SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: A slippery slope all the way to ... the point of no return?

Manic Street Preachers had a hit song in 1998 with a variation on a theme of slippery slopes.

The future teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold
"So if I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists"

Bullets for your brain today
But we'll forget it all again
Monuments put from pen to paper
Turns me into a gutless wonder

And if you tolerate this then your children will be next
And if you tolerate this then your children will be next
Will be next, will be next, will be next

The song is about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, saying in essence that if "we" tolerate fascism somewhere else by not assisting in the fight against it, as with supporting the legally elected government in Spain at the time as it was engaged in a life-or-death struggle against Franco's insurgency, fascism will be victorious, gain strength and visit our own homes.

As you probably already know, Franco won the war with the assistance of Hitler and Mussolini (the Soviet Union supplied the Republicans). Subsequently the proxy Guernica atrocity became a mere prelude to far worse elsewhere -- but does this fact alone confirm the slope's slipperiness, or were there too many other unknowable variables to be so sure?

Here is one definition of the slippery slope.

A slippery slope is an argument that suggests that a certain initial action could lead to a chain of events with a relatively extreme result, or that if we treat one case a certain way then we will have to treat more extreme cases the same way too. For example, a slippery slope argument could involve saying that if we allow a relatively minor event to take place now, then a major and tragic event will happen in the near future as a result.

The Guardian warns that usually the logic behind the slippery slope concept is fallacious.

In the field of informal logic, the slippery-slope argument is a fallacy when the endpoint does not follow necessarily from the initial step, which is especially obvious if there are many (unidentified) intervening stages involved.

However, the newspaper acknowledges a degree of attitudinal sense to the notion of a slippery slope.

The most sensible thing that can be meant by an appeal to slippery slopes is not a truth about the dynamics of public policy, but rather a worry about our moral psychology. The idea must be that, if we all get used to this one new thing being allowed, we will be less able to resist a slightly more alarming thing in the future.

Or, the way to boil a frog alive one degree at a time.

This all arises because earlier today, while writing, I contemplated the use of "slippery slope" to describe a certain situation. Before doing so, it seemed it might be useful to know more about the term, and after researching it, my understanding has improved.

However I kept "slippery slope" in the essay because I feel the context is appropriate.

To me, using "slippery slope" never implied absolute determinism -- that the initial step always would lead to an alarming outcome. Rather, my interpretation has been that by undertaking the first step, conditions for the outcome were being made possible and encouraged, as when you learn that it's hell getting the genie back in the bottle.

Wouldn't you like to think it through first, before taking a step that might be irreversible?

Never mind. The slippery slope already has brought me to the Kenny Rogers Theorem, coming tomorrow.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War: Britain's "Last Brigadista" dies at 99.

Having just now posted about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness, it's worth recalling the classic song by Manic Street Preachers, which hit #1 in the UK in August of 1998.

'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next' was #1 for just one week (but) not bad for a song which lifted its title from a Republican Spanish Civil War poster and which was heavily inspired by The Clash’s ‘Spanish Bombs’ and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The Manics would return to the topic of the Civil War with the song ‘My Guernica’.

Now to the point.

Britain’s Last Brigadista, by Marcus Barnett (Tribune Magazine)

Geoffrey Servante passed away earlier this week aged 99. He was almost certainly the last Briton to fight fascism in the International Brigades to Spain.

... Geoffrey Servante, who was almost certainly the last surviving British volunteer for the International Brigades, died this Sunday 21st April. He was 99 years of age – just weeks away from his 100th birthday.

Servante was to become a committed internationalist, but it began with beer.

Servante’s entanglement in the Spanish conflict began in summer 1937, when he was enjoying a beer with his father in a Soho pub. A stranger they struck up conversation with was telling them how it was impossible to join the International Brigades due to the fact that France had closed the border. “I bet I can join,” Servante told the man, who refused to believe him. “I’ll bet you a hundred quid I can do it.”

He made it to Spain.

Servante admitted that he was only eighteen, which led Brigade authorities to post him to an artillery unit in Almansa, some 70 kilometres east of Albacete. This unit, the John Brown Battery, was named after the American abolitionist, and had a battle song to the tune of a famous US Army song from World War One:

Over sea, over land
We have come to take our stand
With the fighters for Spain’s liberty;
Point that sight, lock that breech,
We have just begun to teach
The fascists the meaning of Red.

And he saw action.

In December 1937, the Battery was transferred to the Toledo front, defending Madrid from the south, where the soldiers saw slightly more action as the nationalist forces closed in. In an interview with historian Richard Baxell, Servante recalled that while he was incredibly drunk, he fired a shell which missed his target by miles, resulting in formal punishment. It was only afterwards that he realised he had directly hit the car of a senior fascist officer, blowing the officer and his aide-de-camp to smithereens.

The Spanish Civil War ended badly for the Republicans.

In an interview, Servante recalled his misery when he heard the news of Franco’s victory, saying that “We knew it was coming. It was inevitable. Once Madrid had fallen that was it.” Despite his initially apolitical stance, the struggle of the Republicans against fascism changed Servante, who became and remained a loyal Communist Party member, and is registered as a “good and disciplined comrade” in the official records of the Brigades.

By the time Servante got back home, the man who had bet him £100 had passed away. During the Second World War, he was conscripted into the Royal Army Ordinance Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, where he served in north Africa. After war’s end, he took up work as an engineering worker in a Vauxhall car factory, and retired in 1977.

It's a time that should be remembered -- but I know; there's a sale at Old Navy.

Over the course of the Spanish Civil War, more than 35,000 men and women travelled to take up the call of the Spanish Republic and thronged the ranks of the International Brigades. From the fields of Cork, the ghettos of Baghdad and the slums of Sofia, from every region and continent across 53 countries, these volunteers knew that the enemy of the Spanish people was also theirs, and that the defeat of fascism in Spain would destabilise fascist regimes across the world.

The defeat of the Spanish Republic was a tragedy for millions. “It was in Spain,” Albert Camus once wrote, “where my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.”

This perhaps explains why so many felt a personal sense of loss when hearing of Geoffrey Servante’s passing: rapidly, the last partisans of the struggle against fascism are vanishing. We must do everything possible to keep their memory alive.

Previously:

"Franco's Long Shadow" over reconciliation and remembrance in Spain.

"(Spain's) transition to democracy ignored the demands of justice. That is why it succeeded."

A belated R.I.P. to Delmer Berg, who fought against fascism.

"Guernica at 75."

Tunes, or the bimonthly roundup of the music playing in my head, May/June edition.

In 2018, I've resolved to offer a musical recap every two months.

For those just tuning in, I can no longer carry a tune across the street without breaking both legs, but music's playing in my head every waking moment. I'm convinced that when the music stops playing, death will be near.

I'm old school -- no iTunes or playlists for me. Perversely, no vinyl, either; my albums are stacked over at the Public House and I don't own a turntable. As with books, each year I research and buy those CDs that seemed best suited to my tastes. They're usually augmented with impulse buys and random excursions, and of course I listen to snippets of radio, YouTube and the like.

