Music Monday: Crush Special

There's not been a lot of talk of David Tennant round these parts of late. Fear not, I would still leap onto him like a kitten up curtains given even the slightest hint of a chance, but in terms of crush maintenance it has been tricky. David has been doing a lot of resting since his stint as Doctor Who, and when he hasn't been resting, he has been doing voiceovers for Tesco and filming BBC1 dramas for which advance stills look like this -



A BBC1 drama about a widowed dad, set at a farm show with people dressed in battle reenactment costumes, carrying fishing rods and in mid-1990s indie clobber in the background? It's just as well I love you David. Love is ever forgiving. Ever forgiving. Even so, I'd really prefer it if you didn't turn into the male Sarah Lancashire.

And then there's Michael Cera. Now I've had a Michael Cera thing since Superbad, and I have to be very careful around underage-era Arrested Development DVDs, but last week I went to see Scott Pilgrim - which is fabulous, incidentally, in an I-wish-I-was-still-a-teenager-and-could-dye-my-hair-blue-without-looking-like-an-eejit way - but for Michael Cera I felt nothing, in the trouser department anyway. Nada. In fact my affections were far more taken by Kieran Culkin as his flatmate Wallace. That's Kieran Culkin, brother of Macauley, as his gay flatmate, Wallace. Au revoir Michael, I guess all good things come to an end.

Just as well I have backup, really. Here's Benedict "Sherlock" Cumberbatch doing his best to make me fancy the suit off both him and DT (taking one for the team, Ben - nice, very nice):



And then there's new arrival Joseph Gordon-Levitt. JGL is 29 and has been hovering on the brink of cute for quite some time, being hilarious but underage and bad of hair in Third Rock from the Sun, and then dorky-cute and standing too close to Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, and then intense-cute in I-didn't-like-it-as-much-as-I-was-told to Brick. But THEN I saw him in Inception with his hair sorted out, stealing a kiss off Ellen Page and doing exceedingly cool things in zero gravity. And THEN THEN there was this in (500) Days of Summer - aha - did you wonder when the music was going to kick in?



OK so full disclosure: that was Hall & Oates, and actually I wanted the bit when he sings 'Here Comes Your Man' in the karaoke bar, but Youtube didn't have it, and I started this out as a musical post, and that's an incredibly cute dance sequence even if the fringe was an error, but the clothes were just right, and also did I mention cuteness, and SIGH, and I should do some work now.

This was just a public service announcement to let you know my hormones are in full working order. There may be more coherent posts later in the week.

In which I am patronised by a soup

Good morning! Today I am mostly: annoyed by soup.

Now, when I buy soup (and I am aware that it would be cheaper and more fulfilling to make my own: this too is an annoyance, but not the main one) I only really need to know two things about it: what's in it, and how long it takes to heat it up in the microwave. Soups have been providing this information since time immemorial (or perhaps since the invention of the domestic microwave oven in 1967), and I'm not exactly sure when they got bored of providing it in the traditional manner. But they have.

Thus to today's soup, a Tuscan Chicken and Orzo from Glorious Soups. I'm not sure who you think the market is for a Tuscan Chicken and Orzo soup, but I suspect it is someone quite middle class and pretentious who likes to think they are eating a sophisticated soup tailored for their sophisticated palate. Me, in other words. I therefore am the target audience for the following:

I've been carefully checked for bones, but you might still find a few small ones

and

I contain celery and gluten. I've been known to hang around near nuts, peanuts and sesame seeds and I may contain them as well

and

Freezing me? best do it right now and eat me within a month

and most egregious of all

Ouch! My pot can get a bit wobbly when it's hot, so stand me on a plate when you're reheating and stirring, and mind your fingers when you pick me up

(although actually I am put off my soup even more by

Made in the UK with three spoonfuls of love and a pinch of gusto

but it doesn't count because it's not in the sodding first person. And how many calories in a spoonful of love, eh? Tell me that.)

I am 34 years old. I left nursery school 30 years ago and that was the last time anyone saw fit to speak to me in this stupid, affected, patronising voice. And on that occasion it was a human being, not a fucking soup.

A message to the people of Glorious soups: I want to EAT the soup, not make friends with it. And in any case, when I'm hanging out with my friends (or "chilling", as in Let's chill. Keep me in the fridge) they very rarely exhort me to take off my lid and stand me on a plate in the microwave and make sure I'm nice and hot before serving. Because that would be WRONG. And a bit kinky.

