Luiza Sauma - writer & editor

Short story: "Management"

2012-01-12T21:40:00.002Z

Rather pleased to have a short story published in this month's Untitled Books - a great literary website I've admired for a while. The story is called "Management" and it's about office politics. Read it and tell me what you think.

Twitter scandals

2012-01-06T14:36:00.002Z

I won't add to the hubbub – I'll just direct you to this exchange between Prior and Belize in Tony Kushner's Angels in America:

How to be a bad writer - Langston Hughes

2012-01-02T16:48:00.002Z

Nicked this from This Recording's great round-up of writing advice from legendary writers. This was my favourite, by the wonderful poet Langston Hughes (pictured)... Numbers 1 and 5, I think, are especially important.

How to be a bad writer (in ten easy lessons):

1. Use all the clichés possible, such as "He had a gleam in his eye," or 'Her teeth were white as pearls."

2. If you are a Negro, try very hard to write with an eye dead on the white market - use modern stereotypes of older stereotypes - big burly Negroes, criminals, low-lifers, and prostitutes.

3. Put in a lot of profanity and as many pages as possible of near pornography and you will be so modern you pre-date Pompeii in your lonely crusade toward the bestseller lists. By all means be misunderstood, unappreciated, and ahead of your time in print and out, then you can be felt-sorry-for by your own self, if not the public.

4. Never characterize characters. Just name them and then let them go for themselves. Let all of them talk the same way. If the reader hasn't imagination enough to make something out of cardboard cut-outs, shame on him!

5. Write about China, Greence, Tibet or the Argentine pampas — anyplace you've never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your home town, or your home folks, or yourself.

6. Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it.

7. If a playwright, put into your script a lot of hand-waving and spirituals, preferably the ones everybody has heard a thousand times from Marion Anderson to the Golden Gates.

8. If a poet, rhyme June with moon as often and in as many ways as possible. Also use thee's and thou's and 'tis and o'er , and invert your sentences all the time. Never say, "The sun rose, bright and shining." But rather, "Bright and shining rose the sun.'

9. Pay no attention really to the spelling or grammar or the neatness of the manuscript. And in writing letters, never sign your name so anyone can read it. A rapid scrawl will better indicate how important and how busy you are.

10. Drink as much liquor as possible and always write under the presence of alcohol. When you can't afford alcohol yourself, or even if you can, drink on your friends, fans, and the general public.

If you are white, there are many more things I can advise in order to be a bad writer, but since this piece is for colored writers, there are some thing I know a Negro just will not do, not even for writing's sake, so there is no use mentioning them.

Happy New Year

2011-12-30T16:23:00.002Z

Fernando Pessoa

2011-12-16T15:22:00.003Z

I am in love with this beautiful poem by the great Portuguese poet - the first stanza makes an appearance in a short story I'm working on today, which is set in the north of Brazil... Enjoy.

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

In Portuguese:

Vivem em nós inúmeros;
Se penso ou sinto, ignoro
Quem é que pensa ou sente.
Sou somente o lugar
Onde se sente ou pensa.

Tenho mais almas que uma.
Há mais eus do que eu mesmo.
Existo todavia
Indiferente a todos.
Faço-os calar: eu falo.

Os impulsos cruzados
Do que sinto ou não sinto
Disputam em quem sou.
Ignoro-os. Nada ditam
A quem me sei: eu escrevo.

Our Love is Here to Stay

2011-12-10T16:55:00.001Z

This is possibly my favourite Gershwin song - though it's hard to pick, because I like almost everything George and Ira did.

Posting it just because it makes a cameo in a story I'm finishing off today, which is about a music-crazy friendship between two teenage girls.

This version is my favourite, by Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. One of my favourite films of all time, and certainly the most underrated musical of the Golden Era... Who needs sex scenes when you can dance like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron? Don't even get me started on the 20-minute ballet at the end. Just watch the film - it's perfect.

"Gone, My Boy" – Spilling Ink Review

2011-12-01T10:18:00.001Z

More good news! Today I had a short story published in the lovely Glasgow-based online journal, Spilling Ink Review. It's called "Gone, My Boy" and is about a Hackney nightshift worker struggling to come to terms with her son's disappearance, 20 years previously.

I write and write for years, the rejections pile higher and higher, and then I get three "yes"s in one week. It's been a very, very good week.

Read the story and tell me what you think.

Flash fiction - "Cousins"

2011-11-28T12:04:00.001Z

Today I had a very short story called "Cousins" published on the brilliant flash fiction website The Pygmy Giant. Go and have a look.

The story is about long-lost family, immigration and national identity. It's less autobiographical than it might seem - unlike the protagonist, I go to Brazil regularly and speak Portuguese. The story came out of imagining what it would be like to feel almost completely cut off from your country of origin. Even for me, with all my links to Brazil, it's a loss that never goes away. Do let me know what you think.

India's book

2011-11-24T21:35:00.001Z

I recently heard the lovely news that I've had a short story accepted into the first draft of a book project called The Life of India Emmott. It's a great idea - a collection of stories and poems by different writers, all about the same fictional character.

I believe they're still looking for submissions, so writers should go and check it out. The book is being represented by a literary agent at RCW.

All very exciting. Fingers crossed my story makes the final book. Either way, I'm happy. Writing fiction - unlike journalism - is so isolating and, for me, so much more challenging; the rejections pile much higher. It's good to have a "yes" once in a while.

Anti-bullying ad

2011-11-17T18:35:00.000Z

I've been bullied. Who hasn't been? Which is why this US public service announcement is so moving. Anyone can be victimised and anyone can be a bully. I think I've been a bully, even though it hurts me to say it. Anyway. Watch it.
Losers from Everynone on Vimeo.

Karen Dalton - It Hurts Me Too

2011-11-11T09:45:00.001Z

I like this very much.

Insomnia and me

2011-10-20T18:00:00.000+01:00

Insomnia creeps up on me, like a ghost saying, "Boo". I'll go months sleeping like a baby (better than a baby, in fact) and forget all about it - it'll seep to the back of my mind, filed away with all the other things I think I've overcome.

And then it comes back. Boo.

"You're not sleeping tonight," it says, cackling. "At all." Or when it's feeling kinder, "OK, I'll let you sleep for an hour or two before work."

Lying there, at 5am, with meaningless sentences running through your head like ticker-tape, choruses from annoying songs playing over and over, your heart beating through your chest. Tossing, turning. The loneliness, even when there's someone sleeping next to you - especially when there's someone sleeping next to you.

And the next day, a hazy, grey sort of hell. I only ever have insomnia before work, never at the weekend.

Your vision blurs sporadically throughout the day. Your heart seems to quicken. Your skin shivers, even when it's warm. Jokes aren't funny. Limbs feel dead.The smallest task - making a cup of tea, talking to a colleague, walking down a street, asking a shop assistant for help - is riddled with potentially terrible consequences: you might burn yourself, faint, trip over or have a panic attack. Somehow you keep it together.

I've gone through many, many days of work like this, at several jobs; somehow, I've managed to write and edit and interview while in this catatonic-yet-anxious state - probably having clicked into autopilot. But it doesn't get any easier.

The best description of insomnia I’ve ever heard came fromthe film Fight Club, of all places. (I did read the book, but can’t remember whether these words cropped up there initially.)

With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

Also, there's the most beautiful part of fellow insomniac Joanna Newsom's most beautiful song, In California.

Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, and I stand,
Shaking in my doorway like a sentinel, all alone,
Bracing like the bow upon a ship, and fully abandoning
Any thought of anywhere but home, my home.

Thank God for the occasional sleeping pill. And running, which helps. And sleep, sweet sleep, when it eventually comes, and the ghost goes back into hiding.

Fleeting magazine

2011-10-07T20:10:00.004+01:00

This week I heard that I received a "special commendation" from the brilliant Fleeting magazine for my short story "Milk", which I entered into their Best Short Writing in the World competition. Read about all the winners here.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember, largely in secret, but only with genuine confidence for around six months or so... So it's nice to have a little recognition.

"Milk" went up on my blog a few months ago. Read it and tell me what you think.

I haven't put up any other stories in a while because I'm trying to get them published, and working to get them into shape. Also, I'm working on something longer - something stupidly ambitious - which is in the planning stages. Wish me luck! I need it.

Write Now: Bob Dylan - Nobel Laureate

2011-10-07T20:02:00.003+01:00

As Bob Dylan sang, on his 1975 song Clothes Line Saga, “Have you heard the news?”

The news earlier this week was that ol’ Robert Zimmerman – the greatest lyricist of the 20th century – was the favourite to win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, ahead of Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon and Philip “I’ve stopped reading fiction” Roth. In fact, today it was announced that it went to the poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Now, I love Bob Dylan as much as the next guy – I’ve got the albums, I’ve seen the documentaries, I’ve read the books, listened to the radio show and had the inappropriate fantasies about going back to 1964 and being his chief groupie – but as LL Cool J might put it: “Say what?”

The times they are a-changing, indeed; to the extent that several members of Nobel panel – the ones who nominated Dylan – decided that “literature” doesn’t just have to be words on a page, but can also include the lyrics of a song. Whatever next? Will Tinie Tempah win the Booker? Will a cat win Crufts, because it looks a bit like a dog?

This is the crux of the matter: Bob Dylan is a musician who looks a bit like a writer.

Read the rest at IdeasTap.

Image courtesy of ky_olsen.

Emily Dickinson and Indian summers

2011-10-01T15:22:00.000+01:00

I found this Emily Dickinson poem yesterday quite by accident, and I'm glad I did - it perfectly captures the magic of an Indian summer, just like the one we're currently experiencing in the south-east. The beauty of a sudden, autumnal heatwave - with its golden leaves, its unexpectedness and rarity - far exceeds that of plain old summer. But Emily put it better than I ever could, back in 1864, in a poem first published as "October"...

THESE are the days when Birds come back--

A very few--a Bird or two--

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume

The old--old sophistries of June--

A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee--

Almost thy plausibility

Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear--

And softly thro' the altered air

Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,

Oh Last Communion in the Haze--

Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake--

Thy consecrated bread to take

And thine immortal wine!

Image courtesy of fabi_k.

