It began in 1977, at second-hand: I knew before I heard a note of it that I’d love Cecil Taylor’s music. In a jazz encyclopaedia I’d already read of a pianist “zipping and unzipping the keyboard” — but first contact came from a sideways leap out of bent chartpop. Across Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Mike Garson’s cocktail piano clichés mutate towards cancerous splinters, which rock reviewer Charles Shaar Murray approvingly compared to Taylor. I needed to know more.

With other princes of the Utterly Out — Ornette, Coltrane, Beefheart — I was, I confess it, puzzled by how tame they seemed against the buzz of advance promo. But Cecil — on Black Lion/Freedom’s 1975 Silent Tongues, his 1974 Montreux Festival solo performance — did not disappoint. Perversely, far more subsequent time was spent addressing Coleman and the good Captain, battling to discover ways to hear their sound as deranged delight, learning tolerance for the well-meant overreactions of enthusiasts. And so my response to these others to this day sometimes seems suspect, post-fabricated out of a need to be wowed, or to seem weird; the pianoman, by contrast, I always knew I could trust, to swoop in, connect instantly, and transfigure. With Cecil, no need to fake it.

So I didn’t visit often, though I dallied with his less demanding children — Von Schlippenbach, Tippett, Crispell, Shipp — and all too soon I was taking him for granted. The affair turned second-hand again, and stalled. Modernism’s dirty secret: avant-garde work requires the survival of the order it first flared against, or its full radicalism no longer properly registers. Mind switched to low, just like those Black Cultural Nationalists who voiced concern about Taylor’s ‘European’ influences — because deep, deep beneath their political bluster, they doubted an African-American artform could wrestle white tradition and win — I projected my own baffled timidity, and even dismay, onto an oeuvre I was no longer regularly checking.

The counter-force epiphany for me came with a CD full of what Stefan Jaworzyn has described as “Teletubbies-style verbal gibberish”: Chinampas (Leo, 1987). At which point, things I’d known for years – but been too nervous to accept – came suddenly clear. Like so many sympathetic yet humour-free interviewers down the years, catching the edge of a Cecil tease but missed its meaning, I’d overlooked countless clues. The cover to Silent Tongues — featuring Cecil, winsome in glasses and woolly hat – I’ve now felt joy towards for some 20 years: in retrospect, the gulf between this absurdly cute sad-little-boy mugshot and the record itself expresses nothing if not irreverent glee. In the sleevenotes to Blue Note’s Unit Structures (1966), dry crypto-Darmstadt analysis mutates into cut-ups, and wicked Burroughsian war on grammar. On Soul Note’s small-orchestra set Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants) (1985), on A&M’s impishly superb In Florescence (1990), on Chinampas, Taylor invokes Aztec gods — gorgeous, jagged, murderous deities more outrageously unsuited to worship even than the much-bothered Egyptian pantheon. Their presence among the grunts, rumbles and oblique exclamations punctuating In Florescence suggest a musician whose absolute confidence in his work frees him to kid, to plant the worry that it’s a giant joke. Indeed, this is more than just flirtation — again and again he soars, eagle-god turned trickster gremlin, way out over the abyss of the possible put-on, and never more gloriously than with the high-fired aztèque concrète that makes up the piano-free Chinampas.

Of course, the ‘whitest’ concert-hall piano virtuosos – and the composers that encouraged them – have courted official unrespectability when they became too flamboyant, too romantically individual, too inhumanly extreme or unplayable, from Liszt to Xenakis, from robot-lover Nancarrow to Glenn übernerd Gould. But when piano-play turns into self-absorbed callisthenic work-outs, when the musician presents as some superfit but otherwise daffy street-person, mazed into his own asides, gestures and solo dances, when the compositions are like architectural design-brainstorm sessions for the living city-of-the-future, and this unlikely idiot-savant dervish is busily, dizzily solving every urban conundrum there could ever be, we may begin to realise why most orthodox Cecil-crit favours lulling solemnity. For art-fraud on so titanic a scale – so vastly vivid, so elaborately detailed, so whirlingly learned – is no less startling than the ‘straight’ work it seems to send up. Indeed, it’s far more staggering, and even scary, in its implications — what kind of madman devotes his entire life-energies to the merely unserious? For me, the only works in the avant-garde canon that match Taylor’s serene, omniscient cheek are Finnegans Wake, and Vexations, Satie’s vast day-long hymn to absolute simpleton repetition.

As it was, Coltrane, all bruised earnestness and cosmic quest, became the poster-child for the New Thing, the model for what ‘being taken seriously’ would come to mean. Nobility? Self-denial? Avant-garde transformation as a solemn, lonely, painful, search? Well, yes — yet a glance at the lives of most known questers (knights errant, polar explorers) reveals quests as monuments to anti-domestic panic, with most seekers fleeing as much personal duty as they’re pursuing. All across the slopes of art’s Everests, a great deal of immature selfishness continues to mistake itself for the austere sublime. Much celebrated (rightly celebrated), Coltrane’s natural grace of spirit and vast generosity served mostly to obscure (A) how little imitated this was in Cultural Nationalist circles, and (B) how repressed, repressive and reactionary the CultNat version of radicalism quickly became.

By temperament, Taylor had chosen Out before Ayler, Coltrane or even Coleman, playing free years before this became the term for the play, his example encouraging each of them to take similar steps. He was always already Out; it was always already Play. His work — in its mischief-making badboy totality — has from the outset been not a quest but a masque, wherein the daunting modernist massif and its pervasively silly, naughty, niggling parody coincide. I love this music because it makes me happy — and it makes me happy because it refuses to sidestep, to underrate or even to disrespect the tireless teasing perversity at the core of human behaviour, because even if it wanted to shill for pompous fraudulence, self-seriousness or fast-track fake enlightenment, it just couldn’t.

