Posted in Architecture, Literature, tagged commuting, home, London, the clash on November 21, 2008 | No Comments »
The Blonde is back in town. After a two-year, caffeine-soaked, Caramac-stoked commuting craic, I have surrendered to the basement embrace of a tiny Holbornian womb, replete with a forty three year old chain-smoking chav with a Michael Jackson obsession and a seven month old Alsatian called Snatch. Natch.
There is something to be said for the [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged moleskine, journals, diaries, william boyd, any human heart, virigina woolf's diaries on November 14, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In my imagination, I know exactly how it goes. Bedecked in nothing but a ragged top hat, a pair of cashmere socks and a tremulous snakehipped boy, I finally breathe my quavering last in a secluded riad, ravaged by a life of intellectual and sensual excess. As weeping acolytes pile in to preserve any secreted [...]
Posted in Art, Film, Literature, tagged running, Tate Britain, Work No 850, Haruki Murakami, Rachel Whiteread, Martin Creed, Turner Prize, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on November 7, 2008 | No Comments »
Martin Creed owes me kicks. My twelve-year-old Green Flash have finally expired, and the cheeky conceptual bulb-botherer’s to blame. (Martin, if you’re reading, as I have no doubt you are, these superfeet are just the right side of revolting. C’mon. Make a poor Blonde smile.)
Let me explain. Having failed to give much of a shit [...]
Posted in Fashion, Literature, tagged Beowulf, Daisy Goodwin, Off By Heart, poetry recital, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare on October 30, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I hate it when my specious and shallowly provocative prejudices come back to bite me on my self-important although deliciously exfoliated ass. Having once been, OK, a little snippy about Daisy Goodwin in the Guardian, I must now shamefacedly acclaim her evidently brilliant Off By Heart children’s poetry recital scheme.
Poetry was invented to be conjured on [...]
Posted in Literature, TV, tagged bbc, bradley james, king arthur, merlin, robin hood on October 7, 2008 | No Comments »
Geoff of Monmouth? Loudmouth. Chretien de Troyes? Cretin. Malory? Meh.
For years I have quested through the misty verbal thickets of our eminent Arthurian authorities, but amongst all the legend’s comely ladies and puissant knights, they collectively fail to mention the fairest of them all. Yep, apparently, Merlin was hot. A puppy-eyed, crooked-grinned, bone-fide geek-chic, Benedict [...]
Posted in Dance, Literature, Music, Theatre, tagged beauty, christopher walken, dorian gray, gate theatre, hedda, leo tolstoy, matthew bourne on September 29, 2008 | No Comments »
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion”, wondered Count Tolstoy, no doubt blinking in the cruel glare bouncing off a harlot’s milk-white bosom, “that beauty is goodness”. In Leo veritas. Beauty is more reliably bad-ass, and too much of it can kill.
It’s a truism beautifully told in Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s updated version of Ibsen’s [...]
Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged palaces, stately homes, Versaillles on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
I have a love/hate affair with what Virginia Woolf called ‘those comfortable padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.’ Surely even those without a mother prone to riff on the earnest, sweaty idealism of her days in the SWP must feel the chill fingers of the little match girl [...]
Posted in Architecture, Film, Literature, Theatre, tagged Burbage's theatre, London, memory, Muppets, New York, Paris, Shakespeare on August 6, 2008 | No Comments »
So, the original site of Will’s first Theatre has been found. Londinia, the old tart, sweeps up her crusty skirts to show what she’s been hiding all along and laughs at our redfaced surprise.
We shouldn’t be shocked. Paris may be the curlicued, calorie-controlled charmeuse with the pristine avenues and neatly trimmed bush; New York may [...]
Posted in Architecture, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged Antony Gormley, Dickens, Don DeLilo, Heath Ledger, the city, The Dark Knight, Underworld on August 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In the moist, muggy days of England’s sort-of summer, when I should be out playing croquet with hedgehogs, bathing my milky, sun-shy skin in cucumber-plump Pimms, and wearing a little something like this, I’ve been mentally rooted in the subscape and the skyscrape of the beast we call City: that bustling, shadowed playpen filled with [...]
Posted in Film, Literature, tagged realism, david lean, great expectations, lawrence of arabia, BFI, NFT on June 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The best literary and filmic realism stems from meticulously constructed fakery. The English, masters of precise practical craftsmanship and emotional detachment, do it particularly well: we frigid orgasm-feigning voyeurs are brilliant at building sincere pieces of insincerity that hit the heart by tricking the mind. From Thackeray and Hardy to Eliot and Dickens, our great [...]
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