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October 11th, 2014

11/10/2014

1 Comment

 
 
  
    Went in to kiss my son goodnight. 'Take a look at the picture, Mum.' 
    This is Frankenwhore, apparently. Some quick decisions to make; it's late. Obviously he has copied this from the Internet and it throws up at least a dozen issues, all of which need careful thought in terms of presentation since my son, Flint, is autistic and has a low level of comprehension.
     'Well, it's a really good picture but that's not a very nice name.' 
    He still looks pleased with himself. 'I like her hips.'
    'Uhuh, but it's a bit horrible, asking people to have sex like that?' Alright, alright, I said it was late. 
   'Ok, Mum.' 
    'You know one day when you will have sex with your girlfriend, you'll be in love.' Oh jeez, it’s not that late! What the hell am I saying? 'And when your parents have sex, they love each other, just each other. I don't ask lots of people to have sex with me, do I?' I now ask myself the same question that he asked his science teacher recently: Have you lost your mind?
   Flint still seems very happy with the world and I leave him. On my way to our room, I remember that he caught us - this has never happened before, that he caught us, I mean - last month on holiday and I wonder... He'd stood in the doorway, arms folded and said 'Are you two having sex?' Quite a lot of surprise, and interest, in his voice.
   I actually pulled the covers over my head and said, 'Yes?' Then unrhetorically, 'Is that ok?' I looked out from the sheets at his lopsided grin. He said, 'Yeah', and wandered away. Later in the day, I told him casually that sex is private and this is not the sort of thing you tell everyone about. Not, for example, at school. 
   Generally, Flint, who is 15, doesn't like to talk about sex. He says he would like to do that one day but not yet. He might make an exception for Britney Spears though I think he genuinely thinks more about just kissing her. Flint told me last year that he wouldn't be able to make love to girls when he is older because they would slap his face.
   So there's some kind of monster here and I hope I didn't do much by way of its creation.


 

(Frankenwhore also makes an appearance in ‘Piano from a 4th Storey Window’ but I must stress that this is not an autobiography, almost wholly not.)


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Ladies and Gentlemen

20/8/2014

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The incomparable, Isabella Rossellini.
    YOU PROMISED ME!

    What she's saying (and she watches me all day, never blinks) is:

    'A thousand words, Jenny! A DAY! That's what you said. And how many have you done this week?'

    'Um, four hundred.'
 
    'Four hundred, Sir ! And what day is it?'
 
    'It's Wednesday, Sir.' 

     If Isabella could, at this point, she'd be shaking her head. 'You've let me down. You've let yourself down but most of all, you've let the Ladies and Gentlemen down.'

    (The Ladies and Gentlemen are an imaginary audience who live in our house. They have done, in various locations for over 25 years. They vary in number from season to season, but generally, we have around twenty to fifty Ladies and Gentlemen. They don't just react with applause. They boo sometimes and gasp. They're a pretty good barometer of our behaviour. On the whole, they're fair, they're good to have around. And they have a cameo in my new novel, 'Piano from a 4th Storey Window '!)
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Last Night of the Proms

21/7/2014

3 Comments

 
A Good Old Feminist Rant
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Marin Alsop
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Vasily Petrenko
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Xian Zhang
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Jocye DiDonato
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Nicola Benedetti
   So here we go again: The Proms. Last Night of the Proms, last year - I didn't see it. My partner loathes that kind of thing and I'd done plenty of scurrying away to watch over the weeks, so I was happy to forego the final event, since that particular gig wasn't really my bag. Checked out the reviews online  though. Lordy! It's really true then, about Telegraph readers. It seems the (woman) conductor's speech was a 'feminist rant'. I tuned into the clip immediately because I love a feminist rant. But I found the rant difficult to detect. Had the clip been edited? The Telegraphers want women to stop speaking out because this is uncomfortable PC marxism and only serves to annoy. And more than that, if you women keep on, then good folk - tabloid and broadsheet readers alike - will suspect you're a lesbian! Only in she-conductor, Marin Alsop's case, she is a living, not suspected, but genuine, lesbian. Perhaps then she is less scared by the accusation. Perhaps not. One blogger thought the mezzo soprano, Jocye Didonato (a balloon size 10), should lose weight. Alsop fared rather worse: 'ugly', 'crass', 'insane marionette' and devastatingly, 'from the United States'.

   The conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philarmonic, Vasily Petrenko, believes that conducting is for men, that: 'a cute girl on the podium means that the musicians think of other things'. I think he means the male musicians. I think. There's sparrows of confusion circling my head now. Haven't we heard this burqa-style argument before? But wait a minute, what if the woman (I really can't apologise enough but I have to make the gender qualification for the sentence to work) conductor is over 50? And a lesbian? Are the guys out of the lust woods? What will the poor sex-crazed string section think of that? Could this deviance have them ripping at their tails? And was Comrade Petrenko - oh God and he was so lovely in that other interview - not concerned with how the straight women members (putting 'women' in front of members is ok here, I think) in the orchestra react to beautiful him? Hmm, HMM? If only the men had kept it simple for us in classical music: males everywhere, like they have in Germany and Austria. Male conductors, male orchestras. Bob ist deine Onkel and Fanny is, well let's leave that. Unless of course Bob is gay...

Oh yeah, I put Xian up there because she was the other woman conductor at the Proms last year. And that's the bloody last time I'm writing woman in front of conductor, ok. She is not so vilified, I hazard because: she's not American (though she lives in New York City), she didn't conduct on the last night and, she's married to a man (I know, I know, every bit as dykey as Marin, that's what I thought).

Oh yeah yeah, Nicola. I put her in because she is the often strapless beauty with universal approval. I'm suddenly too depressed to list why. Also, she's from Glasgow and it's good to see someone up there now and again whom no-one is going to twin with deep fried Mars Bars.

And breathe...
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