From: Russell Brand
To: Daniel Pinchbeck
Never have you written more succinctly and irrefutably on this most nebulous and complex of topics. Excellent! Other than your dismissal of the term “Revolution”, which is the magazine’s theme and, I think, a necessary galvanising signifier for the previous generation and the more truculent members of the working class. How like you to be insurgent in a magazine about insurgence.
To: Gary Lineker
Gary! This is f***ing brilliant. Great vocab, cool swearing, great structure. Keeping possession in an unflustered, enveloping rhythm before scoring – a lovely gag nicked in the six-yard box, right at the death. If only the national side could do that.
The stuff about your personal experience as a young player and your dad’s disappointment at a discipline issue is cool and surprising but makes sense of the “Lineker myth” – I mean story, not myth as in untrue – of you as disciplined and gentlemanly.
I love hearing about the way you supported your sons – that’s really spiritual and sounds like simple good parenting.
I am reminded that I heard you say, when I was a kid, that you never put the ball in the net during the pre-match warm-up because a goal is sacred. That, for me, is where football and poetry intersect, at the point where there is magic beyond what we can understand. I suppose that’s why you lot are superstitious.
I don’t know anything about football. My inability to play the game is one of the great laments of my life – my dad and stepdad were both really good Sunday players and growing up in Essex in the Eighties and not knowing how to trap a ball was like going to school in a bikini. Which I also did.
To: Rupert Everett
What you have written is the most tender, personal, inclusive, funny, candid piece I’ve ever read on homosexual culture.
A mate of mine’s young relative has recently been diagnosed positive. There is a lot of fear and ignorance around him. I will pass on this gentle chronicle of his history and potentially bright and fun future. Your writing is an antidote to prejudice and fear.
The Wilde motif is f***ing brilliant, the throwaway, self-aware career refs are great fun. Your description of the transition of NYC from utopia to hospice is Dickensian. Emphasis on the first syllable. I like that you wrote it to me, as a letter. I come from a culture that can be surprisingly ignorant around homosexuality. Your candour and spellbinding charm woke me the f*** up.
Obviously like most heterosexual men on meeting you, there was a quick wince of regret that I wasn’t gay. After reading this, I’m seriously considering reverse conversion therapy.
Really funny, smart, surprising and not in accordance with my manifesto – which will mean you’re in trouble after the revolution but you’re fine for now.
My prediction: “George Osborne – most slappable man in Britain” will take off and end up on T-shirts.
To: Oliver Stone
As I listened to Jemima reading your piece, I felt the wave of undulating devotion that typically accompanies her voice.
However, I can almost certainly ascribe the sense of fervid, virile, “fight the power”, “f*** the man”, hammer-and-sickle priapism to your writing. It was inspiring and thorough and entertaining and cool. Thank you.
To: Alec Baldwin
Yes, Alec! Yes! An authoritative, rolling, beat, HOWLing hymn of dissent.
I like the bludgeoning body shots of listed transgressions, the optimistic flights into a new, true, concealed narrative. Your naming of the Kennedy assassination as an end of innocence, a commencement of institutionalised deceit, is smart. The revaluation of truth as a prized, perversely neglected commodity is skilful.
I think you’re f***ing great, Alec Baldwin.
To: Naomi Klein
I received and read with relish (as much relish as one can muster when being politely informed that the planet is undergoing systematic destruction to maintain an imaginary economic idea) your brilliant and provocative piece. This wonderful, precise and accessible article is what the issue needed and validates the decision to go with such a potentially amorphous topic as “revolution”.
What you’ve written is galvanising , original and inspiring. I’ve not written anything yet but I’m so amped up on Klein-engendered fervour, I might instead throw my laptop through Powergen HQ’s windows. I read No Logo when I was in the foothills of my junkie-dom. I was in Cuba, coincidentally, flooded by anti-establishment rage. Had I not been high I could’ve got in trouble – they’re surprisingly strict there!
Reading your article made me feel the charge, the fuel, the kick that we can and must take action. I like that feeling, Naomi (especially now I’m not allowed drugs); it is in fact the feeling I live for. One of two feelings I live for . . . The other one is in fact summoning me now.
To: Judd Apatow
Thank you, Judd. Obviously your success, aside from the more starkly clown-based Anchorman and Cable Guy-type movies, is to a large degree based on your remarkable ability to infuse comedy with personal truth.
This piece of writing, though, has a rawness and innocence that I find very touching beyond what I’m accustomed to in your milieu. Comedy saved my life, too. Sometimes when I’m on the precipice, when I feel, even now, that I am that unselectable little boy, a joke comes, and humour sweeps me into its gangly arms and saves me.
Comedy is a retort to oppression, corruption and even death. It saved me when I was alone at home, at school, and every lonely, destitute place I’ve ever been in since. And now, when everything is actually OK and I still get down, comedy reminds me how silly I am, how silly it all is.
To: Diablo Cody
Beautiful writing, gentle, humorous, elegantly structured.
If there were Oscars for journalism, you’d have even more clutter in your downstairs loo.
To: John Rogers
John. We are friends. Proper, not pretend, to-the end friends.
Therefore I take you for granted. But that piece of writing surprised and excited me, mate. The simple unpretentiousness of walking as a revolutionary act.
What I found most remarkable, John, was the strength of your writing: purposeful, confident, strident and assured. It is my belief that it is this manner of authority and ease that is required for the advancement of our ideals.
To: David DeGraw
Clear as crystal, as sharp as broken glass, as explosive as a Molotov cocktail. There is some great writing in the issue, mate; but this spells out, in the dominant language of economics and in cold, hard numbers, the necessity for action.
To: Shepard Fairey
That image is f***ing spectacular. The comedy of the bulb, the literalism of the brain. This is why I call you the most relevant living artist. F*** the bourgeoisie, long live the revolution.
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