I was in Berlin over the weekend. One thing I am coming to realise is that there is a bottomless pit of crazy ass weirdo music from before The Wall came down. Currently rocking my world is a socialist psych cover of The Zombies' 'She's Not There'. The lyrics have all been translated; I think they are now singing about increasing production in a tractor factory. Deadly stuff.
Hey, that reminds me, I read an article in the October issue of Journal of Pop Culture that was about the creation of nostalgia for DDR, called Ostalgie. It was pretty interesting, even though it referenced two films I'd never seen. But I thought of you.
ReplyDeleteAlso there was an article about alternate histories and why they keep having nazis in them. And an article about Buffy. It was good stuff.
That sounds deadly, better see if Spy School carries it.
ReplyDeleteIt is sometimes said that the reason that alternate history (or AH as it known to nerds) has TEH NAZIS in it all the time is that SF fans are all secret RASCISTS who wish that the other lot had one the second world war. But I reckon it is acutally because the Nazis are so comedically bad that imagining them winning is like imagining the very worst thing possible happening.
On Ostalgie, the big film is Goodbye Lenin. I've not seen any others but I hear there is at least one about an East German secret policeman. The danger with Ostalgie, though, is that instead of ending up listening to Oktoberklub or Orchester W. Kubiczeck you find yourself flying over to Berlin in late December for a concert by DIE PUHDYS, and you really don't want that.
Right, Goodbye Lenin is one of the two films they talk about. They also had a very good theory about why AH stories so often feature Nazis, but I will not tell it here because I don't want to spoil the article for you.
ReplyDeleteThere was also, although this is more something I care about than something you care about, a very good article about the iconisation of Elizabeth I.