Fame at last – Thoughtcat in the London Informer

A few weeks ago I had an email from a journalist on a weekly free local newspaper called the Informer, asking permission to include Thoughtcat in “London Blog”, a regular feature profiling bloggers from the area and printing typical extracts from their blogs. I’d never seen the article before (I think the paper gets delivered to my address, but so do a couple of others, and in honesty they generally all end up being recycled before I even register what they’re called) and I was initially suspicious, doubting that a local free paper would really be interested in blogs and thinking one of my mates was winding me up. However, the journalist’s email address was kosher and he said he’d found the blog from a credible source (London Bloggers, a stylish directory I’d joined some time ago), so without further delay I wrote back to say I’d be delighted. He asked for a bit of background, including my age and location, and a photo. I provided him with some info on Thoughtcat and, not knowing the layout, asked if he just wanted a small close-up of my whiskers or a full length shot of me (which, thinking about it, wouldn’t actually be much different in size, but there you go). I also offered him a few suggestions for “typical extracts” from Thoughtcat, since I modestly assumed finding such a thing amid three years’ and 50,000 words of blog posts might be difficult. However, said journo then vanished for several days, leaving me unsure whether he’d actually written the article or had gone off the idea, or still needed the photo, so – now paranoid once again that this was in fact an elaborate practical joke – I gave him a nudge. A few days later he reappeared and said the feature was out, illustrated with a photo he’d found on the site, and if I gave him my address he’d send me a copy. I did, and waited.

I was still nervous about the result: would it be a hatchet job? A tabloid stitch-up? A honey-trap preying on my vanity? I imagined myself imagining a glorious write-up, newspapers banging on the Thoughtcat-flap begging me to write for them for real money, little suspecting the reality – a huge photo of me looking ridiculous, a picture I’d put on the site years before and forgotten about, with a quote twisting my carefully-chosen words to paint me as a bizarre nimbyist eccentric, a closet nazi living with 17 cats, spending his days self-publishing insane pamphlets calling on McVities to bring back Dad’s Cookies and the local council to bomb McDonald’s – or worse, claiming I was a Tory voter.

Thankfully, having now received the paper containing the feature (it’s the 31st March issue, local folks!) none of that is the case, and although the majority of the article is composed of my own words I hope I’m allowed to say I think the results are excellent. It is still a little eccentric, but that’s probably appropriate, and in any case it’s fascinating to see how you come across to people: From his small flat, cat-obsessed [am I??] Richard Cooper (pee-Cooper to his friends) [what this must sound like with no Thai context God only knows] muses on everything from sausages [where?!] to political scandals. The novelist-cum-biscuit taster [apart from sounding faintly disgusting this omits to mention I have never been either, at least on a professional basis] flirted with fame after becoming embroiled in a row over authorship of a book called All My Own Work [this will come back to haunt me!], after he based his title on a poem by Ted Hughes [surreally, this makes Hughes sound as if he was the aggrieved party in the AMOW debacle]. Click and you arrive at: Lord Profumo, Albrecht Durer, Mince Pies, Mobile Phones, Blues, Leonard Cohen [yay!], Basil Fawlty [true, but only I think in the context of 'Don't mention the war' from last summer's election], InterRail [hmm, I'm impressed - the journo's had a look around the main site and found my account of our French InterRailing trip!], Buena Vista Social Club [it gets better], Randy Newman [again a one-off, but can't be bad] and Russell Hoban [double yay! - whether Russ will appreciate it in this dubious context I don't know, but I'm honoured to be responsible for even the smallest press mention of his hallowed name].

So far, so weird – but it gets weirder. The blog feature itself is right at the back of the paper, sandwiched between adverts for a plumbing and heating company and the Modhubon Tandoori (“Eat as much as you like for £4.95!”), and just overleaf from a double-page of classified ads divided equally between man & vans and escort agencies (“Za Za… Irish fire cracker… Japanese goddess”). The rarefied company I find myself in is infinitely enhanced by a huge picture of Bob Dylan c.1966, as I realise with delight (and some relief, when I think of some of the possible alternatives) that the blog post the journalist has chosen to represent Thoughtcat is the recent one about Dylan snubbing the UK Music Hall of Fame awards. DYLAN DISHES IT, runs the headline. Richard says Bob Dylan has the right idea about music award shows, says a caption beside my photo, which turns out to be the one of me from my about page wearing a THAILAND t-shirt and eating a bowl of my wife’s best green curry. “What’s the point in giving an award to an artist who’s been around for decades?” bewails a quote splashed in white letters across Dylan’s black jacket, while the main image is captioned BOB’S YOUR UNCLE: Dylan the legend (obviously just in case anyone’s unsure of who it is, or that it may be me).

