| Author | Message | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Martin has summed up much of this already. But Jerry Cornelius was a representative of all that was good and bad about the British SF New Wave and therefore by implication the Swinging Moorcock Era New Worlds. Moorcock's original joke was to take a key early Elric story and then transfer it to sixties London. He pumped it full of drugs and pop culture and Ian Fleming and William Burroughs. It dragged SF out of the gosh-wow ghetto that it had been perfectly happy to ruminate since before the war, and straight into wow-man! The joke expanded out and Cornelius was nailed to the mast of the good ship New Worlds. The regulars were invited to play with the format, twist it, reinvent it. The new kid on the block, a young writer called M John Harrison took the format and infused it with such a anger, irony and intensity that many of his refinements were apparently integrated into Moorcock's third Cornelius novel. But it wasn't just the fact that hip SF writers were playing the Cornelius riff, a JC comic strip appeared for several months in International Times, the official newspaper of the swinging London underground scripted by Moorcock, Harrison and Langdon Jones and drawn by Mal Dean and Richard Glyn Jones. And there was a (slightly dire) movie of the first novel, The Final Programme. Jerry had become a proper pop culture icon - or so it seemed to the SF community who weren't entirely sure they'd seen one before. In spite of the rounds of reincarnations, incests, character-elisions, confusions, multiple worlds, apocalypses and utopias, after four novels and umpteen short stories the Jerry Cornelius sequence was brought to a close. The final novel, The Condition of Muzak, tears aside the veil of Maya and the truth about Jerry comes out: he's not the messiah - he's a very naughty boy! We are introduced, once again, to another JC but this one is a snotty little wanker who lives with his mum in a filthy flat in Notting Hill. He wants to be a rock star, but he's actually more of a dreamer than a do-er. Jerry imagines himself in exotic impossible locales, socking it to the man, involved in a multiverse spanning plot where the same characters are shuffled like tarot cards of his obsessions until he himself is locked into an ever decreasing circle. Entropy catches up with him and he goes into hibernation, to re-emerge butterfly like to usher in a brave new utopia. But meanwhile in the real world: Cornelius plays his first gig in Notting Hill. He's a bit shit, and the stage collapses under him. He breaks his guitar in the fall and can't afford a new one. His mum dies. That wouldn't usually be a problem in these stories. But no, his mum *really* dies. The round of reincarnations and reinventions is over. Welcome to base reality. Jerry gets bit parts in TV adverts. It pays the bills. The end. Unfortunately after all that Moorcock produced further JC novels and stories because as ever he couldn't let it lie. More in part two! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
In the mid-eighties I was a teenager. I discovered SF and fantasy through mysterious paperbacks that an uncle had left at my grandparents when he'd moved to the States in the seventies. Moorcock was a pretty much de rigeur part of the fantasy reading list. It was pretty much like reading an inverse version of Robert E Howard, and besides there were lots of them and you could play Spot The Connexions until the cows came home. But there were a handful of these books that didn't seem to fit into the standard science fantasy mould. They had mysterious oblique covers and hinted at the arcane secrets of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. I was probably fourteen or fifteen when I first read A Cure For Cancer and mostly I didn't have a clue what was going on. But it was cool. And it had these weird bold black & white illustrations by Mal Dean. Mal Dean was a key New Worlds illustrator. Deceptively simple pop surrealist images often containing autistically detailed drawings of military hardware alongside cowboys and indians, hippies and the fuzz. He also produced artwork for UK music mags and images of hep cats from the London free jazz scene, in which he was a player. Mal Dean, as much as Moorcock, helped to define the JC groove. The eighties turned into the nineties. The Thatcher Era which the yoof had revived the sixties to escape eventually passed and London began to swing again in the optimism of Blair and New Labour. There was Brit-pop and club culture - all of that was probably quite ill judged too. And after much krautrock, drugs and mysticism I found myself drawn into this terribly exciting new frontier called The Internet. Before the internet you had to spend hours trawling around secondhand record shops and bookshops and reference sections of public libraries to dig up obsolete and esoteric information about cool stuff that no one else liked. And then all of a sudden it was all there as large as life but slightly badly scanned. Other people who knew about Amon Duul and the Holy Modal Rounders and hell, even Michael Moorcock himself were all available on tap. In a bout of enthusiasm for the new media I sketched some rather badly written JC vingettes that dragged Cornelius through cyberpunk and krautrock across London to the East End. And the I had him shot by his cyclops son on an awful Jools Holland TV programme. These were the original raison d'etre for the original iotacism website and I found myself inheriting a forum called The Krautrock Message Board which slowly morphed into Radio KRMB. These rose, fell, were reincarnated, reinvented and fell into apocalypses and utopias. And once in a while I got bored! More in part three! | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
