Not To Mention Love: A Heart For Patricia (David Clewell) is a love poem I rather like.
“Here, the heart is the heart, and isn’t
a fist or a flower or a smooth-running engine
and especially not one of those ragged valentines
someone’s cut out, initialed, shot full of cartoon arrows:
the adolescent voodoo of desire. Here nothing’s colored
that impossibly red.”
Just bought my travel insurance. According to the brochure, I pay higher premiums for travelling to Europe than I would if I were going to Iraq.
My first Norman Mailer book since giving up on The Armies Of The Night in disgust is The Gospel According To The Son, which is either very appropriate or somewhat blasphemous to begin reading today, judging from its first page:
“While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.”
There I was all smug because I managed to be on-the-ball enough to get tickets to see Múm at the Old Vic (well, to get Russ to get tickets) the day after I arrive in London. And then I found out about this, conveniently organized for when I’ve fucked off to Krakow. Not living in England any more really sucks.
When something sucks this much, only novelty mp3 downloads can cheer me up, which is why it was fabulous to have found:
(I can’t exactly remember where I found the mp3 links, but I’m pretty sure they were from largehearted boy, which I increasingly realize I can no longer live without.)
Word to Adidas for using Calexico’s very lovely song Pepita as the background to their ad featuring big sports names running with Muhammed Ali. I’d have used Quattro instead, because it always makes me think of being borne across a vast expanse of night clouds at exhilarating speed with my bare feet skimming their cool damp surfaces, and that seems to be a fairly nice mental picture to have associated with sports shoes, given that my usual mental picture associated with sports shoes involves heat rash and a general longing for death. But Pepita’s cool too.
Studying will really really begin tomorrow. For real. Really.
Unfortunately, going by previously established patterns, dear Reader, this probably means you’re in for a rather slow 3 weeks. No more of my rapier wit and irresistable personality! No more visceral vignettes of my swinging rock and roll life! Indeed, my friends, you will have to get by with my usual exam output of unrestrained music geekery, pointless links collected during hours on end of study avoidance surfing, and most certainly nothing even remotely intellectual.
So, pretty much the same as what you’ve always got here, just with even less of a life than before. Sigh. Here’s a little taster:
Music Geekery
Newly arrived from Django, yay!
Pointless Links
In honour of For Alec, who had his first actual bout in a boxing ring a few days ago and wisely decided not to tell me about it until after the fact: Mike Tyson Quotes.
Here’s one I’d like to highlight for you, you big dolt no one in particular, because of course I’m totally cool about the fact that my favourite nose in the world could quite possibly have been broken before I got the chance to see it again – “I try to catch him right on the tip of the nose, because I try to push the bone into the brain.”
Nothing Remotely Intellectual
I certainly never kept my Will Young mania a secret on this site during the original Pop Idol, and I see no reason to be shy about my commitment to its American franchise. This Ryan Seacrest fellow is a poor substitute for Ant and Dec, and I like Pete Waterman so much more than the painfully inarticulate Randy Jackson, but at least sexy Simon is still around, and getting sexier by the episode. Oh, and GO FANTASIA!
Okay. I’m green like the Hulk. This year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties lineup has six curators and is held over two weekends. Out of the six curators, three are Sonic Youth, Stephen Malkmus and Mogwai. OMFG.
I’m always a little self-conscious using the word “dream” because it feels so Judy Garland but attending this festival has been my dream since it began in 1999. Under a deluded sense of priorities, I never managed to go while I was in England because it always managed to coincide with the freakout period in April where I realized I had four weeks to claw myself out of a year of complete academic neglect. Well, that and the fact that until my last year in England I didn’t know anyone who a) shared my taste in music and b) had the funds to commit to a weekend residential festival as opposed to a gig in Shepherd’s Bush and c) were good enough company for me to actually want to spend an entire weekend with. Benny only made the transition from ostensibly sane but potentially axe-murderer email buddy to real life friend in my Masters year.
