Culture - February

Books read:

George Orwell - 'Homage to Catalonia'
Rudolf Rocker - 'Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism' (non-fiction)
Kingsley Amis - 'Lucky Jim'
Bruce Robinson - 'Withnail & I' (screenplay)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Drowned World'
Glenn Greenwald - 'How Would a Patriot Act?: Defending American values from a President run amok' (non-fiction)

Whilst large swathes of Southern England reclined beneath parasols of floodwater this month, I thought the timing too opportune to miss to dive into J.G. Ballard's debut novel 'The Drowned World'.

Written in 1962, Ballard sets out his prescient stall with eerie accuracy, telling of a world in which global warming has caused a melting of the ice caps and a catastrophic rise in sea levels, leaving the cities of the West submerged as a new aquamarine seascape in which the few survivors find themselves gradually reverting back to a kind of savage primacy.

It is fascinating, the way in which Ballard expostulates on the notion that this marine environment, the endless lagoons, archipelagos, and the feverish sun, serves as the psychological trigger for the return to deeply sublimated motives and desires within the psyche of humankind as the modern age revolves around again to a second Triassic period.

Ballard's truly exceptional prose style bursts with the effervescent imagery that would enrich all his subsequent work, and certainly you get a very definite sense that here is a fresh literary voice bursting out of the gates, teeming with an imagination that would sustain such a long and prolific writing career.


Films Watched:

'The Thin Red Line' (Terrence Malick)
'My Beautiful Laundrette' (Stephen Friers)
'Groundhog Day' (Harold Ramis)
'Annie Hall' (Woody Allen)


Albums Played:

Mark McGuire - 'Along the Way'
Eluvium - 'Nightmare Ending'
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - 'Let Love In'
Led Zeppelin - 'Led Zeppelin II'
Portishead - 'Third'
St. Vincent - 'St. Vincent'


Exhibitions:

David Lynch / William S. Burroughs / Andy Warhol (at Photographer's Gallery, London)

Read the review here


Gigs:

Fuck Buttons at The Forum, Kentish Town

Standing at opposite ends of an equipment-laden table, facing one another as though they would at any moment break into a game of ping-pong, the two components of electronic act Fuck Buttons delivered a consummate and quite often hypnotic headline set.

Their choice of opener was the astonishing 'Stalker' from 2013's 'Slow Focus', a track with an expansive, almost cinematic scope that spans an epic 10 minutes and yet could comfortably last double that. The rest of the set does well to try and maintain such early heights, but the duo's accomplished amalgam of influences from Aphex Twin to Mogwai to Squarepusher has resulted in a dense and mesmerising sound that is uniquely their own, as captivating in a live setting as on record, and holds them in place as one of the most interesting electronic acts of recent years.