okay, okay, no more cartoons today, I promise. YouTube has suddenly become my #1 procrastination aid of choice. But honestly, Daffy has always been my favourite, largely down to this masterpiece. I feel like this every damn day.
Whilst soaking up the splendid weekend sunshine back home in Suffolk, I rediscovered some pieces of classic animation which not only proved to be highly effective babysitters for me as a child, but probably kick started my mini-obsession with cartoons. All the Cats Join In is brief, beautiful and deceptively simple - please take five minutes to enjoy it - I assure you it will enrich your life.
book of the week (and the weeks inbetween): carol by patricia highsmith
Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.
I'm sorry I haven't posted about books for a while, and I'm sorry this isn't even going to be a proper post. My reading pile for work keeps toppling off my shelves it's so tall, but as soon as I've got through it and consigned it either to the recycling pit or the acquisitions meeting I promise I'll post again. But for now, Patricia Highsmith's Carol is well worth the time and trouble, even if its surprise ending may have you scratching your head for weeks afterwards.
"Caviar. How very, very nice of them," Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. "Do you like caviar?" "No. I wish I did." "Why?" Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was. "Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it," Therese said. Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. "It's an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant - and hard to get rid of."
In the Sunday morning drizzle we pack up the tent, because even the Foos can’t redeem a festival this poorly organised, with so little regard for anyone attending it. Despite the fact that all of my festival family expressed a heartfelt desire to jack the whole thing in and leave yesterday, everyone has agreed to let me watch Iggy and the Stooges before we go home. I feel very loved.
Rodrigo y Gabriela warm up the crowd in the rain with nifty cameras slapped on their guitars and beamed onto the screens to showcase the exent of their talent. Pixelboy spends most of the set catching flies. Highly impressive, virtuoso stuff, and despite the fact it’s drizzling and barely past midday, they finish to a huge, happy crowd.
If you were a young teen in the mid ‘90s, then it’s likely you either received or made some young crush a mix-tape featuring The Goo Goo Dolls. The three years between minifig and I open like the great division they were when we first met, as he heads off to watch Seth Lakeman, while I stop with my little sister and her boyfriend to watch an embarrassingly old Johnny Rzeznik try to pull off emo for grown-ups. Although it’s cute to hear Black Balloon and Slide, as Pixelboy puts it, you can just imagine them soundtracking a scene in Dawson’s Creek. I leave them with the stark realisation that Iris was actually never that great a song. Who’da thought such things were possible?
Captain play as we drink beer and are followed by The Cribs, fronted by a man who appears to be far too familiar with the sunbed and St Tropez. Despite all their rock ‘n’ roll posturing, The Cribs also reveal themselves to be rubbish at both crowd-surfing and smashing up their equipment. Rumbled. And thus another dull indie band sinks without a trace.
Joined by numerous guest singers (but no Lily Allen, lazy moo), Mark Ronson, celebrity producer extraordinaire, and his multi-talented band entertain a smiley, tipsy crowd. To my mind, as good as Ronson is at his job, live, he's just the guitarist in a glorified covers band. Still, a surprise rendition of Phantom Planet’s California (theme tune from The OC for those of you too busy/clever/old/sensible to watch such utterly genius tosh) is greeted with a mass sing-a-long and some very adventurous crowd-surfing (walking on hands, no less) by an over-zealous fan. As much as I enjoy it, I can’t help but think I’m getting far too old for such things.
Rilo Kiley give such a disappointingly, and atypically lacklustre performance I would be very surprised if they attracted any new fans. Willy Mason, avec band, are rousing. James, with a new, bald, kilted Tim Booth sound great from the interminably long portaloo queue as minifig and I take the two vocal parts of Out to Get You. Looking back, I imagine we’re quite annoying to look at. En route to another stage, it appears that the entire world is watching Lily Allen being obnoxious.