… and we both agreed it’s bad and here’s why

it does the usual documentary thing, of hunting out a bunch of talking heads — family, professional, the commentatative pundit — and then merely stitching them together with stills and live footage into the same version of the story we always already know… anything odd or interesting that pops out of someone’s mouth is not returned to or dwelt on or even apparently noticed

the shape it offers is utterly conventional: beginning times (where from, where first played); times with miles (interrupted by drugs); GIANT STEPS; break-up of marriage; A LOVE SUPREME; final tour of japan and sad early death

these mounting avant-garde milestones are all routinely invoked, but really no attempt is made to say what made them milestones — nearly a dozen musicians are present yabbing away, but nearly none of them say anything whatever about the changing content of the music, coltrane’s technique, his approach, what was concretely at stake in the choices being made, on-stage or in the studio. there was no glimpse AT ALL abt what it is that JC actually did, that was new to and impressed other musicians — or bothered them. wayne shorter for example, a shrewd and highly intelligent man (as well as player), is on-screen for a little. I interviewed him once and got him to talk abt the effect the arrival of the beatles had on the scene in c.1964: he was funny and interesting abt how much they divided jazzers, how some pricked their ears up and others just said “more nonsense from whitey”. we know that jazz in the early 60s wasn’t a collegiate love-in, anything but… but JC has undergone retrospective MLK-ification, and the fights and fears are forgotten in the haze of blissed-in pro forma sanctification

(i’m not really dissing shorter, sonny rollins, mccoy tyner, benny golson or jimmy heath here — the latter two, as perhaps not-stellar-musicians who were JC’s friends and colleagues in the early days, did give good backstage anecdote, even if mainly abt the junk-ambience everyone was battling with, and the first three were either asked dull questions or — as likely? — had their interesting answers consigned to the cutting-room floor)

(here’s who I am somewhat dissing however: carlos santana, wynton marsalis, cornel west, BILL fkn CLINTON)

(tho west clearly knows little abt music in the sense I’m thinking abt, and somewhat gave that away in a performance of twinkly down-with-the-streets bullshitting that was at least somewhat signalling that he knew this doc was trash and was playing along, for you to spot and the director not to)

(and santana and also john densmore were at least talking as fans responding to something on the way to their own music and sensibility: the former a notorious spiritual-hat guitarwank bore after his early records, the latter apparently a massive elvin jones nut as a teen)

(cue for santana, the claim — do I believe this, I am not sure — that when he’s on tour he “purifies” every hotel room by burning incense and playing the whole of a love supreme) (cue for densmore lots of stills of JIM MORRISON, surely coltrane’s purest equivalent in the rock universe)

(also there were some historian-biographers and some embarrassed-seeming family members, who obviously love their dad but feel somewhat squinky abt this tin-eared project — their dad who I am happy to continue to believe was an unusually lovely and generous man, especially for a working musician) (scope for an ingenious approach: present JC as the anti-miles, and deal w/their journeys in compare-contrast parallel)

so yes, i was hoping at least to learn something or see or hear something that that wd help inch me in a little past my long-term JC-sceptic status: I get that people adore him and that he is considered important, but this very highly important contribution that none of us can put into words bores me, I find his tone entirely unappealing, and ditto the fetishisation of granite-hard everests of effort in the journey, like some kind of saxophonic rich piana. PEOPLE ONLY EVER TALK LIKE THIS ABOUT HIM — or if they don’t, they either weren’t selected for this doc or the relevant passages ending up unused

and I have no yen to push back on ppl’s veneration (much), but NOBODY TALKS ABOUT HIM WELL and I wish that could change: huckster-pundits clinton west and WYNTON FKN MARSALIS worst offenders in this respect. until the peerlessly maddening moment — my friend and and I p much turned to each other and shouted #SMDH — when EINSTEIN no less was wheeled out to explain and explore what GENIUS is, what it does and and how it work, completely with equations and everything floating past in the edit-collage.

of course they didn’t actually deploy the equations in any coherent or speculative or provocatising way, but they DID display them. the publisher’s motto is: every equation included in a popular science-writing book halves the readership…

well, here we do get THIS —->> but nothing abt chords or scales or what gitler meant by “sheets of sound” or the west african sound of JC’s soprano in “naima”, or the various things (political, “spiritual”) that the search for FREE actually meant to ppl, to coltrane or to anyone else…

(minor side issue: has relativity special or general even been used intelligibly to illuminate music? I think likely NO: i’d kind of love to see it pulled off somewhere, if only in the form of trolling, but — as an actual semi-credentialed mathematician w/a degree and everything, this was just halfwit piffle)

in general — and the einstein moment entirely fits here — the interstitial work was just lazy garbage. it was an era of strong photography, so it could hardly help looking OK from the stills angle, despite very few pictures you hadn’t seen 30 times before (and every photo was panned and zoomed in the same dull way): some of the live footage was genuinely new (at least to me; tho I very much doubt to an actual hard-seeking fan). it rested a lot too on some (I thought) quite bad mystical afro-futurist art as the backdrop point of rest. whenever they recreated a newspaper splash w/headline and photo, if you looked carefully you could see that the paragraphs of text too small to read were ALL just lorem ipsum fkn dolor, which wtf you half-measures cheapskates (obviously the recent TSwift hommage to same was witty and cheeky in comparison)

(scope for a second ingenious approach: shape the whole thing round lorem ipsum dolor, and the idea that the blow-the-top-of-yr-head-off playing of ascension is designed — lol like metal machine music — to reach a plateau of buzzing calm… )

and a final bad decision: denzel washington reading as coltrane’s actual voice, which just took away any quirky sense of the man himself and replaced it with humbug hollywood gravitas

(tbf this^^^ is a super-tough ask for any actor I think: but I’d almost have preferred — since we’re anyway in wynton-propinquity — something more outrageously ken burnsy as a v/o. something that gave a sense of past times and lost sensibilities: a courteous gentlemanly black north carolinan at sea in the turbulent city) (one of the takeaways from the stream of stills is how melancholy and also how gawky he often looked; his ungainly country-boy goofiness: he was no dapper hipster, quite the opposite)

so the move ppl use to dodge talking abt the music is donning the spiritual hat by proxy: and then — having invoked spirituality — say nothing whatever about it, what it means, how coltrane deployed it (as mask, as weapon, as balm, as what the fuck ever). closest to achieving actual concrete comment is sonny rollins, gnomic as ever and resplendent in an amazing crimson suit: for a start he substitutes the word “celestial” for the word “spiritual”, and does so in a context that implies the JC’s self-constructed pan-faith religiosity was a way to step away — away away far far away — from planet earth’s grief and crimes and conflict, and explore how to see and sketch and perhaps fashion shared samenesses among the belief-systems and cultural sonics of the many warring clans. “the big picture,” rollins calls it, simply and directly enough: and of course the doc sweeps past this and makes no connections, and hints at no sense that they just heard what they heard…

