Will Self's Blog, page 38

William Burroughs at 100

Will Self is one of the contributors to the Radio 4 programme Burroughs at 100, presented by Iggy Pop and available for five days to listen again to.

Real meals: Urban Eat

I hope some of you, after you finish reading this column, will go straight to urbaneat.co.uk, where you can find out all about such “real food” as the “hand-crafted” red Thai chicken wrap I saw advertised in my local Costa clone yesterday. (Costa clones are coffee shops so lacking in self-esteem that they’re “proud to serve Costa coffee”.) This particular wrap was pictured apparently lying in the roadway of Benefits Street – or at any rate, somewhere gritty and urban – with a disproportionate...

On addiction and the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rhyJaK6obU

Watch Will Self on Newsnight talking about addiction, after the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The madness of crowds: Clapham High Street

It must have been in the late spring of 1982. I went down to London from Oxford, where I was at university, to buy a bag of marijuana from a friend of a friend who had a room in a squat immediately behind Brixton police station. “It’s a great gaff to deal out of,” the bespectacled little fellow said. “I mean, this is the last place they’d come looking – right by their back door.” Maybe he was right; after all, it was only a year since Brixton had been up in flames, the railway bridge was stil...

On Guy Debord – podcast

http://media.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/2014-01-23-will-self.mp3

Listen to Will Self in discussion withPatrick Keiller andMatthew Beaumont at the LRB bookshop recently.

“We’ve never had it so good”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Xx3XGCZsY

Watch Will Self debating the motion “We’ve Never Had it so Good” with Rod Liddle, Rachel Johnson and Jesse Norman, in this recent Intelligence Squared debate.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products – review

“Quoting his subject’s words at the head of the chapter on the design and development of Apple’s iPhone, Leander Kahney makes Jony Ive sound oracular: “When we are at these early stages in design … often we’ll talk about the story for the product — we’re talking about perception. We’re talking about how you feel about the product, not in a physical sense, but in a perceptual sense.” Throughout his biography of Apple’s design magus for nigh on the past two decades, Kahney comes at Ive’s notion...

On Patrick Keiller

There’s a 4,000 word essay that Will Self has written about Patrick Keiller and his new book, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, at the London Review of Books website here. Will is going to be talking about Guy Debord with Patrick at the LRB bookshop in London tomorrow and there should be a podcast available soon after to listen to.

‘A crowd of one nutter: Prince Harry’

Someone asked me to go to Antarctica in November – it was a press junket, an 11-day cruise leaving from southern Argentina. I don’t normally go a-junketing; to my way of thinking, it takes being a hack – which is bad enough – dangerously close to the icy and treacherous waters of marketing and public relations. I don’t have any objection to joining the 35,000 or so tourists who head for the Antarctic each year; it’s hardly that big a crowd and there’s nothing delusional about wanting to see f...

Heroin on Radio 4

Will Self is one of the contributors to the BBC documentary Heroin, in whichProfessor Andrew Hussey explores the effect of the drug on the creative output of those who have been heavily involved in using heroin, and before it, opium. You can listen to it here.