‘Rawness, freedom, experimentation’: the Brit jazz boom of the 60s and 70s

So sad...and that opening C U T joke is one of my all time faves

Strewth...

The original inspiration for these stories was an anecdote told to me by my flatmate at the time, the lovely Grant McLennan of the Go Betweens. Hence the Australian accent in the 1st story (the one he told me) about the Ozzie and the beer can... https://t.co/08jFdk5Zl3

— charlie higson (@monstroso) August 18, 2021

Scribbles from last night

John Birmingham: Is SloMo a liar or a bullshitter?

Minimata (Trailer)

MORE IMAGES 

W. Eugene Smith's Warning To The World

I'd call them the 'cunts without compounds'

George Harrison - All Things Must Pass (2020 Mix)

 

Thanks to My Friend Stan for posting this review of the ATMP box set and finding out that this mix isn't on the release!

Allan Jones to release a follow up book to 'I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down'

As the blurb for 'I Can't Stand...' said: 

'Allan Jones launched Uncut magazine in 1997 and for 15 years wrote a popular monthly column called Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, based on his experiences as a music journalist in the 70s and 80s, a gilded time for the music press. By turns hilarious, cautionary, poignant and powerful, the Stop Me...stories collected here include encounters with some of rock's most iconic stars, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Smiths, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam. From backstage brawls and drug blow-outs, to riots, superstar punch-ups, hotel room confessionals and tour bus lunacy, these are stories from the madness of a music scene now long gone'

Allan is/was one of the funniest journalists around taking the piss when the piss had to be taken 

Jones the Journalist and I go way back

Socially_Distant

Numeric Pictures

Memphis '69: The 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival

Memphis ’69 documentary film, capturing three days and two nights of the sweltering, interracial 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival, held within weeks of a KKK rally at the same location. Full song performances include a number of iconic Blues Hall of Famers such as Rufus Thomas & The Bar-Kays; slide guitar great Booker “Bukka” White; Sleepy John Estes with Yank Rachel; Texas’ Johnny Winter; Memphis’ own Furry Lewis, Beale Street sweeper who opened for the Rolling Stones; and North Mississippi bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. There are no talking heads, just the unfiltered shots of the concert and its surroundings from the time 

Fat Possum

Garden gate o'the day (and a shy friend)

Blixa back in Berlin

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Blixa arrives back in Berlin

PS: Have you ever seen Blixa and Patti Smith in the same room?

Paul GIlroy: "Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human" (The 2019 Holberg Lecture)

Paul Gilroy discusses a range of topics, including his childhood and adolesence in post-colonial Britain, his research on race and identity, and how to best meet the threats posed by neo-fascism and the climate crisis. +   +

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of their Eyes” (1979) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall's contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom

There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack

“Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.” ― Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack