missing dust jacket

by way of apology

2009-10-12T14:32:00.005Z

I was dashing off for a last-minute visit to the loo with a friend of mine, prior to us running the Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon in London (it hurt), when I asked him if he'd been watching X Factor. He scoffed, and then exclaimed how much he hated "that one with the afro" and how he loathes "Sex On Fire". I mumbled something in agreement, because I do actually agree with him, ...but I also have bad taste. Paddington was the perfect gent and didn't blow my cover. It's times like this I'm relieved my friends don't ever check my blog. However, in case he does, I hope this link to a very lucid and intelligent look at the influence of Studio Ghibli's Howl's Moving Castle and Laputa on Pixar's Up does something to restore his confidence in me.

SOTW - Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon

2009-10-07T21:03:00.007Z

The Kings of Leon video is "disabled by request" so we shan't plug them and their silly record label. Pah.

This week’s SOTW has been a slow-burner, as on its release I pretty much refused to listen to it. I think this band is overrated, and I thought the song was too silly. But ever since that bloke Jamie performed it for his “first” audition on X factor, Kings of Leon’s Sex On Fire has been in my head all week. No one is more acutely aware of this than Paddington, who has had to endure me wailing the one thing that makes this song brilliant– “Yeeeeewwwwwww-ooooooooooooo, uuurrr sexxx iz on frrrrrrrrrrrr!”

It’s not so much a lyric as a primal scream, or at the very least, a muddle of the English language which takes some heavy cues from Lolcats.

Ever since Molly's Chambers came out I've remained unconvinced by Kings of Leon. Caleb’s [real name, Anthony what’s with the middle-name thing? If people knew me by my middle name I’d have an entirely made-up name that’s a composite of my mum’s maiden name and her actual name. Which, by the way, I actually think is quite cool. But KOL don’t even have interesting middle names. Huff ?*?] Sorry, I’ll start that again...

Caleb’s gravelly whine has never done much for me, and the opening of this song is about as generic as radio-friendly rock comes. It has a chugging bass, a crunchy guitar, a plodding drum beat, a half-hearted strum thrown in, and that predictable progression of quiet and moody to BIG AND LOUD, usually employed by half-arsed rock groups to signify depth of feeling. [Unless you’re The Pixies, whereupon it actually represents true genius and greatness.] But gollygeewhiz if that ain’t the damned catchiest chorus ever.

By now everyone’s probably familiar with the story about how this song was called Set Us On Fire or something until some sleepy sound engineer misheard it as Sex Is On Fire. Yeah, right. If the lyric to this song was actually 'set us on fire', it would sound like any other U2-cum-Killers wannabe stadium rock track of stinky cheesiness. But the fact it’s actually 'Sex Is On Fire' elevates it into dizzy new heights of silliness. Suddenly this song about the euphoric, intense, violently unmanageable flush of new love/lust feels immediate and impulsive, and it’s that ridiculous OTT-ness that gives it such potency, enhanced by the fact Caleb-Anthony insists on delivering it as if he means every word . It’s a joyful, noisy, hand-clapper of a choon and I love it.

All together now...

Yeeeeewwwwwww-ooooooooooooo, *grrr* uuurrr sexx iz on frrrrrrr!

Song of the Week: Call the Shots - Girls Aloud

2009-09-29T21:23:00.006Z

Next to the recent glut of antiseptic nineties revival euro-dance, this 2007 offering from Girls Aloud is a refreshing slice of quality. But next to earlier GA tracks, such as the rambunctious multi-chorused The Show or former SOTW Biology, Call the Shots is, at first glance, an incredibly conventional number.

Opening with a rather generic mid-tempo dance beat of synthetic, echoey ‘ah-ooh’s that swirl into that ubiquitous washing-machine-fuzz, it’s so far, so heard-it-all-before. Nasal Nadine delivers an unemotional, polished pop opening verse...and then as the low-key lead-in to the chorus speeds up into a defiant floorfiller, this becomes a little bit special.

The stupidly simple backing track, with its electronic booms and jabbing keyboard chords, calls for overenthusiastic grooving on the kind of light-up dancefloor you find at Infernos in Clapham. However, the song’s melody and break-up lyrics make this a decidedly plaintive, grown-up affair.

The song’s very basic structure means that the classic GA formula is stripped of all its usual playfulness and irreverence, and what’s left is an equally melancholy and catchy pop song. Trimmed off their 2006 Best Of album for being too downbeat, Call the Shots, while perhaps less innovative than some of their earlier output, arguably offers the most conclusive proof of GA’s status as the best new pop act to come out of...well, anywhere since Kylie.

Deliberately tinny and artificial, but with a sincerely sad anti-girl-power sentiment at its core [I’m over you, except I’m obviously not, as I’m singing this song and it’s coming off more Carly Simon than Gloria Gaynor], Call the Shots shows up the differences in the five girls’ voices. There’s diva Nadine, belter Sarah, husky Cheryl, poppy Kimberley and angelic Nicola. As a result, instead of delivering the kind of deliberately characterless dance pop that’s fashionable at the moment, their distinctive voices give a solid, but perhaps unexceptional, song depth and immediacy.

No where demonstrates GA’s strength better than in Call The Shots' middle eight. In lesser break-up songs this would soar into the heights of defiance or the depths of heartbreak, but in Call the Shots it stays in almost exactly the same sparkly place it began, and shifts moods by shifting singers. Cheryl’s rich Geordie boom is replaced by GA’s unassuming and overlooked star, Nicola. Her girlish, icing-sugar voice is clean and vulnerable following Cheryl and Nadine’s beefier, sassier vocals. Without a whiff of Mariah-melodrama, she deftly takes the song to a lonesome place.

As the track closes up into an ambient fade out, the middle-eight’s faux-naive rhyme of shimmer and glimmer stands in stark contrast to the dumb beat of the dance track, which punches its way back into the limelight with an irresistible hammering knock. And - ta-dah - we’re back to the circular euro-beats of the song’s opening.

All-too-soon it fades out unassumingly, but although no one’s made a big fuss or done any clever pop pastiches, Call the Shots cries out for a repeat listen.

In Nunhead Cemetery

2009-07-09T18:13:00.003Z

In Nunhead Cemetery

by Charlotte Mew

It is the clay what makes the earth stick to his spade;
He fills in holes like this year after year;
The others have gone; they were tired, and half afraid
But I would rather be standing here;

There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place
From the windows of the train that's going past
Against the sky. This is rain on my face -
It was raining here when I saw it last.

There is something horrible about a flower;
This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw it in just now; it will not live another hour;
There are thousands more; you do not miss a rose.

One of the children hanging about
Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled
This morning after THAT was carried out;
There is something terrible about a child.

We were like children last week, in the Strand;
That was the day you laughed at me
Because I tried to make you understand
The cheap, stale chap I used to be
Before I saw the things you made me see.

This is not a real place; perhaps by-and-by
I shall wake - I am getting drenched with all this rain:
To-morrow I will tell you about the eyes of the Chrystal Palace train
Looking down on us, and you will laugh and I shall see what you see again.

Not here, not now. We said "Not yet
Across our low stone parapet
Will the quick shadows of the sparrows fall.

But still it was a lovely thing
Through the grey months to wait for Spring
With the birds that go a-gypsying
In the parks till the blue seas call.
And next to these, you used to care
For the Lions in Trafalgar Square,
Who'll stand and speak for London when her bell of Judgement tolls -
And the gulls at Westminster that were
The old sea-captains souls.
To-day again the brown tide splashes step by step, the river stair,

And the gulls are there!

By a month we have missed our Day:
The children would have hung about
Round the carriage and over the way
As you and I came out.

We should have stood on the gulls' black cliffs and heard the sea
And seen the moon's white track,
I would have called, you would have come to me
And kissed me back.

You have never done that: I do not know
Why I stood staring at your bed
And heard you, though you spoke so low,
But could not reach your hands, your little head;
There was nothing we could not do, you said,
And you went, and I let you go!

Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through,
Though I am damned for it we two will lie
And burn, here where the starlings fly
To these white stones from the wet sky - ;
Dear, you will say this is not I -
It would not be you, it would not be you!

If for only a little while
You will think of it you will understand,
If you will touch my sleeve and smile
As you did that morning in the Strand
I can wait quietly with you
Or go away if you want me to -
God! What is God? but your face has gone and your hand!
Let me stay here too.

When I was quite a little lad
At Christmas time we went half mad
For joy of all the toys we had,
And then we used to sing about the sheep
The shepherds watched by night;
We used to pray to Christ to keep
Our small souls safe till morning light - ;
I am scared, I am staying with you to-night -
Put me to sleep.

I shall stay here: here you can see the sky;
The houses in the street are much too high;
There is no one left to speak to there;
Here they are everywhere,
And just above them fields and fields of roses lie -
If he would dig it all up again they would not die.

with thanks to Paddington, Sasha Goblin and Lady Quinoa for helping me find this...

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling III

2009-01-25T18:42:00.006Z

When Wendy is ‘captured’ in S&M roleplay with Peter and Tinker Bell, placing her in the position of Barrie’s Native-American character Tiger Lily, she imagines herself, quite literally, taken by pirates:

I couldn’t sleep for cabin-girl fancies, the maddest, filthiest things. On tilting decks they’d make me watch while pirates fondled and sucked each other, or all spent into a tankard I’d be forced to drain. All through the creaking night they’d fuck me, old negro men and little Malay boys...

And that hook of a hand, dragging down my underthing, probing my bottom. I’d frig myself there in the darkness, horrified and ashamed at the thing I wanted done to me. A-and the shame was exciting. The shadows slipped their long fingers up me, and could feel for themselves that I was ready...

Shame, degradation, violence and loss of control characterize Wendy’s fantasies. It is when she is at her most debased that Wendy feels most empowered by her own sexual potency, and effectively ‘allowed’ to enjoy it, sexual abandon being forced upon her, absolving her of any responsibilityand thereby enabling her to sublimate and harness her sexual guilt for her own pleasure.

With this comes Wendy’s own horror as she becomes aware of her parents’ sexual games with the nanny. Wendy is both disturbed by the exposure of their Edwardian upper/middle-class hypocrisies, and aroused by it, remarking 'I suppose that was how everyone must secretly behave.' However, Wendy cannot reconcile her sexual pleasure with her sense of self. Her repression leads to her inability to believe that sexual desire and goodness can coexist, undermining her conception of her whole world:

After everything my brothers and I had been doing, our family’s respectable façade seemed such a sham. So did society. How could everyone act so normally when they all had this heat between their legs; these things they wanted so to do?

Although sometimes joyful and capable of inspiring love, for Wendy, desire can also be violent and ugly. As Wendy masturbates, remembering her father kissing the nanny, her disgust at her father’s betrayal and her own arousal manifests itself into ‘a crashing, angry passion which I didn’t quite understand myself.’ Wendy’s shame is compounded by the voyeuristic intrusion of the Captain, who spies on the lost boys and the Darlings in the spinney. When Wendy realizes this in the most violating and intrusive way possible, with the Captain ejaculating onto her back, Wendy suddenly sees the desire of others as disgusting and ridiculous, saying; 'it was suddenly so silly and so ugly I almost wept.'

Moore and Gebbie cleverly juxtapose Wendy’s fantasies of submission, borne out of her guilt, with the experiences of Peter, who we discover is a child prostitute, servicing the paedophile Captain. The Darlings’ games in the spinney are brought to a crushing halt when Annabel (Tinker Bell) is found raped, we presume by Captain Hook. When Wendy finds the Captain masturbating in the spinney, in the place where Tinker Bell’s body was found, she is plagued and disturbed by her own rape fantasies: 'I was so afraid that he’d catch me, rape me, hurt me...but wasn’t that what I wanted? What I’d dreamed about? What I’d gone there for?'

Wendy’s self-disgust at her fantasies leads her to question, 'I-If I could think such things, then didn’t I...deserve them?' But as the Captain closes in her on her, Wendy is brought to the realization that ‘I could think about what I liked. That didn’t mean I wanted it to really happen to me.’

The power and freedom of the privacy headspace of sexual fantasy enables Wendy to confront Hook, for in defining her boundary separating desire and fantasy, she is able to attack him for his abuse and violence against the lost boys and Tinker Bell. In a wry play on Barrie’s characterisation of Hook as plagued by the agent of his death, the crocodile with the ticking clock buried in his belly, Wendy defeats the Captain, reducing him to tears and impotency when she says:

Children won’t realize you’re inadequate. You can pretend you’re still young like them, that the clock isn’t ticking. That’s why you fuck children, why you dye your hair. You’re afraid of women. And you’re afraid of getting old.

Gebbie’s final fantasy spread shows Hook being swallowed by a large jawed, fleshy crocodile, its mouth painted to resemble an adult vagina (it even has a beard and moustache) swallowing the Captain whole. Although not exactly what you’d call a happy ending, there is something triumphant in Wendy recognising the split between her real and fantasy desire. But the inherent risk and danger that comes with the potential happiness of sexual maturity and fulfilment remains.

In Neverland, one need never age. Eternal youth and escapism awaits those who dare to fly free from all parental control. But Neverland is a place of freedom, not innocence, and freedom can be a dangerous thing. The lost boys’ desire for Wendy as a real, flesh and blood mother, is as heartbreaking in Lost Girls as it is in Peter Pan. In her maternal, and sexual love for them, she both redeems and comforts, corrupts and threatens. While Moore and Gebbie remain woolly on whether the children’s sexual games actually occur, for our heroine, they are presented as threatening only in so far as they threaten Wendy’s sense of herself, as we are never offered the perspective of any other character. What we are told though, is that the figures of Peter, Tinker Bell and possibly the other lost boys are exploited and abused by the Captain. The last time we see Peter in Lost Girls, soliciting outside a public lavatory, “his face looked...harder.” Although still a boy, Peter is quite literally, lost.

***

Although there is a strong case for the argument that Wendy’s story of Peter is simply her fantasy, one could also read it as her way of sublimating the very real, unseen, abuse that she actually suffered from her father’s business associate, the Captain. This secret, repressed pain may lurk, still buried beneath fantasy and narrative, at the heart of Wendy’s confession. Her defeat of the Captain as a young woman supports this argument, and it goes some of the way to explaining her anger at her parents throughout the story and her own feelings of guilt and self-hatred. I think it’s entirely possible (although also reductive) to read Lost Girls as three testimonies of abuse, for exploitation of power never lies far from the centre of its protagonists’ fantasies/recollections.

However far you choose to take this interpretation, ultimately, although able to confront the Captain’s sexual abuse and corruption of the children in the spinney, Wendy is not able to reconcile and distinguish this perversion of sex with her own desires. Terrified and repelled, Wendy retreats;

My own desire had scared me so badly that I locked it all away in the darkness beyond those railings. Married Harold, twenty years my senior, because desire...w-well, frankly, it wouldn’t be an issue.

Thanks to Top Shelf for letting me use the pics...i.e. please don't sue me....

and no thanks to blogger, which always messes up the formatting on my blog posts :(

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling II

2009-01-25T18:28:00.006Z

In Lost Girls, Neverland is replaced by the spinney in the park; a place for Wendy to begin her own sexual discoveries. Again, Gebbie and Moore suggest that Wendy’s stories are just fantasies, or at the very least, operate with different rules to normal, non-spinney interaction: “…it felt like a dream, as if the real world were a different country altogether. All the rules were different in the spinney.” This is echoed later in Lost Girls, when Alice describes the hotel in which she, Dorothy and Wendy are staying in as “our island, like your spinney”; a place where each of the women is able to confess and explore their sexual fantasies and experiences without fear of reproach or rejection.

In the spinney, Peter introduces the Darling children to his friends, a ramshackle bunch of boys (the lost boys), and his lithe, gorgeous sister, Annabel (Tinker Bell). Spied on by a vicious, yet publicly respected, paedophile, a man associated with Wendy’s father (Captain Hook), Wendy’s teenage sexual experimentation enables her to indulge her fantasies of becoming like Tinker Bell, who is worshipped and degraded by the boys.

However, as happens throughout Lost Girls, the line between reality and fantasy is constantly challenged and blurred. Thus, as Wendy’s sexual games with the lost boys and Tinker Bell become increasingly elaborate, they collide more forcefully, and more farcically, with Barrie’s Peter Pan. For example, Wendy’s mature female body shocks the lost boys into silence, buoying her up with sexual bravado as she undresses for them before playing their ‘mother’;

I went to each of them in turn, to tuck then in and give a goodnight kiss. The first one was a boy called Tuttle, that they nicknamed ‘Tootles’. When we kissed, my nipples brushed across his hard, bare chest. I put my hand in his trousers, and he called me Mother.

In Barrie’s Peter Pan, Wendy stands in direct opposition to the boys in the story. As a girl approaching adulthood, she stands on the cusp of those permitted access into Neverland. Paradoxically, despite her love of fairytale and her reluctance to grow up, it is only after Wendy travels to Neverland and is dumped into a pit full of little lost boys, that her mature, maternal side is triggered. The boys flock around this sudden injection of female comfort and kindness, begging her to become their mother and Wendy quite literally becomes their “old girl”. She goes from child to mummy in the time it takes her to fly out the window.

Tinker Bell is, of course, Wendy’s nemesis. She is girlhood epitomised, so tiny and full of tantrums, all sparkle, vulnerability and female cunning. Totally overwhelmed by her feelings for Peter, Tinker Bell deeply resents Peter’s affection for Wendy and will stop at nothing to beat her love rival. No female solidarity here. Furthermore, in Peter Pan her wild mood swings and extreme behaviour are excused due to the fact that she is a mere fairy, and so her small stature prevents her from containing more than one feeling at the same time. In other words, she is a child.

She is also the archetypal bad girl. After all, she can make people fly... Heck, she’s such an archetypal male fantasy even her Disney version is a blonde, sexy Marilyn-eqsue hottie. However, when Peter returns to the Darling house in Barrie’s book, (and he keeps on returning, taking first Wendy, and then her daughter and granddaughter in later books) it is revealed that Tinker Bell ‘is no more’ since ‘fairies don't live long, but they are so small that a short time seems a good while to them’. You can’t marry girls like that.

In Lost Girls, in contrast to the nubile, girlish Tinker Bell, Wendy’s body is full, womanly and maternal. When Peter approaches her as whore, not mother, Wendy feels these two competing sides clash, saying of Peter’s first kiss; ‘it wasn’t an ordinary kiss; the way you’d kiss your husband’. As we see, the adult Wendy’s sexually unfulfilling relationship with her husband is the product of her (and his) inability to reconcile the two.

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling I

2009-01-25T18:24:00.007Z

continued from 17th October 2008 (sorry for delay...)

One day while playing in the park, sixteen-year-old Wendy Darling and her younger brothers John and Michael spy a young boy and girl having sex in the bushes. As the boy comes, his eyes fix upon Wendy. Later that night, the same boy climbs through their bedroom window. I hardly have to tell you his name is Peter.

When Peter comes to the Darling children’s bedroom, Moore makes it clear that Peter’s desires are fixed primarily on Wendy. As Peter initiates her brothers into the 'games' he and his friends play, Wendy watches in fascinated, horrified silence. Eventually Peter guides her into mutual masturbation before finally having sex with her in front of her brothers. As Wendy recounts this tale to Dorothy and Alice, everything she writes is qualified with an apology.

First, she apportions blame on Peter, focusing on his coercion of her: “Then Peter smiled and everything seemed all right, as if we both knew that this was only a harmless game.” As Wendy’s story progresses, she distances herself from her own experiences by placing it in the realm of fantasy or dream.

“He…he put his hand between my…o-on my private parts, and…and then nothing seemed quite real anymore. I didn’t believe it was happening.”

Shamed by her own behaviour, Wendy asks her audience; “Oh, how could I?”, Peter’s seduction of her treading a fine, and at times uneasy, line between persuasion and exploitation. However, as Peter brings her to orgasm, her shock is replaced by momentary bliss, and a sort of bittersweet sadness:

“I realized that I was…moving myself against his hand, then everything in me seemed to burst and there was such joy. Such perfect joy…

Afterwards came a quiet dreamy time. He told us to visit him in the spinney, but that we must never, never tell anyone. He then left us, through the window, but in my dreams he took us all with him, out over London, up into the sky, like a wish…and that’s how both my real adventures and my dream adventures began: with a vision of flying.”

