Dance & Drink & Screw

I walked past a young man this morning in the Tube (Bank station), sitting with a Transport for London staff member and holding a cup of water and a bar of chocolate. She seemed to be explaining to him something. (Don't travel on an empty stomach? Drink more water?)

On Friday, the same happened on the Northern line, only it was a young woman who fainted inside the carriage. The crowd on the platform gathered at the door instead of giving her space (bunch of nitwits) but luckily she quickly revived with the help of TfL staff and was led away.

These two incidents made me think of the growing amount of anorexics I now see wandering around London. (in a sort of unrelated way). People go on about the obesity epidemic - that Britain is trailing close behind America - but I think there's a directly opposite problem growing in the background.

If I go on my lunch break to - say - Russell Square - I'll walk past at least 3 of them. Perversely enough, either in cafes or supermarkets. And just as many young men as young women. Today, Tumblr announced it's banning blogs that promote self-harm and anorexia, which has been hailed by some charities like Mind as a good move. There's also this interesting blog post about Pinterest and how it's become a favourite site for pro-ana and pro-mia users.

I don't really know what's the answer. Western society has been skinny obsessed for a long time now, but it's more enforced I think in big metropolises like London - especially with people who feel they have to compete with others on the way they look or fit into fashion. There's a difference between wanting to be slim and healthy (e.g. mine and your case) and wanting to starve yourself to beyond size 0.

Also... I kinda think gyms should have the power to ban anorexics from working out/joining. (Is that harsh?)

Grace Dent agrees with me that The Killing is the best thing on the telly right now - even better than Boardwalk Empire and all the other new U.S. shows.

I'll shut up already about this show.

There's an article in yesterday's The Guardian that mentions Livejournal. It's about depressed people who create online personas and fake illness in order to get sympathy and attention. I think everyone on LJ by this stage knows at least one person who has done this or has had first hand experience of being tricked.

Fopp have a sale on - tons of great albums from 2010 for £5 or less. Classics for £3 or less. Worth checking out. I'm going back to CDs. I don't see the benefit of digital downloads unless they are remixed b-sides.

I bought a copy of the new i paper this morning, partly because I agree with dickon_edwards that it's about time a newspaper was named after a Magnetic Fields album. The man at the stall asked me if it was any good. "I don't know! I'm buying it to figure that out," was my reply.

My verdict: better than the freebies content wise, but not much different from them in style or range and definitely London-centric. If anything, there's more variety in the Metro (more gossip and weird news) whereas the i paper regurgitates stories throughout its pages (e.g. Take That and Robbie Williams tour story in the first few pages, which then reappears towards the end - same with the story of the giant stag, which appears on the front page, page 2, page 4, and probably a few other ones.) Surely there's enough content out there to stop repetition?!

Things I've learned: Cheryl Cole's hooker tights from Sunday night sold out after her performance and that Cherie Blair has put an autograph of Tony Bliar up for sale on eBay for 10 quid.

I was tempted to leave it on an empty seat in the tube, beside a copy of the Metro, and see what people went for first. But my £0.20 expenditure made me bring the copy into the office with me.

1) idioticpoet mentioned on Facebook how his town's library had created a "quiet room". It struck me as a very Borgean notion: add a quiet room within a space that's already meant to be quiet. Then imagine that quiet room needing a quiet room once all the noisy and affronted left outside decide to go in (because we know they'll be the first ones through that door.) The same noisy people I see when I visit Tower Hamlet's Idea Stores (the Borough's version of libraries) in search of a book: mothers that let their children run riot and think libraries are daycare centres, teenagers giving lip to security guards, adults chatting to each other over coffee. The quiet rooms within the quiet rooms' quiet rooms can only go downwards, eventually - chambers and alcoves underneath East London.

2) The Saturday papers carried news of the search for a heir to Hackney's "mole man" William Lyttle. He died this month and left behind a Victorian home worth £1million. The catch: he was known as the "mole man" because of the tunnels and rooms he built underneath his home, prompting a battle with Hackney Council to evict him when they discovered everything with the help of ultrasound scanners. I like how he cheekily claimed to have just a big basement.

3) The papers have also recently carried stories on the explosion of the mole population due to a ban on poisons used before to kill them. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Big Brother's producers when they randomly selected a contestant to go inside the house dressed as a mole (an outfit he wouldn't be able to remove until he completed certain secret tasks in behalf of Big Brother) and sleep in a mole hill in the garden. Some of the tasks involved him scurrying around tunnels inside the Big Brother house which the other contestants were not aware of.

4) While I was writing this post, I went to my bookcase and grabbed one of Wink's books, Creators on Creating. It's a collection of essays by various writers, thinkers and artists. I flicked it open and landed on Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. The first paragraph goes like this:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thoughts - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopaedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."

I've come up with a game that involves history books. The rules are as follow:

1) Pick a non-fiction book to read, preferably about a person or period centuries ago. (If you want a real challenge, start with the Egyptians.) In my case, I picked Bill Bryson's brilliant biography of Shakespeare.

2) After you've read it, find a way to move chronologically forward in world history through a subject raised somewhere in the book. I chose King James of Scotland since he came into power halfway through Shakespeare's life.

3) Keep doing this until you reach present day.

After King James I, I was re-directed to the Americas, the colony of Jamestown, John Smith and Pocahontas (the first modern celebrity, in my opinion). My next book will be on the first African slaves brought to the east coast colonies.

