Charmless Man

Listening to Jonathan Ross ingratiate himself when interviewing celebrities is a frequent, painful occurrence. But watching Friday Night With Jonathan Ross this week was too much to bear, as his slobbering sycophancy was burbled over Beth Ditto in a baffling display of inept adulation.

The infectious exuberance of the Gossip front woman somehow maintained my interest in what was otherwise a cringing dialogue worthy of Ricky Gervais. Ditto should be applauded for her feminist, fat-and-happy, out-and-proud stance, but in an interview like this surely praise should be reserved for her talents, instead of the tabloid-friendly labels so frequently applied to her? Her phenomenal singing voice, fierce political ethics, her lightening quick wit (which merrily ran rings around Ross's own mithering pantheon of innuendo); none of these were mentioned. Ross did touch upon her status as a fashion icon(oclast), but was far more interested in tired stories of squirrel-eating.

The lowest point probably came when Ross realised his usual flirtatious interview technique was unlikely to work. He daintily ran away from Ditto's comment that she prefers the "ladies who look like boys". Sycophancy failing, he then switched to flattery, claiming he finds his wife more attractive when she is carrying a bit more weight, as if this rescued Ditto from any embarrassment she might have about her own size. Not only is this patronising, it is also a serious distortion of the truth - Jane Goldman, Ross's wife, could at most be described as voluptuous, and certainly does not approach Ditto's frame.

Note to self: must research and write post about film critics' wives. Jane Goldman is a wonderful oddball, and I believe Mark Kermode's wife is a leading academic mind on soft-core porn. Maybe Barry Norman's wife was a Page Three girl...

All of which leaves only reinforcement for my opinion that Ross should abandon BBC 1 for perhaps Channel 4 or BBC 3, where he could cater for the niche market that he better suits. He is too talented a presenter to be re-programmed as yet another personality-free prime-time clone.

Oh, and have a shave!

Throw Away Your Television

Television is a strange and dangerous beast. Strange, because it confounds expectations, despite never being anything other than predictable. Dangerous because the uneasy comfort it provides is an opiate, a sucking tentacle wrapped around our mind, placating and digesting.

This morning was good. I got up early, ate a bowl of pecan and oats cereal. Had a shower. Teeth brushed, hair (sort of) combed, I sit in front of the computer and progress. For the first time in a while, I feel I'm getting somewhere. Short breaks here and there to read the news never fully interrupt the flow.

Its just after one, and I decide to have lunch. I'll watch a bit of telly, I think. Scrubs is on at half-past, so I'll make my sandwiches to eat then. Kill a bit of time first, and come my appointment with the grey, imposing structure in the living room, I'm sat, food in hand, ready for a thirty minute treat in the middle of a productive day.

Only its never thirty minutes. A tiny bit of channel-hopping and one episode has become three. And I don't even want to be here, its just a sickening compulsion, a hypnotic trance that I slip into, broken only by the lull of a four minute advert break. This in itself is a further ploy; get some crisps, have a banana, put the kettle on, glass of coke. I consume. And then I can't move, I'm just stuck there.

Television can be a wonderful thing. Educational, partisan or unbiased, entertaining, a conduit for information or analysis, a great way to watch films cheaply and easily. But as an accompaniment to eating alone, it is a sweet and sickly poison.

Hello? Oh...

A sample of some of the phone calls I've had to deal today. And yes, this post is named after a song. Its by the Cribs....

Me: Hello?
Caller: Hello?
Me: Hello? Who is this?
Caller: Yes.... Yes, I'd like to speak to Susan please?
Me: Susan?
Caller: Susan Merkelville.
Me: I'm sorry, I think you've called the wrong number.
Caller: My glasses are broken.
Me: I think this is the wrong number, sorry.
Caller: Oh....
Me: Goodbye, then.
Caller: Yes.
Click.

...

Me: Hello?
Caller: Congratulations! Your household has been specially selected by the Spanish Lottery and you have won a timeshare house in Austr-
Click.

...

