The momentum of ostalgie grows. I particularly enjoyed k-punk’s comparison between Mark E. Smith’s autobiography, Renegade, and David Peace’s The Damned Utd - a novel concerned, in particular, with the character of the football manager, Brian Clough. k-punk concludes his article attacking the short-termism of neo-liberalism and re-enchanting the era of the cold war:

The puffed-up patricians who hounded Clough out of Derby have long since been replaced on the boards of football clubs by bland accountants representing corporate interests or pharaonic figures with vast personal capital available for potlach. The continuous upheaval of post Fordism has destroyed the long term in football, as everywhere else. In a perfect reflection of the general situation after thirty years of neoliberalism, the rich clubs have become richer, more remote, impervious. Derby, Forest or some other small club winning the Premiership is unthinkable. The grim Seventies - the Eastern Bloc as an era - has become a time of fairy tales. [k-punk]

An image of the architecture of Eastern Bloc fairy tails was serendipitously supplied by Frédéric Chaubin’s photography of future-orientated architecture in the old Soviet Union [pingmag]:

According to PingMag, Frederic Chaubin, chief editor of a French magazine, Citizen K, is considering a book about Soviet Architecture from the 1970s and 1980s.

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