I’m posting this as a reminder more than anything else.
BBC Four will be screening a season of programmes on British comics starting on September 10th. This will include Johnathan Ross’ nearly already legendary Search for Steve Ditko, and a three part retrospective with, oh just about everyone. Alan Moore to Leo Baxendale. To say I’m planted in front of the whole lot (even the 60s Batman screenings!) would be to seriously underplay my excitement.
Can’t wait. Cantwaitcantwaitcantwait.
Kenneth Foster, the Texan sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, is due to be executed tomorrow. It would appear that Texas Governor Rick Parry is more than happy to allow Kenneth to go to his death on the advisement of a law that was never supposed to be applied in capital cases, in a trial that was deeply flawed.
Here’s my initial post on the subject, and please check the comments too.
Please, visit that site, read the story, and if you feel that there’s anything you can do to protest this utter travesty of justice, do so.
A beautiful song by Jamie Liddell, given a sweet treatment by my mate Nick Scott. Keep an eye open for a familiar name in the credits 😉
Dreadful news from the Independent on Saturday. The New Piccadilly restaurant, the cathedral of caffs, run by Soho character Lorenzo Marioni, has lost it’s last attempt to keep the bulldozers from its doors. It will close for good on September the 22nd.
Such a damn shame. The place is an absolute gem, and has always been a joy to eat in, chipped formica tops, see-through coffee mugs and all. Since 1951, it’s been a place for everyone from Soho gangsters to stars of stage and screen to sip froffy coffees and enjoy the spag bol and chicken. I’ve eaten there many times, always with friends, and it’s always been a bit of a treat. Somewhere to go when we want to feel that all is right with the world.
And now the landlords, Windmill Developments have decided to knock it down to make way for a “mixed-use block.” Another mall-type mash of cafes, offices and stationers. Another chunk taken out of Soho’s soul. If there’s a Starbucks in there, I swear to God, I’ll be so mad I could just … leaflet or something.
Calls for the New Piccadilly to be listed, like it’s compatriot in East London, Pellucci’s have fallen on deaf ears. English Heritage, having no interest in it’s unspoilt interior, have looked only at the shabby bricks and mortar that encase it and deemed the place unworthy of saving. Even Westminster City Council have deemed the cafe’s architectural quality as not good enough to be preserved. Once again, profit shouts louder than history. Adrian Maddox, author of the book and website Classic Cafes says, “Very individual places run by characters like Lorenzo are an irritant in the way of turning our streets into huge, faceless malls.”
I’ll be making a point of going there at least a couple of times before Lorenzo shuts off the big neon EATS sign for the last time. I’ll be having the usual. Steak pie, chips and beans, strawberry milkshake.
Funny how sometimes even a simple thing like lunch can make you sad.
Incidentally, the article that inspired me to write this in The Independent On Saturday seems to be unavailable on their website. Straaaange. Have a browse round the Classic Cafes website I’ve linked to above. Plenty of nice pics. If anyone’s interested, I’ll scan the article and post it on the blog.
ImprovEverywhere go for broke. The instructions: go to a previously arranged location, and at a specific time, press play on your MP3 player, which you’ve previously loaded with a file downloaded from the IE website.
Happy teens, studes, A-Level celebrants and the occasional adult are skipping merrily to a field on the outskirts of Reading tonight, anticipating three days of fun and frolics during the last big rock concert of the year. What they’ll be met with is … well, a swamp, actually. Many of the campsites regularly used for the Reading festival were underwater this time last month, and it’s taken a huge effort to pump them out to the point where tents can be pitched. The going will, in horseracing terms, be soft to heavy. By Sunday night, it’s going to look like the Somme out there. If the fragrant darlings I’ve seen tripping out of Reading Station over the last couple of days are anything to go by, most people seem spectacularly unprepared for the conditions. If you need to make a quick buck, get down to Richfield Avenue sharpish with a van full of tent liners and wellies. The youth will snap them up. The weather report is for a sunny weekend. The primordial slime will be nice and warm then. Who knows, we may see new forms of life evolve from the mire, although we’ll probably mistake them for Razorlight fans at first.
Grooooan. Serious dose of Sunday head, facilitated by alcoholic misbehaviour on Friday. Lately, though, C and I seem to be finding a routine where we both end up doing as little as possible over the weekend. That, tied into the poor excuse of a summer, means the garden looks like a bombsite, and I’m never in the mood to do anything about it. Still, the spuds and onions coming out of it are tasty, so I shouldn’t gripe too much.
Sunday afternoon. Soft rain outside. Up to my eyeballs in tea. Traffic’s Mr Fantasy on the stereo. It’s gonna have to be the Small Faces next. Lazy English psychedelia for a lazy English day.
Readers, I have a new heroine this morning. Jasmine Wallis was hospitalised after downing seven double espressos in a row while working in her family’s sandwich shop.
She says she didn’t realise they were doubles. I say she was just after that sweet sweet rush. And boy did she get it.
She said: “My nerves were all over the place. “I was crying in front of the customers and had tears streaming down my face.”
After going home she experienced frightening physical symptoms.
She added: “I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating.
“I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I think I was going into shock.”
Oh, OK. So that’s unusual then. Maybe that’s why I’ve been getting strange looks from my clients lately…
Meet Kenneth Foster. He’s 31, and hails from San Antonio, Texas. Up until 1997 he ran a small record company, Tribulation Records.
On August 14th 1997, Kenneth was driving a borrowed car around the streets of his home town. With him were three friends, Dewayne Dillard, Julius Steen and Mauricio Brown.
The LaHood family are rich and influential, and Michael’s father an attorney who is highly respected in the Texas legal community. The family pushed for, and got, the result they wanted. Justice, if you like. Mauricio Brown was found guilty and executed for the crime in 2006. Dillard and Steen were given life sentences for their parts in the events, which is bad enough when you consider that they were in the car and 100 yards away from Brown at the time of the shooting. Brown himself has testified that the murder was unpremeditated.
But the worst part of the story is that Kenneth Foster, in the same car as Dillard and Steen, and equally unaware of what his homie was up to, was also sentenced to death.
In Texas, it now seems that being in the wrong place at the wrong time can kill you.
Kenneth’s downfall is The Law Of Parties, a Texan law designed to counteract conspiracy by charging accomplices with the same force as the main defendants. It’s at best a technicality, and at worst part of “the structure of the Texas’s legal system [that] makes it easier to sentence people to death”.(David Dow, founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and author of Executed on a Technicality (2005).
In an August 10th editorial in the Galveston County Daily News, Heber Taylor writes “If people in Texas let Foster die, we’ll be putting our approval on the idea that it’s OK to use a law designed to punish conspirators even in cases where there’s no conspiracy. And we’ll be saying we’ll stretch the law in cases where we’re mad enough against one criminal but we won’t stretch the law in cases where we’re not that mad at his two riding buddies.”
Yeah, ok, admission of bias. I’ll put my hand up and say that I’m completely against the death penalty, and in this case it seems especially farcical. Kenneth Foster committed crimes that night in August, sure. And he should be in prison. But he should not be on death row, about to die for a capital crime of which no-one including the Texan Criminal Court believes he’s guilty.
If anyone can explain that to me, I’d be grateful, because it’s making my head hurt.
Read more on the case here. (including more from the two pieces I’ve quoted from above.)
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 