While waiting for Iggy and the Stooges, minifig gets into a conversation with a man who has brought a disturbing portable urinating device which he uses, very publicly, much to the distress of everyone in the general vicinity. I take a detailed mental picture of his face so I can avoid him before leaping into the impossibly tiny crowd of older men that have gathered for Iggy and the Stooges. With the sound turned up all the way to 11, Iggy flings himself around the tiny stage like a man-possessed, humping the amplifiers, scaling the lighting tower and baring his backside and aged penis to anybody who cares to look. Marvellous. Throwing himself into the crowd with abandon, he sprays us with bottled water which is provided by a devoted woman poised at the side of the stage like a ball girl at Wimbledon. When I emerge to my waiting family, my sister’s face is a picture of shock and delight. I bound back to the car screaming I Wanna Be Your Dog, and as we speed back to London in a steam-filled car, we simply shrug at missing The Killers.
Pleased to be going home we make a promise to each other never to return, waving goodbye and good riddance from the car window.
Mr David Grohl rocks my fifteen-year-old world all over again
I don’t think I have ever been less excited about going to a festival. We’ve been going to the V festival for ten years and despite its near total lack of atmosphere, it’s always been well-organised and close to home, and therefore easy. By now, you could say it was a habit of mine.After this year I think it’s a habit I’m going to break. Easily. Any festival that drives me to drink lager at 11 in the morning simply because there is nothing better to do should be consigned to live music hell. ‘God, I feel like I’m in prison,’ whines my little sister. The bands haven’t even started yet.
Once inside we grab plates of nasty junk food whilst some policemen dance to Just Jack. We mill around in front of The Proclaimers all vaguely disturbed that we knew most of the songs. The crowd drink smuggled alcohol and pick their noses while waiting not-so-patiently for 500 miles. There’s nothing to do and the boys want a drink. I want to see Martha Wainwright. The bar and Juliette and The Licks are en route, so off we troop.
Although it isn’t even two o’clock yet, the site is swarming with people. Noticeably more people than usual. In fact, too many people. And whaddaya know – those crazy tykes at Virgin have sold more tickets for the same number of facilities. Great.
Every queue we pass for every bar is about four people thick and at least a hundred people long. With nothing else to do, we join one and watch Juliette Lewis gyrate and squeal across the stage in tight white leather. I adore Juliette Lewis; she’s a thoughtful, provocative actress and one of the most attractive people to ever walk the earth, but even a long-term fan like me thought she was trying too hard. As I watch their set, it occurs to me that we have been waiting in the queue for the bar tokens (yes, tokens, not even actual alcohol, despite the fact there is no queue at the bar) and barely moved. Itching to see Martha Wainwright, my lovely festival companions grant me special dispensation to leave the queue and go watch the lovely husky one. We arrange a place to meet during her set, and off I amble.
Inside the tent (I am not referring to any of these venues by their sponsors) there cannot be more than a couple of hundred people, despite the fact it holds a couple of thousand. Dressed in black with kinky lace-up sandals which she stoops to fasten, extending one long Wainwright calf to her adoring fans, Martha delivers a passionate, but brief performance of, she giggles, ‘incredibly depressing songs’. Bathed in nightclub light at two in the afternoon, she begins Factory with the apt lines These are not my people, I should never have come here. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but rather lovely all the same.
Only problem is, my festival friends are still yet to join me. I rather optimistically try calling them, and then send a flurry of text messages with precise details to meet near The Arcade Fire photo cut-out, anxious that Kanye West is due on soon. I then settle back against the barrier with my book in case they turn up in the next half an hour. They don’t, but I do see Sinead O’Connor walking casually through the arena, apparently unrecognised by anybody. It’s one of the defining things about a typical V festival crowd member. They’ll be able to spot some random off Shipwrecked at fifty paces, but stick a legend in front of them and they’ll ask them for a light. *Sigh*.
With still no sign of my sister or the boys, I begin to wander over to watch Kanye West, when it dawns on me that, an hour and a half later, they may still be queuing for bar tokens. Returning to the spot where I left everybody, I find them several metres along in the queue. Naively, I amble over to minifig, thinking I may be able to have a chat with my boyfriend across the queue barrier, seeing as he’s been waiting for over two hours. I am grabbed by two security guards yelling at me to ‘get back’ for no other reason than it makes them look busy while fights break out further up the queue. Happily, minifig informs me that security soon started fighting amongst themselves, spitting and shouting at one another with the usual refrain of ‘You disrespectin’ me?’ I wait with my sister for another hour before the boys emerge, royally pissed off and thirsty.
