Paul Arden has a new book out - God Explained in a Taxi Ride - so I popped into our local book shop to buy a copy. First stop, New Releases. Nope. New Paperbacks then, a sub-section of New Releases. Surely it isn’t a hardback (New Paperback’s twin sub-section)…no not there either. Books for Christmas perhaps? Staff Picks? Non-fiction. Gotta be in non-fiction. Hmm. The nook that houses Advertising, Design and Photography - perhaps they put it in there? No. A last, desperate rush to the no man’s land between Language and Religion. Nothing. Right then. To the counter.
Excuse me, where do you keep the Paul Arden books?
The what?
Books by Paul Arden…y’know, the guy who wrote It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be? He has a new book out this week and I can’t find it.
Oh yeah. That book about taxi drivers. It’s upstairs in Books for Under a Tenner.
I hadn’t seen Books for Under a Tenner before. Full of funny-for-a-day gift ideas for those difficult family members, no doubt, but it made my heart sink. Almost the whole of the ground floor is categorised in this way. 3 for 2. Half Price Bestsellers (are they best sellers because they’re half price? Or are they overstocked best sellers from Oprah and Richard & Judy book lists of yesteryear?) It wasn’t there anyway. Who’d have thought a book about taxi drivers would be so popular? Perhaps I’m wrong and they’re right. Maybe people like to buy their books by the £ but it makes you think - where exactly do you file Paul Arden?
I have an uncle who famously hates olives. Thinks tapenade is the devil’s work. Won’t eat anything an olive has touched. Won’t have olive oil on his salad or even eat pizza. But about once a year he’ll look at the olives on someone else’s plate and ask if he can try one, “just to see if I still don’t like them”. Usually you don’t notice rules too much so I try to remember the olives whenever one becomes apparent. Just because something stood the tests of a year, or ten, or even a hundred, doesn’t necessarily make it an eternal truth.
Going to see Michael Clark has always had the same feel about it as going to a gig, partly because of his choice of music and earlier associations with The Fall, and partly just because he’s a glorious bad ass troublemaker and you can’t help but be excited about what he might do next. Yesterday was the opening night at the Barbican of his extraordinary Stravinsky Project - a choreographed trilogy to the composer’s Apollo, The Rite of Spring and Les Noces.
Featuring versions of Leigh Bowery’s toilet costume, a topless woman with a Hitler moustache, and a knitted wedding dress in the shape of a condom (a 1965 Yves Saint Laurent creation), Clark always manages to elicit laughter from an audience.
Just like I am Kurious Oranj (see video clip), these three pieces are performed to live music with the Britten Sinfonia and New London Chamber Choir adding to the electricity. You don’t just watch his dancers perform, like you don’t just listen to live music; it’s an all-encompassing experience. When it’s good, as it was last night, you can feel your brain open up as if you’ve got a flip-top head with lots of torches inside jiggling their lights around the room.
He makes fleeting appearances in his own productions these days but this provides space to prove that his work as a choreographer is infused with the charisma and attitude that always made him so tantalising as a dancer.
I was in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil in the middle of a sleepless night earlier this week when my gaze rested on the juicer I bought five years ago. and I realised that other than the occasional wipe down I haven’t touched the damned thing for about four and a half of those five years. I certainly haven’t juiced anything with it. For lack of any other bright ideas at 3 in the morning I bunged it in the under-sink cupboard.
When I first got it you couldn’t move in my kitchen for apples and carrots and ginger. Friends visited to sample the amazing fresh beverages and almost all of them left my house on a mission to buy their own juicer. For a while we swapped recipes, tried to impress each other with new things to juice. Then it all stopped and we silently went back to eating our fruit and veg.
I’m beginning to think that Facebook is like that juicer. Perhaps it just hasn’t successfully made the transition from its beginnings as student networking tool to being used by such as me, but I’m not convinced that it’s tried that hard anyway. Like an affordably-priced kitchen gizmo, long-term allegiance doesn’t seem to be an important brand factor.
For the first time ever, the four paintings that make up Walter Sickert’s ‘Camden Town murder series’ have been brought together with many other of his nude studies. The paintings, many from private collections, are being shown at the Courtauld Gallery in the lovely Somerset House until 20 january 2008.
Sickert is said to have begun the series after becoming fascinated by the murder of a local prostitute, Emily Dimmock, found in bed with her throat cut. There is nothing so grisly in his paintings, but a more anonymous threat both in terms of the smudged, dark shadows and obscured features of the women and their customers and also in the conditions in which they live and work. There is of course a great tradition of artists using prostitutes as models. The great beauty in Sickert’s paintings is his interest in the social truth of their lives, he doesn’t dress his nudes up as something they are not.
Recently poor old Walter (or ’sick heart’ as someone in my art history class used to call him) was in danger of becoming less well known for his work and more famous for the accusation made by Patricia Cornwell that he was Jack the Ripper. This article in The Guardian goes into more detail about that. Sickert’s attraction to the underbelly of London life always shone a dark light on his reputation but whether or not you believe in the theories, what cannot be denied is his importance as both artist and social commentator.
being famous for entertaining the public just isn’t enough. models, actors, singers, chefs and sports people alike have realised that there’s big bucks to be made from products bearing their name. taking a sip of suntory whisky for millions of yen is only the beginning of the opportunities available to a superstar, especially if they’re good looking (i know i’d enjoy a drink with bill murray, but when it comes to clothing it’s scarlett johansson that gets the deal).
perhaps it was only a matter of time. maybe i should have seen it coming… but on the train to work this morning a small ad in the back of the free paper made me laugh out loud.
0.12 seconds of googling later and the details emerged. set up in 2005, kylie is planning to sell sofas to the world from the factory base in china. the mantra in the studio this week is “be nice” so i’m saying nothing else except that i have no doubt a lot of british bottoms are going to be sat on a kylie minogue sofa in the very near future. i’ll hold out for that drink with bill.