of course the word celestial (as slyboots rollins well knows) takes us to the jazz einstein who could (IMO) crack open all these issues, but we sweep past him entirely: this would be sun ra, whose chief sideman john gilmore is said to have inspired JC to exclaim “he’s got it! John’s got the concept!” ra is dead and so is gilmore, but marshall allen is (at time of posting) still alive and well and active!! why not get him in front of the camera? this film is after all clumsily named for a piece inspired by gilmore’s sound. “space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity,” says ra. “it is a order of sounds synchronised to the different order of being”

yes this is opaque and riddling — hallo and welcome to the heliocentric worlds! — but ra’s sense of vaster hierarchies or orders and layered geometries as a recalibration of mere mundane perspective is at least a well enough trod approach to see coltrane’s journey somewhat from a side elevation: and ra’s bleak pessimism is also a help I think. instead of the somewhat numbing glad-hand positivity of (allegedly) achieved lovely oneness — which is what I’m most allergic to in the backward-looking coltrane discourse — there’s SR’s often-stated belief that the human race haven’t got the concept and won’t get it and it’s already after the end of the world, brother. i don’t believe JC believed this — or anyway couldn’t bear to concede it to himself — and all of his sound is a FIGHT against it, on the exact same battle, and a fight (I assume) against the elements in himself which were drawn to ra’s scornful (and invigorating) anti-humanism.

instead of course we get wynton, riding the reverence trane with total chutzpah, given his known views on free: and — despite his endless ability to grab up his horn and demonstrate the rhythms of a king oliver joint — again saying nothing (good OR bad) abt the musical choices trane was making [EDIT: no, he says that the earliest recording of trane’s playing, from the late 40s, while he was still in the army i think, demonstrates he couldn’t really play yet — but we’re just supposed to be able to hear why they’re saying so, nobody stops to say “this bit is why it’s bad”]. It somewhat occurred to me to wonder whether his condition of involvement was the non-discussion of ra (who his mentor stanley crouch has dismissed as a pure charlatan). at least — speaking of charlatans, or anyway trickster-figures enjoying playing them on TV — cornel west has the grace to say of ASCENSION that he has no idea what the fuck is going on, but he’s happy to be long for the ride bcz no doubt one day he will (in other words, I’m kinda glad someone voice this sentiment and that it was someone embracing it not denouncing it) (I might as well say here that west is someone I’m super-ambivalent about, as observer and as troll)

(plus I quite like imagining how grumpy CW probably was at the screening to find himself alongside fellow huckster-pundit clinton, doing his own — different but equal — version of a similar hustle for would-be-woke but unwakaeble northern urban whitey)

so anyway it ends in a crazily aggravating place which (A) exactly — if timidly — approaches the pan-cultural sense of mourning and bearing witness, JC in japan on his final tour, visiting the temples at hiroshima and so on: and hunting for a celestial language that translates the feels and the meaning of this for him to lie interweaved with every other mode cultural expression, and then (B) inflects the entire story through the self-regarding narrative of an insane japanese collector-fan who lives in a room that’s a cave-shrine to the commodity god coltrane, just jam-packed with every single gatherable object. the fact of this guy at all is a tell; a symptom: except he of all people is the worst person to be telling it

(i mean, imaginably not: he might have had insightful perspective, it’s just that he very evidently — after just a few moments in his presence — doesn’t. meanwhile we’re watching JC touring and already — tho it’s not clear if he knows it yet — mortally ill: which is simultaneously moving and maddening)

two last points (good moments thrown away):
• there was a colour shoot from the early 60s I’d never seen before where the photographer had directed him to look about in portentous male-model style in some backstage space full of ropes and ladders, which made me grin, bcz you can see his ugh-this-is-dumb look as he does it (this may be why the pictures aren’t well known of course)
• the tale of trane and miles feels thrice-told and yet the evident interesting friction of it feels to me endless sidestepped and elided: so of course the “how do you stop? just take the horn our of your mouth!” story is trotted out, but of course it’s also referred to as joke and in-studio banter, miles being incrutable his non-corny self, and not at all explored as an actual real aesthetic flashpoint between the two. there’s even revealing live 1959 footage of miles side of stage while trane solos in (apt title) “so what” and you can absolutely tell he’s thinking GET ON WITH IT JOHN

(originally created on THIS ILX POST. cross-posted at freaky trigger)

Quite apart from anything else, the past — even the very recent past, maybe especially the very recent present — is a mass of detail that’s hard to take in and process (not least because you have to push away the immediate present to do so). My conference produced a little over 12 hours of conversation in one large (often quite hot, by the end quite airless) room, and the discussion has continued elsewhere, in nearby pubs or bars after the two days of debates; also here at ilm, here at Freaky Trigger, and here and here on tumblr. Resonance 104.4FM broadcast it nearly in full on 25 May and have put the eight extracts up on their mixcloud site here (I don’t know how long for).

If I say the commentaries so far have been partial, I mean three things. First, that several of the commentators (Tom Ewing and Hazel Southwell in particular) are very good friends, co-conspirators even; they’re partial to me! Second, that with a couple of exceptions, almost no one commenting attended the whole thing: I actually agree with plenty Laura Snapes says, but she was only in attendance for her own session; purely as a description her account can only reflect that final 100 or so minutes (and the fact that she definitely had the pointy end of the Q&A, in the jaded final minutes of a long tiring day). And third, so much seemed to be touched on over the two days that wasn’t pursued, as is the nature of these events; certainly it’s going to take me a long time to dig down into what I actually now feel, less about the conference than about the era it claimed to explore, what this era meant and means, and why (or indeed if) it still matters at all. On the whole, I’m enormously pleased with how it turned out, just because I think such a lot has been gathered together and set down for future scholars and scoundrels to play with. (Transcripts of the panels are to be gathered into a book along with further memoir and commentary by those who attended and those who couldn’t: this is the plan, anyway. Though I’m taking a bit of a break first.)

Here’s an extract from the report I wrote for Birkbeck:

Underground/Overground:
The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85

This was a two-day symposium (15-16 May) at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As. Run by Mark Sinker, former editor of The Wire, it brought together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s, to explore their own experiences academics and other media commentators. The first day looked at the period when UK rockwriting emerged out of the conflict between a rising generation’s counterculture and the embattled establishment in the late 60s and early 70s. Through the witness testimony of participants, and the overview of historians of the era, panels examined the evolution of a critical outsider voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. We learned what the underground press felt like to write for, how the mainstream press responded to rock music and its social penumbra, and how the trade press reached out for some of these writers — notably Charles Shaar Murray, who had written for the notorious schoolkids issue of Oz as a schoolkid — and what it was like moving over to the trade press. We heard from those in the editorial backroom about what it felt like being on a weekly responding to stories in pop and politics, how decisions were made and what the pressures were: Cynthia Rose noted that this was a time when striking miners’ wives from Kent came to the NME office to discuss stories run on them.

