Crikey, is that the time?

I’ve been blogging here for more than four years, and I think the flame’s spluttering a little. Part of this is for the best of reasons; in work terms, things have been going exceedingly well for me in recent months, to the extent that 2009 was the first year in a long time that I haven’t been forced to do any work I didn’t find at least vaguely interesting or fulfilling. In 2005, the blog served as an outlet for the ideas I was having; now, it seems more like a place where I can tell you about the other places where those ideas are being expressed, which isn’t nearly so interesting. (Talking of which, do check out History of Now: the Story of the Noughties on BBC2, starting next Tuesday.)

Moreover, the best bit about blogging has always been the community, the conversation, and that’s become decidedly quieter lately. Fewer comments are appearing here, about which I can’t complain, as I’ve been leaving fewer smartarseries in the boxes of others. Also, the past year has seen many splendid bloggers – Patroclus, both Annies, Valerie, LC, among others – either cut back their activity, or move away from proper old diary-type blogging, or hang up their bloots entirely. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to join them, but I’m getting to the stage where I feel more of an obligation to blog, rather than a pleasure in blogging, and that’s the wrong way round: “We run tings, dem nuh run we,” as someone, possibly Peter Tosh, or maybe Brian Sewell, once said. And the smell of leaving is heavy in the air. David Tennant, Terry Wogan, Oprah and, most importantly, Malcolm from Spooks have decided to hop off their respective conveyor belts, so I’d be in good company if I ambled into the digital sunset.

That said, I’m not pressing the delete button just yet. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart, and everything will be back to the way it was in about 2006, when I could knock out vast screeds about Baudrillard and Rob Bryden without even breaking into a sweat. I’ll probably pop up here occasionally with a one-liner, even if nobody’s around to read it. A bit like Teletext. Oh no, that’s gone as well.

GUILDENSTERN: Our names shouted in a certain dawn... a message... a summons... There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.

(He looks around and sees that he’s alone.)

Rosen–? Guil–?

(He gathers himself.)

Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you –

(And disappears.)

Cut!

If you happen to be in Scotland or thereabouts today, do pick up a copy of the Sunday Post, which appears to have betrayed its self-description as “a thoroughly decent read” by finding space for yet more of my chinstrokes about the soon-to-be-gone decade.

However, my quest for absolute domination of the day’s media has been derailed by the last-minute decision not to include my contributions in this evening’s The Greatest TV Shows of the Noughties on Channel 4. The best I can offer is to use this space as a sort of DVD Extras section for the show, to give you a flavour of what you won’t be enjoying tonight. First I suggested, quite reasonably I thought, that the snivelling BGT moppet Hollie Steel simply proved my contention that the true hero of the Nativity story was Herod. At that point, producer Sean (a very nice man, by the way) stopped me in my tracks; not because I’d casually advocated the murder of a 10-year-old girl, but because some of the viewers might not know who Herod was.

Then, while discussing the success of QI, I made some mild jibe at Stephen Fry (I think I repeated the line about his being a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person looks like) at which point Sean again brought proceedings to a halt and explained that they were trying to get St Stephen to do the voiceover, so it might make things a bit sticky if I said that.

In the event, they had neither Fry nor me. I’m not sure who the talking heads will be, but the tweeting polymath’s replacement is ubiquitous fat lad James Corden. Not that I’m bitter or anything, I’ll just quote the closing lines from Brian Logan’s review of Horne and Corden’s stage appearance in March:

There’s no spark, no dynamic relationship between the two to generate tension or comedy. Nor is there sensitivity, warmth – or the sense of one's own ridiculousness from which comedy springs. Their final sketch, in which two frilly magicians flounce around, performing crap tricks to a bombastic soundtrack, suggests they can’t even make basic silliness funny. “Everybody is going down on you,” sing their Young People’s Church alter egos, with forced innuendo. But it’s Horne and Corden who are going down – and fast. Surely they can’t sink further.

Top of the tree

So this is Christmas, as the third or fourth best drummer in a Rutles tribute band once droned. I’ve been looking for something appropriately festive as an accompaniment to your semifreddo turkey twizzlers, but everything out there is either vile or a bit obvious. (Oooh, Rage Against The Machine, how utterly daring, etc, etc.)

Anyway, here’s something that’s a bit obvious, but not vile, but not terribly festive either. But I like it, and Small Boo likes it, and if you don’t, well, you can just go and stick brandy butter up your bum. Happy holidays, and all that cal.

I tune out self-pity. It makes my dick soft.

Yes, I am still here.

I'm pretty sure the connecting flight through LGA to home just boarded and I heard them begging for five people to get off and get $500 passes instead. Hope they don't ask my flight the same thing. I mean, they CAN. I won't be volunteering for jack.

I am playing around on Cute Overload, Texts From Last Night and Fail Blog. And I had to leave my gate area because I was giggling too much. Some favorites...I like to think you can work out what comes from where:

(513): So I was just looking through the calendar on my phone seeing what day new years was on & on dec 31st at 9am it says "nude champagne toast". Guess we have to do it.

Followed by some AWWWWWWWWWWWWW:



And some creepy:







This last one kinda reminds me of the "sign" posted in the elevator that goes from the Park Station platform to the street level. Someone has taken a Sharpee (blue) and just written on the white plastic part of the wall (so there is really no "sign" to speak of), "Do not urinate on elevator. You are on camera!" And I always cringe a lot and try not to breathe. At first I thought, "I'm never taking this elevator again!" But let's face it, those law books and my computer are pretty fucking heavy. So yeah, sometimes I ride in an oft-pissed-in elevator to get to the street. Meh, whatcha gonna do. At least it always smells severely of bleach and death in there.