Write Now: Writing and running

2011-09-22T10:45:00.002+01:00

Writing is a lot like running.

Both take enormous amounts of will power and stamina. Both are rather solitary. The more you do them, the better you become. Running and writing are activities that many of us dread, but once we’ve got going, they can fill us with joy, excitement and lust for life.

I only discovered these parallels recently, when I took up jogging and (quite out of character, this) became a bit obsessed with it. A few years ago, if you’d told me that I would one day join the legion of Saturday morning runners in my local park, I would have sucked on my fag and laughed in your face.

But within weeks I had the new shoes, the iPod armband and the smug, red face. Better yet: I’m writing more than ever. It can’t be a coincidence.

I’m not the first person to notice that running can make you a better writer. The most famous runner-writer is Haruki Murakami, who often talks about his exhausting schedule of writing masterful novels and running 10,000km before dawn. He even wrote a book on the topic, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Read the rest at IdeasTap.

Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon on Flickr.

Norfolk

2011-09-18T22:38:00.001+01:00

A week of bliss.

Write Now: Write where?

2011-09-08T18:30:00.000+01:00

Truman Capote liked to do it on the sofa.

Jonathan Franzen sometimes does it blindfolded, in the dark, wearing earplugs, drinking shots of vodka. Proust famously did it in bed, in a cork-lined room. J K Rowling liked doing it in public, while John Cheever did it in his pants.

I’m talking, of course, about writing: where do you write and does it matter?

When I was a young, aspiring writer, I thought that conditions had to be perfect for the muse to strike – whether I was working on an academic essay, article or appalling short story.
Three essential elements had to mystically align for me to be able to set finger to keyboard – from the time of day (middle of the night), stimulants (black coffee and cigarettes) and company (none). If I ran out of cigarettes, if midnight hadn’t struck or if I could hear my friends scuttling around our student house, all bets were off.

Read the rest at IdeasTap.

To distant friends

2011-08-26T18:11:00.006+01:00

Friends come and go.

Sometimes with a bang, and sometimes they just drift away. But the appreciation you had for them - back then, when you were friends - doesn't go away. For me, at least, the friends I am no longer in touch with (even if we did go out with a messy bang) are crystallised in my memory.

My best friend from school will always be 15, wearing blue eyeshadow and dancing at an indie nightclub; the boy I fancied when I was eight, now deceased, will always be alive and wearing school shorts; the one friend I remember from school in Brazil is forever four years old, with bright red hair. I don't even remember her surname, or know what she does for a living, or whether she's married and has children, but she's alive in my mind.

Yesterday I found out that another boy I used to have a crush on passed away. (The two facts aren't related - I'm not a conspiracy theorist.) I hadn’t seen him in around 12 years.

He was a neighbour and my friend's brother more than an actual friend. My family lived in the same apartment building as his family in Rio de Janeiro; after we came to the UK, I continued seeing him and his sister, who I was particularly friendly with. His sister and I would spend hours playing with dolls in her room, running around the playground, chewing bubblegum and running away from fat Brazilian cockroaches. In that same concrete playground - on one of those interminable holidays in Brazil - she was the first person to tell me that I was developing a British accent. I was seven years old and it broke my heart; it suddenly dawned that this was not my country any more.

They were the only Brazilian childhood friends I retained for any length of time after leaving the country. Hence, in my mind, despite the fact we only saw each other once a year, there was something about that friendship - something that anchored me to Rio. Increasingly I felt alienated from the country - I had few friends, I spoke Portuguese with an accent and sometimes I forgot words altogether. Going to my neighbours' flat and hanging out with them and their overwhelmingly kind maid (yes, a maid - Brazil is a very different country) made me feel like I belonged.

Our teens arrived and we drifted, despite the fact that I continued to visit their building every year, to stay with my gran. I had thrown myself headfirst into being alternative, having green hair and piercings and dressing like a freak - which drew lots of stares in Rio - while my neighbours seemed like the ordinary, straight-laced, beach-going Brazilian teenagers that I longed to be. Oh, you know, the usual stupid reasons why people stop talking.

We would nod hello, shyly. Then they moved out.

Today I found out that the brother passed away at 31. I do not know what kind of man he grew up to be, but he will always be, in my mind, a lovely-looking boy, with a surfboard under his arm, walking down the Rua Farme de Amoedo to the beach.

Distant friends, like celebrities, never really die – not in your mind.

Image courtesy of Frank Kehren on Flickr.

Three cities, one week

2011-08-15T20:16:00.009+01:00

Visiting family in Lisbon, working in Edinburgh and then back home... London may not be the fairest of them all (of the three, at least), but it was good to be back. A few pics from my trip.

Hackney Wicked

2011-07-31T18:46:00.003+01:00

Terrifying human-size bunny spotted at a high-up window in Hackney Wick. Nearly made me scream. Was the highlight of an otherwise crusty festival.

RIP Amy

2011-07-26T22:56:00.004+01:00

A fitting tribute, spotted through a window in N16. GCSE art coursework? Either way, very sweet.

Lana Del Rey - Video Games

2011-07-25T19:16:00.005+01:00

Beautiful song. Bad lip job. Just listen and look away.

Write Now: Commandments

2011-07-25T13:34:00.004+01:00

So you want to be a journalist? Good luck with that – you’ll need it.
But before you set off on a career of interviewing movie stars in hotel suites that charge more per night than your landlord does per year, here are my commandments for any wannabe culture hack.

I’ve been journalising for seven years now, which means I’ve made all the mistakes in the book – so you don’t have to. Without further ado…

1. Stop trying to be Charlie Brooker or Caitlin Moran. While they are two of the most entertaining and loved journalists in the country, that does not mean that newspapers and magazines are looking for half-baked, mini-me versions of them. Unless you’re the real deal, don’t force yourself into an “angry misanthrope” or “drunk, funny woman” archetype. You can tell when it’s not genuine – especially when you’re too attractive/clean-shaven to be a hot, furious mess.

Read the rest at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of vaXzine on Flickr.

Write Now: The canon

2011-07-12T22:26:00.004+01:00

How much of the literary canon have you read? Go on – be honest.

We’ve all lied about the books we’ve read – in my case, mainly to please teachers at school, when my 11-year-old brain couldn’t cope with Jane Eyre. I know I’m not the only one. At university, seconds before we entered a Postcolonial poetry seminar, a classmate leaned over and whispered, “I haven’t read a single one of the poems – teehee!” Minutes later, she launched into a hot-headed debate with me about Derek Walcott.

What is the point of the canon? What, in fact, is the canon? In truth, there’s no official canon to speak of: it’s a loose collection of literary works that we – readers, academics and critics – have deemed to be worthy of artistic merit, dissection and eternity; books that speak to our times, running from Homer to Jonathan Franzen, with Shakespeare and Dickens (and hundreds of others) in-between.

It is the life-long ambition of most keen readers to tick these must-read books off our lists; it does, indeed, take a lifetime.

Read the rest at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of SabrinaDan Photo on Flickr.

Write Now: Holiday reads

2011-06-26T15:02:00.005+01:00

Where’s the best place on earth to read books? On holiday, of course.

Summer is finally here, and along with the crap weather, failed exams and shirtless, sweaty men comes that tiny glimmer of hope and happiness: the summer holiday.

Whether you’re going on a five-star break in Barbados or a no-star ordeal in Bognor Regis, I’ve always found that holidays are the best time for uninterrupted, lose-yourself reading.

Back at home, unless you’re a student, retired or unemployed, reading for long stretches of time is an all-too-rare luxury – what with work, tiredness, social lives and Twitter taking up your every waking moment.

Bedtime reading? On a good day, it sends me to sleep within five minutes, before I can even get into the story. The hour-long commute to work? When I’m being squeezed against a bus door by 10 touchy-feely commuters, after a rubbish night of sleep (thanks, insomnia), often the last thing on my mind is reading. Often, I can’t move my arm far enough to get the book out of my bag.

But, ah, for a sun lounger, a long train journey, a nice view and some quiet companions who only bother you to offer you wine, food and an occasional card game.

Read the rest at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of Auntie P on Flickr.

India

2011-06-18T11:21:00.007+01:00

From piping-hot Delhi to holy-cow Rishikesh by the Ganges up to Old Manali in the Himalayas - via several back-breaking buses, staring men, gurus and vomitous trips to the toilet. It wasn't relaxing or easy by any means, but all I could think was: when can I come back?

Went with my old pal Poonam, who is of Indian heritage and was questioned at least 10 times a day by people who didn't understand how someone could look Indian and be from London - and be friends with a whitey like me. At one point, we were asked if we were sisters. At another, if we were from Japan.

Climbed mountains, dipped feet in the Ganges and met several people on charas-fuelled journeys of self-discovery. People who drank whisky and smoked chillums at 10am, held media conspiracy theories and thought work was for sell-outs and capitalists. I realised how conventional I am in comparison, and felt pleased about it.

But like I said: when can I go back?

What is psychoanalysis?

2011-05-26T14:56:00.001+01:00

Great animation from the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Write Now: Spiritual

2011-05-12T13:11:00.000+01:00

Billy Corgan – frontman of Smashing Pumpkins – recently announced that he’s currently writing a “spiritual memoir”.

Corgan knows as well as we do that he’d sink into middle-aged obscurity if he grew a beard and stopped slagging off Courtney Love on Twitter, so it’s nice to see him taking one for the team and keeping up his pretentious persona well into his 40s.

But as much as I loved rocking out to Siamese Dream back in the Middle Ages (1993), while sporting kohl eyeliner and fairy wings, the question remains: is there a more detestable literary genre than “Spiritual”?

Read the rest of the column at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of brizzle born and bred on Flickr.

Bank holiday: The river

2011-05-02T19:18:00.004+01:00

A long cycle ride down the Thames with my boyfriend reminded me that I live in one of the greatest, most beautiful cities on earth.

Pictured below: HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge. (Like a douchebag, I'm getting into taking lots of photos with my new iPhone. Find me on Instagram.)

Bank holiday: Fire + light

2011-05-02T11:59:00.003+01:00

Turnpike Lane, 1 May.

Write Now: RIP Typewriters

2011-04-28T20:07:00.004+01:00

Boohoo, the typewriter is dead.

