What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  

This  BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. 

Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score. 

And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.

As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West). 

There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. 

The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the  mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.

I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.

There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness. 

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"

Talking of the onset of patternwork....

There is a 10th Anniversary Edition of Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights out this month

I'm sorry, there is no earthly or unearthly reason why Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights should be commemorated for having existed for a decade, let alone get the copious in-depth sleevenotes treatment.

I liked the record at the time, but it was hardly an epochal release.   (If it was, then it wasn't much of an epoch, let's be honest).

Pitchfork reviewer Matt LeMay avers that "in retrospect, 2002 may have been the very year that we stopped talking about how music sounds, and started talking about what other music it sounds like."

Hmmm, that was going on for a goodly while, I'd say.  It goes back at least as far as the mid-Eighties, starting in fanzines like Forced Exposure, where a kind of record-store-clerk delirium referentia set in.  The writers could assume a shared knowledge base among the readership and use comparisons as shorthand. It was simply how they processed new music: in terms of its relationship to preexisting music.

Increasingly fanzine-culture type bands approached music-making the same way. Often like Pavement they'd worked in record stores (c.f. Quentin Tarantino who worked as a video store clerk before becoming a director). In a sense it was totally natural, an authentic state of irony and knowingness.  That doesn't of course deflect the decadence / Nietzche "On the Uses and Abuses of History" / patternwork arguments, of course -- one can be authentically enfeebled c.f. earlier more vigorous stages of one's own culture.

Maybe it has got worse in this decade. But if so, the reviewing things in terms of references, what it reminds you of, etc -- that's a response to what the bands are doing, how they're laying it all out there.  Cultural capital: a portfolio of influences spread out for you to scan and approve.

addendum to previous post on patternwork

here's the very thing I had made a mental note re. -- Phil's post from April last year on patternwork at the Nineties blog Up Close and Personal

which starts with this bloody big Spengler quote


"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.

So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures." 

- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

and goes into a panoramic riff-sweep across 20th Century culture before homing in to blast into smithereens both Britpop and Britart - the former described as "a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well" and the latter as "a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge".

patternwork

Phil Knight at The Phil Zone picks up on the post here about Beck and Flaming Lips doing remakes of classic albums, in relation to the difference between art (discovery, vision, bring something new into the world) and craft (doing it correctly, replication, perpetuation of the tradition etc). He mentions Spengler, who

"had a term for precisely this kind of process, which he called the descent into patternwork. An archetypal example of this is the Persian carpet, whose complex interwoven motifs were originally intensely meaningful expressions of sacred geometry (our old friend phi and its fractions), but are now churned out merely as decoration by people who have no idea what the designs signify, and if they do, view it as merely anecdotal. What once was high art becomes a kind of autistic self-replicating craft. Much of what we now consider to be ethnic styles of pottery, textiles etc. are simply the endless reproductions of art forms whose meaning has long since withered away."

I am sure I've come across this idea before -- almost certainly it was something Phil posted somewhere or other, or maybe a comment he made in a comments box at one of the Decades Blogs.  I made a mental note to do something with pattern work here, but naturally forgot.

This thought of Phil's struck me as particularly acute: 

"Most interesting from our perspective is that the lubricant for the passage from art to craft appears to be irony. It's when the replications start to be produced by people who don't get the in-joke, and this will surely happen, that the true inauguration of the long, long era of patternwork begins."

Yes, the irony phase, which in rock sets in among the cleverer sort of bands from
the mid-Eighties onwards: Butthole Surfers, Red Kross, Urge Overkill, Zodiac Mindwarp, Gaye Bykers on Acid,  Monster Magnet, White Zombie, Royal Trux (to an extent),...  later on it becomes more mainstream and less-clever The Darkness...     you also have something like Andrew W.K..  There's a urge to rock, to have that kind of scale and epic-ness and the mass response that came with it, but it's checked by an awareness that kind of ye olde rock is ludicrous and passe, and also, more significantly, what it signified in the late Sixties and pre-punk Seventies in terms of rebellion, a lifestyle of freedom and excess that was counter-hegemonic and anti-normative, that was no longer tenable. Indeed it had become hegemonic, normative, cliched. The way to deal with attraction to cliches that are no longer valid or timely was through parody, a form of equivocation.

Then you had bands, concurrent with the ironic "we just wanna rock" bands in the alt-scene, who were deadly earnest about it (Sunset Strip glam metal -- Motley Crue, G'N'R, etc), and not parodic, so much as self-caricature, or mannerist maybe.

And somewhere exactly in between: The Cult, who managed uniquely to give off the aura of presumed irony but were as far as I can tell absolutely earnestly dead-serious about it (and so succeeded in the commercial American context more than the genuinely ironic meta-rockers)

Rick Rubin seems to have some crucial place in this fake-real, becoming-patternwork of rock. He believes, with all his heart; but what he touches comes out, despite that, with this sheen of air quotes. 

Andrew W.K. reminds me of Rubin, there's a sort of Zen aura....

(Def Leppard belong in here somewhere. At some point they go from being the real thing to being the pomo thing)