America: the new black

I went to a screening of the documentary America Unchained the other night at the Clapham Picture House, followed by a Q&A with the film's star, comedian Dave Gorman (this is the cover of the companion book). It is sort of a 'set yourself a Morgan Spurlockian task' type doc: Gorman and a director try to travel across the US from California to the East Coast without buying anything from a chain store or big corporation. It is, as you might imagine, a difficult task. Filling up the gas tank proves most daunting, particularly on the highway, so Gorman ends up driving along the back roads through small town America.

The film is a trifle contrived, of course, but compelling, and it shows how in many ways Western society has lost a lot of its soul with corporate homogenisation. I say Western because this McDonaldisation is not just an American disease; just look at any UK high street.

A thing that struck me, though, was that the film was respectful, if not positively flattering, of most of the Americans in it. Small town Americans are easily caricatured, and often are, as thick-set, guileless, gun-toting, bible-bashing loons. But the people in Gorman's film are friendly, decent, curious and overly generous (for example he is invited to a family Thanksgiving dinner by a guy who runs the mom and pop hotel he is staying at).

There seems to be some sort of thawing of at least British attitudes towards Americans. The BBC's North American editor Justin Webb recently brought out a book eulogising how brilliant America is. This is a new, and slightly disconcerting experience for your Expat. I've not experienced much overtly hostile anti-Americanism since living abroad, except once having a pint of beer poured over my head by a fat, mustachioed Serb in Budapest during the height of the Kosovo conflict. But this was the sort of place where knife fights would occasionally break out, so I got off lightly. Mostly any anti-Americanism is subtler; people think I must be stupid and irony-free, speaking to me slowly and rather patronisingly.

The has gone by the board with goodwill from the Obama honeymoon continuing without abeyance - people are excited to talk to me about the US, ask me if I'm upset to be away at this historic moment, etc. There are smiles and thumbs up from my normally sour, scowling neighbour who once told me whilst we got talking at the recycling bin that the US was responsible for all the evil in the world and he hated all Americans ('you're not too bad, though').

Can't wait for the author tour

I was thinking of Thomas Pynchon yesterday in the news agent's, which was a shrine to Jade Goody, her bald pate plastered on every paper from the red tops to the broadsheets.

Being able to live your life on screen and in print is the most cherished goal of our narcissistic age; Goody choosing to have her death in front of it perhaps the pinnacle of that. Her publicist says now that she won't actually die on camera, but I am unconvinced. I suggested to colleagues that she will sell right to a camera installed in her coffin so viewers could see her body decompose. They thought this in bad taste, but surely it is the logical conclusion.

I don't begrudge Goody whatever money or fame she has found from, well, doing nothing apart from being a reality TV celebrity. If magazines and newspapers are willing to fork over cash to take photos of a cancer victim as she wastes away, she would be stupid not to take it. And complaining about it in a blog which is itself some form of narcissism would be a tad ironic.

But there was perhaps a balancing out of the universe when Pynchon's new book was bought by a UK publisher in the week Goody announced she had a month or so to live. Pynchon, choosing to live his life out of the public eye, is the matter to Goody's anti-matter; if the two ever met there would probably be some rent in the time space continuum, destroying life as we know it. He is often called a 'recluse' in the press, but that is just journo-speak for not speaking to the press. He apparently lives in New York City, has a family, gets out to gigs and is a fan of at least one indie rock band. He obviously has some sense of humour about the whole thing as well, having sent up his whole image on The Simpsons twice.

But I find it comforting that there is still someone out there who lets the work speak for itself. His next book is to be a detective novel and though it assuredly won't be like most of the genre, it may be more accessible than his other books. I once read Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow back-to-back, which I do not recommend. It was difficult, not Finnegans Wake difficult, but I felt blinkered, bludgeoned and beaten up, and couldn't read anything more challenging than Heat magazine for about a month. But the crime novel might lead to more fans. His last book Against the Day sold 10,500 copies in the UK. Jade Goody's first autobiography: 130,000. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about the times we live in.

