I’m a great fan of Symbolist art. This was a 19th century European art movement, of which the Pre-Raphaelites were a part in Britain, which used painting to point to a higher, transcendent reality. It often depicted figures from Graeco-Roman myth. I was inspired in this sketch by Carlos Schwabe’s painting of Orpheus, which shows the head of the Greek hero on his lyre on a moonlit river. I wondered about updating it to the world of modern pop stars, and who the modern Orpheus would be. I’m also a fan of Queen, so I thought it would be Freddy Mercury. He was flamboyant, camp, but a massively talented, charismatic showman, who, in my opinion, is one of the great British rock gods. I’m sure you can think of other contenders to be a modern Orpheus – Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Lennon/ Macartney, David Bowie and so on. Bowie would be a good alternative, as he was influenced by the occult. Apparently his last album, Black Star, is full of occult imagery. Orphism was an ancient Greek cult that has been seen as a form of shamanism, and some Symbolists were very strongly into occultism and heterodox mysticism. But I preferred Mercury.
I didn’t watch either the Grammy’s or the Brit Awards this year. I can’t say I’ve been into either of them, and today’s pop music largely isn’t to my taste. I grew up in the 70s, 80s and 90s and it’s largely the pop music from those decades that I listen to, although I do follow some more contemporary musicians. And looking at some of the very flamboyant and outrageous fashions sported by Lizzo and Sam Smith did two things to me. Firstly, it suggested that they had got their fashion taste from Lady Gaga and had pushed the dial up to eleven (Spinal Tap reference). A few of the journos writing about it suggested that some of them were taking their sartorial cues from the great pop stars of the past. Harry Styles’ outfit was, in the view of one of the journos, partly influence by 70s Bowie. I think that’s probably true, but in its camp quality it reminded me of David Lee Roth when he split with Van Halen to do ‘Just a Gigolo’. I like the song and the video, but unfortunately millions didn’t and it ended Roth’s nascent solo career. Two – I got nostalgic for the days when bands came on Top of the Pops in their normal, everyday clothes, and simply performed. Of course popular music has always been linked with fashion, since the days when Jazz fans in America dressed in Zoot suits, through the Beatniks, Hippies, Teddy Boys, Skinheads, Glam Rockers, Punks, New Romantics, Two Tone Ska peeps, Gender Benders, Goths and Rockers. And I did hear that some of the camper styles came about because many of the bands’ managers were gay. A friend of mine was reading a book by one long-time pop manager, who was gay. This chap claimed that the fashion for cravats, velvet and so on in the early 70s was creation of the bands’ managers. They were gay, and this was their taste in clothing and so they insisted or encouraged the bands they managed to dress similarly. I also heard a rumour that suggested another reason why Noddy Holder’s outfit also joined in. They were originally a skinhead band and really didn’t want to adopt the new style in case people thought they were gay. But as the Skinheads have a reputation as violent thugs, they were nevertheless persuaded otherwise in order to allay possible public suspicion. Also, one of the former members of the one of the Glam Rock bands – I can’t remember if it was Sweet or Mud – said that they started wearing makeup as one evening on Top of the Pops their dressing room was next to that of Pan’s People, and it gave them an excuse to go there and talk to the ladies. But I also remember moments in the late 70s and early 80s when bands turned up on TV in their T-shirts, jeans, pullovers, tank tops or whatever and simply let the music speak for itself.
One band have been following on and off for the past few years is the robot band Compressorhead. These really are robots, created by a team of engineers based in Germany. I think they comprise three Germans and one Brit. As you’d expect, they play Rock/Heavy Metal. There are videos out there of them playing Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and Blitzkrieg Bop. They used just to play the instruments, but they added an awesome vocalist a few years ago. I found the video below on YouTube. It shows them playing a gig in a workshop, with human audience but with a robot bar. This has robot arms pouring the drinks, and, I noticed, spilling them.
But it reminded me of Greasy Gracie’s, the underground robot bar, from 2000AD’s ‘Robusters’ Strip’, created by the legendary Pat Mills and the sadly deceased Kevin O’Neill.
