Slenderfire-blog - A Slender Fire
More Posts from Slenderfire-blog and Others
16 year old Pauline Blackburn is queuing for tickets to see The Beatles at The Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead, England | 17 April 1963
the issue with 2:15 is thats already 4 pm
Drawings of John Lennon by Klaus Voormann
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(Monthly Book, November 1963)
A city melting into air
Spy tower, Teufelsburg
I was recently in Berlin, staying near Alexanderplatz in the old East, and was struck by the still-unfinished look of the city, even 65 years since the war and 20 since reunification. The picture-perfect reconstructions of 19th-century streets in Oranienburgerstrasse and Auguststrasse contrast strongly with random patches of debris-strewn grass and fenced, abandoned building sites. The city’s long history of artistic occupation of abandoned buidings is still visible in the admittedly touristified Tacheles complex, but other buildings further from the centre, especially abandoned GDR edifices, are keeping the ad-hoc nature of Berlin’s urban settlements alive. This super slideshow presents some highlights, including an abandoned GDR amusement park, a spy tower built by the West in the wonderfully named Teufelsburg and the remains of the hastily exited Iraqi embassy. These images reveal Berlin to be a fine example of how Marshall Berman famously described modernity: ‘this maelstrom…..in a state of perpetual becoming.’
The Quarry Men’s banjo player, Rod Davis, recalls, “I had bought the banjo from my uncle and if he’d sold me his guitar, I might have been a decent enough guitarist to keep McCartney out of the band. I might have learnt guitar chords, I might not, and that was the big limitation really. McCartney could play the guitar like a guitar and we couldn’t, and let’s face it, a banjo doesn’t look good in a rock’n’ roll group. I only met Paul on one other occasion after the Woolton fête and it was at auntie Mimi’s a week or two later. He dropped in to hear us practising. From my point of view, I was the person he was replacing – it’s like Pete Best – you’re the guy who doesn’t know. Some things had gone on that I was unaware of.”
(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)
go read the first chapter of my dumb mclennon britpop au hooray
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Some writing and Beatlemania. The phrase 'slender fire' is a translation of a line in Fragment 31, the remains of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho
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