It's Monday morning and I'm watching a goat being tethered to the deck of a naval vessel. It will soon be blasted by heat and radiation from and atomic bomb in the name of developing protective clothing. To get some perspective before I feel too sorry for the animal I remind myself of what happened to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A-bomb test footage is as compelling as it is terrifying...watching that vast plume unfurl atop of the stem to form the famous mushroom evokes awe and horror. Ironically, it's the act of creation that lead me to visions of the ultimate destructive weapon. I was looking into Wallace Berman's Semina magazine, specifically the price of the facsimile set published a few years ago. Disappointingly it was still way beyond my pocket.
A good substitution for that is Semina Culture - Wallace Berman And His Circle, which I featured in a post on my other blog back in 2015. At least it's affordable. Bruce Conner's name came up in a review of the show that I came across, which prompted me to look into him again. I learnt that he made a film from footage of the Project Crossroads nuclear test called Crossroads (1976). Sadly, it's not available in full on the internet.
These investigations sent me back to the book, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association by Anastasia Aukeman, which has been on the shelf for a few years. I decided to read it properly as opposed to dipping in and admiring art by Conners and others on the Painterland scene. I can't help but feel a little envious of an art scene set in California, such is the mythical allure of the county, especially for someone raised in soggy Britain.
I used to daydream over the West Coast Jazz scene for the same reason, wondering if anything could be finer than the combination of sun, sand and Shelly Manne playing in a club nearby. Then there was the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, which published Norman Mailer's The White Negro in 1957. In it, Mailer describes 'the collective condition' as living 'with instant death by atomic war'. So much angst for his 'American existentialist - the hipster'.
The White Negro is quoted in Jeff Nuttall's classic, Bomb Culture, chiming, title-wise, with Mailer's view that this young generation lived under the potentially devastating cloud of that terrible 'mushroom'. The book (pictured) has been with me for over 30 years, which is miraculous considering how often I recycle books and testimony to it's place in my heart. Although (or because) it's written in a 'hipster' prose (part Kerouac improv) style, close scrutiny reveals many fascinating personal insights in the era and underground culture of Britain, specifically London. Of course, it's that very style which endears it to me over a journalistic, historical account, which may be better for facts but cannot convey the atmosphere.
All three books are worthy additions to your collection should you be interested in how writers and artists not only survived but thrived in the years after the war and the horror of A-Bombs being dropped. Perhaps it's not stretching things too far to suggest that what was perceived as a very real future death threat sharpened some minds to the point of ensuring that the moment was to be seized because the future wasn't guaranteed.
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