I’ve found myself ignoring the papers for the last couple of weeks, initially because I found the lurid coverage of Michael Jackson’s death distasteful, and then because I started to realise that I find most newspaper journalism distasteful. In Dublin a couple of months ago I picked up a copy of the Irish version of the Daily Mirror, which was almost identical to the UK edition except that the celebrity gossip pages on the inside were all about people I’d never heard of. But reading them, I noticed that the stories about Brian O’Driscoll and Amy Huberman have a very different slant from the ones we get over here about Jordan and Peter Andre. The Irish celebrities were granted respect and admiration – not quite in the cloying tones of Hello magazine, but with an underlying assumption that they were decent people who deserved their success. It was sweet and refreshing and I enjoyed it.
Contrast that with the snide attitude of the UK tabs, whose bile and bitterness is barely concealed whenever they have the opportunity to publish a story (or, more usually, a non-story) about one of our home grown celebs. Beware the pop star or soap actor who flashes some thigh as she steps out of a car, or goes to a party and – the horror – gets a bit drunk; for she (and it will almost always be she) will face the chastisement of our morally spotless guardians of the press the next day. It sunk to an especial low this week with a camera thrust down the modest cleavage of 19-year-old Hermione Granger Emma Watson as she battled with inclement weather at the Harry Potter premiere in Leicester Square. Really, is that the best we can do? It makes me wish there were a heaven so that the photographer who took that shot could line up with the 3am girls, the showbiz editors and every columnist ever and be asked to account for their actions at the ends of their lives.
St Peter: And what did you do?
Columnist: Well, I…sneered. And called people bad mothers, and drew attention to their weight gains.
St. Peter: Hmm. Anything else?
Columnist: I, I…well, I used my column to transfer small gripes and personal feuds onto the national stage.
<thunder, lightning bolt, columnist is never seen again>
But we all know that the gutter press is hateful. What I find more objectionable is the scarcely-concealed attempts of the “quality” papers to bump up their readership by focusing almost exclusively on sport and scandal. The MPs’ expenses row went on for six weeks longer than was necessary or interesting, and now the Guardian looks to be attempting to emulate the Telegraph’s success by creating a jumped-up nonstory over the News of the World’s attempts to bug the mobile phones of, well, just about anyone who sprung to mind. Now, I bow to no-one in my distaste for the way the NOTW conducts almost all of its affairs and I agree that it’s very much Not OK to bug people’s phones without their knowledge and for no demonstrable reason except to gather dirt. But of all the things which happened in the world this week, is that really the one we need to know about the most?
Of course, everybody gets their news on the internet now, so newspapers have had to start shouting and campaigning and resorting to whatever tricks they can concoct in order to shift copies. But I feel the loss of a time when the newspapers told me the news, and did it without feeling the need to pronounce on the character and motivations of everybody they report upon.
Plus, you know, journalists are the worst people in the world, so it’s hard to read their hectoring with any level of seriousness.
A publisher of tour guides has written to me to ask whether they can use one of my Paris photos in the next edition of their guide. I said yes, of course, but I do hope they straighten it up a little before they publish it:
Apologies for the long silence. I have been getting to grips with my new job; which doesn’t give me much time for thinking, let alone writing. I’ve got a nerdy-obsessive Michael Jackson post fermenting, but in the meantime here are a couple of my highlights of the last few weeks, presented in the style of a tabloid newspaper.
SPOOK
Last night I went to a Ghostbusters-themed comedy night, to celebrate 25 years since the original film’s release. I know what you’re thinking – and, well OK, you’re right; but it was still lots of fun. The highlight was a passionate, witty and informative set from Paul Gannon, who is a bigger fan than I have ever been, and from whom I learned the following new facts:
The follow-up cartoon was called “The Real Ghostbusters” because a company called Filmation (makers of Masters of the Universe, among other things) had sometime in the 1970s produced eight episodes of a truly awful live action TV show with the name “Ghostbusters”. When the film was being made they threatened to sue, but they agreed in the end to allow the film-makers to use the name so long as they (Filmation) retained the rights to use the title for any future animated series. So when the film was turned into a cartoon, they had to give it a new name.
The scenes between Pete Venkman and Dana Barrett in Dana’s apartment were all improvised by Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver.
There is Ghostbusters porn. It isn’t very sexy, but it’s fabulously funny (he had a selection of clips for our viewing pleasure).
DUKE (grant me literal poetic license on that one, please)
We went to see Bobby McFerrin at the Royal Festival Hall as part of Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown. I am devoutly atheist, but the closest I’ve come to believing in something higher than humankind is when I watch him perform. It’s just insanely brilliant:
PUKE
I have seen Jeremy Clarkson twice in the last fortnight.