And everyone knows how we’re meant to interpret flying...

If we read Wendy’s account of her tales as pure fantasy, we can see her conflicting feelings of elation and guilt around her sexual fulfilment, matched with her latent, unsettling interest in, and desire for, her brothers. Peter’s insistence to the Darling children that they keep their adventures a secret can either be read as an actual instruction, or a restriction she places on herself to keep her sexual desires secret. Either way, both of these interpretations reinforce her experiences with Peter as private and sacred but also potentially threatening and dangerous. There is, of course, another more upsetting explanation; that Wendy is recounting the first instance of sexual abuse.

song of the week: first orgasm

2009-01-22T22:22:00.003Z

An understated, miserable, elegant song from Boston's finest. Amanda's taut, creepy piano riffs and Brian's shimmery drum crashes brilliantly mimick the building crescendoes of orgasm, leaving the listener feeling as hollow and as lonely as the song's protagonist. One of the coldest songs I can think of, with Amanda's muttered dismissals of relationships and droll double-entendres cutting incisively through the song's blatant bitterness.

Not perhaps the most appropriate song to post on the week after, I am delighted to say, I became engaged. But then, I don't live in MTV; my itunes shuffle doesn't know I'm madly in love.

This is not just a Velociraptor Heart, this is a Madame Pamplemousse Velociraptor Heart in Red Wine...

2008-10-26T17:58:00.009Z

Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles - by Rupert Kingfisher, illustrated by Sue Hellard

A delicious little children's novel about the beauty of good cooking, true kindness and genuine personality, that's a bit like a warm, witty and slightly twisted mix-up between Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Patrick Suskind's Perfume. (Actually, it's not really like that at all, but I like the comparison anyway...and there is some truth to it.) A memorable read for those with big, inventive appetites and perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but not when you've got a rumbling tummy.

In the city of Paris, on the banks of the river, tucked away from the main street down a narrow, winding alley, there is a shop. A small, rather shabby-looking shop with faded paintwork, a dusty awning and dark, smoky windows. The sign above the door reads ‘Edibles’, as it is a food shop selling all kinds of rare and exotic delicacies. They are not just rare and they are not just exotic, for this shop belongs to Madame Pamplemousse, and she sells the strangest, the rarest, the most delicious, the most extraordinary, the most incredible-tasting edibles in the world.

Inside, the shop is cool and musty-smelling, lit only by candlelight. In the flickering shadows, great bunches of sausages and dried herbs, strings of garlic and chilli peppers, and giant salted meats hang from the ceiling. Rows of cheeses are laid out on beds of dark green leaves and all around there are shelves winding up to the ceiling, crammed with bottles and strangely shaped jars.

But look closer and you’ll find these aren’t just plain sausages, they’re sausages of Bison and Black Pepper, Wild Boar and Red Wine, and Minotaur Salami with Sage and Wild Thyme. Among the dried meats there are Salt-Cured Raptor Tails, Pterodactyl Bacon, Smoked Sabre-Toothed Tiger and Rolled Tyrannosaurus Rex Tongue. The cheeses are of an unimaginable smelliness, some dating back to medieval times, and each of the pots and jars have their contents written in fine, purple letters: Scorpion Tails in Smoked Garlic Oil, Crocodile Kidneys in Blueberry Wine, Cobra Brains in Black Butter, Roast Piranha with Raspberry Coulis, Electric Eel Pate with Garlic and Prunes, Great White Shark Fin in Banana Liquor and Giant Squid Tentacle in Jasmine-Scented Jelly.

Underneath the shop, down a winding spiral staircase, at the end of a long, dark corridor, there is a door. A door that is forever kept locked. For it is behind this door that Madame Pamplemousse cooks her rarest delicacy, a delicacy sold in the tiniest little jar with a label upon which nothing is written. The label is blank and the ingredients are a secret, since it is the single most delicious, the most extraordinary, the most incredible-tasting edible of them all….

Lost Girls: Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Wendy Darling

2008-10-17T21:41:00.006Z

When we meet Wendy Darling in the first volume of Lost Girls, this middle-aged woman is sexually repressed, frustrated and silent. Unlike Alice’s aristocratic sexual bohemianism, and Dorothy’s earthy blue-collar openness, Wendy is the epitome of middle-class repression and denial. However, whiles her equally unsatisfied husband Harold may affectionately refer to her as “old girl” as they arrive at the Himmelgarten Hotel, their bedroom tells a different story. A queasy art-nouveau parody of writhing bodies and breast-shaped drawers, with an erotic collection lurking in the room, acting as a substitute for the more usual Gideon’s Bible, their sleeping quarters are jam-packed with the reminders of the elephant in the room. While her husband furtively indulges in Beardsley’s depiction of the orgy in Venus and Tannhauser (more on this in a later post), Wendy is compelled to follow the handsome young bellboy into the gardens of the hotel. Hands pressed to her lips, she watches him undress, before disgusted with herself, she flees back to her hotel room. This is just the first of many acts of voyeurism and exhibitionism that Wendy will enact, enjoy and recall. Furthermore, the parodic reproduction of Venus and Tannhauser read secretly by Harold will come to mirror the sexual games of Alice, Dorothy and Wendy that are to follow. However, where as in the original Wagner opera of Tannhauser, the protagonist’s carnal devotion to Venus and the opening orgy is the point of sin from which the hero must attempt to redeem himself, it is only through sex, play, fantasy and storytelling that the characters in Lost Girls are redeemed.

Back in the hotel room, Wendy and Harold share a mundane, domestic conversation, but the shadows cast by their forms against the walls of their hotel room betray their latent desires. As they search the hotel room for Harold’s misplaced business papers, their silhouettes conspire, often improbably, to reflect the couple engaged in foreplay. As the shadow-Harold appears to enter his wife from behind, real-Harold benignly discusses work prospects;

“Of course, for me it’s the challenge that’s the thing: doing something you haven’t tried before. Realizing your opportunity and seizing the moment…”

For a moment, the grouping of text in one isolated speech bubble allows the reader to pretend that shadow and reality are finally aligning; that Harold and Wendy may one day find themselves sexually compatible…until Harold finishes with “Just imagine promotion, sales division manager…”, neatly placed in a separate frame. Eventually, sadly, gently, truth and fantasy marry up as Wendy rests her head on her husband’s shoulder, in both shadow and full-colour form.

That night, Wendy is tormented by the sounds of Alice and Dorothy enjoying uninhibited pleasure as she takes a bath in the hotel. Harold, meanwhile, dreams of orgies composed of the sounds he hears from next door and Venus and Tannhauser. Although both craving the same thing, they cannot bear to ask it of each other. While there may be tenderness and companionship in this marriage, there’s a helluva lot of sexual repression and dissatisfaction.

Wendy’s compulsion to watch the bellboy undress and her voyeuristic eavesdropping on Alice and Dorothy undermines her carefully composed image of the pure, “good” woman. But why is Wendy plagued with such guilt about her sexual desires and what stops her from sharing these with her husband? When Wendy is discovered spying on Dorothy and Alice, bent over eachother’s bodies like playing cards (check the Caroll ref) by the pool, she is brought to tears. As Alice berates her for being nothing more than “a common peeping Tom”, Wendy stammers her confession:

“I-I came to listen. I didn’t know you’d be…I overheard what you said at breakfast…a-and last night about dream worlds. When you were young… You see that’s my story. I’ve never told anyone else about it.”

Witnessing, watching their explicitly female sexuality returns Wendy to the turning point in her sexuality, her first voyeuristic experience, and gives her the courage and starting point from which to address her own sexual development. Perhaps most uncomfortably for readers, and as it turns out, the censors, this means retreating to fantasy worlds and returning to childhood.

When Alice invites Wendy to join her and Dorothy, she rediscovers these lost girls, and in unlocking Wendy, opens the entire book:

“Now then…Mrs. Potter, I am Lady Fairchild. My companion is Miss Gale. Fate, seemingly has brought us to the Himmelgarten for a reason. Therefore, I propose we devote this afternoon to storytelling. Just the three of us. Together.”

(more on Wendy to follow over the coming weeks)

song of the week: bread and roses

2008-10-13T19:42:00.002Z

As we go marching, marching
In the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens
A thousand mill lofts grey
Are touched with all the radiance
That a sudden sun discloses
For the people hear us singing
Bread and roses, bread and roses

As we go marching, marching
We battle too for men
For they are women’s children
And we mother them again
Our lives shall not be sweetened
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses

As we go marching, marching
We bring the greater days
For the rising of the women
Means the rising of the race
No more the drudge and idler
Ten that toil where one reposes
But the sharing of life’s glories
Bread and roses, bread and roses

Words by James Oppenheim

DV is writing her book and working on some lengthy Lost Girls posts, so expect lazy but well-meant posts like this one...

song of the week: this must be the place

2008-10-01T21:49:00.003Z

Like, duh. I had one of those stupid little eureka moments last weeks. It wasn’t especially groundbreaking, but it’s improved my quality of life beyond all measure. I “remembered” Talking Heads’ This Must Be the Place. It sits quite innocently on the jukebox in a pub near my office but I always forget it’s there. Then last week while out drinking with my girlfriends, I remembered it’s existence, and now I’m listening to it at least three or four times a day, having rediscovered the best love song ever written.

So, where to start when discussing its all-round brilliance?

It’s so-called Naïve Melody, whereby the bass and guitar repeat the same phrase for the song’s entirety, restricts the melody to a very nursery-like G-A-B-A chord progression, binding the song into a gentle, repetitive lull. Its simplicity leaves room for David Byrne to overlay the song with a lyrical, understated but sincere vocal. Its childlike opening, which extends past a full minute, complete with keyboard-y clavinet-y riff is ripe for dancing shyly to and dozing off to. The effect is soothing, like when someone strokes your fringe away from your forehead. I don’t think it’s any surprise that The Spice Girls nicked the especially perky section of the keyboard riff for Mama (1:24) because This Must Be The Place epitomises naïve, safe and innocent. It also fails to go anywhere especially significant, happy to be thoughtlessly trapped in its own simple pattern. Consequently, it treads a fine line between sweetly straightforward and a little bit dull. However, this latent dullness works against the upbeat preppiness of the guitar and bass to deliver a song that, no matter how cute, retains a surprising and pleasing air of melancholy. In a song filled with promises of uniqueness and forever ever after, Talking Heads still succeed in creating a pop song that feels temporary and throwaway in its easiness. It’s perfect, and yet also, because it doesn’t quite go anywhere, just a little bit unfulfilling…hence why I want to hear it again, and again, again. So perhaps not that dissimilar to love.

Covers of this song, no matter how dreadful, still unwittingly reveal its uncomplicated beauty. Shawn Colvin strums her way through a sickly, syrupy version (it’s pretty icky), while MGMT ham up the cutesy keyboard skipping. Arcade Fire deliver an aching, slightly co-dependent hymn with skinny violin parts and tinny drums. None are as good as the original, but all pick up on the various strains lying dormant in its sound. Shawn Colvin does sentimentally slushy; MGMT do boppy, poppy, happy and Arcade Fire do lovestruck and desperate. No change there then.

I never think of this as a very Talking Heads kind of song. It’s them at their fluffiest, their most docile. There’s something drunkenly joyful and a little bit sleepy about it, until David Byrne lets loose with great big heart-bursting, wailing declarations of love. The lyrics are adorably optimistic, a little bit delusional, and stubbornly resist romantic clichés in favour of rather more understated ways of saying what every other love song insists on shouting at you. Its almost tinny, hollow poppiness works brilliantly with the elegantly spare lyrics. The euphoric, moaning tone that David Byrne’s drawl reaches with that most exquisite of chat-up lines, “And of all those kinds of people, you got a face with a view” is pure, infatuated, utterly nutso love. You’re beautiful, you’re unique, and he wants to be with you for ever and ever.

His quavering, blurry voice beefs up the melody with just the right amount of neediness, as behind this apparently transparent, innocent tune are terribly clingy, long-term-love kind of lyrics. The man singing this song isn’t just in love, but hell-bent on staying in it for the rest of his life. This little animal has found his home, taken off his shoes and coat, and intends to love you till he’s dead. And yet, in line with the song, there’s also just the right amount of maturity and level-headedness, honest commitment; a kind of give-and-take that’s echoed in the identical structure of the bass and guitar parts. The song’s melody mirrors the comfort that comes with being in love, or finding a “home”, or sharing “the same space for a minute or two”. It’s this easy-going but incredibly heartfelt combination of “feet on the ground” and “head in the sky” that makes This Must Be The Place so emotive. It uses a very simple musical structure and very basic, uncluttered lyrics to express a deep, quite complicated emotion and bring out a fundamental truth. Which is that love, when kept simple, is actually very simple. Not bad in 4:53.

Okay. I’ll stop getting all slushy and D&M on you. And even if you think that’s a load of old tosh, David Byrne’s final yelping swoon is divine (not to mention his lurve-dance with the lamp).

http://www.petitesophist.blogspot.com/...

2008-09-23T12:57:00.002Z

is awesome

Dude, where's my Prague?

2008-09-22T20:47:00.008Z

Prague doesn’t let go…This old crone has claws.

Kafka.

Having recently returned from a holiday in the Czech Republic, I’ve been wondering what happened to Prague. I first went there during my gap year in 2002 and remember it as a dark, icy city, slightly inhospitable, but also just a little bit magical. In my head, Prague was the city of Kafka and Faust, a fairytale enclave filled with alchemists, necromancers, astrologers and star-gazers. In the bitter spring cold, feeling lonely and far from home in the dreary but cosy suburb of Holešovice, I felt comfortably cheerful in my gloominess. So I admit, it was foolhardy to expect a similar experience in 2008, when I returned in a joyfully sunny August, staying within spitting distance of the astronomical clock, having shared my easyjet flight (delayed) with weekend drinkers and randy stags. But still, I was alarmed to find no disconsolate charm. No hot chocolate and whisky at 3am. No gloves. No snow. No teary conversations down the payphone to my old boyfriend back home.

I was significantly happier in Prague this time around, but it was altogether less satisfying, and with my new boyfriend to share it with, actually less romantic. There’s nothing like being alone in a cold, beautiful city, missing someone back home, to make you feel dreamily melancholy. I walked Prague that first time, dolefully wishing I was walking in the sunshine with my boyfriend, drinking cold beer and throwing off my winter coat. This time, I walked Prague, holding hands with my boyfriend, drinking cold beer in short sleeves, and though I was much happier, Prague had lost something.

Prague has certainly changed. Its centre feels much like a glorified film set, set up almost purely for the purposes of tourism. Staying in a soulless, grotty, party-hostel near the grossly overrated clock only compounds the sense that, although everybody’s here, the real business of life is happening somewhere else, and with fewer digital cameras. But like all cities, Prague’s heart is not to be found in its centre. You’ll learn no more about Prague from standing in front of its astronomical clock than you will gawping up at Big Ben. (However, I’d suggest that you’ll learn a little more about Prague if you learn of the fate of the clock’s creator, Hanus, whose work was so prized that the town councillors, fearful that he would make a replica elsewhere, had him blinded. Such ruthless cruelty always cheers me immensely.)

Now only a short walk from the castle, I quickly realized that all my affection for the wintry city of six years ago was centred around its outskirts; Holešovice and its wide, empty streets and quirky streetlamps; Vyšehrad with its restrained gardens and introspective silence; Kutna Hora and its creepily mesmerising ossuary, a compelling combination of the sacred and the sacrilegious. Last time, my travelling partner and I downed absinthe in basement bars in the suburbs and whiled away hours trudging through parks on the outskirts. Tours of the castle, of Wenceslas Square, of Mala Strana, were solemn and dutiful; justification for our being there, but conducted quickly, perfunctorily nevertheless. There is much to see and do as a tourist in Prague, but none of it feels real or breathing. Rather, it is the preserved elegance and severity of a long-gone past, polished up for its tourists and running on the sale of postcards, overpriced marionettes and cheap beer. This summer, wandering around the city, exhausted and desperate for lunch away from the crowds, I couldn’t help but think of Mme de Staël’s identification of the predicament of the tourist: “What I see bores me, what I don’t see worries me.”

I didn’t return to Vyšehrad on this trip. We didn’t have time, and besides, I didn’t feel any urgency to return, because I’m secure in my feeling that Vyšehrad, unlike the Hradčany, will remain as it ever was. Prague’s “other” castle, the one hardly anyone visits, is where its old, historical, majestic heart sleeps. As John Banville points out, it is best approached from the metro station, where you pass some chunky, brutalist gigantism in the form of the Palace of Culture, and some grimy commercial leisure, in the form of the Corinthia Towers Hotel. This glossy building of luxury and respectability overlooks a prison. Apparently its exercise yard had to be roofed over to spare the hotel’s guests the sight of the prisoners plodding miserably in circles. Brilliant.

The castle is quiet, serene and regal, like the long-suffering, better looking, nicer queen to the stroppy, bullish, slightly tasteless king of Hradčany. Although he overwrites, John Banville describes Vyšehrad excellently in his contribution to The Writer and the City series, Prague Portraits:

What do I recall most clearly from my last visit to Vyšehrad? I draw up an inventory. Dead, damp leaves beside a gravel pathway. A mother and her toddler wandering through the cemetery in a vaguely questing way, as if these were not graves on either side but supermarket shelves. A nun in the Rotunda of St Martin, lighting a candle and smiling blissfully, angelically, to herself. Black spires seen through the bare black limbs of a winter tree. That soft-spoken man in a blue jersey sitting at a small square table selling entrance tickets to SS Peter and Paul’s – of the church itself I retain practically nothing…

The question I am addressing is the one that historian, tourist and essayist alike must grapple with: how and where to locate the “real” Prague, if, indeed such a singular thing may be said to exist. Those dead leaves that I remember beside the path on the heights of Vyšehrad, what is there about them that makes them particular to the place? When I think of Golden Lane I see far more vividly the snow under my feet, compacted to grey glass, the first time I walked there with the Professor, than I do the house where in the late autumn and winter of 1916 Kafka wrote the stories that would make up the collection A Country Doctor…These are the things we remember. It is as if we were to focus our cameras on the great sights and the snaps, when developed, all came out with nothing in them save undistinguished but maniacally detailed foregrounds.

This is exactly what I experienced returning to Prague’s centre. All the big, important monuments were still there and probably just as they ever were. But that wasn’t what I remembered. I expected to return and find myself nineteen again, cold and playing up my self-appointed role as melancholy-poetic-(but v pretentious and impossibly grumpy)-English-girl-du-jour, continually peering at the city from the furry hood of my parka, unable to grip anything beneath my woolly gloves with my numb fingers.

I did experience fairytale moments in the Czech Republic, but none in the winding alleys of Hradčany or Mala Strana. This new Prague was dazzling, hot, optimistic, a little bit brash and full of surreal and absurd tourists, as opposed to dour, thoughtful Czech men, grumbling and smoking as they practised their English on me. Now everyone speaks English. (bugger)

Instead of finding romantic, radical, supernatural Prague in darkened cobbled alleys and smoky basement bars, I think I found another bit of it in the calmer, grubbier streets of Žižkov, as we stared up at Cerny’s mimenika, the strange mutant babies that crawl across the giant Soviet rocket that is Prague’s TV Tower.

Here, again, but differently, life felt aesthetically pleasing; clean, shiny and beautiful. The sun was so achingly bright, the sky a perfect blue, the streets so cinematically wide, sloping and gorgeously empty, this private little district became momentarily ours. Žižkov’s laidback elegance rubbed itself against us, and we too became briefly gorgeous and carefree.

Trudging up Klet mountain in the Blansky Forest as I emerged from a childish strop brought on by drizzle and disappointment (this forest hike is not forest-y enough!) my boyfriend and I started to talk about Kafka’s A Country Doctor. Paddington pointed out its folkloric structure and symbolic set-up and events, and soon our talk turned to fairytales, storytelling and minor literature. It was only as we neared the top of the mountain that we realized we had spent a good half an hour, walking through a deserted forest in central Europe, happily talking about Baba Yaga and Sleeping Beauty, sacrificial daughters, penitent fathers and vengeful fairies. I didn’t feel nineteen again. I was nine, walking through a forest and watched over by princes masquerading as bears and witches cackling from gingerbread houses. We even saw a creepy abandoned Baba Yaga hut. I was truly enchanted.

