Etcetera #19: Joni, Architecture, Coupland

The NYT has a loving, wide-ranging piece with contributions from twenty-five musicians of varying vintage. Some old stories, some new ones. All are interesting.

A slightly shorter while not dissimilar article in the Guardian asks artists to pick their favourite tracks from the album as a vehicle for a few more of those personal stories.

C, S, N and Y all feature heavily in the Joni Mitchell story. Here’s an account of their struggle to follow up Déjà Vu. A typical tale of talent, excess and ego—this one really ends really firmly though, with David Crosby’s self-created ostracisation from his once best friends.

Crosby, as anyone with any taste knows, recorded the best album of anyone involved in the Laurel Canyon set: If I Could Only Remember My Name. (Joni contributes backing vocals to a couple of the stand-out tracks.) Here’s a piece by Amanda Petrusich for the New Yorker about a film Cameron Crowe made about Crosby a couple of years ago.

Away from music now. The Shopping Building in Milton Keynes (commonly the city centre; in marketing speak The Centre:MK) is the Twentieth Century Society’s building of the month for June. It really is a wonderful piece of modernist architecture: a 700m long indoor high street, separated into two parallel arcades and flanked by sub-tropical and temperate flora. The long, low-rise steel-frames house an almighty amount of glass, meaning it is an incredibly light and airy place. I suppose it’s inevitable that MK’s most celebrated contributions to architecture are those that house commerce and consumerism, but that’s the way it goes when you’re a city that, as we saw in a previous issue of Etcetera, was conceived as a social democratic project under the Labour height of the welfare state but delivered by Thatcher’s neoliberalism—it is somehow fitting that the dreadful witch was the one that formally opened the building.

As you might know, for several years I worked at The Open University, also based in Milton Keynes. In the past week there’s been a disappointing development with the launch of the (yawn) ‘gender critical research network’, making life very difficult for the trans people working and studying there. You can very quickly walk through a mental checklist of very bad things and find that the network is guilty of all of them. The network sprang out of nowhere; various members of the OU’s staff work at the intersection of health, wellbeing and gender, and none of them seem to have been consulted. The people who form the network tend to be those who work in nearby (at best) disciplines. Their research so far seems to be simply putting out transphobic communications and, well, you’ve used the phrase ‘gender critical’ in the name of your network, lads. Kinda gives the game away.

There’s been a great deal of pushback from staff, students and alumni. Of course, the reaction is one of hiding behind misguided ideas of ‘academic freedom’, a thorny topic which has its place, but elsewhere. The whole thing has a very strong I’m just asking questions energy.