Coronation musings

May 6, 2023 by Leave a comment

One day when I was in primary school, back in the mid-1970s, we were all loaded on to buses and taken to the cinema, which was a pretty big deal, since such extracurricular excitement was a rare event in those days. The film we saw was A Queen Is Crowned, the 1953 documentary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Presented in glorious Technicolor, and narrated by Laurence Olivier no less, it was quite a spectacle, and must have been even more impressive when it was first released to a nation only just emerging from postwar austerity. I’m not sure why we were taken to see it; the obvious reason would be the Silver Jubilee of 1977, but I’m fairly sure this trip was a couple of years before that. Anyway, whatever the occasion, Liz’s big day was clearly grand enough, even at second hand, that I can recall it nearly half a century later.

There has been plenty of comment over the last few weeks noting the contrast between the forward-looking, vibrant country which welcomed a modern young Queen, and the insular, sclerotic nation, obsessed with past glories, that her elderly son has inherited. There’s no doubt that the excitement that greeted Elizabeth’s ascension has not been replicated; popular reaction to today’s events has predominantly been one of indifference. Even staunch republicans like myself are mostly irritated rather than outraged, and we’re not complaining about the extra holiday on Monday.

The gloominess may be overstated though, and it is probably confined to observers of my generation, who are looking back on their lives with vague regret. Younger citizens, who still have a future ahead of them, see a Britain that, for all its troubles, is infinitely more diverse and socially progressive than it was in the 1950s. The fact that we are no longer psychologically in thrall to the monarchy is sign of how far the nation has come. We probably won’t have to wait 70 years for another coronation, but I’m sure that next time around it will be even more of a minority interest.

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Tom Verlaine RIP

January 29, 2023 by Leave a comment

Sad news today; Tom Verlaine has passed away, at the age of 73. I was just getting into music when Television broke up in 1978, so I didn’t catch up with them until later; Marquee Moon has been a favourite since my college days, and after their reunion I saw them when they toured in 2014, and again in 2016.

Much has been written about Television’s musical legacy, but equally important, for me at least, was their sartorial influence; I’ve been trying to carry off that 70s New York underground look for most of the last 40 years…

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BBC centenary

November 14, 2022 by Leave a comment

It was one hundred years ago today that the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then, transmitted its first programme on the wireless, a news bulletin from London, covering, among other things, billiard scores and the foggy weather. Or it may have been a children’s programme broadcast the previous day from Manchester; records of those pioneering days are a little sketchy.

Whatever the details, when viewed from the perspective of today’s fractured and fractious media landscape it’s hard not to feel a sense of longing for the days when broadcasting was viewed as a way of “spreading culture and good sense”, an antidote to the horrors of the Great War. More recently, the internet seemed to hold similar promise, but that hasn’t really worked out either. Perhaps the next telecommunication revolution will be more successful…

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Sterling work

September 26, 2022 by Leave a comment

Regular readers will know that I am fond of waxing nostalgic about the early 90s, when I was young and carefree, so perhaps I should be grateful that the government has chosen to stir up memories of that era by arranging a rerun of the 1992 Sterling crisis.

As I recall, that particular debacle came to a head a week or so before I took a trip to the US, somewhat curtailing my spending power, so I’m glad that this time around I’ve had my summer holiday before the pound started flirting with dollar parity. That’s about the only bright spot though, as Kwasi Kwarteng’s horribly misjudged mini-budget threatens to deepen the coming recession into a full-blown depression.

The gloomiest forecasts are predicting that interest rates will have to go up to around 6% to arrest the fall in sterling, with the resulting increase in mortgage costs set to hit the middle-class bedrock of Tory support particularly hard, so political reality suggests that Liz Truss will perform a signature U-turn and adopt a marginally more sustainable fiscal policy. Failing that, we might have a new Prime Minister even sooner than expected.

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Fifteen Years Ago

May 26, 2022 by Leave a comment

Second Life Shrink made its debut on May 26th 2007, an exciting time when technology promised a future of unlimited opportunity. The must-have communication gadget was a BlackBerry, all the cool kids were on MySpace, and it was still possible to dream of making a living by blogging.

A decade and a half later, after nearly 700 posts, we’re still going strong, or still going at least. This would seem like a good opportunity to reflect on how the dream of internet liberation degenerated into the post-truth social-media dystopia that we live in today, but that sounds like hard work, so in true SLS slacker style I’ll just do what I did on our fifth and tenth birthdays, and list my favourite posts from the past 5 years:

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Perhaps this review will inspire me to post a bit more frequently again; we’ll see. In the meantime I’ll revive a favourite feature that has lain dormant since 2017, the post-title-related music link.

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@R.Mutt

March 24, 2021 by Leave a comment

After posting our last piece about non-fungible tokens, it struck me that perhaps I was missing the point, and that such works should be read conceptually. Interpreted thusly, NFTs would be akin to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, mass-produced objects given significance by being chosen by the artist, and could even be seen as a critique of the commodification of art, rather than just a particularly crass example of it. It does seem like a lot of meaning to hang on a five-word tweet though, even one worth $2.9 million.

