Cocktails and Records

We haven’t had a good list round here in a while. So from the time-wasters at utalkmarketing.com comes this scintillating snippet of suprise. Or not as the case may be.

These, folks, are apparently the celebrities most likely to persuade UK customers to buy stuff:

1. Jamie Oliver
2. Gary Lineker
3. Myleene Klass
4. Carol Vorderman
5. Lewis Hamilton

And these are the celebrities least likely to persuade UK customers to buy stuff:

1. Victoria Beckham
2. Wayne Rooney
3. Katie Price
4. Kate Moss
5. Kerry Katona

But, and I genuinely ask you this, what is the difference between these two lists? They’re all berks of dubious credibility in my eyes.

I would no sooner buy some kitchen cleaner/pasta sauce/insurance because Gary Lineker advised it than than I would Wayne Rooney. They’re both football players after all. I do not shop in Sainsburys because Jamie does and I don’t not shop in Iceland because Kerry Katona apparently did. And isn’t Myleene Klass on The One Show, that well-known bastion of taste and credibility?

Help, I don’t get it!

When we run events at work we always have a pile of evaluation forms available at the end should anyone like to a. sign up to the mailing list b. tell us how great we or, most commonly, c. complain.

How I wish I had an evaluation form on Saturday night – although, admittedly, it was partly my fault. We went to the wrong gig you see. We had tickets to see Matthew Shipp, jazz pianist extraordinaire (you can hear him here on an ancient Song of the Week). We’ve seen him before and he was very good, very good indeed. But it transpires that that was Matthew Shipp solo.

Unbeknown to us, Mr Shipp had a guest on Saturday night,  J. Spaceman – a.k.a Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and Spaceman3 fame – and instead of the anticipated jazz piano gig we got an experimental jam for organ, guitar and effects pedals based on two chords, one tempo, no tune and 45 spirit sapping minutes.

If I was being kind, I would say that this was a ingenious combining of free jazz and minimalism to create a mesmerising and mind-bending piece of work. But I’m not. It was the tiresome result of what happens when a jazz musician wants to join Jesus & Mary Chain and a rock musician thinks that he is John Adams. It was the kind of boring, self-indulgent ramble where all attempts at musical sophistication are washed away under a sea of drone and audience yawns.

Thankfully two other musicians joined the pair for a second 45-minute piece and rescued us with some drums and additional chords. Audience appreciation of this sudden injection of colour was expressed by the almost instant cessation of texting and whispering. People even stopped checking their watches and turned their heads towards the stage.

Now, I know that I came expecting something different and a good music snob would accuse me of being a philistine, but god I was bored during that first half. I even had to resort to counting all the trendy Fleet Foxes style beards in the room (14).

So what’s the most boring gig you’ve ever been to and how long have you lasted?

If there’s one thing that miserable old me likes even less than people going on holidays for charity, it’s pop stars recording songs for charity. So you’ll imagine that I was delighted to hear that national saviour Simon Cowell has gathered together all of our very favourite musicians (Rod Stewart, Susan Boyle, someone from Westlife) for an over-emotive mangling of REM’s classic ‘Everybody Hurts’ for the people of Haiti.

Great. Lucky them.

Why are charity songs so lazy and so bad? Increasing the profile of a cause is almost always welcome, as is raising money, and I’d like to think that the motivation behind the charity single is largely genuine (and I dare say it was once upon time – in 1984). Somehow I suspect though that the opportunity to generate some column inches in a non spouse-cheating/my-drug-hell/help-I’m-having-nervous-breakdown kind of way is the real selling point for ‘the artists’ involved these days.

Honorable intentions or not though, doesn’t it make more sense to choose a decent song in the first place? Being associated with dirge like ‘Rocking around the Christmas Tree’, hideous sap like ‘Earth Song’ or point-missing remakes of ‘Perfect Day’ might raise some much-needed cash, but it’s hardly helping the long-term credibility of either party is it?

The original versions of ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas Time?’ and ‘We are the World’ worked not just because raising money to alleviate famine in Ethiopia is a good thing, but because the actual songs weren’t cynically chucked together in five seconds flat à la Band Aid 20 and everything ever featuring the X Factor finalists.

So who buys these crap charity singles? Who is encouraging their recording? Is it you, dear reader? Have you ever bought a charity record? Come on, be honest now.

Lots of people are of the mistaken opinion that I am a chilled, laid-back and accepting kind of person. This is completely and utterly not true, and here is the proof.

