Giggles are hard stones in the teeth of the authoritarian

Yoani Sanchez, Cuban "Generation Y" blogger:

... as I do not feel myself a victim, I raise my skirt a little and show my legs to the two men who follow me everywhere. There is nothing more paralyzing than a woman’s calf flashing in the sun in the middle of the street. Nor am I wooden like a martyr, I try not to forget to smile, because giggles are hard stones in the teeth of the authoritarian.

(Spotted at Harry's Place.)

girl in black

a generic pretty girl
"generic angel of death", she
thought, "generic lady of pain"
Generic in black
But that was the fashion these days,
   might be anyone.

The lost art of listening

The power of forgetting

Karen Armstrong
Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian
...
People who have no religious beliefs are often willing to talk to contemplative nuns, because these women, who have embraced silence and emptiness, know how to listen. Listening is rare in our chattering society. It is often all too clear that, while their interlocutor is speaking, participants in talk-shows and phone-ins are not really listening, but thinking up the next clever thing that they want to say.
...

The return of nature to abandoned places

In the Guardian's obituary for Welsh artist Bert Isaac, Monday, April 10, 2006:

There was one subject Isaac made his own: the return of nature to abandoned places. From overgrown quarries to tin-shacked moors, he was fascinated by the transformation back to wilderness. His energetic marks and vital colours echoed the redemption wrought by the cycle of nature. The environments he conjured seemed metaphysical - one felt that by pushing through his veils and thickets one might encounter an impossible new world or enter a higher consciousness.

Fact-checkers approaching the metaphysical

Simon Hoggart's Week, The Guardian, Saturday March 18th, 2006 describes a conversation with Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor of the New Yorker:

We talked about the magazine's dreaded fact-checkers. Like hunting dogs, they never let go. Once an American friend of mine had written a profile of Margaret Thatcher and politely asked if the fact-checker could call me. He did. Again, and again. They don't just ask about simple matters of detail, but about issues which approach the metaphysical. "John writes that on her own, Margaret Thatcher likes to cook 'simple' dishes, such as Welsh rarebit and coronation chicken. I'm all right with Welsh rarebit, but could you call coronation chicken a 'simple' dish?"

But, I said cheerily, you can't have fact-checkers in the fiction department. But they do. Apparently they ran a short story in which a character goes to McDonald's for chicken nuggets. A reader wrote in triumphantly pointing out that chicken nuggets were not introduced until the following year. In New Yorker terms, that is the equivalent of the Titanic for the White Star Line, or Nick Leeson at Barings.

Shakira's opaque lyrics

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Shakira's Oral Fixation Vol 2 in The Guardian, Friday March 3, 2006:

...
[Shakira] Ripoll has provided an explanation for the cover, but then, Ripoll has a way with an explanation that makes you wonder why anyone bothered asking in the first place. This one involves Renaissance art, original sin and a desire "to attribute to Eve more reason to bite the forbidden fruit". Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that you wouldn't get anything similar passing the lips of Christina Aguilera.

Ripoll's last English-language album, 2002's Laundry Service, went platinum 13 times over, but it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that she bears a similar relation to her American pop-AOR peers as the Tropicália artists of late-1960s Brazil bore to British and American psychedelia: their sound has the same basic constituent elements, but is rearranged and amended according to some perplexing internal logic until it resembles something beamed from Mars rather than Latin America. Another way of putting it is that Ripoll is crackers.

Just how crackers is signposted the minute Oral Fixation Volume 2 hits the CD player. Anyone discombobulated by the cover image should spend a few minutes composing themselves before pressing the play button and thus being confronted by How Do You Do. The opening track features mock-Gregorian chanting by a group called Seraphic Fire, a staccato wah-wah guitar solo that bears a debt to Queen's Killer Queen and a winning chorus that you would call stadium rock were it not embellished with backing vocals sung in an inexplicable baby voice. The lyrics seem to feature Ripoll confronting God with his failings - she is angry about famine, she is angry about the Middle East and she is also angry about cats being chased by dogs. For the most part, they are so opaque that they might as well be in Latin, which indeed some of them are.

...

Picasso: art as magic

In Stealing beauty, The Guardian, Wednesday March 15, 2006, Andrew Meldrum writes of Picasso's encounter with African art:

Picasso was visiting Gertrude Stein at her Paris apartment in the spring of 1907 when Henri Matisse stopped by with an African sculpture he had just purchased. According to Matisse, the two artists were enthralled by its depiction of a human figure. Soon afterwards, Picasso went to the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology (now the Musée de l'Homme) with another artist friend, André Derain. That visit, Picasso later claimed, was pivotal to his art.

"A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately," Picasso said of the museum. "But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."

Sasha falls, young and fair

I was able to believe when everything looked a little dark and gray.

Here are two of the best articles that appeared as people were taking in what had happened. The first also appears on Sasha Cohen's own site.

After Falling, She Rises And Shines

By Sally Jenkins, Washington Post, Friday, February 24, 2006

TURIN, Italy

There was no way to prettify it. Everyone fell. On such a night, when the Olympic gold medal in figure skating went to practically the only woman left standing, it seemed right that silver was awarded to the one who did the best job of getting back up again.
...
Cohen fell in warmups. She fell on her first triple jump of the night, a lutz, when she lost her balance and landed on the back of her exquisite little red dress. And then she almost fell again, on a triple flip, when she staggered and put both hands on the ice. But somehow Cohen managed to steady herself on that ice, so scarred with skid marks, and stayed upright.