Without any sense of irony, the internet is currently awash with people crying over the fact that the last typewriter factory in the world – which was based in Mumbai – has closed. But while the factory closed in 2011, the typewriter has been on life-support for a long, long time.

With a small sense of irony, seeing as I’m writing to you from an article illustrated with a photo of a typewriter, I’m going to tell you why it doesn’t matter. Not one little bit.

Maybe I don’t care because I’m too young to remember the glory days of click-clacketing, smoke-filled offices. In my career as an editor and writer, I’ve never had the pleasure of ripping a page out of a typewriter, screwing it up and throwing it at a wall, which is a bit of a shame.

Read the rest of the column at IdeasTap.

Image: teal typewriter by Amanda Woodward, available under a CC BY-NC license.

Short story: Milk

2011-04-22T14:25:00.007+01:00

The short story Milk is based on my adolescence in north London, but is a work of fiction. It follows the friendship of two teenage girls during a long, hot and aimless London summer. (But it's a very short story.)

I recently found some files from my old computer; among them were about two dozen unfinished short stories from 2004-2006. I used to be really, really bad at finishing stories; would always write a few thousand words and then give up.

Milk was one of the half-finished stories from that period. I decided to finish it - which I did, this morning. So it was five years in the making. Tell me what you think.

The photo above was taken last summer, with Hannah and Chris. That's me on the left. Enjoy.

Milk - Luiza Sauma -

My week in three photos

2011-04-22T13:20:00.007+01:00

Sunday: walked across a low-tide seabed to Scolt Island in north Norfolk. First time I left London in six months - lack of money, lack of time and opportunity - and it was dreamy.

Monday: walked home from work, via London Bridge, Bishopsgate, Shoreditch and over Regent's Canal (below). Spring makes me love the city once more.

Thursday: lunch and ice cream with my big sister, who's going back to Brazil soon.

Write Now: Short Stories

2011-04-18T20:03:00.007+01:00

I didn’t have much time for short stories when I was younger.

Novels were my thing. On what planet could a tiny little glimpse of a story compete with my favourite books by Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, Jonathan Franzen et al – big, hefty novels with big, hefty ideas? Even on my English university course, short stories barely got a look in.

Too often, short stories are seen as a precursor to novels; a starter to the main course, and for writers, a baby ski slope to overcome before tackling the big, scary and exhilarating black piste. Brainwashed by a degree that valued Old Norse gibberish over modern short fiction, I too looked down on the short story – despite the fact that I wrote them (badly) in my spare time.

Read the rest of my column at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of emdot on Flickr.

Family

2011-04-09T12:21:00.002+01:00

Cute photograph found randomly online, courtesy of Kevin N Murphy on Flickr.

Short story: A Trace of April

2011-03-26T12:38:00.007Z

This story has been knocking about on my laptop/in my head for a while - I wrote the first draft in December 2009, I think.

It's about the search for a long-lost sister and a frozen lake. Initially inspired by missing my sister when she was living in the Amazon for two years, but rest assured that we are nothing like the sisters in my story.

Enjoy. Tell me what you think.

A Trace of April - Luiza Sauma

Image by DrTusk.

Crazy Hands

2011-03-13T17:03:00.001Z

Liked this short by Charlie Graley, starring David Schneider. Good, old-fashioned physical comedy.

Write Now: Beat Generation

2011-02-26T11:42:00.003Z

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it now, but the book that cemented my passion for reading and writing was Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical classic, On the Road.

I was 15 when I picked it up. I knew something of Kerouac’s hipster reputation and his jazz-inspired, uncrafted prose, which inspired Truman Capote to say of him, “This isn’t writing, it’s typing.”

It had such an impact on me in liberal, New Labour-loving 1997 that I can only imagine the response when it was released, in buttoned-up 1950s America.

Read the rest at IdeasTap.

Image courtesy of dovima_is_devine_II.

The Ruins of Detroits

2011-02-21T17:28:00.008Z

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's beautiful photographs of abandoned buildings - schools, theatres, churches etc - in Detroit have been doing the rounds for a few years. But they still get me, every time. See more at their website.

Write Now: Digital

2011-02-19T10:15:00.001Z

Around Christmas, I told a friend that I would never buy an e-book reader.

“Books are perfect objects,” went my argument, “They’re beautiful, convenient and help to insulate your flat. CDs and vinyl are flawed – they get scratched and aren’t easily portable – but how could you improve a book?”

Less than two months later, I’m reading Anna Karenina – a book I have avoided for several years, largely due to its intimidating, 864-page heaviness – on my brand-new Kindle, having happily swallowed my words.

Read the rest of my column at IdeasTap...

Image courtesy of Pikaluk.

Anna Calvi - "Blackout"

2011-02-19T09:07:00.000Z

Love this girl. Melodrama and guitars.

Write Now: Rejection

2011-02-10T19:30:00.004Z

This week in Write Now, I wrote about rejection - something every writer or journalist has to learn to cope with, and I shared a heavily abridged history of my own rejections.

Image courtesy of Kalexanderson.

Threw my bad fortune off the top of a tall building

2011-02-09T12:21:00.004Z

I know I'm having a good week when I can't get this song out of my head.

Short story: Isaiah's Dream

2011-02-07T21:30:00.009Z

As some of you might know, I write fiction in my spare time - very, very slowly. Once in a while, I'll submit my stories to literary journals, but I haven't had an acceptance yet, so I've made the rather rash decision to start uploading some of my rejects to my blog. What the hell.

This is the first one I'm uploading, "Isaiah's Dream", which I wrote in 2009. You can view it or download a PDF below. It's about an elderly Jewish east Londoner, his Sudanese carer and the past. Hope you enjoy. Let me know, either way.

Isaiah's Dream -

Image courtesy of brizzle born and bred.

Write Now: Reality Bites

2011-02-06T12:03:00.004Z

In this week's column, I wrote about how journalism is impossible to break into, but you might as well do it anyway (if you've got the balls/determination/sadomasochist nature).

It was a bit glum, and I don't think people liked it as much as my previous columns.

But that's the nature of the business, and I firmly believe young people need to understand what they're getting themselves into when they decide to be journalists, while the industry sinks faster than the Titantic. More of which, later.

Read it.

Write Now: Young Guns

2011-01-30T11:53:00.004Z

This week in Write Now, I wrote about how literary success can come at any age - but how the press will always love a prodigy... Yeah.

Oh, you pretty things

2011-01-22T19:29:00.016Z

I hate pretty writing, because life isn't pretty.

There are moments of prettiness in life - a walk across a field in the summer, a bunch of flowers, a beautiful song, a good-looking person - but ugliness is always there, in all of these situations.

Stung by a wasp as you cross the field; the guy who gives you the flowers - and then dumps you by text; the mouth-breathing troll standing behind you at the gig; the good-looking person's horrible personality.

Ugliness and prettiness are everywhere, and always entwined in some way.

Which is why whimsical writing make me want to scream. Twee is a cultural power worthy of academic theses and journalistic investigation; in fact, I remember, a few years ago, watching a documentary about why Japan is obsessed with cute things, which offered up a lot of interesting theories.

If I remember correctly, the documentary (whose name escapes me) proferred the idea that Japan became obsessed with cuteness - cartoons, schoolgirls, animals, dress-up - as a coping mechanism for its traumatic recent history of violence. But, if this was the case, Germany would be the cutest nation on earth - which it patently isn't.

Even so, there is a tide of cute in Europe and the US - whimsy, twee, whatever you want to call it. It's a trend that sees grown fully grown women - with flesh to grab and brains to spare - frollicking through cities dressed like little girls in knee socks and pinafores, standing pigeon-toed at bus stops, not asserting themselves and getting breathless over cakes, fairy lights and rubbish American bands.

This is just the indie version of dumbing yourself down so that people (read: men) aren't intimidated by you - an old trick that doesn't really get you anywhere. And it makes me really angry when it seeps into women's writing.

Whimsy is a decorative aesthetic; fine, perhaps, for cakes, clothes and soft furnishings, but not when it's the meaningless, prettified aesthetic that writers instinctively reach for. Because it has no baring on reality. None at all.

I can't bring myself to name and shame the (largely, but not always) female journalists and novelists who write as though every day is an ethereal journey through floaty fairyland - whose descriptions are so sugary, they give you a toothache, whose heartbreak never makes their characters want to punch someone - but it holds us back. Not just as women, but as people.

Like the American poet Amiri Baraka, I want "poems that kill", writing that "shoot[s] guns".

I know that sounds a bit pretentious. So be it.

Image courtesy of john faherty photography on Flickr.

Write Now: The long and short of it

2011-01-20T14:47:00.003Z

I haven't posted anything other than my column for a few weeks. Oh dear. Life's too short to blog everything that passes through my mind – and there's always Twitter, after all.

Anyway, here's my Write Now column this week. It's about the near-extinct genre of long-form journalism, which I love. Read it!

Write Now: Pitching

2011-01-14T19:46:00.003Z

In this week's Write Now, I shared a few tips on pitching articles. Yep, that's what I did.

Write Now: Reboot

2011-01-08T12:01:00.003Z

This week, in my IdeasTap writing column, I shared a few tips for easing your way back into productivity: firstly, give up any overly ambitious resolutions...

Write Now: It's personal

2010-12-23T18:12:00.005Z

My latest column for IdeasTap is about confessional writing: while some writers borrow elements from their lives, others steal... Can they go too far? (Clue: YES.)

The Brilliant and the Dark

2010-12-22T18:01:00.001Z

This gave me the shivers: Hackney women's choir Gaggle's awesome interpretation of 1969 opera The Brilliant and the Dark. Gorgeous.

The Brilliant and The Dark from Open Music Archive on Vimeo.

We recently did a piece about radical choirs on IdeasTap.

Write Now

2010-12-17T19:11:00.004Z

I've started writing a new column (about writing) over at IdeasTap. This week it's all about the basics: grammar, punctuation, spelling and writing for the sake of writing.

Check it out. Tell me what you think.

So you want to be a journalist?

2010-12-14T18:13:00.002Z

Try not to cry as you feel your dreams breaking into tiny pieces.

(Half-joking. Only half.)

