Moorcock?*

A brief note to flag up my recent rather niche Pinterest additions. You'll find scans of my dusty old collection of books by (or edited by) Ladbroke Grove's leg end: Michael Moorcock. I collected these books mainly in my late teens when recreational pursuits collided with an insatiable desire to read. There wasn't much on TV in those days.

But MM - never, it has to be said, the world's most nuanced of writers; he did churn them out, my galleries are the merest tip of a really big iceberg) - still managed to win you over with size. Not only with trilogies, quartets and endless series of novels, but also with the sheer size of his imagination. No matter that he was portly, had a big beard and probably invented steampunk (double boo! even if we didn't know it at the time, obviously). To my peer group he was cool. He even had his own pet rock band.

What's more, via the integral part he played in forging a new sci fi aesthetic as edior of influential journal, New Worlds, he was the portal to other, even cooler writers such as J G Ballard, M John Harrison, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Thomas M. Disch, or even William Burroughs.

However I found that the tedious business of scanning lots of old books from my late adolescence focussed my mind on the way in which we experienced visual design a few decades ago. Was it design that brought music and literature so much closer together, or were the cultural lines merely so blurred in those far off days that illustrators could find work in more places?

Whatever the answer, the fact is that many of the artists who produced these covers also worked on album sleeves, cinema production design, magazines and more. They provided, in the absence of more than one Stanley Kubrick, the equivalent of today's brain melting CGI for the kids who, y'know, dug it. It also gave our world a kind of coherence. In the same way that Moorcock emulated his own Multiverse by writing a vast swathe of interlocking, intertextual books with recurring characters, the covers of the books connected us to other worlds, dreamed up by other musicians, writers and artists. Obvious, I know, but still true.

So there are covers by everyone, from Rodney Matthews (boo!), to Chris Foss (yay!), with even some real stinkers thrown in such as Boris Vallejo. The four 1979 Quartet Jerry Cornelius paperbacks are real favourites of mine.

One board is entirely devoted to the work of Bob Haberfield who I know next to nothing about, except that he's Australian and (if still with us) 76 years old. At the time I found his covers brash and clumsy compared to, say, the jewel-like hallucinations of Patrick Woodroffe (above) or the elegance of Bill Sanderson's Jerry Cornelius covers. But putting them together I admire both their vigour and their variety. Does anyone else know any more about this guy?

So, there you go. if you like dodgy '70s sci fi book covers, this may float yer boat...


*sorry, pun stolen from Tony Benyon in about 1904

The Wheel

Hurrah for this. It still pops up in my mind on a regular basis. posted by Tom Coates six years ago, it signifies a kind of lost Golden Age to me, when the people I worked with, at least tangentially (they worked in the same office) were making great leaps forward in online thinking. While I hardly understood what Tom, Dan or any of those other brainy guys were doing, I was infected by their self belief - a quality I seem to have a minus amount of - and the way in which they taught me not only to use the web but how to enter into the spirit of the web. I didn't pretend to understand most of it, and I doubt Tom even remembers me, but this picture stands for something i still believe in.

I'm quite aware that the WAY I use the web these days is positively neanderthal, being the equivalent not really of a quill versus a touch screen interface, but more like some cave man banging his head against a cave wall and writing something crude in his own blood. But I did at least learn a little about the semantic web, the possibilities of what we quaintly used to call web 2.0 and erm… alt tags. A swerve of events and I'm working in social media: a field that is fabulously buzzy and equally venal. In fact more venal, let's be honest, now. I'm not, and have never have really been in the business of selling things. That doesn't mean to say I haven't DONE it. I was, after all, a bookseller for over a decade. But looking through these pages i wonder if anyone thinks I'm just being a second-rate PR company? Which brings me onto this:

In the tradition of middle-aged self-examination, I've been trying to reassess what exactly 1) this blog, 2) my photography or 3) my music are FOR. As Balthus said:
[Art] is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

