Quasi quitique

My review of When the Going Gets Dark, the seventh album by Quasi (who?) is here.

Bittersweet Bundle of Truancy

Television is one hell of a deceptive medium. Yeah, I’ve been in an edit suite and had them mash stuff together, or cut stuff out. But last night I was in the audience, and that felt different. My friend Birdy had tickets for the filming of The Album Show, a new Channel 4 music programme which features bands performing album tracks live.

"We got dealt a bad hand," said this passer-by who collared me. She was right though: Will Young, The Like, Sean Paul, The Automatic. I wouldn’t have minded – The Like were cool (but too small for this venue), Young had the star factor (despite being effortlessly effortless live), Sean Paul got the crowd going ("What is he saying?" asked a guy next to me. "I have no idea," replied his companion).

But when the announcer shouted, "Ladies and gentlemen, GRAHAM COXON," I rushed forward to see the great ex-Blur guitarist (and my old best friend). The crowd applauded rapturously. He didn’t appear. Then the presenter did it again: "Yes, it’s GRAHAM COXON!" No Coxon.

Why? The man had played the previous week, but hadn’t garnered the necessary applause; so they needed some footage of the crowd going crazy for Coxon, despite the fact that he wasn’t even in the building. Ever feel like you're being used?

Me, Dan and Birdy left before the final band could come on. They were still doing endless, "Clap your hands for GRAHAM COXON!" takes. We went to the pub and ordered some Thai noodles. My evening was hugely brightened when I came back from the cigarette shop to find Dan having a long conversation with the waitress in what seemed to me like fluent Thai. "That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in two years," I told him when she’d gone. He’d probably be hugely flattered if he knew that the previous coolest thing was the time when I found out that one of my friends had once smoked crack with some homeless people in Central Park.

Lessons learned from... Good Night and Good Luck

McCarthy bad, smoking good.

Lessons learned from... Syriana

Oil bad, Clooney good.

The death of Mishima / the birth of new Hula Hoops

I was reading an interview in an old magazine with a forensics expert the other day and he was asked to name the strangest fact that he'd found out in his job. His answer was quite unexpected, nothing grizzly at all: it was that most suicides remove their shoes before killing themselves.

Today I was reminded of the extraordinary way in which Japanese writer Yukio Mishima ended his life. Having finished the the final book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, he dropped the completed manuscript off at his publishers and went to the Tokyo headquarters of Japan's Self-Defense Force where he read a manifesto, and committed seppuku, ritual suicide, disembowelling himself with a sword, after which a colleague cut his head off.

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Hula Hoops have brought out a new flavour of crisps, called Sheriff's Saucy Ribs. The packet is an unlikely mauve pink colour, but it's the crisps themselves that really shock in the colour department. It's insane: they look almost radioactive. The taste? Saucy, with hints of bacon, reminiscent of a long summer day spent with a new lover lying on an empty green expanse of grass.

The chord works in mysterious ways

I love working where I work. Actually, I’m talking more geographically than anything. Came out of work on Monday night and on my way to the pub, stopped by at HMV Oxford Street, where The Mystery Jets were playing a five-song set. "It's a bit weird playing a gig in a record shop," said the lead singer. It certainly is: they looked strange twisting around beneath the static indoor lights; we felt strange standing in the aisles, CD racks on each side. I was in the rock and pop aisle, next to the Cs, The Cribs and Culture Club.

I wasn’t very impressed with the Jets; they seem like a poor man’s Futureheads to me. What I was impressed by was the number of screaming teenage girls, well, screaming. You expect that at a Westlife gig, but not for four scruffy and odd-looking indie-types playing jittery rhapsodic guitar rock. That they're listening to obscure, trying-to-be-inventive indie that's actually a bit mediocre while they lust after their boy heroes, well, that's surely preferable to the usual saccharine pop balladry that they have to put up with.

Listen to The Mystery Jets here, if you must.

No butts

This Greek girl I met in the pub last week told me that she was staying in England to make a short film. I asked her how long for. "Until they ban smoking," she said. I laughed, but she was dead serious.