By the way, I agree with you, too. Especially in those pants.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. One semester down, five more to go. The first year is supposed to be the worst, but I don't know if the first or second semester is the ugliest. The first semester hurts because it's new and the midterms (and one final) are stressful--but then next semester my hours are longer, the winter gets meaner and the finals are 75%, as opposed to the 25% they were for midterms.

Criminal Law was my last one, a final. Next semester I have Constitutional Law instead, in a smaller section and for twice as long. JOY. On the bright side, the book was $150 and I found one for $40 online. (Something about a broken cover, ask me if I care.)

The criminal law final wins the humor contest, though, since I actually snickered out loud twice while reading it. He clearly had a lot of fun writing it, using current events to make every conceivable felony we studied happen. Some guy was trying to make a new reality TV show but he wanted to pull a publicity stunt first, so he got a guy to get him a gun, some explosives, and some seed money. He got that guy's wife--with whom he was having an affair--to steal a homemade balloon from the college where she was working. At some point, he put the explosives in his trunk and due to a defect and extreme heat, they went off and killed a passerby. He went to go meet up with the other guy to give him the gun, but the wife was home and when the friend came home, caught them together. The wife had some fairly inflammatory things to say, including that their children weren't his after all and they infact had a stash of frozen embryos and were going to have babies forever. As you can imagine, there was some attempted murder, but someone walking by outside got shot intead, which they all covered up. The jilted husband went online and got his assistant to find the embryos (known as "frosties"), and as he instructed him, "Toast those frosties!"

I am very fond of this professor.

The publicity stunt ended up being a take on the whole balloon boy hoax (so how funny that their sentence got handed down today), but the kid was really in the balloon here, but died when a helicopter pilot flew too close and the balloon was destroyed. The kid had already become unconscious due to the altitude, but upon discovering the dead body, the fact pattern noted, ("An autopsy report is still pending,") which made me chuckle, I admit it.

And that was just the first fact pattern. So there was potential burglary, robbery, involuntary manslaughter with potential 2nd degree murder, conspiracy, attempt, extortion, damn, it's a three hour exam and we all could have written more.

Anyway, I'm at the airport now, trying to fly home. I am five hours early, in the hopes of snaking something on standby. This probably would have been more likely if a flight to my city hadn't been diverted this morning, don't know what that was about. So there's about twenty people on standby for a flight at 4:30 connecting through New York. I'll stick with my direct flight, thanks. Of all the cities to get stuck in, I'd take LGA, but really, I'd like to pass on that altogether, mmmkay.

And because it occurred to me about a week ago I have NO PRESENTS for my nieces, I get to go shopping on xmas eve! Smart, that's me. I'm dragging their mother, Veloute along, so she can point to stuff and I can buy it. Win.

I have two books with me, Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. If I can find an outlet, I shelled out $7.95 for the honor of using the airport wifi. (SOME airports let you use it for free, but WHATEVER.) So I can play online, and I do have two DVDs--To Sir, With Love and the first disc, first season of XXXholic: Vol 1, neither of which I've seen before.

On the other hand, the bartender here now knows my name and started off by trying to get me a Bloody Mary. Nice. I'm opting for white wine since I don't wish for any of my drinks to revisit me on the flight, kwim? And he's pouring freely from the bottle for refills rather than bringing me normal glasses, so this could be the place to stay for a bit... ;)

Blowing a Gaskell

Those lightly soused reprobates The Shark Guys have turned a few passing remarks in my Leonard Cohen tome into yet another list, as if we need such a thing at the end of the decade. Only difference is, theirs is quite amusing, even if I say so myself, and I bloody well do. Go and take a look.

Also, I may or may not be appearing on The Greatest TV Shows of the Noughties, which Channel 4 is parping into your post-festive parlours at 9pm this coming Sunday. I certainly filmed some bits and pieces for them a while back, but they still can’t confirm whether or not I’ve been, ahem, saved for the DVD Extras. In any case, my parents have already informed me that they’ll wait for the repeat, as the first transmission has the temerity to clash with Cranford. Well, we wouldn’t want to upset Dame Judi, would we?

PS: Turns out I’m not in it. That nice Julia Mackenzie breathes a sigh of relief...

Eat it

And now I’m back in Bangkok, with a different hat on. In London, I hold my stuff up to criticism; here, I’m the one doing the critting. Or am I, really?

Many people have mused in the past decade over the extent to which Web 2.0 has made professional critics all but redundant. Never mind the perceptive analysis, seems to be the message; just tot up those stars. Well, yes and no. Obviously there are perceptive critics on blogs and other sites; but to sift successfully through the sludgestorm of opinion on any specific cultural product, the consumer needs to have critical faculties of his/her own; who crits the crits? I’m delighted with the level of response that my books have attracted on Amazon and similar sites, even the negative stuff; it really is better than not being talked about. But I’m always reminded that many ordinary readers have priorities that differ a little from those who review for broadsheets and learned journals. One person complained that my Leonard Cohen biography contained language not known to his Microsoft Word dictionary; several said they’d have liked the Noughties book better if it had had pictures.

And already we’re in dangerous territory. As RATM’s shouty rudeness began to threaten the Yuletide niche that had apparently been granted in perpetuity to his witless catamite of the moment, Simon Cowell accused those behind the campaign not just of attacking The X Factor, but of having a dig at the viewers and voters: “I also think it's incredibly dismissive of the people who watch and enjoy the show,” he said from through his big, fake teeth, “to treat our audiences as if they're stupid and I don't like that.” Of course Cowell can’t call his audiences stupid to their stupid, bovine, let’s-give-our-money-to-Simon faces; any more than I can do a Ratner and call my readers stupid if they want more pictures.

