Vaclav Havel ... as a doornail

First Hitch, now Vaclav. That's two great ones gone belly up in half a fortnight. Let's hope these flies don't drop in 3s, hmmm?

You see what I did there, working out a way to say fortnight?

Well I've been a fan of the Havel Man for a good long while & if you haven't been, all I can say is, I win.

From Matt Welch's 2003 piece Velvet President:

In 1968 a rare copy of the Velvet Underground's first record somehow found its way to Prague. It became a sensation in music circles and beyond, eventually inspiring the Czech name for their bloodless 1989 overthrow of Communist rule, "the Velvet Revolution." The Plastic People, then a newly formed troupe that borrowed heavily from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, quickly added a half-dozen songs from The Velvet Underground & Nico to their repertoire. The group was banned not long after the Prague Spring concluded but continued to play at weddings and secret shows.

Then, in 1976, four members were arrested on charges of "disturbing the peace." The Czech dissident movement, newly roused by Havel's open letter, made the trial an international cause. Havel, who intuitively grasped the symbolism of the case, was in the courtroom every day to witness and document the judicial farce. Just as George Orwell saw picking up a gun to shoot fascists in the Spanish Civil War as "the only conceivable thing to do," Havel understood this assault on freedom as one outrage too far. It was a turning point in his life. "Everyone understood," he wrote later, "that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life."

Well that's got just a good old roadhouse backbeat does it not and reminds that the future's uncertain and the end is always ... near, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

I need to stop saying that Bill Murray thing, I know.



Now the only problem with that live version is, it misses the nice a-gotta beepa concha two chomp co-co con-ka don-cha aycha poona may-cha bop a lu-la ee-cho bop a mee-cho he some funk, hey right that you get on the Morrison Hotel version. Or is it gotta beepa gonda CHOO chaw on-con con-ka donda eecha booma MEECHA bop-a-lula ee-chaw bop a bee-cho ee saw CONG, yeah right?

Well we decide which is right & which is an illusion, yeah right.