I recently had to take a 40-minute journey on the tube. This did not bother me. Although the tube is not the most pleasant place to pass time,  it is a good opportunity to immerse oneself  in ‘a good book’.

So I settled down and all was well for a while. Well, until precisely the next stop where a man, a deceptively ordinary-looking man, got on and sat opposite me. He had an old supermarket bag which he placed on his lap. This should have warned me – ever since I witnessed a seatside fight between a cinema-goer and a rustler at the National Film Theatre, I have been weary of men and plastic supermarket bags.

But I digress. This supermarket bag was full of bananas. And the man proceeded to take one out, peel it and eat it, all the time gazing straight ahead into the middle distance behind me. This was fine. He wasn’t staring at me. And he was after all, just a man eating a banana.

Then he ate another. It was at this point that I noticed his Keith from Nuts in May eating style – that kind of slow, methodical, thoughtful chewing where you just know that he is carefully counting the correct number of chews in his head. And still he stared straight-ahead at that mysterious point just behind my right ear.

By the third banana, my skin was beginning to creep and by the fourth, all attempts to concentrate on my book were drowned out by an intense desire to shove it down his throat and choke him with it.

I didn’t wait around to see the fifth banana. As he pulled it from his bag, I leaped to the door and defiantly turned my back on him and his stupid, bloody bananas.

Later, I told my sorry tale to a friend. ‘But’ she said reasonably ‘he was just eating bananas. What’s wrong with that?’. ‘It was the way he was eating them’ I explained. ‘I thought that you Australians were meant to be laid-back.’ was her puzzled, yet completely irritating reply.

She is lucky that I didn’t have a banana on me as I know where I would have placed it.

Right, so I haven’t blogged for over two weeks and during that time I’ve completed a formidable amount of work, narrowly refrained from killing a few people, seen a fab gig (Portuguese Fado wonder Mariza), been to the movies five times and even met some of you – so you’d think I’d be able to write something interesting wouldn’t you? But no, I’m just going to moan.

You see, this weekend someone asked me if I wanted to go on a trek to Nepal – for charity.

Now call me selfish, naive… downright mean if you will, but this is something that I really don’t understand.  Oh, I know that people sponsor you for your efforts and it can raise lots of money, but it’s really just going on holidays for charity. It’s not particularly honourable and it’s certainly not showing your level of ‘commitment’. Cycling the the length of the Alps or climbing K2 may be a personal achievement, but it’s hardly the same as actually doing volunteer work or campaigning for a cause day in, day out. It’s more like guilting someone else into financially indulging your foolhardiness.*

So as much as I would like to visit Nepal one day, I won’t be going for charity. And if I want to support said charity, I’ll take the less glamorous route and simply send them a cheque.

* Speaking of which, if you need an excuse to give money to a not-so-good cause, you can sponsor my annual JJJ Hottest 100/Countdown-athon where I stay up all night with a bottle of vodka and watch old Cure, Stone Roses, Mondo Rock and Marilyn videos and mourn my lost youth. I promise the money will be going to worthy cause, even if its just my Asprin Fund.

A recurring theme in this blog as well as many others  (yes, I mean some of you listed over there on the right hand side) is fretting about the state of manners in the world today. People are just so rude we complain, wringing our hands and feeling generally exasperated.

Well, I’ve had my comeuppance this week.

Our mailing house at work has screwed up royally, sending out our latest missive to the wrong names at the right addresses. Now because all the recipients on this list have signed up to receive the mailing, are expecting it, have received it for years and could probably guess what it was from the envelope, I hoped that most of them would recognise that there had simply been a stuff up and open it anyway.

But no.

We’ve been besieged by calls from people asking what they should do. In response, I carefully explain the problem to them, stress that as usual there is nothing personal inside and that they should feel free to open it anyway. ‘But it’s not addressed to me!’ they say, ‘It’s not right, it’s impolite to open someone else’s mail’.

Grrr.

Just when I want people to rude and impolite, they’re not.

Typical.

I caught a brief glimpse of the BBC’s pre-emptive review show, The Story of the Noughties, last week. The bit that I saw was waxing lyrical about the importance of big name brand handbags and how, just two weeks ago, way back in 2009, no woman was complete without a vile, expensive but strangely tacky handbag on her arm.

