Category: Arts

Fitness, fatness, and other f words

On By Laura MorganIn Books, Navel gazing

I’m in the middle of a six-week programme with a personal trainer at my workplace gym, but last week I read Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby, and I agreed so vehemently with most of what it says that, even though I am not and have never been on a diet (I like cheese too much ever to consider a world in which I couldn’t eat as much of it as I like), I found myself reluctant to go back to the gym, even though I enjoy it, because it felt like giving in to the body fascists.

Nuts, I know. And I did go back, yesterday, and enjoyed it as much as ever.  And I don’t think it’s any saner to deliberately gain or keep weight than it is to try and lose it (though having read the book, I don’t think it’s any madder, either).

It’s a great book, by the way, and I don’t think you have to be fat or on a diet to get a lot from it. I like my round bottom very much, but I had started to feel a bit self-conscious about getting naked in the changing rooms in front of the skinny twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, and fortysomethings) who are the biggest users of the gym. Yesterday, for the first time, I happily undressed without caring who was looking (not, of course, that anybody was). It may not be a gym bunny’s bottom, but it’s mine and if it weren’t round, all my clothes would fall off.

I am all about liking yourself the way you are, in any case. For a bit, I thought I wanted to get the gap between my two front teeth fixed, but this postcard, sent in to the always-wonderful PostSecret, convinced me otherwise:

birthmark

In other news

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Music, Reasons to be cheerful

Apologies for the long silence. I have been getting to grips with my new job; which doesn’t give me much time for thinking, let alone writing. I’ve got a nerdy-obsessive Michael Jackson post fermenting, but in the meantime here are a couple of my highlights of the last few weeks, presented in the style of a tabloid newspaper.

SPOOK

Last night I went to a Ghostbusters-themed comedy night, to celebrate 25 years since the original film’s release. I know what you’re thinking – and, well OK, you’re right; but it was still lots of fun. The highlight was a passionate, witty and informative set from Paul Gannon, who is a bigger fan than I have ever been, and from whom I learned the following new facts:

  • The follow-up cartoon was called “The Real Ghostbusters” because a company called Filmation (makers of Masters of the Universe, among other things) had sometime in the 1970s produced eight episodes of a truly awful live action TV show with the name “Ghostbusters”. When the film was being made they threatened to sue, but they agreed in the end to allow the film-makers to use the name so long as they (Filmation) retained the rights to use the title for any future animated series. So when the film was turned into a cartoon, they had to give it a new name.
  • The scenes between Pete Venkman and Dana Barrett in Dana’s apartment were all improvised by Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver.
  • There is Ghostbusters porn. It isn’t very sexy, but it’s fabulously funny (he had a selection of clips for our viewing pleasure).

UKE

I am now a world record-holder (along with 850 others).

DUKE (grant me literal poetic license on that one, please)

We went to see Bobby McFerrin at the Royal Festival Hall as part of Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown. I am devoutly atheist, but the closest I’ve come to believing in something higher than humankind is when I watch him perform. It’s just insanely brilliant:

PUKE

I have seen Jeremy Clarkson twice in the last fortnight.

The funk of forty thousand years

On By Laura MorganIn Music, Reasons to be cheerful1 Comment

thriller2

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?)

Spring reading

On By Laura MorganIn Books

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.)

Funny

On By Laura MorganIn Arts3 Comments

Last night I went to watch an episode of Would I Lie To You? being recorded at Pinewood studios. Rob Bryden had mentioned it on Twitter, and it was free, and Reginald D. Hunter who I think might be my favourite living comedian* was appearing, and a friend is the executive producer and writes some of the jokes, and these all seemed like good reasons for going. Also, I didn’t realise beforehand how far away Pinewood studios is. It’s in Buckinghamshire! We were driven there from the station at a bracing speed by a taxi driver who appeared to be under the impression that it was a race, even though we were the only car on the road.

Anyway, it was lots of fun. The other guests were Ken Livingstone, Fern Britton (who I had to google so as not to mix her up with that awful teenager who presents music shows) and Stephen Mangan, all of whom were good value for money. Fern and Ken, especially, since they are not paid to be funny and I wasn’t certain they would be. Fern was also an exceptionally good liar.

Rob Bryden presented, and was as likeable as ever, even when he was having to get people to repeat lines for the sake of the recording. And team captain number one was David Mitchell, whom I used to dislike because he has the cold dead eyes of a shark, and because I didn’t think he was handsome enough for TV, but whom I subsequently met at the aformentioned friend’s house, and he was so lovely that I stopped being offended by his looks (I admit, this isn’t the most flattering change of heart, and I still hope he doesn’t read this) and decided he was very nice indeed.  And last night he was very quick, and very funny, and very generous about giving other people the chance to shine, and keeping quiet when they were making a good joke at his expense.

All of which was in marked contrast with the other team captain, Lee Mack. I really don’t know what he was doing there, and I don’t wish to sound like a snob, but in a studio full of smart, witty and broadly right-thinking (by which, naturally, I mean left-leaning) people, he just seemed completely out of place. His end-of-the-pier, slightly racist, slightly sexist, slightly homophobic brand of humour was utterly at odds with the tone of the show, and putting Ken Livingstone and Reginald D. Hunter on his team only emphasised that.  Sadly, the audience didn’t agree with me and laughed heartily at his most boorish jokes. Which was a shame.

And talking of funny, I’d like to apologise to anyone who watched Comic Relief on Friday night on the basis of my enthusiastic endorsement. Barely a laugh was raised. I can’t remember when they stopped letting comedians present Comic Relief, but it’s a poorer thing for it.

*I can’t immediately think of a dead comedian I prefer, but I wanted to qualify it somehow so as not to sound too ebullient.

