground until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Unable to perform openly, an entire underground cultural movement formed around the band during the 1970s. The sympathizers of the movement were often called máničky, mainly due to their long hair.

In 1976, the Plastics and other people from the underground scene were arrested and put on trial (after performing at the Third festival of the second culture) by the Communist government to make an example. They were convicted of "organized disturbance of the peace" and sentenced to terms in prison ranging from 8 to 18 months.^[1] Paul Wilson was deported^[3] even though he had left the band in 1972. It was in protest of these arrests and prosecution that led playwright Václav Havel and others to write the Charter 77.^[3]

[ Souce: HISTORICAL DIGESTS FROM WIKIPEDIA]

OCCUPY: THE BOOK

2012-01-05T14:33:00.001Z

‘Occupy: Scenes From Occupied America’ published by Verso was rushed out and into the bookstores before Xmas.

The book is an edited compilation of material from the first three issues of the Occupy Wall Street Gazette [see below] with contributions from some of the world’s leading radical thinkers including Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

Much of the book captures the adrenaline and excitement of the Occupy actions in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston but also highlights the many problems. The consensus decision-making process on which most of the camps were run favoured people with time and patience but infuriated others. The drum circles, a feature of the camps, often drowned out the speakers and annoyed residents in the neighbourhood. The camps also became a refuge for scores of homeless people who found the sites safer places to be than the public shelters. Then there was the issue of how to deal with huge piles of discarded wet and dirty clothes which had to be trucked off the site and laundered elsewhere.

In a speech given by Žižek in Zuccoti Park on October 9th, he warned the Occupiers:

‘There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, “Oh, we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is, “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organisation can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?’

These three issues of the Occupy Gazette are available for download on the n+1 website

OTHER OCCUPY NEWS

* Time magazine have published an Occupy book: What Is Occupy: Inside the Global Movement

*Columbia University are offering a course on the Occupy movement

* Occupy Together website

* Occupationalist is an impartial and real-time view of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Covering history as it unfolds. No filters. No delays.

THE GENERALIST: TRAFFIC 2011

2012-01-03T20:32:00.001Z

Individual Hits

55,131

Downloads

76,635

Good New Year wishes to all my readers worldwide. Thanks to you, this year’s figures are almost greater than those of the last two years combined (2009/2010). Please keep spreading the word and I’ll keep pumping up the volume.

PLANET EARTH: THE DEATH OF AMPHIBIANS

2011-12-16T00:23:00.001Z

This amphibious fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) is threatening to make the world’s amphibians extinct.

Source: http://mythix.com/projects/amphibian_extinction_crisis

Read this powerful article in full in American Scientist: Lessons of the Lost by Joseph R. Mendelson III

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis likely is capable of infecting every species of amphibian on Earth (nearly 7,000 species), representing the broadest host-range of any known pathogen.

Herpetologists and wildlife biologists began observing inexplicable disappearances of amphibians around the globe in the mid-1970s and especially by the mid-1980s but were at a complete loss to explain them. Finally, in the late 1990s, an insightful team of pathologists at the U.S. National Zoo, led by Don Nichols, collaborated with one of the few chytrid fungus scholars in the world, Joyce Longcore, and identified this quite unusual new genus and species. Conservationists and disease ecologists were unprepared for the reality of a pathogen capable of directly and rapidly—mere months!—causing the elimination of a population or an entire species that was otherwise robust.

The concept of a lightning extinction was foreign to researchers and conservationists, and we argued vehemently about it throughout the 1990s at symposia worldwide.

Northern Leopard Frog, a North American native species http://frogsaregreen.com/tag/endangered-amphibians/

…the pathogen itself, was not described until 1999. While we were debating the issue, a terrible lesson was playing out for us around the world as an unknown disease decimated amphibian populations.

The concept of “endangered species” does not apply here. We are witnessing the nearly complete elimination of entire clades of species. This is another lesson learned, as we were all trained that such things are only to be observed in the fossil record. This precedent from the amphibians forces us to address the serious implications for possible disease-driven losses among other major clades. Consider for a moment the potential consequences of clade-level extinctions among monocot plants (corn, rice, wheat), pollinating insects, salmonids or scombrid fishes (mackerel, tuna), mammals or birds.

Conservationists have been overwhelmed by the amphibian crisis. In the atmosphere of ongoing declines, we realized that there was no framework to address a challenge of this magnitude or rapidity. Even worse than problems of scope and scale is the reality that conservationists, collectively, are stymied by the central problem of not knowing what to do

There is a parallel between what amphibian taxonomists do these days and what homicide detectives do. Both arrive at scenes of mayhem. Maybe they solve the crime, but they are powerless to undo it.

Recent studies show the Earth's warming climate is contributing to the increase of chytrid disease, a fungus infection that is responsible for the extinction of many tropical frog species. The fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, infects tadpoles and eventually attacks the skin of adults and kills them. Scientsts know the spore stage can swim through water to infect other frogs, but there is still much to know about how the disease spreads, and if it can survive in other animals.
Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=105707&org=NSF

THE VANISHING: AMPHIBIAN EXTINCTION

A powerful and moving gallery of photos by National Geographic photographer Joel Satore.

Extinction in Our Times: Global Amphibian Decline by James P. Collins, Martha L. Crump and Thomas E. Lovejoy III, which offers a complete history of the phenomenon. See review at Conservation Maven

MAMPHIBIAN ARK is a joint effort of three principal partners: the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), the IUCN/SSC Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG), and the IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG).

Our vision is the world’s amphibians safe in nature, and our mission is ensuring the global survival of amphibians, focusing on those that cannot currently be safeguarded in nature.

GLOBAL APPETITE FOR FROG’S LEGS COULD CONTRIBUTE TO THE AMPHIBIAN’S EXTINCTION

POP ART: THE FIRST POP AGE

2011-12-15T17:48:00.001Z

Some months back THE GENERALIST reported on the death of Richard Hamilton and my investigations into the birth of Pop Art [See Previous Post]

So was excited to receive a review copy from Princeton University Press of this new book by Hal Foster, an American professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton, which promised a fresh view of this intriguing art movement. It delivers.

In the book’s opening essay ‘Homo Imago’, Foster writes: ‘I focus my reflections on five artists – Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha – because they evoke, more graphically than any others, the changed conditions of painting and viewer in the first age of Pop, which here I take to have begun in the mid to late 1950s. Stripped to its essentials, my thesis is this: a shift occurred during this time in the status of image and subjectivity alike, and the signal work of these five artists registers it most suggestively’

So the form of the book is five substantial critical investigations, all illustrated with a generous helping of artworks by each – some well-known, most fresh and interesting. Most striking in this regard are Lichtenstein’s sculptures, like ‘Surrealist Head’ (1986), none of which I had ever seen before. Quite a revelation.

Foster views the works of these artists as ‘a paradigm in picture making.’ He describes this work as ‘an attempt to give these artists more formal due, and more theoretical aspect, than they are usually afforded, to demonstrate the nuances of the imaging and their understanding alike’

The parallel he draws is with the work of Leo Steinberg, the art history professor, who wrote the book ‘Other Criteria’ in 1972, which profiles Pollock, Rauschenberg and de Kooning amongst others, and which introduced the idea of the ‘flatbed picture plane’

He examines the leitmotifs of existing Pop criticism and says these are structured around binaries: high & low culture, form & content, immediacy & meditation, printing & photography, manual & machines, private & public, contemplation & distraction, critique & complicity.’

Foster expands and deepens these ideas. He says that Pop is ambiguous and non-judgemental towards popular culture being ‘neither critical nor complicit’. His binaries include ‘reverence and cynicism, delight and disdain, distance and immersion'.

Pop, he says, does not return art to representation after the abstraction of the previous generation. Rather. it combines the two: ‘It differs from them both and disturbs them’

(Left) A detail from a serial image of Elvis by Andy Warhol. The image is taken from the 1960 Don Siegel movie Flaming Star. It was first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. In the original there were 16 identical images which serially faded across a 37ft canvas. A kind of art parallel to Jack Kerouac’s scroll.

These artists were confronting the ‘inflated images of consumer society’ with its media celebrities and brand-name products. They examined and probed ‘the changes that the new image technologies wrought on human nature’. He says they took apart ‘ the cliches of celebrity and commodity to see how they work and put them back together with differences.’

In the process, says Foster, there was a shift in the function of the artist from romantic creator to trained designer and points out that Hamilton and Lichtenstein trained as draftsmen, Warhol was an illustrator and Ruscha a graphic designer. (He could have added that Rosenquist began by painting billboards).

There’s so much more insight and depth to explore in this deft, nuanced work. These essays will repay repeated reading. If I had to draw a parallel it would be with Greil Marcus’ ‘Lipstick Traces’ – both books combine new scholarship with fresh insights and stylistic innovation, to refresh our perspectives.

The book also contains more than 50pp of references and notes which contains a mine of sources of great value.

This is certainly a major contribution to our understanding of the Pop Art shift and its continuing significance and importance. It seems to have taken us more than fifty years to really appreciate how profound the changes were. We have Hal Foster to thank for opening our eyes and minds with this important and iconic volume.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

1. Marcel Duchamp was a mentor and exemplar for many of the Pop Artists. Hamilton made his first visit to the US in 1963. He travelled with Duchamp and met Warhol, Lichtenstein and ‘other young bucks of American pop art’.

2. There is a very good overview piece on Pop Art on the wonderful site The Art Story. The essay quotes Hal Foster at length and provides a good summary of the ideas in this book: ‘The critic Hal Foster has anatomized Pop art as consisting of essentially five different image types, each of which is preoccupied with a slightly different problem, and each of which has been importantly influential on subsequent artists. ‘

3. Whilst researching for this piece, discovered this excellent profile/interview with Ed Ruscha by Rachel Cooke for The Observer in 2010.

"I like to think the California sun has burnt out all unnecessary elements in his work," says film director David Lynch. "[He is] the visual deus ex machina of what has become the most over-scrutinised city on earth," says novelist James Ellroy. "The coolest gaze in American art," said the late JG Ballard.

4. Read my Previous Post Masters of the Avant-Garde, a review of ‘Ahead of the Game’ by Calvin Tomkins, which profiles Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tingueley and Robert Rauschenberg.

RUSSIA: VADIM GORBATOV/WILDLIFE ARTIST

2011-12-10T14:35:00.001Z

Whilst rifling through the Archive for material on Bulgakov (see last post) I unpacked the time capsule of material relating to my Greenpeace trip to Moscow in 1988 and came across this photo. That is me with Vadim Gorbatov, the leading wildlife artist in the USSR. As I recall he arrived with two huge folders of his artwork which it was my privilege and pleasure to go through with him. A dazzling experience. He gave me two packs of postcards of his work and two wonderful posters which I still treasure. These are three of the cards that I particularly like.

(Top) The Five-toed pygmy jerboa which has the delightful Latin name of Cardiocranius paradoxus. According to the Encyclopaedia of Life, these jerboas ‘are found only in a few areas in Asia. In Russia they are found in the Ubsu-Nur Depression of the Tuva Autonomous Region in the extreme south-central part of the country. In Kazakhstan, their range is restricted to a small area north of Lake Balkhash, where the species was first discovered. They are also found throughout western and southern Mongolia, as well as in the Nan Shan Mountains of northern China. ("Five-toed Dwarf Jerboa", 1999; Gromov and Eszhanov, 2004; Gromov, 2002)’

(Centre) The White-naped Crane (Grus vipio) breeds on the borders of Russia, Mongolia and China. It is in the Vulnerable category of the IUCN Red List because, according to Birdlife International, ‘it is thought to be undergoing a continuing population decline largely as a result of the loss of wetlands to agriculture and economic development.’

(Bottom) This striking painting depicts either a male Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) or a Siberian bighorn (Ovis nivicola) aka snow sheep. The confusion arises because the Latin name on the back of the card reads Ovis canadensis borealis. The wonderful Ultimate Ungulate site lists no sub-species of that name. There is a borealis of the snow sheep but that Latin name would be Ovis nivicola borealis. How confusing and pedantic is that. In the course of trying to unravel this, I learnt that, according to the latest gene sequencing techniques: ‘the history of true sheep (Ovis) began approximately 3.12 million years ago (MYA). ‘The evolution of Ovis resulted in three generally accepted genetic groups: Argaliforms, Moufloniforms, and Pachyceriforms.

;The Pachyceriforms of the subgenus Pachyceros comprise the thin-horn sheep Ovis nivicola (snow sheep), Ovis dalli (Dall and Stone sheep), and Ovis canadensis (Rocky Mountain and desert bighorn). North America wild sheep (O. canadensis and O. dalli) evolved separately from Eurasian wild sheep and diverged from each other about 1.41 MYA. Ancestral stock that gave rise to snow sheep, Moufloniforms, and Argaliforms occurred 2.3 MYA, which then gave rise to two different extant lines of snow sheep that diverged from each other about 1.96 MYA. The more recent nivicola line is genetically closer to the North American wild sheep and may represent a close association during the refugium when Alaska and Siberia were connected by the Bering land bridge. The earlier period of evolution of the Pachyceriforms suggests they may have first evolved in Eurasia, the oldest ancestor then giving rise to North American wild sheep, and that a canadensis-like ancestor most likely gave rise to nivicola. ‘

Phylogenetic Analysis of Snow Sheep (Ovis nivicola) and Closely Related Taxa

T. D. Bunch, C. Wu, Y.-P. Zhang and S. Wang/ Journal of Heredity. http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/1/21.short

A more recent picture from the artist’s own website: www.vgorbatov.ru

Sending you greetings from across time and space.

SEE PREVIOUS POST: ARCHIVE: RUSSIAN CONSERVATIONIST ALGIRDAS KNYSTAUT...

Read my interview with Russian conservationist Algirdas Knystautus, author of a book on the Natural History of the USSR. It was published in The Guardian on March 31st 1987

RUSSIA: SURKOV, BULGAKOV & PELEVIN

2011-12-09T17:52:00.001Z

Source: www.tumblr.com/tagged/vladislav-surkov

This post began when I read an article about Vladislav Surkov in the London Review of Books, entitled ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ by Peter Pomerantsev. You can read the whole article here.

Surkov, a former theatre director and PR man, is described by Pomerantsev as ‘Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal’ and says he is also known as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’

‘In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero.

‘The novelist Eduard Limonov describes Surkov himself as having ‘turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models’.

Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

This fusion of despotism and postmodernism, in which no truth is certain……

…which reminded me immediately of the work of one of my favourite novelists Mikhail Bulgakov. His take on the absurdity, humour, suffering and violence of the Russia of his day and of the pomposity of power meant that virtually none of his works were published openly in his lifetime. Fortunately much of his great work is now available in good translations.

His masterpiece is ‘The Master & Margarita’ which I read when I was in my late teens and reread just recently. Its a magnificent work of the imagination made up of intertwining tales.

The first concerns the Devil’s visit to Moscow. His sidekicks include a human-sized black cat that talks. They create complete havoc, mischief and mayhem and their exploits are fantastical, hilarious, scary and astonishing by turns.

Then there is is a book within a book, a retelling of the biblical story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate, his sentencing and crucifixion and the strange remorse of Pilate – a beautiful and vivid piece of writing.

There are many different translations. Michael Glenny’s (cover above) seems to be rated as one of the best. The cover (left) is from the original edition I had, which fell apart over the years. I kept the cover.

Bulgakov began writing this book in 1928 and continued working on it until his death in 1940. The first uncensored version was not published in the Soviet Union until 1989. It was first published in the West in the 1960s and perfectly chimed in with the mood of that time. It became a cult book of the period.

These two are also great:

‘Heart of a Dog’, written in 1928 was first published by Grove Press in New York in 1968;in Russia until 1987. It concerns a mad professor who implants a human heart and pituitary gland into a dog with bad results. Pavlov was doing real-life dog experiments at the time. This is the Picador Classic edition, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1999)

‘Black Snow’ is Bulgakov’s hilarious fictionalised portrait of Stanislavsky and one of his productions which Bulgakov wrote after his experiences working at the Moscow Arts Theatre, a post personally arranged for him by Stalin. This is the 1999 Harvill Press edition translated by Michael Glenny.

As chance would have it my friend Lin gave me a copy of this extraordinary sf novel ‘The Fatal Eggs’ by Bulgakov which has only recently seen the light of day. A professor discovers a strange ray which has an extraordinary effect on living cells. Panic and mayhem ensues. Bears comparison to H.G. Wells (a writer Bulgakov admired) and Karel Čapek’s strange novel ‘War with the Newts’ [See Previous Post: LARSEN, MISHIMA & ČAPEK]

In this edition there is a very interesting foreword by Doris Lessing about the relationship between Stalin and writers in general, Bulgakov in particular. She writes:

‘I have believed for a long time that Stalin wanted to write but had no talent. It would account for his obsession with literature. He personally oversaw everything published in the Soviet Union.’

One should mention the publisher Hesperus Press who ’are committed to bringing near what is far – far both in space and time’ They publish short classic works, around 100pp pages in length, by both great and unknown authors, works that are little-known in the English-speaking world, in fresh translations. Interesting stuff.

Bulgakov remains a potent figure in the Russian underground imagination as I discovered when I visited Moscow in 1988 as a rep for Greenpeace at the first Soviet and Eastern bloc record fair [See Previous Post: ARCHIVE: GREENPEACE MUSIC for more details.]

It was that trip where I met musicians and artists, one of whom gave me these amazing illustrations for ‘The Master & Margarita’ These are four from a larger set. I’m afraid I have no notes of the artist’s name

This is the original programme leaflet from a production of ‘The Master & Margarita’ by the Four Corners Theatre Company at the Almeida Theatre in London in July/August1992.

www.popuw.com/pocp.html

Viktor Pelevin, one of the great cult novelists of modern Russia, is a modern-day Bulgakov. Highly recommended. I read three or four of his books including these two some years back. Time for a reread.

