Late Afternoon Sun

I was hoping these two Walter Mosley books I ordered from Amazon might have arrived today but they didn’t so I’ve had to start this massive library book about grunge (‘Everybody Loves Our Town’ by Mark Yarm) that I’ve had lying around for ages. Actually it’s pretty good, an ‘oral history’ kind of thing, and the first couple of chapters are quite funny about the nascent ‘Seattle Scene’ with the U-Men and the Melvins – the Melvins being one of those bands that I always feel I really should like but don’t. I actually went down to Birmingham once to see them play live, probably about ’91, and they were truly terrible; I mean, like a really poor, horrible, pointless, tuneless dirge. A good quote from Buzz Osborne, though: “I always laugh at that: Kurt Cobain was our roadie. Look at him – he could barely lift himself out of bed. A roadie? For what, a flea circus?” Anyway, I read the first three of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels in an omnibus edition I got from Oxfam for a couple of quid and they’re really good. I can’t believe I’ve not read them before, given that they were written in the early nineties, I think. Easy is a kind of accidental black p.i. in 1950’s Watts, Los Angeles, and the characters and milieu are just so perfectly realised and readable. Unfortunately the Notts Library service has let me down on this one and I’ve had to get the next two installments secondhand via the internet’s favourite tax-dodgers. Maybe tomorrow…

Bill Callahan in dub, who’d’ve thought that would work…