Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
MAP NO. 19: AMERICA ITS FOLKLORE
I like the way that Canada and Mexico are teeming with fauna but entirely uninhabited by humans. (No folk, no folklore.)
TEXT AND DRUGS AND ROCK'N'ROLL?
I don't have a copy of this, and don't know the author, but it sounds interesting - and has a title that gets itself noticed:
This is the publisher's blurb, not mine:
Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.
Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few.
This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians use the material of Beat literature in their own work? How did Beat figures become embroiled in the process of rock creativity?
These questions are addressed through a number of approaches - the influence of drugs, the relevance of politics, the effect of religious and spiritual pursuits, the rise of the counter-culture, the issue of sub-cultures and their construction, and so on. The result is a highly readable history of the innumerable links between two of the most revolutionary artistic movements of the last 60 years.
This is the publisher's blurb, not mine:
Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.
Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few.
This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians use the material of Beat literature in their own work? How did Beat figures become embroiled in the process of rock creativity?
These questions are addressed through a number of approaches - the influence of drugs, the relevance of politics, the effect of religious and spiritual pursuits, the rise of the counter-culture, the issue of sub-cultures and their construction, and so on. The result is a highly readable history of the innumerable links between two of the most revolutionary artistic movements of the last 60 years.
I KNOW
I've written this in verse form - ok, doggerel - and it explains itself:
CILLA BLACK
OR THE STAR OF THE NORTH-WEST
CILLA BLACK
OR THE STAR OF THE NORTH-WEST
When first I lived in Liverpool
Some pleasure for to find
I heard a local singer there
Most pleasing to my mind
The scene was getting groovy then
The year was ’62
And in among the beat-group boys
This girl was fresh and new
Her rosy cheeks, her gutsy voice
Like arrows pierced my breast
She was The Maid Of Merseyside
The Star Of The North-West
She knew her black soul music then
She knew her r’n’b
She made her reputation
Without panto or TV
You’d catch her at the Cavern then
Or the Tower in New Brighton
Singing with a rhythm group
The punters couldn’t frighten
But Cruel Fate did wreck her
Her career was soon a past ’un
Poor girl, she signed to Decca:
Fame was snatched from Beryl Marsden.
So when the music biz sent round
Some tone-deaf cockney hack
To sign a slice of Mersey Sound
There was only Cilla Black.
MAP 8: FIRST INTEGRATED LONDON TUBE MAP
Since the British media seems to be celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground, here is the earliest integrated map of its lines, created and published 105 years ago by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), which comprised the Bakerloo, the Hampstead, the Piccadilly and the Metropolitan District lines, in conjunction with the four non-UERL lines:
MAP 7: AN OLD PULVERISED LONDON
A newly created interactive map showing exactly where all the bombs fell on London during the Blitz. Astonishing. This is just the YouTube preview. The real thing is here.
25 YEARS SINCE THE DEATH OF JAMES BALDWIN
James Baldwin died on December 1st, 1987. He was poor, black and gay at a time when being any one of those would have made life difficult enough. He became an important 20th Century American writer - of essays as well as novels - and yet, modishness being what it is, he's very under-attended and seems little regarded today. I was reminded of his importance, not least in shaping public consciousness about the Civil Rights struggle, by finding his book Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) when I was researching Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell. Among much else, Baldwin writes there with great perspicacity and passion about his own first impressions of visiting McTell's home state of Georgia.
This video section is actually not about Malcolm X, but about growing up in Harlem, New York, as the son of a southern family. He's as likeable as he is mesmerising, and to see this clip now is also to see just how much TV has dumbed down. It's not that he's a writer and therefore A Cut Above Your Average Talking Head: rather, that his care of expression and his moderate tone both seem remote, now, from how anyone on television, writer or no, ever chooses to comport themselves:
I admire this too, again for its tone, his comportment:
I wish he was still alive. He'd be in his late 80s and he'd still be interesting.
This video section is actually not about Malcolm X, but about growing up in Harlem, New York, as the son of a southern family. He's as likeable as he is mesmerising, and to see this clip now is also to see just how much TV has dumbed down. It's not that he's a writer and therefore A Cut Above Your Average Talking Head: rather, that his care of expression and his moderate tone both seem remote, now, from how anyone on television, writer or no, ever chooses to comport themselves:
I admire this too, again for its tone, his comportment:
I wish he was still alive. He'd be in his late 80s and he'd still be interesting.
UPDATE: 1000-YEAR TIME-LAPSE MAP
This blog entry offered a terrific moving map that swept forward through the turmoil of Europe's history/geography from 1000 AD until 2005. Unfortunately, the video of it had only been up here a couple of days when YouTube withdrew it from its website (and therefore from everywhere online), because of a disputed copyright claim. Apologies to readers who hadn't yet caught up with it here.
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