Last christmas' Tussauds version of the manger scene featuring Samuel L Jackson, Blair, Bush, Kylie Minogue and the of course the Beckhams.

NO CAUSE TO WAX LYRICAL
Just the other week, my travel writing instructor decided to surprise everyone by taking us to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. It was an early Saturday morning, and I had not prepared myself for the journey that lay ahead.

First of all, I never made an attempt to go the "museum" on my own, on the grounds that I had visited the Hollywood Wax Museum as a small child and was genuinely freaked out by the experience. Second, that fateful Saturday morning I was in a surreal, barely-functional state known as the hangover. And my assumptions that these otherworldy wax monsters would be quaintly tucked away behind a glass partition was blown as I suddenly found myself surrounded by these things. My gut instinct was to equate them with human taxodermy.

Let me just say that Tussauds is an amazing institution in many respects. Madame Tussaud began making her statues in the late 18th c. A housekeeper of a physician who used wax statues for medical studies, Tussaud took waxworking to a whole new level by re-creating scenes from the French Revolution by using actual decaptitated hands and heads as her models. Today, you can see these same figures restored in all their morbid glory.

The first room you enter gives a clear indication as to just what the frequenters of the museum want: they want to pose with "celebrities", and they want to capture it on film. Basically, you enter a room designed to look like a Hollywood gala. You've got Madonna sitting on a bench with "VIP" written in the background, you've got Travolta, Cruise, Pitt and Angelina, you've got your Lopez prominently displaying her backside, and you've got all the mundane British celebrities your bubblegum-chewing brain can take before going into d-list celebrity overload, like Graham Norton or some cheesy celebrity chef.

The room with prominent historical figures is eerily quizzical, to say the least. Hitler is beside Churchill, Bush and Blair stand side by side, with Sadam to Bush's right and Jamie Oliver to Blair's left. Sadam was barely recognizable. I thought he could pass for Fidel Castro's brother. He was clad in a plain khaki jumpsuit with a very large semi-automatic weapon strapped to his leg.

I highly encourage anyone in or visiting the London metropolitan area to pay your respects to Tussaud. These statues are so bizarre; so creepily similar to their real-life counterparts. And you are allowed to touch them. When I stroked the balding head of London mayor Ken Livingstone, I swear it was real human hair.

The Las Vegas Tussauds just this week unveiled its Tupac Shakur statue, fittingly, in an odd, somewhat "ironic" (to use the term in its improper form, here I am referring to the term as defined by Alanis Morrisette), kind of way as Shakur was in fact gunned down in sin city.

"Museums" like this, as kitschy and pointless as they may appear, reflect so much about a society and culture if heroes and icons are anything to go by.

I LOVE TO JOG, AND I'LL TELL YOU WHY


A view of London from the top of Parliament Hill in the Hampstead Heath.

A lot of people find jogging--and joggers--boring, but I've always been fortunate enough to jog in some of the most amazing places in the world and, in a sense, have felt more connected to them by doing so.

As Guy Browning, one of my favorite Guardian columnists wrote:
"Jogging, like heavy metal, becomes interesting only when done at an intensity that threatens to burst something vital to the body."

I was reflecting on that just this morning, as I nearly choked on the crisp, chilly air like an emphysema patient with a clogged voice box. Now I have suffered a lack of cardiovascualr activities in recent times, but in this case I was making a fighting effort to tackle a very steep hill. Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath to be exact, where you can view all of London--including the Gherkin and the London Eye.

I haven't properly jogged since I lived in Santa Cruz, where, in just under five minutes, I could reach a beach with a Coney Island-style boardwalk to the right of me, and a yacht harbor complete with light house to the left. Just before that, I was living near Capitol Hill; in 10 minutes of jogging I could reach the Washington Monument, running along the Reflecting Pool and culminating in a visit to ole Honest Abe.

But I reckon that most people, even those living in the most gentrified mess of tract-home hell that is suburbia, can find a sense of pride and connectedness with their surroundings by simply putting their feet to the pavement and roaming free. The mundane can become active and alive; the foreign and unfamiliar becomes your playground.

JUST ONE OF MANY MEANINGLESS DREAMS

Last night I dreamt that Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder were battling it out in a scat singing contest. Jackson just blew Stevie out of the water, it was crazy. Crazy amazing! Stevie's major setback was that he did not seem to understand that scat involves using your voice like a jazz instrument and that whole words just do not count. (For instance, "be be du bop do be!" would work, but "my cherie amour" would not). Jackson really impressed the judges with his variations of the term "shamone". He was turning shamone inside out, upside down and sideways, singing stuff like "sha mo mo mony sha me sha mu mone". Just brilliant.

When I awoke I was left wondering just what happened to Michael these days, besides the obvious new-found talent for scat. I found out that he is in Bahrain, dressing like a Muslim woman. I just picture him hangin out on the beach in his burka, scatting to Louis Armstrong...

A BAD OMEN?