By delicious co-incidence I happened to be reading a book called Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China at the same time. Amongst the captivating and inspiring stories of the young immigrant women who make our shoes, mobile phones, televisions and trousers, was a chapter or two about a feisty young woman called Min who worked in yes, a handbag factory in Dongguan, a major manufacturing city in south-east China.

Min’s factory made loads of big name brand handbags and she and her colleagues nonchalantly nicked the bags left over at the end of an order.  Leslie T. Chang, the author who followed Min’s life over several years, describes her factory dorm room as ‘awash in Coach bags’.  For Min, the handbags’ value came as an easy gift for friends e.g. as a quick thank you to someone who let her kip over when she was job-hunting. But on most days the £££ bags were ‘worthless because almost no one in Min’s circle had any use for them or knew what they were worth’.

Maybe it’s just me, but I love the idea that somewhere in China a factory dormitory full of  20-something year old girls is disinterestedly kicking posh £300 handbags out of the way as they go out for a night on the town with their mates. And that’s how it should be.

As cliche demands, I usually write some kind of personal review of the past year around late December/ early January. Unfortunately, a lowlight of 2009 has been my rapidly loosening grip on time. Essentially time has kaleidoscoped and for me, recent events seem to take place at one of two points -  either within the last two weeks or at some time within the past five years.

So lets keep things simple. Here are some highlights from my past two weeks of delicious holiday freedom:

1. The Shop Around the Corner remains the charming film that I first thought it was 13 years ago. This is one of James Stewart’s earlier films from 1940 and was remade as You’ve Got Mail in 1998 with Tom Hanks. And try as he might, Tom Hanks will never be the new Jimmy Stewart.
2. I have finally discovered, at my tender and youthful age, the delights of TinTin. Captain Haddock = fabulous. And it’s written in proper grammatical French so I can actually read it.
3. I have officially given up on Doctor Who and it is a weight off my shoulders. You know that TV programme Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old? Well, it’s clear from Doctor Who that I’m not. The show must be aimed at ‘the family audience’,  but I still can’t understand it. I struggled through both the Christmas and New Year’s shows,  completely bewildered by the excess emotion and random plot points. If Doctor Who is the last of the Timelords as I previously thought, how can they be back? When did the Timelords turn evil? Why does everyone always want to take out London? And why the hell does the head Timelord look like Robert Kilroy-Silk? Well, I no longer care.
4. The David Sedaris Christmas special on This American Life.
5. Neu! I have been listening to their first fantastic album for the past week. My delight at this new discovery is only undermined by the equally new realisation that Stereolab have spent the past 20 years ripping them off.
6. I finally got round to watching the film of Carousel. As you may remember, this is one of my favourite soundtracks but I’d never actually seen the musical. It was as bad as I suspected it would be. Stick with the music folks.
7. Despite it’s inappropriately time limited name, the Wedding Bells cocktail has made our new year. Try it: 3/4 oz orange juice, 3/4 oz gin, 3/4 oz Dubonnet and 1/4 oz cherry brandy.

I had a horrible dream last night that my parents’ house was burning down. In the dream I ran madly around their home trying to rescue all the things we most cherish – Grandpa’s war medals, treasured items of jewellery, favourite books, seemingly endless shelves of my Mum’s carefully arranged photo albums documenting 100 years of family history.

And as the fire engulfed the Swiss Family Robinson style tree house that they were living in (it was a dream you know), I awoke in a panic desperately hoping I’d got to every single one of those bloody photo albums in time.

Awake and in a slightly fevered state, my mind naturally turned to the location of all the items in my house that I needed to save if by chance, it suddenly caught on fire right now.

1. Passports (I’m not going through the hassle of replacing them).
2. A quilt my mother sewed for me.
3. The excellent present that my Aunts gave me for my 18th birthday.
4. The shoebox of letters and postcards from my nearest and dearest.
5. The other shoebox of old photo negs.
6. The external hard drive back-up with the rest of my life on it…

Digital isn’t romantic, but it sure beats lugging piles of photo albums around.

I am currently attempting to sort out some financial matters and need to obtain a certified copy of a document. The instructions on how to do this stress that the copy needs to be certified ‘by a professional person (e.g. a banker, lawyer or doctor).’

Fantastic!

Isn’t it lovely that social workers, sales assistants, builders, IT people, photographers, nurses, administrators, graphic designers, plumbers etc. etc. are all considered too untrustworthy and downright dodgy to be able to verify a photocopy, yet a banker or lawyer is.

At least someone still believes in them.