Here’s the Compressorhead video from MicroGreenGardening’s channel:
And here’s a recent depiction of Greasy Gracie’s hangout, where exhausted droids could enjoy a cool lube at the end of a hard working day by zarjaz art droid Clint Langley in ABC Warriors: Return to Ro-Busters by Mills and Langley (Rebellion: 2016).
In the original Robuster’s story from back in the 1980s, the robots are dancing and one of them is singing ‘I Am Your Automatic Lover’, which was a hit back then for one of the punk ladies.
OK, we haven’t got anywhere near human-level intelligence in robots. Looking forward to the millennium in their issue for the last weekend of 1999, the Independent quoted robotics’ scientists and engineers as saying that by 2025 machines would be about as intelligent as cats. But I think that’s optimistic. Nevertheless, reality seems to have caught up just a bit with Mills, O’Neill’s and Langley’s SF imaginations.
As the very stylish, computer-generated video jockey Max Headroom used to say in ads for Channel 4:
More overt fascism from the channel that has begun its livestreams with footage of Oswald Mosley and his stormtroopers goose-stepping about. This afternoon they put up a meme supposedly showing that present mass migration to the west is all due to the Kalergi plan as part of a UN-backed ‘Great Replacement’, financed by the Rothschilds, the Baruchs and the Warburgs. In other words, it’s just a new wrinkle on the old conspiracy theory about the UN one-world dictatorship plotted by Jewish bankers. Lobster put up a review of a book on Richard Von Kalergi a few years ago, and I put up a post about it. Kalergi did believe that countries should include different ethnic groups, but for quite different reasons from those attributed to him by the paranoids. He was writing after the First World War, and believed that countries would be less likely to go to war on each other if their opponents contained members of their people. It’s about preserving peace in Europe, not replacing its people. As for his connection to the EU, I think he was just one of a number of political thinkers at about that time who were trying to create a pan-European state in order to protect international peace, and I don’t think he had much success or influence on the EU architects. If you want to find the ultimate roots of the EU, it’s possible that it’s derived from Kant’s On Perpetual Peace, in which he argued that the world should be organised into a federation of states. This was back in the 18th century, long before mass migration from outside Europe.
The meme also states that the UN calls this migration ‘the Great Replacement’. I’m sceptical about this, as I understood the term was invented in 2012 by a far-right Frenchman. In any case, ‘the Great Replacement’ is just another version of the old Fascist myth that the Jews are encouraging Black and Asian immigration to destroy the White race. I’m quite prepared to believe that the UN has declared criticism of its migration laws hate speech out of concern for the refugees subject to racist attacks.
As well as this fascist nonsense, their lead man also says in the comments that he hates David Bowie and Mick Jagger because they were Satanists. I don’t know about Jagger, but there was a vogue for the occult among some rockers at one time, including Bowie. There’s supposed to be a lot of occult material in his last album, Black Star. But I’m not sure if you could call him a Satanist. The late 19th-early 20th century occult society, the Golden Dawn, was mostly composed of High Church Anglicans, who were very definitely not Satanists, with the exception of the vehemently anti-Christian Alistair Crowley.
I’ve been reading various SF books over the past few days. These have been the collections of classic SF stories edited by the British Library’s Mike Ashley. One of these is a history of British SF in 100 stories. This doesn’t collect the stories themselves, but consists of precis of what he judges to be the 100 best British SF stories. It begins with H.G. Wells, as you’d expect and includes a number of other well-known SF authors from the period, like Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. But there are many others that are now obscure, but seem to be really interesting and sometimes chillingly prescient. For example, the 1918 novel, Journey to Meccania, is a terrible warning of what will happen if Germany wins the War and dominates Europe. It’s the account of visit to Meccania, a Nazi-style totalitarian superstate in 1970 by a Chinese traveller, Mr Ming. Another story, written by Charlotte Haldane, the wife of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, written in 1932, describes another racist, eugenicist dystopia. This is a state in which the government rigidly controls who may be allowed to marry and breed. The scientist, who has founded this totalitarian society, has also created a poison designed to only kill Blacks. At the moment, this is the only such toxin of its kind, though the story states that there are others working on a similar poison to destroy east Asians. In the ’60s or ’70s the South African secret service, BOSS, was really working on a racist poison like it. The book also uses the term ‘holocaust’, though not in connection with the Jews. Charlotte Haldane was Jewish. Her maiden name was Franken, and so I wonder if she was just looking at the direction the contemporary craze for eugenics and racial ‘science’ was going and showing just how horrific this would be in reality. And it did become horrific reality in Nazi Germany.
