Etiquette on the internet

Because good manners cost nothing...

Here is what I've learned after nearly 3 years of this nonsense:

Never post private emails on your blog.

Any more rules of etiquette you'd like to share?

Scary visitor ii

Why is my humble blog suddenly of such interest to the American military/judicial system?

Paranoia...









(Seriously, does everyone get these? Why can't I get people searching for porn, like everyone else?)

Having flashbacks

I don't know what it is because I haven't changed, but what was once so warm, so easy, so fun, is now filled with awkward uncomfortable silences. How he can turn it off like a tap, just like that, I'm left baffled. His eyes used to light up, but now when I walk in the room, I can feel the silent waves of... something, willing me back out the door again. I don't know how to turn it back to how it was before.

Something has shifted, I've lost the power to please. So you begin to hate yourself, this loser that he doesn't want to be around. I wish I was anyone else. I wish I was S, who he still bothers to flirt with. I'd swap places with her in a second.

He didn't tell me he was leaving to go travelling, he left it to his best friend, with whom there'd always been a bit of rivalry for my attention, so when his best friend tells me he's almost gleeful about it, ( but when he sees how genuinely shaken I am, how gutted, he's more gentle.)

He sends me postcards from Egypt and does funny drawings and signs himself silly names, and there's some comfort in the fact that he was writing to me from another country and bothering to find a stamp and post it. That familar handwriting that I'd know anywhere, brings him back powerfully. But he's not there, he's gone. I miss his writing and the notes he used to push under my door. I miss him. Until one day, I don't anymore, and that's the saddest thing of all.

See here

7 songs

I have been tagged by foxy Clair and lovely Boz for this 7 songs meme. I'm having the same problems as Tim though - lost my music mojo and have not changed the tunes on my iPod in a hundred years. And on the rare occasion I hear something I like - say, Lykke Li - they immediately go and use it on a car advert or something. Minus 10 groovy points.

So here's what I propose - you let me know what song is rocking your summer, it could be old or new, just one, and I'll track them down and post them here. Only one though - okay Del?


Update:

I Feel It All by Feist, recommended by Bowleserised. Fireworks in the video, I like it. Feist is a chick. I thought Feist was a band. V out of touch.

SuperTrouper by Max Raabe - Abba in a thirties (?) crooner style, from Ben.

Beguine the Beguine by Artie Shaw, from Arabella. Makes you wish you could dance properly.

Grace Under Pressure by Elbow, from Del - I like it a lot. It also kind of starts off like The Rain Song and makes me all nostalgic.

Sugar Water by Cibo Matto, as suggested by Billy. Cute Japanese girls showering in sugar (yes) in the video, child-like vocals over trip hop - what's not to like?

Main Bloom by Go Home Productions, by Rockmother - odd & original mashup of Nirvana as a jazzy soundtrack to a Sweeney style cop show. Nice but kind of sad to see Kurt Cobain again - wasn't he a beauty?

Moving by Cathy Davey - lovely singer-songwriter I've never seen before, as recommended by new visitor Troll Formerly Known as Yooper - hi, TFKAY! I have no idea of the answer to your question - is it one of the lyrics? The only video I could find is her supporting the Verve live and the sound is a bit muddy.


Thanks, everybody. It's a lot more eclectic and interesting than what I would have come up with.

Shhhhhh

Bright lights hurt eyes. Loud noise hurts head. Shhhhh...

I blame GSE, LC (who is much less macho than I expected) and RoMo. Bad bloggers.

Things I learned this week

I went to the same college as John Lydon (briefly). I found this in 'Rip It Up and Start Again', it's jolly good.

If you should ever shoplift something that has one of those die-filled tags attached, a simple way around this is to put it in the freezer - the die will freeze and won't explode over your garment when you attempt to remove it. [Not that we advocate shop-lifting - though in these times of economic hardship... Legal Disclaimer Ed]

John McCain called his wife an unmentionable on national TV. And his views on contraception and abortion make him an unmentionable. (seen on Bowleserised, via Feministing.)