On the bus 1

The cattle car closeness of London transport means it is difficult to even open up a tabloid, so many folk read books. I find this comforting; the world might be a more sane and safer place if people ignored the constant shriek and wail of the daily newspapers. Trade magazines should still be read scrupulously, though.

Today on the 176, I'm uncomfortably sandwiched in my seat in the wilderness of the back row, upper deck. A large woman opposite, her thighs spill over into the next seat, is reading MacSweeney's 24. I have a finely tuned Ameri-dar - the ability to pick out my countrymen by sight - and even before she speaks into her mobile and I get the flash of tell-tale American pearly whites when she smiles, I know that her voice will have the metallic twang of those square wheat producing states out west.

A teenage black girl is next to her, almost edged out of her seat by the American woman's ample thighs. The girl has a long scar over her face, a diagonal slash from right eyebrow down to her jaw. I try to imagine what caused it, and the pain. She probably doesn't think this when she looks into the mirror, but the scar gives her a haunting beauty. She is rather furtively reading a library copy of Black Lace Quickies 1, her eyes darting around as if expecting someone to catch her.

Across the way a pink cheeked jolly looking woman - I imagine her being an enthusiastic, if inexpert karaoke singer - is chuckling at Stuart Maconie's Pies and Prejudice. A tough looking, blocky fellow with a ruddy face that looks like it has seen its share of bar fights, is nearing the end of Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her.

A large, floppy haired indie boy - think Jack White's beefier brother - next to me is engrossed in the The Brothers Karamazov, a hardcover edition with yellowing pages, from Oxfam, I notice approvingly as he flips to the front page with the price. For some reason I hope desperately that he is reading on his own and not for some course. And me? Well I'm writing this all down in my Moleskine and I notice that Brothers Karamazov is surreptitiously looking at what I am writing. Can you read my scrawl, O Jack White's beefier brother? Can you?

Southern gothic

Since the New Year I have not read anything new, going back to old favourites (A Fan's Notes, A Confederacy of Dunces, Tropic of Cancer) and things I have never got around to reading.

One of the 'never got round to' books is Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. About ten years ago, I went through a phase of Southern American literature, but I got burnt out reading about the freaks, idiot man-children, moonshine-soaked pastors, whiskey priests, redneck racists, eccentrics, hucksters, con men and other grotesques who seemed to make up the entire population of Dixie in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lonely Hunter does have the freaks; two of the main characters are a deaf-mute and an out of control alcoholic communist. But they are more sympathetically drawn than the characters in, say, Flannery O'Connor's stuff. What the book is really about is being an outsider. Four alienated people - the alcoholic; the repressed, possibly gay owner of an all-night cafe; the tomboyish teenage girl who dreams of becoming the next Mozart; a black doctor who chafes at the South's racism and the plight of his people - are drawn to the deaf-mute Singer, impelled to spill out their stories to him.

Singer doesn't answer, of course, but by reading lips, he listens, and maybe that is what people really need, someone just to acknowledge their story. With an overriding theme of loneliness and that much of the action takes place in a 1930s cafe at night, I constantly thought of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, of how we are often cut off and isolated from the world, even when sitting next to them at a greasy spoon counter.

McCullers was 23 when she wrote it which seems well-nigh impossible; it is far too wise to have been written by someone so young. But she had a short, sickly life (three strokes by the time she was 30, dead at 50) and perhaps she sensed innately that her time was short. There is something poignant about this photo, her peculiar avian beauty augmented by the haunted, vaguely troubled look in her eyes.

The death of Stewie

Life is so transient, is it not? Here is Stewie, one of the snowmen I created on Monday. Look at him in the first flush of youth at the beginning of the week, all smiles with a future as pure and white as Arctic landscape ahead of him. Just a couple of days later he is slumped into decrepitude, and there he is today, an ex-snowman.

