Will Self's Blog, page 37

My Festival Hell

“Five or six times during the 11 hours Ispent at the festival, people came up and asked me what Iwas doing there, and I explained that I’d made abit of a mistake, having assumed that I was coming to areading festival, not the Reading one.”

Will Self on attending Reading Festival with his son Ivan – read the full Esquire article.

Cultural Capital: Artisan Crisp Antipathy

If, as Nietzsche assures us, wit is the epitaph of an emotion, what then is the crisp if not the apotheosis of hunger? The crisp promises so much – yet delivers nothing at all. Vladimir Putin disdains the alcohol that transmogrifies his countrymen and women into slobbering, soulful wretches but I’d wager he forgoes crisps as well. When I consider the amount of time I’ve wasted eating crisps – let alone the money I’ve spent on these fried andfriable folderols – it occurs to me that,sanscrunch,...

At the crossroads

Read an interview Will gave for Gramophone magazine here – along with Iain Sinclair and Chris Gollon – focusing on the “crossroads of music, literature and art”.

The madness of crowds: Fearless flying

I was hungover and jittery in St Louis, and there was a blizzard raging across the Midwest. As I looked at the departures board in the airport it riffled into DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED . . . the only exception being the New York flight: my own. Cursing this glitch that was sending me to my doom, I tramped down the companionway, reflecting ruefully on howmy last moments on earth were to be spent noting, yet again, the bizarre habit air transport infrastructure designers have of fitting odd ver...

On location: The Great Barn at Harmondsworth

It’s a blustery grey day on top of the short-stay car park at Heathrow Central. Down below us the new Terminal 2 building is taking shape in a series of steely whale ribs and arabesques. It doesn’t look like it will turn out to be anything much, but then nothing in the built environment nowadays looks like anything much; or, rather, it all looks like too much – too much airy embellishment, too many wave-form roofs, too many great expanses of curved glass parametrically wrapped around hideous...

Real meals: The cinema

Harvey Woolfe, a regular consumer of Real Meals, writes to suggest that I tackle the vexed question of cinema food. He observes that whereas there are tintinnabulating warnings in advance of every screening that patrons should put their mobile phones on silent, there is nothing done about the clash of their jaws, the gargling of their gullets, or – my favourite, this – that peculiarly gravelly noise the last few centilitres of a fizzy beverage makes as it is sucked up a straw from a waxed pap...

On location: JG Ballard’s flooded Shepperton

On the cover of the Daily Mail the other day, there was an aerial photograph of the Thameside town of Shepperton, its achingly dull semis and prosaic garage forecourts submerged in the muddy brown effluvium. The editor of the New Statesman emailed me: “Your pal Jim wouldn’t have been surprised.” This reference to the late JG Ballard, for many years Shepperton’s most notorious resident, got me thinking about the strange conceptual flotsam that the current deluges are dumping on the floodplain...

Real meals: Garages

If motorway service centres with their sweaty agglomerations of Burger King, KFC and Costa are the brothels of fast food, then garages are its knocking shops: the places where stressed-out people commit unspeakable and degrading acts with Peperami. No one in their right mind would ever visit a garage for the love of gastronomy, yet everybody who’s passing through seizes the opportunity to put something in their mouth. Why, when the combination of foods that are necessarily high in salt and pr...

On surrealism

Will Self is one of the contributors to the Radio 4 programme, Tony Law’s Surreal Guide to Surreal Comedy, available to listen to for three days.

New column

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.