archive for May 08
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Went with Matt to the Royal Opera House to see a double bill ballet – Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering and Frederick Ashton’s The Dream.
I really enjoyed Dances at a Gathering. It’s a pleasingly plotless work set to piano pieces by Chopin, with six characters named after colours. It felt modern, with a light touch, not weighed down by lots of pomp and narrative. The characters dance together and apart, weaving patterns physically and emotionally, though you never know what their relationships might be, just some sense of old loves and friendships being playfully rekindled.
I didn’t like The Dream, a ballet of Midsummer Night’s Dream, so much. I found it a bit too obvious and Victorian. Lots of Shakespearian fairies running around all over the place and green lighting. But it was quite funny, with lots of physical humour and some great miming from Puck.
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Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Here’s an interesting debate. The Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne have launched 1st Nation, an ethically-sourced cigarette for the UK market. They contacted various Fairtrade labelling organisations in Italy, Germany, Britain and the US to talk about getting the Fairtrade Mark but thus far they don’t want much to do with it.
1st Nation said that although the Fairtrade organisations expressed a desire to help impoverished tobacco farmers, “without exception they felt that fair trade tobacco was too politically sensitive a crop for their organisation to engage with”.
Amusing story in the Metro here, and a good People & Planet post on it here. The Metro story reminds us that tobacco has a different traditional reputation as a sacred plant, rather than a dirty big business controlled health risk. Much like cannabis or coca, both “wonder plants” that have been revered for thousands of years before being demonised relatively recently in human history.
It’s interesting for me because I am only a few steps away from 1st Nation. We are pretty much marketing Fairtrade chocolate to children. Our careful argument is of course that we don’t want them to eat yet more Fairtrade chocolate and spiral into craven obsesity: we want them to buy a Dubble bar instead of a Dairy Milk or Nestle bar. We’re about taking market share away from unethical business!
In a similar way, 1st Nation say: “It is not our intention to attract new smokers to the market, but to offer existing smokers of competitor brands an alternative tobacco product that provides real economic advantage to the tobacco growers and processors.”
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Saturday, May 24th, 2008
Over to Belgrade for the glory of the Eurovision final tonight! Presided over by Terry Wogan. A wonderful slice of pop competition and not taking things too seriously.
We’re drinking with Alex and Tracie from Canada, and marking all the acts out of 12 for costume, performance, dance routine and song.
Romania – pop ballad duet with lots of lights and a grand piano, not very good outfits.
UK – great bright coloured light stained glass pop disco background, song’s OK, good performance from Andy.
Albania – lots of wind machine, quite bland, great psychedelic background.
Germany – oldish quartet of girls with capes.
Armenia – sexy slidey backing dancers, quite fun performance.
Bosnia & Herzegovina – excellent kooky outfits and catchy fun song, wedding dresses and red polka dots! They came first on my scoring.
Israel – very cute boy with big voice, song was a bit bland though, he also should have taken his shirt off.
Finland – long haired metal Nordic ROCK madness.
Croatia – excellent song, quirky, with a 75 year old white suited rapper.
Poland – nice grand expansive song, long blue dress, too much tan and bright powerful white TEETH!
Iceland – throbbing gay Euro dance pop, “this is my life, all the pain! all the joy it brings!”
Turkey – somewhat overperformed soft rock thing.
Portugal – dramatic black clad short lady sings melancholy chanting ballad thing.
Latvia – piratical tanned hi hi ho performance, Alex really likes it, doesn’t turn me on though.
Sweden – 50 year old woman with amazing legs and silver outfit and plastic surgery cat face plus laser key change!
Denmark – catchy song, East End barrow boy cheeky Robbie Williams look, good fun.
Georgia – blind woman comments on political situation, pretty sixth form angst lyrics though, good costume change moment, black to white baby!
Ukraine – great dancing, cool flood lit box background beginning, nice “shady lady” lyric.
France – pretty substandard, though nice ending chorus and interesting outfits, fake moustaches on the backing singers.
Azerbaijan – fantastic angel and devil outfits and contact lenses!
Greece – sexy little well packaged Kylie pop song, Alex really fancies the singer so he’s giving her 12 for everything!
Spain – comedy chiki chiki.
Serbia – waily and annoying.
Russia – sexy singer, mad ice skater, he did take his shirt off, probably why he won. Â
Norway – scary Scandinavian blonde clone army!
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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Neil did a book list and I couldn’t resist!
“Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread†in LibraryThing.
The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list.â€
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Well, I didn’t hate it, I think in some ways it’s quite cool. But I’m certainly never going to enjoy reading it.)
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (One day anyway. Perhaps when I’m old, in a home, hopefully the same home as Charles. And he can explain it as I read it.)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (I’ve read a couple of them anyway – great stuff!)
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (well, bits of it)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray *
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbevilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Dune
The Prince (bits of it!)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces*
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Jon T gave me this in a secret santa at Charles’ house. I knew he gave it to me, because he asked me afterwards if I’d read it or not. I’m looking forwards to reading it at some point.)
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being (Poor old Karenin. I’ve maintained that I didn’t like this for the last eleven years, just to annoy Steve and Charles. Actually, I did like it. I still do.)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road* (inspiring!)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (still good – even when you read it again!)
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
To the Royal Vauxhall Tavern last night for David Hoyle’s Magazine. The theme was the “eighteenth century”, and it was probably one of his best shows.
He had a bevy of wenches and a cello player, and everyone was decked out in splendid period costumes. There was even straw all over the floor of the pub, which gave everything a nice smell of barn.
