Watch your back Tanya!

Watch your back Tanya! Our own resident music hater seems to have serious competition from an unlikely source: Amy Winehouse. Up until now the main joy in Winehouse’s existence has been her ability to make good copy in interviews, and it appears that she has herself noticed it. What was previously a sly dig at Jamie Cullum or Christina Aguileira seems to have become her full time career. This could prove to be a problem later in her career (ie second album) when no-one wants to work with her, or she gets mugged by the Black-Eyes Peas on Later with Jools Holland. She is the young fogeys version of Teenage Fanclub, always good for copy. And she’s more regular than Tanya too.

y’k vagonu tekerlek

y’k vagonu tekerlek

The above phrase is a (probably syntactically inaccurate) translation of ‘WagonWheel’ into Turkish. Which is what the Halley Pasta is, pretty much. Produced by snack manufacturing giants ‘lker, it’s a round marshmallow biscuit sandwich of approx. 8 cm. diameter, covered with vaguely waxy chocolate-flavoured stuff, and I was unreasonably excited to snap up a 5-pack (exotically stuck together along one side with the nutritional information label) from my local shop for local people at Archway the other week.

With great trepidation I opened the packet to find something that indeed, as the external picture had led me to believe, looked just like the Wagon Wheels I knew and loved in times passed into legend. When chomped into, however, a different story was told: the biscuit itself was disconcertingly crumbly, with a spicy hint of coconut, and the marshmallow filling was so overwhelmed by the strong personality of its surroundings that I barely noticed it. A strange sense of otherness swept over me, like being on holiday and eating a custard cream, only different and foreign. And as a novelty junkie, that’s the kind of sensation I live for, man.

Robster, who was my companion on this taste odyssey, says:
“I don’t remember much from my consumption of the Ulker biccie - other than that the filling didn’t have the chewy mallowyness that makes official Wagon Wheels so satisfying. But then it’s been ages since I had a proper Wagon Wheel.”

It’s all too true. Gone are the days when one could irresponsibly tuck into confectionery (bought with the last of the weekly pocket money) from an eye-wateringly bright wrapper; I could of course pop into the supermarket right now and buy (and indeed scoff) a packet of Wagon Wheels, but I’d feel excruciatingly infantile and would end up a bit sticky about the chops. As the actress said to the bishop.

West Ended

West Ended

I read in the South London Press that So Solid’s Romeo is accused of involvement in a stabbing incident in Soho. This is obviously a bad thing for all concerned. I also note that, as part of the conditions of his bail, he has been ordered to stay out of W1 and WC2 (West One and West Central 2 covers Soho, Covent Garden, Oxford Street and so on: a large chunk of London’s retail centre / clubland.)

I wasn’t aware that it was possible to impose such broad restrictions, and my first pedantic reaction is to think of the practicalities: what’s to stop him (anyone) causing bother in one of the bazillion clubs outside W1/WC2? How would you catch him if he skirts over the line from (say) SW1? Is he allowed to travel under W1 / WC2 on the tube? Who knows where the borders between these sorting-office locales lie anyway?

And then I think my usual thought about how lazy it is for people to call this area Central London because it’s the place where they do their shopping, when London’s centre is a doughnutty binary star shape, but everyone’s bored of me going on about that.

But now I’m thinking about how London would feel without that ‘centre’: how far my experience of London as London depends on that centre. I’ve lived here for six years now, bathed in the golden glory of the sunny South Eastern poscodes, and I’ve tried to get to know the place as well as I can (within reason - you still won’t catch me in the dragon-infested regions west of Notting Hill, if I can help it). Still, if I’m going “into town” I always mean the West End…

What would my London be like if it had W1 and WC2 brutally excised? I’m considering banning myself, like Romeo, from ‘town’ for a few weeks, to see what will happen. Is that a terrible idea?

