BOOKS: DIVERSIONARY READING 1

[Left]: 'Peacock Feathers' by Temple Bailey, (Grosset & Dunlap. 1924). The designer was Cole Philips. [Right]: The cover of 'The Cardinal's Mistress', Mussolini's first and only novel, (Albert & Charles Boni. 1928). The artist is unknown

Both taken from the marvelous 'Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design 1920-1950' by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast [ Chronicle Books. 1995]

In a recent essay in the New York Times - 'Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote It', Charles McGrath looks at 'the assumption that genre fiction - mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories - is a form of literary slumming.'

'These kind of books,' writes McGrath, 'are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they're entertaining, they can't possibly be serious.'

He says the 'distinction between highbrow and lowbrow - between genre writing and literary writing - is actually fairly recent. Dickens wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that.'

[Digression: In my book 'Curious Facts 2', it says 'the phenomenon whereby social structure affects taste was dubbed 'Highbrow' and 'Lowbrow' in a 1914 essay by Van Wyck Brooks.' Have lost my source for this but this statement now seems unlikely. He no doubt discussed the issue in his writings but the 3rd Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts 'highbrow' (meaning 'intellectually superior') as US 1908 and 'lowbrow' as 1913. The answer undoubtedly lies in 'Highbrow/Lowbrow:The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America' by Lawrence ] Levine {Harvard University Press], which I have yet to read. The blurb says that Levine traces 'the emergence of familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century.'
Further digression: Just discovered 'From Lowbrow to Nobrow' by Peter Swirski.

McGrath goes on to talk about 'that interesting category of novels that are said to "transcend" their genre'. This is false praise' says McGrath. 'To trancend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel.'

The above thoughts provide a prelude to THE GENERALIST's round-up of the best of genre fiction I have read in the last 12 months. A few of these books are brand new, others have been published in recent years. They are all intelligent, intriguing and interesting books which will provide you with hours of valuable 'diversionary reading' - taking your mind of worldly and personal worries and concerns. They are thus a valuable and absorbing strategic resource.

'In 1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his one and only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoral degree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had ever received for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States. He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical ailmments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long puzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown events in America could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.'

Thus begins Jed Rubenfeld's masterful work, that invents a fictional explanation of this real-life conundrum, in which Freud is drawn into the investigation of a savage murder of a stunning debutante. It's a great read in itself but what makes it doubly intriguing are the author's end notes, which scrupulously itemise how much fact lies behind his fiction and exactly where the fiction differes from the known historical record. It will suprise you.

[The book had the effect of sending me back to my collection of Jung books and led me to purchase what is I believe is the best modern biography - 'Jung: A Biography' by Deirdrie Blair [Little, Brown. 2004] - and read the first 200pp of it. (The book is a vast 647pp with a further 200pp plus of detailed notes and references and an excellent index). Its a totally fascinating story which I hope to return to in due course.]

'The Chatelet Apprentice' is the first of a series of novels featuring the character Nicholas Le Floch in Paris in the 1760s, written by Jean Francois Parot, a diplomat and historian. These books have been celebrated in France since first p;ublication in 2000 but is was only last year that this first adventure was made available for readers in an English translation by Gallic Books in London. (The second, 'The Man with the Lead Stomach', is due for publication in April 2008). Parot uses all his professional skill to paint an accurate portrait of the sights and sounds of the period, full of telling incidental detail. The central crime is suitably dark and convoluted and involves a cast of a characters full of subtlety and substance. Le Floch is an engaging central figure, full of uncertainties, who in this book is undergoing a trial by fire as he struggles to discover missing documents of vital importance to the King as dead bodies proliferate around him.

Fred Vargas is the pseudonym of a French female academic archaeologist and this delightful and quirky book, first published in English in 2003, is one of a number of her works now available in translation. The mystery starts with an Breton town crier who, three times a day in a small Parisian square, reads out the local news and adverts people have posted in his box, to his small but devoted audience. All is well until a series of disturbing messages start appearing, warning of death and pestilence, followed by the appearance of strange markings of apartment doors. The case comes to the attention of Detective Commissaire Adamsberg whose eccentric techniques enable him to eventually unmask the true secrets behind a dark and diabolical plot. Pitched just on the right side of the unbelievable, its creepy themes pick up contemporary resonances with the paranoid times we live in.

The extraordinary phenomenon of 'The Da Vinci Code' has spawned an ocean of imitators, eager to try and emulate the success of the original. The only one I've been drawn to read is Michel Benoit's 'The Thirteenth Apostle' - a satisfying, well-written mystery built out of time-honoured elements: a young Benedictine who, following the mysterious death of a colleague, begins searching for lost biblical texts that place Jesus in a fresh context, one that would threaten the teachings of the established church. Naturally, there is a dark cabal inside the Vatican who are determined that he will not suceed.

[Of course the Godfather of this genre must be Umberto Eco with his landmark books 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum' - both huge tomes stuffed with long sections of arcane knowledge welded to a gripping plot that I remember finding genuinely thrilling and unique at the time.]

Translated from the German, this No 1 Swiss bestseller is one of a number of Eurocrime novels published by Arcadia Books. Set in the claustrophobic community of an out-of-season hotel in a remote Alpine village in the Swiss Engardine, its main character is Sonia Frey, escaping a violent husband and a bad acid trip, who gets a job there as a physiotherapist, hoping that fresh landscapes, Alpine air and a calm and ordered existence will heal her soul.
Bad move as it turns out. Sutter expertly creates an atmosphere of menace and intrigue, in which real-life violence appears to be following the plot of ancient superstitions.



Considered Italy's leading crime writer, Massimo Carlotto's first book 'The Fugitive' is a novelised real-life story about the years he spent on the run from the criminal authorities. It's an extraordinary tale.

Born in 1956 in North-Eastern Italy, Carolotta first got interested in far-left politics at the age of thirteen. He became an activist with Lotta Continua and began getting involved in investigative and counter-information work. In 1976, after discovering the body of an acquaintance who had been brutally murdered, he was falsely accused of the murder, arrested and put on trial. Acquitted and then convicted (there is no double-jeopardy law in Italy), Massimo, on the advice of his lawyers, fled abroad to avoid imprisonment.

