chunga’s revenge
by uzwi
Andy McDuffie sends an improved image of the inner sleeve art from Chunga’s Revenge. I identified heavily with that vacuum cleaner at the time. It was such a metaphor of the creative process & how you felt when you were on form. You had the fire. You had the dark Gypsy European night. You were dancing & wheeling by the light of the flames. You were weird. At the same time you were the engineer, the desk, the observer, the interrogator, the double, mon semblable, mon frere. What could emerge from that but Viriconium ? Thanks again Andy.
the m john harrison blog 
This is similar to the pleasant dichotomy I felt at listening to both Metamatic and The Garden by John Foxx (for a slightly later generational take on such things). Metal liquids and ruined stately homes. It’s the strength of effort on the part of the performer that makes the link compelling and natural, and it’s not the realisation of the correspondence but the abject admiration of the skill involved to achieve the linking, and the resulting bond itself as an object, that makes it thrilling.
as a teacher of world literature i’ve long felt as a wanderer on a steam balloon because some unplanned occurence ten years ago (obviously overlooked by my Higher Self) made me a ‘weird fiction’ acolyte.
since mieville’s ‘PSS’ first found me among the dustworthy crime bestsellers on one of the flea book markets in Kiev, i’ve been on the hook. it appeared as I’d been waiting for this kind of stuff since my early acqiaintance with Platonov and Bulgakov.
When ‘the Course of the Heart’ was recommended by Mieville in one of his interviews i was already on the scout, hunting and stalking these hard to find editions here in Ukraine (and people who would agree to offer them for me on Alibris), spotting and devouring the ghosts of meanings within the pages, rolling them over in my head like weird candy.
by this i’d like to say thanks.
and Viriconium?
it is a book that has actual wells and holes of ‘light’ you can find yourself suddenly in one of them.
this is a wonder.
the moment of tarot cards falling down in the glow of light is … you know,
Hi Mike,
I love how these images can resonate with us, summing up a period so perfectly.
Zappa and Cal Schenkel’s work together seems to me to encapsulate a counter culture within a larger counter culture; one that had already been commodified.
One might argue that, while the hippies preached their message of love & peace, tracks such as “Chunga’s Revenge”, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh”, “Uncle Meat” (titles to conjure with!) and their accompanying artworks were presenting snapshots from a reality untouched by the pseudo Arcadianism of the hippy dogma. These were rougher boys, looking out of a different window and the landscape they saw was grittier, odder and more interesting than anything yet glimpsed. A familiar feeling? “You were dancing & wheeling by the light of the flames. You were weird.”
Similarly, in the UK, much of the Progressive scene was looking to the musical traditions of nineteenth Cenutry romanticism while a smaller subset of bands (King Crimson, Henry Cow etc) concerned themselves with the more austere but more malleable materials of jazz or 20th century composition.
“What could emerge from that but Viriconium?”
A similarity – for me – between Viriconium and the landscape glimpsed through Zappa’s work, for example, is that we’re experiencing a world that is not “formalised”.
The fiction that started to really intrigue me from this period (although I read it some years later) had eschewed the hermetic world building of Tolkien, replacing it with something more mutable, more open ended. Something that was, maybe, only explicable in terms of a wider context which was not only unknown but unimportant to the text: Ambiguities taking precedent, at last, over the obsessive “train set” mentality that had informed Tolkien, Lewis etc.
Hardly new observations here, of course, but “Chunga…” seems to have provided a new lens to look at that narrative shift through and i always welcome stuff like that.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed the pic.
Cheers.
Hi Andy. Nice summing-up. Strong, open-ended acts of imagination.
Hi oleksus. My pleasure. Hope the fun doesn’t go out of it now the editions are easier to find…