Tag Archives: 1980s

Friday, 9th Mar 2012

Bulgaria’s astonishing ruined monument to Communism

Photo: Copyright Timothy Allen http://humanplanet.com

A fantastic photo essay by Timothy Allen who was determined to visit The Buzludzha Monument atop a Bulgarian mountain.

I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria. Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’. Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself.

The result is a mix of Communist-era hubris, Brutalist architecture in ruins and snow. Lots of snow. The photos are gorgeous but the story makes it.

via Kottke

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Saturday, 18th Feb 2012

Martin Amis on Arcade Games

Lovely find this. When he was a struggling writer in the early 80s Martin Amis wrote a piece of hackery about the booming arcade video games scene for some barrel-scraping publisher. He’s reportedly disowned it and literary types have sought it high and low. This review dives in head first.

Curiously, for a writer so deeply preoccupied with stylistic refinement and playful innovation — who elevates the pleasure principle to a sort of aesthetic moral law — Amis favors a no-frills approach to gaming. The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide.

via Kottke

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Sunday, 15th Jan 2012

David Stubbs’ review of the Thatcher film

I have no desire to see it but I did enjoy this review in The Quietus:

Denis Thatcher’s ghost is her only real match, and occasionally he plays a Jiminy Cricket-type role in her imaginary conversations with her in widowhood. He pricks her conscience; but only to say things like “You’re drinking too much”, rather than, say, “You presided over the dismantling of the UK’s manufacturing base, sold off the country’s commonly owned silverware to a bunch of money-grubbing, pinstriped opportunists, practically eliminated the country’s social housing stock and eroded the welfare state by unleashing the worst of which the British people are capable – fear, ruthless greed and small-minded loathing, racism, xenophobia and homophobia – adding insult to injury by administering all this with a sickly, acrid, old-fashioned dose of castor oil moralism. It is just that you rot in senile purgatory and die a lonely death.”

via Simon Price

See also Stewart Lee on Thatcher’s back door and the Is Thatcher Dead? Twitter account (there are many but I like the simplicity of this one).

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Tuesday, 29th Nov 2011

Pinsent’s original Illegal Batman

Following his sequel earlier this year Ed Pinsent has scanned his original Illegal Batman comic from 1989.

Again, I’m having trouble viewing the PDF on my Mac but it works in Google Docs.

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Saturday, 10th Sep 2011

Close (to the Edit)

Another video I don’t remember seeing to a song from my 80s youth. As Tom Ewing says in his excellent Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise review, from which this link was extracted, “Close (to the Edit) reminds you that Art of Noise were trying to be funny and sometimes scary”, and even with the knowledge that it all came from Paul Morley’s conceptual intellectualism of pop there’s something quite disturbing and alien about these four minutes of classical instruments being destroyed with power tools.

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Friday, 26th Aug 2011

Ewins and Milligan on the telly in 1988

Bit of Brit-comics history here, a 1988 telly interview on Night Network with Brett Ewins and Pete Milligan in the middle of their adventure in rockstardom, just prior to the launch of Deadline. It was around this time I would queue up outside London comic shops to get the signature of these guys. Was that really 23 years ago? This is particularly interesting for me because while Ewins was a loud and ever-present character of the comics scene Milligan was much more mysterious and quiet, as befits the literary scribe maybe, and I’ve never had a clue what he’s like.

Comes via Mindless Ones where the observation is made:

Just look at Milligan leaning back into the couch, giving cool answers through his shades, and tell me that the whole Strange Days crew aren’t part of of the lineage of working class art-pop stars Owen Hatherly describes in his new book on Pulp.

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Wednesday, 17th Aug 2011

Tom Ewing on Introspective

His favorite album ever is the Pete Shop Boys’ multi-coloured extended-mix one:

I was 15, awkward, mistrustful of dance music, adrift from pop. Introspective changed that – it’s a collection of extended mixes for songs that mostly weren’t yet singles, and these longer versions are the definitive ones. I know now that a lot of this album draws inspiration from years of fabulous, opulent disco mixes. But at 15 it was a beautiful education in what you could do with pop given space and ideas.

I think Tom and I are the same age as I had a similar relationship with the Pet Shop Boys. For some reason, probably related to growing up in a house dominated by classical music and having friends who only listened to Iron Maiden and Anthrax (which didn’t do much for me) my music knowledge was extremely limited. I often say I didn’t really “do” music until 1989 when I discovered PWEI and the Pixies, which is true, but in the 80s I did listen to a lot of the Pet Shop Boys, because they were safe and accessible and perfect stomping music for a paper round. I have no idea how they influenced me (I also listened to a lot of Queen) but I often return to those early albums with my nostalgia hat on and marvel at how good they still are.

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