In this instalment, I’d like to sing the praises of Word, a fairly new music and entertainment magazine – sort of like Heat, but for people who aren’t slack-jawed yokels (apologies to any Heat readers I know). Among the reasons I like the edition I bought are:
1) It informed me that Ian Rankin really, really liked Treasure Planet. For some reason, this makes me giggle every time I think about it.
2) Their resident critic implicitly agrees with me that Jack Kerouac was a talentless hack who wasn’t fit to spike William Burroughs’ veins.
3) The suggestion that The Cure's "Let's Go To Bed" - a pop song about being frightened of the prospect of having sex - is the most English piece of music ever. I propose we adopt it as the National Anthem.
4) Mark E. Smith (Yes, that one) gave his views on Alan Clark’s The Fall of Crete, in a passage so wonderful that I fear I must quote it:
“It’s a great picture of British incompetence. We’ve got these Greek irregulars, farm lads from the Lake District and some Maoris lined up against these supermen Nazi paratroopers falling from the sky. There’s a good bit where the Greeks attack the Germans – women with knives tied on brooms and some kids with dogs up against machine guns firing three hundred bullets a minute.”
I also decided at the weekend to go out and spend some of the cash I’m earning. Armed with some of my vouchers from Christmas, I returned with No Pasaran!, a graphic novel set in the Spanish Civil War (How could I resist?), a book on screenwriting, and Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, which I got for the bargain price of £3.
The weekend also saw me channelling some kind of burst of restless energy: I knocked off the first draft of a screenplay (that book paying off already), tarted up a short story that I’ve had in a semi-finished state for a while, put together a basic outline for a PhD proposal, and went to the Science Museum to grab a couple of photos. Crikey.
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