[UPDATE: The soup was delicious. I don't know if that makes it more annoying or less.]

All of which reminds me of that brilliant scene in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by the late, great, and apparently prophetic, Douglas Adams, when Arthur Dent meets the cow that is soon going to be his dinner:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.

"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.

"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.

"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."

"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."

The Universe raged about him in its death throes.

"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

It managed a very slight bow.

"Glass of water please," said Arthur.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

Musical bookswap on a Monday

And why not? It's my blog.

I am SO BLOODY EXCITED about the Firestation Bookswap on Thursday. Here are some reasons you might want to get excited too:

1. It's the bookswap's first birthday! I might wear that transparent dress I accidentally wore on the first night, to celebrate. Then again, I might not.

2. We have had some amazing guests on the bookswap so far but it'd be hard to beat this month's line-up. I read Matt Rudd's William's Progressin one sitting, despite being filled with horror at its hilarious revelations about the truth about having young babies - yes I will now never have children and it is all Matt Rudd's fault, but I will forgive anybody who makes me laugh. Get a taste of his inimitable sense of humour at his blog. And Andrew Kaufmann's All My Friends are Superheroesis the only book that has ever made me cry from happiness. I read it less than a year ago, have already given away four copies (including Scott's - sorry Scott, if I can remember who I gave it to I might be able to get it back) and I love love LOVE it. In fact if you buy a copy you can find a quote from me on the back confirming this very thing. His latest, The Waterproof Bible, is similarly strange and wonderful. Andrew is interviewed on the Beat website by bookswap alumnus Aliya Whiteley and I defy you to read the interview and not want to meet the man in person.

3. For one month only, the bookswap is FREE. Free I hear you say? Why yes -



Hilarious. Could that video be any more 90s? And when did you last think of the Soup Dragons?

No(t) shit, Sherlock

Plenty to say about Sherlock, and plenty is already being said. It was proper, everyone watched it, everyone's talking about it, "water cooler" etc etc telly. The first two episodes aired while I was on holiday and I didn't even know that they were going to be on; by the time I got home it was wall to wall on Twitter (people discuss things in places other than Twitter? I wouldn't know as am currently working in an empty office.) We're (almost) all agreed: it was clever and funny and brilliantly performed, and maybe we're not sure about the visible text messages and the blogging storyline (in a word: NO) but Benedict Cumberbatch is an extraordinarily-named genius who has made Holmes his own and I wonder if he turned down Doctor Who (that bit's just me).

One thing I have found interesting is the hormonal outpouring from female viewers including me: I've seen Cumberbatch in plenty of stuff before and surely he was never sexy (I mean, Stuart: A Life Backwards? Thanks no) only now suddenly he is wearing a long coat (see also Doctor Who - men, if you know what's good for you, buy a long coat) and his eyes look kind of oh yes, and he's got a very funny script and a decisive don't-give-a-toss demeanor and he's clever and YES I WOULD. But in addition, I don't know if it's the presence of a gay co-creator but there's so much man-on-man flirting going on: Holmes and Watson, Holmes and Lestrade, Holmes and Moriarty, Holmes and everybody basically. And we love it. By which I mean the ladies love it. There's a whole other piece to be written about how, in the era of the internet and slashfic a previously unknown well of female interest in men getting it on with other men has emerged (I just typoed 'me getting it on with other men', which is a whole other other piece) but I have a deadline so I can't write it right now (magazine editors: you know where to find me and my rates are very competitive). I'm not surprised to see this coming from Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat - both having done time in RTD-era Doctor Who which was the first bit of mainstream family telly to crank up the gay flirting and win. (Ironically, given the context, in Moffat-era Doctor Who the gay flirting has been excised, and Gatiss wrote the one really duff episode of the most recent season, the WW2 dalek one, and I wonder if he feels like his wings have been clipped.) I'm mentioning Doctor Who a lot, which is because Sherlock is really Doctor Who for grown-ups: in an updated version of a popular old classic, a mysterious, socially removed, insouciant but charming supergenius and his prosaic sidekick solve crimes involving monstrous villains and a hypereal version of the world. I guess it's not surprising that I adored it.