The thing is, people who post reviews on Amazon, or buy copies of the ‘The Climb’, don’t have to answer to anyone. Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to sneer for a living find very quickly that we don’t have an entirely free hand. As I pick morosely over one more high-end soufflé of mediocrity, I’m always aware of the chain that connects the dish to the restaurant to the owner who may or may not deign to advertise in the publication that sent me here in the first place. AA Gill might have the licence to tear a new alimentary canal for every restaurant he visits; most of us mere hacks operate in a fuzzy neverwhere between free speech and advertorial. So I often find myself turning in copy as insipid as the so-called bouillabaisse I endured at [NAME OF OVERPRICED BANGKOK EATERY RESCINDED]

Would restaurants (and publishers and film studios and car manufacturers) really be just as happy with feedback from Amazon reviewers who don’t know much about music but quite liked that one by Coldplay, or maybe Napalm Death, provided said punters were only permitted to offer four- or five-star reviews? Only up to a point. A multi-starred chef would be a tad conflicted by unstinting praise from a diner whose best point of reference is KFC. Those who offer product want public criticism that is to an extent informed, but not in the slightest bit incisive. From the point of view of the producers, the ideal food critic – or the ideal person to decide what is or isn’t an appropriate Christmas number one – is one who knows a lot about food or music, but doesn’t hold any strong opinions; in fact, one who doesn't really like food or music very much.

Why should I listen to you, anyway? You're a virgin who can't drive.

I was sad to see Brittany Murphy died today, at 32. Naturally, aside from "cardiac arrest," they don't say anything about the cause, just rumors of diabetes or anorexia...



It goes without saying she was so adorable in Clueless...I've seen her in other roles, and while she was always good, the movies seldom were. It's really a shame the material just wasn't worthy.

And we were going to make you King of the Winter Carnival!

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.



Now get the fuck off my computer, cat, I have to study. (I mean, I do have the heat turned on, you know...)

(Seriously, by the time I discovered this, his fat little body had added 300+ empty slides to my criminal law presentation, ha ha. I just re-opened it.)

Pearls! The woman is wearing PEARLS in the KITCHEN!!

I started Julie & Julia last night, not very far in yet, but I'm enjoying it. I really like Amy Adams--I know everyone says they just want more of the Meryl scenes (and I can still see why)--but for the record I really do enjoy Amy Adams.

Anyway. Thank GOD one of my exams was YESTERDAY morning and not THIS morning. Because FUCK. ME.



That's the marsh outside my window. It's usually water. It has been freezing over a little in the mornings but this is new. And you can barely see the train station, let alone the Boston skyline.



The area between the door and screen was even filled with snow! That's what the winds are like!



Someone likes it, though.



The snow is blowing sideways. I have been watching people shovel the front of our building and trucks plowing by and it is a really sad exercise in futility.

There is, seriously, more snow on the path than when he started.

Gob job

And there’s more: Scott Pack says nice things on his Me And My Big Mouth blog.

Definitely maybe not

With the editorial injunction “no French postmodernists please” ringing in my ears, I ruminate on the subject of fakes, hoaxes and why we knowingly fall for them in the latest edition of Prospect. (You need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing online, or you can buy the mag, which may not have the typo in the headline.)

All the news that's fit to remember

Further book pluggery in the guise of cultural chinnery-strokery: the dénouement of the BBC’s sort-of-interactive review of the decade.

It’s just noise comin’ out of an ugly scientist.

My neck is incredibly sore from sleeping on it wrong. Nice work.

I am very much procrastinating this morning. I need to not do that.

For one thing, I told myself that if I got a lot done today, I could go to a special screening tonight. It's in Braintree, so it's just a ten-minute drive south of my little town. It's the first time Doctors Without Borders has allowed a documentary to be filmed while they work, and wow, if that doesn't just sound uplifting enough right there, how about a clip?



It's called Living In Emergency. It's screening in NYC tonight but they're broadcasting the screening and the follow-up Q & A at various theaters nationwide at 7:30. It's also on the shortlist for Oscar documentaries (shocker).

If nothing else, it's guaranteed to take my mind off my studies.

And I know, I've been posting recently but mostly I've been sneaking in clips and songs and whatnot and those aren't really posts are they? But there is very little going on in my day lately.

Wake up.

Sit in downstairs cafe and drink too much coffee.

Dick around online.

Study.

Dick around online.

(We won't explore the time proportions on these, mmkay?)

Start drinking.

(We also won't explore what time of day these occur.)

Keep studying but go upstairs to prevent more dicking around online.

Eat. Pass out.

Repeat.

This can't just be shagging. A mini-break means true love.

Speaking of awesome chicks who play the piano...



You know, I almost got to see Weezer a week ago. My friend S thought she might end up with an extra ticket, which I would have gladly taken her up on, but she ended up not having one. And then the band got in an accident and Rivers Cuomo had to go to the hospital for minor injuries so the show was canceled anyway. (I think all is well once more.) But I really had fun at Weezer when I saw them in Austin nine years ago!

Anyway, I thought this was a cute song and was thrilled to see they asked Sara Bareilles to sing with them.

But see, that's another new album I didn't know about. Dang.

Let's get you a cocktail.

It's sad really, how disconnected I have become from normal everyday things like news, movies and music. I got a $15 itunes gift card from my mother-in-law, and not knowing what new albums had even come out this year, I glanced at NPR's All Songs Considered, a podcast I used to listen to but haven't in ages. Well, I opted for the new Regina Spektor album, Far, since I previewed a few tunes and I usually really like her stuff. Plus she's ttly cute and I will see her live one day. (You know how I like my chicks'n'pianos...well, though I was never a huge Tori Amos fan, but whatevs.)