What I got from Prague had as much to do with what I was like when I visited it, as it had to do with what it was actually like. Prague has changed, but then, so have I. And the Prague I loved, (still love really) was a place in my head, as opposed to actually being on a map. It was a moody inland city where I could find bohemia, rebellion, radicals, spies, Kafka, fairytales, torture, alchemy, castles, snow, Golem, gypsies, absinthe etc. Of course, that Prague has never existed (at least, not as I conceived it). And now, Prague’s centre is really like any other major European city centre; a gaudy pantomime of commercialism, exploitation and consumption.

But the rest of the Czech Republic?

Now there’s a place where bears really do turn out to be princes, and fairies really do tumble into your shot glass. Honest.

my apologies

2008-08-28T21:53:00.003Z

I know I promised a part II to my post on the girls vs boys musical debate, and trust me, it'll follow in September.

But, alas, not until then, as I will be returning to my spiritual home of the Czech Republic this week. I have never felt more at home, or more in love with anywhere, than when I landed in Prague as a fresh-faced and shit-scared nineteen year old on her gap year jaunt around Eastern Europe. Everywhere was dusted with snow, everyone in our hostel looked like an I.D. model, cigarettes were 50p a pack and the city streets were loaded with a thrilling feeling of mystery, beauty, drama and possibility. I remember looking out on the city in the wee hours of the morning from Petrin, buzzing on vodka and naive enthusiasm as the city opened its drowsy eyes, and not being quite sure if it was real, or if I was just having the most divine lucid dream. I didn't think there could be anywhere more enigmatic or romantic on earth.

And then I went to Cesky Krumlov.

So, I'm going home. I'll send you a postcard xxx

In response to your comment....

2008-08-25T22:05:00.003Z

Your post (and the title of the book you quote from) made me think something else: what is the difference between the way teenage boys and teenage girls react to pop? The teenage girl's relationship with pop seems more genuine, less forced, to me. Boys don't abandon themselves to pop as much, or at least not in the same way - instead of cutting a rug, they make lists or collect everything their favourite band has ever done - anything to distance themselves from (and, in a way, deaden) the music.

Girls "get" pop more than boys do - they immediately find meaning where boys have to search for it. And it is more limited to a specific time, place and set of feelings - hence why women are often less lifelong in their passion for music. The glorious, estacy of teenage pop obsession exhausts itself for girls, whereas boys turn into neurotic, depressive rock fans (cf High Fidelity). Paddington

I largely agree with your analysis of the differences between the way teenage boys and teenage girls listen to pop, and indeed, music generally, particularly when it comes to girly pop versus boys rock. (I have less of an idea how this relationship differs in other genres of music though, although from the little I do know, I’d say that dance music, particularly DJ-based genres engenders dorky obsession, whilst hip-hop and its grimier cousins appears to be quite closely linked to abandon and cutting a rug, as it were.)

In answering your question, I feel compelled to conjoin my two big loves, music and books, into one big love-in and pull out my YA bible, Julie Burchill’s Sugar Rush. It’s probably no surprise that former NME writer Burchill, places such significance on pop music in her first-love novel, Sugar Rush. Significantly, here the first glimmer of sexuality, drinking, dancing, and all those delicious activities that are so magical when you are 16, and simply silly and a tad banal when you’re 26 (unless you’re me, in which case, they’re even better) are rooted in the protagonist, Kim’s, involvement in pop.

When Kim falls in love with the deliriously sexy and rebellious Maria, she is plummeted head first into what she refers to as GirlWorld.

“Girlworld makes daydreaming, water-treading sirens of us all. The posters of boys, torn from magazines, on the walls, the fruity cosmetics on the dressing tape, tiny tops from Morgan and Kookai strewn across the floor, the CDs out of their boxes, snatched off in the heat of the moment of having to hear THAT SONG, RIGHT NOW. Until after one and a half minutes you remembered the one you REALLY wanted to hear.”

Burchill captures nascent teen girls’ heady obsessions with boys and fashion by linking it to the impulsive, compulsive pull of pop music. In Sugar Rush, her characters discard their inhibitions and clothing with the same thoughtless, heartfelt recklessness that they tear their CDs from their cases “snatched off in the heart of the moment of having to hear THAT SONG, RIGHT NOW.” Everything is beautiful, momentary, fleeting, yet ultimately, disposable. (Unless the two things become married in a divine union. Then you get the undying devotion embodied in the soaking seats of concerts stretching from The Beatles to The Backstreet Boys et cetera et cetera, until, of course, they try to become “musically serious” or break up.)

Burchill’s image of CDs discarded across the floor, usurped by a better song summoned immediately in the heat of the moment reminds me of my eager, impatient habit of only listening to half-songs, ever a slave to the skip button. I am instantly reminded of my old boyfriend’s habit of stopping me from flicking onto a new song on the i-Pod until the previous one was finished, thereby disrupting the play count and disrupting the machine’s record of our listening habits. Often, by the time that song had finished, my desire had melted. The moment had passed.

I gave up trying to express my identity through my music some years ago. I’d appear insane or schizophrenic, and besides, daaarlings, I’m just too complex to be little more than a straightforward little indiegirl (my previous e-mail and music blog incarnation btw). Boys into their music have a tendency to wear their tastes and their carefully studied knowledge like a badge of honour. Similarly, I used to be like Kim in Sugar Rush - a girl who believed to be taken seriously, you had to take everything seriously, especially your music. Contrasting her musical identity with her love-interest, Maria’s, Kim explains:

“She held up a party-coloured box containing the sort of dance-tune compilation that I had often yearned over in Virgin but then turned my treacherous back on, because I am – was – a High girl, and High girls listen to Dido and Radiohead and hardcore rap about how many drive-by shooting you’ve pulled and how many bitches you’ve slapped, as we chew our pens over our algebra homework, because we’re, like so intelligent or something that we know they’re only ‘ironic’ shootings and slappings.”

Cut out the Dido and there’s me, aged 16, trying to be taken seriously and swearing off cheesy pop, or at the very least, hiding my Kylie behind The Velvet Underground. I catalogued my music, controlled my listening and spent a significant time on the internet, discussing music very seriously with like-minded, equally serious boys, writing for online music sites. I sacrificed all-night dance binges at the local nightclub in favour of much shoe-gazing and chin-scratching in boys’ cold bedrooms, the windows shoved open to get rid of the smoke as we analyzed Smashing Pumpkins/Jimi Hendrix/Nirvana et cetera et cetera.

But although the kind of music I listened to changed, the way I ate it up never has. I listen obsessively but shallowly, devouring individual songs and albums but barely digesting them. I only really took any nourishment from the truly excellent (Prince, Radiohead, Beastie Boys, The Clash etc.) and the personally significant (Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere, Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, Robyn’s With Every Heartbeat, The New Radicals' You Only Get What you Give), which are frequently, also, truly excellent, but centred not around the album, or the career progression, but the three minutes it takes to crystallize a memory, cement a relationship or force a decision.

Boys collect, collate, catalogue, analyze, order and sort. I find this level of anal obsession something of an aphrodisiac. To me, it demonstrates an intoxicating combination of passion, restraint and borderline psychosis, my top three qualities when seeking a mate (screw GSOH). I admire it, and for several years, did an okay-ish job of trying to replicate it. But given the choice, I respond to music impulsively, spontaneously, hysterically. Give me a dancefloor, a moshpit, or a mirror and a hairbrush over a league table any day. I’d rather lose myself than find patterns or time signatures.

I like music when I commute, when I work, when I play, when I cook, when I eat, when I drink, when I love, when I socialise, when I bathe, when I dress, when I work, while I sleep. I rarely sit and listen. Music is rarely something to analyze (although I do appreciate that too) but rather, a constant companion when no one else is around. When I have felt miserable, or joyful, fallen in love, or fallen out, the first thing to know will be my stereo. It reflects my momentary happiness or heartache back to me.

In Sugar Rush, music provides the soundtrack to Kim’s love affair with Maria.

“She whooped, drained her glass, pulled me to my feet. She turned me to face the mirror, stood behind me, caught my wrists in her hands and began to move my arms wildly to that beautiful song – “Cos you’re FREE – to do what you WANT to do – you gotta LIVE YOUR LIFE – do what you WANT to do!” Her eyes were wide in mock horror.
“Ohmigod, Kim! Look! You’re just a dancing machine! A slave to the rhythm! You just can’t control your feet! You’re going to dance yourself to death! Stop! STOP! NOT ON A SCHOOL NIGHT, KIM!”
We feel backwards on to her bed, helpless with laughter – and in my case, rising nausea from unfamiliar Smirnoff on an empty stomach, bar a Belgian waffle – and it could have gone either way right then; I could have vomited or I could have fallen in love. As it turned out, I went for the latter option. But I often wish I’d just been sick, right there, and then on Sugar’s sweet-smelling GirlWorld bed, and disgraced myself with a short, sharp shame, rather than take the scenic route to sorrow, as I was later to do. But again, I get ahead of myself. There were loads of good times to come, before the morning after – that final morning after the one that never ends – that finally caught up with us.”

What I love about this is the utter cheesiness of the song she chooses. It’s absurdly optimistic and motivational, good but not groundbreaking, serious, but only for the short time that it exists. It’s meant to inspire a kind of deluded ecstasy, not cerebral engagement. In short, it’s about capturing and cherishing a moment that may, or may not be magical; that could end in vomiting, or falling in love.

Part II of this post to follow later this week…

do not enter

2008-08-24T19:49:00.002Z

in every dream home a heartache

2008-08-24T19:30:00.014Z

Architectural Rescue, Southampton Way, Peckham

2008-08-24T19:00:00.009Z

what we did on the weekend

completely boy

2008-08-14T19:22:00.007Z

At the denouement, the final dramatic unraveling, the music stops and we talk it. Tony is shot and Maria picks up the gun and makes that incredible speech, 'How many bullets are left?' My first thought was that this was to be her biggest aria. I can't tell you how many tries I made on that aria. I tried once to make it cynical and swift. Another time like a recitative. Another time like a Puccini aria. In every case, after five or six bars, I gave up. It was phoney...
Leonard Bernstein

Song of the Week: Jet Song (and everything that follows for the next 2 hours) - Leonard Bernstein

Me and my little sis, Monkey2 went to see West Side Story at Sadler's Wells last night as part of her birthday treat. It's a very conservative, conventional production, with some excellent performances from last night's Maria and Anita, and a A* rendition from Action and the Jets of Gee Officer Krupke, Sondheim's lyrical high-point with its terrifically funny attack on well-meaning liberalism. The seething, angry, sexy choreography of Cool positively bristled and pulsed with hormonal tensions. Finally, the costumes for the dance; Jets in slippery silvers, cold-blooded greens, golds and the occasional feminine burst of yellow or orange; the Sharks in a tropical array of hot pinks, reds and purples that screamed sexy teen exuberance, were inspired. But as usual, with any performance of West Side Story, the star was Leonard Bernstein's incredible score.

So, today I hand the baton onto Lavinia Greenlaw, and excerpts from her chapter on West Side Story in The Importance of Music to Girls. It's (almost) impossible to pick "the best" song from this, the best of all musicals ever ever ever. America's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, I cried in the theatre during Somewhere and Maria (what a cheeseball) and Something's Coming is brimming with youthful hunger and expectation. But my favourite, always, is the musical's opening Prologue. It's just a taster of the delights that are to come, and it segues wonderfully into the Jet Song, which, aside from being a joyfully macho kick-starter to the action, is the song I rather bizarrely chose to choreograph and perform in front of my primary school as part of a Year 5 assembly. And for this reason, it will always hold a very dear place in my heart. And I still know all the moves off by heart.

I was Riff, natch.

West Side Story was a fire-engine-red album cover with high-rise black lettering propping up a fire escape on which the sharp silhouettes of a man and woman danced (fell? fought?). From the first whistles and clicks, the spasmic strings and bass, it erupts into a drama of such extension and motion that I gave myself up to it. This music has its own architecture, machinery, circulation, boundaries and weather. I got lost and found myself back where I started. I passed places I'd seen earlier. I found dead-ends, alleys, shocking open spaces, blind corners and always the pleasurable sense of something building. A city still buidling itself - what could be more exciting and alive?
And these characters who spat or sang were neither adult nor child. Until I saw the film, they weren't characters at all but each a formulation of feeling,. I was astounded that they could be talking, quite ordinarily, mroe than ordinarily, and from there, burst into song. I thought people either stood around talking or stood around singing, but here was a new possibility; you could go about your life and then, when the mood took you, you could dance, you could sing, and everyone around you would know the words and the steps, and just like that the world would be musical.
Here were boys, bristling and strutting and unlike London's floaty hippies, the end-of-the-pier Teddy Boys or prissy Mods, they were completely boy. They fought, smoked and swore even as they sang and danced. The opening scene in which the Jets strut through their territory, threatening and teasing and showing off, is described in the libretto as 'half-danced, half-mimed' as if the whole of it lay in movement.
Song and dance are explosion and interruption, and sometimes the only way to keep up with what's happening. Mid-strut, the boys pause, spine and glide, their arms opening into a port de bras (which means 'the carriage of the arms' and it was as if they were carrying arms), parting the airt as if to reclaim a space they felt themselves losing. They could sing and dance and then get back to business; they could have feelings, they could recover from them...
...Leonard Bernstein wrote in his West Side Story Log in 1956 (by which time he and Arthur Lorenz had been ruminating on the idea of West Side Story for seven years): 'Chief problem: to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and "just dancing"... The line is there, but it's very fine, and sometimes takes a lot of peering around to discern it.' Like the narrowest tenement, West Side Story is built on this fine line which is why it is such a volatile structure, why it keeps falling and rebuiling. The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilising tri-tone. This is an interval of three tones, or six semitones, which sounds powerfully unsettled. So much so that in the Middle Ages if was known as diabolus in musica. It is the augmented fourth, the diminished fith. Play middle C and F sharp on the piano and your ear wuill insist that something has gone wrong or has been stretched too far.
The Jets and Sharks meet at a dance in the gym. No one speaks but everyone dances through a sequence of 'Blues-Promenade-Mambo-Cha-Cha'. These dances are expletive, plosive, headline and subtext. This is war and even the girls, who mostly simper and flounce, produce some brutal moves. It wasn't the girls I idenitifed with, nor was it Tony and Maria, the simepring Romeo and Juliet. I identified with the music.

And herein lies West Side Story's biggest problem. Tony and Maria are our Romeo and Juliet, an innocent pair of star-crossed lovers. But everyone cares far more for the boisterous Riff, the hot-tempered Bernardo, the sultry Anita: their appetite for Shakespeare's more violent delights makes them much sexier, stronger and much more appealing. I feel far more watching Riff tumble at Bernardo's blade than watching Maria andTony feverishly collapse on each other's lips. And I think Bernstein feels the same. Like Milton with Satan before him, he gives the bad kids all the best lines.

Until the end that it is, hence my choice of picture. All the music - kaput; just silence amidst the horror of the Jets' rape of Anita and the lone gunshot that murders Tony. All that beauty and squealing joy of the earlier scenes has gone. The same passion that brings forth such ecstasy ends in misery. How wonderfully...Shakespearean. Just Maria, howling "Now I can kill because I hate now."

Yes. I cried. Gets me everytime.

song of the week: S.O.S - ABBA

2008-08-04T21:23:00.008Z

After thoroughly loving the utter pile of crap that is Mamma Mia! at the cinema with my mum and sister on Sunday, I had to pick my favourite Abba song as SOTW. In short, Mamma Mia! succeeds where Baz Luhrmann previously failed, by trading all nods at irony, knowing, gloss and cool credibility for overblown slapstick, histrionics and mawkish sentimentality.

The film itself is a shambles - there's dubbing dodgier than a 60s Tamil film, absurd plot holes and continuity errors and no emotional depth (yet still I wept like a baby at the creepy, emotionally manipulative image of Amanda Seyfried curled up in Meryl Streep's lap, having her toenails painted as Meryl crooned Slipping Through My Fingers. *shudder*).

But...for your ticket price you get Colin Firth singing (oh, he shouldn't have), Stellan Skarsgaard's buttocks (yes, we've all seem them before, but why not?) , Meryl Streep doing "kooky" in dungarees, Piers Brosnan being (shock horror) er, charming, and, well...a bit dishy, (my taste was chucked out with the popcorn box), plus the charming, gorgeous Amanda Seyfried letting her big blue eyes and seaswept blonde hair act for her as she plays weird Freudian Daddy's-girl-games with the three leading men.

And Julie Walters falls into the sink! (Trust me, you have to be there.) And sings Dancing Queen into a tube of cotton pads! I mean, what do you people want, blood?

I hate hate hate hate this sort of thing normally, but, it was effing brilliant. "So bad it's good" is a cliche that should really only be reserved for a masterpiece like this. Mamma Mia! is the nightmare car crash of a film you'd get if Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge got Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You grotesquely plastered and did the dirty on the Greek island of Kitschos. Or, Much Ado About Nothing in a three-way with Eldorado and TOTP2.

Just (sigh of filthy pleasure) a-MAY-zin'.

As for S.O.S...

This is crushing heartbreak pop at it's most affecting. Although Piers Brosnan and Meryl Streep play this for laughs with backing vocals provided by stock comedy-Greek peasants (they even sing on opposite sides of a wall, a'la Kylie and Jason in the Especially for You video) such ludicrous staging can't undermine the elegant desperation of the "When You're Gone...." climax to the chorus.

song of the week: Je suis la tigresse - Delphine Desyeux

2008-08-03T09:03:00.003Z

Apologies for the tardiness in posting this week; I've been busy booking my summer holiday (returning to my spiritual homeland, the Czech Republic - woo!) and planning my future.

Last week's blissful sunshine and the ressurrection of all my frilly summer dresses and flirty cut-off t-shirts meant that frothy French ye-ye happily dominated the i-Pod. This uncomplicated, exuberant and oh-so-girly '60s pop kind of replicates what the inside of my head does when the sun comes out (i.e: la-la-la-la, mmmn ice-cream, la-la-la-la, what pretty pink flip-flops, la-la-la, seriously, Sophie Kinsella can really write - okay, maybe not the last bit). Delphine Desyeux's Je suis la tigresse ticks all the boxes - it's the biggest load of candyfloss girly twaddle and so indulgent and inconsequential that I defy you not be just a little bit happy when you hear it. It's proto-girl-power (or, as I like to think of it, sexism in it's most naive and innocent form) lyrics brilliantly reinforce the song's mix of faux-innocence and cynical marketing of young female flesh. I tell you, it's a dream. Unfortunately, youtube only has the original Lulu version of the song...which doesn't sound anywhere near as good, but does come accompanied with this gem of a video. Forget drunken office-party snogs or farting in front of your boss...this is professional suicide of the most impressive kind.

looking for lisa

2008-07-14T20:55:00.009Z

While moving home recently, I stumbled across some writing from when I was sixteen, and indeed, hadn’t thought about since I was sixteen. One in particular I had forgotten I had written, but remember what drove me to write it like it was yesterday. My then-boyfriend’s habit of buying FHM every month, issues slowly stacking up under the bed, was really starting to nark me. I, frankly, found it hard to believe that he really wanted to know what Lisa Faulkner had to say about being in Holby City (he didn't watch it), and indeed, he was more interested in seeing what she looked like in her underwear. In fact, it upset me so much that I can pretty much draw every single one of the photographs in the “article”. I spent a good two years after this trying to work out how I could pass my A levels, solve the corruption that came with globalisation and look like a girl would look like, if she was in FHM.

I still can’t go out without my make-up on (even at Glastonbury) and preferably not without my hair straightened or a body coated in head-to-toe Johnson’s “Holiday Skin™”. I panic and skip my meals if I look in the mirror and the tops of my thighs touch. I regularly check my skinny jeans (which I never wear) to make sure I can still pour myself into them without lying down to do the top button up. When I was a teenager, I was so fraught about this kind of thing that I picked up every high-achiever’s favourite sickness, the big A, and spent my late teens waiting for my body to successfully menstruate again. Fun, huh? The minute it did, I got acne. Brilliant. (That's gone now, thank god, but I'm typing this while I've got my facepack on.)

