The London Perambulator documentary is being shown at the London International Documentary Festival tonight at the Free World Centre, which features an interview with Will Self, and footage of him walking with his friend Nick Papadimitriou to Heathrow talking about his late 80s Interzone project. Details of the screening are here.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
The absurdity of the general election
Will Self talks about the role of the absurd in the general election, and meets some of the heirs to Lord Sutch, here on Radio 4. He’ll be doing more of these reports for Today in the run-up to next week’s election.
Nick Clegg: international man of mystery
The latest Madness of Crowds column from April 22:
I don’t know Gordon Brown – do you? I don’t know Dave Cameron, either, not even remotely. As for Nick Clegg, he’s an enigma – albeit not one I feel driven to solve. Presumably Miriam González Durántez has penetrated further into the Clegg mystery, hacking her way through the jungle of his id, and so doing has drawn closer to the lost city of Clegg-Dorado.
This Week appearance
Will Self is going to be on This Week on BBC1 tomorrow night at 11.35pm.
Crash: Homage to JG Ballard
In memory of JG Ballard, who died a year ago today, here is the catalogue essay that Will Self wrote for the Crash exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in London recently:
“Illuminated arrays glowed through the night, like the perimeter lights of a colony of prison camps, a new gulag of penal settlements where the forced labour was shopping and spending … ” So wrote JG Ballard in his final novel, Kingdom Come, a dissection of crap modern Britain before the bubble burst. In Ballard’s evocation of society drifting waywardly into an elective collective psychopathy, it is the shopping mall that is the cynosure – at once a temple of consumerism and biosphere that, poisoned by re-circulated air and piped muzak, becomes wholly decoupled from the dull Surrey dormitory towns that surround it.
Erasing David Q&A
“Leaving his pregnant wife at home in London, director David Bond takes his camera on the run, trying to evade capture for 30 days from private investigators hired to track him down. Trawling through social networking websites and state and commercial databases, and utilising mobile phone tracking technology, the investigators are soon hot on the trail, probing into the most minute details of David’s family life. With the film demonstrating the staggering amount of information about our lives available in the public domain, notions of a surveillance state suddenly seem all too real.”
Blair and New Labour: I told you so
‘During the 1997 election I put up a handmade poster in the house where I lived that read: “A Vote for Labour is Not Necessarily a Vote for That Sanctimonious Git Blair.” I-told-you-so is never an attractive quality, but while my sign may have been factually incorrect, I was spot-on when it came to the man himself, which was why my tick was placed elsewhere in 2001, 2005, and will be again come May.
Sky Arts Book Show: Liver
Watch Will Self on the Sky Arts Book Show talking about his short story collection Liver among other things here.
The planet after humans
It’s a measure of how our conceptions of Eden have done an abrupt 180-degree handbrake turn that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us should have become a bestseller. This thought experiment, imagining what a post-human world might be like — and how quickly Mummy Gaia would recover from the depredations of her wayward sons and daughters — ended up being advertised on the Tube. As you descended the escalator into the frowsty netherworld, you could feast your eyes on the book’s cover image: Nelson’s Column entwined in a bushy convolvulus while the admiral’s stony gaze surveyed a tree canopy undulating towards the horizon.
The forward mulch of Labour
The latest Real Meals column is here:
Even people who know absolutely nothing about British politics of the past two decades still know that Peter Mandelson once mistakenly referred to mushy peas as guacamole in a Hartlepool fish-and-chip shop. So widespread is the awareness of this epochal solecism that when I was on an eco-holiday last year, deep in the Congolese rainforest, I was accosted by a group of Ituri pygmies who suggestively poked my groin with their spears while chanting: “Mishy-mushy, mishy-mushy, mushy-pea-Pe-ter!”