This cynical (but true) little video made me glad I'm not a new graduate. And that I'm no longer a 21-year-old idealist. Being old and not giving a fuck is so much more fun.

Julia Pott - "Howard"

2010-11-25T18:30:00.002Z

Absolutely in love with London-based animator Julia Pott's short animation "Howard", which perfectly captures what happens when love goes stale. I'm lucky enough to not have experienced this in a while (boyfriend and I are getting close to our eight-year anniversary!), but I remember how it was in my teens/early twenties – when exhilaration and giddiness quickly turns into discomfort and embarrassment.

More than anything, her drawings are beautiful. Watch below, and check out her Etsy shop.

Via Olivia Humphreys on IdeasTap.

Street View

2010-11-16T20:10:00.009Z

This blog of strange pics from Google Street View is very moving and funny, despite the depressing number of prostitutes captured on camera...

America

2010-11-16T19:46:00.005Z

More of Edward Curtis's beautiful photographs of Native Americans in the early 20th century can be found at the Denver Post.

Teenage dream

2010-11-15T19:10:00.005Z

In my new capacity as an online editor, I suddenly find myself also working as a picture editor (in the olde world of print, picture editors are dedicated and numerous - as they should be) and trawling Flickr for images.

Thus, I come across some beautiful things. Here's one. I can't even remember what I was searching for when I came across this photo. It really captures the awkward, unmade beauty of late childhood/early adolescence (although not my adolescence, unfortunately, which was just awkward).

Image courtesy of eliz@...♪♪

Rob Ryan

2010-11-13T10:00:00.007Z

I'm not usually a fan of whimsical things (cupcakes and puppies aside), but I'm loving Rob Ryan's papercuts lately... (Click the images for a closer look.)

Read a nice interview with him from IdeasTap. I like people who find success late in life - they're generally the most humble.

Happy place

2010-10-28T15:18:00.004+01:00

From teen photography collective Fourteen-Nineteen (they won funding from IdeasTap, where I work).

London spirit

2010-10-23T12:41:00.011+01:00

I took this photo a few months ago in Lower Clapton - the artists took the sign down, understandably. (I have very little doubt that the tenants are out-of-towners transplanted to London. It's just a feeling.)

The short, to-the-point piece of graffiti at the bottom of the sign captured, for me, the true London spirit: unpretentious, unimpressed, and with a biting sense of humour. Basically, it made me LOL.

By the way, I have nothing much against out-of-towners. (When I say out-of-towners, what I really mean is the h-word.) If I hadn't grown up in London, I would probably be dicking around in London Fields, dressed like a pillock and enacting a tardy rebellion at this very moment.

But oh, how I love the proper, moody, dry-witted, seen-it-all London spirit, which crosses class, race and place of birth. London is the place for me.

"An important message about the arts"

2010-10-13T16:08:00.006+01:00

David Shrigley's animation says everything that needs to be said about why the arts matter, and why public arts funding shouldn't be slashed to bits. (It neatly demolishes the old "hospitals are more important than museums" argument.) Sign the petition.

Also, apologies to my two fans (hi mum/sister!) for lack of posting. I've been busy with my lovely new job as deputy editor of IdeasTap; incidentally, we're not cutting our arts funding, so pay us a visit soon. But I hope to be posting more here too.

What the wilderness taught me

2010-08-06T19:11:00.015+01:00

Everyone needs some time in the wilderness - figuratively, rather than literally. Unlike that boy from Into the Wild, who died alone and starving in Alaska, I don't believe humankind has much to gain from Thoreau-style solitude, apart from mental illness and pretentiousness.

My own personal wilderness involved quitting my job, giving up all the ambitions I had held since childhood, grudgingly deciding to become a psychotherapist (as if it was written in the stars, and there was nothing I could do about it) and reading a lot of Freud. The last bit was quite good, but the rest made me feel like I was going crazy.

My newspaper job wasn't particularly well paid, but it was secure - well, as secure as any job in a dying industry can be. I became a journalist because I wanted to be Truman Capote (not an entirely noble aspiration), but found myself as a nameless cog in a media machine, interviewing so many actors and singers that I can't remember who I have and haven't interviewed any more; commissioning reviews of records that had started to sound the same; going to lunch with colleagues and talking about how we wanted to leave.

On paper, it was very easy and manageable, but it made me want to stick needles into my eyes. I wrote, I commissioned, I got drunk every night and found that my clothes weren't fitting. I stayed awake until dawn, fantasising about being unemployed and writing a novel. One by one, most of my regular lunch dates left the organisation. I was too scared to leave - I knew that newspapers were firing, not hiring, and that I would never work at one again.

And then I plucked up the courage and applied for voluntary redundancy. The editor asked me to reconsider, but I insisted. A lot of other people just thought I'd gone crazy. There was a recession on, after all, and I had a dream job. They weren't entirely wrong.

A few months later, I found myself working at a part-time job for menial money. The recession had hit and freelancing was impossible, badly paid and boring. I hated working at home; my "freelance days" stretched out before me: empty, yet depressingly quick days in which neither ideas nor words flowed as easily as they had done in the office. I started a Master's degree in Psychoanalytic Studies, which was a nice distraction, but deep down I knew I didn't want to be a mental health professional. Ever.

Sure, I wasn't being overworked and underpaid any more, but I had done something far worse - eliminated myself entirely from the competition. I honestly thought that I would never come back, but here I am. I realised that the idea of working in mental health was entirely absurd (for me, anyway), that I was amazing at grammar and punctuation and deserved a life. So I quit my MA and got a real job, as an online editor; three weeks on, my year in the wilderness feels like a mirage, a rubbish gap year from being a normal person.

Here's what I learned:

1. You should do what you want in life, as long as you're not hurting people.

2. On the other hand, don't worry too much about "helping people". Social workers, nurses and teachers are, indeed, saints - but that doesn't mean that you have to become one. There are other ways of being helpful in the world; you don't have to be Jesus Christ.

3. Stick to what you're good at. Doing things you're good at makes you feel better.

4. If you think your job is making you go crazy, leave it before you actually go crazy, but don't assume that all similar jobs will make you go crazy. You're just in a crazy job, that's all.

5. You will meet as many difficult people in the charitable sector as you will meet in the media. FACT.

6. At the same time, leaving the media allows you to mingle with people who:
a) aren't Anglo-Saxon

b) aren't middle-class

c) didn't go to expensive and/or very good schools

d) or university, necessarily

e) watch X-Factor unironically

g) probably don't know and, quite rightly, don't care who Henry David Thoreau was

f) are often more worldly, wise and caring than many of the people you've rubbed shoulders with before. The "caring" part can't be stressed enough. It's very fucking important.

7. If you have a nice boyfriend/girlfriend, you can get through almost anything.

8. Being nice to people is a beautiful thing. So is Xanax, but only in moderation.

9. If you stop drinking every night, you'll lose half a stone.

10. The wilderness looks nothing like the photo above; it looks like this:

Consequently, you should seek work in a beautiful place. They exist.

Pics courtesy of Al_HikesAZ and ilamont.com.

Swoon

2010-07-24T18:37:00.010+01:00

The majority of men seem to have two uniforms: "work" and "15-year-old boy". The former involves uncomfortable, often mismatched "smart" items; the latter jeans, tshirts and (uh oh) old trainers. Not so the dandy young men of Street Etiquette, who are making me swoon on a daily basis with their dapper stylings. They're two guys from the Bronx - Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs - who eschew hipster fashions for classic style; in short, they dress like the Ideal Man, and they contextualise each blog post with a pictoral history of style.

I mean, just look at them.

Depression is not a trend

2010-05-20T15:23:00.010+01:00

Mental health is big news - I can't remember a time when it has been more talked about in the media. As someone who comes from a family of mental health professionals, who works part-time in the sector and has many friends/family with mental health problems, I can only celebrate the fact that services, experiences and stigma are being discussed so often and so openly. But with the good, comes the bad.

Many of you will already have seen Janet Street Porter's column in The Daily Mail which described depression as "the latest must-have accessory" for well-off women. I've written about depression stigma before, and received a fair bit of flack for it from people who find it difficult to acknowledge how a successful, physically healthy person could be genuinely miserable. But JSP's article took it further, by accusing the celebrities who have been brave enough to step forward and say, "Yes, I've been depressed" of merely trying to be fashionable.

There's nothing trendy about mental illness, nothing stylish about lying in bed all day, refusing to talk to friends, refusing to eat or go to work. There may have been a brief blip in the Nineties when grungey disaffection was all the rage, but depression isn't mere angst or existentialism. It's pure, unbridled despair, raging unhappiness and, most of all, hopelessness.

Depression is very real and, unlike JSP asserts, it's an illness that crosses continents, classes and races. The majority of incapacity benefits claimants are depressed - and they're hardly middle class. I work part-time as a helpline adviser at a mental health charity for children and young people, and a huge proportion of the parents I speak to are out-of-work, on benefits, depressed and struggling with children who are fast following in their footsteps.

When Janet says that shelf-stackers and favela dwellers don't get depressed, I assume she thinks she's celebrating working-class resilience. I would also wager that she doesn't know many shelf-stackers or favela dwellers - because of course they get depressed. Indeed, by declaring that only rich people get depressed, JSP does poor people a disservice - by assuming that their emotional lives are far too simple to ever self-destruct.

Bollocks. In fact, some studies show the exact opposite to be true - that depression is rife among the poor. The only reason that wealthy women like Marian Keyes and Emma Thompson are known to be sufferers, is because they're successful enough to have a platform to talk about it. Single mothers in one-supermarket towns aren't likely to cause a stir by revealing their depression to the world, because they don't write newspaper columns, act in blockbuster films or write bestselling novels.

Strangely, I think severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, psychosis and bipolar are almost more acceptable: when someone is hallucinating, delusional, manic, "crazy" in the traditional sense, no one denies their illness. But when someone who has - on the face of it - got everything going for them, but can't get out of bed in the morning, it's harder for the naysayers to accept.

