Dotun and Andy are joined by Lars Sivertsen for another roundup of continental capers, with the Sevilla derby a traditionally fiery affair - three red cards anyone?

Elsewhere, we pick through the matchups for the Champions League’s knockout stages and Andy’s recent field trip to see Xabi Alonso’s struggling Leverkusen.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whitney Houston inspired Lady Gaga and Beyoncé

Last year, I began running the trail at Lake Storey in Galesburg, Illinois, where I live. My friend S. recommended Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” as an exercise soundtrack; soon, I was clocking my runs by it. Five took me around the lake and to the dock where I stretched. For me, there is only the ten-minute version. The five-minute original is like getting cheated out of an orgasm.

The song had just been released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the 2021 rerecording of her fourth album, which came out in 2012. It’s a power ballad, the story of a dissolved romance that haunts the speaker, who is still hurting over the cruelties of the relationship. “You never called it what it was,” Swift sings. “All I felt was shame.” “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”—which broke the Guinness World Record for longest song to hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100—is also a master class in the present tense. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. Verse one opens in scene: “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.” The door is the door to an ex-lover’s sister’s house, where Swift has forgotten a scarf. The first three lines of the verse are written in simple past, but the fourth shifts to present perfect, foreshadowing the showdown to come between tenses. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present.

In writing workshops, the present tense is often perceived as a lazy shortcut. As Janet Burroway notes in Writing Fiction, “the effect of the present tense, somewhat self-consciously, is to reduce distance and increase immediacy: we are there.” But are we there? And where is there? The present is a “parched and barren country,”  William Gass has written. Yet he also acknowledged its existential hold: “The present can last an eternity … Its overness is never over.” When Swift ushers listeners through that door in the first line, the listener steps toward a perpetual present, a place where the overness of past love is never truly over, “ ’cause,” as the chorus goes, echoing Dolly Parton, “there we are again.”

***

How Carolee Schneemann changed culture with her provocative performance art

Born in 1913 in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district to a German Jewish father and a Swiss mother, Meret Oppenheim lived out the initial decades of her life in the shadows of Europe’s two world wars. Yet hope is inherent in her artistic practice, which spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, jewelry design, and poetry. Oppenheim’s work isn’t particularly uplifting, much less cheery; indeed, the language in her poems is often exceedingly dark and piercing. But her inventive verse opens up spaces for transformation—even under circumstances in which any sense of possibility is veiled by cruelty, and is therefore fleeting. Such contradictions come to life, for example, in an untitled poem that opens with the exclamation “Freedom!”:

Freedom!
Finally!
The harpoons fly
A rainbow encamps on the streets
Undermined only by the distant buzz of giant bees.

Oppenheim began writing poems not long after moving to Paris in 1932 at the age of eighteen; she lived there for several years and visited frequently after she left. All but a handful of her poems are untitled. The bulk of her poetic output took place from 1933 to 1944, though she also wrote several poems later in life—including “Self-Portrait from 50,000 B.C. to X,” her last recorded work, written in 1980, five years before her death. Her poems are in conversation with the French symbolists, who were, of course, lodestars for Breton and the surrealists. Think of the fairies that appear in Oppenheim’s poems, “flying by with bright thighs,” along with the fur, the clover, and the shadows in the woods: all of it recalls the imagery in Rimbaud’s Illuminations. The first exhibition of Oppenheim’s work was at the 1933 Salon des Surindépendants alongside established surrealist artists, but in later decades she chose to distance herself from that limiting label. A retrospective of her work, “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” opened last weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and will be on view there until March 4, 2023. 

A new three-part series. Episode 1 available Tuesday November 8th, right here on the Football Ramble feed.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Protestors from Spanish environmental activist group Futuro Vegetal apparently glued themselves on Saturday to Francisco Goya’s painting The Clothed Maja (circa 1800), which hangs in Madrid’s Prado Museum, and wrote “1.5 C” on the wall next to the painting.

“Last week, the UN recognized the impossibility of staying below the Paris Agreement’s goal of staying below a 1.5 celsius degree change,” an account for Futuro Vegetal wrote on a Twitter post attached to a video of their action at the Prado.

The UN report referenced by the activist group found that the Earth is on its way to temperature increase between 2.4 celsius and 2.6 celsius by the end of this century.

“We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, wrote in an article on the report’s findings. “Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

Meanwhile, the Prado put out their own statement on Twitter.

Our verdict on the Netflix royal saga, as it reaches the 1990s