beep and indeed beep

Etiquette In this week's Goop, Gwyneth interview some fashion guy, Derek Blasberg, on the subject of electronica and "high end" socialising. It's probably useful read and fairly entertaining partly because he answers without a hint of irony in soundbites like...

"To Tweet or not to Tweet, that is the question in these modern times."

I mean really ...

"My rule of thumb is to take a cue from the host: If they're the sort of person who is into social media and has already Tweeted about the fete, go for it. But if the host is the sort of person who abstains from Twitter and Facebook, keep your cameraphone pictures to yourself."

Mostly common sense stuff then. But there honestly isn't anything worse than going out for a drink with someone, just the two of you, on purpose, and they spend the whole night conducting conversations by text with other friends, especially if you're not doing same and you're being interrupted every three words (beep and indeed beep), especially when it's one of those moments when you really need to talk.

"holding a glass of cucumber water"

Food Indulge me. The New Yorker have covered the press launch for Gwyneth's recipe book. At her house. The Guardian's Hadley Freeman couldn't have written a much better parody:

"Mario Batali, in pink cargo shorts, was talking to Ruth Reichl. “She eats like a truck driver,” he said of Paltrow. He recalled being in Valencia, Spain, and “watching her eat an entire pan of paella as big as a manhole cover.”
Michael Stipe added, “Once, a duck she was cooking caught fire, and she threw it in the pool.”
Paltrow greeted people by the door, holding a glass of cucumber water. Her mother, Blythe Danner, arrived.
“Hi, Mommy,” Paltrow said.
Danner unfurled a white monogrammed cloth: “I brought you something. Daddy’s napkin.”
“Oh, boy,” Batali said. “The tears are gonna fly now, baby.”

As David Hepworth said on Twitter, "This evening at Gwynie's story is the best portrait of the power elite since Tom Wolfe wrote "radical chic" in 1970."

Is this the same book?

Food Gwyneth has a new cookbook out soon. I know you're all probably rather bored with the whole thing, but:

In the US, the book is called My Father's Daughter and this nice audio interview at npr emphasises the autobiographical element of the enterprise, as she talks, for example, about how her reputation for having a macro-biotic diet, one of Alexis Petridis's comic props, came from an attempt to try and help cure her father's cancer through osmosis.

Now the UK edition, which is called Notes From My Kitchen Table.  Is this the same book?  A glance at the Amazon page suggests that sections have been rewritten and references to her father are nowhere to be seen.  But the cover art has been used to illustrate that npr thing.  They could be the same book.  I've asked Metafilter.

Clearly there's an element of marketing in all books, but I'd be interested to know from food bloggers and people in the industry if there really is that much difference between us and US, if we prefer our cookbooks with a cleaner approach which focuses on the recipes rather than human interest stories.

Which one should I buy?  No, really.

the things which interest her

Blog! I know it's unfashionable, but I still really like Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle newsletter which is considered by many, including the commenters under The Guardian article where this first appeared, to be a bit of a folly. Perhaps I'm easily pleased but I've even attempted a few of the recipes.

Part of the problem is the format. Paltrow is effectively blogging. She's writing about the things which interest her in the hopes that we'll be interested too the only difference is she writes about aspects of her life which granted isn't our life and her social circle which granted is other celebrities.

On that level it does that thing which personal blogging is very good at -- offering an insight into lives which aren't ours. I don't properly know anyone who lives in New York, but I wouldn't accuse them of being out of touch if they suggested some excellent restaurants in the area or nanny agencies.

I also like that, as often happens with bloggers who have the odd anonymous bully in their comments (and hello to the anonymous bully who seeds my comments who the rest of you don't see thanks to moderation) or again her version of it, after a slight existential crisis, she's decided to keep going.

Well done you.  Me too.

never go out of fashion

People Gwyneth Paltrow's website Goop was greeted with snorts of derision on launch but it's rapidly turned into one of my favourite reads. She's not really doing anything too much different to some bloggers -- especially Lifehacker -- writing about things which interest her and offering some tips along the way. She's just got a larger budget to play with and her friends happen to be in showbiz. So when she asks some people to offer some film suggestions they happen to be Steven Spielberg or Wes Anderson.

This week's post/newsletter is about rediscovering what's still fashionable in your wardrobe and actually includes shots of her wearing what are supposed to be her own old clothes which she's then selling off on ebay for charity. I know I'm not likely to wear nautical stripes any time soon it's a reminder that someone else dictates what fashion is and it's not always necessary to do what that someone else dictates. Plus, t-shirt and jeans never go out of fashion, so I'm OK.