The bizarre thing is, in order to counteract this daily obsession, I deliberately cultivate a very scruffy, bookish, outwardly tom-boyish appearance, for fear that anyone “serious” might rumble me for being a primping, preening girlie. So I spend ages plucking, waxing, styling, glossing, painting and blow-drying, only to throw on six-year-old jeans and an ink-stained t-shirt, ’cos god forbid anyone finds out I actually care what I look like. I want to curl up and die of embarrassment if my boss catches me reapplying mascara in the toilets after work. In my line of work, the comma, not the kohl, is key. I rail against the body fascism of everything from Cosmopolitan to Playboy in front of my friends and colleagues, and then pinch my stomach fat and have a cigarette.

All of this is stupid, but to try and stop thinking this way now is like telling me to stop drinking. I know it’s not all that good for me, and I probably do it far far too much, but, er, if I don’t do it, something bad might happen… I mean, it’s normal, isn’t it?

One of my best friends has recently had a baby daughter. Bemoaning the fact that even at four weeks old, we can’t help but praise her beauty and cuteness, I asked my friend what she thought she could do to stop her daughter getting screwed up over trying to be pretty. My friend was very sensible and stoical. Nothing. She’ll try to reinforce her daughter’s sense of her self, and how clever, resourceful, kind, funny and sensitive she is, etc etc etc, and try to limit comments, both praising and damning, about the physical appearance of herself, her daughter and all other women in general…and hope for the best.

Until she buys her first copy of Cosmo and starts finding phantom cellulite that she’s far too young to have, that is.

Fact remains, if you’re female, it doesn’t matter if you’re intelligent, articulate, charming, talented, good, vivacious, strong, creative, kind, determined, principled, organized or witty. Blah blah blah. Of course, all those things help. But if you don’t look like Angelina Jolie/Kate Moss/Lisa Faulkner/Jessica Alba/Jenna Jameson sometimes it feels like it doesn’t really matter all that much.

And even if you are beautiful, FHM and the men of Great Britain might only rate you at #56 in its list of #100 women, anyway. So, tough.

I look nothing like Lisa Faulkner, so that edition of FHM hurt like hell, because if my boyfriend thought she was pretty, what did he think of me? I now know that, although my ex-boyfriend found Lisa Faulkner attractive, he no more wanted me to look like her than he wanted me to star in a primetime BBC hospital drama series. But it still hasn’t stopped me trying to look a little bit more like her, and a little bit less like me, even though I know it’s basically impossible.

What a stupid, crushing bore. There are books I could be reading while I do this. Or worse, books I should be writing while my GHDs heat up.

I am not ill. I am not lonely. I am not impoverished. I have a job I love, and wonderful friends and family close by. I have a lovely boyfriend. I even occasionally get chatted up in bars or bookshops by people who’ve forgotten their spectacles or had too much to drink. But I’m still plagued by the worry that all of these things will disappear if the tops of my thighs touch when I put my feet together. I don’t care if smoking gives me cancer. I care if it makes me look old. It means more to me that I get wolf-whistled in the street than if my boss tells me I’ve done a good job.

But then, I can at least say to myself, “Darling, you’re excellent at copywriting,” or “Wow, you know a shitload about Hemingway”, but I can’t ever look at myself and think “Hey, did you used to be in Holby City?”

historical materialism and ljubavi

2008-07-07T21:21:00.007Z

Darling Vicarage is back in her old flat, dolled up with a sexy new internet connection and ready to return to the information super highway. I'm desperately seeking a flatmate at the moment, and so gumtree and spareroom.co.uk are getting more of my attention than blogger right now, but no fear, I will be back.

But first things first. Since minifig moved out I've been forced to confront my blind ignorance of all things interwebby, like, how do you add links to your blog? If I could link successfully, missingdustjacket would be directing you here, a smashing blog by a fine man who knows a heckuva lot about CLR James, as I've been reliably informed by people who went to his lecture during Marxism this weekend. The "What They Say" section alone puts my poor links to shame.

And this here is my song of the week.

Watching Eurovision at my first proper Euro-party (i.e: it wasn't just me and my sister monkey2 and long-suffering boyfriends in tow) I was utterly flabbergasted when my enthusiasm for Bosnia's entry was met with consternation. If you can ignore the absurd video, I think you'll agree this sounds like MGMT invited Kate Bush for dinner when suddenly Bruce Springsteen turned up and started dancing on the tables. I think lesser-spotted mid-noughties indie outfit The Delays might have dropped by to pick up their keyboards too. I have already listened to this 8 times tonight, and you know, it's still not enough.

It's called Pokusaj and it's by Laka, and this here's what they're singing about.

Ne silazi sa cardaka rek'o mi je pjevac Laka
Don't come down from the castle, laka the singer told me personally
Ne klepeci nanulama, nemoj da se pravis dama
Don't clap with your wooden slippers, don't pretend that you are lady
Ne silazi sa cardaka rek'o mi je licno Laka
Don't come down from the castle, Laka told me personally
Ne silazi sa cardaka dok ti ljubav nije jaka
Don't come from the castle untill your love is strong enough

Na moju omiljenu foru
On my favourite tactic
Prevarim faunu i floru
to cheat fauna (animal world) and flora (plant world)
Da zivot nije postao u moru
that life didn't come from the sea
Nego od ljubavi,
but from love
Ljubavi, ljubavi
Love, love
Od ljubavi
from love

Kolike protracili smo dane
So many days we have spent
Lezeci, jeduci banane
laying around, eating bananas
Pa spadosmo na niske grane
so we fell on lower branches
Bez ljubavi,
without love
Ljubavi, ljubavi
love, love
Bez ljubavi
without love

Pokusacu da te poljubim
I'll try to kiss you
A ti se pravi luda
and you pretend you are crazy (like you don't notice)
Pokusacu da te poljubim
I'll try to kiss you
A ti se pravi luda
and you pretend you are mad
Pokusacu da te probudim
I'll try to wake you up
A ti se pravi budna
and you pretend you are awake

Ne silazi sa cardaka rek'o mi je pjevac Laka
Don't come from the castle laka the singer personally told me
Ne klepeci nanulama, nemoj da se pravis dama
Don't clap your wooden slippers, don't pretend that you are a lady
Ne silazi sa cardaka rek'o mi je licno Laka
Don't come down from the castle Laka told me personally
Ne silazi sa cardaka dok ti ljubav nije jaka
Don't come down from the castle untill your love is strong enough

Pokusacu da te poljubim
I'll try to kiss you
A ti se pravi luda
and you pretend you are crazy
Pokusacu da te poljubim
I'll try to kiss you
A ti se pravi luda
and you pretend you are crazy
Pokusacu da te probudim
I'll try to wake you up
A ti se pravi budna

I know, it makes not a lot of sense, but I adore this. I cannot, cannot, cannot stop listening to it. Plus, as I've got the house to myself, it means I can do great big epic laps of my flat in the big fat soaring chorus. (I really need someone else in here before I become too dreadful to live with anyone...)

an annoying little meme from an annoying little person

2008-06-14T17:54:00.004Z

Yeuch, my tiresome boyfriend has sent me a meme that he hasn't even been invited to do. Seven songs that I have been listening to recently.

'List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.'

So here goes;

Electic Feel - MGMT

I bought tickets to go see MGMT after hearing this and Kids and being unable to get them out of my head. This is slinky, cheeky indie-dance at it's niftiest. I like. Shame youtube won't let me embed the official video, which has the MGMT boys dressed up like a cross between J M Barrie's Lost Boys and Duran Duran's Wild Boys, frolicking in a rainforest, riding motorbikes and eventually splitting the moon. Genius.

How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down? - The Silver Jews

Hopefully I will actually make it to see MGMT and not miss them, as I did with The Silver Jews. Fair enough, I was enjoying and exhausting myself in the Lake District... but still. This is shallow, daft, throwaway and oddly innocent jingle-jangle stuff with a great example of boy/girl vocals.

Fascination - Alphabeat

This is shallow, daft, throwaway and oddly innocent jingle-jangle stuff with a great example of boy/girl vocals. Oops, I said that already. What Rod, Jane and Freddy would sound like if they were still making music. More addictive than smack.

Anthrax - Gang of Four

I cannot wait to go see Go4 at Southbank Centre on Friday as part of Massive Attack's, frankly stunning, Meltdown line-up. Squealing, crunchy guitars, heartbeat drum and bass and a subtly menacing vocal track consisting of two deadpan, competing, aggressive, and yet weakly masculine voices. Gets better with every listen.

In A Sentimental Mood - John Coltrane and Duke Ellington

I have had this on my i-pod for ages and, being a jazz ignoramus, had no idea what it was. Everytime it comes on, it's like my entire body gives a great big sigh and swoons "lovely!" It's also brilliantly cinematic. I can't help but listen to it as I'm walking through Clerkenwell on my way to work and imagine great wide lens shots of me striding romantically through the city in wearing impossibly high-waisted flares, a fitted shirt, tie and big floppy hat, with a tiny, funny little Jewish man by my side struggling to keep up with me. The very definition of mellifluous.

Bonnie and Clyde - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot (or, even better, the Mick Harvey and Anita Lane English cover)

A relatively recent trip to the BFI to see the hilariously sexist wankfest that is Serge Gainsbourg's pervy semi-delusional love letter to Jane Birkin kicked off a revival of all things Serge for a while. Featuring fevered, shrieking strings, groaning, swooning vocals and with a baroque appreciation for all things sexy and criminal, plus, yes, my fave again, boy/girl vocals, this is the stuff of wet dreams. Plus, as you'll see from this ace video, the 1967 film is a rhapsody in sartorial elegance and Faye Dunaway's weirdly remote and earthy beauty. An all-round stunna.

Pin - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Only recently revived in my CD collection, following Dr Batty's inclusion of the YYYs in his 7 songs. Nasty. Brutal. Short. Dark, cute and witty animated video too, from none other than TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. Is there nothing that man can't do?

Okay. Fin. Beware my friendly bloggers...I shall begin hassling you with this meme shortly. Now, where's my dinner?

the day i swapped my dad for two goldfish

2008-05-11T20:16:00.002Z

A big family weekend has left me a little bit tired, and not really up for a Lost Girls post, but unfortunately I haven’t really got anything remarkable to report on from my reading this week. So how about I trawl through the old reliables? Plus it was my Dad’s birthday this week, so with him in mind, I steer you in the direction of a children’s book no bookshelf is complete without.

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish brilliantly takes traditional playground swaps and turns them into a terrific quest, as a boy struggles to recover his father after swapping him for his best friend’s goldfish. Dave McKean’s creepily spiky, textured artwork gives the book a brilliantly surreal edge, setting the reader in a world where someone’s dad can be traded, quite reasonably, for an electric guitar, a gorilla mask or a fat white rabbit. After all, Dad’s don’t do much except sit and read the paper.

It’s funny, daft and beautiful, full of the everyday casual cruelty and affection of sibling relationships and childhood fair-weather friendships. There are tons of opportunities for doing the police in different voices if you read aloud to your children, and much to enjoy and discover in the semi-photographic, collage artwork. The ritualistic nature of the story gives it the familiarity of a fairytale, whilst also maintaining the edge of a joke with a killer punch line. It utilises all the great devices of classic young, folkloric storytelling – repetition, journeys, thwarted expectations and antagonistic forces (i.e.: adults) – and resituates them in a modern, urban setting, thereby retaining its innocence without becoming old-fashioned or staid. There isn’t an extraneous word in the whole book, so in its way, it’s really rather poetic. Ezra Pound would certainly approve. I love this book, and happily fall asleep to my CD of Neil Gaiman reading it aloud – and like all the best bedtime companions, I don’t settle down to the end, I never skip the pages, and pretty soon I think I’m going to know every word by heart.

Plus I love the implicit guilt and attempt at self-justification in the title. He knows it was a mistake, but it’s not like he swapped his Dad for just one goldfish. I mean, c’mon, there were two of them…

Lost Girls, Part 1: Dorothy and the Lion

2008-04-30T21:33:00.002Z

Since the advent of the camera, pornography has been able to get away with being arguably less than imaginative. Anything you want to see need only be set-up, dressed and made up, and there you have it, a “real” flesh and blood human being in whatever pose or disguise your heart, (or something less romantic) desires. In turn, artists seeking to engage with sexual fantasy have frequently adopted many of the motifs of pornography to illustrate their point – I’m a big fan of Dave LaChapelle so I’ll use him to illustrate my point.

But sex and sexual fantasy are two extremely distinct and different things. Sex is real bodies, fluids, squelches, embarrassments, giggles, extreme tenderness and extreme vulgarity. Sexual fantasy is much more murky, indistinct, abstract, cold and controllable, and that’s precisely where its power lies.

Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls’ use of alternately delicate, frothy and surreal artwork, dolled up in a monumental confection of pastel colours, bound hardback and coy covering moves pornography away from the merely representational, and back into the realm of fantasy, possibility and play. In it, very little actual, real-time sex is represented. Instead, a significant part of the narrative focuses on the retelling of sexual experiences and/or childhood sexual fantasies (the boundaries between these two categories are deliberately blurred), which, as they are told, reveal themselves to be the well-known exploits of three of children’s literature’s greatest characters, Alice (in Wonderland), Wendy (Peter Pan) and Dorothy (Oz).

From now on, whenever I have a dull week and there isn’t a children’s book worth writing about (as will now be the main focus of this blog – it runs my life, it may as well run my blog) I’ll write about Lost Girls, mainly because I could write about it for ever. There’s so much to say, about sex, class, pornography, art, feminism, power, history, war, fantasy, literature, literary parody, the form of comic books….blah blah blah, I could go on, and indeed, over time I shall.

But tonight I’m tired. So I’ll start with a very straightforward fantasy, which I think Lost Girls delivers beautifully. It is arguably, the great romantic female fantasy, typified by Elizabeth Bennett’s Mr Darcy and Bridget Jones’s Mark Darcy; the woman whose love has the capacity to ennoble her man, to transform him, to better him. In Book Two of Lost Girls, this classic romantic tale is gently, sweetly applied to Dorothy’s taming of the lion in her personal Oz.

Sexually frustrated, down on the farm, in the deep south, Dorothy is obliged to work her way through the farmhands. One she describes as a ‘big, gruff guy’, whose crude catcalling and brutish sexual teasing she immediately recognises as cocky sexual posturing. If anything, she finds his attempts to intimidate her slightly pathetic, explaining; ‘I weren’t scared o’ him, in fact, the way I reckoned, he was more’n likely scared of me, else why raise all that dust'. Her precocious self-possession thus gives the young Dorothy all the benefit of hindsight that scores of women wish they had at that age. In fact, I think this story is partially for every thirteen year old girl subjected to the playground-slut-myths or kiss-and-tells that used to characterise the Monday after the Friday disco, at my school, and many like it. Dorothy’s self-awareness and sexual intuition gives her instant power over this boy – like every great romantic heroine before her, she knows what her man needs before he does, and in her infinite wisdom, she is able to redeem him.

In Dorothy’s sexual fantasy, she approaches the farmhand and with immense control
and confidence, offers herself, admitting that 'once I saw how scared he was, it sorta made me hot'. It’s quite clear, both visually, and in Dorothy's speech, that the farmhand is not attractive. Instead, she is moved to act through vanity. Her beauty, her undressing, is more central to the fantasy than his active involvement;

'Lookin’ at him, what got me hot was thinkin’ how excited he was, lookin’ back at me. Not his body, but how he wanted mine.'

Throughout the fantasy, Dorothy describes the boy in purely animal terms, with her seduction comparable to throwing a dog a bone. It is quite clear that she is training him. Physically, he is much bigger than her, a bear with a muzzle for a mouth and a large, rough tongue, and Dorothy revels in the fact that she, ‘some little girl’ has full mastery over him. But it’s not his submission that acts as an aphrodisiac for Dorothy, but her own power that she finds so exciting; ‘I made him scared. I made him tame. Hell, by the end, I’d even made him brave.’

I made him. I did it. Look, mum, no hands! Get me! etc etc

Following their little tryst, the farmhand is the perfect gentleman. He holds her, kisses her, tells her she is beautiful. In fact, Dorothy gets the full courtly love treatment, except of course, their love isn’t really all that courtly, at least not in the classic troubadour sense. However, in giving herself to this wretched, crude, unattractive boy, Dorothy transforms him. She is touched by his gratitude, and enjoys witnessing the impact her love has had, as she watches him blossom into something of a ‘dandy', with ‘the courage to ask women out instead o’ leering at ‘em cross the street.’ In lowering herself, by bestowing her love on him, Dorothy elevates the boy’s status and soul, like some benign, generous angel, by giving him ‘somethin’ more than just a place to stick his thing.’ Through her girlish charms she manages to do what pretty much every romantic heroine strives for – she changes her man. She gives her lion his courage. She makes him a better man.

Where Alan and Melinda score extra points however, is in locating this fantasy’s true power. The woman is less interested in the outcome of this changed, charming man – hence why Dorothy is quite happy to move on to her next strapping young buck and no one cares what happens to Liz and Darcy once married. The thing that really excites women is the conceptualisation of their own sexual power, their agency, their influence, their borderline divinity. The Mr Darcy transformation is little more than a girly power-trip – Look what I did, see how great I am – the inevitable product of a woman’s response to an idea of female sexuality perpetually skewed and shaped by the male gaze. When Dorothy tames her lion, she has to place herself in the position of the beast, and work out the best way to calm him. To her delight, she realizes that the very aspects of her that he so outwardly scorns are her greatest weapons.

By way of reply to SashaGoblin’s comment on my last post, I love the lion story for the same reasons I love Under My Thumb. It treats the love object as little more than a plaything who proves your own power. Under My Thumb works lyrically by forcing me into the position of the subjugated female – which, let’s face it, is where we’re put in most pop songs written by men. I just love that this one’s a bit more honest, and therefore, I find it almost naïve and oddly touching. Like Dorothy giving her lion courage, the fantasy is strictly isolated to the teller (down to me – me, me, me).

It has nothing to do with the person you’ve changed, and everything to do with the dizzy rush of your own power. And everybody, no matter what they say, wants to be King (or Queen) for a day.

Why Weeps the Brogan? by Hugh Scott

2008-04-21T21:27:00.003Z

I would be lying if I said I found Hugh Scott’s Why Weeps the Brogan? consistently gripping and entertaining. In fact, for a book that struggles to fill 100 pages of a back-pocket-sized paperback, it often feels like a bit of a drag. However, this isn’t because it isn’t interesting, but because it is incredibly frustrating.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to frustrate you too now, as I can’t really tell you why it’s frustrating without spoiling the entire book. All I will say is that Hugh Scott drops you in the middle of a strange, alien situation, with rather sketchy, fragile characters. The initial pages are less of a story and more of a puzzle, where you, as the reader, have to decode the world you’re presented with. Although this in itself doesn’t take very long, figuring out why these characters are in this world, what’s happening to them, and of course, why weeps the Brogan, takes virtually the rest of the book. There is a lot of repetitive action, which, in its apparent futility, takes on the feel of a Beckett play. The dialogue is likewise playfully and wilfully incomprehensible at times.

It’s a masterful work of science fiction and human drama and ends with a nasty, sickening twist. Travelling up the hill on the #59, my stomach kicked and flipped when I read the end, after which, everything that has come before is cast into sharp relief. It shook me up as a twenty-five year old. Had I been twelve when I’d read this, I think it might have turned me upside-down.

Why Weeps the Brogan? won the Whitbread in 1991, yet is now no longer in print. I find this depressing, but hardly baffling. There are no quick access points into this book. Though brief, it’s an intense, yet often dull, reading experience. It most definitely cannot be made into a global-selling series or licensed onto stationery, backpacks or t-shirts. It confounds reader’s expectations of the narrative, and offers a wholly shocking, yet satisfyingly unsatisfying ending. It can probably only really be re-read once, for as soon as you know the answer to the question, Why Weeps the Brogan? your time with the book is arguably done.

But as a brilliant mystery, an exercise in narrative, and proof of the force and power of such taut, uncompromising writing, it is a gem. Weird, alienating, and yet by the end, all too human and all too terrible, Why Weeps the Brogan? is about as uncommercial as a children’s book gets, whilst also getting probably as good as it gets. This is quality writing.

