sooo hot, gah. for someone who hates winter, i'm not really great in the summer either. so it was quite a pleasure to spend the afternoon in an air-conditioned cinema watching a film. i confess i was a little nervous, the film is secretary, which well has rather been touted as a p-rn- flick, with you know, s&m and so on.
pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (i'm not really sure why i just said that, it's a wizard of oz thing). it's actually a rather sweet romance, sure the romance happens to be between a recovering self-harmer and her (trying to be) dominant boss, but that doesn't stop the film giving you a serious warm fuzzy at the end.
oh sure there's a bit of spanking and some pretty shots of self harm, but actually i couldn't really see why it was an 18.... although the bbfc says it's because it contains "strong sexual theme, sex and language". which it kind of does, and you do see her naked at the end... oh ok, fine.
quite importantly though, it's also one of the best portrayals of self-harm i've ever seen, as a reaction to the things that are going on around you: the subtle tensions of everyday life with mum and dad. hmmm.
it's based on a short story, which has the protagonist (she's called lee in the film and debby in the story), give the job up the romance ends abruptly. i suppose that's hollywood changing the ending again, but in this case i think they were justified.
for the record i'm fairly sure i'm not responsible for the fact that the top and the side of this now cover the main blog, they seem to have been moved down 100px, and i'm not really sure how or why. add to this the fact that for some reason i can't reach my template and you have a bit of a problem. i'll fix it as soon as i possibly can, but until then you have my apologies.
edited 29/5/03 - seems to be all fixed now, i still have no idea what happened there, i can only assume it was something to do with blogger moving things around before the exciting changeover to dano.
yeah, yeah, it's unusual for me to leave it so long without blogging, i know.... i've been really quite busy though. mostly with fixing myself up with clothes for gradball. thus far i have a dress from monsoon in manchester, and a pair of shoes from office in london (as we walked into office manchester they were being unspeakably rude about londoners: "they're all so rude and unfriendly, it's so impersonal", yes but i've never been insulted by shopstaff like that in my city), add to that a necklace that mum and dad got me last year and mum's pashmina (oh god i've turned into a bluddy sloane....
speaking of which, on the bus back from oxford (mum bought her masters, we went to the graduation ceremony in the sheldonian, there was much comedy latin and bowing, all the graduands had to change academic dress halfway through, tom, dad and i were thoroughly amused), there were three absolutely priceless wannabe sloanes. two from some unknown boarding school in bath (aged 17), on their way to a boat party, and one from jags (aged 15), a rather indifferent independent girls' schoo, lwho had been visiting a friend in oxford . all three were attempting to pull a 24 year old spanish guy who had the misfortune to have sat next to them. i think the whole bus, while annoyed by their inanities, was also secretly extremely diverted, i know i was.
15 year old: i pulled a 25 year old last week, it was kind of disgusting really [bit of an own goal there love], i think it's alright if they're not old enough to be your dad.
15 year old: i was really depressed when i was 14, but now i'm fine.
17 year old 1 on 17 year old 2: oh god she was so drunk, and she's not really used to it, we were dancing at this ball and i turned around for a second and she was on the floor, i took her to the toilet and [... snip, this anecdote is actually far too unpleasant to tell in public, so i have no idea what she was doing telling a bus full of people, suffice to say it involves ball dresses and sick]
comedy value. oh, spare a thought for tom and dad, who had the bad luck to have been in cardiff watching qpr lose to, er, cardiff in the second division play off final, thanks to a last minute (virtually) cardiff goal. personally i blame the cat, who usually acts as a lucky charm, but may have been confused by the fact that it was cardiff playing in the blue and white not rangers.
i've been exhausted for the past couple of days, like stay-in-bed, can't-quite-make-it-to-the-village drained. i suppose it's the recent lack of sleep catching up with me or something, although i have a theory that i might have been bitten by a wasp or bee on thursday. so i've been spending my time doing cross stitch and reading books which i've taken out of the library. since handing my essays in on tuesday, i've read: vesta tilley, a biography of the cross-dressing music hall star; girls, visions and everything, which i thought was great; live girls: a novel, it was ok, but not fantastic; babyface, a crime novel starring the lesbian barrister frankie richmond; and now i'm half way through the assasination of marilyn monroe, which suggests that norma jeane was murdered by rfk.
