THE GRAPHIC PUBLISHING REVOLUTION

 It has long been The Generalist’s   belief that the evolution of ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novels’ represents an extremely important development in modern publishing, if nothing else and simply because telling a story in a graphic form is often a much more effective medium than straight text - and will become increasingly so.

As if to prove that point, witness this really remarkable book. It is the account of a French photographer who travelled overland from Pakistan to Afghanistan with a party from Medicins sans Frontieres back in 1986 when the Afghanistan war was between the Russians and the rebel tribes.

The story is told in photos and in comics – a seamless narrative of contact strips and comic frames – the like of which I have never seen before.

Its a truly wonderful and impressive and remarkable book. It will take you several hours of your life to experience this extraordinary journey. It is a true rite de passage.

Equally remarkable in its own way is the wonderful Logicomix, the history of modern logic and philosophy as seen through the life of Bertrand Russell. Sounds heavy going but the comic artwork is superb and the whole extraordinary concept of the work impel you to pay attention and try to understand the concepts the work seeks to explain. A truly marvellous example of how a graphic/comic presentation can address complex issues and communicate them to a broader audience. A triumphant realisation of a beautiful thought.

Finally and remarkably, a new generation iteration of the extraordinary poetic outpouring known simply as Howl – a work that gains stature as the decades elapse.

This is the book of an animated sequence within a feature film ‘Howl’ that investigates, with documentary footage and dramatic reconstruction, the genesis of this legendary poem and the subsequent obscenity trial that the book’s publication triggered.

Get with the graphic publication revolution. Its the way forward.

RE-THINKING ON-LINE NEWSPAPERS / LONG LIVE PRINT

 Over the years THE GENERALIST has published many stories challenging the notion that everything is going on-line and that newspapers and books will disappear. An important contribution to this debate is 'Print Is Dead. Long Live Print' by Michael Rosenwald, published in the Columbia Journalism Review [Fall/Winter 2016]

Knight Ridder's Roger Fidler with his 1994 tablet (left) and
Apple's 2010 iPad (right)

It focuses on Roger Fidler, who is described as the 'forefather of digital journalism, as he conceived of a digital tablet on which you could read electronic newspapers back in the early 1980s. He now believes that this is entirely the wrong direction.

“I have come to realize that replicating print in a digital device is much more difficult than what anybody, including me, imagined,”



The story's other important source is Iris Chyi, a University of Texas associate professor and author of  Trial and Error: U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles Toward Inferiority. 

Here's a snatch from “Are newspapers steak? And online is noodles?” by Steve Dempsey in The Sunday Independent (25th Oct 2015), which has the biggest newspaper circulation in Ireland. According to Chyi, newspapers are so bad at digital publishing that they should write off their forays into the internet, and focus all their energies on print.

'Chyi suggests that newspaper executives drank too much of the dotcom Kool Aid. Drunk on digital, they focused on unsustainable online growth and failed to protect their core print product. As a result, they now find themselves in a self-fulfilling vicious cycle, where they are undermining print through cutbacks and lack of investment.

Chyi also posits that publishers have failed to distinguish themselves in the digital age. News outlets worldwide have consistently produced homogenous news content, which is distributed it through a plethora of platforms - apps, websites and social media - to an audience that's already suffering from information overload.'

A more recent piece Would you believe it? Print remains a favourite with readers by veteran media correspondent Roy Greenslade [The Guardian/ 31st Jan 2017] refers to research done by Neil Thurman at City, University of London,

His study, 'Newspaper consumption in the mobile age', shows that 89% of newspaper reading is still in newsprint, with just 7% via mobile devices and 4% on PCs. Greenslade claims that is 'the first research to comprehensively account for the time spent reading newspapers via mobile devices.'

'Although online editions have doubled or tripled the number of readers that national newspapers reach, Thurman argues that this increased exposure disguises huge differences in attention paid by print and online readers.
He said: “My research shows that while print newspapers are read for an average of 40 minutes per day, online visitors to the websites and apps of those same newspapers spend an average of just 30 seconds per day."

PREVIOUS POSTS

PAPER1: AN ELEGY IAN SANSOM [19 Nov 2012]

PAPER2: ART, ARCHITECTURE & MAPS

PAPER3: ENVIRONMENT

E-BOOKS2: THE DEATH OF THE BOOK [29 Oct 2011]

E.BOOKS1: MICHAEL S. HART[29 Oct 2011]

THE GRAPHIC PUBLISHING REVOLUTION [19 Jan 2011]

PUBLISHING FUTURES: NEWS  [4 June 2009]

GREEN PUBLISHING & THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK [15 Nov 2008]

THE END OF PAPER ? [9 Sept 2008]

THE ANALOGUE WAVE: WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

This post was triggered by listening to 'The Persistence of Analogue' on BBC Radio 4 in which technology writer Leigh Alexander explores the growing popularity of analogue culture in a digital world. Excellent. The blurb reads as follows:

'For 30-something technology writer Leigh, the digital world is just a part of her everyday life - there's no logging off. But despite all the boundless conveniences of the digital world, she says it can sometimes feel as if something has been lost in the transition to an intangible, instantaneous, always-on virtual society. 