Any downside? Sadly yes. Sherlock's representation of women is awful. It's maybe unfortunate for Moffat and Gatiss that I watched it so soon after hearing about the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test? Why yes, it's a formula for figuring out whether the films have the most basic characterisation of women. Basically it works like this:

1. Is there more than one woman in it?
2. Do the women have names?
3. Do they talk to each other?
4. Do they talk to each other about anything other than men?

Try to think of some films that pass this test. Er... (I came up with Juno and all of the work of Mike Leigh, but it's much harder when you move past independent movies into the world of mainstream.)

TV is way ahead of the curve on this, with the likes of Mad Men or The West Wing proving that it is entirely possible to have a fantastic show with a wealth of intelligent female characters who have more on their minds than who they are or aren't shagging and what the men are up to. Sadly Sherlock isn't one of them. There are plenty of female characters, yes, but they never speak to each other, and if you think for a minute about why they don't speak to each other you'll realise it's because they'd have nothing to say, as they aren't really characters at all, just a bunch of girlfriends, victims and idiots whose lives revolve around the men. So Sarah, who exists to be Watson's girlfriend, and gets captured and shrieks; and Molly, who has a simpering crush on Holmes that renders her incapable of using the brain you assume she must have to be a qualified pathologist; and the policewoman who slags Holmes off but doesn't appear to have much by way of a job to do; and Mrs Hudson, who is Una Stubbs and therefore wonderful and very funny but a bit thick and makes the tea. And lots of dead people, and one criminal mastermind in episode two who actually isn't that much of a mastermind because she's just following orders from Moriarty.

Ah, Moriarty. When the envelope turned up in episode three with a woman's handwriting on it, I had high hopes that Moriarty would be a woman; making Holmes's evil nemesis female would have been a nice 21st century touch. Making Molly Moriarty, for example, would have been an excellent about-turn for her frankly insulting characterisation (oh no I'm going to cry because Holmes thinks I've put on weight!) But no, this is boys' games in a boys' world, and the girls are incidental. Which is not to say that Moriarty wasn't fantastic: like the rest of the male characters, he was bright, witty, sharp and very hot. In fact, the irony is that while female viewers have got the total horn watching all the sexy men running around being clever and cool, (straight) male viewers have some eye candy here and there, but nobody who is any fun or actually does anything (seriously: 'girl in car who looks at her phone a lot'?). So in a way, we women have the better deal. But in another way, we really don't.

Perhaps I'm being unfair, picking holes in something that is so much better than the British TV norm, but I don't mind a lazy attitude to women as much in something that's crap, because it's crap across the board; this is good, and so it should know better. End of mini-series report, then: brilliant as far as it goes, but when you get the recommission, if the women could actually talk to each other next time, that would be great.

Gods Behaving Badly Locations

Missed this while I was away - interview with me, which you may or may not find interesting, but accompanied by a fantastic set of photos showing various locations from Gods Behaving Badly. Great work from Rachel at Londonist. And only when looking at the pictures did I realise that the book contains a major continuity error which escaped my editor and me through months of forensic corrections. See if you can figure it out, it's obvious from one of the photo captions (though of course you'll only spot it if you've read GBB).

I am returned

Had a lovely time in Tuscany, but feeling a bit fragile as a beloved friend passed away while I was on holiday. Not yet ready to resume trademark inconsequential frippery. Although, to be fair, said beloved friend was a big fan of inconsequential frippery. The last text message I got from him was to alert me to the fact that Samantha Fox of Page Three / bad pop / lesbian / born again Christian fame has rabies. So, not least in his honour, the fun will return.

Meanwhile, a reminder that we're having our first ever London bookswap at the London Review Bookshop on Thursday at 7.30pm. Our guests are James Miller and Patrick Neate. It's very close to sold out, so if you are planning to come, please don't show up without a ticket as you will almost certainly not get in. You can book ahead here. Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

UPDATE: LRB bookswap is now sold out.

Out of blog auto-reply

Marie is on holiday. She'll be back at the beginning of August. If anything interesting happens while she's gone, just pop it in the comments, there's a lamb*. Thanks.

*It's just an expression. There is no lamb.

Alternative

Don't read my blog today. Read Robert Hudson guest blogging on Me And My Big Mouth. It is an inspiring photo essay which will blow your mind, and teach you to make better coleslaw, which won't be hard: coleslaw is the finely-shredded food of the devil. I need to go and wash my tongue just from thinking about it.