THE SQUARE TABLE: 12, Avril Lavigne - “My Happy Ending”

POP FACTOR: 450 CONTROVERSY RATING: 344

Hard-won experience of life has crushed poor Avril’s enthusiasm: the instrumental hook of “My Happy Ending” is the hook of “Sk8er Boi” stuck in a sulky tar-pit. I’m grateful for my fuzzy grasp of American indie history but as I understand it getting from the crisp slap of punk to the precious moping of grunge took 14 years: with a copywriter’s gift for summary Lavigne has managed it in two albums. 2 (Tom)

Donald Judd was asked once by an interviewer what he called his work, and he called them specfic objects, and then he was asked what he looked for in other peoples work, and he said that it had to be interesting.

What happens when we stop looking at music to be authentic and start looking for work to be interesting? We get abstract specfirc objects like Toxic by Britney or Dirrty by Xtina.

What happens when we claim that the big 5 media companies can give us filthy female empowered punk authenticity? Well, bullshit like this. 0 (Anthony Easton)

“All this time you were pretending so much for my happy ending”

Avril you’re 19 for God’s sake. Life for you should be a joyous flux, not heading towards “ending” and premature middle age. This maturity is joyless, like the sex-educative bits of a teenage soap opera. The words are heavy and laboured, as if she’s been locked in a room, sweating blood to get these lyrics out. It gets 1 pt solely because her voice does not cause me the same degree of internal haemoraging as Anastasia. 1 (Derek Walmsley)

This sounds like if Alanis Morrisette needed to collaborate with Jarabe De Palo in order to have a hit record. 2 (Diego Valladolid)

Somehow I’ve managed to miss Avril’s music completely and now that I’m finally forcibly introduced, I still feel like I miss Avril’s music completely. Formulaic in the extreme, Creed-y inflection, running-in-place lyrics and a rhythm that sounds like it was put together by a corporate computer; this would’ve sounded derivative and uninteresting ten years ago, much less now. This isn’t even really deserving of disdain, just apathy. Why bother? 3 (Forksclovetofu)

Oh, Canada. Your pop songs, much like yourself, are blandly comforting. “My Happy Ending” has me skimming though my Handbook of Faint Praise for adjectives like “serviceable”, “competent” and “perfectly acceptable”. The chorus hook is sticky, but if Avril is one-tenth the punk she makes herself out to be, she’d ditch the corporate production team. She’s too young to sound so polished. I do like the line about her “darn friends”, though I suppose that’s the radio-editers at work. 5 (Henry Scollard)

Ah, Avril Lavigne. My mothers middle name is Averil, a mispelling I believe so I have always had a soft sport for the narky teen and her tie wearing antics (it pays to wear a suit to a job interview but that attitood just means she never gets the job). Bit early to say, but I think it is clear that Avril saves the better tracks for the second single, and whilst this is no lexical feat of ingenuity like Sk8ter Boi, neither is it a complete pile of festering poo.

I like the moans which sit in for a chorus. They are the kind of moans not made by people who have ever really had to moan about something, which of course make them all the more plaintive. Your eighteen my’dear, you don’t get a happy ending. You haven’t even had the trying middle bit yet. 6 (Pete)

Again, Avril Version 2.0 brings a box of sardonic whine to the party, giving her not-so-complicated fella the “shyeah thanks a LOT” kissoff. The orchestra chugging away in the background seems redundant, but you can’t expect AL to trump punk rock horns by copping moves from Michelle Branch - a little Train is U&K, too. All snark aside (and believe it or not there’s something left once I shelve the snark), it’s a grower - Avril Co. is getting really good at this. Perhaps a mature, less pwecious & pwecocious AL might not be what Devon X. Sk8er (or Devon’s pervy dad) was expecting, but it’s a development that augurs well for her future. At the very least, tapping her angst early and often now offers hope that she won’t exploit her future love troubles the way Alanis cashed in on her tryst with Brat Pack waterboy Dave Coulier. 7 (David Raposa)