I've been depressed - who hasn't? Being depressed once in a while is just part of life. And I feel lucky that, while I've had my ups and downs, I have a reasonably strong constitution, and can always pick myself up. Others are not so lucky. I have known, liked and loved people who are depressed, psychotic, schizophrenic, bipolar, the works. One of them - a member of my extended family - took his life last week. I didn't know him very well, but I was devastated by the news. I won't say any more about it, because it wouldn't be right.

The message we can take from these terrible tragedies - which number in their thousands every year in the UK - is that there is no point in being ashamed, and creating shame, around mental illness. Life is fragile and precious. Being purposefully ignorant is easier than trying to understand the minds of our fellow human beings. Hopefully, we're getting there.

Football and identity

2010-05-10T14:04:00.005+01:00

Over breakfast, I read A A Gill’s Vanity Fair piece about football - which is accompanied by sexy trouser-less pics of various players (above) - in which he quite rightly posited the sport as the most beautiful on earth, and the World Cup as the greatest tournament. (We already knew this, of course – it was for the sake of the magazine’s American readers.) Gill saved the best for last, closing his piece with the story of the famous 1950 World Cup final, when Uruguay unexpectedly beat Brazil at the brand-new Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro – to this day, the only football stadium I’ve ever been to.

Brazil was so sure of its victory that a song had already been composed for the occasion, and medals printed with the names of the players. It’s a story I’ve heard many times before; it’s the kind that gets passed down from generation to generation, like a folk tale, which always ends, “... and that’s why we hate Uruguay, my child.” Even so, as I read about the deathly hush that fell over the stadium – and the suicidal Brazilian fans who threw themselves from the higher tiers of the stadium – I laughed out loud, and then found myself welling up with tears, just for a second. I rarely follow sports, but Brazilian football has that effect on me.

It’s taken a long time for me to feel British. This summer, I will have been here for 24 years. Twenty-four years! I spent many years dreaming of leaving the UK, because I didn’t feel at home here; I now realise that – having a split identity – I probably wouldn’t feel at home anywhere, and should just embrace feeling like a weirdo. My older brother and sister, perhaps, felt this even more: I’m the only one still living in the UK, the only one who fully identifies as British.

These days, I have a British passport, speak like a BBC newsreader, eat marmite, drink pints, shout “Bollocks!” when something goes wrong; I love cruel, dry humour and don’t trust overly friendly people. I am, in short, as British as a cup of tea. In other words – both British, and not: PG Tips is grown in India, after all. While calling myself “Brazilian” feels completely phoney, I am the only person in my entire family who would stand up and say, hand on heart, “I am British. This is what I am.” It’s a lonely feeling – to be the only one.

Yet Brazil still beats in my heart like a drum; when I watch our football team playing at the World Cup – as Gill wrote, in their mesmerising and emotional way – something hits home. The way the players look, the colours of their strip, the way they move, the fans beating their drums, the national anthem, the tears, the sound of Carioca accents calling across the pitch; the way Brazil managed to be the best at something, against the odds. The way they still seem like the best team, even when they’re not winning. Supporting England just doesn’t feel the same.

"Unorthodox Jews"

2010-05-08T18:59:00.005+01:00

Check out my feature about Orthodox Jews and cinema on The Arts Desk, a great new-ish arts website set up by former Daily Telegraph contributors. The piece mainly concentrates on Eyes Wide Open, a beautiful Israeli film about two Orthodox Jewish men in love. Well worth seeing.

Tesco, Green Lanes

2010-04-28T14:08:00.005+01:00

Stop inconveniencing me with your crap spelling and random punctuation.

The beast of Stoke Newington

2010-04-24T12:43:00.008+01:00

This is probably the best photo I've ever taken on a camera phone. I've seen this cat round the neighbourhood for a while now; he always looks quite fierce and serious, and is evidently a dedicated killer - last year, I saw him with a dead little mouse hanging out of his mouth.

This week's catch, however, must be his best ever. He was very pleased with himself, and stood there posing for a few minutes as I took pictures.

"Evangeligal Reformed Church"

2010-04-24T12:38:00.006+01:00

Nothing brightens my day like correcting some really bad writing.

This little beauty was spotted near Victoria Park, Hackney.

He that hath spell-check hath Jesus on his side.

He that can’t spell “Evangelical” should probably call it a day with the whole Jesus thing.

Food blogs

2010-04-13T19:50:00.006+01:00

In the past week, I've written three blogs for Foodnetwork.co.uk: one about Jewish food, one about junk food, and one about gender and celebrity chefs. Read them, if you fancy.

Image courtesy of roboppy.

Good vs evil

2010-03-06T12:34:00.004Z

According to The Sun, Jon Venables has committed a "sickening sex crime" that would "horrify the nation". I very much that the nation, now hardened by decades of tabloid horror stories, would be all that shocked by whatever it is he did. A boy who killed a smaller, weaker child has allegedly become a sexual predator - this, at the very least, shouldn't surprise anyone. The logistics of rape aren't dissimilar to that of the murder of a child. In psychiatrist Dennis Friedman's words, rape is, after all, "an illicit bid for potency by the powerless".

I don't doubt for a second that Venables is extremely disturbed; its the widespread acceptance of his "evil" which makes me feel uncomfortable, particularly in a country as secular as the UK. The idea of "evil" is that it is innate; like The Omen's Damian - a similarly cruel, murderous child, and none other than the spawn of Satan. Which is all very good and scary for a horror film, but back in the real world, we are all born as helpless babies, eager to love and be loved.

For Venables and Robert Thompson to have done what they did in 1993, they must have been deeply traumatised - we can only speculate in what way. The myth of innate evil is so troubling to me because it denies the capacities of the human mind to become corrupted by trauma. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in The Guardian about how depression is not respected as a genuine illness. Several of the readers' comments were supportive, but many also angrily argued that nobody who who exercised, slept well and stopped feeling so bloody sorry for themselves could be depressed.

In other words, the commenters proved my point. If depression isn't widely acknowledged as a genuine illness, more serious disorders such as psychosis or psychopathy don't stand a chance. I'm not calling for psychopaths, rapists, paedophiles and murderers to be respected; I just find it exasperating that these conditions are regularly boiled down to the infantile idea of wickedness, rather than plain old madness.

Type Venables' name into Twitter, and you'll find members of the public swapping rumours about his latest misdeeds, hungrily searching for new information, calling for his identity to be revealed and repeatedly stating "our" right to know about his alleged crime. I understand James Bulger's mother's concerns, but what about people who have nothing to do with her family? Why did perfect strangers take time out from their lives to mob the vans that carried the murderers to court?

In 2000, in the wake of Sarah Payne's murder, some residents of the Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth began a protest after hearing that there was a paedophile living among them. The group - mainly consisting of mothers and children - took to the street and attacked the cars and homes of innocent people.

If Venables' identity was revealed, he would probably be dead within a few days. I wouldn't shed a tear for him, but I might shed one for the terrible irony of the act: the people who would like to kill Venables are - like Venables, Thompson and the Paulsgrove protesters - projecting their anger onto a person who had nothing to do with their own disappointments and traumas. In short, the mob would kill Venables for the same reason that he killed James Bulger.

Perhaps if the pervert-hunters took time to delve into the source of their own murderous impulses, they wouldn't waste their energy on fantasising about killing convicted criminals. They might find that the source of their rage is much closer to home. As John Milton's Satan put it (in my favourite line of poetry, ever): "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell".

Depression/The Guardian

2010-02-22T12:05:00.004Z

Last week, I wrote a comment piece about depression for the Guardian's Comment is Free section. Click here to read it. Lots of good debate in the comments.

Image courtesy of Alex E Proimos.

Ghost bikes

2010-02-04T15:14:00.003Z

Last Saturday, over lunch, a friend told me about Ghost Bikes: spray-painted, white bicycles that are chained up all over London - indeed, all over the world - at spots where cyclists met their maker. I hadn't noticed them before; perhaps I had seen one, but had thought it was just ordinary bicycles, chained up while its owner went to work. Funnily enough, after meeting my friend, I encountered one an hour later, chained up outside Mosquito Bikes on Essex Road, Islington. So I took a photo of it with my phone (above).

My friend had been quite enthusiastic about Ghost Bikes, which, as the movement's website puts it, "serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel." Their website gives locations of Ghost Bikes around the world, advises readers how to make their own Ghost Bike, and lists names of the recently deceased.

Which is all very well and good, but the only thing I felt as I walked out of the shop and saw the bike, was a nameless dread. It was downright creepy: a shell of a bike, with no handlebars or chain, and a bunch of pink flowers attached. If I had just bought a bicycle (which I'm planning to do soon - for the first time in my adult life), I would have taken to the street with my confidence zapped.

I can imagine that Ghost Bikes would be a hit in Mexico, the most death-obsessed place I have ever visited. I've never felt so slapped in the face by my mortality as when I took a 10-hour bus trip down a motorway in western Mexico (I forget the exact location) with a 200ft drop on one side.

I've been on equally dangerous roads since (and with crazier drivers), but in Mexico, none of the crashed cars, motorcycles and buses had been cleared away. They numbered in their hundreds; IN THEIR HUNDREDS. I would not have been able to count the burnt-out vehicles that lay on the roadside, scattered like confetti, even if I had wanted to. Instead of being cleared, they were turned into memorials. Painted with crucifixes and the names of the dead. The name "JUAN" painted in bright colours on the roof of a car is burned in my memory. I spent the trip gripped in a state of quiet terror.

Why do we have to use death to terrify the living? When I die, I don't want a gravestone, a Ghost Bike or any kind of creepy memorial. I want to be burnt to a crisp, scattered on Hampstead Heath and maybe have a nice park bench with my name stamped on it, which people can enjoy, without fear. The dead should be rememebered by their lives, not by their deaths.

David Lynch/The Guardian

2009-10-26T15:18:00.005Z

Hello there. I wrote a piece for the Guardian film blog about the David Lynch Interview Project - including a little interview with his son Austin, who created the project with fellow film-maker Jason S. Click here to read it, and leave a comment!

