The Merry Widow

The hundred million self-confident German masters were to be brutally installed in Europe, and secured in power by a monopoly of technical civilisation and the slave-labour of a dwindling native population of neglected, diseased, illiterate cretins, in order that they might have leisure to buzz along infinite Autobahnen, admire the Strength-Through-Joy Hostel, the Party headquarters, the Military Museum and the Planetarium which their Fuhrer would have built in Linz (his new Hitleropolis), trot round local picture-galleries, and listen over their cream buns to endless recordings of The Merry Widow. This was to be the German Millennium, from which even the imagination was to have no means of escape.

- Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1953)

The Guardian's acquisition of Bashar and Asma al-Assad's emails makes me wonder if anyone's ever done a sociological analysis of the material culture choices made by dictators. The Assads, like Hitler, seem to go for a fairly straightforward bourgeois consumerism - a banality of culture to go alongside the banality of evil. Gaddafi, meanwhile, went for the full-on Tony-Montana-in-Scarface aesthetic. Further datapoints are required to spin the concept out to book-length, of course.

The Condition of Stockport

There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, but belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of Manchester. It lies in a narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope down a steep hill on one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not remember to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of this district.

- Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

You have to wonder what he'd make of Merseyway, a piece of Le Corbusier-esque High Modernism which is increasingly inhabited by pawnbrokers shops. On the other hand, the description of it that I just gave tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

The Man Who Sold The World

This is the first of my pieces on David Bowie's 1970s albums, which I'm listening to and simultaneously reading about in Peter Doggett's book The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s.

To someone who's main exposure to Bowie has been through singles compilations, this album, recorded in 1970, is something of a surprise. The glam-rock which made Bowie's name had yet to arrive, and we find ourselves very much at the tail end of the 1960s scene. The themes which would become Bowie trademarks: sexuality ("The Width of a Circle", "She Shook Me Cold"), violence ("Running Gun Blues"), madness ("All The Madmen"), the occult ("The Supermen") and dystopian futures ("Saviour Machine") are all present. The melodies themselves, however, are very much in the psychedelic rock/hard rock/acid rock/heavy rock which is pretty standard for the time. Going by Doggett's account, Bowie was never fully invested in the album, and much of it was created by other members of the production team

The one exception to this is the title track, which looks back in capturing something of the alienated deep-space chill of Bowie's only previous hit single "Space Oddity" (1969), and fits with the Bowie of the future in that it demonstrates his ability to give you something which sounds like nothing you've heard before. It's perhaps also the only song on the album in which the melody really matches the lyrical content. The latter is perhaps the bleakest thing this album has to offer, acting as a prescient commentary on the 1960s counter-culture, and perhaps on Bowie's fears about himself and his identity: everything you believe in is going to be sold out - and you're going to be the one who does it. Troubling stuff for someone who was only 23 when this was written and recorded, but we all have our moments.

So, this isn't destined to be one of my favourite albums, but it's an interesting look at the background from which Bowie's most successful period emerged. Next up: Hunky Dory.

Belief

Delamere Street, Chester, January 2012.

1980s Science-Fiction Was Never Knowingly Under-Bleak

1995
After a period of increasing tension and escalating border incidents, full-scale war erupted between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
...
On October 7th, 1996, the Bundeswehr crossed the border between East and West Germany and began attacking Soviet garrison units still in the country.
...
While the political leadership of the European members of NATO debated the prudence of intervention, the U.S. army crossed the frontier.
...
1997
...On July 9th, with advanced elements of the 1st German Army on Soviet soil, the Red Army began using tactical nuclear weapons.
...
1998
The winter of 1997-98 was particularly cold. Civilian war casualties in the industrialized nations had reached almost 15% by the turn of the year, but the worst was yet to come. Communication and transportation systems were non-existent, and food distribution was impossible. In the wake of nuclear war came famine on a scale previously undreamed of...Plague, typhoid, cholera, typhus, and many other diseases swept the world's population. By the time they had run their courses, the global casualty rate would be 50%.

- Twilight: 2000 Referee's Manual (1984)

I downloaded the pdf of this a few years ago as part of an RPG Day promotion. It's eerie to think that people were sitting down to play this game at a time when the above seemed like a future that was more likely than not. The suggested campaign is pretty interesting, being Xenophon's Anabasis transposed to post-nuclear central Europe. If I can ever get a group together, I may even run it. I probably wouldn't use the original rules, as they're a bit too early 80s for me. I could probably kitbash something together based on  Reign, though.

An Experiment With An Artist

Bowie, in particular, in a series of 'camp' incarnations (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Mr Newton, the thin white duke, and more depressingly the Blond Fuehrer) achieved something of a cult status in the early 70s. He attracted a mass youth (rather than teeny-bopper) audience and set up a number of visual precedents in terms of personal appearance (make-up, dyed hair, etc.) which created a new sexually ambiguous image for those youngsters willing and brave enough to challenge the notoriously pedestrian stereotypes conventionally available to working-class men and women. Every Bowie concert performed in drab provincial cinemas and Victorian town halls attracted a host of startling Bowie lookalikes, self-consciously cool under gangster hats which concealed (at least until the doors were opened) hair rinsed a luminous vermilion, orange, or scarlet streaked with gold and silver.

- Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) 

According to Wikipedia, one of those drab provincial cinema gigs was in my manor, just by where I went to secondary school. While I've been into Bowie for quite a long time now, my knowledge of his music comes pretty much entirely from radio play and singles collections - I know almost nothing about the albums, although some of them have excellent reputations.

For Christmas I got a copy of Peter Doggett's recent book The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s, and copies of "The Man Who Sold The World" (1970) and "Hunky Dory" (1971). My plan is to listen to the albums as I read the relevant sections of the book. I may even blog about it here as I do it, although I'm pretty sure people have done that before.

I Survived The Great Stockport Tornado

I haven't been posting much recently, mostly because I've been working three different part-time jobs (two lecturing, one note-taking), and apart from the time spent travelling to them and doing them, I haven't been up to much other than writing lectures.

A couple of weeks ago a tornado happened in Stockport. More than that, it happened in Heaton Moor, just as I was walking home from the station. I didn't actually realise what was happening at the time, just that it was a bit windy and raining hard. The next day, the local news were interviewing a fireman clearing up some of the debris when he said that "Some people are saying it's like Armageddon". Really? What people? Where?

Above: Armageddon.