Paging Dr Freud

I'm walking in town. Everywhere there are tiny, perfect little sculptures of animals on the ground, so many you have step over them to avoid treading on them – tigers, rabbits, hedgehogs… they're beautiful, but all surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies.

Then I remember I'd read about this in the paper, the sculptures are actually filled with the corpses of dead animals, it's a protest action by conservation and animal rights groups. The idea is that they will lie there rotting until the clouds of flies attract people's attention to the issue of extinction. It gets harder and harder to walk without stepping on them, the hedgehogs in particular are quite prickly.

Then I wake up. It's 5 in the morning and I can hear techno coming from downstairs, faint enough but it's vibrating through the mattress and pillow. I have to be up in an hour.

What does it all mean?



(Yes, you know you've hit blogging rock bottom when you start posting your dreams. Any you want to share?)

Fact v fiction

"Miss," says one of my bright sparks, "all stories have happy endings don't they, and the goodies always win over the baddies..."

I think about it. The stories they know all have happy endings. To all intents and purposes, stories to them are defined by happy endings, even when arrived at quite violently. The 3 little pigs defeat the wolf, he runs away with his [burnt] tail between his legs; Hansel and Gretel destroy the witch, and never go hungry again; Cinderella marries the prince; even Goldilocks, that thieving, house-breaking little trollop, escapes the house of the bears; in the juniors, St George kills the dragon and marries the princess.

They are thrown for a loop by the story of Boudica though. They can't get enough of this story (the edited version which doesn't mention that she and the children were raped). The tragedy, that she's a heroine, and brave and strong, and protecting her children, and a queen, and that she fights well, but she still loses. And kills herself in the end. We go round and round in circles. 'But why did she die? Why did she lose? What happened to her children?' Most of all 'Why did she drink poison and die?'
'Why do you think?'
One of my shy unconfident ones pipes up
'She didn't want the Romans to kill her first.'

Fairy stories are full of violence, they are warning tales and contain lessons about etiquette - don't trust strangers in the woods, don't treat your poor relations like dirt, they might end up as royalty - and they're fun, but it's the real life stories that hook them, a gateway into adult complexity and ambiguity. Sometimes the goodies don't win over the baddies. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. Or the story doesn't even have an end.

Manly Kiss

Some of you may have seen this before, but for those who haven't, have some fun here with the Anagram Server.

Yours,

Lanky Miss

Only connect

So, I arose from my sickbed & went to rent some videos & buy a scart lead but it's not working IT'S NOT WORKING IT'S NOT WORKING! Why does all electronica hate me?

The scart lead's connected to the TV...
The scart lead's connected to the DVD
The TV's connected to the mains socket...

I know I'm only a simple non-mechanical soul but it's not rocket science. What am I doing wrong??

I now have one Pineapple Express & one Buddha of Suburbia DVD which I cannot watch. And I had to pay a fine from last summer. Bah.


PS Good, happy yet cool songs to play at a wedding. Let's have 'em.

Truanting

I am Unwell, at home. Given up trying to do anything useful & work related. Feel too guilty to go outside. I'm stuck inside with daytime TV & Radio 4, which is currently broadcasting a depressing play about a kid going missing.

Entertain me, I beg you. Tell me what you're having for lunch. Tell me what you saw on TV last night. Tell me a joke. Tell me your favourite line from a film (and let us guess which film.) Ask me a question. Anything. The floor is yours.

The Evil Poor

Do you think they're closing in on rich people with off-shore bank accounts and dodgy accountants who look for tax loopholes? No?

Hmmm... Thought not...

Where to stay in NY?

Now then. Are any Americans or ex-pats reading? Or well travelled people? Over here, a B&B is a cheap institution for people who can't afford hotels. Usually in the region of £35 a night. (though the one we stayed in in St Ives, was dead posh, posher than some hotels I've stayed in, it had Phillipe Starck bedlamps, a huge ensuite bathroom with marble tiling and an enormous flatscreen TV.) Over there, it appears that they are in the region of $125 a night, (and some are up to $275 in low season ) which is a lot. Where do you stay if you want somewhere cheap?

Saul Steinberg

at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Go, go, go! I've never seen so many pictures I've lusted after & wanted to own so fiercely, all in one exhibition. (He was a famous illustrator for the New Yorker for years, mates with the Abstract Expressionists, born in Romania, escaped Fascist Italy whilst an architecture student by the skin of his teeth,wound up in Manhattan.) There is something very bracing, very restful in looking at a perfectly drawn line, at someone who can really, really draw. It's not just aesthetically pleasing though, there's real wit and intelligence, some weighty ideas behind this stuff. I refer you here to find out more.

Other illustrators that have given us pleasure over the years:

Quentin Blake. Of course. The Maestro. (He is setting up a Museum of Illustration in Kings Cross, where I would sell my soul to get a job.) When I was a kid, I didn't like them so much, I preferred drawings that were a bit more pretty and decorative, it's only as a grownup that I can appreciate the brilliance, the humour and joie de vivre and beauty of his work.

