Dance & Drink & Screw

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gone Girl is an enjoyable thriller in the mould of Patricia Highsmith's fiction, and reminiscent of Lionel Shriver's "We Need To Talk About Kevin".

Nick and Amy Dunne are a New York couple with the kind of perfect relationship that annoys their Facebook friends. They are young, wealthy and good-looking, with media careers and a bit of fame (Amy's parents are the authors of a successful series of children's books.) So why has Amy disappeared on the morning of their fifth anniversary?

The disappearance unravels through Nick's account of the police investigation and the issuing media circus, and Amy's diary. But the novel is also about the breakdown of the American dream - how young couples like the Dunnes have to leave New York for the Midwest in search of work, how communities were ripped apart by the 2008 financial crash. The final twist is marmite-flavoured.

A film version is in production, with Rosamund Pike playing Amy (great casting) and Ben Affleck playing Nick (terrible decision.) To me, Nick should be played, ideally, by a young Mickey Rourke lookalike.

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The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was expecting The Help to be a slightly insulting chicklit novel but before I knew it I was hooked. The novel is told through the point of view of three women living in a small town in Mississippi in the early 60s: two black women, Minny and Aibileen, who work as maids, and one young white woman, Skeeter, who dreams of becoming a published writer and exposing the hard life of black women.

Skeeter, indignant with the way her society treats black women, puts together a book of anonymous interviews of the town's maids, exposing the underbelly of 60's southern America. The gathering of these stories sets in motion incidents that put Minny and Aibileen's jobs in danger, maybe even their lives.

Full of good intentions, Stockett's novel is unintentionally campy, reminiscent at times of pulpy trash like The Valley of the Dolls. There's something drag queenish about Skeeter herself. Another character, the mantrap hillbilly Celia, who is shunned by small town society because she's too voluptuous, seems to have been created with an eye on a Marilyn Monroe postcard.

A lot of Stockett’s material was apparently taken from her own upbringing (from what she observed and understood later as a white woman from the American South). Characters are either good or bad, though, with no subtlety in between. More often than not the white ones are ignorant and evil while the black ones are good, kind and hardworking. A lot of emotion comes through as sentimentality, as if written with an eye for the Hallmark Channel’s movies. It’s a novel that portrays the 60s as we imagine it rather than what it was really like.

It's an enjoyable read nevertheless. Stockett conjures a fascist world that reminds me of the claustrophobia and horror of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. It's a world we haven't completely left behind.

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After getting some new bespoke running shoes at Runner's Needs (thank you sparklielizard for the tip!) I've become a regular jogger in Victoria Park. I like to go in the mornings, with my iShuffle plugged in (dangling from some very expensive, neon Adidas running earphones I also got at the shop). I do one full circuit of the park - the equivalent of 5K - then follow it up with two days at the gym doing weight training.

Yesterday morning I noticed a group of short, skinny people doing sprints in the park... Olympic athletes! They were from Rwanda, I learnt later. Apparently they didn't feel like practicing in the Olympic stadium and asked if there were any nearby parks they could use. Victoria Park was the suggestion. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I do.

This London Olympics, which felt very British when it was first announced, has become progressively more "American" as the years have gone by (and especially under the Tories.) Do we really need the biggest McDonalds in Europe built right inside the Olympic park? With a ban on nearby businesses from selling french fries because McDonals has the sole permission to sell it? It's the next best thing to having a giant American flag waving in everyone's face. And by "American" I mean in this context profit-over-commonsense - that neoliberal idiocy that businesses ultimately choose what's best for everyone.

Still, despite all the weird stories surrounding the Olympics (from slum conditions for cleaners living near the park to graffiti artists being arrested), I felt a thrill of excitement at suddenly being so near to Olympic athletes in Victoria Park. My dance company is also involved - we performed as part of the Olympic Torch relay through London and many of our dancers are part of the opening and closing ceremonies.

On McDonalds related news, HBO Documentaries has made available online its recent "Weight of the Nation" series. You can check it out on YouTube. It's in 4 parts and quite compelling viewing, especially if you also recently saw the BBC's "The Man Who Made Us Fat". The series is often mawkish but has some eye-popping figures and graphs. It's made me go off soda drinks for life.

