February 4th - February 10th 2002
Sunday Bone Idol
Saturday Marcus - Meatballs
Friday Original content
Thursday Ex-tra, Ex-tra
Wednesday Placemats
Tuesday Vixens
Monday Massow - Massive
Sunday 10th February 2002
Now that (contrary to predictions from Popbitch) Will Young is new Pop Idol maybe I can get a break from the recent run of search requests here at Blogadoon:
"amy gehring"
Gareth Gates web pages
gareth gates underwear
"gareth gates" naked
gareth gates pictures gay
pictures of Gareth Gates and William Young from Pop Idol
naked underage little girls from Holland
"Amy Gehring" nude
amy gehring
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gareth gates naked
"will young" + gay + "pop idol"
"will young" + gay + "pop idol"
"will young" pop idol gay
gareth gates pictures
"amy Gehring" naked
Gareth Gates sex
ivan massow
"will young" pop idol gay
How come no-one wants to see "Will Young naked"? Or "Ivan Massow naked" for that matter? I know I do.
Next up, something I could win: Bone Idle - write your own rules, I can't be arsed.
Knew there had to be something amusing amidst all the hagiographic coverage of the death of Princess Margaret and here it is:
Two skinheads arrived, bearing lavish sprays of lilies. One, clad in a black jacket with a small ring in his eyebrow, said: "I think the Queen should be left to grieve in her own way this time, and not hounded as she was over the death of Diana. After all, she's lost a sister." His friend, with a thick neck chain, said: "Princess Margaret was someone who made her own life and her own rules."
Maybe they were chums of Prince Charles recently-resigned spin doctor, Mark Bolland, endlessly praised as "sensitive" (i.e. musical).
One of the many things I don't understand about Bolland is why no-one takes exception to the fact that, in order to take on his job with Prince Charles, he ceded his position as director of the Press Complaints Commission to his boyfriend Guy Black.
Heaven knows what their sex-life is like, or even if they have one, but it's hardly what one would call an arms-length relationship...
Saturday 9th February 2002
Friday 8th February 2002
"There is so little that's original on the web these days. Everything seems a bit recycled, plagiarised, stolen, revisited, reworked, repackaged.
"Especially in the personal publishing world."
Thus spake Meg - to a chorus of comment.
Very tempting to just post the quote and leave it at that, thereby proving Meg's point, tee hee hee. But that seems a little adolescent. (Not that I have a problem with adolescence.) (For problems with adolescents, see King J.)
Indeed, simply quoting Meg's obiter dicta is already becoming something of a...
Fad.
You thought I was going to call it a meme, didn't you? Think again; a meme is something which develops - take it, run with it, but don't put it down in the same place that you picked it up. Merely copying what somebody else has already done, noticed, linked to... that's not a meme - that's a fad.
I know that the whole blog-thang started as a best-of-the-web tool. But that was long ago and far away, before the Guardian discovered the whacky world of weblogs, before the writers threatened to outnumber the readers, before (in Baudrillard's phrase) the map became the territory.
These days, I don't see much point in merely re-reporting what other, more widely-read blogistas have already discovered for themselves. That's one reason you don't find a whole lotta linky goodness here at Blogadoon. (The other is that all those externals only work if you have a fast connection and a job that you're avoiding, neither of which applies in my case.)
Slightly against my better judgement, Blogadoon's fall-back position on content is to pick up stories from the press. As a rule, I try to do that only if I can add at least a little value to the original story (more often than not by liberally sprinkling it with snide®.)
I justify that policy by noting how little time people have these days for traditional news-media (let alone comparative esoterica like the LRB.) But, at best, it's second-best.
The one sure way to coin genuinely original content is to talk about your own life, be it the small-change of conversations at bus-stops, bars and saunas or - more difficult - the high-denomination issues that provide one's pleasure or one's pain (cf. toothache, itself something of a meme at the moment.)
That sort of personal content shnot easy to write, and v. v. difficult to write well, requiring as it does both partial observation and objective analysis. By the time you've decided how you feel about something, the topic has morphed beneath you and you find yourself back in the room you started from, with the floor where the ceiling used to be.
