I’m back from Brazil, quietly trying to recover from the jet lag. See the pics on Flickr..

Been ruminating about the rock documentary ‘Dig’ and amongst the many ideas one that struck me was the comment of the writer, producer, director Ondi Timoner who says something like we who grew up in the 80s and 90s realised what we had missed in the counter-culture of the 60s, and that bands like the Brian Jonestown Massacre drew on that to produce their sound, basically. And that’s really true of music. But what interests me is how untrue that is in politics in a way, despite all the talk of empowerment, so little of the radical potential and creativity made it through as a real inspiration. I guess there’s really no market for it more generally, so it’s left to people to mine the ideas for themselves? Andrew Kopkind’s ‘The Thirty Years Wars‘ is one of my favourite books about the time, and helps explain why the 60s in terms of US radical-politics apparently came to so little.