Pondering the future of Cameron Diaz...


It is a confronting reminder that you are growing older and time is swifly and irrevocably moving on when watching the trailer for the upcoming movie My Sister's Keeper and realising that Cameron Diaz is now playing the role of a matriarch, as oppossed to the perky, slightly naff singleton characters she has done for the past decade or so. This decision for Diaz to make the leap as an on-screen mother means she has crossed a fine line in her career. Never again can she play her trademark happy-go-lucky singleton charatcers. Rather, all her future parts will now be confined to the role as a mother, or if she plays a singleton she will have to do so with a tired, desperate my-biological-clock-is-ticking negataivity, a mini-genre that is already thoroughly covered on (and off) screen by Jennifer Aniston.

James Frey is Nicola's writer crush. Molly Young is mine, and she is much less thuggish and much more honest than Frey (unlike him, she did not commit what is perhaps the most mortal sin of our times: lying to Oprah Winfrey). Disciplined and industrious (as well as young and pretty, too pretty to be a writer; as it is my belief that writers should be cursed with a Stephen King-esque ugliness) she churns out a remarkable amount of work: chapbooks (mine arrived from New York last week, and needless to say it's amazing), articles for prolific on-line magazines, and my favourite, her daily blog. Her quirky, idiosynchratic vignettes, such as the one below, add an extra colourful dimension to my day, and I'm totally in love.



About the Author: Steve Martin is the kind of guy who loves to write things about himself on book flaps. In fact, he has been known to write entire books just so he could write on their flaps.


Molly blogs here, but just remember when she is a hugely famous novelist in about fifteen years that I liked her first!

I'm very suspicious about Lady GaGa. She dresses in an outlandish manner ("a more cartoonish Gwen Stefani"/ "a John Galliano fashion show on (even more) crack"), and conducts herself in interviews like a drivelling loon, yet her music is so accessible. How is it possible to simultaneously produce mainstream magic like "Pokerface" and act like you're on a day trip from the mental asylum? GaGa's muse Grace Jones was absolutely eccentric, but her music was equally as odd, and thus she was genuine. An image needs to supplement the music (and vice versa), not contradict it, otherwise the whole persona comes off as wildly unauthentic, as is the case with Lady GaGa.

Questions I frequently ask myself:
-Is Portia DeRossi a real lesbian?
-Will Jason Dundas ever stop wearing Wayfarers?

Jemma MacDonald's upcoming road trip across America: 50% Kerouac, 20% Christopher McCandless, 15% Hunter S. Thompson, 10% Joni Mitchell circa the Hejira album, 5% Thelma and Louise.

"Nights on the road were full of neon signs and round-the-clock diners and the melancholy exhiliration of being alone and rootless and going someplace, anyplace."

PLATONIC POWER COUPLES:

Happy Birthday Nicola. Love you.

The most important social events in our lives (the ones we look forward to most; save our best clothes for) slowly alter with each decade we grow older. Proof:

Childhood: Birthday parties (daytime)

Teens: Birthday parties (nighttime)

20s: Outings at various clubs/bars

30s: Dinners (generally dates with prospective partners, which will eventually whittle down to one partner, who will morph into spouse)

40s: Dinners (generally with spouse and other couples to discuss children's education, house renovations etc)

50s +: Church

Text message of the day:
"Sorry i cant tell you. itll be leaked faster than a nude rihanna pic"

For about the past nine months I've been following The Selby, a blog which delves into the apartments of well-to-do, almost famous creative types, and photographs the results. Despite the fuss about these "creatives" (musicians, publishers, writers, trust-fund-kids-cum-art-students, filmmakers) one can only but notice the sameness of each abode, to the point where they all become indistinguishable. Every apartment is drowned in organised, somewhat intentional, clutter, and is guaranteed to feature at least one, if not all, of the following: stacks of rare coffee table books, a brick wall covered in asymmetrical, slanted framed prints, an impressive record collection and an abundance of kitsch memorobilia. The homes recall Claire's old bedroom, but without the hyper-colour, slightly majestical Disney tinge. And yet for some strange reason I am completely addicted to the site. It could be because I'm a busybody (I like to snoop through people's book and CD libraries), because I'm bored and have no life (the most probable answer), or because it relates to my much mocked, suprise dream of being an interior designer.

