Mirroring My Mindset

Friday's Playlist #7

An ongoing series:

Love of Diagrams, 'No Way Out' (Love of Diagrams EP)

The Rogers Sisters, 'Freight Elevator' (Three Fingers)

The Grates, 'Rock Boys' (Gravity Won't Get You High)

Teenage Fanclub, 'The World'll Be OK' (Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Seconds: A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub)

Spoon, 'Jonathan Fisk' (Kill The Moonlight)

James Brown Is Annie, 'Planet Betamax'

Love of Diagrams, 'Theme'

Graham Coxon, 'Standing On My Own Again' (Love Travels At Illegal Speeds)

1990s, 'You Were Supposed To Be My Friend'

The Shins, 'Sea Legs' (Wincing The Night Away)

Update 11/12/ 22
Only found the one missing track on YouTube. Step forward The Rogers Sisters with 'Freight Elevator'. Looking at the playlist 15 years on, and it looks like scratchy guitars were in that week.

Spotify Playlist Link.   

Sullivan's Travels

Kara's good friend - and the witness at our wedding back in 2005 - Glynnis, has an article on Andrew Sullivan in today's Huffington Post.

What's that she writes about blokes with beards?

Bono Goes Solo

You know me, I've never had any issues with Bono; so I wish him well in his planned solo career.

I'm also glad to note that with the new project Bono has decided to swop the cheesy leather trousers for more sober attire.

With regards to a post-Bono U2, here's hoping that Jim Kerr finally gets the job he's been hankering after these last twenty years.

He should be a shoe-in for the gig as long as the Edge, Barney and Smudge can forgive him for this little incident from a few years back.

Swansea, England*

ABC News gets its geography askew when reporting on the letter bomb that went off at the DVLA office. Also, according to the crack team at ABC News, apparently Swansea is "near London".

*I declare an interest in this story 'cos Kara's Dad is originally from Mumbles.

London's Brilliant Parade

Good comrade and friend, Keith "Keeef" Scholey* - who's greatest claim to fame is that he knows more obscure shit about the SPGB and the old De Leonist SLP (British section) than even I do - has recently written a pamphlet about the old long gone Communist Club of London, which, from the mid-nineteenth century up until the early twentieth century, was the political haunt of radical emigres, social malcontents, ner-do-wells and that one bloke who always turns up at radical meetings with his 'funny money' theories.

Naturally, the pamphlet gets the obligatory plug in the pages of the Socialist Standard, but I think I may have also stumbled across the text online at the rather excellent Past Tense website, which I believe has some connection with the South London Radical History Group, but it's too early and much too cold on this February morning in Brooklyn for me to be arsed to join the dots . . . and the political clots . . . to work out the connection between them all.

I'm hoping it's the full text but apologies in advance if it's incomplete. I'm sure Keith won't be too put out by my linking to the text. The couple of quid in lost royalties would only have been mispent on obscure political postcards from yester-year, and it's a welcome addition to the social history of radical London. It should be filed alongside such texts as Ken Weller's 'Don't Be A Soldier' and Stan Shipley's 'Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London'.

Finally, click on the link for a photograph that dates from 1905, and is of the first SPGB Conference, which was held at the Communist Club when its premises were in Charlotte Street. Sadly, I'm not in picture. I was doing a paper sale outside the Royal Court Theatre at the production of George Bernard Shaw's 'Major Barbara'.

* Yes, it's the self-same 'Keef' from this stream of consciousness post that dates from March 2005.

The Dude's An Arse

From today's Guardian:

I threw out the TV for practical purposes many years ago, and barely ever go to the movies. I do know (slightly) and very much like Matt Groening, and did get my children a tour of the Simpsons set a few years back, but have not seen many episodes. Same with South Park - people say, hey look, they attack the Pope and the Mormons and the Islamists, and I say, "Tell me about it." I do this myself in real time: don't need the vicarious living that seems so central to all this stuff.[Christopher Hitchens on The Simpsons]

Reidski's On Wikipedia

Further to Big Blowdown's recent anecdote about Paul Hartley, when he was at Reidski's second club, Millwall, it's heartening to see that someone has taken those sentiments and run rampant with them on the Paul Hartley entry on Wikipedia.

UPDATE

Kev at The Scottish Patient has more on Hartley and the Huns, but from a very different perspective. Christ, Hartley looks about 12 in that old photo!

Weller Watch

Great performance by Paul Weller on last night's Conan O'Brien show, performing the much neglected wee gem - that term again - 'Running On The Spot' from the last Jam album, The Gift.

Nice to see Steve Craddock has stopped wearing stupid sixties bunnets to hide the receding hairline, and great drumming from Steve White but I wish he wouldn't eat all the pies. No wonder I can't find Cornish Pasties in NYC.

PS - Before I forget - here's the link to said performance.

Macmillan Must Go!

A wee gem from the '50 Years Ago' section in this month's Socialist Standard

"If we were Labour or Communist vote-catchers we would be campaigning for "Macmillan Must Go!" and telling anyone silly enough to believe it, how successful we had been with our last campaign for "Eden Must Go!"

Since the S.P.G.B. was formed in 1904 there have been ten such campaigns for getting rid of a no-good Prime Minister.

There have been rather more than ten governments because some of them, after being pushed, pulled or squeezed out have managed to get back again. When we survey the list we marvel at the rich variety.

Scots, English, Welsh, and half- American (Churchill); spellbinders like Lloyd-George, and others who didn't know how to gild the lilies of oratory; philosophical types like Balfour and Asquith and "plain, blunt men" like Baldwin; semi-Pacifists and war-mongers; business men and professional politicians; the relatively poor and the passing rich; religionists and agnostics; aristocrats and commoners; Tory,Liberal, and Labour.

There are the differences:What of the similarities? They have all had a strange belief that the country was very lucky to have them at the helm. They have all come in generously promising how much better they will make life for the people and have all gone out little lamented.

And what difference has it made in the one thing that ought to be of paramount concern to the workers, the question of establishing Socialism in place of Capitalism? Just no difference at all. That job has yet to be done and it won't matter in the least whether the next Prime Minister who tries to administer Capitalism is Mr. G., or Mr. B., Mr. X or Mr. Y.

['Notes By The Way' by H, Socialist Standard, February 1957].