Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. Neither long nor contemporary but funny (in a waspish, schadenfreude sense) and about the kind of female writer who writes the comically bad version of what perhaps you're actually after, with no little unacknowledged sadness in there, all in highly drinkable prose.
Dinnerinafancyrestaurantladies
Sure have. Brilliant book. i also treasure my copy of It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track - older LRB pieces packaged together, and magic.
Ian Penman on the Beach Boys - impeccable. My word, he’s good at this. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Oh I very much will. God, that man.
Zoe’s piece on advertising agency culture remains definitive. zoescaman.substack.com/p/mad-men-fu...
Found a Mad Men box set in a charity shop. £2 - couldn’t not. (Some sense is kicking in I should be prepping for streamer collapse.) The media outlet calling depictions (S1 alone) of brutal misogyny, blatant racism, forced adoption and workplace bullying “sheer joy”? That’ll be the Mail On Sunday.
Finished this over the weekend. It’s very good. There’s a recurring line that defines America as “an adolescence without end“ and I keep thinking about that.
❤️
Oh this looks magnificent - thank you.
Did you get Keenan talking about Weatherall? He was great at those 60th birthday talks at Fabric… And on the music press and how good it was for artists to have a community of listeners, readers, writers gathered round like that. Looking forward to that one…
April
🎶 *bryan ferry voice*
“Disposable darling
You’ve made so much money
My new hobby is flags
It’s a national emergency”
Really enjoyed this one, Phil
👌
Yes it’s the most Partridge moment ever but also, having just read the book thanks to @iammilliam.bsky.social and @andrewmale.bsky.social, I can’ see Goodwin as a akin to Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel - brittle, self-regarding, impervious to reflection, a laughing stock who will never realise it.
As a radio DJ Craig Charles is a great reader-out of words other people have written for him to say, other than he also sounds totally wooden doing that.
Anyway, if you see Liam, let him be. He’s having the time of his life and my friend doesn’t need to hear about it. He’s old now, and jealous.
Is that it? Are people projecting indoorness onto our wild, brazen, live-for-today-don’t-care-bout-tomorrow cats? This is PC* gone mad.
*Parenting Cats
Our cat was brought to the vet once, who called us. The vet is at the end of our road. So was the cat. ‘She was in a bush and looked wet.’ Yeah, she’s a cat. My friend’s cat’s vet said about 70% of cats are ‘indoor cats.’ What?! Madness.
I am shocked though at how many people are cat meddlers. Have you ever felt it necessary to call an owner because a cat was ‘in the middle of the road‘ or ‘looked sad at the window’. Like, it’s a cat. Let it roam. Leave my friend alone.
This is the cat. Real ‘draw me like one of your French cats’ vibes. Sadly, his name is not Cat Winslet. It is Liam. This feels apt for a true rocknroll star of cats.
My friend fields sometimes 6 calls a day from people demanding he collect his cat. The cat goes missing for days and has been found in pubs, schools, people’s homes. He‘s been in the cathedral, the zoo, followed a guy home from the Thekla once.
The culture you describe in this piece is kinda familiar to me but mostly alien. I’ve seen the river but I don’t know its tributaries. Now I’ve read your generous piece, I really, really want to listen to this album, and I can learn and connect as I do
The Morrissey of academia
New McCartney is just lovely. Feels somewhere between Rubin-produced Johnny Cash and Sufjan’s Carrie And Lowell. Hazy, melancholy, voice soft and occasionally cracking
*regressing. Though open to suggestions as to what ‘refressing’ might mean.
#nowplaying, special weather turning/refressing edition
