Bad reviews
Ryan Gilbey on Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof in the New Statesman:
… it represents a sort of embarrassment of riches, only without the riches.
Actually, we don’t have world enough and time.
Years ago, my boyfriend got in trouble with his then-girlfriend for an Insensitive Joke. It was Valentine’s Day, he was on a radio panel on ABC local radio, and the question was: “What price love?”
“$6.90,” Simon volunteered. “That’s what I paid for a single stem rose earlier. Should get me off the hook.”
On the other end of the ether, Simon’s girlfriend got hopping mad. She felt that it underrepresented Simon’s regard for her. She knew most of the other panel members. Basically it just gave her the shits.
Life moves on. They broked up, we got it on, not least because we both regard $6.90 for a single stem rose as a bit of a bargain, frankly. Within a year, I was finally ready to shrug off the I’ve-got-heaps-of-time-might-just-go-travelling-even-though-I’m-nearly-30 me, and the I-would-think-about-kids-but-I’m-a-still-a-kid-myself-despite-being-slighty-over-30 me, and the ok-sure-I’m-34-now-but-oops!-I-don’t-have-a-boyfriend me, and – true to my sex and demographic – DEMANDED we try to get pregnant right away. I was, by then, 36 (geriatric, in obstetric terms). Simon agreed, understanding enough to seem empathetic and dishy but grumpy enough to seem take-charge and manly.
We never did get pregant, though, and after about two years I started wondering why. (Simon had, by then, forgotten about it.) My wondering led to all sorts of tests. Which led Simon to all sorts of other tests, some of which he would have happily been marked “absent”, even if it meant failure, which says something, because he’s very conscientious.
Which leads us to the question, what price baby?
$2,527. Plus the anesthetist’s fee.
It appears Simon and I can’t conceive naturally, so we going to do IVF – to be precise, a particular type of IVF called ICSI. Our problem is Simon’s sperm is really quite retarded and fairly solitary in nature. (Those chips off the old block.) With ICSI, they find one particularly athletic sperm and inject it straight in to the egg, which they have – the idea is – previously extracted from me. We hope to get pregnant this way. We have a few things going for us and a few things not going for us. On the plus side, male infertility is easier to deal with than female infertility. I’ve had every test known to womankind and my insides look ok. On the minus-sign side, I have just turned 39. These are old crone eggs, well past retirement age. Frankly, they were thinking about a nice little unit in Noosa. A little back from the beach, where prices are better. Now I’ve come barging in, expecting them to don hotpants and act 25 again. “Oy vey!” they say. (My eggs are Jewish, for some reason.)
Our plan is to give it a red hot go, then in true Aussie fashion give up if it doesn’t work. In which case we fully plan to go on and have a ball doing other stuff. Really, I don’t want to make it in to a big thing – I know this happens all the time: the infertility bit, and the IVF bit, and the potential pregnant bit and the potential childlessness bit. Everyone is at least one of those things. I’m just telling you.
Anyway. Fingers crossed for us. It starts soon. End of the monthish.
MESSAGE TO MY MATES
In posting this information, I rely on you to NEVER ASK ME ABOUT IT UNLESS I BRING IT UP. (Simon may feel differently. Ask him.) I will let you know if there’s any developments. I don’t mind talking about it but I’m thingy about people asking. Not that I blame them/you/whatever. I’d ask; I’d totally ask. But I’ve learnt how it feels from my side, and from my side, it’s like, if I had something for you, I’d give it up. It’s a slow and difficult process – and there’s really no interesting development except “Would you believe it? I’m pregnant”.
I say all this knowing that YOUR [think of yourself here] sensitivity and enormous insight would preclude YOU [ditto] from any vulgar behaviour, but just explaining my thingyness.
And thanks in arrears and in advance to those who’ve answered a call from me just to hear shuddering sobs, or have listened or will listen to much medical and emotional detail. Preciate it.
Neverland & the finger
Brilliant opinion piece by Simon in The Age yesterday.
‘I DON’T want to grow up. I don’t want to be a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” So said Peter Pan as he set off for Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s immortal fairytale. But were Peter Pan living in Melbourne today, he wouldn’t have to fly away anywhere. He could be as boyish as he liked, for as long as he liked, right here. His playfulness would moreover be seen as good — even essential — for the economy.
The signs are everywhere that childishness is more popular than ever, that infantilism is in. Look around. Adults read Harry Potter, rapt like children. Movie screens are dominated by cartoon characters, pirates, superheroes and sequels (“Tell me the story again, Mummy!”). Workers queue round the block to buy a new brand of doughnut. Women dress like teenagers. Men lose days playing with their Wiis.
The rest here.