For me, classical music is WUOL-FM and my CD collection, and the latter suffices for jazz listening and world music (internet radio helps). I've nothing bad to say about hip hop or country; they're just not my taste.

In 2018, it's looking as if live music will be restricted to the Louisville Orchestra at the Ogle Center, unless anyone has cheap seats to the Def Leppard/Journey show at Yum next week (hint).

I'd like to be more supportive of local music, and concede that this is the 800-lb chink in my armor. It's a constant struggle, but the fact is that I don't do much in the way of nightlife any longer, and when dining and drinking out, our preferences run to conversation, which is precluded by loud music.

So it goes. It's all about me, and what I like.

Following are CD purchases from May and June, 2018. They're in approximate order of preference, and I can tell you now that Marr and the Manics will be among the year's most listened for me. It cannot always be said with confidence, but verily, I've spent my money wisely these past two months.

---

Johnny Marr … Call the Comet

Manic Street Preachers … Resistance is Futile

Parquet Courts … Wide Awake

Kamasi Washington … Heaven and Earth

Chvrches … Love Is Dead

Matthew Sweet … Tomorrow’s Daughter

Arctic Monkeys … Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino

Snow Patrol … Wildness

---

Reviews have been chosen because they're fair and balanced according to the verdict of my ears. I typically skim reviews before making purchases, then read them voraciously afterward.

Recent archival digressions included the complete CD set of Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five, acquired a few years back and filled with deliciousness, and the 1970s oeuvre of Edgar Winter, both solo and with his band at the time, via a brief free trial with an on-line music provider (I've no physical copies of his output). Winter had a spectacular run from his debut to around 1977, and no more versatile performer could be found during that period.

Through the same medium, I listened to several live performance of The Who from the pre-Tommy period. Glorious days, indeed, and a rare treat for me.

An aside: Usually Glastonbury keeps me abreast of contemporary Brit Rock, though not this summer, as it's a break year. But there's much of the recent Isle of Wight fest to be viewed on YouTube, and my friend Jerry and I continue to split the cost of a yearly subscription of Mojo magazine.

A few headlines from May and June:

Calendar check: New Albany Blues, Brews, & BBQ Festival at Bicentennial Park on Sat., Sept. 29.

The two most recent Manic Street Preachers albums, ending one era and beginning another.

ClassicX Escape radio, with new music from classic rock artists.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Moon's brandy and Lennon's Brandy Alexander, with other less interesting milkshakes and frappes.

Ten days that shook my world -- or, the albums that changed my life when I first heard them.

You keep singing "My Old Kentucky Home." I do not think it means what you think it means.

Paine & Pleasure, Part 2: A design for life.

Part one of "Paine & Pleasure" urged you to think about Thomas Paine on July 4. In retrospect, this repeat of a column written in 2016 has little to do with Paine, but I already brought it up, so here it is.

It's a good snapshot of my mood in the run-up to Pints & Union, about which there'll be more to say in the next few days. My period of exile is just about over, and it's going to feel a bit odd having a regular spot to hang my hat.

Baby steps. Get back in the saddle, and ride.

---

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Throughout my decidedly mediocre high school basketball career, members of the coaching staff often administered what they surely imagined as damning criticism of my uninspired performance.

“Baylor, you’re always on the outside, looking in.”

They were right on target, and it didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always felt like an outsider, even when making conscious (read: doomed) efforts to conform.

These efforts to fit in almost always fail. High school athletics were merely an early example of the pattern. I tried to take sports seriously, but couldn’t. Reviews were scathing. You’d think I’d clubbed baby seals, or urinated on a grave.

Perversely, many years later there emerged a role model who might have inspired me to work harder at basketball. When Dennis Rodman took his rebounding-first attitude to its most ludicrous extreme and refused to shoot even uncontested layups, at last I saw how it might have been for me.

Alas, by then it was too late.

---

Contrarianism, especially as it pertains to embracing positions that offend the majority, is a quality associated with dissent and radicalism. It’s no surprise that of all the “founding fathers” we Americans are taught to venerate – often mistakenly, in my view – the one who made sense most reliably was Thomas Paine.

Paine was brilliant when it came to documenting the need for revolution. He was less adept at contributing to principles of governance following the revolt’s successful conclusion, but this difficulty in transition isn’t uncommon.

Welcome to my life in “craft” beer.

If I have any single regret about my life as a contrarian, it’s that a pesky sense of fair play causes me to consider the other side, and at periodic intervals, to make ill-fated efforts to go with the flow even when I can foresee the dismal outcome.

Owing to my lifelong mathematical ineptitude, this cannot be attributed to a gambler’s instinct for statistical improbability. Maybe I’m just too nice a guy to avoid “reaching out” here and there.

By high school graduation, many of the various threads of my disgruntlement were exposed, and others were revealed during college – which ended with a philosophy degree, of course.

By 1985, and the high water mark of Ronnie RayGun’s incessant theatrical blather about what it meant to be patriotically American, I’d been to Europe and realized that the waylaid stork made a tragic error dropping me here.

Accordingly, intemperate arbiters of style back home in Indiana greeted me with a fresh new message:

“Baylor, if you hate it so much here, why not just go to Europe and just stay there?”

As usual, they completely missed the point. To be a contrarian is to understand that you can’t ever truly belong, and making good on this realization logically requires staying put, not leaving, so as to inflict your opposing viewpoint on the wider, somnolent community at every turn, forever more.

Perhaps the real reason I never tried playing the role of expatriate in Europe was fear that my contrarianism wasn’t continent-specific and would follow me wherever I went.

In other words, having felt like a European stranded in America, I’d move to Europe, only to find myself becoming attached to Harley Davidson, Bud Light and Mitt Romney.

I couldn’t risk it.

---

The Public House provided the chance to fine tune this approach. A quarter-century ago, I stumbled into the pub and restaurant game quite by accident. It was something I’d never done. My only core belief at the pub’s commencement was that the only way to succeed in business without really trying was to pretend the barroom’s four walls delineated completely different worlds.

Outside them, it was insane Indiana. Inside was a classroom somewhere in Europe. I stayed upright only by self-deception, generally too busy to think, though unfortunately not to drink. There was plenty of alcohol, and while I’m bright enough to know it wasn’t always a good thing, it was a good idea at the time.

However, there was plenty of teaching, too. In retrospect, my expectations were profoundly naïve, but the plan was to be as European as possible within the space allotted, with which I’d be able to locate others of like mind for commiseration, and to educate those who weren’t simpatico.

I genuinely thought of myself as an instructor, and at times it almost seemed to work. The lesson plan called for a period of dependence on European beers, following which America would reclaim its place as a beer country.

We called it microbrewing then, and I was sure that when it got off the ground, the ensuing dialectic would produce the best of both worlds. We’d have good, local beer and a European-style community in which to enjoy it. I could declare victory, and collect consultancy fees happily ever after.