I’m sure I’ll finally get my chance some day, unless (God forbid) I lose this hunger for music and start thinking Dido CDs should actually be played rather than used as cool holographic coasters, but in the meantime, I am here and All Tomorrow’s Parties is there, and all I can say is that this post was originally liberally dotted with obscenities but I edited them out because I’ve been thinking lately I swear too much.
I went Googling for the cast of the painfully unfunny comedy series Just Shoot Me, because while watching (and absolutely loving) Big Fish a few weeks ago I was convinced that Albert Finney also played the boss in Just Shoot Me. Thankfully, I was wrong, but the results of the search were disturbing in other ways. For instance, there are actually people in this world that liked Just Shoot Me enough to make fan sites for it, and nominate it for Emmy awards.
I mean, I’m really not a comedy fascist. I never liked Seinfeld, but understood how other people could find it funny. I’m not into the diarrhoea gag that is apparently a mandatory feature of all screwball romantic comedies these days, but with some effort I can also understand why people start falling out of their chairs the minute the bubbly explosive noises start. What I do like is wisecracking and sarcasm, which Just Shoot Me attempted to specialize in but only ended up ass-raping.
Which is precisely why Just Shoot Me deserves to be peppered with rusty nails and left to die of tetanus, and why the Internet is truly a place for freaks to find each other.
Hello, freaks! :)
It is rare that I watch a Colin Firth movie for sources of eyecandy other than him, but Girl With A Pearl Earring is just that beautiful.
Other things that are beautiful, and which will not cost you $6.50 to enjoy on a weeknight, are this photograph out of many others at this exceptionally well-designed site (in Japanese, but you can’t have everything), and these recent black and white photographs Scott (of erasing.org) took in an empty airport at night.
I want you all to have something beautiful to look at. I’ve been video-chatting with Alec a lot these past few days, and am feeling everyone else deserves visual treats too.
[Addendum: Random surfing just yielded an audio clip of Anne Sexton reading the poem this entry is named after. If you’re a fan, treat yourself. If you’re not, become one.]
The books of The Borrible Trilogy (Michael de Larrabeiti) are full of theft, swearing, treachery and murder. Decapitation, electrocution, catapult blow to the head, crushing, burning, and innumerable stabbings are only some of the ways in which various characters, both good and bad, meet their deaths. And they’re among my favourite children’s books ever.
The London of these books is bleak, ugly, and riddled with decay and brutality. Borribles live in derelict buildings in rough parts of the city like Tooting and Peckham, and live off what they can steal. On their adventure, they travel by night, paddling up discoloured, viscuous rivers, wading through dank sewers, and seeking refuge in vast rubbish sites and industrial wastelands. It’s the London you glimpse through the window of the train half an hour before it pulls into King’s Cross, before you shudder delicately and return to your book. It isn’t the London I knew, but in my hopeless irrational love, even this London is intriguing.
Some points are perhaps made a little less subtly than some adults would like. As a child, I never picked up on the fact that the Rumbles of Rumbledom were a dark piss-take on the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, or that their arrogance, wealth and speech inflections (e.g. “I’m tewwibly sowwy, old bean”) were meant to satirize a certain class of English society. I also didn’t know enough about London to understand why the author chose to make the Borrible from Brick Lane a Bangladeshi, or the Borribles from Brixton black. (The German Borrible, for what it’s worth, is called Adolf.) Perhaps my political correctness hackles are supposed to rise in response to this, but they don’t, because none of these characters are ever confined to a stereotype, or a caricature.
There is no magic in these books. There is no train departing from platform 13 and a half at King’s Cross. The stories are as riveting as any good action thriller I’ve ever seen, and I remember many late nights spent as a wild-eyed hostage to distrust, suspense and genuine concern for the welfare of the characters, who live or die solely by their wits, courage and indomitable spirit. If the most recent children’s books you’ve read are the Harry Potter ones, step out of your comfort zone and meet the Borribles. Rated PG.