But it's far more fun to say that my mother-in-law also (indirectly) purchased Jay-Z's 99 Problems for me as well. (And it's true!)



Anyhoo,it's almost time to go home! 2 down and 3 to go. I think a really good new album will help me to the finish line. (That and all that popcorn, Alex, you rock!!)

...also

I’ll be on Radio 5Live tomorrow morning, talking about death in the Noughties. I may get out of bed to do it, but probably not.

By the licking of my thumbs

If you Google the word ‘book’, the first result that comes up is Facebook. Which got me thinking...

Unless they’re related to work, my reading habits seldom follow a particular plan. The selection of a book from the teetering piles of unread matter is down to chance, mood, sleep patterns, energy levels, travel plans, even the weather (or more specifically the shape and size of the pockets of the outer garments I might be wearing at the time).

Sometimes there’s a happy congruence between two successive books: if you pick out a Martin Amis, does this raise the chances of your next selection being an Ian McEwan? But it’s rarer that coincidence brings together two books that appear to contradict each other directly. Even if, after deeper analysis, they turn out not to.

On the face of it at least, Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read does what it says on the cover. Bayard not only acknowledges the guilty secret that many who inhabit academic and literary circles haven’t actually read Ulysses/A Brief History of Time/anything; he even identifies such a state not as an omission, but as a commission, and a positive one at that:

If many cultivated individuals are non-readers, and if, conversely, many non-readers are cultivated individuals, it is because non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be protected and even taught.

Bayard’s thesis is based on the fact that any text is inextricably linked to the cultural context in which it exists; in this sense, his notion of non-reading can be seen as the logical end of Barthes’s Death of the Author (apologies to long-standing readers who’ve been subjected to this several times before). Just as the writer gives up any special authority over a text the moment it is read, so the reader gives up any claim to authority once the text becomes part of a broader culture. We need neither to write nor to read a book in order to own it; which must allow Katie Price to sleep more easily.

There does remain the question of whether Bayard is entirely serious. An air of mischievous irony hangs over the slim volume; and the breadth of references (Balzac; Proust; Musil; Wilde; Soseki; David Lodge; The Third Man; Groundhog Day) suggests that the author’s been reading a little more deeply than he affects to let on. Which in turn discourages the casual (non-?) reader, by framing a whimsical jape in the forbidding context of proper literary criticism.

Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, by contrast, couches a serious point in the context of whimsy. It’s a brief story about the Queen, who becomes an avid reader late in life; this change disturbs her advisors at Court and in government, who find the monarch becoming less malleable and reliable as a result of her literary explorations, and also begin to feel insecure about their own cultural aridity. Almost in passing, she expresses the point of reading a book, as distinct from being aware of its contents:

“Of course,” said the Queen, “but briefing is not reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

Which in turn makes me think of Cliffs Notes and similar products that claim to offer us the benefit of reading without actually, y’know reading. I’m not sure whether there’s an equivalent of Cliffs in Bayard’s native France, but I was half expecting a passing reference to them in his book. That said, raising the existence of such non-reading guides might have alerted us to the fact that he’s taking the piss, by implicitly acknowledging the point made by Bennett’s Queen: that it’s not the content of a book that’s important, but the process by which the reader engages with that content.

Not that you need to read this post to know that, of course.

I don't show my tits for watered down Bud.

I'm not just putting on an eye-candy parade, really, I have a reason here.







First of all, I have been studying too much because I sat here at my laptop for a good twenty seconds going, "What is that bastard's name again?!?!" before I remembered. Sad.



Anyway, I'm told they were ridiculously on sale, but I am now the happy owner of the first THREE seasons of Supernatural! Hooray! (And yes, Mob, it's a great show, it's not just an excuse for me to drool over Jensen Ackles on a weekly basis, ha ha! On the other hand, erm, that is sort of what Castle is (only for Nathan Fillion), so I'm not going to pretend like I'm too good for that...that show is such a guilty pleasure, but it does somehow manage to be cute and watchable, again, clearly because of NF.)



ANYWAY. Dying to rewatch the first season of Supernatural. I remember it being really great except for one episode, I think it was on the second disc, called Bugs. Omfg. It was such a "Which One of These Does Not Belong" Seasame Street moments. The whole episode was total shit and there was this great scene with spiders in a bathroom...wow. We were positive they were little plastic spider rings with the rings cut off and you could infact--I swear--hear them clattering to the floor when someone picked up a white towel full of them. Ed Wood would have been proud.



And I'm not yet vouching for season 4; it was treading real thin ice and I've yet to complete it.



So good xmas so far! I get prezzies as study breaks, but I am very good about not watching them that instant. Oh, and here is my Enterprise (mentioned in the previous post):











*squee*



And I also admit that yesterday was not as full of studies as it ought to have been...



One of the xmas prezzies I got from my mother-in-law was an Express gift card and well, I have been wanting to go shopping there lately...practically speaking, I need some type of suit...impractically speaking, a girl can always use a new dress for a rockin' New Year's Eve party! ;)



So I compromised and found 2 suiting skirts (the jacket sleeves were a tad long and it was also a little tight, so no go) and I got a wearable-for-other-occasions little B & W dress. (There was a tiny strapless black dress with swatches of sparkly and I was very good at talking myself out of it.) I also got a couple shirts and another dress. It was a great day to go shopping--since it was a weekday, I had two people waiting on me hand and foot (in a good way for once, not in that annoying, pestering go-the-fuck-away manner) and I talked the girl into splitting up my purchase into 2 transactions so I could use the coupon twice (you got $30 off if you spent $75) and even with my gift card, I still spent too much.