I often bore my friends with a review of the children’s/YA book I’m reading and more often than not, they politely nod and ask me what I’d like to drink in the hope conversation will turn to something more grown-up/bawdy/bitchy etc. But with Why Weeps the Brogan? I’ve got people reading it, or at least asking to. My boyfriend already knows too much about the story, but the strange, ill-formed impressions I gave him halfway through my reading, alongside the fact that the ending made me feel sick, is enough for him to ask to borrow it. (And it’s very short. And he’s just finished Philip K. Dick) My good friend, let’s call him Dylan, both because he drinks like Dylan Thomas and looks like Dylan Moran, has ordered it because I couldn’t tell him anything about it, except to say the ending made me feel oddly sick. And my other friend, a cohort in the children’s book publishing business, read it for the same reasons I did – because nobody would tell us what it was about, except that it was essential, and would leave you with your heart rammed in your throat.

So, read it. I can’t tell you what it’s about. But like some other of life’s pleasures, it will make you gasp, shudder and (here’s a rare one) think.

***

For those of you who are interested, on Thursday, Portishead at Brixton Academy were polished and proficient, but alas, sadly, not as glittering or ethereal as they were in my head. Roseland or Glastonbury, clearly, were better gigs. And they didn’t play All Mine. However, my companions at the gig were second to none, bona fide, brilliant people, which made it rather lovely.

Also this week, Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend had me a-chuckling and entertained most of the way through. My initial feelings about Fritz Lang's Metropolis were confirmed; stylistically magnificent, ideologically naïve. Destination of the week is The Illustrator's Cupboard on Bury Street nr. Green Park tube station. A big thumbs up also goes to another old fave, Polly Dunbar's Penguin, after a fresh pair of beautiful blue eyes made me look at Polly's delightful illustrations anew. And song of the week is Under My Thumb by The Rolling Stones. Because I am.

Not under my own thumb of course. That would be weird.

Henry Tumour by Anthony McGowan

2008-04-14T20:23:00.003Z

Last week, I fell in love with a fourteen year old boy and his brain tumour. Anthony McGowan’s Henry’s Tumour is a dark, sick, funny and incredibly moving account of one teenager’s very visceral grappling between his good, sweet and incredibly uncool side and his evil, nasty, cancerous side.

Hector Brunty is a good kid with a big problem. He has a brain tumour, Henry Tumour in fact, who talks to him and makes him do and say bad things. And it’s killing him. At the most difficult time in his life, adolescence (duh) Hector is battling with a big, bad wolf inside of himself…but then aren’t we all?

McGowan’s triumph is in making the book’s two competing voices of id and ego equally compelling and lovable. Hector, our sweet but ineffective boy hero, has a wonderfully distinctive voice which veers between the darkly witty, the endearingly clueless and, best of all, the baroquely eccentric, as he rhapsodises on maths, junk food, and school sex goddess Uma Upshaw’s marvellous rack. The following rumination on his Mum’s decaying perfume made me snot with laughter on a packed circle line carriage;
The other bottle was perfume, given to Mum years before by someone who couldn’t have known what she was like. She didn’t use products that might have been tested on animals, although putting perfume on a rabbit and sending it out to a a nightclub in a slinky dress to see if it pulls doesn’t seem too cruel to me. Only kidding. I know they pour it in their eyes.

Henry is a vile, despicable, self-centred idiot, but importantly, everything he does, he does for Hector. We love Hector, so it’s therefore hard not to love Henry. As Hector’s tumour, he is, of course, the thing that threatens to kill him. But he is also the voice in Hector’s head that impels him to indulge in every thrill and whim he desires before he kicks the bucket. So, while he gives Hector the courage to ask Uma Upshaw out on a date, his lecherous desperation means he screws it up. Henry risks ruining Hector’s blossoming romance with shy, friendless, Amanda and her enormous facial birthmark, because she’s a nobody. Worse of all, he tempts Hector into ditching his kind, loyal, but pretty tragic friends (a beautifully drawn bunch of sweaty, sniffling, scoffing but supremely intelligent and sweet boys).

Nevertheless, as Henry goads Hector into getting a haircut, shoplifting and sticking up to the school bullies, you cannot help but root for Henry, especially as Hector’s cool quotient rises expotentially with Henry’s influence. As Henry wins over the ladies, gets closer to his mum and, in the best playground showdown ever (involving a used condom and a bag of Revels) beats the school bullies, you can’t help but feel your eyes mist over as you wish Henry could stick around without killing Hector. But, shucks, he’s the selfish, snarky, self-destructive ego, and if Hector’s going to grow up, he has to learn to manage and suppress him. Dammit. Thus, the book ends with a pretty major hospital visit.

The book is packed full of brilliant touches. Everything from the chapter names to the font of the chapters is executed with flair, thought and love. As Mal Peet said on reviewing the book when it won the 2006 award “I recently had the rare pleasure of presenting the Booktrust teenage prize to a novel which begins with the word "Arsecheese" and ends as a five-page cartoon strip.” Not only does that take guts (and props to Doubleday Definitions for publishing such a weird, wonderful book) but it takes a helluva lot of talent for a writer to get away with such shenanigans.

Of course, it’s all very clever. The relationship between Hector and Henry Tumour is apparently meant to directly parallel that between Henry IV and Falstaff (no, I didn’t spot it at first, but Henry ups his Shakespeare references the closer to death he gets…and then dreams of dying in green fields…Oh!). Like the great Bard, McGowan makes you root for Henry Tumour while all the while wishing he would die and let Hector fulfil his life’s potential by becoming, well, in this instance, just a man, but he sure looks like a king from where I’m standing.

It’s brash, vulgar, anarchic, disgusting and embarrassing to read in public. There’s enough four-letter words to land it an X-rated certificate and more noisy bodily functions than a club toilet. But it’s also incredibly sympathetic, wise, and above all, it bears the hallmark of a writer who loves and understands his audience. Like fellow naughty schoolchildren of teen and children’s fiction (Roald Dahl, Melvin Burgess, Judy Blume, Julie Burchill) this book is written with such respect, affection and compassion for its audience that I wish I could hand it out on the street like Hari Krishna’s do with their free Buddhism books.

I may still be in the first flush of new love, but from where I’m standing now, Anthony McGowan’s Henry Tumour is one of the best young adult fiction books I have ever read. (See also Junk, Sugar Rush, Forever, How I Live Now (post from July 07) and, that homicidal classic, George's Marvellous Medicine.) I just wish McGowan had been writing when I was fourteen.

I wish I could say the same for David Almond’s Skellig. Now that’s an overrated read. Sublime, poetic, subtle…and really rather dull. It’s a short book, but I had to renew my library loan twice. I mean, come on, do we really need another angel/coming to terms with mortality book. Sheesh.

Bring on the bad tumours and groping girls in graveyards I say.

song of the week: don't talk, put your head on my shoulder

2008-02-15T22:31:00.000Z

Now back online with my intermittent wi-fi connection, I think it’s only right to resurrect the blog with a nod to Valentine’s day and one of my favourite love songs.

The Beach Boys have written some of the greatest love songs on earth, God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice springing immediately to mind. But it’s the quiet drama of Don’t Talk, Put Your Head on my Shoulder that gets me every time.

Opening with that stern (minor, right? spot the musical ignoramus) chord, the song manages to be both cinematically epic and understated, as all the misery of love is echoed in Brian Wilson’s Californian wail. The listener is immediately thrown into the position of somebody waiting for something beautiful to end. There is aching hound dog resignation in Wilson’s performance, stretching into plaintive sighs and that drawn, elegiac ‘heartbeat’.

Working against the song’s almost lazy melancholy is the tick-tick of the cymbals, marking the fast-approaching end of this elegant sliver of lethargic, calm heartbreak. There is no musical door slamming or hysterical crying, but rather a deep, quiet understanding that even the most sincere attempts at love are doomed, or will end, or are impossible. All passion has made way for chaste consolation, brimming over with unresolved desire and disappointment. The song goes no where, because the thing it’s singing about can go nowhere.

The strings make their unsettling and miserable progress through the song, building to the almost-crescendo of that drum-roll, knocking at the door of a relationship’s end. Tugging at the song’s beautiful drowsiness is the knowledge of inevitable parting, matched with a wilful sense of denial. It is a song that expresses a bitterly lovely agony and I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

sights and sounds of 07

2007-12-27T11:02:00.000Z

2007 has been a superb year for Clash fans, and therefore, a superb year for me.

Film of the year has to be, without a doubt, Julian Temple's The Future is Unwritten - a funny, touching, raw and elegantly conceived documentary on the life of perhaps the single greatest man to ever walk the surface of the earth.

Okay, so the campfire/Strummerville motif that runs through the film is a little bit schmaltzy. Fortunately, Temple never forgets that Strummer was a snobby, philandering, arrogant, jumped-up little twat for most of his twenties which dulls the toothache. But it's Temple's stunning mastery of archive footage, home videos and talking heads (who veer from the sycophantic to the downright disappointed and hostile) that make this one of the greatest rockumentaries since Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney.

Gone are the crutches of bog-standard documentaries - no intrusive subtitles or credits introducing people (and too right - if you don't know that's Mick Jones talking you need to go back to school), no hammy attempts to structure a narrative where there isn't one and no struggling to make Strummer into a hero, a sinner, or saint. Narrated entirely using recordings of Joe Strummer's posh snarl, the film is a masterclass in editing. Excluding the campfire interviews, Joe Strummer, his family and friends pretty much shot all footage themselves. The effect is direct, immediate, moving and utterly absorbing.

The film's opening, with a young Joe Strummer screaming the opening to White Riot smacks you round the head with all the force of hearing the song for the first time. Those opening minutes put The Future is Unwritten ahead of anything else released this year.

And song of the year? Sorry to be dull, but it has to be MIA's Paper Planes. This song was love at first listen when I heard it at the end of this summer. I spent the first year of my university degree waking up to a Clash compilation, dozing through The Magnificent Seven and Rock the Casbah, only rising when Straight to Hell came on. The song is a perfect example of that lazy, mellow, pseudo-exotic, ambient-rock The Clash did so well, (see also Sean Flynn) underpinned by the most horrifying of sentiments. As you sink back into the song, you are chastised by your own comfort and complacency. Genius.

So for MIA to take that sublimely insidious lounge riff and overlay it with a drum track is inspired. Slowing down the drawn out scream of Straight to Hell's opening squeal and matching it with her passive/aggressive British ghetto-whine, then slamming in the sinister comedy of gunshots, trigger pulls and cash registers for good measures, is a trick of menacing beauty. I can't tell you how relieved and delighted I was to hear a Clash song sampled, revived and done proud. I'm sure Joe is well pleased. I am.

song of the week: another chance - roger sanchez

2007-11-05T21:33:00.000Z

In preparation for my forthcoming trip to Le Big Apple, I have been prepping my playlists for all things NY. Velvet Underground. Check. Beastie Boys. Check. Suzanne Vega. Check. Frank. Check. George. Check. So far so booorrring. So here's a dedication to a rather European New Yorker, the S man himself, Queen's very own Roger Sanchez and his early noughties' house floorfiller. Tinny drumbeats, cheesey lyrics, mushy, swirly, hand-wavy, wobbly, distorted, brain-mashing repetitions and the indisputable feeling that you're in love with everyone else in the room. There were so many "cool" or just classic possible choices for this week. Here's something disposable. Like Reeces pieces, Coca Cola, apple pie with a slice of cheese and a side of ice-cream and Lucky Strike it will rot you from the inside out. But it's a fun sort of decay.

song of the week: all by myself - feeder

2007-11-02T23:08:00.000Z

Before there was OK Go on treadmills, there was the Feeder fan video. While getting ready for work this morning, XFM kindly reminded me of this slice of quintessentially English teen suburbia. Okay, so it’s not a ground-breaking, or even particularly great, song, but frankly I find this video cute incarnate.

The synchronised dancing with guitars
The emo boys taking themselves far too seriously
The bad lighting
The rubbish interior décor
The Fab lolly
Gyrating black-bra lady
Blonde girl with multiple wardrobe changes (are they the same girl? Or just the same room?)
Cute nu-metal girls in visors and their photo opp
Those adorable blonde children, the nose-picking, Funny noooooooowww!!!!
Weird lady with cyan zip-top doing Blanche Dubois goes psycho
(especially when she gets out the dressing-gown and fag)
The tea break from the Topman boys
Sincere boy in white t-shirt and glasses
The umbrella-ella-ella
Glove puppets and newspapers
Show-off video-camera dancing
And let’s not forget enraged mother at 3.46

Jocelyn!

song of the week: digital - joy division

2007-10-27T21:32:00.000Z

Darling Vicarage is at a crossroads in her life...

Walking up Caledonian Road on my way to see Control, feeling restless in the extreme, I stuck on some Joy Division to try and reset my mind before the film. When that steadfast, confident, weirdly upbeat bass kicked in, my stomach settled, my pace quickened, and dragging on an illicit cigarette, I felt vaguely closer to being in control.

As a teenager, Digital was battle music. When they played Digital or Transmission down at the indie nights at the Corn Exchange the floor would be crammed with drunk, underage bodies self-consciously bumping up against one another, eyes averted, affecting an aloof stare. This was dance music I felt I was permitted to dance to. This stuff used to make me feel adult and invincible.

As I pounded the pavement, the tripping guitar riff and trembling, deep, deep slur of Ian Curtis lifted my spirits as it cracked into a frustrated, spitting yell. So I sung along, as you do with songs you’re blindly familiar with, quite mindlessly and innocently in my head; ‘day in, day out, day in, day out’. There was something strangely comforting about having those words in my mouth again. And then I remembered exactly what I was singing.

Here’s this casually infectious three minute piece of stripped back post-punk. It doesn’t give me nightmares like Dead Souls, make me cry like Atmosphere or bring me to my knees like Love Will Tear Us Apart. But my God is it a nasty, insidious piece of work.

For a very intense moment, I felt sick, panicked and fatigued and all that sick, panicked, exhausted tension in the song hit me like a crash-test dummy in a government advert. I tripped on the pavement and stopped to take a deep breath. Then I kept on walking, trapped in the hypnotic, menacing, bass riff, aware that I had to keep moving because you can’t simply stop on the street and scream. As Ian Curtis belted out that final, bullying, triumphant/desperate plea ‘don’t ever fade away, don’t ever fade away’ I calmed down and felt less sketchy, especially when it finished.

I’ll probably always dance to Digital with teenage abandon, all the while feeling queasy as that’s part of its horrific charm – I’ve always recognised that. But in true thunderclap style, my head, my circumstances and my i-pod synched up on Friday night, and suddenly, listening to a three minute pop song felt a helluva lot like looking in the mirror. And when that song is by Joy Division, I hope I could be forgiven for freaking out on Caledonian Road.

and now for some psychogeographical drifting

2007-10-22T19:51:00.000Z

lose yourself

In her essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Virginia Woolf explores the liberating effect of walking without purpose in London, applying the language of rambling to experimentation and rediscovery of the self:

What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

For Woolf, the city walk enables the individual to escape, or ‘deviate’ from themselves, even adopting ‘briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’ as part of a simultaneous escape, and reaffirmation of identity. Unsurprisingly therefore, it plays a significant role in Woolf’s novel on human interconnectedness and isolation, Mrs Dalloway. Concerned with the interior, emotion lives of an apparently disparate, but intimately linked group of people in London, Woolf first acquaints her readers with the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway when she steps out into the streets of Westminster to buy flowers for her party. First sketched, although far less sympathetically in Woolf’s The Voyage Out, Clarissa’s character was developed in the 1923 short story Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. The titles of these two preliminary works immediately intimate the significance of walking in London for Woolf.

As she weaves between the crowds, Clarissa’s thoughts drift between memories of her past at Bourton, observations on London and various impulses and emotions initiated by the walk. For Clarissa, the frantic activity of London’s streets is exhilarating, seeming to possess an invisible electricity or magnetism, in a manner comparable to the experiences of Baudelaire’s painter:

Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.

This ‘divine vitality’ has a liberating and energising effect on both the atmosphere and Clarissa, enabling her to momentarily relinquish the confines of her domestic and familial responsibilities. This shift that occurs when a woman moves from the private interior of home to the impersonal city is wittily (but somehow, bleakly) articulated by Woolf in Street Haunting when she explains that at home:

we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express theoddity of our temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.

Isolated from the milling crowds, Clarissa’s independence results in simultaneously carefree and anxious concentration on the immediacy of the moment and her own mortality:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

The deliberate, strained, repetition of ‘very’ exacerbates the tone of excitement and anxiety that pervades the passage, for despite her freedom, Clarissa remains deeply self-conscious. Joining the streets, she begins to feel anonymous and capable of considering relinquishing her familial responsibilities. Paradoxically, however, the dissolution of self that results in immergence with the crowd exacerbates anxiety about the fact that her public identity remains that of the wife of Richard Dalloway:

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.

In Edmund White’s book on the flâneur, he quotes the following extract from a 1929 essay by Walter Benjamin, describing the splitting of the self that occurs in the city, during which the streets simultaneously dissolve social hierarchies whilst making the walker grasp for the familiarity of their interior lives:

Landscape – this is what the city becomes for the flâneur. Or more precisely, the city splits into its dialectical poles. It becomes a landscape that opens up to him and a parlour that encloses him.

Surely this is similar to the effects the walk has on Clarissa Dalloway in the opening of Woolf’s novel, appropriate when one remembers that the novel concentrates on Clarissa’s simultaneous feelings of isolation from society, frustration at society’s definitions of her, and her desire to reach out beyond her home, achieved through the parallels Woolf draws between Clarissa and the young war veteran, Septimus Smith. The notion of the self fragmenting in the chaotic London Streets, reaching out and forcing sympathetic connections with strangers is explicitly referred to in Street Haunting, when she muses that nature was too distracted when making man, and consequently allowed contradictory impulses and desires to influence each person:

we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here not there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?

By leaving the home and the ‘old prejudices that fold us round’, the individual liberates themselves in wandering the streets, enables the ‘varied and wandering’ self to freely explore and adopt diverse identities, resulting in an affirmation of the self; ‘we are indeed ourselves’.

Frustratingly, as Woolf also acknowledges, this can only be an occasional luxury, for people must allow the world to reduce them to their social status and responsibilities, later rationalising; ‘for convenience sake a man must be whole’. This is a sad fact of all society, but nevertheless, the city provides the walker with the opportunity to ‘shed the self our friends know us by and become[s] part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'.

And as this is primarily a blog about music, which catchy summer choon samples Betjeman's The Cockney Amorist, a wistful little poem which both echoes and contradicts Woolf? No google-cheating allowed, yeah?

Oh when my love, my darling, You've left me here alone,
I'll walk the streets of London, Which once seemed all our own.
The vast suburban churches, Together we have found:
The ones which smelt of gaslight, The ones in incense drowned.

song of the week: damn, i wish i was your lover - sophie b hawkins

2007-10-20T22:08:00.000Z

I have much to thank sardonic Tom Reynolds for. His cutting essays on the most diabolically dreadful songs ever written have given me many happy evenings spent joyously ranting at crimes to music. But he’s also reminded me of some gems. His tirade against Sophie B Hawkins’ truly nasty fairytale-incest-love-song Don’t Stop Swaying (it’s new-age Flowers in the Attic vibe makes my stomach turn) is wholly justified. But it also reminded me of that Sophie B Hawkins early 90s classic, Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover this week.

I remember this coming out when I was a child and absolutely loving it, whilst also being half-aware that there was something very grown-up about it that I didn’t get. “Come inside my jungle book”. Now what, exactly, did this mean? I wasn’t sure, but I knew Rudyard Kipling probably wasn’t involved. Not that it mattered. Like Madonna’s Like a Virgin, The Divinyls’ I Touch Myself and Kelis’s Milkshake, its stamp of pop perfection overrides the not-so radio-friendly lyrics until that moment where you stop and go, ‘Hold on, what did she just say?’

It begins with a weird rumbling - ocean tides or a train passing - and then a simple drum-loop and repeated heartbeat keyboards. It promises to be a rather standard slow-dance number. The vocal begins mellow, unobtrusive and wistful, lulling you into the sense that you’ve heard this song a hundred times before. Then suddenly, there’s that yelp of utter frustration ‘I had a dream I was your hero’, and that long, pulled out sigh of ‘damn’. Unable to keep its secrets, the rest of the song blossoms out around the vocal. Drums replace the tracked sample, a twelve-string guitar patters into action and the keyboardist stops playing the same notes over and over and over. It becomes a song that you can’t exactly dance to, but you can certainly move with.