The rest of the page is composed of the blog entry, reproduced fairly faithfully, albeit with the original Blair-unfriendly ending excised in favour of a cynical comment on the Eurythmics’ Christmas greatest hits cash-in. In fact it’s interesting that, although Blair does get a mention elsewhere, it’s not a critical one, and you wouldn’t guess from reading the feature that I can’t stand the man; did the Informer get cold political feet, despite it being quite clear that the article represents the personal opinion of one slightly bonkers local blogger? Whatever the truth, just to put the record straight, I CAN’T STAND TONY BLAIR. (In seriousness I must curtail this habit of beating Blair with any stick I can find. I mean, for God’s sake – when you’re writing about Bob Dylan and the ludicrosity of music award shows, to still manage to squeeze in a Tone-moan just looks facile and opportunistic – not unlike Blair, in fact, the bastard!!!)

Blair or no Blair, if I say so myself, the profile of Thoughtcat appears to represent a cultural high for at least this edition of the paper. Headlines on other pages include:

LICENCE TO KILL: Is our under-fire prison system putting killers on YOUR street?
Leak hotel fined
Anger over repair demands
IT HAPPENED TO ME: I built a Viking ship in my garden shed
Hotel in riverside clean-up

and, best of all:

NOT EVEN A ‘DENT’: Gordon’s car tax rise is a joke say Chelsea tractor haters.

I should mention at this juncture that this edition of the paper is technically the London Informer, covering the areas
of Hammersmith, Kensington and Westminster; there seem to be scores of local variations on the Informer title, and I know of at least one edition, the Richmond & Twickenham Informer, which also carried the Thoughtcat piece, albeit in a black & white and slightly reduced-size version which ends in mid-sentence, not even getting in the bitter remark about the Eurythmics, let alone Tone.

But I digress. I must admit when I read the piece again I was surprised at the (unintentionally) catty comment about Aretha Franklin, and that the paper deemed a remark about the size of the soul diva’s breasts to be acceptable where one about Tony Blair’s musical preferences wasn’t. They say you should never apologise but I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Aretha – not, probably, that she’s a reader, but all the same.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole episode is that it has taken some extracts from Thoughtcat to be reproduced in a “real” printed medium to make me see what the blog is really like – and, by extension, what I’m really like. The blog has been around, as I say, for over three years now, but this is the first time it’s seemed “real” to me – and I’m not sure I like all I see. Maybe I’m just overreacting to the observation about Aretha Franklin’s melons, but perhaps I saw myself as a bit more serious than that casual remark might suggest. Then again, you can’t take blogging too seriously, can you?

There is, fairly obviously, no online version of the article, but clicking on the image above will open a JPEG which is more or less readable, while clicking here instead opens a better-quality PDF version. And if you can get your hands on a copy of the actual paper, hold on to this unique Thoughtcat collector’s item! It surely can’t be long before they start appearing on eBay.

Oh yes, before I forget – to clarify, “pee-Cooper” (with the emphasis on the -per) is what my wife’s friends affectionately call me. “Pee-” is a Thai honorific, placed in front of the family name of someone who is older than you to signify respect. I’ve been saying to them all for years to just call me Richard, but will they ever?? Anyway, the appearance of this article can only make things worse: soon this is what everyone will be calling me.

Filed under: Uncategorized, blogging, bob dylan, excellent local newspapers, getting published, thoughtcat