Music Monday on a Tuesday

I wasn't here yesterday to do Music Monday on yer actual Monday as I was in transit from a (lovely, sunny) long weekend on Dorset's beaches. On the way home I was listening to my iTrip* (*not actually an iTrip but some ultracheap knockoff I bought off Amazon which just about transmits to my radio if they are within no more than two inches of one another, but hey, that'll do) and reflecting on how, when we used to drive to Dorset as a family, we would listen to only the following tapes ever, for as long as I can remember throughout my entire childhood:

- the Muppet tape - an distinctive olive green tape with songs and skits from the Muppet Show on it (good grief the comedian's a bear!)
- Ella Fitzgerald's Greatest Hits
- Louis Armstrong's greatest hits
- Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
- the Bubbling Brown Sugar original cast recording

And that's it, for well over a decade. I think you could probably trace all of my musical preferences and half of my personality back to that very list. (I will no doubt be returning to one or more of the above for future Music Mondays.)

That's all very well, I hear you say, but it would be helpful for us to judge your taste, not to mention your sanity, if we knew what Bubbling Brown Sugar is.

I'm so glad you asked. Bubbling Brown Sugar is a musical set in a nightclub in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s and features songs from artists including Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, which played in London in 1977, the year after I was born. I nver actually saw it, but I can probably do the entire album by heart - not necessarily in any way that another human being might enjoy, mind you - and when I was very small, my favourite song was called 'Strollin'. The singer said that in order to be cool you had to stroll, and in order to stroll you had to "walk with your left leg dipping a bit, resembling a limp". I thought this sounded like a great idea, so that's exactly what I did. All the time. Without telling anybody. I was three. My mother thought that I had orthopedic problems and nearly took me to see a specialist, except that I got bored of doing it just in time.

Here's a bit of Bubbling Brown Sugar performed on a Dutch TV gala a few years ago. No strolling, alas.

Bookswap Preview

Next Thursday is our regular Firestation Bookswap night and for once I have actually been sent the books far enough in advance to do a proper preview. Previous bookswap authors look away now... Gone? OK. The rest of you, usually I get the books so late I have to finish them on the train to Windsor. OK bookswap authors, you can look back now.

First up, we have Aliya Whiteley, author of Light Reading. Light Reading is a murder mystery - or is it? - in which two neglected air force wives stave off boredom and try to avoid thinking about their own problems by investigating a suspicious suicide in a sinister seaside resort. The cover, with its "A Lena and Pru Mystery!" sticker, makes it look like cheerful but conventional fun, but it's far darker and more unusual than that, and actually I can't figure out whether of the book's being missold or I'm missing the irony of the packaging. A question I'll be putting to Aliya.

Joining Aliya will be Bronia Kita, whose Wild West novel The Swansong of Wilbur McCrum reads like a cross between Forrest Gump and Little House on the Prairie. Wilbur McCrum, a cow-phobic, fit-ridden outlaw, narrates his peripatetic life story from the bottom of a well, where he is drowning after trying to escape a vengeful posse while disguised in women's clothes. No need to say more - that's a premise which sells itself.

STOP PRESS. At this point I wrote a whole lot of information which is now completely inaccurate. Like, as of five minutes after I posted. And which I will now delete. So I started off by saying that we're doing a bookswap at the London Review Bookshop on Thursday August 5th, which is still true, and then -

la la la la la la la -

He'll

[but who? The author who isn't coming, that's who. For entirely respectable reasons, I should add]

be joined by James Miller, whose book I don't yet have, but whose website promises the following:

Other than writing, my main passion is Jamaican and African-American music. I have a ridiculous collection of reggae, dub, dancehall, soul, blues and gospel music. My other obsessions include drinking coffee, wandering around London, going to Italy and taking pictures of buildings. I'm also interested in Civil Rights history, psycho-analysis, post-colonial theory, anti-capitalist protest, Middle East politics, Modern, pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance art, mega-cities and anything that might offer an insight into our present postmodern nightmare.

He doesn't mention cake. But clearly a man with plenty to talk about.

I think the LRB event is going to be fantastic, but please, please book ahead - I am fairly certain it will sell out. The event's not on their website quite yet (at time of writing anyway) but you could try calling them on 020 7269 9030. (Usual bookswap rules of free entry for those who bring home-baked cake will apply.)