From that moment on, she began counterpunching. The triples began landing cleanly, like uppercuts. Triple loop. Triple flip. Triple toe. And then two more triple salchows. Five triple jumps in all, before she ended her four-minute free program, and skated to the sideboard where she mouthed something to her coach, John Nicks, that looked like, "I tried."

No one would land more triples among the final group of contenders. Not Arakawa, and not the bronze medalist Irina Slutskaya of Russia, who fell hard on her own triple flip, and also skipped other planned jumps.

"I was able to take one step at a time. I was able to believe when everything looked a little dark and gray," Cohen said.

The fact that skaters wear mock evening gowns makes it hard to appreciate what Cohen did. Maybe if her knees were bloody. Maybe if she wasn't such a royal figure in her garnet and gold dress, and maybe if the score of "Romeo and Juliet" hadn't been playing while she was working, it would be easier to convey the grit of her performance. Think of it this way: How often does a quarterback throw two interceptions in the first quarter but come back to throw three touchdowns and make the playoffs? What Cohen did was something similar.
...

Cohen falls down, doesn't melt down

By Ron Judd, Seattle Times staff columnist

TURIN, Italy — Figure skating is a cold business, and if you let it, the chill can run right to the bone.

How cold? This cold:

Thursday night in Turin, in what could have and should have been the dramatic highlight of the XXth Winter Olympics, American ice princess Sasha Cohen skated onto the ice, sailed into her first jump, a triple lutz — and landed flat on her backside.

And in the stands at the Palavela, an entire section of fans stood up and cheered wildly, waving Russian flags. They jumped and hooted, delighting in Cohen's misfortune because they believed it would push their own skater, Irina Slutskaya, to the top of the medal stand, completing an unprecedented gold-medal sweep in figure skating for the Russians.

Their celebration continued when Cohen, 21, made her way to the opposite end of the rink and tried another jump, a triple flip, and slid out of it, reaching down with both hands to save herself from a fall.

All this happy back-slapping continued as Cohen, rattled by her inability to land triple jumps in her warmup, struggled to pull herself back together on the ice.

The Russians had read the same script as everybody else: Cohen lays down a short program as delicate and perfect as a summer wildflower, then goes out for the free skate and creates skunk cabbage.

It looked that way. Felt that way. Hurt that way.

Except two things have changed since the last time Cohen blew apart before the world's eyes. She grew up, learning not to let a hole in the ship turn into a full-fledged sinking. And the rules of her own game changed.

Both came into play over the next three minutes, as Cohen struggled to get back into something of a rhythm.

She landed a triple loop. Survived her combination spin. Stuck a triple flip and added a double to it for good measure. Got to a place where, she said, "the music carried me through."

The rest of her free skate was not vintage Cohen — the Sasha of the short program — but her footwork was solid, her spirals superior.

"I just took it one step at a time," she said. "I was able to believe when everything was dark and gray."

Believing translated into scoring in the judges' box, where skaters now are awarded points for everything they do — including the rotations of that botched triple flip, even though it wasn't landed cleanly.
...
Undeserved? Not really, Cohen said.

"Ultimately, a medal just signifies what you've accomplished," she said.
...
"Over the past four years I've changed as a person, because my focus is not on the medal," she said. "For me, it's the experience and the process."

She's been unleashing that cliché for months. But here, once and for all, you saw that she meant it. Saddled with sore legs, a painful groin muscle, chronic back problems and an aching ankle, she missed her Wednesday practice and received ultrasound treatment and gulped down painkillers before skating. But Cohen offered none of it as an excuse.
...
She said she lives and skates now for those perfect, fleeting moments — not when the medals are handed out, but when the whole world stops spinning long enough to watch a figure skater mix grace and power the way only they can do. It is an instant, she explains, when skating "goes beyond an athletic event, and becomes an emotional experience."
...

Sasha's silver gift

There's a fluidity to her grace that's unusual, that the others lacked; and there was heart in the way she continued after the disasterous start, and in the quality of her skating, again after that start. Her nervouseness when she began made that later control more compelling, gave it a narrative arc. There was none of the fizzing, upbeat triumph of her short programme, but there was something, and it was a gift, to her, to us, or just there.

Shizuka Arakawa won by a substantial margin but played it safe, trading planned jumps in for easier ones. She was beautiful, graceful, flexible. One of the BBC2 commentators gave her the thought "anything Sasha Cohen can do, I can do", and in a way that's true, if you take it abstractly, and leaning over backwards, curved backwards, in a spin or spiral (I forget which), or letting go of a leg while keeping it vertical, she was impressive at things I'm not sure Sasha Cohen can always equal. But still there's something missing.

Irina Slutskaya also resorted to easier jumps, and still fell, departed from her planned programme to try to make up for the problems, but ended third. Sasha, so sure she'd get nothing that she'd taken off her skating constume and had to put it back on, came second. She called it a gift.

A true gift is given without expecting anything in return, but she had worked for that. What she gave, though, was given without knowing, or expecting, that result.

The Southern on her short programme:

...
Cohen's program was far from perfect, and it showed in technical marks lower than both Slutskaya and Arakawa. The landing of her double axel was curvy, and she had to fight to save it. The takeoff on her triple lutz could have been cleaner, but she made up for it in her connecting steps, transitions and spirals.

And no one sells a program better. Skating to "Dark Eyes," a Russian folk song, she was expressive for the entire program. She made eye contact with all of the judges, as if she was skating just for them.

When she stood at the edge of the rink, just before starting her straightline footwork, she gave a little shimmy of her shoulders and the crowd roared.