i do read quickly i suppose, and quite widely (not that you'd be able to tell by that list, which is mostly female, young and, er, gay). mike and i watched the bbc's top 100 books, and i was rather pleased to see that i've read just over half of them. i'm fairly sure i voted for donna tartt's the secret history, which blew me away, when i read it last year, but i might have voted for the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay, by michael chabon, which is certainly the most amazing novel i have ever read - covering every theme imaginable: desire, gender, war, religion, comic books, circus freaks... you name it it's in there. i was pleased to see the secret history made it into the list, and rather disappointed in the taste of this country that kavalier and clay didn't make it. still as i'm not actually sure if even i voted for it, i can't really complain.
also, i was reminded by young chris f, on wednesday that i've made a complete u-turn, and i'm definitely going to the london college of printing, and not city at all. that's mostly because it's a masters degree, but also because it's offers a broader base in journalism. oh yes and my mum insisted on asking gillian reynolds, who writes for the telegraph, and judith vidal-hall, who edits index on censorship what they thought at their college gaudy, and they both said lcp was better.
everyone else is doing it
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Low |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Low |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Very Low |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Very Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very Low |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Extreme |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | High |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test
i didn't think i was *that* violent. lustful, fair enough, but i'm not really violent.... well there was the time i kicked stu in the face, and oh yeah, the time i attacked asm... oh, alright.
they're showing the film i'm in on saturday, alright it's not exactly, um la dolce vita, heck it's not even legally blonde. and fair enough, i'm just an extra, although apparently you can tell it's me. i wouldn't know, i've never seen it myself.
it was filmed in the summer of 99. i was going out with ali, and performing in fattybottypuss with tim (there were enormous amounts of animosity between the two of them, which was kind of funny really). tim's sister works for an extras agency, and they were looking for teenagers to be extras for a house party scene. it was on our day off, so we went down to buckinghamshire for the filming (which was in an identikit barratt house). we then spent the entire day kissing. no really. that was what we had to do, and they paid us £80 each for it.
of course i haven't seen the film, because it looked pretty terrible as they were filming it, so heaven only knows what it's like. but i shall probably watch it on saturday night, because at least this way it won't be cutting into my profit margin. if you're going to watch you should be able to pick me out, i was wearing a neon pink t-shirt and cream trousers. i was 17, i could just about get away with it.
oh and in case you were wondering, kathy burke was luverly. the less said about her co-star the better.
urgh dilemmatastic. with fantastic timing, lcp have offered me a place the day after i posted my money to city to confirm my place. and even better, their tuition fees are £2000 cheaper! i talked to the p's and neither of them seems bothered by the money, but it's a big difference.
so mum and i phoned up woman & home and the face respectively to ask their advice. the woman at, er, woman & home said that everyone she knew had gone to city, while the woman at the face said there wasn't much to choose between them, and i should try and get as much experience as i could, because that was the important thing. so city it is then.
it could have been timed better though: the middle of my open paper, all i want to do is worry about webster and sidney, not universities. and i feel bad because i really liked the woman who interviewed me at lcp, but i just don't think the course is right for me. £2000 cheaper or not. *sigh*
this post takes the form of a script for a tv programme that i sincerely hope is never made.
INT: A HOUSE, MORNING. SARAH is sitting on the sofa in a dressing gown. TARA comes down the stairs.
day 2 of the open paper. tara and sarah are up early. this week's task requires them and every other student in the english department (or so it seems) to write two essays on shakespeare and his contemporaries before tuesday, using only their brains and the books in the library to help them. who will they have to wrestle today to get hold of that elusive copy of love and death in renaissance tragedy?
TARA
it's weird sleeping in the middle of an exam, isn't it?
FADE TO BLACK
chris j has put our beloved president up for sale on ebay. hee.
also, stu has a a new website, which is mostly exciting because he used my scrabble set for the opening page.
i'm fairly sure lcp are going to offer me a place. the woman who interviewed me seemed fairly sure, and she kept saying that i'd have a difficult decision ahead of me. darn tootin'. (sorry i just wanted to say that). it's all down to whether i want to take the ma, which means writing a dissertation, and also whether i want to specialise in periodical journalism now, or wait until after i've finished. oh yes, and there's the fact that city is all food policy and insurance and risk management, whereas lcp is part of the london institute which includes central saint martin's, and camberwell and is therefore stuffed to brimming with cool arty people. gah, if only i could take both.
