The women where I work seem obsessed with the Daily Mail website. At first, when they kept mentioning it, I thought that I'd perhaps started working with a load of hysterical-right-wing nutters. But, as it turns out, the Daily Mail is not just the last bastion of all that is wrong with middle-England, but a treasure trove of celebrity gossip! Who'd have thought it? The Daily Mail writing about WAGs, Hollyoaks, and (shock horror) lesbians. Try as I might to pretend I am above such tittle-tattle, one such article did catch my eye yesterday: Peaches Geldof's magazine column sparks hail of abuse by that old hack The Daily Mail Reporter (have they never heard of bylines at the Daily Mail?!) Ever one to read the misfortunes of someone younger and more successful than I, I read on.
Now, I like Nylon magazine. I buy it at the extortionate Comag import price because it represents the kind of women's magazine that is sadly lacking in the British market. There is real journalism in its pages, thoughtful reviews, some fashion/styling advice but always done with boundless creativity. There are no sex or weight loss tips and they, more often than not, carry interviews with the kind of witty, independent-lady actors and singers that I like. I vaguely remember seeing Peaches' face a couple of issues ago and knew she was involved in their website but had never had the joy of reading her enlightening musings on life, travel, fashion and music.
I tried, I really did, to read her columns (1 and 2) with an open mind. After all, Nylon > Daily Mail in both the cool and sensible stakes. I trust the editors of one of my favourite magazines to exercise the same good judgement they do in putting the rest of their magazine together. But in this instance, unfortunately they have got it so so very wrong.
Granted, she is a teenager, and pretty much all teenagers go through a period of writing cringe-worthy prose that relies on cliches (I know I did). London is all 'cobbled streets', everyone wears 'plaid' in America, all that is cool is 'vintage', everyone cool is her 'best friend', etc. But most teenagers don't get deemed worthy of a column in an uber-popular magazine. Hell, most of them don't even get deemed worthy of making the tea! Then again, most of us don't have Sir Bob for a dad (though I kind of wish I did as I happen to be one of three people who quite like the Boom Town Rats).
This may sound like sour grapes and, in a way, it is. Because, for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer, seeing people who can't write very well get published is a tad frustrating. The editors of Nylon should know that a large part of their readership think themselves marginally cool, creative, perhaps even a bit talented, and that they aspire to people with real talent, which is why, I assume, they aren't like every other stupid magazine. Therefore it is obviously going to piss a few people off if you publish some badly written, badly edited fluff written by someone largely famous for being famous.
I'm not saying that she shouldn't be a writer, write away to your heart's content. But take some classes first and practice practice practice. If I submitted such lazy writing on my journalism course I would have been reduced to tears and my work set on fire (only a slight exaggeration about the fire bit, the tears are true). In fact the start of her first article reminds me of my first class on feature writing where we were told to go sit somewhere and 'set the scene'. But then you move on, get deeper, and that's the bit she doesn't seem to have grasped yet.
Perhaps Nylon's editor-in-chief should stop "strumming his guitar" and think about giving opportunities to people with real talent and interesting stories to tell.
I really do hope that Nylon readers know that this so-called 'British Invasion' of Lily Allen, Peaches Geldof, Amy Winehouse, et al is representative of the UK. Cause it's about as accurate as Dick Van Dyke doing an English accent!
Saturday 29 November 2008
Saturday 1 November 2008
Taxisdermaphobia
Happy (belated) Halloween.
The walrus is as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the wall. I am small, tiny, barely five years old and a few feet tall. To this day I wonder whether he was quite as large as I remember for the purposes of my tale, but to my mind he was the largest being that I could comprehend.
He doesn’t say anything but just sits there lazily in his box with that blue lining that appears to wallpaper all similar boxes. Perhaps it is there to remind him of the sea, along with the fine layer of sand and shell scattered about below him like a seaside holiday scene. He stares straight ahead with the diligence of a soldier standing to order, solemnly sworn not to move an inch. Even dancing around in front of him, or breathing on the glass to write ‘hello’, does not raise a reaction, not even a bat of the eye. His long yellowing moustache droops down like an old man’s and his brown leathery skin betrays the telltale liver spots of age. Maybe one hundred years.