A Hackney Labour Counsellor who is a total arse (insulting 7/7 survivors and giving a frightening insight into the mind of New Labour over terror laws.)

'Bitterness is an acquired taste'* spoken by the tutor on a wine-tasting course but it felt like he was speaking to me personally.

Umami is my favourite new word.



*from the days when we were cavemen and bitter meant possibly toxic.

What did you learn then?

Wordle

What's this? It's a word cloud of this post. Make your own on Wordle.
Hours of fun with fonts!

Summer Screen

at Somerset House is back. Huzzah! Last year we saw Howl's Moving Castle, drinking beer and lounging on cushions amidst spectacular architecture, under the night sky, and it was the best fun.

Who wants to see Leon on the silver screen then? (I am not not NOT going to see the Exorcist again. It's taken me years to get over it.)

Don't

Here's a list of Don'ts which I plan to turn into a Mix Tape:

Don't Give Up - Basement Jaxx
I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You - Colin Hay
Don't - Dinosaur Jr
Papa Don't Take No Mess - James Brown
Don't Mess With My Man - Lucy Pearl
Don't You Worry About A Thing - Stevie Wonder
Don't Come Around Here No More - Tom Petty
Don't Want To Know - John Martyn
Don't Talk To Me About Love - Altered Images
Don't Ask Why - My Bloody Valentine
I Don't Care - Shakespeare's Sister

Any more?

Here are some of your suggestions:

Don't You Want Me Baby - the drama! The synths! The haircuts!

Don't Stop Me Now - Freddie when he was young and beautiful, sans moustache. Awww...

Love Don't Live Here Anymore - saddest breakup song ever, NOT by Madonna, Bedshaped, but by Rose Royce. Rose Norwalt is a proper soulful singer, unlike old sinewy bionic-arms She-Ra.

Don't Leave Me This Way - babeh...

Troubles

...worries, things on your mind? Leave them in the comments box.

Relationship status on Facebook

Why would you?*











(And if they're going to have them, surely they should be a bit more varied, to express the myriad variety of human relationships, eg:

Status: A____ is sort of seeing someone she met on the internet but is not sure if it qualifies as a relationship yet or not

Status: A____ has recently enjoyed a passionate quickie with her not-boyfriend but friend-with-benefits, and is feeling mighty pleased with herself

Status: A____ is seeing a married man only on weeknights (but it's alright because his wife is also seeing someone else)

Status: A____ is happily married to the Eiffel Tower


Etc etc.


*As Bad Sarah will tell you, it's only asking for everyone you ever met to email you with annoying questions.

meme of 5

mememememe - for when you're out of inspiration. I can't remember where I saw this - if it was you, I do apologise.

Five snacks I’d enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world
Hula hoops/pretzels/rice crackers/M&S seasalt and black pepper crisps/salt and shake crisps

Mmm, salt...

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world

See above

Five things I’d do if I were a billionaire:
(freak out and cry. Too much money to cope with. Too much responsibility, even in a fantasy. Let’s pretend it said millionaire:)

1.) Pay off all my friend’s debts and buy them all houses.

2.) Buy the derelict building in Chisenhale Road and turn it into a arty community centre type place with a café.

3.) Go away and see all the places I want to & can’t afford (Tokyo, Kerala, San Francisco, etc etc etc.)

4.) Get a big fuck-off SLR and take photos to my heart’s content.


5.) Turn Kenwood House into Chateau Slaminsky. Okay, maybe I could cope with the billions after all.

Five jobs I’ve had

Usherette – no uniform sadly, though I did get a torch

Careworker – old people + incontinence + alzheimers = not the job for me

Editorial Assistant – they sent me to flog their dodgy Mind Body and Spirit books at the Mind Body and Spirit Festival once. As I was what you might call a bit sceptical, I spent the whole time chanting ‘fuckoff fuckoff fuckoff’ at customers in my head to see if their supernatural, psychic skill would detect my aggressive, sceptical aura. It didn’t.