From 1982 to 1985, he lived under a series of borrowed identities in Paris and then moved to South America. During these years of exile he was supported and sheltered by the international community of political refugees and worked in a number of capacities (pizzaiolo, translator, academic researcher) whenever he was able. In Mexico, he was betrayed by a lawyer, underwent torture following a case of mistaken identity, and then returned to Italy and to prison. In 1986, Massimo Carlotto became the focus of an international defence campaign that won wide backing: the South American novelist Jorge Amado and the eminent Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio were among his supporters. In 1993 he was finally released from prison with a pardon from the President of Italy.He had been tried a total of eleven times and had amassed 96 kilos of court proceedings.

After his release, Massimo quickly turned to writing, 'The Fugitiveis first and most autobiographical novel, Il fuggiasco (Fugitive) relates the almost eighteen years between his arrest and his presidential pardon. A film version of Il fuggiasco, directed by Andrea Manni and starring Daniele Liotti, was released in 2003. It has won many awards.

Since then, Massimo has written eight other novels, several plays, countless newspaper articles and essays. Film versions are currently being made of two of his most recent novels ('The Goodbye Kiss' and 'Death's Dark Abyss'); in January 2005, he signed a contract with his Italian publishers for five more novels. He also continues to act as a consultant to criminal lawyers, assisting them in cases involving organised crime, political intrigue and state intelligence.

The books mentioned are all published by Europa Editions, a fantastic imprint which specialises in publishing contemporary European writing.

NICK DAVIES: FLAT EARTH NEWS

Nick Davies, Special Correspondent for 'The Guardian' speaks to The Generalist in a new series of contemporary interviews for our companion audio site THE AUDIO GENERALIST. Listen now.

His latest book is 'Flat Earth News' [Chatto & Windus] - a term he defines as an unreliable statement or story 'created by outsiders, usually for their own commercial or political benefit, injected by a wire agency into the arteries of the media through which it then circulates around the whole body of global communication .'

The rise of 'flat earth news' in our media is due, Davies believes principally to less people having to produce more stories in a 24/7 environment, leaving little time to check facts - or even to leave the office !

It also means an unhealthy reliance on wire copy and pr releases. A research report specially commissioned for the book from the University of Cardiff discovered that 80 per cent of news stories in a sample of 'quality' national newspapers in the UK consisted of agency or PR copy. [Available for download here]

On a low level it means more noise in the system; on a high level - the Y2K panic and WMDs in Iraq.

The book also reveals the extent to which British 'broadsheets' employ the services of a network of 'crackers' who supply them with details from private databases - phone records, bank details and the like.

The book, most controversially, analyses three newsroom situations in more depth: the history of the Insight team at the Sunday Times and the reason for its decline; the situation in the newsroom at The Observer leading up to the paper's decision to give its editorial support to Blair's Iraq campaign; the scene inside Paul Dacre's Daily Mail (In a word: ugly.)

The book's sucess can be partly judged by the fact that it is already on its third reprint just eight days after publication.

The book has received a great many praiseworthy reviews, including:

Flat Earth News. Review by Deborah Orr
[Independent on Sunday. 15 Feb 2008)

The Vile Behaviour of the Press by Peter Oborne
[The Spectator. 30 Jan 2008]

'News media have no time for truth' by Sam Leith
(The Telegraph 10 Feb 2008)

THE OBSERVER CONTROVERSY

Failures of the Fourth Estate by Mary Riddell
(Observer 3 Feb 2008)
Flat Earth News. Review by David Aaronovitch
(The Times 8 Feb 2008)
Is Journalism Getting a Fair Press in this Book?
by Dan Sabbagh (The Times 8 Feb 2008)
Kamal Ahmed: 'Nick is a coward.'
By Michael Savage. (The Independent 11 Feb 2008)

[Since first posting, Nick Davies has written to us claiming that the Kamal Ahmed piece is libellous and that he has written to the Independent to that effect. The Times are publishing a letter tomorrow correcting what he describes as 'the worst of the falsehoods' in the Dan Sabbagh piece.

CRITICS
'No topic is so surrounded by myth as the golden age of the press.' by Simon Jenkins
(The Guardian 8 Feb 2008)

Damaged Limitations by Peter Preston (The Guardian 9 Feb 2008)

These articles say more about the critics themselves than they do about the book which they have either wilfully misunderstood and/or patronised

SUPPORTERS :
John Humphries, Ian Hislop, Roy Greeenslade, John Pilger, Peter Oborne. All have positive quotes on the book jacket.

Lively debate at pressgazette.co.uk

DIGITAL DEBATE
What interested me most was a quote in Hard truths for the trade in 'Flat Earth News' by Tim Luckhurst (The Independent 10 Feb 2008): 'I suspect Flat Earth News will come to be seen as among the last excellent books about journalism by a member of the pre-digital generation. Many of the sins he identifies are too easily detected by informed internet readerships. That which survives unchallenged in print is increasingly exposed to ruthless scrutiny on the web. Cynicism is not a new phenomenon in British journalism, but it has a new foe.' [First sighting of the phrase 'pre-digital generation'! Those who began on manual typewriters]

charliebeckett.org makes the point that Davies seems uninterested in 'alternatives to Big Media. There is a world of citizen journalism, user generated content and bloggers out there. There is also a whole range of new journalism techniques that can link the hack with the public to create a more interactive, transparent and trustworthy news media. It can support even the most sophisticated kinds of investigative journalism.'

There is a detailed and interesting critique by Adrian Monck which questions the Cardiff research and much of this has to do with new technology, which has revolutionised journalistic practice and enabled writers to be much more productive. [Monck has his own book out called 'Can You Trust the Media.']

AND FINALLY

Nick Davies gave a speech at the London School of Economics on Nov 17, 2007. It is reproduced on the Media Workers Against the War site. The first comment on the piece reads as follows:

steve_roberts Says:
December 10th, 2007 at 5:37 pm

Sweet irony
“for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat.”
The Ancient Greeks knew the earth was round and Eratosthenes estimated its circumference to within 16.5% in 240 BC. The widely held belief that it was widely believed that the earth was flat is itself a flat earth belief.

CULT MOVIES: BOX SETS/WENDERS & HERZOG

Having extolled the budget-conscious delights of the VHS in my previous post, the price of some great boxed sets are now
becoming more affordable. So for the last two months its been New German Cinema season at chez nous in the company of Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

[I just discovered, the British Film Institute in London are halfway through a major Wenders season at present. It runs until the end of Feb: details here.]

As a result, some interesting assessments of Wenders ouevre
have appeared: Nick Roddick's essay - 'The Road Goes on Forever' - in Sight and Sound and 'King of the Road' by Chris Petit in The Guardian. James Mottram in The Independent takes what seems to be a widely-held view that Wenders recent output is weak. Hopes are high that his new collaboration with Dennis Hopper may see a return to form.