From there, to here:

The Baltimore Sun, Last one standing gets gold:

By Randy Harvey
Sun Reporter
...
The silver here went to Cohen, who later called it "a gift.''

Not really. Cohen, 21, skated brilliantly for three minutes. Unfortunately for her, they were the final three of her four-minute program.
...
But she fell twice in her warm-up before the final group of six skated their long programs and looked frightened, like a novice instead of the reigning U.S. champion. Nerves? Injuries?

Her night would get worse before it got better. She fell on the front end, the triple lutz, of her opening combination, then almost fell on her triple flip. But just as it seemed the crowd was about to witness a spectacular fall from grace, she began skating like, well, Cohen.

She inserted a combination she hadn't planned, a triple flip-double toe, then landed her next triple-triple.

More important was her expressiveness, her feel for the music from Romeo and Juliet. The judges gave her marks second-best only to Arakawa for artistry and the best marks for interpretation.

"It just wasn't my night,'' Cohen said. But only for one minute.
...

Sasha Cohen before the long programme

Between the short programme and the long
Falls the shadow?

Expectations? MSNBC even asks Can Sasha Cohen Save the Olympics?, but also notices what ought to matter:

What Cohen has going for her is that she is a truly beautiful skater, a skater who loses herself in the character she plays and surrenders to the passion of her music. At her best she is a true enchantment

In USA Today, Mike Lopresti comments:

Which brings us to Sasha Cohen. Possibly the last obstacle to the Russian sweep. All 5-2 of her.

She had trouble sleeping Tuesday night, so she skipped practice Wednesday. The Alpiners have gone south, the speedskaters can't get along, and the only team the men's hockey team could beat was Kazakhstan. Sasha must save the republic. And she takes the day off.

When her practice slot came in the afternoon, the music for her routine was dutifully played, to empty ice. Her coach was there to swat the flies from the press.
...
Now everyone waits for Thursday night. Nicks as much as anyone, ... "I spend all my time waiting for ladies," he said. "I waited for my sister, my mother, my girlfriend, my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter.

"And Sasha."

So how has our ferocious defender against the Russian medal horde been doing in the athletes' village? "I feel funny," Cohen said, "because figure skaters are the only ones wearing makeup."

Slate: They All Fall Down Figure skating, the world's least-graceful sport.

...
A dancer sweeps you away with her grace and flow and hides her sweat with a flourish. A world-class figure skater, on the other hand, pulls you into her own anxiety. She performs just barely above the limits of her skill, trying jumps you both know she can't always land.

The stress of these make-or-break moments overpowers whatever artistry a performance may have. What should be a choreographed composition becomes a series of near-impossible leaps strung together with idle tootling. Skaters fill up the dead time with gratuitous arm movements as they catch their breath and get in position for the next jump. Meanwhile, the announcers expect the worst.
...
What about those effortless, eye-blurring spins? I've always found them to be the most compelling part of a skater's performance. Nobody ever falls while doing a spin, but they're thrilling and graceful nonetheless. ... but none of that matters in the end ... One of the highest-scoring spins you can possibly do—a perfectly executed flying change foot combination level four—is worth just five points. You could pick up that pocket change just by flubbing a triple axel.

Here's some help with distinguishing the many different jumps.

Playing piano in the dark

Myleene Klass, asked by the Independent on Sunday, 12 February 2006, about her favourite things:

Way to relax 'Turning off all the lights and playing piano in the dark. There's a song title in there.'

Word 'I love "onomatopoeia". And I like "acciaccatura" – it's a musical term. It's satisfying to say, and kind of onomatopoeic.

Coffee's one thing, but coke is another

Coffee's one thing, but coke is another
-- Jennifer Love Hewitt

Hollywood actress Jennifer Love Hewitt believes bosses at fashion retail chain H&M have done Kate Moss "a favour" by dumping her as the company's spokesmodel.

"I have to say that I think maybe they did her a favour, and maybe she'll actually get help. Coffee's one thing, but coke is another. It's not something you want to really have as a problem in your life.

"I think we have to kind of stop rewarding bad behaviour and actually start helping people.

"You know when you're out in public that there are gonna be people who watching you, so you should just try to act like somebody that you would wanna be proud of if they got a photo of you. Not that you should always feel like you're always working, but it goes with the job, I think."

Beauty and the bust

Jess Cartner-Morley
Friday September 23, 2005
The Guardian

For a graphic illustration of double standards in the fashion industry, take a look at this week's issue of Grazia, the celebrity and fashion magazine. On the front, inevitably, is a paparazzi photograph of Kate Moss. She is wearing enormous sunglasses, her hair is tousled and wild; she looks sullen and troubled, as well she might, and possibly hung over - which will surprise nobody who has been conscious in the past eight days. "Kate in crisis: broken and vulnerable," reads the cover's headline.

Now turn to the back cover for another picture of Moss. Again she is wearing enormous sunglasses, her hair untamed; the camera has captured the same signature Moss expression, moody, knowing, vaguely petulant. The caption on this picture reads simply "Dior". It is an advert for sunglasses.

Stereotyping saves lives

In TheGuardian, Wednesday October 5, 2005, Matt Seaton writes of the "astonishing - and possibly a little outrageous - number of stereotypes [cyclists] carry around in [their] heads":

the assorted sinners of the road-going universe: U-turning black cabbies, oblivious bus drivers, flash gits in sports cars, school-run mums in SUVs, Royal Mail truck drivers "going postal", the ubiquitous white-van man.

