Picking up on what Danny said[1], some thoughts on fame. Stewart Lee’s answer gets it right, I think: fame enough to be financially comfortable and comfortable with one’s audience. The further question is whether that’s only achievable — or only recognisible in a way that brings the associated comfort — on the downslope, after you’ve tasted celebrity — and celebrity, in turn, has spit you out.

Fame has frontiers, and some you only notice when you return. There’s only a step between a comfortable, loyal fanbase and, well, this.

But I mostly wonder what happens ‘after’ fame. Not many of the bands and artists whose careers I followed (and, I suppose, helped sustain) in those formative college years are still around. The first thought is of a quiet retirement living off the royalties, perhaps a production job or similar to keep busy. But then you realise: that only happens to a few former popstrels after they put away the bleach and bad outfits. For those earnest indie types I came to love, if there was any money left at the end, it was barely enough to pay the rent, let alone relax by the pool. And that’s okay, in its own way, as long as you park the tour bus and pack away your gear knowing that the rest of your life is waiting.

Stephen Fry (now, more or less, the best blogger ever) talks expansively about what fame is. What fame was, though, is another thing entirely.

1. Ten years ago? I remember that night, not least for Charlie Brooker’s interlude. Who knows where the time goes? Anyway, keep writing, you bastard.

On my first weekend in the US, I took a town car from Manhattan to Newark airport. As we hit the Turnpike’s miles of steel and brick and smoke, (think: opening minute of The Sopranos) I joked to the driver, a middle-aged Russian man, that it felt like home. It took me the rest of the drive to explain.

The look and feel and talk of hard industrial graft is deeper in my system than anything the chimneys spewed out. The bridges and old works may be steampunk, but take the trunk road to the coast at night, and the lights lay bare something that forces itself beyond modernity. And, dear god, did we have sunsets.

Which is just to point to this interview with Ridley Scott, in the knowledge that, like him, I’ve seen the first light from the flaring.

What’s so delicious about Stephen Fry’s survey of smartphones, as deep as it is wide, isn’t the unabashed geekery, though that has generated an antiphonal ‘squee!’ from all corners of my digital neignbourhood. No, it’s the unconscious connoisseurship of the thing: the sense that you (well, that he) can write about geek toys in a mode that’s neither Mossberg nor Gizmodo nor anything in-between is as exhilarating as the breeze that waves farewell to a stultifying summer.