Although the ban of smoking in public places in England is now on its way, it's not just the politicians who are down on cigs; they're becoming pretty demonised all round. Last night, one of my friends was telling me how he'd recently been freebasing cocaine (it's a short step from crack apparently). Shortly afterwards, he politely asked me if I'd hold my cigarette in my other hand to keep the smoke away from him.

If we're scared of cigarettes now, imagine what we'll be like in 15 years. The days of smoking on planes are long long gone. Series 12 of 24 will probably feature Jack Bauer desperately trying to stop terrorists who are holding 20 Mayfair Lights and a box of matches. "Yes Mr President: and they plan to smoke them today."


The ban will be good for me - I usually only smoke in pubs and clubs, so I'll probably be forced into quitting, although I'll still whinge on about the infringement of civil liberties, they start with the little things, and before you know it you're Winston Smith/Bernard Marx etc. Really I'll be benefitting, but I do feel I've been slightly brainwashed into coming to this conclusion; the problem with the whole debate is that the pro-smoking arguments have been lost in the melee. So, here are two which I like, both articulated by people who are cleverer than I am.

The first is about as pretentious as this blog will get, as it's a quote from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "Smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world." What does this mean? I may be wrong, but I think it's akin to saying, "You smoke because you don't give a fuck."

The second comes from Alexander Chancellor's Guardian column from Saturday: "There is something attractive about people who don't regard their own health and longevity as the most important things in the world."

Stockwell flats: blue sky/grey sky

On Sunday morning I was lying in bed looking up at the clouds through the window at the head of my bed. The sky kept alternating between patches of blue, swathes of white clouds and a murky grey mass. But, as always, the point is best illustrated through the medium of the Stockwell flats: in this picture it’s like the building is cutting the sky in half, like a big ruler.

How to organise a William Atherton film festival without really trying part 3

And so, the final flashback to summer 2005. After I’d sent out two long emails about the William Atherton film festival, I realised that the whole thing was too much hassle and I couldn’t be bothered. And that was the end of that.

How to organise a William Atherton film festival without really trying part 2

So after I'd sent out the first email about the William Atherton film festival last spring, I was amazed by the enthusiastic response and subsequent developments. Here is the second email.

Date: 26 May 2005

Dear William Atherton fan,

Firstly, may I thank you all for the overwhelmingly positive response to the forthcoming festival.

I'd like to commend Edward Hagan, Northern Ireland, for recognising that Atherton did not in fact play "the fucking idiot who did lots of coke then tried to befriend terrorist Hans Gruber" in Die Hard, but in fact was the fucking idiot journalist who tried to undermine John McClane's credibility and got his comeuppance in the form of a swift punch in the face from Holly McClane. Additional kudos goes to Nicole Kobie, Canada, who pointed out that the man on the inside is actually Harry Ellis, played by Hart Bochner.

Thank you to Will Macfarlane, Dorset, who, "as something of a Die Hard expert", has pledged to bring his Die Hard trilogy box set to the festival.

Also well done to Jamie Wilkes of Japan, who sent a heartwarming and poetic reply: "So sad i can't make it; the festival sounds like the very life-blood of intellect that I, as a vampire of thought, would love to sink my teeth into. Still, I wish you all the best with it. I like the idea of subverting the academies by turning your living room into one."

I like the idea too, Jamie, and I'm sure William Atherton would approve!

Which brings me to the final point. Michael Kline, America, has managed to find out that Atherton is represented by Deborah Miller of Miller & Company in LA. By strange twist of fate, Mike, who used to work in Hollywood, already has her mobile number. As you read this, the young Chicagan is calling in all favours in an attempt to get Deborah's email address, so we can formally invite Atherton himself to speak at the festival.

I'll leave you with one of Atherton's finest and most waspishly irritating quotes, from Die Hard 2: "But why in hell can't I get the first class meal my network paid for? Do you know who I am?"

Yes we do. You're William Atherton.

Best wishes,
The Dalyell Road film committee