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ROCKSTARS IN POLITICS, |
'please don't put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band...'
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"...If
Hendrix had lived, would he have been heading a counter cultural think
tank advising the Home Secretary on the dissolution of the UK and what
to do with the House Of Lords? Bono's current foray into politics makes
Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love look alarmingly prophetic..." |
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Politicians may be seduced by the rockstar concept, megastars may decide to use their high status and visibility for the political benefit of the world's poor. Grassroots aspiring rockstars frequently align themselves with radical, utopian politics, but the sources for the Bold As Love scenario are deeper in the past. Revolution.... Pop
culture icons taking government jobs: |
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"Here I am, already doing
a statesman's work...." "'Does France
wish to force Paris into having recourse |
26th June 1848...'Leaving a barricade one no longer knows what one has seen. One has been ferocious, yet one has no recollection of it. ![]() |
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On the left, we have George Sand, free spirit and lifelong socialist with a tough attitude to the By Any Means Necessary concept; on the right we have Victor Hugo, ruthless opportunist in the backstabbing of the arts world, genuinely shocked at that red stuff under his fingernails... So, that's where the Deconstruction Tour came from. A little bit of 1968, a little bit of 1848, blood running in the gutters, radical rockstar icons of their times feeling it their natural duty to get in there and mix it with the People. But Ax's Manifesto of art and love has different, English sources, or analogues, in our Victorian past | |||||||||
Sweetness And Light... Social
Reform, the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts Movement In Ruskin's
1884 essay "The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century", he chronicles unpublished essay, SFF Blanched sun, blighted grass, blinded man... We live in a Victorian Age. John Ruskin, English dreamer, the great Victorian Art critic turned reformer, was probably addressing the mass-affluent middle classes in that first quote, and telling them to buy something more tasteful to put in the drawing room, but his words could equally stand as an accusation of modern globalization. Unfortunately, then as now, it is the poor, first and above all, who have to consider price alone, and who pay the cost of the profit motive. Only now we count them in billions... However,
that's only half the story. The expression Sweetness and Light comes from
Matthew Arnold, poet and Educational Reformer,who believed, like Mr Ax
Preston, that the natural environment of people is people, we are meant
to look after each other, and that this doesn't just mean sharing the
food, the clean water, the dry places to sleep. A shared culture means
the best of everything, art and ideas included, shared by everyone. "We're revolutionary idealists, cloth-ears. Art for a cause. Being naive and corrupt is a vibrant part of our cultural heritage..." Castles Made Of Sand
How many references to the Victorian English Dreamers can you pick up, in the glory days of the Rock and Roll Reich? The pre-Raphaelites had a painful triangle of lovers, in William Morris, Janey Morris (the model for all those sultry redheads in the famous pictures), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Rivermead's barefoot architect is called 'Topsy', and given a description to match Wm Morris,because Morris, who originally trained as an architect, was known as 'Topsy'
But where is the real, unsinkable Promised Land? Maybe it's in a dark, derelict car park by the Regent Canal, in the pouring rain... Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill....
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