I have always liked shopping at Marks and Spencer because it is such a sensible shop, and when I am pretending to be a grown-up I like to imagine I’m sensible. It’s also where my rich auntie used to buy her food, so from a young age I thought of it as the place to go for luxury foodstuffs, even though what it offers foodwise is really limited to things you put in an oven and warm up, rather than than things you can use to cook with.
But after some thought, I’ve decided that after Stuart Rose’s rant in the Observer last week, I will be buying my tights elsewhere. It can be very hard work trying to be taken seriously in the workplace when the obvious sexism is unspoken – especially if you work, as I do, in a male-dominated sector – but it’s really very disspiriting when someone as prominent as he is can, apparently unchallenged, say something like this:
Girls today have never had it so good, right?…Apart from the fact that you’ve got more equality than you ever can deal with, the fact of the matter is that you’ve got real democracy and there are really no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time. Women can get to the top of any single job that they want to in the UK. You’ve got a woman fighter pilot who went in to join the Red Arrows yesterday. I mean, what else do you want to do, for God’s sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven’t got?
Yes, what on earth are we complaining about, now that we’re allowed to be miners? The piece goes on to suggest that he might have been attempting to wind up his (female) interviewer, but it’s such a vastly stupid thing to say that I don’t much care what his motivation was. Your tights aren’t that good, mister, and your cheese selection is crap, and whilst there are probably a hundred reasons to boycott any high street store if you look closely enough, this one was so eminently avoidable; so completely unnecessary, that I shall be taking my fluffy little head elsewhere in future.
I would like to propose a moratorium on the use of emotive language in news reporting. I expect it from the tabs, but I don’t need proper news providers talking to me about “the tragic death of Baby P” or “a catastrophic drop in numbers of cuckoos”. Tell me the facts, and let me decide how tragic or catastrophic they are. Tell me about the preventable death of a child, or an unforeseen drop in numbers of cuckoos, and let me choose where to place them on my own scale of tragedy. Give me the information, and allow me to make the value judgement.
I decided yesterday that a meal in a properly swanky restaurant is worth at least a weekend away, for the amount of pleasure it brings. This was on the back of lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Claridges restaurant, which might have been the best meal I’ve ever had. We had the set lunch, but it was so good I’m tempted to go back and try everything else, and if I could afford it that’s exactly what I’d do. As it is, I’ll just share the menu with you so you can enjoy it vicariously.
Since it was a special occasion our waiter gave us a whistlestop tour of the kitchen, which was much calmer and quieter than you’d expect. I thought kitchens of posh restaurants were supposed to be a louder and hotter version of actual hell, but this was more like a very orderly production line. Which, I suppose, is what it is.
(Do you like my new design, by the way? It’s not my own; it’s one of WordPress’s standard designs, but I like the layout and the header image, which makes me think of Ireland, where I will be next week. A fantastic meal may be a good substitute for a holiday, but there’s no harm in having one of each.)
Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
What I really meant was
Not including London, Paris does human-scale street life…etc etc.
London is bigger, so there are more places where it doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s as good as anywhere else’s. I was reminded of this yesterday coming through Brixton Market, which is still the most interesting place I know in London.
As astute eyes like yours will have noticed, they are all the same. I bought the black ones first, and they were SO comfortable and SO pretty that I found myself thinking about the other colours and wondering whether they’d be a good investment. And after a couple of days I remembered something that an ex-boss at the Guardian once told me when I couldn’t decide whether to buy a lambswool Elvis Presley scarf for £45, which was that the amount of emotional energy I was expending worrying about whether to buy it would soon outweigh the financial cost of just doing it. So I did.
…was still lovely, of course. We caught the sun on the first day and I realised I hadn’t been there in good weather since 1998. It makes walking with no particular purpose in mind much more appealing.
In my second, or maybe third, year at university, I wrote an essay about Haussman’s Paris, and the period between 1853 and 1870 when he, along with Napoleon III, was responsible for what amounted to a wholescale razing and rebuilding of large swathes of the city. Huge numbers of slum-dwellers were effectively banished; their homes replaced by shiny new apartment buildings which only the rich could afford to live in. This is still the main reason why Paris’s inner city, in the sense in which we use the term, is largely outside the city.
Anyway, one of the things Haussman succeeded in putting in place was a set of rules governing future development in the city, which meant that subsequent building projects have had to abide by the aesthetic rules devised during his period as Prefect of the Seine. As a result, one of the most immediately Parisian of images is the wide, tree-lined boulevard edged with elegant buildings of greyish-white stone, never more than five stories high. This is the Paris that Haussman defined, and it’s still there much as he envisaged it.
And yet, there’s more variation in Paris than you might think, and it’s the sudden differences as much as the general sameness which make it a beautiful city. Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, but the unexpected sights which lurk around every other corner: a flea market; a gloomy courtyard, usually occupied by a grumpy-looking cat; a carousel; a sudden sharp hill leading up, or down, to a new vista. Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
And it has La Grande Arche de la Défense, which is really big and has a hole in it:
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