Leeds - Friends in High Places ...... No 'cos We Got the Rad !

[MrsORichSenior]

Yeah - 'bout right your interpretation Jez.
Football attracts all kinds of information requests from non league to pro level and portfolio build ups are required to suit demand.
http://www.fanseurope.org/en/activit...etwork-en.html

Got more time on my hands so I can fit alot into schedule slots and location wise I'm ideally placed by train .........
Just kind of happened by following Leeds around and getting contacts via the 'travelling' - as I always tell folks opportunities are there but you gotta make 'em happen so any door open I'll always have a look inside,just so happened that the UK was not the place for me to do it the way I wanted to do it anymore.
MOT

[MrsORichSenior]

Ramblings by me of notes,transcripts,club politics I've read to translate this week that may be of interest for those with grey matter to muse over during the break ..........

After a week of robust discussion on the Forum and armed with various disclosures from my Balkans translations I recalled my visit to the National Football Museum in Manchester and remembered the Badges of yesterday years and various old pictures on display also the middle aged blokes wearing replica club shirts mooching around reminiscing their past days,Sadly not to many folks under 25 years old in there encompassing the past.

Some pictures on the walls of artist Lowry show a happy procession of featureless ‘matchstick men’ flocking to the game having just knocked off from the Saturday morning shift in one of the factories whose chimney stacks smoke away in the background.The club ground in his pictures is rooted in the locality of the community where players and supporters inhabited the same lifeworld and same social class, perhaps sharing a pint or two in the pubs later.

Lowry paints a scene of a somber stadium of which the seeds later escalated into the colossal football industry of today (Bolton’s old Burnden Park depicted in the painting)would eventually be replaced by an out-of-town stadium named after the Reebok sportswear manufacturer, with the communal experience of walking to the game replaced by the modern bus/train or car journey that is the footballing ecosystem mode today - totally 'unrecognisable' to Lowry’s world................

Helping my understandings of the way of grasping postmodern TV-age football was helped by a letter a colleague gave me to read pointing a finger to the French Marxist provocateur Guy Debord’s writing of The Society of the Spectacle (published fifty years ago).He stated "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation”. The spectacle Debord tells us, is “the social organisation of appearances”, adding that it is “not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.” The spectacle insinuates itself in all our actions and interactions, our interior lives, our intimate dreams. We now walk down the street checking our reflection in car windows, continually scanning the world for pretexts for a social media update via our handy devices. Contrived naturalness is the reality of today as we follow and absorb the image presented to us by vast marketing and personal media 24/7.

Supporters’ have given way to ‘the market’ – in fact supporters are part of what clubs sell to the market. The idea of such devotion, the sound of the ground as kick off approaches, the images of a jubilant crowd (which in real-time is now being asked/forced to sit down) is all packaged up with the game and dispatched around the world globe to folks who might never get within 100 miles of a stadium.Clubs constantly 'mine' their own traditions as the means to extend the brand globally, all the while using everything from in house TV stations to Twitter to soft soap the less feel good aspects of their financial operations.

Working for fan groups it's known that Liverpool’s fans are a militant vocal crowd ((passionate too) not only through the extraordinary Hillsborough campaigning but also the Spirit of Shankly group (formed in opposition to Hicks and Gillett ownership) whose ultimate aim was/is fan ownership of their club. To that end they embody the political vision of the man whom they were named who famously said “The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.”

Well - we as a club this week showed the world similar philosophy that Leeds United are now in fact UNITED,as for having a share - well that remains to be seen,but it's a start and something to build on and as for all the negative stuff/moaning posted some of us actually do stand up to be counted and communicate concerns weekly direct to football clubs owners and will continue to do so.For some the opportunity to vote on our Badge would have been satisfying but I bet not too many will take up the call to continue to voice concerns direct consistently over matters that also require change,hey ho ............ but thank heavens some do and for those like my mate Moscowhite of The Square Ball Mag & Pod casts here's hoping that his sales and views will long continue.

MOT