rozk: (Default)
rozk ([personal profile] rozk) wrote2010-12-08 11:38 pm

Abigail On Lennon

We did an issue of New River Blues a couple of days after the murder and this was what she wrote.

[identity profile] ffutures.livejournal.com 2010-12-08 11:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for that - I don't see her work much, it's good to be reminded how well she could write.

[identity profile] selenak.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 07:36 am (UTC)(link)
Alas she entirely lost me from the third paragraph onwards. I hate being dictated to what it means to be a "real" fan. Especially when much of the musical innovation and the working drive actually came from cuddly suburbia.

[identity profile] rozk.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 08:03 am (UTC)(link)
You should use the link to absorb a bit more of her writing, though. She was, thinking back on it, a bit too caught up in the fannish fandom wars of the time - but read the piece called 'A Mitcham Mint' to see just how inventively funny she could be.

[identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 08:02 am (UTC)(link)
I enjoyed that - though when she wrote that John's hooking up with Yoko constituted the first link between avant-garde movements and pop culture I found myself muttering 'Warhol' under my breath.

[identity profile] rozk.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 08:04 am (UTC)(link)
I think she was talking in terms of what we knew and when we knew it - and Abi was never the fan of the Velvets that I was.

[identity profile] cmcmck.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 06:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Or even Marinetti, Boccioni and Russolo at the beginning of the twentieth century.............The Rumourharmonium has to be unique in musical terms and these were the people who invented 'happenings' :o)

[identity profile] rozk.livejournal.com 2010-12-09 11:07 pm (UTC)(link)
Well yes, and Abigail knew quite a lot about them - even though her personal tastes were mostly quiet ceramicists - but the whole point about that lot is that they did not form an alliance with actually existing popular culture so much as be bombastic about what popular culture would be like if they could control it.

NRBs

(Anonymous) 2010-12-09 12:19 pm (UTC)(link)
That post sent me to rereading some of Abi's other stuff that's up on the site - that brought back memories - SeaCon 1979. God we were still in our 20s - were we really ever that young? (I know biologically we must have beenm, but you know what I mean).

I note/recall that Abi consistenly misspelt my name; ah well I remember that it grated at the time (after all she had known for me for the best part of 10 years by then), but what of it. Still it's a good piece - all the better viewed through the lens of time - it must be 30 years since I last read any of NRBs,

Graham