The first of the three is best answered here. Not that this is in any way definitive, merely an attempt to make it clearer for myself. If you flick back through the virtual pages of this stupid thing you'll find that most reviews or commentaries - post-my questionable Lost-watching days - are mainly positive. They're about things that I loved and want you to see if you have eyeballs and opposable thumbs. How bland…

Well, yes and no. I do seem to have a gift for the hyperbolic. Everything's 'fantastic' and amazing' and 'genius'. This is now often hatefully branded as 'passion'. Everyone must now have 'passion' for his or her field. It's what helps a sad little blog like this become widely read. 'What comes across is the passion for X': how many times do you hear that a day? Food, clothing, the manufacture of dog biscuits. They can all be done with passion.

Well, my point is that the word's overused (in much the same way that 'genius' is) - and that this blog's full of 'passion'. So where's the critical distance that I grew up worshipping in MY favourite cultural critics? I read a few of my old reviews and I see a flash of that sometimes: the ability to constructively pull apart a faulty mechanism and point out its flaws with fairness and erm… passion. But it mainly got me into trouble.

At some point in the early part of the 21st century, in tandem with the rise of the internet as our prime means of communicating, we lost the ability to handle such stuff, often it seemed for fear of offending the people who were possibly passionate for something that you passionately hated. The result of this cultural shift was the awful five star 'marking' systems that blight arts pages. While the writing's often exemplary (YOU try summing up anything in less than 250 words) it still leads to lazy reductionism - three being bad and four good - for the reader. This is why I always hated the Observer Music Monthly. It made everything seem great. But everything isn't great. 90% of it is bad or mediocre. 9% is perfectly nice. And maybe 1% is truly marvellous.

I've long-since decided to eschew some quixotic crusade for a critical press that tells it like it is. I even understand why any culture needs to prop up its own infrastructure by constantly coaxing people to try new stuff. Most people don't consume it, or at least only a fraction of what's on offer. Culture needs all the help it can get. But I now realise that this blog should 'fess up to the fact that in most cases my hymns to the latest film/play/book/album/gig that gets me scribbling are there because I genuinely love whatever it is. This blog is also not a brothel. It will not sell you stuff that is useless: only recommend stuff that you're free to reject, or disagree with. And above all; stuff that I do really feel has some kind of worth.

The 'irritability' quote in the blog title (from this) doesn't imply that I want to be angry all the time: find pleasure in being mean or gratuitously negative. In fact, it means that I react to those things that make me feel something. pleasant or unpleasant. Also, as a man who truly believes in the concept of Karma, I fail to see the point of using this blog to merely bitch about all the things that make my life, your life, anyone's life more of a living hell than it already is.

I'll still reserve the right to write more critical prose. Ridley Scott's Prometheus was such a giant let-down that I felt compelled to at least point out WHY. If only, again, more for my OWN purposes: writing does help you think more clearly. And I've actually held off writing about Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie, just for the reason that I loved it so much that I would easily exhibit more of that puppy dog passion. But in the end, you'll just have to trust me. If I write about something in glowing terms, I mean it. I really do. my next post will be about two films about London that I haven't seen (one by Julien Temple, one by Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting) and may contain references to the Olympic opening ceremony (despite my promises not to write about the Olympics): I'll probably love 'em. Just warning you...

