Three things that are making me very happy right now

I am not a religious girl. I like the idea of an all-seeing, all-powerful, omnipotent and omnipresent god, but then again, I also like the idea of an all-seeing, all-powerful, omnipotent and omnipresent, gay-approving, free-love-endorsing cheesecake, watching us from on high in divine, sugary glory. The two ideas seem equally as likely to me, which is a shame for those religious folk who always seem to sense a sinner in me waiting to be cleansed by the benevolent body-wash of The Church (sadly, not the band.) Could it be because they see me emerging from the sex shop in which I work; a location puzzlingly infested with all manner of religious loons? Regardless, my point is that I just can’t believe the story behind this god character. It’s like asking me to believe that Katy Perry is actually very intelligent and that her idiotic demeanour is just a publicity stunt. It’s just not true.  

However, there come times when I wish I could believe in the Holy Bearded One, if only to have someone to thank for things. Obviously, when someone compliments me (a rarity, as it is common knowledge that I am a gaunt old crone) I thank them. I have someone to whom my thanks can be directed. However, when things happen which are outside of my immediate life, events or creations that can’t be attributed to anyone in particular, my desire to give thanks can’t be satiated.

However, now I have you. And you’re so much better than god (mostly because you don’t make insane demands of me, or make it impossible to go shopping on a Sunday evening). Let’s hold hands and give thanks for the following awesome things:

Ducks being resilient:

This video would be really awful if the ducklings weren't so utterly unharmed at the end of it. So fluffy! I particularly admire the mother duck's almost instant return to dignity. A ruffle of the feathers, and the duckings are back in line.

Bobbi Starr just generally continuing to be perfect:

 

The Weepies staying beautiful (Be My Thrill):

I honestly don't know how anyone could fail to be mildly aroused by how beautiful this new album  is. Sure, The Weepies stick to one formula of simple arrangements, gentle tones and folksy quaintness, but it just works so well.



Plus, how could anyone in their right minds resist the sugar-sweetness of their home life? They just look so happy. The Weepies make me want to curl up in lethargy, and sleep like a cat in the sun for days on end. 

Amen, folks.

The Wonderful World of TWIZZLERS™!

It is no easy life being a sex-shop worker-cum-student, such as I. On a daily basis I am assailed with such traumatic decisions as: “which antibacterial spray would be best suited to this G-spot vibrator?” and “how can I avoid paying for train tickets to uni without being caught yet again by the haggard banshees at Transperth?” When faced with such problems, my [friends] would tell you that I usually respond with Audrey Hepburn-esque dignity and thoughtfulness. However, there come times in everyone’s lives when too many of these challenges arise at once and, no matter how gosh-darned fabulous you are, it is necessary to turn to some sort of chemical for help.

Johnny Cash is smoking. He is also awesome. Do the figures.

Some turn to alcohol, as it is readily available and relatively inexpensive. Indeed, if you are an employee at a bar supplies are not only endless but totally free, especially if you are willing to engage in some light thievery. Some turn to cigarettes, presumably because awesome people like Johnny Cash and Jarvis Cocker smoke[d] them, and pretending to be someone much better than one’s self is a good way of solving life-problems. Just look at Wolfmother, they’ve been pretending to be Led Zepplin for so long they must have convinced themselves they’re okay by now! Others, who are far more street-wise than myself, turn to illicit drugs, such as heroin, marijuana, crack, ice, etc. (Please let me assure you I only know these names because I Wikipedia-ed “illicit drugs” two minutes ago.) Have you ever noticed that most street names for drugs can be both a verb and a noun? Crack, ice, weed, pot, speed and so on. One could feasibly be “icing a cake made of ice while on ice”. Actually, I’m not sure if ice users would be capable of making or icing a cake, as I don’t even know what ice is, but you get my drift.

My point is that everyone has their vice, their sneaky little friend they turn to in moments of dire stress who sits them down, rubs their shoulders and whispers “come on, love, it’s going to be ok. Do you know why? Because you’re fucking God, that’s why.” Mine is none of those aforementioned. Indeed, until my housemate’s boyfriend flew in from Canada two days ago, I didn’t even have access to them. Now, though, I have a sturdy supply of my own little vice, my pick-me-up, my sycophantic little cheerleader – Twizzlers.

