The books are piling up as the time-sands of the working days trickle away through a giant hourglass. The pressure of the day job is easing. Only a day or two to go. I’ve been preparing for this over a couple of weeks now. Long evenings and weekends engrossed in volume one of Capital, LudovicoContinue reading “Ask The Man Who Cuts the Golden Silk”
Author Archives: DannyB
Anti-War
On the road that runs along the sea front a large Range Rover is motionless while the engine continues to run. The driver is staring out to sea. Dreaming of concentration camps for refugees and law and order for the people who shuffle through the streets, plastic shoes, thin coats, huddled up, it’s cold. JustContinue reading “Anti-War”
Red Vienna: A Reading List
The Architecture of Red Vienna – Eve Blau This is a brilliant book on the subject of the architecture, design and politics of Red Vienna. A template as to how the architectural histories of cities can be approached. The Austrian Revolution – Otto Bauer This is essential reading for the political context of the originsContinue reading “Red Vienna: A Reading List”
Cosmopolitics
Unsure of the atmosphere on the streets. Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, Mortimer Street, Tottenham Court Road. Not sure what atmosphere I’m trying to find. The degradation of England is deliberate. The Tories have been in power for thirteen years. It would have been possible to have fixed poor housing, housing shortages, zero hours contracts, refugeeContinue reading “Cosmopolitics”
Flanders Light
Another time, these are different people, with lives we pass as our train slowly picks up speed. The Palais de Justice past Bruxelles Centraal, built on a hill top in the centre of the city to act as a physical reminder to the working class of the power of the state. The obligatory walls ofContinue reading “Flanders Light”
I Am, Your Image
I traced almost exactly the same steps as a week ago. So much has happened in those past seven days. So much should have happened and never did. A billion more car miles added to the death of planet earth, never ending smog, burning forests, dried up rivers, melting ice caps. Thousands more tonnes ofContinue reading “I Am, Your Image”
Memory of a London Radical Book Fair
Nature has had enough. There’s been plenty of warnings but the endless line of SUVs never stops, the dumping of waste in the sea, the smoke-stack chimney chemicals into the air, plastics everywhere, in the deepest parts of the oceans, in the highest part of the mountains, in the food, in the bodies of theContinue reading “Memory of a London Radical Book Fair”
The march to barbarism
No bombs have fallen yet on England. But the so-called political leadership of the Conservatives and Labour rush to take sides. An unwritten agreement as to who is right, and who is wrong, where death is always one sided, where only the children on one side of the conflict are ever killed. These are pre-crisesContinue reading “The march to barbarism”
Watching Vermeer
Compulsion is a curious force. It suddenly wells up inside and shoots us off in the opposite direction to that of expected travel. Compulsion arrived at around 8.30 this morning and kicked me out of bed with orders to be at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien by ten o’clock. It was important that I was theContinue reading “Watching Vermeer”
Serendipity in the Rabenhof
To walk around Rabenhof is to step into an imagined world of what London could have been. Instead, London has been taken over by big capital; capital from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, the Kuwaiti Sovereign Wealth Fund, Chinese companies, and a whole layer of global criminals that use the London property market toContinue reading “Serendipity in the Rabenhof”
Commodity Fetishism 