Brought to B(r)ook(er) 3

My ambivalent relationship with bookshops due to a decade long career managing the bloody things has meant that I can easily miss out on stuff until it's been out for ever. Thus, while finally getting round to buying the latest M John Harrison novel I picked up Charlie Brooker's Screenburn, the collection of his TV criticism pieces from the Saturday Guardian dating from about 2000 onwards.
There's something utterly charming and comforting about reading a column which makes your own misanthropy look like mild irritation with a broken shoelace. Brooker hates for the UK, and all of his targets are utterly deserving. What's more he's incredibly fair-minded. While he bemoans the idiocy of reality show contestants, minor celebrities and Pop Idol contestants, he reserves his real ire for the complete c***s who think this stuff up. Not for nothing did Brooker invent the incredible Nathan Barley back in the day when he ran TV Go Home - the website that regularly had me laughing my tea through my nose (my favouritist ever TVGH character was Teeterlegs Jackson - the furious black 4 ft high detective who went around on stilts).
Not only this, but he's almost a poet in his use of language. No, really. Anyone who can describe Nigel Lythgoe as looking 'like Eric Idle watching a dog drown' or Anne Widecombe as having a face like a 'haunted cave in Poland' has to be some kind of genius.
But the real genius is the index. On its own it would make a great half hour read; with entries like Baker, Tom: has limbs torn off in space, 292 or Aspel, Michael: is considered dull, 8; possibly excretes eggs, 26; might as well fellate guests, 27. Whoops there goes my tea again...

PS: His Screenwipe on BBC Four is also fantastic. Try to catch it.

R.A.W R.I.P

A new year (and a lengthy blog hiatus - sorry Jones fans) broken with sad tidings. Not only has Alice Coltrane shuffled off, but one of my original heroes - Robert Anton Wilson.
It was originally his Illuminatus! Trilogy which fried my imagination as a young whippersnapper. Whereas most of my peers were getting 'turned on' by the usual suspects such as 'Zen and the Art...', 'On The Road' and Carlos bloody Casteneda - I fell for RAW's healthy, playful, questioning agnosticism and love of connectivity in the universe. Probably the modern father of conspiracy theorists, he was a prankster of the highest order and introduced me to more esoteric lore and leftfield theorists than was healthy for a young man ;-)
Hail Eris, and goodbye Bob. The next 23 spliffs are for you...

Put your clothes ON when you dance...

I have peculiar reading habits. While I love a good read of something new on the train/tube/bus/in bed and consume ridiculous amounts in very short time periods (a habit I never lost from college days) I reserve my 're-reading' matter to, yes you guessed it, the WC. Ok, I've gone too far haven't I? Well sod it...
Yes, I will pick at old texts, reacquaint myself with loved paragraphs and generally bone up again on stuff that I've forgotten. This is why reference books are great, as well as short story collections and collections of essays. Robert Christgau's 'Rock Albums Of The 70s' is a doozie, as are Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Anthony Lane's 'Nobody's Perfect' and my beloved hardback of JG Ballard's 'Complete Short Stories'.
So it is that I've recently been dipping into Frank Zappa's deeply-flawed-but-still-fascinating 'autobiography/rant' The Real Frank Zappa Book and was amazed at how , well, CLEVER he was sometimes. Not just with the black dots and lines, but in his analysis of our hell-in-a-handcart mentality when it comes to CULTURE. I was particularly struck by his chapter for his Dad, which not only puts forth the views that the music business has only been rubbish since young people took over in A&R (because they're far more conservative than their forebears) and that we all stand a good chance of dying a truly entropic death by ever increasing slavery to NOSTALGIA, but also this little gem:
'No Change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to. No musical innovation will ever succeed on a large commercial scale without the full involvement of the industries which profit tangentially from it: clothing and 'merchandise'.
Wow. Frank Zappa said that. Really...
Maybe this explains why, in London, the so-called cultural capital of this country, everyone under 35 dresses EXACTLY THE SAME. Homogeny is king (unless you count the idiots who think dressing like Russell Brand are being somehow radical). Boring clothes? Boring music scene. Simple.
This is gonna sound stupid and mawkish, but every day I miss FZ a bit more. I really do...

