Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? was a long running BBC children's TV show that, from the early 70s onwards, showed all kinds of pastimes, games, hobbies, projects, and other non-passivities that kids could be doing rather than staying sat in front of the goggle box. It's hard to imagine a commercial TV station going against its own interests in this way.

Fascinating post from Carl at the Eighties blog on the expansion of TV channels focusing on i/ the construction of children as hyper-consumers 2/ the superabundance of choice, which prefigures the internet:

"It is of course during the Eighties that two phrases develop to reflect the numbing, paralysing effect of the increasing vastness of the mediascape, of the impossibility of settling for any one thing, the burden of an overabundance of choice: “channel surfing” and “couch potato”.As Bruce Springsteen put it, there are “57 Channels and nothing on”. Whereas before you might have flicked through four or five stations and then gone and done something else, in Springsteen’s song, “got friendly upstairs”, now the search becomes the activity in itself, (this is something magnified on the Internet, of course, with its low-grade, endless, questing and grazing) and there was an early transfer of the verb “to surf” from TV to Net-based activity that has fallen into disuse. “Surfing” implies a restless, depthless forward momentum, indeed an impelled momentum; the shift from the earlier use “channel hopping” to channel/web “surfing” well captures the degree of volition and the scale and force implied by the burgeoning swell of media. TV then becomes less an event, a family gathering point, a moment running to a schedule, and more of a resource or an arena to be navigated but one which is in a sense cognitively unmappable, an open terrain to wander about in, filled with unrealizable promise. You could always be missing something better elsewhere, angst and dissatisfaction are built into the system, yet it also induces a kind of half-fascinated torpor. Vegging out."

Of course the difference between TV and Internet is that while day to day use of the latter does still involve a lot of aimless idle flitting hither and thither, it also incorporates elements of activity -- reacting, commenting, answering back, reblogging, linking, etc etc... just enough of an element of dopamine-achievement-buzz to ensnare users even more effectively ... it's not the Spectacle as was, but a new improved (in)version of it...

at the Los Angeles Review of Books: the podcast of a really enjoyable conversation about retroculture I had with Andy Zax in the summer, with audio-clips expertly woven in by Oliver Wang

bonus bit: at FACT, Matt Woebot's gallery of his fave 70s gatefold sleeves

Older readers may remember a blog from the early "golden" years of blogging called TWANBOC*. One of its specialties was enormously long posts about particular genres or lineages of music, often listing outstanding records in the area and commenting on them with a uniquely characterful blend of enthusiasm, informativeness, and good humour, and always illustrated with high-quality scans of artwork.

The blog was renamed Woebot at a certain point and went through various incarnations (including a web-TV format) before the owner decided to jack it all in ** and focus his energies on music-making.

Well, guess what: Woebot, also known as Matthew Ingram, has had a writing-relapse. And how! The mother of mega-posts--18 thousand words long, heavily illustrated--can be found not on a new blog but in the form of an e-book.



Long-time record-digger Ingram has lost interest in esoterica, being largely unimpressed by the sort of stuff that the salvage operators have been dredging up in recent years, and has instead directed his attention to music that is "hiding in plain sight": 1970s rock albums that were mostly released on major labels and, in aspiration at least, were mainstream. Some of the names in his Lost list are well-known but are often considered "beneath consideration"; others really have been lost to history despite being the kind of record that might have been promoted with full page adverts in the music papers in its own brief moment.

100 Lost Rock Albums From the 1970s is available from Amazon and Amazon UK at a very modest price. You don't need a Kindle to read it, only the freely downloadable Kindle software, which works on PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets.

* TWANBOC, if I recall correctly, stood for "That Was A Naughty Bit of Crap", a saying of Matt's father.

** I'm not sure what the status of TWANBOC/Woebot's archives are: they don't seem to be readily accessible, which is a pity.