INTERNATIONAL TIMES

2011-12-04T15:04:00.001Z

International Times – one of the great underground papers – is now online. A fantastic database of every issue, page by page. To check the search engine and for my own archival interests, tried to find the contributions I made to the paper. Found some as follows:

Back in 1969, I wrote two short pieces about the activities of our Arts Lab, the Worthing Workshop

In 1972: a news piece entitled FRENDZ – Still Rocking. In fact, this was wishful thinking as the paper closed that year.

In 1973 I was listed as one of a number of Associate Editors and wrote, amongst other things, two features – one of squatting and one on terrorism. These were experiments in a style where I intertwined fact and fiction.

In 1974, I was listed as one of a number of Contributing Editors. Credited as a researcher on an article called ‘Paranoi9d Panorama’. Also contributed a long book review on the chequered career of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling.

THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE

An almost complete page of IT stickers. According to the International Times Wikipedia entry: The paper's logo was a black-and-white image of Theda Bara, vampish star of silent films. The founders' intention had been to use an image of actress Clara Bow, 1920s It girl, but a picture of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, not changed.

The Underground Press Gazette

OCCUPY PHOTOS & GRAPHICS

2011-11-29T22:53:00.001Z

The worldwide Occupy movement has generated some wonderful photos and graphics. Here are some of the best I have come across so far:

THE HISTORY OF THE BEATS

2011-11-28T18:27:00.001Z

I have Neil to thank for, out of the blue, arriving at my house and giving me this book. As regular readers will know, I have a deep-seated love for the writers and poets of the Beat Generation, forged in my teen years. I was privileged to meet and interview Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and to engineer (with my son Al) a live internet link-up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti from San Francisco to the Komedia club in Brighton. The many and varied beat posts on this blog are summarised below. I have a big library of beat literature and have read extensively and religiously much beat and beat-inspired texts, biographies and historical accounts. So…

For my money, this is the single best history of the Beat Generation that I have ever read and I will explain why. The story of the Beats – both the main characters and an extremely large supporting cast – is complex. They were, apart from everything else, almost constantly on the move. They were restless souls and tormented ones – constantly falling in and out of relationships. Many of them were bisexual and slept with each other in between or at the same time as maintaining relationships with women.

Out of this emotional maelstrom, out of their wanderings, missions and adventures not only on the highways of America but also in the jungles of Mexico, the medinas of Morocco, the Beat Hotel in Paris, the Buddhist monasteries of Japan and the streets of Varanasi, allied with their almost constant experimentation with drugs of varying descriptions and illegality, flowed a body of work that continues to inflame minds and spirits and has great relevance in our own times.

Treasures from the Beat Library of The Generalist Archive: ‘Beatitude Anthology’ [City Lights. 1960]; first issue of the ‘City Lights Journal’ [City Lights.1963]; First edition UK paperback of ‘The Subterraneans’ by Jack Kerouac [Panther. 1982]; First edition of' ‘The Last Words of Dutch Shultz’ by William Burroughs. [Cape Goliard Press. 1970]

This book will rearrange your understanding not only of the Beat movement but also of the times and politics they moved through. One book, Big Sky Mind, argues that the Beats were the transmission apparatus for introducing Buddhism and eastern thinking into America. The beats in their own time were vilified by the mainstream media, arrested and imprisoned, often deported.

Bill Morgan has done a really wonderful job of integrating all this ferment into a seamless readable narrative, formidably well-informed and beautifully written. He brings out the humanity of these characters as they battled with their demons and is, by and large, non-judgmental. He has given shape and context to the Beat Generation story and communicates it in a way that makes sense to succeeding generations. These were the pioneers of a revolution in poetics, politics, social mores, activism, communal living, backpacking, altered states of consciousness. Their collective work is like a deep well of inspiration that has great resonance in these troubled times.

Bill Morgan is the American author and editor of more than a dozen books about the Beat writers and has worked as an editor and archival consultant for nearly every member of the Beat Generation.

His UK equivalent is Barry Miles, who was close with both Burroughs and Ginsberg and has written biographies of both them and Kerouac. He has also acted as an archivist and in 2003, co-edited the revised text edition of Naked Lunch. His latest book ‘In The Seventies’ (following on from his excellent ‘In The Sixties’ a period during which he was close with Paul McCartney, ran the Indica Bookshop and was one of the founders of International Times) adds more to his Beat reminiscences.

Particularly good are his accounts of Ginsberg’s upstate New York commune and adventures on the West Coast plus Burroughs’ early ‘70s sojourn in London (seriously weird). Miles was sound-editing Ginsberg’s tape archive in the Chelsea Hotel and there’s an interesting chapter on another of the Hotel’s residents, the strange and wonderful genius Harry Smith. Also learnt a lot from the chapter on Wilhelm Reich, inventor of the orgone box.

The Typewriter Is Holy by Ted Morgan [Free Press 2010]

In The Seventies by Barry Miles [Serpent’s Tail 2011]

See IMDB details of the cast and production credits for the ‘On The Road’ movie, directed by Walter Sallis, due for release 2012.

PREVIOUS POSTS

2011

BEATNIK NEWS: ON THE ROAD MOVIE

2008

NAKED LUNCH@50

2007

2006

The Beat Library [New additions]

2005

ARCHIVE: MEETING ALLEN GINSBERG

ARCHIVE: MEETING WITH BURROUGHS AT THE CHELSEA

W illiam Burroughs & T.S. Eliot Fighting in the Ca...

CURIOUS FACTS: MAGNETIC COWS & COW MAGNETS

2011-11-14T18:08:00.001Z

Source: www.photos-for-you.com

New developments on magnetic cows which you may not be aware of.

Three years ago, Sabine Begall and colleagues at the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which suggested that cows have a statistically significant preference for aligning themselves in a north-south direction, oriented to the magnetic north rather than the geographical pole. They found a similar preference in deer. They concluded that the animals must be sensing the Earth’s magnetic field.

Begall’s team used Google Earth to analyse the orientation of 8,510 cattle at 308 sites around the globe. For the deer they conducted field work in the Czech Republic, observing 2,974 grazing fallow and roe deer in 241 locations as well as checking body prints left by deer resting in the snow.

For more details, including a lively and interesting set of comments on the subject see this Nature article: ‘Magnetic cows’ are visible from space.’

In 2009 they published a follow-up paper

Here, we show that extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELFMFs) generated by high-voltage power lines disrupt alignment of the bodies of these animals with the geomagnetic field. Body orientation of cattle and roe deer was random on pastures under or near power lines. Moreover, cattle exposed to various magnetic fields directly beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions exhibited distinct patterns of alignment. The disturbing effect of the ELFMFs on body alignment diminished with the distance from conductors. These findings constitute evidence for magnetic sensation in large mammals as well as evidence of an overt behavioural reaction to weak ELFMFs in vertebrates. The demonstrated reaction to weak ELFMFs implies effects at the cellular and molecular levels.

Earlier this year, Lukas Jelinek and other researchers at the Czech Technical University in Prague reported that they had been unable to replicate these results using different Google Earth images.

This paper presents a study of the body orientation of domestic cattle on free pastures in several European states, based on the Google satellite photographs. In sum, 232 herds with 3,412 individuals were evaluated. Two independent groups participated in our study and came to the same conclusion that in contradiction to the recent findings of other researchers, no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found.

Burda and colleagues reanalysed the replication attempt and, according to this account in Nature, they concluded that half of their data should be excluded ‘because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead.’

Looking forward to further developments.

A footnote to this story which is also interesting is whether cow magnets have anything to do with this phenomenon. The following information from magnetsource.com who sell them.

Cow magnets are popular with dairy farmers and veterinarians to help prevent Hardware Disease in cattle. While grazing, cows eat everything from grass and dirt to nails, staples and bits of bailing wire (referred to as tramp iron). Tramp iron tends to lodge in the honeycombed walls of the reticulum, threatening the surrounding vital organs and causing irritation and inflammation, known as Hardware Disease. The cow loses her appetite and decreases milk output (dairy cows), or her ability to gain weight (feeder stock). Cow magnets help prevent this disease by attracting stray metal from the folds and crevices of the rumen and reticulum. One magnet works for the life of the cow!

Ru-Master 5 Cow Magnet
The Ultimate Heavy-Duty Cow Magnet!
Patent No. 5128644

Measures 3/4” dia. x 3-3/8” long

Burda responded to this suggestion as follows:

‘Regarding cow magnets and the idea that they would align in the cow’s stomach Note that this practice is not common (mostly also unknown) in most countries where we made recordings. For sure, none of the deer we observed had it in its stomach. Do the people really think that a small piece of magnet (which does not freely align on a table) would freely align like a magnetic needle in a full stomach? And if so would the cow perceive its movements?’

See Steve Spangler’s science video on Cow Magnets on You Tube

NICK TOSCHES: THE GREATEST

2011-11-13T21:47:00.001Z

Portrait: Montalbetti & Campbell

Photographyserved.com

THE GENERALIST has a taste for great journalism and fine writing as my regular readers will know. But there has been one name missing from my pantheon until now, a man whose work I have circled round for years without quite connecting with his full mastery – namely the dark lord known as Nick Tosches.

He is, in so many ways, the greatest – a judgement I’ve come to after spending a helluva time working through this chunky hair-raising book ‘The Nick Tosches Reader’ which I have no hesitation in recommending except for those readers of a nervous disposition or those easily offended.

What makes him such a great writer and journalist. This man goes in deep. He combines obsessive research with a unique stylistic ability and a love for the dark side. He has an deep love for early American music and an intense interest in organised crime and corruption. His books include full-length biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Liston and Dean Martin (the latter to be filmed by Martin Scorsese (natch). Talking of which, Johnny Depp has bought the film rights to Tosches’ novel ‘In The Hand of Dante’ which is another helluva strange book.

This Reader is definitely a fabulous way of getting to know the man. If you start at the beginning, do not be put off by the early works which are crude, violent, visceral pieces in the baddest of taste. On the other hand, they may whet you appetite. The bo0ok runs chronologically and includes letters, diary entries, poems, extracts from his books, complete pieces of unpublished journalism. Astonishing stuff.

My favourite pieces are profiles of Patti Smith, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, De Niro, an extraordinary and lengthy piece on George Jones, and an excerpt from ‘Power on Earth’, a book about Michele Sindona, ‘the infamous Sicilian financier who was believed to occupy the throne at the heart of the world's evil, where the secret reaches of international finance, the Mafia, and the Vatican.’

That’s just for starters. The book comes replete with praise for Tosches’ undeniable genius of which I love Jerry Stahl’s comment the best:

‘Nick Tosches stands out as the kind of writer other writers only dream of becoming – amazing at fiction, unparalleled in journalism and biography, and possessed of a stature and genius his lessers can but crouch beneath, gazing up in wonder, awe, and more than a little terror at what this man, in a single, unfinished life, has been able to accomplish on the page.’ Good one, Jerry.

Here’s some of the best stuff on the web.

Nick Tosches official bio on exitwounds.com, the website of his collaboration with Hubert Selby Jr, the writer that Tosches himself most admires. As a teenage reader of ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, fresh from its release after the obscenity trial, I share his judgement.

Tosches has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1996 and several of his pieces are available on-line including his lengthy and wonderful account of his search across continents for a real opium den:

‘Confessions of an Opium Seeker’

Saint Nick is a great interview by Mike Millard which appeared in the Boston Phoenix.

‘For more than 30 years, Tosches has been the nattily dressed scumbag sage of American letters, a cerebral, autodidactic hybrid of Jersey City hood and polymath savant. ("I read a lot," he says of his formative years — despite the fact that they were spent in a town of "few books, many bookies.") His body of work harnesses these two extremes; commingling the sacred and the profane, it is as awash in Seagram’s and semen as it is grounded in the dusky eloquence of Classical epics.’

Another interesting profile piece, My Lunch With Nick Tosches, the Man in the Leopard-Skin Loafers by Rex Doane, which appeared in Salon.

‘Tosches emerged roughly 30 years ago from music magazines like Creem and Fusion where he placed the fringe figures of rock 'n' roll history in proper perspective. Providing a reminder to those at Woodstock that the party started years earlier with R&B giants like Joe Turner. Long before acid there was bootleg liquor. Long before free love there was Hank Ballard who let us know what working with Annie was all about. Along with Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and a handful of other noble notables from the era, Tosches elevated rock writing to a new plateau.’

ANTI-NUCLEAR INDIA

2011-11-13T17:01:00.001Z

India’s operational nuclear reactors, those under construction and the proposed new plants, superimposed on a map of earthquake zone/Graphic IBN Source: dianuke. org

One of the under-reported stories in the Western media is the anti-nuclear protests in India which threaten to derail the country’s ambitious nuclear expansion plans. Even before Fukushima, there was deep concern about the possibility of a nuclear Bhopal. That chemical disaster was the biggest industrial accident in the world, whose effects are still being felt. A nuclear accident would be far worse in a country that has a poor industrial safety record.

Dow Chemical has consistently refused to accept financial responsibility for cleaning up the Bhopal factory site. Despite this still contentious issue, the Indian government passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010 which capped the economic cost to nuclear plant operators in case of an accident and absolved them of liability. Potential nuclear equipment suppliers think this Act is still too stringent; opponents feel it should be strengthened.

(Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images)

Here is a good summary of the background story by Janjit Devraj of InsideClimate News

‘When India's central government passed the long-delayed Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement in 2008 and implemented plans to add 40 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2020—10 times its current capacity—it certainly didn't foresee what would happen next. A rare grassroots uprising led by farmers and fisherman took shape in three major states to block atomic megaprojects that locals say would threaten their traditional livelihoods.

Nor did national leaders expect India's intelligentsia—led by retired judges, military leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and academics—to get behind the farmers and fishers and build up such a wall of resistance that some fear it could scuttle billion-dollar deals to import reactors and quash several nuclear projects.

But that's what has happened. Their grievances have now made their way to India's Supreme Court, which is considering a petition to put a stay on nuclear construction until safety reviews of existing plants and those planned along the peninsular coastline are completed.

If the court sides with petitioners it could drive away crucial foreign investment in the rapidly growing nuclear program, local experts say.

Currently, the country has 19 nuclear reactors producing about 4,000 megawatts, only about 3 percent of the country's electricity needs. India, which has refused to sign the 189-nation Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, found itself subject to decades of isolation in the international nuclear trade following its 1974 nuclear weapons test. The Indo-U.S. deal reversed a 34-year-old U.S. ban on supplying nuclear fuel and technology to India.

For American reactor builders like GE and Westinghouse, and foreign investors generally, the pact opened a market for nuclear equipment estimated at $175 billion. For India, the third-largest economy in Asia, it meant the promise of a vast new electricity supply needed for economic growth.

But both sides' expansive ambitions are running up against Indian political realities.’

HARJIPUR: The Chief Minister of West Bengal told the central government in August that the state is scrapping plans to allow this Russian-built 6,000 MGW facility to go ahead in the face of mounting resistance.

Hunger strike protest/dianuke.org

Several hundreds of people led by the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) and belonging to the coastal villages around the KKNPP are staging a relay fast, demanding the project’s closure. It began on October 13th and is ongoing.

KOODANKULAM: The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadhu is urging the central government to put plans on hold for adding six new reactors to the existing plant – two reactors constructed but not yet operational – until local concerns are addressed. If it goes ahead, this facility will be double the size of the Fukushima complex. The People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy have been campaigning against the plant since it was initiated in 1988. A total blockade of the plant by local people has been in operation since October 13th

LEWES: NOV 4th

2011-11-04T23:27:00.001Z

In the middle of the road, blocking the road, outside the Elephant and Castle, in full cry, this wonderful band from our twinned town Waldshut-Tiengen in Germany,play their socks off. Remarkable and moving.

The big day is, of course, tomorrow, This was a very special moment. I was there with my camera.

THE OCCUPIED TIMES OF LONDON

2011-11-04T16:06:00.001Z

Pick up the 2nd edition of ‘The Occupied Times’, originally published with a print run of 2000 copies on Nov 2nd. Since then, fears of violent eviction no longer an immediate worry.

www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2011/11//487942.pdf

SYSTEM D: THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

2011-11-03T17:40:00.001Z

Here a chart of Europe in the black economy as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product), estimated for 2010/ EUPEDIA

Thanks to John Trux for turning me on to this essay, by Robert Neuwirth, writer and investigative reporter, which is excerpted and adapted from his new book: Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy. Highlights below, full article here.

The Shadow Superpower

Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy – and its future.

‘Systeme D’ is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean …This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.

Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

In many countries -- particularly in the developing world -- System D is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. But even in developed countries, after the financial crisis of 2008-09, System D was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated -- in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D -- fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations. Studies of countries throughout Latin America have shown that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial crisis.

Malioboro, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, originally uploaded by Mini Anna {Munandar}. Source: Indonesia Urban Studies

PREVIOUS POST

For more on Robert Neuwirth and his previous book ‘Shadow Cities’ see Vernacular Architecture

SEE ALSO:

In Praise of the Shadow Economy. Interview with Robert Neuwirth by Andrew Leonard/Salon

E-BOOKS1: MICHAEL S. HART

2011-10-29T15:12:00.006+01:00

Michael S. Hart, the founder of e-books and Project Gutenberg
died some eight weeks ago.What a remarkable and inspiring man.
This obituary is granted to the public domain by its
author, Dr. Gregory B. Newby.

Michael Stern Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington on March 8, 1947. He died on September 6, 2011 in his home in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 64. His is survived by his mother, Alice, and brother, Bennett. Michael was an Eagle Scout (Urbana Troop 6 and Explorer Post 12), and served in the Army in Korea during the Vietnam era.

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network.