Last night I was accosted by a white-haired, rambunctious bloke who'd been laughing wildly at the end of the bar all night. I'd just gotten off my waitressing shift at the gastropub I work at in Chelsea, and was minding my own with a Sunday Times and a glass of white wine. He invited me to sit with the "chaps" and have a drink. I said if the chaps were well-behaved I just might.

He introduced me to them--turns out I was sitting with a Chelsea football star and his entourage. It didn't mean anything to me because I don't follow football (it's just soccer with more hype), but I guess the football dude was a big deal. He was good looking enough, kind of quiet and had a really firm handshake that seemed to last for days. (OMG I'm suddenly in pulp fiction/noir style mode, I apologize).

Anyways, the white-haired man was so-and-so's personal masseur and he wanted to know my life story. So I told him I was out here to study journalism. He said "don't do it!" He went on to tell me I was too good for that. When I tried to explain to him that journalism was an honorable profession, and that there were so many different types of writers out there that he couldn't simply tell me that I was too good for it all, because it wasn't all bad, he just said, "Aw, but if you want to make money, you're going to write something that won't be so honorable." Touche.

I'm finding it more and more difficult, as the industry morphs into something more elusive everyday with the help of new technology (i.e. blogs), to believe that I will one day earn my bread and butter through writing things that I feel are, indeed, honorable and of the public interest. Then again, being a young woman, he probably made some immediate gender-based presumptions as to what "journalism" meant to me. He probably thought I daydreamed about becoming an editor for Hello! or OK! or Grazia or one of those other bullshit chick-trash weeklies. I'm sure that he'd never stretch his imagination to think for one second that I may just be a lone Woodward looking for my female Bernstein...

He also told me a joke...here's the short version which probably isn't funny since it's lacking context, but...a woman turns to her husband in bed one night for a romantic interlude and says, "Honey, tonight, I want you to kiss me where it stinks." So he tells her to hop in the car right away. The hours go by and the wife is growing uneasy so she asks, "Honey, where are we going?" He says, "Darling, I'm driving you to Birmingham!"

Wine almost shot out of my nose at that one--Frank Lampard's masseur is one funny guy.
This is what Frank Lampard looks like, he looks a lot dreamier when he's playing soccer:

A Movie Review

Just the other day I emerged from a darkened movie theater with my best friend Bobby, merrily walking along with that fresh, reality-distorted euphoria only a truly inpsiring film can induce. I breezily turned to Bobby to scan his face. "That was the one of the dullest movies I've ever seen. I've been wanting to walk out for over an hour," he said.



Coogan wonders if he is leading man material with a giant fake nose, Brydon fancies his yellow British teeth.

I had been looking forward to "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" for nearly a month, but in that moment I felt like a complete jackass. I look to Bobby for the gospel truth, and if he is telling me a film is dull, well maybe that makes me dull too?

Upon further reflection, I think I've been able to conclude that a) I am not a jackass for liking this movie, and b)Bobby did have a point.

The film is an adaptation of a novel in the same vein as, well, "Adaptation" (the cerebral Kaufman masterpiece starring Nicolas Cage). It takes the 18th c novel by Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and successfully translates it into a film manifestation with the same self-indulgent, incomprehensible narrative that made the book so uniquely timeless. In the same way that the narrator of the "biographic" novel, Tristram, leads his readers away from his own life story with arbitrary revelations and digressions, the filmmakers of said adaptation have cleverly mimicked this idiosyncratic tendency. The result is a film within a film not dissimilar to Sterne's novel within a novel: with me so far?

In the words of Steve Coogan, the actor who stars as Tristram Shandy and as a satirical exaggeration of himself--the actor Steve Coogan: "Tristram Shandy was postmodern before there was any modern to be post about."

It was hard for me to critically analyze this film based on its own merits, due to my own infatuation with Steve Coogan, the actor best known for his role as Alan Partidge in "I Am Alan Partridge" and "Knowing Me, Knowing You". He is master of that trendy new form of humor I like to think of as anti-humor. Anti-humor pioneers include Ricky Gervais and Larry David, as well as the US TV show, "Arrested Development". Anti-humorists are not the typical comedians, no, their mission is to make the audience feel awkward as they recklessly put themselves in awkward situations that mirror real life.

But it seems I was not the only one infatuated with Coogan, as director Michael Winterbottom took what could have been a brilliant Kaufman-esque piece and turned it into a bona fide loveletter to the actor. Anyone who has seen "24 Hour Party People" can attest. In "24 Hour", Winterbottom took a pitifully bland script and solely relied on Coogan's supreme wit to dig it out of the muck. That time it failed. This time, with the help of the endearing egomaniac of a co-star Rob Brydon, the film was nearly carried, but not quite. "A Cock and Bull Story" is quite like the unfortunate progression of a carnival ride after too much funnel cake: fast-paced and exciting at first, then dizzying, then nauseating.

STATE OF THE RODENT



Today I got an email from a former instructor regarding tomorrow's events:

This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out, "It is an ironic juxtaposition: One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication... and the other involves a groundhog."