He then turns to stereotypes drivers - and other cyclists - might have of cyclists: "lycra lout", "nodders" ("casual riders to nod their heads up and down as they pedal"), "courier-dude" (no breaks), "messenger-wannabe" (has breaks), "campaigner-commuter", "sit-up-and-beggar", "mountainbike-macho". Finally, the uncomfortable point:

It is easy to get offended by such reductive labels. But it's not just blind prejudice; we use them to predict driver behaviour. For example, Q: what is the likelihood of this vehicle ahead of me at the lights turning left without indicating? A: taxi 10%, white van 40%, SUV man talking on his mobile 90%, etc. And I suspect motorists are watching cyclists and doing the maths. Stereotypes? Don't knock 'em. They keep us alive.

Ashes of roses

I was reading Ditch Monkey: Ferrero Roche, and the phrase "ashes of roses" cought my eye:

Last night was a bit of a contrast to the normal Wood living antics, it started off at the a Fashion show at the Argentinean Ambassador’s residence, lots of clothes, lots of models wearing stuff like this http://www.ashesofroses.com/ lots of champagne and a whole bunch of mischief. From there I managed to find my way to Brick Lane, somehow loosing my friends and wallet on the way. When I got there I discovered another fashion show going on, this time all the clothes had been created from recycled clothes. ...

I was thinking Ashes of roses might be something goth-romantic, and maybe it is; but a look on the web suggested a possible source for the phrase in a novel, Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch, page 52:

I carefully unpacked my good dress and smoothed out the creases. Ma had made it for me just a few months before we left. In Limerick she was a seamstress for a fancy shop on O'Connell Street, and they paid her only a small fraction of what they sold the dresses for. The shop owner must have felt guilty about that, because every now and then he'd let Ma have some fabric, usually something that was damaged. The piece she made my dress of was silk taffeta in a new color called "ashes of roses." It had some water stains on it, but Ma cut the pattern so none of them showed. I'd never had anything quite so grand. Though I tried not to be prideful, I couldn't help but notice in the mirror how the soft rose colour brought out the blush in my cheeks.

There is also a poem by Elaine Goodale Eastman:

Ashes of Roses

Soft on the sunset sky
   Bright daylight closes,
Leaving, when light doth die,
Pale hues that mingling lie —
   Ashes of roses.

When love’s warm sun is set,
   Love’s brightness closes;
Eyes with hot tears are wet,
In hearts there linger yet
   Ashes of roses.

Only women read

In Hello, would you like a free book?, The Guardian Tuesday September 20, 2005, Ian McEwan reports what happened when he tried to give away novels:

Every young woman we approached - in central London practically everyone seems young - was eager and grateful to take a book. Some riffled through the pile murmuring, "Read that, read that, read that ..." before making a choice. Others asked for two, or even three.

The guys were a different proposition. They frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. "Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks mate, but no." Only one sensitive male soul was tempted.

As in the 18th century, so in the 21st. Cognitive psychologists with their innatist views tell us that women work with a finer mesh of emotional understanding than men. The novel - by that view the most feminine of forms - answers to their biologically ordained skills. From other rooms in the teeming mansion of the social sciences, there are others who insist that it is all down to conditioning. But perhaps the causes are less interesting than the facts themselves. Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Not only that. Only women watch television. Here's Charlie Brooker on why men are portrayed as morons in shows such as He's Having a Baby (men fumble tasks regularly managed by moms) and Bring Your Husband To Heel (a dog trainer teaches men to behave) even though most network controllers are men amd "ultimately men are nodding these through":

Well, since the ... study of demographics became a number one priority in TV land, it's been noted that men are a tough audience to snare. So perhaps it's an act of revenge. Here's a quote in which Nick Elliot, ITV's controller of drama, explains why most of his output is aimed at women:

"You can bash your head against a brick wall trying to make dramas for 16- to 34-year-old males, but if they only want to watch football or videos and PlayStation, there's no point ... I'm not sure what a very male drama is. Maybe it's about business or something. We do guns and violence for boys occasionally... We actually thought Footballers' Wives would appeal to men, but it doesn't very much ... they soon suss out it isn't about football."

Jesus! He hates men! And no wonder: from the sounds of it, they're morons! Because that's what you see when you study any demographic: a hateful, ignorant, unthinking mass. And in this case, a mass which doesn't watch much telly.

Everyone in telly studies demographics. And I think that's why they hate us.

"Screen burn: Surface male", The Guardian, Saturday September 17, 2005.

Talk like a pirate day

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

But how does one talk like a pirate beyond saying "Arrr", or "Ahoy!", or "Jim lad"?

(Talking like a pirate's parrot might be easier. "Arrawk!", "pieces of eight!", "dead man's chest!". Priate's parrots can be random and ironic.)

Naturally, the web has the answer. Or an answer. Here it is:

• Double up on all your adjectives... Pirates never speak of "a big ship", they call it a "great, grand ship!" They never say never, they say "No nay ne'er!"
• Drop all your "g"'s when you speak and you'll get words like "rowin'", "sailin'" and "fightin'". Dropping all of your "v"'s will get you words like "ne'er", "e'er" and "o'er".
• Instead of saying "I am", sailors say, "I be". Instead of saying "You are", sailors say, "You be". Instead of saying, "They are", sailors say, "They be". Ne'er speak in anythin' but the present tense!

Thanks to The Talk Like a Pirate Day UK HQ, which also provides a clue as to how it all started:

International Talk Like A Pirate Day began in the mists of the 1990s, when two Yankees, John Baur (Ol' Chum Bucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), be talkin' like pirates all o'a sudden. They decided that, to further the noble causes of the sweet trade of piracy, September 19 each year be the day when all souls over the world should be talkin' like pirates. For years, their valiant efforts were wasted, until they contacted a man by the name of Dave Barry, who be writin' a humour column for the great masses o' landlubbers out yonder. ...