Also much wisdon on rudeness from Thornton McCamish:
‘Oi!” someone shouted. I kept walking. Then there was a dog-whistle. I turned, half-expecting to find a runaway hound at my throat. But there was no dog in sight, just a guy lumbering up the street. He was whistling at me. He wanted to know where he could find the pub. I told him. Then he lunged off, without a word, like I’d ceased to exist.
Then there was that man in the city, scowling at his parking meter. As I walked by, he asked me if I had any change. I said no, I didn’t, sorry. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he muttered. I said: “Pardon?” “Just piss off,” he told me matter-of-factly, already lining up the next passer-by.
The rest here.
Don’t shoot anyone
The other day the guy in my local FoodWorks asked me what I was listening to on my iPod, then before I could answer he said, “I always get the feeling that you’re listening to someone saying, ‘Keep it together. Just don’t go crazy. Don’t shoot anyone.’”
I am aware I can look like a bit of a nutter sometimes – my iPod is basically stapled to my head, and I’ve a tendency to giggle and sing under my breath when I hear David Essex’s Hold Me Close – but I don’t think I fully realised the extent of it. It’s cause my brothers were so much older than me that I basically grew up as an only child, and I lived, and still do live, in My Own Little World. (See the spotty house description, below.) I notice everyone on the street, but I sometimes feel they can’t see me. I don’t like running in to people – I may be very distant, so far, far away, and it’s difficult to suddenly drop back in.
That’s sometimes. Other times I walk around so convinced of my own freckle-faced glamour that I’m surprised anyone can tear their eyes away. Although that’s not so often.
Anyway, I was premenstrual at the time (of the FoodWorks incident) so when I came home and told Simon I started crying. Then we stood in the kitchen while he patted my head and said, “You’re not a nutter. No one thinks you’re a nutter.”
Gods and Binkers
I have just finished The God Delusion, and am devoted to Richard Dawkins and his fervently held thesis. (Then again, I am the famous one* for uncritical embracing of people/places/passions, followed in a week? a month? a year? by a blasé, revisionist disinterest. As the first best friend I made in Saigon, Jonas, said, rather poignantly, to the second best friend I made, “It’s lovely to be on top of Ginger’s pedestal, but it’s such a long, lonely fall down.”)
Completely devoted. What has endeared me most is not the argument but the emotion. It is, in fact, an embedded answer to one of the criticisms levelled at atheism – that a world without god is a world without passion, and without good works. Though it must have made him gazillions, I have no doubt this Oxford don views his self-career-hijacking as a public service.
He is manfully unashamed of his anguish. He talks, for example, about an Israeli experiment in which children were asked their opinion of Joshua’s actions during the battle of Jericho (related in the book of Joshua). Joshua killed every man, woman, child and beast in the city, keeping only silver, gold, bronze and iron, as these are “sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord”. Sixty-six per cent of the children gave their total approval to this act, for such reasons as:
Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.
Would Palestinian children feel similarly, in a comparable situation? Presumably, thinks Dawkins. “These considerations fill me with despair.”
He constantly talks of being moved by people’s stories of religion, particularly as it scarred their childhoods. These are often told to him in letters, which he invariably answers. He adores Douglas Adams, to whom he dedicates the book, quoting him on religion: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” In fact, at one point, he most sorely laments his late friends: “Douglas, I miss you. You are my cleverest, funniest, most open-minded, wittiest, tallest, and possibly only convert. I hope this book might have made you laugh – though not as much as you made me.”
He also adores his wife, Lalla Ward. You may have once done so one also – I certainly did. Lalla was the second incarnation of Dr Who’s timelord assistant Romana.
I was cross and disorientated when Romana regenerated, but I learnt to love her so slavishly and to think her so pretty that it seemed impossible I wouldn’t grow up to be her. She still is so pretty.
I feel certain Dawkins is talking about Lalla when he tells this story.
Another child, a girl, had a ‘little purple man’, who seemed to her a real and visible presence, and who would manifest himself, sparkling out of the air, with a gentle tinkling sound. He visited her regularly, especially when she felt lonely, but with decreasing frequency as she grew older. On a particular day just before she went to kindergarten, the little purple man came to her, heralded by his usual tinkling fanfare, and announced that he would not be visiting her any more. This saddened her, but the little purple man told her that she was getting bigger now and wouldn’t need him in the future. He must leave her now, so that he could look after other children. He promised her that he would come back to her if ever she really needed him. He did return to her, many years later in a dream, when she had a personal crisis and was trying to decide what to do with her life. The door of her bedroom opened and a cartload of books appeared, pushed into the room by … the little purple man. She interpreted this as advice that she should go to university – advice that she took and later judged to be good. The story makes me almost tearful, and it brings me as close as I shall probably come to understanding the consoling and counselling role of imaginary gods in people’s lives.