From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years. Hart was an ardent technologist and futurist. A lifetime tinkerer, he acquired hands-on expertise with the technologies of the day: radio, hi-fi stereo, video equipment, and of course computers. He constantly looked into the future, to anticipate technological advances. One of his favorite speculations was that someday, everyone would be able to have their own copy of the Project Gutenberg collection or whatever subset desired. This vision came true, thanks to the advent of large inexpensive computer disk drives, and to the ubiquity of portable mobile devices, such as cell phones.

Hart also predicted the enhancement of automatic translation, which would provide all of the world's literature in over a hundred languages. While this goal has not yet been reached, by the time of his death Project Gutenberg hosted eBooks in 60 different languages, and was frequently highlighted as one of the best Internet-based resources.

A lifetime intellectual, Hart was inspired by his parents, both professors at the University of Illinois, to seek truth and to question authority. One of his favorite recent quotes, credited to George Bernard Shaw, is characteristic of his approach to life:

 "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.  Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.  All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

Michael prided himself on being unreasonable, and only in the later years of life did he mellow sufficiently to occasionally refrain from debate. Yet, his passion for life, and all the things in it, never abated.

Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors. He fixed his own house and car. He built many computers, stereos, and other gear, often from discarded components. Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world. The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job." He had this advice for those seeking to make literature available to all people, especially children:

Michael is remembered as a dear friend, who sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good.

According to the Project Gutenberg Wikipedia entry, as of June 2011, they had 36,000 items in their collection with 50 new e-books being added every week. mostly in English but increasingly a wide variety of other languages including Finnish and Chinese.

There is a useful summary of the history of the e-book phenomenon on Wikipedia here.

e-BOOKS2: THE DEATH OF THE BOOK

2011-10-29T15:02:00.001+01:00

THE HYPE CYCLE

Thought it would be interesting and informative to investigate the ‘death of the book’ phenomenon. Look this up on Google and you’ll find 408 million items, Here are the most interesting pieces I have come across in reverse chronological order, prefaced by this wonderful diagram.

Source: graphpaper.com

2011

August 30th: The Death of Books Has Been Greatly Exaggerated by Lloyd Shepherd/The Guardian

According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.

April 18th: The Death of the Book by Ben Ehrenreich/Los Angeles Review of Books

Excellent, witty, thoughtful essay (if slightly esoteric towards the end) setting this notion in a long historical context.

‘In a 1913 manifesto, Filippo Marinetti (a futurist of the OG sort) called for “a typographic revolution directed against the idiotic and nauseating concepts of the outdated and conventional book.”

‘The alarm at first built gradually. In 1999, Robert Darnton, writing in The New York Review of Books, consoled his readers that, all the grim prophecies notwithstanding, “the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction.” The book seemed safe enough for a few years, in more danger from the avarice of the carbon-based conglomerates that ate up all the publishers, than from anything in silicon. Safe until the fall of 2007, when lady Amazon released her hounds. Within a month of the Kindle’s debut, the New Yorker was writing of the “Twilight of the Books.” (Cue soundtrack: all minor keys, moody cello.) The London Times worried that “the slow death of the book may be with us.”

April 6th: 541 Years of the Death of Books/Blurb

In The Body of the Book,* Jan-Dirk Müller recounts how, in the 15^th century, a man in Paris named Guillaume Fichet was worried. He was starting to see the effects of the invention of moveable type, created 30 years earlier, and he didn’t like them. We’re not talking the blogging software, but the actual metal type that was being used to print books in large quantities. In 1470 he wrote that if “everything that can be thought can immediately be written and preserved for posterity [by this new technology] the memory capacity of the cultural system will be overstressed and oblivion will be the result.”

February 21st: Are Reports of the Death of the Book Greatly Exaggerated? by Rabbi Tzv Pittinsky

But, it appears that the book as we know it is dying. Eli Kannai, Chief Educational Technology Officer of the Avi Chai Foundation, recently directed me to a hypothetical Academic Library "Autopsy Report" from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The thesis of this report, which seems highly likely to be proven true, is that by 2050, the library will be no more. Books will become obsolete as all books and journal articles will be fully digitized to be accessed anytime, anywhere using computers or portable e-readers.

Source: Ron Chapple/phillyburbs.com

2010

October 8th: Death of the Book, or Not by Michael Cerveiri/ScribeMedia

Think of the billions living in the developing world where hardcover books can cost half a month’s salary, Amazon doesn’t deliver and local bookstores that can get new books charge even more because of transportation and procurement costs. Think of all these things and you can begin to see validity in Negroponte’s idea.

Books, and the desire for books, are creating a demand for low-cost tablets and the accessibility they afford because physical books themselves are simply, and globally, unaffordable.

September 21st: The Death of the Book Has Been Greatly Exaggerated by Christopher Mims/Technology Review

Here's the reality this kind of hype is up against: back of the envelope calculations suggest that ebooks are only six pecent of the total market for new books.

How can that be possible, when Amazon recently said that ebooks are outselling hard-cover books at Amazon.com? Easy: Amazon is only 19 percent of the total book market. Also, Amazon has something like 90 percent of the world's ebook market.

August 7th: It’s Futurists Versus Consumers As The Death of the Book Is Prophesied by Devin Coldewey/ Tech Crunch

Article triggered by Nicholas Negroponte’s prediction that printed books would be dead in five years. Article concludes:

‘Negroponte posits (and he is not the only one) that the raw information comprised by books will soon be more important and accessible than books themselves. That’s inevitable, as printed books were only ever containers, but they remain effective and popular containers, and I think they still have a lot of life left in them — more than five years, anyway. The age of print is coming to an end, but those of us writing excitedly about it are the only ones in a hurry.’

2000

The Death of the Book by S. David Marsh/Mars Hill Review

Death-of-the-book-as-we-know-it forecasters ply their trade with confidence. It seems there is no test of the prophet in this business and every few years the terms of the prophecy are retooled to reflect the latest technology. Everyone has a new epiphany and the cycle rolls over once more. With the new millennium before us, we are assured anew that paper-based information delivery is on the verge of total collapse (again) and that full content, high-quality virtual libraries and e-books-a-million sites will spontaneously materialize over the Internet to fill the void. Access will be unencumbered and inexpensive (or free). Soon, we are promised, e-book reading devices costing less than $100 will weigh half a pound and hold one million titles. So "forget paper . . . here come e-books . . . the physical object consisting of bound dead trees in shiny wrapper is headed for the antique heap . . . books are goners."

AN ADDENDUM TO THE ABOVE:

DEATH OF READING

E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks by Julie Bosman New York Times 4th Feb 2011

“Kids are drawn to the devices, and there’s a definite desire by parents to move books into this format,” Ms. Vila said. “Now you’re finding people who are saying: ‘Let’s use the platform. Let’s use it as a way for kids to learn.’ ”

Twilight of the Books by Caleb Crain/The New Yorker 24th Dec 2007

What will life be like if people stop reading ?

AND FINALLY

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins by Dirk Johnson/New York Times 20th Feb 2011

Here’s the London Review of Books article referred to E-Book 1: Short Cuts by James Meek. Meek is reading Peter Mandeslon’s The Third Man

I moved to underline it, only to realise someone had done so already. Oddly, the book was spit new. It wasn’t even on paper. It was an ebook, a digital form of Mandelson’s masterwork that I’d downloaded from Amazon via the Kindle app on my iPad in the hope (futile, as it happened) of gleaning information about an obscure moment in recent British history. How could someone have been there before me? Each copy of each ebook, stored as bits of electronic data, is always new, the pages as white and the text as crisp as the day they were generated. I’d never looked at that page before. Yet there, under Mandelson’s bleak words, was a faint, dotted grey line. I touched the passage with my fingertip, and the explanation appeared in a pale blue balloon: ‘Eight other people highlighted this part of the book.’

ALAN MOORE: GENIUS AT WORK

2011-10-23T14:38:00.001+01:00

As chance would have it, having completed posts on New Worlds and Jim Cawthorn, both of which involved Michael Moorcock, I received this review copy of ‘Alan Moore: Storyteller’ with a intro by Mike M which, in part, has this to say.

‘The history of comics dates from BAM to SAM – from Before Alan Moore to Since Alan Moore – because quite simply no one had the ambition, the imagination, and the talent to do what he did…..In the hands of Alan Moore [the “graphic novel”] becomes an enduring monument, capable of constant interpretation and re-examination. That is why we admire him, respect him and celebrate him, an authentic genius for the twenty first century.’

This a superb book which I have just devoured over the weekend and will constantly refer to. Its author Gary Spencer Millidge has done an incredible job in documenting the extraordinary story of Alan Moore’s achievements to date. This handsome edition, fully illustrated throughout, is beautifully designed and presented and stands as the definitive work to date on Moore’s life and times.

Moore is a remarkable fellow whose output is colossal, whose imagination is boundless, whose honesty and down-to-earthness is exemplary. The scale of his achievements is humungous.

For anyone interested in comics, particularly young people keen to work in the medium, this is the Bible. It shows Moore’s working methods and explains how he worked with his collaborators – a real education, direct from the maestro.

Having reinvented comics and graphic novels – expanded their possibilities and created several masterpieces – Moore has in recent years followed a hectic schedule of live musical/theatrical appearances. The book comes complete with a 19-track CD which samples his prodigious output in these fields too. Strange and wonderful.

Meticulously researched, clearly written, with a wealth of rare and wonderful graphics, this is a book to treasure. It will inspire and excite your imagination.

‘Alan Moore: Storyteller’ by Gary Spender Millidge is published by Ilex Press. £25.00

NEW WORLDS: OLD AND NEW

2011-10-19T14:31:00.001+01:00

Top Left: Issue 176 (Oct 1967). Cover by Richard Hamilton from the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition 1956.

Top Right: Issue 178 (Dec 1967). Cover by Charles Platt & Christopher Finch)

Left: Issue 179 (Feb 1968) Cover from ‘Barbarella’

Just unearthed from the basement of THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE: some rare copies of the legendary science-fiction/speculative fiction magazine ‘New Worlds.’ Had no idea, until reading the lengthy history of the magazine in Wikipedia, that the mag was first published in 1946.

I always knew it during the period when it was edited by Michael Moorcock. We were working on Frendz magazine at the time (1971/1972). Mike was a regular visitor to our office and we would often go round Mike’s house where I remember a manic Robert Calvert and the shy presence of Keith Roberts, author of the wonderful novel ‘Pavane’.

Top Left: Issue 188 (March 1969). Cover by Gabi Nasemann. Top Right: Issue 190 (May 1969). Cover by Gabi Nasemann. Bottom Left: Issue 193 (Aug 1969). Cover by Charles Platt. Bottom Right: Issue 200 (April 1970). Cover photo by Andrew Lanyon. This was the last issue in magazine format that went through a distributor.

New Worlds published work by a huge number of important writers including J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazney, John Sladek, Thomas M. Disch, M. John Harrison and Terry Pratchett. Also some great illustrators/graphic artists including Mervyn Peake and Mal Dean.

These are probably the rarest issues: Left: A Special Subscription Only issue (201) published in March 1971. Right: The magazine was revived by Mike Moorcock as a fanzine between Spring 1978 and Sept 1979. They were numbered 212 to 216. Issue 212 (pictured here) took the form of a spoof newspaper and was distributed free. [See: New Worlds history on sfcovers.net]

NEW WORLDS IS BEING REPUBLISHED NEXT MONTH IN BOTH ELECTRONIC AND PRINT FORM. http://www.newworlds.co.uk/

_Michael Moorcock's New Worlds Magazine_

The Directors of the Daves Dream Company - Dick Jude, David Hodson, David Tamlyn, Roger Gray and Felix Jude- West - have reached an agreement with Michael Moorcock to revive the seminal science fiction magazine New Worlds. Michael has kindly agreed to lend his name to the masthead of the magazine and to contribute editorial pieces. The magazine will appear in both electronic and traditional print on paper formats and be backed up by an extensive website that will feature exclusive editorial features free to all interested readers.

Source: SF SIGNAL

JIM CAWTHORN

2011-10-19T14:29:00.001+01:00

One of the great illustrators that appeared in New Worlds was the late Jim Cawthorn. Another recent discovery in the basement of The Generalist Archive was this beautiful piece of original artwork by Jim, which is obviously related to the work below, which appeared in the aforementioned subscribers-only issue of New Worlds.

In my search for information about Jim’s life and times, came across an this post on John Coulthart’s excellent blog feuilleton. This is a double pleasure because it gives me a chance to big up John’s blog which is a real delight that I have been dipping into often over the years. A wonderful and informed collection of cult illustration and art, written about from a very informed viewpoint. Its is a beautifully designed site which I highly recommend.

Fans of Mike Moorcock will know of his work. John quotes Mike as follows: “Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can’t remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for me, the best.”

There is an excellent interview with Jim by David Britton on the Savoy Books site.

As mentioned above, I knew Mike very well during the period I worked on Frendz magazine and was involved with Hawkwind. Jim and Mike did this wonderful comic strip for a special issue on the band designed by Barney Bubbles. An article about this also appears on feutillon

Another piece of work Jim did for Frendz was this wonderful double page spread to illustrate this extract from: ‘An Alien Heat’, Vol 1 of Mike Moorcock’s ‘Dancers at the End of Time’. The large figure on the left of the image is definitely based on Mike. I don’t think this has been reproduced before. It was in the Grateful Dead issue of Frendz

MY BOLERO JACKET: HAWKWIND

BARNEY BUBBLES BOOK LAUNCH

BARNEY BUBBLES REVIVAL

CURIOUS FACTS: METEORITES

2011-10-19T14:27:00.001+01:00

WILL A METEORITE HIT MY HOUSE?
The chances of a meteorite hitting your house are very small, but it does sometimes happen.

[One of the many stones from the Park Forest meteorite fall, in Chicago on March 26, 2003. Source: http://epswww.unm.edu/meteoritemuseum/virtualtour/world.htm

‘Halliday et al (1985) estimate that one person will be struck by a meteorite somewhere in the world once in nine years and that sixteen buildings per year could receive some damage from meteorites which weigh at least 500 grams.’ [See Spratt below]

Meteorites have always fascinated me so was very interested to read in the paper a few days ago that a meteorite had crashed through the roof of a house in France owned by a family named Comette.

'We got the roof tiler round and he was astounded,' said Martine Comette (left) Photo: PHOTOPQR/LE PARISIEN

‘An egg-sized meteorite believed to be 4.57 billion years old smashed through the roof of the Comette family home on the outskirts of Paris some time over the northern summer. The rock, blackened by its journey through Earth's atmosphere, remained buried in the roof insulation, until Hugo's mother Martine noticed the roof was leaking and called out for someone to fix it. The roofer took one look at the broken tile and told the Comettes that whatever had smashed their roof tile must have come from the sky. ''It would have had to be Superman to break a tile in this way,'' he said. It was only then that the meteorite, weighing 88 grams, was discovered. ‘ Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/meteorite-rocks-house-of-comette-20111011-1lj1l.html#ixzz1aWBbSRw2

In ‘The Book of Curious Facts’ (published by Collins & Brown in 1993) I recorded the following fascinating story:

‘It is likely that more actuaries live and work in the area around Hartford, Connecticut, where the giant US insurance business is centred, than anywhere else in the world. (Actuaries calculate the statistical risks and premiums for all kinds of accidents, injuries and disasters on behalf of the insurance industry.)

Wethersfield is a small Connecticut town of 26,000 people, and it has been struck by meteorites twice in 11 years.

In April 1971 a 12¹/2-ounce (0.3-kg) meteorite struck a house, crashing through the roof and becoming embedded in the ceiling of the living room.

Then on 8 November 1982, a 6-lb (2.7-kg) meteorite tore into another house while its owners were watching M*A*S*H on television. Travelling at 300 mph (483 km/h), it burst through the roof, an upstairs closet, and the living-room ceiling, hit the floor, bounced off at an angle into the dining room, ricocheted off the ceiling and finally rolled under the dining-room table.

The odds against two meteorites striking houses in the same town is incalculable.

[See Spratt below who says: ‘The fact that both objects penetrated the roofs of buildings within a few blocks of each other is rather coincidental. The odds against this happening at almost the same geographical location but at different times (11 years) are rather high’]

In the whole of recorded history, fewer than a dozen houses are known to have been struck. Only one city, Honolulu, is known to have been struck twice by meteorites (in 1825 and 1949) but no houses were hit on either occasion.

On 7 April 1990, a meteorite 10 inches (25 cms) across hit a house in the Dutch town of Enschede, shattering roofing tiles, penetrating 4 inches (10 cms) of insulating material, and breaking into fragments in an upstairs bedroom.’

My estimate of a dozen houses is certainly wrong. According to discovery.com there have been 57 recorded strikes by meteorites on human structures in the 20th century. This also is incorrect.

The best list I have come across is the ‘Chronological Listing of Meteorites That Have Struck Humans, Animals and Man-Made Objects (HAMs)’ on The International Meteorite Collectors Association Inc website. This was originally compiled by Walter Branch Ph.D and updated by Ken Newton, who writes that list is not complete and is constantly “under construction”. This list, which dates back to 861 AD, records 110 Objects Hit, 14 Humans hit and 6 Animals hit.

It records more than 57 human structures hit by meteorites since the mid 196os.

The most extensive and carefully sourced boss article on the subject is: ‘Possible Hazards of Meteorite Falls by Christopher E. Spratt [The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada]. His list has 61 structures hit from 1790-1990

Source: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1991JRASC..85..263S&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I have found the following recent incidents, presented in reverse chronological order.

Meteorite hits California House August 13, 2011. Meteorite causes 4.5-6ft impact zone in roof of suburban house, causing thousands of dollars of damage.

A Meteorite lands in a N. J. Bathroom/USA TODAY 11 Jan 2007

A hole in the roof, a bathroom full of debris and a strange, silvery rock near the toilet — the Nageswaran family soon realized they needed an astronomer, not a contractor, to fully explain what damaged their house. Scientists determined it was a meteorite that crashed through the roof of their central New Jersey home more than a week ago.