Back to H.G. Wells, the book obviously discusses The Time Machine, possibly the first serious book about time travel. Wells based the future races in the book, the Eloi and the Morlocks, on what would happen if present social trend continued. The Eloi are the descendants of the aristocracy and the artists, living above ground but farmed like cattle by the Morlocks, the descendants of the working class, who have been forced underground to tend the machines. Wells set that part of the story 800,000 years in the future because that was when he predicted, using then current theories of speciation, that the two post-human species would have diverged. Apparently the book originally included a section on racial degeneration, which was later cut from the book and published as The Gray Man.
Years ago, Martin Kottmeyer, one of the contributors to the small press, sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, ran a series of articles ‘Varicose Brains’ on how the Grays of UFO lore conform to the aliens in much SF literature. These were based on contemporary theories of evolution, which predicted that as humanity advanced the brain would develop and become larger while the body would consequently become smaller. As humanity became more intelligent and intellectual, so it would become less sensual and food become increasingly simpler. The result would be small people with large heads and atrophied digestive systems. This sounds exactly like the Grays. And some UFO theories state that these are the degenerate remnants of an alien race following mutation and racial decline due to nuclear war. But it’s also the name Wells’ gave his future, racially degenerate humans that also fascinates me: the Gray Man. Did Wells invent the Gray as a cultural motif, which then became incorporate into the UFO experience in the late 1960s and ’70s following the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill? Or did he just predict the figure’s appearance based on nothing more than his literary imagination and scientific insight?
And there are other connections between UFO encounters and early SF. One female SF writer in the ’20s and ’30s wrote a story about Martians coming to Earth to take water back to their own world. UFOs have often been seen over water, including instances like the Joe Simonton encounter, where they appear to be siphoning it into their craft. And then there’s the film The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg and starring David Bowie, in which an alien travels from his desert world to bring back some of Earth’s water. Is it a case of the human imagination taking these images and narratives and turning them into accounts of encounters with aliens during extreme psychological experiences? Or is the phenomenon behind the UFO encounters taking these images and stories and manipulating them? Or is it just coincidence?
John Lewis have just launched their Christmas. This follows their failed advert for insurance, in which a White boy in makeup dances around the family home wrecking it and spraying glitter and paint everywhere. That was widely criticised for promoting the trans ideology amongst children and for false advertising, as apparently the insurance policy being sold didn’t cover deliberate damage. In the new advert, a cute Black little boy sees an alien spacecraft fall out of the sky. He follows the contrail into the woods, where he sees a crashed alien spaceship and its humanoid pilot. The alien is White with white hair and rather feminine. The lad offers her some mince pies. The alien accepts them, and the two becomes friends. While fixing her craft the alien sets the electrics working so that the Christmas lights on a neighbour’s house suddenly come on, much to the neighbour’s annoyance. Having repaired her spacecraft, the alien gives the lad a peck on the cheek in farewell and flies off. The lad goes home to join his family for a festive meal, while looking into the sky. The sound track for the ad is a cover version of Phil Oakey’s ‘Electric Dreams’. I found this video of it put up on YouTube by the Guardian.
