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=> 1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove...

1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove...
Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Tuesday, May 14 2013, 1:32:18 (UTC)
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1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove, a year of social and cultural upheaval
Introducing our look at the year that defined the modern era, the veteran writer recalls the extraordinary collision of politics, culture and social upheaval that he witnessed as a student
Tariq Ali
The Guardian

Was it a prefigurative year? I think so. Not that one thought of it as such at the time or even a few years later, when it was totally forgotten in the turbulence that engulfed the world. I am trying to recall that year, to find deep down some memories, even a few impressions on the basis of which I could reconstruct a misted-up past without too many distortions.

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months. The Cuban missile crisis had temporarily boosted CND: the Labour party conference had actually voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1960, before changing its mind again the following year, influenced strongly by leftwing icon Aneurin Bevan's deathbed refusal to "go naked into the conference chamber". Bertrand Russell thought CND was too moderate and resigned to create its direct action offspring, the Committee of 100.

Talk was of the Beatles. Those who had been at the Carfax assembly rooms that February to hear them were bewitched. Even so, there were huge arguments at parties between the Beatles partisans and those of us who thought the Rolling Stones were simply superior, certainly more exciting, more sensual and better to dance to. At one such party we voted on who we would dance to and the women, with a few exceptions, preferred the Fab Four. The "real men" demanded the Stones.

Bob Dylan was in the air too. His album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had just been released and Mr Tambourine Man provided the backdrop for myriad eye contacts, a prelude to seduction or not, as was often the case. The pill had changed attitudes and given women much more freedom, but the discrimination was appalling. It was Judith Okely (Jude the Baptist), fresh from the Sorbonne, who argued the case for feminism and introduced some of us to the work of Simone de Beauvoir.

That same year Dylan moved in with Suze Rotolo in the Village. Her parents were communists who had survived McCarthy. Together they radicalised Dylan. The Times they are a-Changin' (1964) was the result, helping to fuel the civil rights movement and radicalise students who had expected a great deal from President Kennedy, but had got the Bay of Pigs invasion and Vietnam instead, and later Lyndon B Johnson. In August, Martin Luther King's "I had a dream" speech electrified a whole generation. Almost a century after the civil war, African Americans were being lynched, denied basic human rights, not allowed to register for the vote in most southern states, and discriminated against in the north. The Ku Klux Klan had supporters in both Republican and Democrat parties. They had decided to fight back: peacefully if we may, said Dr King; violently if we must, replied Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X.

One memory is very clear – 22 November 1963. I'm sitting in the Oxford Union TV room watching the early news with a whole gang of friends. Suddenly everything goes sombre. We watch the footage in silence. John F Kennedy has been assassinated. None of us speaks. We walk to the bar. The first person I meet is a pretty, petite, pale-faced, curly-haired Judith G, a stalwart of the communist club. "Kennedy's been assassinated." She looks at me expressionlessly. "Ah, I see. Did they get Lyndon Johnson too?" She was always very good at striking a pose.

The debate as to who ordered the hit started the very next day and the issue remains unresolved. Three months later, Stanley Kubrick's savage masterpiece Dr Strangelove hit the screens, depicting the Pentagon under the control of crazies preparing a nuclear holocaust, with Peter Sellers as a worried president. Earlier this year, the American economist James Galbraith, whose father, JK Galbraith, was a close friend of Kennedy, told me that "in our household Dr Strangelove was always viewed as a documentary". Some of the generals were supremely insolent, some plain paranoid.

Elsewhere, other leaders were crumbling: Harold Macmillan (Britain), Konrad Adenauer (West Germany), David Ben-Gurion (Israel) were all brought down by scandals of one sort or another, usually involving sex and/or state security. Nothing much has changed on this front. Despite the spirit of 1945, Britain remained a sharply divided class society where deference to one's "superiors" dominated the political culture. The new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, turned out to be an excellent leader of the opposition, challenging, mocking and puncturing Tory pretensions on every front.