David encouraged everyone to immerse themselves in the eighteenth century, a time of great art and massive upheavals in politics and intellectual life, as rationalism began to challenge the dead weight of Christian orthodoxy, a time when you had to live on your wits rather than the welfare state, when an unwanted pregnancy could be dealt with by downing a pint of gin and tossing your baby in the Thames. “I’m all for it,” said David. Killing unwanted offspring and the need to do away with the welfare state were recurring themes through the evening.
The performance got increasingly bawdy as the evening went on. David was raped in the stocks by two of the wenches at the beginning of the second act, and by the third act, he came on stage and urinated on to a straw bale. Shortly afterwards, the star wench also urinated on to the straw bale. She was a big girl with her boobs hanging out and blacked out teeth and a great comedy way about her. She urinated at very high velocity, firing out watery piss while laughing raucously. The room was really hot by that point, and what with the straw all over the floor and general mayhem, it did start to feel like a mad eighteenth century cesspool of a molly house. David also started kicking piss from the floor on the stage over the tables at the front, which many in the audience thought a step too far!
A camp laugh and a great night! Well done, David.
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Sara and I attended the launch of the new Christian Aid report on the scandal of tax evasion – particularly by multinational corporations – which undermines government revenues all over the world, violates the social contract between citizen and state, and constitutes a massive ongoing transfer of weath from the poor to the rich.
It’s headline figures focus on “transfer mispricing”, where different parts of multinational companies and their subsidiaries sell goods or services to each other at manipulated prices, and “false invoicing”, a similar practice but between unrelated companies. The loss of tax revenue to developing country governments from just these two activities is currently running at £80bn a year, one and a half times the combined global aid budget.
It’s good to see a mainstream NGO taking on this subject. There was a good talk at the event from Richard Murphy, who also wrote a good post on his blog that summarises very powerfully what the report is doing.
The report launch was up in London’s Living Room at City Hall, and the balcony was open, so Sara and I spent a lot of time walking around admiring the spectacular views across south London and along the Thames as the sun slowly went down.
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
Round to Tom and Emma’s new flat round Brondesbury Park area for dinner last night. Matt and I went early and had a wander round Paddington Old Cemetery first.
Kate B joined us there later. They’ve got lots of work yet to do on the flat, including knocking down all kinds of walls and removing a strange sordid little sauna the place has got in the attic, but they’ve already painted two rooms and are generally getting stuck in with gusto!
Tom made us a nice summery salad with one of those hot oriental dressings with lime, chilli and peanuts.
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Saturday, May 10th, 2008
I love hot weather in May. We haven’t had a May like this for a few years. We’re deliriously poised between the wetness of spring and the sunshine of summer, with the rain-strengthened plants soaring up to the sun in a crusade of green. Sitting on our roof terrace, you’d think you were sitting in a forest! Well, nearly.
We went to Hampstead Heath today, met up with Mark H, and we had a wander through the old Forest of Middlesex bits of the Heath, where all the great gnarled trees remind you of an older England. I got mildly sunburnt shoulders.
We’re back in the flat now listening to Dolly Parton. We were really inspired by the eulogy to Dolly in last week’s Guardian, so Matt got us a CD of all her essential hits and we’ve been listening to it all week. What a great musician and songwriter she is! Classic tragic country songs, with the power of blonde trash upon them.
There’s a great bit in the Guardian piece when she talks about how she always wanted to look trashy.
From the off, she knew how she wanted to look – cheap. There’s a story that she used to watch with adoration the town prostitute, all dyed blond hair and synthetic glamour, and decided to model herself on her. Is it true? “That’s right, and that’s just what I look like, don’t you think?” She grins.
As soon as I read that I knew I had to love her.
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Monday, May 5th, 2008
Went to see Happy Go Lucky with Matt and Wade. It’s SO much fun. It’s like our lives in film!
Thirty year olds, living in shared flats in north London, staying up all night having increasingly incoherent conversations, occasionally visiting friends who’ve moved out to the suburbs to have children and afternoon Jacob’s Creek barbeques, cycling around and having your bike nicked, there’s Finsbury Park Road and maybe Lowman Road at one point, lots of Camden scenes, a flamenco teacher who’s an exaggerated but nonetheless believable distillation of all the Spanish people, a scary unrealistically mad but entertaining driving teacher, OK so that one is not so much our lives, though we have one Swedish maniac from my Toynbee Hall days we could substitute for him…
The main idea of the film is the central character, Poppy, who is relentlessly and sometimes irritatingly but also inspiringly cheerful. I found her wonderful to watch. Like most Mike Leigh films the joy is all in the carefully created characters and their interactions with each other. Matt and I did worry throughout this film that something awful was going to happen to Polly at some point: perhaps the tramp she encounters one dark night was going to rape her, or the mad racist driving instructor was going to bludgeon her to death, but nothing like this actually happens. She handles various dark events with compassion and intelligence, and it feels right that her cheerfulness is at times disconcertingly robust, but the film skips amiably and chirpily to its conclusion.
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
Matt and I took several bottles of port round to Andy and Jo’s place today; Matt had brought them back from holiday in Porto and Andy’s going to lay them down for 80 years until various people turn 100 or something like that.
Andy made us an amazing Chinese feast, with several waves of food sailing forth from their little kitchen – seaweed and collapsing home made spring rolls deep fried in their new mini deep fat fryer, chicken and black beans, pork, chicken and sweet lemon sauce, and even home made ice cream – till we all staggered away from the table completely stuffed in a Sunday afternoon kind of way.
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