What’s fun about the crisis is watching the experts scramble to explain things they obviously don’t understand. The same experts who didn’t see this coming are now spouting off about how long it will last. It’s funny also to see blind faith in the voodoo power of magic words make a comeback. Tusk announced yesterday […]
Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank – I’m familiar with them all but it turns out that if you want real red in tooth and claw writing you should turn to the French. I’ve been reading Alain Bihr’s frankly Marxist Neoliberal Newspeak and it’s strong stuff. Essentially, any kind of exchange between people […]
Errol Morris, the documentary-maker whose films include The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure, is a man who is interested in images, and in particular photographs. To mark the end of the Bush administration, at the end of January, Morris invited three photo editors to discuss a selection of images of W. ranging from […]
An alternative title for this triumphalist rant could be “When Critics Bite Back…”, but the dangers of sounding like a Sky One documentary cross bred with a doughnut addled Rolling Stone sub-editor are for now, enough to keep me satisfied with my primary path of destruction. Sure it’s a pre-occupation as old […]
When Platforma Obywatelska took over it looked like the end of a glorious two-year run of self-writing stories courtesy of the assorted gang of oddballs and weirdoes that had been in power before. With PO in the saddle it was just more dull neoliberalism – without even any need for the shock tactics Naomi Klein […]
When I think of John Martyn – who sadly passed away on the 29th of January – I think of friends, spread out across time and space, with whom I’ve listened to his music. It’s natural, because for decades Martyn was an artist to be discovered. He only periodically existed on radio/tv or in the […]
It was without a doubt a media coup, when Berlusconi announced on Friday that he would be pushing forward a special decree to intervene in the case of Eluana Englaro. And, not just a media coup, for some. The Englaro case been in the media spotlight for months, since a definitive sentence was handed out […]
It is heresy to say shops – of all things, shops – are miserable places in Poland today. “Under the communists all you could buy in shops was vinegar and blah blah blah…” is the usual response. But communism and rationing are gone for getting on a quarter of a century now. There’s no need […]
Imagine yourself in the anonymous looking high-street of any home-counties English town, on a tuesday morning. As you stroll, minding your own business, a man in a bowler hat brushes accidentally into you. The likelihood – in our admittedly contrived scene – is that he’ll akwardly issue an embarassed apology, perhaps going so far as […]