October 10th - October 16th 2005
Sunday Tate Modern
Saturday Tuna loin
Friday Pinter
Thursday Transported
Wednesday Etiquette
Tuesday Tv
Monday Grumpy God
Sunday 16th October 2005
Tate Modern, Autumn 2005
Saturday 15th October 2005
Safeway used to be, if not as cool as Waitrose, then at least.. acceptable. Which suited me, given that they have a branch no more than half a mile away from here.
And then they got taken over, and became Morrison, and it all went pear-shaped, socio-retailing-wise.
Morrison is now engaged in desperate rear-guard tactics, heavily promoting the up-market nature of their produce.
Chief amongst which, if you belive the ads, is something called Best Fresh Tuna Loin.Leaving aside the screaming redundancy of Best and Fresh (Second-best? Slightly stale?), I'm particularly pre-occupied by the concept of Tuna Loin.
I don't have a definition of Loin to hand, and my grasp of piscine anatomy is slippery at best, but.. I'm pretty sure that whatever body parts are required to situate a Loin on an animal are entirely absent from a Tuna.
But then again, scientists can do anything these days.
Friday 14th October 2005
LENNIE: I think you'll find there's more than one journalist down Fleet Street touching himself in his favourite places today. Giggling with glee over getting to describe that Harold Pinter as 'speechless'. Over winning the whatsit. The Nobel prize. [pause] For literature, no less.
[Pause]
It's the quotation marks, do you see? [mimes] 'Speechless'.
He said it himself. "I haven't stopped being speechless," he said.
[Pause]
Which is a paradox in itself, if you think about it.
[Pause]
But that's not my point. My point...
They'd like to say it themselves, do you see? "How about we describe him as speechless?" they'll have said. "What with the pauses, and all?"
And someone else, some sober-sided sod in a suit on the other side of the room, he'll have sat there and he'll have gone [shakes head] "Best not".
And they'll have gone, "What?"
And the old guy, the guy in the suit, he'll have looked up from his racing page, and he'll have looked them in the eye, and he'll have said: "He has cancer. Of the [pause] esophagus."
But this guy, Pinter, he said it himself.
[Pause]
Speechless. [pause]
[mimes] 'Speechless'.
Ironic, wouldn't you say?
Thursday 13th October 2005
Unlikely as it sounds, Transport for London have their own squad of stormtroopers. Although they operate at all times of day, they're particularly effective on night buses.
You're just nodding off, congratulating yourself on being simultaneously dead drunk and less than half hour from home when the bus comes to a long and unexpected halt. And suddenly there are all these stern-faced types moving in a solid phalanx down the bus, checking to make sure that each and every passenger has a valid ticket or bus pass.
Which, given that each and every passenger is too drunk to remember his or her name, let alone where they put their ticket, can take a while.
When they're expecting trouble - at night, or in West London - they wear bright yellow over-vests emblazoned with their dread calling: Revenue Protection Service.
Like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition, they're most effective when least expected. So I shouldn't have been surprised to be surprised to see a small gaggle of them standing by my bus stop home from the crowded streets of the Notting Hill carnival a month or so ago.
One of them was improbably young. And kinda cute, in a spotty-herbert kinda way. And very, very camp.
So, bold social documentarist that I am, I took his picture.
His eagle eye, trained to spot an outlaw at twenty paces, noticed me immediately.
"Make sure you get my good side!" he called out.
"Later for that," I replied.
Wednesday 12th October 2005
Courtesy of the ever-bountiful bitful, I direct you to this surreally exhaustive and extremely useful manual issued by the Social Issues Research Centre:
Natives perform the pantomime instinctively, without being aware that they are following a rigid etiquette, and without ever questioning the extraordinary handicaps - no speaking, no waving, no noise, constant alertness to subtle non-verbal signals, etc. - imposed by this etiquette.
(How to get served in a busy bar.)
Tuesday 11th October 2005
TV guide
WEST WING Season 7: Opens with a stunning flash-forward to the opening of the Josiah Bartlet Memorial Library where a gathering of former staffers await the arrival of the presidential motorcade. From the car steps...
LOST Season 2: Still lost, still suffering from tedious flashbacks, still a long way away from logic
WEEDS Season 1: Excellent, touching, funny - and starring her, the lobbyist from The West Wing with the odd mouth (plus, later, CJ Cregg as a wacky blow-lawyer)
SIX FEET UNDER Season 5: Somebody put these people out of their misery immediately - oops, looks like they've started
NIGHTY NIGHT Season 2: The scene where the heroine insists that her confidante empty an entire plateful of sperm-soaked meat and veg into her vagina marks a benchmark of sorts
OZ Season 6: Having finally dribbled to a spasmodic close in the outer late-night reaches of E4, this remains memorable as the first tv series to feature a penis in its opening credits
QUEER AS FOLK (US) Season 4: And you thought the UK series broke new ground in taboo television? Ha.
A VERY PECULIAR PRACTISE: Memo to self: just because you loved a tv series when it was first shown, don't assume you'll still love it when it's re-issued on DVD twenty(!) years later
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: See above - but it looks a lot gayer now, for some reason
BARCHESTER CHRONICLES: See above - but the vicious double-act between Alan Rickman and Geraldine McEwan is still probably the campest thing you'll see this side of Christmas
Monday 10th October 2005
For I thy God am a grumpy God
1. Let the utterance of thy mouth be suited to the audience thereof
(i.e. when talking on the telephone, adjust the volume of your discourse to the entire population within hearing distance. If it is not possible to make yourself heard to your caller without also broadcasting your impenetrable tedia to everyone in the immediate vicinity: remove yourself from the immediate vicinity.
(Do not shout out to your mother in her flat three floors up from the courtyard just because you're too lazy to run up and communicate with her at a more intimate volume.
(If you want me to send you more work, make your request at a volume that I can hear above the hum of busy computers and other ambient noise. Make an allowance for my aged ears. I am not telepathic; I am, despite appearances, merely human.
(And, when travelling on public transport, if you can't talk to your co-traveller without shouting - shut the fuck up.)
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