Countercultural history, through the lens of a fan

Glen E. Friedman is not a documentarian. So calling him one, in polite deference, doesn’t make for a great start. He doesn’t like open-ended questions (“I think you have to put it in more specific terms. What you are saying is kind of general”) or when you misinterpret what he says (“It’s idealise, not idolise. Not make them an idol, but an ideal.”) Invite him to dinner at your wife’s new restaurant and he’ll drop you like a bomb.

“Do you serve dead animals?”

“Um, yeah…?”

“Then absolutely not, no way.”

We’re standing in the perfectly lit atrium of the maze-like building that Glen has taken over in London’s Covent Garden. The walls are neatly lined with images from his new book My Rules, which collates peak moments of countercultural history as seen through the lens of a fan. Radical thinker Noam Chomsky gazes out next to a lanky Tony Hawk; Public Enemy next to Pussy Riot. It takes about ten minutes to get the lighting just right – Glen fiddles with the dials and squints into the shadows until the ambience feels pretty much identical to when we first walked in. Now we’ve stopped to take a break so that Glen can talk to a fan who wants to buy a print and, you know, casually invite him out for a bite to eat.

The invitation does not go down as planned.

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