For those unlucky enough to have never seen/consumed/heard of Twizzlers, here is a brief sketch:

Twizzlers are a confection from the US and Canada, and are distinguishable by their distinctive shape, texture, taste and the fact that they are in no way actual food. This is what I love about them. Twizzlers are unashamedly unnatural. Out of their 15 ingredients, 9 are preservatives, the rest being “artificial flavour”, sugar, salt, corn syrup, colour and mineral oil. What a veritable smorgasbord of oral delights! This is not to mention the colours, which would be enough to throw any toddler into spasms of delight.

The only way Twizzlers identify with actual food is with the variety of luminous cartoon fruits on the packets, and the assurance that no Twizzler will ever contain any traces of peanuts. I’m surprised someone felt that there was a need for this warning, as it’s clear that no Twizzler will ever contain a trace of a nut, or indeed anything that isn’t a petroleum by-product.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Twizzlers taste like absolute shit. Eating a Twizzler is like chewing one’s way through an electronic cable that has been covered in air-freshener. The yellow ones (“Lemonade” flavour) are highly reminiscent of lemon dishwashing detergent, while my favourite, “Grape”, tastes like nothing on this whole earth should ever taste, least of all a grape.

The true joy of Twizzlers lies most solidly in this escape from reality. In the World of Twizzlers, anything is possible! It’s okay to eat something which could be used to insulate boats, or to crave the flavour equivalent of your household cleaning products. The only demands Twizzlers make of you is that you “enjoy the fun!” (and rather bizarrely that you “make sure you read the label every time”. I’m not sure what this is all about, maybe Twizzler is worried you would forget to enjoy the fun? Not going to happen!)

So there you are: my vice. And next time I am overwhelmed by the stifling quagmire of my existence, you can be assured that I will turn to you, Twizzlers. I will enjoy the fun, I will question the fact that Twizzlers have been around since 1929, I will revel in the bright colours, and I will relax. After all, “Twizzlers make mouths happy!”

(For anyone great enough to want more info on Twizzlers and their various uses, please refer to: The Twizzlers Website! Robert from Ohio uses his Twizzlers to make bracelets for his girlfriends. He has girlfriends. Think on that for a bit.)

Kanye West does "Art"!

I didn’t think I’d ever be inspired to write a review of a music video, but Kanye West’s “Runaway” (a 34:32 minute ‘film’ directed by and starring the man himself) was so rich in failures that I really had to put it down. Interestingly, I started out liking it, but the more I watch or think about it, the more I hate this awful thing. 

A delicious flow diagram synopsis of the video, for those who’ve not had the dubious pleasure of watching it:

• Kanye West runs along a road.
• Wow! Explosion! But wait; something’s falling out of that fire in the sky. It’s a “phoenix” (note: phoenix can be read as “hot girl covered in feathers”.)
• Kanye rescues fallen phoenix and takes her to his house, the garden of which seems to be infested with Disney woodland creatures.
• Heart-warming scene as Kanye and Miss Phoenix bond, he plays with his MPC 2000XL sampler (product placement, anyone?) and teaches her to dance/gyrate/twitch etc.
• Small child runs with a flare.
• Wow! Fireworks! And a big ol’ Michel Jackson parade, with red-clad Klansfolk and a marching band. Miss Phoenix seems very pleased with Kanye’s choice of first date.
• Miss P. is just as impressed with the second date, hanging out with his boring mates, watching the ballet, until...
• Eating a bland dinner of chicken, bread – SHOCK! – they serve phoenix! Miss Phoenix doesn’t like cannibalism, apparently.
• They both have time alone to reflect on this shitty date, have a chat on a hill about the birth and death of originality, and Miss Phoenix casually mentions that she’ll be dying soon.
• Obviously they have goodbye sex.
• Wow! Explosion!
• The next day, she’s gone to kill herself and Kanye does a bit of running through woods .
• Oh wow! She’s on fire. Miss Phoenix flaps around looking for Kanye for a while and then shoots off.
• Back to the beginning where Kanye is running along a road. END.
  

