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Quality Footwear: I Rememember Rock n' Roll Radio
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-rememember-rock-n-roll-radio.html
Wednesday, July 8, 2009. I Rememember Rock n' Roll Radio. Do you remember lying in bed. With your covers pulled up over your head. Radio playin' so no one can see? Unlike the Ramones, I didn't need to pull the covers over my head. When everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I shut my bedroom door and turned on the radio at a low volume. At the flick of a switch, the adult world of political debate and euphemistic pop songs filled the room. The station started out in the 1980s as a counter-cultural stud...
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Quality Footwear: Yevgeny Aleksandrovich
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2010/04/yevgeny-aleksandrovich.html
Tuesday, April 20, 2010. A poem can be finished," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti many years ago, "a translation can only be abandoned.". But can an original poem ever truly be finished either? Here it is, then. Unfinished, perhaps, but I hope that these poems collectively will serve to explain what I'm trying to say in the awkward silence that I fall into whenever people ask me, "Well, how was Russia? With emptiness on the linoleum. Crumples the autumnal pages on. The tight bay window. Sighs disrupt the dust.
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Quality Footwear: Trial and Error
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-followed-recent-farcical-trial-and.html
Tuesday, January 11, 2011. I followed the recent farcical trial and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Formerly the richest man in Russia, with some interest. Not because I have any strong personal sympathy for the man himself, who was memorably described by The Economist as 'unlovely'. But because the trial was so obviously a politically-motivated miscarriage of justice. It also seems to have sparked a degree of international and Russian public protest. Back in Stalin's times, Mikhail Bulgakov. In toda...
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Quality Footwear: Eyebrow Literature
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2009/06/eyebrow-literature.html
Monday, June 22, 2009. On Friday, my older brother forwarded me a Twitter campaign asking people to visit the Daily Mail's website and take part in the following poll:. Should the NHS allow gipsies. To jump the queue? The poll was successfully hijacked. 93% voted in favour of prioritised healthcare for gypsies and it was removed from the website. I thought it was from the 1930s! Scenario ( NHS research shows. The Economist recently wrote. With regard to Silvio Berlusconi's anti-immigration rhetoric in It...
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Quality Footwear: Musikautomat
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2011/01/musikautomat.html
Thursday, January 20, 2011. I wrote a poem this week called 'Danube Blues'. The title is a rather easy twist on Johann Strauss II's. Waltz The Blue Danube. But I was still quite pleased with it. Of course, checking how many people got there before me, I find 269,000 Google hits for my witticism. Either the news of my linguistic breakthrough spread bloody quickly, or it is a very obvious play on words. I fear the latter. As something of a technophobe myself, it's sometimes quite instructive to look back a...
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Quality Footwear: The Roaring Twenties
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2010/08/ageing-is-subversive.html
Monday, August 16, 2010. One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century. Which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century. View my complete profile.
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Quality Footwear: Death of a Patriot
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2010/04/death-of-patriot.html
Monday, April 12, 2010. Death of a Patriot. The reaction in Poland, even among Kaczyński's political enemies, was and still is one of shock and devastation. This is natural given that the crash took so many lives, regardless of who they happened to be. As it turned out, it was a presidential delegation comprised of many major figures from various walks of life, from politics to the military, finance and academia. This patriotism served, then, as a kind of binding force for what the Czechoslovak dissident...
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Quality Footwear: Imagined Communities
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2010/08/imagined-communities.html
Friday, August 20, 2010. The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities. And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat. This is where the tribal el...
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Quality Footwear: Night Train
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2010/06/night-train.html
Wednesday, June 2, 2010. Has come a long way since the days of Valentin Parnakh's First Eccentric Orchestra (pictured) and Stalinist repression. Through the streets to make the last metro have become so tangled in my memories that it's difficult to imagine one without the other. Fleamarket nudes spoil beige walls. Above ill-lit front tables. Glowing faces flowering from. Woolen polo neck sweaters. Scratching greasy once-blonde hair. Inspecting the blue shadows for wealth. Deaf to our cacophony. Man at gr...
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Quality Footwear: Ernst Jandl, or Dogs versus Angels
http://qualityfootwear.blogspot.com/2011/01/ernst-jandl-or-dogs-versus-angels_7776.html
Friday, January 28, 2011. Ernst Jandl, or Dogs versus Angels. The Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. 1925-2000) is almost unknown in the English-speaking world. This is largely because Jandl's experimental poetry has a great deal to do with sound and is deeply rooted in the German language. Consider his war poem schtzngrmm (from the German word 'Schützengraben' - trench. With the vowels omitted, so literally trnch. A video of which you can find at the bottom of this post. Said one critic, the dog is for Jandl.
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