Will Self has contributed to a documentary entitled The Future of Work and Death that explores how imminent technologies may – or may not – have a seismic effect on how society operates. The film chiefly focuses on artificial intelligence, “negligible senescence” and silicon-based immortality.
There’s a Kickstarter page here too.
Will Self writes about the drowned world of JG Ballard’s Shepperton in the first column of his new psychogeography series, On location, in the New Statesman, available online soon. This replaces his Real Meals column.
Watch the political philosopher John Gray and Will Self discussing JG Ballard’s work, his cities and his legacy in this Festival of Ideas talk from 2011, here.
In largeheartedboy.com’s Book Notes series, Will Self has created – and discusses – a music playlist that relates to his most recently published book, Umbrella, from the Kinks’ “Ape Man” to “Don’t Let it Die” by Hurricane Smith.
Itsu is a Japanese-inspired chain of some 40 takeaways and a brace of proper restaurants that are scattered across London’s financial district with a few outliers, including one in Oxford. Itsu – which is a Japanese prefix meaning “when” – was founded by Julian Metcalfe, who is also responsible for Pret A Manger, so you get the semantic synonymy.
I ate in a branch of Itsu near St Paul’s a couple of weeks ago, and for some perverse reason I so enjoyed the experience that I returned to see whether I had been suffering from a hallucination: the decor had seemed so pleasing, the service so light-touch and the food so deliquescent.
I had been hallucinating – on second pass, Itsu was just another fast-food joint with a shtick devised to part office porkers from their readies.
I suppose it is interesting to ruminate on this strange fact along with one’s Itsu salad box: that over the past 15 years or so, simulacrums of Japanese eateries have come increasingly to dominate British high streets, much as replicants of human beings will doubtless vault the boulevards of Los Angeles come the end of this decade. In City of Quartz, his fine work on the psychogeography of LA, Mike Davis hypothesises that the Asiatic hordes teeming through Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner were a sublimation of the anxiety felt by Hollywood during the early 1980s as more and more prime downtown real estate was snaffled up by the Japanese. Fair enough, yet this doesn’t really explain why British quants and financial traders are now so enamoured of rice noodle soup and sushi selections – unless, that is, they believe that by eating Japanese they will magically ward off the deflation that has bitten down on the once-tiger economy for the past 25 years.
The Itsu philosophy (if we can sully the word) is to respond to “years of listening and reacting to customer feedback” by “creating a low-calorie menu for the upbeat and the active”. But am I alone in detecting a contradiction here? The last thing the active and upbeat require is “butterfly-light, low-fat, nutritsu food”; I mean, if you’re properly active you can get away with more or less limitless stodge. As for the grim coinage “nutritsu”, this is of a piece with other bits of babyish signage stuck up in Itsu – ask not for a noodle pot but a “noodle potsu”, and (most yucky this) you might like to sluice it down with an “itea”. Combine with the life-size sepia shots of etiolated Japanese maidens in itsu-bitsy bikinis that adorn the walls and you get the picture: Itsu is aimed not so much at the high, male end of the City feeding chain but at female secretaries and keyboard rifflers whose sedentary drudging is – they quite reasonably worry – turning them to sludge.
On beige-vinyl-covered stools held aloft by mirror-shiny aluminium poles, with one’s Hello Kitty handbag shackled to the underside of the table by a purpose-designed strap (handy, that), you can squirt soy sauce from one of those dear little individual plastic bottles into one of those dear little individual plastic trays, then mix in the wasabi with the tip of your chopstick. Mm, it’s all so . . . diminutive. On reflection, I think it is this aspect of Japanese culture that most appeals to us at an unconscious level: the saccharine infantilising of the bitter pill of machine-ordered conformity. We may have to work all the hours Mammon sends, but at least we can have our lunch break in cute surroundings, our fair cheeks brushed by the wings of the Itsu butterfly logo.
In fact, the food at Itsu is perfectly all right. Even close to closing time on a gloomy October evening the salad still had some bounce in it and the sushi some bite. As for the miso soup – which Metcalfe has insinuated on to the shelves at Sainsbury’s – it was a wholesome mixture and looked, as good miso soup should, like the beginnings of an attempt to see if life can be synthesised in a laboratory.
In a way, I find this most disturbing of all: that food should be subject to the most ruthless commoditisation under late capitalism is only to be expected, but that we should for one second allow ourselves to enjoy it is a miserable and gut-wrenching experience. Every time I find myself savouring under such circumstances, I double-take, remembering Winston Smith looking up from the table at the Chestnut Tree Café to see the implacable face of Julian Metcalfe – sorry, I mean “Big Brother” – staring down at him, and returning that dictatorial gaze with . . . love.
Flytopia short film from Karni and Saul – Sulkybunny on Vimeo.
Film version of Will Self’s short story Flytopia from his collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys from Film4. You can read what Will has to say about it too. Flytopia was filmed by Karni & Saul, and it premiered online today.
Friday 20 September, 6.15pm: Barbican, as part of Urban Wandering season: Screening of Estates and a panel discussion afterwards with Lynsey Hanley et al, barbican.org.uk.
Friday 27 September, 7pm: Portobello Pop-Up cinema under the Westway at Ladbroke Grove, screening of London Babylon followed by conversation with the director, Julien Temple.
Wednesday 2 October, 6.15pm: Barbican, as part of Urban Wandering season, in conversation with “place-hacker” Bradley L Garrett – Shard climber – et al, barbican.org.uk.
