Thursday, November 13, 2008

...plus c'est la même chose

3:am magazine is gracious enough to direct us to Reality Studio, a Burroughs site that has the complete archive of My Own Mag, the mid-60s publication created by artist, poet and all-round provocateur Jeff Nuttall.

Now, I never really found myself on the same wavelength as Nuttall. I first heard of him in the late 1980s, when I was growing increasingly exasperated with the dayglo floristry that constituted the 1960s revival of the time, which glossed over the social and political upheavals - Vietnam, Black Power, gay and women's rights, Powellism - in favour of footage of dollybirds dancing in parks (the sort of thing I described here).

But by the time I got to Nuttall's seminal work, Bomb Culture (thanks, Murph), I'd read equivalent volumes by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Guy Debord and Richard Neville, and Nuttall's opinions on how to stick it to The Man gave me a distinct feeling of déjà lu.

Now, though, looking through the scrawls and doodles of his earlier stuff, you see the urgency, the need to communicate, that informs the best of blogging. OK, the mechanics of production and transmission are different, and you don't get the same sense of conversation (© Patroclus), although I'm sure the magazines provoked plenty of it.

And I bet there was some 1960s equivalent of bloody Andrew Keen to sneer about how amateurish the whole project was.

And just to prove the decade could indeed be dangerous and subversive and unexpected, not just jolly and tuneful, here's Jimi Hendrix and chums giving Lulu's producers psychedelic kittens. RIP Mitch Mitchell.

4 comments:

Billy said...

I've got a Nuttall book, it's good in places but does generally feel a bit dated. I take it we're adding him to the would-have-blogged-if-it-had-existed-then list also populated by William Blake?

wv: press. No, really it is.

Rog said...

At risk of proving the old adage about being able to remember the 60's, surely Richard Neville wrote Play Power?

Tim F said...

Very much so, Billy. Burroughs, too.

Murph: D'oh. Thanks for that.

Dick Headley said...

How could Nuttall not seem dated? And talking of Burroughs, I just spent a few days in Tangers attempting to recapture a few sixties moments. It seems a lot tamer...or maybe I'm not so easily impressed anymore.