This story has harkened me back to my own imaginary childhood world. It was the spotty house. I miss the spotty house. My real family lived there – and a large, noisy, bossy one it was too; no wonder I so often sought time out with my gentle, clever parents. And, conveniently, it was just around the corner, although my mother tell me I was always slightly vague on the exact directions.
Richard Dawkins is reminded of A.A. Milne’s Binker:
Binker-what I call him-is a secret of my own,
And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone.
Playing in the nursery, sitting on the stair,
Whatever I am busy at, Binker will be there.Oh, Daddy is clever, he’s a clever sort of man,
And Mummy is the best since the world began,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan-But they can’t See Binker.
Binker’s always talking, ‘cos I’m teaching him to speak
He sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar…
And I have to do it for him COs his throat is rather sore.Oh, Daddy is clever, he’s a clever sort of man,
And Mummy knows all that anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan-But they don’t Know Binker.
Binker’s brave as lions when we’re running in the park;
Binker’s brave as tigers when we’re lying in the dark;
Binker’s brave as elephants. He never, never cries…
Except (like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.Oh, Daddy is Daddy, he’s a Daddy sort of man,
And Mummy is as Mummy as anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny,and I call her Nan…But they’re not Like Binker.
Binker isn’t greedy, but he does like things to eat,
So I have to say to people when they’re giving me a sweet,
“Oh, Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two?”
And then I eat it for him, COs his teeth are rather new.Well, I’m very fond of Daddy, but he hasn’t time to play,
And I’m very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away,
And I’m often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my hair…But Binker’s always Binker, and is certain to be there.
I’m a hopeless non-fiction reader – it took me weeks to get through it – but I loved turning every page of this lumpy, brainy book. It’s not the freedom from such preposterous reasoning as the resurrection, or the perverse lab-rattery that is the “gift” of free will. Cause I never believed that stuff anyway. Nor is it freedom from pretending to respect someone’s religion rather than their humanity. It was for the kindness of it, the humour and the wonder, and Dawkin’s steely and munificent brilliance.
*Jokey family idiom. Originates from my nephew, The Big Reuben. (That’s The Big Reuben because my friends Chris and Ros had a baby, and called him Reuben, so I call him The Little Reuben. It’s like the Lebowskis). Anyway, at age five, The Big Reuben told us he was “the famous one for vintage trucks”.
The Big Reuben is such a hipster. He’s been into vintage everything since he was about two. Seriously.
Gee. You. Why?
If, like me, you live with the constant anxiety that you’re snookering your brain with booze, you’ll have a sick shiver hearing this extract from a letter from Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West – his wife – in 1950:
I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.
Guy Burgess spied for the KGB before, during and after WWII. At the time of Nicolson’s letter, he was one year pre-defection to Russia and about a decade pre-death. He was, around this time, living in the US with Kim Philby, who was forced to babysit him on account of his propensity to disgrace himself at every opportunity:
“Darling. Please. Really.”
I am ardently fascinated by Guy Burgess. A little bit I love him. It’s that chutpah, and the idealism. Perhaps I shouldn’t feel like that; he was a traitor of course. But the Cambridge spy ring hated Hitler and loved the commies – and their ideological children were still alive and thriving well in to the 80s. I was one of them, in my childishly pretentious way. I bought Socialist Worker and tried to pretend I was working class. Then there’s his funnyness and gayness, of course – funny gay men go hand and hand with the womenfolk. And I get the thirst, the love of alcohol and drunkenness and silliness. What secrets he had, what motivation to get soused, to block and tackle the constant paranoid mummerings.
I think they need a new movie. Cambridge Spies wasn’t very good – too lovey & actory.
“This is the world in a vessel,” said Jonathan Williams of the British Museum.
oh wow oh wow oh wow. buried treasure.
David Whelan and his son Andrew, 51 and 35 respectively, were out metal detecting in a Harrowgate field in England. See, right there, drama and mystery. Even before we get to the buried treasure. David is only 16 years older than his son – was he a real dad to Andrew, or did they grow up together, with Andrew’s grandparents taking on a parenting role? Is he still with Andrew’s mum? Were father and son always close, or was metal-detecting a way of bonding, a throwaway suggestion from a burnt out social worker that they took seriously because they were stumped for anything else? If so, who initiated it – Andrew the genxer, searching for an activity that demands both silent concentration and comradely proximity? Or was it David, searching for a way to communicate something both simple and unspeakable – unthinkable to say it aloud! – to his first born boy?
Either way, in this Harrowgate field, they hit upon some lead casing. It was protecting something. “I just kept going and going. A ball of earth rolled out of the side of the hole and I could see a coin stuck in it. We dug the hole out. We crouched down on our hands and knees.”