Whatever the answer, see the site for yourself here.

One of my favourite writers, James Wolcott, believes that television is currently in its renaissance period, citing Weeds, Dexter, Californication, Mad Men and The Wire as examples. TV, he argues, is more current, clever and cutting edge than cinema, and comes without its huge ego. "TV promises so much less, yet gives so much more. Dialogue that's fast, mordant and elliptical, intimate, layered, complex stories." My good friend Sophie would definately agree. She plans her evenings (or as she unashamedly admits "her life") around what's on the box. Her tastes differ from Wolcott's though. (The City, Girls of the Playboy Mansion and The Kardashians are favourites).
However, TV for me feels like it is in its final, dying stages. Littered with generic crime shows, banal sets and toothy, obnoxious reality stars, you have to go searching to find anything of quality, and who can really be fucked, when friends already send you obscure music videos and ingenious ads ("Cadbury Eyebrows" anyone?) via YouTube. Things are so bad it seems, that not even the saviour herself, Oprah Winfrey, can save television from the ashes of ruin. Perhaps she's just exhausted from all the campaigning she did with the Obamas, but these days she looks inert and haggard, and The Oprah Effect feels so spookily Stepford. Her rival, the perkier Ellen DeGeneres, is also starting to test the limits. Awash among the infomercials and made-for- TV movies that is day-time television, her saccharine skits and interviews with plastic celebrities were once feel-good, but now just feel forced. (Her interview with the recently de-lesbianised Lindsay Lohan was plain odd; check it out on YouTube.) But maybe its just me. Maybe I'm alone in thinking that if there is no on-air revolution sooner rather than later, television will surely go the way of the typewriter and the VCR.

Just finished High Fidelity. Still tossing up my favourite quote. Between "You could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Durex" and "People are allowed to feel horny and fucked-up at the same time."

The song that plays over the final montage near the end of each episode of Cold Case is crucial, as the audience's sense of closure and satisfaction rests entirely upon it. And despite it being a difficult task to find a new song every week that simulataneously brings together elements of poignancy and smug vindication, it is always done in a gratifying manner.

I am a full blown hypochondriac. In the past year alone the list of diseases and conditions I have diangosed myself with include, but are not limited to, anhedonia, anxiety (particularly Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD), coeliac disease, stomach cancer, anemia, chronic hayfever, marfan syndrome, testicular cancer ("I checked myself this morning, and couldn't feel anything!"), diabetes and, of course, hypochondria itself.

Already scared to death by various quotes from Revolutionary Road and The Perks of Being a Wallflower that seem to sum up my life in an indifferent, depressing manner (my favourite being "Maybe high school was my glory days, and I didn't even realise it because it didn't involve a ball"), Nicola goes one step further by calling me 'an artist that creates no art'. All this brings to mind is yet more panic and another depressing quotation, this time from Truman Capote's (amazing) travel sketch on New York. "Lunch today with M. She belongs to that sect most swiftly, irrevocably trapped by New York, the talented untalented: too acute to accept a more provincial climate, yet not quite acute enough to breathe freely within the one so desired, they go along neurotically feeding upon the fringes of the New York scene. For artists without an art, it is always a tension without release, irritation with no resulting pearl. But M. deserves a finer destiny than to pass from belated adolescence to premature middle age, with no intervening period and nothing to show." Perhaps I can take some cold comfort from my own favourite quote by Hemingway, who said "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

The question "If you woke up tomorrow with the choice of looking like anyone in the entire world, who would it be?" is a very complex one. Case in point: three of my friends, all of whom if given the opportunity to look like anyone on the face of the earth would end up choosing only slightly more attractive versions of themselves. Nicola would like to be transformed into Kate Beckinsale, Chris would prefer the scultped, but ultimately alien, facial features of Zac Efron (look closer and he bears similarities to Michael Jackson in transition from black to white circa 1985) and in his perfect world Brodan would look like, well, Brodan. The main reason is not because my friends love the way they look (which they do), but has more to do with the fact that human beings are not adept to extreme change, even in worlds of complete fantasy.

With the exception of Sophie, any person who cites their favoutie band as U2 is so preposterously boring they are not worth a second of your time. Also, Bono is the most pretentious person on the face of the earth. No exceptions.