Manchester, so much to answer for
I started reading this story aloud to Laura, and she asked me if it was a joke or something. Well, it’s not April, and the Guardian is allegedly a respectable newspaper (although they once mentioned me and a project of mine in an article or two, so that’s subject to debate), so it would appear that maybe this is true:
The BBC plans to mark the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ this Easter with an hour-long live procession through the streets of Manchester featuring pop stars from The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and featuring songs by The Smiths and New Order....
[A] character representing Jesus will sing the legendary Joy Division anthem Love Will Tear Us Apart before dueting his arch-betrayer Judas on the New Order hit Blue Monday....
Mary Magdelene, the penitent whore of the New Testament, is also getting in on the act: she is being lined up to sing the Buzzcocks hit Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t have) accompanied by a string band....
The climax of the event sees Jesus sing the Smiths classic song Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now as he is being flayed by Roman soldiers. He will then come face-to-face with his Roman prosecutor Pontius Pilate with the two of them singing a duet of the Oasis hit Wonderwall...
I can see how being flayed would make one miserable. Hey, maybe they can resurrect late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis for the lead role. The story says Jesus hasn’t been cast yet.
Nah, this can’t be true. The Guardian must have been taken in by a hoaxster or something. MADchester indeed. (Via Salon.)
Posted at 6:14 AM
Ah, then youu didn’t see Saturday’s Guardian www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5391439-103677,00.html
Stuart Jeffries meets radical historian Jonathan Schofield
...Five hours into his tour of radical Manchester, Schofield lets his voice become reverentially hushed for the first time.... This, at least, is the historian’s contention about the city’s importance in catalysing communism. "Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union," Schofield says with a challenging look. "And the history of the 20th century would have been very different." Imagine - no Lenin, no gulags, no Mao, no Nazi-Soviet Pact, no Cultural Revolution, no cold war, no nuclear arms race, no Che, no Che T-shirts, and, without doubt, no faithful Chinese communists crying among the bookshelves. Oh, Manchester (as Morrissey sang in a very different context), so much to answer for.
Can it really have such a central role in history? "Yes it can - and does," he says. Schofield directs me to a passage in Asa Briggs’ Victorian Cities. "If Engels had lived not in Manchester but in Birmingham," wrote Briggs, "his conception of ’class’ and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age in the 1840s ... was of central political importance in modern world history." [ more another 120 lines ]
------------- and you would look better with a loss of about 15 pounds, rather than shaving off the beard and moustache...
---------- Came from your cruel comments on Tod Maffin’s enthusiasm for a CBC Radio Tech magazines.
It won’t compare to the bits and pieces that Jonathan Marks is now putting out. ---------
Posted by ` at 9:19 PM, February 5, 2006 [Link]