'Perhaps that's why analogue formats remain timeless - in fact, they seem more popular now than ever, especially among people of her generation. From board games and vinyl records to books, calligraphy and even old-fashioned letter writing, people are increasingly seeking avenues to bring a little more face-to-face back into their lives. 

'Leigh hears from Colleen Cosmo Murphy, founder of listening events that bring participants into a room to enjoy a single album uninterrupted by phones. A 17-year-old student explains why he prefers reading news magazines in print.

'Leigh hears from a couple who fell in love over vinyl and Leigh's own husband, Quintin Smith, explains why board games are experiencing a huge boom. People just like being with other people, he says. And Guardian columnist John Harris argues that the persistence of analogue is nothing less than a cultural revolt against industrialisation, one that's been present ever since the late 18th century.'

*
Why Vinyl Records and Other 'Old' Technologies Die Hard

by Nick Bilton [New York Times 16th March 2016]

*

WHY ANALOG COUNTER-CULTURE WILL DISRUPT TECHNOLOGY

Posted on Wednesday July 22nd, 2015 by Melanie Langpap under Allgemein

Is analog the new organic and 24/7-connectivity a drug that became a part of our culture? Then ( OFFTIME ) can be compared to methadone, a substitute drug to overcome addiction?
Following the call of Berlin’s Tech Open Air, ( OFFTIME ) hosted a public satellite event as part of its ongoing series of meetups on how to live in a hyperconnected world. For that purpose, on 16th July, ( OFFTIME ) invited for a fireside chat with André Wilkens, author of “Analog is the new Organic”– a book that has recently seen a massive hype. 

You can listen to the interview. The illustration above is a visual diagram of it. 

For some years now I have been trotting out my thesis that there has been a noticeable shift back towards analog culture - a human reaction to the digital virtual world.

Back in September 1994, I produced a 15-page article for The Telegraph's  Saturday supplement entitled 'Communicpia: The Shape of Things to Come' - the first major piece in a mainstream paper sketching out the huge implications of the digital reveolution. It was also the longest piece the magazine had ever published. This was at a time when only a couple of MPs had e-mail and CD-ROms were going to be the next big thing! That didn't last long.

One of the people I interviewed for the piece was Professor Peter Cochrane, the head of BT's Core Research group. Although it didn't make it into the finished piece, what has stuck in my head is his idea that, in the future, digital technology would be an everyday thing and cease to be seen as this miraculous and exciting technological revolution and the broadband network will simply be accepted as another utility like the gas, electric and water systems. We have obviously reached the point where this is the case. In addition, people have become more and more aware of the downside of computers, the internet, 24/7 news, social media and virtual reality and are once more seeking to balance that by returning to analog culture.

Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters examines the resurgence of vinyl record technologies in the twenty-first century and their place in the history of analog sound and the recording industry. It seeks to answer the questions: why has this supposedly outmoded format made a comeback in a digital culture into which it might appear to be unwelcome? Why, in an era of disembodied pleasures afforded to us in this age of cloud computing would listeners seek out this remnant of the late nineteenth century and bring it seemingly back from the grave? Why do many listeners believe vinyl, with its obvious drawbacks, to be a superior format for conveying music to the relatively noiseless CD or digital file? This book looks at the ways in which music technologies are both inflected by and inflect human interactions, creating discourses, practices, disciplines, and communities

Vinyl was an obvious starting point. After justified concern about the massive reduction in the number of record shops in the country, which lead to the establishment of Record Store Day, the ones that survived began giving less and less space to CDs and more and more space to vinyl. Smart new record players at an affordable price became available which meant younger people who'd never owned a vinyl record were suddenly hooked by this new old medium which they found had a warmth and depth to it  They discovered that the very act of making time to sit down and really listen to a record - carefully constructed so that both sides of the LP have a satisying flow of songs that take you on an audio journey - whilst admiring the sleeve and digesting the sleeve notes was a very satisfying experience.

You'll see from the Previous Posts below a lot of stories challenging the popular trope of the mainstream press namely that paper was dead and in the future we will all be reading everything on
screens. Great article too on the fatal flaws on newspaper publishing on-line by the man who  concieved the idea in the first place.

Further thoughts came in 2012 from viewing the excellent documentary 'Side By Side' produced by Keanu Reeves which contrasts every aspect of film making and examines
the pros and cons of  digital vs analog. Digital is a nightmare for archivists.

Film is now back in fashion in movies and photography.

PREVIOUS POSTS

RE-THINKING ON-LINE NEWSPAPERS / LONG LIVE PRINT

PAPER1: AN ELEGY IAN SANSOM [19 Nov 2012]

PAPER2: ART, ARCHITECTURE & MAPS

PAPER3: ENVIRONMENT

MOVIES: THE FILM VS DIGITAL DEBATE [9 August 2012]

E-BOOKS2: THE DEATH OF THE BOOK [29 Oct 2011]

E.BOOKS1: MICHAEL S. HART[29 Oct 2011]

THE GRAPHIC PUBLISHING REVOLUTION [19 Jan 2011]

LETTERS AND TYPEWRITERS [Dec 2009]

PUBLISHING FUTURES: NEWS  [4 June 2009]

GREEN PUBLISHING & THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK [15 Nov 2008]

THE END OF PAPER ? [9 Sept 2008]

PAPER1: AN ELEGY/IAN SANSOM

 

This is writer Ian Sansom and this is a review of his recently published book ‘Paper:An Elegy’ [Fourth Estate].

