Black History Week revisited

I know this is the weblog equivalent of posting your kid's pictures on the fridge and forcing visitors to admire them, but just take a look at these CD covers they made as a result of your suggestions, and feel very proud. I do.

Scroll down for track listing. If your track did not make the final cut, it was nothing personal, just constraints of money and time (ie they are five years old and have the attention span of guppies.)


Miriam Makeba

Ray Charles

Bob Marley




















Nina Simone
















Black History Week CD

1. Three Little Birds - Bob Marley
2. Pata Pata - Miriam Makeba
3. What A Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong
4. Hit the Road Jack - Ray Charles
5. My Baby Just Cares For Me - Nina Simone
6. Dance To The Music - Sly and the Family Stone
7. Sir Duke - Stevie Wonder
8. Ma Baker - Boney M
9. Sunny - Boney M
10. Samba - Miriam Makeba
11. Rock Steady - Aretha Franklin.
12. Coming In From The Cold - Bob Marley
13. Dancing In The Street - Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

Happy Halloween

Forgot the Halloween candy again, bugger it.

Another evening of hiding from the feral estate children with the curtains drawn.

Choose an S

This photo is driving me crazy. It's got to go. It will be replaced with a nice "S" (for Slaminsky).

Which "S" do you prefer?




















Update: photo removed to 66 things post

Adventures with the teenies

Rachael and I went to see Bloc Party, we booked it months ago as part of our "must see more live music" drive. We confess to each other that we haven't managed to listen to the album all the way through yet.

It is soon apparent that we have made a grave error, and have seemingly parachuted ourselves into foreign territory, namely the land of the Teens, without knowing their customs or ways or fitting in much.

There are lots of girls, far more than usual, maybe because the singer looks like this but they kind of melt away when the band comes on and we're surrounded by a million teenage boys.

I do believe it is the first ever gig for the boys in front of us, so very excited do they seem. They are so young that they haven't had to use a razor yet. I feel like Miss Marple, but this does not deter one of them from grabbing my arse. Boys, this is not suave. Not the way to win a woman's heart. I'm not feeling Bloc Party so much, the singer has the thinnest voice I've ever heard, and they lack depth to me.

But half-way through their set Rachael turns to me with a light in her eyes. "By this time next year I'm..." I can't hear what she's saying, she's nodding at the stage. I think she's saying "I'm going to be playing Brixton Academy" but in fact she's saying she wants to have stage dived, an ambition which I share. By the time we come out, totally drenched, we've both shed about a decade. Hurray for jumping up and down to live music.

Oprah style book club

At the moment I seem to have a very short attention spa- oh, look, the Simpsons is on!

Which is maybe why I have 6 books on the go and can't seem to finish any of them.

Here they are -

John Gray, Straw Dogs - Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. The two pages I have read are very, very interesting.

Frankie & Stankie, Barbara Trapido - Fantastic memoir of growing up under apartheid.

The Scapegoat - Daniel Pennac An entertainingly silly French crime writer.

Change Your Mind - A Practical Guide To Buddhist Meditation. Paramananda. Don't mock, his writing is crystal clear. Apparently when you can't concentrate it's a "desire for sense experience" sometimes called "'monkey mind' from the image of a monkey frolicking in a tree laden with fruit; he does not even bother to finish one fruit before he jumps onto the next."
I have a monkey mind.

Bob Dylan Chronicles Inside the head of Bob. Thanks to the clerk at Borders who said "Good choice" and gave me a chocolate bar for free when I bought it.

Scar Tissue - Anthony Kiedis. A different type of rock biography. Girls! Drugs! Music! More drugs! More girls!

I have too many books and not enough bookshelves. Inspired by Anthony's example (give it away, give it away, give it away now) if you fancy any of these books, dear reader, drop me a line and I will send it to you. (except for Straw Dogs, which isn't mine). If you don't want to reveal your address, I believe the Post Office will hold items for a small fee.

Pissed

in charge of a weblog. Not the first, and surely won't be the last.

I am bored of writing about Me. Me me me me. You must be too. But I respect people's privacy. If I don't use their last names, that doesn't count, right?

People currently rocking my world:

My hairdresser. Very cute. Scottish. And gay. Story of my life.

My nephew. 6 years old. Likes - Ratchet and Clank. Telling knock knock jokes.

Current flatmate. Cute. Smart. Funny. Working far too hard.