Of course, on this site Pirate Day calls for pictures of Sam from the Big Brother 6 Pirate Task. Sam was the most loyal member of Captain Science's crew (mutinous, scurvy dogs, who failed the task on its first day), but I think only Science tried to talk in-character.

Indeed, it took the lubbers only an hour and a half to fail.

Stop Press: This Ship Has Sunk
Day 19, 22:30

The Housemates can swashbuckle all they want but it won't change the fact that they have already failed the pirate task.

Incredibly, their chances were scuppered just an hour and a half into their voyage on the high seas.

Thanks to shoddy shipmates Anthony, Saskia and Maxwell forgetting to don their hats, the crew incurred three fails. Big Beard ordered only two a day would be acceptable.
...

The soundtrack of this site: Transvision Vamp

Why Transvision Vamp?

Because it's a revolution, baby, and I don't care; because Wendy James was the perfect bleached blonde trash-pop goddess; and because they did a cover of Holly Beth Vincent's "Tell that girl to shut up".

Wendy James has recently reappeared as Racine, writing, producing, and playing all the instruments.

Links:
We Are Transvision Vamp!
The Racine World

Hated Heroine: Katie Leung

Scottish actress Katie Leung, who plays Harry Potter's Goblet of Fire love interest Cho Chang, became the subject of hate sites when she got the part. In a widely reported item in the UK October issue of Good Housekeeping, she said

"Looking different from most of the people at school never caused me any problems. Still, I never expected the hate sites that popped up on the internet after I got the part in the film. I couldn’t understand why people were so angry - a lot of the messages were from jealous girls who didn’t like the fact that I play Harry’s love interest in the film and some of them did bring my ethnicity into it."

The September 11, 2005 Sunday Mail provides more detail:

Comments printed on the "Hate Katie" sites include: "I hate her because she is stupid, dumb, an idiot and gets to play Cho Chang.

"And, oh... she gets to kiss Daniel Radcliffe."

Other comments attack her looks as 'ugly' and 'bizarrely too Eastern', poke fun at her Scottish background and mock her soft Scottish accent.

But there have been others even more coarse and explicitly racist.

However, the story goes back to an article, "Harry Potter and the Poisoned Chalice", that appeared in the Mail on Sunday on April 10, 2005. This being a Harry Potter story, it was bound to be possible to find the complete article somewhere, and somewhere tuned out to be a page at Veritaserum. Here's part:

Despite being deliberately kept under wraps by Warner - without public appearances, interviews, or official pictures - the slender and shy student has become a hate figure for obsessive Potter fans.

Scores of fake websites have sprung up, some apparently giving her thoughts and feelings in diary form. ...

Most disturbing are several 'hate Katie' sites where youngsters are encouraged to explain in graphic detail why they loathe the dark-haired beauty. One site has e-mails with statements such as: 'I hate Katie Leung till the end of time.'
...
There are racist comments too crude to print, many using the coarsest language. Some come from angry fans of established Korean and Chinese actresses who failed to get an audition. This is because Potter creator J.K. Rowling insisted that the girl whose caress transforms the bespectacled Harry from boy to love-struck adolescent has to be a complete unknown.

The natural reaction is sympathy for the actress, combined with disgust at what is being said, but sometimes there is something else that will be familiar to many who have followed internet discussions of Big Brother housemates: a curious admixture of "What did she expect?". For example, a forum thread, "Katie Leung - the price of fame", at SnitchSneeker.com, where one post by DramaticJourno includes:

The recent Katie issue is the most perfect example of fame's cost. The truth is, quite a lot of young people who dream of becoming a successful actor or actress want the job in order to become 'famous'.
...
It's all part of the celebrity obsession. ... Teenagers aspire to be the stars of tomorrow, ... youngsters ... assume that they can rise to fame overnight.

However, Katie Leung's rise to fame practically did appear overnight. The once-unknown student is now the envy of thousands of girls across the globe, who have become so bitter that they are taking to internet abuse to let out their anger. It's a huge step for Katie, and even though I personally pity her, my main thought is, 'Well what did she expect?'

Having a sought-after part in a huge movie is bound to spark fury somewhere along the line. hoever you are, not everyone is going to like you. Hatelistings and nasty webpages are upsetting, but it really is all part of being a rising star, and should really be expected. Everyone gets bad press; it's a fact of being famous. ...

Yet being just seventeen, it is understandable why such negativity could be worrying Katie.

But alas...she wanted to be Cho, and should have realised in the first place that bad aspects were obviously going to be experienced as well as good. Though it is simply astonishing what things can be said about a girl nobody knows; who is not due to make her screen debut until later this year.

On the whole, the article is sympathetic, and it makes some well-observed points. However, on this one issue, the reasoning takes a slightly odd turn. What's being said about her is "simply astonishing", but ... she should have expected it.

One thing missing from all of the articles I've seen so far is any sense that the internet has brought out something new. Yet whatever nasty things rising stars had to face in the past, webpages containing comments "too crude to print" were not among them. Yes, a few people might write hate-filled letters, but they couldn't so easily find, and be encouraged by, others with similar opinions.

Overrated Heroine: Kate Moss

From coolest woman in the world to raddled druggie in just a few days.

