This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

Gruff Rhys – ‘American Interior’ (2014)

American Interior is a book (and also a film and an album) by Gruff Rhys, the creative force behind Super Furry Animals.  The project arose from Rhys’s practice of ‘investigative touring’: combining a standard musical tour with field research.  His book is an imaginative examination of the journeys of the eighteenth-century Welsh adventurer John Evans and his search for the mythical Welsh-speaking tribe of Native Americans who supposedly lived somewhere beyond the Missouri River.  The result is a joyfully whimsical and thought-provoking work.

Rosemarie Waldrop – ‘Blindsight’ (2004)

“A frame supports what would, on its own, collapse.  Apple trees pilfered from a novel, the firmest possible squeeze of the hand, the same skin in and out.” (Certainties)

Rosemarie Waldrop is a German-American writer and critic who specialises in experimental prose poems and philosophical questioning.  Blindsight is one of her most accomplished collections and refers to the neurological concept of the brain registering far more visual information than we are consciously aware.  Thus, she uses collage effects and unusual structures in her poems to try to expand the reader’s imaginative vision.  The result is a work of profound beauty.

Joan Retallack – ‘Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music’ (1996)

Joan Retallack is an American poet and lifelong friend of the writer, composer and artist, John Cage.  Musicage is the result of a series of interviews she conducted with Cage over a number of years.  Cage talks with candour and wisdom about the fields of music, art and literature and constructs a cohesive worldview; a beacon of opposition to authoritarianism in art and in society in general.

Elizabeth West – ‘Hovel in the Hills’ (1978) and ‘Garden in the Hills’ (1982)

In the 1960s Elizabeth and Alan West gave up their jobs in Bristol and bought a derelict cottage on a plot of land in North Wales.  For the next ten years or so they spent considerable time and energy repairing the cottage and turning their unpromising hillside plot into a garden capable of keeping them self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables.  But the difference between Elizabeth West’s two books and the host of other ‘good life’ titles is that the Wests were early innovators, dropping out of the system before it was considered

fashionable.  They were also a working class couple with no private income and very little in the way of savings, so life was a constant struggle of finding casual work to keep them afloat whilst they lovingly nurtured their garden.  West tells their story with straightforward humour and humanity.

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

Annea Lockwood – ‘Ground of Being’ (2014)

Annea Lockwood is a ground-breaking composer who specialises in working with found sounds.  This collection gathers together works composed between 1996 and 2013 and makes uses of natural sounds, conventional instruments and conceptual experiments such as pianos gradually destroyed by water or fire.

Davy Graham & Bert Jansch – ‘Davy & Bert’ (2014)

Two of the giants of the folk guitar, Davy Graham and Bert Jansch, were brought together for a concert in Edinburgh in 2005.  Alas, neither is with us any longer, but this album provides a record of the guitar virtuosity of two very different, but equally innovative, players.

And watching:

‘Jimmy’s Hall’ – Ken Loach (2014)

After being deported from the United States, Jimmy Gralton decides to build a dance hall in 1930s rural Ireland.  In doing so he challenges the power political conservatism and an authoritarian Church has over the people of his native village, but above all else he wants to give people the chance to dance and have fun.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ – Matt Reeves (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is an entertaining Hollywood action film that actually asks important questions about what it means to be human and how we relate to our planet.  The apes are wonderfully realised, but a convincingly unhinged Gary Oldman in a supporting role steals the show.

‘A Taste of Honey’ – Tony Richardson (1961)

Adapted by Richardson and Shelagh Delaney from her play, A Taste of Honey is a gritty slice of early 1960s social realism.   Shelagh Delaney broke new ground by creating working-class characters who were fully-rounded and believable and gave a new voice to women, gay people and others on society’s margins.  Tony Richardson and his cinematographer, Walter Lassally, evoke an industrial Salford that is now long gone.