There’s no attempt to dress-up or poeticize the sentiment. Plain and simple, I wish I was your lover, and the stuff she promises is pure utopia; promises upon promises of a life of total romantic bliss. But beneath these warm, fuzzy declarations of undying love is the persistent, circular repetition of the song which, following the first confession of unrequited love becomes entirely chorus. Suddenly, before the song even feels like it’s started, it soars into a triumphant break-down that sounds disturbingly like the song’s coda, climaxing in a long, drawn out, obsessive wail of ‘for ever and ever and ever and ever’. The voice in the song is so wrapped up in her fantasies of possession that she has, in not so many words, totally gone off on one. It’s a moment of wacko euphoric delusion, and yet, musically, it’s the bit where the dance floor cuts loose, everyone gets down and everything’s sparkly and poptastic. It’s a clever trick to play.

So when the song gets pulled back into its yearning opening (the grinding confident guitar now replaced by that doleful keyboard again) it’s both a relief and a surprise. Lyrically, the second chorus is entirely a fantasy of romantic resolution that promises the singer some rest from this relentless yearning. But still, she ‘returns as chained and bound to you’. Her resigned disclosure builds up to that pleasure/pain junction condensed into one half-hearted, but highly effective, curse. Damn. From here until it fades out, the song stretches out into one long chorus with no returns to the middle break-down, hitting its peak at the end of the second chorus with a series of repeated ‘I wants’ (I want to open up, I want to come inside, I want to fill you up, I want to make you cry). And as we all know, I want doesn't get.

Much has been made of Sophie B. Hawkins’ self-confessed “omnisexuality” (as Tom Reynolds puts it “there seemingly isn’t a species of flora or fauna that she won’t give her phone number to”) and this song is now widely regarded as a classic lesbian love song, up there with Come Into My Window and Drive. The subject of the unrequited love is clearly going out with a controlling, abusive monster. But there’s no nope in our narrator rescuing her, because she’s not into girls. It’s a hopeless situation. However, what I love about this song is that, despite the fact many people seem to regard this as being the primary point of interest in the song, I think it’s totally secondary to the song’s greatest strength. You don’t really register that she’s singing to a girl until after a couple of listens, because the song has nothing to do with the object of her affections – it’s entirely about the narrator’s frustrated desire.

As a result, the song is so charged, both in Hawkins’ performance and the song’s perpetual chorus (all climax/no foreplay makes for a shallow high), tempered only by those brief moments of courtly-love melancholy, that it’s achy-breaky pop prettiness make radio gold. Superficially it’s mushy, slow, soft rock but beneath that glossy production lurks something much more violent.

Just listen to the way she says ‘shucks’. It’s even better than the first ‘damn’.

song of the week: caring is creepy - the shins

2007-10-14T19:48:00.000Z

sunday afternoon with minifig, darling vicarage and our friend simon -
brixton's answer to the IT crowd

Absolute weirdness. This Sunday matinee's film was Zach Braff’s Garden State, as recommended by minifig who bears a scary spiritual resemblance to the film’s protagonist, Andrew. “Just watch it,” he implored, “you’ll see why, I promise.” So there I was finding Sam, Natalie Portman’s character, increasingly irritating and desperately trying to work out whom she reminded me of. And then I realised. Me. Aargh. Minifig found it hilarious. Ha. Ha.

Garden State’s not a terrible film – very slow-moving and treading a fine line between kooky/witty and kooky/annoying - but as a film shot through the lens of a depressive, it ain’t half bad. Anyone who’s seen it will know The Shins get a rather significant mention in it and so this week’s song of the week is Caring is Creepy, a dreamily downbeat number on depression.

Don’t be fooled by the chirpy whistling intro and punchy chord-laden intro, which in any other emo single would lead into something a little more upbeat. This is the liveliest it gets. James Russell Mercer’s plaintive warble is mixed into a trembling yowl merging with hushed guitars, sulky bass and moaning organ. The drums don’t so much as roll as plod in, cymbals whispering under a guitar yawning through various swirling effects pedals as if on the brink of waking. Mercer’s murky vocals curl up for a nap as the song folds in on itself.

Something approaching a chorus comes in the dour switchblade triumph of the lyrics ‘Hold your glass up, hold it in’, followed by the sing-song sigh of ‘never betray the way you've always known it is’. This sort-of chorus finally ends with the languid, lethargic syllables of All/ these/ squawk/ ing/ birds/ won't/ quit/ build/ ing/ noth /ing /lay / ing / bricks’ a creepy, meaningless chant that not only echoes the song's opening melody, but oddly, I’ve just realised, Sufjan Steven’s Chicago (last week’s SOTW). The murmuring organ and blurry guitars lazily work up something approaching a musical interlude before returning to that shrugging, tired mantra ‘Hold your glass up, hold it in...’

And yet, in its hushed drumming, distorted guitars and melting vocals there is something cosy about this song. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that depression is a similar game; live with it for long enough and it becomes your friend and bedfellow, something to cuddle up with when the crowds have gone. A warm, fuzzy, big, fat nothing.

At no point in the song is the title referred to. The voice of the song is beyond caring, ‘never got cold wearing nothing in the snow’, and so articulating anything beyond the numb blankness of a bad case of the blues and a Lithium prescription seems facile. There’s none of the militant screams of the early Manics here or the ferocious drone and crash of Nirvana, or the self-loathing thrum of Nine Inch Nails. The Shins are way past that. Caring is Creepy isn’t a nervous breakdown, but the slow, sleep-deprived sigh of resignation. And, in that lazy Pavement, autumnal Elliott Smith kinda way, that actually makes it a rather pretty song. Oh! to be a fake-tortured teenager again. Only I'd probably have to like Panic! at the Disco and *shudder* Fall Out Boy if that was the case, so perhaps not...

Right, enough of this maudlin stuff, who's on for a bit of Push the Button?

song of the week: chicago - sufjan stevens

2007-10-07T19:32:00.000Z

My sister pointed out how lazy I’ve been with the blog recently. Truth is, I’ve been sort of busy. Still, that’s never a good enough excuse for not writing, so in an attempt to ensure I don’t forget how, song of the week is back.

Opening with a series of gently climbing chimes played on a glockenspiel/xylophone/
marimba/whatever in a series of ascending and then descending notes, Sufjan Stevens’ Chicago is a song that I always take to be about change, despite the fact it's doesn't go anywhere. That simple, see-saw beginning that promises new dawns and bright days - sounding like eyes opening, kettles whistling and toast popping - glides effortlessly into a soaring, pounding journey that gives the impression of continually moving, whilst never diverting from its opening structure, dropping you back six minutes later almost exactly where you began.

Sufjan Stevens’ layered multi-tracked sound (one-man-masquerading-as-entire-orchestra) works to gild the opening progressions, through lush looped strings, uptight, pulsing keyboards, rumbling bass and even-tempered drumming, pulling back to that same soothing opening, before it’s time for the brass, the crashing symbols, the choir. This series of ceaselessly changing, but returning riffs, gives Chicago its tireless, sweeping momentum, pushing you through the song at subtle speed whilst delicately tearing you to pieces.

Because despite, but also maybe because, of its mounting, rapturous repetitions, Chicago is one of those beautifully depressing songs. Whether it’s the soft, inevitable repetition of Sufjan’s simple refrains, shifting from ‘all things go’, to the barely believable ‘all things grow’, or the final, resigned ‘I made a lot of mistakes’, the song’s illusion of progress leaves me feeling both uplifted and empty.

From the first chorus, the innocent, untrained choir flips the previously vague, willowy lyrics into worshipful hymn (you came to take us, all things go, all things go / to recreate us, all things grow, all things grow) opening the song up to characteristic Sufjan Christian spirituality - which he very sensibly leaves up to you whether to take or leave. I don’t have it in me to sing along like I truly mean it, and perhaps it's that unwillingness to take that leap of faith that means I always leave the song too soon. I never quite make it onto the choir’s final chorus with it's clean, bell-like trumpet. Instead, I’m left with the taut restraint of Sufjan’s last solo, coming not towards the end of the song (as you may think) but almost directly in the middle;

if I was crying /in the van, with my friend
it was for freedom / from myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes / I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes / I made a lot of mistakes

The closing choral repetition glances off me with little impact as the song reaches its peaceful conclusion. When Chicago ends with the same opening chimes, overlaid with swooning choral voices, flattening into a trembling violin, I feel little more than a calm emptiness. Perhaps sometimes it takes an elegant, complex epic to make you feel virtually nothing at all, except the skin you’re wearing.

endings

2007-09-13T21:30:00.000Z

So here's something worth blogging, for me, if for no one else. I just wrote the ending of my book. And even if no one else in the universe gets to see it, I know it exists. So here's to red wine, Siobhan Dowd, Stevie Nicks and laundry - the four things that made me stay up, tired and irritated, to bring some order into the monster that's been dogging me for the past three years.

And exhale.

Siobhan Dowd

2007-09-13T20:12:00.001Z

I found out yesterday, belatedly, that Siobhan Dowd died last month. She was an extraordinarily gifted writer, and by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. There aren't many people in this world that can write like she could, and I for one am sad that somebody so firmly (and rarely) dedicated to both writing and people in equal measure isn't around anymore.

Beastie Boys at Brixton Academy - 4th Sept 07 - setlist as promised

2007-09-09T19:24:00.000Z

Thank the Lord for men like MCA from The Beastie Boys,
Darling Vicarage's favourite boyband of all time

Mmm Solo
Time for Living
Gratitude
Off the Grid
Root Down
Super Disco Breakin'
Sure Shot
Shake Your Rump
Live at PJ's
Remote Control
Electric Worm
Lighten Up
Tough Guy
Brass Monkey
Pass the Mic
Flute Loop
Skills to Pay
Time to Get Ill
Son of Neckbone
The Gala Event
Egg Raid
Sebrosa
Alright Hear This
Check it Out
Body Movin
3 MCs
So What'cha Want
Intergalactic
Heart Attack Man
Sabotage

Beastie Boys at Brixton Academy - 4th Sept 07

2007-09-09T18:55:00.000Z

Okay, so there were no nearly-naked girls in cages, inflatable penises or co-ordinated tracksuits. After all, it’s been over 20 years since The Beastie Boys supported Run DMC at Brixton Academy (and the following year, Public Enemy – if this isn’t recommendation enough I don’t know what is), and ‘boys’ doesn’t really seem that appropriate anymore. Fortunately, their support act, Philadelphia’s finest purveyors of hip-hop filth, Spank Rock, do not disappoint. Grinding and pumping their way through thirty minutes of blush-inducing, dark and dirty beats, they bring new meaning to the term ‘warm-up’ act. Counting Thom Yorke as one of their biggest fans, please do take a look at their impeccably tasteful MySpace page. Understated, huh? The sap's clearly rising in the house that night, as I am mighty tickled to be chatted up using the immortal opener 'How yew doin'?' from a bona fide tanned, tatooed Little Italy New Yorker. Like the thorny English rose I am, I stifled a howl, nodded and and said 'I'm fine, thank you very much. And how are you?' Amazing how quickly he lost interest really.

As time ticks past 9pm a braying crowd begin a unified stamping, shouting chant of ‘Beastie Boys! Beastie Boys!’ before Mixmaster Mike takes to his decks amid hysterical screaming – the man is a G.O.D. after all. In fact, if I have one criticism of the gig, it’s that we didn’t get enough Mixmaster Mike action. For your viewing pleasure, I highly recommend you check out this video from their last (heartstopping) tour. My enduring memory of that night at Wembley is of gasping during Mixmaster Mike’s solo interlude, fearful that I may never see anything that good again. I still haven't.

Lovingly described by my Rough Guide to Rock as ‘sniggering and bratty…moronic and tasteless,” I have loved The Beastie Boys since the days when I too, was bratty and moronic. But The Beastie Boys are old men these days, MCA sporting a distinguished salt and pepper haircut, Adrock looking super-smooth in an elegant suit, fedora and big gold jewellery, and Mike D in a chic, skinny, tailored blue two-piece. Of course, this lounge-lizard look lasts just the time it takes for Adrock to sling a guitar round his shoulders, MCA to pick up that bass and Mike D to get behind the drums and it feels like 1986 all over again (at least I imagine it does) as we are thrown headlong into a violent moshpit of pure, distorted, anti-social punk.

After corroding our ears, things get explosive as that undulating, menacing but sexy bass off Root Down kicks in, whereupon I sustain the first of many bruises around my rib-cage. Note to all girls – if you’re around 5’5" and standing at the barrier of Brixton Academy at a potentially hectic gig, I strongly advise against wearing an underwired bra. Money Mark keeps his shades on for the regular lounge-music interludes that slink their way into The Beastie’s set. Sitting just the right side of sleazy, songs off new instrumental album The Mix-Up rest easy alongside squelchy slap-bass favourite Sabrosa, and much of the night we’re treated to funky, low-key grooves inbetween moments of sheer anarchy.

Halfway through the show and I am coated in a lovely grimy layer of sweat, only some of it mine. Standing against the front barrier, hips pressed against the metal as a couple thousand people try to get that little bit closer, we all open our mouths like goldfish as a line of obedient security guards hose us with water. “Can everybody take one little step back so y’all get a little more room. We want y’all to be a little more comfortable, k?’ smiles Adrock, clearly chuffed to bits at the carnage they’ve caused. Soaking wet bodies continue to fly over the barrier every time anyone so much as mentions the word ‘ill’.

The Beastie Boys play and perform with the kind of cocksure easiness and confidence you’d expect from a group with such longevity. Live, the chemistry between their voices is stunning. One need only replay the intro to Sure Shot for proof. Mike D’s spiky whine, Adrock’s snarling nasal bite and MCA’s knee-trembling gruffness all delivered in that streetsmart, gum-chewing New York drawl, matched with staccato lyrics that are absurd and intelligent, childish and conscientious. On stage, Mike D leaps erratically across the stage, strutting about in his confrontational way. Equally energetic Adrock gurns his way through vigorous guitar playing, before cheekily modelling his sharp suit; the consummate charmer. Every bit as laconic and cool as he sounds, MCA swaggers across the stage, casting vaguely dismissive, sideways smiles at his two pumped colleagues, while he casually sips from his cup of coffee. Mixmaster Mike keeps everything tight, happily riffing off The Beastie’s improvised moments which involve comedy crowd participation and not a little posturing. Money Mark alternates between providing the funky sleaze and hurling himself around the stage clad in New York’s finest tailoring. Believe me, it's quite a sight.

Come the encore and the paramedics are attending to one of my barrier neighbours as the crowd seesaws across a dancefloor slippery with beer, sweat and other bodily fluids. Gesturing to the upper circle, MCA gallantly flouts all health and safety rules with one wave of his hand ‘Y’all can all stand up people, you don’t have to listen to that!’ Adrock casts him a slightly nervy, disapproving look. In a fit of overexcited dancing, Money Mark hurls himself onto his keyboard before promptly toppling off, flailing arms and legs disappearing behind the riser. Fortunately, he emerges, looking worse for wear, and contritely settles his keyboard back on the stand…before starting his mad tribal waving all over again. As Adrock slings his guitar over his shoulder for the last time, mopping his brow and adjusting his fedora, gushing ‘Man, we y’all love you guys, we really appreciate it y’all, we jus’ love comi’ here y’all’ even the security guards look excited. As that crunking great electric guitar starts up, Mike D beating the crap out of his drums, a collective primal ‘IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII caaaannnn’t staandd it’ ushers in the calm before the great apocalyptic mosh of moshs.

And let me tell you, every single bruise was collected with love. If you want proof, just see the set list (which blogger ain't letting me upload, so it's typed above, but thank you Mr Roadie – you know I was the most deserving candidate).

My night of Beastie bruising brings to mind a love letter to The Beatles from one Cookie E of Queens New York. I feel just the same about my B-Boys (although MCA - you know I love you just a little bit more, k?)

Dear Beatles,

I saw you when you landed at Kennedy Airport in New York. I was almost killed and I was just six feet away from you. Everybody went crazzzy. I had an ankle sprained, my dress town, a slightly scratched face, and a black eye.

Isn’t it WONDERFUL?

I adore you all.

sonic youth at the roundhouse 30th August

2007-09-03T17:32:00.000Z

5 words to describe sonic youth's performance of daydream nation (and a not inconsiderable number of songs from rather ripped) on 30th August 07

1. clattering
2. intense
3. detached
4. furious
5. beautiful

Paddington describes it with much more grace and eloquence here, and Minifig took some great snaps, because he's soooo tall he's practically a giant.

duck amuck

2007-08-27T20:37:00.000Z

okay, okay, no more cartoons today, I promise. YouTube has suddenly become my #1 procrastination aid of choice. But honestly, Daffy has always been my favourite, largely down to this masterpiece. I feel like this every damn day.

all the cats join in

2007-08-27T19:43:00.000Z

Whilst soaking up the splendid weekend sunshine back home in Suffolk, I rediscovered some pieces of classic animation which not only proved to be highly effective babysitters for me as a child, but probably kick started my mini-obsession with cartoons. All the Cats Join In is brief, beautiful and deceptively simple - please take five minutes to enjoy it - I assure you it will enrich your life.

book of the week (and the weeks inbetween): carol by patricia highsmith

2007-08-24T20:06:00.000Z

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.

I'm sorry I haven't posted about books for a while, and I'm sorry this isn't even going to be a proper post. My reading pile for work keeps toppling off my shelves it's so tall, but as soon as I've got through it and consigned it either to the recycling pit or the acquisitions meeting I promise I'll post again. But for now, Patricia Highsmith's Carol is well worth the time and trouble, even if its surprise ending may have you scratching your head for weeks afterwards.

"Caviar. How very, very nice of them," Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. "Do you like caviar?"
"No. I wish I did."
"Why?"
Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was. "Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it," Therese said.
Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. "It's an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant - and hard to get rid of."

v festival 07: sunday

2007-08-20T18:02:00.000Z

In the Sunday morning drizzle we pack up the tent, because even the Foos can’t redeem a festival this poorly organised, with so little regard for anyone attending it. Despite the fact that all of my festival family expressed a heartfelt desire to jack the whole thing in and leave yesterday, everyone has agreed to let me watch Iggy and the Stooges before we go home. I feel very loved.

Rodrigo y Gabriela warm up the crowd in the rain with nifty cameras slapped on their guitars and beamed onto the screens to showcase the exent of their talent. Pixelboy spends most of the set catching flies. Highly impressive, virtuoso stuff, and despite the fact it’s drizzling and barely past midday, they finish to a huge, happy crowd.

If you were a young teen in the mid ‘90s, then it’s likely you either received or made some young crush a mix-tape featuring The Goo Goo Dolls. The three years between minifig and I open like the great division they were when we first met, as he heads off to watch Seth Lakeman, while I stop with my little sister and her boyfriend to watch an embarrassingly old Johnny Rzeznik try to pull off emo for grown-ups. Although it’s cute to hear Black Balloon and Slide, as Pixelboy puts it, you can just imagine them soundtracking a scene in Dawson’s Creek. I leave them with the stark realisation that Iris was actually never that great a song. Who’da thought such things were possible?

Captain play as we drink beer and are followed by The Cribs, fronted by a man who appears to be far too familiar with the sunbed and St Tropez. Despite all their rock ‘n’ roll posturing, The Cribs also reveal themselves to be rubbish at both crowd-surfing and smashing up their equipment. Rumbled. And thus another dull indie band sinks without a trace.

Joined by numerous guest singers (but no Lily Allen, lazy moo), Mark Ronson, celebrity producer extraordinaire, and his multi-talented band entertain a smiley, tipsy crowd. To my mind, as good as Ronson is at his job, live, he's just the guitarist in a glorified covers band. Still, a surprise rendition of Phantom Planet’s California (theme tune from The OC for those of you too busy/clever/old/sensible to watch such utterly genius tosh) is greeted with a mass sing-a-long and some very adventurous crowd-surfing (walking on hands, no less) by an over-zealous fan. As much as I enjoy it, I can’t help but think I’m getting far too old for such things.