By way of introduction, Sansom  has also written a book on babies and the Mobile Library Mystery series, four books so far, featuring Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from England who runs a mobile library in Northern Ireland.

In a great essay on Northern Irish writing, he says: ‘I didn’t have the foresight actually to be born in Northern Ireland, [Ed: he was born in Essex] but I have had the good sense to come and live here: love and marriage can take a person to all sorts of unexpected places.’ He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, currently teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast and writes for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. 

His website captures delightfully the spirit of the man: a lover of curiosities, a keen observer of the intricacies and absurdities of everyday life, a great storyteller, a natural humorist and poet. A man whose easy-going self-effacing style masks his deep erudition and his feelings of despair.

The biographical sketch on his website begins: ‘It’s embarrassing, of course, to talk or write about oneself, to show off, to presume that other people might be interested in one’s own sad and wasted life, when clearly other people have sad and wasted lives of their own to be getting on with.

 

‘Paper: An Elegy’ is a welcome and timely book that is effortlessly intriguing, packed as it is with strange facts, curious stories and unlikely people.The book covers, amongst other things chapters on the history of paper-making, trees, maps, bibliomania, bank notes, advertisement labels, paper and architecture, artists and paper, paper toys, origami, the military and bureaucratic use of paper, and a final chapter that jams together information on paper in film and photography, toilet paper, paper clothes, cigarette papers, paper boats and much more. Its a highly invigorating brew, studded with the author’s personal memories and digressions.

Paper dog by James Vance. Source: Rochembeau blog

Fascinating as all that is, the book covers two themes that are of even greater interest to The Generalist – paper in the digital age and the environmental issues connected with paper production – both of which have been the subject of Previous Posts (see below).

I am old enough to remember the notion of the ‘paperless office’ back in the 1970s alongside the then-discussed topic of the ‘information explosion’.

The current debate is about the ’death of paper' - the death of newspapers and books, the threats to libraries and independent bookshops, the rise of electronic readers and so on.

This book is a useful corrective to some of these notions. As Sansom clearly point out: ‘We live in a paper world. Without paper our lives would be unimaginable…Imagine for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would everything be lost? Everything would be lost.'

‘Paper’, he writes ‘is the ultimate man-made material. It’s cheap, light durable, and be folded and cut and bent and twisted and lacquered and woven and waterproofed so that it can be used in almost every way and for anything.’

The ubiquitousness of paper in all its forms and our addiction to ‘the white stuff’ shows little sign of abating. The average American, for instance, consumes 750lbs of paper every year

In our new digital world we may appear to be moving away from paper but, in fact, our use of these new technologies has increased office paper consumption. According to The Myth of the Paperless Office by Sellen and Harper ‘technological change has not replaced paper use but rather has shifted the point at which paper is used.’ In other words, says Sansom, ‘we distribute and print, rather than print and distribute.’ The average office employee in the West now uses over 10,000 sheets of paper per year he informs us.

[There’s a useful pdf here  of Sellen & Harper’s book which gives a summary and overview of its contents. It says: ‘The phrase ‘paperless office’ is traced to Xerox PARC, although they trace the idea of replacing paper-based methods of working all the way back to the 1800s with Samual Morse’s idea of electronic mail.’ ]

Interestingly Sansom tells us that  Pixar Animation Studios, one of the most advanced digital production studios in the world, still uses paper storyboards and employs 5-15 full-time artists to produce them. They also hold daily life-drawing classes open to all. For the 2005 movie Finding Nemo for example, 45,536 storyboard drawings were produced in total. We also learn that storyboards were first developed by Walt Disney studios in the early 1930s and first used for a live-action film on Gone With the Wind.

Sansom documents the amount and kinds of paper he use in constructing his book, which he tells us, is printed on 100gsm Ferigoni Edizioni Cream, composed of a mix of  hardwood and softwood fibres from eucalyptus, pine and Fagus sylvatica, grown in Austria, France and Brazil and certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as being from responsible sources.

A ream of paper is roughly equivalent to 5 per cent of a tree which means, Sansom calculates, that just the notes for the book  consumed one entire tree ‘though that’s not including all the paper books that were read and consumed in its production, nor the paper used for its own printing and publication.’ The gross product cost was ‘probably at least a small copse.’

The environmental cost of paper production is immense. ‘Today’, writes Sansom, ‘almost half of all industrially felled wood is pulped for paper, and according to green campaigners our uncontrollable  appetite for the white stuff has become a threat to the entire blue planet.’

He quotes writer/activist Mandy Haggith: ‘Making a single sheet of A4 paper not only causes as much greenhouse gas emissions as burning a light bulb for an hour, it also uses a mugful of water.’

The paper industry, dominated by a few giant conglomerates – International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, Weyhaeuser and Kimberley-Clark – stands accused of destroying ancient forests and replacing them with monoculture plantations, sustained by chemical fertilisers. Industrial paper making not only consumes trees but also finite resources of water, minerals, metals and fuels.

