lemon revolution

A really good film that I, rather criminally, only saw through a couple of evenings ago. Still need to read the book which Messr Carney assures me is much better. The interview scene was truly golden. The pre-game discussion of the job-jiro is the 21 st century at its finest, a 30-second sketch of the same sentiment echoed by Noel Gallagher in Cigarettes and Alcohol, followed by a quick rush of class A drugs to help prepare for an important meeting – an image as honest to working-class Scotland as it is to the City of London. Spud’s manic gesturing and his brain-spark admission that he only has one fault: perfectionism. Anyone who has ever sat in an interview will no doubt have faced this absurd question (what is your biggest fault) and may well, like Spud and myself, have thrown together a trashcan of platitudes about “trying too hard for the best” and “being a bit tunnel-vision”. The film’s central idea is to explore the character of modern, Weste...

this face big adult shouting at me maybe shocked at me angry black pits are most of this it’s all empty space has he just punched me in the face like a clown with those big plastic ears shooting me down rough scruffy spikes of hair packs of needles out of his skin with the smoke, he like a bear thrashing around in the forest fire his pupils sprung as if hooked to live wire, will this be me one day errupting at a kid fat in my neck grease on my skin steel world cage traps my heart in

screens pictures of footballers and women, images of friday evenings at the bar, drinks clubs beaches dresses and suits, slogans and tags brands logos and tatts, plastered on the subway halls, on the city gates and village walls: a glass curtain warping time and memory and touch to its molten white rage, like bacteria crawling through your flesh and blood in the lonely, dreaming hour, swarming on the precious stones and towers wild wolves through a lost city. your mind is no more. your body is no more. your words are no more and your touch is no more. welcome to the digital age scratching burning and turning with boredom, the newsman is screaming loud and clear to the pipe in your ear which echoes with the drop drop drop of water, slow and not so steady as the basilisk fang hangs but never yet bites, the tigers claw paused yet never strikes, lying there flicking through the endless pages of a book you’ll only start but never finish, page after page after page ...

sitting by the tent as the sun spun wild and great i found the claw of envy be resting on the muddy floor i found the mad knife, blade wedged into a spirit bottle anger rose like a great bonfire, spiralling smoke into the night footstepts drawn in circles and eyes burned by sorrow the barrel had been emptied, the dream stamped dead all that remained was the shell the bleak icy shell frozen, all life stolen from it in its shining hour broken bits of old money sent from one end to the other flung round the fading tube maybe the time was coming to an end and the sun sunk down neath the towers and trees and darkness etched over our time of glee maybe it would never return and maybe we’d never be so free

 Is this film not a brilliant analogy of class-consciousness in the Western world since the 1980s: the individual awakes after a traumatic incident, unable to recall anything but watery memories of the distant past, unable to stitch its steps through the modern world into any coherent narrative or sense? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time? The film undoubtedly develops the post-modern questioning of truth – we can’t even trust our own memories, so how can we claim anything at all to be true? But the plot, which hinges around some untold, practically forgotten accident, something you know is there in touching distance but you just can’t quite grasp, presents to us a pertinent truth of modern society. We do feel as though something is missing. Despite our materials, comfort and money, we have felt as though things don’t quite add up to make us whole. We feel empty, we feel battered, we feel cogs in some grand, faceless machine, but we d...

lions growling fear rings and echoes through the plain sounds carve across the verge in naked horror thoughts spun wild from milky eyes goodness, spirit chimes in starry flashes on the boiling black turf but reptilian fear surfaces again and again and crawls on leaving prints of red anger and at noon slippery and darting to gaps in the earth hiding from the preying sun and waiting to spin an eye into shadow to drown the shoots of conscience in curling madness i know that mine are not mine that my eye talks before it can see and brain screams before it can hear

The shop floor is a faded beehive on this very day: soul after soul crumpled up dead on the smoking heap of prices and tags and codes and notes. Eyes jumping from rock to rock, bed to bed, the gleaming canyons of heaven vomited onto a canvas of shit: oh wool, knitted, draping jumper; oh so crumpled and green and soft, as the ocean round england’s rocky shore. The man had his focus set from the starting whistle, eyes narrowed and hair waxed straight in furious needles. What more could I say to the chap, as he marched through the clicking switching flinching trench: Oi! Fucking move that jumper you prick! Hurry up! Oi! You! You! Move! But in that moment I glimpsed him naked, eyes swiped bright and fresh and live with the burning wires of panic, a crippling shock which sent fear sprinting in a rattle through his every limb and hair. The rope had been tugged and the faceless hand twitched: a tremor in the stakes of a man’s living, the earth only laughing as it...

Taken from a Facebook comment thread... I do like Liam, a lot. He's clearly very insecure, and to cover this up he feels as though he must shout louder than everyone else, and act the hardman. I forgive him for all this though - he was the front face of the biggest band in the world for a nu mber of years in the '90s, and I think that's enough to turn anyone a bit wonky. Furthermore and more importantly Russ, I think that it is his voice which makes the Oasis sound: on the first two albums (the only albums I like), Liam sings with a tenderness, nuance and sadness that belies a far greater emotional range than what he gives off in his interviews. He's a gem to me, and the fact that a guy off a council estate in Burnage who spent his youth knicking bikes and shoplifting can sing the words to Live Forever and Up In the Sky in the way Liam does, for me says all that ever needs to be said about how great a thing art is. Also, Noel. I love the man as eq...