On day two, we heard more from voices outside these offices and these times, as a kind of counterpoint to the more canonic stance perhaps established on the first day. Val Wilmer, a veteran of the music papers in the 60s, recounted what it was like as a woman — in the very male milieu of jazz writing— bringing back stories from the radical black underground. There was a panel exploring punk’s often difficult relationship to the underground that helped birth it, and another on those constituencies not so well served by the music papers at this time, looking at black music and dance music especially. Finally a somewhat turbulent panel attempted to answer the tricky question of legacy — how much does this history help or even affect writers today?

In the course of the two days, we heard from well known voices but also from people who have not often had the chance to enlarge on their perspective. An enormous amount was touched on that will be of interest to scholars in various fields, from popular music and media studies to sociology and political aesthetics. Some myths were exploded, others perhaps further entrenched.

One thing I always hoped to do as an editor — and it turns out being a conference runner is not dissimilar, in its joys as well as its frustrations — is to bring voices together that didn’t normally get converse in the same space: as at The Wire in the early 90s for a couple of years, so at Birkbeck in mid-May 2015 for a couple of days. In both cases, I was especially keen — as discussed in this earlier post — that the past and the present creatively encounter one another, perhaps on slightly different terms than they do ordinarily, in music-writing or anywhere else. So as well on critical writing on the various contemporary streams, rock and pop and soul and rap and dance and the electronic avant-garde, blah blah blah, I following my predecessor Richard Cook in deliberately encouraging contributions from the best voices from the old guard, voices talking about (at that point) some 70 years of jazz, and some nine centuries of composed music.

Did I succeed? At the time I thought no: I felt that this particular exchange, between the best of the present and the best of the past, was still a dialogue of the deaf. Few in the various territories I was yoking together seemed at that time curious enough to explore the interests of rivals sympathetically or insightfully. And of course in practice The Wire had a super-tiny budget, and our bat-signal was primarily attended to by those with nowhere else to go when they wrote on x or y, the high quality of their commentary notwithstanding. Writers who are experts in their own specific (sometimes small and embattled) fields tend to hunker down and play defence when they encounter enthusiasts for very different fields and tendencies and perspectives.

Then again — for this or other reasons — I wasn’t editor for very long. Because the ways to combine the perspectives, or use them creatively against one another, are generally worked out by readers, not least when or if they in turn become writers a few years down the line. An editor’s job is ultimately — in various different ways — to be a kind of idealised reader. And one element of this ideal is the plain fact that readers can enjoy a piece by one writer, and get a lot from — then turn the page and do the same with the first writer’s mortal scornful foe. From the thread discussion that hangs from Tom’s FT review, a theme emerges that I absolutely recognise, summed up by a useful word that hadn’t occurred to me: “oscillation”. Just in the territory the conference covers (but also in my conception of the role of The Wire in the early 90s), there seem to be a proliferation of essential oscillations between this or that or the other opposed cultural ethos*. Not just the way rock rubs against jazz on one side and pop on the other, and punk likewise; not just (as Frank Kogan notes on the FT comments thread) the way critical journalism rubs against investigative journalism, or the way that both rub against history; not just my overall theme of underground and overground, and how inside track and outside pressure work against one another; but the ancient uneasy dances of music with noise, and of order with desire; and of course of age with youth… If “1968-85” is my shorthand for the era of the self-consciously all-encompassing ‘outsider’ magazine [adding: in the UK] — “1968-94” only if you include Richard’s and my time at The Wire — then this is the era when technology and happenstance combined to fashion a clustered territory where readers were encouraged to enjoy and think about conflicting things; to move backwards and forwards between stances and traditions, in and out of close-read trust as they turned pages.

The potential of this world arose from the richness of this dividedness: and the refusal of any of the divisions to map simply onto the economic or racial or gender seperations and hierarchies that structure the larger world. And underneath — or above? — all these is the refusal of the not-quite division of music from the spoken or written world to settle into anything easily summarised, whatever the fashionable pressures of niche-marketing at target demographics. On one hand, all the splintered and shifting currents of music present a map of the real in its infolded complexity; on the other, there’s no music that doesn’t also manifest as a rhetoric of potential utopian togetherness: on one hand, there’s just the fact of the unpredictable constituent shape of any gathered crowd at any show; on the other, the potentially mutable readability of music itself, its last-instance combination of concrete sensuous quiddity and, well, untranslateability. We may occasionally agree what the words of a song mean, but all we can actually agree we agree on in the bits of music that aren’t words (i.e. re the meaning of this harmony, that chord change, this blue note, that grace note, this fill, that grunt…) is that we likely don’t agree. That’s the point: we’re gathered here together in part because we like that we won’t read it the same, and that’s the fun and the risk.

(Unlikely and probably unsustainable analogy: the Bible shared in a shared language you mostly didn’t understand enabled religious unity; however — and Lollardry notwithstanding — the Bible translated into a shared language you DID understand meant a splintering into warring sects…)

The panel I was secretly most pleased to have convened — because it dug into the kinds of backroom work that people who never worked in print-age newspaper or magazine offices rarely understand, however closely they’ve read the output — was the final one on Friday, which Tom ran: The encroachment of professionalisation on a generational playpen — What were the pressures in a music paper’s editorial office, and what was the potential? Half-joking about the working conditions, Cynthia Rose used the term “plantation journalism”: the papers themselves were really make a LOT of money, but little of it reached the editors and stringers, hired to deliver a Stakhanovite output day after day (these were cheaper times to live, for sure, but there was still no margin to put by even a penny of every pound you earned). Tom reaches for a rather different metaphor: “… [T]he sense of the work on an underground or weekly mag – the circus of sheer effort involved in bringing the bastard to land each week, that was grand to hear about, like a hundred years ago you might have heard men talk about life on a whaler…” This was a small, shared world, baffling and perhaps worse to those who come long after, beleaguered by surging pressures but united by task into intense group loyalty, its reward mainly a very local prestige, with (lurking at once just over the horizon but also, unmentionable, within the crowded quarters) the terrific Moby-Dick shaped leviathan of, well, what, exactly? The implicit politics of the craft of this long-vanished music-writing worldlet?

