Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Fine documentary on television this evening courtesy of BBC 2 from Dominic Sandbrook, author of late fifties “Never Had It So Good” and the sixties “White Heat” addressing the decade of the seventies. The half hour music programme following it concentrated on the art-rock of the period, so we had Bowie, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, The Kinks, Sparks , and just two low points in it for me, New York Dolls, and the overblown pretentious Queen.

It got me thinking back to when I did the Arts Foundation course for the O.U years back, and at summer school (UMIST) we had a project to do, and I concentrated my project or thesis on the sixties, after reading the late great Arthur Marwick book on the same period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Marwick

Arthur Marwick was a critic of postmodernism, seeing it as a "menace to serious historical study". It was also the methodology of the postmodernism to which he was opposed, "the techniques to deconstruction or discourse analysis have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over years". In some ways I have tended to err towards his critique although I have found postmodernistic discourse to be very invigorating in historical discourse vis a vis from the strands of analysis by Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, et all.

I must try and get a copy of his book “The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998) “, which was one of the books I used as background to the project.

Meanwhile, just nearing the end of “How To Live, A Life of Montaigne”.