Tear him for his bad verses

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

But surely that also applies to those who rage against the review? I know, somebody read this post back to me in a few months’ time...

PS: And look! A respectable reason for non-gynaecologists to read Playboy!

Coming attractions

Crikey.

not to mention

Ooh, I say.

The wrong sort of clever

“...a thinly veiled comment about how important it is to wrap things up nicely - to write only what you can write in the duration of a Sats exam.”

I think I’ve found the story that encapsulates what’s wrong with education in the UK. Read this.

Putting yourself about

Well, the year’s half done, and it’s customary at times like this to start beating yourself up and griping about all the New Year resolutions you haven’t kept and how you just haven’t achieved anything so far and how life is slipping away and it’s like a record and you’re edging towards the play-out groove and the record seems to be speeding up 33-45-78 and you still haven’t worked out what the tune is.

Well, bollocks to that. I’ve done rather a lot so far this year. And there’s more to come. So there.

But what I haven’t done, for several years, is a job. I mean, a proper, salaried, where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years, office party, annual evaluation job job. I sort of miss it. Maybe I should have another go. Except that I’m crap at selling myself (or anything else, for that matter), so I’m rather in awe of people like this:


(by xkcd)

The revenge of the Belle & Sebastian fans

Ruminating about death and Wikipedia and Swells and the various levels of famousness, at Prospect.

He’s out of my life

You see, I’m in two minds about Michael Jackson. Of course, he was a genius, despite everything. So what I really wanted to do was to find a copy of the NME cover that ran after Elvis died, when they used a pic of him in his ducktailed, knock-kneed, 1956 glory with the legend: “REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY”, acknowledging that he was so much more than the bloated Vegas abomination.

But I couldn’t find the cover, and anyway it would probably have just looked stupid and insulting if I stuck a shot of ‘I Want You Back’ or ‘Wanna Be Starting Something’-era Jacko in the middle of it. And of course there was all the other stuff as well. If we’re really going to look back on his life, we need to include this as well:

Deflates

I was going to say something about how sad I am that Slaminsky’s chucked in the towel, but then I thought, hey, it’s her call, it’s not like she’s dead or anything.

Then I found out that Steven Wells (aka Seething Wells/Swells/Susan Williams) had lost his three-year battle with cancer.

I never met Swells. I did occasionally exchange e-mails, and once had a bit of a phone barney with him. (I called him a plagiarist; he called me a whinger; we both agreed that the idea of reviving the musical Hair in the 1990s was an affront to good taste.)

But at the same time, I knew him intimately, first because of my teenage obsession with performance poetry; and later because for several years he was the cleverest, funniest writer in the NME, in that late-80s/early 90s phase when it was past its best but still the best thing going. What was great about him was that even if you disagreed utterly with what he said (he loathed the Smiths, and I’m sure it was he who argued that Sonia had made a greater contribution to pop history than Morrissey ever could), he was still more readable that a dozen hacks who just regurgitated your own prejudices and served them back to you. Which is why, presumably, there was no longer a place for him at the NME, and he plied his trade instead at The Guardian, the Philadelphia Weekly and online spaces such as Quietus (where this gorgeous pisstake of Radiohead comes from).

He died on Tuesday, the same day that the editor of the NME was appointed to take over at Top Gear magazine. Little more needs to be said. (Although Betty says it.)

PS: Everett’s collated some of the many tributes; another from Akira the Don; and here’s the man himself on sport and blogging and stuff.

Laid out

Can’t for the life of me remember where I found this, and it was only two days ago. I feel like one of those respectable ladies who enters the menopause and starts nicking evaporated milk from Fortnum & Mason. Anyway, if it belongs to anyone, please yell, and I’ll acknowledge, and get my medication changed. And give the evaporated milk back.

Green graffiti

It seems as if I’m running some kind of anti-Banksy campaign here, and I’m really not; he’s fab, and so are the Art Hate guys. We cannot live on polite watercolours alone. But images from Tehran such as this


and these and these (at the excellent FryingPanFire blog) rather put received notions of rebellion and criminality into some kind of perspective.

PS: That said, here’s more evidence that Banksy’s outlaw brand has eaten itself.

Kunst

It probably entirely contradicts everything I was saying last week about the faux subversion of Banksy’s Bristol event, because this is just as hypey and adolescent, but National Art Hate Week does strike me as being a rather amusing wheeze.

PS: The word I was striving for with regard to the Banksy gig: authenticitude.