The cover of Sansom’s thought-provoking book carries an IMPORTANT MESSAGE: ‘Paper is the technology through which and with which we have made sense of the world. The making of paper and the manifold uses of paper have made our civilisation what it is.’ The other important message is that our love of paper products in their multitudinous forms has come at a very high cost.

LINKS

‘Can Paper Survive the Digital Age?’ is an article Sansom wrote for The Guardian about his book

Sansom’s book reviewed alongside ‘The Missing Ink’ by Philip Hensher – a book on the decline of handwriting – in The Telegraph.

 

PREVIOUS POSTS

THE END OF PAPER ? [9 Sept 2008]

GREEN PUBLISHING & THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK [15 Nov 2008]

PUBLISHING FUTURE: NEWS [4 June 2009]

THE GRAPHIC PUBLISHING REVOLUTION [19 Jan 2011]

E.BOOKS1: MICHAEL S. HART [29 Oct 2011]

E-BOOKS2: THE DEATH OF THE BOOK [29 Oct 2011]

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

'You Say You Want A Revolution?' is the book of the exhibition at the V&A, previously flagged up in an earlier post. This oversized extravagantly designed 320pp catalogue captures the spirit of the times with a cascade of stunning photos, graphics, posters, album covers. All that's lacking is a free giveaway tab of acid taped to the cover - but you can use your imagination.

Veterans of the period will have seen many of the classic images clustered here and the '60s have of course spawned a huge library of previous publications but, to their credit, the organisers have broadened the traditional focus and present much that has been rarely seen alongside the old chestnuts. The book, I would imagine, only contains a fraction of the material in the show as a whole. Have spent best part of two days at the kitchen table - the book being too unwieldy for my crowded desk - digesting and taking notes on the book's nine essays plus intro and epilogue, taking notes.

Here are the show's two curators Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey Marsh, fresh from their success with the Bowie show, now touring the world. 

Their Preface claims that the 1,826 days that make up the time period of the exhibition 'shook the foundations of post World War II society and undeniably changed the way we live today.'

The one million babies born in 1947 became teenagers in 1960; in 1967, one in three people in France were under 20. 

[A point I would make, which gives this period a fresher context, is that this period could be seen in retrospect as our Arab Spring. Discuss.]

They point out that 2016 is the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's 'Utopia'. References are made to William Blake and LSD and pride of place is given to the late Martin Sharp's wonderful 1968 Dylan poster 'Mister Tambourine Man'.

It's good to see the cover of the 1962 Port Huron Statement from the Students for a Democratic Society with the stirring quote: '...we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed  by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organised to encourage in dependence in men and provide the media for their common participation...' What about women you might well ask. The Port Huron Statement is famously referenced in 'The Big Lebowski' and there's a great post on Mental Floss about this.

[Left] Trocchi Photograph by Marvin Lichtner, 1967.

Interesting to see a copy of 'The Moving Times' [new to me] a broadsheet poster publication  
edited by Alexander Trocchi featuring text by William S. Burroughs and Kenneth White. The associate editor was Jeff Nutall, author of the seminal 'Bomb Culture'.

According to this source: "The Moving Times" served as number 1 of the Sigma Portfolio. Self-publishing was a key aspect of Project Sigma and the Sigma Portfolio texts produced by Trocchi were circulated on a subscription basis. Project Sigma, which was the focus of much of Trocchi’s work from 1962-1977, was an attempt by Trocchi to establish an international network of counter cultural activism largely focused socially based institutions perceived as limiting free expression such as the media, universities, and workplaces.'

 Doffing the cap to the curators for their no doubt strenuous efforts to make such a large scale exhibition happen (which by all accounts is wonderful and voluminous) their intro and contributions to the catalogue are the weakest part of the whole production. 

Section 1: You Say You've Got A Real Solution  is an essay entitled 'A Tale of Two Cities': London, San Francisco and the Transatlantic Bridge' by Geoffrey Marsh. This consists of 100 fictional diary entries written by two imaginary journalists. For many readers these are references to events that they will know little if anything about it. It's only when you get to the back of the book that the factual info is listed in detail. The section includes five double page spreads of album covers for each year, seemingly chosen at random, which become more disorganised as the spreads progress. They look colourful but lack meaning.
Jumping ahead, Section 6: You Say Yes is an essay entitled 'You Say You Want A Revolution - Looking at The Beatles' by Victoria Broakes. This is frankly awful and should have been written by Mark Lewisohn, given the centrality of The Beatles to this time period.

Moving swiftly on. Section 2: You Say You Want to Change the World. This essay is 'Revolution Now: The Traumas and Legacies of US Politics in the Late '60s' by Sean Wilentz, author of 'The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln' (2015) and 'Bob Dylan in America'.Now a professor at Princeton, Wilenz grew up in Greenwich Village and is the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website.

Source: No More Songs

This is an excellent march through the unfolding American revolution of the period. Great to see a photo and mention of Dylan's dark brother and rival Phil Ochs who, unlike Dylan, stayed political but drowned in his own depression, leading to him taking his own life in 1976. (Worth mentioning that one of the best pictures in the whole book is of Woody Guthrie in the 1940s, with his legendary 'This Machine Kills' guitar, looking like he's coming down from speed.

