lemon revolution

the late summer breeze shakes down to my knees as i sit on this bench by the working man's fence where the great tarmac road like a grey river flows swoosh past my feet to the nighttime retreat and leaves laugh above my skull nailed tough to the winding routine of a dizzying scene & I sit as I wait for the future's fresh take on my spluttering mind through the dark fiery vine

* Following notes build on a response I wrote over at bob-dylan.org.uk - a great site, exploring the meaning of countless Dylan songs. The Tambourine Man entry suggests that the song is a reflection of a drug-induced experience, or hallucination. ------- Though I know the evening’s empires have vanished from my hand left me blindly here to stand but still not sleepy This to me speaks of a crumbling fantasy: a momentary drug-delusion perhaps, but also the disillusion of the very basic, fundamental fantasies which form the bedrock of our lived experience. It’s those moments when the blinders are stripped from our eyes, where the towering visions we dream and use to navigate through the world are crushed beyond repair, leaving us standing alone in the haunted wasteland of human desire. Despite the stumbling despair of a dying dream, Dylan’s tone of voice through this passage is particularly soft, dreamy and almost carefree - he's been here before, and will be he...

one two three - is this where we are now?

water run smooth on broken leaves diamond leaves glistening cool green from every branch and twig in every corner of the unbeaten land smell damp fresh pollen grassy dew tinged neath cloudy noon sooths my beaten brain shields my gaze from the dull beaten brick and the dense, leafy wood of dark flames which shatter light and the oncoming road and lift me from this crumbling low

Chi Onwurah today (22nd Aug 2016) in the New Statesman: "In September [2015] Jeremy gave me the job of shadow minister for culture and the digital economy. In the January [2016] reshuffle he gave half the job to Thangam Debbonaire. As the leader, he had every right to do so; unfortunately he omitted to tell her or me...  If this had been any of my previous employers in the public and private sectors Jeremy might well have found himself before an industrial tribunal for constructive dismissal, probably with racial discrimination thrown in – given that only five per cent of MPs are black and female, picking on us two is statistically interesting to say the least." Chi Onwurah on 26th June 2016: "Jeremy is an excellent leader. He is sincere and authentic and many also think he’s the most honest politician." A charge of racism is serious, and deserves to be treated as such. Why wasn't this bought up before? Why did Onwurah not publicly highlight wha...

I've watched the league's opening weekend with the same, transfixed gaze as any other football fan. But there has been, for me, an unmistakable sense of excess to the whole thing. The kind of feeling you get when you've eaten too much sugar, or when a feeling of happiness falls into sharp sadness. The transfer fees passed around this summer begged belief, as always, from a financial perspective - "how can anyone be prepared to spend that much on a footballer" . But the fees are starting to lose any kind of proportion to player ability. There is no longer any obvious sense that the world's most expensive player is among the world's very best players. And plain average Premier League players such as Yannick Bolasie are trading hands for the kind of money that only one or two years back, was held in reserve for the likes of Fabregas: players who competed in Champions League and World Cup finals. This hasn't simply appeared out of the blue, and is o...

I came across this while surfing A. Niven's blog recently. It's a Futurist painting entitled 'Dynamism of a Soccer Player', by Umberto Boccioni. I don't know much about Futurism. But this painting I find amazing. It's sharp strokes and colliding shapes and shades express the iron-crafted grace and subtlety that anyone who has ever played or watched the game can recognise. A great, real example of this is my favourite video of Xabi Alonso, dictating the tempo of a game at Anfield in 2005. Alonso paces up, down and across the pitch furiously, sliding into tackles and sprinting to loose balls in the aim of controlling the game's flow. The jutting lines and sharp, piercing metallic fragments of Boccioni's painting do justice to this, painting the howling energy and effort which goes into playing the game. As a whole though, in its weeping, bleeding colours, its violently flowering, bursting sense of shape and the soft, cool streaks of light which ...

*Before he became an ass. This is brilliant though. He predicts the inevitable circus of post-modern debate and makes well-reasoned points on actual sexual relations between men and women as well - something all too-often ignored in theory circles these days.