In the star's new film, he is 'subdued to the point where he's barely conscious'

March 31 – May 20, 2023

February 15 – May 20, 2023

Fast X 'takes stupidity and excess to breathtaking new heights'

In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century.

It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!”

To be clear, I am one of these girls, a lover of Chloë, someone who has spent years showing the stylist at the hair salon a picture of her in Kids. But I did not have to stand in the ouroboros of girls, for a few important reasons. The first is that Chloë wasn’t the only person selling clothes in NoHo that afternoon. The Sale of the Century was actually put together by Liana Satenstein, a former Vogue staffer who organizes closet clean-outs for fashion icons. In addition to Chloë’s stuff, the sale also featured selections from the closets of Sally Singer, the former creative director of Vogue who now heads fashion at Amazon; Lynn Yaeger, a Vogue contributing editor known to wear whimsical Comme des Garçons frocks; and the longtime Paper magazine editor Mickey Boardman. I was Sally’s assistant at Vogue when I first moved to New York, once upon a time. Therefore, when I arrived at 676 Broadway at 11:55 A.M., I sent her a text and floated to the front of the line with my friends Anika and Sage. The other reason we got to skip the line is because it was my twenty-seventh birthday, and sometimes when you turn a new age you get lucky. 

With Borussia Dortmund and Bayern locked in an epic title race, Andy had to head over to Dortmund to share the roar of the Yellow Wall for a crucial showdown with Borussia Mönchengladbach. He speaks to former Dortmund player Patrick Owomoyela about that fabled atmosphere and meets some very unusual Dortmund fans who have come all the way from… Dumbarton?!

Where should Andy head to next? Find us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***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.

Close to 10 years to the day since Sir Alex Ferguson’s final game as manager of Manchester United, we had to look back at the defining game of his career. Or really, the defining two minutes of it.

Marcus Speller, Luke No-friends-at-the-pub Moore and Vithushan Wee Nipper Ehantharajah reminisce about Manchester United’s extraordinary turnaround against Bayern Munich and Ferguson’s role in it all. From the snooker with Jonathan Greening, to distracting a - erm - restless Roy Keane, and *that* iconic post-match interview. The Football Ramble, bloody hell.

Let us know what you thought of today’s Guide. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***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!***

April 19 – May 20, 2023

April 8 – May 20, 2023

William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas.

“Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence.

“Every word must come from my acts direct,” Howe writes of poetry’s impossible task in “Philophany,” an earlier poem in her most recent collection, Love and I. “Primrose for X” comes toward the end of the book before two final poetic sequences. The placement of individual poem-to-poem sequences through the whole takes on the shape of neumatic notation, rhythm pitched to love’s life. Here lines move within snail-paced thought, the measure of attention where, as Buber describes it, “love comes to pass.” Here lines move in a spark with the restless “I,” who finds the X subjects of love’s gift among the poor immigrant women in Victoria, impoverished children, “drugged and dirty and crushed” boys of Kentish Town, and the victims of a father’s violence, half-allegorized by a machete. Catherine Sophia Boucher Blake belongs here, too, in the hidden vision—she who learned the secrets and practice of her husband’s illuminations and signed the Parish Register as bride with an “X.”

Blake loved quatrains as much as the fourteen-syllable line. “Primrose for X” is only one of three poems in Love and I written in consistent quatrains, and the longest of the three. Its symmetry doesn’t follow any set metrical or syllabic pattern like the iambic tetrameter of Blake’s “London.” Instead each quatrain’s short line-to-line syllabic variation counters the overall symmetry, unsteady rhythm bound to beating image and thought and the needs of the heart. Only one stanza is composed entirely of trimetric lines, in the alien description of the “boys hunched,” as if to heighten the nightmarish fairy-tale quality of “What is created by humans / is almost always alien.”