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Succour, and yet --
Controversial I know but I get the sense that Arcade Fire fans enjoy the Waitrose like safety of their multi-instrumental Simple Minds-lite angst whilst being reassured that the edges of the songs remains smooth and reassuringly competent. They're the John Lewis of stadium rock. -
Movement in Still Life
You listen to an old song through London lights, you hear another story, and as the happy-sad Christmas season arrives, fat Santas drinking through their pain, the memories are there waiting to be rejuvenated like an old photo album with those plastic pockets stuck together. Your parents look impossibly young and they are hesitant and gangly. Move ( Read more... ) -
Post Modernism or Po-Mo, you decide
Post Modernism is "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way ( Read more... ) -
Money's Little Helpers
"The central evil, in Sinclair's view, is the vast Westfield shopping mall planned for the site. This is the actual legacy, a double for its West London equivalent. Sinclair explores the original with appreciative loathing: this, we see, is where history really ends, in a timeless retain interior which is only in the most strictly formal sense a ( Read more... ) -
Exhaustion
Lying on the sofa in a University of Greenwich hoodie that doesn't fit, under a blanket, with the heating on. The album that is playing stops and I pull up the hood, turn into the sofa and try to sleep. It is the middle of the day. -
Fragment
I'm not moved. Or at least, I am moved, yes, I am moved, but I sit still and watch you move instead of moving myself. There's a gentle curve to parts of you, savage hills here and steep drops elsewhere. The television is quiet and almost mute and I'm not really here, I think, this isn't me. You shift on the bed. I move a glass of wine an inch ( Read more... ) -
Westgate and Back
Moving slowly along Portway in a 104 with my brothers on the way to Westfield Stratford City. This is a Saturday and it is the first weekend the shopping mall, Europe's largest, has been open for trading. I'd been here the day before, sitting next the access road. A little over an hour later, we are in The Cow drinking in the sun-lit rain with ( Read more... ) -
"This Girl, and Me"
So she lifted up the cup to her lips and drank a sip of tea. We were in a café, and it was mid-afternoon, on a Saturday. The night before we’d both been out, with friends, and I’d stayed round hers, sprawled like a half-filled rubble sack on her couch. In the morning the tinkle of cups and the flittering of water noise from the shower had woken ( Read more... ) -
Semantics
If you look at the lyrics of 'Rent' by the Pet Shop Boys, there's a duality at play. On the surface, it's a song about a man (or it could be a woman) in a relationship with another man/woman who is rich. The rich partner is paying for everything - including rent - and everything is, ostensibly, fine. But there's a sadness, too. The refrain, on ( Read more... ) -
King's Cross
"Read it in a book, or write it a letter/
Wake up in the morning - and there's still no guarantee."