lemon revolution

That voice. The chorus, the shrieks of 'fly', 'high', 'why'. The pain buried in Liam's voice at this point explodes and threatens to wash out the entire tune in a storm of sadness. But then, like a tide, it falls majestically at the final hurdle, loping down into a crash. The foam mutters, bubbles along the sand; the wave recoils, feeding back into the great sea. And new hope rises from the bright burn of tragedy. Doesn't get much better. 

Says it all

Here . Old Noel going off on one: "The Tories don't care about the vulnerable, and the communists don't care about the aspirational" I must confess, I decided about a year ago that I will always love Noel Gallagher. I decided it after reading some of Alex Niven's stuff (various articles and short book on the debut Oasis album) and after some of my own, rather obsessive research on Noel's changing character over the years. Noel Gallagher's character is the George Galloway of music. Constantly oscillating between the principled and the barbaric, between alienated serf and royal lord. A good example is this - here is Gallagher eviscerating X-Factor for what it is: a Thatcherite nightmare designed to sell young people down the river and into the gap between Simon Cowell's teeth, and an abhorrence to the very idea of original music. And two years later we see Noel riffing on about the show's "greatness", and then, in sheer parody, la...

Honest Burger on Eastcastle St, of Oxford Street in central London. This kind of place typifies gentrification. A place which has spent a great deal of money and time in promoting and glamourising its product in the eyes of the London rich. Decked with skidded wooden tables and chairs, heavy-thought light-weight menus and always flashing in shirts and ties on a Friday noon , a lot of effort has gone into making this place a middle class trend.  Like many of these venues however, there is a fundamental problem: the food is shit.  Isn't this the essence of the gentrified village: well scrubbed, well polished shit?  In fact, the whole of Oxford street often looks like an overly polished shit. A stuffed corridor of furnished (what a fucking ugly, middle class word), wardrobes, blistering with person upon person from sunrise till sunset, a sparkling stream of furious self-consumption. I've walked down from Tottenham Court Road to Bond Street on many, many occasions and when do...

Can't stand her articles over on The Guardian, not least this... Corbyn is a 1983 man, a relic of the election that brought him to parliament when Labour was destroyed by its out-of-Nato, anti-EU, renationalise-everything suicide note.  The problem with Toynbee's type in the Labour Party is their refusal to answer certain questions or rather, their determination to ignore history's unwritten underbelly: the scraps of black narrative which are out there, only told by those who don't have access to power, access to mass printing and access to capital. On the EU - what is Toynbee to say to the dictatorial TRIOKA, and its attack upon Greece? On NATO - what is Toynbee to say of the United States, like a colossal parasite, staffing its armoury with soldiers from across the world for the purpose of creating a living in Iraq? And renationalisation - what is Toynbee to say of the railways, the universities, the NHS?

Well what a mess Greece finds itself in, and what an utter farce the past 5 years have been - an endless attempt to uphold "European" capitalism at the expense of pretty much everything and anything. The entire thing has been a complete middle-finger to the very idea of democracy - to the very idea that a people should be able to govern themselves. The European Union, in tandem with the IMF, has gnawed the Greek fillet to the bone and in doing so, has plunged Greece only further into an abyss of economic hardship. David Harvey's 2011 video explains why Greece should default, and why any stimulus package should not include any kind of demands over the size of the Greek state. This article over here explains why attempts to prevent a default have been a complete failure. The standard line at the minute goes on like this - Greeks have lived beyond their means over the past 15 years, and so must now suffer the consequences of doing so. This kind of line ignores the rel...

"It's a media myth, there's poverty in London that'd make your eyes bleed. It's convenient, it's bullshit" Ian Brown