Wednesday 27 July 2011

Propaganda and popular culture

I'm reading the latest Louie Knight noir-parody, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still. It's good, but I can't help feeling it's jumped the shark a little. There are some good political bits though, and it's set in places with which I'm familiar - Wales and Shrewsbury.

Some sections are exactly the kind of thing I say. Like this speech, delivered on the approach to Shrewsbury railway station, which sits between the castle (on the left) and the prison (to the right):
If you steal small things, you get a room on the right with a view of the river and the railway station. If you steal big things - like counties - you get a room on the left also with a view of the river and the railway station. The room is bigger, and the food is better. You have about as equal a chance of having your throat slit while you sleep… they are just descended from the better armed robbers. It's like a great Welshman once said: 'Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?'.
(It was, of course, David Lloyd George).

To go with it, here's a bit of Swedish indie-poppers The Radio Dept.: the little speech at the start is charming, naive and true.

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