Idealism

2009-10-02T19:27:00.008+01:00

I spent four years at a newspaper, chasing PRs and contributors, interviewing musicians and actors, coming up with ideas, trying to get ahead. It was a job with many perks - tickets to shows, invites to premieres, breakfasts at the Wolseley etc - but the main perk was that everday, I went to the office and worked with words. I love words like geeks love numbers; whether I'm editing or writing, I'm content. (Not necessarily happy, because writing is hard - just content.) But sometimes, after pulling another late night or weekend, or interviewing another gushing ingenue actress, I would look to the sky (or, at least, at the grey ceiling of our office) and think, if I'm going to spend my time on earth working this hard, shouldn't I be helping people?

Ah, youthful idealism. I got my wish. As well as freelancing as a journalist, I'm working part-time at a charity, where I spend my days speaking to parents who have children with mental health or emotional problems; they run the gamut from social anxiety and weed-smoking (been there, done that) to sexual abuse, neglect, social deprivation and multi-generational mental illness. Some days are good. Sometimes, I'll skip home glowing with the knowledge that I've helped someone think about their children's issues, and persuaded them to get some help.

Other days, I feel like I've found the key to the dark soul of the UK - the one that hides behind the shiny facade of all-inclusive liberalism and opportunity. I wanted that key, much more than I wanted to go to film premieres, but my new knowledge of our country's shortcomings is still a bitter pill to swallow. While I live in my idyllic corner of Hackney, stressing about my various jobs (OK, I have more going on, but I'm not one to overshare), there are pockets of Britain where women like Fiona Pilkington - who recently killed herself and her disabled daughter - have to cope with more abuse, loneliness and rejection than most of us can imagine.

Most of the mothers I speak to at work have, like Pilkington, been abandoned by their partners to raise difficult children in impossible circumstances. Many of them, like Pilkington, struggle with their own mental health issues, which can hamper their ability to seek help, before it's too late. Many of these parents call us from invisible pockets of the UK that I've never heard of. Such places don't feature on tourist board adverts; Americans wouldn't be interested in tracking down their ancestors in such unphotogenic, mean-looking towns. They are rarely featured in a newspaper articles either, apart from when something tragic, like Pilkington's suicide, happens. There are towns where people have been out of work, mentally ill and father-less (and sometimes mother-less too) for generations - because of lack of opportunity, lack of intervention, lack of education, lack of support. Their lives are a cruel accident of birth and geography, and they are being failed on every level.

I came home from work yesterday thinking that I couldn't take much more of it, that I should stick to the parties, the ingenues, the music and films. It's what I know, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. But once you've found that key, it's hard to give it back.

Image courtesy of Amyn Kassam.

Holloway's finest

2009-09-22T10:21:00.008+01:00

This photograph (which was taken on my phone) does not do justice to the spectacle that was this New Age warrior on a motorbike who I spotted coasting down Holloway Road on Saturday afternoon. I think there had just been an Arsenal match, because the street was clogged with drunk people wearing red football shirts - so naturally, this guy got a lot of attention. And he lapped it up, by doing that a Queenly, stiff-wristed wave. What a legend. I bet he lives with his mum in Pinner.

Note:
1. His skull face-covering
2. The ARMOUR on his legs and arms. ARMOUR!
3. His cross-shaped wing mirrors
4. Horns on his helmet and his shoulders!

Literally. Awesome.

Bees

2009-09-16T17:57:00.005+01:00

Douglas Coupland: "I think if there’s a choice between people giving up their cellphones or the bees disappearing, I think you’ll be hard to pressed to find anyone who’ll give up their cellphone."

Such an odd quote, I thought. Why would we have to choose between bees and our mobile phones? As it happens, ole Coupland hasn't lost his marbles. A couple of years ago, German scientists linked the honey bee's rapidly declining population to mobile phone masts, which may affect wandering bees' sense of direction. All over the world, bees have been leaving their hives to do a day's work, never to return - leaving the queen and a few younglings alone in the deserted hive. It's called Colony Collapse Disorder, and it affects life as we know it - without bees to pollinate crops, the agricultural industry would be in tatters. These unassuming insects are worth £200 million to the British economy.

Einstein once said that if bees disappear off the face of the earth, mankind would die within four years. So, I dunno, Coupland. When it's put that way, the loss of my Blackberry doesn't seem like such a big deal. But you learn something new every day. Today I learned: we should worship the buzzy little blighters.

Image courtesy of SkipSteuart.

Yes

2009-09-14T11:12:00.002+01:00

Old joy

2009-08-22T19:31:00.009+01:00

While cleaning out my laptop, I came across this rather earnest article about Golders Green (my childhood neighbourhood) which I wrote on spec five years ago, at the age of 22, for a little London journal. At the time I was working as a waitress and trying to break into journalism with little success; even Glamour wouldn't have me as an intern. Sadly, the little journal rejected my piece - another rejection on an ever-growing pile, which only added to my despairing feeling that I would never make anything of myself. (Only later did I find out that "making it" isn't all it's cracked out to be.)

This rejection hurt more than the others, because I poured my heart into the essay. Reading it now, I can see that it's a little too serious and sounds a bit academic at times, but in spirit, I still feel the same way about my neighbourbood, even though I haven't lived there in several years. (The Old Bull and Bush pub, however, is now a gastro-shithole.)

So, if you're interested, here's the piece. I haven't edited any of it since 2004.

Golders Green Revisited: how I learned to stop worrying and love the Jewish ghetto

I used to be ashamed of living in Golders Green. Not always, but it crept up on me when I left the sweet haven of my local primary school to attend a private girls school. I was eleven years old, shy, foreign and overwhelmed. The girls at my new school were alarmingly confident and sophisticated. They spoke with refined accents, of diets, ponies and grade-eight cello certificates; their fathers were famous film directors or record producers or businessmen, their mothers had scalpel-sculptured button noses, and they lived in Hampstead, Highgate and St. John’s Wood, where chi-chi boutiques and delicatessens nestled alongside impossibly gorgeous Victorian mansions. Hampstead is a mere five-minute drive away from the pound shops and synagogues of Golders Green, but it is a different world. Since 1986, when we arrived from Rio de Janeiro, I had happily lived, with a child’s ignorant bliss, alongside those pound shops and synagogues, as well as the mysterious, bearded men who roamed the streets on Saturday morning.

All born-and-bred Londoners have heard of Golders Green; some of them have even been there, because it is the National Express’s north London stop-off. But the National Express is not what makes Golders Green so infamous – it’s the Jews.
Golders Green lies on the Edgware strand of the Northern Line, in the London borough of Barnet. When the tube station opened in 1907, hundreds of Jews arrived en masse. Prior to that, Golders Green had been a farm, sign-posted by a plank of wood. After Hitler came to power, wave upon wave of European Jews followed their British cousins to the area, and when East London – London’s traditional Yiddish outpost – was bombed, even more decamped to the area. It is now estimated that 46,686 Jews live in Barnet – the highest concentration of Jews in the UK, ranging from the ever-increasing numbers of non-believers to the way-of-life fundamentalists (the aforementioned mysterious, bearded men). By way of comparison, a measly 226 Jews bask in the smog of central London. Make no mistake – Judaism rules Golders Green.

A month before I began at my new school, my family moved into a house on the outskirts of Hampstead Garden Suburb, into a property that could be most aptly described as a dump. Hampstead Garden Suburb is a pretty, unfailingly bourgeois Edwardian housing development, where the middle-classes of Golders Green live, many of whom like to believe they live in Hampstead. When we moved in, however, the house was practically uninhabitable. No kitchen, no electricity, no heating, overflowing toilets, crumbling walls, builders everywhere. It was an unhappy coincidence that I should move into this house just as I started at private school, where my new friends lived, seemingly, like gods in their Hampstead mansions, with weekends at their country houses. I avoided bringing them over to Golders Green for as long as possible, at least until the electricity was sorted out. Just so I wouldn’t have to force these god-like creatures to piss in the cold, clammy dark. It was only two years later, when the house was fixed-up and beautiful, that I realised I still lived in a shameful place. The house could be as gorgeous as it liked, but it would never sprout its wings and fly away from Golders Green, a place so embarrassing to me that I often told people I lived “near Camden”.

Golders Green has suffered a legacy of shame. Turn to the biographical page of any Evelyn Waugh novel and you will learn that he “was born in Hampstead in 1903.” This would have made him proud – Waugh was a native of Golders Green, and, like my teenage self, he utterly despised the place. It is interesting that Waugh’s publishers choose to give precedence to the place where he was born, rather than to the location of his childhood home, where the seeds of his social insecurities were sown – an unassuming, small white house near the tube station, now indelibly stamped with a blue plaque. As a teenager, he would walk through blizzards and rainstorms to Hampstead to post his letters, just so that his envelopes would carry the superior NW3 postmark. It seems to have worked in Waugh’s favour – the website Myhampstead.co.uk, for example, proudly lists him as one of Hampstead’s famous former residents. Hampstead is teeming with wealthy writers – why not add another to their celebrity roll call? What’s a little embarrassing postcode between friends?

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh was a paradox: a legendary social climber who dedicated much of his writing life to the exposition of elite-class emptiness. Perhaps it is not a paradox as such, more indicative of his love-hate (or love-envy) relationship with wealth and prestige – something all of us can relate to. In the topsy-turvy world of Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People of Mayfair live on champagne and borrowed money, constantly bored yet constantly partying; a new Prime Minister is elected every week and nobody ever remembers who is in power at any given time because their favourite news rag The Daily Excess is more concerned with society gossip. Published in 1930, the novel captured the end of the devil-may-care decade – as Waugh put it, “when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.” Given Waugh’s terrific tearing apart of the upper classes, it seems strange that he was so ashamed of living in a nice middle class enclave such as Golders Green. Frankly, I do not believe that it was Golders Green’s banal middle-classness that he was ashamed of, but rather, the area’s inhabitants. After all, one of Vile Bodies’ most shady characters is Mr. Isaacs, a Yid-named quack film director who sets out to con mad old Colonel Blount out of his money – the ubiquitous stereotype of the money-grabbing Jew.

Jews have been in London longer than almost any other ethnic minority. Although it is presumed that they arrived with the Romans in 41 A.D., the first documented evidence of a Jewish quarter appeared in 1128. A relic of early Jewish London still exists in the city centre, in the form of a street called The Old Jewry, which dates back to 1210. Life was not easy for those early settlers. They were barred from working ordinary jobs so they became moneylenders, because it was the only form of business that Christians could not take part in, as it was considered sinful. Herein lies the ultimate irony: the penny-pinching “Shylock” figure was borne not from greed, but from prejudice and Christian fundamentalism. In 1283, the Jewish population of London was expelled altogether, a decade after hundreds of Jews were executed on suspicion of tampering with the currency. It would be another 350 years before they would be allowed to return.