Chris Petit, incidentally, does not rate 'Wings of Desire ' (which he calls 'a triumph of location over content') or 'Paris, Texas' ('on the evidence of websites, many are willing to subscribe to Paris, Texas as a profound statement on emptiness, rather than an empty film...'

Petit is an interesting and innovative filmmaker in his own right. According to a profile in Screenonline, he 'interested Wim Wenders in backing his first feature, Radio On (1979). In spite - or perhaps because - of having no previous film-making experience, Petit pulled off an extraordinary debut, a highly 'European' road movie which, greatly aided by the cinematography of Wenders regular Martin Schafer, presented the British landscape, both rural and urban, in a manner quite unparalleled before or since. Moody and angst-ridden, it announced a singular talent - but also one that was clearly not destined to find a niche easily; as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith aptly put it, Radio On was "a film without a cinema"'

The box set of Wenders contains 10 films - a mix of features and documentaries. Alongside 'Wings' and 'Paris' are two early works - 'Wrong Move' and 'The Scarlet Letter' (the first, a strange, wordy saga in which annnoying writer called Wilhelm sets out on a random journey and meets strange wierdos along the way; the second, a weird costume drama set in the Puritanical village of Salem, Massachusetts in the 18th century, drawn from the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne). Curios both.

Original film still and paperback (The Generalist Archive)

'The American Friend', on the other hand is, in my view, Wenders at his best. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper star in this brilliant, edgy film based on the novel 'Ripley's Game' by Patricia Highsmith. Saw it on its first release back in the 1970s and found it happily still as great on a re-look. One of Hopper's best roles, combining cool and menace.

Jean-Luc Godard in 'Room 666'. (1982) Now President of the European Film Academy, Wenders was to present Godard with the Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Godard, writes Petit, 'was a no-show, saying afterwards that his absence was in protest against a prize "imposed" on his entire career. Godard's snub (at Wender's expense) was done as a point of principle, but it generated far more publicity than if he had accepted. Godard and Wenders are both expert manipulators, curators of their own legends...'

The documentaries are really interesting. 'Room 666' was shot at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders invited a number of film directors to talk directly to camera about the future of film in a hotel room set-up with a camera and tape. They come in, switch them both on, and start talking. The question was:"Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" It begins with Jean Luc-Godard then, in no particular order, Antonioni, Herzog, Fassbinder, Spielberg, Monte Hellman and other younger voices. Superb and fascinating. Antonioni looks into the future and correctly predicts large-screen tv in the home. Herzog takes his shoes and socks of before answering such an important question Godard is a brilliant thinker and showman, Spielberg views are fascinating too in the light of the subsequent development of his career in particular and Hollywood in general.

Two documentaries on Japan - 'Tokyo Ga' and 'Notebooks on Cities and Clothes'. The first is a portrait of the city using the films of Ozu as a framing device; Herzog appears also in this. The second I first saw on Arena many years ago, a portrait of the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto as he prepares a new collection. Video was relatively new at this time and Wenders enjoys playing around with a whole range of new gadgets. Watching Yohji at work is fascinating. Funniest scenes: Yohji and Wim talking whilst playing pool; Wim is very tall and Yohji is very small.

'A Trick of the Light' is a real discovery. A documentary about the Skladanowsky Brothers, the German-born duo responsible for inventing the 'bioskop', an early version of the film projector. Eclipsed by the fame of the Lumiere brothers, the S Brothers experimented with silent film and slapstick comedy. Wenders uses some wonderful inventive trick shots, animations and fictionalised episodes, built around the incredibly vivid testimony of 95-year-old Lucie Skladanowsky, the surviving daughter of Max, one of the brothers. [See IMDB for a more detailed account of this film]

'Lightning Over Water' is a documentary Wenders made of Nicholas Ray, the legendary director of such classics as 'Rebel Without A Cause' and 'Johnny Guitar', as he lay dying of terminal cancer. I haven't had the heart to watch it all through yet.

Ray and the late Samuel Fuller (read Wender's eulogy to him here) were Wender's mentors and icons - two rough, tough battle-hardened vets of the movie business, outsiders of great charisma. They both also acted in Wender's films: Ray played an art forger in 'The American Friend', Fuller a camerman in 'The State of Things', my other great favourite. (This black and white movie was shot in Portugal in a break during the long nightmare that was the filming of 'Hammett', Wenders tribute to the don of noir fiction Dashiell Hammett, at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in California.

In conclusion: A valuable set. Shortcomings: No extras.
Wim Wenders official web site

Whilst I love Wenders work, find it fascinating and cool, I am in awe of Werner Herzog.

His global search for what he calls the 'ecstatic truth' has produced both legendary features and a back catalog of extraordinary documentaries - more than 50 films in all. These two box sets are a good place to start getting to grips with this inspiring figure.

Herzog/Kinski is dynamite. Here collected together are the are the five features that Herzog made with the legendary madman Klaus Kinski. Kinski made scores of films, in most of which he only appears in cameos. This was because he was absolutely impossible to work with. Only Herzog was able to control, cajole and threaten this monstrous man, corral his ferocious spirit, and capture performances that have a power unequalled in cinema.

'Aguirre Wrath of God' and 'Fitzcarraldo' are rightly Herzog's best known films. Shot in the Amazon, they are not only terrifying to watch, you also know that there is no special effects trickery here. To make these films hundreds of people actually lived and worked under hazrdous condiitions to achieve movies that noone could now emulate. They wouldn't find the financing and the risk factors would be too high for any sane person to handle. The sheer determination it must have taken to realise these stunning films is almost beyond imagining.

'Cobra Verde', based on the Bruce Chatwin book 'The Viceroy of Ouidah', sees Kinski leading an extraordinary army of black women warriors. In 'Nosferatu', he becomes a ghastly creature of the night, the scariest vampire ever put on screen. In 'Woyzeck' a hapless soldier, bullied and torturted beyond his limits. The set is completed with 'My Best Fiend', Herzog's documentary tribute to his deranged comrade.

Many of the films have versions with commentary by Herzog and others. Never less than fascinating.

Box 2 I'm still absorbing: It contains four features - 'Heart of Glass', 'The Enigma of Kasper Hauser', 'Stroszek', 'Even Dwafs Started Small' - and 'Fata Morgana', Herzog's strange documentary on desert mirages.

