Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts

Wednesday 17 February 2021

I'm Missing The Snow


This morning I finished "Left Out" which while it mostly depressed me on the infighting in the Labour Party but left with the observation that Corby had moved the party back to the Left , but I home that Starmer has something lined up to destroy the Tory party because he's being very quiet at the moment.

Next up is "Fake Law" by The Secret Barrister which doesn't start well as it intersperses right wing idiot quotes from the press , parliament and the rest, and is almost like a Daily Mail article but it is what you hear from so many everyday people who can't be bothered to think or look into what they are reading. I have been guilty several times but luckily have friends who can put me right.

The snow has gone and temperatures are up , but generally the weather is grey and uninspiring .I don't need two coats , gloves and a furry coat to go out in and while it's a bit brighter it's a bit meh. I  thought I would pen a non-poem on my thoughts , so I supposed it is still causing some inspiration. 


"I Miss The Snow

Crunching underfoot

The bright white pavements

Parks and Fields

I Miss The Snow


I Miss The Snow

I miss The Snowmen

The animal trails

A bird , a cat, a dog

I Miss The Show


I Miss The Snow

The iced puddles and ponds

Electric Brilliance from The Winter Sun

And still that crunch underfoot

I Miss The Snow"

So that's a non-poem for this day off, and the weather is boringly mild but I will nip out for a walk soon. While I'm writing this I picked up a CD called "Raw Rockabilly" from my Discogs pile , the music is great but the cover is a bit iffy as it contains the Confederate flag which has been adopted by American Nazis in the same way the St George's Flag and Union Jack have been purloined by British Nazis . It's also an anti Black Lives Matter image now, but when this was designed it was a redneck image but was not seen at that time as a racist image, which it undoubtedly was. I'd never seen it as a racist flag , but I had all the bits which if I had bothered to put them together, I would have immediately seen that it was. We all have to be continually learning and to be educated.

So musically will go with "Please Don't Touch" by Johnny Kidd and The Pirates from that album. More rock and roll than rockabilly but still a great record, which Motorhead and Girlschool updated for the St Valentine's Day Massacre EP which I have posted about recently and in the past (follow the tags).



Wednesday 26 June 2019

Women's World Cup 2019 - How To Play Football - Target 1965


This is post 1965 and my original target this year was to hit 2K posts by the end of 2019. I've now changed that to hit it by the end of July, so that's another 35 posts to do. The blog has dropped off the Feedburner radar. I am quite amazed that although I have friends that read this , subscribers are virtually non existent, and you can't ask people to subscribe, I very seldom subscribe to anything so cannot point a finger.

I'm still enjoying the Women's World Cup but have a despairing chuckle at the number of people (mostly men) who won't watch because it's not real football. Every match is full of skill and passion and heartbreak. While the reactions of the Cameroon team were wrong , they were caused by extreme passion and the accusations of FIFA racism were over the top but given Europe and The USA's treatment of African nations and indigenous people in the past and even today that is an easy card to play. The referee should have immediately called the captain and coach over to the VAR screen to explain the decisions. The Cameroon disallowed goal was unfortunate but the correct decision.

The thing is the competition has been brilliant and very little cheating , cynical fouls and the like that permeates the men's game.

So it's a very grey morning as we head to another Glastonbury Weekend, and though I love music and like smaller Festivals , bt the thought of Glastonbury the Festival leaves me cold, but I love the town and Glastonbury Tor gives you some amazing views.

So given that with my last Women's World Cup post I used Echobelly's "Dark Therapy" (one of my favourite ever songs) , and Echobelly liked the post although I barely mentioned them, for this one I am going to choose the more appropriate and brilliantly uplifting "Great Things". This will get rid of the grey skies this Wednesday , a brilliant record.

Enjoy.


Sunday 21 April 2019

Woody Guthrie - 3000 Unrecorded Songs


I've just watched the BBC documentary Woody Guthrie: Three Chords and The Truth and it reminded me of a few things and showed me a lot i didn't know about them man. I didn't that Guthrie and his father were racist and his father was involved in or facilitated lynchings. A lot of Guthrie's early writing was awash with racist wording and illustrations until ...

.. on his radio show he played a piece called "Run Nigger Run" , and he used THAT word in the worst ways you could, but then he got a letter from a Negro listenten, an educated guy who said up to the that point the show had been excellent, but by playing that and using THAT word he was showing disrespect and race hate towards African Americans. Guthrie took this on board and vowed never  to use THAT word again, he apologised on air and in a letter and became very active in pushing race equality. The problem is race inequality is still with use but Woody showed that people can change when educated by events.

This then brought me on to the fact that though he was struck down by the horrifying Huntingdon's Chorea which destroys the nervous system and therefor you lose control of everything, he had been a prolific writer being inspired by everything. After his death there were over three thousand sets of lyrics to unrecorded songs.

A lot of these are now being picked up by artists examples of which are seen in Billy Bragg and Wilco's "Mermaid Avenue Sessions" and the wonderful  take on "Old Man Trump" by Ryan Harvey (with Anne Di Franco and Tom Morello) and he remarked bout the number of songs that Woody had written.

Another remarkable one is "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" , my favourite take on this is by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (see here), but this illustrates the absolute disdain the for immigrant workers not even acknowledging them as human and the same is happening today with Trump's Wall and Brexit in the UK.

The documentary is excellent watch it , listen to Woody's songs and if you need to change yourself for the better , do it.