lemon revolution

1. Why grow? 2. Why work? 3. Why pay? 4. Why sell? 5. Why earn?

The wind was starting to tumble down off of warmth's edge that September: the time of year jackets begin to pop out of thin air. As we sat at the table, my mind reeled with nerves and choked submerged in sadness. The crumbs on the table arrived slowly, slowly, slowly, eventually falling from the meat of our history. They lay scattered and still, lonely, sad stars waiting to be brushed aside by the hands of some wild monster pulsating force. They were all I could look at as I sat there and fizzed at the blunt black future, tortured by the present's imminent death. It was a cliff hanger in my life, as they say and a cliff hanger in yours. I was young and playing on the grey carpet floor. Maybe crawling. I smiled. Two smiles back. Soft voices through the air. Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence on a record player, and smells fresh eyed innocence. Toys surround me as I ponder and stumble, you laugh and cry. I wonder why it hurts so much, briefly, and try to throw aw

So someone in mainstream culture actually gets it? What a fucking film ...which really does say everything there is to say about a humanities graduate's spinning state of thick, smokey despair after leaving school: the feeling that nothing makes sense anymore, that everything learned up and to the point has been smashed out of its meaning by a juggernaut of the very things we taught ourselves to distrust (the market, older people, professionals) and subsequently, the crashing perception that life lying ahead appears to consist of a very few, awfully banal choices. The initial part of the film mirrors the thrust of Esther's torment in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, in that Dustin Hoffman's character is left helplessly sulking after leaving university to find a family home intent on fuelling a lifestyle of bizarre consumerism (purchasing scuba diving kits to try out in a swimming pool) via a day-to-day life of meaningless work. 

Me over at T'Amateurs Poddy : The one-fan one-vote policy of FC United of Manchester, a club thrashed together in fury upon Malcolm Glazer’s takeover of Manchester United, is unlikely to find international success on the pitch any time soon. But a more a much difficult task is at hand: the task to save the spectacle of modern football from the prying lense of a furious desire to commercialise and profiteer from all of its earthy, utopian brilliance. And any success at all in this battle, is a victory worth fighting for.  

“I’ve been here 30 years and it’s just dwindling down and down. I can’t see my own job lasting much longer” The latest goings-on over near Swansea, Port Talbot, make for very depressing reading. The decline in global steel prices means that the steel factory on the port, a pillar of social and financial stability in the local region for years, is crawling to a painful death. The Port is unable to produce steel at the same, low prices of other countries, namely China, which benefit from being able to employ steel workers at much lower inhumane wage-rates. “My Dad’s been here nearly 30 years and my grandpa was here too” The fall of the steel industry is leaving the local community in a state of sad decay: helplessly crumbling into despair and depravity as it is slowly starved of its life-source. The example of Port Talbot is a clear product of a world in which markets run amok, where empathy and community take a backseat. It seems bizarre that groups of peopl

Waking up and feeling tired and ill. Beer lingering in my breath and in my eyes and feeling cold. Pull on the socks and walk through the fold, morning after morning a play skip repeat. Greeting those golden eyes at Euston station, a hug, handshake, snacks, the seats and the words start to roll. The walk is what makes it, dreams splattered on the sky's canvas as the sun begins to rise, will he wont he, will we wont we. A pub in the midlands, near the station. More faces, hymns of redemption and our brotherhood; a burger, two beers though faces still shudder against the bright midday frost. Steps around our palace in awe and fawning, it's orange steel crest upon the brick pillars. A million eyes dart inside. The doors snap shut and our voices roar the hymns like volcanoes. I stand close to him and the others. We sing and jump, dance, a bundle of matchsticks falling and crying, tumbling onto one another down into the light. And I feel warm, renewed and redrawn. 

Friend: Hilary Clinton's problem is that she can't do anything too extreme - being a woman is radical enough, people in America wouldn't accept her if she was as extreme as Sanders. The American people are too small 'c' conservative I disagree with all of this , as it assumes Clinton's support base is rooted in some kind of populist, 'small c conservative' sentiment' which wouldn't accept socialist, Sanders-esque policies. This kind of politics is modern-day liberal bollocks, which assumes (as said friend continues to insist is the case with Corbyn) that socialism can only find the slightest threads of support in the educated middle classes. It assumes that the majority of lower-income Americans have as much of an issue with women in positions of power as they do with left-wing policies, and that politics works in discreet single-issue trade-offs, rather than by a dynamic of interplay between voter beliefs, policy and social context.

The clock reads 6.24, and the queue for my bus at platform 11 beckons. I walk forward and into the queue, roughly ten people deep. The conductor checks tickets before allowing people forward to the luggage compartment and then onto the bus. Before me in the line stands an African family, speaking to each other in a mixture of their own native language and heavily accented english. They have a small child with them, cupped in the mother's arms. Grandparents stand at each parents side, they shuffle along and the intensity of their speech seems to be rising as they near the barrier. "Tickets please?" "sorry sir - no ticket" "Tickets please?" "sorry sir - no ticket. please" "I need to see a ticket. You can't get on the bus without a ticket" "sir, please, please. just one time. please sir" The conductor beckons a manager over. "It's company policy. You don't have any idea how many people try to

Think there has been some shite written about this, particularly on the left. Granted, unions are incredibly important and their declining power is a contributing factor to the economic poverty of the UK and the US. But unions need to refrain from replicating the top-down, anti-democratic structures of the institutions they exist to tame - namely the workplace. 'Requiring' workers to sign up for a union is a dangerous game to be playing, and is along the lines of the 'give us the money, get your head down and leave us to it' spiel which has become an incessant, repulsive feature of modern democratic parties. Of course, in the US, there are ties with federal law here as well, which as far as I can tell, require unions to cover workers who do not pay their dues. The battle I feel, for unions is to build truly democratic, grassroots coalitions within the workplace, and by arguing that workers, if they don't want to, shouldn't have to pay in for union members

This is great. And out of the blue. Sure, everyone is disgruntled with modern professional football and sure, everyone wants things to get better. But since Liverpool fans danced around Broughton and Purslow in 2010, I haven't seen much of the rebellious spirit, bar the odd banner here or the odd chant there. My hopes for any kind of reform of football, particularly at Liverpool, have been drowning for a long, long time. I've seen Liverpool fans openly encourage others to 'get stuck in and read The S*n...all politicians should start writing for it, because it has influence in this country and it's the only way to win an election' on RAWK, and journalists like Tony Evans have been lambasted by Reds for shaking heads at the attempt to turn every single particle of the club into a profitable marketing campaign . ^This sort of conservative, unimaginative shite has been nothing short of depressing and even more so in light of the eye-closing dross served up on the

I've been told and I believe That life is meant for livin' And even when my chips are low There's still some left for givin'