A third box set is exclsuively available from the Werner Herzog Archive

'Werner Herzog – The Documentary And Shorts Collection', they say, 'is a collection of twenty-five films which run the gamut from his first experimental short ('Herkales' from 1962) through to longer documentaries such as 'God's Angry Man' and 'How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck', making all sorts of quirky little cinematic stops along the way. Most of this work is new to DVD.'

Much to my suprise, two weeks after I started watching these films, a brand new Herzog movie was released - 'Rescue Dawn' starring Christian Bale, who plays Dieter Dengler, a German-born American pilot, shot down in Laos duing the Vietnam War and tortured by his captors. He led a prison break-out and escaped, battling his way through the jungles to safety in Thailand.

Obsessed by this real-life story and despairing at ever raising funding to make a feature, in 1997 Herzog made a documentary instead - 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly'.

A good account of Herzog and this new project is Christopher Goodwin's 'Dangerous Waters' which appeared in the Sunday Times.

Useful Wikipedia entry

CULT MOVIES: COEN BROS & VHS ADVENTURES

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men."

Photo: Richard Foreman/Miramax

There are few things better than sitting down to watch a brand new movie in the comfy armchairs of the Duke of York's art cinema in Brighton, particularly when its made by the Coen brothers. The new film - 'No Country for Old Men' - is perplexing, mysterious and haunting. visceral, technically superior. Certainly up there with 'Miller's Crossing'.

From left, author Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Cohen.

Eric Ogden for Time.

Read the excellent interview with the three of them here.

Probably like you I go to the cinema less than I used to; now generally only for big sfx pictures which need to be watched on the largest screen available or art house classics as above. Apart from that, its home viewing which is what this post is about. Now is the time to buy VHS.

Nasturally everyone's getting rid of their VHS collections. Why bother to hang onto those clunky boxes and dodgy tapes when you can get slimline DVDs. Answer: they're cheap as chips. As somone who needs a constant supply of movies fodder and as a social experiment, for the last couple of months I have been haunting the charity shops and boot sales and picked up about 50 movies for an average price of £1.50 - a cult library of stuff such as 'Salvador', 'Deliverance', One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 'Hudsucker Proxy', 'Five Easy Pieces', 'American X' - classics all.

Three particularly excellent discoveries:

'Wild Side' by Donald Cammell (of 'Performance' fame) starring Christopher Walken, one of the great actors and certainly one of the strangest. Never less than intriguing to watch. All Cammell's film are fascinating. More of that anon.
'The Basketball Diaries' featuring a young Leonardo di Caprio, with an intriguing cameo by Jim Carroll, author of the book on which the film is based. Most of di Caprios early films are great: 'Glibert Grape' and 'A Boy's Life' in particular.
'Fritz the Cat', the cult animated film by Ralph Bakshi based on the Robert Crumb characters. Strange to relate, I found a rare VHS of this at the boot sale, took it home, to find its unplayable; the following week, found another copy that worked at the same boot sale. What are the odds of that, I wonder?
It was Bakshi who made a rotoscoped version of 'Lord of The Rings' back in the 1970s. For more on rotoscoping see previous post: PHILIP K. DICK: A SCANNER DARKLY


Most important, one great rediscovery, and this gem I urge you to watch. The second film by Jane Campion, 'An Angel at My Table' is a long and very moving saga about the life of Janet Frame, now regarded as New Zealand's greatest writer.

[Left: Janet Frame stands behind the three actresses who play her at different ages in the film. From left: Kerry Fox, Alexia Cox and Karen Ferguson. They are all brilliant.]

The film, based on Frame's autobiographical trilogy, follows the story of her poor childhood in the Depression, her fascination with literature, her shy student days and her long and painful incarceration in mental hospitals after being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and subject to repeated ECT treatment. Miraculously she survives, travels to Europe and experiences the bohemian life and finally achieves fame as a writer.

Coincidentally or not, the week after rewatching this powerful and very emotional film, The Guardian ran a feature by Campion which relates how she was almost born to make the 'Angel' film.

Her life changed when, at the age of 13, she read 'Owls do Cry', Frame's first novel, and later drove past the mental home 'Sunnyside' i n which Frame had been incarcerated. Whilst studying film, her mother sent her 'To the Island', the first volume of Frame's autobiographical trilogy and Campion determined to make a tv series on Frame's life, finally getting to meet her on December 24th 1982. Frame suggested she wait until she had published the next two volumes of the trilogy and she promised not to sell the film rights to anyone else in the meantime. The tv series was made successfully and became this superb film; its is to Campion's eternal credit that the film's success revived Frame's reputation and helped her financially in the last years of her life. Campion records that in 2003, when Frame was diagnosed with acute leukaemia, she was reported to have said that her death was an adventure, and "I've always enjoyed adventures." She died on 27 January 2004.

[Campion of course went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1993 for 'The Piano', which also earnt her the Palme D'Or at Cannes, the first female director to be awarded that honour]

See: 'In Search of Janet Frame' (The Guardian 19.01.08) The essay forms the introduction to a new edition of the book of 'An Angel at my Table' just republished by Virago.

Excellent Wikipedia entry on Janet Frame

UPDATE: See 'Instant Nostalgia? Let's Go to the Videotape' in the New York Times

“Be Kind Rewind,” Michel Gondry’s latest adventure in high-concept whimsy, appears to take place in a parallel universe without Netflix, TiVo or iTunes. When the entire VHS inventory of an old-school video store is demagnetized, the clerks respond to the disaster not by upgrading to DVD, but by enlisting the customers to remake the films with a VHS camcorder. Not far beneath the slapstick humor and communitarian spirit of Mr. Gondry’s movie (which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last week and is set to open Feb. 22) lies a strong nostalgia for a technology that revolutionized home viewing but now seems destined for the dustbin of history.'

IS THERE A CONNECTION ?

MUSIC BUSINESS TODAY

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (left) and David Byrne.
Photo: James Day

Two of the best and most interesting articles on the subject of the modern music
business are two excellent pieces in Wired magazine.
(thanks to bigfug for the tip off)

'David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music'
[bigfug advises the audio is better than the article]
Also links to:

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars

Coincidentally, the following e-mail message arrived from the founder of
Pandora, one of the most innovative music sites on the internet.
Self-explanatory and indicative of the current state of play

hi, it's Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Based upon the IP address from which you recently visited Pandora, it appears that you are listening from the UK.

It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable...so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.

We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we'll get beyond this. We're going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We'll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I'm very, very sorry.

-Tim Westergren (Pandora founder)

wwww.pandora.com

REWRITING MUSIC HISTORY

I am trying to get my head round what appears to be, on the face of it, some kind of Buddhist lesson.

