The Dick van Dyke thing

(DISCLAIMER: No part of the following post should be interpreted as 'knee-jerk anti-Americanism'; as I've said many times before, I love Otis Redding and Andy Warhol and Christina Ricci and Converse sneakers and insane conspiracy theories far too much to slag off 300 million people. I'm just saying, though, right...)

When I meet an American, s/he usually asks me where I'm from, which is a perfectly sensible question. To which I give what I hope is a perfectly sensible reply, which is "London".

Because I'm not a complete social retard, I then ask the same question of my interlocutor. Who, more often than not, says something along the lines of: "I'm from the States."

Well, I mean, duh? It's just possible that he's clarifying that he's not Canadian, I suppose. But do Americans not realise that, as soon as they open their expensively realigned mouths, they are announcing their Americanness? We get that bit - where in America? New York? LA? Or somewhere in the flyover states, somewhere that only really impinges our attention when there's a high-school massacre?

Last year, in Cambodia, I met a nice American couple.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"We're from the States."

"Riiight... Whereabouts in the States?"

"A city called Minneapolis."

"Oh, OK."

"Gee, you mean you've heard of it?"

And rather than saying that I come from London, should I be announcing that I come from England, as if every atom of my being, from my accent to my pasty skin, from my yellow-grey teeth to my fondness for sarcasm, doesn't scream that fact out loud?

PS: Serendipitously, this turns up in my inbox, courtesy of the ever-delicious Very Short List. I like the Scottish one best.

Lovin' it?

Here's a good thing, flagged up by my excellent luncheon companion Charles Frith.

It's called Brand Tags. The deal is that you have a succession of brands flashed at you, and you type in the first word or phrase that comes into your head. Some of the brands are specifically American, which may baffle some, but hey, there are no wrong anwers. As the site develops, a tag cloud is created for each brand - and the fun comes when you try to guess the brand from the tags alone. Fun for the label junkie and the Naomi Klein groupie alike.


(And good luck to Mr Redknapp and his chums this p.m., of course.)

You can never leave

Traipsing around a Bangkok department store, I come to a shelf of DVD players: three different live Eagles DVDs are playing, with three different live versions of 'Hotel California'.

New musical ellipse

I can never remember if I'm behind the loop or outside the curve, but suffice to say that if there's something conceptual, Zeitgeisty and sort-of-oval-shape-ish, I'm almost certainly somewhere else. The only way I might get a vague idea of the sort of thing to which today's young persons might be frugging in their discotheques is if I chance upon a copy of NME from the week before last, but even then it's just full of people with too much eye makeup, shouting, which is of course precisely the way it's always been, and should be, but in the olden days they were shouting to/at me. Or at least I thought they were.

So I'm slightly confused at the cover story of the most recent copy to tumbleweed its way in my general direction. It endeavours to identify The Future 50: The bands, artists and innovators driving music forward. Shouldn't it be packed with people that I've never heard of, making noises I don't understand? You would have thought. But not only does the Top 10 encompass such gummy old farts as Radiohead, Damon Albarn and Rick Rubin; a little further down the list, at number 38, we find the guitarist for 80's Mackem agit-soul combo The Kane Gang.

Next week, Roger Whittaker goes grime.

Also... from the splendid Stuff White People Like: "Don’t worry, it is impossible for a white person to turn down the opportunity to proofread."

You're an intellectual giant, an authority

Guardian journalist Zoe Williams, hauled up before the readers' editor to defend her below-the-belt article about Boris Johnson, responds thus:

"I'm not a reporter... I write comment. I tell people what to do all the time. I don't expect them to take me seriously."

Which is fair enough I suppose, and I've always been fond of Ms Williams' pungent drollery. But that's certainly one to store up for the next time somebody like Andrew Keen disparages amateur, dilettante bloggers by comparing them to 'proper', 'serious' journalists.

PS: Just heard John Mortimer on the Today prog, being very snotty with the poor guy who's written the new Brideshead Revisited adaptation. (Younger readers may not be aware that Sir John penned the 1981 telly version that got us all wearing our jumpers over our shoulders.) One line from the irrepressible old curmudgeon stood out: Brideshead is "...entirely a book about God and homosexuality."

PPS: More on the vacuum where the commentariat's vital organs should be, from the mighty Bête.

Unbelievable

We're constantly discouraged from mentioning politics and religion in polite conversation. A recommendation I've blithely disregarded in my latest CiF spiel, although that might not be obvious from the opening paragraphs:

"Inayat Bunglawala's post here on Saturday exemplified all that I love about blogging. This wasn't just a newspaper article, to which we were invited to append our responses; it was a call for advice, a starting point, that only really came into its own as the commenters pitched in, spinning the virtual Frisbee between them, creating a glorious dialectic of literary adulation and execration.