There are plenty of other very smart things that could be quoted in that thread. But this is me writing, so right now instead I’m going to quote myself, because I think this is relevant: “We live in a time of extremes of proximity, not just between cultural blocs formerly more safely distanced (or so it seemed, in the metropole), but also between present and strong representation of elements of the past […]: I think negotiating these proximities has become a *lot* more perilous, but we actually do have to negotiate this situation (and not just wish it away as a symptom); which inevitably means become expert in far more things than we perhaps formerly believed we signed up for.” The internet has collapsed distances, and not just between the many militant faiths and political stances as they exist in the once-wide world today: we are more than ever, every day, hard up against idealised echoes of the past, and more than this echoes of various rival idealised pasts, making very strong demands on us. We castigate those who wish to return us to such-as-such a point in the past — arguing (generally correctly) that they have no strong sense of what it was actually like — and then we turn round and lament that such-and-such an organisation or institution is not what it was, and will only return to relevance when it rediscovers and reanimates its earlier principles and purpose. At which moment, others naturally castigate us. In other words, how we address and draw from the past is as live and tricky an issue as it’s ever been: even “where’s that jetpack I was promised!?” is an appeal to a past mode of futurism. As time passes, revolutionary purists more and more become original-intent reactionaries: one thing we ought to have learned from punk is the inextricable tangle that year-zero vanguardists get themselves into as they thrust us to the future: “rip it up to start again” is an intrinsically conflicted demand…

A conference organised to cover 1968-85 can (just about) get away with being eight panels and roughly 30 people: probably not representative of those involved, but not quite out of sight of it. As Hazel said to me at some point, how would you even begin to select people represent the last 15-odd years? You’d need 20 panels with 50 people on each. An ocean so full of vessels, and indeed wrecks of vessels… In their physical and structural make-up, the seas we sail have changed utterly. To quote myself again (this time from a 2009 essay for a collection on Afrofuturism that rather irritatingly still hasn’t appeared: A Splendidly Elaborate Living Orrery: Transplanetary Jazz: Further Thoughts on Black Science Fiction and Transplanetary Jazz):

With the internet, the discursive cosmos can seem inverted, matter for emptiness, emptiness for matter: a multitude of isolated geocentric bubbleworlds, planets and asteroids dragged into their neutron gravity, the heavens become a dense, grinding press of shattered astral matter… Encounters are still possible: to tunnel to this or that bubble isn’t rocket-science. But no gorgeous sunflare or night glow through velvet dark to call us, magnets to the romantic eye all broiled to cinders. And history — that painstaking reconstitution of real-time fragments — seems harder than ever. Stargazing has become a shuttered archeology of the hardscrabble crystalline sky.

A friend who sat though the whole thing, both days, described it afterwards as being the tale of a long battle utterly lost. And half of me sadly says yes to that; and half of me stubbornly thinks no. In practical terms, of course we can’t reinvent the music-press of the 70s and early 80s: it was never less than a curious serendipity, a confluence of a great many unrepeatable things; it was rooted in technologies that no longer exist and a society that has very much mutated. As a format, it was as highly unstable as it was path dependent: it didn’t make much economic sense, and very few writers made their fortune from it (a few made their fortunes escaping from it). Maybe for a while it was possible for a select few, with the right gifts but also the correct attributes, to make an inexpensive living from it (which I never did; my entire working life I’ve made my living basically correcting other people’s spelling). Many many people were unable to break into that select few — I made a point of inviting some people who were outsiders at the time, even if they momentarily had their foot in the door; who don’t ordinarily get to join in the retrospectives. There’s no dearth of good writers today, that’s not the problem at all (OK don’t get me started on good editors). But we haven’t found a way of making the current set-up pay for itself, in a way that’s remotely fair to the majority of the writers battling their way through it.

But it was also always after all a tale of the belief in the benefits that accrue by unleashing the unlettered urchin glee of the young on the wider world — on cultural legacies till then beyond their ken — and then battling with the problem of how things fell out when this wider world, as it always did and always will, began (a) to return the not-unpoisoned compliment, and (b) to include the past. As for (a), the urchin cheek now flows both ways, and now and then respectful tact flows with it also, and the two are needed, going in both directions, for adult relationships to survive that that aren’t lifeless or toxic reverence.

But (b) is much tougher to trust in — the past only ever has unbiddable parity when it manifests as a stony unchanging weight, the return of the dead as a forbidding monument. Yes, perhaps the designated crew can journey out to it the way we did with Afropop in the 80s or KPop over the last few years, with care as well as insolence, with fannish fascination as well as straightforward well intentioned inquisitive ignorance — but with Afropop and with KPop at least there was potentially a case that a similar counterflow might push back, to challenge the errors and rude liberties taken. That the implicit problem of “who’s this WE, white man?” could one day dissolve or transform in the encounter, to everyone’s benefit. But how can the past push usefully back in like fashion?

Journalism, including cultural journalism, is of course primarily about the now — it’s called NEWS for a reason. And part of working out what’s actually significant now includes a recognition of the relevant force and quality of the various flows. I’ve paid tribute to these music-magazine and weekly paper offices of long ago because — by the serendipity of the times — they saw a coming together of writers and editors from very different backgrounds, responding to very different calls. And that’s part of the complex, contradictory weave that I value, or mourn, if that’s the appropriate word. But now I think of it, the best of the writing exhibited the same characteristic: every writer’s indiviudal style that I admire from then (and also now, because this hasn’t vanished) was and is a crackling codeshifting weave also, of threads that come from very different sources. (Because good writers are always readers, and these were always wideranging readers, and listeners too…)**

And as codeshifters get older, their involvement to history — the one I’m obscurely worrying at throughout this rambing post — of course grows in and out of their relationship to their own youth; to their memory; to the values they set out with long ago; all this is bound into what they do and who they are. And some people settle into this badly, because they can shift themselves into a place of comfort and shallow complaisance. And others, well, others find they’re always already been embedded in a world that has cultured such negotiations and such oscillations reasonably effectively: they maintain curiosity, self-awareness, self-irony, amusement, kindness, anger, the ability to manage simultaneous contradictory status and pressure and pull. The trapdoors and the timebombs, they’re coded right into us, if we know how to listen — and of course we learn to listen to our inner pirate crew by learning to listen to others; others often not at all like us, insofar as we’re even like ourselves. How we address the popular, how we prioritise the semi-popular, how we respond to the unpopular or the plain unknown, these are ever-more linked into our relationship to the past, recent or deep: and this is not going to change; if anything it’s going to intensify.***