I cannot think of another ethnic minority that has been persecuted in London for an entire millennium (I may be wrong – answers on a postcard, please). In the twentieth century, Jews became one of the most influential ethnic groups in the world, from the Spielbergs and Weinsteins of Hollywood, to the Marxes and Freuds of thought, from the money-spinning Rothchilds of London, to the literary Roths and Millers (the latter, surely the greatest playwright of the century). Despite all this, and despite all the horrors of the century, in the last year, attacks on British Jews have tripled. Synagogues have been desecrated, boys in scull caps attacked. I am no Zionist, and as a staunch Atheist, I am barely a Jew, but it is difficult not to wonder what the hell is going on.

As a teenager, I was ashamed of Golders Green due to people’s reactions to the area, not due to ethnic shame. My boyfriend recently noticed that whenever he tells someone that I live in Golders Green, they respond strangely, almost contemptuously. I have become used to certain friends jibing that I live “out in the sticks” and that Golders Green is “not really in London,” despite my NW11 postcode. Is it because Golders Green’s deeply religious inhabitants, dressed like the last two centuries never happened, render the whole area into another city, another world? Some people, when I tell them where I live, simply ask, “Are you Jewish?” No, I’m not Jewish, I reply. And they breathe a sigh of relief. Or, as an Italian recently said to me, “Thank god, because I used to live in Golders Green, and I fucking hated all those Jews.” It was not the first time it had happened. It’s interesting that anti-Semitism is a relatively acceptable form of racism to adopt these days. It reminds me of the young intellectual “Communist or near-Communist” that George Orwell encounters in his 1945 essay “Anti-Semitism in Britain.” “No, I do not like Jews,” he tells Orwell, “I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-Semitic, of course.”

Judaism – particularly Orthodox Judaism – just isn’t sexy. In America, Judaism is Natalie Portman pretending to be a stripper, Dustin Hoffman being seduced by Mrs. Robinson; it is Woody Allen, Billy Wilder and Bob Dylan. In London, Judaism is Golders Green, Volvos, long beards, longer skirts, black coats and hats, wigs and constant prayer. Unlike the Caribbean and Asian food, music and culture that has crossed over to the mainstream in the UK, Jewish customs remains resolutely unglamorous, and ultimately foreign.

But Golders Green isn’t just about Jews. If you walk down the high street (ignoring the sad, sad windows of KFC), you will find – alongside the shops selling Menorahs, falafel and the best bagels in London – a Turkish grocers, a Pakistani supermarket (well stocked with Polish food), a Chinese Herbalist, a charity shop run by Brazilians, a Chinese Buffet, a Sicilian barber, an Art Deco café and a sushi restaurant.

On a Saturday night, glamorous underage princesses in mini-skirts roam the streets, brandishing packets of fags like trophies, staggering into the all-night newsagent to try their luck on a bottle of vodka. Packs of rude boys and girls swagger past in respectively baggy and tight clothes, insulting each other flirtatiously. Orthodox Jewish boys stroll in gangs, many of them impossibly handsome with their smart black clothes and olive skins, speaking to each other in accented English or perfect Hebrew. The local punk tramp (you know who you are) can be found sitting on the grassy knoll outside the tube station with his dog, listening to pop music on Radio 1 and smoking spliffs with his mates. Aussie backpackers shoot pool in the god-awful pub down my road. Much more promising is The Old Bull and Bush up North End Road, a ten-minute walk from the house that the young Evelyn Waugh was so ashamed of, and one of the oldest pubs in London. The Bull and Bush dates back to the reign of Charles I, and a hundred years ago, it was the subject of music hall star Florrie Forde’s greatest hit. The lyrics are chalked onto the wall of the pub:

Come, come, come
And make eyes at me
Down at the Old Bull and Bush,
Come, come, drink
Some port wine with me
Down at the Old Bull and Bush.

I used to sing this song at primary school (along with that other music hall classic “Who’s this geezer Hitler?”), and only recently found out that the pub was near my house. The place is definitely worth a visit for the old photographs of Golders Green and Florrie Forde that cover the walls. And if that doesn’t convince you, head towards the Golders Green crematorium on Hoop Lane, where you can pay your respects to Sigmund Freud, Peter Sellers, Joe Orton, Keith Moon, Peter Cook and Marc Bolan.

I spent three years living in Leeds, studying for my degree. When I came back to Golders Green, I found that the shame had lifted, and I loved this strange place like nowhere else. It may not have the glamour of Hampstead or the rock stars of Primrose Hill, but what it does have, which those places don’t, is diversity – not just a tolerated diversity, but a celebrated one. Everyone here gets along just fine. Perhaps because, in much of the city, all of us – the Jews, the South Americans, the Asians, the Eastern Europeans – are in the minority. Soon, I will be leaving Golders Green, probably to east London, in search of cheap rent. I can always be assured that when I return to visit on a Sabbath Saturday morning, I will find the streets overrun with relics of a different London, a different century. There is nowhere else like it in the city.

Old H2 bus pictured above, courtesy of AndrewHA.

Here's Johnny

2009-06-12T13:08:00.014+01:00

Here's Johnny Depp looking like a crisp Christmas turkey on the cover of the current issue of Vanity Fair. A particularly handsome turkey, but a turkey nevertheless. Much could be made of the fact that VF have chosen to leave Depp's skin looking sun-damaged and wrinkly, while a female actor of similar age would surely have been airbrushed to buggery. One could say that it just encourages the widespread idea that women grow old, men grow distinguished - and it does. But that would just be boring, and, anyway, I don't agree with that maxim at all. I think everyone (both men and women) grows older and uglier. Some at differrent rates than others, depending on what "God" gave you.

My problem with Johnny Depp in Vanity Fair isn't his aversion to factor 50; it was Douglas Brinkley's piece itself, which was a sychophantic paean to everything that is wrong with our celebrity-worshipping age. Full disclosure: I am a fan of Mr Depp's work, and not just because he's hot. And I also like Vanity Fair. Sure, it runs far too many pieces about real estate in the Hamptons, but it's one of the only publications on earth that is still consistently well-written and researched. I like nothing more than reading long, dirty dissertations about Bernie Madoff. Truly.

But then you have Brinkley on Depp. Brinkley - who is also a professor of history, according to Wikipedia - is obviously so super duper chuffed at being invited to Depp's private Caribbean island that he can't bring himself to say anything interesting about the actor. He has an indulgently decked out yacht! He drinks Corona and eats classy junk food! He's still banging on about Jack Kerouac! (What is he, 15 years old?) He swims in the sea, except, like, he's so much cuter than the rest of us! I went from thinking Depp was a mildly interesting actor to thinking he was just a boring rich guy with an island. Perhaps it's the truth - but I doubt it.

I hate celebrity culture as much as the next guilty Dlisted reader, but it's the religion of our times, and it deserves better analysis than this. The last thing you need in your precious, precious life is to read yet another fawning celebrity profile. It's a wasted half-hour. As Michael Jackson proved, the truth is always much, much stranger. Just don't read them. Maybe I'll take my own advice.

Or bring back Truman Capote.

Tree cosy

2009-06-09T16:36:00.005+01:00

Between 2005 and 2008, this otherwise unassuming tree in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, sported a rather fetching "Tea Cozy", as knitted by the artist Carol Hummel. Pretty, no? And pretty perplexing - how did she do it?

I passed through Cleveland on the way to New York when I was 19 and travelling on my own. Even at 4am, the Greyhound station was full of Amish families and homeless guys asking for change. And then I missed my bus, lost all my belongings and realised I had no money in my bank account, so that, eight years on, the word "Cleveland" just means "hell" to me. But it had a tree cosy, so it can't be all bad.

Shake yo ass

2009-06-08T20:43:00.003+01:00

All the worst aspects of Brazilian culture, summarised in one horrific four-minute video.

And to even things out, here's the best (this really is the fucking best!):

Animal of the week: the slow loris

2009-05-27T19:56:00.005+01:00

Please buy me one for Xmas.

I did a little interview with Kim Gordon for last Sunday's Independent on Sunday - click here to read it.

Nadine Dorries, Tory MP

2009-05-22T12:41:00.003+01:00

"People are seriously beginning to crack," Ms Dorries told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "The last day in Parliament this week was, I would say, completely unbearable.

"I have never been in an atmosphere or environment like it, when people walk around with terror in their eyes..."

Boohoo! At last, politicians know how workers in the city, the car industry and the media have felt over the last year, coming into work every day, terrified of being laid off. Except most of them didn't do anything to deserve it.

Link from The Times.

BNP rant, part 2: Look what the cat dragged in...

2009-05-20T15:38:00.011+01:00

Or rather, the postman. If I were him, I would have ripped it to shreds, but I guess that would be unprofessional. (Thankfully, some postal workers are pickier about what they deliver.)

What most frustrates me about the British National Party is their stupidity. In many ways, we're fortunate to have idiots representing the British far right - rather than, say, Hitler, who was clever enough to dupe one of the most cultured nations in the world into believing that Jews were the root of all its problems. But the BNP is no Nazi Party. While perusing the blog of a supporter the other day (hey, I have a lot of time on my hands), it was rather pleasing to note that the blogger couldn't even spell "Britain". Bravo, patriot!

The back of the BNP's new leaflet (the second picture above) cites "D-day" and "The Somme", among other battles, as reasons for why "we" (ie white people) have earned the right to be stupid, British and racist. Does that mean that all the Americans who landed in Normandy are British too? Oh, and the Somme - any eight-year-old who's been on a school trip to the Imperial War Museum will know that thousands of Indians and West Indians fought in the trenches.

Underneath that, there's a picture of a cuddly pair of old fascists, explaining why they want England to become a neo-Nazi state (exaggeration, mine): "We've seen how this country has declined under the present government and we're voting BNP because they will put pensioners before asylum seekers and ensure our future." Because Gordon Brown really does sit around pondering, "Who's more important/better/cuter, asylum seekers or defenseless old grannies?" - and he ALWAYS picks asylum seekers, the bastard.

