The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

there was a piece in Vice where I think Brooker interviews him, despite liking his work (not fucking Brookers, no!) I can't think of anything much more insufferable. I would probably consider him as big a tosser as Brooker if I'd have clicked on it and read it but he doesn't seem to have much interesting to say outside of his work anyway, well based on an interview I heard on WS where he was pedalling all that usual hackneyed polarisation of politics bollox beloved of most libs.

So far I think episodes 1 and 4 are best. 2 and 3 are kind of lists in search of an overarching point and 5 is all over the shop even by his standards. 1 and 4 both focus on a tendency that the left is broadly hostile towards - individualism and apolitical activism, respectively - and gives them their due, explains where they came from, while still pointing at how they can end in catastrophe.

it's very funny to me that this thing is getting any kind of mainstream discussion/attention in your country; if this showed in the US on PBS, no one would notice

Think you might be trapped in the same bubble I was in when I logged onto the iplayer page expecting this to be the featured item - turns out it wasn't even on the front page!

It was a featured item for me, presumably because of personalisation.

but really the operative word here was depersonalization [segues into stars of the lid track]

sorry that was piss poor!

So far I think episodes 1 and 4 are best. 2 and 3 are kind of lists in search of an overarching point and 5 is all over the shop even by his standards.

Yeah that's the one - lots of interesting stuff in there as usual but just moving from story to story with no sense of direction.

damn, i wanna see these but i don't have a UK TV licence and don't want to get one. can you buy/rent it or something somehow?

you know they don't know whether or not you use iplayer?

also that if the tv license man comes round you have no reason to let him in?

if you live in the UK just click "yes I have a license" on i-player, but perhaps close your curtains as a precaution if you see the tv detector van rolling past your yard!

or just... pay your tv license 🙄

I thought having an internet connection means you are compelled by law to buy one, even if in the "I don't even have a television" category

figured they had cleverer ways to tell if you've been watching iPlayer these days, like checking if there's a TV license associated with your account, or using your IP address or something.

You don't have to have a license if you don't watcvh live or streamed BBC TV afaik.

certainly not paying for a license just to watch one show though

Not sure if UK blocks this but this is how I watched it

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtPP_-rkrT3CAPe8OmDnlZBDvaQ7baH7B

any iPlayer use requires a TV license but it’s not enforced. there is no mechanism for it.

i would not suggest not paying the license fee if youre a habitual user of the iplayer and or someone who watches broadcast tv in the uk. if you literally want to just watch one show then i don't see any issue. although the amount of media ive consumed in my life that came from "the usual sources" probably means i have a certain stance on this kind of thing that others may not share. i also hate the license fee guys who are arseholes who go around bullying pensioners and housewives

I didn't pay a license fee for years and it was handy living in an upstairs flat because if it looked like a cunt knocking I simply wouldn't answer the door. I have memories as a kid of my mum pulling the curtains over and telling us all to be quiet while some cunt aggressively bangs on the door. Lol it was a vintage b+w valve tv and the license would have probably cost a few quid.

In America, in the early 1950s
Little Rock, Pasternak
But at the same time
Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Little did the people expect
Sputnik, Zhou En-lai
Simultaneously 
Bridge On The River Kwai
But something else inside them
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle
Meanwhile,
California baseball
Five thousand miles away,
Starkweather Homicide
What they didn't foresee was
Children of Thalidomide
At the very same moment
Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur
But someone was listening:
Space Monkey, Mafia
But even as one group grew stronger
Hula Hoops, Castro
And at the very same time
Edsel is a no-go
One poor farmer had an idea:
U-2, Syngman Rhee
There would emerge a new idea
Payola and Kennedy
Just across the border,
Chubby Checker, Psycho
Meanwhile
Belgians in the Congo

brutal

Started chapter 3 tonight; gave up about 20 minutes from the end - it was going nowhere.

Turns out it's all Cecil Sharp's fault. All the woes of the C20, down to him and his bloody folk dances.

fucking morris dancers eh?

the cecil sharp stuff was weak af - there’s plenty of interesting stuff to be said about late and long victorian arts and crafts, merrie england, and the influence of pastoral on national vision but this wasn’t a useful vector tbh.

do you ever see any Morris Dancers in London? in the pre-Rona days they descended like a nightmare plague in the Holm Valley near me every summer, possibly with the ghost of Roy Castle lagging behind in his tap shoes.