*The world seems to be divided on what a correct plural of the noun ethos is: ethe or ethea or (the incorrect but greeky) ethoi or (the anglicised but silly) ethoses. In the mood of the moment, I choose to take this to be telling…
**I’m going to defend the mixedness of this overall metaphor as further evidence of what it is I value: gallimaufry, salmagundy, macaronics: pie itself gets its name from the mixed jumble of items found in a magpie’s nest…
***There’s a peril in dredging up the carcasses of the vessels of the past, and probably more than one, especially if you do it collectively. Collapsed across the treasures you hoped to re-acquaint yourself with is the bony evidence of crimes you’d hoped perhaps to forget, and so on. But the discussion of all that is for the future, now, when the book starts to be made. For now, I want once again to say a powerful and heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who participated and attended, and advised or helped in ways large and small. It was what it was, and what it’s going to be, who can say?

A few weeks back, Marcello asked if I had any thoughts on this TPL post (about, among other things, Johnny Hates Jazz and The Wire as it was in 1986/87). Well, I did and I didn’t: I did because this era of my mentor Richard Cook’s project is very much the making of me, and I absorbed an enormous amount of his sensibility and thought a lot how to advance it best (whether or not I did is for others to judge; sadly he’s no longer with us for his perspective). But I didn’t (at least tactically, for now) because I have for most of this year been organising a conference on UK music-writing in the 60s, 70s and early 80s, trying to focus on how things had evolved from roughly 1968 (and the discussion of rock in the underground press) through to maybe 1985, when (in my judgment) Live Aid hit the inkies hard sideways, and changed their political ecology for good (Geldof’s revenge, you could call it). The serious social potential of pop began to be more and more of a topic for the tabloids and the broadsheets: the inkies began more and more to fold in into their own niche, exploring less and less. In this they were reflecting changes in the world, to be sure — but they were also amplifying and accepting these changes.

Richard’s was (to me, then) the smartest part of the counter-response to these shifts — The Wire considered as a magazine about all possible music and indeed all possible ways to write and think about music, including the free play of the most scholarly anti-philistines against pop’s and punk’s cheerful teenage school’s-out yawp (not to mention a phalanx of more studied anti-music and anti-art stances). Max Harrison alongside Val Wilmer alongside Biba Kopf alongside, well, me.*

Anyway, looking too long and hard at (meaning reassessing) all this right now means not just distracting me from a rolling reassessment of the earlier era — as I chat to the various likely participants in my conference, and recalibrate my understanding of how things were — but probably undermining my entire current provisional grasp of what I need to be grasping. So for now**, you should be boiling what I am (possibly) thinking out of here (where I outline the purpose of the conference and name the participants) or here (a Facebook page you can like and also share) (share it!) or here ( tumblr with some nice pictures and also rolling thoughts on what organising a conference entails) (grief! also joy! so far much more joy luckily… )

Here’s who’s confirmed (reverse alphabetical): Val Wilmer, Richard Williams, Mark Williams, Simon Warner, David Toop, Bob Stanley, Hazel Southwell (nee Robinson), Laura Snapes, Mark Sinker, Cynthia Rose, Penny Reel, Mark Pringle, Tony Palmer, Charles Shaar Murray, Paul Morley, Toby Litt, Esther Leslie, John (aka Jonh) Ingham, Barney Hoskyns, Jonathon Green, Beverly Glick (aka Betty Page), Paul Gilroy, Adam Gearey, Simon Frith, Nigel Fountain, Tom Ewing, Kodwo Eshun.

(Not quite confirmed but definite interest shown: Tony Stewart)

Panel topics not entirely coalesced yet but will likely include: what the undergrounds knew that the mainstream was missing; rhetorics of outsider style; the changing make-up of bohemia; handling pressures on the playpen, professional and commercial; the rock press as a species of agit-prop samizdat; and legacy and lessons today…

You’ll need to register/book here but it’s free!

*Me (that is) as in the me just today delighted to be in receipt of the intelligence that (OMG LOL) Daphne & Celeste (@Daphne_Celeste) is now following you on Twitter!
**My rule-of-thumb back in the late 80s and early 90s, on ways to ensure The Wire really actually did have the widest possible scope, was to think of it as the mini-arena in early 80s NME jostled with mid-70s MM, allowing strategic space for sensibilities like Musics and Collusion, the late 80s Village Voice (a revelation to me) and even (bcz I have never not been a bit of a goth) Zigzag.

PˆNK S LORD SÜKRÅT CUNCTØR ON 30 MAR 2014:

“Queen Queen Caroline washed her hair in turpentine”

I don’t at all buy that strong emotional response to the death of someone you didn’t personally know is *necessarily* fake or silly. To jump sideways into it, here’s something I wrote on another website when the mass social-media lament for the death of Steve Jobs was being discussed, similarly scornfully:

“My mum wept when Willie Rushton died. She never remotely knew him, except as a face on telly or a voice on radio she enjoyed; he was a few years younger than her, a celebrity of a fairly niche type — and his death hit home.

“I was puzzled at the time, as I found him vaguely annoying, but afterwards it seemed pretty obvious she was weeping — as much as anything — for her own youth; for the bright cast of a particular hoped-for world she’d envisioned when young, and this was as much as anything a lament for the way things hadn’t turned out the way she imagined, for her and for the world. Rushton — in some small, almost private way — was bound up in this (memories of she and my dad when first married, bright semi-innocent young things reading Private Eye in its very early day and caught up in the early 60s notion that things were moving on away from the dreary stifling past, opening up, changing… something like this).

“Seems to me the Apple story can easily be fitted into a similar narrative, on a larger scale: a widely shared naive utopianism that felt like the air you were breathing at a particular time — and now, with the death of someone apparently central to it, you suddenly face not only your own mortality (that happens with any death), but also the sense of the foolishness of the optimism with which you set out on your current journey long ago; the degree to which, yes, you’ve wised up since (you’ve had to) and you recognise how much more flawed and perhaps even empty were the things you once invested so much in than you saw at the time; and above all you see the contrast with where you’ve ended up; where — if you have this kind of empathy — we’ve all ended up, given how abrupt the recent economic pull-up will have been, for many. Obviously there’s a lot more actually being mourned than simply this guy; it’s a public outlet for endless private griefs — hence its inchoate, oversimplified intensity — but also I think for a kind of vague youthful solidarity of outlook and temperament and hope; a recognition that it’s gone, and that it was maybe never worth as much as you hoped, and that nevertheless you preferred yourself when caught up in its fevers and deliriums than yourself today.”