Which no doubt explains why so many blogs so often end up being about biscuits.
And...beans.
Pop Idol is creating quite enough hoo-hah without me throwing any pebbles in its pond - but am I the only one who sees a glancing similarity between Will and a well-regarded UK blogger?
"Who is our broad-stroked impressionist yet word-ly postmodern king? Living Proof, the Cher album himself, my dream lover, the houseboy barista, pretty's stunt double. A walk in the park with trying harder for less hardness. A sensation almost edible. As a lover of cheese sandwiches, I'd eat his cheese daily."
Philo on Richard. And quite right too.
Intrepid reporters who smuggled themselves into the closed 'spokes-meetings' organised by anti-globalisation protesters in New York recently reported that, in order to save time, participants were required to refrain from clapping.
To register approval of a speech, the audience could twinkle by silently raising their hands in the air and waggling their fingers.
I bet some of the powers-that-be who had to sit through the president's State of the Union message in Washington last week wish they'd known about it. Watching the crowd haul themselves up for yet another standing ovation at the end of each phrase, like arterio-sclerotic waves breaking on a beach, brought twinges to my knees.
Thursday 7th February 2002
Uh? What's that noise? ring-ring ring-ring ring-ring... My god, it's the landline!
Me: Hello?
He: Oh, so you're answering the phone these days.
Me: First time it's rung for six months. Hello.
He: Since you obviously couldn't be bothered to ring Louise and wish her happy new year...
Me: Look, if the first sentence of the first conversation we've had for a year is going to consist of you scolding me, we might as well stop now.
He: Don't be silly! Gosh, you're so sensitive!
Me: And there you have the predictable second and third sentence.
He: Perhaps I'll ring you back when you're in a better mood.
Me: Good idea.
-click-
Yes, indeed. My ex is in town.
Dick Van Dyke Cockney, Advanced Level. Overheard at the Limehouse Health Club very early this morning: "Oh please, the day you give up smoking is the day I take it up the shitter."
Wednesday 6th February 2002
Salutary warning to anybody who, like me, has been carrying a toothache around for a couple of weeks in the faint hope that it will Just Go Away: the next appointment my dentist has free is in a fortnight's time.
Just what I need: more time to perfect my sardonic routine about "...jaw has more holes than the Cheshire Gorge...don't stand too close or you'll hear the echo..."
Damn: the only in-joke I'd prepared earlier and I forgot all about it. I was going to lean into the fevered pop-quiz discussion at some stage and hiss: The Placemats! Hate it when that happens, don't you?
The little clockwork wheels of the universe turn, in their well ordered way, and produce not only a troubled_diva for the Pop Quiz but a Pop Quiz for the troubled_diva, a Pop Quiz so precisely typical that it could have been ordered on a plate with a side-order of fries and a piece of limp lettuce.
Typical inasmuch as the place was full without being crowded. Typical inasmuch as there was money at stake but not much. Typical inasmuch as our team, despite our visiting expert, still managed to lose by half a point.
Typical, too, inasmuch as there was not one question to which I knew the answer. That's not failure-to-know as in "Oooh, wait, tip of my tongue, ah!" but failure-to-know as in "Hmm. Nope."
Come again soon, Mike, and let me impress you some more.
Tuesday 5th February 2002
Ivan Massow resigned as chairman of the ICA last night.
From inside her paper bag, artist Tracey Emin is quoted (elsewhere) as saying: "This makes no difference to me, but he was offensive to me - he attacked my intellect, which was unfair. He is a fox hunter, after all. Think about vixens."
Right.
American readers may be forgiven for not knowing who Jordan is. English readers, too, unless they read the News of the World with any degree of dedication.
Jordan is, as far as I can tell, a woman with just two talents - both of them mounted on her chest. And she has a nose for publicity second only to the blood-lust of a shark.
On Sunday, the pregnant 23-year-old model announced to the world that she will be broadcasting the birth of her child live on the interwebnet.
