God save the Sex Pistols (and Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees)!!

There is only one ”great pick me upper” if i feel down. Listening to SP loud, mad and running a couple of km. After that – I’m tired, deaf to the point of bleeding from both ears and overall one happy guy.

Sex Pistols are hostile, hateful, hopeless, and full of ”fuck you attitude”. They don’t play that good but they play with an energy that is out of this world.

You should YouTube this: ”E.M.I.”, ”Pretty Vacant” and ”Problems” – they are on top of my list.

I re-discovered “Siousxie and the Banshees” a while back. It happened in a weird way. They had a great song which I truly missed, but the problem was that I didn’t remembered the title or the lyrics. This is not a good starting point. If I wanted to find it again I would have to start somewhere – so I started on YouTube. The odd thing was that I didn’t find it at first after listening to everything on YT. I became a bit worried if it really was ”Siousxie and the Banshees”. The result was that I became a fan or their music, without really finding what I was looking for.

Last week I YouTubed ”Siousxie and the Banshees”, and long behold the missing long lost video was there. I found out it was ”Kiss Them For Me (1991)”

The video/song is simple, harmonic in a 90′ies kinda way. Siouxsie Sioux (Susan Janet Ballion) is dancing seductively, and nothing else is really going on, besides a lot of slow motion shot. Still, the whole package is highly addictive and work great whit the song. After listening to ”Kiss Them form Me” a couple of hundred times, I’m tired of the song and have gone back to SB other material like “Face to Face”, “Happy House” and “Cities in Dust”.

The whole experience was a bit of an odd eyeopener.

What more can I say… Over’n Out?

“The Dance of Death”, in Iraq?

Today, I hear the terrible news that the USA has decided to escalate the conflict, by sending 20’000 additional troops. The situation in Iraq is horrible and seems to be going from bad to worse. The vacuum of centralized power has split the country into numerus factions. Irak is a war zone and in a state of civil war.

The Iraqis are without hope. Desperate at the situation, they see the American/Coalition presence as the cause of their inhuman life. The guerillas seem to have no problem in getting support from the population and even the local police. They are being helped with their silence, help, and ressources. The conflict will only worsen, unless the country is stable and find a person or idea to back behind – somehow to find a new common Iraki identity.

The parallels to the Vietnam War are horrific. There military are sending more resources and trying to delegate the military power to the local authorises. The question is how can conventional troops gain a military victory in a civil war, without support from the population? They are slowly getting deeper and deeper bogged down. They won the war but lost the peace. This it tragic for both parties, they are as now doomed to continue the dance of death. More dead troops, more dead Iraqis and pushing the country into further destruction.

The sending of further troops, are just making more potential targets for the disillusion population. Never underestimate the power of hate, it is far easier unite against someone with hatred, than to unite for a common good. I guess what Bush and the “neo-cons” where planing was some sort of nation building. But what do you do with a country that doesn’t have the institutions to handle democracy. Is there hope? There is all ready enough pain to go around and there has to be a solution! Saddam might be gone, but was is really worth it sacifice? Are the Iraqis better of now?

I hope that Iraq gets stabilized and that there can be some kind og peace. I might be grasping at straws, but maybe there is a Iraqi Atatürk? The founder of the republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was able to reform Turkey to a secular democratic progressive state. His legacy has kept Turkey in the realm of the secular state. Maybe he could succeed where the Americans have lost? I know, i know - I am grasping at straws….

In going to end with a little quote and a picture…

 

“Oh rational creature,
who desires eternal life.
Here you have wisdom, worth noting:
to properly end your mortal life.
It’s called the dance of death,
which everyone will learn to dance.
For man and woman it’s natural,
Death spares neither small nor great [persons].
In this mirror everyone can read
that he will dance likewise.
Sage is he who mirrors himself well.
Death makes the living [one] advance,
You will see the greatest begin [= lead the dance]
for there is nobody whom Death does not vanquish.
It’s a pitiable thing to consider.
All are forged out of the same material….”

(Source: http://www.dodedans.com/Eparis.htm)

 

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Holbein-death.png)