Considering I haven't been clothes shopping since probably last year, though, WHEE!!



So yes, I know, this was my most titillating post yet, but what do you expect when I'm procrastinating? And you can probably also tell how much coffee I've had.



For any fellow procrastinators or anyone needing a great laugh, here was mine for the day (thanks, dad!):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Gretchen Carlson Dumbs Down
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

All you had to do was come and say, "Hi" or "thanks", or something... I mean... But no, you sent me to a restaurant with shitty breadsticks!

Wow, whoops, sorry about that. No updates AND you get to stare at Steven Tyler. I will try to make amends.



So at least if I don't update, you can enjoy some Nathan.

It has started getting cold finally (even though it's colder in Texas, wth). Yesterday morning was my first midterm. I woke up, looked out the window to see big gusty wins of fat wet snowflakes swooshing all around. It would have been pretty had it not been so unfortunate looking, as it is when one is realizing one must go out in it shortly.

And nothing was uglier than the midterm itself. It was my first but the one that I--and everyone--was dreading most. There is nothing I could have done differently study-wise, they were two essay questions I felt were a little out of the blue, one in particular. Whatever, it's over.

Another one Saturday. It's an easier one but I also don't want to blow it off. Big mistake. Huge.

13 days til I can get THE HELL OUT OF HERE YAY!! It's not so much that I'm eager to leave Boston, it's just that I'm incredibly eager to GO HOME!!

I am also very excited to see ACTUAL REAL THEATER MOVIES!! First of all:



I just couldn't put up an actual image from The Road cause every image is so bleak and melodramatic looking. I haven't read the book but I'm thinking that it and Shutter Island will keep me company at the airport. My friend L saw it already (she adores the book) and said that while it was incredible and did well by the book, she said Do. Not. Watch It. Til After Midterms. Real upper, you see.

And you know I'm ttly spazzy to see The Lovely Bones cause it's Peter Jackson and the trailer looks like it too does well by the book. Another upper.



I'm hoping it's sort of in that Heavenly Creatures vein. It just looks like it will be visually captivating and I'm all for that. Happy happy happy to be sucked into anything not law-related.

Of course the problem is that no matter what the topic, I often can only think of law-related issues. It's sad. It happens with receipts, it happens at the grocery store, it happens when friends get mugged, it's taking over my brain.

But movies, want! Silly stuff, too. Want me some Clooney in Up in the Air, want some Princess & the Frog, anything. One of those two might be a treat Saturday after the midterm, not sure. The 3rd midterm may be a bit of a beast, and the last one surely is, so have to take it easy with my "treats."

Nothing else special going on. Oh! I did get home and watch the new Star Trek movie last night, one of my xmas prezzies from D. I took pics of it, but I'm not on my laptop at the moment, so this is almost it (the one below is the Blu-Ray, but you get the idea):



So the Enterprise model IS the DVD case. The saucer section opens up and has 2 DVDs inside. It is SO COOL and my inner dork is so happy. So it sits on top of the DVD shelves because obviously it doesn't shelve very well. ;)

New York state of mind

Tied in with the Noughties tome, I ponder the news stories of the past decade for the BBC. The temptation to ignore 9/11 entirely, and plump for the return of Davros was immense.

Too much too young

I am becoming increasingly fond of The Word magazine, and not just because they’ve mentioned my Noughties book for the third time in two issues. I suppose it’s because their prejudices gel with mine, not least in their overview of the bests and worsts of the past decade: The Wire, Twitter, winning the Ashes, BBC4, Heston Blumenthal, Brian Blessed on HIGNFY in the first camp; reality TV, The Da Vinci Code and Ugg boots in the latter.

But then we reach their Top 10 books of the last 10 years (I like to console myself with the notion that my tome was hovering somewhere around 11 or 12), and Christopher Bray’s take on Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, by David Kynaston, which is lauded as a “gloriously open-armed account of the era in which Word readers’ parents were setting up home.”

Except that my parents got married in 1966. Does this mean I’m 15 years too young to read The Word?

Package deal

I’ve never really liked Christmas. Even its few redeeming features are dying out; the Salvation Army band that used to play at Victoria seems to be have replaced by an ad hoc, plain-clothes combo that barely gets through a single verse of ‘David’s City’ before grinding to an embarrassed halt.

So I was delighted to read the thoughts of Joel Waldfogel, who has offered sound economic analysis to support my instinctive distaste for that cornerstone of the modern Yuletide, the giving and receiving of gifts. The transaction, he argues, represents a deadweight loss; the value placed on a present by the giver inevitably exceeds that which the receiver calculates. In any case, in a developed economy, if people want something, they’ll probably buy it for themselves. ‘Gift shops’, almost by definition, sell things that nobody really wants to own.

But then you read down the article, and discover that Waldfogel has a book out, with the Zeitgeisty title Scroogenomics. I can’t help but think that, for all the author’s protestations, more than a few copies will be purchased as Christmas presents; probably for grumpy gits who profess to loathe Christmas. And of course I have a book or two out at the moment, and despite my anti-festive feelings, I’m not going to forbid anyone from buying copies as gifts.

Maybe Waldfogel and I should enjoy Christmas together, scowling across a bowl of lukewarm sprouts, pulling crackers with royalty statements inside and then spending the rest of the day feeling guilty.

The spirit of Hornby

I think the first time I ever posted a comment online came about 10 years ago, when The Guardian tried to compile a list of the 100 ‘greatest’ albums that never showed up in lists of 100 ‘greatest’ albums. What they eventually produced, as I pointed out, was the bottom half of a list of the 200 ‘greatest’ albums. In the same admirable if slightly quixotic spirit, that obsessive cinematic taxonomist Iain Stott has come up with another list, this time of the ‘greatest’ films that have somehow evaded the consensual canon of ‘greatestness’. Here’s Iain’s roll-call of second-bestness; here’s, I dunno, the Conference North; and here’s my own humble contribution to the project. Great.