Above: The creator of the this 1960s magazine ad was
arrested by the FBI for "a crime of inciting with lewd
and indecent materials"
Below: Rare Edition of 'Earth Times' (May 1970),
a short-lived ecology magazine published by
Rolling Stone [The Generalist Archive]

We follow the student riots, the anti-Vietnam movement, the famous Civil Rights 'March Against Fear' in Mississippi at which Stokely Carmichael utters the phrase 'Black Power' that leads in 1966 to the formation of the Black Panther Party by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton.

On the 4th April that year Martin Luther King is assassinated and riots break out in cities across America, which Wilentz says is 'the biggest wave of violent unrest since the Civil War. On the 4th June Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. Then comes the brutality of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Exorcism of the Pentagon so brilliantly captured in Norman Mailer's 'The Armies of the Night' and the SDS split leading to homegrown terrorist attacks by the Weathermen.

Wilentz then documents the feminist reawakening, the birth of Gay Liberation following the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 and the first organised national conservation movement in America's modern times leading to the the birth of Earth Day on 22nd April 1970.

The '60s movements linked the personal and the political but, says Wentz, it's too early to say who won or lost. These revolutions continue. In Lincoln's time,  America was 'a house divided against itself'. Wentz concludes:  'So it may prove that the revolutionary '60s produced in America another house divided, one whose fate - as one thing or another - has yet to be decided 50 years later, but that sooner rather than later will face a reckoning.'

For those interested, Wentz recommends three indispensable books: 'A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968' by Paul Berman (1997). 'The Sixties:Years Of Hope Days Of Rage ' by Todd Gitlin (1987) and 'America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s'                                                                                           by Maurice Issermnan and Michael Kazin (2000)

Original OZ handbill/THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE

Section 3: You Say You Want to Change Your Head features 'The Counter-Culture' by Barry Miles, a personal friend and one of the most prolific authors on both the Beat and the Hippy Movements. Miles was in the thick of things with the Indica Bookshop and the early days of International Times, (IT)  the UFO club/Roundhouse etc. For my money his book 'In The Sixties' is a great atmospheric read.

Miles takes as his starting point the birth of CND and the annual Aldermaston marches (1959-1963), the rise of recreational drugs, the Underground, the Movement, the New Left and flips to the US where the counter-culture is a very broad church dominated by many strident males - the feminist movement emerged for good reason.

Miles locates the  true birth of the British counter-culture as being the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall on 11th June 1965 and the birth of the undeground press to the LA Free Press in 1964 which led to some 100 other papers emerging in the following decade. In the UK, IT was followed by OZ, Friends/Frendz, Ink and more than 100 local and regional papers in the UK.

Miles is right to highlight the fact that the counter-culture transformed graphic design (using analog technology I might add in those B.C. (before computers) world). Music was a transformative force and the Festivals pivotal events. He pays tribute to John 'Hoppy' Hopkins (whose great photos appear on several spreads in this book. See Previous Post on Hoppy's own photo book here) and Mick Farren but saves his biggest praise for Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris of Release, which helped busted freaks from the Beatles on down.

We romp through May'68 Paris, the San Fransisco Diggers, the Yippies and the deaths at Kent State. He concludes: The counter-culture brought a healthy distrust of the Establishment that continues to this day.' He sees the legacy of the underground press in
Wikileaks.

Section 4: You Say You're Experienced is a knowing and knowledgeable essay by Jon Savage entitled 'All Together Now' that focuses in on the effects of LSD. which the UK governments secret establishment at Porton Down had been experimenting with since 1953. 

Fresh from the production of his last major work - a hefty and detailed examination of the year 1966 [See Generalist review] he writes: 'By the end of 1966, the smart end of pop was defined by the use of LSD'.

Jon highlights the Stones' bust at Keith Richards' house Redlands in Feb 1967 and, a few months later, McCartney admitting on tv that he had taken LSD. A few days after that, The Beatles play 'All You Need Is Love' (25th June) on the first global tv broadcast. Albums sold more than singles for the first time that year and August saw the closing down of pirate radio.

LSD not only changed the music it helped form the idea of alternative culture, communities and communes. Jon describes the Notting Hill Gate and North Kensington area as the epicentre of counter-culture. He highlights the mass squat at 144 Piccadilly in London and the August 1970 Isle of Wight Festival at which 600,000 people gathered and the fences came down, making it free. [I was there, were you?]. For my money, Jon's take on that period is the best in the book, hence the larger type:

'...many late '60s ideas seem not time-locked or nostalgic, but still latent and powerful, waiting to be activated by a new generation'

 1966 poster by Garry Grimshaw

Section 5: You Say Everything Sounds The Same focuses on 'The Fillmore, The Grande and the Sunset Strip: The Evolution of a Musical Revolution' in an essay by Howard Kramer, former curatorial director at the Rock n Roll Hall of fame. 

It's a straight ahead account of what went down. As he makes clear these may be the highest profile 'scenes' of the time but right across America the musical revolution made itself 'manifest in a cellular organic manner'.  

There's some great posters here and good to see photo of the Family Dog crew and Bill Graham, who ran the Fillmore West and East with an astute belligerence. Personally I love the Detroit scene with the MC5 and Iggy - still amongst the greatest bands I've ever seen. 

