manchester

"Look at Tony Wilson, live on Channel Four."

Sadly, no more. And the earth itself groans. (Via Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From, who likewise was put in mind of The Times's song, "Manchester.")

NB even the BBC can't decide if the man's name is (Cambridge-educated) Anthony or (Salford lad) Tony.

Now watch 24 Hour Party People in which Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, meets God on a Manchester rooftop. "It's a pity you didn't sign the Smiths, but you were right about Mick Hucknall: his music's rubbish and he's a ginger." Marvellous.

Oh, and then there's this (via Blood and Treasure):

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

anecdotaholic

The Wednesday quotation, Part VI: The fiction of Michael Ignatieff.

They saw the WMDs over the hill, staggering under the weight of their own nonexistence like some funereal assemblage of bent-backed phantoms. Ignatieff crouched in the mulberry copse, glassed his target, cursed the Chomskian dust that risked his weapons ruin, then raised The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jeffersons Dream and sent its buckshot tearing into Iraq-- tatterdemalion, sanction-wracked-- and the rocks behind were splatter-stained with a crimson decoupage like some chromatic inversion of all that is holy and lawful. I kindly reckon we just shot the shit out of Iraq, Ignatieff said. And Friedman said, Lets move in to get a better look at her. And they tried hailing a cab with an anecdotaholic driver but they couldnt find one because they were stranded in a featureless semantic apocalypse, meaning-raped and apostropheless like some joy-smudged, italicized parody of Cormac McCarthy. And on the crest of the hill they heard Kanan Makiya weeping soundlessly like the very enabler of evil itself. (David Rees, "Cormac Ignatieff's 'The Road.'". From The Huffington Post)

Read the rest of Rees's hilarious take-down of Ignatieff here. Via Printculture.