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.
* 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
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spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to
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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?
