"Another Green World" - Eno documentary on BBC4's Arena

[Ness Rowlah]

Anyone else enjoy this?

If you did not see it, you got another week.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...r_Green_World/

Thoroughly liked it and there was a quote in almost every reply from Eno (and big up for including
15 seconds of "My Sex"/Ultravox).

He keeps it all together by good storage, good labeling, loads of space, taking notes and drawing in small notebooks
(although almost never referring to them - Van Gogh's letters-> Eno's notebooks?).
And I got the impression he's producing U2 and Coldplay
cause he actually wants to reach people, he wants results.

[nochexxx]

Anyone else enjoy this?

If you did not see it, you got another week.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...r_Green_World/

Thoroughly liked it and there was a quote in almost every reply from Eno (and big up for including
15 seconds of "My Sex"/Ultravox).

He keeps it all together by good storage, good labeling, loads of space, taking notes and drawing in small notebooks
(although almost never referring to them - Van Gogh's letters-> Eno's notebooks?).
And I got the impression he's producing U2 and Coldplay
cause he actually wants to reach people, he wants results.

looking forward to this, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[baboon2004]

And I got the impression he's producing U2 and Coldplay
cause he actually wants to reach people, he wants results.

Not because he's gone mental?

This may result in an instant ban, but I kind of have a soft spot for some of his production work with U2.

Will def watch the programme- thanks for the heads up.

[grizzleb]

Watched it and enjoyed it. I do like him but he does seem a bit self-satisfied, a bit of a bellend. All that stuff about nobody else doing light installations haha.

Much of his chat is spot on though.

[zhao]

Eno said

"In my house in Oxfordshire, we have this big, beautiful Andrew Logan sculpture of a lovely Pegasus with blue glass wings. When I get a taxi from the station, a driver will always comment on it because it is so striking. What they often say is, 'What does that stand for then?' Or, 'What does that mean?', based on the idea that something exists because it has to tell you something, or it refers to something else, and I realise that this notion is foreign to me. The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else."

this struck me as interesting... because it seems obvious to me that it is impossible to make anything non referential; and this non-referentiality, uniqueness and originality is pure illusion and a particularly modernist conceit.

a (late period) Mondrian is referential of Pythagoras, of Euclid, of ancient architecture, of classical painterly compositions, of modern city streets.

in fact, it can be convincingly argued that abstraction is more, not less, referential of other objects or systems in the universe, than representation or narrative.

Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire makes me think of Tibetan singing bowls, Catholic hymns and choir music, Shakuhachi, Buddhism, the tragectory of an object flying through the air, sitting alone by a silent lake at dawn, sunrise on desert planes, staring up at stars at night.

[swears]

Not because he's gone mental?

This may result in an instant ban, but I kind of have a soft spot for some of his production work with U2.

Will def watch the programme- thanks for the heads up.

With Or Without You is a proper lush production, just a shame about Bono's vocal :/

[PeteUM]

I can sort of cope with the idea that Eno is a bit self-satisfied at times. The diary book he wrote, "A Year With Swollen Appendices" is a mixture of thought-provoking and smug on almost every page but he's so good when he's good that I always feel obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt, almost even up to the point of being a champion of the Lib-Dems. However, watching that Paul Morley overview of his career really genuinely made me feel miserable. Watching the Miss Sarajevo concert section swiftly followed by Coldplay just made me ashamed to live in East Anglia.

[woops]

in fact, it can be convincingly argued that abstraction is more, not less, referential of other objects or systems in the universe, than representation or narrative.

Abstract works have wider range of reference due to their abstraction. That's why a still life of a bowl of fruit has a comparatively limited set of references (a bowl of fruit, one school of painting, a contemporary lifestyle). You're saying 'abstraction is more widely and less strictly referential...than representation or narrative', not that abstraction is somehow better at referring. Eno is overdoing it but that's what he's getting at too as far as I can tell.

Anyway it seems like you're setting up this one as another anti-materialist-carnivorous-westcentrism type thread, there is no need.

As two big names in geometry Pythagoras and Euclid are going to come up in a lot of paintings.

[mistersloane]

I once got told to 'go home' in Hackney because I was saying everyone was deluded and that Eno was an arse. Talking Heads? Arse. Roxy Music? Arse. Solo work? Arse. Later productions? Don't make me laugh.

He's a wanker.

But I was pointed to that documentary by someone who said that it and Eno reminded them of me. So that makes me a wanker too. Aargh.

[sufi]

2016/2017

The consensus among most of my friends seems to be that 2016 was a
terrible year, and the beginning of a long decline into something we
don’t even want to imagine.

2016 was indeed a pretty rough year, but I wonder if it’s the end - not
the beginning - of a long decline. Or at least the beginning of the
end….for I think we’ve been in decline for about 40 years, enduring a
slow process of de-civilisation, but not really quite noticing it until
now. I’m reminded of that thing about the frog placed in a pan of slowly
heating water…

This decline includes the transition from secure employment to
precarious employment, the destruction of unions and the shrinkage of
workers’ rights, zero hour contracts, the dismantling of local
government, a health service falling apart, an underfunded education
system ruled by meaningless exam results and league tables, the
increasingly acceptable stigmatisation of immigrants, knee-jerk
nationalism, and the concentration of prejudice enabled by social media
and the internet.

This process of decivilisation grew out of an ideology which sneered at
social generosity and championed a sort of righteous selfishness.
(Thatcher: “Poverty is a personality defect”. Ayn Rand: “Altruism is
evil”). The emphasis on unrestrained individualism has had two effects:
the creation of a huge amount of wealth, and the funnelling of it into
fewer and fewer hands. Right now the 62 richest people in the world are
as wealthy as the bottom half of its population combined. The
Thatcher/Reagan fantasy that all this wealth would ‘trickle down’ and
enrich everybody else simply hasn’t transpired. In fact the reverse has
happened: the real wages of most people have been in decline for at
least two decades, while at the same time their prospects - and the
prospects for their children - look dimmer and dimmer. No wonder people
are angry, and turning away from business-as-usual government for
solutions. When governments pay most attention to whoever has most
money, the huge wealth inequalities we now see make a mockery of the
idea of democracy. As George Monbiot said: “The pen may be mightier than
the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen”.

Last year people started waking up to this. A lot of them, in their
anger, grabbed the nearest Trump-like object and hit the Establishment
over the head with it. But those were just the most conspicuous,
media-tasty awakenings. Meanwhile there’s been a quieter but equally
powerful stirring: people are rethinking what democracy means, what
society means and what we need to do to make them work again. People are
thinking hard, and, most importantly, thinking out loud, together. I
think we underwent a mass disillusionment in 2016, and finally realised
it’s time to jump out of the saucepan.

This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just
tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and
political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve
taken for granted - some semblance of truth in reporting, for example -
can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good
analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial
support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the
non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if
we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education,
not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social
generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens.
And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely
charismatic ones.

Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain,
resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we
want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I
think we’re starting to.

There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a
surprising year.