Me: Hello?
There is a long silence.
Me: Hello? Is anyone-
Caller: Yes, hello, sir.
Me: Yes how can I-
Caller: Yes, sir, I am today to tell you if I can have a moment of your time that you have a telephone?
Me: Er, yes I do have a telephone, obvious-
Caller: It is a mobile telephone that you currently are in use of using to phone your friends and relatives in HRZZFFFRRRRRTTHH!!! sir?
Me: I'm sorry?
Another long silence.
Me: I'm sorry, are you selling something, please?
Caller: My name is Sharon and I would like to tell you that your Virgin mobile is now owned by-
Me: I don't have a Virgin mobile.
Caller: Which mobile do you have, sir?
Me: I'm sorry, I'm not willing to disclose that; I'm going to hang up now.
Caller: My name is Sharon and I-
Me: Sorry, goodbye.
Caller: If you'd just -
Click.

...

Me: Hello?
There is a long silence.
Me: Hello?!
Some piano music starts playing.
Me: You ring me up and put me straight on hold?!?!
CLICK.

...

Me: Hello?
There is a pause.
Me: Hello?! Who is this?!
Caller: Hello?
Me: Oh, hi Grandad...

Things The Grandchildren Should Know

Just to state the obvious, and as an excuse to post a picture of snow at a random point of the year, the little pictures towards the top right of the page link to my music reviews and film reviews, which are hosted on different blogs.

The book reviews are gone. That was just a silly idea.

The Old Man's Back Again

In an unbelievable and exquisite twist in the plot of the universe, Scott Walker is to release a new EP next month, only a year after his last album, The Drift came out. It is perhaps not entirely accurate to say that this breaks his usual eleven-year gap between albums, since it is a twenty-five minute instrumental piece commissioned for a contemporary dance troupe of disabled and non-disabled dancers (see the trailer here), and since it is limited to 2,500 copies.

Nonetheless, I'm rather excited.

Trash

Given a long enough period of time, some storage space out of sight and a lack of sufficient willpower, it is truly amazing how much junk you can amass from nothing at all. The sort of stuff that you don't need or want, but fail to dispose of without sufficient incentive.

This morning, I got up uncharacteristically early to clear out the loft and garage of some such unwanted junk, to deposit in front of the house as part of the wonderfully named "Bring Out Your Rubbish Day". There have been no children in this house since I was a child (now in my twenties), and yet there was still a surprising amount of child friendly rubbish lying around. Items disposed of include:

- one King-Size mattress;
- two sponge single matresses;
- at least seven cardboard boxes, empty or packed with other boxes;
- three spare bathroom panels, 8' by 3';
- one 7' three-piece wooden tree, stage prop;
- one huge plastic bag filled with other bags and torn boxes;
- one large metal fireguard frame;
- one gas fireplace;
- one staircase guard for toddlers;
- three large empty paint tins;
- one suitcase, broken;
- one plastic training potty;
- one child's digging truck, yellow.

To be honest, I think we beat the other people on our street.

Anyone Can Play Guitar

I don't know how many of you out there play a musical instrument (or for that matter, if any of you actually bother to read this blog, which I fear is spiralling downwards in a diminuendo of wit and relevance). However, my estimates tell me that for every ten of you, approximately 9.3 will play the guitar. To which embarrassingly mundane list I add myself.

It wasn't always this way, you know. I once played the recorder. I used to dabble on the piano. I even got a couple of grades in that one. But generally, I like my own musical pastimes to be easy, so I'm reduced to simply bashing out a few thunderous chords as fancy takes me. To hell with this coordinated hand motion crap, I'll just arrange my fingers in a claw-like shape and then moronically mash my paws on the keys like Chris Martin. Its easier.

Then, about 18 months ago, I decided that I wanted an instrument that was more painful to play, and would constantly, infuriatingly drift out of key. So, after a brief fling with an ancient nylon-string that constantly found new and exciting ways to break both itself and the skin on my fingers, I bought a steel-string acoustic.

Now the guitar itself is very nice, plays well. But good grief, who decided it would be a good idea to make such a dangerous, awkward instrument?

