troubled diva

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Friday, January 27, 2006

That "four things" meme, then. (Sheesh, I was beginning to think that no-one would ever ask...)

Isn't it great that Meg (*) has started blogging again more frequently? Quite like old times.
Yay, Spirit of 2001! (See also next post down.)

Anyhoo, in keeping with the Spirit of 2001 theme, Meg has tagged me with a meme. Mark my words, we'll be doing "Which work of art are you?" quizzes next. (Remember that one? That one was massive.)

Four jobs I've had:

Demonstrating "Magic Plastic" balloon kits to gullible tourists, on the ground floor of Hamleys in Regent Street. (Evil stuff. Takes the polish off wooden furniture.)
Loading crates of electrical wholesale equipment into the back of trucks, in a warehouse in Doncaster. Only got the job because my dad knew the boss, and so was roundly despised by all my co-workers. "Character building", allegedly.
Computer programmer for "Europe's largest manufacturer of nightie cases", as the people at the software house proudly told me at the time. Oh yes, all the big names: Poochie, Teddy Beddy Bear, My Little Pony (with free grooming brush), you name it. Management got free samples at Christmas. Jealous doesn't begin to cover it.
Club DJ, in the days before anyone gave a stuff about seamless beat-mixing. Biggest Choons: The Only Way Is Up (Yazz), Theme From S-Express (S-Express), Big Fun (Inner City), Can You Party (Royal House), Alphabet Street (Prince), Sympathy For The Devil (Laibach).

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Actually, I never do this. But, um, boring answer: Withnail And I, which K has watched over and over.
Groundhog Day: it goes deep.
Breakfast At Tiffany's: sentimental reasons.
There's this Falcon Studios one from about ten years ago, where they're all farm hands... oh come on, do you think I know the titles of these things?

Four places I've lived:

Doncaster (I only go back for funerals).
West Berlin (not been back since The Wall came down).
Loughton, Essex (99% certain I'll never go back there again).
Cambridge (stayed away for years, until my mother moved there).

Four TV shows I love:

Six Feet Under: currently working my way through Series 4 on DVD - but I can only watch it when K isn't around, because all that DEATH freaks him out.
Shameless: now into its third series, and still right up there with the greats.
Posh Nosh: we haven't been so comprehensively nailed since...
Frasier: I even liked it when the quality occasionally dipped, which is always a good sign (though Niles and Daphne should NEVER, etc etc).

Four places I've been to on holiday:

Vietnam, which I wrote about at some length.
The Azores: one of the planet's best kept secrets.
Gran Chuffing Canaria, with its fabulous Yumbo Centre. Crapshagtastic!
Lowestoft Harbour. Storm-bound, in a cabin cruiser, for four miserable days, with my perpetually warring seven-strong family/step-family. We got given 50p a day for the amusement arcades, and had to get into a dinghy and row across the yacht basin, every time we wanted to step ashore. Total and utter f**king misery from start to finish, which I attempted to alleviate by listening to the John Peel show, sitting on the chemical toilet, with a mono earpiece in one ear. Yes, I was that desperate.

Four of my favorite dishes:

The pressed meat terrines at The Druid in Birchover: like angels' kisses, melting on the tongue.
The monkfish at The Bowling Green in Ashbourne: fresh from the Manchester fish market, delicately fragranced in a way that I didn't know monkfish could be (as when monkfish was trendy during the early 1990s, everyone used to slather it in too much sauce).
The caramelised calves' livers that were personally cooked for us by Marco Pierre White, on the day of our tenth anniversary. The Apotheosis of Posh Nosh.
Currently, it's Tung Pau Yuk, which I've enjoyed four times in the past month.

Four sites I visit daily:

Four places I would rather be right now:

In the cottage, on the sofa, in front of the fire, with a nice glass of wine.
The Banyan Tree, Phuket: standing in our pool and staring into space, with a faraway smile playing across my lips.
Hangzhou and/or Shanghai, if only it were possible to "pop across" for the weekend. China got under my skin, in a way I hadn't expected.
London. I wish we got to spend more time there. One day, not so very far in the future, we probably will.