Like I said, I drank a lot in those days, and it may have altered by cognitive function.

I thought better beer could presage a better life, and it was this conviction that started me asking questions about New Albany, because after all, it isn’t as though anyone else would be doing it, especially Alabama-based newspapers.

In turn, this led through Bank Street Brewhouse to two-way streets and a mayoral bid, and the scoreboard shows that none of these have turned out particularly well for me, but isn’t disappointment always a potential outcome when you decide to drop the shield and for once, lead with your heart?

You might win, you might lose, and there’s a reason why sweet dreams are made of this. It’s because they’re dreams, and dreams, you see … well, dreams just aren’t real.

They’re unreal, though bizarrely, with my plans for world domination doing double duty as bird cage liner, those dreams I had aren’t any more unreal than the current spinning wheel marketplace for “craft” beer, or the present brain-dead shape of “two-party” political solutions.

Satire is neutralized, and contrarianism threatened with extinction. We’re living in a skit.

Contrarianism can be exhausting, even more so when you’re older, and never more so than the present time. I find myself becoming reacquainted with my former tactical device, that of an expatriate in my own country, a willful stranger who keeps his eyes fixed on the pendulum, waiting for it to come near again, close enough to hold on for another ride.

But is that what I really want?

A very long time ago, it became obvious that a contrarian can’t be a prophet in his own time. An asshole, yes, though I’m serene about my talent at it.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, and when the local hacks, vandals and poseurs approach you with wilted mutton javelins in hand, you always have the option of throwing the ultimate haymaker in return: A six syllable word.

Okay, that felt better.

Looks like I’m not going anywhere, after all.

When the final buzzer sounds, all a contrarian really has left is the satisfaction of knowing that he fought the bastards good and hard, right down to the last possession … and this I propose to do.

My coaches would be proud.

The two most recent Manic Street Preachers albums, ending one era and beginning another.

A new Manic Street Preachers album has been released. It's called Resistance is Futile, and I love it. There'll be more to say about the album at another time; for the moment, here's a glorious song (above) and an excerpt from the review at NME:

A Franz von Stillfried-Ratenicz photograph called ‘Samurai Warrior 1881’ adorns the sleeve of the Manics’ 13th album, ‘Resistance Is Futile’. It’s a snapshot of one of the very last warriors of his kind. Much like the record’s title itself, is this a call to arms in the face of the changing tide, or an acceptance of defeat?

“People get tired, people get old – people get forgotten, people get sold,” pines James Dean Bradfield on opener ‘People Give In’, but rather than collapsing under the weight of the sorrow at how “there is no theory of everything”, the band gloriously rise from the ashes – driven by their hardened will just to exist and grow stronger.

This morning over coffee, my thoughts turned to the band's previous 2014 release, Futurology, and I started thinking about the way certain aspects of your life make perfect sense in an instant, while others take a while. It's especially relevant to me now, with Pints&union just around the corner (cross your fingers for early July).

In 2014, I turned 54, perhaps a bit late for grand epiphanies, but those were exactly what I received, one after the other, all year long.

We closed the original kitchen at Bank Street Brewhouse. My mother sold the house where I was raised, and she moved to Silvercrest. After four years of continental absence, Diana and I returned to Bamberg and Poperinge, two of my favorite European cities, and we also visited Berlin together for the first time.

The album Futurology by Manic Street Preachers was released in July, 2014. It quickly became my preferred soundtrack for the latter portion of the year, and now, when I listen to a track like "Between the Clock and the Bed," it reminds me of how hopeful I felt at the time. All the changes coming down weren't easy, but even then, there was a dawning awareness that they were necessary.

In retrospect, it's clear to me that the year 2014 was about addressing exhaustion, plotting escape and seeking redemption. Numerous challenges were ahead, and I was gathering the strength needed to take a big leap into the unknown, which is exactly what happened in 2015 and the years since.

If Futurology was the soundtrack to the end of an era, Resistance is Futile is poised to serve the same purpose for the start of a new one. This is the effect music has on my brain, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

As an aside, thanks to everyone with whom I chatted last week at the Fest of Ale. It's humbling and flattering that you're interested in the forthcoming pub, and I hope to have a more coherent update about all of it very soon. Stay tuned, and thanks again.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: We only want to get drunk, so send away the tigers and climb into your cups.

I'm a Manic Street Preachers enthusiast. The band's 2007 album, Send Away the Tigers, recently was reissued. In my opinion, the albums released by the Manics since SATT have been among their finest.

Reviewing the album in 2007, NME wrote: “Manic Street Preachers really have no business sounding as good as this. If it doesn’t quite scale the dizzy heights of ‘The Holy Bible’ or ‘Everything Must Go’, it certainly comes close and is, in many ways, the quintessential Manics album – the cathartic regeneration that the band really needed in order to become relevant again.

“It’s the triumphant comeback of the year. And it’s a pleasure to be able to review it without having to fear for our lives.”

Ten years ago, I was fascinated by bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire's explanation of the album title's origins.

Send Away The Tigers is a phrase the comedian Tony Hancock used whenever he started drinking. I saw a parallel between that line and the animals being released from the zoo in Baghdad when the Allies invaded. A misguided idea of liberation. Also that idea of being haunted by a wrong decision. With Hancock it was sacking his writers. And, if it weren't for the Iraq war, for all his faults, in historical terms, Tony Blair would be seen as a great Prime Minister. Now his life is utterly ruined. On a smaller scale, certain things I've said which have been stupid and inane – they're what I'm gonna be remembered for.

Moving laterally, peoples in northern climes have dozens of words for snow and ice, corresponding to seemingly tiny gradients and shadings of meaning.

The Sami also have as many as 1,000 words for reindeer. These refer to such things as the reindeer’s fitness (“leami” means a short, fat female reindeer), personality (“njirru” is an unmanageable female) and the shape of its antlers (“snarri” is a reindeer whose antlers are short and branched). There is even a Sami word to describe a bull with a single, very large testicle: “busat.”

It is my belief that frequent drinkers of alcoholic beverages, of whom I am unrepentantly one, have about as many ways of describing our condition as the Inuit have for snow.

Actually, we have hundreds more, including one of my perennial favorites, "in my cups."

As a euphemism for being sloshed, “in one’s cups” is actually one of the more diplomatic phrases we’ve come up with over the centuries. In his recent book “Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary (Melville House, 2009), lexicographer Paul Dickson has collected more than 3,000 terms for being “whiskey frisky,” breaking the Guinness World Record for such a list (which he himself had set several years earlier).

The Word Detective nails it, and it's worth your time to read the short essay.