It has been one of my principal working practices to follow my enthusiasms and investigations wherever they may lead. Sometimes you strike gold; other times, the outcome is downright failure. You never know for sure; either way you learn a lot on the journey.

For the past twelve months my leading obsession has been the musical history of Britain in the 40s and 50s which led me to try and map all the clubs and music venues in Soho - the junction box of British music during that period - from 1942 to 1964. It was a fascinating study. I drew up a large pencil-sketch map and read a bookshelf load of books - keeping both Amazon and Abebooks well fed with orders in the process.

Twelve months in, I happened to mention my project to Mr Jeff Dexter, best known to most as a leading dj during the 60s and 70s, at clubs like UFO and at most major festivals including the Isle of Wight. He tipped me off to these two titles, they arrived within a few days of each other, and I was somewhat taken aback to discover that - to all intents and purposes - the work had been done. A very strange feeling.

'London Live' by Tony Bacon may not be the definitive work on the subject but I can categorically tell you its the most comprehensive to date. Full of maps, posters, handouts, photos, it runs from the 50s to the punk period and includes an astonishing and totally comprehensive database of everyone who played at the Marquee Club, arranged both in date order and by artist. Its obviously a labour of love and it will be enjoyed by many. What was really galling was to discover it was published in 1999 - how the hell could I have missed it!

Pete Frame's book is brand new. He is well known to most as founder of Zigzag magazine and as the author of the Rock Family Trees, now available in one volune from Omnibus Press, which formed the basis of a tv series on the BBC sometime back. One of his hallmarks is an almost obsessive attention to detail.

Thus this mammoth memoir reeks with authenticity, with a feeling that what you are reading is a wholly accurate account of what went down - a feeling bolstered by the fact that the book is built around scores of interviews with key people of the time, many of whom I suspect have never been interviewed before or since. Its a brilliant work and immediately stands head and shoulders above all but a few works on the decade. I can say this with some certainty because I've read scores of them. Most provide genuine insights and useful information but none are anywhere near as comprehensive, level-headed and carefully constructed as this masterwork. We are all in his debt for the thousands and thousands of hours he has spent since 1989, doing interviews and thinking about this project.

It starts, correctly, with several chapters on the marvelous Ken Colyer - the Joe Strummer of his time - a difficult man who had a major impact on his musical times. News of his death was marked by two minutes silence in the House of Commons. Yet today his name has been forgotten except by afficionados.

Then comes Chris Barber - another man whose huge contribution to British music still remains underplayed, and a marvelous pen portrait of Lonnie Donegan. These three characters along with the likes of Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner lie at the roots of so much of British music.

Frame then takes us to Soho of the time, to clubs like the 2I's, The Roudhouse, the Gyre and Gimble, and the Nucleus and gives us a full blast of the characters, action and ambience. He charts the birth of skiffle and the growth of the folk clubs and coffee bars (inventions of the period), the impact of Elvis.

If you think all this stuff is dusty old material of no relevance to today, then you'll be much mistaken. We have up to now been fed a kind of 'official history' of British music which is not only woefully manipulated and partial, but also excludes the many and celebrates the few - most often the wrong ones. 'The Restless Generation' is a huge contribution towards setting this picture straight. Its a big work in every sense of the word, packed with meticulous detail and telling incidents, driven along by a strong narrative style. It comes complete with a detailed chronology and index thus increasing its usefulness as a research tool.

Interestingly, both books are published by independent publishers. In the first instance, the author is also the publisher. Tony Bacon co-founded Balafon in 1992, which he claims on the flyleaf is now 'the leading independent publisher of fine books about music, musicians and musical instruments.'

In the second case, Pete Frame explains in the introduction how he had begun on the process of self-publishing, rightly assuming that no commercial publisher was likely to fund such a detailed work on this subject, when ' who should come tripping back into my life but Johnny Rogan.'

'Since I first got to know him in the golden age of Zigzag, he had not only become the acclaimed author of more than 20 books but had also unlocked the secret codes of publishding. A man with a keen interest in political and social history as well as rock music, he was eager to read the manuscript and, even though he winced at some of my rampant self-indulgence and schoolboy enthusiasm, he offered a deal and a distribution network which I could not refuse.'

See: www.roganhouse.co.uk

As a final PS, many of the comments above could be equally applied to another recently published huge tome - Peter Doggett's 'There's A Riot Going On' [Canongate] - which, in brief, puts the politics back into the history of '60s music - too long portrayed in an emasculated manner as one long LSD party with a big comedown.

The book's thesis: 'That between 1965 and 1972 political activists around the globe prepared to mount a revolution. While the Vietnam War raged, calls for black power grew louder, and liberation movements erupted. Demonstrators took to the streets, fought gun battles with police, planted bombs in public buildings and attempted to overthrow the world's most powerful governments. Rock and soul music fuelled the revolutionary movement with anthems and iconic imagery.'

Like Frame's work, this book has been in gestation for decades, and contains material from scores of original interviews. Veterans of the period may remember the highlights but will have forgotten a great deal of the detail, much of which has only emerged in the decades since.

For those not around at the time, this book will be an instructive education into a period, forty years distant, when it did seem possible for a brief time that youth movements could change the world and how this movement was dissipated and destroyed, repressed and swallowed by the forces of Control and Mammon helped by cynicism and celebrity stupidity .

Whilst not totally agreeing with Chuck V writing in The Skinny (Edinburgh and Glasgow's free entertainment, culture and listings magazine) I think his reaction is an interesting one:

Doggett details the drama of the aborted American revolution

'There’s A Riot Going On traces the rapid decline of 1960s counter-culture from naïve radicalism to uncommitted self-obsession. Psychedelic musicians are exposed as ignorant or hypocritical, movements slip from dynamic idealism to drug-addled cynicism while radical politicians are confused and exhausted.

In breathless prose, Doggett details the drama of the aborted American revolution, expressing disappointment while retaining a tremulous hope in music’s potential. Although Doggett obviously admires the musicians of the late 1960s, he clear-sightedly deconstructs the bizarre mixture of psychobabble and empty rhetoric that characterised the period. John Lennon comes across as a distracted junkie who switches between support for terrorists to flaccid pacifism; Dylan abdicates responsibility for any political stance while artists from Mick Jagger to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young climb on the revolutionary band-wagon without actually offering anything.

