Lifestyle "1983 Redux Zeitgeist Surf School"

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Didn't know they did this cover version. Hope your re-entry today was smooth.
I've got a rotten week of admin writing to do and would prefer right now to saw off my fingers with a plastic serated knife but no, will trudge through it determinedly albeit resentfully.
Chin up, mate. Cook something indulgent when it's all done to celebrate.
 
Didn't know they did this cover version. Hope your re-entry today was smooth.
I've got a rotten week of admin writing to do and would prefer right now to saw off my fingers with a plastic serated knife but no, will trudge through it determinedly albeit resentfully.
Work was ok … PD day - so there were no kids. Starting in earnest tomorrow.

I love the cover of the Sparks song. This is a good one too.

 
Page ‘67 - The RZSS’s SUMMER OF LOVE AMIDST A WINTER OF DISCONTENT.


















 
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Cultural Marketing Files:

Ian Curtis revisionist article

Satchi & Satchi did this ad recently for the World Cup Soccer, subtitled 'Hate, not in my shirt 2024'
There are more than a few 'Hate' jackets to buy on the net...fashion marketing!



interesting comparing the above to the very first recording in 1979 and vid:

 
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Cultural Marketing Files:

Ian Curtis revisionist article

Satchi & Satchi did this ad recently for the World Cup Soccer, subtitled 'Hate, not in my shirt 2024'
There are more than a few 'Hate' jackets to buy on the net...fashion marketing!



interesting comparing the above to the very first recording in 1979 and vid:


Peter Hook has written two substantial autobiographies about his time in Joy Division and New Order. I read them about six years ago and they were both fascinating.

Have a great day, my friends. I certainly intend to.
 
Having burnt through all my NYTimes shares and then things get interesting!

I don't know if you've read JD Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy', I have.
One of many reading it because of the link to the Sackvill's and Purdue Pharmacy, that the Artist Nan Goldin was on about years ago. Hillbilly Elegy was one of the set pieces that came out at the time documenting his family's existance in the rust belt's demise of working class USA...nothing new apart from the 'new' drugs really.
Bruce Springsteen has been documenting the same 'rotting class' of American existance since the 1980 'River' & 1982 'Nebraska' albums, his conclussions and politics are diametrically opposite to JD Vances and he has sued characters like the 'Orange One' for coopting 'Born in the USA' for their campaign songs.
This 'lamenting of loses' that is driving so much in politics, the good old days. Nostalgia politics. Backwards because forwards is too frightening.
Jingoism.
And here we have an essay on the candidate......

Excerpt from todays NYT.
Guest essay:
J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He’s Got Plenty of Buyers.
by Ed Simon.


"At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”

That brand of striving, so strong that it compels Faustus to sell what is most essential to him, must lie somewhere in the makeup of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who on Monday was offered and accepted the invitation to be Donald Trump’s running mate. What he has renounced in the process is in the public record for all to see.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

After Monday’s announcement, of course, Mr. Vance distanced himself from those comments. Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

Certainly, all politicians are ambitious — and many of them are cynical. But there is something particularly noxious about Mr. Vance’s posturing, which exceeds the run-of-the-mill Machiavellian self-interestedness that characterizes politics. The Faustian contract seems to have already been drawn up and signed.

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.

For many tastemakers, Mr. Vance’s reputation as a thoughtful intellectual had been secured with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

An account of his journey from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to his graduation from Yale Law School, “Hillbilly Elegy” was often portrayed by critics and interpreted by readers as an explanation of rural Appalachia’s embrace of Trumpism. Praised from the Upper West Side to New Haven, Capitol Hill to Cambridge, Mr. Vance was posited as an Appalachia-whisperer, the sort of respectable conservative worth listening to.

Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president. His book and film contracts have proven Faustian in the sense that they may place him a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

Mr. Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. “Hillbilly Elegy” owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Mr. Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives,” Mr. Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn’t dreamed big enough.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.

There have been potent critiques of Mr. Vance’s writing. “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,” by the historian Elizabeth Catte, and the anthology “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, are two examples. Mr. Vance, critics from the region noted, depicted the poverty in his childhood community much the way conservatives historically stereotyped minority communities. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he offered rugged individualism and bootstrapping as cures for systemic economic inequities, blaming the “culture” of Appalachia for what ails it instead of free market policies.

As my colleague Jody DiPerna of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism put it, Mr. Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.

There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil. In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.

That is perhaps what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you. Mephistopheles certainly understood that the house always wins, however, since the Faustian contract always appeals to the worst in the person signing on the dotted line.

As Mr. Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Mr. Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Mr. Vance, too."(End)

Ed Simon is the author of “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” and the editor in chief of Belt Magazine. He teaches in the English department of Carnegie Mellon University.