Rilo Kiley give such a disappointingly, and atypically lacklustre performance I would be very surprised if they attracted any new fans. Willy Mason, avec band, are rousing. James, with a new, bald, kilted Tim Booth sound great from the interminably long portaloo queue as minifig and I take the two vocal parts of Out to Get You. Looking back, I imagine we’re quite annoying to look at. En route to another stage, it appears that the entire world is watching Lily Allen being obnoxious.

While waiting for Iggy and the Stooges, minifig gets into a conversation with a man who has brought a disturbing portable urinating device which he uses, very publicly, much to the distress of everyone in the general vicinity. I take a detailed mental picture of his face so I can avoid him before leaping into the impossibly tiny crowd of older men that have gathered for Iggy and the Stooges. With the sound turned up all the way to 11, Iggy flings himself around the tiny stage like a man-possessed, humping the amplifiers, scaling the lighting tower and baring his backside and aged penis to anybody who cares to look. Marvellous. Throwing himself into the crowd with abandon, he sprays us with bottled water which is provided by a devoted woman poised at the side of the stage like a ball girl at Wimbledon. When I emerge to my waiting family, my sister’s face is a picture of shock and delight. I bound back to the car screaming I Wanna Be Your Dog, and as we speed back to London in a steam-filled car, we simply shrug at missing The Killers.

Pleased to be going home we make a promise to each other never to return, waving goodbye and good riddance from the car window.

v festival 07: saturday

2007-08-20T17:39:00.000Z

Mr David Grohl rocks my fifteen-year-old world all over again

I don’t think I have ever been less excited about going to a festival. We’ve been going to the V festival for ten years and despite its near total lack of atmosphere, it’s always been well-organised and close to home, and therefore easy. By now, you could say it was a habit of mine. After this year I think it’s a habit I’m going to break. Easily. Any festival that drives me to drink lager at 11 in the morning simply because there is nothing better to do should be consigned to live music hell. ‘God, I feel like I’m in prison,’ whines my little sister. The bands haven’t even started yet.

Once inside we grab plates of nasty junk food whilst some policemen dance to Just Jack. We mill around in front of The Proclaimers all vaguely disturbed that we knew most of the songs. The crowd drink smuggled alcohol and pick their noses while waiting not-so-patiently for 500 miles. There’s nothing to do and the boys want a drink. I want to see Martha Wainwright. The bar and Juliette and The Licks are en route, so off we troop.

Although it isn’t even two o’clock yet, the site is swarming with people. Noticeably more people than usual. In fact, too many people. And whaddaya know – those crazy tykes at Virgin have sold more tickets for the same number of facilities. Great.

Every queue we pass for every bar is about four people thick and at least a hundred people long. With nothing else to do, we join one and watch Juliette Lewis gyrate and squeal across the stage in tight white leather. I adore Juliette Lewis; she’s a thoughtful, provocative actress and one of the most attractive people to ever walk the earth, but even a long-term fan like me thought she was trying too hard. As I watch their set, it occurs to me that we have been waiting in the queue for the bar tokens (yes, tokens, not even actual alcohol, despite the fact there is no queue at the bar) and barely moved. Itching to see Martha Wainwright, my lovely festival companions grant me special dispensation to leave the queue and go watch the lovely husky one. We arrange a place to meet during her set, and off I amble.

Inside the tent (I am not referring to any of these venues by their sponsors) there cannot be more than a couple of hundred people, despite the fact it holds a couple of thousand. Dressed in black with kinky lace-up sandals which she stoops to fasten, extending one long Wainwright calf to her adoring fans, Martha delivers a passionate, but brief performance of, she giggles, ‘incredibly depressing songs’. Bathed in nightclub light at two in the afternoon, she begins Factory with the apt lines These are not my people, I should never have come here. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but rather lovely all the same.

Only problem is, my festival friends are still yet to join me. I rather optimistically try calling them, and then send a flurry of text messages with precise details to meet near The Arcade Fire photo cut-out, anxious that Kanye West is due on soon. I then settle back against the barrier with my book in case they turn up in the next half an hour. They don’t, but I do see Sinead O’Connor walking casually through the arena, apparently unrecognised by anybody. It’s one of the defining things about a typical V festival crowd member. They’ll be able to spot some random off Shipwrecked at fifty paces, but stick a legend in front of them and they’ll ask them for a light. *Sigh*.

With still no sign of my sister or the boys, I begin to wander over to watch Kanye West, when it dawns on me that, an hour and a half later, they may still be queuing for bar tokens. Returning to the spot where I left everybody, I find them several metres along in the queue. Naively, I amble over to minifig, thinking I may be able to have a chat with my boyfriend across the queue barrier, seeing as he’s been waiting for over two hours. I am grabbed by two security guards yelling at me to ‘get back’ for no other reason than it makes them look busy while fights break out further up the queue. Happily, minifig informs me that security soon started fighting amongst themselves, spitting and shouting at one another with the usual refrain of ‘You disrespectin’ me?’ I wait with my sister for another hour before the boys emerge, royally pissed off and thirsty.

Luckily Kanye West is excellent and the beer is cold. I’m not particularly familiar with his music, but I prefer it to most mainstream hip-hop. Backed by a glamorous all-female string section and his DJs, Kanye gives us a breathtakingly energetic show. Standing towards the back of the hill, the crowd below is a blur of wildly waving arms. Such excitement proves extremely infectious. At one point, still rapping sixteen to the dozen, Kanye sprints to the far side of the stage, sparking a hysterical mexican wave in the crowd. Racing across to our side of the stage, I feel my arms miraculously lift, as if puppeted by Kanye West himself, and find myself screaming like a child. This is superstar showmanship of the highest order and probably worth the cost of a day ticket alone.

Dizzee Rascal’s set is one great heaving mass of east London brilliance as the rather ineffectual security are now ambushed by mighty hordes of tracksuits leaping the bizarre, one-way-system barriers into the tent. I cheer inwardly for each and every one of them as they slip out of the grasp of the wheezing security guards. At least it’s not Reading I think to myself – someone would have set fire to an ice-cream van by now.

When we regroup later, just after Ocean Colour Scene (which we make a point of missing) my sister’s boyfriend, Pixelboy, emerges from the crowd, sweaty and elated, singing that annoying refrain from The Day We Caught The Train. My sister berates him. The other punters around us appear to be attending an Ian Brown look-a-like convention.

Jarvis Cocker is a lanky dream. Arms languidly waving like a magician, hips shaking, fingers dancing, Jarvis balances on amps and dances with his microphone, cracking dry jokes in between songs. He finishes with a gloriously camp rendition of Paranoid, which, unfortunately, inspires a revolution in minifig who leaves the tent calling Jarvis a bastard for not playing Running the World. I make sure to walk several paces behind him.

Watching The Foo Fighters is one long nostalgia trip. They occupy a very special place in my music collection, and another beer on, I begin to regress into adolescence. Opening with an intense semi-acoustic version of Everlong, followed by a blistering Monkey Wrench, the crowd are assaulted with hit after pogo-inducing hit. Pixelboy looks about ready to combust with joy. Dave gives us Up in Arms, My Hero, This is a Call, Breakout, Learn to Fly and Times Like These. The crowd is as loud and lively at the back as in the pit. As they play Stacked Actors I am queuing for the loo, whereupon, we all start moshing as the chorus hits. I feel about fifteen – it’s brilliant. Finishing with old-time fan pleaser, Enough Space and a raucous version of All My Life that brings out the little hooligan in me, we spend the next hour screaming about how AMAZING Dave Grohl is.

Done, done and I’m onto the next one, done and done and I’m on to the neeeeexxxxxtttttt!

prince at 02 arena, 11th august 2007

2007-08-12T17:30:00.000Z

you're filthy cute and baby you know it

I had a rather restless night’s sleep, waking up warm and dazed and remembering yet another song that Prince played last night. I came home slightly disappointed after two and a quarter hours of music was compressed into the disappointment that he never made it onto the chorus of Little Red Corvette. This was compounded by the twenty-minutes mooching time on the Jubilee line home, and drifting around thirsty in London looking for somewhere, anywhere, still serving, that wasn’t a club. I’ve actually listened to Little Red Corvette this morning and it gave me grumpy pangs. I fear it may take some time to get over this.

That’s not to say the concert wasn’t wonderful, of course.

Nestled in the core of the millennium dome, the 02 arena is actually much smaller than I expected, which makes for a better arena show. The outer circle of the stadium is a collection of passively generic restaurants and bars, lined up along a paved boulevard like Braintree’s outlet shopping village. There are video bubble centres to record yourself dancing, an artificial beach with safe sand and fibreglass palm trees, and a Kubrick-style martini bar. The ceiling rises up like one great cathedral arch. It is, as paddington commented, “more Ballard than Ballard”. For me, it was like Murray Jay Suskind’s euphoric trip to the supermarket in DeLillo’s White Noise, a place that ‘recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright’.

Beautifully, and horrifically fake.

As we took our plastic seats, steam began to shoot out from all four corners of the arena. We eagerly watched our corner of the stage, positive that Prince would emerge from there, and indeed he did, albeit sealed in a box. From the minute he and the ubiquitous Twinz took the stage, the rest of the concert is a blur. He opened with Purple Rain, a bombastic, plump epic of a love song, and as silly as this may sound, it was rather dreamlike. Seeing somebody you feel you’ve grown up with, singing probably their definitive song first, is a bit hard to grasp. I have vague memories of watching the Twinz’s pert little bottoms wriggling to Cream, and although we were in the back of an in-the-round show, Prince did deign to come out and see us occasionally, while the band often performed to us.

There was a mildly cringe-inducing moment when members of the audience were pulled up on stage to dance with the band, and one lovely man in a leather jacket (in August) pulled some classic white-man moves. Prizes go to the girl in the purple Beyonce booty-shaker dress – a true star. Unfortunately, the dancing is my only major criticism of the main show. I know Prince isn’t as young as he used to be, and that he’s a bona fide musician and so has a guitar slung around him, but I was hoping for a little more spectacle and James Brown dance action. You can’t tease a generation of teenage girls with the Get Off video and then not provide just a little bit of grind.

A lengthy lung-busting saxophone solo of What a Wonderful World provided ample time for a wardrobe change. A gooey crowd-pleasing version of Nothing Compares 2 U didn’t make me cry as I’d hoped. U Got the Look was smokin’. Kiss was a giggle. Controversy was funky. As was Musicology. If I Was Your Girlfriend was sublime – I think it’s one of Prince’s most beautifully complex songs lyrically and woke up in the middle of the night having remembered it in my sleep. Thus, the first hour and a half disappeared.

Opening the encore with a thumping version of Let’s Go Crazy was a cruel trick to play on all those people who needed the loo, but almost made up for him not playing I Would Die 4 U (not that I was reeeaallly expecting it). Sadly, the encore was disappointing. Taking the keyboards, Prince proceeded to coyly play opening bars of some of his greatest hits – and then stopped. What began as cute teasing quickly became frustrating, especially when he halted Little Red Corvette before the chorus. Imagine watching a Prince show where you almost hear Raspberry Beret but fail to reach ‘the rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof’ bit; get teased with the anticipatory beeps of Sign of the Times; have the first minimalist chimes of When Doves Cry squandered, are denied the spangly glitters that begin Diamonds and Pearls and only begin to get all warm and fuzzy to The Beautiful Ones. He didn’t finish a damn track.

And then he plays a Princed-up version of Le Freak. Huff.

Hot and thirsty and unable to get a beer anywhere in central London without a cover-charge, I think Prince’s teasing encore ended up marring the night in the initial after-buzz. And it was never going to live up to my starry-eyed expectations, which have been building since 1994, when I borrowed my big sister’s copy of Diamonds and Pearls and a VHS of Prince videos.

But it came close enough, and so, in the sunny light of day, I ask you, “Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh, no let's go!”

book of the week: blankets

2007-08-09T21:32:00.000Z

...'unafraid to suggest the ways that obsession can consume itself and evaporate' The New York Times Book Review

With its combination of stark black and white simplicity and acute attention to detail, Craig Thompson’s Blankets is the perfect beginner’s graphic novel. Its understated text proves the perfect bedfellow for its bittersweet illustrations, conveying all that is painful and beautiful in that bright ache of first love. The callous brutality of childhood and the guilt-ridden ecstasy of religious and romantic fervour are subtly rendered in this quiet little masterpiece, which, while perhaps not changing the world, will change the way you’ll look at storytelling. It’s also a joy for anyone with a CD collection filled with early 90s classics – the artwork of Raina’s bedroom is the graphic novel nostalgia equivalent of watching Cameron Crowe’s Singles - a grunge-geek's dream.

Cruel but hopeful, wide-eyed and sincere, and like first love, despite being pretty, it hurts.

just one of the many reasons to visit highgate cemetery

2007-07-30T18:39:00.000Z

book of the week: how i live now

2007-07-28T17:26:00.000Z

I've literally just finished this baffling, infuriating, beautiful, flawed, utterly absorbing, peculiar-beyond-belief, raw, intoxicating novel and feel slightly swamped with a tangle of strange emotions approximating a ball of wool massacred by kittens. So please, somebody I know read it so we can talk about it. I really hope E. Jones doesn't mind that I've used her(?) review from amazon.co.uk as a lazy way of trying to persuade you to read it, but I absolutely love this - it reads like a British incarnation of the book's protagonist, Daisy, had written it, and crackles with the buzz of having read something incredible:

This book made me cry several times. And i laughed many times. I picked it up in Waterstones becuase the book cover caught my eye (i know they say never judge a book by its cover, but i was right this time!!) and i bought it. when i tried to read it the first time, i has just finished reading Angus Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, and anyone who has read that will know it is written in a completely different way to How I Live Now. so i put How I Live Now away because i didn't like the first page. But then, at my grandma's i had nothing else to read so i started reading it again. and got completely sucked into it! I completely thought that i was Daisy! And Edmond sounded gorgy! Then i kept ready. And i was in tears about the whole massacre thing!
if you want to read a classic, then you have to read this. utterly fabuloso. you will adore it.
it is now on the top shelf of my bookcase because that is where all my fave books are (like Avalon High by Meg Cabot, Let's Get Lost by Sarra Manning etc) because i'm tall and it's more convenient having my faves up the top.
Read it or you're just weird.
Also, if you don't cry or laugh or smile, then you need to buy another heart!!!
READ IT!

book of the week: harry potter and the deathly hallows spoilerama

2007-07-24T19:29:00.000Z

Okay, so now I've had a couple of days to cool off and catch my breath, I think it's fair to say this is the best book of the bunch despite having some major flaws. There's not enough Hagrid, too much monging around in the tent and the epilogue makes me want to gag. And deep down, as much as I'm fond of the speccy one, I think it would have worked so much better if Harry had actually died.

However, the battle of Hogwarts is a stupendous piece of action writing; Dobby's death made me weepy; the Dursley's departing is both funny and touching; the dialogue between the big three in Chapter 6 is a near perfect example of characterisation, plotting and grounding using conversation; and the scenes in Godric's Hollow, Bathilda's cottage and the forest (both with the stag and the stone) are by turns creepy and evocative, moving and heart-stopping. And Mrs Weasley calls Bellatrix Lestrange a bitch. Brilliant.

So, because I love a good snigger, here's my favourite extract from the book. It's Harry's 17th birthday, and Ron has bought him a book.

"This isn't your average book," said Ron. "It's pure gold: Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches. Explains everything you need to know about girls. If only I'd had this last year I'd have known exactly how to get rid of Lavender and I would've known how to get going with...well, Fred and George gave me a copy, and I've learned a lot. You'd be surprised, it's not all about wandwork, either."

Wandwork? Now, come clean, Jo - don't tell me that's not deliberate.

monkey's bad day

2007-07-24T18:58:00.000Z

By way of tribute to my marvellous little sister for getting backstage tickets to Lovebox this weekend, thereby enabling me to fulfill a longheld ambition to see The B-52, I give you this little gem of an e-mail she sent me at work today. I'm allowed to do this, if I 'quote [her] literary genius and put a nice pic up', so here she is *evil cackle*

Morning stink

I have just had the worst morning - before I even got to work! Yucko.
I had a baaaaaaaaaad tummy this morning. Then left the house, got on tube which decided not to go anywhere for 10 minutes.

Then, I was standing near some seated bits on the tube, coming to a stop, lady gets up - she is soooooooo fat she barges past me so hard that I FALL OVER because of her fat bum!

And everyone looks at me like I'M the one who should have moved because I'm the skinny one! Pfffft.
Get the Hammersmith. After my bad tummy I think I should get something from Tesco in case I feel like eating. Go to get a danish. Pick one up to let 3 others fall on the floor.

The bakery man looks at me with such disgust I quickly run away.
Walking to work. Go to cross road and knock a cyclist off his bike in doing so.
All in all...poop. In every sense of the word!

Lots of love

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

don't shoot the editor

2007-07-20T12:35:00.001Z

grrrr. what a pillock

I was so irritated by this smug little story yesterday that I downed several glasses of wine whilst explaining to my beloved why I was so miffed by it.

Thankfully, here's a wonderful reply which says all the things I wanted to say, only without the slurring.

book of the week: a swift pure cry spoilers

2007-07-18T20:54:00.001Z

With an eloquence that never undermines or falsely elevates misery, but is ceaseless in its engagement with, and love of, language, A Swift Pure Cry is the book I was lucky enough to read last week. Pushing the gasping, heart-in-mouth plot aside, which, incidentally, delivers complete satisfaction, it is Siobhan Dowd’s artful, yet still intuitive game with words that lifts A Swift Pure Cry above it’s synopsis as just another dreary Irish teenage pregnancy saga. Dowd’s Ireland is, to some extent, the Ireland we’ve seen countless times before, shrouded in a perpetual mist of whisky, confession and drizzle. And yet, snatching from Joyce and Maeve Binchy in equal measures, Dowd presents an Ireland I would never want to visit, but which holds you hostage nonetheless, taking tired stereotypes and turning them into the tangible and utterly unromantic. In the book’s central turning point, in the midst of the sickness, horror and panic, I found myself laughing on a busy train with a kind of desperate hysteria, as the protagonist's younger siblings, Jimmy and Trix, prepared all the things they believed necessary for the deliverance of babies. Twine, scissors, a plastic bin-bag, old doll’s clothes and a cardboard box, “lidless and thickly lined with cotton wool”. Such black, nasty humour, poking delicate fun at Jimmy and Trix’s strange combination of naivety and practicality epitomises what makes this book special. There is no misty-eyed pathos - just simple experience; no overdone sentimentality - but a gentle, not entirely confident whisper of compassion; no easy endings but potentially better beginnings; and bright, sometimes lurid, word pictures, taking a story that has been done countless times before and making it into a fresh vehicle for startling writing. A Swift Pure Cry indeed.

since sliced bread

2007-07-18T18:45:00.000Z

I think this has to be the greatest hat ever designed in the history of time. My knitting friends - I implore you to prove your oft-professed devotion and make me one. Pattern's right here.

And while we're on the subject, this month's edition of Little White Lies is joyously dedicated to Studio Ghibli's latest output, an adaptation of Ursula K Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Le Guin has famously said she feels betrayed by Ghibli, unlike Diana Wynne-Jones' rather more amicable, if not bemused shrug at Howl's Moving Castle. Like the incredibly smart, incredibly knowledgeable goddess of anime, Helen McCarthy, interviewed here, I'm increasingly concerned by the lack of original plots coming from the studio, and the ever-approaching retirement of Miyazaki (Earthsea is directed by Goro, Hayao's son). But perhaps as one of the most significant careers in cinema history approaches its end, we're about to burst into a brand new dawn of anime...and while we wait, I'll be ready with my popcorn for Earthsea.

Animal Collective @ The Coronet 070712

2007-07-12T20:06:00.000Z

Marnie Stern - when I grow up I wanna be just like her

What happens when you spend your childhood dancing to rave music, your teens discovering grunge and lo-fi, and college smoking to the sounds of Sigur Ros. You join Animal Collective.

But before I tell you about them, a word about the venue, Elephant and Castle’s Coronet. A former art-deco cinema, the Coronet is suffering from a serious case of mutton dressed as lamb. Apparently tarted up with all the red paint leftover from Koko’s facelift with a glass-fronted balcony (which gives a pretty soulless view - like watching a gig on an ice-rink - always get standing tickets) the Coronet is every inch the South London sweatbox. In its favour, it does have the cosy little raised platforms and leaning barriers so treasured at The Forum and staff who pop open the dance floor fire exits so everybody can smoke, joyfully flouting the small print of the smoking laws. And what it lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in plumbing, with possibly the largest number of ladies’ toilets yet found in a gig venue. But I won’t be hurrying back.