The Guardian's most recent books podcast is on the future of Science Fiction. They mentioned how Ursula K. Le Guin had a problem reviewing Margaret Atwood's most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, because Atwood refuses to label her distopian fiction "science fiction" (she calls it instead "speculative fiction".) Something to do, it seems, with Atwood's fear of being shoved into the sci-fi ghetto. I love both Le Guin and Atwood and hope they don't get into any Dynasty-style cat fights that might lead to a balcony fall.

One of the podcast's speakers predicted that 2010 will be the year Paranormal Romance novels like Twilight lose their popularity to Epic Fantasy (thank god.) HBO is currently filming a series based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels, which made me think Avatar's style and success truly is the face of what's to come. The Guardian's Saturday Review also had a small article on Avatar and a recent accusation of plagiarism aimed at it from Russian sci-fi writers. But, the article said, the person with the biggest claim against Cameron is Ursula K. Le Guin (there she is again), whose novel The Word for World Is Forest is uncannily similar to the film. I hear an echo from the time reviewers said Le Guin should take J.K. Rowling to the courts for lifting so much stuff from her Earthsea novels.

Today, I'm finishing off Stephen King's latest novel Under the Dome, meeting a friend at the Museum of Childhood and then going for a swim which will hopefully fix my back.

I learned yesterday in The Guardian that my borough, Tower Hamlets, has the highest concentration of swine flu patients in Britain. The borough's centre for Tamiflu distribution has, apparently, a line up snaking round the corner, with colour-coded rooms depending on whether you are infected or not - a melancholic scene from 28 Days Later left on the cutting room floor. Kevin said that our tower block must definitely have some cases, which I agree because it's been ages since I've shared the elevator with somebody else. Some of the graffitti on the elevator goes like this:

David is Gay (to which I added "Love", and then someone added "Rocks")
Pigs live here (to which I added "oink oink!")

Yesterday, we walked through Victoria Park, sat on a bench and watched the hundreds arriving for the Lovebox Festival (Florence and the Machine, Doves, Groove Armada, NERD, Gang of Four, etc.) I kept thinking to myself "welcome to swine flu central!" I even saw Nikki Grahame from Big Brother 7 in the crowd, looking so skinny her knee bones were poking in one direction while her legs moved the opposite way.

Later, we slipped under the covers with a bowl of bombay mix and watched an interesting, quirky American indie date film, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, which I think one of you recommended aeons ago. It left me puzzled with straight people's mating behaviour. Then we watched trailers for upcoming films and I despaired.

Hot, young flesh is pouring out of Mile End Tube. Skinny jeans, low waists, droopy eye lids, bangs, boob tops, T-shirts, fresh fresh fresh-scented skin that is going to rub up against each other in Victoria Park when Radiohead plays - very soon. I'm at home with all the windows flung open; since the park is just a stone throw away, I want to see if the sound travels here and I get to hear a concert for free. I am standing, they are there - two worlds colliding - and they can never tear us apart.

I went for a job interview today - the first one since I left the National Theatre last July (I don't count the one from The Guardian since I cancelled that one at the last minute after I realized how little they were going to pay me.) I've got mixed feelings: I talked a lot and yet described myself as shy; I called myself highly organised yet described my biggest weakeness as "managing" (I meant the opposite of administering, but did they understand me?) The job is for a small arts organisation in Hackney, a bike ride away from home. Not much money, but plenty of sunlight through the large windows that rise all over their spacious office and exhibition room. Well, if I don't get it, at least I had the experience of going to an interview; I can work on what I did wrong for the next one.

Thank you to everyone who gave suggestions on how to write a job statement. I took your advice on board and it worked! I think the secret is to be candid and warm, yet show that you have the skills they need. People want to know there's a human being behind the application form. Being too formal and general makes them think, I imagine, that you are just cut & pasting job statements from one application to another and don't really care about their organisation.

More photos here

One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

From the BBC.

James Meek, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, 2008
Anyone expecting a great follow up to James Meek's brilliant The People's Act of Love is in for a disappointment. Like his previous novel, this one revolves around war - this time, though, he tells the story of a journalist stationed in Afghanistan, Adam Kellas, who falls in love with hard-to-peg Astrid, another journalist. The novel then traces Adam's search for Astrid in America as his personal and professional life falls apart.

Meek's experience as a Guardian journalist during America's latest invasions seems to have been a large source of inspiration. Like his previous novel, Meek is very good at showing the surreal nature of life under war, and the horrors that can be visited upon someone without any notice, changing their lives forever. What he has failed to do here is create believable characters that can carry the reader through the story. What we get instead is dialogue that either explains plot or sounds artificial and stilted, meant to prove Meek's own views on war, America, or the publishing world, rather than any internal character life. At times, plot is revealed too ackwardly. An example is when Adam makes a discovery about Astrid, towards the end of the novel. Instead of Meek trusting the reader to understand what can easily be shown (and was there before) he feels the need to have his character explain the obvious. It kills what was meant to be meaningful and pivotal to the story.

Strangely, it's hard to completely dislike the novel. There are some very good scenes - like Adam's meeting with his American book agent, his overblown rage at a posh dinner party in London, and the shelling of a Taliban convoy. Hopefully, Meek's only way is up after this novel.