Who needs television, eh?

At face value, Gremlins is a horror/comedy about a bunch of little monsters running amok in a nice little American town on Christmas eve. But I was watching it last night decades after the last time I'd seen it, and some things in the story made me wonder. It was the logo of the Pegasus in the town's gas station towards the end of the movie that reminded me of the book The Mythological Unconscious, and of how popular culture uses Jungian archetypes sometimes without realising it.

It struck me that a) Gremlins is about small town mass hysteria at the encroaching of urban, big city living; and b) it's about Chinese products versus American products, perhaps even in a prophetic way.

The conservative, small American town where boy-next-door goes out on prim and proper dates with girl-next-door, where mom spends her time making ginger bread men, where nice neighbours sing carol songs at your door, doesn't have any of the loose, depraved living that the Gremlins bring with them. No smoking, no partying, no raunchy laughter, no dirty jokes. Are the Gremlins the good people's repressed selves? How lustily does the hero's mother wield her knife when she stabs the Gremlins in her kitchen?  Then later, where does the surviving Gremlin run to and multiply into an army? The YMCA's pool!

There's this substory of the hero's father being a crap inventor, full of that American spirit to reach the Dream one day, then here comes along a Chinese "toy" that nearly wrecks the entire town's economy. A little bit like how America now buys everything from China but hardly exports anything.  There's also the hero's neighbour, who owns a tractor and complains of foreign cars and televisions, blaming imaginary Gremlins for their malfunction. And the movie concludes with a battle in the town's shopping mall...

The only two scenes that made me laugh involved the hero's girlfriend, who seems to be a bit of a depressive. The hero is trying to get the courage to ask her out and all she can think of is how some people slit their wrists during Christmas. We later learn she's referring to herself because when she was 9 her dad broke his neck falling down the chimney, dressed as Santa, and Christmas was ruined forever for her. These scenes meant for us to feel sorry for her and flesh her out but I was left wondering if the whole movie wasn't a nightmare in her head.  Because like any nightmare, Gremlins has some massive plot holes - the kind that only make sense when you are in it in your sleep, until you wake up and laugh. (Such as Gremlins multiplying like crazy if water drops on them, yet they spend their whole time running around on snow with no effect.)

The Gremlins theme song is now my ringtone for when wink_martindale calls me...

There are certain technical words in the vocabulary of every academic discipline which tend to become stereotypes and cliches. Psychologists have a word which is probably used more frequently than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry of the new child psychology.

Now in a sense all of us must live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophemic personalities. But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted.

I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.

I call upon you to be maladjusted. The challenge to you is to be maladjusted—as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;” as maladjusted as Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, in words lifted to cosmic proportions, “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the persuit of Happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus who dared to dream a dream of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. The world is in desperate need of such maladjustment.

Martin Luther King, April 25, 1957

Most Brasilians dream of one day visiting Portugal just as I imagine most Americans wish to eventually cross the ocean and take pictures of themselves outside Buckingham Palace. It's one of those things that is drilled into us from school: this is the country that discovered you, that you fought against to gain your independence, that you now have a special relationship with thanks to shared history and language.


Last week, at the height of the riots across the UK, wink_martindale and I hopped into a plane in Stanstead (terrified we'd encounter rioters as we took the No. 8 bus at 4am to the train station) and flew to Spain for 8 days of traveling down the Iberian coast to Lisbon. We visited Bilbao, Gijón, Ferrol and Galicia in Spain; and Braga, Aveiro, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal.


Spain and Portugal are very similar to France in the widespread restaurant and café culture, except that they mostly specialise in sea food. Alcohol is very cheap and the food is mostly excellent, sometimes really great. Watch out though for the bread and butter placed at your table without your request - if you eat from it, you pay for it.  We found the Spanish and Portuguese to be friendly and helpful.


