Andy Bay’s cultural highlights

Andy Bay was born in Paris and lives in Brighton. He started freelance writing for Composition Gallery, an online art collection based in Brussels, in 2018 and has been working for WritersMosaic since 2021. 

Album: Ptah the El Daoud by Alice Coltrane

Although her husband John Coltrane’s canonical fame still looms large over the  creative possibilities of the harp as an instrument of musical improvisation, Alice was a co-conspirator in John’s spectacular chordal and modal innovations known  as ‘sheets of sounds’. Her third album Ptah the El Daoud is a favourite in my wife Zoe’s kitchen. Coltrane’s hypnotic harp performances weave together passages of pianistic clarity in ‘Blue Nile’ with a challenging study of post-bop harmonies. The trance-like wavering time signature in ‘Turiya and Ramakrishna’ features Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone and flute.

Ptah the El Daoud may take a few listens to overcome its unusual, high altitude exploration of collectively improvised sounds but there’s something irresistible in this music, which is deeply reminiscent of John Coltrane’s late, great albums like A Love Supreme and Impressions in which the legendary tenor saxophonist was influenced by the music of Ravi Shankar and Eastern musical modes. Alice Coltrane also caught these adventurous flights of post 20th century harmony to build her own musical legacy, with the weightless punctuations and mesmeric sounds of her harp playing. With Ptah the El Daoud, she assimilated and reconfigured the self-contained echoes of the Jazz avant-garde, and announced the future of what was to become the World Music of the 21st century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkh19hnlvyc&list=OLAK5uy_l_qZz8lc1Jj3lhNaAe0DnTSU2anhesRsg&index=2

Book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

In 1986, only 1% of the world’s information was stored digitally; in the year 2000, it was 25%, but by 2013 it was 100%, which is an incredibly fast ‘big leap’. In her non-fiction book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff eloquently explains how we have become an Information civilization and that our information devices and communication technologies have become entirely privately controlled and owned in pursuit of rampant economic gain. Zuboff doesn’t merely lift the veil, she diagnoses the latest full-blown mutation of Capitalism’s smirking poker face. From now on, every one of our keystrokes, mouse clicks, private conversations and sighs, will be recorded and strip-mined for profit on a scale far exceeding anything the barons of the Industrial Age could’ve ever dreamed of.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism also tracks the inevitable next stage, the relentless attempt by artificial intelligence to capture every aspect of human nature and behaviour. These are not just social media platforms, Zuboff suggests, but a new, normative, algorithmic socio-political regime. The book remains as riveting as it was when it was published in 2019, begging the fundamental question: have these Orwellian phone screens we already can’t live without terminally reshaped our individual realities into endlessly monetisable commodities? As HAL 9000 would say: ‘Everything’s running smoothly, and you?’

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/

Exhibition: The Anthony Rudolph Collection: works gifted to him by Paula Rego, Ben Uri Gallery, London

The Ben Uri Gallery in St John’s Wood, London is white, uncluttered and meditatively modern. Currently on show is an exhibition drawing the arc of the 26 year long relationship between Portuguese painter Paula Rego and her favourite male model, Anthony Rudolf. When Rudolf caught her attention at the end of the 1990s, Rego was already a household name in the art world. He became a silent muse, a subject who inspired her to have a new attitude in her thinking about men and about painting them.

What remains of this imaginative collaboration are the Polaroids, sketches, notes and fragments, being shown here to the public for the first time, curated with a reverence for what made Rego and Rudolf’s brilliant collaboration so successful. As you uncover the dimly-lit rooms, you hear the footfall of a bygone, platonic romance, and surrender to the discreet privilege of being in the presence of it.

https://benuri.org/whats-on/

Book: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 non-fiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was seen by many of its critics as an uncomfortable provocation, but I always felt that it was something more urgent: a sober reckoning. With the precision of a seasoned psychologist, Haidt explains why Gen-Z and millennial children deserve better than our behaviour-altering technologies. The book explores the crisis unfolding behind the i-phone screens of our youngsters, both in their homes and classrooms. At the core of The Anxious Generation is the simple, terrifying premise that as soon as using social media starts becoming a habitual, continuous pattern for our children (especially our daughters), it also  becomes something more insidious: it turns into an an aggressively addictive, algorithmically controlled hijacking of their attention.

Haidt’s conclusions are corroborated by meticulous research data, and the results provided are incontrovertible: dramatic spikes in depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal are alarmingly high among Millennials. Theirs can be a low-grade reality and overall societal panic, designed by our billion dollars tech industries.The Anxious Generation is a book about culture, but also about pathology and, most importantly, about how technologies and platforms designed by profit-maximising corporations, not only fracture attention but undermine the emotional, familial, and communal fabric upon which ours, and especially our children’s mental health depends. The book nevertheless, is not without a glint of hope, offering forward-thinking practical strategies  to rekindle in each of us the conviction that we can understand and tackle this new paradigm. As responsible parents and social actors, we must ensure that this next generation, which is growing up so much faster than the previous one, can forge its own path into our digital, and mysterious future.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/456971/the-anxious-generation-by-haidt-jonathan/9781802063271

Andy Bay

Andy Bay is a writer and reviewer.