Wednesday afternoon, half past one. Work is boring today, and I’m trying to think of some words to say about “My Happy Ending”, essentially it’s a song about how crap being a teenager is, and the general lameness of relationships. Poor Avril, she can’t find the right guy at all, if her past singles are anything to go by. I like this song, it’s one of the stronger tracks on “Under My Skin”, angsty and anthemic, rising and falling, pre-chorus, all great elements! - I even like the totally Alanis breakdown at around 2 minutes 20 seconds. It’s a sad song. 9 (Jel)

All loves are first loves: all endings are the same ending. All endings hurt like the first one. So love ends, over and over. But belief in truth dies only once: the first time. When happy endings become only stories, and you realise, sickening, that your happy ending was only ever a story, a trap that you set for yourself, YOUR happy ending. Yours. Not only do we deceive each other - ‘you were pretending’ - but we have to deceive ourselves to be taken in - ‘you were all the things I thought I knew’ because ‘all I ever wanted’.

Which doesn’t mean we’ll stop believing in happy endings, unless we never love again, but from now on they can only be stories, never truth. This could itself just be a mawkish story, but what convinces is the disparity between teen angst and schlocky AOR ballad. Avril finds herself caught up in a story that everyone else already knows - it’s passed into cliche. But in the space between the over and over and the for the first time, truth, which dies, flashes up. 10 (Alext)

EDITORIAL NOTE: This is the end of Round 1 of the Square Table. Round 2, with a handful of new participants and most of the old ones, will kick off soon and hopefully there will be a little statistical fannydangle beforehand too.

I had a good day in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago.

I had a good day in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. Some pleasant beers, excellent company and an interesting new city for me to explore. Oddly I probably had the classiest drink I have had this year in the Vodka bar there, which reminded me I should drink stupidly strong cocktails more often.

There was one problem though. I was in Scotland. Pubs stay open later there, right? This was underlined by the pub quiz that Ally took me to which did not kick off until well after nine which we had rushed too in the rain. The rather heavy rain (Lucy scarpered fearing her washing had dissolved). Still we settled in the pub looking at an evening of boozing in the pub discussing an pitch for an Estonian romantic comedy called Love Oven (and I wanted to called Loven - but mere as an American Movie homage). And it kept raining outside as we were smug and warm and dry and…

Then the barman told us the Gents toilets were flooded. That was fine, we could use the disabled toilet (there must be a better name for it, that suggests it doesn’t work). And then, at ten, last orders were called. The cellar was flooded with all that rain, and was getting near the electrics. Result: leaving the pub at 10:30, a touch earlier than I would have done in London. Foiled again!

(To be fair it was probably not a bad thing after all the drinking I did in the next week).

Last Life In The Universe is a Thai film

Last Life In The Universe is a Thai film by a director (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - of Mon-Rak Transistor fame) who is well aware his audience is predominantly in the West. Why else would this slight love story between a morbid Japanese youth and a messy Thai hostess take place predominantly in stilted, second language English? There is probably a decent theme of cultural cross-over when the only language you have in common is one you do not speak well, but it become clear in the final third that Noi, the Thai girl, actually has a pretty good grasp of Japanese. And it is not as if Kenji, the Japanese suicidal, ever says all that much.

Barry Salt, the film theorist, did a lot of work in the eighties about shot length, concluding that the Average Shot Length (ASL) has been decreasing since film has started. Salt does not editorialize these findings, others make the link between low attention spans and the others. The closest Salt gets to being pointed on the issue is regarding arthouse films. The greater the pretension to art, the greater the shot length he notes.

Last Life In The Universe has some absurdly long (and coincidentally beautiful) shots in it. It is in the main the very epitome of langourous; the middle section when the couple with nothing in common probably has ten lines of script for its hour long segment. And yet it did not annoy me, and did not seem to overdo it. Instead you could rely on surprising moments of dead-pan humour, the scatology and occasional absurdities reflected nicely on the over-all piece. The section in the middle where the house is being tidied Sorcerer Apprentice style around Noi is a clever piece of filming, a great special effect and a potential approximation of what Noi’s stoned mind thinks of Kenji’s tidying. It is a film which walks the tightrope between absurdity, slowness and beauty - and on another day I may have hated it. But then it was aimed directly at me and this odd mix of Wong-Kar Wai and Woody Allen worked last night.