Luckily Kanye West is excellent and the beer is cold. I’m not particularly familiar with his music, but I prefer it to most mainstream hip-hop. Backed by a glamorous all-female string section and his DJs, Kanye gives us a breathtakingly energetic show. Standing towards the back of the hill, the crowd below is a blur of wildly waving arms. Such excitement proves extremely infectious. At one point, still rapping sixteen to the dozen, Kanye sprints to the far side of the stage, sparking a hysterical mexican wave in the crowd. Racing across to our side of the stage, I feel my arms miraculously lift, as if puppeted by Kanye West himself, and find myself screaming like a child. This is superstar showmanship of the highest order and probably worth the cost of a day ticket alone.
Dizzee Rascal’s set is one great heaving mass of east London brilliance as the rather ineffectual security are now ambushed by mighty hordes of tracksuits leaping the bizarre, one-way-system barriers into the tent. I cheer inwardly for each and every one of them as they slip out of the grasp of the wheezing security guards. At least it’s not Reading I think to myself – someone would have set fire to an ice-cream van by now.
When we regroup later, just after Ocean Colour Scene (which we make a point of missing) my sister’s boyfriend, Pixelboy, emerges from the crowd, sweaty and elated, singing that annoying refrain from The Day We Caught The Train. My sister berates him. The other punters around us appear to be attending an Ian Brown look-a-like convention.
Jarvis Cocker is a lanky dream. Arms languidly waving like a magician, hips shaking, fingers dancing, Jarvis balances on amps and dances with his microphone, cracking dry jokes in between songs. He finishes with a gloriously camp rendition of Paranoid, which, unfortunately, inspires a revolution in minifig who leaves the tent calling Jarvis a bastard for not playing Running the World. I make sure to walk several paces behind him.
Watching The Foo Fighters is one long nostalgia trip. They occupy a very special place in my music collection, and another beer on, I begin to regress into adolescence. Opening with an intense semi-acoustic version of Everlong, followed by a blistering Monkey Wrench, the crowd are assaulted with hit after pogo-inducing hit. Pixelboy looks about ready to combust with joy. Dave gives us Up in Arms, My Hero, This is a Call, Breakout, Learn to Fly and Times Like These. The crowd is as loud and lively at the back as in the pit. As they play Stacked Actors I am queuing for the loo, whereupon, we all start moshing as the chorus hits. I feel about fifteen – it’s brilliant. Finishing with old-time fan pleaser, Enough Space and a raucous version of All My Life that brings out the little hooligan in me, we spend the next hour screaming about how AMAZING Dave Grohl is.
Done, done and I’m onto the next one, done and done and I’m on to the neeeeexxxxxtttttt!
I had a rather restless night’s sleep, waking up warm and dazed and remembering yet another song that Prince played last night. I came home slightly disappointed after two and a quarter hours of music was compressed into the disappointment that he never made it onto the chorus of Little Red Corvette. This was compounded by the twenty-minutes mooching time on the Jubilee line home, and drifting around thirsty in London looking for somewhere, anywhere, still serving, that wasn’t a club. I’ve actually listened to Little Red Corvette this morning and it gave me grumpy pangs. I fear it may take some time to get over this.
That’s not to say the concert wasn’t wonderful, of course.
Nestled in the core of the millennium dome, the 02 arena is actually much smaller than I expected, which makes for a better arena show. The outer circle of the stadium is a collection of passively generic restaurants and bars, lined up along a paved boulevard like Braintree’s outlet shopping village. There are video bubble centres to record yourself dancing, an artificial beach with safe sand and fibreglass palm trees, and a Kubrick-style martini bar. The ceiling rises up like one great cathedral arch. It is, as paddington commented, “more Ballard than Ballard”. For me, it was like Murray Jay Suskind’s euphoric trip to the supermarket in DeLillo’s White Noise, a place that ‘recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright’.
Beautifully, and horrifically fake.