A spokesman (i.e. press agent) was quoted as saying that "She wants the public to see exactly what happens, warts and all."
Somewhat unfortunate phrase when you think about it.
Sadly for the voices of vituperation, Amy Gehring was cleared by her jury yesterday, denying us the chance to compare and contrast the sentences handed out to gay paedophiles with those given to straight ones and turning the story, at a stroke, from being about mad judges to being about stupid juries.
If the jury didn't feel stupid before, they should now. As the trial ended, Surrey County Council revealed that, even before her last employment, Gehring was already under suspicion for having slept with another of her pupils.
Monday 4th February 2002
Ivan Massow. Tasty treat or total tosser? Political prophet or self-publicising prick? Star or schmuck?
Massow first came to fame as that rare rare thing, a horny insurance salesman. As one of the first people to spot the potential of the pink pound, he and his company were all over the gay papers which, just as soon as they discovered his photogenic looks, were all over him.
We heard about his difficult childhood, his Mayfair flat and his country house. We heard about the suicide of his hairdresser boyfriend, who threw himself out of a window just as a poster campaign featuring a naked photograph of the couple was about to break.
In 1999, somewhat to the surprise of people who had heard him cheerfully admit to knowing 'zilch' about contemporary art, Massow was quietly appointed chairman (and financial adviser) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London's prestigious modernist arts-factory.
Shortly after that, he wrote an article for The Spectator (a right-wing op-ed weekly) entitled "Why I, a homosexual, want to be a Tory MP."
Despite Massow's oft-avowed interest in money and country homes, many in the gay community were shocked by this declaration - not because ambitious Ivan wanted to be an MP but because they now learnt that he'd been a Tory since he joined the party at the age of 14. Worse still, he rode to hounds.
Shortly after this, The Telegraph floated the idea of Massow as a Tory candidate for Mayor, an idea which many seemed to take surprisingly seriously, although Massow ended up as a low-key policy adviser for the official Tory candidate, Steve Norris.
Massow's short-lived career as a prospective candidate came to an end a year later, when he noisily defected from the Tories, a party which, he wrote in the The Independent, had become "just plain nasty" under William Hague. (The Times initially reported that Hague had offered the 32-year-old a peerage to remain in the party, but even Massow himself now admits that no such concrete offer was ever on the table.)
After a quiet few months, Massow once again hit the headlines with a loud diatribe in The New Statesman (a left-wing op-ed weekly) in which he railed against the current preoccupation with conceptual art, dismissing most of it as "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat that I wouldn't accept even as a gift", adding that "anyone who has met Emin knows she couldn't think her way out of a paper bag."
Whilst some commentators gleefully hailed the potential of Emin thinking her way out of a paper bag as a new artwork in itself, others felt moved to point out that Massow's career to date was itself somewhat conceptual.
Just over a year ago he formed Rainbow Massow, one of the largest Independent Financial Advisers in Britain, and certainly the largest ever gay-oriented one. Rainbow Massow, initially said to be worth some £20m, crashed spectacularly last autumn, probably costing Massow his millionaire status as it did so.
Massow has now re-launched his corporate career in the form of a website, which is described as both a business site and a meeting place for like-minded gay professionals. (Gay historians may care to note his claim to be "largely considered responsible for creating the concept of the 'Pink Pound'".)
The ICA affair rumbles on in the meantime. Massow called a press conference last week, brandishing a plastic water pistol whilst he claimed that the ICA's director, Philip Dodd, was organising a secret meeting to discuss Massow's future.
Defenders of Dodd responded by pointing out that they were more likely to be discussing Massow's past than his future, given that he had singularly failed to produce the new funds he was originally hired to find for the Institute.
Reading Massow's extensive cuttings, it's genuinely difficult to decide whether he's an over-enthusiastic fantasist with a flair for self-publicity, or a charmed boy-wonder who simply needs to learn a few lessons about the way the world works.
Whatever else, he's certainly entertaining.
......previous entries