今、酔っぱらっています。ちょっと首がすわらない感じ。
Kate BushのMLで、ある方から寄せられた情報。元ネタからBest25を抜き出してみると、
1
OASIS
Wonderwall
2
QUEEN
Bohemian rhapsody
3
LED ZEPPELIN
Stairway to heaven
4
BEATLES
Let it be
5
JOHN LENNON
Imagine
6
POLICE
Every breath you take
7
THE JAM
Going underground
8
VERVE
Bitter sweet symphony
9
ROBBIE WILLIAMS
Angels
10
STRANGLERS
Golden brown
11
CLASH
Should i stay or should i go
12
KINKS
Waterloo sunset
13
PINK FLOYD
Another brick in the wall
14
BEATLES
Yesterday
15
QUEEN
Don’t stop me now
16
KATE BUSH
Wuthering heights
17
COLDPLAY
Yellow
18
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
Relax
19
THE JAM
Town called malice
20
DAVID BOWIE
Starman
21
SOFT CELL
Tainted love
22
ROLLING STONES
Paint it black
23
UNDERTONES
Teenage kicks
24
HUMAN LEAGUE
Don’t you want me
25
BEATLES
Hey jude
という感じになる。
MLでこの情報を紹介して下さった方もいうように、「新鮮味はありませんね」。
また、この手のランキングって、年齢、職業、学歴、世帯収入といった変数と込みでないと、社会学的には〈使えない〉という感じがする、例えば、日本でやるとか、或いは日・中・韓で比較したらどうなるのかな、などと妄想するところは多々あるのだが、取り敢えず紹介した次第。
Great British Songsのついでに、"Rollers star held in drugs probe"という記事が何となく気になってしまいましたといえば、世代がバレバレだろうか。
さて、５月29日付の『オブザーバー』に、
Deyan Sudjic "Towering egos"
というエッセイが掲載されている。編集部によるリーダーによれば、
という感じなのだが。所謂〈建築と権力〉というネタなのだが、ちょっと抜き書きしてみる。
From Hitler's vision of a new Berlin to Tony Blair's Dome and Michael Eisner's EuroDisney, tyrants, kings and tycoons have erected grand monuments to their own vanity. Deyan Sudjic deconstructs the Edifice Complex
Saddam Hussein, like many dictators, was an enthusiastic patron of architecture. Unlike Napoleon III, however, whose fastidious tastes are still clearly visible in the parade- ground tidiness of the boulevards of Paris, or Mussolini with his contradictory passions for modernism and Caesar Augustus, Saddam had no obvious preference for any specific architectural style. He did, however, have an instinctive grasp of how to use architecture to glorify himself and his regime and to intimidate his opponents.
ところで、Deyan Sudjicさん、The Edifice Complexという本が出たみたい。
Building is the means by which the egotism of the individual is expressed in its most naked form - the Edifice Complex. This is not to equate George Bush the elder's presidential library in Texas, or Tony Blair's Millennium Dome (or his Wembley stadium) with Saddam's mosque. Tony Blair may aspire to be as much of an autocrat as, say, Francois Mitterrand, and he may have wanted to rebrand Britain, as a glossy, shiny, modern state, but he lacks Mitterrand's instinctive confidence in his own judgment on architectural issues. Blair needs to be told what to like, or rather what to say that he likes. And the fact that there was nobody close enough to Blair that he could rely on for decisive guidance about the Dome contributed to the fiasco over its content.To manoeuvre at the court of an elected prime minister in order to secure the chance to build involves an altogether less corrosive kind of compromise than the potentially lethal survival dance demanded by a dictatorship. But democratic regimes are just as likely to deploy architecture as an instrument of statecraft as totalitarians. Even so, just as it is as well to keep a careful eye on those leaders with a taste for writing poetry, so an enthusiasm for architecture is a characteristic that should ring alarm bells when present in a certain kind of political figure.
