'To pick a card that shows your heart and your pride'

Can anything more directly sum up the Noughties cultural stagnation than this? 'Earnest' mewling, U2 ubiquity and all the post-Live Aid paradigm. Guitars in hand, preaching a false togetherness. Today is the first time I've seen this, and it is a sickening - and grimly amusing - spectacle. This symbolises, on so many levels, the void that we have inhabited (and continue to).

Who on earth was this pawn employee who decided to do this; the delusions of Capitalist Realism writ large.

And who can guess what happened to this merged company two years down the line?

Zero Books - recommendations

Just received this today, before its supposed date of publication! 300 or so pages, 23 writers, including many vital voices:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resistible-Demise-Michael-Jackson/dp/1846943485

Some more fine work from a publisher that doesn't talk down to its readers, nor intimidates. Accessible, eloquent polemics for these times:

'Where have the interesting women gone?'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Dimensional-Woman-Nina-Power/dp/1846942411/ref=pd_sim_b_3

A European Modernism reclaimed and asserted

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Militant-Modernism-Zero-Books-Hatherley/dp/1846941768/ref=pd_sim_b_5

'A ruthless portrait of our ideological misery'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1846943175/ref=pd_sim_b_1

N.P. The Jacksons, 'Show You the Way to Go' (1976)