Kramer concludes: 'The power and identity of youth is defined more by its music than by any other single characteristic.'                      

Section 7: You Say You Want Shorter Skirts features 'British Fashion 1966-70: A State of Anarchy' by Jenny Lister, curator of Fashion and Textiles at the V&A. This is not my bag to critique or illuminate in detail but the whole section seems a bit flat, a bit straight. The key quote for the piece comes from a piece in Nova (Sept 1968) entitled 'Fashion Is Dead, Long Live Clothes' by Brigid Keenan. It reads: 'There is a state of anarchy in fashion - a 'why not?' that has toppled all the unwritten rules that used to inhibit the choice of clothes....The questioning and rejecting is going on in more significant areas than fashion, but it is in dress that it shows most.' Jenny Lister concludes that there is 'less potential than 50 years ago to shock with clothes....Paradoxically, now that fashion is more available, it is less meaningful.' [For my money, the best source book is Paul Gorman's 'The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion' (2006)

[Right: Detail from a beautiful  landscape poster from Biba in THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE. It's inscribed on the back: 'In memory of an era. Shoplifted from Biba. August 1975. JC]

Section 8: You Say You Want It Cheaper  contains what is for me the most interesting essay in the book - 'The Chrome-Plated Marshmallow: The 1960s Consumer Revolution and Its Discontents' by Alison J. Clarke, a professor of design history and theory. This seismic shift in the world of 'things' is an equally significant aspect of the late 60s/early 70s and a topic that broadens our understanding of the period. Things we no longer just utilitarian and traditional. A new fast-moving fashion conscious culture embraced the ephemeral and the new. As Clarke points out, in Europe there was 'growing disquiet over the vulgarising effect of an imported Americanised version of consumer capitalism.'

In the 1950s, an interesting exception to this was the views of The Independent Group, a network of artists, designers and architects 'who famously embraced the blossoming of consumer culture and invented the concept of 'pop'.

Clarke references Kubrick's 'Clockwork Orange' in which' 1960s modern art and design operate as signifiers of amoral dysfunction rather than social progressiveness'. In 1968, Jean Baudrillard's 'The System of Objects' talks of the 'dislocated relationship between people and things in the new information-led technological society.'

The roots of CAT lie with the alternative
technology magazine 'Undercurrents' from
which this book-length catalogue was born
in 1976 (Wildwood House)
[The Generalist Archive]

By the end of the 60s, the frothy novelty of consumerism was thrown into sharp relief by Vietnam, riots, assassinations and, writes Clarke, 'the lone voices and marginal groupings of dissent had concretised as a distinct critical body, a popular environmental and ecological movement spawning diverse counter-cultural responses, from the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog in the United States to the establishment of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Britain.' [It's great to see CAT recognised in this manner. Well overdue.]

The focus then shifts to the simultaneous revolutions not only in material culture but also in information culture which, in 1964, Marshall McLuhan characterised as a world 'not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns'. Clarke describes a 'confluence of counter-culture initiatives and emerging cybernetic technologies that would arise as a mode of 'digital utopianism...'

'The late 60s and early 70s boom in experiential design and media - with an emphasis on the individual psyche, alternative environmental politics and cyber-networked culture - generated the 'outside the box' creative entrepeneurialism defining present-day Silicon Valley culture.'

The essay then moves on to the writings of Vance Packard. His 'The Hidden Persuaders' was a critique of the advertising industry which was followed by 'The Waste Makers', an attack on the concepts of 'planned obsolescence' and disposable design; consumerism as indicative of a growing alienation within modern life.

'In one of the most prescient passages of 'The Waste Makers', Packard envisages a design culture driven by product designers reinvented as futurologists. The city of tomorrow, dubbed 'Cornucopia City' will ban the repair of any appliance over two years old; its supermarts feature conveniently located receptacles 'where the people can dispose of the old-fashioned products they bought on a previous shopping trip.' Over the next decade, Packard predicts, consumers will be encouraged to 'tingle at the possibility of using voice writers, wall-sized television screens and motorcars that glide along highways under remote control.'

Alison Clarke then moves on to the influential ideas of Victor Papanek who produced a radical critique of consumerism in 'Design for the Real World'. [Clarke is Director of The Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.]  His design ethic was for the greatest number, appealing to social conscience rather than profit. He joined forces with Finnish activists to launch a socially responsible design movement.

It's interesting to see the occupation by protesters at the Milan Triennial, one of the design world most prestigious event, in May 1968. The Situationists were also active with Raoul Vaneigen's 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' (1967) which posited that we are seeing the death of the working class and the rise of the consumer whose only power resides in the act of shopping.

In the US the prestigious 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado was also disrupted by what

was called the French Group and a US environmental design group called Ant Farm. The following year the event was handed over to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) who were radical ultra-progressives. They believed in the social and transformative possibilities of design, interdisciplinary thinking and utopian culture. Tom Wolfe attended that conference

Clarke's long and detailed essay deserves further study. She concludes: that Packard's designer/futurologist prediction 'chimes so poignantly with the anxieties of twenty-first culture. As technologies emerge ever more clearly as extensions of ourselves, our futures precariously intertwined, these designer-futurologist hybrids wield a magnitude of power that would have made 1960s anti-consumerists quake.'

