Once more unto the bleach, dear follicles. Though as my hair is pretty short, I now look like Eminem with a side parting.
(Is Eminem still going? Is anyone still going? Who’s the Prime Minister again?)
Have overdone the peroxide a little, resulting in a few days’ shame with pink skin around the hairline, plus a tight, sore scalp that feels it might fall off. Must remember to spend less time under the chemical halo. It’s not as if I’m a novice.
Monday: to Wahaca, an affordable Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden. An evening meal in the company of the frankly godlike novelist Dennis Cooper, along with other visitors to his blog such as the photographer of note, Marc Vallee. I get DC to sign my copy of ‘All Ears’, his collection of non-fiction articles. One of which is an interview with Keanu Reeves, conducted just before the shooting of Point Break, plus the second Bill & Ted movie, plus My Own Private Idaho. A vintage Keanu year. The young Mr Reeves is funny and fizzy, and clearly great company – close to the ‘Ted’ character. One wishes he’d do one more comedy, after all the serious and portentous Matrix goings-on. Maybe a forty-something update: ‘Bill & Ted Get Into Endowment Mortgages’.
Mr Cooper is only in London for a couple of days, yet the Customs officers at Eurostar St Pancras (he’s an American based in Paris) gave him a hard time. Once he said he didn’t know exactly where he was staying (he was meeting a friend who would take him to a hotel), that was reason enough to install him in The Unkind Room. They grilled him about his last trip to the country a year ago (and expected him to produce the ticket for proof), then asked him to go online and prove he was who he said he was, and so on. Their parting shot was to tell him to ‘never to use Eurostar to enter the UK again’. Utterly baffling.
In other unfair Customs news, Tony O’Neill sends me his excellent interview with Sebastian Horsley for S Magazine in the US. It’s timed with the Stateside release of Mr H’s ‘Dandy In The Underworld’. After conducting the interview over the phone, Mr O’Neill goes to meet the notorious memoirist at his NYC book launch, only to discover the party’s off. It turns out US Immigration has banned Mr Horsley from entering the country, citing ‘Moral Turpitude’. They’d read the book. Still, if that sort of thing could boost any career rather than hinder it, it’s Mr Horsley’s. I’m flattered that the article also refers to me and my diary.
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Yet another Swedish interview for Fosca is online:
http://www.stockholmsfria.nu/artikel/21327
I wonder what the bit about ‘cute and puppy’ means.
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Greatly enjoyed this weekend’s Doctor Who, set in Pompeii. Top marks for an in-joke for Latin students: the main family in the story have their names taken from the Cambridge Latin Course. I took the course as part of my ‘O’ Level circa 1985, and it still seems to be in use today, judging by a few blog discussions. It was a series of orange booklets introducing Latin for beginners, following a Pompeii family as they go about their daily life (eg ‘Module 5 – The Baths’), until the final module when Vesuvius erupts and all the characters bite the volcanic dust. eheu! fugaces labuntur anni!
