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This Case Is Closed: The Enduring Enigma of Tom Verlaine

One of the great punk records is Marquee Moon by Television. Of course, that's a contradiction. There's nothing punk about Television really, except that they appear at the right time, in the right place, and Richard Hell is briefly in the band, and he has some claim to be the inventor of the punk look, with the spiky hair and the safety pins. But there is only one TV in Television, and Hell is gone long before Marquee Moon appears. Marquee Moon doesn’t need a category. It’s a record of jagged imagery in which the voice is a nagging shadow and the guitars - of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd - do the talking. Patti Smith compares Verlaine’s guitar to a thousand bluebirds. What they are talking about, I still can’t fathom. Marquee Moon is a timeless mystery. I talk to Tom Verlaine on the phone. This is probably better than talking to him in person. On a transatlantic phone line there is an excuse for the delays and the hesitations and the awkward silences. We are talking a full...
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The Academy Awards Are Like Buses, Leonardo DiCaprio Is An Apprentice Brian Blessed; Quentin Tarantino, What Happened?

The Oscars are marketing, so to comment on the nominations is like comparing Flash to Daz. But, since my exposure to contemporary cinema is roughly confined to reading the sides of buses, I do feel qualified to offer an opinion or two. So, obviously Leo DiCaprio will win in the Best Male Actor Who Got Fat and Looked A Bit Wild Like Brian Blessed category. Eddie Redmayne will not, even though he's on the side of every 271 (Highgate Village) bus. I would like Jennifer Lawrence to win in the Pretty Lady With Pluck category, because I saw her phone her dad in the Edinburgh Filmhouse to tell him where she was, and she looked quite thrilled about it. And Cate Blanchett is very nice and supersmart. But apparently Brie Larson is going to win, and not just because she is named after a versatile and inoffensive cheese.
But mostly, what I want to say is, Quentin Tarantino, what happened? The Hateful Eight has been on the side of every 43 bus for ages, and it's only nominated for hiring Ennio Morricone to do the music (and he will win, because everyone loves the spaghetti westerns, even if they considered them to be trash at the time) and cinematography, which is like saying, yeah, you made your film in an obsolete format so nobody could screen it, but that shows you have taste. But nothing for the crackpot video store jive talk dialogue or the actors dancing with their mirror images and being offensive in a postmodern way, forcing you, the director, to be defensively offensive or say nothing, which is roughly the same thing. And this is your masterpiece, which must now be known as your overlooked masterpiece. Surely, QT, this ain't how it was meant to be?
On another note, I was in 99p Stores today, looking for marshmallows and wooden kebab skewers, and I noticed they sell preloved DVDs. They had The Road. I was going to buy it, but then I thought, is it worth 99p? I mean, I loved the book, but do I need to spend almost a pound to feel desolate, when I could just leave the shop and walk down Holloway Road, watching buses in the rain?
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