Ex-flatmate's gay friend: we have an illuminating conversation in the pub. Why cannot straight women go out and demand hanky-panky, just like gay men? Why do women hold all the cards before they do the deed, but not afterwards? Answers on a postcard please.

Ex-flatmate. We start off relatively civilized in Soho, and relocate messily to Bethnal Green. Looks like Fern Cotton and is foxy as you like. Has relocated to Wales. Is about to knock on the door any minute and bring back half the gentrified East End pub with her ( just because they serve tapas, doesn't mean most of their clientele aren't still gangsters. How many men do you know wear a bespoke suit to their local pub during the week?)

Just a quickie before I go out.

Inspired by Natalie's musical lists, here are some songs whose creation I believe may have been influenced directly or indirectly by PMT. (I am allowed to do this because I'm a girl. But just this once, boys are allowed to join in. )

Sheryl Crow - Strong Enough
"I make the rules up as I go..."

Joe Jackson - Different for Girls
"I can't seem to say or do the right thing." Too right. Not when the mist descends...

Finlay Quaye - It's Great When We're Together
"You're just like the weather - when you change, and you refuse to speak to me..."

Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know
Queen of the scary vengeful harpies, in this song she comes on like Cruella de Ville on crack.

PJ Harvey - well, take your pick.

Buffy Caza Vampiros

Sorry, I feel like it was false advertising, but we didn't make it to Howl's Moving Castle, as it was showing nowhere local. Instead we went to see Serenity, which elsewhere Dan has reviewed much better than I could. Serenity was written and directed by Joss Whedon, who conceived the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon is much admired for his story-telling genius in Slaminsky Mansions, let me tell you. So instead here is a little personal Buffy history...

I started watching this in Spain, where it was known as Buffy - Caza Vampiros. Like most Spanish telly, it was dubbed: "Weellow - a donde vas, Weellow?" The Spanish actress who dubbed Buffy had an incredibly mature, womanly voice which did not really match with the youth of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

And the dialogue made it somewhat hard to follow, my Spanish vocab being geared more towards asking for 3 tomatoes in the market and less towards phrases such as "demon from the portals of hell". My favourite character, who sometimes turned into a wolf, appeared to be called "Oth". (How the letter Z is pronounced in Spanish.)

Despite all these obstacles, I was hooked, hooked! Who taught Buffy those kick-ass karate moves? Who was her funny red haired friend? And this manically crazy blonde baddie whose energy burned up the screen? What was Billy Idol doing in the series, and what was his relationship with Buffy? If only I could understand what was going on!

Then I came back to England, and went round to look at a room in a house, belonging to a friend of a friend. And lo, there on the shelves in the living room was the entire series of Buffy, from beginning to end. I decided to move in.

This weekend, we will mostly be watching Howl's Moving Castle. Can't wait

Feel good, inc

We went to Canary Wharf for a drink (Canary Wharf, for non-English/London readers, is where our newspaper/banking industries have relocated to, a big steel-and-glass metropolis slap bang in the middle of the poorest part of East London, where the old docklands used to be with their tobacco warehouses.) The clientele is suited and booted, Jess and I feel like mole people in our trainers and jeans, but this matters not to the men in suits, it's like walking into a wall of testosterone.

Two girls come up to us. You work hard, goes their sales pitch. You need to relax at the end of the week. Would you care for a 10 minute back massage? You can pay us what you like.

Yes indeed. And for 10 minutes in the middle of the smokey noisy pub, they give us both a back massage. It is total bliss, and the only massage I've received whilst smoking a cigarette. I bet they do a good business with lager-ed up city boys, though the three quid I had left in my wallet would probably not keep them in lip gloss for a week.

Onto more important mattetrs. What I have eaten today:

A KitKat (from shop in the station for breakfast)

A tuna sandwich

2 glass of wine and 500 cigarettes.

I need a personal chef.

Social kissing

We were brought up to kiss hello and goodbye. All my friends do it. Saying goodbye in a group can take an age. When we were teenagers, for a daring moment, even our male friends kissed each other goodbye. Then I went to live in Spain, where everyone kisses hello and goodbye, twice, one on each cheek. I believe in some countries they even do it three times, which is pushing it.

So now you know the background. Once upon a time we went out to see Lee Perry and the Upsetters at the Town and Country Club. My friend Donna (Guyanese-English) her friend Arun (Dutch-Indian-English) and his mate (Indian-English.) We went to the pub first and drank a lot, then went to the gig.