Gerald Scarfe. Wicked imagination. And wickedly cruel. I remember seeing him on some programme where he was for some reason being a consultant on a Disney film. One of the Disney artists was saying how she had drawn an animal to look cute. He looked utterly baffled and dismayed. 'Why does it always have to look cute?' He started drawing when ill as a child - you know that line in Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, 'When I was a child, I had a fever, my hands felt like two balloons'? That came from Gerald Scarfe, that did.

Andy Warhol - He was a great graphic artist, before he became a bona fide artist (though that's still a contentious idea.) Great colour, sense of humour too.
Posy Simmonds - skewers the middle classes brilliantly, draws like a genius. I wish she'd start her strip in the Guardian again, most broadsheet cartoonists are pants and can't write for toffee.

Ralph Steadman - I love that hallucinatory, satirical style. I went to see an exhibition of his pictures for Alice in Wonderland years ago, it was a perfect fit of style and subject matter.

And of course, our own blogging Lucy Pepper. Words can not express how much I love her style. And it's not just drawing, her recent paintings of Devon are so ridiculously beautiful. Bah. Some of us were born to be artists, some of us art appreciators, I guess.

Foxy

I've seen 3 urban foxes in the last two days - one trotting out of Victoria Park at 6.30am, one slinking past the fire station in Bethnal Green at 6.45pm, one at 10.30 pm running through the estate.

What does it mean?

Foxy, originally uploaded by Slaminsky.

I know it's over

I'm in the kind of fragile state of mind where an Andrex puppy ad might make me a bit misty. I've gone to see Slumdog Millionaire, wanting to be distracted, uplifted, lost in someone else's story for a couple of hours - but they're playing The Smiths before the film comes on (it's the Curzon Soho). I Know It's Over - 'Love is natural and real, but not for the likes of you and I, my love...'

I do love them (though I could do without them at the moment) - the sheer, hand-to-the-forehead melodrama and over the topness of Morrissey, and the fact that he sends himself up at the same time as articulating real pain and isolation, kind of taboo subjects for rock n roll.

When you think of American rock and pop, it was all that Chuck Berry/Beach Boys idea of cars and girls and sexual success (never mind that Brian Wilson was a lot more interestingly leftfield and complex than songs like Fun Fun Fun implied). The Smiths were the first band to really champion songs about sexual failure and loss, to put losers and misfits at the centre. And a generation of geek boy (and girls) worshipped them for it. That was even before the geeks inherited the earth.

The girl and boy bands around now are more like the shiny, superficial haircut bands that were around in the 80s. Where are this generation's Smiths? (Though in fact, at the moment I can't really bear to listen to them, it's too raw and close to the bone. I can only listen to them when I'm feeling chirpy. In times of doubt, I reach for Stevie Wonder or Sly and the Family Stone.)


Slumdog Millionaire, the short review - first third with their childhood, fab. Last two thirds, pure Bollywood. And the gameshow framework slowed it down too much.

My secret weapon

Just bought me five minutes of peace

Reasons to be cheerful

Head state v bad, as Bridget Jones would say. Apart from my own private personal hellish circumstances, let's look at the evidence:

Gaza
Zimbabwe
Congo
World recession and
It's fucking freezing.

Tell me something good, something cheerful, I beg you.

(incidentally, my New Year's Resolution is to stop swearing on my blog. Look at this:

Created by OnePlusYou )

Waiting for Godot

Please someone come with me please please please please?

(I just checked, tickets in the stalls are now £51.00. Good grief! But still! Ian McKellen! Jean Luc Pickard! Samuel Beckett...)

Things I learned in 2008

Pinched from the lovely Patroclus. Thank god for memes, I'm brain-dead.

1. Not to buy a flat sandwiched between two other noisy bastard flats shortly before a recession which sees house prices tumbling.

2. You can email the mayor of Hackney and he has to respond.

3. My crush has a long-term girlfriend, (which explains blowing hot&coldness.)

4. Parisians are more friendly than they used to be.

5.Apparently I'm bootylicious. Like the Jewish J-Lo. Or the honky Beyonce. Only not.

6. Changing things to how you want them to be is about as easy as levitating.*

7. Weddings in Cornwall are more debauched than weddings elsewhere in the country.

8. No matter what history you share, you still have a bond with your family.

9. Beneath my amiable, fluffy exterior is a will of iron. Don’t fuck with me.

10. * But not, you know, totally impossible. However much you think you’ve seen it all, you can still be surprised. There's always room for hope.

Dear Neighbour, you are not invited to my party...

The problem I have with the note is not that he was having a party and didn't invite me, it was that he selected a vibrant background of balloons, effectively stating that his party was going to be vibrant and possibly have balloons and that I couldn't come.

Seriously funny prankster-ism from David. Thanks to P for this.