I do not think that I truly comprehended that he was dead, because he was sat up with his eyes open, which defied my five-year-old definition of death, and I was far too young to concede such a point. So we sat for a half hour in a harmonious arrangement where I told him about myself and he just listened.
My younger childhood was spent being hauled from one appointment with a walrus (or a crocodile, a polar bear, a gorilla, a sheep) to another in daunting, crypt-like museums and sprawling stately homes. Someone should have warned my parents that such educational generosity was bound to have an affect on the psyche.
Mine finally snapped one day in Noah’s Ark. Two by two of every animal you could ever imagine had been, decapitated, hollowed out, packed with sawdust and mounted on a wall in a colossal homage to the Victorian love of trophy hunting. Giraffes’ necks stretched long and taut with all the litheness of a plank of wood. Great majestic cats, leopards and lions and tigers, snarled sinister sharp-toothed smiles with eyes that lacked all the necessary animal instinct. Antlers protruded in irregular angles from stags, wilder beast, a giant moose, plus the giant spiral horns of the gazelle and springbok. Birds paused mid-flight with wingspans spread in full beat.
But the worst things were always the eyes, eyes everywhere; anatomically correct in the finest minutiae. Those glassy, vacant eyeballs that gaze, into the distance wetly, fearfully, silently imploring you for freedom from their eternal corporeal shell. I would rather think of them fetid and rotting down, full of organs and death, going back into the earth, rather than being reformed in a kind of man-made semi-nature. Some dignified man’s prize reminder of the natural order of things. The ultimate insult is, surely, to not let a thing die a death but to make it live on in oblivious humiliation on your wall, in a place it would never have experienced in its natural life.
This mortal, albeit animal, crisis impacted on my being so much that it all but refused to cooperate with the situation. My body collapsed first. My head curled into my chest and my legs curved up to meet them at the point where my breath stopped flowing and my heart blood congealed in a gooey panic. Then my eyes screwed shut in some kind of ineffectual act of sympathy for all the fake ones that surrounded me. If they could not, I could not see, and I simply would not open my eyes until someone picked me up and dragged my lifeless body away from my waking nightmare and into the light.
In the light I am safe from my fear. These grim beings do not live in the bright or the outdoors. They live in glass cabinets in dimly lit rooms and occasionally on the walls of galleries and bars, waiting to surprise and embarrass me in company with my phobia that has no name and apparently no other sufferer than myself (believe me I have looked).
I search for a name so I don’t feel so... odd. If there were an official register of phobias then I would lobby them for a classification. I would ask them to tell me that I’m ok. But until then I make up my own. Taxis comes from the Greek for "arrangement", Derma from the Latin for "skin". This would mean that I am afraid of arranged skin, which lacks the necessary meaning because I am afraid of death, and fur, and animals and reanimation and size and scale. I am afraid of man’s need to claim what is dead and own its form. I’m afraid of this egotism and its giant hairy manifestations that assume to be something they are not.
In the pub where I sit, there is a small head on the wall, a fox or a small sharp-eared dog. Moths have bitten away its form so much it’s hard to tell. The fur is chafed away almost to skin and stuffing, like a teddy bear worn down to the weft. Loved to death, is the phrase that springs to mind, though more likely shot to death and kept as a bit of fuzzy memorabilia. Or perhaps he died of natural causes and someone thought enough of him in life that they wanted to preserve him in death. Like I say, it’s hard to tell.
I surprise myself because I can look at him; he is the only one I can face off. Though he is wearing a large pair of sunglasses over whatever little beady glass eyes may be fitted into that space where his eyes would once have been, so I am cheating myself.
I feel like I am being strong, overcoming my fear. But I know that if he were to take off the dark spectacles then I would once again stare into the same hollow, viscous blackness that steals my breath and strangles my arteries and makes me ask myself the terrible question, what must they do with all those eyes?
The walrus is as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the wall. I am small, tiny, barely five years old and a few feet tall. To this day I wonder whether he was quite as large as I remember for the purposes of my tale, but to my mind he was the largest being that I could comprehend.