I was awake and watching the story of Diana’s death unfold in real time on TV in the early hours of that sunday: a friend had called to let me know, and we stayed on the phone as we watched, wrapped in blankets and talking it through. She had been awakened by an acquaintance who slept with the telly blaring (an acquaintance who had something of an annoying and obsessive crush on my friend; rather than stay talking to her, or sitting through it alone, she’d thought “Mark is a journalist, he needs to know…”). This meant I knew very early, and then missed most of the daylight sunday you’ve all described (I went back to bed and slept in). It also meant that the news was marked with dreamstate oddity and even unreality for me — and nothing about it afterwards surprised me. I was in Amsterdam on holidaythe rest of the week, away from even Dutch TV; Dutch newspaper billboards were the closest I came to enduring blanket coverage, and actually it was far from blanket, just a few screamer posts on kiosks, and headlines on magazine covers on shop counters.

Two people I knew well were really upset — I was already in the process of terminally falling out with one (for unrelated reasons) and never got to quiz her on it. The other is someone who’s unusually self-aware and self-critical: when I interrogated her, she was straightforward: “It’s not really about Diana, Mark, really I think I’m mourning myself.” (Actually this is probably where the insight for the Rushton quote comes from, if insight it is.) I’m hesitant to generalise about the two of them — quite apart from anything else, they disliked each other intensely — but I suspect a complicated and fraught sense of who they were in relationship to their own families and backgrounds is part of the story; there was a lot of anger there. If Di’s luck in the early 80s had been the very opposite of meritocracy, this too might have its attractions: after all, happiness of all things shouldn’t actually be something you have to EARN, via superior mind or talent. Everyone deserves it; this I take to be a root for some of the vague shared idealism apparently torrented onto her, however contorted the connection seems. It surely can’t be very surprising that a family relentlessly presented to us as a social and political symbol of cohesion and continuity gets a fvckton of private symbol projected onto it — and that apparent rifts in that unity and continuity take on intensely personal meaning.

Nor are such vast events at all a new thing. I’m old enough to remember my dad travelling to London in 1965 to be part of the (vast) crowd for Winston Churchill’s funeral. I watched it on (black and white) TV and painted a picture of it — all dark brown smeary colours as I recall (I was five). Typically — this very much fit in with family lore — Dad had arrived in London only to realise he had flu; so he spent the day itself feeling sorry for himself in bed at my grandparents’ house. Thirty-odd years before that they had taken him out to view the parades for the coronation of Edward VIII — oddly enough, since I’m pretty sure they were both still in the communist party at that point — and he had spent the entire time squatted on the ground putting gravel into his cap, and missed the horse and the carriages and everything (he was five).

But more to the point, two centuries ago, another Prince of Wales set aside a wife, Caroline of Brunswick — and relentlessly smeared and scorned her in order to force a divorce. At his coronation, in 1820 (he became George IV), she arrived on the steps to claim her crown. Security barred her from entering the ceremony; she died three weeks later (of grief or exhaustion or disappointment or possibly just ordinary pre-modernity illness). During all this time enormous public sympathy, among the middle and artisanal classes, swelled and swelled — to the point that she was functioning as a symbolic rallying point for radical anti-establishment voices like Cobbett. Absurdly enough, no doubt — I doubt she much admired the Jacobins, though the prince’s pet press often laid this charge. Her woeful tale — or lurid versions thereof — was excitedly taken up the nascent yellow press based round Seven Dials…

A little while after Diana’s funeral, the writer Christopher Hitchens made a TV polemic mocking Dianamania. It wasn’t a good programme: for a start, TV never really suited him, he always seemed stiff and anxious and sweaty, and his undeniable gift for a sentence on the page rarely translates — said out loud it could come across orotund and pompous. He didn’t really trust or respect the medium, and inevitably it turned this contempt back on him. I’d always liked him as a writer because he seemed strong on ambiguous subjects, in particular the subtle complexities of the reliably middlebrow — on Larkin’s private politics for example, or on the former leftist and intellectual turncoat Conor Cruise O’Brien. He was never great on popular culture (my personal theory here was that Hitchens always relied on his pal Martin Amis for insight into UK popular culture; Amis being a man whose entire body is made of tin ear). But this — to me, as someone who had admired him — was worse; scornfully simplistic and hectoring and smug in its mockery of the phenomenon of public emotion: a shock and a foreshadowing. Of course, the “stiff upper lip” is a semi-modern invention itself, a device fashioned in dozens of efficiently ghastly schools up and down the land, to firm up the maintenance and management of a vast empire — to demonstrate “our” fitness to govern the world’s chaotic masses. Seriously, there was no stiff upper lip in 17th or 18th century Britain; quite the opposite. And sure enough, four years later, Hitch would accelerate his transition across the political spectrum and gleefully throw himself into the cheerleading for all-out war; a lurch back into empire-think, the self-regard of the idea of a heroically civilised “we” put here in the world to punish the barbarians; to violently force on them the gift of civilisation. This too was an atavism, whatever its more-rational-than-thou demeanour and complacent mansplainy privilege.

All of which is perhaps a way of saying we live in a strange and ancient land — with several peoples and languages and all kinds of subterranean currents and blockages surging through its history and across its terrains. I’m prepared to accept that mass delusions and folk panics are a social fact, and sometimes a scary one, which we should try and sidestep — but I also believe that sat goblinish among them is the idea that we educated moderns at least have made our way out onto the calm cool uplands of reason and sensible ordered life. Of course we haven’t: quite apart from anything else we are all of us still battling family demons; and of course we respond to subterrean historical forces as we would to a book or film: we’re genuinely moved by things that aren’t at all present in our physical lives, which nevertheless have enormous force in our inner landscapes. In the 1930s, when the civilised European space as he saw it was threatened by the rise of fascism, T.H.White wrote The Sword in the Stone, a book about the soon-to-be King Arthur being trained in anachronistic democratic theory by Merlin, a wizard who lived backwards through time; White based much of his story on a romance written by one Thomas Malory, in the last ghastly decades of the Wars of the Roses. The fragile just and chivalrous space that Malory imagined Arthur creating was called Camelot; it would be shattered in later books by Arthur’s vengeful bastard son Mordred forcing a legalistic war with Arthur’s best friend, Lancelot. White doesn’t call this land England or Albion or Britain: he calls it Gramarye (as in “Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye”, from the last verse of Kipling’s poem “Puck’s Song”). Gramarye is a strange old english word which has given us the modern words grammar and grimoire (meaning a texbook of magic) and — of course, bringing it all back to Diana — GLAMOUR. White’s books would be gathered in 1958 into a single volume, called The Once and Future King; the fourth book, bleak and poetic and never published separately, in which Arthur dies and Camelot falls and Malory steps into view, is called The Candle in the Wind.

Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Scargill and Richard Jobson, among others. Tom Ewing and Frank Kogan are already arrived in the comments on excellent form: my fantasy thread would eventually also include Mark E. Smith, Robin Carmody and Robert Christgau duking it out with Liam and Noel Gallagher and maybe even one of the Appleton sisters…

The media momentum in the mid-80s was very much towards the elective affinity niche: people who took themselves to be anti-system dissenters* had pioneered the communication micro-cluster as a supposed zone of resistance (the indie label, the avant-garde movements, the specialist journal, the theoretico-critical discipline), but the system they declared they were resisting was actually not at all unhappy with this development. Self-balkanised geometries relocate (and quickly muffle) dissent. Freedoms of choice; freedoms of association: knowledge and intelligence arrive and evolve as a consequence — of course — of a degree of unfreedom in both choice and association. There was a knot here, a contradiction inside a conflict inside a conundrum: fuzzily but very strongly, I wanted start from the established reactive niche to push in another, much wider direction, against the encroaching self-quarantine around me; to shake up all the little comfort zones of specialisation. What would a magazine look like that covered everything, from every perspective? What would its production routines and technical shortcuts be? How would this ethos shape its editorial tactics and strategies?

(I should write this whole story up properly. Actually I have been writing it up properly, in the guise of a review of a record no one likes, including me and its makers. Read it when I finish it aka THE INDEFINITE FAR FUTURE dot dot sigh #smh)

Anyway, like Paul I too left The Wire, my project not at all finished — luckily with a few professional skills I could barter into a (much less ambitious) working life. For a decade or so, from c.2000, I had been giving a good part of my time — and surely more significantly my emotional energy — to my parents’ welfare: they were increasingly old and increasingly ill, and I owed them the best of me. Now that this duty is properly discharged, I’ve been returning to the projects of my youth, and wondering again — pretty ludicrously, given all the changes in media and how you get paid — about running some kind of magazine. Knowing full well that I have neither the resources (time/money) nor (in certain basic ways) the temperament, lessons I learnt the hard way the first time round. What should I be doing instead? The internet very much suits my temperament and habits, in good and bad ways. How can I shape these into a thing that’s useful — or anyway beguiling — for others (as I like to believe I briefly did, long ago, in the aftermath of Virtual Space issue zero, which helped get me an editorial role at The Wire).

At a minimum, I’d like to be pointing readers to the various writers that I routinely turn to, and see what transpires. If I could even get people squabbling debating in the comments-threads here, and attract traffic as a consequence of the smell of blood in the water quality of the discussion…

Have fun starting arguments? Light the blue touchpaper and lean in? No: those may have been my mottos at The Wire more than 20 years ago, but I don’t think they helpfully apply any more. Firestarting is hardly the problem on the internet: it’s how to bring together mutually inflammatory material and not set off exhausting flamewars. It’s something patiently grown-up, not something cheekily adolescent. Grown-up but enticing; catching, even. Hmmmm.

Let’s pick a scatter of who I might mean, and you the reader can do the math. Bearing in mind that my attentions will shift from month to month — I read a lot, and I likeread more a lot more than I hateread (though as you’ll see this somewhat means I merely hateread vicaroiously). I’m a magazine journalist: by definition I honour my boredom as hidden critique. If the butterfly-brained refusal to settle is the manifestation of one kind of symptom, incessant re-appearance at the same spot is another. This would be a very rough sketch of a possible ground; let’s just say that, and not pay attention to the clangour of everything that isn’t here.

• Marcello Carlin (here being nice about me). We are pals, of course. Whatever the thing is that I’m building, it can’t be hostile to fellowship or intimacy; and so must take into account the issues that can arise from this.

• Frank Kogan: here with an oldie that adverts to a tradition of writing and thinking which is not so distant from what I have in mind. Aside from the late Richard Cook, the two figures whose aesthetic I most wanted to fuse at The Wire (or clatter against each other, as a way to talk about all kinds of music) were Greil Marcus and Frank. I wasn’t really there long enough (and also hadn’t entirely had my head round Frank’s thinking, I suspect).

• Seth Edenbaum, and a PDF of a work-in-progress. In some form this should already have been a published book (for several years). As with Marcello and Frank, a friend — and I feel a slight squirmy degree of embarassment that I’ve haven’t been able to do more to draw proper attention to his work, and to him. I used to be good at this; or at least, I once briefly had a platform I hoped to do this kind of broadcasting with. Which some people remember fondly.

(Already we possibly recognise an underlying question: what is wrong with the cultural world we face, that these three are all basically outlier minds, their marginality less a function of their own often daunting rigour than of the failure of what — further up — I termed the routines and shortcuts and tactics and strategies of editorial practice and production?)

Plus some more (rather younger) names: outsider I’d guess more by choice than unspoken decree.

• Alex Harrowell, the Yorkshire Ranter.

• That Tasmanian Devil of prose Hazel Robinson (who is also my extremely close friend off the net as well as on).

• isabelthespy, writing a streak on Britney just before xmas.

And for now I’m stopping at just six. Because I’m imagining even just these guys in a room, debating I don’t know what, and I can no longer hear myself think >:D >:D >:D Though the project would certainly also include the blog I started with Tallita Dyllen, if we work out a way to encompass doing it while living in London and Beirut respectively; and any material that Victoria DeRijke writes, once she frees herself from the horrible clutches of academia. sadface emoticon.

I’d only want to do it — but do what? I literally have no idea how to realise this practicably — if it could be a space bending towards curiosity, generosity, mischief and so on. Is it doable? Is it something you’d like to see, or be part of?

[Update: blog.com seems have been having server trouble the last few days — hence the images all appearing as broken-image symbols… ]