When it finished, I said goodbye to Donna (kiss) Arun (kiss) and went to kiss his friend goodbye, when he turned his face and spat at me "I don't do that!"

If he'd have taken out a knife and stabbed me it couldn't have hurt more. Now, I'm not insensitive. There were Muslim boys on the course, who wore traditional dress, prayed, ate only halal food, didn't touch alcohol, and wouldn't touch a girl's hand when we had to be in a circle during PE training sessions. I would respect anybody's beliefs, and I knew where I stood with them.

But this boy had been buying me drinks all evening, and had been talking about smoking weed and doing charlie, so it can't have been so much on religious grounds. What kind of religion allows you to cane it, but bans a kiss on the cheek? He might as well have said, Get away from me, you dirty white whore! He made me feel ashamed of myself, but really the problem was his. I guess this gave me an insight on what it's like to be on the receiving end of racism (sexism I'm more used to). There was a life lesson somewhere in this experience, I'm just not sure what it is.

Anyway dear reader, if we ever meet, give me due warning and I won't kiss you.

Tagged

by Guyana Gyal. I'm shy of tagging anyone else, as I don't really know the etiquette - I know DCveR doesn't like them and I know Wyndham's already done it - if you fancy this one, dear reader, please consider yourself tagged.

20 random facts about me.

1. I have a wonky eye. The left one doesn't look straight, à la Marty Feldman. It especially shows in photos. I once asked my optician what could be done about a wonky eye. The answer involved "popping the eye out of its socket onto the cheekbone" to tinker with the muscle behind it; on balance, I decided I could live with it.

2. My nose was once in the Daily Mail.

3. I wanted to be a film director when I grew up, and crewed on a film with this company. It was a stinker, but we had fun making it.

4. My first love was about 2 feet taller than me.

5. Bowling is the only sport I like, because you can simultaneously smoke, drink and have chips and ketchup sent to you whilst participating.

6. Sometimes I love London with a passion and sometimes it makes me want to run far away to somewhere green and quiet, with no pigeons.

7. I secretly think my family are far madder than anybody else's.

8. In my secret fantasy life I am a pool shark. In reality someone has to hold the back of my cue straight for me when I line up the shot.

9. My biggest regret is not going skinny dipping in Hampstead Ladies Pond along with everyone else at my 18th birthday party. Too shy.

10. The famous people I see most often in London are Gilbert and George. Beginning to think that they're following me around.

11. Hate Christmas. Hate it. Bah humbug.

12. There is an HG Wells book with my name as the title. (It wasn't written about me though. I'm not that old).

13. I have lived in 30 different addresses in the past 11 years. Dreaming of putting down roots.

14. We have a crazy garden. It has no rhyme or reason to it. It would make a garden designer weep. But we like it. We get our plants from Columbia Road.

15. Bored of being vegetarian, and considering becoming a carnivore again after 23 years of abstaining.

16. I have a dark side, which only shows when someone INTERRUPTS MY SLEEP.

17. Currently I'm reading The Outsiders. "...I had only two things on my mind. Paul Newman and a ride home."

18. My favourite tune in the world is Sly and The Family Stone's If You Want Me To Stay. Short, but very sweet.

19. Passed my maths GCSE in my third decade. Better late than never...

20. My proudest moment was being beeped by a whole fire- engine full of firemen. Mmm, firemen...

Phew

Owing to temporary financial embarrassment, I thought I was going to have to cancel my broadband connection - and since, without internet access, my computer would be like a useless empty box, possibly flog the computer on ebay. But what's this? My service provider has locked me into a twelve month contract? I have to pay for it whether I have it or not? Phew.

Biblical times

Good grief, could it get any worse this year? If I believed in God I'd say he has it in for us.

Well, this weblog is not about current events, so much as it is about, um, cookie monster lunchboxes, so all I will say is this.

Investment through lunchboxes

Here is a tip for you. Forget about stocks and shares and check this out. Spice Girl lunchboxes now go for 165 dollars. Might start mugging the kids at lunchtime.

(My preference would be the Scooby Doo mystery machine or this Cookie Monster
one.)

The tuffest kid in school would probably go for the Kurt Cobain model.

Spread the word

We were discussing how much we hated a certain mobile phone ad.

"Yes, it's so pecky." I said
"What does that mean?" asked my flatmate.