(And there’s more on lists at my Noughties blog.)

This is pop

A quick piece I wrote about the pop/celeb culture of the past decade for the Australian women’s magazine Madison. You need to scroll down before you get to my bit. Incidentally, they removed my stuff about The Truman Show and replaced it with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their gaff, their rules, I suppose.

And talking of films, when I think of Madison, this is what comes to mind:

That’s what it’s all about

If anybody still doesn’t quite get the hang of Twitter, apparently this is what I’ve been doing for the past year:


And you thought it was all about overturning injunctions and dissing homophobic journalists and bring democracy to Iran, didn’t you?

(Go here if you want one for yourself.) On second thoughts, don’t. Apparently you’d be laying yourself open to hackers. Sorry.

PS: Or maybe not. Sorry, this is just too complicated for me.

Cohen for a song

Review of the Lenny book in Q magazine. (Does horizontal hand wobble thing.)

Wooh, hello Paddington!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of London’s Frontline Club this coming Wednesday, do feel free to pop in and chuck a bread roll or two while I discuss the past decade. More details here.

Flighty

I’ve been topping up my karmic footprint in the past few days, indulging in what Alan Whicker would have dubbed a jet-set lifestyle. And as the recycled, H1N1-drenched air slowly poisoned my brain, a few thoughts seeped through:

1.) I simply don’t comprehend the prevailing neurosis about unflattering passport photos. Surely it’s the flattering ones that should cause the most distress? My own picture dates from 2004, a point at which I could muster respectably pointy cheekbones and enough hair to concoct a pompadour that might offer Little Richard a run for his money. In fact, I look pretty cute in it, if I say so myself. As a result, whenever I present it at immigration, the polyester-swathed lackey’s eyes brim with pity, as if to say “You poor sod, what ungodly trauma blighted your once-carefree life over the past five years?”

2.) Talking of those grounded denizens of the airport, why do they insist on saying “Have a nice flight”? My tongue-jerk reaction is to say “You too”, which rather rubs in the fact that I’m about to fly off somewhere potentially interesting, while they’re just going to spend the next six hours looking at passports, checking in luggage, selling bottles of duty-free Scotch and the like. Must stop doing it.

3.) I understand that, when it comes to picking in-flight entertainment, airlines tend to avoid movies that include scenes of air crashes, hostage situations and the like. Surely it would also be tactful to avoid exposing economy-class travellers to films such as Julie and Julia, which is essentially about the joy to be had from the preparation and consumption of delicious food. I mean, that’s just cruel.

4.) Between flights, my sleep cycle is inevitably buggered up. I find myself leaping fully awake at about 4 in the morning, then crashing out again shortly after lunch. All well and good, except that this would only make sense if I’d been flying from Trinidad, or possibly Tasmania. Which I wasn’t. Jet lag I can deal with, but I’ve never before suffered from someone else’s jet lag.

Hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary

The good news that Gil Scott-Heron is back on the scene has got me thinking. As he suggested, the revolution will not be televised; but that’s because by the time we get round to organising the revolution, television as we know it will be dead and gone.

Sticks, stones and tweets

Stephen Fry, discussing his on/off infatuation with all things Twittery, reckons that “it is a bit much that somehow people almost feel they have a right to be heard in their insulting of me.” Well, assuming they have the right to say it, I suppose that entails the right for it/them to be heard. Otherwise, Twitter (and by extension, pretty much the whole of Web 2.0) develops into a whole new strain of the Bishop Berkeley conundrum: if Stephen Fry is insulted on Twitter and nobody reads the tweet, is he still entitled to be upset?

But on a more general point, we’re back to the situation in which people who have multiple pulpits, many of them well remunerated, from which to say stuff to a wide audience, slap down those for whom blogs, Twitter, Comment is Free and so on are the only means of being heard. Talking of which, our blogchum Fat Roland gets a mention in CiF, and some of the comments are a bit unpleasant, but I think he’s fine with that. Take note, Mr Fry.

Print’s charming

Maybe I’m just benevolently disposed towards The Word at the moment, seeing as how they gave my book so much coverage, but I was impressed by an article that David Hepworth wrote in the current article, suggesting that the Kindle and the Reader and such like won’t present much of a challenge to the dominance of the conventional book. His is not just a fogeyish argument that books have lasted 500 years so they ought to last for at least another 500; rather, it’s a highly modern observation about how we express our identities today:

...a lot of books and nearly all magazines are read on public transport. In the act of reading something with the cover pointing outwards we advertise ourselves and our attitudes. It’s the most complex and powerful sign language we know. An attractive woman makes herself twice as attractive when she is seen reading an interesting book. How can a brushed metal blank or a piece of nice smooth plastic begin to cope with that? We live in a culture of display, where people pay more for a ringtone than for a record. It’s the worst time in history to be hiding what you’re reading.

That said, here’s another view, from Freek Bijl. (Thanks to Ian Hocking for alerting me to this one.)

Blinking freak

I’d never quite identified a word or phrase that defines all those books (Blink; Freakonomics; The Black Swan; The Long Tail; The Undercover Economist; and so on) that seem to oscillate between economics, sociology, psychology, business, current affairs, pop culture and self-improvement, until Shane Richmond nudge*d me towards this article by Maureen Tkacik about Malcolm Gladwell; she refers to “the competitive thought-generation business”, which nails the whole genre quite nicely. Although, when I come to think of it, I suppose that’s what I do as well, albeit with less success. Ouch.**

*And there’s another one.