Hooray! Dylan snubs UK Music Hall of Fame

I don’t know what possessed me but the other night I tuned into the TV broadcast of the UK Music Hall of Fame, at which legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin were due to be “inducted”. The whole thing seemed an exercise in vanity and futility from the off – I mean, how many more accolades do these people need? – but I suppose I was vaguely excited at the prospect of seeing Dylan et al live and in person (well, on TV anyway). I saw the Eurythmics, who were quite good despite a typically overblown and pretentious speech by Bob Geldof (“Dave Stewart is one of this country’s greatest ever guitarists” – yeah, right) and a commendation from Tony Blair. I also saw a bit of Aretha, in fact I saw quite a lot of her, as her breasts are now so enormous she’s in danger of turning up in a “Bubbles” sketch from Little Britain. Then I nodded off for a bit and when I woke up it seemed Dylan had already been and gone, because now it was Hendrix, in whose memory that walking rock’n'roll cliche Slash played a guitar solo that lasted about 40 minutes, and The Who. Pete Townshend was introduced by Ray Davies, the two exchanging (and, naturally, waving away) buttock-clenchingly lavish compliments, before Roger Daltrey appeared on a video link and said about three words of thanks. That, I felt, was the correct tone, and Townshend in fact did say something semi-barbed like “without you [the audience] this would be just another fucking TV programme”. But in general the whole thing was totally unnecessary. What’s the point in giving an award to a band or artist who’s been around for decades, sold billions of records, made pots of money and inspired almost everyone? This was definitely what I felt about Dylan, so I wasn’t surprised to read in the Independent that he not only didn’t turn up to collect his gong but that he didn’t even record a patronising video speech either. Good on you, Bob! Seriously, I suppose the stated purpose of these ceremonies is to introduce legends to a new generation of fans, but if the fans don’t already know about them (which is unlikely, as they can’t exactly have missed them) then they’re never likely to become interested in them anyway. It’s really just the music industry milking the stars for all their worth – and it can hardly be a coincidence, can it, that apart from turning up on the show, Eurythmics also have yet another greatest hits collection out just in time for Christmas… which cynicism is all rather a shame, because I’ve loved Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) since the day it came out. I was disturbed, therefore, to discover that this was something I had in common with Tony Blair… aarrghhh!

Filed under: Uncategorized, bob dylan, guitars, old blues singers, thoughtcat, tv

Leonard Cohen for the Nobel!

The BBC reports on a bid to nominate Leonard Cohen for the Nobel Prize for Literature. To my mind he deserves it more than many ‘proper’ writers and certainly more than almost anyone working in popular music. That is, only one other person really deserves it more than him, and it’s Bob Dylan. So the chances are pretty slim methinks.

Filed under: Uncategorized, bob dylan, leonard cohen

Stuff in the news

Looks like we’re going to be in for a Dylan moviefest in the coming months. First it was Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic (see TC 21st February), and now Martin Scorsese announces he’s working on a film about Dylan. Haynes famously said he’s casting seven different actors to play Dylan over the various periods of his career, including a woman. Maybe Scorsese could get Leonardo DiCaprio to play the young Bob, Daniel Day-Lewis for the middle years, Robert “Bob” De Niro for the present “grizzly” version and Cameron Diaz for everything else.

* * *

As poor old Jean-Pierre Garnier sobs to the Telegraph that he’s “not Mother Teresa”, Richard Adams outlines in the Guardian’s City Diary the definitive reasons why the Glaxo Fat Cat is not the Angel of Calcutta.

Filed under: thoughtcat, bob dylan, movies, stuff in the news

Stuff in the news

The Guardian reports that Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen has topped a poll by Orange, the sponsors of the female-only Orange Prize for Fiction, as women’s best-loved women’s book. The news put me in mind of Bob Dylan’s song 1997 song Highlands, which contains the following exchange between the narrator and a waitress:

Then she says,”you don’t read women authors, do you?”

Least that’s what I think I hear her say,

“Well”, I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”

“Well”, she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”

I said, “you’re way wrong.”

She says, “which ones have you read then?”

I say, “I read Erica Jong!”

Speaking for myself, one of the few “women authors” I have read is Jane Rogers, whose 1987 novel The Ice is Singing I found inspirational and very moving.

* * *

There’s a lovely story in the Guardian too today about an amateur movie of John Lennon dicking about in New York in 1974 being put up for auction. The private footage, shot by a student who simply went up to Lennon and asked him if she could follow him around the city filming him all day, apparently includes shots of him taking over a New York ice-cream van and imitating baboons for startled children. Sounds like early Trigger-Happy TV.

Filed under: thoughtcat, bob dylan, books, stuff in the news, tv

It ain’t me, babe

The Independent reports today: “It ain’t me, babe. Bob Dylan to be played by a woman in his life story“. Could Bob be exploring his feminine side as he approaches 60 and looks back over his myriad relationships, which, as he once sang, “have all been bad”? The recent photo of him with Jessica Lange from the preview of his new film Masked and Anonymous, wherein he sported a long fringe of blonde hair, would perhaps bear this out.

Filed under: Uncategorized, archives, bob dylan