Saturday 5 October, 2.30pm: Snape Maltings, Flipside festival, in conversation with Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho.
Sunday 6 October, 8.30pm: Cheltenham festival, live performance of Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor accompanied by Peter Wiegold’s klezmer band.
Monday 7 October, 7.30pm: Birmingham festival of literature.
Wednesday 13 October, 6.30pm: Bloomsbury festival, in conversation at Senate House.
North America:
Monday 21 October, 7.30pm-9pm: Texas A&M University. Presented by the Department of Literature and Languages, 203 Hall of Languages, Commerce, Texas 75429, USA.
Tuesday 22 October: Reading and signing, Live Talks, 6204 West 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA.
Thursday 24 October, 7pm: Reading and signing, Seattle public library, Microsoft Auditorium, 1000 Fourth Ave, Seattle, WA 98104, USA.
Saturday 26 October, 8pm: Reading and signing, Vancouver international writers’ festival, Canada.
Sunday 27 October: 11am: Writers’ brunch, Vancouver international writers’ festival, Canada.
Monday 28 October: (time tbc): In conversation with Professor Mark Mazower at Columbia University, Heyman Center for the Humanities, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Tuesday 29 October, 7pm: In conversation with Martin Amis, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012, USA.
Wednesday 30 October, 7pm: Reading and signing, Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Heading very slowly across town to the Slug & Lettuce in the Borough, I kept looking behind me to check that I was leaving a man-sized slime trail on the pavement. I was feeling pretty low on this, my 23rd Father’s Day. Not, you appreciate, that a fearless gastropod like me has any need for such marketing-led pseudo-festivals – although it did occur to me that not one of my little slime had bothered to mark the event with so much as a tweak of my antennae.
Ah well, I could rely on the Slug & Lettuce to make good the emotional deficit financially; because – so long as the staff didn’t scatter salt on me the second I oozed through the door – I had some astonishing Father’s Day offers to look forward to. The one pellet (an ironic pet name we molluscs bestow on our offspring) I’d hung on to would eat for only a pound, while I’d receive absolutely free a patriarchal pint of beer. True, I don’t actually drink alcohol any more but I was looking forward to pouring my free pint down the Slug & Lettuce urinals as a sort of libation for all those fathers whose alcoholism had deprived them of access to their own children on Father’s Day. I’m not joking.
Anyway, the smear cheered me up: the sun came out and the pellet kept scooting ahead at speeds in excess of 0.0001 miles an hour. Ah, the energy of the young! But as we reached the establishment – housed, like many others of this 80-strong chain, in a former bank – the trouble started: despite the Slug & Lettuce being, on the face of it, a pub, the dog wasn’t allowed inside. (Don’t ask me to explain why a slug has a pet dog, just run with me on this thing.) We were exiled to a grim seating area at the prow end of the old, boat-shaped building, where we could look upon a First World War memorial that featured a Tommy petrified in mid-sprint. Was he advancing or retreating – who could say?
I didn’t mind not getting to sit in the restaurant – the decor was a puke-inducing gallimaufry of padded vinyl, beige tile, “decorative” mirroring and dark wood. Random sections of wall had been abused with sub-Bridget Riley wavy wallpaper, while a weird mushrooming column dominated the main area, with – get this! – a series of fake chandeliers dangling from its white plaster cap.
Besides, sitting on the patio I was able to Google the Slug & Lettuce and not only read up on it but also discover that I’d namechecked the chain when I reviewed All Bar One in this weird, mushrooming column a couple of years ago. I wasn’t complimentary, but described S&L, erroneously, as if it were the gateway drug for all such other narcotised faux-pubs. It wasn’t . . . but then, quite frankly, who cares?
Who cares what was on the menu, either? I mean, if you’ve reached this stage in life – a New Statesman reader still against all the odds cleaving to a progressive socialist ideal in the centennial year of this publication – do you really want to know about this mishmash, bish-bosh nosh? Suffice to say the menu was full of those process descriptions that first came into vogue in the late 1980s – some dishes were “lightly coated”, others “lightly dusted”; others still were “served on a bed” (something I assumed only happens to the Duchess of Cambridge with a turkey baster), and also “finished with coconut cream”. The pellet had a burger, I had a Caesar salad with “shredded” chicken. Ach! All this shredding – the Yiddish word for non-kosher food is “trayf”, which means torn or shredded; I wondered if the S&L powers-that-be were trying to tell me something.
The waiter – who was eastern European, of course – had three things to tell me: when I went in to ask for the bill he informed me that because there wasn’t “table service” outside I should’ve given her my credit card to begin with so he could open a tab. The idea of it! A tab at the Slug & Lettuce! The second thing he told me was that the pellet wouldn’t eat for a quid because he hadn’t ordered off the kids menu, and the third was that I wouldn’t be receiving my free Father’s Day pint because I hadn’t had a burger.
“So, that’s Father’s Day at the Slug & Lettuce!” I said to the waiter and he grimaced sympathetically. “Still,” I continued, “I expect they’re fucking you over too.”
He grimaced differently, but conceded: “Since the recession, things have got . . . worse.”
I said, “I’m sorry about that . . . I can afford to be philosophic, after all since I’m a slug – and hence a hermaphrodite – I’m always fucking myself over anyway.”
Will Self introduces a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the ICA in London at 7pm on July 9. For further details, go here.
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