It was a heart rending sight to come home from a weekend away to see all that remains of Stewie was his leek nose (I had had no carrots), his Ireland scarf and a blob of snow. Though Stewie's life was brief it flashed across the firmament, touching so many of us. It was but a week, but what a week, what a week.

I had a quick memorial service over Stewie's remains with Brutus' words on Cassius inevitably coming to mind: 'I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay.' Then I scooped the remaining snow into a pitcher and with the help of my liquor cabinet turned Stewie-that-was into a strawberry margarita. It was what he would've wanted.

Live from Television Centre

Here's my spot on Working Lunch on BBC2 this afternoon, spouting off about how to get a book published. My bit is 21.49 into the programme, if you fancy a gander. I've tried to embed it but I can't figure out how to crack the iPlayer's DRM. I know doing so would not be entirely legal (or legal at all), but what the hell do I pay my licence fee for if I can't rip off copyrighted material from Aunty? So if any of the Expat Files many followers who are experts in illegal downloads want to lend a hand...

It was a rather nerve wracking experience beforehand, knowing I would be live and worried that I would say something stupid, inadvertently drop the F-bomb or decide to do an impromptu strip-tease. But I seemed to settle down once I got on that fuschia couch, helped by the warm metaphorical televisual embrace of Declan Curry and Naga Munchetty. I especially enjoyed near the end when they superimposed the "Tom's Tips" graphic.

No business like snow business

The snow that paralysed South East Britain today was what we native New Englanders would call a dusting. True it was the biggest snowfall in England in the last 18 years, but I am always amused at the havoc relatively mild weather events create in London and I found myself wondering today, as I frequently do, how these people once managed to conquer most of the globe.

I had a grand old time, a productive day working from home (the boss may be reading this), followed by snowy fun. I created a snowman and snow woman, then a snow tree of knowledge, and told them not to eat the fruit from it. Then off to pelting the neighbourhood kids with snowballs - the trick is to pack the snow down really hard so it's almost ice, then go for head shots.

Walking around, everyone seemed so friendly and happy. My neighbour, a large forbidding Jamaican woman who heretofore had only acknowledged my greetings with a scowl, stopped to chat, all smiles and twinkly effervescence about seeing her first snow. The grandmother, single mom and two daughters who live a couple doors down - my relationship with them is more courteous, we give each other slight nods of recognition when we pass on the street - effusively showed me their snow woman, complete with pink scarf and hat. It was if the storm had melted that icy urban wall between us that makes London such an unfriendly place. In the midst of all this snow the city finally became warm.

Here's my swag...

...and a few of photos from the excellent Alternative Press Fair , which I went to today (incidentally I advise caution to any of the Expat File's many epileptic followers wishing to click on that hyperlink; there is some sort of strobe effect going on across their banner). The fair was at the St Aloysius Social Club near Euston station, wonderfully no-frills, slightly down at the heels, not seen a lick of paint since the 1970s. It seems like an actual working social club. There is a bar at the end of the hall and in one corner sat four old fellas who looked like ardent News of the World readers. It was obviously their local and they seemed bemused at the collection of art school hipsters and comic book nerds, although they were quite appreciative of the comely girl with the pink hair and 1950s cocktail dress as she sashayed past them.




As I make my coin serving mainstream media masters it was refreshing seeing all these folk who are scribbling, drawing and crafting away, just for the love of it. And it is inspiring, and makes my own project [see resolution 2 in previous post - ed.] seem a bit more manageable and less daunting.

It was a bit disconcerting going through the stalls, with the creators eyeballing you expectantly as you leaf through their work, work that because of small print runs and niche-within-a-nicheness is so intensely personal. That did put a bit of pressure; Khaled Hosseini or Dave Eggers don't hover nearby in anticipation as you peruse their books in Waterstone's. I did look up from reading Skinny Bill in...Bill's Birthday, half-smiling at its funny/sad tone to see the author staring at me intently. It was a slightly awkward moment, and to fill the silence I asked her if it was strange watching people react to her work. She said yes, it is like having a conversation with someone but they're not answering back.