Will Self's Blog, page 41

Hatchet Job – review

Will Self’s review of Mark Kermode’s Hatchet Job, from tomorrow’s Guardian Review.

Madness of crowds: Skeuomorphs

What a lot of skeuomorphs there are around nowadays – once you begin noticing them, they crop up everywhere. A skeuomorph, for those of you not design-savvy, is any derivative object that treats as ornamental elements that were functional in the original. One of my favourite examples is Anaglypta wallpaper, which I didn’t know – until I was told by the director of the National Gallery, no less – owes its raised ridging and epidermal feel to its origin in the tooled hides that adorned the wall...

On housing

You can watch Will Self talking about housing, on Channel 4 News tonighthere.

Big Issue birthday

Will has written an introduction to this week’s 22nd birthday edition of the Big Issue. Do buy a copy:

“These accounts by Big Issue sellers of their favourite places do not read like conventional descriptions of ‘attractions’; they are the considered opinions of people who know a place bottom up – who’ve experienced it from the perspective of the pavement and cardboard-box-bash; who’ve filtered it through the harsh realisation that to be here, now, is all they have.

“This is the queered topogra...

Question Time

Will Self is going to be on Question Time tomorrow on BBC1, along with Douglas Alexander and Michael Gove, among others.

Real meals: Fasting

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman is here.

Autumn events, and 10-day US and Canada tour

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 20 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,...

Real meals: Five Guys

Five Guys is a US fast-food chain that’s been high-profile there for some years. This is for two reasons: way back in 2009, President Oburger – sorry, I mean Obama – made a televised visit to one of its burger joints in Washington, DC and since then he’s been subject to holding press conferences there whenever it’s too rainy for the Rose Garden. So politically influential has Five Guys become that when the Washington Examiner was scrabbling for objectors to the president’s new health insuranc...

The madness of crowds: Speeding and the Tower Bridge 22

At the speed awareness course run by AA DriveTech somewhere in the arse-end of the Angel, I run into Stephen Bayley, the design guru. Bayley is the author of (among many other works) Sex, Drink and Fast Cars, a copy of which he rather opportunistically has in the Gladstone bag he’s lugging along at the end of his cream-linen-clad arm. A quick exchange establishes that he, like me, was nabbed by the speed cameras on Tower Bridge doing 27mph. Our admission calls forth from our fellow course par...

The madness of crowds: Dance crazes

A while ago, a regular round-robin emailer, Hassan (big-up to him), sent me a link to a Palestinian “Gangnam Style” video on YouTube. In this, a group of young men living in the Gaza Strip do all of the things that the South Korean rich kids do in the original Psy pop promo. That they’re confined in what is – to all intents and purposes – a giant concentration camp soon becomes painfully clear: they have to push their car in to the petrol station; they have no money to hang out in stylish bar...