Some of you no doubt, have dismissed Springsteen as being way too mainstream, an icky MOR sentimentalist, he has his moments of mawkishness however he has been consistently documenting and commenting on the death of the 'American Dream' for way longer than JDV and he hasn't swallowed the 'Koolaid Dream' that any of it's recoverable.
 
Excellent article Pammy and thank you for posting.

The state of US politics seriously upsets me to the point that I've had to have a news and social media (except Bigfooty) blackout on several occasions. Maybe it's naïvety born from the comfort that comes from living in a country so divorced from wars and civil strife, but I never thought that so many people would be overjoyed to bring fascism back after being thoroughly discredited post WW2.
 
Excellent article Pammy and thank you for posting.

The state of US politics seriously upsets me to the point that I've had to have a news and social media (except Bigfooty) blackout on several occasions. Maybe it's naïvety born from the comfort that comes from living in a country so divorced from wars and civil strife, but I never thought that so many people would be overjoyed to bring fascism back after being thoroughly discredited post WW2.
I generally avoid ever talking about 'the Orange Person' (who seems a lot less overtly orange lately) because of the wastage of brain space, that I'd rather reserve for better purpose but I am interested in the 'cultural co-op's', the shifting baseline of morality (how about a bit of truthiness anyone?) and the diverse spread of the infection of ideas of fascism through fearmongering.
Unfortunately the ethernet spreads these ideas far and wide and we are not beyond the bounds, see this article published yesterday, an example of our own homegrown facistic heartland denziens:


But hell there's music playing so lets dance away from this;

 
I generally avoid ever talking about 'the Orange Person' (who seems a lot less overtly orange lately) because of the wastage of brain space, that I'd rather reserve for better purpose but I am interested in the 'cultural co-op's', the shifting baseline of morality (how about a bit of truthiness anyone?) and the diverse spread of the infection of ideas of fascism through fearmongering.
Unfortunately the ethernet spreads these ideas far and wide and we are not beyond the bounds, see this article published yesterday, an example of our own homegrown facistic heartland denziens:


But hell there's music playing so lets dance away from this;


Yes I read that article this morning.

And you are right. Let's dance.



 

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I saw this Pammy and immediately thought of you. Do you know her?

I read this yesterday.

Official RZSS Hashtag:
#IreadthisandthoughtofPammy

I read this today. (yes, I know Lesley)

I laughed at the #IreadthisandthoughtofPammy (thanks I really need to have a laugh this week)

Should this hashtag be twinned with #sameasiteverwas or #zeitgiestfuturesofPamcakesadventuresintheartworld #thanksforthinkingaboutthePamcake

I'm asking myself this week if I've turned into Don Quixote, eyeing off yet another windmill waiting to be known in the distance, in the seemingly Kafkalesque epoch.
I don't want to embrace the whinge.
It's Saturday, Goodmorning!
Wishing everyone a good one ahead.
Life is a wild ride!



">#tellmesomethingIdontknowalready or #zeitgiestfuturesofPamcakesadventuresintheartworld #thanksforthinkingaboutthePamcake

I'm asking myself this week if I've turned into Don Quixote, eyeing off yet another windmill waiting to be known in the distance, in the seemingly Kafkalesque epoch.
I don't want to embrace the whinge.
It's Saturday, Goodmorning!
Wishing everyone a good one ahead.
Life is a wild ride!



 
I read this yesterday.


I read this today. (yes, I know Lesley)

I laughed at the #IreadthisandthoughtofPammy (thanks I really need to have a laugh this week)

Should this hashtag be twinned with #sameasiteverwas or #zeitgiestfuturesofPamcakesadventuresintheartworld #thanksforthinkingaboutthePamcake

I'm asking myself this week if I've turned into Don Quixote, eyeing off yet another windmill waiting to be known in the distance, in the seemingly Kafkalesque epoch.
I don't want to embrace the whinge.
It's Saturday, Goodmorning!
Wishing everyone a good one ahead.
Life is a wild ride!



">#tellmesomethingIdontknowalready or #zeitgiestfuturesofPamcakesadventuresintheartworld #thanksforthinkingaboutthePamcake

I'm asking myself this week if I've turned into Don Quixote, eyeing off yet another windmill waiting to be known in the distance, in the seemingly Kafkalesque epoch.
I don't want to embrace the whinge.
It's Saturday, Goodmorning!
Wishing everyone a good one ahead.
Life is a wild ride!




#StopMeIfYouThinkYouveHeardThisOneBefore
 
The penny just dropped, that the character in the vid of the recently released "I'm not a Role Model' by Fatboy Slim is taken from this album cover of his.
I'm not a Role Model is still on high rotation in the house of Pamcake but I don't want to Baddonk.
Interesting to distract by falling down the rabbit hole of following through the career of this early 60's child.





 

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Lifestyle "1983 Redux Zeitgeist Surf School"

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