THANKLESS TASKS

I'm late in mentioning this, but do check out The Worst Songs Project, an attempt to delineate the worst 200 pop records of all time. Tom May, David Lichfield, John Gibson, Robin Carmody and myself voted, and there are comments by four of us on most of the entries (note the ineptitude of my comments in comparison with the shock eloquence of the other three lads).

I think Florence and the Machine's "You've Got the Love" is up next week, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Speaking of which, I've got a putative idea for a book of essays (maybe a Zero thing) called something like Against the New Bloomsbury, about how modernism and the historical avant-garde generally is being turned into a bourgeois commodity in a privatised higher education system. Any takers?

I REALLY HOPE PEOPLE GET WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY HERE ...

I know I'm clutching at straws here on one of the darkest days of the century thus far, but I repeat, I'm adamant that we should see a small glimmer of hope in the figure of Andy Burnham.

Of course he's a Blairite golem in many respects, but if we're going to retain any faith whatsoever in the Labour Party - and I allow that there are pretty formidable reasons not to - Burnham's visceral left populism seems like the only game in town:

We will remind them every day of the damage they have done to our NHS ... While on a day like today it's hard for me to give any encouragement to people worried about what this government is doing, I can at least say this: that we will repeal this bill at the first opportunity and restore the N in NHS.

I know it's only rhetoric, but at least he's speaking the right language, and with a degree of sincerity and confidence. I can't think of anyone else in the political mainstream doing this in quite the same way.

Note the assertive, instinctive use of our. Not many politicians can get away with that without sounding disingenuous. When we find someone who can, we should be very cautiously optimistic.

NEWCASTLE MUM STATUS UPDATE

Walking along
the street
today

and some guy
shouts "Hey
USA!"

so I asked him
what "USA"
stands for

and his reply
was "U
Sexy Angel"

that was
sweet
of him.

(Hayley Rasoul via Facebook)

OLYMPIANS 2012

This was Blair's dream: a war hero's
welcome for himself, miles of minions
genuflecting everywhere. Drake
triumphing in the Solent summer.

Cameron is cooler. The crop fields
whisper to him as he stalks the city
framing parades, jubilees, pastoral pride --
but sport is too modern, too hopeful.

A charmed man from Chingford smiles
a sucrose smile. Bombs ricochet in
the East End of the pea-soup planet
and the victors graze in a vaporous sky.

STRAY THOUGHTS ON THE LATE-CAPITALIST GOTHIC REVIVAL

The pictures of the Hogwarts CGI models are interesting:

 

Weird that this supposed to be a conflation of Durham Cathedral and Alnwick Castle. I can see the Durham Cathedral part but mostly it's just wildly exaggerated fantasy gothic (as you might expect, I suppose).

There definitely seems to be something timely about this return to the gothic. What's worrying though is the absence of any underpinning Puginian/Ruskinian ethos.

This is culture as consumer pastoralism, a solipsistic fantasy artificially inseminated in the mechanised laboratory of late-capitalism.