9 March 2009: The meteorite arrived in loud fashion with a sound a neighbour described as a sonic boom. It then tore a hole in the roof of a home in Cartersville, Georgia, before crashing through the ceiling and ending its cosmic journey on a bedroom floor. The house was unoccupied at the time. [Source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meteorite-that-hit-cartersville-house-to-be-on-display-at-tellus-science-museum-91607094.html

12 June 2004: A 1.3kg meteorite broke through the roof a house in Ellerslie, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, and bounced off the sofa. [This comes from another list: Some Interesting Meteorite Falls of the Last Two Centuries, which dates back to 1807. It is on the site of the International Comet Quarterly at Harvard University]

Source: http://dailycosmicnews.blogspot.com/2011/04/probabilities-go-wrong-and-meteorite.html

According to discovery.com, ‘The first recorded instance of a meteorite striking a person was in Sylacuaga, Alabama on November 30, 1954, when a large meteorite crashed through the roof of one Ann Hodges -- who was just napping on the sofa -- bounced off her radio and struck her on the hip and hand. Hard. She was badly bruised, and to add insult to injury, she was renting the house. Her landlady sued for possession of the offending rock, in hopes of auctioning it off to pay for the damage to the house.

According to the Decatur Daily: ‘Ann Hodges never fully recovered from the incident that put a grapefruit-sized bruise on her left hip and left permanent emotional scars. She died of kidney failure in 1972 at a Sylacauga nursing home. ‘

[Other reports call her Hulitt Hodges or E.H. Hodges

]

Source: http://www.thelocal.de/article.php?ID=19857

In 2009, Wired reported that a German teenage boy was hit on the hand by a meteorite while walking home from school. He described seeing a large ball of light, then felt a pain in his hand, followed by "an enormous bang like a crash of thunder," telling the Daily Telegraph that "my ears were ringing for hours afterwards." The meteorite was large enough to leave a foot-wide crater in the ground.

Wired has this story about a meteorite that nailed a parked car in Peekskill, New York on Oct 9 1992. The meteorite fragment which hit the car weighed 12kg on impact and according to the article was moving a shade over 10,000 km/h when it hit the car.

The car doesn’t look too bad in the pic, but apparently it was totalled. [Source: http://alistairpott.com/2007/10/09/today-in-1992-meteorite-hits-a-parked-car/

WALL STREET PROTESTS: USA

2011-10-11T23:08:00.001+01:00

Noam Chomsky, the leading academic and public intellectual, has issued a statement in support of the “courageous and honorable protests” on Wall Street.

‘Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”

Source: Roar mag

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on New York for three weeks.

Tomorrow, they plan a "Millionaires' March" through Manhattan's Upper East Side to take their grievances about the gap between rich and poor to the doorsteps of the super-rich.

The demonstrations are spreading across the USA. There will be so0lidarity protests on at least 56 campuses.

On Monday, several thousand protesters, including teachers and religious leaders, converged on downtown Chicago, targeting a meeting of the Mortgage Bankers Association and a US futures exchange trade association conference.

On Tuesday in Boston there were more than 100 arrests in Dewey Square Park.

There is an Occupy Camp in Washington

A protester affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street protests stands with a US dollar bill taped over his mouth in Zuccotti Park in New York. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gan Golan, of Los Angeles, dressed as the "Master of Degree," holds a ball and chain representing his college loan debt in Washington DC. (AP)

YOUTH RIOTS: CHILE

2011-10-11T23:06:00.001+01:00

Source: camila_vallejo_mosaic_by_cornejo_sanchez-d461n0j.jpg

One of the underreported stories of the year, at least as far as the British press are concerned, are the student riots in Chile, which started in July and are still ongoing.

To get up to speed read the following:

‘Camila Vallejo – Latin America’s 23-year-old revolutionary folk hero’ by Jonathan Franklin/The Observer 8 Oct 2011

‘Vallejo, a 23-year-old geography student, was singing and marching with a handwritten sign when a squad of military vehicles closed in and attacked her with jets of tear gas. A pair of trucks mounted with water cannons unleashed a barrage of water fierce enough to break bones and scrape a person across the pavement. Vallejo was soaked, a cloud of tear gas was then blasted on to her body. With her skin wet, the chemical reaction was massive and incapacitating. Vallejo was paralysed. Her body went into an allergic reaction and welts from the gas erupted over it.’

See Wikipedia entry: 2011 Chilean Protests

Meet Camila Vallejo: Leader of Chile’s Youth Movement by Ameris Castillo/Latina

Protestors lined the streets in support of a teenage boy shot during two-day protests over education reforms in Santiago. Reuters/Carlos Vera. Source RFI English

See this incredible slide show on Flickr by urbancn

BERT JANSCH

2011-10-09T22:25:00.001+01:00

Like millions of others, hearing the news of the death of Bert Jansch was a great sadness. In my musical firmament he was one the brightest stars. I remember listening to his first albums when I was at school. These early albums – the first two now available on one CD – still haunt me to this day. I particularly love Bert And John – the instrumental record he made with John Renbourn – which I still play regularly in the mornings to brighten up the day. Later I saw several Pentangle shows, including one show at Brighton Dome where I went backstage to interview the legendary guitarist John Fahey and got Pentangle’s autographs.

[The Generalist Archive]

With my son Louis saw him twice – a double pleasure – once at the University of Sussex just after my 50th birthday, when I got to thank him and shake his hand, and last time playing with Johnny Marr at the Royal Festival Hall during Patti Smith’s Meltdown festival.

For my money this is the best book on Jansch, although there is also good stuff in Will Hodgkinson’s Guitar Man and Rob Young’s Electric Eden, both the subject of Previous Posts.

JM ARCHIVE: RODIN IN LEWES

2011-10-09T20:50:00.001+01:00

The biggest project in my life so far was to persuade the Tate Gallery to lend me The Kiss – a national treasure and one of the world’s most famous statues – for an exhibition in Lewes. There are many different versions of The Kiss, including four larger-than-life marble statues. One of these was commissioned around 1900 by two gay guys – E.P. Warren and John Marshall - who lived in Lewes. The statue came to our small town and was there for more than 30 years before it left and eventually ended up in the Tate Gallery. Rodin came for supper in Lewes one night.

The project took me nine years – virtually all of my 40s. The story has come again to focus because the Tate has just lent The Kiss to the new Turner Gallery in Margate, Kent. As a result I’ve been on the local tv twice this last week talking about our project back in 1999. Above is the cover of the exhibition catalogue we produced, which included this essay I wrote that tells the fascinating back story.

THE KISS: A LEWES STORY

There are many strange stories to be unearthed in the ancient hill town of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex. For many of its inhabitants, the past remains a subject of everyday conversation, alongside the present gossip and scandals in which every small town abounds.

But there is one story which, for reasons that will become clear, has been effectively buried for almost seventy years. It is the story of the intermingled destinies of a gay Hellenic brotherhood, one of the greatest sculptors of the modern age, perhaps his most controversial work - subsequently adopted worldwide as a symbol of romantic love -and a venerable house which carries the name of the town and provides a link to much of its history.

The back view of Lewes House from the garden [Lewes District Council Archive]

Lewes House, currently the headquarters of the local District Council, sits on a parcel of land that dates back to the reign of Edward III. Mulberry trees, planted by law to help the silk trade, date from the Elizabethan period. The Italian Garden, recorded on a map of 1703, has gone, but the sundial and grotto remain. The house itself, with its former stables and servants' quarters, remains virtually as it was when a young American, E.P. Warren, first saw it in 1889 and decided to make it his home.

Warren recorded his first impressions in a letter of 22 October 1889: 'The house that may do here is huge, old and not cheap. It has only three or four sunny rooms (this number might be just sufficient) and then a goodly number of large north rooms. It is in the centre of Lewes and yet has a quiet garden, a big kitchen garden, a paddock, greenhouse and stables ad lib. Downs accessible and green wooded country as well. You can also have a walk by the seaside. I am much inclined to it.'

It was here that Warren was to establish a 'brotherhood' of like-minded aesthetes, archaeologists, artists and scholars dedicated to establishing a major antiquarian collecting business, driven by his own deep love of Greek culture.

Edward Perry Warren, born in 1860, was one of six children of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Samuel Warren. Edward (Ned) grew up in the prestigious surroundings of a grand house in Boston, Massachusetts, in an atmosphere almost oppressively devoted to the arts. His mother, Susan, was an obsessive art collector, and several members of the family were involved with the birth and development of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to which they made substantial donations.

The Warren family historian Martin Green gives us a striking picture of the young boy: 'Ned was indeed "nervous". He grew up evasive, devious, unreliable, a hypochondriac but with plenty of energy and pertinacity. Perhaps his most striking feature was his failure or refusal to be boyish - and later, manly. When his brothers played Indians, he ran around by himself in a toga.' Openly afraid of women, Ned was bullied for his 'sissiness', for his sexual 'abnormality', for his 'failure in manly sports and tastes'. He grew up scornful of the social and intellectual pretensions of the Bostonian elite, and developed instead a passion for ancient Greece and its manly virtues, which included the love of young men. Boston at that period had a lively bohemian culture, in which a 'gay' and 'queer' society - favoured adjectives of the fin-de-siecle - was beginning to emerge. The city was considered the Athens of America and one of the aesthetic capitals of the world.

It was in Oxford however that Warren's developing tastes found expression. Oxford in the 1880s engaged in the new passion for beauty and aesthetics expounded by John Ruskin and Walter Pater and embodied by Oscar Wilde, who had recently graduated from Magdalen College.

When Warren arrived at New College in 1883, he found much that he liked. He devoted himself to classical studies, especially art and archaeology, despite eye problems that were steadily to worsen. The following year he recorded in his unfinished autobiography: '. . . I was asking myself whether I could be excused from the world's work of business or other terrors - could justifiably live without earning money provided I spent little.' He was also 'on the look-out for affections between my own sex, real affections.' This he was to find at New College that same year of 1884, when he met John Marshall, an archaeologist and scholar from Liverpool who was to become Warren's long-term companion and the great love of his life.

Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall with their Sealyham terriers ay Lewes House. Photo: Edward Reeves

During the autumn term of 1885, unable to study as a result of his eye trouble, Warren made his first trip to Greece. He had in mind several plans as to his future direction. His mother was in Europe and fond of travelling, and he thought he could get his health back by accompanying her and acting as an adviser in buying works of art.

In 1888 Warren's father died, leaving an estate worth $1.9 million, to be administered by a Trust established to run for thirty-three years. One effect of this, Green writes, 'was to tie the Warrens together for life, financially and therefore in other ways, and to make them dependent on each other but above all on [his elder brother] Sam.' It was an arrangement that would lead to tragedy.

Warren was now determined to establish his Hellenic shrine and, Green says, 'had decided that the Hellenic idea was unintelligible without art - meaning above all Greek sculpture, but also vases, coins, intaglios, and cameos.' Newly wealthy, and with a new love, Warren discovered Lewes House.

Warren and Marshall turned Lewes House into a professional collecting enterprise, processing vast quantities of antiquities in their search for the fine, the rare and the ancient. They brought together both objects and people, and the house became the hub of a network linking many major institutions and museums, dealers and collectors, artists, artisans and classicists.

The dining room at Lewes House. [Lewes District Council Archive]

Lewes House had studies and bedrooms for eight, stabling for three Arab stallions, and was home to a pack of dogs including St. Bernards, Sealyham terriers and a boarhound. The atmosphere was described variously as being that of a pagan monastery or the court of a small German princedom. Candles were the only light allowed in the rooms, except in the halls, bathrooms, and passages. The painter William Rothenstein recalled: 'Meals were served at a great oaken table, dark and polished, on which stood splendid old silver. The rooms were full of handsome antique furniture, of Greek bronzes and marbles.' Over all this presided Ned Warren, a set of amber worry beads clutched constantly in his left hand.

Among several Fellows of New College who helped to get the enterprise off the ground was Matthew Stewart Pritchard, a former barrister whom Warren had met in Rome. Pritchard had been a member of Oscar Wilde's circle, as had another key member of the group, the painter John Fothergill.

Fothergill was introduced to Wilde in 1895, the year of his trial and imprisonment, by Robbie Ross, Wilde's first lover. It was through Ross that Fothergill met Warren in 1898. Fothergill joined forces with Warren and William Rothenstein - who was later to introduce Warren to Rodin - to finance a new London gallery, the Carfax.

Through the Carfax, Warren and his associates established a link between the antique and the modern, at a significant time in art history. The work of the moderns would find a place alongside the Greek treasures in Lewes House, where the artists themselves were entertained, among them Roger Fry and Augustus John, Eric Gill and Auguste Rodin, from all of whom Warren purchased work. Fry, acting as a link between the Bloomsbury Group and Warren, introduced Warren to Gill, which led to the purchase of Ecstasy, a stone relief of a heterosexual coupling - a work lost for many years, now in the* collection of the Tate Gallery, alongside Rodin's The Kiss.

The antiquarian enterprise was at its peak for ten years from 1892. By 1895, Warren and Marshall had established a flat in Rome to help coordinate their rapidly expanding collecting operation, which allowed them to travel widely over the Continent and the Mediterranean in their search for treasures.

According to David Sox, the author of Bachelors of Art, the story of what he calls the 'Lewes House Brotherhood', they had 'complete control of the market in classical antiquities. Almost everything that was good, whether a new find or an old one, came to [them] for first refusal. Competition had all but ceased.'

The business really took off when they struck an unorthodox deal with Edward Robinson, curator of antiquities at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Warren was granted £1,000 annually for five years by the family Trust to purchase antiquities. This sum was to be matched by Boston, and purchases not approved by the museum would be retained by Warren without charge. As a result of this deal, ninety per cent of the museum's current holdings of classical antiquities came as gifts or purchases from the Warren/Marshall team. Through this, Warren felt that he could both express his contempt for Boston and improve their collection, while also confirming his status in the family.

Thus the various members of Lewes House, and several local tradesmen, found themselves involved in collecting, cleaning, restoring, photographing, insuring and repackaging the stream of objects that arrived each week during this period.

Classical pieces included a head of Aphrodite from Chios - considered one of the finest Greek sculptures ever made - a bronze head of the Roman Empress Livia, a torso of Hermes, and many other desirable ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman pieces. From the Renaissance came a Madonna and Child from the school of Donatello, a tondo by Filippino Lippi, and Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach, now on show at the Courtauld Gallery, London. Modern works included a giant portrait of the Lord Mayor of Liverpool by Augustus John, the controversial stone relief by Gill, and several works by Rodin, the greatest of which was a marble version of Le Baiser ('The Kiss').

Few people are unaware of The Kiss, Rodin's most famous work alongside The Thinker. The sculpture has been made in many materials and at many scales, in bronze, plaster and terracotta versions, ranging from ones that can be held in the hand to three over life-size marble carvings, housed in London, Paris and Copenhagen. (A fourth inferior version, produced from Rodin's studio after his death, is in Philadelphia.)

The Lewes Kiss began life when Rothenstein saw the first version of the sculpture at the 1898 Salon in Paris. Convinced that Warren would like its 'pagan sexuality', and knowing that Rodin could use the money, Rothenstein effected a contract through the Carfax Gallery on 12 November 1900.

The price was £1,000, and it was a condition of the contract that the genitals of the man must be distinct and complete. Warren subsequently came to see the work in progress in Paris and visited Rodin at his home in Meudon, outside Paris. In 1903 Rothenstein persuaded Rodin to come to Lewes to see Warren's Greek collection, which apparently impressed him greatly.

The following year, on 28 November, The Kiss left Paris en route to Lewes. Exactly how the four and a half ton marble travelled to Lewes we cannot be sure, but when it finally arrived in the town it was, according to the Sussex Express & Herald:'... placed in the coach house, the only part of Mr Warren's residence in which there was room for such a massive piece of sculpture.' Did Warren miscalculate its size? We may never know. It seems strange to commission such an expensive and prestigious work only to sequester it, out of sight, in a space full of bric-a-brac at the far end of a stable block. There it was to sit for the next ten years apart from a brief outing to an exhibition in London, and in none of the literature or visitor's accounts so far discovered is there any mention of it during this period.

In 1906 Rodin requested that Warren lend The Kiss to the International Society's annual exhibition at the New Gallery in Regent Street, London. Rodin had been elected President of the Society in 1903and was a regular exhibitor. The appearance of the sculpture was to make it famous in Britain for the first time. As far as we know, after the exhibition The Kiss was returned to the stable block at Lewes House, where it remained until 1914.

For reasons that again are not known, Warren then offered to lend it to Lewes Town Council. It was to be placed in the Town Hall, at the South End of the Assembly Room. Negotiations began in January and were concluded by May 1914; on 4 August war was declared. The Kiss was moved from Lewes House to the Town Hall by trolley, using three men and four horses, and was ' installed in the Assembly Room on 2 December 1914.

The same week, the Assembly Room was opened as a reading, writing and recreation room for troops billeted in the town. Regular boxing matches were staged in the same room, where, according to the recollections of one resident (recorded by the Borough librarian), the sculpture was 'used as a vantage point from which to obtain a better view of the boxing ... at one match, the audience pressed so closely round the statue that you could see the sweat running down the woman's back.'

Then, early in 1915, The Kiss was suddenly wrapped in canvas and marked off with a guard rail. Whatever the cause of the cover-up, it was not written about in either the Council minutes or the press of the day. Press reports from 1929 refer to 'susceptibilities being offended' and to the undraped figures of The Kiss 'as offending the proprieties'. The search for more evidence will no doubt continue, but the upshot was that the Town Council returned the statue, saying only that the room did 'not lend itself to such a noble piece of statuary.' On 26 February 1917, The Kiss was once more taken to the stable block where it was to remain for a further sixteen years.