It was the 17th century, but close enough for government work, as they say. “In his cups” first appeared (as far as we know) in printed form in the sense you mention in 1611, in, of all places, the then-newly-issued King James Version of the Bible (“And when they are in their cups, they forget their love both to friends and brethren”). There are actually two meanings to the phrase “in his cups” (which can be rendered, of course, just as well with “her,” “their,” or, in case one encounters a drunken robot, “its”). “In one’s cups” can mean, as you say, inebriated (i.e., drunk as a skunk), but it can also mean merely to be engaged in drinking alcoholic beverages, an endeavor which will not necessarily culminate in drooling on parking meters. This sense appears a bit earlier than the “stinking drunk” sense.

It's a bit early in the a.m. on a Wednesday morning to commence crawling into my cups to the tuneful accompaniment of the Manic Street Preachers ... or is it?

THE BEER BEAT: Day drinking porter with the porters at the market pub.

Take it away, guys. I'm thinking mezcal for brunch.

Libraries gave us power

Then work came and made us free

What price now for a shallow piece of dignity

I wish I had a bottle

Right here in my dirty face to wear the scars

To show from where I came

We don't talk about love we only want to get drunk

And we are not allowed to spend

As we are told that this is the end

A design for life

A design for life

A design for life

A design for life

A six-pack of Manic Street Preachers documentary films and interviews.

The following collection of Manic Street Preachers video clips is intended more for my personal benefit than yours as a reader.

After all, it's my blog.

I came a decade late to MSP's oeuvre, but since around 2002, these three childhood friends from mining country in Wales -- James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore -- have comprised my favored rock aggregation.

Having missed out on their rambunctious early 1990s rise, culminating with the classically intense album The Holy Bible, I've tended to focus on the band's musical output during the "mature" period of my familiarity, and these songs have been uniformly invigorating for me.

Leading off the video parade and brief overview, there's a BBC documentary from 1998. It tells the story of the band's early years. When founding member Richey Edwards abruptly disappeared and was presumed dead, the three remaining members persevered, regrouped and adapted. The first song by the Manics to be released after Edwards went missing was "Design for Life," one of the biggest hits of the decade in Britain -- and relevant once again today.

In 2002, the Manic Street Preachers returned to Wales for a homecoming concert in Cardiff.

While it remains a personal favorite, the album Lifeblood (2004) was poorly regarded by fans and the band itself. After a period of reflection, Send Away the Tigers (2007) was a rousing success, inaugurating a remarkably fecund second (actually third) act for the group. In 2009, Journal for Plague Lovers was released to widespread acclaim. The album is built around Edwards' remaining lyrics, included in a notebook he gave to Bradfield and Wire just before his (probable) death.

The excellent Postcards from a Young Man followed in 2010, then a fine compilation called National Treasure - The Complete Singles in 2011.

This set the stage for the two most recent (and to me, wonderful) albums by the Manic Street Preachers, separated by a year in terms of release, but recorded all at once in 2012.

First the softer and more acoustic Rewind the Film (2013) ...

... and then a rousing and euphoric masterpiece, Futurology, my album of the year in 2014.

The band has toured constantly throughout the world in recent years, although as has tended to be the case with with bands I like, rarely in America. That's okay, because there is much concert footage on YouTube.

Last week came a report that a new album may be in store next year. Rock and roll is dying; may the Manic Street Preachers live on.

This Sullen Hoosier Heart ... with apologies to the Manics.

You can't ever be sure when a song will come out of nowhere and grip you. It might be the melody, the beat or the words; of course, it might be all three. "This Sullen Welsh Heart" is a current example of such an ear worm, although the words I'm hearing are "This Sullen Hoosier Heart."

I came late to the band called Manic Street Preachers, just shy of my forties in the late 1990s, but the depth of my subsequent attachment parallels David Kitching's:

The Manic Street Preachers have always occupied an unusual place in this continuum. I encountered them as I entered a phase of my teens wherein I sought answers to explain the world around me, as well as the correct questions to ask. I was a fairly bookish kid with a love of music and a nascent interest in how the world was run. For a kid with too many questions, the Manics had something to say. They demanded that we take up arms. Yet this arsenal was not to be composed of bullets, batons or blades. One felt compelled, rather, to build and borrow from armaments of ideas; to read and become better; to cultivate the mind in such a way as to understand the world but still have an emotional resonance with it …

In 2013, the Manics released an album called Rewind the Film, stating that a companion piece, Futurology, would follow in 2014. These songs were recorded in the studio all at once, with guest vocalists brought on board to augment the singing of guitarist James Dean Bradfield, but the mood of each album is strikingly different.

Rewind the Film is acoustic, somber and introspective, while Futurology is electric and clamorous. Numerous arguments have been advanced that Rewind the Film represents the "old" Europe and Futurology the "new," which if true suggests that the group's post-Brexit work will be very interesting. indeed.

Construction time again: The renewal of Manic Street Preachers at festival No. 6, by Craig Austin (Wales Arts Review)

 ... When Bradfield performs the acoustic, and magnificently titled ‘This Sullen Welsh Heart’ it only accentuates the band’s inverse portrayal of fatalistic despair: ‘I don’t want my children to grow up like me / It’s just so destroying, it’s a mocking disease’. In this sense, Manic Street Preachers stand determinedly defiant in their self-imposed pariahdom as the ‘anti-U2’, or as Wire best positions it in a recent interview with John Doran of The Quietus, ‘like a version of The Fall that just happens to play arenas’. Where U2 have perpetually revelled in the earnest mythologising of triumph over adversity, and the supposedly redemptive power of love over hate, the Manics still see no justifiable reason to deviate from their time-honoured palette of turning boredom, alienation and fatalism into an art form; the emancipating gift of personal autonomy, to ‘love your masks and adore your failure’.

In this Quietus interview, bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire elaborated about "This Sullen Welsh Heart":

"The first line, 'I don’t want my children to grow up like me, it’s too soul destroying, it’s a mocking disease', sets the tone for the kind of cruel self examination of the album. It’s about looking in the mirror and realising we’re all 44, and while we’re still deeply enthralled and still in love with the delusion of being in a band and playing to people, and all those brilliant rock cliches which we’ve always specialised in - we probably can’t do it any more. That line, 'I can’t fight this war anymore, time to surrender, time to move on', I don’t want to be like that but I think… it’s better if we are. It’s The Holy Bible for middle aged men - the horror of realising you’re in charge, you’re the grown up. I think our generation hangs on to being young more than any there’s ever been, but it’s fucking hard. Musically it’s very tender, we wanted something very Leonard Cohen-ish with Lucy [Rose] adding those beautiful textures. I think it’s the most sparse start to a Manics album."

There's a lot swirling through my head as I consider the song: Age and the passage of time, demographics and authoritarian America about to be implemented, my own role and perennial status of "pariahdom."

It goes on and on. What I love most about music is the way it can make you think, and sometimes, when the thinking gets to be too hard, the very same music can be a means of escaping thought.

Perhaps as the music plays, the word "Hoosier" supplants "Welsh" because in the context of origins and belonging, I feel like I'm without a home. I've lived in Indiana my entire life, and now I'm as much of an alien here as the numerous preferred targets of emerging Trumpism. And yet, as a straight white male, I might blend choose to collaborate and in with the Falangists, mouthing whatever platitudes are necessary for their amusement.