Boy in the corner

Boy in the corner
Private Eye seem to have taken sides in the on-going “was Hawking wrong?” debate.

Darts for the Big Guys

Darts for the Big Guys
I mean, of course, the Shot-Put. The highlights made this event look exciting. No doubt in real time it lasted hours, but the BBC shoe-horned it into ten minutes.

It had everything that defines the modern Olympics; Grunting, a bad loser and a minute winning margin.

The USA ‘athlete’ Adam Nelson chucked first. 21 metres 16cm. Big cheers. “USA, USA”. Smug grin.

Yuri Bilonog from the Ukraine went second. If you wanted to defy the myth that all Eastern European athletes were big and pasty-faced, this wasn’t good evidence. 21.15. Doh. He threw again. 21.15. Doh again. Last throw 21.16. Get in. Oh hang on, that’s the same distance as the other guy.

Inbetween the US bloke had somehow committed a foul on every other attempt. The highlights didn’t show them all, but what they did replay was comical; lots of twisting in the ring then silence as the put rolled down his arm. One time he forgot to let go at all.

The Ukrainian won because, despite the tie, he remembered to throw the thing more often. The American looked crestfallen and sweaty, complaining to the line judge, ungracious with silver. A little joy for the Ukraine to offset their tanking at St James Park.

Bad Science at the Guardian

Bad Science at the Guardian has a crusade against You Are What You Eat’s Dr Gillian McKeith (PhD - ahem), who they point out does not really seem to have a proper PhD at all. Last week they spent much of their time moaning about this lack of real PhD, this week they take her to task for some of the science she uses. Such as Chlorophyll being “high in oxygen” which is why the dark leaves of plants are better for you. There are obviously gags a plenty in this (he kinda squanders the “gills in your stomach” one) but this cage rattling does bring up a few questions. Surely Channel 4 could hire a reputable clinical nutritionist to do the show. But maybe they would not be so judgmental, rude and/or keen on poking around in someone’s faeces*. Channel 4 is obviously more keen on making rollicking television (and selling the tie-in book) than propagating good nutritional advice.

Of course eating the dark leaves of vegetables is good advice. For a completely different reason, and unfortunately Bad Science has yet to come up with something she says which is harmful. Except intellectually. Mind you I rather like the idea that “Skid mark stools are a sign of dampness inside the body”. Show me a body that isn’t damp and I’ll show you a Mummy.

*I had a great idea for a prime-time ITV cop show in the Inspector Morse traditional called The Faecologist, about a detective who reconstructed the last hours of peoples lives from their shit. It got turned down my netweork central for the reason that there is already too much shit on ITV.

My Favourite Olympical Things (So Far)

My Favourite Olympical Things (So Far)

Pete I rise to your challenge!

- Tiny weightlifters. Big weightlifters are better represented by Worlds Strongest Wo/Man but the tiny ones are ace, how can they lift so much! The Thai lady who won her category doing call-and-response stuff with her fans was the highlight. Weightlifting is the best sport to watch so far, it looks very dangerous.

- The magic ‘who’s won’ displays in the swimming pool - how does this miracle of sports science work? It looks great, much better than the actual races.

- Only Weightlifter In Britain Michaela Breeze getting shirty with crass interviewer who asked her why she had got into weightlifting. “You’re only asking me that because I’m a woman!” - bad choice of person to offend I’d guess.

- The ‘rotational technique’ of the American shotputter which led him to one superhuman throw and then falling on his arse or dropping the putt five times in a row. He looked like he was about to explode when he failed to get gold.

- Posh wrath in the three-day eventing. Says: “The rules must be applied you know”. Thinks: “I’ll scratch your eyes out, you boche hussy!”