All the talking heads in the Peter Green documentary were male heads, I believe; and — for all they’ve achieved a kind of artless wondering openness towards the discussion of what must have been very tricky passages of their long-ago past — none seemed especially wise heads. Green himself, hearteningly enough, has emerged as a cheerfully plump balding hobbit of a man, a long long way from the ethereal and curly-headed yearning elf-poet of yore: he has — for someone who’s been through the extended labyrinthine haze of mental breakdown, medication and ECT and long stays on wards — a strikingly exact memory of moments, artistic or chemical or inspirational, on the cusp of his breakdown. He’s vague enough about what he wanted, what drove him — a thing that wasn’t yet there, in his music and his playing — but he’s funny and practical about everything else. Continue reading “i’ve seen lots of pretty girls”
Category: Memory
do not read if you hate subjective maps of the unconscious
When I was tidying up my CV a few months ago, a colleague suggested that the “complete” version should list every piece I ever wrote, and every dream I ever logged. I do kind of like this idea — if only for its obnoxious self-absorbed uselessness — but it will take a little work to go back and get the tags inserted. You can quite easily skip it, now and forever.
lost worlds
Tom links to a blog about Kit Williams’s Masquerade: a book that was published (1979) just as I was at my most judgmentally teenage and unimpressable. I didn’t like the art and I didn’t like the idea — and yet as a kid, I’d often spent hours poring over record sleeves or illustrations in books, the kind that seem to be nothing but detail, to piece together the implied totality of the secret. The 1954 Argo Under Milk Wood (feat.Richard Burton), for example (see below the cut); or the climactic humiliation scene from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (ditto), drawn by Pauline Baynes as if to encompass the entire lurid netherworld. Looking again at this images I don’t even know how my young eyes took in so much — so fuzzy and confused they seem now, and it’s not just my poor scanning, because what I do make out is nothing I don’t already know in my bones. Continue reading “lost worlds”