Four bloggers I am tagging:
- with all due apologies if a) they've done it before, or b) they hate doing memes:

(*) Anna's sister. Gosh it feels weird, having to explain that.

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What's that you say? Bit of a quiet week?

Not at all: I've actually been blogging more than you might think.

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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Frozen: a brazen plug.

Everybody should go and see Frozen this weekend: an independent British film, featuring the wonderful Shirley "Moaning Myrtle out of Harry Potter" Henderson in her first leading role, which has finally secured a limited UK release (check here for screening details).

Last night, at a special preview screening, we met Ms. Henderson, who - along with producer Mark Lavender - introduced the film and answered questions about it afterwards. It was a strange experience, meeting someone in the flesh and then seeing them up on screen a couple of minutes later - and for the first couple of scenes, I wondered whether I was going to be able to suspend my disbelief.

It is to Henderson's immense credit as an actress that, after less than five minutes, I was fully engaged with Kath, the character whom she portrays: a fishery worker from Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, with a missing-presumed-dead sister, who is determined to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding her disappearance.

Imbuing Kath with the sort of quiet, ambiguous, is-she-disturbed-or-just-different singularity of character with which she has come to be associated (I'm a long-time fan), Henderson compensates for Kath's verbal uncommunicativeness by means of an extraordinarily subtle, intense, multi-layered performance, in which Kath's facial expressions speak volumes on her behalf: you simply can't tear your eyes away from her. To have constructed so rich a character from such sparsely and simply worded dialogue is an astonishing achievement, and a process which Shirley was happy to talk about during the Q&A (revealing an unexpected Scottish accent in the process).

It's a slowly paced film - a mood-piece, beautifully shot on location in Fleetwood - and yet, despite the lack of constant forwards movement in the plot, I found myself riveted. There are mysteries to be solved, not all of which are ever fully explained (although you are given some fairly clear nudges in certain directions), and the film cooks up an intriguing brew of the real and the imaginary, the natural and the supernatural, the logical and the just plain baffling.

(Oh, and that gorgeous man who starred in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North And South is in it. Woof woof, readers!)

I might have been on BBC Radio Nottingham today, commenting on the film - but we can't stream radio at work, so I've no way of knowing. (It was a little disconcerting, giving a gushing review of Shirley's performance while she was standing only a few feet away, in full earshot, but I'm sure she's used to worse.)

Frozen, ladies and gentlemen. I commend it to the group.

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Guest doodles resurfaced.

It's good to see that Demian is slowly rebuilding Guild Of Ghostwriters: a hand-doodled blog which went AWOL a while ago, before being reborn on Blogspot.

It's particularly good to see him re-posting the guest doodles which he solicited during the autumn of 2004 - and extra-specially good to see him re-post the three guest doodles which he submitted from me.

But what's Pete Burns doing in there? (Second doodle, second row.)

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Monday, January 23, 2006

...and now it's his turn.

Yes, we're quite the local media couple these days. Following my "Business Diary" piece in the Nottingham Evening Post from two weeks ago, my partner K's day-by-day account of his recent trip to Florida will appear in the same slot, in tomorrow's (i.e. Tuesday's) pullout Business section.

What K's article doesn't mention - and this is a bit of a shocker, so hold on tight - is that when his business partner G arrived back in the UK from the same trip, and opened his suitcase (which he had left unlocked for the duration of the journey, to comply with US security requirements), he discovered, sitting on the top of the publicity leaflets for the company...

...a live bullet.

Now, explain that one to me. Chilling, n'est-ce pas?

We're trying to persuade him to contact the head of security at Virgin Atlantic - with whom he flew, Upper Class, from Orlando to London Heathrow. Because, well, that sort of thing is just not really On, wouldn't you say?

