Recent content by DreamingofStew

Now that Sunak has said there is no place for swastikas in Britain we can expect cries from the left of, "Sunak is far right! Hands off our swastikas!" etc. The world has turned into a looney bin in the last decade.

Ah yes, I do remember that one, but I remember the denouement rather than the set up.

Perhaps we're thinking of different incidents, as the one I'm thinking of was much later than the eighties: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/oct/18/arts.artsnews2

Urban myth? You mean, it wasn't real?

Actually, this came across well. Apart from anything else, hearing someone cover one of Morrissey's songs tends to bring out the songwriting itself, abstracted from Morrissey, and it's often surprising (I don't know why I should be surprised) how solid it is.

Let us hope, indeed, it is not the last of Ireland. In Michel Houellebecq's Submission, after the Islamist party takes power in France, the Jewish girlfriend of the main character, François, is, naturally, thinking of fleeing to Israel. François's response is, “There’s no Israel for me.” The...

Of course.

"A History of a Dangerous Emotion." I'm not sure what sense 'dangerous' has here, whether there are invisible scare quotes around it or not, but it seems to me that if there's one thing that's dangerous it's medicalising emotions. (One suspects that there are political motivations when such...

Jesus Christ appears to combine two very oddly matched roles: healer and judge. Having said that, I am not sure what the West, formerly known as Christendom, is going to do without him. We have bombers on the right side, loonies on the left, and the rest of us are stuck in the middle...

And there's also this novel by northern writer Keith Waterhouse, who also wrote Billy Liar (see also: 'William It Was Really Nothing'). The book (at the link) seems to have provided some inspiration for Bowie: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3247379 "There is a Happy Land tells of the...

Juvenile knuckle-dragging Americans. Morrissey certainly has his flaws, but there's nothing remotely impressive about this sort of locker-room tough-guy talk, which always has that philistine stink of Puritanism about it. I've never really got round to listening to Tool, but it looks like I can...

“I read somewhere, and it’s an old phrase... separate the art from the artist. There’s a lot of painters that were complete arseholes, and horrifically horrible people, but they created beautiful works of art that are hanging in galleries all around the world, and people who are good...

Were his parents fans of William Godwin, I wonder?

Some Monkeys Have Fallen from Great Heights Here at the bottom of the tree, The primate death-rate is climbing alarmingly, And I've never seen so many prehensile tails Fail so sadly. Still the perfidious purveyors of coconut milk sleep soundly at night, While I, I howl from the treetops...