Or: in no days at all. For here is Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian on Thursday September 15, 2005, the very day in which the Daily Mirror published the fateful photos, explaining Why Kate Moss is the coolest woman on earth:

The power politics of fashion's inner sanctum are opaque to all outside it, and so riven with Chinese whispers that most of those on the inside are only pretending to know what's going on. ... Elsewhere, the dynamics of style are fairly self-evident: a pretty girl - Sienna Miller, for instance - wears nice clothes, gets film-star boyfriend, so we all copy her for a bit. After a while we get bored of her look and start slagging her off instead. Often, this happens at about the same point the film star boyfriend gets bored and starts slagging around, which is a bit brutal, but there you go.

But fashion's top tier has a pecking order all its own. At this level, such mundane considerations as pretty dresses and It handbags will get you precisely nowhere. ... Anna Wintour sits with her arms and legs crossed, with no handbag, just a tiny mobile phone in a tiny hand. Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue, has fine, raven hair with no extensions or highlights, is sinewy-thin but without fake breasts, and has a lopsided-sexy smile that is likened to either Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop, depending on whether she turned you down for a job. She is unlikely to grace the cover of Heat. Within the industry, however, the influence of her look is so great that Tom Ford considered her his muse while designing for Gucci.

Roitfeld - and this is the news that seems to have prompted the article - is letting Kate guest edit the December issue of French Vogue.

"There is something magical about Kate," said Roitfeld. Of course, this statement only confirms what Heat readers have known for years, but therein lies the impact: the greatest mass fashion icon is being given the ultimate seal of critical approval.
...
Moss's influence over fashion grows by the minute. She stalks the catwalks and corridors of fashion power looking mischievous and haughty at the same time, like Madame de Pompadour, only slightly less chaste. By the simple technique of almost never uttering a word to the press, she has perfected a public persona that makes Anna Wintour - probably her only remaining rival for the title of fashion's most influential woman - look cuddly and approachable. Moss, who as a model understands full well that even icons have to keep up, currently has two public looks. One is accessorised with a waistcoat, Pete Doherty, a bottle of beer and sunglasses which hint at late, late nights; the other is elegant and decadent, in an F Scott Fitzgerald kind of way, all expensive evening gowns and gin and tonics. The theme for Moss's 30th birthday party at Claridges, after all, was "the beautiful and the damned".
...

Some of the oddities of Britain's celebrity obsession can be glimpsed in that article. The "dynamics of style" are treated as something that just happens. We just "start slagging her off", for no particular reason, when we "get bored of her look", rather than just ... getting bored, and moving on to someone else. And that has supposedly happened with Sienna Miller? "At about the same point the film star boyfriend gets bored"? I wonder if it has, in any lasting way. She still seems popular enough to me.

Heat is mentioned, without anything about its role in style / slagging dynamics; and although Carine Roitfeld is "unlikely to grace the cover", Heat readers were supposedly years ahead of her in knowing "there is something magical about Kate."

Now a dynamic has many slagging Kate off instead, led by the press; but will the public follow?

In more innocent times, just two days before, Marina Hyde's chosen criticism in her gently mocking So you couldn't quite get your head around A Brief History of Time? was merely distress at Kate's voice:

Profoundly troubling as it is to learn that Kate Moss is considering quitting Britain, one has to agree she has no choice if she is to preserve her myth.

For years, the supermodel has turned down all requests for interviews and refused to comment on any story. So many photographs coupled with so few words have contrived to surround her with an air of beautiful, fascinating mystery. ...

But Who the F*** is Pete Doherty?, the recent BBC3 documentary about her on-off Babyshambles singer boyfriend, changed all that irrevocably. Initially all seemed well. There was footage of Kate laughing silently, lounging silently, and dancing silently. Then there was footage of her arriving at Glastonbury (silently) while music, always incidental music, swirled round her heavenly form.

At which point there was a sound akin to the needle being abruptly scraped off a record. "Oh my God!" she screeched at some acquaintance in gratingly strident tones. "You've no idea what a facking nightmare we've had getting here ..."

Mossy. It's over. Bon voyage.

Born to be sold

All you hot shot, big buck
Sweet talking, side walking
Foot tapping, tail wagging
Back stabbing, money grabbing
Slaves of gold
I'm telling you, I don't need to be told
I cross my heart, rock my soul
Baby I was born to be sold
I was born to be sold
- Transvision Vamp

This is just a reminder (I need one somewhere) that television and radio are different from everything else in that the people who would normally be the customers - the viewers and listeners - don't pay. Instead, they're sold. Advertisers pay for access to the audience, which is why broadcasters care so much about audience demographics.

(Of course, newspapers and magazines do the same, but in a less pure form.)

Living in a ditch, living in an Oxford ditch

Hugh Sawyer, 32, Oxford law graduate, Sotheby's bids department by day, ... ditch in the woods by night.

"I want to make people think about how much they consume that is not necessary," he told The Observer. "I am trying to prove it is possible to do everything you normally do, maintaining a full existence, while cutting back. I have realised I can lead my life without television, carpets, sofa, electricity, chairs, tables, a fridge and a freezer."

He's also trying to raise money for the Woodland Trust. (There's a link in his blog to a site where you can make donations.)

He has clothes, books, and photographs in a rucksack, a cooking stove, a sleeping bad, and a tarp for rain. A hammock also seems to be involved. This seems totally inadequate to me. What? Not even a tent? Nor, it seems, a torch. When it's dark, he just has trouble finding things. He started with six weeks, found that "quite easy", and now aims for a year.

It's not clear that he literally lives in a ditch (is there something wrong with flat ground?), though The Observer has a picture of him bedding down "in his Oxfordshire ditch", with a small radio in his hand and what looks like a suit jacket and tie hanging over a fence wire.