Alex Belfield has already posted a rant about it. He rightly points out that it doesn’t contain much in the way of Christmas imagery. There’s no Santa Claus, although it’s possibly a pine forest so there might be Christmas trees. There also isn’t much in the way of specifically Christian imagery either. I might be wrong, but there’s no nativity scene. It’s a very secular interpretation of Christmas. A decade ago there was controversy over what the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers and organisations described as a ‘war on Christmas’. They were angry because some local councils appeared to be deliberately omitting or playing down any mention of Christmas because they were somehow afraid it would offend non-Christian minorities. Birmingham council was particularly attacked for its reinterpretation of the festive season as ‘Winterval’. I’ve heard instead that, rather than replace Christmas, ‘Winterval’ was dreamed up as a marketing initiative by Brum’s council to create an inclusive festive season that would also cover the festivals of other faiths near Christmas, like Hanukka and Diwali. Also, from what I saw, most if not all of the calls for the removal of any public celebration of Christmas came not from the members of non-Christian religions, but from atheists and secularists like the National Humanist Society. The framed their arguments on behalf of religious minorities, while I think they were far more motivated by the rise of a much more militant atheism following the publication of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I also think that the advert is secular simply from the sheer mechanism of capitalism, although John Lewis is organised as a partnership with its workers more like a cooperative. Capitalism and private industry exist to maximise profits. One way of doing this is seeking out new markets to you can sell your product to more people. About 15 per cent of the British population is Black and Asian, and many of the latter are non-Christians, like Hindus, Muslims and so on. Christians are now a minority in the general population. Hence John Lewis and many of the other firms advertising play down Christmas as a religious festival in order to appeal to a broader section of customers.
But Belfield also criticised the advert because he thinks that the alien in it is ‘ambivilacious’, his term for anything that is gay, non-binary, trans or generally sexually ambiguous. I can see what he means, though it seems to me that the alien is more like a pre-adolescent girl rather than anything more exotic and controversial. I might be reading it wrong, but it seems more like a tale of Earth boy meets alien girl in an innocent Christmastide romance.
Behind all this, I think the advert’s been strongly influenced by a number of pop songs and seasonal films. It reminds me more than a little of the Chris de Burgh song about a visiting spaceman at Christmas, which really is a Christian metaphor. ET with its friendship between a human child, Elliot, and a cute extraterrestrial, is another one, although it also has its differences. The most significant of which is, in my opinion, ET was definitely nonhuman and alien, while the alien in this very humanoid except for her suit and the colouring of her hair. It also reminds me of the seasonal children’s film, A Christmas Martian, a Canadian film that the Beeb screened one festive season over here when I was a sprog. Mercifully, the advert doesn’t seem to have been inspired by the truly dreadful Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was screened over here one Christmas in the early ’80s as part of Michael Medved’s season of terrible movies, The Worst of Hollywood, on Channel 4. But if the alien is sexually ambiguous, I suspect it might be due more to the influence of David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust than the trans movement.
Or it might come from certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon itself. Among the various aliens supposedly visiting Earth and abducting people are the ‘Nordics’. These are tall, blonde aliens, like Nordic White Europeans, hence the name. They are also sometimes described as having long hair and a feminine appearance. One of the early UFO contactees, Frank E. Strange, provides a picture of one in his book A Stranger in the Pentagon. Strange claimed that the US government has made a treaty with aliens from Venus. These aliens could provide us with a method of producing cheap, clean energy, but had been prevented from doing so by ‘certain interests’. If nothing else, this shows that people were looking for alternative energy as long ago as the ’50s and ’60s, and the ‘certain interests’ sounds very much like a veiled reference to the oil industry. The ‘alien’ in the photo to me simply looks like a blonde, glamorous woman and not like anyone who arrived here from Venus, or anywhere else. The veteran Fortean, John Keel, author of the books The Mothman Prophecies, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and Disneyland of the Gods, stated that the Nordics were so feminine in appearance he wondered if they were gay. You can certainly wonder what was going on in Buck Nelson’s encounter with the Nordics on his farm. He was going out to his barn one morning when a group of four of them, all with long hair, came out of his barn, stark naked. They told him they from Venus, and explained the nudity by saying that they wore no clothes in order to show him that they were as human as he was. Well, they might have been Venusians, but it seems to me they may also have been a group of ordinary men. They may have been gay, and looking for a quiet place for their activities because of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in America at the time. Or they may have been pranksters playing a joke.
