The day that Judy Garland attempted suicide for the second time, Katharine Hepburn elbowed her way through the throng of reporters and paparazzi outside the Minnelli house, shouting back at them from over her shoulder, “Don’t you have anything better to do?” She sat Judy down, one legendary actress to another, and said, unsmiling: “Now listen, you’re one of the three greatest talents in the world. And your ass has hit the gutter. There’s no place to go but up. Now, goddammit.
The urban village. A Jane Austen vision of pastoral Britain complete with farmers’ markets and bunting projected on to high streets up and down the country. Oblivious to the green beacon of the job centre; impervious to the homeless man asleep in the shop doorway; pro-bike, anti-lorry; in short, a regression.
Flatland is a social satire by Edwin Abbott Abbott, published in 1884. The book describes a world of only two dimensions, in which each character is a different class of geometric shape, and is narrated by a pseudonymous ‘Square’. One day, the Square is visited by a Sphere from Spaceland, a world that has three dimensions.
A decade after first watching Dazed and Confused, I still find myself trawling through rails in vintage shops with only the costumes of the cast in mind. And as soon as I spot an item that even slightly resembles something one of them might wear, I hear Steven Tyler’s voice in my head, singing loud and clear: “Sweeeeeeeeeeet emmooooooooootioooon”.
It wasn’t a Suzuki GSX-R750 – the bike I’d always wanted – that would come later. It was a Suzuki GSX-R600 – near enough, certainly for me, who’d never ridden anything faster than a Lambretta. I’d always had Lambrettas: GPs, Yorkshire style, no Moddy crap – race-tuned, stripped-down, 85 mph – fast for a scooter.
My name is Tom and I have a job as a radio presenter for BBC 6 Music. It’s a pretty nice gig in that my week consists mainly of bombarding my head with a variety of terrible, unfortunate, occasionally magnificent and often confusing music. A combination of going through lot of records people have kindly sent, and shopping until I drop for new and interesting things in the stores around London.
In the lunch break of a soul-sapping temp job, I typed my own name into a search engine. Travelling back a few pages into the sticky ‘ooooo’ of Google, I found a review someone had written of a film I had acted in when I was a child. I was struck by the author’s tone.
