Mick Jones Rock n Roll Library

Mick Jones’ Rock n Roll Library,

Chelsea Art Space. April 2009.

Mick Jones was in The Clash. For boys of a certain age, ahem, this bestows on him Godlike status. I loved The Clash and they are still the best band I’ve ever seen live. But that’s not important right now.

Mick as a form of protest against the British Music Experience at the O2– the Starbucking of British Rock – has put on display a tenth of his Acton lock-up. Thus we get old Clash flight cases, books, real-time Punk fanzines, videos, scribbled notes, shirts, toys, guitars, movie posters, mix tapes and ephemera from a Lifetime.

Mr Jones says all the artefacts go some way to explain where he came from and who he is. A lot of it will be familiar to anybody born before 1980 and had even a smidge of interest beyond the mainstream. A time before all our groovy, modern ways of accessing culture, when John Peel and the NME were pretty much the only ways of learning about the world, beyond whatever small part of the UK you lived in.

Is it Art though? Does the fact it’s on display in a “proper” Art space confer Art-ness. And if it wasn’t Mick’s stuff would it mean anything? OK, I’m Fan Boy but I think it transcends its Clash-ness. As an exercise in cultural rippling, blending nostalgia with the here-and-now, it’s like a giant scrapbook or Pop Art installation. Images that were transient, temporary, fleeting now resonate against eachother. Calling up ghosts at once familiar but intangible. Memories bubbling up from the cortex.

So, yeah, it was kinda Art-y. It had that Thing-ness about it. You know, form and content, the thing itself and then what the thing represents, or could represent to whomever, depending. All that Art critic malarkey.

Mick wants to create a proper library where people could look at stuff or just hold it for a while, use it for reference or just shits and giggles. Coz in 100 years most stuff like this will be lost or in land fill. The “everyday” in this collection will one day tell us more about yesterday and today. Bit like Art.

 

Bob Dylan at Blackbush musings...

Bob Dylan has just played London again (April 2009). The Neverending Tour grinding through town, one more time. No big deal. But way back in 1978 Bob played his first gigs in 8 years and everyone went potty... read more here:

http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/blackbushe-reviews.html

Jack Kerouac article (pub. Garageland)

The following piece I wrote after seeing Jack Kerouac's scroll for On The Road and published in art magazine Garageland

The Scroll.

Institute Of Fine Art, Birmingham. 6 January 2009.

Searching for Satori, I find myself standing in the small room housing about 20 feet of Kerouac’s Scroll, unrolled. The original manuscript for On The Road. He wrote it, non-stop, over three weeks in 1951, in New York, the Benzedrine rush of writing apparently fuelled solely by caffeine and cigarettes. Over the years I’ve collected Beat literature, studied the period and count Carolyn Cassady as a friend. I’d heard about the manuscript even before I read the finished book, and now after all these years, like some latter day pilgrim looking for saintly bones I’m in the same room with it.

The actual writing aside, this is The Source. The birth of the Counter Culture. A stepping stone to our world today. Context is all and, though some of the book reads as dated, it’s a time-bomb from an age where The Man was installing onto a bland post-war cultural landscape his vision of how things should be. Kerouac saw the world as it could be. Freedom of the Self and, yes, the Soul.

He came to abhor the hippy revolution which came next. But in this one book he unlocked minds. Not just with wild, yea-saying tales of madness and kicks but with his knowledge that the world is a beautiful place and God (for want of a better word) lives within us all.

Just as Kerouac felt sad that nobody takes the time to describe early morning dew on top of a fence post anymore, I wonder which modern day tale is able to speak to us like On The Road? I imagine in centuries to come people will read Kerouac anew and marvel at how and why he did it. For now, this fragile document, splattered with his pencil notes, sitting in a university building in the middle of England, is a time machine back to the man himself, sitting in New York all those years ago changing his life and ours. Respect.