Sarah and the Angels

On By Laura MorganIn Arts

I am thinking of buying this Mark Chagall print:

sarah_and_the_angels

It’s slightly more money than is strictly sensible, but on the other hand, so pretty!  And I do love Marc Chagall.  His figures always look as though they’re flying (which in the case of the angels I suppose they probably are).

Books for the new year

On By Laura MorganIn Books

The most rewarding aspect of my year-and-a-bit old resolution to stop re-reading old favourites and concentrate on new books has been discovering authors whom I’d either heard of but never read, or had simply never heard of.  I am lucky enough to have the library of one who reads more than I do at my disposal, and thanks to him I’ve recently come across two people I’d like to read more by.

Asylum by Patrick McGrath is a dark and rather depressing thriller whose central conceit is that the story is related by one of the major players in a way that initially leads us to think it’s a dispassionate account, when of course the point is that it can’t be.  I found myself almost more interested in the motivations of the narrator than in the events which unfold in the story itself – which in itself is quite gripping enough.  Add to the mix that both the narrator and other key characters are psychotherapists, or possibly psychiatrists (I know it’s terrible to get them confused, apologies to representatives of both professions) and you begin to realise that there are more layers to this story than might at first be apparent.

That said, the weakest part of the book is its characterisation, and it’s hard to care about people who don’t seem quite real, somehow.  But even so, it kept me engaged right to the end.  I don’t know whether either author would see this as a compliment, but I mean it as one when I say that it reminded me of Ruth Rendell at her best.  It certainly made me want to read more by him.

But then I wanted something completely different.  “What sort of thing?”, enquired my private librarian.  “Something set in Ireland!”, I declared triumphantly.  And so it was that I found myself reading J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, the story of a first world war veteran (though he’s not old, which is something I always have to remember when I read about “veterans”) who in 1919 becomes entangled with an Anglo-Irish family living in a tumbledown hotel on the east coast of the country, and gradually finds that he is unable to leave them or the place to their grim fate.  The inevitable eventual ruin of the hotel, brought to rubble by creeping vegetation, serves as a slightly clumsy metaphor for the decline of English rule in Ireland, but the writing is so magical, the characters so beautifully drawn and the jokes so icily perfect that I forgave it everything.  It’s a gem of a book which I would recommend to absolutely anyone.  I have now found copies of The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, and if they’re half as good I’ll love those too.

Speaking of world war one veterans, I have now moved on to The Avenue Goes To War, the second part of the Avenue trilogy by R.F. Delderfield which I began reading last year.  Having barely recovered from the various ravages wrought by the first war the inhabitants of this unremarkable suburban street find themselves embarking on a second.  I haven’t got very far with it yet (I only picked it up at the weekend), but I’m already struck again by the subtlety of Delderfield’s writing.  It seems so simple, and yet it’s so very readable that one wonders how hard he had to work to perfect it.   More thoughts to come when I get further through the book.

In the category of “Things I Thought I Should Read Because Everybody Else Was Doing It” is The Road, which I started a couple of weeks ago but which hasn’t grabbed me yet.  I’ve heard so many good things about it, and so few bad, that I shall do my best to persevere to the end.  It’s not a long book, and I think all I need is a few uninterrupted hours when I’ve nothing better to do.  But as long as I keep finding Wodehouse books I haven’t read for £1.99 in Oxfam that’s unlikely to happen.

Talking of Wodehouse, I’ve come to a firm conclusion about something which I’d only suspected before, which is that I prefer the Blandings stories to Jeeves and Wooster.  Jeeves and Wooster are wonderful and perfect, but the more one reads of them the more one realises that there are a certain number of boxes which must ticked in each story, and once the boxes are all ticked the story is over.  I shan’t enumerate the essential plot elements because I don’t want to pre-empt anyone else’s enjoyment of them, but they are there, and once one realises that the stories become slightly – and only slightly – less enjoyable.  Perhaps this is a symptom of having “discovered” the books so late in life and read too many of them in a six-month-long gorge.  A spot of indigestion is only to be expected.

In contrast, the Blandings crowd are an entirely unpredictable lot, and though they travel on a similar merry-go-round of broken engagements, misunderstandings and small domestic catastrophes, these things happen to a wider variety of people and are resolved in less foreseeable circumstances.  There’s also the fact that they are set in the countryside.  I do like domestic catastrophes involving farm animals.  And there is something intrinsically funny about a prizewinning pig.

Which leads me almost seamlessly to a book about which I still can’t quite form an opinion.  Stalking Fiona is by Nigel Williams, of fond Wimbledon stories memory (does that make it sound as though he’s dead?  He isn’t), and it’s the first non-comedy I’ve read by him.  Which doesn’t stop it from being funny – he can’t help but be funny, even when he’s not trying, though I suspect he was trying in this case.  And yet it’s not quite funny enough to count as a comic thriller: I’m fairly sure it’s intended as a straight thriller.  And the problem there is that it’s not quite tight enough to be a straight thriller.  It sets up lots of questions, and by the last page they aren’t all answered.  In some genres that’s forgivable, but I think not here.  I enjoyed it, but I shan’t be racing out to find the sequel.

Books which made me laugh out loud

On By Laura MorganIn Books

On these long cold dark days, when the sun comes up after you leave home and goes down before you leave work, you need something cheering, and I can’t possibly let you down when you look at me like that, so I decided to make a list of the funniest books I knew.  And as I started to list them, I realised that the books which make me laugh, or in some cases smile (but smile a lot) are almost all (with one obvious, though slight,  exception) the stories of middle-class suburban men failing slightly.  I wonder what that means?

I’m sure there must be more which I can’t think of offhand.  I’ll post them as I do.