#30: Berlin in the 90s, Red, Hot Rewind, New Words, On the Road with David Lynch, the Matrix.
Throw these into the conversation.
Welcome to the 30th issue of QUALITY TIME on Substack.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my opinions and obsessions as much as I’ve enjoyed spouting them. I’m eternally grateful for readers’ enthusiastic support. Keep your comments and suggestions coming and if you’re moved to support this occasional newsletter, please share / promote it via social media and / or throw me a few shekels to keep me off the streets. Simply donate via Venmo (@DavidMillsDept), PayPal (@DavidMills351) or Ko-fi. Meanwhile, if you’re in NYC or London, please come to an upcoming performance of my stand-up cabaret show, meet other QUALITY TIME-ers, and join in as we laugh in the face of the impending apocalypse. (Details below.)
s t a y l o s t
Inspired by 2024 New York, the new show touches on broken dreams, disappearing freedoms, casual violence and the tyranny of social media. Contemporary culture gets a rip-roaring roasting as the world teeters on the brink. Fun for the whole family!
‘His bracing intelligence, skewed view of life, unbridled wit, and piercing dramatic chops push his act to the lofty heights of the best comedy has to offer. It might be a bit premature to bandy about words like “brilliant,” but it did keep occurring to me during his hour on stage.’ - Gerry Geddes, BistroAward.com
Oct 19 & 26 @PangeaNYC / Nov 11 & 12 @CrazyCoqs (LDN) / Nov 16 & 23 @PangeaNYC all tickets here.
OK, self-promotion over. Let’s get into it.
1. Dream On: 90s Berlin
In the wake of the monumental fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Berlin was in flux, caught between a stagnant past and an exciting but scary future. Optimism battled with fear as the defining mood of the era. As controversy raged over the new German capital’s rapid development, disparate subcultures flourished leading to a city no less fractured than it had been when divided by a physical wall. As potential futures and utopias fizzed in and out of fashion, the tumultuous 1990s left a lasting mark on Berlin’s image that continues to reverberate today.
Dream On - Berlin, the 90s, brings together the work of nine artists from photograhpy collective OSTKREUZ established in East Berlin in 1990. Together, they trained a sharp eye on the era’s widespread societal transformation and the challenges of reunification, creating a unique record of a complex and unsettling era. Check it out!
Dream On runs Sep 14, 2024 – Jan 22, 2025 @coberlin
2. Red, Hot + Blue
It’s 1990 and the AIDS crisis is metastasising across the globe. Enough ‘mainstream’ (read: straight) celebrities and high-profile children have been affected that everyone is scared and looking for someone to blame. Gay men, intravenous drug users, Haitians and Africans - the populations suffering the most - soon become easy targets. Empathy and support, never in massive supply, recede even further as suspicion, fear, hatred and violence rise dramatically. It was a febrile and dangerous time to be an out gay man.
So it was a considerable risk for the era’s biggest names in pop music to band together, record and release an album of Noel Coward covers, in contemporary pop / rock style, as a fundraiser for people living with, at risk of contracting or in any way associated with AIDS. But they did it anyway, and Red, Hot + Blue was born as the music industry’s first ever response to the AIDS epidemic.
Writer John S Garrison revisits this terrifying cultural moment in his enlightening and entertaining memoir / treatise Various Artists Red, Hot + Blue, part of Bloomsbury’s provocative 331/3 series which explores the music, artists and context behind iconic albums.
Garrison, typically well-informed and insightful, weaves a compelling story that casts light on the charged late 80s / early 90s, when the stakes were high for the participating artists and even higher for those living in the shadow of AIDS. Pop stars Annie Lennox, U2, Erasure, Jimmy Sommerville, David Byrne, Tom Waits and filmmakers Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Demme and others put there careers on the line to come out strongly in support of the cause. For many of them, it inspired a life-long commitment to activism. For gay men everywhere, it inspired a sense of solidarity in the darkest of times. Garrison’s slim volume transports the reader back to that seemingly hopeless era and celebrates an album of unlikely covers that, somehow gave us hope.
3. Word Salad
The iconic and authoritative Miriam-Webster has added 200 new words and phrases to their online dictionary. Some are more widely used than others. How many of these terms can you correctly define?
jam band, dungeon crawler, street corn, International Bitterness Unit (IBU), heat index, spotted lanternfly (New Yorkers will know!), shadow ban, touch grass, IDAGF, badassery, and late capitalism
Perhaps these were easy for you. If so, why not try these British-isms, that have apparently taken root in the American lexicon. How many of these common UK terms can you correctly define?
chat up, gobsmacked, pap, brekkie, swings and roundabouts, done and done, streets ahead, wangle, omnishambles, po-faced, plonk, make a hash, full of beans, bog standard, on about.