>> as large as life but slightly badly scanned. [sigh] and you've already changed the forum tagline once this week. Speaking of Jools Holland: watch the show after his this Friday night, it's called Blast and is on at 12.30. It's a "yoof" programme, but from what I saw last week it's really not as bad as that sounds. And crucially, it may feature an interview with me, but more importantly has a feature on the young folks I met in Liverpool last week and some of the wonderful art they're doing. (They're I've gone and done it: dragged another thread totally off-topic again. Thanks for the JC info io. Can't wait for part 3). | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Oops, it's not after Jools. It's after a documentary on The Fall. So I know you'll all be watching anyway  | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
During one of these periods of boredom I decided I was going to put together a gallery of Mal Dean's illustrations. Although the internet was this huge-encyclopedic-network-of-all-knowledge-ever, it had gaps. One omission was material about Mal Dean. So I got in contact with Moorcock and Langdon Jones and anyone else who might have known Mal to try to get in touch with Mal Dean's widow, the poet Libby Houston, to ask her permission to use this material. No one knew where she was, but I got a reply from a (slightly older) M John Harrison. Mike had lived off the legendary Holloway Road in the seventies, just up the road from Mal Dean. In fact I believe Libby dragged him along to a climbing wall at the Holloway sports centre, and we know where that went. Of course this was a *big thing* for me. Not only was Mike one of the few writers from back then that I still read, not only was Course of the Heart the book that I regularly bothered people about, but my first memories of the world came from living on Holloway Road in the seventies. Out of the windows of a flat in Salisbury House I saw my first punks strutting along. And if you've read Mike's stories "Running Down" or "The East" you'd have been as excited as I was. Anyway, I had asked Mike about Mal Dean, the whereabouts of Libby Houston, and also whether he needed any help on his website. Mjohnharrison.com already existed but the only page was a mass of undigested HTML. He gave me some good stories about the first, turned up a blank on the second and I think you can guess on the third. The Mal Dean site, thus far, has never happened. Once I started building various incarnations of mjohnharrison.com and a few other sites for other people and organisations I didn't really have the time or inclination. As a slight post-script: earlier in the year I did a solo gig as The Original Entropy Circus at the Drones Club. Also playing was my mate the theremin guru Man From Uranus, and headlining was a certain Charles Hayward from the seminal post-punk experimental band This Heat. Hayward had been knocking around on the London free jazz scene for some time when This Heat came to prominence in the late seventies, however earlier in his career he had played in Mal Dean's Amazing Band. The finale of the evening was a jam session with Phil, Charles, Ninki V (another thereminist), Justin Patton (on Moog), and me. I didn't fall through the stage or break my guitar. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Speaking of Jools Holland... Dude! Remind me. I'm so crap at remembering to watch telly in general. Actually, make it into a separate thread so it'll be shouting at everyone when they're surfing the internet instead of watching Sumption do his thang on telly. But yes, I seem to have accidentally produced a combined FAQ and potted history for this forum. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Holloway Road climbing: is that the Sobell centre? I have amazing memories of running riot around there, my first time as a teenager let loose in a totally uncharted part of London. I especially remember running into MacDonald's, shouting "twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepickles andonionsallonasesameseedbun" and not even waiting around for a free burger (an anarchist and a vegetarian in those days). | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
That is indeed the Sobell Centre. I've got a feeling that it's now a David Lloyd Sports Centre, which if true would cast a slightly mysterious light on the cover paintings for some recent Night Shade MJH editions. As it happens I lived on the other end of Holloway Road but I had a dream when I was about four or five where I wandered up the road on a sunny day, without my parents, eating from a big bag of sweets. The Holloway Road went on forever. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
> The Holloway Road went on forever. Yes, as did Seven Sisters (I spent a week living in Finsbury park, and cycling to work in Richmond every day. It was mid-winter. I nearly had to get prosthetic fingers fitted by the end of it). | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