"I'm still trying to figure out what the right line is between myself and the people I play." -- Maggie Gyllenhaal

Film Maggie Gyllenhaal is the new Gwyneth Paltrow in that there is a law, or at least should be, that we should all watch every movie she's in. Even the turkeys. More often than not the best thing about the thing. So that you can keep your quota and not fall foul of the film police here's another one, created as part of an online protest connected with the writers strike. It's called Speechless and has some lovely noirish lighting.

Forgotten Films

View From The Top (2003)

The original idea for February's film fest was going to be 'Great scenes in bad films' which sort of speaks for itself. The main reason I didn't go forward with what is probably fertile ground is that it would have meant rewatching lots of really bad films in order to review those great scenes which doesn't sound like an entertaining way of spending any month. But I thought, just for fun I would let one slip through.

View From The Top is a dreadful film. It's the meandering story of Donna, a small town girl who dreams of becoming an international flight attendant and the trials she has to go through to reach her goal. It's Showgirls with trolly dollies, with unfocused design and inconsistent costume work and the repeated deployment of too long unfunny scenes of Mike Myers forgetting how to do comedy as an instructor. Star Gwyneth Paltrow spends most of her time looking dazed and miscast, as though she's trying to work out how the script she probably signed on for ended up turning into crap by the time it reached the set. I mean look at the hair in that picture...

Yet, somehow at about minute seventy-five, once Donna has joined a major airline the film suddenly changes into something quite good. In fact those final ten minutes look like they were directed by someone else, as the tone calms down, Paltrow starts acting like a human being and the story seems to find a direction that its been lacking for the past hour and a quarter. At the epicentre of the transformation is the expected scene that demonstrates Donna's new jet set lifestyle.

Earlier in the film that could have meant a rather simple, cliched montage of the flight attendant grinning through a number of fabulous places. But instead director Bruno Barreto (if indeed it is he) opts to place us within a single hotel room that represents a range of destinations, the fixtures and fittings changing as the camera pans through 360 degrees to reflect the various locales. Meanwhile, Paltrow steps in and out of frame revealing dozens of costume changes as her new restless existence comes to the fore. If only the rest of the film had been this impressive and so carefully thought through.

It's just about possible to blame the rest of the films fumbles on its troubled history. As the Internet Movie Database describes, although it was completed in 2001 ready for a Christmas release, 9/11 caused it to be put back because the studio thought that a satire on flight attendants might not be such a great idea. The film sat around for a year, then after another series of edits, including the loss of Myers routine about dealing with terrorists it was finally spat out in the US in the Summer of 2003 when it was roundly ignored by everyone and then took even longer to find its way direct to dvd in the UK and it's still available.

But seriously, I wouldn't recommend it. Except for that one scene.

tentatively

Film Gwyneth Paltrow divides her films into two categories: those she does for love and those she does for money, or "shite" as she calls them, tentatively road-testing the British vernacular. Into the former category goes Sylvia, which, she says, "because it's a movie about a poet who killed herself, [didn't] have a big audience", and The Royal Tenenbaums. Into the latter goes Shallow Hal, the Farrelly brothers film, and "this terrible movie called View From the Top that Harvey Weinstein talked me into doing". -- Emma Brockes interview.

I could read interviews with Gwyneth all day. View From The Top is a terrible film. Uneven editing, unfunny setpieces with people like Mike Myers, horrible script. But wierdly the last eight minutes are really good. There is a montage sequence in which we see Paltow's air hostess character moving in and out of her apartment over a series of days and weeks all in one 360 spinning tracking shot and from nowhere the script becomes vaguely literate. It's odd. I'm not sure whether that's the actress talking about Shallow Hal or Brockes' spin. She's been pretty positive about that film since its release so I'm hoping its the latter. It's a sweet film.

The Rub

Life This is something I've been meaning to write for some weeks but a new post from Robyn has sort of given me a reason to get around to it. Aaah. Hmmm. Well. There are certain subjects I don't cover on the weblog which aren't in the The Rules but which for some reason I just never mention. I've never been sure why. Some of it is to do with the readership, which I think generally tips towards the feminine, but otherwise because I'm not sure if it's the done thing. I think the writing here has a tone and I don't want to lower that tone. But since I want to respond to Robyn I feel the need to go there, so here we are. The taboos for no reason list:

(1) Swearing. I always think long and hard about bad language on here. I only ever include the 'f' word if its entirely necessary, as in part of a quote or emphasise a point for a certain effect. Otherwise its gratuitous and I hope I'm cleverer than that.