When a piano gets too much (or too little) use, its strings become warped, some of the felt will harden, you may lose the odd note. They develop a sort of honky-tonk charm as they lose their tuning, and if you ever do need to adjust anything, its perfectly acceptable to get a professional out. These wonderful little gremlins will arrive, toolbox in hand, open it up, play it for half an hour, twiddle this and polish that and - presto - you're done.

Not so with a guitar. Firstly, it is socially unacceptable to get someone else to replace your strings for you. What are you, a girl? Secondly, it goes out of tune about every 25 minutes, and sounds crap when it does. After carefully tuning the thing for 12 months, careful never to put too much strain on it, my G-string finally snapped. Oh, the excitement. Forget the fact that the bloody thing nearly took my eye out when it went, and just consider the emotional, physical and financial pain I went through to get the little bastard ship-shape again.

Firstly, I took the decision to replace all the strings, since they'd been on there a while and had collected a repulsive amount of my dead skin, which is apparently green. So first up was to identify the correct strings (80/20 Bronze Lights), order them from Amazon (just over a fiver) and wait for them to turn up. When finally they did, I had to remove the old strings (though not all at once, or the guitar will snap or something) which is where I started to run into problems.

So, you have to loosen the string at the tuning end, fine. Once that's free, you need to 'gently pull out the bridge pin' at the other end and then you're done. Gently pull? Ha, I think not. Pin, I think, is a misleading term here. Perhaps "nail" would be better. Or those things that you put into drilled holes to screw stuff into, the self-expanding impossible-to-remove ones.

A herculean struggle or five later, involving two pairs of pliers, several wedge-shaped bits of card, two bleeding fingers and a pile of bloody tissues to match, and about two hours of fruitless googling to find some sort of insider's trick, I'd managed to change the first five strings. Putting the new strings on had proved easy enough, if a bit tedious (imagine winding down the window on your car, only it takes you ten minutes) and I was all set for a victory lap on the final string, with my guitar miraculously unharmed.

Well, after much teasing, tweaking, ramming my hand into the inside of the guitar (cutting my arm on the 5th string in the process) to try and push it out, the final pin began to budge slightly.... and then snapped in two. I let out a scream of rage something along the lines of "AeeeaaauuuuuaagggghHHRGHH!" and fought back tears. So close, only to fall at the final hurdle.

New set of bridge pins, about £3, in a lovely pack including a completely and utterly useless bridge pin remover. As effective as a chocolate fireguard. I was still in quite a pickle though, as the bottom half of the pin remained wedged in the hole, about half an inch in, and with nothing for me to grab hold of to pull it out. They're the wrong shape to push through into the guitar, so it was a case of loosen some of the strings, reach in and push it out with a penny. A neat trick learnt from several how-to websites, and completely useless.

After about half an hour of trying this, I reached some sort of "damn it all to hell" moment (though perhaps not in those words). Keys, garage, dig around in the back. Power tools. The drill. Drill bit, plug, turn it on. About four good attacks and the little pin, my arch nemesis, crumbles into the inside of the guitar. The new pin fits nicely, and thankfully not quite so snugly. Victory is mine.

To Lick Your Boots

After all that big talk of expansion and a new dawn ushering in, you get sod all for a week. A fanfare followed by an ironic, extended silence.

I am not worthy.

Something Changed

As mentioned in the previous post there have been a few changes happening at Curious Quill. The crux of the matter is that there are now three independent blogs operating under my control as part of the same system, one each for reviewing albums, movies and books. This isn't particularly because I want this to take over my entire life, but rather that I wanted a way to organise and separate my own analyses of these things in a non-diaristic way. In addition it removes them from this blog, freeing it up for my own thoughts on life, or on mine anyway.

So there you are, follow the links at the top if you want to hear my misinformed, partisan opinions on anything and everything I feel I can digest. There's not much there yet, but they will grow (and we'll see how the book one does... I'm not the world's fastest reader). Enjoy.

Changes

Bigger things to come on Curious Quill. An excess of free time and an itchiness to create means expansion is in the air. An eye for criticism needs to focus. Stay tuned.

And hopefully by now you realise that this post must be named for the David Bowie song. Not the Ozzy-Kelly duet. Shudder.