A revealing punk memoir from a member of the notorious Bromley Contingent. Bertie 'Berlin' Bromley cuts to the core of the 1976/77 punk sensibility, recounting his own adventures as a ubiquitous scenester and rent boy. The Bromley Contingent included Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Billy Idol and Jordan. Marshall, as a pivotal member of the Contingent, views the scene and its stars with the intimate eye of an insider, offering a vivid picture of the most important British music movement in the 20th century.
Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are streaming north out of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Many people blame stagnant household incomes and economic inequality. However, Possessive Individualism argues that the origins of world disorder are in the failure of the Enlightenment to anticipate the acquisitive individual as a creature of global capitalism. Daniel Bromley provides a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism to explain why the world now finds itself in widespread disorder. Capitalism's basic flaw, he argues, is "possessive individualism." Glorification of the rational individual motivated by acquisitiveness prevents the adoption of necessary government programs that would ease the economic burden on beleaguered households. Meanwhile, possessive individualism enables managerial capitalism-controlled by the "one percent"-to suppress wages and salaries, embrace automation, and move jobs overseas. Capitalism is no longer an engine of improved livelihoods and social hope. Drawing on evolutionary institutional economics and political theory this book offers two remedies to the crisis of modern capitalism. Escape from the crisis requires that the isolated acquisitive individual rediscovers a sense of loyalty to others-as neighbors, as colleagues, and as participants in the shared social process of living. Escape also requires that the private firm be reimagined as a public trust in which the economic well-being of employees becomes a central part of its purpose. In the absence of these dual transformations, capitalism as we know it cannot endure.
Over 5 decades of economic and technical assistance to the countries of Africa and the Middle East have failed to improve the life prospects for over 1.4 billion people who remain vulnerable. Billions of dollars have been spent on such assistance and yet little progress has been made. Persistent hunger and hopelessness threaten more than individuals and families. These conditions foster political alienation that can easily metastasize into hostility and aggression. Recent uprisings in the Middle East are emblematic of this problem. Vulnerable people give rise to vulnerable states. This book challenges the dominant catechism of development assistance by arguing that the focus on economic growth (and fighting poverty) has failed to bring about the promised "convergence." Poor people and poor countries have clearly not closed the gap on the rich industrialized world. Pursuing convergence has been a failure. Here we argue that development assistance must be reconstituted to focus on creating economic coherence. People are vulnerable because the economies in which they are embedded do not cohere. The absence of economic coherence means that economic processes do not work as they must if individual initiative is to result in improved livelihoods. Weak and vulnerable states must be strengthened so that they can become partners in the process of creating economic coherence. When economies do not cohere, countries become breeding grounds for localized civil conflicts that often spill across national borders.
Next, case studies from around the world demonstrate how collective systems function under diverse conditions with reasonable success. Finally, implications for further research and for effective policy formulation are explored.
In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes (property relations)--economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors (and hence plausible outcomes) that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes.
Both realism and justice demand that efforts to conserve biological diversity address human needs as well. The most promising hope of accomplishing such a goal lies in locally based conservation efforts -- an approach that seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of conservation efforts. Natural Connections focuses on rural societies and the conservation of biodiversity in rural areas. It represents the first systematic analysis of locally based efforts, and includes a comprehensive examination of cases from around the world where the community-based approach is used. The book provides: an overview of community-based conservation in the context of the debate over sustainable development, poverty, and environmental decline case studies from the developed and developing worlds -- Indonesia, Peru, Australia, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom -- that present detailed examples of the locally based approach to conservation a review of the principal issues arising from community-based programs an agenda for future action
When Lou Reed and Iggy Pop first met David Bowie in the fall of 1971, Bowie was just another English musician passing through New York City. Lou was still recovering from the collapse of the Velvet Underground, and Iggy had already been branded a loser... Yet within two years they completely changed the face of popular music with a decadent glamour and street-level vibe. With Bowie producing, Reed's Transformer album was a worldwide hit, spinning off the sleazy street anthem “Walk on the Wild Side.” Iggy's Raw Power, mixed by Bowie, provided the mean-spirited, high-octane blueprint for Punk. Bowie boosted elements from both Iggy and Reed to create his gender-bending rock idol Ziggy Stardust. Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell is the story of this friendship and the incredible productivity and debauchery that emerged from it. Presented here for the very first time are their stories interwoven in a triple helix of sexuality, glam rock, and drugs – as seen through the eyes of the people who made it happen.
“Eravamo anti-sistema in tutto e per tutto, nella musica e nell’arte. Volevamo distruggere qualsiasi cosa avesse regole prestabilite, tutto quel che c’era di asfissiante, tutte le certezze. Eravamo decisi a infrangere tutte le regole in tutti i modi possibili”. La Londra di Barry Miles è quella della cultura underground che nasce fra le macerie della Seconda guerra mondiale ed esplode nel corso degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, concentrandosi sul West End e su Soho, le zone in cui era confluita un’eterogenea popolazione di personaggi creativi e fuori dalle righe, intolleranti nei confronti delle costrizioni della cultura e del costume ufficiale: scrittori, poeti, registi, musicisti, artisti, pubblicitari, architetti, stilisti, e una miriade di più anonimi personaggi decisi a fare della propria vita un’arte. È la storia di una rivoluzione culturale determinata a ottenere una “totale confusione dei sensi”, che si sviluppa fra le vie di una metropoli artisticamente onnivora, fatta di locali, librerie, club, pub, teatri, piazze, vicoli, scantinati, case occupate o case borghesi. Una storia di sconvolgente energia vitale e al tempo stesso autodistruttiva, raccontata sul filo di quell’ironia che solo un testimone diretto può comunicare. Mettere in fila i nomi che si incontrano fra queste pagine fa tremare l’idea stessa di ‘controcultura’, poiché vi si ritrova molta della creatività che animerà per ibridazione la cultura ufficiale del Novecento: Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, i Situazionisti, il cool jazz, il rock ’n’ roll, Mary Quant, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard, i Rolling Stones, i Beatles, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, i Pink Floyd, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Townshend, Yoko Ono, Derek Jarman, David Hockney, i Clash, i Police, Gilbert & George, Vivienne Westwood, i Sex Pistols, Boy George, Charles Saatchi, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst e moltissimi altri. Un libro-mondo brulicante di storie e di personaggi, il ritratto più preciso e divertente mai scritto sull’avventura gloriosa e infame di un’epoca oggi entrata nella leggenda.
'No Feelings', 'No Fun', 'No Future'. The years 1976–84 saw punk emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and re-energised British youth culture, inserting marginal voices and political ideas into pop. Fanzines and independent labels flourished; an emphasis on doing it yourself enabled provincial scenes to form beyond London's media glare. This was the period of Rock Against Racism and benefit gigs for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the striking miners. Matthew Worley charts the full spectrum of punk's cultural development from the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and Slits through the post-punk of Joy Division, the industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle and onto the 1980s diaspora of anarcho-punk, Oi! and goth. He recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt and re-invent.