Weekend Views No.7

Sometimes life is synchronous to the point of madness. Take this example: I'm halfway through the latest collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - and i'm reading it on my journey home from Manchester's Futuresonic Fiasco. By the time I'm on the tube to Brixton I'm reading a story called 'Tony Takitani'. As I reach Brixton I just finish the story, walk up the escalator, step onto a bus and as I sit down I look up. The bus is passing the Ritzy cinema, and up on the hoarding it says, between Superman and Pirates of the ~Carribean...yup, you guessed it...Tony Takitani!
Weird. I'm sure all you film buffs out there will be screaming 'we knew that film was out!!' but put yourself in my place. I'd never heard of this film, and suddenly, seconds after READING this story, there it is on the silver screen. I nearly fainted. Especially as Murakami's tales are FULL of strange coincidences and almost surreal twists of fate.
Of course, I HAD to see it.
Jun Ichikawa's film of Murakami's tale of a lonely man whose wife cannot stop buying clothes is wonderfully minimal. Set to a suitably sparse piano score by Ryuichi Sakamoto it's shot in muted greys and with stylised panning shots seperating each quiet scene. Two actors play the four main characters with only their interjections into the spoken narrative providing most of what amounts to dialogue. Hardly anything happens, but that doesn't matter one bit. Now THAT's film making. What's more you get to see some beautiful clothes.
To think, if this chain of coincidence hadn't alerted to me the existence of this film, I might never have seen it. Wowser.
Life is strange sometimes...

Brought to book No.2

The big advantage of going on yer hols is, of course, NOT to get a good dose of skin cancer and ozone followed by rich food and trinket buying in some foreign field. Oh no. It's so you can grab the latest hardbacks in those handy to carry (not) 'airport editions'! So it was that I grabbed the latest David Mitchell opus, Black Swan Green.
Initially put off by the back cover's description of it being the experiences of a 13-year old growing up in a midddle English village in the early 80s, my doubts were further confirmed by a tendency to try far too bloody hard to place the reader back in 1981 (lots of references to pixie boots, Spandau Ballet and asteroids - for which I think we can blame the Andrew Collinses of this world). But hold on...this is David Mitchell, and he's GOOD. Veering wildly from the magical realism of his previous 3 novels he has power over words that lifts what could be a mildly funny, poignant picture of adolescence (shiver) into a poetic and gripping read. His best trick is to make you think all is mundane and then show you that even suburbia is as dark and arcane as any fantasy world. I laughed, I cried, I want more...

Brought to book No.1

Two tomes finally dispatched and leaving me much to chew over.

1) The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg (Yale 1987, updated second edn 2005) - Crikey this is a book which I'll be coming back to again, and again and again...The series of essays examine the experience and philosophy behind recorded music and is simply marvellous. Thanks to the Very Clever Dan Hill (VCDH) for this one. My favourite chapter addresses the idea that in using records for the purpose of, ahem, seduction, we give the music the role of substitute Cyrano De Bergerac. It pulls off the clever trick of being gritty and yet deeply funny at the same time.

2) Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns (2005) - Hoskyns' Waiting For The Sun was a masterful study of the babylonian world of the LA music scene and this focusses in on the canyon community and its rise and fall under the likes of 'Free Man In Paris' David Geffen and his ilk. Hoskyns (who, I feel certain I read somewhere, was himself once in the grip of marching powder) again pulls off a trick; this time that of repelling you from the egotistical mania of a peer group lost in a snow blizzard, while still making you gasp for a line or two. Careful with that mirror, Eugene...It confirms everything you ever thought about the Eagles and weighs in with yet more evidence that Neil Young isn't the lovely old hippy you always thought he was. Far be it for me to blow my own trumpet (oh hell, this is a BLOG for God's sake) but my review of Jimmy McDonough's book touches on this...

But it also finally got me to buy some Randy fucking Newman (incidentally, after reading Waiting...I discovered the mighty Nilsson), and thank goodness. His (Newman's) intelligent cynicism (cf: Steely Dan) is like the freshest air across my blanded out synapses. The only downside (as with Harry N) is his rather TOO American reliance on the ragtime format. But still moving...