I couldn't believe I had used this word. It just slipped out. When we were 15, it was one of our favourites, invented by Emma whilst at a sleepover at my house. I was asleep at the time but apparently it was triggered by the dawn chorus.

" I hate birds," said Emma to Claire. "They have red legs. And pecky beaks."

Pecky became our worst insult. It entered immediately into our language, and people who didn't even know its origin seemed to grasp its essential meaning instantly. Even parents - like Emma's dad, a project manager at a housing association, who came home from work once and confessed he'd accidentally used it in a meeting.

But gradually it dropped out of usage, like so many good words. Join my campaign to enrich the language, and share with me what words you have invented.

He done it his way

At college, a girl was asking the teacher what you do if someone says something grammatically wrong in class. The teacher said you have to be sensitive to the way they speak. This girl said "but it's not even a child in my class. It's someone in college. I've heard someone say "We done this". To me, that's just wrong."

I wanted to smash her stupid smug face in. I knew who she meant - one of the othersis from Stepney, it's just the way he speaks. He' s a proper, bona fide, apple-me-pears East End Cockney with an accent to match, and yes, he says, " we done this" not "we did this" but he makes everyone laugh and also has charisma to burn. She on the other hand is a flat-faced mooncow with an annoying voice, however impeccable her grammar might be.

I went into a rant about people understanding how you use one language with your friends and another with your bank manager ("That's called register" said the teacher) and how even children pick up on what to use when. So stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, you flat-faced mooncow.

You can't say the way someone speaks is wrong, if that's what they've been surrounded by, growing up. In speech we break the laws of grammar all the time - and anyway, grammar isn't really fixed, it changes over the years, like all parts of language. Innit?

Children en masse can be scary

Copycat

I'm copying these fine blogs, because I'm lazy. And I've never done a meme before. You have to listen to the first 13 songs on your ipod on random shuffle (though it probably works just as well just with CD, tape or indeed vinyl), as answers to the following questions.

1. What do you think of me, Random Music Player?
Fire Fire M.I.A.
I'm a liar liar pants on fire?

2. Will I have a happy life?
Panic - The Smiths
Hm, this makes no sense.

3. What do my friends really think of me?
Shakespeare's Sister - The Smiths
Ha! I knew it.

4. What does my S.O. think of me?
Love Will Tear Us Apart - Nouvelle Vague
Give me a break.

5. Do people secretly lust after me?
This Modern Love - Bloc Party
I've never listened to this tune; contains the lines "I'll pay for you, anytime".
A new career beckons!

6. How can I make myself happy?
Auf Achse - Franz Ferdinand.
It means "on axle", apparently. iTunes is a very cryptic oracle. Worse than the I-ching.

7. What should I do with my life?
Infinita Tristeza - Manu Chao
See? This means infinite sadness.

8. Why must life be so full of pain?
La Chinita - Manu Chao
iTunes has given up

9. How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?
What I'm Feeling - Nightmares on Wax.
I'm liking this answer. Seems to indicate that I should be totally selfish in bed.

10. Can you give me some advice?
We got the - Beastie Boys.
We got the power to make a difference! We got the power to make a change!
Vague, but positive.

11. What do you think happiness is?
Brothers gonna work it out - Public Enemy
What, my brother? You mean he had the secret of happiness all along?

12. Do you have any advice to give over the next few hours/days?
Marian - Nouvelle Vague
No, can't make head or tail of this one.

13. Will I die happy?
She Belongs To Me - Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is the Grim Reaper!

What nonsense. But fun.

Inscription for a bedroom ceiling

Daily dawns another day
I must up and make my way
Though I dress and drink and eat
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend -
Bed awaits me at the end.

Though I go in pride and strength,
I'll come back to bed at length.
Though I walk in blinded woe,
Back to bed I'm bound to go.
High my heart, or bowed my head,
All my days lead but to bed.
Up, and out, and on; and then
Ever back to bed again.
Summer, winter, spring and fall-
I'm a fool to rise at all!

Not by me, but by Dorothy Parker.

Sometimes it's very, very hard getting out of bed.

First and last post about celebs

This is a profound theory, and not merely an excuse to paste pictures of good-looking people.

Here is my theory.

Kate Moss once liked Johnny Depp, a beautiful male version of herself.
Now she likes Pete Doherty, an ugly male version of herself.

See evidence below, and judge for yourself.

Kate Moss







Johnny Depp

Pete Doherty