Fuck them.

Welcome to Indiana,you poor bastards.

We May Write In English But Our Truth Remains In Wales, by Richard King

‘Yes,’ said Alun, enthusiastically this time. ‘Impressive fellow, I thought. He knows his job all right. Very professional.’ Charlie seemed rather doubtful of that one, but then raised his glass. ‘Here’s to us all. Welcome to Wales, you poor bastard.’
-- Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

‘This sullen Welsh heart
It won’t leave, it won’t give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily’
-- Manic Street Preachers, "This Sullen Welsh Heart"

In The Old Devils Kingsley Amis illustrates, through a series of alcohol-debased set pieces, a glass half-empty stoicism that has curdled with age into misanthropy. Set in a fictional Lower Glamorgan, the narrative follows the return of Alun (born Alan) Weaver to his native Wales as he reacquaints himself with his past lives and the friends who populated them. Amid scenes of relentless and dissolute lunchtime drinking that conclude in half-cut walks through inevitable drizzle, is a keenly observed South Walian humour:

“Don’t let’s think how long it’s been,’ (Alun) said to Peter, genuinely enough. ‘Now drinks.’ While these were coming he went on, nodding at Peter’s paunch, ‘I don’t know how you do it. I suppose it’s just a matter of eating and drinking anything you like.’

‘Yes, (said Peter) but it’s the slimline tonic that turns the scale.’

What all these ruminations seem to address are a handful of knotty questions that have been asked since the dame of time. Who am I, and what do I stand for? Where do I belong? How does the past reflect the future?

Complete lyrics:

This Sullen Welsh Heart

I don't want my children to grow up like me
It's just so destroying, it's a mocking disease
A wasting disease

I don't want my children to grow up like me
It's just so destroying, it's a mocking disease
A wasting disease

Some times I wake up with love still alive
I just want to go to sleep, but I can't, I close my eyes
I can't, I close my eyes

I can't fight this war any more
Time to surrender, time to move on
So line up the firing squads, kiss goodbye to what you want
Go with the flow, go home
You can keep on struggling when you're alone
When you're alone

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily
The battle easily

The act of creation saves us from despair
A phrase that keeps repeating in my head
In my head

It's not enough to succeed others must fail
My unhappy mantra I wish I could escape
I wish I could escape

I can't fight this war any more
Time to surrender, time to move on
So line up the firing squads, kiss goodbye to what you want
Go with the flow, go home
You can keep on struggling when you're alone
When you're alone

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily
The battle easily

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily
The battle easily

This sullen Welsh heart
It won't leave, it won't give up
The hating half of me
Has won the battle easily
The battle easily

Mencken meets Manics: "A farrago of nonsense" ... because "the penalty of intelligence is (everlasting) oblivion."

I awoke to the word "farrago" as it fought for release from my tortured conscience, no doubt an inevitable side effect of watching Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening.

Another hour of my life, wasted without strong drink.

Flashing like motel neon just adjacent to "farrago" was the name "Mencken." It's tempting to take the easy way out and extract all of Shane's excellent future words from Mencken's writings. Typically I must consult the dictionary several times per Mencken essay, as with "sempiternal" (eternal and unchanging; everlasting).

Of course, the word "everlasting" takes me directly to the Manic Street Preachers.

But I digress.

Mencken's famous observation that the Book of Genesis is a "farrago of nonsense" is included herein, in an essay embracing a general theme that will be painfully familiar to New Albanians who've watched the unfolding Chronicles of New Gahania.

"The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear."

---

Forgotten Men, by H. L. Mencken (American Mercury, March, 1928, pp. 280-282)

Happy nations, said Cesare Bonesano Beccaria, have no history. Nor, it appears, have intelligent men; at all events, they are seldom remembered generally, and almost never with respect. All the great heroes of the human race have preached things palpably not true, and practised things palpably full of folly. Their imbecilities, surviving, constitute the massed wisdom of Homo sapiens, lord of the lion and the whale, the elephant and the wolf, though not, as yet, of the gnat and the fly, the cockroach and the rat. So surviving, these august imbecilities conceal the high probability that, when they were new, they must have been challenged sharply by doubting and dare-devil men—that sober reason must have revolted against them contemporaneously, as it does today. But of that revolt, in most cases, nothing is known. The penalty of intelligence is oblivion.

Consider, for example, the case of those ancient Jews whose banal speculations about the origin of things still afflict the whole of Christendom, to say nothing of Islam. Is it possible to believe that, in the glorious Eighth and Ninth Centuries B.C., all Jews swallowed that preposterous rubbish — that the race was completely devoid of intelligent men, and new nothing of an enlightened public opinion? I find it hard to go so far. The Jews, at that time, had already proved that they were the best of the desert tribes, and by long odds, and they were fast moving to the front as city folks, i.e., as civilized men. Yet the only Jewish document that comes down to us from that great day is part of the Book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it. The kind of mind it reveals is the kind one encounters today among New York wash-room attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors, and Tennessee judges. It is barely above the level of observation and ratiocination of a bright young jackass.

Are we to assume that this appalling mind was the best Jewish mind of the time—that Genesis represents the finest flowering of the Jewish national genius? To ask the question is to answer it. The Jews, you may rest assured, were not unanimously of such low mental visibility. There were enlightened men among them as well as sorcerers and theologians. They had shrewd and sophisticated fellows who were to Moses and the other patriarchs as Thomas Henry Huxley was to Gladstone. They had lost and happy souls who laughed at Genesis quite as loudly the day it was released as it is laughed at today by the current damned. But of these illuminati not a word survives in the records of the Jews. Of their animadversions upon Moses’s highfalutin tosh—and no doubt those animadversions were searching and devastating—we lack even so much as the report of a report. Thus all we know today of the probably brilliant and enterprising intellectual life of the ante-Exile Jews is contained in a compilation of balderdash by certain of their politicians and ecclesiastics. It is as if their descendants of our own time were to be measured by the sonorous rumble-bumble of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Otto H. Kahn. It is as if the American civilization we sweat and prosper under were to go down into history in terms of Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford and Arthur Brisbane.

Well, why not? Those, perhaps, are the precise terms in which it is to go down. On second thought, I change perhaps into no doubt. What has happened invariably in the past will keep on happening to the end of the chapter. Certainly we can’t expect to escape the fate of Greece and Rome—and both Greece and Rome are chiefly remembered today (and venerated by the learned and unintelligent) by the records of their second- and third-rate men. Is it seriously argued that Plato was the most enlightened Greek of his age? Then it may be argued with equal plausibility that Upton Sinclair has been the most enlightened American of this one. Item by item the two match: as political scientists, as professors of esthetics, as experts on the natural processes. In some ways, true enough, Plato was clearly superior to Sinclair: for one thing, he was better versed in the jargon of metaphysics, heavenly maid—which is to say, in the jargon of organized nonsense. But I think that no one will undertake to deny that Sinclair beats him on the pharmacology of alcohol, on the evils of voluptuousness, and on the electronic vibrations of the late Dr. Albert Abrams.