The years following the commissioning of The Kiss marked the end of Warren's Hellenic dream. Pritchard befriended Warren's brother Sam and left Lewes to join the staff of the Boston Museum, a decision Warren described as 'going over to the enemy'. More surprisingly, John Marshall formed an attachment with a spinster cousin of Warren's who had come to stay in Lewes House, whom he subsequently married.

In September 1901, on the death of his mother, Warren returned to Boston. There the long-simmering disagreements between him and Sam intensified over the future of the museum, resulting in an acrimonious trial and ultimately in Sam's suicide. In the last year of his life, having nursed his old friend John Marshall through his final days, Warren revisited Oxford and Lewes, as well as finding the energy to complete his magnum opus, A Defense ofUranian Love. He died on 28 December 1928 in a London nursing home.

The Kiss being loaded ready for its move to Cheltenham in 1952 [Lewes District Council Archive]

On Warren's death, Lewes House and its contents were inherited by his secretary Harry Asa Thomas, who auctioned them in October 1929. The Kiss failed to reach its asking price and was yet again returned to the stables. A few years later, Thomas offered it to any provincial gallery that would pay the costs of transport and insurance. Cheltenham responded, when the museum's curator remembered Rodin's connection with the town: he had spent five weeks there in 1914. The sculpture remained in Cheltenham for three years before reaching its current destination, the Tate Gallery.

In 1952, Sir John Rothenstein, son of William Rothenstein who had arranged the original deal between Rodin and Warren, launched a public subscription to save the piece for the nation. The Kiss was purchased in 1953 and is now one of the Tate's most popular attractions. Its return to Lewes marks what we hope will be a revival of interest in Rodin's relationship with Britain, and in the activities and lives of Ned Warren and the other colourful occupants of Lewes House at the turn of the century.

Sources:

Osbert Burdett and E.H. Goddard, Edward Perry Warren: Biography of a Connoisseur, Christophers, London, 1941

Martin Green, The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860-1910, Charles Scribners, New York, 1989

David $ox, Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren & The Lewes House Brotherhood, Fourth Estate, London, 1991

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Le Baiser de Rodin, Reunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée Rodin, Paris, 1995

Additional material from the East Sussex County Records Office and the Lewes District Council Archive

IMRE MAKOVECZ:ORGANIC ARCHITECT

2011-10-02T13:52:00.001+01:00

This post is a tribute to the Hungarian organic architect Imre Makovecz, a man of true vision, who recently passed away. I owe most of what I know of him to Edwin Heathcote, whose monograph ‘Imre Makovecz:The Wings of the Soul’ [Academy Editions. 1997] is I believe the only detailed source in English. Beautifully illustrated as well. Makovecz’s work is inspiring. When I was editing Tree News magazine, I commissioned this piece from Edwin which he has kindly agreed to let me republish here. Makovecz was obsessed by trees and his buildings were built entirely of timber.

Source: www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=216250

ARCHITECTURE AND THE TREE OF LIFE

When the authorities of communist Hungary banished the architect Imre Makovecz (b. 1935) to the forest in the late 1970s, they thought that would be the end of him. They were wrong.

Makovecz had been a persistent thorn in the side of the Communist regime, unwilling to build standardised structures for mass production and openly critical of the corruption and repression of the regime. He was becoming a magnet for dissenting students.

The response of the authorities was to bar him from working in the state offices, normally professional death for an architect in a country where the construction industry was nationalised.

Makovecz however had contacts in the forestry department and he went to work in the extensive woods of the Danube bend where, to all intents and purposes, the authorities were happy for him to do what he liked, in the hope that he could have no real impact out there in the wilderness. What happened, however, was that Makovecz began working among and with the trees, and created a distinctive architecture ouevre that has exerted a profound effect on architects and artists around the world.

THE HUNGARIAN PAVILION

After the fall of the communist regime, Makovecz was given freer reign to build and, in a series of community buildings, houses and sacred spaces, he honed an architecture which incorporated archetypal symbols, folk and organic motifs and the earth, all using the natural form of trees as part of their tectonic language.

Real international recognition, however, only came with a building that was entirely based around a tree that stood at its heart.

The Hungarian pavilion at the Seville Expo in 1992 became, against all odds, the most popular pavilion on the site. A swelling, hump-backed roof crowned with a row of spires, the building formed an antidote to the bland hi-tech of the pavilions that surrounded it.

Source: www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=216250

The Hungarian building centred round a single tree in a dramatic space defined by timber vaulting and sitting within a glass floor.

Describing the symbolism of the tree, Makovecz said:

"The most important thing is that the tree grows simultaneously upwards and downwards, towards the light and towards the dark. Darkness belongs as much to its essence as light. Nevertheless, we always talk only about what is visible - leaves, chlorophyll, the circulation of water in the tree- we never talk about the roots with the same emphasis.

"Of course we have learned that the roots dissolve salts and the tree uses them to build itself up, but no-one ever talks about the fact that the tree's connection with darkness is just as weighty, just as meaningful, as its connection with the light.

"I thought that this strange creature, which grows upwards and downwards at the same time, must be known in its entirety. If people comprehend the view of below with as much power as they do of the above, they will perceive a new world."

In the image of the tree, its roots exposed, Makovecz found the perfect symbol for his own essentially Manicheistic world view. He told me that: "What I try to do in my architecture is to create a connection between the earth and the sky."

From the Vikings to the Native Americans, dozens of cultures have perceived the cosmos as a tree. Its trunk ascending from the axis mundi and bearing the weight of the heavens in its branches, while the tangle of roots below the ground are analogous to the serpents which still represent darkness and fear of the unknown (think only of the tree in the Garden of Eden, with evil represented by the serpent).

From the Maypole to the pagoda, the Jewish Menora to the Vikings' Yggdrasil, the image of the tree as world structure seems to transcend geographical boundaries. Yet as Makovecz is keen to point out, it is also the most local of images.

To transplant a tree from the Hungarian plains to the arid site of Seville Expo is a gesture demonstrating the futility of attempting to show Hungarian culture in the neutered surroundings of a glorified trade fair. As well as being a heroic image, the tree stripped naked presents us with a picture of alienation, of dryness and, ultimately, of death.

TREE TECTONICS

In his Hungarian buildings, however, trees and the rough-hewn timber they provide seem to appear as sentient beings, holding broad sheltering roots in their powerful grip.

Source: www.1hungary.com/info/zalaszentlaszlo/

In the community centre for Zalaszentlaszlo (1976-84), a building constructed by the villagers themselves, Makovecz planned a courtyard surrounded by columns hewn from trees, the stubs of their branches left intact. The aim was to use this courtyard as a public square for community activities organised by the villagers rather than imposed on them from above by the communist authorities.

The architect refers to Macbeth in which the witches forecast that Macbeth will not be defeated until Birnam wood comes to his stronghold at Dunsinane. Makovecz saw his trees as similar beings coming to haunt the communist authorities.

Source: www.zenth.dk/research/makovecz/visegradfr/visegradfr.htm

His period of exile in the woods of Visegrad bore fruit in a number of educational buildings and small structures for campers. Among the most impressive was the Forest Education Centre, a domed structure sitting partly beneath the ground, the earth piled up against its sides.

Its dome is supported on twelve columns, the by now familiar stripped, yet recognisable trees. Signs of the zodiac crown each column as a further reminder of the metaphor of the celestial vault atop these trees of life.

An oculus (a glazed round opening at the centre of the roof), a literal 'eye to the sky', provides the link between the earth and the heavens.

Other buildings were influenced by the yurt, the round tent of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia from whence the Hungarian people originated. These lightweight structures share an oculus that not only provides light but refers to the shamanic roots of the people - it was through this hole that the spirit of the shaman would fly, his spirit mingled with the smoke from the fire, into the realms of the sky.

Dobogókó Ski Lodge 1980 www.zenth.dk/research/makovecz/dobogoko/dobogoko.htm

Bak Community Centre 1985-88 www.zenth.dk/research/makovecz/Bak/bakB.htm

Other buildings are based on zoomorphic forms, such as the ski-hut at Dobogoko, which resembles a shaggy buffalo, and the later cultural centre at Bak, based on the spread wings of an eagle. In all cases Makovecz uses the skills of local craftsmen to evoke the surfaces - from hairy bison to the feathers of a bird - with coarse timber shingles hewn from local trees.

Siofok Lutheran Church 1986-90 www.makovecz.hu/

Two churches built by Makovecz in Siofok and Paks during the late 1980s, demonstrate the full expressiveness of the architect's animal imagery. The church at Siofok uses a literal interpretation of the notion of the facade, its entrance being through the mouth of a warrior's mask.

Paks Catholic Church 1987-90 Source: www.zenth.dk/research/makovecz/paks/paks.htm

The church at Paks church blends Celtic patterns in plan with swelling, fecund forms and piercing spires coated in scale-like, hand-cut slates.

In both buildings, as in the dozens of houses Makovecz has designed, the rough-hewn trunks of trees play a pivotal role as columns, gateposts and totems, their role both structural and symbolic.

Just as Daphne turned into a tree to escape the advances of Apollo, these trees have been sacrificed to provide shelter aad the buildings wear their timber as Apollo wore his crown of laurels in tribute to this lost love.

Jacob Grimm, the collector of fairy tales and etymologist, suggested from his research that our first temples were glades and clearings in the forest where the spirits of nature were said to dwell. Makovecz has created an ouevre in which the architecture echoes these archaic temples and reminds us of something that we know instinctively: that trees stand, like us, upright in the landscape and provide a glimpse of the lost knowledge of a link between the realms of the earth and the darkness and the light.

Hagymahaz Theatre, Mako

Sources: www.mako.hu/files/Utikalauz/angol/images/n17a.html

www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=216250

SEE MORE OF HIS BUILDINGS AT THIS OFFICIAL SITE www.makovecz.hu/

ALSO ON FLICKER www.flickr.com/groups/imremakovecz/

OBITUARIES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/29/imre-makovecz?newsfeed=true

www.bdonline.co.uk/news/imre-makovecz-%281935-%E2%80%93-2011%29/5025237.article

JULIAN ASSANGE & DANIEL ELLSBERG

2011-09-28T23:47:00.001+01:00

Whatever else he might be, Julian Assange is a natural controversialist. Everywhere he goes, he creates a turbulence around him. This flawed strange first-draft biography holds some clues as to why that is through its insights into his turbulent nomadic childhood. His purchase of a Commodore computer thrusts him into an alternative reality which he was born to master. We follow his immediate attraction to the hacking underworld and his fast progression into global networking. He is a troubled lad with a mission to reveal secrets. This almost mystical obsession leads him almost inevitably to the birth of WikiLeaks through which he plays out his fantasies on a global stage.

This is not the first book on Assange and WikiLeaks and it certainly won’t be the last. Three earlier works are reviewed in this interesting piece by Jonathan Haslam.

The full controversy surroundings this new biography’s publication is covered here in a number of stories published by The Guardian

Daniel Ellsberg on the cover of Time magazine [5th July 1971]

‘Those who have been following the WikiLeaks affair will have noticed the recent prominence of Dan Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, in many respects, was a predecessor to WikiLeaks, and has provided insightful commentary regarding the current situation.’ Source: Unredacted: The National Security Archive

The Pentagon Papers were finally declassified and released in June 2011. Available now on National Archives site

See: Wikipedia for full background story

KEN KESEY & MERRY PRANKSTERS 1

2011-09-17T14:30:00.001+01:00

As some of you will probably know there is new movie ‘Magic Trip’ about the legendary 1964 coast-to-coast journey by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on board a psychedelic bus, driven by the legendary Neal Cassady, immortalised by Kerouac as Dean Moriarty in ‘On The Road.’ The movie is largely composed of 16mm footage shot at the time which has never been seen before. Filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood restored over 100 hours of film and audiotape. The movie is now out in the US from Magnolia Pictures and is expected on these shores before too long. You can read more about this movie in Edward Helmore’s article ‘How Ken Kesey’s LSD-fuelled bus trip created the psychedelic 60s.’

These two books are probably the best accounts around of that original bus trip. First Tom Wolfe’s classic piece of New Journalism ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ (my battered and smoke-stained 1969 Bantam paperback edition above). Second ‘On The Bus’ a fully illustrated documentary account by Paul Perry, with Flashbacks from Ken Babbs and Forewords by Hunter S. Thompson, Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey, published by Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York in 1990.

Ken Kesey

(Sept 17, 1935 – Nov 10, 2001)

KEN KESEY & MERRY PRANKSTERS 2

2011-09-17T14:12:00.001+01:00

This is an account pieced together from The Generalist Archive and the memories of my friend and colleague David May, co-author of ‘The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’ [See Previous Post] of Kesey’s last visits to the UK before his death in 2001.

Our story begins in August 1998 when Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs appear at The Barbican as part of a GrandFurther Tour. I was working with a small APS camera at the time so the stage shot just gives an impression of the set-up – the two Kens behind separate lecterns on either side of a large screen, dressed in outfits that resembled psychedelic Morris Men.David May, who was working for David Brook at Channel 4 at that time, invited DB and me to the event and afterwards we went backstage, where the rest of the pics were taken. The bottom one shows me shaking hands with Kesey, who then signed my Calder & Boyars 1972 hardback edition of ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.’

David Brook and Simon Jameson suggested there and then that Kesey should bring the bus over to Britain the following summer in the lead up to the Millennium, when there was to be a major solar eclipse.The basic deal was done that night.

David May went with journalist Mick Brown to Oregon to settle further details (Mick wrote a piece for The Telegraph magazine) and they spent July 4th with Kesey and Babbs and all the Merry Prankster’s who had gathered at Babb’s place for the celebration.

David Brook enlisted the support of commissioning editor Alan Hayling and Channel 4 Chief Executive Michael Jackson to create a ‘Summer of Love’ season. See next post.

Note on the bus. This is picture of the original bus – a 1939 International Harvester school bus - still sitting on Kesey’s farm, from the official website run by Kesey’s son Zane ww.key-z.com.

In The Generalist Archive, found an interesting article by Katherine Bishop - ‘Down Electric, Kool-Aid Memory Lane’ – published in the International Herald Tribune Nov 7th 1990.

At that time Ken Kesey had just published his own account of the original 1964 trip - ‘The Further Inquiry’, published by Viking Press – and to promote it, was staging another coast-to-coast ride in the new bus which, said Kesey, incorporated ‘important portions of the original “Further”…including the driver’s seat from which Neal Cassady…piloted the rolling affront to respectable behaviour on the first trip.’The article reports that, at that time, the Smithsonian was interested in obtaining the original bus and restoring it. For Kesey that was a no-go.The new bus was the one that was to make the trip to Britain.

KEN KESEY & MERRY PRANKSTERS 3

2011-09-17T14:06:00.001+01:00

[Top] Front and back cover and inside spread of the promotional leaflet for Channel 4’s ‘The Summer of Love’ season, containing the tour schedule for the bus. The channel broadcast 5-minute updates on the progress of the bus each day.

[Below] Pictures of the bus arriving in Brighton On August 8th 1999, various views showing the most excellent paint job, and yours truly in front of the bus.

KEN KESEY & MERRY PRANKSTERS 4

2011-09-17T13:52:00.001+01:00

‘The 'Acid Test’ at London’s ICA was instigated by me and Channel 4’s Head of Events Claire Sefton along with Kesey and co. We got Jeff Dexter down and put on a light show with The Light Surgeons. Some serious hippies turned up from San Francisco with, they claimed, Owsley acid. A story in the Daily Express claimed that the event was promoting drug use and demanded Channel 4 carry out an inquiry – which was excellent publicity. In fact, Kesey was spiked at a private show in Scotland before the Edinburgh Festival He handled it but hated that it was done to him without his consent.’- Notes from David May

HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE TRIP

RICHARD HAMILTON & POP ART

2011-09-15T00:20:00.001+01:00

The news of the death of the British artist Richard Hamilton came a few short weeks after I had been researching the roots of the Pap Art movement for a forthcoming book project. Its a fascinating story which took me a while to understand and piece together.

It begins with the little-known Independent Group (1952-55) whose history is documented in this excellent website.

‘The Independent Group looked at, discussed, analysed, wrote about, designed, built and assembled a galaxy of highly significant work exploring contemporary culture ‘as found’. Using a range of sources including the pages of science-fiction magazines, Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Hollywood film, helicopter design, the streets of London’s East End and modernist architecture the Independent Group created a radical approach to looking and working with visual culture.’

Their first meeting in 1952, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, focused primarily on the imagery of popular American culture, particularly mass advertising. The co-founder of the group – artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi – presented a lecture featuring a series of collages he had put together in Paris during 1947 and 1949 which he titled Bunk! This included this 1947 collage entitled I was a Rich Man’s Plaything which included the word POP.

According to Wikipedia:

‘Subsequent coinage of the complete term "pop art" was made by John McHale for the ensuing movement in 1954. "Pop art" as a moniker was then used in discussions by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955, and the specific term "pop art" first appeared in published print in an article by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Arc, 1956.However, the term is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, although the term he uses is "popular mass culture". Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery found in mass culture in fine art.’

Paolozzi’s earlier contribution has become overshadowed by this image, Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing, created in 1956 for the catalogue of an seminal exhibition entitled ‘This Is Tomorrow’ and used on the exhibition’s poster. The core of the exhibition was put together by the IG Group and was staged at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery. A detailed analysis of all the elements that make up this collage can be found here. The original work is now in the Kunsthall Tubingen in Germany.

Around that time. Hamilton defined what Pop art meant to him: "Popular (designed for a mass audience); transient (short-term solution); expendable (easily forgotten); low cost; mass produced; young (aimed at youth); witty; sexy; gimmicky; glamorous; and last but not least, Big Business."

The pioneering work of the IG Group and of Richard Hamilton in particular laid the seeds for younger artists, principally Peter Blake. The launch of Pop Art in Britain is widely considered to be the January 1961 ‘Young Contemporaries’ Exhibition at the Royal College of Art, which established the reputations of Blake, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and their lesser-known contemporaries Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier.