They scratched underneath, and saw silver – a pot, dirty, but clearly something special – is that engraving? – and bits of silver and more coins poking out. “We were sat there shaking – it was unbelievable. We made sure we got everything out and then packed up for the day and went home to find out what to do with it. We told the antiquity authority and handed it over all intact.” An applaudable move – any further foraging at that stage would have hindered archeologists’ investigations about the pot’s provenance.
In fact, the pot is at least 1000 years old. It is engraved with deer and lions, and plated inside with pure gold. A French communion pot. And it was packed full – full! – of Viking loot – silver rings and gold armlets, brooches and dress ornaments. And coins! There are 600 coins, thieved or traded from Samarkand in central Asia, Afghanistan, Russia and north Africa, some of them never seen before. There was so much loot that, according to the British Museum’s Hayley Bullock, “if somebody asked me to fit it all back in now, I’m not sure I could.”
The very youngest of these coins – dated 927 AD, is the clue that unravels the story. The coin was minted by King Athelstan – the first “King of All Britain” who knew about alliances and swept though the country, challenging Viking power. It’s likely that the owner of the loot buried his treasure in the field as a safety deposit, expecting, one day, to return. He never made it.
The British Musuem will now value the treasure – expected to be well over £1,000,000. Then they have to buy it – the proceeds will be split between the Whelans and the owner of the land.
And my favourite part of this story is David Whelan’s response when asked what he was going to do with the money the two will recieve.
“We don’t need owt. We’ve got all we want. It’s a thing of dreams to find something like this. If we had found one coin we would have been over the moon.”
For video of the BBC’s story on the treasure, featuring David and Andrew Whelan, click here.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Stella Vine. Incredible, isn’t it? What a stunner he is. But why youthful, handsome Dorian, I wonder, and not his distasteful, ageing mask? I’ve got a crush on Stella. Were I to live in Oxford, I’d be hotfooting it to this exhibition.
In other news, everything about this story fascinates me. I want to make a telemovie of it.
The Guardian, Wednesday July 4, 2007
by Helen PiddHe was the eccentric German aristocrat with a penchant for fishnet stockings and lederhosen whose debauched parties had twice ended in death.
The first time was at Oxford University in 1989, when the daughter of a Conservative minister overdosed in his bed. The second was last year, when a man plunged 60ft to the ground from the roof terrace of the 44-year-old count’s luxury apartment in Chelsea, west London.
This week, a third and final tragedy struck Gottfried Alexander von Bismarck – his body was discovered by paramedics at his flat.
The great-great-grandson of the Iron Chancellor, who united 19th century Germany, had apparently died of a heroin overdose.
The paramedics had been called in by an estate agent who had the keys to sell the property; it is understood he had been asked by a member of the count’s family to look round because of their concern that they had been unable to raise him for several days.
Reports suggested drugs paraphernalia were found near the body. A Met spokeswoman last night would not say whether the police were treating the death as suspicious. Results of a postmortem are expected today.
The life of the flamboyant count – full name Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen – was marked by the highest highs and the lowest lows, often one directly following the other. At Oxford he was notorious for wild parties at which severed pigs’ heads were served and guests toasted each other in blood, while he played host dressed in fishnet stockings or lederhosen.
In 1989, at a party in the student count’s rooms at Christ Church College to celebrate the end of exams, Olivia Channon, daughter of the millionaire trade minister Paul Channon, was found dead in his bed.
She had died due to respiratory failure caused by an overdose of heroin and drink. Although von Bismarck always claimed he had not seen Ms Channon “chasing the dragon”, heating heroin on silver foil and inhaling the fumes – and was never implicated in her death other than to be charged separately for possessing drugs – the incident haunted him for the remainder of his life.
In 1991 he said: “There are still people who will not speak to my parents because of it, who said to my mother, ‘What a rotten son you have, he has disgraced the name of Bismarck’.”
After time in rehab, then a spell back in Germany working as an actor, and in a job helping firms in the former GDR on the road to privatisation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he resettled in London some years ago.
He kept out of the headlines until last August, when a man fell from the roof terrace of his London home during a wild party. Anthony Casey, 38, had a “substantial” amount of cocaine in his body when he plunged 60ft, an inquest heard in October. Mr Casey had been feeling unwell when he asked the count for the key to the roof terrace.
The coroner, Paul Knapman, said that a room in the flat contained what most people would consider “unusual” and “bizarre” items, including buckets of sex toys, a butane gas canister and a box of dozens of syringes.
He added: “In common parlance, in the early hours of the morning, there was a gay orgy going on.” Dr Knapman recorded a verdict of misadventure.
Hedonism ran in the von Bismarck family. His great-great-grandfather was made prime minister of Prussia in 1862, and is credited with engineering modern Germany by defeating France in 1870-71 and uniting the various German states into an empire. He also loved food and drink and was a famed raconteur at parties.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