Without denying the power of the state - guns, spies and the courts were routinely used to undermine the counter-culture - Doggett reveals how easily capitalism could co-opt the wild energy of the times. Since much subsequent radicalism has taken its cue from the 1960s - adopted the Panthers, Rave took its utopianism from the first summer of love and even the SSP follows the inclusive spirit of 1968 - There’s A Riot Going On is a quietly depressing read. It shows how the energy of youth can be mistaken for commitment, and catalogues some of the stupidest statements made by public figures (on both sides of the conflict). Of course, these days nobody would mistake a concert performed by millionaires as a substitute for meaningful political protest, would they?'

PICTURE FOR GRACE

Sometimes - not often - life throws up perfect conjunctions. This picture is the result of one such. Just over a year ago my mum died (see THE 200TH POST for poetic tribute) and over the course of those twelve months much time has been spent sorting out her effects - a difficult and emotional task as many of you will know.

Throughout her life, she was passionately fond of greetings cards - she ran a card department in a big branch of W.H.Smith's for many years - and amassed a large collection of her personal favourites. Until her sight got too bad, she became fascinated by the Victorian pastime of 'decoupage' [see definition below] and used many of the cards as material for a whole string of pictures and objects, most of which she gave away to friends.

[Left]: Here is one of the pictures, faded over time. A centrally- placed window featured in many of her works.




She was very concerned about what would happen to these cards - and the bags of tiny little bits she had cut out of them - and that worry stayed with me. I just didn't feel I could throw them away but knew noone who would want them. Then fate took a hand.

I was invited to an exhibition locally by Maria Rivans - a collage artist par excellence. See examples of her work here

As soon as I saw them I knew I had found the answer to my problem. I explained my story to Maria and, the long and the short of it is I gave Maria a large proportion of the cards and cut-out pieces and commissioned here to produce a collage picture, with a photo of Grace in the centre, in celebration of her art and life. I think you will agree she has done a beautiful job.

Decoupage (or découpage): the art of decorating an object by gluing colored paper cut outs onto it in combination with special paint effects, gold leaf, etc. Commonly an object like a small box or an item of furniture is covered by cutouts from magazines or from purpose-manufactured papers. Each layer is sealed with varnishes (often multiple coats) until the "stuck on" appearance disappears and the result looks like painting or inlay work. The traditional technique used 30-40 layers of varnish which were then sanded to a polished finish. This was known in 18th century England as The Art of Japanning after its presumed origins. [Wikipedia]

CELEBRATING JEFF NUTTALL

(Above): The front-line of Brenda's Boyfriends, with Jeff Nuttall on cornet, playing live in 1980. (Photo by George Perkin)

(Below): A 1990 photo of Jeff in his beloved Volvo ('Celia') with one his hand-made friends ('Auntie') in the passenger seat. Photo taken in Nelson, Lancashire By Claire McNamee.
Purchase 'Jeff Nuttall's Wake on Paper' and 'Jeff Nuttall's Wake on CD'

My 1985 audio interview with Jeff Nuttall is now available for download at the Audio Generalist. Please check it out. The full back story to the interview can be found at this previous post: Jeff Nuttall: Bomb Culture and Beyond

By way of introduction to Mr Nuttall (what a great name for a prankster and animateur), here is the obituary written for The Guardian (12 Jan 2004) by Michael Horovitz and used with his permission. Hear MH on the Audio Generalist

'Jeff Nuttall, who has died aged 70 was a catalyst, perpetrator and champion of rebellion and experiment in the arts and society. Bomb Culture, his 1968 chronicle of the emergence of internationalist counter-culture in Britain, remains a primary source and manifesto for the post-Hiroshima generation.

The vision of Jeff's youth was grounded in "a faith that, given liberation, the human spirit would predominate. I imagined some kind of stone age village. People would build their own houses imaginatively and live there sophisticatedly and in a literate way and they would live with their hands and their minds and they would not be dictated to by anybody selling them anything. People would have the opportunity of coming into their true self, which was generous and creative and permissive".

He was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, but most of his childhood and teens were spent in Orcop near Herefordshire's Welsh border. His father was the village headmaster but the most formative years of Jeff's education were at Hereford and Bath art schools (1949-53). In 1954 he married Jane Louch, the painter who had taught him at Hereford, with whom he reared a daughter and three sons. They stayed more or less together for the next two decades.

From the late 1970s to 1984 Jeff drove around Britain, Australia and Portugal with Amanda Porter, as svelte as he was chubby, with whom he had another two boys. The rest of his life was shared with Jill Richards, a diminutive Welsh actor as hard-drinking and sharp-witted as himself.

From 1956-68 Jeff was a secondary school art master, and for the following 16 years he worked at art colleges, in Bradford, Leeds, and then as Liverpool polytechnic's head of fine art. But while bringing a transformative zest to those jobs, he was also getting on with his mission.

From 1964-67 he edited and circulated My Own Mag, a bran tub of anarchic texts and images, with William Burroughs lavishly featured in most issues. In 1966 International Times, the first London-based "underground" newspaper, was set up. Jeff contributed articles and cartoons to IT and other underground publications which emerged in its wake.

Central to the burgeoning oral verse, jazz poetry, happenings and performance art movements, he also played effervescent jazz piano and scalding cornet in the Red Allen-Roy Eldridge idioms, and sang infectiously genial vocals. The humours of Fats Waller were recreated in Jeff's persona, yet he struck some on a brief encounter as a show-off. For many more he was an outstandingly original artist also possessed of a gift for helping others appreciate their own potential.

Other precursors whose legacies he extended were the dadaists, surrealists and beats, Dylan Thomas, John Bratby and kitchen sink painting, McGill postcards, bebop and northern music hall. In 1967 he co-founded the People Show, an improvising theatre troupe with which Jeff travelled, wrote and acted for five years.

From the mid-1980s he took cameo roles in films and television. Throughout his days he made and exhibited hundreds of lyrical-threatful-polemical artworks.

He was the Guardian's incisive poetry critic (1979-81) and during the last 40 years he published some 40 books. There were poetry, plays, fiction, memoirs, essays, and verbal portraits of kindred spirits like Blackpool's star mid-20th century comedian Frank Randle (King Twist, 1978) and the free jazz virtuoso Lol Coxhill (The Bald Soprano, 1989). Jeff's Selected Poems has just appeared (Salt Publications).

In 1990 Jeff summarised his artistic approach: "I make a line out of a rhythmic figure. The previous figure suggests the subsequent one. The rhythmic figures owe much to Charlie Parker's saxophone phrasing." Thus a characteristic Nuttall poem opens:

So brightly blisters the great regurgitating ribbon of the Thames .
Sculls skim through like springtime swallows.
Keels kiss tidal scum, lancing the stolen sun-boils
or bops to a stop, as in
The bee on wheels has laments on a stick
Wags weepy banners with gypsy ribbons ...
The tiny wheeled bee has the sky on a stick
Idly waves as she buzzes through the afternoon
Kicking the tears around like bean tins.

