The single best piece of writing that I have read this week, penned by an old friend of mine from my Cambridge days. Her blog, “From The Edges”, is well worth following.
When I last lived in Spain, there was nothing between me and the sea. Our street, Calle Virgen del Socorro, clung to the bare rock of Mount Benacantíl at the edges of the city. From the windows of our 8th floor flat, the view was of infinity.
I dreamed of tsunamis over and over.
Everything was clear – I would be sitting at our table chatting, or hanging out the washing on the balcony, when the water struck. There was no time to get away. I felt it hit me, cold and brutal, before I woke up gasping. Over and over. I have no idea why; I have never been afraid of drowning – at least, no more than I have ever been afraid of death. But the sea that filled my senses through the waking day overwhelmed me as I slept.
The people at Vice.com were unimpressed with the recent cover story at Esquire magazine, devoted to Hollywood star Megan Fox. Actually, “unimpressed” is putting it too charitably:
The cover story of this month’s Esquire is an interview with Megan Fox by Stephen Marche. And, though I haven’t read every single thing that has ever been written, I can say, with confidence, that it is the worst thing that anybody has ever written. Ever.
With our expectations calibrated to a suitably low bar, the Vice takedown zeroes in on some of the worst things about the Esquire puff piece:
MEGAN FOX BELIEVES THAT BEING FAMOUS IS WORSE THAN BEING BULLIED
“‘I don’t think people understand,” she says. ‘They all think we should shut the fuck up and stop complaining because you live in a big house or you drive a Bentley. So your life must be so great. What people don’t realise is that fame, whatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those ten kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you’re being bullied by millions of people constantly.'”
When I was at school, there was a kid who everyone picked on because they thought he was gay. One day, a bunch of older kids dragged him into the PE showers and forcibly inserted a broom handle into his ass. Pretty sure he’d trade lives with you, Meg.
And then this, on Fox’s approach to escaping fame:
MEGAN’S UNUSUAL APPROACH TO ESCAPING FAME
According to the article, “Megan Fox doesn’t particularly want to be famous anymore.” Obviously, appearing on the cover of Esquire in your underwear to promote a new movie that you’re starring in isn’t the best way to go about this. But what about some other methods she’s tried?
“She’s tried to escape from her fate as a sex symbol. She starred in Jennifer’s Body, a magnificent, delicious, criminally underrated parable about a bombshell who literally devours men.”
“In December, in Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, she plays a woman so gorgeous that the other characters cannot quite believe it.”
And neither of those things made it so she wasn’t famous anymore? Weird!
But the best part relates to particular pet peeve of mine, the overambitious / anatomically incorrect Photoshop attempt made for the cover picture. You may be familiar with the recent image in Vogue China, in which the model appeared to be missing a leg…y’know, just to tidy up the shot a bit:
I think there’s something missing.
While Esquire magazine managed to (more or less) avoid losing any critical parts of Megan Fox’s anatomy in their Photoshop attempt, it nonetheless had many of the unearthly, not-quite-human characteristics that we are accustomed to seeing in glossy magazines:
No.
As the Vice article drily notes:
How many people must have seen that cover before it went to print? And not one of them said, “Uh, guys, her left thigh is shaped like a teardrop, she has a wrist a third of the way up her arm and her vagina is, like, a foot wide.”
Quite. Good job, guys. Of course, the sheer level of half-assery on display here by Esquire will not have cost them anything in terms of reputation or profit. Nobody reads the drively words anyway, and I’m sure that the Editor’s mailbox has not been inundated with complaints about the photograph either.
“The Fairy Garden” from Mother Goose Suite by Maurice Ravel (1910), performed here by the Scott Brothers duo in the original piano duet arrangement:
I had not previously encountered this duo, but the Scott Brothers’ official biography on their website states:
International Piano Magazine said of ‘Duets for Piano’ “I doubt whether Debussy’s Petite Suite or Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye have ever sounded more beguiling on disc.”
I am also new to this particular arrangement of “Ma Mère L’oye”, having heard it for the first time as an encore to yesterday’s BBC Prom concert, performed by acclaimed pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the conductor Philippe Jordan taking the other hot seat.
The piece has many of the hallmarks that characterise so much of Ravel’s writing for piano – beautiful melodies; clean, sparse and somewhat melancholy chords; and a wonderful sparkling sound that always conjures in my mind an image of crystal clear water in a bubbling brook.
And above is the orchestral version, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Charles Munch.
Yet another example of why Maurice Ravel remains the most gifted orchestrator ever to have lived.
The pressure group Climate Name Change has published an hilarious video on YouTube, imagining a world where the World Meteorological Organisation names extreme storms not after everyday, innocent people (thereby tarring their names by association with devastating natural disasters), but instead after some of the more intractable anti-science climate change deniers currently serving in the US Congress:
I must say, I do quite like the idea of a Hurricane Bachmann or a Tropical Storm Steve King:
“Senator Marco Rubio is expected to pound the eastern seaboard sometime early tonight”
or
“Now, Michele Bachmann is on the way folks, and specifically the eye of Michele Bachmann will be hitting Florida in a few hours”
This is not to say that I am totally intolerant of climate change skeptics. I can certainly appreciate the potentially distorting effects of groupthink in the scientific community, and at a stretch I can see how some of the data points, correlations and trajectories may have been exaggerated to better fit a pre-ordained narrative, intentionally or not.
What I have no time for, however, are the mouth-breathing troglodytes – serving Republican members of the U.S. Congress – who talk about dinosaur flatulence or a literal interpretation of the Bible’s account of Noah’s flood as a way of trying to discredit scientific evidence. All in the cause, they innocently protest, of “having a fair debate about the issues”.
The blog Standing Ovation, Seated takes a look at the “innovative” new work of architect Richard Rogers, who is going round pimping out what he calls the “shellhouse idea” – basically cheap, prefabricated, garish, plasticy-looking constructions, modular in form and “stackable”. I suppose in his mind this is revolutionary and never-before-attempted. In my mind (and I am at pains not to sound too much like Prince Charles here – I love the new skyscrapers and commercial buildings transforming the London skyline), this looks like just about every new residential building popping up in towns and cities across the UK. Cheap, bland, thoroughly forgettable and almost certain to age badly, just as the brutalist concrete architecture of the 1960s and 70s is doing. Still, a fascinating blog post well worth a read.
Richard Rogers RA is an innovative architect who is behind the shellhouse idea. In short, this is IKEA concept extended to building houses. Pre-fab, cheap, fast, waterproof. And it can be stacked up to have more floors.
This weekend, the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts was turned into a construction site for a sample shellhouse.
The house is meant to be completed by tomorrow, the 13th, when it would become a colourful pendant to Joshua Reynolds’ somber monument, and RA visitors would be able to appreciate its beauty from the inside as well.
The building must be easy-to-assemble, for I’d not seen much of constructing going on in those few hours I spent there popping in and out of the RA for alfresco coffees (though “al cemento” would be a better term).
During all that time, Joshua Reynolds was sadly trying to reach the semi-erected house with his brush…
Semi-Partisan Politics 