Plato survives today as one of the major glories of Greece. Put upon oath in a court of law, more specialists in dead ideas would probably rate him as the greatest Greek of them all. But you may be sure that there were Athenians in his own day who, dropping in to hear his Message, carried away a different notion. Some of them were very bright fellows, and privy to the philosophical arcana. They had heard all the champions, and had their private views. I suggest somewhat diffidently that there were ideas in the Republic and the Laws that made them retire to the nearby wine-shops to snigger. But no one remembers those immune Athenians today, nor the hard-boiled fellows who guffawed at the court of Philip of Macedon. The world recalls only Plato.

Here, I sincerely hope, I shall not be mistaken for one who seeks to cry that great man down. On the contrary, I venerate him. There is implicit in his writings, though not often explicit, the operation of an intellect of a superior order. Whatever may be said against him, he at least refrained from ratifying the political, theological and epistemelogical notions that were current in his time. He was no Athenian Rotarian, but his very intelligence made him remember, when he got up before his customers, that it was necessary to adapt his speculations to their capacities and prejudices. Like Woodrow Wilson in a later age, he had a weakness for oratory, and got himself enmeshed in its snares. Some of his principal works are no more than reports of his harangues, and the heat in them singes the sense. He suffered, as all reflective men must suffer, from the fact that what is put into words for the general ear can never come within even the remotest reach of what is pondered in the privacy of the study or praying-room.

The case of Abraham Lincoln immediately recalls itself. He was, I believe, one of the most intelligent men ever heard of in his realm—but he was also a politican, and, in his last years, President of the Federal Union. The fact worked an immemorial cruelty upon him when he visited the battlefield of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863. One may easily imagine the reflections that the scene and the occasion must have inspired in so sagacious and unconventional a man—at all events, one may imagine the more obvious of them. They were, it is highly probable, of an extremely acrid and unpleasant nature. Before him stretched row upon row of new-made graves; around him ranged the gaunt cinders of a witless and abominable war. The thought must have occurred to him at once that --

But before him there also stretched an acre or two of faces—the faces of dull Pennsylvania peasants from the adjacent farms, with here and there the jowls of a Philadelphia politician gleaming in the pale Winter sunlight. It was too cold that day to his badly-cushioned bones for a long speech, and the audience would have been mortally offended by a good one. So old Abe put away his reflections, and launched into the tried and sure-fire stuff. Once started, the furor loquendi dragged him on. Abandoning the simple and crystal-clear English of his considered utterance, he stood a sentence on its head, and made a pretty parlor ornament of it. Proceeding, he described the causes and nature of war in terms of the current army press bureau. Finally, he launched a sonorous, meaningless epigram, and sat down. There was immense applause. The Pennsylvania oafs were delighted. And the speech remains in all the shool-books to this day.

Lincoln had too much humor in him to leave a diary, and so we do not know what he thought of it the day following, or a month later, or a year. But it is safe to assume, I believe, that he vacillated often between laughing at it sourly and hanging himself. For he was far too intelligent to believe in any such Kiwanian bombast. He could no more have taken it seriously than he took the strutting of Mr. Secretary Seward seriously, or the cerebral steam-pressure of General Grant. He knew it, you may be sure, for what it was. He was simply doomed, like many another good man before and after him, to keep his soundest and loftiest thoughts to himself. Just as Plato had to adapt his most penetrating and revolutionary thoughts to the tastes and comprehension of the sophomores assembled to hear him, so Lincoln had to content himself, on a great occasion, with ideas comprehensible to Pennsylvania Dunkards, which is to say, to persons to whom genuine ideas were not comprehensible at all. Knowing their theological principles, he knew that, in the political field, they grazed only on pansies.

Nor is this all. The highest flights of human intellect are not only inordinately offensive to the overwhelming majority of men; they are also, at least in large part, incapable of reduction to words. Thus the best thought of the human race does not appear in its written records. What is set down in orderly and seemly sentences, even today, always has some flavor in it of the stilted rubbish that the Sumerian kings used to engrave upon their tombs. The current cliches get into it inevitably; it is never quite honest. Complete honesty, intellectually, seldom expresses itself in formal words: its agents of notification are rather winks and sniggers, hip flasks and dead cats. The language was not made for it. Reading Shakespeare, a man of penetrating intelligence, one frequently observes him trying to put a really novel and apposite thought into words—and falling helplessly into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. The groundlings pulled him and the deficiencies of human speech pushed him. The result is many a magnificent salvo of nonsense, vastly esteemed by the persons who esteem that sort of thing.

I propose no remedy. In fact, I am convinced that no remedy is possible, or even imaginable. The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear. Sound ideas, when by chance they become articulate, annoy it and terrify it; it prefers the sempiternal slobber.

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Throughout my decidedly mediocre high school basketball career, members of the coaching staff often administered what they surely imagined as damning criticism of my uninspired performance.

“Baylor, you’re always on the outside, looking in.”

They were right on target, and it didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always felt like an outsider, even when making conscious (read: doomed) efforts to conform.

These efforts to fit in almost always fail. High school athletics were merely an early example of the pattern. I tried to take sports seriously, but couldn’t. Reviews were scathing. You’d think I’d clubbed baby seals, or urinated on a grave.

Perversely, many years later there emerged a role model who might have inspired me to work harder at basketball. When Dennis Rodman took his rebounding-first attitude to its most ludicrous extreme and refused to shoot even uncontested layups, at last I saw how it might have been for me.

Alas, by then it was too late.

---

Contrarianism, especially as it pertains to embracing positions that offend the majority, is a quality associated with dissent and radicalism. It’s no surprise that of all the “founding fathers” we Americans are taught to venerate – often mistakenly, in my view – the one who made sense most reliably was Thomas Paine.

Paine was brilliant when it came to documenting the need for revolution. He was less adept at contributing to principles of governance following the revolt’s successful conclusion, but this difficulty in transition isn’t uncommon.

Welcome to my life in “craft” beer.

If I have any single regret about my life as a contrarian, it’s that a pesky sense of fair play causes me to consider the other side, and at periodic intervals, to make ill-fated efforts to go with the flow even when I can foresee the dismal outcome.

Owing to my lifelong mathematical ineptitude, this cannot be attributed to a gambler’s instinct for statistical improbability. Maybe I’m just too nice a guy to avoid “reaching out” here and there.

By high school graduation, many of the various threads of my disgruntlement were exposed, and others were revealed during college – which ended with a philosophy degree, of course.

By 1985, and the high water mark of Ronnie RayGun’s incessant theatrical blather about what it meant to be patriotically American, I’d been to Europe and realized that the waylaid stork made a tragic error dropping me here.

Accordingly, intemperate arbiters of style back home in Indiana greeted me with a fresh new message:

“Baylor, if you hate it so much here, why not just go to Europe and just stay there?”