It was film-makers, dramatists and satirists, however, who were leading the race towards modernity. Television, a relatively new medium, was often watched collectively since not every home possessed one. In the US, a Harvard maths professor, Tom Lehrer, was entertaining the liberal middle classes with his mocking songs (he stopped singing when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize because "satire was no longer possible"). He was flanked by Lenny Bruce, one of the most brilliant and savage standup comics ever seen on stage: his deliriously incoherent stream of consciousness was considered subversive and he was arrested for "obscenity" in San Francisco and permanently denied entry to Britain after a successful gig at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in 1962.

In Britain, Private Eye had come into existence and the BBC (not then completely neutered) was screening That Was the Week that Was (TW3), watched by 10 million viewers a week, with David Frost and Willie Rushton performing and Dennis Potter, Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams, John Cleese etc helping to write the gags.

It was at the Scala on Walton Street in Oxford (and later the Academy in Oxford Street, and the Hampstead Everyman) where one could see the latest in European cinema. My first experience was educative. After a showing of Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds at the Scala, they played God Save the Queen. Thoughtlessly, I stood up, as I used to in Lahore when the national anthem was played, only to be greeted with a uniform chant from the row behind: "Sit down, you fascist!" The mistake was never repeated. The French new wave was a revelation. Jean-Luc Godard's films alone hit one like bullets, their charge not unlike reading a Stendhal novel – Le Mépris, Bande à part, Une Femme Mariée, Pierrot le Fou, Deux ou Trois Choses, La Chinoise, Weekend dominated the decade. Not that the British film industry was dead. Far from it. The Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter partnership gave us The Servant, a powerful depiction of class and sexual repression (homosexuality was not legalised till 1967) with startling camera shots that make the film a classic. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life were all precursors of what lay ahead.

The first play I saw in this country was Joan Littlewood's Oh What a Lovely War, a moving homage to music hall culture and Brecht, "whose work we knew well from the 30s", she explained. It was a savage deconstruction of the first world war and should be performed again next year as an alternative to the centenary fare we are likely to be fed. The Royal Court was the liveliest theatre in London, combining Beckett and Ionescu and commissioning new plays non-stop. Pinter's The Caretaker premiered that year and Peter Brook, a huge fan of Littlewood, was immersed in work that would challenge every theatrical convention.

The culture reflected a growing self-confidence in the decades following the second world war. Some of my university friends were in revolt against everything: professors, examinations, institutions, and life itself. They pursued the world, seeking it out only to reject it out of hand. They too would soon come into their own.

What I was not prepared for in 1963 was the food. It was awful, apart from the breakfast. After my first week I ventured into the local Indian, imaginatively named the Taj Mahal. Dreadful. I summoned the manager and asked why food we wouldn't give stray dogs at home was being served here. He got upset and took me to his office. "Have you just arrived? Then please don't come here again. There is a Punjabi lady who cooks proper food every weekend in north Oxford. You can order it in advance." My English friends were amazed. "So this is what it's really like." It saved me in the short-term, but I had to teach myself to cook, which I did, and have never regretted. There was nothing to suggest that 30 years later this country would become known for its restaurants and good food. Miracles do happen.

And a footnote. In 1965, a year after the election of a Labour government that went back on many of its promises, Michael Foot shouted at us in despair as we denounced his leader, Wilson, for "crawling to the Pentagon". "You idiots," he screamed. "Don't you realise that Wilson is the most leftwing prime minister this country is ever going to have?" Our satirical laughter enraged him. We're not laughing now. Fifty years later, globalisation has provincialised European politics and culture. Britain has no film industry left. Even Ken Loach gets most of his money from Europe, which itself is largely reduced to mimicking Hollywood thrillers and action flicks, its proud cinema effectively dead; its literary gaze firmly fixed on the NYT bestsellers list, its writers obsessed with being translated into American-English; its politics repeating the tweedledum-tweedledee rhythms pioneered in DC. The most interesting films are being made by Iranian, South Korean, Taiwanese and Thai film-makers, the most challenging politics are in South America, the centre of the world market has moved eastwards to China. Not to worry. North America and Europe still dominate the arms industry. With drones dominating politics and culture, why shouldn't they be arms-market bestsellers as well?



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