Two defining moments for Jeff - and for the future he considered crucial for human survival - were the beginnings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s, with its anti-H-bomb marches and the first grand scale cosmopolitan poet-meet that filled the Albert Hall in June 1965. Jeff felt confirmed in that "all our separate audiences came to one place at the same time, a frisson for us all to savour as there had been at the first Aldermaston, and the underground was suddenly there on the surface, in open ground with a following of thousands".

Nuttall and John Latham had planned a happening for that gig which encaked them both top-to-toe in blue paint, but this blocked their pores, and Latham passed out. A hot bath was needed fast but the only bath in the building was in Sir Malcolm Sargent's dressing-room. The dazed duo tumbled gratefully in, to be discovered, reviving, by a caretaker, who assumed that unimaginable beatnik outrages were being enacted beneath his eyes.

In Jonathon Green's Days In The Life: Voices From The English Underground (1988), Jeff recalled "a shift between 1966 and 1967 from poetry and art and jazz and anti-nuclear politics to just sex and drugs, the arrival of capitalism. The market saw that these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods. What we misjudged was the power and complexity of the media, which dismantled the whole thing. It bought it up. And this happened in 67, just as it seemed that we'd won".

Nuttall lived to see that spirit rekindled 35 years later, with wise children again marching, speaking, and acting out their hearts and minds against the philistines, profiteers, and warmongers who go on ruling the west.

He died on a Sunday, leaving the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny, where his trad band's lunchtime gig had been the highspot of his week for 10 years. At his soul's incarnation in Elysium it will surely come to pass, as Jeff once dreamed, that "Spifflicate water-buffalo drunk on rainbow fish will snore beside the oval father where he basks". For the rest of us, as long as "global politics" fester in lies and pea-brained Hollywooden mega-violence, it is bollocks to them, and long live Jeff Nuttall.'

· Jeffrey Nuttall, polymath, born July 8 1933; died January 4 2004

JEFF NUTTALL 2 : BOMB CULTURE

(Left): The excellent cover for the 1970 Paladin edition (UK) of 'Bomb Culture', credited to 'Head Office'. Any clues as to who they were ?

The most well-known of Jeff Nuttall's works (and with good reason), 'Bomb Culture' is a fascinating and vivid insight into
the mindset and mores of the alternative/underground scenes of the 50s and 60s told by a man who was in the thicket of it. But it is much more than that.

Here is the back cover pull quote from Peter Fryer, writing in New Society: 'Fragments of autobiography? Anarchist manifesto? Slice of contemporary cultural history? Manual for young guerillas in the generation war? The Underground's epitaph by one who was in at its birth? Jeff Nuttall's book is all these and more...his book is a letter from a man who deaperately wants to share his terrible healing vision in the hope that we may profitably pool our madness and our sanities. He is a man I should like as a friend.'

Even more interesting is this extract from Dennis Potter's review in The Times: 'BOMB CULTURE is an abcess that lances itself. An extreme book, unreasonable but not irrational. Abrasive, contemoptuous, attitudinising, ignorant and yet brilliant...a book which you must read, as soon as possible.'

Here is a short but key extract from the book that goes to the heart of the book's theme:

‘What way we made in 1945 and in the following years depended largely on our age, for right at that point, at the point of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the generations became divided in a very crucial way.

‘The people who had passed puberty at the time of the bomb found that they were incapable of conceiving of life without a future. Their patterns of habit had formed, the steady job, the pension, the mortgage, the insurance policy, personal savings, support and respect for the protection of the law, all the paraphernalia of constructive, secure family life. They had learned their game and it was the only game they knew. To acknowledge the truth of their predicament would be to abandon the whole pattern of their lives. They would therefore have to pretend, much as they had pretended about ecstasy not being there, and they proceeded to pretend as cheerfully as ever. In any case, to look the danger in the eye might wreck the chances of that ultimate total security their deepest selves had contrived, death by H-bomb.

‘The people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving of life with a future. They might not have had any direct preoccupation with the bomb. This depended largely on their sophistication. But they never knew a sense of future.

‘The hipster was there. Charlie Parker's records began to be distributed. The hipster became increasingly present in popular music and young people moved in his direction. They pretended too, but they did not enter the pretence at all cheerfully. In fact they entered the pretence reluctantly, in pain and confusion, in hostility which they increasingly showed. Dad was a liar. He lied about the war and he lied about sex. He lied about the bomb and he lied about the future. He lived his life on an elaborate system of pretence that had been going on for hun­dreds of years. The so-called 'generation gap' started then and has been increasing ever since.’

THE GENERALIST AUDIENCE

This is a snapshot of The Generalist's global audience, courtesy of Stat Counter, a wonderful service for all bloggers. Stories being accessed in this view of my blog's global traffic (16th December 2007) include stories on the Bering Bridge, on Arthur Brown, Tony Tyler, Mike Horowitz, Truman Capote, Al Gore, Johnny Depp, Joy Division etc etc

In case people wonder why anyone would spend 2 1/2 years writing hundreds of thousands of words - for free - the answer is in this image. After decades of working for mainstream newspapers and magazines, my blog gives me complete freedom to write about what I think is important, in a way of my own choosing. Equally important is the oppotunity to reach out to a genuinely global audience, of all cultures, backgrounds and thoughts.

Imagine if there was some global system whereby, when you wrote a book, you could log on to the internet and get a map of everyone who had taken your book to bed that night and was reading it. This blog gives me a feeling of real connection with an incredibly diverse global world.

I have written stuff every month since June 2005 - except for three months surrounding my mum's death - and the possibilities keep opening up before me.

Thanks to you all - past and present readers. Output is variable but consistently so. The plan is to keep this baby going until I run out of road. Hope you will join me for the ride.

Check out the Audio Generalist here

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: MEMORABILIA

Some of the first fruits of the extensive
archaeological dig into the HQ INFO archive,
currently undergoing an extensive cataloguing operation
From Top Left:

1. Band sticker for Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Pepper's
first album - 'Kings of the Robot Rhythm' -
released on Revelation Records in 1972.

2. Membership card for Radio Geronimo

3. Business card for Joint Enterprises, who sold
smoking paraphernalia of all kinds and imported
very cool US skins from the States

4. Sticker produced as part of the protest
movement connected with the 1971 Oz Obscenity Trial
at the Old Bailey - the longest obscenity trial in British legal history.