**Which might well be another one again.***

***Ah. It is. Sort of.

Not the one with Huffty

Much coverage of the Noughties book in the latest issue of The Word magazine, available from all good newsagents and doubtless a few iffy ones as well.

Reading while bleeding

Got an e-mail from an old friend, apologising for the fact that she’s only just finished The Noughties, because she doesn’t commute and as a result barely reads anything these days. I sort of know what she means; I’ve got piles upon piles of unread books over two continents, that show no sign of succumbing to erosion. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s only when I’m on trains and boats and planes that I’m forced into a state of prolonged concentration.

This seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon. I must admit that a quantity of drink was taken on Tuesday night: Red Stripe for Billy, Guinness, then vodka for your correspondent. But not nearly as much as had been encountered by a gentleman I saw on the way home, barely able to stand, blood trickling from a mysterious wound on his flushed, sweaty forehead. But once he’d boarded the train at Old Street and managed, after several attempts, to achieve a satisfactory bottom/seat interface, he got stuck into a battered paperback of Thomas Mann short stories.

Punk pedantry

So it was Talking Musical Revolutions last night, transplanted to a pleasantly dank cellar in Shoreditch, and Stevie Chick is discussing his fine-sounding, just-out book about Black Flag with John Robb, and Stevie mentions that guitarist Greg Ginn was a huge Grateful Dead fan, and how the whole punk Year Zero concept is a bit of a myth, and that the Sex Pistols were really into Yes, and I mutter sotto voce that, actually, it was the Buzzcocks (specifically Steve Diggle) who were into Yes, and Billy completes my thought process by asserting that the Pistols (specifically John Lydon) were more into Van Der Graaf Generator, and I wonder whether we should start a Facebook group or something of that ilk for people to get all nerdy about the banal minutiae of the whole Now-Form-A-Band culture, although wouldn’t it be more punk not to care?

Heads, I win. Tails, you *ooze*!

Congratulations, Steven Tyler, for having the scariest fucking picture ever.



I couldn't really care less if he is leaving Aerosmith, I just know a bunch of us died laughing at this picture in class today. As the guy next to me said, "God, I can just hear Stephen Colbert doing his Crypt Keeper impression!"

It’s not as funny as it used to be

I’d rather drifted away from Viz, and only picked up November’s issue because it promised a nostalgic wallow in the company of some of my old favourites, such as the Pathetic Sharks, Roger Irrelevant and Johnny Fartpants. (Hey – what happened to Mr Logic – surely the model for Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory?) But there was one gem, in the sub-Tuckeresque midst of Roger’s Profanisaurus: a single word that encompasses all those regional exclamations that don’t mean anything, such as “Howay the lads” and “Och aye the noo”; bolloquialism.

You go get the door--I'll be in the closet!

Nostalgia time! (For me, anyway.)



Omfg, that theme song.

Something else not available on DVD...the funny thing is, for me, it was just enjoyable to watch when I was a kid (I was probably 8 or 9); how could I know anything about it was controversial? But I guess this was probably the first gay-themed sitcom on the air. Half the jokes must have flown over my head (like the subject line).

Showtime kicked ass in the 80s. Who knew?

That was then, this is then as well

I just posted this at the Noughties blog, but I’ve allowed it to come out of its box and run around for a bit, since it doesn’t have school tomorrow or anything. It’s by Patrick West at Spiked, discussing the extent to which the current decade will be defined by its nostalgia for previous decades:

No wonder Philip K Dick’s stories have become so popularised in cinematic form - in the guise of Minority Report (2002) and A Scanner Darkly (2008), which are both paranoid paeans to the past, and to the future. And no wonder Danny Dyer’s fake cockneyism has become popularised in a time when we all long for the ‘good old days’ when West Ham, Millwall and Chelsea fans could kick the shit out of each other. No wonder the backward-looking Life On Mars was a success. Even Dr Who has a decidedly retro feel about it. Yesterday and Dave and various Discovery and History channels have become successful avenues, and with good reason. The Noughties has been an epoch of endless re-remembering.

Return of the old-style cultural theory post!

If I were to frame Larkin’s Law of Reissues, it would say that anything you haven’t got already probably isn’t worth bothering about. In other words, if someone tries to persuade you to buy a limited edition of the 1924-5 sessions by Paraffin Joe and his Nitelites, keep your pockets buttoned up; if they were any good, you’d have heard of them at school, as you did King Oliver, and have laid out your earliest pocket money on them... Everything worthwhile gets reissued about every five years.

Larkin was writing in 1969, in the days when music fans were expected to wait patiently for any audio scraps to fall off the table. But he also seems to speak of an era when nostalgia was rooted in accurate memories, with no potential for revisionism. For example, I certainly didn’t watch this



when it was first on TV in 1980. But in true postmodern style, I’m quite capable of retrospectively absorbing it into my childhood. If, as Roland Barthes suggested, the Author is Dead, did he take the Past down with him?

The Film of the Noughties

Last weekend, almost by accident, I caught Michael Moore’s latest salvo, Capitalism: A Love Story. It’s what you might expect from the man that Bernard Goldberg identified as the most dangerous person in America; let’s just say that the title’s a tad sarcastic. In fact one could argue that with this and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has created a cinematic diptych that defines the Noughties, a two-part Film of the Decade.

In fact, that’s what I thought for a few days: until I saw Chris Atkins’ Starsuckers, which reminded us that, even if our era is bookended by two New York institutions collapsing into dust, many of us have been distracted by Britney and Brangelina, by Jade and Jedward, and by the weird wish that maybe, just maybe, we could have a tiny slice of the same pie. Just a little too late for my book, I’ve found the film that sums it all up.