Meanwhile, K arrived in Orlando to find that his Samsonite suitcase had been smashed open by airport security - just as his other Samsonite suitcase had been smashed open by airport security in Miami in 2004. And this despite the notice on the relevant website which says it's OK to lock Samsonite suitcases, because US security personnel carry a full set of master keys. (Of course, that would have been far too much intellectual effort for them, when compared to the pleasures of a healthy bit of brute force.)

Are you beginning to see why we're not awfully keen on travelling to and from the US these days?

(Oh, and word from K: he will never, ever fly with United Airlines again. Attitude Problem ain't the half of it, as previous experiences had already indicated.)

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Stylus Singles Jukebox: Gloriously Faceless.

In this week's column, I get to come over all arch and clever-clever about releases from A-Ha (Norwegian 1980s survivors), Cascada (German eurotrance), Remioromen (Japanese indie-lite), Pharrell Williams (confused R&B) and the sublime Richard Hawley (MOR C&W - with a twist! - from South Yorkshire).

Actually, I'll retract the "arch". This week, I tried to approach my reviews from a different direction than usual. See whether you think it worked.

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Post of the Week: Week 8 results, Week 9 nominations.

After the marathon catch-up session of Week 7, Week 8 yielded the smallest number of nominees to date: just seven in all, which lightened the load for our guest judges: D from Acerbia and Tokyo Girl. This also meant that every nominated post picked up at least one vote, which is nice isn't it, yes, I thought so too.

In amongst the pet birds, minor league football matches, Bush-bashing fantasy games, blog performance reviews and multi-coloured "slabs of control and stability" (oh yes!), two winners emerged, both polling the same number of votes. Rather than exercise a casting vote, I have decided to award this week's POTW jointly to:

Waiter Rant: Treasure.
GUYANA: Cane-cutters and their wives.

Here's what our judges said:

I just loved the bitchiness of [Waiter Rant's post]; giving the guy the plastic cork was pure evil. The waiter was too nice to the wife. She married the guy, and she is still married to him. She must be getting some sort of a platinum-card advantage out of the arrangement. I hate going to a restaurant with a dieter, and if they are going to fuss around, counting calories, then I would be only to willing to help them out by drinking all the wine. The wife was too subjugated* for a woman of the affluent first world, shameful.

*(This word, in this context, is new to me, see below, and I am going to use it to death.)

[Guyana's post] gave me a feeling of a totally different way of life, an alien society, a world in which the women are "subjugated" (I had to look that word up in the dictionary). I loved this post.

Both superb little episodes offering perspectives into other people's lives. The waiter acts as silent and practically unoticed observer to the brash man and his timid wife and the cableguy as raconteur to the author's audience. These glipses, these anecdotes are exactly what I love about catching odd posts on other people's blogs, no back-story, no linking out to other sites, they're self-contained slices of life, momentary digressions that transport you.

Please leave your nominations for Week 9 in the comments box below. Rules of engagement are here.

This week's judges are Clare and Stressqueen.

1. Twenty Major: Shut it you fat c***s.
(nominated by stressqueen)
(WARNING: Very strong language, very opinionated "rant" style, may offend.)

Lazy c***s sitting around eating more food every day than your average African child eats in a lifeitme is not a disease. It's greed. It's gluttony. IT. IS. NOT. A. DISEASE.

2. forksplit: F**k You, Barbie.
(nominated by patita)

I love lonely sad sacks. I love losers. Love them. Probably because I am one, although I don't really look like one anymore. That's what junior high was for. But looking like a pudgy, four eyed beaver throughout my formative years gave me a little insight into the painful reality of being ugly and awkward and undesirable. Thanks to puberty and contacts and braces and restrictive dietary practices, I've just learned to hide it better.

3. Nutgroist: Tuesday 3rd January - Saturday 14th January.
(nominated by JonnyB)

I call the promoter. It's very simple - they have a packed night with top quality comedians but I can do 5 minutes and it must be 100% clean and NO mentions of sex, NO swearing and if he doesnt like what he's hearing he'll flash his light to either get me to move onto the next joke or to get off the stage entirely. Apparently the audience will all be religious jews who can get easily offended. Jerusalem, ladies and gentlemen. Who'd have guessed it?