Book buyer – it was a surprisingly blokey atmosphere in the buying office. I suspect they were compensating for the fact that sitting at a desk buying books all day is not the most macho of professions.

Teacher of English as a Foreign Language – Lots of lovely students all the time, fascinating talking to them, but 7 hours of conversation in a row took its toll. I became notorious for trying to cut the hour short. I think my record was 25 mins.
"Well done! You’ve covered the work in less than half the time. Kthanxbye!"

Five places I have lived
Norwich
Streatham
Hampstead Garden Suburb
Barcelona
Hackney

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Was working in a bookshop in Holborn.

It was a chain of bookshops, ours was the neglected branch of the chain, they didn’t even bother opening on weekends, with not much passing trade, and consequently employed a random assortment of waifs and strays who’d been taken in more or less out of charity. It was never very busy. Once we had a shoplifter and that caused maximum excitement. Once they evacuated the whole street because of a suspected bomb and it was the most fun we'd ever had.

I remember working in the basement (music books, art and reference) feeling calm and peaceful like I was a fish floating in a goldfish bowl, and thinking to myself ‘Well this is all very nice but I MUST GET OUT OF HERE OR NOTHING WILL CHANGE FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE’. Plus it was minimum wage.

They were very nice there though. They bought me a Walrus beanie baby and Courtney Love's biography (that I used to sneak reads of) when I left.











Your turn. Take it and run with it, my little blog friends.

Poll

When you were 6, would you have been

a) thrilled to bits to see the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex towering over you? or
b) suffering nightmares and traumatised for life?

I thank you.

A Tale of Two Markets

In the city there's two markets, Spitalfields and Petticoat Lane. A stone's throw from each other in terms of distance but a world apart in psychogeographical terms.

Petticoat Lane has mainly black and Asian customers (though many of the stall-holders are white Eastenders) and the odd baffled Spanish tourist who's wandered into the wrong market, and who wasn't expecting this. Spitalfields has mainly white customers and many tourists.

Typical things to be found on a Petticoat Lane stall:

• London tourist tat featuring black cabs and guards in bearskins
• England shirts
• Highly flammable 'sexy' black and red underwear that makes Ann Summers look like La Perla
• African fabric of such bold and colourful design you need shades just to look at it
• Highly flammable clothes that look like they'd fall apart if you just look at them
• Bling bling costume jewellery
• Socks and batteries
  
• Fake Louis Vuitton scarves, handbags and sunglasses

In Spitalfields you will find

• Retro furniture
• Vintage clothing
• Moroccan leather poufs and lanterns
• Jazz, blues and salsa vinyl
• Farmer's market charging mental prices for a loaf of bread
• 70s children's annuals
  
• Very expensive clothes boutiques

The clientele of each market do not mix. They are barely aware of each other's existences. I used to wonder why so many African women were carting these huge suitcases around Liverpool Street on a Sunday, when my photography tutor enlightened me one day. 'They are buying presents in Petticoat Lane for their big extended families back home.' They're stocking up on the sunglasses (or the saucy underwear, who knows?) to impress the folks when they visit.

My grandad grew up in Petticoat Lane. There's still traces of the Jewish barrio it once was (in the voices of the stall-holders, in one cafe still serving salt beef or smoked salmon beigels) but mainly now it's an Asian neighbourhood, and they don't shop in Spitalfields, bang in their midst.

The east end has always been home to new waves of immigrants, and as I'm wandering through the market I think about why people are so anxious about new people moving into the country, when it's been a pattern for years and the country just absorbs them and carries on as usual. I'm very aware that my family were once the outsiders, feared and avoided and herded into a ghetto. You wouldn't have been able to walk through Spitalfields without hearing Yiddish and Hebrew, German and Polish once upon a time. But gradually people started to talk in English and left their own languages behind them. I know the same will happen with this generation eventually.

