RIP the UK

The title might be a little dramatic, but this week's news that the supposed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to send Parliament home for five weeks in a bid to stop them from stopping his no-deal Brexit agenda is also quite dramatic. It's also probably overkill, since Parliament had trouble agreeing on anything before he took power.

Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or the Sun or the Daily Mail, I'd be just as het up but in the other direction: worried that my Brexit and taking-back of control could be stolen out from under my nose at any time by shifty foreigners and disloyal leftists.

Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.

My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.

But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.

And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).

Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.

I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.

The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.

Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.

But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).

Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.

Big Cold War Love

Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.

The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.

It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.

It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.

On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.

What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.

I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).

Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.

In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.

I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.

Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.

Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now That's What I Call All of British Music

My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.

I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.

My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?

The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.

The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.

The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).

There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.

Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.

It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.

There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.

Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...