Inayat's premise was simple: he hadn't read as much fiction as he would have liked; recent dalliances with the novel had been unsatisfactory; he went to the Cif massive for advice..."

Further solecisms here.

Two more reasons to miss that deadline

A couple of things to which I'd like to draw your attention:

• The splendidly lugubrious Bête de Jour is conducting a survey of blogging practices. Yeah, yeah, all been done before, I know, but this one's good. Like the best surveys, it actually makes you think about your own actions and motivations as you're completing it. Although I suppose that's not necessarily a good thing, because it means the subject is affected by the act of being observed. Anyway, it's here, so just go and blimmin' do it, OK?

• And the fearsomely intelligent Dr Ian Hocking has come up with an interesting twist on Twitter. (It's cooler than Facebook; John Humphrys said so.) He's writing a novel, and he's having his heroine, Saskia Brandt, send updates on her triumphs and tribulations as the narrative develops, all in 140 characters or fewer. I do wonder what he'll do when he gets to editing, though. If he cuts something out, maybe Saskia will have to send a new message saying that, actually, that thing I did six weeks ago, involving the secret policeman and the teleport device and the tureen of borscht, well, I didn't. Social networking, St Petersburg-1907-style, starts here.

Verse about face

Poets as a species aren't particularly known for their modesty, but they can occasionally be creatively self-deprecating, albeit in a distinctly "aren't I bloody great?" sort of manner. WH Auden famously described his own face as being "like a wedding cake left out in the rain", a line that Jimmy Webb subsequently adapted for inclusion (= stole) in the neo-psychedelic MOR epic 'Macarthur Park'. (Incidentally, David Hockney rather topped Auden by surveying the old poet's battered, furrowed countenance and wondering aloud "If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?")

And now the famously unlovely (in more ways than several) Philip Larkin has come up with a posthumous cracker, having described a less than flattering photograph of himself as "CS Lewis on a drugs charge", which sounds as if it could be the original of that tiresome construction, "X is like Y on acid", but probably wasn't. It does however throw down a challenge. I've long identified myself as Andy Partridge with gout, but I'm sure my lovely readers can skewer themselves with far more élan than that. Are you Hyacinth Bucket eating Space Dust? Richard Dawkins not sure where he left his keys? Or Mao Zedong desperate for a pee? Over to you.

PS: More Larkin about, from themanwhofellasleep.

PPS: Anyone know where Wyndham's disappeared to?

When it's a Jarre

In the fast-moving world of blogthings, memes are just sooooo 2006. Clearly then, Matt from Zenbullets has judged the time right for a revival, or at least a bit of retro irony. He's tagged me to provide 8 Random Facts (at least one of which is possibly a Random Fib) about bouffy-haired Gallic electro-ivory-tickler and laser fetishist Jean-Michel Jarre.


1. Jean-Michel Jarre is the son of Maurice Jarre, who wrote the soundtracks for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and, uh, Ghost.

2. Jean-Michel is best known for that one that goes "BAH ber-ber ber", that was used as backing music for 86% of the supporting features about skateboarders that were apparently compulsory in British cinemas in the late 1970's.

3. It's called 'Oxygene', by the way.

4. I was at school with a guy called Micky Warren, who was a big fan of Jarre. However, he pronounced his hero's name "John Mitchell Jarry".

5. Despite this, Jarre is no relation to the playwright Alfred Jarry, author of the absurdist satire Ubu Roi.

6. In addition to his high-tech keyboard instruments, Jarre also plays the theremin and stylophone.

7. In 1997 he came second in a poll to judge The Most Ludicrous Haircut In Bland Adult Instrumental Pop, pipped to the post by Kenny G. However, many experts have suggested that Jarre should have taken the award because of his imaginative succession of atrocious barnets, whereas Mr G has stuck resolutely to the same grotesque abomination throughout his career.

8. Despite his tonsorial errors, he has touched the bosoms of many extremely attractive ladies, including Charlotte Rampling and Isabelle Adjani, and may even have seen them in just their pants. Most philosophers suggest this, rather than the Babel fish, is the most persuasive argument for the non-existence of God.

In keeping with the old-skool ethos of this meme, it's not a free-for-all. I must tag eight bloggers, and tell them who they must write about. i think I'll add the further restriction that not all the facts can be scooped from the individual's Wikipedia entry, although the fiction can be. So...

• Annie Rhiannon must provide eight nuggets on the subject of Lucrezia Borgia

• Betty on Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

• First Nations on Friedrich Nietzsche

• Geoff on Madame Blavatsky

• LC on Traci Lords

• Patroclus on one or other of the Chuckle Brothers

• Slaminsky on Perkin Warbeck

• Valerie on Eric Cartman

What would it be like...

...if you were a passive-aggressive obsessive-compulsive?