Section 9: You Say You Understand Whole Systems?  consist of an essay entitled 'Computers & America's New Communalism 1965-1973' by Fred Turner, Professor of Communications at Stanford and the author of 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.'

THE GENERALIST has two Previous posts on Brand, One is the  interview I did with him in London for a piece in the Sunday Times  in December 1980.  The other is called  Stewart Brand: Reinventing Environmental Thinking, which includes details on Turner's book, the blurb of which reads as follows: 

  '...the previous untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay entrepeneurs...Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the Whole Earth Catalog, the computer-conferencing system WELL, and, ultimately, Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of a virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Turner's fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.'

A.D. [Architectural Design] was essential reading in the late 60s/early 70s.
Actually got to see Bucky Fuller lecturing at the American Embassy in London thanks to Colin Moorcraft,
another unsung pioneer, who produced a series of  British Whole Earth supplements for Friends magazine
[The Generalist Archive]

Original battered copy of 'Drop City' by Peter
Rabbi (Olympia Press. 1971).
Below; Original 1969 Anchor paperback
[The Generalist Archive.]

Turner essay begins with an account of the infamous Drop City commune, who lived in fairly ranshackle geodesics. He claims that in the early 70s, there were three quarters of a million people in the US living in some 10,000 communes. 

He compares the view of the New Communalists and the New Left, quotes material on Theodore Roszak's book 'The Making of The Counter Culture' [See Previous Post on Roszak here), mentions 'The Greening of America' by Charles Reich and talks about the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Wiener on the thinking behind the 'Whole Earth Catalog'. 

The article is accompanied by a big picture of Doug Engelbart, inventor of the Mouse and pioneer of personal computing. 
[For more on Engelbart and the role of LSD in the early history of computing see my post on 'What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry ‘, a remarkable book by the New York Times science writer John Markoff  which not mentioned by Turner]

He concludes that 'the deepest irony behind the lingering influence of the 1960s communes and their view of technology' is that 'the dream of using information technologies to create a global community of consciousness is in fact being realised - but by the very military-industrial complex so many young Americans once hoped to undermine,'

Finally Michael Sandell's Epilogue 'Where We Go From Here' doesn't actually go anywhere. He just says: 'We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold....Today the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life. It is time to ask whether we want to live this way.'
I think we knew the answer to that a  long time ago.

The book closes with one final piece: An extraordinary diagrammatic map of Networks of Resistance: A snapshot of  the rapidly evolving groups of Rebels and Revolutionaries in the United States 1966-1070. A great work of scholarship by Elisa Bailey and great design by Yat-Hong Chow.

KNOCKABOUT COMICS /TONY BENNETT: FURRY FREAKS / ROBERT CRUMB / WINSHLUSS / JENS HARDER

Knockabout Comics logo

Another recent visitor to THE GENERALIST HQ was Tony Bennett, the head honcho behind Knockabout Comics, one of the very few British independent publishers and distributors of adult and underground comics.

We worked out the last time we probably saw each other was at the very first WOMAD festival at the Bath & West Showground near Shepton Mallet, Somerset in 1980. On the bill was Peter Gabriel, Don Cherry, The Beat, the Drummers of Burundi, Echo & The Bunnymen, Imrat Khan, Prince Nico Mbarga, Simple Minds, Suns of Arqa, The Chieftains and Ekome amongst others.

Robert Crumb speaks! See below

Awesome. Needless to say we had a lot to catch up on. 

First some history of Tony's pioneering role taken from a 2006 interview by Joe Gordon on the Forbidden Planet blog. Full text here: 

'Not only has Knockabout been instrumental in pioneering the market for challenging underground material it has also been at the forefront of legal battles over censorship; it is probably no exaggeration to say that the increased leeway enjoyed in the medium today is thanks in no small part to the cases Knockabout has fought out with The Man so we could have the right to decide what we wanted to read for ourselves. 

Tony: In the late 60s and early 70s I was working with a publisher and distributor called Unicorn Bookshop [run by Bill Butler]. Originally in Brighton, we moved to a farm in West Wales where we were growing our own food and had a printing press in the barn. Unicorn, as well as publishing books on self-sufficiency, cannabis and poetry was importing Underground comics from the USA. This really sparked my interest in comics, partly for the wide and weird content and partly because they were creator-owned. It even encouraged me and a friend to draw and print our own self-indulgent heavily derivative comic, Trip Strip, which we distributed at festivals. With the demise of Unicorn in 1975, due to bad debts I took over some of the distribution and started publishing the Gilbert Shelton's The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in 1975 [through his own company Hassle Free Press].

From the Generalist Archive: Front and back cover of the first Furry Freak comic published in UK by Knockabout; Knockabout Anthology No 10 with cover by Gilbert Shelton. Thirteen issues were published in the 1980s.

Read my interview with Gilbert Shelton for the NME published in October 1979

The company [which changed its name to Knockabout Comics in 1978/79] also became the UK publisher for Robert Crumb and original work by British comic artists Hunt Emerson and Bryan Talbot. It has also published many works by Alan Moore including 'In Hell' and, most recently, his new remarkable novel Jerusalem [see Generalist review]. See the Knockabout website for many more titles.