"The Hollway Road Went on Forever" : autobiography title! Dare we mention the film of "The Final Programme"? *Feels smug; remembers seeing it once on late night tv, c. 1980; realises can't remember a blind thing about it* | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> Dare we mention the film of "The Final Programme"? I'm afraid I already did. Didn't I mention that there'd be a test at the end of the lecture? >> Yes, as did Seven Sisters... Lived there, inevitably. An estate just off Seven Sisters Road opposite the tube station (side entrance) had some of my gloomiest moments ever in that flat. I believe Mike lived around there during roughly the same period. For me the Holloway Road is a rather shabby symbol of eternal life, while the Seven Sisters Road gets pretty close to damnation. Actually that's not fair, I have a soft spot for that big London Transport building near Manor House tube, especially in autumn when it's covered in a blaze of russet creepers. | ||
| robp Username: robp Registered: 6-2006 |
So... thats what *Every Thing* is all about. Only I can't help wondering if the plural of apocalypse shouldn't be apocalypi... R | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>So... thats what *Every Thing* is all about. Oh, the merest tip of the iceberg! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
>Test at the end ... Sorry: posting in the middle of a frantic training day. I wasn't reading the board as carefully as I usually do. So - did you go the whole way with your fixation, and get the Jerry hair-do, car coat, and flares? Or did you just do like the rest of us, and simply bump off a series of well-known international figures in cold blood? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> simply bump off a series of well-known international figures in cold blood? Hmm, well when I took my first E, I didn't go raving like a sensible person. I went for an all night perambulation of the Medway Towns on my own in freezing fog dressed in a brown suede car coat, combats and white leather high-heeled winkle pickers occasionally stopping to write the word "CUNT" on car windscreens. Crossing the motorway bridge back across the Medway on the way home I saw a procession of shadowy figures out in the fog, throwing themselves into the river, one after another, synchronised with balletic grace. Fuck knows what that pill was cut with, I'd bought it from a friend's mum who was an art teacher at a notable local public school. I had one shitter of a comedown. Life's always better in the movies. >> Sorry: posting in the middle of a frantic training day. Oy vey! Well, I had a far more relaxed day than I expected. Hence the minor autobio(geo)graphical epic. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
>CUNT on car windscreens. So it was you! Scrub as I might, it always showed up in foggy weather. Training: yep - oral history. In other words, professional exercise for me and big mouth. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>CUNT on car windscreens. >>So it was you! Scrub as I might, it always showed up in foggy weather. Well, you see early nineties Medway wasn't a very connected culture either! | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Heh, sounds like quite a trip. My friend had an affair with his art teacher at a notable non-local public school. Art teachers, eh? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Hmph. Well all of mine were burly red-faced men. Couldn't score off them, couldn't shag them. That's what you get if you can only afford the non-local grammar school. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
One of mine was great; the other was a frustrated fourth-rate landscape artist, and succeeded in stifling the visual creativity of almost everyone he taught (including me) by painting over the work we were doing in class and telling us what it *should* be like. God knows how one got through it, actually. *Starts weeping helplessly onto Betamax copy of "Our Friends in the North" * | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
It's HIM! ... Um, isn't it? http://www.legis.state.ia.us/GA/76GA/House/Members /Jerry-Cornelius.html | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
"Died, December 1995" | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
That's never stopped him in the past! *Wonders who inherited car coat* | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
See? He just went into mufti: http://www.canyoncreekart.com/our_store/our_store. htm - The English assassin - - living quietly - - in Dallas - - somewhere near Dealey Plaza (probably). Case solved, I think! How slowly the last century yields up its secrets ... | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Hey io, thanks for the autobio(geo)graphical posts and info on JC. I’ve been swamped at work and got behind on important stuff like posting recently, but, I definitely found it interesting. The British New Wave and Moorcock era of New Worlds were a bit before my time, so they’re also a bit of a mystery to me unfortunately. It was especially cool to read about how all this history is intertwined and how you got involved with MJH (always sort of wondered about that). I’ve never read any of the JC stories…just a few Elric novels. I don’t think Moorcock is for me any more though. I appreciate him and what he did with his work, but the Elric stuff seems to lose its appeal after the age of 15 or so. And there’s just *so much* other stuff that he’s written that I find it daunting to locate an entrance into it and afraid to commit the time it would require to read it all. I may have to read the MJH Cornelius stories though. Thanks again! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
A pleasure. You pull one thread and the whole cardigan unravels itself! | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
>>You pull one thread and the whole cardigan unravels itself! Life's great that way. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Looking at JC the picture framer... there's something about his eyes which says he's seen it all. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> JC the picture framer... There's another JC, who we all know, who was a carpenter. Have you accepted him into *your* life? | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
