In a hurry? Almost too late to catch your train? Escalator too slow, stairs too dangerous? At the Utrecht Overvecht trainstation you can now slide down to the platform, as shown in the video below made by local journalist/blogger Simon de Wilde:
See also Simon’s own blog for more, much more about Overvecht and the slide there.
This is thirty years old now:
unemployment is rife. The political and economic parallels between Britain in 2011 and 1981 may be self-evident, but musical reactions to today’s tempestuous times are conspicuous by their scarcity. Thirty years ago, however, there was one anthem that defined that summer of discontent. On 11 July 1981, the Specials’ “Ghost Town” hit the top of the charts, where it stayed for three weeks – the day before it reached No 1, rioting erupted across Britain. It was an elegiac portrait of the band’s Coventry home town, but its message resonated far beyond the Midlands, chiming with a country feeling the bite of Thatcherite cuts and galvanised into unrest by April’s Brixton riots. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf … No job to be found in this country,” Neville Staple and Terry Hall memorably sang to a backdrop of strident brass, haunted-house organ and loping bass, the groove’s eerie Middle Eastern flavour as unsettling as the lyrics. Meanwhile, to compound the disquiet, the video offered a road trip through post-apocalyptically empty London streets.
Hitler made the biggest yet inevitable mistake of the war and started Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. Though incredibly succesful at first, it turned out to be far from the cakewalk the Germans had expected. The tenacity and fighting power of the average Soviet fighting man (and woman) was far greater than anybody, including Stalin, had accounted for and the Russian defence might have been in disarray in the first few weeks, it never broke. The Germans needed to deliver a knocout blow and once they failed to do it, the outcome was inevitable.
Three short years later and the Russians launched Operation Bagration, swept the Germans out of their country and inflicted the worst German defeat in the entire war: it was this, rather than the Normandy Landings, that meant the end was near. In the west we have a tendency to airbrush the Soviet contributions to the defeat of Germany out of our history, but without them, we’d all be speaking German stilll..
The version of The Internationale above is sung by SWP activist and folk singer Alistair Hulett (best known for being in Roaring Jack) with backing by Jimmy Gregory. Sadly Alistair Hulett died early last year due to liver cancer.
There will be a hell of a lot of Bruce and E-Street Band fans tonight who’ll be listening to some variation on the song above, in memory of the Big Man, King of the World, Emperor of the North Pole, Clarence Clemons, who died this Saturday due to complications from a stroke. Only 69 years old as well, way too young to die.
It was his saxophone, as much as anything that defined the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, always there in the background, driving the songs and sometimes in the foreground, making them. Rosalita is one of these songs, a concert favourite, unthinkable without the Big Man there to lay down the horns. Jungleland is of course the other one:
Sometime in the mid-eighties Clarence Clemons also had a rare hit without Bruce and the rest of the E-Street Band, working with Jackson Browne on their own album, coming out with a song so very eighties that it makes me happy each time I hear it:
Goodbye Clarence; you’ll be missed.
Suddenly the petty concerns of my bike commute in lovely Amsterdam do not seem so bad anymore. Casey Neistat was ticketed for not riding his bike in the bikelane in NYC, but his video clearly shows that sometimes riding the bikelane is actually either impossible or highly dangerous….
(Via Michael Minneboo.)