Oh, this is beautifully done. A marrying together of the music of Blue Nile and the art of Edward Hopper.
Kudos to music writer, Chris Roberts, and YouTuber, prodriguez, for making magic happen.
One caveat, though; the Hopper painting that you see at 3:17 in the video is not how I remember it.
November 2009 Socialist Standard
Editorial
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Letters, Book Reviews, & Meetings
Voice From The Back
Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 123
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 123rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.
We now have 1544 friends!
Recent blogs:
Afghanistan - lying about dying Joining the killing machine The myth of Maastricht
Coming Events:
Quote for the week:
"Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included)." Karl Marx, Letter to Kugelmann, 1868.
Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
'Another Girl, Another Planet' is so fucking overrated.
Granted, it's a good song, but in no way does is it qualify as great. It's nothing more than the bastard cousin of Richard Hell doing the guest vocals on a Motors song.
It's taken me 15 years to pluck up the courage to voice that opinion out loud. Even know, I expect Pitchfork to turn up at the front door with the . . . erm, pitchforks. Knowing my luck, Peter Perrett will break a guitar string tomorrow and his fan base will hunt me down via google alert.
Someone disagrees. That person needs to put on a loud shirt and listen to Wham!'s debut album.
File this post under 'An iTunes Shuffle Epiphany'.
. . . apparently it seems that my most devoted reader is googlebot. If only it would leave a comment every once in a while.
The Californian one. Not the European one. The latter is still blanking me because of that regrettable incident with diggit.
How are you with your knowledge of the history of early British Trotskyism?
Do you know your Heaton Lee from your Ralph Lee? Ted Grant's real name? The first bullshit myth Gerry Healy spun about himself? CLR James's batting average for the Old Fractionians Second XI? The name of the De Leonist organisation in Scotland which turned towards Trotskyism in the thirties? Who debated for the Bolshevik Leninists' against the SPGB's Adolph Kohn at the AEU Hall in Doughty Street in London in 1936?
Well, the answers to all of the above questions will not be found in the following clip from Mastermind, but what does follow is Paul Moorhouse answering questions on his specialist subject,"British Trotskyism Until 1949'. (What's the odds that all the questions were cribbed from Bornstein and Richardson's two-volume history of British Trotskyism?)
This edition of Mastermind dates from March 13th of this year but I've only just now stumbled across the clip. I got nine answers right but that's only because I'm from the Menshevik-SadBastard Tendency.
Give it your best shot:
But there's more.
When Paul returned to the black chair for the second round, John Humphrys asked him about his specialist subject in the first round and inquired, in an amused tone, if there were any Trotskyists left?
Paul resisted the temptation to leap upon the black chair and declaim 'The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International' in its entirety but he did lean forward in his chair like the seasoned cadre that he is and gave a fifty second thumbnail sketch of what it is to be a Trotskyist today.
Humphrys said nothing in reply, thus confirming the suspicions of two million Daily Mail readers that the initials BBC really do stand for the 'Bolsheviks Broadcasting Communism'.
A quick google search reveals that Paul Moorhouse is a longstanding member of the Millies (SPEW/CWI) down in Bristol.
I'm sure he got muchos-kudos from his comrades for putting his politics before an audience of a few million (back in the eighties, Mastermind could be watched by up to 15 million people), but I wonder if he also got his nose tweaked by the local full timer for not mentioning Peter Taaffe's name at least twice during those fifty primetime seconds.
The Menshevik-SadBastard Tendency member in me can't help heckling to the computer screen that he should have said: 'Trotskyism? Past'
More on that particular episode of Mastermind over at Life After Mastermind, the blog of 2007 Mastermind winner, David Clark.
I love this quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould that caught my eye on Facebook yesterday:
“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Within minutes of spotting that clip I stumble across this picture - and its accompanying story - on Facebook. LabourStart readers have just voted it their Labour Photo of the Year.
If I had any fingernails, I'd dig them into the palm of my hand to remind myself that it's 2009.
Hat tip to MM for the quote.
Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 122
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 122nd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.
We now have 1535 friends!
Recent blogs:
Postal workers out on strike Fat Cats: creaming off profits Who’s afraid of the BNP?
Quote for the week:
"If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still."Joe Hill, Workers of the World, Awaken!, c.1914.
Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
One for the Party archives?
Abstract propaganda front and centre in The Merry Frinks, a madcap comedy from 1934.
And there was you thinking that the Hays Code was enforced in 1934 because of Mae West's single entendres and Joan Blondell showing a bit of thigh. How wrong you were. Jack, Harry and Daryl apparently viewed Utopian Socialism as more dangerous than Upton Sinclair during this time period.
The commie curmudgeon in the clip is Allen Jenkins, who some of the more infantile older readers of the blog will recognise as the voice of Officer Dibble in Top Cat. A worker in uniform.
Of course I'd love to claim Allen Jenkins's Emmett Frink as one of us, but how do I explain away the earlier scene in the film where he's carrying under his arm a portrait painting of Joe Stalin? Despite my best efforts, I can't.
More Comintern Third Period than Great Dover Street Impossibilism, but a very funny film, nonetheless. It's worth hunting down.
We've had the staples: Small Party of Good Boys and Simon Pure's Good Brand are the best known, for instance.
We've had the witty Small Party of Glesga Bookies (as the local branch in Glasgow was known in its early days because, it turns out, a number of its members were bookies) and we have had the just plain abusive Smug Pricks and Gobby Bastards (just made that one up but I've yet to copyright it).
But I think the old school playground nicknames all fall by the wayside with Julian V from Enfield and Haringey Branch's recent suggestion on the Party's discussion list that the SPGB now stands for Senile Pensioners in Geriatric Bathchairs. The bloke's got form in the witty stakes. It was Julian who came up with the title of 'Socialism Or You Money Back'.
Sterling Cooper's loss was the SPGB's gain.
Cheeky opponents and the usual malcontents will riposte that they've been referring to us as that for years, but it's no good now mentioning that now on the commentary of your latest dvd. Prove your point by providing the requisite YouTube clips from those Arena specials you were on all those years ago. Otherwise, button it or we'll send the youth section around to have a word, brew a pot of tea and share some Werther's Originals.