I've not even accepted JC the picture-framer into *my* life. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I think I'd accept Johnny Cash into my life. You know, if he wasn't dead and shit. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Let's face it, Cash dead is still cooler than I'll ever be. As for The Other Cornelius (titles for unwritten stories - we've got 'em) - several years ago, I overheard an elderly couple on a train into Paddington, huddled over the Sunday paper. "You see, my dear," he said, "these people who do not believe in the Bible. They are called Muslims." His wife made the kind of amazed noises you might expect. "And they have *not* accepted Christ as their personal saviour." He lapsed into satisfied silence, leaving her -and me - to stare out at England getting dark in the winter rain. As JB Morton used to say in his "Beachcomber" column, this could not happen In Any Other Country ... But sadly, I'm not sure that's any longer true. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Back on topic: time to squander the kids' inheritance, I think - http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/CITADEL-WARHAMMER-OOP-1980s- ELRIC-JERRY-CORNELIUS_W0QQitemZ220030159654QQihZ01 2QQcategoryZ45364QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZView Item - You don't see much workmanship like that any more ... | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Go for it Martin! Something tells me there won't be much of a bidding war and that inheritance will be fine. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
*Gnaws fingers* *Eyes non-existent offspring* *Eyes equally non-existent savings* *Feels panicked and empty* Oh, gaaawwwwwwdddddd - what am I going to *do*????????????????????????????????????? Ahem. No, you go on Dave - you know you really want it! | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Maybe we could just tip them off about this Ebay item over on the forum at www.multiverse.org and watch things decay into mindless bloody violence? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
You've got a cruel mind, lad. Just let me get the beers in first (not Peroni) ... | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
That is cruel, io. I like it. I haven't painted a figure like that for a loooong time. It's all yours Martin. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
"Aaaargh! If you outbid me, Count Blue Oyster of Nottinghill, I'll smite your ass with my wicked evil runesword!" "Ah, fuck it, I'll win this auction in my next incarnation." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
No, no - I really can't afford it. I just bought this: if you don't know Guy Davenport, the mixture of everything from Heraclitus to Faraday, Shelley to Montaigne could well bowl you over. It does me. http://www.amazon.com/Every-Force-Evolves-a-Form/d p/0865472475 | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Martin, that book is going for $1.28 used. The figurine is currently at $0.99. I'm not one to counsel careless consumerism, but Break out the runesword and live a little. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
*Sudden mental picture of that beach ball creature in 'Dark Star,' twitching its claws indecisively when faced with new experience* I dunno - this capitalist economy may be a good idea after all. What does anyone else think? | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
I think I have one of those Jerry Cornelius figures (painted) in my loft. I'm pretty certain I also have the Elric one, and a few others, from the same set. Plus lots of other Games Workshop oddities, such as Sanity Claws, their limited edition Christmas Cthulhu figure. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
Christmas With Cthulu!!? *Brain fogs* ...Didn't The Fall record that? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 6-2006 |
Can we do Airfix models now? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 6-2006 |
After you with the Bostik ... | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Did somebody say Christmas With Cthulu!!? http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/12/16 Bostik: I can vividly remember how that stuff smelled. Yuck. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 6-2006 |
Yes, Christmas with Cthulu: http://www.rolljordan.com/sol2/www.solegends.com/c itle/citle16sanityclaws.htm This was one of Citadel's "limited edition" range. I owned most of them, full list here: http://www.rolljordan.com/sol2/www.solegends.com/c itle/index2.htm The toilet ones were the best! | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 8-2006 |
Cool Dan. I haven't seen or thought about these little figurines for sooo long it seems. I'm getting nostalgic. Kinda embarrassing. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Meanwhile, Jerry's been busy. Or rather, Oxfordshire Record Office has: http://www.darkarchivist.com/ Very Mal Dean: very tasty. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Gosh! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
The Ultimate in Science Fiction - Rated "R" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKNrL3sRV4o - It all looks rather sweet now, doesn't it? | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
IF they are making a new version of Death Race 2000 and they did Transformers...This is overdue for a re-make! Hollywood are you listening! |