The Cool School is an excellent look into the lives of some of the seminal artists creating their own scene in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. The film focuses around the Ferus Gallery and the artist, actors, and other creative types who were part of its success. Guest appearances come from Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha and narration by Jeff Bridges. It might take a little digging, but the DVD can be found on eBay and Amazon.

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Shucks, computers sure have have come a long way over the past 60 years or so, as this awesome collection of photos of early models — including Whirlwind, Colossus and Pegasus — confirms.

I wonder what hippies in the ’60s would think of Maya Hayuk, who seems to translate the incomprehensible joy of the universe into technicolor paintings and murals. I don’t think they would have been able to handle the truth. Rye Rye commissioned a wall piece from her for the video for Sunshine [watch video below].

As if watching Mad Men hadn’t convinced me enough that I was born in the wrong era. I find these office photos of Bell Labs from the late 60s, and I can’t help but swoon over the clothes, vintage wallpaper, and the prototype terminals. If only going to work today looked as cool as a vintage mainframe computer.

Inspired by children’s books, encyclopedia’s from the ’50s and ’60s, textiles and crocheted rugs, Australian artist Kirra Jamison’s paintings are from the world of dreams. And it’s not just the colours and composition that is making me look twice. With whimsical titles like The Sea was Red, The Sky was Grey, I Wonder How Tomorrow Will Ever Follow Today and He Smelt like Apples Jamison proves that it’s all in a name.

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Archigram is recognised as an influencer of many of the world’s greatest contemporary architects and buildings. Exhibitions of their work from 1961-1974 have been touring major institutions worldwide since 1992, and Archigram was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 2002. Despite this, the architectural vision of Archigram is mainly unbuilt and the bulk of their visionary work remained difficult to access, largely stored domestically or in temporary storage. 

The Archigram Archival Project is an online inspiration gallery of Archigram’s work; featuring almost 10,000 items including digitised drawings, collages, paintings, photographs, magazines, articles, slides and multi-media material, accompanied by original texts by Archigram wherever possible.

Analog electronics by British outfit Belbury Poly (Jim Jupp and Eric Zann) make me believe machines have souls and the ghosts of obsolete recording devices are haunting the dusty stacks of libraries debating the relevance of 60s avant-garde music and counterculture.

Google recently demonstrated their ability to predict flu outbreaks across America weeks in advance of the outbreaks themselves. It would seem that they are more than just a pretty search engine. And as if that wasn’t enough, they’ve now teamed up with Life Magazine, what was the cornerstone of photojournalism for the Twentieth Century, to digitize 95 per cent of their image bank that never saw the light of day. Now millions of photos stretching from the 1750s to the present day are available on Google Images at the click of a button.

Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan writes the most delicate, haunting, and unforgettable music. Yet she left the industry for more than thirty years following limited acclaim during the folkie days of the late-1960s. Miraculously her career was re-ignited a few years back in the same neo-folk revival that re-introduced us to the likes of Nick Drake and Buffalo Springfield. We asked her whether she still pinches herself at how differently the last decade has panned out from where it all seemed to be heading. ‘When I wake up in the morning, I have to put into place all that has happened to me over the last eight years and try to believe it all over again. So far I have not become jaded or bored. It is still new and all I could ever have dreamed of when I was 17 or 18.

Through the years between, though, I never dreamed of anything like this — it never crossed my mind that I could ever come back to music and especially that I would ever play live shows. As far as being a ‘folk hero’ goes, well it is funny for me and makes me laugh a lot sometimes, as I don’t see myself as a folkie person at all.

Sure enough I did abandon city life and modern ways for some years. But having children changed all that. I don’t believe in keeping kids from the realities of the world. I always did let them have TV and whatever technology was current, even when we lived a mile up a farm track. I no longer wish to be living in the nineteenth century. I found out all I needed to know about how it is to live without electricity, state support or the internal combustion engine.

I loved the years and learned more than I could have any other way, but couldn’t sustain it without denying that the rest of the world had changed. I have benefited obviously from the change and I emerged to a world that understood me at last – but It’s quite weird sometimes to be thought of still as the girl on the cover of Just Another Diamond Day in her mother’s apron and her sister-in-law’s Grandmother’s old tweed dress, smiling out onto what was a Hebridean field full of cows and sheep and her neighbour’s daughter playing her violin. I live in the city and have done for 15 years now.

I was never a folk-singer and never will be. But I know that the period in my life when I lived that very pastoral existence had a huge and everlasting effect on me and that maybe that effect is what has come through and meant something to other people and to songwriters who are the same age I was when I left music behind’.

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