4. light from an empty fridge: Two things that you see.
(nominated by Sarsparilla)
(Short post; too short to quote here.)

5. a beautiful revolution: Self-mythologising (near) stream of consciousness (guest post by Vaughan)
(nominated by JonnyB)

when andre asked me to do a guest blog entry i was only too delighted to accept but i did say i did warn i did suggest that as i havent blogged properly for nearly four months thats nearly four bleedin months i might be a bit rusty i said a bit out of practice i said what is this blogging of which you speak that's what i said and andre replied oh that's alright mate write anything you want and i said are you sure and he replied i'm sure of course well of course we didn't really have this conversation because we're both too nervous and shy to have such a conversation but i wanted to build up the drama ot this entry a little bit and make it sound like we are blogging gods in a secret cabal as if i said as if stop

(and breathe)

6. Silent Words Speak Loudest: �If nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed�
(nominated by Pete Ashton)

"The best book about punk rock and pop culture ever". Thus reads the NME critic's appraisal on the cover of Jon Savage's 'England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols And Punk Rock'. Perhaps it's just an idiosyncratic tendency of mine, a function of my cynicism, that leads me immediately to view such pronouncements with suspicion and spend my time hunting out and dwelling upon perceived faults. Anyway, more of that later.

7. The Tool Shed: Tool of the Week: 01.22.2006
(nominated by patita)

I finally met with my GP after two weeks of making internal decisions like "When I tell my friends about my cancerous cojones, should I make a joke about it to break the tension? How about stoic with just a hint of quivering jaw and downcast eyes? Maybe milk the Spiritual Genius angle, like that kid who had MD and wrote poetry?" I even, friends and neighbors, had planned to blog the treatment process, and I devised a title for the project: My Mutinous Manberries.

8. ambainny: breaking bounds.
(nominated by guyana-gyal)

The school was obsessed with controlling girls, by not allowing them out of bounds, a bit like the purdah, zenana system. Boys on the other hand, could do what they liked and go anywhere, except where the girls were.
The girls dormitory would be locked from outside at night, by the matron. This was a huge fire hazard, all of us could have got singed, unable to escape. The priority was protection of our virginity rather than our safety.

9. meanwhile, here in france: survival.
(nominated by Clare)

It is quite a challenge to maintain one�s own lyricism next to a pneumatic drill in chamber music. It is even more of a challenge to maintain one�s confidence. We are all struggling to stretch our limits, facing the roots of habits that have been fed like weeds during months of orchestral playing. My personal weed has grown mighty strong and having it pulled at by someone who cares both about the music and about me is quite enough to leave me feeling about seven, raw and blushing with shame, hiding behind my cello and not wanting to come out�. I don�t need this.

10. Diary of a Goldfish: Love is real, real is love.
(nominated by Vaughan)

It was getting kind of late, so Johnny suggested that they head back to his cave for a coffee.

Jane pointed out that they were on the wrong part of the continent for coffee, even if they could work out, within the space of an evening, how to process the seeds of that plant into a stimulating hot beverage. As you can imagine, without language, this took the best part of an hour to get across.

Johnny averted his eyes and twiddled his thumbs as if to say, �I know, but I just invented the euphemism.�

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We like it when our friends become successful (2006 edition).

Blogs from my sidebar which have made it to the shortlists for this year's Bloggies:

Best Asian: Tokyo Girl.
Best European: Vitriolica Webb's Ite, My Boyfriend Is A Twat.
Best British or Irish: Little Red Boat, Diamond Geezer, Girl With A One-Track Mind.
Best Latin American: Guyana.
Best GLBT: Joe. My. God.
Best Writing: Mimi In New York.

..and... wait for it...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: NAKED BLOG!!!

Sincere and hearty congratulations to one and all.

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