The term ‘pop music’ originated in Britain in the mid-1950s, referring to rock and roll. The marriage between Pop Music and Pop Art was consummated in 1967 with Peter Blake’s cover for the Beatles’ ‘Sgt Pepper’ album. He would go on to do covers for Paul Weller, Ian Drury and Oasis. The target, a symbol used by many Pop artists, became an iconic Mod symbol, rendered in red, white and blue.

[Above: An original promotional card for a 25-minute film on Richard Hamilton, directed by James Scott and produced for the British Arts Council [Generalist Archive]

Richard Hamilton’s work also crossed over from Pop Art to Pop. Above is one of the iconic images of the 1960s. It shows a young Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed in the back of a police van during their trial for drug offences in 1967. According to a 1999 article by Jonathon Jones, Hamilton copied one of the photographs and turned it into an artwork ‘by adding real metal for the handcuffs and a replica of the police van’s window frame. The piece is now in the Tate Gallery.

Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London III, 1972
This screenprint was sold by Sotheby’s in March 2006)for £64,800 . Source: www.thinkingmanagers.com

Hamilton later designed the cover for the Beatles’ ‘White Album’.

Left: One of Hamilton's more recent works, Shock and Awe

CULT BOOKS1: PATRICIA DUNCKER, ANDREI MAKINE, ANDREY KURKOV

2011-09-08T00:14:00.001+01:00

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker, which I finished at 3 o’clock in the morning, is a wonderful, wonderful novel which I urge you to read. It concerns a young student doing her degree at Cambridge on a glamorous and scandalous French novelist named Paul Michel. Little does the protagonist and the reader know where this will lead and I intend to reveal little more than that as the book is full of genuine surprises. It touched me deeply.

The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine is of similar rank. This story begins in Paris with a Russian writer in exile whose girlfriend has just left him. In some despair, he decides to return to St Petersburg only to discover both the New Russia and the dark secrets of the past. This is very strong meat indeed, once again full of unexpected developments. It will bring you to tears. Makine is a wonderful novelist with a whole body of work worth exploring.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov is a grand example of that strand of Russian literature which combines the dark and the absurd. How is this for a set-up. Once again we have a lonely writer whose girlfriend has left him. The zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them so Viktor adopted a king penguin he names Misha, to keep him company. From such strange beginnings, Kurkov creates a tale of humour which becomes overshadowed by menace and tragedy. Not a happy read but an intriguing one.

CULT BOOKS2: FREDERIC PROKOSCH, DAN BILLANY, CHRISTOPHER PRIEST, DAVID LEAVITT

2011-09-07T22:32:00.001+01:00

More remarkable reads and great discoveries.

‘The Asiatics’ by Frederic Prokosch is described on the cover by Andre Gide as ‘An astonishing feat of the imagination’, by Thomas Mann as ‘A most brilliant and original achievement’ and is also lauded by Albert Camus. High Praise indeed.

First published in 1935, this is that rare thing, a ‘travel novel’, about a young American who hitch-hikes across Asia, from Lebanon to the southern frontiers of China. According to the blurb, ‘he experiences drug smuggling in Trebizond, imprisonment in Khorasan, the perils of the Persian salt marshes, Baluchi bandits’ and many other remarkable adventures. A strange and wonderful adventure, hugely enjoyable. This Faber edition, published in 1983, ahs a cover designed by Pentagram and illustrated by Paul Leith.

Prokosch (1906-1929) is an extraordinary and interesting figure who wrote a long list of novels, memoirs, poems and books of criticism. He was a mysterious character, obsessed by tennis, squash and lepidoptery, who was involved at least twice in forgeries for profit.

See the interesting Wikipedia entry. the essay entitled ‘Collecting Fredric Prokosch, A Writer and a Minor Literary Scoundrel’ on the blog ‘The Books In My Life’, and his obituary in the New York Times.

‘The Trap’ by Dan Billany must be one of the most remarkable novels written about World War 2. Its power came as complete surprise. The early part of the book is set in Cornwall, and concerns a working class family whose daughter falls in love with a young man who is called up and sent to fight in the desert against Rommel’s army. Much of the book echoes Billany’s own wartime experiences; he was killed in mysterious circumstances in 1944. There is a great site and bio about him: ‘Dan Billany: Hull’s Lost Hero.

A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest is a wonderful piece of British sci-fi by an author perhaps best known for his novel The Prestige, which was made into a great film by Christopher Nolan. Lauded within the sci-fi world, his string of 11 remarkable novels are worth investigating. His work, steeped in the grand tradition of H.G. Wells and other British sci-fi masters, is genuinely original. This book concerns the Ridpath project, in which volunteers are transported into a strange alternative world. Priest is still very active as a novelist and journalist and you can find all about him on his website www.christopher-priest.co.uk

While England Sleeps by David Leavitt, set in England in the 1930s, concerns a gay relationship between Brian Botsford, a young upper-class writer and Edward Phelan, an idealistic Communist Party member who works on the London Underground. It brings to life the feeling of that time leading up to the Spanish civil war and explores in graphic detail their sexual relationship. Its a moving and haunting story that touches the heart.

Leavitt, an American writer, was sued in 1994-5 over this book by the poet Stephen Spender, who claimed that he had plagiarised his book ‘While England Sleeps’ and fictionalised his life. As a result, the first edition of this book was pulped. Leavitt discusses the lawsuit in a special preface in this revised edition, which was republished by Houghton Mifflin. He is currently a Professor at the Department of English at the University of Florida, where his cv can be found.

9/11 COUGH

2011-09-05T22:20:00.001+01:00

Back in September 2007 The Generalist reported the following:

'The 9/11 Cover-Up: Thousands of New Yorkers were endangered by WTC debris—and government malfeasance', is the title of an article by Michael Mason, in a special issue of Discover magazine on the health effects of 9/11 on the people of the city. Issue also includes interview with Philip Landrigan, the doctor leading the research on this. Extract as follows:

Q: Your department is monitoring the health effects from the collapse of the World Trade Center. When the towers collapsed, two million tons of dust containing cement, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on lower Manhattan. Yet less than a week later, the EPA said it was safe to go there and breathe the air. Now we know that erroneous assessment may have put thousands of people at risk for serious chronic health problems, and even death.

A: [EPA Director] Christine Todd Whitman's statement that the air in Manhattan was safe to breathe was stupid and ill-considered because she was making a very strong assertion with almost no data. I wondered how she could say this—it's like a doctor telling a patient that the patient is healthy before he's done any tests.'

Now listen to tonight’s ‘Crossing Continents’ on BBC Radio 4

See: Health Effects Arising from the September 11th attacks on Wikipedia

More than 30,000 police officers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians who toiled in the smoldering wreckage at Ground Zero suffer physical or mental health problems today, health officials say.

- North Jersey.com

HEAR US: Downtown Manhattan residents call on Presidential candidates to pay attention to post-9/11 health effects. Many who work and live south of 14th St. suffer some of the same symptoms as firefighters present at 9/11.

(Christine Lin The Epoch Times 2008)

SEE PREVIOUS POSTS:

TWIN TOWERS: MOVING STORIES & SPECTACULAR STUNTS

9/11 REVISITED

THE GREEN ENERGY REVOLUTION

2011-09-05T22:01:00.001+01:00

Source: The Solar Energy Revolution Will Be Televised

"It will take a technology revolution to build the green economy, but this is already under way. Much of the technology necessary to create low-carbon prosperity is available and is being developed – and costs are falling fast. The question is whether Britain will be in the vanguard of developing and using it, reaping the rewards in exports and jobs, or whether, as often in the past, it will stumble along behind more far-seeing economies."

(Image from Teahugger.com)

Regular readers of The Generalist will be aware that I have been banging on about this topic for a long time. In fact, my epiphany on the subject dates back to 1997 when I first met energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins [See numerous Previous Posts. Search under Earthed].

Since that time, I developed the view that what was unfolding was a new ‘industrial revolution’ which was going to lead us away from the age of oil as a cluster of new technologies converged to transform our world.

I felt certain because I had written an early extensive high-profile article in the Telegraph magazine about the previous such event – the digital revolution - in 1994. There were such obvious similarities. Silicon Valley thought so too. They had experienced the spreadsheet betting on start-ups that had characterised their world and they were quick to invest in the new green start-ups that were proliferating.

I spoke to many top editors to try and persuade them to produce a special issue of their supplements, if necessary with sponsorship, to draw together the thinking on this topic. I spoke to The Times magazine, to The Telegraph and most recently the Financial Times – with no success.

Now, finally, The Telegraph, with funding from Shell has, at last produced what I imagined. See: The Age of Energy – The Green Economy. Its full of the usual suspects, of course, who will now race to be seen to be part of this new initiative.

Source: Dowry culture and the green revoluition

Britain is a long way behind many other countries in this global transformation – a radical change that offers real prospects for creating a new sustainable economy, substantial employment and some hope for the future.

The media carry a lot of the blame for this, mired as they are in old-fashioned ‘green lifestyle’ perspectives and arguments, blissfully unaware of the scale and nature of the radical changes that are now being ushered in by the global financial turmoil.

Lets hope they now recognise the paradigm shift in thinking required to embrace the possibilities inherent in this new revolution. It’s time to get with the programme.

Portugal’s Clean, Green, Hi-Tech Energy Revolution

CHECK OUT CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY

2011-08-22T00:15:00.001+01:00

Charlie is a number one, A-list geezer who I’ve known off and on for almost four decades. He first came to prominence as one of the wild children of School Kids Oz, graduated to the NME academy of new rock writing, hobnobbing with some of the greatest names around and writing extensive chronicles from the frontline of all the madness. The blues were in his bones. Blast Furnace and the Heatwaves was his band. As I recall, he generally wore a black leather jacket and had an bit of an afro thing going on. Words spilled out of him, long digressive thought waves, always worth listening to. Looking back on it, we were all crazy at that time, full of jumped-up juice and ready for action.

Charlie has produced two stone-cold classic books; ‘Cross-Town Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop’ and ‘Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century’. An archive of his music journalism can be found on the wonderful Rock’s Back Pages site and there is a collection of his journalism still available called ‘Shots From The Hip’. He’s done loads of other stuff, which is covered in Wikipedia.

So now we come to the purpose of this post – Charlie’s first novel ‘The Hellhound Sample’, recently published by HeadPress. Briefly its the story of James ‘Blue’ Moon, an old black blues guy, not long for this world, who gets it into his head that, for his last project on earth, he wants to make an album with his daughter Venetia ( a major music diva), his grandson Calvin Holland (rap producer with a multi-million dollar clothing business) and Mick Hudson, an English rock guitarist, who idolised Moon, learnt all his licks and has been thick with the old man for decades. Needless to say there’s a big back story behind this family and their intertwined fate and relationships. Making the album proves to be quite an adventure.

To cut to the quick, this must be one of the best music novels ever written. Its a totally assured and wonderfully realised piece of writing. What makes it so good: great premise, skilful plotting, full-blown characters that you really care about, brilliant set-piece scenes full of telling detail, believable dialogue. Charlie’s deep appreciation and understanding of music gives the book complete authenticity. In short, its a great read. The author’s end notes suggest that there’s more novels to come.

Someone somewhere will be smart enough to buy the film rights. In the meantime, waste no time in getting your hands on this little beauty. Hats off Charlie, you’ve pulled off a BIG ONE.

PS Look out for Charlie’s band Crosstown Lightnin’ and check in with latest developments at his excellent website.

CASSETTE REVIVAL

2011-08-17T18:15:00.001+01:00

“I only listen to cassettes” – Thurston Moore/Sonic Youth

Its been more than four years since my Previous Post ‘The Death of the Cassette’, reported the decision of a major UK retailer to stop selling them, a move that triggered an emotional outcry. Now, thanks to Emil, The Generalist can report on the fact the fact that there is a thriving underground world of cassette releases, out of sight of the main stream media.

This Is Not A Mixtape by Marc Hogan on the Pitchfork website. This extensive article does a grand job of analysing the scene and listing some of the major bands and labels releasing them

Paradoxically, it may have taken the technology of the 00s for the technology of the 80s to really make a comeback. Today's cassette culture is both a reaction to and a product of digital media, the Internet, and downloading, says Shawn Reed, who runs Iowa City-based cassette label Night People. On one hand, tapes are "the embrace of something old and outdated, intentionally obscure and marginal, almost pointless in some way," he acknowledges. On the other hand, the Internet is a place where cassettes are "allowed to flourish."

NP126 Sewn Leather- “No Need for Reverse Talking” C26 on the Night-People label.

101 Cassette Labels by Ceci Moss on the Rhizome website is a wonderful place to view the outpouring of creative work on cassettes.

‘In the age of GarageBand, Myspace, and file sharing, it may come as a surprise to some that cassette labels are still very much in operation. Tapes now function as a basic form of patronage between musicians and their audience; since a physical format is no longer necessary to send or receive music, these objects become a gesture of support. Tapes act to make tangible the connection between a creator and their listeners, and the attentive and often handmade packaging speaks to this exchange.’

TWO BOOKS

Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture by Thurston Moore [Universe Publishing. 2004]

Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song At A Time by Rob Sheffield [Crown Publishing Group, 2007]

2011 YOUTH RIOTS

2011-08-14T18:32:00.001+01:00

West Midlands Police appeal to the public by displaying pictures of suspected rioters outside the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham England Friday Aug. 12, 2011. (AP / Rui Vieira)

Two very strong pieces on the London riots – Paul Lewis’ first hand account of a journey through the riot zones and Jack Shenker’s broader context piece about youth riots around the world + GANG MAPS of London

UK riots: Paul Lewis's five-day journey

Paul Lewis charts the journey from the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan to civil unrest on a grand scale

‘It was just before 9pm on Sunday when I saw hundreds of youths head to the G Mantella jewellery store on Enfield high street, six miles north of where the disturbances had begun.

Police had earlier warned residents that the suburb would be on the "frontline" that night and filled a Tesco car park full of police horses in anticipation.

By late afternoon, a police car had been attacked in Enfield, and a handful of shop windows broken. The attack on the jewellers was over in seconds.

Minutes later I was stood on a side-street, where young men were knocking down garden walls and collecting bricks to hurl at police. I used my bottled water to wash the bleeding hand of a boy who looked about 12.

This was the opening salvo in what would turn into the second night of disturbances.’

How youth-led revolts shook elites around the world – Jack Shenker

From Athens to Cairo and Spain to Santiago, old certainties are being challenged after the Arab spring and financial crises

"Historically in any country and in any context it's young people who are at the core of protests. But at this moment in history we're seeing a shared sense of deprivation among the young, a shared sense of there being a democracy deficit across the world. In all these places neoliberal economic policies have intensified their hold and affected young people most directly, young people looking for employment, study, prospects. I think it has cut young people to the bone, and they're confronting it directly."

-Priyamvada Gopal, an English professor at Cambridge,

"Today there may not be a single unifying ideology of change among global youth protests of the sort that united people in 1968, but there is a common ideology embedded within our shared model of organisation – no egos, no celebrities, no one telling anyone else what to do and no one willing to take orders – one that lends itself to online social media and has captured people's imaginations." - Steve Taylor, a campaigner with UK Uncut.

UK gangs thrive in August riots

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press

Virtually every spot on the English map that suffered riots is home turf to one or multiple gangs, according to an interactive online map called London Street Gangs and related gang-mapping efforts by the Metropolitan Police and University of Bedfordshire youth-crime expert John Pitts.

One riot spot, Enfield in north London where a Sony distribution center was ransacked, hosts a half-dozen active gangs including Dem Africans, Red Brick Crew and Gun Man Down. The south London borough of Croydon, scene of the worst arson attacks and the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old man, is the power base for the Don't Say Nothin gang.

SEE MAPS OF LONDON STREET GANGS

Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots

These rioters feel they don't actually belong to the community. For years, they’ve felt cut adrift from society

‘Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.’

See: Kids Company

LEE MILLER & FARLEY FARM

2011-08-12T14:39:00.001+01:00

Had the great privilege and pleasure yesterday of meeting Antony Penrose (thanks to Daisy) who gave us a guided tour round Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex.

This was the home of the remarkable photographer Lee Miller and her husband Roland Penrose, the leading British Surrealist, co-founder with Herbert Read of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and biographer of Picasso.

During their time, the house became a meeting place for some of the greatest art figures of the age – including Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso.

Antony Penrose holding a picture of himself as a small boy with Pablo Picasso. He has written a children’s book entitled The Boy Who Bit Picasso

The beautiful half-timbered house has now become a museum but it still has a cozy lived-in feel and the spirits of those times still lingers in the air.

Each room and corridor is stuffed with treasures. Beautiful surrealistic paintings, displays of Lee’s photographs, rich libraries of books and hundreds of wonderful works of ethnographic art, objet trouvé and personal belongings.

I was privileged to be shown the Visitor’s Book which the above artists had signed, often adding quirky pen drawings or full-colour artworks.

A visit to Farley Farm House is truly an inspiring experience which I urge you to explore. The House is open for guided tours from April to October; the tour dates left for this year are:

August 21st/Sept 4th and 18th/Oct 2nd and 16th

It is also open on the following dates during the Chiddingly Festival: Sept 24th and 25th; October 1st and 2nd

No need to pre-book. Full details at the website: www.farleyfarmhouse.co.uk

This is a truly remarkable and moving documentary by Antony Penrose about his mother’s life (available through Amazon and on Lovefilm)

It was only after his mother’s death that Antony discovered in the attic a huge cache of Lee’s photographic work, personal writings and possessions. Lee had been traumatised by her wartime experiences and had hidden all her work away for more than 20 years. Antony has rescued and catalogued almost of all of the 60,000 images she took, has authored books and curated exhibitions of her work. As a result, Lee is now considered one of the great women photographers of the 20th century and the quality and vision of her photos matches the work of many of her more famous male counterparts.

