‘I was trapped into being alive’
Never one to shy away from confronting his inner demons, Robert Wyatt’s latest work is as poignant as ever. He talks to Dave Peschek

Dave Peschek
Thursday October 18, 2007
The Guardian

‘I’m a mine of misinformation,” says Robert Wyatt, wheeling his chair into the front room of the Georgian townhouse he shares with his wife, Alfreda Benge. “I’ll just invent something.”

Wyatt is eloquent, voluble, as mischievous as he is sincere. It is more than 40 years since he started making music: initially as part of the progressive Canterbury scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s; then with Soft Machine; then, nominally at least, solo. It is more than 30 years since he was rendered paraplegic after falling from a window at a party while drunk. In the meantime, he has become a national treasure. Each of his sporadic albums retains a singular sense of pop melody and the freedom and inflection of jazz; each is an event. Few musicians who have appeared on Top of the Pops (in his wheelchair) can also claim to have been profiled by the Spectator.

Before you meet Wyatt, you meet Alfie. She drives me from Market Rasen station to Louth, Lincolnshire – the first place they hit on a drive from London looking for an affordable property with a ground floor big enough to give Robert freedom of movement in his chair. Like Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, Robert and Alfie live in an artistic symbiosis. She often writes lyrics for him, and has provided beautifully strange and bright cover art for all his records since his solo debut in 1973. “Everyone,” says Wyatt, “should have an Alfie.”

She is fierce and warm, a Polish refugee who came to London after the war when she was seven with her mother, who now lives with them. When Wyatt met her, she was “a proper mod”, had “all the records you would expect a girl to have, but also all this hard bop jazz.” She was also, it is clear from the photos in Wyatt’s music room, luminously beautiful.

She has not had an easy time of it. Wyatt was incontinent after his paralysis – “hard to live with for a partner, that helplessness,” he says – and suffered from profound depression through the 1990s. “Me and Alfie became like strangers who just accommodated each other,” he recalls. He was “quite unable to sleep. Couldn’t lie still, revolving in the bed all night, and Alfie had to go upstairs to sleep. Wheeling up and down the corridor at 20 miles an hour, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t write. I lost my sight, I suddenly needed glasses. It felt like dying, but that would have been a release. Physically, as it turns out, I’m very resilient. I was trapped in having to be alive.” Counselling saved him, and, in 1997, he made one of his most cohesive records, Shleep.

Reuters, Oct. 16 – The acclaimed American filmmaker David Lynch has brought his own distinctive style to the issue of Middle East peace in a meeting with the Israeli President, Shimon Peres.

Lynch, who’s well-known for films such as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and the Twin Peaks television series, told Peres he wanted to help bring peace to the region.

The filmmaker has been an advocate of transcendental meditation for more than three decades and he told the Israeli president that the practice could provide the Jewish state and the Middle East with better protection than armies.

Peres, a veteran of politics and conflict, welcomed Lynch’s perspective and his visit, although he did appear bemused by the proposals.

link courtesy Joshua Babcock

Why I’ll miss Arthur

British music magazines are formulaic and superficial in comparison to the underground American press.

by Alan McGee

The Guardian Music Blog – March 7, 2007 8:30 AM

Last month, the sad news that Arthur magazine would be taking an indefinite hiatus from publication was announced. Based in Los Angeles, Arthur was the most eclectic, thoughtfully designed periodical I have encountered. Arthur was clearly drawn to psychedelic music and was always a good place to look for fresh acts but to say it was a music magazine would be a misnomer. This free publication presented contemporary artwork, photography, political essays and literary reviews with admirable disregard for categorisation. I never picked up a copy of Arthur without finding something intriguing and informative and I believe that magazines of which this can be said are all too few and far between.

How many music-orientated publications do we have in Britain that invigorate the mind and encourage the reader to explore unknown acts? Yet in the US, Arthur took a place among a score of publications that catered to tastes outside the boundaries of the big glossies. Major cities have weekly newspapers (the Village Voice, the Stranger) which cast a discerning eye over “alternative” culture, and magazines such as No Depression and Creem focus on specialised interests that are untouched by the chart-orientated monthlies.