5. A dollar-bill sized handout advertising a
Spring Offensive to End the Vietnam War,
which was staged on Wednesday April 15th 1970.
Organised by the Vietnam Peace Parade Committee,
17 E 17th Street, New York

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: FEEDBACK

(Left to right) Nick Saunders and Nicholas Albery
(Photo by Mark Edwards/Still Pictures)






Back in August 2006 I published three posts (below) about Nicholas Albery, Nick Saunders the BIT Travel guide to India and Australia and the Arts Lab movement.
Previous postings from THE GENERALIST Archives (August 2006)
ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: BIT by bit

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: BIT Travel Guide

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: Arts Labs

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: Nicholas Albery

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: Nicholas Saunders

Regular readers will be interested in the following valuable feedback - one message which arrived almost a year ago, the second which came today.
Hi!
I am Josefine Speyer, the widow of Nicholas Albery and have just discovered your website, six and a half years after Nicholas' death. It gave me great pleasure to read about Nicholas and his doings in such detail. You must have known him or interviewed him? I wonder.

I have just been at a Christmas gathering yesterday organised by the Saturday Walkers Club which is going strong 10 years after Nicholas first published his 'Time Out Book of Country Walks.' There are now about 200 people who are doing various country walks every week. They have built up a tribe of walkers, many of them used to walk with Nicholas. They have published the 'Time Out Book of Country Walks 2'. Apart from getting exercise and keeping fit, the groups are a wonderful opportinity for networking and wideing ones social circle. They also organise theatre outings and other events, and several couples who first met on the walks are now happily married.

When Nicholas first came up with the idea of a self oganising walking group, I could not believe this kind of thing would work, but it did! And wonderfully so.

The Nicholas Albery Foundation is now The Natural Death Centre, which also runs the annual Poetry Challenge in October every year.

Nicholas died before his time. Had he been alive today he would be deeply involved in getting projects off the ground that create sustainable community, helping create discussion and ideas to stop the destruction of the environment, the issue of terrorism and thinking about a future that would allow for 'nature to be at ease'.

As he had written on a piece of paper, which he kept stuck on his bedroom mirror:
"My purpose in life is to use my imagination, humour and perseverance, through my writing, my projects and my helping people fulfil their potential, so as to help create a world in which people are warm, tolerant and kind to each other, nature is at ease and magic is alive."

Dear John

Just before he died in a car accident, I telephoned Nicholas Albery, who was then the leading light in the Natural Death Centre, and we were delighted to discover, during the ensuing conversation, that we had (unknowingly) collaborated to produce the first overland guide to India.

In 1970. I walked into the BIT offices in Notting Hill (founded by Lennon, as a kind of wild Underground advice centre) with a piece of paper. On it was written the details of how to get from Istanbul to Delhi overland using public transport (buses and trains) for £9.70.  This information had been given to me in Athens, at the then well-known YHA Hostel no.2, by an American deserter – a sergeant, I recall - from the Vietnam war.  Anyway, Albery was then attempting to compile the first overland to India guide for hippies, and was delighted to receive this information, which was duly incorporated into the guide (and the route worked, I discovered afterwards, though I never used it myself).  The guide itself began life as a few mimeographed sheets stapled together, but soon swelled from the ensuing feedback from the freaks who used it.  According to Nick, he then gave/sold it to Richard Branson (who then ran a seedy organic restaurant in Westbourne Park Road) who in turn gave/sold it on to Tony Wheeler, and the rest is history, save for the fact that Wheeler made a mint and we didn’t !

Terry Phelps   

JOY DIVISION: THE DOCUMENTARY

Source: http://members.aol.com/vmelo1/raw/joyd.html

The word of mouth starts here.

Last Friday night at the Duke of York's in Brighton - a night of torrential rain and strange encounters - The Generalist was fortunate enough to attend a special screening - as part of Brighton's excellent Cinecity film festival - of 'Joy Division', a new documentary.

Due for release in the UK next March, 'Joy Division' is a remarkable portrait of the key band behind the explosive and remarkable Manchester scene that transformed a decaying industrial city into a world-renowned centre of new style and culture.

Shot and directed by Grant Gee and scripted and researched by Jon Savage, 'Joy Division' is a work of great beauty and artistry, a powerful and emotional experience that will leave no viewer untouched.

I have no doubt that it will come to be seen as the definitive telling of the story of one of the truly great bands of the 20th century and of the city from whose streets they emerged.

What this curiously unsettling film makes you feel is that you’re been given some very deep insights into something huge, important and glorious, a feeling enhanced by the eyewitness accounts of those who witnessed the birth of Joy Division. They describe the impact it had on them in almost spiritual terms, in a way strangely reminiscent of the accounts of the scientists who witnessed the early nuclear tests.

The surviving band members recount that the strange chemistry that ran between them was so strong that the music just flowed out easily and that it was only after the songs were written that it became difficult.

The figure and fate of Ian Curtis is central to the film’s power. We witness his transformation from mild-mannered married man to otherworldly shamanic priest, dogged by epilepsy, racked by emotional confusion. He commands our attention, even in his absence.

Joy Division’s music is not comfortable listening. It is mysterious and profound. Like Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring, time has only deepened its force. It seems to be eternally contemporary but also eternally challenging and disturbing on levels that other music just cannot reach.

The film plunges into their strange world, into a story which we know has a dark ending, with great force and artistry. Its scrupulous, innovative and stylish collage of sound and vision always adds dramatic and powerful forward motion to the story. Everything fits so beautifully, seems so exactly right at every moment, that you are just carried along, as if by a deep ocean current, towards events that you suddenly realise you’re not entirely comfortable about.

Joy Division were young lads in the early 20s, lads who admit they never saw a tree until they were 12 and who rode pigs round the street for amusement, beer boys with no prospects and a lot of onboard anger. This fuelled their twice-weekly rehearsals - held in artic conditions inside wrecked warehouses – where they forged a sound of resistance powerful enough to challenge the prevailing atmosphere of the city, governed at the time by a near-fascist Bible-reading police chief, in a Britain ruled by the grim forces of Dame Thatcher and all her minions.

There is some very dark territory here but - in another curious paradox - the film is both inspiring and life-affirming. It awakens your senses and your intellect in equal measure. It is a window into a world in which magic can happen, a strange parallel universe where one small gang of street kids can create a music that now stands alongside the greatest of its time and beyond.