So where to begin?! 

I am not going to write about the music. Actually, I really love a lot of the music throughout this video. “Lost in the World” is a scrumptious piece of music, and “Gorgeous” was a nice surprise. So the music aside, let’s explore this little world Director West has created.

The video opens with an excerpt from Mozart’s unfinished “Requiem”, and this to me sums up the whole extravaganza perfectly: it’s trying to be something it’s not. The whole video viewed like a high school film project, with the depth of a bathtub and a budget bigger than the Atlantic. 

With enough in-references to make even the most cultured folk gag on their Kubrick, this video is difficult to watch without feeling a little sorry for Kanye. He just seems desperate to prove that he’s different, that he’s artsy, that he thinks about stuff, dad!

The awkward cuts between songs are not disguised or remedied but are left there, and dragged out. He uses the age-old technique of leaving enormous, loaded silences, which are very obviously loaded with absolutely nothing. About a third of the film consists of a variety of explosions in slow motion, and people looking vacantly at things. In short, it’s trying very hard to allude to having some deep, poignancy when it really has nothing to say. 

It’s sad that Kanye feels like his work is lacking, and needs to be so stuffed, because there are some stunning moments in this video. The ballet scene, which features dancers from The National Theatre, works so well with the music; it’s a shame that it was bracketed by some of the most atrocious dialogue imaginable.

On the topic of dialogue, let me sample some:

“Anything that is different you try to change, you try to tear it down. You rip the wings off the phoenix and they turn to stone. And if I don’t burn, I will turn to stone”.

I shouldn’t have to point out that the entirety of this moving conversation is totally out of context from the rest of the video, is appallingly performed and—what was that? Oh yes, it MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. I am compelled to point it out regardless, because I am still baffled by how shit it is. 

So what was good about this half hour of gut-knotting pretention? The makeup, for one. The design was stunning, and implemented well (aside from one exceptional moment when Miss Phoenix shoots into the fire, and it looks like a still from a b-grade computer game). I was also entranced by Miss Phoenix’s dodgy breast implants; the fact that one is distinctly higher than the other. Actually, now that I mention them (her breasts, that is) I am glad that when she set on fire, they gave her a metal breast plate but no other armour. Obviously they realised that her breasts were the most dangerously flammable part of her.

My conclusion? The album is great, the ballet scene, perfect, and the rest of it? A desperate cry for approval by someone who doesn’t seem to realise that he’s pretty awesome without pretending to know things he doesn’t. And 34:32 minutes of pure bollocks. 

Please choose your books with dignity!

 

Trawling the internet for reviews of my favourite authors’ works, it has been brought to my attention that most internet reviews are written by tweens who have just learnt to spell “juxtapose” and don’t seem to realise the irony in their regular misuse of “irony”. Indeed, there seems to be an overall lacking of depth in most reviews; people clamour for superficial drama and tragedy without acknowledging that the true skills of an author are delicate, infinitely subtle, and very much hidden.

Inquisitive, informed readers are battling what I can only call the “Picoult Generation”. Here is a group of people who really believe that the factory-churned, breath-takingly banal novels they are reading are honestly well written. I take no issue with people reading the likes of Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown; we all need to ingest our fair share of mindless bile every now and then. My issue arises when these “authors” are compared in any way with people who can actually write.

Reading a book by Jodi Picoult is the literary equivalent of watching porn and eating donuts. Her writing is indulgent, prosaic and predictable. Let us take “My Sister’s Keeper” for example. Unconvincing and mawkish characters aside, the plot is a veritable minefield of laughably obvious heartstring-tugging. I would normally write “spoiler alert”, but to be frank, I don’t really think that’s necessary with a book like this. It spoils itself from the first tragic leukaemia diagnosis, right up to the last chapter, where – oh the unexpected tragedy – little Anna dies. There are spectacular moments throughout Picoult’s books where she really does surprise you; how is it possible, you ask yourself, for the trash that I am reading to get so popular?