As usual, they completely missed the point. To be a contrarian is to understand that you can’t ever truly belong, and making good on this realization logically requires staying put, not leaving, so as to inflict your opposing viewpoint on the wider, somnolent community at every turn, forever more.

Perhaps the real reason I never tried playing the role of expatriate in Europe was fear that my contrarianism wasn’t continent-specific and would follow me wherever I went.

In other words, having felt like a European stranded in America, I’d move to Europe, only to find myself becoming attached to Harley Davidson, Bud Light and Mitt Romney.

I couldn’t risk it.

---

The Public House provided the chance to fine tune this approach. A quarter-century ago, I stumbled into the pub and restaurant game quite by accident. It was something I’d never done. My only core belief at the pub’s commencement was that the only way to succeed in business without really trying was to pretend the barroom’s four walls delineated completely different worlds.

Outside them, it was insane Indiana. Inside was a classroom somewhere in Europe. I stayed upright only by self-deception, generally too busy to think, though unfortunately not to drink. There was plenty of alcohol, and while I’m bright enough to know it wasn’t always a good thing, it was a good idea at the time.

However, there was plenty of teaching, too. In retrospect, my expectations were profoundly naïve, but the plan was to be as European as possible within the space allotted, with which I’d be able to locate others of like mind for commiseration, and to educate those who weren’t simpatico.

I genuinely thought of myself as an instructor, and at times it almost seemed to work. The lesson plan called for a period of dependence on European beers, following which America would reclaim its place as a beer country.

We called it microbrewing then, and I was sure that when it got off the ground, the ensuing dialectic would produce the best of both worlds. We’d have good, local beer and a European-style community in which to enjoy it. I could declare victory, and collect consultancy fees happily ever after.

Like I said, I drank a lot in those days, and it may have altered by cognitive function.

I thought better beer could presage a better life, and it was this conviction that started me asking questions about New Albany, because after all, it isn’t as though anyone else would be doing it, especially Alabama-based newspapers.

In turn, this led through Bank Street Brewhouse to two-way streets and a mayoral bid, and the scoreboard shows that none of these have turned out particularly well for me, but isn’t disappointment always a potential outcome when you decide to drop the shield and for once, lead with your heart?

You might win, you might lose, and there’s a reason why sweet dreams are made of this. It’s because they’re dreams, and dreams, you see … well, dreams just aren’t real.

They’re unreal, though bizarrely, with my plans for world domination doing double duty as bird cage liner, those dreams I had aren’t any more unreal than the current spinning wheel marketplace for “craft” beer, or the present brain-dead shape of “two-party” political solutions.

Satire is neutralized, and contrarianism threatened with extinction. We’re living in a skit.

Contrarianism can be exhausting, even more so when you’re older, and never more so than the present time. I find myself becoming reacquainted with my former tactical device, that of an expatriate in my own country, a willful stranger who keeps his eyes fixed on the pendulum, waiting for it to come near again, close enough to hold on for another ride.

But is that what I really want?

A very long time ago, it became obvious that a contrarian can’t be a prophet in his own time. An asshole, yes, though I’m serene about my talent at it.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, and when the local hacks, vandals and poseurs approach you with wilted mutton javelins in hand, you always have the option of throwing the ultimate haymaker in return: A six syllable word.

Okay, that felt better.

Looks like I’m not going anywhere, after all.

When the final buzzer sounds, all a contrarian really has left is the satisfaction of knowing that he fought the bastards good and hard, right down to the last possession … and this I propose to do.

My coaches would be proud.

---

May 5: ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Elegiac.

Welcome to another installment of SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

But why new words? Why not the old, familiar, comforting words?

It's because a healthy vocabulary isn't about trying to show rental property owners you're smarter than them. To the contrary, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

Even municipal corporate attorneys are eligible for this enlightening expansion of personal horizons, and really, for those of us watching as the mayor advocates a doggie dumpie park atop what amounts to a Native American church, all we really have is time on our hands -- moments enough for us to learn something.

As with hagiography last week, a prime motivator for considering the word "elegiac" is strictly personal, as I've been known to mispronounce both of them. More on that shortly.

As a noun, elegy is a "poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead." Strictly speaking, elegiac is an adjective denoting the quality of an elegy.

elegiac

[el-i-jahy-uh k, -ak, ih-lee-jee-ak]

adjective

1. used in, suitable for, or resembling an elegy.
2. expressing sorrow or lamentation: elegiac strains.
3. Classical Prosody. noting a distich or couplet the first line of which is a dactylic hexameter and the second a pentameter, or a verse differing from the hexameter by suppression of the arsis or metrically unaccented part of the third and the sixth foot.

Origin of elegiac 

1575-85; (< Middle French) < Latin elegīacus < Greek elegeiakós. See elegy, -ac

The written pronunciation doesn't really capture it. Listening to the audio, I'd render it el-i-JAI-ik. Concurrently, the British Dictionary offers what seems to me a clearer take.

1. resembling, characteristic of, relating to, or appropriate to an elegy
2. lamenting; mournful; plaintive

I'm not interested in formal elegiac couplets. Rather, it is the mournful and plaintive quality, often in the context of a song, film or work or art -- maybe even a gesture or expression. An example:

"Enola/Alone: Quite simply, probably the greatest Manics single that never was -- an elegiac rush of Brit-rock genius."

No. 1: Roger's Year in Music 2014 ends with Futurology by Manic Street Preachers.

It took only a couple of hours on the ground in Berlin on September 12, near the Tiergarten and Zoo Station, amid the swirling leaves of a gusty, cool autumn day, to convince me that in spite of my best efforts at intellectual equilibrium, returning after a quarter-century to a place that occupies an almost mythical status in the narrative of my adulthood was going to be a deeply heartfelt, emotional experience.

And so it was. I had to grapple with it every minute, and try to wrestle these feelings to the ground. They wouldn’t let me. Two of Tony Judt's Euro history classics and a Berlin Wall book later, the aura’s still there. I can't shake it.

I’d been back to Berlin several times since the critical year of 1989 and my first (and only) look at the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which came just a few months prior to its collapse. However, my last visit came in 1999, and of course, Berlin had changed immensely.

As it turns out, so had I.

In my life, transformative moments like these always are accompanied by ghosts and music, and as Diana and I took to the Berlin streets for a walkabout on the morning of arrival, phantoms were lounging on every historic corner, and music started playing in my head. The latter kept looping constantly for two solid days, as I suspected it might.

What better accompaniment to Berlin than Futurology, the 2014 album by the Manic Street Preachers, which was recorded partly in the city, and now feels as though it was performed precisely to serve as the sound track of my emotional return. For that reason, it’s my album of the year for 2014.

I began 2014 with a flurry of reading about World War I on its 100th anniversary, and these musings gradually yielded to thoughts about the post-WWII European “Great Power” settlement, which included two German states and a divided city of Berlin, this being the geopolitical status quo 25 years ago when I went there.

