alnya

Hot on the heels of dictionary-gate, Nashville parents aren't to be outdone, complaining that Shakespeare'e Romeo and Juliet is too sexy.

"The sexuality was too much. Our children need to be more pure."

Tell me, is it worse than when we were children, or does the internet just make it seem that way?

Interesting news from california, where one school is looking to ban the dictionary for containing sexually explicit words that children might stumble across.

We went looking for them when I was at school.

I feel pretty crappy, tired, achey and a throat made of sandpaper. My brain feels like it's been squeezed into a too-small skull. This might explain the fucked up dreams I've been having.

Nik and I had a bit of a Glee fest earlier on in the week, catching the premier on E4 quite by accident, and then *cough* acquiring the rest of the first season and gorging ourselves on it like children at christmas - actually the analogy is pretty apt, as it is frequently so sickeningly sweet you do sort of crave some salt to balance it out. We're loving it though; very funny, and with quite a lot of sadness underneath.

The other obsession this week has been with Ulysses, after offering to work through it again, finding my old notes and then reading and re-reading the first three chapters and making new notes on them. Its been really great actually, and I'm finding stuff in there to look at that I havent seen before (but then, I was a knowitall 20 something. Now i'm a knownothing 30 something. God help me in my forties).

The combination of all these things led to a dream last night where Stephen Dedalus was putting on a production of My Fair Lady at the school where he taught. I distinctly recall my consciousness silently screaming at all this, whilst simultaneously rehearsing I Could Have Danced All Night.

When I was little I was a terrible burden on my parents with regard to food. I was very picky, to the point of existing on little else but chicken paste sandwiches (white bread, no crusts) and findus frozen lasagne. The guardian's article on childhood foods brought those repressed memories back to me. its worth a read.

It took me until adulthood to realise that firstly, food could touch and that was OK and secondly that my mum wasn't a fantastic cook. I'm not sure if i'd have been less picky if she'd have happily served up curries and stir frys like the other mums (as unlikely as 'foreign food' would be!), but it might have made me less foodie now. I realised i've gone through the other side when I was talking to nik about eating boiled pigs head and woodcock brain.

Anyway, any childhood foods you've not had for a while? We should get down to Asda and relive our youth!

Thanks to offensive_mango's prompting, and having talked about it a few dozen times over the years, I'm going to kick off a support group for reading James Joyce's Ulysses.

The plan is to tackle one chapter every fortnight (ish) from now until we're done, starting this Sunday. I'll post on the Sunday a narrative synopsis, some things to look out for, and some discussion points to be thinking about. I'll post again on the same chapter towards the end of the fortnight (to guilt you into reading it if you havent already) and as a place to leave comments about your thoughts on the chapter, what you liked or didn't like, and any photographs of potatoes that you want to share.

As we go on, hopefully other discussion topics will present themselves, as we discover new themes together and our own life stories influence where things go. Hopefully it wont get too academicy, but just a fun way of crossing off this infamous and wonderful book off your reading list.

I've created a group - http://community.livejournal.com/wanderingrocks so as not to clutter up my journal and just to be more friendly. If you fancy it, please join up and grab yourself a copy of the book.

Last night I was an invited guest on Leith FM to promote my chamber choir's concert tonight (St Johns, Edinburgh, tickets only £8).

Its run and staffed by volunteers through donations, and really focusses on the community, which is great. You also get adverts like "Hi, this is maureen from the drop-in cafe just to say we'll be closed tuesday" which is awesome.

I ended up just blethering for about half an hour about music, christmas and why drunken singing is great for you. Hopefully I plugged the gig enough times, and didn't talk too much rubbish. Mainly it was just gratifying to be able to talk about choral music with the passion I feel for it to an audience.

I think i might have promised to put together a four part arrangement of Fairytale of New York however.

It cant just be me that saw the headline Heather Mills Lined Up for Dancing On Ice on BBC news and thought, So, do they just push her after that and hope for the best?

The Top 40 has been irrelevant to me for some time now, certainly long enough that I couldn't tell you who presents it, or what has been number 1 at any given week this year. The last time I was aware of it's importance was last year, as part of the X Factor Hallelujah cover release, that then made everyone run out and buy the Leonard Cohen / Jeff Buckley version in protest.

Seems that Sony have decided to generate their own counter culture this year in a deliciously wicked move. The crux is this: if you don't like X Factor - buy Rage Against The Machine's seminal Killing in the name of - the track beloved of angry teens everywhere, and steeped in folklore as the track that got Bruno Brookes to inadvertantly broadcast the word "fuck" 15 times on national radio. The whole Rage Factor! campaign, so publicly denounced by Cowell, ticks all the right boxes, except for a few wee problems:
Firstly, RATM are on the Sony label too - so they get your money either way.
And secondly, it seems the registrar of the ragefactor website, Neill Ridley, is a former A&R man for BMG (could be coincidence of course).

Showing it to the man, there.

We've been watching Nigella on some cable TV channel, as she prepares for christmas like some wanton hussy, all cleavage and liqueur.
(A fun parlour game can be had by appending every enthusiastic description with much like myself, which never gets old, and has on occasion forced us to pause and recover our composure. Plumteous beauties indeed.)