It also reminds me of a supposedly true UFO encounter that happened in the 1970s at Christmas. A woman was in her kitchen baking cakes when a groups of small, winged aliens came in. They greeted her and asked for some of the cakes, which she gave to them. They made a few more remarks before finally departing. This is one of the stranger UFO cases which makes me definitely wonder if the UFO phenomenon isn’t a more modern version of the ancient fairy phenomenon rather than anything genuinely extraterrestrial. This does not, however, mean that it isn’t still paranormal, as Keel and Jacques Vallee have argued in their books.
Back to the advert, it looks innocuous enough. While I can’t say that I like it’s secularism, this seems to be a response to the changes in British society rather than an ideologically motivated attempt to foster such changes. And the values it embraces seem wholesome enough. Black and White people come together across the gulfs of space and the Black lad is shown at home enjoying a family meal. This is, in my view, definitely good, as the breakdown in the British and western family has done immense harm to both Whites and Blacks.
If I have a criticism, it’s about the background music. The original song ‘Electric Dreams’ is a jolly, upbeat piece. It was, I believe, used in the 1980s SF film, Weird Science, about two teenage boys who create their idea of the perfect woman on their computer, who then materialises before them. Sort of like Beavis and Butthead meet Tron. And the perfect woman, clad only in bra and panties, says to them ‘What would you little maniacs like to do next?’ The version used here turns it instead into a plaintive ballad until the final few bars, more an expression of sorrow and loss than joy. But it seems to follow a general trend of reinterpretations of classic tracks. At the Commonwealth Games held in Scotland a few years ago the opening ceremony included a version of the Proclaimers’ ‘I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles’. This song is another upbeat hit in something very much like classic march time. But instead it was performed as another plaintive, soulful wail. I’m probably showing my age here, but is contemporary youth so depressed that they can only listen to depressing versions of great old songs? Or is it that the middle aged producers of adverts like John Lewis’ are so depressed, that they can only listen to depressing versions of upbeat hits and so are unintentional contributing to the psychological and spiritual anguish of the rising generation. A generation that has enough problems of its own.
Anyway, even if the advert is intended to sell people stuff rather than anything deeper, it’s a fun piece of trash culture with a bit of kinship to some genuine Ufological high strangeness. And that’s always good for a festive tale of the paranormal.
And here’s the trailer for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which I found on the DTFFmaryville channel on YouTube. In its way, truly a cinematic classic!
Way back in the 1970s David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust asked if there was life on Mars. Things have advanced since then, and a new programme on BBC 2 next Monday, 6th July 2020, ponders the possibility that life might exist on the dwarf planet traditionally at the edge of our solar system: Pluto. From being a dead world, Pluto is geologically active and possesses organic chemistry, the building blocks of life. Which raises the question of whether life of some sort exists there.
The programme’s titled Pluto: Back from the Dead and the blurb for it on page 62 on next week’s Radio Times for 4th – 10th July 2020 reads
New discoveries from the edge of the solar system are transforming what is known about Pluto, thanks to the New Horizons space probe that took the first-ever close up images of the dwarf planet. This Horizon documentary reveals that Pluto, once thought to be geologically dead, is an active world of stunning complexity, with mountains carved from ice, a nitrogen glacier that appears to be moving and a recently active volcano. The data sent back has led some scientists to speculate that there may even be life on Pluto today.
David Butcher’s piece about the programme on page 60 adds
There might be life on Pluto. It sounds far fetched, but that’s the conclusion some scientists have reached, and its one of the unexpected new angles explored in this intriguing edition of Horizon.
The insights come courtesy of New Horizons, a tiny spacecraft that travelled 3.26 billion miles to the edge of the solar system, and sent back amazingly detailed imagery.
It reveals a geologically fertile world with, among other features, a nitrogen glacier and a recently active volcano. Moreover, Pluto’s abundant supply of organic molecules and liquid water suggest some form of alien life might exist.