Meanwhile, it was announced that a new Manic Street Preachers album would be released, less than a year after the last one, and the advance word was encouraging. Concurrently, we began planning the September trip, and realized Berlin would be the perfect place to start.

Put it all together, and you’ll understand why I guessed Futurology would be my favorite album of the year before I’d even heard it for the first time.

Simon Price (at The Quietus) had the very same feeling.

The first sign that Rewind The Film's sister album would be a different proposition was, again, a visual one. Manics followers attuned to semiology would have spotted the clue when the ads started appearing in music magazines for the band's March/April 2014 tour, featuring that minimalist, pseudo-Soviet font with the backwards Rs from The Holy Bible (stolen, of course, from Simple Minds' aforementioned Empires And Dance), with a triptych of Wire-Bradfield-Moore photos underneath consciously echoing Jenny Saville's Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) paintings, as used on that album. The message was clear, to anyone who wanted to read it: THAT version of the Manics was back, and Futurology was going to be one of THOSE albums.

And oh my god, it really is. There aren't many artists I can think of who are able to deliver something as vital as Futurology on their twelfth studio album. In fact, historically there's just one: David Bowie. And Bowie's twelfth was Heroes. Therefore it's fitting that the Manics actually used Hansa studios in Berlin, where both those albums were recorded, for their own twelfth effort.

According to John Garratt (PopMatters), reflection is nice, but introspective advocacy is even better.

Since it comes hot off the heels of Rewind the Film, it’s easy to think of Futurology as its sister album. It’s likely the songs were written right around the same time, but that’s about all of the similarities you can squeeze out of that pair. Rewind the Film was the album where the Manics’ protagonist poured himself a scotch on the rocks, sat down in his easy chair, and scanned his back story. He looked inward and realized that he missed the Tokyo skyline, reflective stuff like that. Now that Futurology has hit the present, the same man has vacated his chair, dumped the contents of his glass into the sink and left the house in a restless huff. He mutters to himself “What is wrong with everyone? What is wrong with me?”

Or, perhaps the finest review summary, by Joseph Viney at Sputnik Music: "He who controls the past controls the future."

History hangs over the Manic Street Preachers more than most bands.

Be it their combative early days, the disappearance of Richey Edwards or the strong body of work they’ve released while still in their erstwhile guitarist’s shadow, MSP have remained stalwarts of British music despite any number of accidental or self-imposed obstacles.

Their most recent records have leaned very heavily upon the concept of history and the self-imposed mythology that surrounds the Welsh trio. Journal For Plague Lovers in essence put the ghosts of Richey away in a box, Postcards From A Young Man spoke of a group of men coming to terms with the present while Rewind The Film was akin to a OST love letter to a life well lived.

But one of the reasons MSP remain so popular and vital is their steadfast refusal to rest on their laurels. Futurology wraps up the ideals of what has come before it, mixed it with their present experience and forged ahead with songs that demonstrate a group with a lot more life in them yet.

There’s plenty to be pleased about here.

Thanks for indulging my year in music. Verily, it was a fantastic musical year when it comes to the type of music Roger likes. Now, let's go to war and run for mayor.

"Manic Street Preachers still have plenty to get mad about."

To know me is to know how much I love this band. It isn't just the music. It's because the Manics have no interest in their music being about music alone, and the band hasn't ever been hesitant to ponder social and political universals. Substitute "better beer" for music in the preceding, and see the connections. Here are a few informative background selections.

James Dean Bradfield looks back on the band's career

That time when the fascists stupidly borrowed a profoundly anti-fascistic song

A philosophy journal ponders the influence of Nietzsche on Manic Street Preachers lyrics

For capsules of the albums, go here.

Manic Street Preachers: The Complete Guide at Clash Music

Twenty-six years on from their debut single, 19 since the disappearance of Richey Edwards, 12 years on from their first retrospective and only 10 months on from their more acoustic, introverted 11th album, Wales’ finest, Manic Street Preachers, are set to return with one of the best records of their career.

Ahead of the band’s ‘Futurology’ and its triumphant riffery, Clash thought it would be a good time to take a tour through the Manics’ past. From the pomp and arrogance of their early years, through the mid-1990s success during difficult times, up to their latest incarnation, there’s plenty to get to know.

The Manics: "Running Out of Fantasy" (cue the New Albany metaphors).

Just in time for year's end ... my beloved Manic Street Preachers. 

My eco-system is based on hatred
My DNA remains untested
I hate the tyranny of the Sun
It always rises, always comes down

I'm running out of fantasy

I don't expect your sympathy
I'm old, I'm strange I'm confidential
Has my fantasy run out of delusion?
Has my fantasy reached its logical conclusion?

I'm running out of fantasy

The dying fall of my sentences
The magic of lost consequences
The seduction of a fading power
In a hotel room in the middle of nowhere

I'm running out of fantasy

I don't expect your sympathy
I'm old, I'm strange I'm confidential
Has my fantasy run out of delusion?
Has my fantasy reached its logical conclusion?

I'm running out of fantasy

I'm revealing myself in layers
Exposing a core to the inner eye
Drawn deep into some distant episodes
I don't know whether to laugh or cry

Running out of fantasy

The obsession with change has bled me dry
My fantasy forever locked inside
The obsession with change has bled me dry

The obsession with change has bled me dry
My fantasy forever locked inside
The obsession with change has bled me dry

Pierce, Thompson and the Manics on the life of Richard Nixon.

That's right: One hundred years ago on Wednesday, Richard Nixon was born. The tributes are effusive and deadly accurate, as with Charlie Pierce's take.

Happy Birthday And I'm Glad You're Still Dead, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

If he were still alive, and the existence of god thereby utterly disproved in a huge and public way, this would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday ...

... There will be a lot of chin-rubbing and beard-pulling, and discreet apologias on the theme of what a "quintessentially American" life was led by Richard Nixon. This a whole load of bollocks. I know hundreds of Americans who live their quintessentially American lives without doing a fraction of the damage that Richard Nixon did to his country and to the world simply by getting out of bed in the morning. His crimes are not excused by his neuroses. The subsequent dementia of the Republican party does not absolve him of the damage he did to our politics. Nixon was not "us." Most of us don't kill Asians to prove to someone else how tough we are. Most of us don't cover our workplaces with shame and disgrace and then claim that somebody else, and there was always somebody else with him, was really to blame.

But there's more!

Let's not forget Hunter S. Thompson's world-classic Nixon obituary from 1994, as originally published in Rolling Stone: He Was a Crook.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The last word goes to the Manic Street Preachers (from the album Lifeblood, 2004).

Is rock and roll dead?

New Labour's passive consumers, Coldplay as Enya, the Manics' impending "Achtung Baby" moment ... it's such a delight when musicians are capable of thinking and speaking, as well as playing.


Also in the Guardian, Jarvis Cocker provides his views on the changing state of music, as in this description of product pricing: "It's a good picture of what capitalism does. They find a formula that kills off the thing they're trying to make money out of."