Saturday, December 28, 2013

CONFUSION REIGNS WHERE THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN SITS

The Gonzo Daily - Saturday
 
The forthcoming year is the 100th Anniversary of the start of the First World War and I wonder how the media are going to deal with it. I don't mean the documentaries, the political analyses and the special tie-in book from Downton Abbey, but the entertainment business and more particularly, the music business. Ever since 1984, when everyone went Orwellian at least once, I have been expecting another big cash-in year. OK it happened in 1999 for the millenium, but I was expecting everyone to embrace fictional space travel, or at least make documentaries about Arthur C, Clark in 2001 and do a remake of Raise the Titanic in 2012, but the first didn't happen at all and the second was somewhat muted. Both my grandfathers fought in the First World War: one in the Royal Flying Corps and the other in the Royal Horse Artillery. The latter was seriously injured and finally died of his condition in 1954. One of my grandmothers was a Land Girl, and the other a schoolgirl who saw Zeppelins fly overhead, and so my childhood was immersed quite strongly in family memories of the conflict.
 
So what's going to happen? In 2014 will we be too immersed in our own sense of self importance or preoccupied with our own problems to care about what happened 100 years before? Or will Simon Cowell present a Salute to Passchendaele and The Spice Girls reform again to sing 'Keep the Home Fires burning' while an inner city grime artist will name herself Dolly Gray (getting the war completely wrong) to present an urban version of Eric Bogle's elegiac 'The Green Fields of France.' Or will no-one care, and will "time, like an ever rolling stream" have indeed borne "all its sons away"? Ask me again in another 12 months.
 

Another visit to our old friend Thom the World Poet
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2013/12/thom-world-poet-daily-poem_28.html
 
 
 
 
 
 
*  The Gonzo Daily is a two-way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at  jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work or even just say hello, please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow....

*  The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html
 
* We should probably mention here that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!

*  Jon Downes, the editor of all these ventures (and several others), is an old hippy of 54 who - together with his orange cat (who is currently on sick leave in Staffordshire) and two very small kittens (one of whom is also orange) - puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon, which he shares with various fish and sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus...did we mention the orange cat?
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