I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.
Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?
WordPress has a facility which tells me the search terms people have used to find this blog. I’ve just had a look at the list, and I am in roughly equal measure pleased, entertained and baffled by it. The top ten, edited to remove near-synonyms, looks like this:
It’s good to know that I am the go-to person for each of these things. The “Fail” searches were all last year, but there were a lot of them. The people looking for “Barack Obama’s mother” are a steady trickle, and I hope, but doubt, that they find what they wanted here. Of course, I have skewed their results even further in my favour now with this post. Sorry.
I went to see Thriller Live last week. I wouldn’t have sought it out of my own accord and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was prepared for something quite weird. And it was quite weird, but in a cheerier and more innocent way than I was expecting. There’s no story; it’s just two and a bit hours of some singers, dancers and musicians performing the biggest hits of Michael Jackson’s career, in chronological order (which, incidentally, makes it fairly easy to work out which ones they’re saving for the encore).
The early songs, performed by a Jackson Five with the worst afro wigs I have ever seen, feature a very sweet little boy with the voice of an angel playing the youthful Michael, but from Off The Wall onwards the lead vocal role is shared between four singers: a guy who sounds exactly like Michael Jackson, a guy who looks exactly like he’s from the 1980s, a woman who is obviously the one they go to when a song is too hard for any of the others, and a guy who sounds more like Michael Jackson than the last two, but makes up for it by being skinny and white. They are backed up by a troupe of dancers, who are kind of amazing, and by a live band who are for the most part hidden, except when one of them is allowed on to the stage to perform a particularly tricky solo, like the guitar line in Dirty Diana.
Everyone is really, really good, and there are some nice costumes, especially in the songs from Bad where everybody gets to pretend it really is the 1980s. But the main thing I took away from it was an overwhelming sense of uncomplicated Eurovisionesque joy. Everybody in it is so happy, all the time! Sensibly, the narrative voiceover which introduces the show and describes the Jacksons’ rise to fame is ditched early on, so that we don’t have to hear any of the less wholesome details of Michael’s life as a solo artist. And even more sensibly, the post-Bad hits are limited to Earth Song and Heal the World. The rendition of the former almost tips over into being unbearably twee, with the performers dressed all in white under a giant projected globe, but they rescue it just in time by bringing back the small boy from the beginning of the show to sing Heal the World. And it’s just lovely.
Michael Jackson is undeniably a strange and disturbing person, but the songs are as good as they ever were. If you liked them then, I think you should go along. If you tell me when you’re going I might even come with you, but don’t tell anyone I said so.
(Edit: it belatedly occurs to me that describing someone as “skinny and white” is no guarantee that he doesn’t look like Michael Jackson. But he doesn’t – see?)
This is brilliant. Give it time to load completely, or you lose some of the effect.
One of the many benefits of good weather is that there’s lots of free entertainment to be had simply by going outside and observing people. Watching a group of six-year-olds playing with a ball is lots of fun; add a two-year-old who’s unsteady on his feet and it becomes something I could enjoy all afternoon. There is something utterly charming about children who have only just learned to walk running around in the sunshine. Coming back from the shops just now I almost tripped over a child whose head accounted for a third of his overall height. Presumably being built along those lines, however temporarily, gives you a very high centre of gravity, which would explain why his unfocused charging around the park seemed to be largely governed by the direction his head fell in with each unguided lurch. It was almost as much fun as watching children dancing at a wedding, which is one of the straightforwardly funniest things there is.
You can do more and more interesting things with creative writing online than you can in any other medium. Check here and here to see why I’m right.
I am still writing a terrifically witty story based on the marriage of Leo Tolstoy, which has been in my head since 1991 and in draft form since 2005. I’ll let you know just as soon as it’s finished.
These aren’t Easter-related at all, they’re just topical articles which are worth reading. Two stories approaching the same issue from different angles, and an article by David Mitchell which I would like to stand up and applaud:
Why London is no place for a young black man
What is the right way to raise children? (Ignore the clumsy initial attempt to make this a battle between two approaches; as the article eventually acknowledges, there is a place for both)
A very quick roundup of books I’ve read in the last few weeks, otherwise this will turn into an actual essay, and I don’t have time for that (I’ve all kind of things to do on my “things to do” list, and it’s already nearly Monday).
I thought I was really enjoying The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay at the time, but a few weeks later I can barely remember anything about it. If you like long, twisty intelligent stories about magicians, I recommend The Deptford Trilogy instead – though there’s nothing actually wrong with K&C. I still think Michael Chabon is very good and will seek out more by him.
I picked up The Diary of a Nobody in Dublin before Christmas, but only got around to it last month. I had seen some snippets of a TV adaptation which I enjoyed very much, but since the TV adaptation actually consisted in somebody dressed as Edward Pooter sitting in a chair and reading from his diary, the style and format didn’t come as a surprise. It’s fairly slight, and again, I could recommend a superior but similar alternative, but it was an enjoyable enough way of passing a day or two.
I’m still sort of halfway through The Singapore Grip, which I bought after enjoying Troubles so much. It has flashes of the wit and subtlety that had me enchanted in Troubles, but in between there’s a lot of dense, fact-heavy prose which makes me feel as though I’m swimming through treacle. I still have high hopes for The Siege of Krishnapur.
I waited months after spotting it on the shelves before I succumbed and bought a – new! – copy of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. I’d read a description and it sounded just my kind of thing: the story of nineteenth century country house murder told from the point of view of the investigating detective. It had had lots of good reviews, and I was very well-disposed towards it when I started out. Accordingly, I allowed it a certain amount of latitude before I started to become irritated by it, but I had still reached that point within a few pages. It’s as much my fault for having overly high expectations as it is anyone else’s, but this is essentially a true crime story written by a hack. The reasoning is poor, there are frequent and baffling non sequiturs and the writing itself has no elegance or elequence, and it turns out murder mysteries need a bit of both to work. Unrecommended.
Two books whose target readership is significantly younger than me – Two Friends, One Summer and Rain – had me walking between tube station and office with my nose buried in them, in the way that only good children’s books and a certain type of thriller can achieve. I shan’t give them detailed critiques because I know the author a bit so it would be weird, but I will certainly be recommending them to acquaintances of the appropriate age.
Talking of thrillers, I justified buying Mr Whicher by taking up Waterstones’ “buy one, get one half price” offer, and the second book was one which I’d never heard of, but whose cover blurb made it sound fun. The Brutal Art looks and mainly reads like a run-of-the mill gorefest, but it’s also really very well written and thoughtful, behind the shiny cover. If you’re looking for an intelligent but undemanding crime caper it’s one to stick on the list.
I dutifully finished The Road, but I didn’t start enjoying it any more than I did to begin with. I like books where things happen, I think. Things happen in Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, which represented my first foray into the work of John Mortimer. I often only think of starting to read someone’s books after they’ve died, which makes me exactly the demographic authors don’t want. Anyway, I liked it a lot and shall be reading more. Like The Diary of a Nobody it doesn’t stay with you for very long beyond the reading of it, but it’s perfectly absorbing for the duration, and I don’t ask more than that.
Right now I’m in the middle of reading another book by Jesse Kellerman, author of The Brutal Art, and once that’s finished I’m changing slant completely and moving on to Hardcore From the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance, in preparation for a book group I’m going to later this month. It’s a long time since I read anything beyond a newspaper article or blog post which had an actual argument to make, so I’m quite excited.
(Forgive the slow typing, by the way: I have painted my nails and I don’t want to smear them.)
|
