| Thursday, September 16, 2004 |
 | Out with the lads last week, we conceived a new diet, inspired by the Maker's Diet but less mad. This diet allows you to eat whatever you want. Carbohydrate-rich foods, finger foods, sexy foods, foodly mcfood. However, after each meal, they then have to down a pint glass filled with a scientifically-balanced (about 1:1) blend of water and sea monkeys. Yes, these tiny monarchs of the deep, along with their fibre-rich crowns, thrones and bikinis, will set up a new home in the gut of the drinker, carefully rinsing fat and undesirable properties out of the belly, bile ducts and intestines, leaving all foods intrinsically macrobiotic and organic, with the added bonus of being virtually calorie-free.
Alas, the acid-ridden pits of your gastric caverns is not the friendliest of environments for a colony of brine shrimp, and these industrious little sea-primates will shortly die, dissolving into a calorie-neutral pinkish substance not unlike Olestra. This will be harvested and provide a brief but adequate source of sustenance for your next half-pint of sea monkeys.
The sea monkey diet. Because people are credulous.
Diets are, in general, problematic. I found myself around the table at work, explaining to an incredulous audience of my peers that, no, I had never made bolognese sauce. Why would I? Bolognese source is, in its pre-made state, somewhat more available than blackberries, and considerably less hassle to harvest. Their mouths got bigger and bigger as they quizzed me about all the foods I had never prepared. I didn't see the issue. I may not have cooked these things, but I've eaten them. What's the big? Apparently never having cooked anything apart from soup (open, pour, stir), noodles (pour, boil, open, pour, stir) and pasta (pour, boil, open, pour, stir) is somehow weird. What they fail to see is that this is a complex operation. Two of those involve boiling, the other involves avoiding boiling if at all possible, unless there is something good on TV or similar.
Do you see?
Anyway, I may one day learn to cook. But don't tell me that anyone who can read can cook, as my mother so often does. I can read, and right now the only way to get me to cook would be to leave me in a hot car with the windows shut.
Meanwhile, what's been going on inside and out? Saturday I have to admit that I forgot entirely that it was the anniversary of 9/11. Perhaps there was something in the way I was struck by incredible, gut-piercing sadness on Charlotte Street, but maybe that was just low blood sugar. Weird: I just didn't make the connection. So, instead I went shopping, returning with plunder and possibly pelf. Sat in Borders reading, took a call from , who couldn't be there with us that day, and home.
And then Potemkin. Man, that's a fantastic film, and the way it was tied in to the British tradition of protest, and the role of Trafalgar Square in those protests (the various Stop the War marches being ticked off with increasingly pissed-off clarity by the guy introducing the show) was very apposite. I don't know, though - do people need to be told these things to make it comprehensible? How much do the public know about Russia in 1905? Enough, surely. Oddly, the Odessa steps/baby interface I found a bit clunky (when you think something was done better in the Untouchables, you know you're in trouble), but the cinematography in general was just breathtaking - there are so many scenes where you just think "how the bollocks did that work". The dozens of small boats spilling out of Odessa harbour and taking sail is wonderful.
Interesting to see it in such a packed but open and public environment, also - the reverence of the cinema screening was removed - people could boo the officers, applaud the sailors... in fact, it reminded me a lot of a previous experience of the same series - Ladytron providing a live score for Tron at the ICA. When the triumphant electro chords rang out and Bruce Boxleitner absolutely killed some ass, the spontaneous whops of excitement rose up. Ah, top quality.
The score, in some ways reminded me of that also; although orchestral, the dominant force was Chris Lowe's keyboarding, with Tennant's voice wisely used only rarely. There are apparently plans to release an album. I'm not sure how it wil work on its own, but since its only immediate competition is the score for the Giorgio Moroder Metropolis, how bad can it be?
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