Copy of ZAP COMIX No 5 given to me
when I visited the Rip Off Press in San
Francisco in 1979

Tony arrived laden with some great recent Knockabout productions (see below) but he also lent me this fantastic book by Patrick Rosenkranz which documents the US Underground Comic Revolution through interviews with 50 of the leading comic artists of the period. Alongside Crumb and Shelton there is Dan O' Neill, S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bill Griffith, Robert Williams, Ron Cobb and many more.Published by Fantagraphics Books in 2002. Essential.

ROBERT CRUMB

'Wierdo' was a magazine-sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb in 1981, which ran for 28 issues until 1993. 

According to the preface by his wife Aline-Koninsky-Crumb. 'Wierdo' was inspired by 'Mad' and 'Humbug' and the Underground comic culture, which had boomed in the 70s. It came out around the same time as 'Raw', the 'high-brow' remarkable outsize graphic/comic journal led by 'Maus' creator Art Spiegelman [who I interviewed in London]. The Crumbs went for 'low-brow' and drew together a whole bunch of artists who worked on the edges of acceptability. 

R. Crumb himself edited the magazine for the first 3 1/2 years and gave it what Aline calls its 'wacky brand-X feel'. It was passed on to Peter Bagge who, she says, changed the mood to a more punk 'zine and many younger artists got their start in its pages. 

This substantial hardbound book brings together all the Crumb material from the magazine, which includes mad '50s style photonovel sexy girl adventures as well-as the conventional comics which Crumb is world-famous for, The last issue was produced in France where the family Crumb  (with daughter) emigrated to and are still domiciled.

Two frames from 'I Remember The Sixties', sub-titled R. Crumb Looks Back!

Didn't the late great Australian art critic Robert Hughes put Crumb up there as a modern day Brueghel! His work is xtraordinary, often hard to take, remarkable for its visceral intensity, insanity and humour. If you watch the long documentary Crumb, you'll understand that he came from a strange household. The bits in the film that still make me gasp is watching Crumb draw in the street, sitting on a  bench with street life ebbing and flowing around him. Extraordinary facility. By the way, this stuff is for adults !!

PINOCCHIO

Pinnochio and me go way back. Can't remember reading the original Carlo Collodi story as a kid but def saw the Disney movie and no doubt read simplified version of tale. But did read Collodi's full version to Number 2 son as I recall. It's quite a dark bedtime read. This edition is the only one to survive in my library and my favourite up to this point, illustrated as it is by pencil drawings and gorgeous full-colour full-page frames by the remarkable Greg Hildebrant. Can't remember where this edition came from. It's published by the Unicorn Publishing House in New Jersey in 1986.

Now confronted with a radical adult re-visioning of Pinnochio by Winshluss, a.k.a. Vincent Paronnand a French comic artist and filmmaker, published in France in 2008. It won the prize for best album at the 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée at Angoulême the following year.

Paronnaud is best known for co-writing and co-directing with Marjane Satrapi the highly acclaimed animated film Persepolis (2007), for which they received numerous awards including the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. It was developed from Satrapi's graphic autobiography depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.

Pinnochio is a remarkable piece if work, a beautifully bound volume of 188 pages, printed on thick paper with ornate endpapers. In this version, P has become a little metal boy who appears to be indestructible, His full colour adventures through the book are interspersed with other parallel narratives including black and white  Adventures if Jiminy Cockroach, Other stories in a kind of brown charcoal effect are self-contained. Elements of Collodi's story are cleverly given new twists. There are some very unpleasant things here including a clown dictator to chill the blood but the artistry, ingenuity, unexpectedness and sheer beauty on display, the constant shifts in frames, strands and technique, make the journey a bare-knuckle ride and a visual feast.

ALPHA

This REMARKABLE book (just to make the point) takes us on a journey thought time and space from the very beginning of our universe to the birth of earth and the emergence of life and the human race. It's an extraordinary achievement.

Here is the book's creator Jens Harder explaining how he came to produce 'Alpha':

'The discussion of time has always been at the heart of things for me, this intangible construct of the fourth dimension, which can be approached more easily in comics than in a time-based medium. Though the presentation of more than 14 billion years in just 350 pages is something of a joke (at a rough estimate of 2,000 drawings, means on average just one image for every seven million years). 

'My own particular obsession being the great mystery of the origin of life which always seems like a "miracle" to us humans. Thus I ended up devoting a not insignificant part of the book trying to approach this through the drawings. 

'Meanwhile, running in parallel to the development of the book, I was following the development of our children from the first blurry ultrasound images until four and a half years later, where in five minutes they can turn our entire living room into a battlefield but also with great joy, produce their first drawings. 

'Above all it is always the realisation that, in "Alpha" of course, that nothing is finished, nothing perfected in this ever-changing story. It changes constantly, but since the beginning of my work in 2004, the state of knowledge has grown enormously throughout the world. Much has been confirmed, much however has also been abandoned - but which only in rare cases did I take into account. If there should one day appear an expanded edition of the first part of this trilogy I will add or modify dozens of pages. And who knows, maybe by then another comic book creator will have taken on "the longest story ever" adding their own interpretation - and I think it would all be worth it.'