(2) The Weather. Even when I'm at my most desperate for subject matter I don't talk about clouds. For one thing I also have an international readership so if I talk about how cold it is outside, someone in Melbourne (for example) is looking out at the sun. I have talked about the rain if it leads onto something else, or I'm again making a point. But what's the point in small talking?

(3) Kvetch. I don't make it a habit to bitch and moan about things. We all the know the world doesn't work to some degree but letting off steam online in something like this isn't going to help anyone. Again unless its about something usually my own inadequacies (see a few paragraphs down from here). And finally ...

(4) Girls. For some reason this never happens here. Well not never. There was a something a few weeks ago about Nicole Kidman on movie posters but apart from that I don't tend to write about this or that girl or whatever. And here the rub. It doesn't appear to be something other webloggers in what you could call my sub-genre have an issue with. Most of my regular reads mention the opposite sex on a regular basis, sometimes with clean pictures. And you know what it is?

(a) Blackeyes Dennis Potter's tv series Blackeyes. From many years ago. I was very young when I saw it (not my parents fault) and I have only a few memories, but most of them seemed to be of the man saying some not very nice things about women.

(b) I'm 19 years old and at my Student Hall formal. For various reasons its not been a very good night (I'll write the whole story some time) and I'm hiding in a toilet cubicle pretending just so that I can get away from an increasingly bad situation. As I sit there looking at the deep blue door I hear two people come in and use the urinal. One is talking about his girlfriend, the other someone he's been chatting up. At no stage during their conversation do they mention the girl's names. Instead we have 'the woman', 'blonde #1', 'blonde #2', 'her' and some bits and pieces which I won't bore you with.

I just don't want to find myself being in the position of fulfilling my promise as a hormonal testosterone fuelled alpha-male hell bent on the objectification of women, at least not on the weblog. I have an idea of myself and how I want to project that idea and I want that to be fairly/very feminist. So I feel like if I decide to write about some girl I saw working somewhere or met somewhere else and through into the mix all the reasons I like her that it would be wrong in someway -- a step too far. Which is silly. Really. I have those feelings. I communicate those feelings to friends in the real space so why not share them with my friends in cyberspace?

So the line is drawn here. I'm relaxing, taking a few breaths and breaking a few taboos. Not about the swearing or the weather. But. I kvetched a lot last night about the horrible signage in Cardiff and it felt great to get that off my chest. Next step. I'm going to do three things.

(1) Here is number 42 in my 100 things about me ...

"someone with a personality. not a sheep, someone who speaks her mind. unpredictable but rational. willing to go out on a limb, be spontaneous, but responsible. someone interested in the world, who like me wants to discover the possibilites and how everything works. someone funny without being purile, spritual without banging on about religion all the time. who doesn't mind making an idiot of themselves if the outcome is pure."

I've always let that hang there. I wrote it during a webchat with someone and as it scrolled up the page I was amazed at how I'd captured things. And also how it doesn't mention appearance.

(2) I've been in love many times. Some have got married, some I don't know what happened to them, some are other stories for other times. My Julie Delpy, the girl I fell in love with on a train was called Andrea (I think). Much like Jessie in Before Sunset I've written about her on this weblog. That post is here. Unlike Jessie I didn't talk about how I really felt. This was one of the few occasion were in the about fifty minutes of the train journey I met someone who I could utterly communicate with and simply wanted to know for the rest of my life. She talked about the problems she was having in her own family with her own relatives and as you can see it made me think about my own situation (the post is fairly self-contained anyway). It all got pretty intense to be honest and whether it was because I was there being some random who she could confide or something else I'll never know. But I can still see her in the back of my mind now, the English Rose with the long dark blonde hair, home knitted cardigan and water bottle. I wanted to write all that back then but something stopped me, so here it is now. There have been other occasions when I've wanted to embelish, but I've picked that example fairly randomly. To finish the story, I actually bumped into her again in Manchester the following Christmas outside the town hall. I found out she hadn't ended up moving to Liverpool at all but somewhere else away from everything. But we swapped telephone numbers. And I rang her but it felt wrong. It didn't fit anymore. As someone said on a tv drama this week, the timing was wrong.

(3) And back to this. Who my Movie Girlfriends are/were ...

- Laura Fraser
- Gwyneth Paltrow
- Minnie Driver
- Parminder Nagra
- Alyson Hannigan
- Kate Winslet
- Elizabeth Shue (in Adventures In Babysitting)
- Franke Potente
- Julie Christie
- Kate Nelligan (in BBC Shakespeare's Measure for Measure)

[Plus there are the givens, Julia Roberts, Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan. But surely everyone'd pick those?]

See that wasn't too difficult. And now relax. Please feel free to link with the phrase 'Stuart comes to terms with his sexuality (thank goodness)'