Bloody students

(via Mike Arnzen)

The quick and the dead

(Adopts Cyril Fletcher voice.) I am indebted to my old schoolchum Diccon Bewes (author of a forthcoming tome about all things Swiss), who alerted me to the Write Badly Well site, which may give some amusement to anybody who followed my Chasms of the Earth blog:

He slowly walked the slow, winding path towards the crooked, run-down old house. With one slow, hesitant hand he bravely, resolutely knocked on the dusty, pock-marked, ancient and frightening door. Slowly, it opened slowly. He slowly poked his brave head through the narrow, foreboding gap.
‘Hello?’ he slowly said, bravely.

Dear Nick Griffin...

Half of my ancestry is of the sort of Anglo-Saxon stock that you revere (possibly with a small dash of Celt, the sort of thing you mention to reinforce the notion that yours is a British rather than English party). The other half is Polish Jewish, a rag-tag bunch that came over in about 1900, economic migrants and asylum seekers.

Should I send my legs back to where they came from?

Meanwhile...

Thinking about Cohen and e-books at Rock's Back Pages; and it’s been a week of Stephen Fry and annoying choppers at the Noughties blog.

Kinda sounds like prison's better than Dunder Mifflin...

Just when you think you're almost home on a nicely uneventful day, someone starts caressing you on the train.

I'd just gotten caught up on Project Runway only to find out fucking adorable hometown girl Shirin lost to some wankface moron whose name I still haven't bothered to learn, so you know, I was already not in the mood for bullshit.

Even when he sat down next to me, it was weird; the train wasn't all that full and my stuff was oozing onto the next seat. He was oozing weird vibe, so I discreetly moved closer to the END when we stopped.

And you know, I wasn't even sure. Maybe I was being paranoid, right? I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but his hand (which I even LOOKED DOWN at) was clearly over his leg and kept brushing/caressing my leg. (I was wearing a dress but it covered my legs plenty, whew.) I figured, if he does it again...

And he did.

So I turned from my shoulders and LOOKED. AT. HIM. Now if someone turns to you on the train, you're going to look back. Out of surprise or confusion if nothing else. Yeah, not only did this guy not look at me, I could feel him not looking at me and pretty much praying I wasn't going to start screaming at him there on the train (there can be more than one crazy, you know) but basically, you could just see the waves of shame coming off this dude.

And then he made a big point of using both his hands to play with his ipod and phone. Just a coincidence, I'm sure...

We could be heroes

Ah, the London Film Festival, a chance to star-spot (Steven Soderbergh and, er... Nigel Havers) and to feel smug because you’ve seen a movie about a fortnight before your friends get a chance. A few titles tickle my postmodern bone, as they turn in on the film-making process, and ultimately themselves.

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take comes from the Adam Curtis school of using archive footage, smartly juxtaposed with talking heads. Alfred Hitchcock finds himself introducing not his TV show in the 1950s and 60s, but broadcasters and politicians nervously assessing the Soviets' lead in the space race, and Nixon’s ‘kitchen debate’ with Krushchev. Via a plot borrowed from Borges, the focus shifts to Hitchcock himself, and a weird encounter that may or may not have occurred during the filming of The Birds. We never forget we’re watching a movie, as we’re shown Hitchcock’s body double and vocal impersonator getting into their stride; were Dick and Nikita playing their parts as well?

L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot appears to be a more straightforward proposition. It’s a documentary about the efforts of Clouzot (best known for The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques) to make a movie about paranoia and jealousy within an apparently happy marriage. The 1964 shoot was a catalogue of disasters: Clouzot didn’t get on with the female lead, Romy Schneider; his habit of waking up his colleagues in the middle of the night with new ideas alienated the technicians; the fact that the artificial lake that was central to the story was due to be drained 20 days after shooting started only added to the pressures. Things got so bad that the leading man, Serge Reggiani, walked away from the film; his replacement lasted a matter of hours; and then while he was filming a Sapphic dream sequence on a boat, Clouzot suffered a coronary, and the whole project was put on ice. The film was eventually made by Claude Chabrol, 30 years later.

The inevitable comparison is with Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's doomed attempt to film the Don Quixote story. But the footage here has added resonance, because many involved in the project – including Schneider, Reggiani and Clouzot himself – are dead, adding an extra layer of poignancy to the sense of missed opportunities. And, great as my regard is for Gilliam, he never used blue lipstick as shorthand for a dream sequence, did he?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s comeback, Micmacs, is less obviously *about* film, although there are numerous nods and winks: the hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is seen mouthing along to the (French dubbed) soundtrack of The Big Sleep; a security guard does an excruciating De Niro impression; there’s a neat reference to Jeunet’s own Delicatessen, and even to Micmacs itself (via film posters).

But there’s also an implicit reproach to modern Hollywood. Micmacs is essentially a warped superhero movie, in which a band of outsiders pool their talents (contortionism; arithmetic; making stuff out of junk) for the common good. They’re not really freaks; but, because this is Jeunet, they look far uglier – far more like us – than the ravishingly beautiful mutants of the X-Men franchise.

Micmacs is essentially the story of how Bazil, who lost his father to a landmine, and very nearly his own life to a bullet, takes revenge on the rival arms manufacturers he holds responsible. The immediate comparison is with another comic book adaptation, Iron Man, which essentially comes down to a final battle between a good arms dealer and a bad arms dealer (see Chris Morris’s Good & Bad AIDS sketch); whereas Jeunet damns them both. Which may be politically naïve (think Boy George’s analysis of military malfeasance) but does make for better cinema.