Pluto isn’t alone in possessing mountains of ice. They also exist on Titan and the other moons of the outer solar system. Titan also possesses organic chemistry, which is why scientists are particularly interested in it for clues about the origin of life on Earth. And it was also at one considered that it too may have life. Carl Sagan also suggested that it might even have volcanoes of frozen gas. There’s an illustration of Titan with one such volcano erupting by the astronomy/science Fiction artist David A. Hardy in his and Patrick Moore’s The New Challenge of the Stars. I don’t know if such volcanoes actually exist there. I haven’t seen anything about the Huygens probe to Saturn and its moons finding any.
Scientists also began speculating that life might also exist in the frozen wastes of the outer solar system after someone suggested that the difference of a few degrees’ temperature between light and shadow on them might be enough to provide the energy to drive life. The quantum physicist and SF author Stephen Baxter expanded this into a short story in his Xelee sequence, collected in the his short story anthology, Vacuum Diagrams. I think that story, however, was set further out in one of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt.
After all this time searching the solar system, I think it’s extremely unlikely that there’s life on Pluto. But who knows, perhaps I’m wrong. It would be truly epoch-making if I was and Pluto did possess a biosphere, even if it was only simply microbial organisms.
The programme’s on BBC 2 at 9.00 pm on Monday, 6th July.
This is another great little piece of comedy posted on YouTube by Joe.com.uk, back at the beginning of October, 2018. It shows May singing ‘No Deal Brexit’ and describing how useless her negotiations and preparations for leaving the EU are, all to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’. Or rather, to the riff at the start of Queen’s and Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’, as this is what Vanilla Ice used, and then were successfully sued for plagiarism by the two above legends of rock. Which could be a kind of metaphor for Tweezer herself: completely lacking in inspiration and any real achievement, so has to steal the ideas of others. Like she has from Corbyn’s Labour party when they’ve got too popular in the polls for her comfort.
The lyrics run
Let’s get on with it
No Deal Brexit,
No Deal Brexit,
No Deal Brexit,
Alright, stop, collaborate and listen!
Brexit is back with a brand new edition
No deal is the latest sensation
because I made a mess of these negotiations
Should we be worried? I don’t know
But I’m stockpiling food
like there is no tomorrow!
The DUP control the new world order
Why can’t the EU see
There won’t be a hard border
Deadly at the negotiating table
Most definitely not weak and unstable
The Chequers plan was my last resort
But take reassurance from
the blue and gold passports!
People should listen
to the message that I send them
‘No Deal’ is better than a second referendum.
Single market access? We can’t solve it
Immigration though,
we can finally control it!
No Deal Brexit
No Deal Brexit.
Warning: This video contains footage of May ‘dad dancing’. It also contains images of her before her aides gave her a makeover to make her look less of harridan. But they couldn’t hide what’s in her soul, though. That still comes through very clearly. Also, when she bobs her head up and down in time to the beat, it reminds those of us of a certain age of the awesome, computer generated video jockey, Max Headroom, when he experienced a glitch on his show. There is a difference between them, though. Max had wit, charisma and sharp suits, all of which Tweezer completely lacks. She does have his massive ego though.
This is another great little video from Novara media, posted on YouTube on the 17th October 2018, about a group of artists, who withdrew their work from the Design Museum and exhibited elsewhere. This is the Nopetoarms collective, a group of radical artists protesting against the arms industry.
They made the decision to withdraw their works following the announcement that the museum would be hosting a reception for Leonardo, the 9th largest arms company in the world. Novara’s Ash Sarkar tweeted that it was a case of the British art establishment coopting radical artists to stay relevant, and ‘facilitating the social calendar of slaughterers to stay wealthy’. They also told her it was a private event, and she had to use other entrances and exits. One of the artists, Glen Orton, states that the movement contained work by Syrian artists, the Hong Kong movement, and other protest groups, who’d been teargassed, beaten, bombed. He was ‘gobsmacked’ that they even considered hosting the company. The Museum stated that they could not immediately commit to refusing money from the arms, oil and tobacco industries.
Another artist, Jess Worth, states that when the time came to move their works, there were forty people in the collective, which now comprised a third of the exhibition. The artists then decided to exhibit their work themselves, on their own terms. Charlie Waterhouse, another artist with the group, states that once the decision was made to remove their work, the Museum’s PR machine attacked them by claiming they were trying to shut down free speech and stop people seeing the exhibition. This made them think that putting the show back on would be a good thing. The exhibition is now being held in the basement of a leisure centre in Brixton, where it is curated and controlled by the artists themselves.
