The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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

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

i did this with my cat during the week that i watched it. i was really disappointed in what he came up with, but i got some sick burns in on him

His list of films that 'express the social and political mood of their time':

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/lists/adam-curtis-10-films-capture-mood-times

Gotta admit I wasn't expecting some of those

Scream 2 was a fun surprise.

Stalker, Society, and Starship Troopers are very on brand and I think quoted in his work. But some of the others are slightly unexpected. Including The Souvenir is cheating the "political mood of their time" criteria a bit! BG is probably haunted by the Bush Era in the early seasons but then more influenced by the pure ridiculum of Lost by the end.

Would like to hear of some other examples of "that growing fascination and fear of the human body that grew up in the 1980s" besides Society, Cronenburg and the like.

cocoon

Teen Wolf

Haha he writes exactly like he talks. Would much rather hear/read him talk about movies than history and society tho

Including The Souvenir is cheating the "political mood of their time" criteria a bit!

That choice leapt out at me too, but rather than put it down to cheating it made me interesting in rewatching the film through that lens. I wanted to rewatch it anyway.

it is an interesting 80's period movie in that it is genuinely hungry and curious about reaching the parts others of that genre don't even seem to know exist, but what I meant was most of the other movies were of their time rather than looking back. I know you've clocked that yourself, but just saying!

movies on the list - I should add

Ah, I see! No, I hadn’t really clocked that. I just meant that I saw it as such a personal rather than political film.

the personal approach in this movie is still imbued with the politics of the era and could potentially be a very crude bunch of caricatures in a bad 80's period movie, and there are lots of them. I respect Hogg's naturalistic approach. But still a movie that couldn't be more detached from the era it was made in.

I just mean that in the sense that Cutis usually seems quite rigidly obsessed with the significance of what popular culture says about the socio political milieu it was created in. I'll let him off with this one!

Surprised "I May Destroy You" isn't listed. He brought it up on his interview on the Red Scare podcast as "a series of films" that captures our age like nothing else. ilx will be pleased to hear.

Would much rather hear/read him talk about movies than history and society tho

Hard disagree. I enjoy Curtis' programmes but, as I think calzino pointed out before, he tends to be a total dolt in interviews.

This list would be ok w/o the blurbs but it's so embarassing - Starship Troopers is prophetic because "the humans send giant armies to kill the insects in the deserts of the remote planet"? Like the US bombing a middle east country was some sort of wild sci-fi in '97?

💥NEW EPISODE💥 @owenhatherley, @zinovievletter, and Alberto Toscano on Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out of My Head. We chatted about Curtis' politics, the changes in his documentary style since the early 1990s, and why he avoids talking about neoliberalism:https://t.co/cuFxPERLPG

— Politics Theory Other (@poltheoryother) March 28, 2021

lol I'd never heard that rumour before that he went door knocking for Corbyn in '19. He does have some strange definitions of what the Left is in his work and of course there are going to be constrictions on what stories he decides to tell when he is selling his work to the BBC and is completely reliant on the BBC archives.

https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/on-adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

excellent and otm piece by Juliet Jacques

good piece, nice to read a balanced critique for a change

yeah I think she's nailed just about everything that is good and bad about him there and I learned that he cut his teeth on That's Life! (execrable 70's middle-class television for non UK's!)

"arguing that the US counter-culture had failed to change the world because it had become too concerned with individual self-expression"

this was the most ridiculous bit of Hypernormalisation

The son of English surrealist poet and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings’s cinematographer, Curtis

i did not know this

meh, he clearly used his surrealism/avant-garde doc connections to get a plumb production job on That's Life!

or possibly a bat soup production job!

ha this is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

B-, music cues need work

any essay that contains both this passage

I had to spend ninety minutes per day holding Perspex dilators inside my ‘neo-vagina’ to stop it closing. I binged on Curtis films while I did this, and eventually discovered my clitoris worked while watching THE CENTURY OF THE SELF.)

and this one


Graeber argued that the morally and intellectually bankrupt Labour establishment, already furious about losing two leadership elections in what felt like (and was) a repudiation of their public-private partnerships and interventionist foreign policy, deliberately sabotaged their own party to defeat a paradigm shift against them. They did this mainly by casting themselves as supporters of the EU, without questioning the EU’s migration policies or imposition of austerity on Greece and elsewhere, and using Corbyn’s refusal to disregard the EU referendum result as a ‘wedge issue’ to divide his base, hoping to demobilise his young supporters and peel away the liberal end of his voter coalition. In the process, many of Labour’s ‘centrist’ MPs lost what were once safe seats in Leave-voting constituencies and handed a thumping majority to one of the most right-wing governments in British history, who immediately voted through the hardest possible Brexit.

is like it was made by robots for me to like it.

Good read. Thanks calzino

this is absolutely excellent. jacques is really very smart and very unusual now to see someone who can really draw on and bring together the political historical and aesthetic critiques that area ll necessary to thinking about this and using it as a jumping off point to think more broadly and critically about our present moment.

i haven't read much by her, the few bits i have were frustratingly short and now seem even more so after reading this where its really clear that she is well able to draw out a complex critique from a pretty dizzying breadth of insights as uh tracers post intimates

although lol tbf i only half watched this i thought it was boring as sin and i cant really deal w/ curtis's tone though if i like the music and archive footage

the main reason I liked Juliet's piece, aside from the fact that she's always an interesting writer was because I also think Curtis is good and love loads of his work but also consider him very problematic and very myopically dumb at times, although possibly this is by design or part of price for access to the bbc archive or maybe he's just a bit of a dickhead! But the segments on Julia Grant are very empathetic and heartfelt and incredibly moving imo and the cold arrogance of the Mengellesque clinician John Randell, was so enraging and powerful.