Side note: I much preferred this version of the State of the Union--this guy does the best impression of Bush EVER.

Favorite quote: "If you have an enemy that's killin themselves, they're already gettin half the job done. Part of what we have to do is sit by and let 'er rip!"

Multitasker of the Year Award: George Galloway

If you asked me last month, I would say that George Galloway is the most awesome MP ever. I have no idea what his role, if any, was in the UN's oil-for-food scandal. All I know is that I was abso-freaking-lutely blown away by his tough talk to the US Senate subcommittee last year during the investigative hearings regarding his involvement. Galloway went berserk before the almighty US Senate, and that's a fact. I don't care if he was involved in a sordid love affair with Sadam and Osama. For one fleeting moment I was able to see, right there live on C-Span, what it might be like if politicians in America actually held robust, open debate similar to that in the House of Commons. I hold no illusions that Galloway opened up some kind of new standard for public discourse on Capitol Hill, but anyone who's ever endured even two minutes of congressional hearings via C-Span knows that the banality is enough to literally spur droves of viewers into dying of boredom. Literally. And there is something deeply disconcerting and almost sinister about that. Lord knows if Bush was held under as much public scrutiny as Blair is by his own colleagues in Parliament he wouldn't last one day as President. The public humiliaton alone would send him stuttering and inventing words which would no doubt lead to the APA diagnosing our little Dubya as showing signs of mental retardation.

But I digress...




Back to Galloway. The MP is ALL over the news out here in Old Blimey. He's been quite the busy bee--not only has he just successfully won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph, but he's also found a home on Celebrity Big Brother alongside the likes of a transvestite who wears gorilla coats, a Paris Hilton look-alike who dubbed Hilton Travelodge, and Dennis Rodman. For the last three weeks the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow has been serving his consituency by dancing the robot in a spandex leotard and lapping milk from a saucer like a kitty.

Unfortunately, such admirable endeavors have taken their toll on his Parliamentary activities. According to theyworkforyou.com, since 2005, Galloway has only voted in 15% of Parliament's elections, ranking him at 634 out of 645 MPs. Among those who ranked below him were five members of Sinn Fein who were practicing abstention, three speakers who were in eligible to vote, and two members who have recently become deceased.

I suppose, if you asked me now, I would not rank George Galloway as the most awesome MP ever, even though his robotic prowess has proven impressive. I will, however, dub him "Multitasker of the Year".

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: The Rev would not be proud

Today, as I scanned some of the top stories from my native soil, I kept seeing the face of Rev Martin Luther King pop up along with various stories. 'What's goin on here?' I thought. Then it dawned on me--yesterday was MLK Day, and I was just sittin out here in limey land sipping tea, watching celebrity Big Brother.

The 20th anniversary of its official national observance, this holiday commands attention on so many levels, and must be recognized now more than ever. With Rosa Parks' recent death, King's widow in the hospital from a stroke, another Vietnam on our hands and the mounting fear of nuclear devastation, the cause of the great Reverend needs a little revisit. And by "little revisit" I mean a major acknowledgement. Monumental I'd say.

This is the only major U.S. holiday which has yet to be diluted and degraded by the shameful, culture-eradicating machine that is commercialization. No "Martin Luther King White Sale Now On at Macy's!" or "MLK Low Low Prices at Circuit City!" to be had.

It was in 1994 that President Clinton signed, with the collaborative efforts of Coretta Scott King, the King Holiday and Service Act, which sought to promote the day as one of "community service, interracial cooperation, and youth anti-violence efforts."
...sorry President Bush, but I guess (from that last line) you won't be celebrating this year, or for the rest of your horrific tenure.

It's the nonviolence tenets of King's teachings which really strike a prescient chord. King historian Taylor Branch wrote an amazing Op-Ed piece in the NYT yesterday which really eloquated (I realize that eloquate is not a word, but if I were eloquent enough, I could think of a bettter one) this well:

"Above all, no one speaks for nonviolence. Indeed, the most powerful discipline from the freedom movement was the first to be ridiculed across the political spectrum. 'A hundred political commentators have interred nonviolence into a premature grave,' Dr. King complained after Selma. The concept seemed alien and unmanly. It came to embarrass many civil rights veterans themselves, even though nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy."

Repeat after me: Nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy. Nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy. Nonviolence...

King is the ultimate patriot, one of the only true martyrs in my book, and proof that the message of America's founding fathers will not be lost in contemporary American history books.

Quoting Branch further, "His oratory fused the political promise of equal votes with the spiritual doctrine of equal souls. He planted one foot in American heritage, the other in scripture, and both in nonviolence."

And finally, Branch concludes:

"We must recognize that the accepted tradeoff between freedom and security is misguided, because our values are the essence of our strength. If dungeons, brute force and arbitrary rule were the keys to real power, Saudi Arabia would be a model for the future instead of the past...Gunfire took Dr. King's life, but we determine his legacy. This holiday, let that inspiration remain our patriotic challenge."

This holiday, I went to Topshop and ate at Starbucks. The Rev would not be proud.