Worth explains that they wanted their exhibition to be free, unlike the Design Museum, which charged 12 pounds, the artists would write the labels themselves, so that it would present the work in the way they wanted. They wanted it grounded in community. They also wanted to make it accessible to people, who wouldn’t normally go to an art gallery.
Waterhouse also explains why the art is hung on clothes pegs from fences. It’s so that people say, ‘Oh, I can do that. Then, ‘I can do that’, and go and do it.
The video explains that oil and arms funding in the arts industry is a massive problem. Worth explains that being in a museum space conveys the impression that a company’s work is legitimate, because otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to be there. This is immensely valuable to the companies involved.
Waterhouse goes on to say that this has got to stop. On the one hand, they’re taking money from the arms industry. On the other, they’re levering cachet from the artists’ work without paying them. It’s a scam, he concludes.
The video also explains that the collective would like to do more. Worth says that what they’d really like to see is museums and other cultural bodies having a code of fundraising ethics, determining who they will and won’t take money from, that’s really clear on their website that everyone can see.
Waterhouse says that it’s time for artists to mobilise, to realise that their ethics, morals and feelings are valid, and they don’t just have to kowtow to the money.
Orton ends the video by saying that the Design Museum doesn’t know what it’s done.
The video shows the works of art as they’re displayed in the leisure. They not only comment explicitly on the arms industry, corruption and other issues, but also on the exploitation of the poor and working class through zero hours contracts. And among the iconic figures used in the works there’s David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust.
I think it’s really great that these artists have stood up for their beliefs against the arms industry, and that they’re encouraging their public to get involved and create their own pieces as well. I wish them all the best for their exhibition.
Tweezer’s entrance dancing at the Conservative party conference set me thinking about alternative tracks, which would be far more appropriate to the revolting spectacle. I was able to come up with quite a few. Here they are:
The Sex Pistols: Pretty Vacant.
Iggy Pop: The Idiot
Alice Cooper: Hey, Stoopid! Poison.
Rubber City Rebels: I pierced My Brain.
Talking Heads: Psycho Killer.
For what she’s been doing to the people of this country.
The Dead Kennedys: Kill the Poor
PIL: Order of Death.
As a comment on what she was doing when she decided to spoil that Abba hit for much of the country:
The Sex Pistols again, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
Band Names that Are a Suitable Comment in Themselves
Primal Scream
Pop Will Eat Itself.
Venom
The Tory Audience
David Bowie: Scary Monsters
Everybody Else’s Reaction
Iron Maiden: Run to the Hills.
Twisted Sister: We’re Not Going to Take It.
I’m sure the great people of this blog have a few ideas of their own about what would make a better track for Tweezer’s dad-dancing. Let me know in the comments below!
This week, Elon Musk’s Space-X company launched a sports car into space, complete with a dummy pilot. This was supposedly inspired by David Bowie’s Starman, and Iggy Pop’s The Passenger. You probably saw the pictures in the paper.
What it reminded me most strongly of, however, was the video for Fear Factory’s version of the Gary Numan hit, Cars. Fear Factory are an American Heavy Metal/Industrial band, and Numan himself appears in the video as a driver of a car in space.
The video includes scenes of the band driving through a futuristic network of brightly tunnels, while alphanumerics scroll down the screen, which is clearly inspired by The Matrix trilogy. Then Numan himself drives at speed through a city. He’s also driving a car in space and collides with a satellite. This is then followed by the scenes of a crash, and the lead singer walking towards an upturned car from which a woman and the firemen are fleeing. It ends with a shot of the other wrecked car in space floating away.
And in between the lead singer inserts one of the band’s CDs into the car’s player, and there’s a creepy kid in the back, who looks just like he came out of Village of the Damned.
Take a look at the video, and see the similarities between it and Musk’s venture. He really should have had this on his playlist, as well as Bowie and Iggy Pop.
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