Morrissey – Autobiografía: Manchester (Citas)
Morrissey, finalmente y después de años de espera y especulación, decidió publicar sus vivencias en un libro que, desde su lanzamiento y como es costumbre con el prodigio de Manchester, causó polémica al ser publicado por la editorial Penguin en su sección de clásicos donde se encuentran únicamente monstruos como Joyce y Dickens. Así es como este es el primer libro contemporáneo que Penguin Classics publica como un clásico instantáneo.
Más allá de sus obsesión con Shelagh Delaney, James Dean y una infinidad de celebridades, su odio hacia la monarquía inglesa, su repudio al Thatcherismo, la muerte de varios miembros de su familia y su amistad con James Maker y Linder Sterling, aquí un resumen en palabras de Morrissey sobre lo que disparó su genio y que más tarde, cristalizaría en arte con The Smiths.
“MANCHESTER, SO MUCH TO ANSWER FOR”
LA CIUDAD: Victoriana, gris, sucia, lluviosa y oscura donde la revolución industrial acabó con las esperanzas de muchos e incitó el intelecto de pocos.
“We live in forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester, where everything lies wherever it was left over one hundred years ago”
“Manchester´s Victorian generation having coughed to their deaths after lifetimes of struggle”
“Birds abstain from song in post-war Manchester, where the 1960´s will not swing and where the locals are the opposite of worldly”
“Manchester is the old fire wheezing its last where we all worry ourselves soulless, forbidden to be romantic”
“all action and adventure with moments of meaning happen in a place called elsewhere, and never in the sad soil of Manchester”
“we are stucked in the wettest part of England in a society where we are not needed, yet we are washed and warm and well fed.”
“Manchester is a barbaric place where only headless savages can survive”
LOS “EDUCADORES”, LAS ESCUELAS Y UN SISTEMA EDUCATIVO INEFICIENTE: Represión, humillación, odio y violencia que inspiró canciones como “The Headmaster Ritual”
“Long echoing halls of whitewashed walls, of carbolic and plimsoll and crayon blazing through the senses, demanding that all cheerful thought must now die away. This bleak mausoleum called St Wilfrid´s has the power to make you unhappy, and this is the only message it is prepared to give”
“St. Wilfrid´s is an asylum, of sorts, for Hulme´s pitiful poor, and although it had been declared due for demolition in 1913, it grinds on, fifty years later, dragging we small children with it, plunging us into its own rooms of gloom.”
“These educators educate no one, and outside of their occupations they surely lament their own allotted spot?”
“This is the Manchester school system of the 1960´s where sadness is habit-forming and where shame is cattle-prodded into kids who are in pursuit of bliss amid the unrelenting disapproval”
“I approach school each day with renewed fear, over the asphalt, trading underfoot the flattened remains of people´s lives, and bigger and blacker the school edifice rises above its bludgeoned parish like a rat refusing to die”
“My experience at St. Wilfrid´s is sealed as a secret agony”
“Now comes the hour to choose between being acceptable to others or being acceptable to one´s self, fro we must kill our true selves off in order to survive. I had no idea that life could get worse, or that schoolteachers could be more contemptuous than those of wilting St. Wilfrid´s, but the snarling stupidity at St. Mary´s is deathless, and its wearisome echo of negativity exhausts me to a permanent state of circumstantial sadness”
“Each day is Kafka-esque in its nightmare, and the school offers nothing at all expect a lifelong awareness of hate as a general truth”
“As an educational establishment, St. Mary´s contained only the traditional values of negativity, and there would not be a single hour spent within its walls when I could feel either relaxed or untrammeled”
MOORS MURDERERS: Los famosos e infames asesinatos que ocurrieron en Manchester en los 60´s que paralizaron a la ciudad del noroeste inglés. Morrissey rendiría homenaje a las víctimas en una de sus primeras composiciones: “Suffer Little Children”
“Were led away to their tortured deaths, and the social landscape of Manchester warps forever with further reason to cry” [Moors murderers]
“we are forced to accept a new truth: that woman can be just as cruel and dehumanized as a man, and that all safety is an illusion” [Myra Hindley – Moor Murderer]
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