Here’s a whole website dedicated to UK words that are making their way into American usage. It strikes me, however, you could easily create additional websites for words mostly used in the North of England, Scotland and the West Country. So while our vocabularies may be converging, we still remain ‘two countries separated by a common language.’
4. David Lynch’s Interview Project
Back in 2009, David Lynch directed a series of 121 short documentaries, which saw the Twin Peaks filmmaker embark on a 20,000 mile road trip across America, interviewing people he found along the way. Now, the aptly-titled Interview Project has resurfaced to celebrate its 15-year anniversary.
Presented in five minutes or less, the films traffic in some very Lynchian themes, from the off-beat characters encountered at the side of the road, to a palpable sense of the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Together, they paint a pretty harrowing picture of American life even as a faint strand of hope can be detected throughout. A few of my favourites below, but absolutely worth watching the whole collection.
5. The Matrix
It’s not a unique insight to suggest that we’re all living in the Matrix now.
The government is controlling the weather. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Hilary Clinton feeds off dead babies. People believe this bunk. And while Donald Trump remains a primary source and amplifier of the most outlandish misinformation, it’s really our society-wide addiction to our phones and social media that are at the heart of our new fact-free world.
Of course, Donald Trump wouldn’t be the first person committed to creating his ‘own reality.’ Countless, motivational speakers and influencers preach the gospel of self-belief as the key to success. Trump’s titanic belief in his own bullshit however, borders on mental illness. It’s even more consequential to his success than any privilege he’s been afforded due to his wealth or his identity. Whatever you feel about him - and I loathe him - you can’t deny his success. He’s a career criminal that was elected President and then tried to overthrow the government - and he’s still not in jail! Now he stands on the verge of another Presidential term, not because he’s objectively the best person running for the job, but because he believes he is, regardless of overwhelming evidence.
This same approach thrives on social media. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn — everyone is lying. Content creators — and by that I mean, ‘all of us’ — post contrived scenes meant to promote ‘their truth’ regardless of ‘the truth’. Algorithms deliver clustered content that flattens and distorts reality. Narratives completely untethered from reality, build quickly. In the relentless spew of content, it soon becomes impossible to discern what is true and what is false.
Think of the ‘big lie’ - that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Why do people still believe it, even though there is no hard evidence of malfeasance? Because on the socials and in the fever swamp of rightwing media - there is evidence. It’s just vague, uncompelling, made-up, false and has been rejected by the courts. These half-truths and lies are endlessly promoted to muddy the water, cause confusion, sow doubt and ultimately create a new reality. Suddenly ‘the truth’ is contested.
Meanwhile, real life, as English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, is mostly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Is it any wonder people would rather get lost in their phones? That people would rather live in uncomplicated worlds with clearly defined heroes and villains? That some people might want to join great campaigns for ‘justice’ that erase all nuance? Say what you will about social media, but at least you know who your enemies are. (For those not paying attention - it’s anyone asking you to compromise.)
In the midst of all these contrived narratives and free floating conspiracies we have an election. Expect more of the same. Mass suspicion of evidence, widespread acceptance of bullshit narratives, organised attempts to promote falsehood, and fervent belief in the most outrageous conspiracies. Trump, who’s trafficked in this sludge all his life, will of course, leverage all this to his benefit. He’ll be aided by social media companies that won’t - and actually can’t - effectively police their platforms. The genie is out of the bottle.
Trump’s play? Flood the zone with bullshit, muddy the waters, create confusion, sow discord and wrest control. It’s straight out of Orwell’s 1984 and any entry-level KGB handbook. It’s what’s they’re doing now, and it’s what they’ll keep doing whether Trump wins the election or not. In fact, building, promoting, and sustaining the Matrix - the fact-free world of false narratives - is the totality of the MAGA program. Control the narrative, control the people, and steal everything.
Objective truth simply isn’t meaningful in American politics today. Until we put down our phones, get off social media and see the world as it really is, truth simply won’t matter.
Small Print:
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Final word from Richard Cheese
and a bonus - the latest from UK cabaret royalty, Barb Jungr!
parting shot