Cecil Sharp stuff felt like he had just read Richard King's The Lark Ascending and decided to crib a little from that. Rad book btw, recommended to everyone. There was gonna be a special concert for it at the Barbican but then co-organizer Andrew Weatherall died and after that BAM, corona. :(

the last london open house i went on (a tiring and drizzly day in 2018 iirc) i ended up visiting cecil sharp house, at which i encountered

a) a small exbihition of punk rock sleeve art
b) a darkling panelled room its walls stiff with large elk skulls
c) being warned i couldn't stay long bcz the AGM of the morris dancing soc was just abt to start (many oldish ppl trooping, in a handful dressed as morris himself commands)

they shd let me make these documentaries *cues up eight hours of the crazy frog*

"but this was a fantasy"

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article13590383.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200b/21_Mr-Blobby-theme-park-in-a-run-down-state.jpg

I went to a night at Cecil Sharp House put on by Bob Stanley and Pete Paphides years ago. There were some bands and Stephen Duffy DJed. Lots of Vashti Bunyan and so on. Good beer behind the bar.

But little did we realise the horror that such acts would unleash etc....

do you ever see any Morris Dancers in London? in the pre-Rona days they descended like a nightmare plague in the Holm Valley near me every summer, possibly with the ghost of Roy Castle lagging behind in his tap shoes.

went to cecil sharp house library once to look up some folk song stuff. also saw a performance by “The Copper Family” absolutely wretched stuff do not deserve to carry the name of the Coppers, eliminate with prejudice.

did see a v frail Bob Copper sing in a friend’s local (The Queen’s Head universally known as Elsie’s after the 400 year old woman who ran it, who was the size of a peanut and would have to place pints on the bar reaching above her head to do so). One beer and whisky only, along with vodka which she introduced when the polish airmen were stationed nearby. that was a different matter entirely, a beautiful, frail voice singing about the nightingale and vicissitudes of the rural economy a+.

kill his epigones.

I never saw any Morris Dancers when I lived in Woolwich although I did see a jester once; Rory McGrath sat across from me somewhere on the northern line.

the moral arc of an ilx thread can be long, but it bends toward rory mcgrath

― mark s, Thursday, January 11, 2018 11:49 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― mark s, Tuesday, 7 May 2019 20:20 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

More than three years ago, I pasted this text from someone's tweet into my Reminders app:

"Cecil Sharp House is the best thing you can go to in London for under ten quid. Totally rapturous & life-enhancing."

Circumstances being as they are, it'll be some time before I complete the task, I guess.

Oops, missed the start of that. Should read:

"The Tuesday evening folk club at Cecil Sharp House is the best thing you can go to in London for under ten quid. Totally rapturous & life-enhancing."

without wishing to cast any aspersions on another’s pleasure… actually that’s exactly what i’m doing nm

i would be astonished were that the case. folkies in the round always seemed to be an awful, pedantic group of bores, with a huge tolerance for nodding and smiling at the very worst stuff. it’s an amateurist crowd which is absolutely harmless as a group and it’s fundamentally a pleasure for those involved, but presents as “the sham coy simper, the complacency, the frisson titters” in the event. ime the music is either the indigestibly twee and “folky” or poor revisiting of “i know some of you will know old Scan Tester and here’s one he used to play before the King and Queen… and many other public houses” <guffaws> etc.

go, Alba! you should definitely go. be interested to hear how it is.

Ha ha, well I'm living in New York now so it may be quite a while before I get to see who's right.

there's a female morris troop called the Belles of London (do you see?) who prance around in what looks like Victorian underwear. People seem to enjoy it. their hoss is a bastard.

(Dan from enderby's room fiddles for them from time to time)

Might watch them in slow motion so it seems more portentous than annoying.

there's a female morris troop called the Belles of London (do you see?) who prance around in what looks like Victorian underwear. People seem to enjoy it. their hoss is a bastard.

(Dan from enderby's room fiddles for them from time to time)

I see Paul Morley has met them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRYUNlDdGyY

oh no

Ha ha, well I'm living in New York now so it may be quite a while before I get to see who's right.

Was tickled to read a while back that on the nite he had his Damascane punk conversion moment, viewing the Clash in Leeds 1977, Green Gartside was in full Morris get-up, having gone to the gig after an evening folk dance class.

There's a mini series on BBC Sounds called My Albion that features reflections on this stuff from the perspective of black british ppl involved in the folk scene, some Twitter Left folks show up too. Worth hearing.

oh i would like to hear that Daniel - thanks for the tip.

in case anyone didn't know the entirety of Can't Get You Out Of My Head is up on youtube

I'm enjoying it even if only as a respite from the "is this person a baddie or goodie" type discourse that seems to be the entirety of the internet rn. I'm sure it's chock full of simplifications and elisions but there's a lot of stuff I previously knew jack shit about, and lots of great footage. Amazing that he managed to hold out for almost 4 full episodes before dropping in "you are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve".

Wouldn't be mad if the editing was tightened up 25% or so

My roommate and I have been watching at opposite ends of the apartment and then emerging to narrate our lives at each other.

yatgtbmsaygwyd was meant to be the title but the beeb told him it was too long

that's so rude! "yatgtbmsaygwyd" is one of the most beautiful words in the entire welsh language