While it would be unreasonable to expect the same range here in the UK, it has to be said that the publications we do have appear decidedly conservative and uninspired in comparison. There seems to be little or no ground between tabloid-style attention to chart acts and the more middle-aged, conservation work of tirelessly compiling lists and meditating on past glories. It’s a shame, because I believe that in drawing attention to what is being produced under the radar and discussing its merits, magazines like Arthur have a nurturing effect on great music and art. They connect artists with audiences and provide an outlet for intelligent discussion and detailed criticism. While the internet can be used to a similar purpose (salon.com being a good example), printed publications generally afford a greater consistency of quality and as far as I am concerned still command greater attention on the part of the reader.

When asked what inspired him to start the magazine, founder Jay Babcock replied: “I felt this creeping homogenisation of voice in magazines and papers. This snarky ironic tone was everywhere. Word counts were getting shorter for pieces and there didn’t seem to be room anymore for consistently in-depth writing.”

While considering the form his envisioned magazine would take, Babcock looked to American publications of the 60s, British music-press of the 70s, and several revered punk fanzines. The US has an undeniably rich tradition of countercultural publications and music journalism. Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus pioneered two very different approaches to criticism which have been broadly imitated over the decades (often in sloppy fashion) but the fact that Babcock looked to British publications of the 70s is a striking detail. It begs the question as to why a country in which the production of fanzines and musical criticism was once vibrantly alive now appears to offer so little in terms of printed matter.

I don’t wish to play the “everything was better in the 70s” card but it does seem to me that British music publications have fallen victim to the creeping homogenisation Babcock identifies. Beyond the fact that the magazines offered largely fall into the two categories I mentioned earlier, the relentlessly repetitive formulas they use are such that they have become a joke among people who care about music. Aside from the obsessive list-making there is a constant tendency to compare new artists to figures of the past rather than discuss what may be of interest in their own music. Namechecking like this does not encourage people to criticise music but promotes lazy and superficial categorisation.

In the US the backlash against this slump remains vigorous and widespread. While I truly hope that Arthur is revived I do not believe there will ever be any shortage of innovative publications of its kind in the US. It would be great to see the example taken up here. After all, wouldn’t you like the kind of magazine that brought you artwork from Art Spiegelman and Spike Jonze, a column from Thurston Moore, an interview with Arthur C Clarke and love advice from T-Model Ford?

mnsbc.com

Updated: 7:57 a.m. PT Oct 16, 2007

WASHINGTON – States and the federal government are not doing enough to monitor and manage the water quality of the Mississippi River and its impact on the Gulf of Mexico, where an annual “dead zone” from farm runoff is killing marine life, according to a major scientific assessment released Tuesday.

The study by experts with the National Research Council calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate the efforts affecting the river and the northern Gulf of Mexico where its water is discharged.

“The limited attention being given to monitoring and managing the Mississippi’s water quality does not match the river’s significant economic, ecological and cultural importance,” said David Dzombak, chairman of panel and professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

In recent years, actions have reduced much point-source pollution, such as direct discharges from factories and wastewater treatment plants.

But the report notes that many of the river’s remaining pollution problems stem from nonpoint sources, such as nutrients and sediments that enter the river and its tributaries through runoff.

“Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas traces the searing graphic art made by Emory Douglas (b. 1943) while he worked as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 1980s. The Black Panthers cultivated a strong graphic identity for their group and their politics during this period, bringing their concerns to the public through newspapers, posters, and pamphlets that can often be described as angry, militant, and incendiary.

“The graphic production of Douglas reveals an unmistakable humanism, representing a populace that had been denied access to the American dream but who were emerging from segregation and proudly fighting to assert their rights to the American dream of equality for all. Douglas’s work gave potent visual form to the plight of urban mothers and to the humanitarian work undertaken by the Black Panthers to bring social services to their communities.

“The graphic work that Douglas created for print can also be seen within the context of Bay Area visual production from this period, revealing a kinship at times to work by artists such as Peter Saul or R. Crumb, while also serving as a stark antidote to the hedonism embodied in the posters promoting psychedelic rock across the Bay….

“Organized by artist and MOCA Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow Sam Durant with MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, this compelling exhibition presents approximately 150 of Emory Douglas’s most influential works. In place of a catalogue, the exhibition will be accompanied by a monographic book on the work of Emory Douglas, edited by Sam Durant and published in February 2007 by Rizzoli.”

Sunday, Oct 21 3pm:
“Emory Douglas will discuss the graphic art that he created for the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s through the early ’80s. Following his talk, Douglas will sign copies of the exhibition’s accompanying publication at MOCA Pacific Design Center.”