The book ‘The Lives of Lee Miller’ by Antony Penrose is published by Thames & Hudson.

Lee Miller and Man Ray: crazy in love

The Roland Penrose website

The Art of Lee Miller

Lee Miller by Ursula Butler

CULT BOOKS: ROBERT IRWIN

2011-08-05T14:47:00.001+01:00

‘It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided that I wanted to become a Muslim saint.’

This the first line of Robert Irwin’s remarkable memoir of the 1960s. He wrote it, he says, ‘to give my youth a retrospective artistic shape… But I also wanted to give an account of Sufism from the inside, as well as instructing readers of the basic elements of Islam and the difficulties a Western convert is likely to face…I also wanted to shed some light of on the occult and mystical aspects of the counterculture, as well as some of the ludicrous aspects of the hippy sixties.’

In an article for The Guardian on his Top 10 quest narratives, he wrote:

"My own quest began in the 1960s when I travelled out from the home counties in search of the meaning of life and self-knowledge. I hitchhiked across North Africa and in a zawiya (a kind of Sufi monastery) in Algeria I saw miraculous things and experienced ecstasy, but, though the books listed below are narratives of successful quests, my own Memoirs of a Dervish is uniquely an account of ultimate spiritual failure."

Irwin’s picture of his younger self is less than flattering. For much of the narrative he appears out of his mind. An outsider, obviously fiercely intelligent but disturbed, he explores a myriad of mystical beliefs, samples a variety of drugs, has love affairs and pursues his spiritual quest. Hs experiences in Algeria are intense and his account of those days is very valuable.

Algeria at that time was still experiencing turmoil after the "Algerian Revolution" which, according to Wikipedia, was ‘a conflict between France and Algerian independence movements from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria's gaining its independence from France. An important decolonization war, it was a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting, terrorism against civilians, the use of torture on both sides, and counter-terrorism operations by the French Army. The conflict was also a civil war between loyalist Algerian Muslims who believed in a French Algeria and their insurrectionist Algerian counterparts.’

Irwin refers to the truly amazing and prescient film ‘The Battle of Algiers’ by Gillo Pontecorvo, one of the greatest drama documentaries ever made, which captures this bitter and bloody struggle in all its terrifying reality. Read Ian Jack’s piece ‘Back to The Future’

In retrospect, the Algerian war was the first conflict of modern times between Islam and the West. Algeria remains one of the few Arab countries that has not become part of the Arab Spring.

‘Memoirs of A Dervish is a must read. I followed this immediately with one of Irwin’s six novels ‘ The Arabian Nightmare’ which is a wonderfully evoked complex orientalist tale-within-a-tale about Balian of Norwich, trapped in the labyrinth of Cairo and in his own dark nightmares. Here we meet Fatima the Deadly, the Father of Cats, the Laughing Dervishes and the leper knights to name just a few of the strange and exotic characters. Its wonderful and haunting story which bears comparison to ‘Samarkand’ See Previous Post: Cult Books: Amin Maalouf]

Looking forward to tackling more of Irwin’s other fiction works as well as well as his non-fiction, which include ‘Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature ‘

Irwin lectures on Arabic and Middle Eastern history at the Universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford, and is the Middle East editor for the Times Literary Supplement.

Footnote: Interested to discover Malise Ruthven’s review of a new book ‘Reading the Qur’an’ by Ziaddin Sardar – a progressive reading of Islam’s sacred text.

ANCIENT LIFE: BRIAN SWITEK

2011-08-05T14:43:00.001+01:00

The Generalist has always been fascinated by fossils in general, dinosaurs in particular, and the ever-changing story of our own human origins.

In my lifetime alone, there has been a continuous string of new and exciting discoveries that have radicalised our understanding of the evolution of life on our planet.

For instance, we now know for sure that birds are the descendants of one group of dinosaurs – which group is still a matter of scholarly debate.

Amongst the remarkable treasure trove of fossil discoveries found in China in recent years have been the remains of a previously unidentified group of dinosaurs with feathers and primitive wings. As a result, according to this week’s news, Archaeopteryx, long considered the world’s oldest bird, has now been reclassified as a feathered bird-like theropod ( a group of meat-eating dinosaurs), many species of which ‘were fluttering around in the Jurassic period more than 150 million years ago’ One other example is this new fossil find, of Xiatingia, believed to be 155m year old

AFP/ GETTY IMAGES

[See: ‘Chinese fossil knocks oldest bird off perch’/The Independent 28 July 2011]

Which brings me back to the main purpose of this post which is to sing the praises of this remarkable new book - ‘Written in Stone’ by Brian Switek, which uses the history of the search for ‘missing links’ – fossil forms that bridge the gap between one group of organisms and another – as a peg for re-examining the long and fascinating story of paleontology. Discovering such links was considered crucial for confirming the theory of evolution.

In a series of remarkable chapters he explains the oldest and latest views of how fish evolved into reptiles, dinosaurs into birds, land creatures into whales and examines the relationship between mammoths and elephants, the evolution of the horse and – last but not least – our own human evolution.

Switek is incredibly articulate and extremely well-informed and his accounts, whilst dense, make fascinating reading, not least because the book is bang up-to-date, including fresh discoveries up to 2010.

For anyone who really wants to understand our current state of knowledge in these fields this book is essential reading.

It has been favourably compared with my other favourite book in this field - ‘Wonderful Life’ by the late Steven Jay Gould’s - which is high praise indeed.

At the book’s end - after revealing that our human lineage is shaped more like a bush than a tree, made up of numerous hominid species of which we homo sapiens are the only ones left standing – he concludes:

‘’Nothing quite like us has ever existed on earth before and may not ever again after we are gone. Given the contingencies of our own history, that we exist at all is amazing. If we wish to know ourselves, we must understand our history. We are creatures of time and chance.’

THE VOYAGE OF THE GOLDEN RULE

2011-07-25T21:00:00.001+01:00

This is a really unexpected find of some significance as I shall explain.

For some years in the 1980s I was running Greenpeace International’s publishing operation, during which I co-authored the official history book - ‘The Greenpeace Story’

Greenpeace’s roots lie in Vancouver and an organisation called the Don’t Make A Wave Committee, founded by Jim Bohlen, Paul Cote and Irving Stowe in 1970. Irving and Dorothy Stowe were Quakers who introduced Bohlen and his wife Marie to the faith. A key Quaker concept was “bearing witness” - ‘a sort of passive resistance that involves going to the scene of an objectionable activity and registering opposition to it simply by one’s presence there.’

Stowe, Bohlen and others aimed to stop US plans to detonate a 5-megaton nuclear bomb on the island of Amchitka in the Aleutians – one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world. The Committee, later renamed Greenpeace, aimed to find a protest vessel in which to sail to the test zone to ‘bear witness’.

SEE PREVIOUS POST: GREENPEACE: THE RETURN TO AMCHITKA

At the time of writing the history, I remember hearing rumours that such an action had been tried before Greenpeace by the Quakers but was not able to find any further information in those pre-internet days.

The chance find of this amazing book confirms that the Quakers did indeed mount such a protest and this is the full account.

In late March 1958, Albert Bigelow and three companions, all Quakers, set out from Los Angeles with plans to sail into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands where the US were planning to stage an atmospheric nuclear test at Eniwetok in April.

The voyage was fraught with problems. Shortly after embarking, the Golden Rule and its crew were caught in a one-in-20 year storm that forced them to return to LA.

Having repaired the boat and restocked their supplies, they set out once more and made it to Hawaii – some 2000 miles. Here their boat was impounded and captain and crew were imprisoned. Much of the book is given up to the circumstances of their incarceration, their various court appearances and the protests organised to try and obtain their freedom.

In the end, unable to make the journey themselves due to their confinement, Bigelow managed to persuade the crew of another boat, the Phoenix, to pick up the mission. They managed to leave Honolulu without rousing the suspicion of the authorities and they actually made it to the test zone where they were arrested.

‘Among those who met the crew members of the Golden Rule in Honolulu and attended their trial for contempt of court were Earle and Barbara Reynolds, a married couple, and their two children. Travelling around the globe on their hand-built sailboat, the Phoenix, they were heading back to Hiroshima, where Earle Reynolds, an anthropologist, had coordinated research for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, established by the U.S. government to gather data on the effects of the atomic bombs. Greatly impressed by the crew members, as well as convinced that the U.S. government had misreported the deadly effects of radioactive fallout and had no right to restrict travel on the high seas, the Reynolds family decided to complete the voyage of the Golden Rule. On July 1, 1958, Earle Reynolds went on the radio to announce that the Phoenix was entering the U.S. test zone "as a protest against nuclear testing. Please inform appropriate authorities." The U.S. Coast Guard boarded the Phoenix the next day, arrested Reynolds, and returned him to Hawaii for trial. Here he was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.’

[This quote is from an excellent article The Long Voyage: The Golden Rule and Resistance to Nuclear Testing in Asia and the Pacific by Lawrence S. Wittner. He writes that ‘Reynolds also resumed his seaborne activities against nuclear explosions. As a protest against nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, Reynolds captained two additional voyages, the first by the Phoenix to Nakhodka (on the Pacific Ocean) and the second by the Everyman III to Leningrad (on the Baltic Sea).’]

Both voyages became the focus of a big international campaign to try and put a halt to atmospheric nuclear testing. We also learn from Bigelow’s account that the Quakers had seen direct action before his voyage.

Demonstration in favour of the Golden Rule and against bomb tests, June 1958—photo from the Albert Bigelow Papers

A British Quaker Harold Steele tried to organise a ship and crew to sail to the Christmas Islands to protest against the nuclear tests being carried out there by the British. He and his wife only made it as far as Tokyo but their example inspired Quakers in the US.

In June 1957, says Bigelow, they organised an ad hoc committee – Non Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons – and on August 6th that year, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, 35 of them assembled at the gateway to the Nevada Test Site and stepped over the line. They were arrested, tried for trespassing and given suspended sentences.

Bigelow reports: ‘After leaving court, we returned to the prayer vigil…We continued to play throughout the night. At dawn we experienced, from a distance of about twenty-five miles, a nuclear explosion. This was proof that our intuition, our feelings and our senses were right.’

Bigelow, who commanded combat vessels in world War II, records the whole saga in punctilious detail and succeeds in capturing the mood and feel of those times. His is a very valuable account of a set of actions that are little known of today. Hopefully this post will help the story find its way into the mainstream historical accounts of the environmental, anti-nuclear and peace movements.

Bigelow (1906-1993) is a fine artist and his meticulous drawings pepper the text.

[This edition is 1st Edition hardback published by Doubleday in 1959. According to the book’s inscription, it was owned by Roger Mabey-Merrall of Yacht “6X”, R.N.S.A. [which I think is the Royal Navy Sailing Association]. One wonders how far this book has travelled.

JUST DISCOVERED:
The Golden Rule Will Sail Again by Lawrence Wittner [Huffington Post]. Plans to resurrect the historic boat. Project site is here: www.heritech.com/goldenrule/

Broken Arrow by Heidi Walters [The Journal, Humboldt County, California]

Albert Bigelow, right, captained the Golden Rule on her mission to disrupt atmospheric nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. PHOTO FROM THE ALBERT BIGELOW PAPERS held at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

LONG-FORM JOURNALISM LIVES

2011-07-23T12:34:00.007+01:00

Hats off the The Independent on publishing the excellent piece by Nosheen Iqbal - 'The Long-Form Resurrection' The cliched wisdom is that with the decline of newspapers and the much-trumpeted short attention span syndrome, readers are unwilling, even, ,to read longer-form work.

The opposite appears to be the case. Iqbal writes; '...its the torrent of short-form thinking - the incessant texts, tweets, status updates and simplistic seach-engine optimisation-geared news stories - that seems to have speed up audience desire for lengthier, more meditative pieces.

Here are the five long-read sites that the article recommends:

Byliner: www.byliner.com
Longreads: www.longreads.com
The Browser: www.thebrowser.com
Arts and Letters Daily: www.aldaily.com
Instapaper: www.instapaper.com

To this I would add the London Review of Books ( which thanks to Lin I have been enjoying as a Guest Subscriber). A portion of the content of each issue is open to non-subscribers.

NICK DAVIES: PHONE HACKING SCANDAL

2011-07-10T22:07:00.001+01:00

Back in February 2008, The Generalist had the opportunity to sit down with Nick Davies, during a period when he was promoting his book ‘Flat Earth News’ for a long interview.

Check it out on the Audio Generalist site.

Also accompanying Previous Post: NICK DAVIES: FLAT EARTH NEWS

In the light of recent developments the book seems prescient. In the chapter ‘Dark Arts’ he addresses the whole issue of newspapers using private detectives and others to illegally tap phone records and conversations and access police databases. What is clear is that the practice was not limited to the News of the World but was rife in many other newspapers including the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and The Times.

Nick was one of the pioneers of these investigations and was also the man who hooked up Julian Assange to The Guardian and other papers leading to the widespread publication of Wikileaks material. Hats off

In that regard, See:

Frontline Club Exclusive: Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Žižek moderated by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman

For more on Wikileaks and Julian Assange see:

WIKILEAKS

WIKILEAKS2: NEW DEVELOPMENTS

For more on Zizek see: http://hqinfo.blogspot.com/2011/01/slavoj-zizek-new-thinking.html

For more on Democracy Now

READ ALSO; ‘Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy’ by Paul Mason

‘As the News of the World scandal gathered momentum it became clear, by midnight on Thursday, that this was not just the latest of a series of institutional crises - the banks, MPs expenses - but the biggest. For this one goes to the heart of the way this country has been run, under both parties, for decades.

‘It is like a nightmare scripted by Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek: key parts of the political machinery of Britain are wavering.’

INSIDE DOPE: OPERATION JULIE/LEAF FIELDING

2011-07-10T14:22:00.001+01:00

Leaf Fielding is a natural storyteller – and what a story he has to tell.

Leaf was not one of the kingpins of the LSD production business that was smashed by Operation Julie but he was involved enough to pull down years of hard time.

Beginning as a hired hand, turning crystal acid into tabs, he graduated to handling major distribution drops.

The book begins with his bust, subsequent trial and imprisonment. We learn a lot about about prison life as the book progresses and get an insider’s view of the LSD manufacturing business.

Interwoven with this is the story of Leaf’s early years followed by his extensive adventures around the world – blazing the hippy trail, hanging out on islands in Greece and Indonesia, wheeling and dealing across continents. He almost dies several times – but this is the cat with the nine lives.

Leaf’s consciousness was radically changed and charmed by LSD and his vision of an interconnected universe and the wonders of nature suffuse the book. Just reading some sections will give you a contact high or, at the least, a distant echo of a flashback.

Leaf got into the whole-food business early on and, after serving his time, has returned to his organic roots. He has also set up an orphanage in Malawi.

He captures brilliantly the look, feel, smell and touch of those times when millions of us were all opening the doors of perception, gaining glimpses of profound new visions of ourselves and the changing world around us.

Leaf has a lovely way with words and an eye for the telling detail. His book is a stone-cold classic which will bring back memories for old-school ‘heads’ as well as inspiring young bucks to search for adventure. Its a book full of survival skills and contagious insights, stirring adventures, hilarious escapades and dope folk tales. Howard Marks loves it and so will you.

{To Live Outside the Law by Leaf Fielding is published by Serpent’s Tail as an original paperback]

SEE PREVIOUS POSTS:

LSD OPERATION JULIE

Review of a previous ‘Julie’ book with newspaper clippings and pictures from The Generalist archive.

INSIDE DOPE; OPERATION JULIE REVISITED

My original account of the Operation Julie trials, written for the NME in 1978

INSIDE DOPE: LSD IN BRITAIN

Lengthy review of a book by Andy Roberts

LSD AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF ETERNAL LOVE

Review of the classic book by David May & Stewart Tendler on the biggest LSD manufacturing ring in the US and beyond.

LEWES: MOVING ON

2011-07-08T13:17:00.001+01:00

‘There are still two weeks to go until the end of the school year, but for many kids Friday July 8th 2011 will be remembered as symbolising the end of an educational era: the transition from primary to secondary school. This is because, for the tenth year running, parents' group Patina have set up the madcap, exuberant, colourful and extremely noisy 'moving on' parade. As ever, hundreds of kids from primary schools in and around Lewes will parade down the High Street in their imaginative costumes, this year themed, appropriately enough, 'Let's Party'. ‘[www.vivalewes.com]

The Moving On parade comes past my front door on its way to the High Street. Here are a small collection of photos I took to give you a flavour of this wonderful event. Beat boxes in prams pumping out hi-volume disco, rock and funk music. The kids love it. Fantastic colours and energy. And the rain held off for the parade !

WHOLE EARTH CATALOG

2011-07-08T13:15:00.001+01:00

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York recently staged a small exhibition entitled ‘Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1974)’.

Curated by David Senior, this bibliographic tribute to the ‘Whole Earth’ phenomenon – the publication itself, the works by McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller. Norbert Weiner which influenced the thinking behind it, other notable publications of the time which championed radical thinking in Structures, Communications and other fields, and various spin-off publications that picked up where the Catalog left off.

Fortunately the exhibition is available to view in an on-line form here.

Front and Back cover of ‘The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog’, with an excellent Robert Crumb original [THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE]

The Generalist is hoping to correspond with the curator as there are factual errors in the piece to do with Friends magazine.

Copy reads: ‘This Rolling Stone–like rock magazine issued four pages of content biweekly that editors described as the “British Whole Earth Catalogue.” Products listed were sourced from manufacturers and booksellers in the United Kingdom. Readers were instructed to cut these pages from each issue of Friends to compile the whole publication.’

Friends began life as a British Rolling Stone, with swish offices in London’s West End. After a falling-out, the magazine was set-up under the company name T.F. Much and the magazine was re-launched as Friends, based in offices at 305 Portobello Road

Issuse 1 was published 22nd Nov 1969. It had two pages on the Whole Earth Catalog. These were written by Colin Moorcraft. A further two pages on the same topic appeared in Issue 2. Subsequently it evolved into a 4pp pull-out or cut out supplement. [Friends was published approx. monthly, not fortnightly)

[Left: first pull-out supplement I can find. Frendz Issue 6.]

Colin was a lovely, far sighted man, who pioneered the British Whole Earth Catalog. His name and work should be more widely known. Colin took me to see Buckminster Fuller give a talk at the US Embassy in London – an unforgettable experience.

Friends later became Frendz (run by a new company, Echidna Epics), which petered out in 1972. During the last two issues, myself, Mike Marten, Jon Trux and others, revived the concept of the British Whole Earth Catalogue, producing two 4-page supplements.

When Frendz folded, we joined together to form a company to produce such a Catalogue in book form. This project transmuted into An Index of Possibilities.

SEE PREVIOUS POSTS:

STEWART BRAND: REINVENTTING ENVIONMENTAL THINKING

STEWART BRAND (2): THE WHOLE EARTH ENTERPRISE

AN INDEX OF POSSIBILITIES

UPDATE:

Thanks to Mike Marten for sending me an article about this exhibition entitled Holistic Browsing’ by D. Graham Burnett [Nature/Vol 474/30 June 2011]

Burnett reports that Steve Jobs ‘suggested in 2005 that this counter-cultural handbook should be properly understood as a forerunner of Google.’

Burnett concludes: ‘Perhaps the Whole Earth Catalog really was the forerunner of the internet and its tools in that it represented a transmutation of a whole cosmos of radical ideas, crazy stuff and possible lives, all returned to us as little more than an alluring opportunity to sit down and browse. We’ve been browsing ever since.’

SEE ALSO: ‘Sea Change’ by Michael Marten, an essay with images about his interesting photographic project, featured on the excellent Camera Obscura site, a blog/magazine dedicated to photography and contemporary art

YAHIA LABABIDI/ARAB SPRING

2011-07-06T21:54:00.003+01:00

Its always a good day when I hear from the Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi. To find out more about him see PREVIOUS POST: Trial By Ink.

His new collection of poems, Fever Dreams is now out and available from Crisis Chronicles Press

What is to Give Light

What is to give light must endure burning, a man once said
Another man became the matchstick
that set a nation aflame
But fire, and its appetite, cannot be
calculated, like freedom
Injustice and desperation make men
combustible, like dry wood
When words lose their meaning
and an entire people their voice
so they can neither laugh nor scream
death and life begin to taste the same
From Tunis, to Egypt, to Libya to Yemen
the light from a burning man proved catching
And those with nothing to lose, or offer, but bodies
fanned the embers of their hopes into a blazing dream.

Self-Immolation of Buddhist Monk in Vietnam

Jan Palach - Czech student who died for freedom in 1969.

On January 16, 1968 he took the morning train to Prague. At the dormitory he wrote his last letter, intended for publication. One copy he put in a briefcase, and three others he addressed to the Writers' Union, Lubos Holecek - an activist in the student movement, and Ladislav Zizka, a friend from the economics school, to whom he also included his personal greetings.
At around four o'clock that same day he stood at the ramp of the National Museum, at the top of Wenceslas Square, poured gasoline over himself and set himself on fire. He ran burning across the intersection toward a grocery store, and fell by the road.A transport worker threw his coat over him and according to witnesses, Palach was still conscious.He was taken by ambulance to the department for burn victims on Legerova Street. Eighty-five percent of his body was covered with serious burns, the majority of them third-degree. He lived another three days and died on January 19, 1969.His funeral took place on January 25 1969 in Prague. It was a grave and silently expressed universal dissent with the occupation of the country. Jan Palach is buried in Prague at the Olsany Cemeteries.

WILLY VLAUTIN

2011-07-06T21:54:00.001+01:00

It was a slow day at the word factory. Hot too. Took care of business and then went wandering round town with no particular purpose. Bought a new capot and then stopped by the Union Store, our local Americana music shop, for a browse when I spotted these two novels.

‘The Motel Life’ came out in 2006, ‘Northline’ in 2008. Vlautin has a band called Richmond Fontaine. The second book comes with a soundtrack, music to listen to while reading the book. I got home and read The Motel Life straight through. I’m a quarter way into ‘Northline’, taking a break to write these words.

Vlautin is a great storyteller. He just grabs your attention and never lets go. Both books are set in Reno, Nevada and feature stories from the street with strong believable characters who speak in a real life way. His books mix humour and tragedy. No false notes. Bukowski, Fante, Carver, Kerouac, Dylan come to mind but Vlautin is very much his own man.

‘The Motel Life’ begins with our hero in bed, so drunk he thinks he’s going to puke when, next moment, a duck crashes through the window and lies dead on the floor. He staggers out of bed, throws the duck out of the window and goes back to sleep after turning his electric blanket to 10.

Vlautin has a third novel out called ‘Lean on Pete’ for which he won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction which I’m going to hunt down.

Check out his website: www.willyvlautin.com/

LATEST PUBLICATION

2011-07-06T21:53:00.001+01:00

Two years work successfully completed. This is a 300pp plus full colour guidebook to the the Garden of Heroes & Villains, commissioned by Felix Dennis. Its a remarkable assemblage of larger-than-life size bronze sculptures. Chuck Berry rubs shoulders with the Trojan Warriors, Stephen Hawkins, King Kong, Leonardo and Emily Dickinson. Not yet for general release. I am the writer, co-producer and one of the principal photographers on this work.

JOHN MINTON & MONTGOMERY CLIFT

2011-06-14T23:53:00.001+01:00

It is with great pleasure that The Generalist presents this reprint of a fascinating article - ‘John Minton and Montgomery Clift: A Parallel’ by T.H.G. Ward - which first appeared in the April/May 1980 issue of London Magazine. Thanks to Sophie Bradford, Assistant Editor of what is now called The London Magazine for permission.

For readers who are interested in a more detailed study of Clift’s life, see this Previous Post ARCHIVE/MONTGOMERY CLIFT It’s a reprint of profile piece I wrote that first appeared in The Face magazine [January 1981]

Photos of John Minton, Lucian Freud and Keith Vaughan by the brilliant photographer John Deakin, who chronicled the twilight world of 1950s Soho and the original Brit Art stars who inhabited it. Now a rare glimpse of his archive recalls that extraordinary generation. See full portfolio on The Independent website.

‘Late in the 1940s, as the first wave of post-war American films began to appear in London, the young English painter John Minton - contemporary of Lucian Freud, Keith Vaughan among others - came across the work of an actor named Montgomery Clift; and from that moment on he followed his rise to fame with a fascination that bordered on obsession. He was not, of course, alone in his adulation. Thousands of film addicts were being held spellbound by this new type of folk hero who, unlike his predecessors, was both sensitive and vulnerable. Here was a figure with whom they could identify themselves with frightening ease. To a generation of young men he was a symbol of their frustration and despair; to a generation of young women he was the masculine ideal.

Source: Haunted Hollywood Week..Montgomery Clift

An interest in the cinema had developed early on in Minton's life. Sometimes, as he sat in the smoky darkness watching the images of the Hollywood 'greats' flashing onto the English screen, he found himself worshipping from afar; but it was always from afar. In those days infinite distance separated the glamorous lands inhabited by the gods and goddesses of the American dream from his own personal everyday world. Now the gap was suddenly closed. Montgomery Clift was not only a hero. He also lived in his world, shared his anxieties and endured his sufferings.

A single visit to the cinema was no longer enough. Over and over again he would watch the film performances and on every occasion he experienced strange and disturbing emotions. Admittedly Clift was an actor who could portray inner conflict with extraordinary force, but was it normal for a grown man to be affected in this way? Minton was intelligent enough to realize that the fascination lay deeper. Even in Clift's masculine roles he could perceive bi-sexual undertones.

Could Minton possibly have known that Clift was facing emotional problems that were near to his own? Minton may have heard just a little of Clift’s private life, but not very much. At the time Minton was producing posters for Ealing Studios so he was in contact with the fringe of the film community. Undoubtedly Clift was discussed and in all probability he was told stories of neurotic behaviour and an unconventional life style, but it is unlikely that it amounted to anything more than anecdote and gossip.

Minton's reaction sprang primarily from what he sensed, perhaps unconsciously, in the film performances; beyond the characters that Clift portrayed, behind the script, the set and the make-up, he recognized in some inexplicable way a character that was near to his own. The effect was traumatic. For weeks on end the image of Clift's troubled aristocratic features lingered before his eyes and at one point the obsession became so strong that he was planning to go to Paris in an endeavour to meet him. Whether they ever met is not known. It is doubtful; but not impossible. Like many of the episodes in Minton's life the details remain obscure.

Portrait of Minton by Lucian Freud (1952)

By 1950 Clift was an international figure; Minton was only beginning to achieve recognition in London. Externally they appeared as very different people, but a closer examination reveals remarkable similarities in their lives and characters. Each of them experienced an unorthodox childhood. In the case of Clift it was his mother who was determined to educate her children in a manner that would fit them for a place in society which she had reason to believe was their natural right In Minton's case it was a wealthy grandmother who was set on doing much the same thing.

In their young days both Clift and Minton received hard knocks. Minton was 12 in 1930 when his father, a comparatively well-to-do solicitor, died leaving the family in greatly reduced circumstances. Clift was 11 when his father went broke towards the end of 1931. Clift and his elder brother were suddenly removed from expensive schools, private tutors and European travel to a frighteningly low standard of living. Minton and his younger brother did their best to reconcile school holidays at the country home of their wealthy grandmother with the rented suburban accommodation in which their mother now lived with her taxi-driver lover.

John Minton by Cecil Beaton

For children confined within family situations of this kind the normal friendships of adolescence are difficult to establish. Minton spent most of his school holidays with his grandmother where he mixed only with boys of his own social class, led a very conventional life by day and changed for dinner at night. She took him abroad with her, helped to make him socially at ease in sophisticated backgrounds, and arranged for her chauffeur to teach him to drive the Rolls Royce. It was natural enough that when he visited his mother in her suburban flat he felt awkward and out of place with the boys who lived in the flat above; and in turn these boys, sensing their different circumstances, made no attempt to establish a friendship. It was much the same with the young Clifts. With their background of private tutors and international education they had nothing in common with their neighbours in the furnished apartment in Greenwich Village which they were forced to occupy during the years of the depression.

The reaction of both Clift and Minton to these experiences was identical; they erected screens that would protect them from prying eyes; mental barriers which would shield them from painful enquiries about their family backgrounds. At home, with their own brothers for example, the rapport was immediate; beyond that it was another matter. Close personal friends recall the reluctance of these two men to talk about their families, although there is every reason to believe that this was something with which they had always been very much concerned. Clift would state quite simply that he 'couldn't remember', which may or may not have been true; while Minton would say that his father had gone off to Australia when he was still a boy and had never been heard of again; and this he must undoubtedly have known to be false.

So these two young men, unknown to each other and living on different continents, began their adult lives with deeply suppressed memories and unresolved conflicts. They had failed to accept the fact, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that they were incapable of facing the fact, that a human being's past can never be wholly suppressed.

Self-portrait, circa 1953/Wikipedia entry

On the threshold of manhood they found themselves beset by similar problems. They would have to come to terms with the seemingly unpalatable fact that by nature they were bi-sexual. 'I could only live with a man', Minton wrote to a friend, 'for though I can desire a woman physically very much and even fall for a girl and all the rest, it is only someone of my own sex that can really affect and shake that part of me that is a painter'; and to a friend Clift said, 'I don't understand it. I love men in bed, but I really love women.' They were both capable of close and intimate friendships with women, but the desire for physical relationships with men was always present and neither Clift nor Minton was ever able to resolve the conflicts that were so much a part of their natures.

Source: Film Posters Archive

It is unnecessary to describe in any detail the patterns of domestic life that resulted from these ambivalent tastes in love. In both establishments a series of close male companions came and went in a manner that is all too familiar. Some of these friends and lovers were capable of real affection, others exploited the position in which they found themselves to the full. To the more balanced and mature onlooker it was often an ugly scene.

As might be expected, Clift and Minton treated their companions in a similar fashion. Usually these young men received affection, generosity and consideration; but there were times when they found themselves subjected to astonishing cruelty. Minton has been described as 'the kindest man I ever met' and also as 'the cruellest man I ever met'. No doubt Clift was described in much the same way.

John Minton by Russell Westwood (1951) National Portrait Gallery

Two factors aggravated the situation considerably. The first was financial. Clift and Minton both became well-off. Clift's rise to stardom brought him wealth while Minton, although not making real money from the sale of his pictures, inherited a fairly large sum. Both were inherently generous, particularly towards the people to whom they were attracted sexually. For any young man who was poor, ambitious and handsome, a friendship with a person like Clift or Minton had much to offer.

Alcohol was the second aggravating factor. In their young days neither Clift nor Minton drank. Their tolerance was low and their friends of those days have only memories of glasses of milk and endless cups of coffee. Somehow it got a hold and eventually became a major problem.

The director Herb Machiz is reported to have said, 'The real tragedy in most homosexual lives and for a person as sensitive as Monty was having to accept the tremendous disappointment of never finding a mate worthy of him'. This was Minton's problem too; the nightmare that led him first to drink and eventually to suicide.

What they both wanted desperately was to be part of a family and each found in the home environment of a young married couple something they were searching for. Exactly what they were searching for is not so clear. On the surface it appeared that the wife was the object of affection, the element that was lacking in their own lives, but shrewder observers believed it to be the husband who was the real attraction. Certainly the need to belong was an important factor and both of them would have liked to have had children of their own.

A relationship of this kind was doomed to failure. It was more or less acceptable by day, but at night both Clift and Minton perceived the truth of their isolation - that they were not really a part of the family at all. There were times when Clift could stand his loneliness no longer and then he would creep into the bedroom of the young couple, climb quietly into their bed and go to sleep. Minton did the same thing. There was one occasion when Minton's frustration became so great that after his friends had gone to bed he pulled off his clothes, ran out of the house into the winter night and threw himself naked into the snow. With all the sympathy and understanding in the world it was not easy to integrate men like Clift and Minton into a normal home life.

As time passed the search for an ideal companion became more desperate; and with this insoluble problem the need for drink became greater. There were nights in prison and brushes with the police. Both Clift and Minton suffered broken noses in drunken quarrels. They were robbed left and right. Their health deteriorated and they seemed increasingly incapable of taking an objective view of the predicament they were in.

Source: Vukutu blog

It is perhaps ironical that in spite of all this neither Clift nor Minton was able to conceal his background. They did their best. They wore the correct dress - jeans and T-shirts. They acquired the right vocabulary. Words like shit and fuck punctuated their sentences; and they associated with the right people — out of work actors, deserters from the armed forces and rough trade. Yet it never quite worked. Both sprang from old and respected families. Both were educated, well-read and widely travelled. However much Clift tried to portray, either on the stage or on film, a working-class character, one could not help sensing that there was something extra there somewhere; a certain breeding and integrity - a touch of class. It was the same with Minton. Twenty years after his death the coroner recalled him as being 'a man of slight build' and then added, 'I should think he came from a good family'; yet the coroner had never seen him alive.

So far no mention has been made of the most important similarity of all. They were both in their different ways dedicated artists who valued integrity more than money or public acclaim. Set-backs or lack of recognition never altered an unfaltering belief in the best and it is for this reason that in the characters of both Clift and Minton something always remained that was pure and true.

At the height of his career Clift received public acclaim of a magnitude that is now difficult to comprehend; and although the hysteria of those days has long subsided the major performances have weathered the passage of time. At a distance of 25 years it is still easy to be moved by films like 'A Place in the Sun' and 'From Here to Eternity'. However much the conventions of film production may have changed, Clift's acting seems as fresh and relevant as it was at the time when the films were released.

In the case of Minton the situation is reversed. After a brief and heady period of success in his own lifetime his work became forgotten. Now there is a noticeable revival of interest and it would be difficult to think of post-war British painting without the name of Minton springing to mind. His last big picture 'The Death of James Dean' is an enduring proof of his involvement in the predicament of the youth of his day.

It is worth considering for a moment the ambience in which this painting was conceived. Dean had modelled his early acting career on Clift. He had discovered his ex-directory number and repeatedly phoned him; but basically they were quite different people and Clift had made no effort to become acquainted with young Jimmy Dean. Yet for some reason Dean's death shocked him. He was in bed when he heard the news and he vomited over the sheets.

Minton was also affected by Dean's death and there is a strange intensity to his portrayal of the scene. It is not one of his best works, but it has relevance to the time at which it was painted and it was considerable enough to be bought by the Tate. Within a year Minton would also be dead and Clift would have suffered the terrible motor accident from which he emerged a different man. By the end of 1957 the whole character of the decade was beginning to change.

Obituary/Daily Mirror/25th Jan 1957

When Minton took his life in January 1957, an English newspaper described him as being the James Dean of painting. This was incorrect. Only at a superficial level was there any resemblance; and it would have been equally incorrect to suggest that he was the Montgomery Clift of painting. In their personal lives, however, Clift and Minton showed extraordinary similarities and of all the people who came under Clift's spell few could have felt the impact more acutely than John Minton. Both were incapable of preventing private anguish from intruding into their work. The fusion of personal conflict and artistic compulsion enabled each, in his own way, to reveal a symptom and create a symbol of the culture of the 'fifties.

Dance till The Stars Come Down

FUKUSHIMA: THE REACTION

2011-06-12T00:58:00.001+01:00

It is three months since the Great East Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The Arab Spring may have taken over the headlines but the nuclear issue in Japan is alive and looks to be heading for an unusual surge of protest.

Franck Robichon/European Pressphoto Agency

Demonstrators in Tokyo on Saturday at one of the many rallies around Japan to protest the country's reliance on nuclear power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/asia/12japan.html