Cooking as she does, sans apron, in her fire hazard of a kitchen (the sheer number of candles would take most of december to light; sod the expresso martinis) she does remind me of a little girl (shutup, not like that) cooking for mummy - everything is overspiced, over sweet, over enthusiastic. I suspect her actual christmas dinner would have me longing for something savory.

That being said, we have bought her book, and I'm looking forward to trying her Christmas (and chocolate, natch) cake.

Too cute for words - sorry!

freya_bean and I leave for New York today (via seeing wonderful friends in London) and we're ridiculously excited - I've not had a holiday for more years than I care to remember.
We've got tickets for the Met Opera, Wicked and (fingers crossed) the Daily Show - depending on if we win the lottery. Of course, the highlight will be meeting the proper Santa.
We're there for 7 days, so want to be tourists, and also want to chill out and be. So, in the spirit of that, and the knowledge that my LJ friends are a well travelled and cosmopolitan lot, what awesome must-see thing did you do when you were in New York? What good bars, restaurants, random cafés, book shops did you find?

In our continuing season of Peter Mandelson watching, it's nice to see he's going to get another job to add to his portfolio.

Minister of Information.

Doubleplus ungood.

Not content with drafting internet legislation that ignores expert findings and review on the back of a champaign label whilst on his holidays, its seems our favourite unelected minister is at it again.

Universities, he says, should focus more on practical training and links to industry. They should not exclude on the basis of academic achievement. They should, in short, be polytechnics.

There are problems in education; finance is the main one. And yes, university isn't for everyone (nor should it be) etc etc. However, lowering the barrier to entry and looking for corporate sponsorship ... yeah, that's never been tried before. Way to screw arts students Mandy, well done.

Brilliant!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present DEM Alan Grayson:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/22/794216/-Grayson-SCHOOLS-Paul-Broun-on-Constitution.-He-will-NOT-yield!-%28Update:-Now-with-even-more-EPIC-WIN

Fox News and their Republican Collaborators are the enemy of America. They're the enemy of anybody who cares about healthcare in this country. The enemy of anybody that cares about educating their children. The enemy of everybody who wants energy independence or anything good for this country. And certainly the enemy of peace. They are the enemy.

I think I might be in love

I'm still exhausted after an amazing weekend of good friends and great singing.
From Friday until Sunday I was at a residential course, working on vocal technique and other great stuff. It wasn't totally full on, but hit the goldilocks spot in the balance between working hard and having time to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

On Saturday night, there was a cabaret event, and so I ensnared some fellows into an arrangement of Kylie's Cant Get You Out Of My Head I hastily put together. It went down very well, and thankfully no one looked at the latin translation too much ;) My later performance of Inflatable You was maybe a slight misjudge of the audience's tolerance for playful smut, but it was being talked about the following day, which to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, can only be a good thing.

Yesterday was a hasty dive back to Edinburgh, a quick change and back into town for St Giles at 6 and coroedina's first public concert, and my conducting debut. St Giles is just a beautiful cathedral with a great and forgiving acoustic, so it was a great privilege to perform there. We had a great audience (around 200) who seemed to enjoy it a great deal, and we made a few contacts that will hopefully result in bookings for the future. I was just pleased that my parents and nik were there.

My stuff went quite well, although there were some hairy moments, its a testament to the quality of the singers that they pulled it back together. I got some good pointers and notes from people; definite things to improve on and think about such as not being clear enough in some cases, moving around too etc. Regardless, I had a blast and while I was probably more nervous than I have been about anything for a long time, it was absolutely worth it.

Excellent Franz Ferdinand vs the Beastie Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJwCJfbA3Mk

Richard Wiseman has posted an interesting article on luck, and "luck school" - tips and techniques to improve your luck (its a 2003 article, so you may have already seen it).

Do you consider yourself to be lucky or unlucky? I personally don't feel either: that luck is just the spin you put on events that happen to you. Of course, you have to be willing to have events happen to you, which is sort of the point of the article.

good luck

My first gig as a conductor is this weekend; the culmination of months of lessons, practising, preparation and looking like a prat in front of the bathroom mirror.

Yesterday's rehearsal went really well from my point of view - it helps that all the singers involved are wonderfully patient, dedicated and talented - and the sound is close to how I want it to be. I'm relaxing more, thinking about it less, and discovering that, actually, while preparation is vitally important (as is knowing each piece of music intimately) really it just comes down to waving your arms about and trying to express something musical as something physical.

Unfortunately for me, it's an embarrassing process. You really need to work with musicians to improve, which means they get to work with you when you're rubbish. I guess it's like losing your virginity with the olympic figure skating judges watching on the sidelines.

I am slightly bemused as to why Mr President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize since I don't believe he's done anything to bring about more peace in the world. He's talked about it a lot, which is good - I'd go so far as to say very good - but correct me if I'm wrong but the US is still involved in two wars, Guantanamo Bay is still operational and nuclear weapons are still pointed at an array of countries.

It seems as though he's getting it by virtue of not being George Bush. Or, as they put it, he has "created a new climate in international politics."