Monday, August 27, 2018

Hipit rautaa..bändit 70-luvulla

Tuli mieleen josain foorumilla, että vaikka me ajattelemme progebändejä taitaviksi soittajikis, nykyisen metallimeiningin ja fantasian (Nightwish) ohella 70 luvun alussa oli edellleen Vietnamin sota ja rauhanaate,

Wigwamin musiikissa tämä tuli Jukan teksteissä uskonnollisena esille.







Myös Jimin teksteissä idea vilahteli:

Atomic man, embossed on hues of
Money greens that swell and ooze, will
Scratch his chin as if to muse that
All this winning meant to lose
Though he slaved and hate his dues
Here he was, no time to choose
A way to change and try to fuse him-
self into the way the queues around him
"Attack you fools!" the captain bawls
"I have your heads upon my walls!"
Rows of heroes crouch to crawls, bomb
Bamboo huts and village halls, smash
Ping-pong bats with cannon balls, as
Ali-Baba's sheiks and sauls
Debag Goliath as he falls
While the Statue Of Liberty climbs and mauls everything
"Champagne for the heroe whore
And watch your step in all that gore
But not too much, he'll scream for more"
El pres. advices from the door
"For though he's filled from skin to core
It's not enough he'll whine for sure, so
Say it's we who keep the score, and
nail him back upon the floor, yeh"
So there he works, still at large
Behind his smiles and his camouflage
Of nice white coats and college grades that
Hide blue suits with golden braids
And though I hope the smell just fades
It does not go but leads to raids on
Bamboo huts in country glades
Where the people use the grass for blades, ain't that something

Wednesday, July 04, 2018

Nikolai Gogol




Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52) was a Russian writer, who was born in an era where European nations with rulers such as Nicholas I were fearful of revolution and tightened up censorship of published works. Gogol’s father died when he was fifteen, but he finished education in Ukraine and headed to St. Petersburg for a career in the Czarist bureaucracy. He fancied himself an actor or a painter, but it was obvious his skills were with words. His skill in describing people led to many a character in his book sketched out by artists of the period. It took him no time to realize that his job would stifle any personal development and even the salary prospects were poor. He attempted creative work in the two or less years he worked as a government official. Most letters to his mother begged for another three hundred rubles.

His first stories were derived from his native Ukraine, as those were popular in Russia at the time. Pushkin preceded Gogol, but otherwise the state of Russian literature was poor. People read many a book of German poetry and fiction as harmless entertainment.

Gogol developed literary relationships in St. Petersburg and published regularly in literary journals. Eventually some stories were collected in book form, and he was accepted into the literary circles and educated circles all the way up to the royal family. He taught in a girls’ school and worked as a tutor at other times.

Gogol’s books are full of fussy majors, landowners, peasants and other colorful characters described to the tiniest detail. If his heroes were vain, so was Gogol. If they had particular habits of eating and consumed a variety of Russian and foreign foods, so did Gogol. He suffered from anxiety, travel discomforts, health problems and endless little things that occupied his daily routines. He was not a particularly easy person to be with, but he did always have Russian friends, especially during his years abroad.

Gogol’s relationships with women were usually with the wives of his friends and supporters, and members of the Czarist nobility. He was never known to have a physical relationship with a woman, and his intimate matters are mostly speculation.

Gogol was in fact patriotic and fairly religious and at times superstitious. His works reflect an attitude to the Russian bureaucracy, but his notions of improvement for Russia must be categorized as rather strange. His private letters were published at one point, after careful editing and censorship. People took his writings as satire and criticism of certain classes in Russia. The Inspector General took some work to publish, but mysteriously Nicholas I himself approved it. The Czar then soon forgot all about Gogol and his plays. The play as well as many of his works are humorous, but writers who followed him warn us not to treat him simply as a humorist. Gogol himself did not enjoy the attention the play got as a sort of criticism of the system, and he made one of his many escapes abroad. He merely wanted some fame, not any label as a revolutionary of any sort.

The Overcoat remains a work that easily portrays Russia of the time and the underclasses. The scribes and offices in it are pretty much what Gogol saw when he arrived in the capitol as a young man. Despite his flaws, there was not a comparable writer in his day. Dostoevski was released from prison in 1854 and published his major works in the 1860s.

One can read the biographies of many writers and find the person not quite what you expect. This is true of Gogol but is even true of Mark Twain, for example. We all have our failures. I find it best to read the material, but then give the greater weight to the works, not the writer and his failures or quirks.