“true as a wet stone’s shine” (Sally Festing); the whole vivarium; time to bed in; to run into the sand; always playing aide-de-camp; oppresses the eye; socio-technical quotient far outstrips its political quotient; cratered bromides; pockmarked and punched through by carve-outs and concessions; beggardly cheeseparing; we get a peak beneath the waves; seeking some sort of no-miracles argument; waiting-for-the-general-strike strategy; more in the spirit of fatalism than apologia; criticism as shit on the sleeve; right up there with Lysenkoism as proletarian science; the sundial that marks the outside sunny hours only; so true to its date and so false to its subject; the critic’s preternaturally strong powers of abstraction;
something as ever-present as outer space; a role that knits you to those outside; what is happening here is purely gestural, and deeply destructive; usefully polemical but it cannot be our resting place; only happiest with the work he’s defaced; a shake-up and a dumb-down, like a pink toilet seat hanging around one’s neck; about as useful as snow polo in Saint-Moritz; fraught as when Bob Dylan or Miles Davis went electric; jumping in with berserk ideas before disappearing; the welfare state replaced by the save-yourself-if-you-can mentality of the-only-thing-between-you-and-death-is-you; when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze; on the edge of the burn pit; “What an interesting person you probably are” (Barry Humphries); The $upreme ¢ourt; there are lettuces with better political instincts;
some are so good at describing the water we’re drowning in; as close to Romance as Rudolph Nureyev was to arc welding; akin to Nestlé commercializing water and selling it back to locals; not sunshine and lollipops, but a mix of cream and lemon with high notes of piss, sauerkraut and room-temperature ranch dressing; as tea dust is to tea leaves; a touch more panic-room chic, shall we?; category-five haplessness is a throughline of his work; as heavy as cold dumplings in stew; Heaney said that Robert Frost inhabited the world at body heat; “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”; what a sham(e); in today’s omnipresent binary of Oppressor/Oppressed; that chance is vanishingly small; Well no actually, I was immensely irritated, bored witless and occasionally moved to laughter; stutters and stalls, this current clusterfuck of crises; self-important things were always better in the past; to know them in silhouette only; please colour me sceptical;
grandiose proclamations followed by appalled second looks; a bit like the corpse having to drive the hearse; too close a contact with men who couldn’t even write a Valentine; Xenophanes: “If triangles were alive, they would worship triangles”; So thick the confusion,/Even the cowards were brave. [Archilochis translated by Davenport]; humankind is declined in the plural; just as late 19th canine veterinarians derided their precursors, 18th century dog doctors; suggestive yes, but persuasive?; a clinic in close reading; it was the early 2000s and having a blog was like having a guitar in the 1960s; plenty of holes open up in the fly screen that separates manifesto from religion; even the subtitles are better than the actor; this surely must be the nail in the coffin of Regietheater!; the point of view is generally transatlantic and aimed at re-evaluation; sofa realism; dilemmatic
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 