He doesn’t say anything but just sits there lazily in his box with that blue lining that appears to wallpaper all similar boxes. Perhaps it is there to remind him of the sea, along with the fine layer of sand and shell scattered about below him like a seaside holiday scene. He stares straight ahead with the diligence of a soldier standing to order, solemnly sworn not to move an inch. Even dancing around in front of him, or breathing on the glass to write ‘hello’, does not raise a reaction, not even a bat of the eye. His long yellowing moustache droops down like an old man’s and his brown leathery skin betrays the telltale liver spots of age. Maybe one hundred years.
I do not think that I truly comprehended that he was dead, because he was sat up with his eyes open, which defied my five-year-old definition of death, and I was far too young to concede such a point. So we sat for a half hour in a harmonious arrangement where I told him about myself and he just listened.
My younger childhood was spent being hauled from one appointment with a walrus (or a crocodile, a polar bear, a gorilla, a sheep) to another in daunting, crypt-like museums and sprawling stately homes. Someone should have warned my parents that such educational generosity was bound to have an affect on the psyche.
Mine finally snapped one day in Noah’s Ark. Two by two of every animal you could ever imagine had been, decapitated, hollowed out, packed with sawdust and mounted on a wall in a colossal homage to the Victorian love of trophy hunting. Giraffes’ necks stretched long and taut with all the litheness of a plank of wood. Great majestic cats, leopards and lions and tigers, snarled sinister sharp-toothed smiles with eyes that lacked all the necessary animal instinct. Antlers protruded in irregular angles from stags, wilder beast, a giant moose, plus the giant spiral horns of the gazelle and springbok. Birds paused mid-flight with wingspans spread in full beat.
But the worst things were always the eyes, eyes everywhere; anatomically correct in the finest minutiae. Those glassy, vacant eyeballs that gaze, into the distance wetly, fearfully, silently imploring you for freedom from their eternal corporeal shell. I would rather think of them fetid and rotting down, full of organs and death, going back into the earth, rather than being reformed in a kind of man-made semi-nature. Some dignified man’s prize reminder of the natural order of things. The ultimate insult is, surely, to not let a thing die a death but to make it live on in oblivious humiliation on your wall, in a place it would never have experienced in its natural life.
This mortal, albeit animal, crisis impacted on my being so much that it all but refused to cooperate with the situation. My body collapsed first. My head curled into my chest and my legs curved up to meet them at the point where my breath stopped flowing and my heart blood congealed in a gooey panic. Then my eyes screwed shut in some kind of ineffectual act of sympathy for all the fake ones that surrounded me. If they could not, I could not see, and I simply would not open my eyes until someone picked me up and dragged my lifeless body away from my waking nightmare and into the light.
In the light I am safe from my fear. These grim beings do not live in the bright or the outdoors. They live in glass cabinets in dimly lit rooms and occasionally on the walls of galleries and bars, waiting to surprise and embarrass me in company with my phobia that has no name and apparently no other sufferer than myself (believe me I have looked).
I search for a name so I don’t feel so... odd. If there were an official register of phobias then I would lobby them for a classification. I would ask them to tell me that I’m ok. But until then I make up my own. Taxis comes from the Greek for "arrangement", Derma from the Latin for "skin". This would mean that I am afraid of arranged skin, which lacks the necessary meaning because I am afraid of death, and fur, and animals and reanimation and size and scale. I am afraid of man’s need to claim what is dead and own its form. I’m afraid of this egotism and its giant hairy manifestations that assume to be something they are not.
In the pub where I sit, there is a small head on the wall, a fox or a small sharp-eared dog. Moths have bitten away its form so much it’s hard to tell. The fur is chafed away almost to skin and stuffing, like a teddy bear worn down to the weft. Loved to death, is the phrase that springs to mind, though more likely shot to death and kept as a bit of fuzzy memorabilia. Or perhaps he died of natural causes and someone thought enough of him in life that they wanted to preserve him in death. Like I say, it’s hard to tell.
I surprise myself because I can look at him; he is the only one I can face off. Though he is wearing a large pair of sunglasses over whatever little beady glass eyes may be fitted into that space where his eyes would once have been, so I am cheating myself.
I feel like I am being strong, overcoming my fear. But I know that if he were to take off the dark spectacles then I would once again stare into the same hollow, viscous blackness that steals my breath and strangles my arteries and makes me ask myself the terrible question, what must they do with all those eyes?
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