I don’t do Pinterest, or Instagram, or Snapchat. But I do tweet and I do, occasionally, do facebook.
Twitter I use primarily for monitoring and commenting on politics, literature, music and baseball; facebook is to see what friends and acquaintances are up to. Both are also and often sources of the kind of news which the mainstream media choose to ignore, an invaluable resource at the moment.
But yesterday, social media was all about the snow: how beautiful it was, how dangerous it was, how it had disrupted travel, and isn’t my snowman gorgeous?!
Which, in the way that my mind works, took me straight to Ulrike Meinhof, because she wrote a powerful essay in konkret entitled “Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t”.
The slogan came, originally, from a Deutsche Bahn (West German Railways) poster of the mid 1960s, showing a train powering through the German snow. It was adopted and transformed by the German SDS, this time featuring portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The message was clear: socialism would plough through any obstacles in order to create a juster, fairer socialist society.
(“At least they make the trains run on time” you may think, and Lenin, of course, had particular reason to be grateful for the reliability of European train services.)
Twitter I use primarily for monitoring and commenting on politics, literature, music and baseball; facebook is to see what friends and acquaintances are up to. Both are also and often sources of the kind of news which the mainstream media choose to ignore, an invaluable resource at the moment.
But yesterday, social media was all about the snow: how beautiful it was, how dangerous it was, how it had disrupted travel, and isn’t my snowman gorgeous?!
Which, in the way that my mind works, took me straight to Ulrike Meinhof, because she wrote a powerful essay in konkret entitled “Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t”.
The slogan came, originally, from a Deutsche Bahn (West German Railways) poster of the mid 1960s, showing a train powering through the German snow. It was adopted and transformed by the German SDS, this time featuring portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The message was clear: socialism would plough through any obstacles in order to create a juster, fairer socialist society.
(“At least they make the trains run on time” you may think, and Lenin, of course, had particular reason to be grateful for the reliability of European train services.)
Yesterday, skimming through social media, I was struck by the absence of any serious political debate on a day on which David Davis revealed that the new ‘agreement’ with the EU was not an agreement at all. It was merely a ‘statement of intent’.
But hey, look at my snowman. Look at the view from my bedroom window. What happened to the gritters?
The statement by Davis was particularly significant because the Sunday press had been full of the triumph of the negotiations with Ireland and the EU. The Tories and Mrs May had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat etc etc.
In fact, it appears, they had agreed to agree to almost everything to keep Brexit negotiations going. And if the implication of this ‘statement of intent’ is a soft Brexit, then 1. no it isn’t and 2. so be it.
Of course, for those of us for whom even a soft Brexit is a disaster in waiting, Brexit continues to be rather more important than the fact that we couldn’t get to the pub at lunchtime. And it is clear that the question is made more vexed by the refusal of Labour to make a clean break with the whole issue.
It is time Corbyn and Starmer did that, doing what they say they do which is being a party whose policies are determined by the memebership.
As members, we do not want Brexit hard or soft. And nor, I suspect, do many of those who voted to leave Europe last year.
The need for a parliamentary vote and, if necessary (although legally it isn’t) a second referendum, is what I and my chums are talking about.
Not the weather.
We know that an overtly anti-Brexit Labour Party will plough through the snowdrifts of these shambolic negotiations and Tory in-fighting.
And we know that we don't need a weatherman to know which the way the wind blows.
Today from the everysmith vaults: There is now a fair representation of Dohnanyi’s work in the vaults, and much of it has been playing recently; punctuated by the Dead from 76, those FM broadcasts after the hiatus and also Luna at Brooklyn Steel last month. All that good stuff.
But hey, look at my snowman. Look at the view from my bedroom window. What happened to the gritters?
The statement by Davis was particularly significant because the Sunday press had been full of the triumph of the negotiations with Ireland and the EU. The Tories and Mrs May had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat etc etc.
In fact, it appears, they had agreed to agree to almost everything to keep Brexit negotiations going. And if the implication of this ‘statement of intent’ is a soft Brexit, then 1. no it isn’t and 2. so be it.
Of course, for those of us for whom even a soft Brexit is a disaster in waiting, Brexit continues to be rather more important than the fact that we couldn’t get to the pub at lunchtime. And it is clear that the question is made more vexed by the refusal of Labour to make a clean break with the whole issue.
It is time Corbyn and Starmer did that, doing what they say they do which is being a party whose policies are determined by the memebership.
As members, we do not want Brexit hard or soft. And nor, I suspect, do many of those who voted to leave Europe last year.
The need for a parliamentary vote and, if necessary (although legally it isn’t) a second referendum, is what I and my chums are talking about.
Not the weather.
We know that an overtly anti-Brexit Labour Party will plough through the snowdrifts of these shambolic negotiations and Tory in-fighting.
And we know that we don't need a weatherman to know which the way the wind blows.
Today from the everysmith vaults: There is now a fair representation of Dohnanyi’s work in the vaults, and much of it has been playing recently; punctuated by the Dead from 76, those FM broadcasts after the hiatus and also Luna at Brooklyn Steel last month. All that good stuff.
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