And now we're assimilated (it's easier when you're white to assimilate) and a different culture is now feeling the heat... On the radio the other day someone was talking about why people don't seem to care about the 42 days and the curtailment of our civil liberties, that there seems so little reaction against it. It's because of our history, he said, we were never taken over by a dictator like Germany or Italy - historically, we don't fear our own government, instead we fear outsiders . But surely if we give in to this fear, and let it dictate our laws, the terrorists have won already.

Art work

Art work, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.

Friday the 13th

Got drunk, fell off the pavement twice. You?

Naked Girls

But not. David Byrne, Norman Cook and Dizzee Rascal.

THE BPA 'TOE JAM' FEAT. DAVID BYRNE & DIZZEE RASCAL

Call in sick

DFace on Cambridge Heath Road

Ahem

*hem*

PS And bravo to David Davis. "...the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms."

Half-Japanese Girls

Toilet door graffitti.

Watched

Chandelier

seen in Selfridges. I wants it.

I'm all out of words. The rest of the week is all about the pictures.









JR on the Truman Brewery. Some more here

Sunday

You have just returned from breakfast at Lennie's, picking up flowers at Columbia Road, a wander down Brick Lane and back through Victoria Park in the sunshine. You have picked up a bottle of vino and some cigarettes because it is too nice not to have a little drink in the sun. You are enjoying your vino when there's a knock on the door - who can it be? Londoners never drop in unannounced.

Horrors! It is the landlord and landlady. They said they left a message, but you never listen to the answermachine. The landlady says something about 'sorting the garden out.'

So when they leave you go into the back yard. You haven't touched it all year and the tiny space is a veritable jungle. You start hacking at it with a pair of kitchen scissors. (You're buggered if you'll pay someone to sort it out, when you never planted any of this stuff in the first place.) The buddleia is sky high and covered in snails.

Have you ever had a snail fall into your hair from up above? I have.

Klimt

Rah! Klimt at the Tate. Oh, but it's in Liverpool. I've never seen one in the flesh, only reproductions.

Klimt had the life every artist dreams of. Successful, popular, wealthy; he persuaded beautiful voluptuous women to get their kit off in the name of art, shagged Mahler's wife and was fêted by high society.

His art is pretty, decorative, the kind of thing you'd live with on your wall quite easily (though with those dark sexy Freudian undertones of the time too.) The fate of art like this is to be turned into greetings cards and notebooks for teenagers to write awful poetry in (see also Monet) but that doesn't mean he wasn't a genius.

Who wants to come on a little road trip to Liverpool then? It's not that far away from London, is it?

Scary visitor

Visiting from Annie Rhiannon. I am afeared.

Tattoos

What do we think of them?

A nice video to make up for Monday's

OTIS - LIBERIA // LONDON
Uploaded by JR

The magnificent JR, (currently appearing at the Tate and all around town) photographed little Otis at a hospital in Liberia, then pasted the photos onto a 4 storey building in London (Mysteriously it says it's in Herdbrandt Street, which I've never heard of and doesn't appear to exist on Streetmap. Where can they mean?)JR is only 25, but take a look at his CV. Very envious.

Filth

I watched the BBC drama Filth, about Mary Whitehouse. It was sympathetic but funny (Mary wanted to call her campaign Clean Up National Television until her husband pointed out the acronym) and a total acting masterclass. Julie Walters making the old battleaxe warm and human, with a happy marriage and family life, Hugh Bonneville being suave and charming as the forward-looking director general, but the prize had to go to Alun Armstrong as her husband.

'Things you learn at these meetings' said Mary. 'Oral sex! Had you heard of it?'
Her husband pauses for a second, nods silently.
'Why would anyone want to...?' she says, looking troubled and faintly disgusted.
The expressions chasing across his face reacting (or non-reacting) to this was absolutely phenomenal acting.

Cattle market

Euro 08 Campaign Against Trafficking

Sunday caption competition

Dummies, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.