The Portuguese are obsessed with that American reality show "The Biggest Loser" - they have marathons of it on the telly as well as their own version of it. In stores, you see all sorts of Wii games dedicated to the show. I'd always heard that their tellies were filled with Brasilian soaps but I didn't spot any. Fado was played in touristy restaurants, Arcade Fire in the ones used by residents.


I didn't like Lisbon very much: it was decadent, decrepid, dirty, crumbling, depressing and a little creepy. But I also saw loads of potential there for rejuvenation - it needs some kind of artist revival that breaks through the hashish haze and brings life and vibrancy back to the streets. This bit of urban art was sweet and inspiring, reminding me of projects here in London that involve community residents: it was an exhibition of photos of elderly residents that lived in the hills surrounding the city's castle; a sort of remembrance. We also saw some great graffiti, including this strange altar in a dead end alley. Sadly, there was also a lot of rubbish tagging that spoiled the beautiful, historical buildings.  Loads of grand homes that would be worth millions in London were completely abandoned, boarded up, trashed.



Porto was lovelier and I want to visit it again. Beautiful beaches that are close to town, loads to see - our day and a half there wasn't enough.  I'd like to go back for a week and have time to spend days on the beach, swim, discover all of Porto's bookshops and history.

The past couple of days have been wonderfully long and enjoyable. It started on Friday with a talk on time travel at the British Museum as part of their current exhibition on Science Fiction, Out of this World. Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Traveller's Wife, was part of the panel as well as sci-fi novelist Stephen Baxter, some guy who writes for Dr Who, some other guy who writes on the science of time travel and a woman who works in publishing (and who chaired the talk.) Audrey was a cross between Margaret Atwood and Tori Amos, all deep husky voice and very funny down-to-earth comments. The audience had a few nutters who shot theirs arms straight up when it was question time. I spotted a few friends of hester 's in the audience but I couldn't remember their names or LJ handles.

Yesterday, I went to the garden's Summer Fair then met friends in the evening at Rich Mix for the documentary Senna. It's a wonderful film which is hard for me to be objective about. Because I'm brasilian, I grew up watching Senna race every Sunday, my family and friends filing my home with cheer for his victories or despair for his losses. Seeing his life played out on the big screen brought back nostalgic memories for me as well as some good laughs at how naff Brasil was in the 80s. Well, wasn't the whole planet?

Senna was to Brasil what Lady Diana was to Britain in their deaths: this outpouring of emotion that showed the true extent they had affected people's lives while alive. He was different from her though in how there was nothing contrived about him: he was pure talent, hard work and charisma. There was something about his eyes that was very beautiful, his smile too - that gave away how idealistic he was about Formula 1 and making a mark in the lives of the less fortunate in Brasil (I suppose similar in that sense to Diana).

Everyone in Brasil knows where they were when they heard he died (i.e. most were in front of the telly) just like everyone in Britain still remembers hearing of Di's accident in Paris.



Today, I woke up early to meet kirsten at Columbia Road market for breakfast. It was rainy, cold, grey and horrible. We had a look around the shops and found a table in Restaurant Espagnol, which has lovely coffee and breakfasts (chorizo on top of fried eggs and toast; why did I never think of this?!)

We then drove to Camden so she could get a piercing at Cold Steel. On the drive back home we blasted 2 Many DJs and talked about Salt-and-Peppa and what the hell happened to them. Weirdly enough, a few hours later I watched a documentary by Chris Rock called Good Hair, which featured interviews with them. It's a bit of a surreal documentary that falls under that subgenre "we all live on a crazy planet". It looks at the multi-billion dollar industry surrounding hair in America in the black community, and its consequences to themselves and other parts of the planet. Funny at parts, weird in others. Made me wonder what will happen to all those people who spend thousands of dollars on their hair if the American economy continues to slide into the hole. It's completely unsustainable, like a lot of other things in America...



Tonight, we are watching Soprano episodes while eating our dinner, reading old newspapers in bed and listening to classical music. Global warming feels like a dream when the typical grim British summer returns to chill our apartment and cover the city with rain.

P.S. More Gingerganza this way! (thank you kirsten for the link.)