As we took our plastic seats, steam began to shoot out from all four corners of the arena. We eagerly watched our corner of the stage, positive that Prince would emerge from there, and indeed he did, albeit sealed in a box. From the minute he and the ubiquitous Twinz took the stage, the rest of the concert is a blur. He opened with Purple Rain, a bombastic, plump epic of a love song, and as silly as this may sound, it was rather dreamlike. Seeing somebody you feel you’ve grown up with, singing probably their definitive song first, is a bit hard to grasp. I have vague memories of watching the Twinz’s pert little bottoms wriggling to Cream, and although we were in the back of an in-the-round show, Prince did deign to come out and see us occasionally, while the band often performed to us.
There was a mildly cringe-inducing moment when members of the audience were pulled up on stage to dance with the band, and one lovely man in a leather jacket (in August) pulled some classic white-man moves. Prizes go to the girl in the purple Beyonce booty-shaker dress – a true star. Unfortunately, the dancing is my only major criticism of the main show. I know Prince isn’t as young as he used to be, and that he’s a bona fide musician and so has a guitar slung around him, but I was hoping for a little more spectacle and James Brown dance action. You can’t tease a generation of teenage girls with the Get Off video and then not provide just a little bit of grind.
A lengthy lung-busting saxophone solo of What a Wonderful World provided ample time for a wardrobe change. A gooey crowd-pleasing version of Nothing Compares 2 U didn’t make me cry as I’d hoped. U Got the Look was smokin’. Kiss was a giggle. Controversy was funky. As was Musicology. If I Was Your Girlfriend was sublime – I think it’s one of Prince’s most beautifully complex songs lyrically and woke up in the middle of the night having remembered it in my sleep. Thus, the first hour and a half disappeared.
Opening the encore with a thumping version of Let’s Go Crazy was a cruel trick to play on all those people who needed the loo, but almost made up for him not playing I Would Die 4 U (not that I was reeeaallly expecting it). Sadly, the encore was disappointing. Taking the keyboards, Prince proceeded to coyly play opening bars of some of his greatest hits – and then stopped. What began as cute teasing quickly became frustrating, especially when he halted Little Red Corvette before the chorus. Imagine watching a Prince show where you almost hear Raspberry Beret but fail to reach ‘the rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof’ bit; get teased with the anticipatory beeps of Sign of the Times; have the first minimalist chimes of When Doves Cry squandered, are denied the spangly glitters that begin Diamonds and Pearls and only begin to get all warm and fuzzy to The Beautiful Ones. He didn’t finish a damn track.
And then he plays a Princed-up version of Le Freak. Huff.
Hot and thirsty and unable to get a beer anywhere in central London without a cover-charge, I think Prince’s teasing encore ended up marring the night in the initial after-buzz. And it was never going to live up to my starry-eyed expectations, which have been building since 1994, when I borrowed my big sister’s copy of Diamonds and Pearls and a VHS of Prince videos.
But it came close enough, and so, in the sunny light of day, I ask you, “Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh, no let's go!”
...'unafraid to suggest the ways that obsession can consume itself and evaporate' The New York Times Book Review
With its combination of stark black and white simplicity and acute attention to detail, Craig Thompson’s Blankets is the perfect beginner’s graphic novel. Its understated text proves the perfect bedfellow for its bittersweet illustrations, conveying all that is painful and beautiful in that bright ache of first love. The callous brutality of childhood and the guilt-ridden ecstasy of religious and romantic fervour are subtly rendered in this quiet little masterpiece, which, while perhaps not changing the world, will change the way you’ll look at storytelling. It’s also a joy for anyone with a CD collection filled with early 90s classics – the artwork of Raina’s bedroom is the graphic novel nostalgia equivalent of watching Cameron Crowe’s Singles - a grunge-geek's dream.
Cruel but hopeful, wide-eyed and sincere, and like first love, despite being pretty, it hurts.
Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot. 
In the Sunday morning drizzle we pack up the tent, because even the Foos can’t redeem a festival this poorly organised, with so little regard for anyone attending it. Despite the fact that all of my festival family expressed a heartfelt desire to jack the whole thing in and leave yesterday, everyone has agreed to let me watch Iggy and the Stooges before we go home. I feel very loved.
Mr David Grohl rocks my fifteen-year-old world all over again 
