Thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored.
Feb. 8th, 2006 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllIn the wake of James Frey and JT Leroy's biographies being revealed as literary constructs and/or heartless scams, am I the only one hoping for some pictures of Dave Pelzer's happy childhood to be splashed across the front pages?
Overheard conversations which don't exactly inspire confidence:
1) Tube station worker, to Tube driver: "Look, if you report everything, then everything goes to Hell. Don't worry about it."
2) The man at the bar with the bearing of a career copper, talking about the aftermath of the police team's rugby match, where the Superintendent who'd had 11 pints of Guinness was insistent on getting into his car, and brushing off the officers who tried to stop him, until he eventually got tackled by one of CID - all this recounted in terms of amusement rather than horror.
You know how ridiculously ubiquitous the Killers became for a while? In every club I attended, on every TV show's soundtrack, every shop and radio station? Last night I heard them played in the oldskool social club for civil servants, in the basement of the DWP. This was one of the four venues in which we discussed how someone we knew used to live with Mark Oaten, news of which it was fairly shocking to be reminded - but not as shocking as it was to discover a fan of sub-Little Britain-series-3 sketch show T1ttybangbang, a species I'd previously believed only to exist in the crazed dreams of BBC3's commissioning editors.
And when, later, I slept, it was fitful in the extreme - in part because I dreamt of a garden party rather spoiled by the hostess' cloned pygmy pterodactyl, and its tendency to keep lunging for my groin. Freud, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
These days, the actor Colly Cibber has the misfortune mainly to be remembered through what those joyless arses the Augustans wrote about him. James Fenton provides a useful corrective, explaining the value of his autobiography for what it tells us about an era of English theatre, and also noting that it was the first autobiography of a modern actor. Of course, that very novelty would be one of the reasons those neophobe Augustan pricks were so outraged.
Overheard conversations which don't exactly inspire confidence:
1) Tube station worker, to Tube driver: "Look, if you report everything, then everything goes to Hell. Don't worry about it."
2) The man at the bar with the bearing of a career copper, talking about the aftermath of the police team's rugby match, where the Superintendent who'd had 11 pints of Guinness was insistent on getting into his car, and brushing off the officers who tried to stop him, until he eventually got tackled by one of CID - all this recounted in terms of amusement rather than horror.
You know how ridiculously ubiquitous the Killers became for a while? In every club I attended, on every TV show's soundtrack, every shop and radio station? Last night I heard them played in the oldskool social club for civil servants, in the basement of the DWP. This was one of the four venues in which we discussed how someone we knew used to live with Mark Oaten, news of which it was fairly shocking to be reminded - but not as shocking as it was to discover a fan of sub-Little Britain-series-3 sketch show T1ttybangbang, a species I'd previously believed only to exist in the crazed dreams of BBC3's commissioning editors.
And when, later, I slept, it was fitful in the extreme - in part because I dreamt of a garden party rather spoiled by the hostess' cloned pygmy pterodactyl, and its tendency to keep lunging for my groin. Freud, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
These days, the actor Colly Cibber has the misfortune mainly to be remembered through what those joyless arses the Augustans wrote about him. James Fenton provides a useful corrective, explaining the value of his autobiography for what it tells us about an era of English theatre, and also noting that it was the first autobiography of a modern actor. Of course, that very novelty would be one of the reasons those neophobe Augustan pricks were so outraged.
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Date: 2006-02-08 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 11:35 am (UTC)Oh, the horror!
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Date: 2006-02-08 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 01:30 pm (UTC)The IT Crowd was much better.
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Date: 2006-02-08 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 10:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 07:42 pm (UTC)You can be a thoroughly cynical bugger, Barry - and that's why your posts make for bloody good reading. I can well believe it of Dave myself...
Colley Cibber
A cracking piece from James Fenton there. The life of Colley Cibber would make a fine film with the right actor, although from what I know of him he was a kind of 18th century Donald Wolfit with a sideline in poetry, so hamminess would probably be the order of the day. By the way, Cibber wasn't much of a poet laureate, but his work was no worse than that of the present incumbent.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 10:16 am (UTC)