Los Angeles
Exhibition at the MOCA Pacific Design Center
10.21.07 – 01.20.08

FRIDAY 26 OCTOBER BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE

“London Lip”: a celebration of the paperback publication of London: City of Disappearances. Witness a rare urban excursion from the legendary Northampton magus of the graphic novel Alan Moore and the Texas-exiled creator of the multiverse, author of Mother London, Michael Moorcock. A conversation refereed by the book’s editor, Iain Sinclair [see below]. Plus Brian Catling and Kirsten Norrie.

Tickets £10 from Wegottickets.com or £12 on the door. This event starts promptly at 6.30pm.
Promoted by Penned in the Margins
www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk
020 7375 0258 for information

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On the road

The son of a Welsh GP, IAIN SINCLAIR studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past. Fiercely critical of plans to regenerate the capital, he has written a new novel about the ‘semi-celestial’ A13, and talks of leaving Hackney for good.

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian

Near the outset of Iain Sinclair’s new novel, Dining on Stones, a visionary poet is teased by a young woman for embarking on a seemingly miserable walk along the cursed A13 out of London to research a book. “You love this shit,” the woman tells the poet as they walk. “Trading horror stories. Without Blair and Livingstone, Conran and Foster, the landscape rippers, you’d wind up sharing a couch in an old folks’ home, plaid rug over the knees watching reruns of Fools and Horses.”

Given that the hack is a thinly veiled if unreliable version of Sinclair, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that hers is a jibe at the expense of the writer and everything he stands for.

The poet’s journey will take him past plague pits, over sewers and burial mounds, under the howling skies produced by City Airport; across the occult vortices of Hawksmoor churches, Ripper landmarks and gangland haunts; onward to Dagenham’s Ford car plant, Rainham Marshes, the full-on estuarial blight of oil refineries and warehouses.

It’s a walk devoid of bucolic heritage idylls, one the narrator conceives of as subverting Blair’s bad alchemists as they strive self-defeatingly to redeem the unlucky A13, rebrand east London’s epic badlands as Thames Gateway and fill it with spirit-crushing Barratt-style homes. Without these wannabe Baron Haussmans bent on erasing London’s mystically cursed landscape, though, Sinclair would have to find another muse to justify his punishing schedule of walking and writing.

Perhaps, then, Sinclair does love the exasperating, cursed tangle of his churned-up city? “Yes, I do,” he says over coffee in his unexpectedly genteel sitting room in Hackney. “The A13 is this lovely corridor of blight which feeds the imagination. But the Thames Gateway notion involves sweeping away everything that’s unsightly and messy in favour of a heritage experiment. That all started with Michael Heseltine’s corporatist vision of Docklands redevelopment – a vision taken up by John Prescott and New Labour. They want to transform that other corridor of blight, the Lee Valley, too; swallow it up with Olympic sites. In my work, the pains of the past need to be appeased – or they will come back.”

In Dining on Stones, the poet conceives of his A13 “as a semi-celestial highway, a Blakean transit to a higher mythology, through a landscape of sacred mounds and memories”. Ever since Margaret Thatcher came on the scene with what he regards as her “demonic vision”, Sinclair has been walking London’s semi-celestial highways, and then writing them up so he can pit his higher mythology of ley lines, mounds and primeval forces against government-inspired makeovers and speculative developments.

“As a symbolic manoeuvre to respond to political forces, I’m very happy with what Iain does,” says Patrick Wright, friend and rival literary pathologist of east London during the Thatcher era. Sinclair’s invocation of a mythologised London is no mere “manoeuvre”, however. He believes there are occult forces at work in east London and that they can be mapped by considering the alignments of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s post-Great Fire churches. “I don’t care about Iain’s hokey-pokey malevolent stuff,” says Wright, “but what was and is fascinating for me is that these systems of geometry and meaning are brought up by Iain just when the city is coming to the end of the enlightenment project, when the welfare state is being destroyed and the dream of London’s municipal socialism is being crushed by Thatcher.”
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BAND JOINED BY GAEL GARCIA BERNAL AND FRIEND FOR ‘QUEDATELUNA’

“WE CAN WORK SOMETHING OUT”…

“BETWEEN YOU AND ME”…

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY!”…