A quote from the blog:

I believe that I thought the hammock to be the most comfortable thing in the world last week when I tried it for the first time after three months of sleeping on the ground. Having just spent a week in a hotel sleeping in bed wider that I am tall I think that I might have been a little hasty with my previous beliefs. However, it was certainly nice to sleep out in the fresh air again and to hear the owls, deer and badgers. I wasn’t so sure about the Owl that woke me at about 3 am by screeching from just above my head, or the deer that woke me up by barking or even the badger that woke me up by scratching about under the hammock but other than that it was fine.

The Observer quotes psychologist John Collins saying "if he sticks it out for a year, it will be difficult for him to return to the noise of the city." Yet he works in the city, and it's not exactly noiseless where he sleeps.

"The woods are not a quiet place at night as all the animals go about their business so it takes a bit of time to get used to all the movements I guess," he writes in another blog entry; and in one for Thursday, September 08, 2005, he complains about being kept awake by police helicopters!

There's something appealing about having fewer things, but I wouldn't want to lose books, or music. (I've just turned on a radio.) Still, I think I could do without television, that "drug of the nation". Television is often unsatisfying, disposable, or just plain irritating. Is there any other area where so many people are paid so much to produce rubbish?

His blog: Ditch Monkey
Observer article, Sunday 4 September, 2005.
Guardian article, Friday 9 September, 2005.

No happy ending

Charlie Courtauld reviewing Children of Beslan in The Independent on Sunday, 4 September 2005:

One year on from the siege of School No 1 - the three-day terrorist attack which left 371 dead - the surviving youngsters relived the nightmare in their own words. Stripped of voice-over, the film was stark in it's simplicity: just children speaking, with translation via subtitles. A few years ago - before The Second Russian Revolution - programme-makers might have shied from the prospect of an all-subtitle show. No longer, thank goodness: for programmes like this - where cadence counts for so much - subtitles are infinitely preferable to voiced translation. Those left in Beslan displayed dreadful survivors' guilt: "We're serious now," one boy asserted. "We don't fight. We're gorwn-ups." I guess he was eight.

There was no mawkish happy ending either. These children won't forgive or forget. One girl, Laima, draws endless pictures of the terrorists -- and then burns them: "It's impossible to get enough revenge," she insists.

Learning films by heart, aiming for perfection

In the Saturday September 3, 2005 Guardian, Mark Lawson considered the implications of the increasing popularity of DVDs. Most of it was about whether the "old-fashioned picture house experience" would survive; but towards the end was something more interesting:

But DVD's greatest achievement has been to transform the nature of the memory of entertainment. In the past, the viewer of cinema or television was subject both to short-term amnesia (the misunderstood plot-twist, the punchline obliterated by a laugh or cough) and to long-term memory-loss: you were lucky to see a classic twice in your lifetime. It's true that video began to intensify recollection, but DVD, with its chapter selection and commentaries, has permitted total recall. If someone likes a film or TV show now, they can know it as well as poems learned by rote at school.

DVD was much praised on this account at last weekend's Edinburgh International Television Festival. The dramatist Stephen Poliakoff, who left the BBC for cinema in the 80s after his play Soft Targets was screened only once, now knows that his work can be repeated at the viewer's private pleasure.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant revealed that the knowledge that The Office and Extras would be chapter-selected, frozen and rewound encouraged them to aim for perfectionism.

For more, see the full article, "Movie revolution: The popcorn gang can no longer hold back the march of the DVD."

The way people watch, and understand, reality shows must also be affected by the widespread use of video, DVD, and hard disk recorders; and this will include the aspects that would normally be the most ephemeral, such as the Big Brother live stream. (Yet so far this has not caused BB housemates to "aim for perfection".)

Hated Heroines: teenage moms

“I might be a teenage mom, but it does not mean you have to be a failure.

Hannah White managed ten GCSEs, seven at A or A*, despite giving birth part way through Here's The Observer, on Sunday, August 28, 2005:

Teenage mother Hannah White is celebrating GCSE success despite going into labour half way through her exams. The 16-year-old from Bisham, near Blackpool, got 10 GCSEs - seven at A* and A - and wants to become a doctor. She had sat six subjects before going into labour just hours after an English Literature exam. She gave birth to 7lb 15oz Ebony at 5am the next morning. She then sat a 90-minute Religious Studies exam in a hospital side room the following day.

The Sun takes up the story:

“An exam invigilator came to the hospital with a copy of the paper.

“We had to go into a special room where she held Ebony on her knee while I did the exam.

“I wasn’t tired — all I remember is being on a massive high. I wanted to run about after the birth.

“All I wanted to do was cuddle my baby girl but I knew I had worked so hard so I thought I might as well give it a go.”

In The Guardian, Laura Barton's "Sidelines" wrapped it in heroine spin:

Gymslip mums, they're only in it for the council flat, right? No siree bob. And certainly not Hannah White ... My, the Daily Mail must be fuming.

Lady in red, what have you said?

Childe Samantha to the BB final came.

A gum-chewing gamine in a red dress, asked by Davina, Sam had her chance in front of C4's millions to say what she had been doing since leaving the Big Brother house, and she said: "lots of modelling and getting men on a p*rn site."

Take a moment to leap to whatever conclusion those words suggest.

Many landed with the thought that Sam was appearing on the site herself, though the truth is very different. Even the "p*rn" part is questionable. Fortunately, everything else she's said about it has been clearer.

Sam wants to create a magazine for women that would would feature "naked men". She'd researched it as a student and thought the "new ladette" culture meant there was a gap in the market. She also describes it as like a lad's mag such as FHM, so perhaps the men wouldn't quite be naked after all. The website is a related idea, perhaps just an easier to produce version.

None of that would be clear to most of C4's viewers, unless she made it clear, so why say something so cryptic to the largest audience she's ever likely to get?

So far (early September), Sam's website is still the barest sketch of an idea, a single page of what appears to be hand-crafted HTML. Whether she will ever develop her idea beyond that remains unclear.

The soundtrack of this site: Holly Beth Vincent

You better tell that girl to shut up
Tell that girl I'm gonna beat her up
You better tell that girl, tell that girl, tell that girrrl.

Holly Beth Vincent's "Tell that girl to shut up" doesn't quite fit Sam's situation, but we're all postmodern quotists now, and any excuse will do for a good song.

Holly Beth Vincent, vocals, guitar, and songwriter for Holly and the Italians is one of the great power pop "might have been"s of the 80s. She could write, play, and sing to match the best, but by the time the Italians' album, The Right to be Italian, was released the right moment had passed, and the timing, plus the band's name, made them seem manufactured to those who didn't pay close attention to the credits.

Her subsequent solo album, confusingly entitled Holly and the Italians, is a work of genre-transcending brilliance, and Holly does virtually everything on it. Mandolins and trumpets join rock instruments in a melancholy wall of sound.

Both records have been re-released on CD. (Buy them now!)

(Martha and the Marbles are supposedly the closest present-day equivalent, but I remain to be convinced.)

Listen

Help Heat: be too thin

The Monday, August 15, 2005 Media Guardian's Media Monkey column has noticed Heat's obsessional too-skinny themette:

Followers of Heat magazine may be feeling a little confused. The Emap title, which began life as an entertainment bible before switching its focus to celebrity shagging, now appears to have morphed into a groovy edition of Weight Watchers. Barely a week goes by without it obsessing about the weight of one celebrity or another .... Perhaps the answer might be that when they put "skinny" on the front cover, sales leapfrog over the 600,000 mark.

So think again, skinny celebs. Do you want to help these people who are exploiting you?

Questions: Why do celebs (and it seems to be women in particular) get so thin? A slender, toned body looks better, and healthier, so why go further? And what does Heat think it's doing here (apart from making money), especially since it's also fond of celeb "new look", "how I lost weight" articles?

They'd tell our girl to shut up

Sam's enemies. They deserve only a minor role in themselves, on this site; but they can sometimes stand for something larger. They are:

• Other housemates: the Bedroom B******, the Dark Deceiver, TLT, Team Smug;
  
• Big Brother in its many branches, including Big Brother's Little Brother guests such as:
  
• Polly Hudson, sarcastic "Pollymeter" Big Brother columnist for the Mirror and writer at large for:
  
• Heat magazine. (It's an anagram of "hate", you know.)

BTW, does Heat still have its Big Brother helpline:

Heat's Big Brother helpline was a huge success this year again with top counsellor Phillip Hodson being inundated with calls. ... Five of the callers were actually crying and were so distressed they couldn't speak clearly. ... Most callers were normal viewers who had just got sucked into Big Brother, watching it on the internet and E4 for large parts of the day, and who now felt at a loss.

Phillip says, "I told them that even though it's only a television programme, it's about real people. The feelings you have are real. You have invested a large amount of time in these people and have interacted and bonded with them. It's completely natural to feel attached to them and therefore experience a sense of loss when they are gone." ...

Source: Heat Magazine, 30 July 2001

Real people weren't being real enough

I was just watching Lost Revealed, and that remark, from John Harlow of The Sunday Times, struck me as something to bear in mind when reflecting on Big Brother. Lost was being compared to Survivor, and a woman was shown saying the characters in Lost had started to seem more real to her than the ones in the reality show. Then: "real people weren't being real enough."

That could be right. Big Brother housemates can be boring, repetitive, or one-dimensional in ways that fictional characters would never be allowed to be, and that real life doesn't seem to be either. Perhaps television filters out so much that only the hightened reality of fiction, and acting, can get through without too much loss.

Or perhaps we're just so used to fiction on tv - to the narrative speed and to the intensity and significance of each scene - that real life in real time seems stretched out and slow.

Somewhere in between we'd find the highlights shows constructed by editing the events of the day before. (Cue huge debate about the aims and effects of editing in Big Brother? Not yet.)

She told that girl to shut up

Sweet Sam, s=xy Sam, sad, tearful Sam: Sam Heuston --- enigmatic, quirky, a bikini-loving beauty with an expressive face. She's been called "the shining light in a dark, dark TV show" and "a geometric, revolving world of shadow and light". She's been thought to be everything "from snidey b****, to s=x-mad maniac, to twitching nutcase, to giggly airhead, to sweet, generous girl, to strong, opinionated young woman." (I thank various posters to internet forums for those kind and unkind words.)

For her first two weeks in Big Brother 6, Samantha Heuston was best known for wearing bikinis in all weather, for oddly-timed, sometimes derisive laughter, for sitting in thought "while expressions passed over her face like cloud shadows on a summer day", for quick (but quickly fading) smiles, and for saying "shut up" and "f off" to her tormenters.

In her eviction interview, she called that her "'shut up' phase", and that was the inspiration for this blog.

I'll use it to post news about Sam, comments on Big Brother, and - why stop there? - my reactions to Britain's celebrity obsession and its distrust of beauty, to media bias and spin, to the hates of Heat, and to anything else that makes me want to enter a "shut up" phase of my own.