This all comes back to my point about subtlety, porn and donuts. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Paulo Coelho (although I must confess a soft spot for his overly sentimentalised preaching), and the ghastly Jodi Picoult have all won the adulation of the masses by stuffing horror, tragedy and suffering down their throats until they collectively gag their praise.

Sadly, the truth is that people like horror. We have a human taste for voyeurism, especially if it involves being a fly on the wall for the darkest side of human nature. Jodi Picoult writes incessantly about child abuse, and it is atrocious how she panders to this clawing desire for detail. I was confident that she had surely written her last, when “Handle With Care” came out. The title alone is enough to make me well up with hate. Let me make myself clear to anyone who is under the impression that “Jodi Picoult touched on a sensitive subject and wrote it well”, as the very aptly named Fairy-Whispers201 seems to believe: It is not hard to write about wicked people doing wicked things. It is not good writing, nor is it evocative, intelligent, or thought provoking, to play up to people’s desire for that thrill of perversion.

Child abuse, rape, paedophilia, murder, prostitution, suicide; all these are topics surrounded in our contemporary society by a dark glamour. They are “black and white” topics, considered so breathtakingly horrific that an author cannot go wrong by condemning them. It doesn’t take a good author to evoke an emotional response to a 5 year old being molested, that’s just prying out a basic human response. A true author, a real artist, would never be so blunt.

So we come to subtlety, and true tragedy. The tragedy that exists in our every day lives is not so easy to write about because of its immediacy and the fact that it tends to lack the magnitude of the topics aforementioned. It’s not socially acceptable to care that much about these things, or to admit how they affect you. The utter horror of being alone on the first day at a new school, a family member who is just slightly too embarrassing to talk to anyone about, the death of a pet, and the stifling loneliness of growing up, or growing old, these are all real human agonies. The most beautiful and interesting things to read about, the topics that require the most delicacy and skill, are the most insignificant-seeming. An author who uses her words like a surgeon wielding a scalpel to perform such tender examinations on the human psyche should not ever be compared to the likes of Picoult, who charge into the operation room with a pick axe and a timer.

I could not think of a finer example of this gentle writing ability than that of Patrick Süskind’s in “The Story of Mr Sommer”. I admire Süskind’s writing at any time, but there is an effortless beauty to “The Story of Mr Sommer”. There is an almost fable-esque quality to his writing in this book, one which is not present in “Perfume: the Story of a Murderer”, and only slightly in “The Pigeon”, and yet he never descends into patronisation or assuming that his readers are idiots (something which I must say Coelho has a tendency to do).

My plea is this: I know it’s a hard book to find a copy of (to my knowledge only one edition was ever printed, in hard and paper back), but this is a must-read for any lover of true literature, and the illustrations are just stunning, so go bribe your local second hand bookstore staff with cake and bookplates and forged signatures of eccentric Finnish poets and get yourself a copy. I promise you won’t regret it, and if you do, you can always go binge on some Dan Brown, I hear they’re selling it by the kilo now.

Today's diagram:

Today’s diagram is fairly self-explanatory. This humble scientific sketch from the late 1800s depicting the various parts of a unicorn may seem simple –child, be not fooled! Its uses are to my mind incalculable. I am glad that I have not found this diagram too late in life for it to come in handy for you, and I am confident that come in handy it will.

Should tomorrow find you cornered by a raging stallion of the species, you may now feel equipped to diagnose your major injuries as likely to be inflicted by part “z”, the horn. Interestingly, the hoofs are also labelled “z”. This could lead one to deduce that the ingenious artist has used a system of “Danger Labels”, wherein “a” represents the part least threatening in attack through to “z”, the most. It can therefore be concluded that the part of a unicorn least threatening to a human would be “a”, the nostrils, followed by “b”, the cheeks (this could be because said cheeks appear to be full of golf balls).

Today’s advice will be, in light of this information,

When charged by a unicorn

When breath is fast and knees are weak

Fear not the nostril or the cheek

From “a” to “z” it’s all been warned:

Be sure to avoid both hoof and horn.

Sound advice, methinks.