I met Garland Seggerman at a bus stop on the old Route 66. A tall, older gentleman, he was folded into rather than seated on the bench. He uncomfortably crossed and uncrossed heavy cowboy boots bookending legs long and straight like lodgepole pine. His face lit up with a warm smile as I sat down. Read More
I survived a hundred degrees in blistering Roswell this month. It was my second visit. I was last at the UFO museum way back in 2000. Not a great deal has changed. Many photocopied documents and images are mounted on display boards, but there are a few new, weightier displays including a giant Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still. Read More
Sometime around March this year I noticed a whole block in a downtown neighbourhood had been blocked off for filming. Whilst watching episode six of Preacher, which has filmed predominately at Albuquerque Studios, I spotted the location. Always the internet sleuth, I mapped some frame grabs next to street view. It is indeed 11th and Fruit in the pretty, downtown residential area, one of my favourite places for a stroll.
So then exit fantasist, it is time to make good on your histrionic promise of liberty. Everything that happens is on your watch. All the tribulations and vicissitudes of the economy are yours. The pound fell to its lowest point since 1985 and the Bank of England is poised to intervene. Standard and Poor’s have said that the UK will lose its fine credit rating. The stock market was down 8.5 per cent in early trading. This is not just a downgrade in the value of assets. It is a leading indicator of the financial turmoil to come. If there is a recession, it is your recession. If inflation goes up and interest rates follow with an attendant spate of repossessions, it’s all yours. Well done.
And for what, exit fantasist? For what? The notion that Britain was not free until the early hours of this morning is the single most childish claim I have ever heard in British politics. I have heard grown people, who ought to know better, talk of serfdom and calling June 23rd “independence day”. This is thinking that is profoundly unconservative, placing an abstract idea above the concrete facts of life. When the sun came up this morning — a new dawn was it not? — it meant nothing to pretend that we have passed from servitude into liberty. It is the emptiest campaign slogan, the self-satisfied bluster of a fluent intellectual dwarf. It is a victory but a victory from which it is going to take an age to recover.
Also good is the Economist’s article A tragic split.
I’ve loved Prince since I was thirteen. He was my first obsession. I collected his entire back catalogue, which back then was an impressive eleven albums. I purchased these slowly but deliberately with my pocket money from my local Woolworth‘s store, on cassette tape. My older brother, always a mainstream guy, was abhorred by the high heels and outlandish sexuality of Prince.
“I bet you don’t like his music when you’re twenty” he once asserted cynically.
Seven years later, at twenty, I made a point of reminding him, and stating “Yes, I do still like Prince“. Disappointingly, he didn’t remember the bet. Read More