Thinking about Duchamp reminded me of seeing his work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, during a visit to that city nearly thirty years ago. I don’t recall much else about that trip, though I was there for a few days, so I guess I must have seen the Liberty Bell, and all the other historical sights. I do remember the youth hostel, a rambling wooden structure in what didn’t seem to be the most salubrious part of town. The weather was good though, so it was nice to sit in the garden in the evening, chatting with the other travellers. I need to take another long vacation in the US sometime; hopefully it won’t be too long before that’s possible again.

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Neil Peart RIP

January 11, 2020 by Leave a comment

When people ask me what the first record I ever bought was, I usually tell them Heart of Glass by Blondie, which was the first single I purchased, but the first LP that I bought was Moving Pictures by Rush. I’ve been a little reluctant to admit that over the years, as Rush are not generally felt to be the coolest act on the planet, but I was definitely a big fan for a while, and they were one of the first bands that introduced me to the idea that music could be something beyond an ephemeral distraction.

After Moving Pictures I quickly acquired all their previous albums, and their next release Signals, but my initial enthusiasm didn’t last, partly for reasons I’ll mention below, and I hardly listened to them at all over the following three decades, until some nostalgic impulse prompted me to get 2012’s Clockwork Angels, which in turn led me to revisit my collection of their old material. I’m not sure that I would sit and listen to any of the albums all the way through, but there are certainly some highlights, especially on Fly by Night, Permanent Waves, and the aforementioned Moving Pictures.

So I was sad to read in the paper this morning that Neil Peart had passed away, at the early age of 67. Much of the appeal of Rush’s work lies in the storytelling of his lyrics, particularly on the earlier albums, where he crafts some intriguing Tolkienesque fantasy, while (mostly) avoiding any lapses into ridiculousness.

There are some problematic elements to Peart’s legacy though; 2112, dedicated to “the genius of Ayn Rand”, is difficult to forgive. It’s said that Peart later disavowed Rand and identified himself as a “bleeding heart libertarian”, but the official Rush website featured a sympathetic portrait of the alt-right icon as late as 2012, and in 2018 Peart was still describing 2112 as the story of “a hero who fights against collectivist mentality (depicted by the evil red star)“, so I probably won’t be putting that back on the turntable any time soon.

I much preferred Peart when he stuck to the elf-related whimsy, so I think that’s how I’ll remember him.

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Reach for the stars

July 20, 2019 by Leave a comment

Regular readers will recall that we’ve posted on the topic of space travel several times in the past, marking, among other things, Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight into orbit, and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

The tone of our previous pieces has been mostly elegiac, noting with regret that the promise of manned cosmic exploration, which seemed just around the corner in my youth, had largely stalled in the years that followed. There have of course been great strides in robotic exploration, from Mars all the way out to Pluto, and ever more sophisticated telescopes have peered into the furthest depths of the Universe, but I still find it deeply disappointing that Moon bases and space tourism aren’t a thing in the 21st century.

It’s interesting then to see that the latest anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which, 50 years ago today, put the Eagle lander on the lunar surface, has been greeted with quite a bit of enthusiasm. I haven’t heard anyone arguing that it wasn’t a good thing to do, and there seems to be a general feeling that it’s the kind of endeavour that humanity could do with undertaking again some time soon.

I’m sure that, at least in part, this wish to travel out into the final frontier is fuelled by a desire to forget about how dispiriting the immediate future is looking here on Earth, but, whatever the motivation, it’s good to see a resurgence of belief in the idea of progress. I may reluctantly admit that I’m probably too old now to make it to Mars in person, but I’m still hoping to see some other human get there before I die.

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Incassable

April 16, 2019 by Leave a comment

As I’ve noted previously, I’ve had some good times in Paris, so it was sad to watch fire ravage Notre Dame cathedral last night. Fortunately, the skill and courage of the Parisian sapeurs-pompiers ensured that the flames were extinguished before the whole structure collapsed, but it’s still going to take years, if not decades, to restore.

It’s tempting to see this event as some sort of metaphor for the fragility of seemingly eternal European institutions, but I suspect it may end up symbolising exactly the opposite; the ability of the EU to survive temporary conflagrations like Brexit. Whether the UK will be part of that future remains doubtful, though the chances of a remain outcome are certainly better than they were a few weeks ago, and seem likely to be further boosted by a good showing for pro-EU parties in the European elections next month.

As time passes, the fire at Notre Dame will become just a footnote in its centuries-long history; hopefully Brexit will fade into a similar obscurity.

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Pete Shelley RIP

December 6, 2018 by Leave a comment

Sad news tonight of the sudden death of punk icon Pete Shelley, lead singer of the legendary Buzzcocks.

I was too young to see the band in their original incarnation, but I got into them towards the end of my school days, and listened to them a lot when I was in college, a time in my life when lovelorn pop-punk was exactly the right soundtrack. Of course I eventually grew out of that phase, and it’s a good while since I last put on one of their records, but I still turn the sound up, and dance around a bit, if they come on the radio.

Anyway, here’s my favourite Buzzcocks tune – how could it ever let me down?

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