This leaflet's purpose is twofold. Most obviously, it's out to recruit new members at a time when support for mainstream political parties is at an all-time low. But its secondary purpose is more sinister - it's been sent out to intimidate immigrants and ethnic minorities. After all, you don't send BNP leaflets to a Hackney council estate - much like the one I live in - unless you want to strike fear into the hearts of black and Asian people. Of the six flats in my block, only one of them is occupied by a white British family.

It says "British Jobs for British Workers" on the leaflet, but they don't mean "British Workers"; they even mean "Anglo-Saxon British Workers". Nick Griffin has made it quite clear that he believes that Black and Asian Britons "do not exist".

How does one decide who is British and who isn't? As we all know, our country has been invaded so many times that it is impossible to ascertain who is actually indigenous. Anglo-Saxons were of German origin, and they've only been around for two thousand years. Black people have been around for almost as long - much evidence supports the idea that the African-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, who rebuilt Hadrian's Wall, was black.

Let's not kid ourselves. By "British", they mean white. Which is why we have to stamp these fuckers out, and use our votes for the main British parties, as much as they have disappointed us in the past few weeks.

How do I love thee, Charlie Brooker

2009-05-18T15:59:00.003+01:00

Let me count the ways:

"Every country has its own tiny enclave of frightened, disenfranchised, misguided souls clinging to their national flag, claiming they're the REAL patriots, saying everyone's out to get them. It's an international weakness. For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard."

Click here for the rest of his BNP kicking.

Redundancy, football

2009-05-17T20:19:00.004+01:00

Here's a nice, well-written redundancy story courtesy of fellow out-of-work writer Alex Balk, who used to work for Gawker... As a freelancer-cum-unemployed person, I could do with more of these.

But sometimes I manage to get work. Check out my piece in today's Independent on Sunday about casual culture and the brilliant indie film Awaydays.

The writer Kevin Sampson cited the cover of David Bowie's Low as a major football casual reference point. You learn something everyday. And isn't it a beautiful picture?

Awkward family photos

2009-05-13T18:38:00.008+01:00

Favourite blog of the week, month, year, ever... Do not scroll down if you are of a delicate disposition - the last picture will haunt you.

The Pashley Sonnet

2009-05-10T13:27:00.006+01:00

Could you be the most beautiful bike in the world?

Probably.

But at £565, it might be easier to write "mug me" across my forehead.

Supermarkets and earworms

2009-04-27T11:51:00.005+01:00

The freelance work is creeping in, slowly but surely. Here's a little interview I did with the actor Clarke Peters (aka Lester Freamon from The Wire) about his role as Nelson Mandela in the forthcoming TV drama Endgame. And here's a piece I wrote for the Foodtv.co.uk about evil supermarket self-checkouts. Go check it out (hur hur).

After working full-time in one organisation for four years, being a lady of leisure - ahem, a freelancer - takes some getting used to. So I have to come up with activities to keep me busy: swimming, walking in the park, playing the guitar and, as ever, getting into music. For example, I've got into Fiona Apple, about 10 years too late.

In particular, Apple's song "Paper Bag" has been living in my head for about a week. I remember the song coming out in 1999 - I liked the video, but was put off by her association with that whole American, angsty, female singer-songwriting scene: I can't really find anything to like about Ani DiFranco or Liz Phair, for example, even though I know a lot of American girls are obsessed with them. (They never really made it over here.) To my teenaged self it just seemed so horribly sincere and so... uncool, for lack of a better word. Fiona Apple is kind of different. She's more like Rufus Wainwright - baroque, ambitious, well-crafted pop. (You know you're getting old when you like nothing more than a "well-crafted song".) And she's a hell of a singer. Shame she isn't more prolific.

Here's a video of her singing "Paper Bag" on the Today show - it's a real earworm. Sneaks up on you.

Weird

2009-04-24T18:44:00.002+01:00

A Gaythering Storm

2009-04-23T15:10:00.005+01:00

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. A cringe-worthy anti-gay marriage advert, followed by a lampoon from Funny or Die, starring Alicia Silverstone and the guy from Star Trek. Please watch them both - it will will make your day.

And while we're on the subject, I don't understand how gay marriage would take away anyone's "freedom", as is proposed in the first video. Can anyone explain?

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

One-album wonder

2009-04-21T16:52:00.005+01:00

I've been listening to Lauryn Hill's one and only studio album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill this afternoon. The album came in 1998, the year when I realised that indie-rock was just one small part of the jigsaw (and not a particularly beautiful piece). I grew out my indie-pixie hair, realised that Bis were the worst band in the world and discovered Sly and the Family Stone. And I listened obsessively to The Miseducation, especially the song "Ex-Factor" (see video above), which remains completely spell-binding.

Hill was the real deal - she wrote and produced her music, she had a voice like velvet, and she said crazy things in interviews, like all the best pop stars. She was, undoubtedly, the most talented Fugee, but perhaps not the most discerning (hello Wyclef).

Perhaps it's best that she never followed up The Miseducation. Although stories of her kooky behaviour still filter back to us, we never had to watch her talent melt away. She never became embarrassing; she never became the Stones. And that is the gift of the one-album wonder. The magic of that one great record never fades, because, for some reason or other - be it death (like Jeff Buckley) or a breakdown - they never managed to repeat it. And all that remains is their perfect moment, frozen in time. Well, almost perfect - let's just forget about "To Zion".

The first dog

2009-04-15T11:06:00.004+01:00

What I love about dogs is that they'll love you no matter who you are, just as long as you feed them, pat them on the head, and sometimes throw a ball. Whether you're the most powerful man in the world, or a crack-addicted tramp, they'll still eat your shoes and be your best friend. Actually, tramp dogs are always the best behaved - but I'd still rather be in Bo's shoes, for obvious reasons. He gets to pee in the Oval Office! (Probably.)

"Don't point that gun at him - he's an unpaid intern!"

2009-04-12T20:51:00.007+01:00

That above quote comes, of course, from Wes Anderson's nautical comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which was released in the UK in early 2005. The "unpaid intern" jokes that ran throughout the film were particularly amusing - and, perhaps, painful - to my friends and I, because we were all unpaid interns at the time. In the first half of 2005 alone, I interned at Dazed & Confused, Vogue, the literary journal Ambit and the Independent on Sunday, all the while working two meagrely paid waitressing jobs and a few other odds and ends. I was pleased to be eventually offered a job at the Independent on Sunday in the summer, because my commitment to journalism had paid off. More than anything, though, I was relieved that I would never have to do another unpaid internship ever again. Don't get me wrong: all of my placements - particularly the four mentioned above - were useful and interesting. But they didn't pay, and performing the dance of "can do!" on a daily basis is awfully tiring.

Why am I suddenly pondering internships, four years on from my last one? Because, as the economy skulks further into a dark, slimy black hole, "vacancies" for internships seem to be cropping up more than ever. Can't afford to pay your staff? No worries, because there will always be a desperate child willing, nay, begging to do it for free. And not just if you run a fancy magazine (where, to be honest, the internships are sometimes worthwhile - well they were a few years ago, when it was still possible to get a job on such a publication).

There's a certain arts employment mailing list which just about everyone I know subscribes to - it's generally useful, but it regularly throws up some dubious-sounding interning opportunities. My friend Jo - who works in film - once joked that she could easily get a little slave of her own by putting an ad in this list.

Just this week, a "writer, creative writing coach and literary events manager" advertised for an intern who could work for free "on a minimum 3-month basis". But why would a writer need an intern? To be his/her free agent and manager, of course!

"The role will involve generally assisting me in developing my brand. This will entail communicating with publishers, writers and others in the field of publishing; publicity for events; blogging; social networking; typing; seeking out opportunities for collaboration; helping with creative classes, etc."

Beautiful! The advert also cleverly pokes at the prospective intern's saddest little hope - that this ridiculous "opportunity" might actually lead to a bona fide job: "It may become a paid position in the future, but this is by no means certain."

Sadface :-(

Art bitch

2009-04-10T12:45:00.009+01:00

I almost feel sorry for Isa Genzken. The German artist's work is currently showing at the newly reopened Whitechapel Gallery alongside a copy of one of the greatest paintings of the 20th century - thus making Genzken's work look utterly ridiculous and trite. The painting in question? Well, it's more a tapestry of the painting - a woven version of Picasso's Guernica; usually, it lives at the UN in New York. (The real thing can be found in Madrid.) I went down to Whitechapel yesterday to check it out with my mother and a 90-something psychoanalyst friend of hers. Three generations of womanhood, with over 30 years separating each from the other. We could all appreciate Guernica, though. My mother's friend was not much younger than me when the real painting - which depicts the 1937 bombing of Guernica by the Germans - was exhibited at Whitechapel in 1939, the year that even more hell broke loose.

I'm not going to describe the painting. You can look it up on Google and find someone to explain it much better than I could. It's a picture of war-torn despair, full of hidden symbols and broken characters. We stared at it for around 45 minutes, completely rapt.

After that, we explored the rest of the gallery, which is filled with Isa Genzken's gaudy, just-fished-out-of-a-bin-bag sculptures. Grainy photographs of shoes in New York. Trolleys festooned with mannequins dressed like acid casualties. Plastic flowers, pictures of Leo DiCaprio glued to a slot machine, random blocks of concrete, more mannequins lying flaccidly, absurdly on the floor. My mother's friend said she just didn't get it. My mother thought it was disgraceful. And I was like, meh, it's just your average, badly executed conceptual crap - I'm used to it by now. Usually it doesn't bother me, but after seeing Guernica, I felt like something had been lost.

Interview with Emily Benn

2009-04-06T13:27:00.006+01:00

Here's a little interview I did with Emily Benn, the 19-year-old Labour candidate for East Worthing and Shoreham (and Tony Benn's granddaughter, of course).

Rumble Strips review

2009-04-01T20:28:00.003+01:00

I went to see them at Dingwalls last week and I was pleasantly surprised... Here's my review of the show. My last gig review as a staffer!