Had a similar moment with Desire many years ago. Also, ecstatic moments with 'Birth of New Life" by Drexciya and Nurse with Wound & Stereolab’s ‘Simple Headphone Mind’.
The most impactful one was hearing ‘Going Up’ by Coil for the first time - total WTF and mind blown. I just couldn’t get my head around it. This hauntingly beautiful first part, the repeated refrain, “are you ready to go now?”, like some musical accompaniment to accepting the brute fact that death is the ultimate truth of the Universe, and everything. Or the (sublime?) feeling of existential vertigo that I have to pass through on mushrooms.
The beatiful, almost operatic, falsetto in the second half, with lyrics about (going up) the floors in a shopping centre are
Article applies GSH to the modern era. In the current climate, a lot of lessons to learn from the past, esp the late 60s/early 70s, even if there isn’t an obvious parallel counterculture anymore. You have to hope enough cameras will eventually expose these fascist militias masquerading as the law, but it will take a lot more than that. Maybe we’ve reached the limits of what keyboard outrage (or even democracy?) can actually achieve?
Your hippy (grand)parents were getting teargassed by Nixon’s cracktroops, whilst you’re hitting ‘like’ and signing petitions in your slippers. But then again, I guess that is simplistic. We’re much more controlled, monitored, interconnected than ever. Anyone itching for revolution will flag up very quickly. Maybe you actually had it easy, grandpa?
I’m not sure what access is like to the FT, I get it free through work, but there should be a link here to use if anyone’s interested: Client Challenge
Last year, trying to avoid the misery of our current moment (the wars, the slop, the uninspiring leadership) and with nothing but sequels and reboots by way of a cultural response, I began rewatching all five seasons of noughties HBO show The Wire. Ostensibly a police procedural, The Wire follows a group of weary cops in an unwanted Major Crimes Unit trying to bring down Baltimore’s drug crews. But from the start, the underlying ambitions of its creators, former cop Ed Burns and former journalist David Simon, were clear. “The grand theme here is nothing less than a national existentialism,” Simon wrote in a leaked pitch to HBO from 2000. He promised that “the reward for the viewer — who has been lured all this way by a well constructed police show . . . is something that Euripides or O’Neill might recognise: an America, at every level at war with itself.” And it wasn’t hyperbole. The Wire was lauded as the best TV show of all time; two decades later it still is by many critics. The show ended in March 2008, before the financial crisis, as the campaign of a young presidential hopeful from Chicago, Barack Obama, was taking flight. Obama called The Wire his favourite show and the gay stickup artist Omar Little its best character. I admit that in rewatching it I was ostriching. I remembered The Wire as the product of a dysfunctional but ultimately moral time. I wanted to retreat into that past, to escape the chaos of Donald Trump’s America, if only for an hour at a time.
25 years ago, I worked nightshifts in Shoreditch (E London) sending press cuttings to clients. A courier on a bike would pick 'em up before dawn so they were despatched to offices by breakfast. Random clients, everything from gov agencies, banks, unions and even random individuals who simply wanted to see if they’d been mentioned in that day’s papers. A line of work, fair to say, that ain’t coming back…
One of the science clients just had one search term: ‘Dr Wakefield’ the notorious doctor not the town (tho the scanning software didn’t always distinguish!) I was thinking about the chaos his research caused families and the impact of casually linking MMR with autism at a time when it was less understood. In a way, it sowed the seeds of the suspicion of jabs that would follow during covid. Anyway, here we are… history repeating itself. Depressing, eh
Was that on Worship Street? Place I used to work at was part of a group including a place there that did tearsheets. Can’t remember the name of it but one of the big wigs was called Donal.
Yes! (BMC) an old factory converted into an office. Most interesting crew I ever worked with. There was no real management at night, and you were left to your own devices, provided it all got done. The air was usually thick with cig smoke. It was all units down The Hope opp Smithfields Monday 7am when the shift ended. Working nights was brutal but you really did see a different London. I sometimes wonder where they all are now.
That’s it! I visited that office once or twice in the mid 90s. I worked for a similar outfit, only we supplied TV ads (that were taped off air by a network of OAPs with the VHS recorders that we provided them). We were bought by The TV Register who then also bought BMC iirc. My ex worked at the TV Reg and did some work with people at BMC. We hung out briefly with a guy there called Hugh something. Lost touch years ago.
I might have crossed paths, dunno. I started summer 2000. Was pretty easy to get those gigs then. It was the last gasp for old media. There were still people using scissors and glue! i was hired to test all the scanning as it went digital. All so quaint now. Our lunchbreak was at 3am! Pollos off Liv St. Some rum characters in there too, esp at wkd…
Think I left that role before you arrived. Your gig sounds more fun than mine back then.
I have a vague recollection of my ex having a really early version of a BMC website on a loaner laptop the size of a microwave, The site didn’t really work because we had no internet at home and it was only partially cached. Feels like a lifetime ago which, in a way, it was. Interesting times.
