Saturday, June 02, 2012

God Save Jamie Reid

1977 was the first year that I was conscious of what year it was. The first weekend of June that year I was turning seven and birthday cards & books that I received were often inscribed with "1977". Thus it's not surprising that that year is vividly embossed in my memory. During that time I was also a novice stamp collector & remember being annoyed that many of the Canadian stamps in the early part of the year were devoted to images of the Queen (at the expense of other cool things that seemed to happening that year, like a new Toronto baseball team called the Blue Jays, or Star Wars, a life-changing film I had seen a month earlier ...). 

Flash-forward to 2012, my birthday is approaching & earlier this week I couldn't buy a set of postage stamps anywhere in Toronto that didn't have military hardware or images of the Queen on them. And fully half of last night's National was devoted to the Queen's jubilee (at the expense of detailed stories on the Montreal protests, Syria, European and U.S. economic meltdowns, the gutting of environmental research in Canada, General Motors closures, and so on...)

At this time I feel it's worth revisiting Jamie Reid's original artwork for the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" which responded to the Queen's Silver Jubilee & which is more transgressive than the eventual artwork utilized: swastika eyes & all...



And Canada's dreaming...

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