By eight o’clock the floor was filled with skinny-jeaned boys and girls in tea-dresses, and after scanning the crowd I predict a grunge fashion revival within the next 6 months – I haven’t seen that much plaid since Blossom first aired. In between beers I also realised that I was about ten years older than most people in the room, which has never happened before. Seeing as I’m going to the first wedding of one of my peers this weekend and my baby sister turns 21 next month, I think it’s time I started planning my pension. But then again, I was IDed trying to get into a pub last Saturday, and I was given a flyer for the underage festival yesterday, so perhaps I needn’t invest in sensible shoes just yet.

First band on, Late of the Pier, mumble something about having run out of money and being unable to play and then shamble off. Knowing nothing about them I didn’t take it to heart at the time. I have since heard their music and am pretty miffed. They sound like the babies of Pyschedelic Furs, Duran Duran and every lovely fly-by-night-dead-or-alive ‘80s one hit wonder you’re ever danced to – in a parallel universe I may have emerged a convert.

Marnie Stern, like, totally kicked butt, dude. Watching her, it’s as if somebody gave a Saved By The Bell cheerleader a guitar, got her drunk, made her watch Wayne’s World and then accidentally realised she was actually a genius. She’s the musical equivalent of sugar-coated crystal meth – an ethereal, spiky, sexy, snarly speed metal angel. Part giggly shambles, part twiddly guitar virtuoso, I think I can safely say that there is nobody around right now quite like Marnie Stern, and as one wise commentator writes on ravensingstheblues ‘awesome is too small a word’.

Animal Collective are an enigma. Last FM reviews for the night are rather mixed, with folk disappointed by the setlist and lack of encore. Being a curious listener as opposed to a fan, I went expecting nothing and I found them fascinating. Aside from the night I saw Mogwai, turning halfway through to see blood trickling from my beloved’s ear, I’ve never been to a gig where a band came out, no words, no hello, and made non-stop noise for an hour. Echoing swarming, psychedelic electronic sounds, the band played as if they were in some spooky shamanistic trance. I drifted in between bafflement, boredom and excitement as songs dissolved into each other. There’s not really even such a thing as a setlist with Animal Collective, just drumbeats and samples and warped, strangled vocals oozing into endless repetitions. There’s no such thing as performance, with band members singing with their back to the audience for twenty minutes, crunched and curled over their keyboards, no eye contact and apparently no concern for anybody’s enjoyment except their own. They could have been playing to a stadium of thousands or to a few friends in a bedsit. Musically, they’re the product of trance, post-punk and LSD headtrips – Mercury Rev meets Flaming Lips vocals, Beach Boys walls of sound, trance monotony and navel-gazer self-indulgence. I wouldn’t want them to be the last band on earth, but in an overcrowded and frequently bland place, their mix of audacity and awkwardness is a welcome antidote to Paolo Nutini.

What's Opera Doc?

2007-07-09T18:44:00.000Z

Amazingly, Chuck Jones judged this masterpiece his least successful Bugs Bunny cartoon, which turns 50 this week. Needless to say, I disagree.

Garth: Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played girl bunny?
Wayne: No. [cracks up laughing] No.
Garth: Neither did I. I was just asking.

Glastonbury 07: Grand Finale Sunday

2007-07-01T16:32:00.000Z

Bottle Rocket from The Go! Team. Wow.

The Go! Team blew everybody away. With two drummers, a band who seem able to play any instrument you chuck at them, and irrepressible frontwoman Ninja, The Go! Team wipe all the competition off the festival map, and were probably the best band I saw all weekend. Their explosive show is accompanied by flawless VJ editing presenting the audience with a captivating series of images reflecting youth culture, culminating with modern Britain. The Go! Team have been a slow-burning band with me; I used to think they were little more than good, clean, nostalgic party music, and yet their mixing of samples, live vocals and performance can be so potent that it triggers a rare spine-shiver. Ladyflash’s ‘We came here to rock the microphone’ section, with its combination of 80s electronica, shimmering cymbals and low-down 70s sampler, flourishing into full-blown strings and breakbeats, never fails to make me all tingly and excited. A must-see live act.

Considering I spent most of Year 8 in a Quadrophenia t-shirt, I was expecting to enjoy The Who more than I did. Sadly a combination of ceaseless drizzle and an apathetic crowd, who knew fewer Who songs than they realised, made for a rather muted end to the festival. The sound was absurdly quiet, and the exhausted and soggy audience barely mustered up a yawn for My Generation. No Substitute, no Magic Bus, no 5:15, just extended guitar solos and the typical Who technique of pretending to have finished a song before launching into histrionic drum smashes and bloated guitar thrashing. Still, nothing will eradicate the image of my sister in a fluorescent pink raincoat and Wellingtons, manically playing air guitar to Baba O’Reilly. Priceless.

And that’s about all folks. Packing up the tent at 6am was every bit as fun as you’d imagine it to be. And once again, on the way back to the coach, I fell spectacularly into a giant puddle of mud, leaving the people on the tube in no doubt what I’d been up to that weekend. Still it was, in its own filthy, exhausting way, quite wonderful.

Glastonbury 07: Sunday

2007-07-01T16:10:00.000Z

WHAT? NO TOWN BAND? Yes, you read right. There was no Glastonbury Town Band this year. Booo.

Perhaps that’s the reason chirpy North London chappies, The Holloways pull a surprisingly hefty crowd on Sunday morning. Now, if this band, by some evil fluke, reached the size of The Kooks, I would think they were the most irritating bunch of snotty-nosed fellas ever. But as it is, they’re currently like a more charming version of The Libertines, bringing their flatmate onstage to play guitar and hamming up their Artful Dodger cockiness, much to the crowd’s delight. After such a smiley start to the day, it would seem churlish to criticise. They were lovely.

Over in the Leftfield tent Ed Byrne’s political comedy is far funnier than anything I’ve seen him do previously. However, it’s hardly difficult to make people laugh at Christian fundamentalists – you need only tell the truth and you’ll have any sane person in stitches. Or tears. A short film with music from Brian Eno on nuclear war followed: if any one else remembers the name of this film, please could you leave it as a comment as I would love to watch it again.

Tony Benn has such dignity and integrity that when he speaks it is impossible not to give him your full attention. Listening to him speak about Trident was a moving and provocative experience, and I hope will nudge me out of my own tendency to become complacent or disheartened. As he reminded us, we are the first generation with both the capacity to destroy the entire human race, and the technology to save ourselves. The right choice is also the obvious choice, but I think we’ve got some way to go before we’re ready to stop relying on nuclear power, both in terms of energy and politics. It’s become increasingly unfashionable to voice your demands for nuclear disarmament, but I think it’s a demand that you cannot voice enough. He’s absolutely right, we need to stop protesting and start demanding. I can’t find any footage of his speech at Glastonbury, but here he is on the February 07 Stop Trident march.

In front of the Jazz World field I enjoy some more cider and gladly give a cigarette to an old man in a dress who confesses he’s meant to have given up smoking, but his wife has taken the kids to the circus, so would I be so kind as to give him a spare fag. Seth Lakeman is his usual virtuoso self as I desperately try to move around in the mud to ensure I don’t sink without a trace.

On the Avalon Stage, minifig, monkey 2, hobbit (monkey 2’s boyfriend) and I are all wowed by Billy Bragg. Explaining that all his electrical kit is stuck in a van deep in the Pilton mud, Billy Bragg presents a stripped-back solo acoustic set, playing a welcome combination of old favourites and new tracks. A busker rendition of Waterloo Sunset rouses the crowd into a giant karaoke sing-along, as does a heartbreaking Sexuality and a rousing Great Leap Forward. England, Half English is superb. By the end of the set, I see several people wiping their eyes…and I doubt it was down to hayfever.

Heading back to the tent, we catch a little of Tinariwen, who although interesting, were a little too dirgey for my liking, but undoubtedly great musicians.

Glastonbury 07: Saturday night

2007-07-01T15:04:00.000Z

Damn - I cannot believe I missed this. Bah.

Disappointed with Mark Ronson, we squelched through the soupy mud over to the John Peel stage to watch Patrick Wolf. I have been reliably informed by a good friend that the man is a prize git and so I have been dutifully trying not to like him. Unfortunately his sprightly fiddle-playing, brassy vocals and impish dancing whips up a frenzy of happiness in the crowd and before I was able to stop myself, Patrick Wolf had put me in the magic position. I hung my head in shame.

Minifig and I didn’t really mean to catch John Fogerty, formerly of Creedence Clearwater Revival, but while waiting for Rodrigo y Gabriela we inadvertently ended up dancing together, clutching our pear cider and giggling. John Fogerty was a treat, playing beefy guitar rock that drew an enormous cheer from the elderly crowd as Bad Moon Rising began to play. And I didn’t feel the least bit guilty clapping along to Rockin’ All Over the World. So there.

Sadly, despite having only two guitars, Rodrigo y Gabriela suffer a technical malfunction, meaning my plan to catch the beginning of their set and the end of Iggy and the Stooges is well and truly scuppered. Above the rain this is my disappointment of the festival. I miss the whole stage invasion at Iggy and the Stooges, Iggy falling over on stage and the opportunity to bounce around and shout. Boo. I also fall over in the mud near Jazz World and am rudely interrupted on the loo. Not the finst 90 minutes of my life. A potent reminder that you should always ditch your friends at festivals and go and see your favourite artists….except, then I would have missed John Fogerty. Hmmn. Such a quandry.

As the clock edged closer to midnight, minifig gallantly abandoned his plans to see Rodrigo y Gabriela so I could see Iggy. And okay, so I only saw one song, but it’s my favourite song, I Wanna Be Your Dog. It took all night for the face-breaking smile to leave my face. We also managed to see the end of Rodrigo y Gabriela. I can’t argue with their technical excellence, but I think an indoor Barbican-style gig would suit them much better as watching two tiny people play fiddly guitar from miles away is a bit dull actually.

Buoyed up by Iggy, minifig and I trundled up to Strummerville, Joe Strummer’s Glastonbury campfire, to raise a drink to Joe and other old friends and loved ones. Halfway through a bottle of wine we realised that actually, between us, we know a lot of dead people and perhaps it was best to call it a night. I fell asleep, dreaming of Iggy’s torso.

Glastonbury 07: Saturday dancing

2007-07-01T13:36:00.000Z

Phew chaps, I was so pleased we went for that little sit down, cos DJ Yoda was exhausting. (Every time the sun came out I swear we were watching someone in a tent.)

Mixing David Dickinson, Star Wars, Grandmaster Flash, Eurythmics and Paul Simon, it was big goofy, gurning smiles all round over in the Dance East tent as DJ Yoda dazzled us with his DJ and VJ pyrotechnics. Being 5’ 5”, I couldn’t see much of the video stuff, and as DJ Yoda is less about dancing and more about DJing, I have to admit, I got a little bit bored. Fortunately, he appeared to have a vast back catalogue of 80s cheese to keep the crowd sweet, and there was something so all-round good-natured about this set that it was hard not to pull a few cheesey grins.

Shame the same can’t be said about Mark Ronson. Someone should tell that man that simply sticking your CD on doesn’t really qualify as a proper DJ set.

Glastonbury 07: Saturday afternoon

2007-07-01T13:20:00.000Z

Saturday lunchtime and we were sitting in front of the Pyramid Stage, in the sunshine, drinking ciders and singing along to The Pipettes. The three ladies and their backing band delivered a proficiently poppy set with many hand-clapping and finger-wagging opportunities. It was the only chance we got all weekend to sit down on the grass and therefore it’s a rosy cider-tinted memory, but I hope that’s allowed.

Everybody got soaked watching The Guillemots. I saw them entirely from the little eye-gap in my ginormous poncho, and from what I could make out through the lashing rain, they were noisy. Fyfe Dangerfield did his usual flailing and fitting on the floor while sultry Aristazabal looked on dispassionately, shimmying all over her double bass. Sao Paulo was ear-splittingly rousing, and as I trudged over to The Other Stage I heard many wet folk enthusing about how excellent they were. A job well done for one of Britain’s most underrated, and loud, bands.

En route to The Other Stage I stopped over at Emma Levine’s stand. Every year I buy one of her brilliantly designed t-shirts and now it’s a bit of a tradition that I stop by and say hello to her motley crew of friends.

CSS were utterly manic. Lovefoxxx performed her, by now, requisite strip-show, revealing increasingly garish full-body leotards to starjump across the stage in. Approximately a third of the audience fell instantly in love with her. Bubble-blowing kits were thrown into the crowd, Lovefoxxx bravely crowd-surfed muddying her sparkly cat-suit, and finished the set by taking a great gulp of helium and introducing Let’s Make Love like a chipmunk. Minifig, predictably, hates CSS. I just wish they’d ask me to join the band. As one commentator on YouTube says, I love the funnesss.

I don’t really understand the hype around The Klaxons – Golden Skans is a perfectly passable song and works reasonably well on adverts – nuff said. However, unlike other ridiculously highly-billed acts (yes, Artic Monkeys, The Killers, The (wtf) Kooks, I’m looking at you), The Klaxons turn up hysterical and blushing at filling the modest 5.00pm Saturday slot on The Other Stage. I’m still not convinced, but Atlantis To Intercourse is a giant, shrieking, dirty great track – like Atari Teenage Riot meets 2 Unlimited, which, please trust me, works well. However, they weren't good enough to overcome my extreme exhaustion, and defeated we all head back to the tent for a cup of tea. Rock ‘n’ bloody roll – what a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged, middle England lightweights. Any one for a slice of Battenburg?

Glastonbury 07: Friday evening

2007-07-01T12:08:00.000Z

Bjork's Hyperballad. I personally think the album version is one of the most romantic songs ever written, while I don't think you could really say the same for this...although in hindsight, perhaps that's not such a bad thing.

On the way back to the tent I caught five minutes of Bright Eyes' set. Five minutes was definitely enough. B-o-r-i-n-g.

A drizzly Friday afternoon magically transformed itself into a pretty blissful evening, watching Martha Wainwright play to a sleepy crowd of probably only a few hundred people on the Park stage. When it comes to the younger Wainwrights I’m not a big fan of their songwriting, but when it comes to their voices, and them, I think they’re flipping great. Her dusky voice and endearing habit of making fidgety flamingo movements as she plays mark this, my first Martha Wainwright performance, as a highlight.

Rufus Wainwright is similarly charming, and his duet with Martha of Hallelujah is sublime. It’s slightly marred by my needing the loo every twenty minutes after one pint of lager, my only drink of the day, so I think that’s quite unfair, but I enjoyed the set. What the BBC hasn’t shown on its highlights section was the fact the sound people cut Rufus’s drag version of Get Happy when he ran out of time. Unanimous booing meant we had to watch the whole thing from the start again, and so the joke of watching his band prance around performing mock-Broadway dance routines wasn’t quite as funny the second time around. Still, he’s a charming man with a lovable warble.

By all accounts Arcade Fire were stunning, but standing further back from the soundstage minifig and I could barely hear anything at all. The Other Stage is a patchy place to watch any music. It gets the worst of the mud, has no natural incline and occasionally the music from The Queens Head pub threatens to swamp the sound. The crowd further back was composed entirely of people who knew none of the songs and were chatting; one of the perennial problems of festivals being that frequently, die-hard fans are competing for spaces with people waiting for the next act or suffering from too much inertia to move. It doesn’t make for a particularly electric atmosphere. After grumbling that we should have moved closer to the front, minifig and I eventually found a spot with enough room to fling our arms around each other and howl along to Arcade Fire like banshees. By the end of the show we are drunk and very happy. So, although I can’t say Arcade Fire were amazing, seeing Arcade Fire with minifig was.

Bjork was very late and we were both very tired. Minifig is disappointed by her minimalist rendition of Venus as a Boy (I loved it), and I am startled by her throbbing rave version of Hyperballad (minifig, along with basically everybody else, thought it was brilliant.) However, we both appreciated Bjork’ s confidence in screwing around with her best-loved songs and delivering a sparkling, colourful show that is nothing like sticking the CD on at home. And her voice is mind-blowing – it still scares me, but also delights me, that a human being can actually make sounds like that.

Glastonbury 07: Rainy Friday Afternoon

2007-06-28T20:01:00.000Z

And if there is no guitar in a house,
You know its owner, he cannot be trusted.
And if there is no drumset in the office,
Don't be surprised when the business get busted.

It’s amazing how good music, or just a good show can distract you from a great British downpour. Gogol Bordello exhibit ceaseless energy and enthusiasm and within about ten minutes (and admittedly, for about ten minutes) I am an evangelical gypsy punk. Phil Jupitus describes them as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe.” I can’t really better that, except to ask you to imagine what that might look like live. New album Super Taranta is pretty infectious, although if you want a perfect piece of gypsy punk my money’s on Punk Rock Parranda from Multi Kontri Culti. Plus I fear I’m rapidly developing a bit of a crush on Eugene Hutz (v. cute accent).

It’s a shame that Amy Winehouse can’t provide enough of a distraction during the prehistoric rainfall. Her performance is so dull and lacklustre, peppered only with some laconic beehive flicking and manic eye-rolling that my fellow campers desert me and I am left to watch the end of her set alone. The band was good though; lots of Temptations-esque synchronised dancing, and I do sort of like her cover of Monkey Man. I just wish she’d eat something; it might give her a bit more energy. Because despite her apparent indifference to the audience, watching Amy Winehouse sing made me realise how utterly natural her vocal talent is. She could be eye-poppingly good. But she wasn’t.

missing dust jacket

by way of apology

SOTW - Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon

Song of the Week: Call the Shots - Girls Aloud

In Nunhead Cemetery

In Nunhead Cemetery

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling III

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling II

Lost Girls: Wendy Darling I

song of the week: first orgasm

This is not just a Velociraptor Heart, this is a Madame Pamplemousse Velociraptor Heart in Red Wine...

Lost Girls: Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Wendy Darling

song of the week: bread and roses

song of the week: this must be the place

http://www.petitesophist.blogspot.com/...

Dude, where's my Prague?

my apologies

In response to your comment....

do not enter

in every dream home a heartache

Architectural Rescue, Southampton Way, Peckham

completely boy

song of the week: S.O.S - ABBA

song of the week: Je suis la tigresse - Delphine Desyeux

looking for lisa

historical materialism and ljubavi

an annoying little meme from an annoying little person

the day i swapped my dad for two goldfish

Lost Girls, Part 1: Dorothy and the Lion

Why Weeps the Brogan? by Hugh Scott

Henry Tumour by Anthony McGowan

song of the week: don't talk, put your head on my shoulder

sights and sounds of 07

song of the week: another chance - roger sanchez

song of the week: all by myself - feeder

song of the week: digital - joy division

and now for some psychogeographical drifting

song of the week: damn, i wish i was your lover - sophie b hawkins

song of the week: caring is creepy - the shins

song of the week: chicago - sufjan stevens

endings

Siobhan Dowd

Beastie Boys at Brixton Academy - 4th Sept 07 - setlist as promised

Beastie Boys at Brixton Academy - 4th Sept 07

sonic youth at the roundhouse 30th August

duck amuck

all the cats join in

book of the week (and the weeks inbetween): carol by patricia highsmith

v festival 07: sunday

v festival 07: saturday

prince at 02 arena, 11th august 2007

book of the week: blankets

just one of the many reasons to visit highgate cemetery

book of the week: how i live now

book of the week: harry potter and the deathly hallows *spoilerama*

monkey's bad day

don't shoot the editor

book of the week: a swift pure cry *spoilers*

since sliced bread

Animal Collective @ The Coronet 070712

What's Opera Doc?

Glastonbury 07: Grand Finale Sunday

Glastonbury 07: Sunday

Glastonbury 07: Saturday night

Glastonbury 07: Saturday dancing

Glastonbury 07: Saturday afternoon

Glastonbury 07: Friday evening

Glastonbury 07: Rainy Friday Afternoon

book of the week: harry potter and the deathly hallows spoilerama

book of the week: a swift pure cry spoilers