The Book Tower

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough euros to go round. “The entire EU is short on coins.”
And I say, “Really?” because there are plenty of them in Germany. I’m never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian casiers, who are, in a word, lazy.

When you are Engulfed in Flames is my introduction to the writing of David Sedaris. This is a collection of loosely connected autobiographical pieces, and the writing has a neat line in self deprecating humour and is full of excellent observations on the everday; it’s the kind of writing I suspect we all aspire to. It’s also the sort of thing you’d expect to find in the pages of the New Yorker, prose that’s as well crafted and nourishing as a good and wholesome meal.

His sixth publication, I’m late to the Sedaris world. His pieces come across as very compact, well-constructed short stories, although this book is officially categorised as autobiography. Sedaris is best when writing about himself and his view of the world; his Greek heritage, upbringing, life as a writer and its odd encounters, addictions, his homosexuality. He also touches on death and all it threatens, a subject he cannot help veering towards. There are also two hilarious accounts of airline travel, where in one he manages to deposit a sucked throat lozenge on a sleeping woman’s lap, and in another he sits beside a weeping, and ultimately irritating, man. The best however is the last section of the book, The Smoking Section, where Sedaris moves to Tokyo for three months in an attempt to give up smoking and to learn Japanese. He only succeeds with one of these goals. This was a highly enjoyable book that I polished off in two days. I look forward to more of his musings.

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Unusual for a music autobiography, Alex James hasn’t used a ghost writer for his memoir Bit of a Blur. He has an easy, engaging writing style of his own that strolls through his time as bass player with Blur, living a booze-fuelled hedonistic lifestyle in the 1990s. He’s proud of the achievement of one of the most successful bands of that decade, but he’s also fond of recounting stories of drinking in the Groucho Club and his friendship with Damien Hirst and Keith Allen. James comes across as a pleasant enough chap, but he can’t help also revealing that he’s been incredibly lucky, sailing through his life and grasping all of the amazing opportunities offered to him.

Blur peaked in 1994 and 1995, following the incredibly successful (and also very good) album Parklife with their part in Britpop and the much talked about public battle with Oasis. James talks less about this that you might expect, and most interesting is the few years in the early 90s that Blur spent struggling; a run of very minor hit singles, a poor selling album and a lengthy US tour orchestrated to beat bankruptcy. Here is the seed for what could have been a very good book, although I suspect that James is very much aware that his fellow band members Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon were the talented ones. James was content to get drunk, look pretty and go along for the ride – he’s more at home writing about this than of any enduring artistic legacy.

Bit of a Blur gets the award for most reviewed paperback in British broadsheets this weekend. It’s also one of the best marketed books I’ve seen recently, although it could have been so much better, and I left it knowing little more than I already knew about a band I was so fond of in their heyday. The drinking and sexual exploits I could have done without. A bit of a bore really.

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From The Pickards.
Are there any extremely famous, worthy or acclaimed films that you’ve never made the effort to see? I’ve seen all of Hitchcock. I’ve also seen most of Truffaut. But I have a lot of gaps. In the days of video recorders I would tape worthy films, keep them for years and eventually tape over them. I kept The Mission starring Robert De Niro for years and never watched it. Films I have simply never seen and have never had the urge to see include:

• Anything with Humphrey Bogart in it
• Anything by Fellini
• My Left Foot
• Any of the Star Wars films apart from the first one
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Anything with Bette Davis in it apart from the Hammer film where she wears an eyepatch
• Born on the Fourth of July
• Any Charlie Chaplin
• There Will be Blood (has anyone actually seen this?)
• Anything by Clint Eastwood post Unforgiven
• Anything by Martin Scorsese post Goodfellas (I threw the DVD of Gangs of New York across the room)
• Practically everything by Robert Altman
• The Sound of Music, even though we have it at home on DVD
• Battleship Potemkin
• Most of what you might call The Meryl Streep Collection
• I also have a problem with Al Pacino, although I have endured Scarface
• Gone With the Wind
• 95% of Westerns
• High School Musical
• Bend it Like Beckham
• All Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney collaborations

I’d also like the time back I wasted on trying to understand the Bourne films.

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