Fascist Architecture & an Old Pasta Factory
Friday Flashback: San Francisco, 1984
FRIDAY FLASHBACK to San Francisco, 1984: “Fascist Architecture”
...A song about the politics of the ego and the soul. This recording was produced by Jonny Vitus and made in an old pasta factory in North Beach, San Francisco, in the same neighborhood as Beat Generation coffee houses and spots where they filmed “Dirty Harry” movies.
The song was written by (San Francisco resident) Bruce Cockburn. His arrangement was in an urban folk style.
I translated it after my bike messenger experiences on the sky-scrapered streets of San Francisco, punk-ing up the tempo and arrangement with a nod to The Alarm and the first Pretenders album.
Cockburn described the song as…“Bombastic, exaggeratedly heroic… overpowering, cold, and makes you think of the baby sacrificing scenes in biblical movies. Sometimes we build structures like this in our own minds...The image 'fascist architecture' came from Italy…built during Mussolini's period…a particular style where the buildings are larger than life and what is supposed to celebrate the greatness of humanity actually dwarfs humanity…it makes you feel tiny and helpless next to it, and everybody hates that stuff. It seemed to me a suitable image for the things in ourselves, the structures we build that are built on false expectations or pretenses…the things we pretend to ourselves. Then when some catastrophe comes your way, like a marriage breaking up or some other thing, those things crack and you get glimpses through them, the light comes through... It's not a comfortable thing."—from the publication CLOSER TO THE LIGHT by Paul Zollo, 1994.
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