Neverwednesday Nights
Not sure if the usual weekly game will actually happen this evening or not, but either way--David Bowie performs a dialed-back and yet powerful rendition of "'Heroes'":
When I set this entry up to appear, I think it was actually before Christmas, and for various reasons (some of them obvious--like Christmas itself) the Neverwednesday Nights entries kept getting bumped back.
So David Bowie's classic about clinging onto hope in the face of adversity only coincidentally appears the day after the new President told us that the difficulties would be great--but would be faced. Bowie's lines about the Berlin Wall--
--don't mean what they did in 1977, and yet I can't help thinking they're apt as applied to the former administration. I don't mean "beat them" in some petty partisan sense (I'm not a Democrat and don't especially expect to ever register as one), I mean "beat them" in the sense Bowie meant in Berlin in '77--that the ones who have something to be ashamed of can be vanquished by the human spirit, whether they're the torturers and spies of East Germany or the American torturers and spies who chose the illusion of safety over our ideals for the sake of expediency.
Or maybe I'm still basking in the afterglow, feeling too fuzzy and thinking too hard. Anyway, it struck me that way when I watched the video again. I hope you'll enjoy the song under whatever terms please you most; it's a good performance of it.
So David Bowie's classic about clinging onto hope in the face of adversity only coincidentally appears the day after the new President told us that the difficulties would be great--but would be faced. Bowie's lines about the Berlin Wall--
And the shame
Was on the other side
Oh we can beat them
For ever and ever
--don't mean what they did in 1977, and yet I can't help thinking they're apt as applied to the former administration. I don't mean "beat them" in some petty partisan sense (I'm not a Democrat and don't especially expect to ever register as one), I mean "beat them" in the sense Bowie meant in Berlin in '77--that the ones who have something to be ashamed of can be vanquished by the human spirit, whether they're the torturers and spies of East Germany or the American torturers and spies who chose the illusion of safety over our ideals for the sake of expediency.
Or maybe I'm still basking in the afterglow, feeling too fuzzy and thinking too hard. Anyway, it struck me that way when I watched the video again. I hope you'll enjoy the song under whatever terms please you most; it's a good performance of it.
Comments
Completely off topic, but my German text books in high school were bought the year before the wall came down, and the school never replaced them until something like 1998, so the text books I used still refered to East and West.