The best one of the year

Two announcements. Firstly, this is the last post here; there are no posts newer than 28th March 2007 on this blog and there won't be any in future. I've merged AE with my work weblog Cloud Street and moved to Wordpress; the result is The Gaping Silence.

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Secondly, here's a book:



I'm in it. Jonny's in it. Harry's in it. Clare's in it. Justin's in it. (My son started quoting Chicken Yoghurt to me the other day, which isn't a sentence I ever thought I'd write.) Lots of people I've never even heard of are in it. It's good.

More specifically, it's funny. I'm not going to tell you it's all funny, because that wouldn't be very convincing. I mean, when you've got something like 101 different contributors with subtly different styles of humour and ideas of what's funny, the result of their intersection with any one reader's idea of the funny is going to be a pretty wide range of funniness (or, as we academics say, humorosivity). So for me to tell you it was all equally funny would be prima facie unconvincing. But to maintain the less extreme position that it was all merely funny would actually risk a similar error, as this would imply that my personal range of humorosivity values for the collection uniformly exceeded zero. Which would be nice, but it's rather a lot to hope for - I mean, 101 is a lot of discrete humorosivity values.

Where was I? That's right, it's not all funny. But some, nay most of it is, and some of it's very funny indeed.

“How can Amundsen be a Close as well as Scott?” I rage. “And it’s not even as though Amundsen Close is further south than Scott Close – that would have at least made some sense.”

My girlfriend phones our friends to explain that we are back by the shops and we may be some time.

Self-harmers
Who could fail to be cheered out of their depression by the oh-so-cute antics of a kitten? And if you're not, at last you'll have a much better reason for having arms covered in scratches.

Student: Do you have that blue book my tutor recommended?
Bad librarian: Yes, we do. It’s kept with all the other blue books in the blue room, between the green and purple rooms. Once you get to the room, you’ll find them arranged in order by how much the tutors like them, with books written by members of staff at the very beginning.

If none of that made you laugh, all I can say that your idea of the funny (and your consequent derived range of humorosivity values) differs from mine. But in that case something else in here almost certainly will make you laugh, even if it didn't have that effect on me. You see how this works?

It's available for a very reasonable price from Lulu.com, who will print a copy for you personally on receipt of your order, which is rather clever. A large proportion of the said price goes to Comic Relief, which is good. And I'm in it, which is nice. And Mike Atkinson of Troubled Diva put the whole thing together in a week flat, which is frankly amazing. Yay Mike, as I believe the young folk say.

Go on, buy one. Buy two, why don't you. Ideal Easter gift.

PS Quite a lot of it really is quite funny.

PPS I'm in it.

PPPS Now go to The Gaping Silence. Go on, get on with you. Shoo!

Eat y'self fitter

Inconsequentially: it occurred to me the other day that I'm firmly convinced that some kinds of food and drink are good for you. In most cases this belief doesn't appear to have any rational basis - although in some cases it's probably based on experience, which is almost as good. Anyone else have a similar list at the back of their mind, or is it just me?

Healthy Food

Ginger
Anything with ginger is good for you. Fact. A friend once advocated ginger tea to me as a cold remedy so persuasively that I was genuinely disappointed still to have the cold when I finished the pot. (It did do me good, obviously, just not quite that much good.) Chopped ginger in cooking is good, or sliced ginger. Crystallised ginger, even (lots of sugar is generally bad for you, but the ginger makes up for it). I'll reluctantly concede that chocolate ginger probably isn't very good for you. (Better than chocolate without ginger, mind.) Gingerbread. Ginger cake. Lebkuchen (although not the ones with jam in). It's all good.

Lemon
Anything with lemon is good for you, apart from sweet things. Apart apart from hot lemon with honey. Bizarrely, hot lemon with honey and whiskey is even healthier.

Chinese soups
Those clear broth ones. They're good for you. It's true. Not so much the ones with all the egg in or those crabstick ones. Hot and sour I'm not sure about, either. But the clear ones, they're great. Same goes for any of those Chinese main courses which are basically a slightly drier version of one of those soups, with noodles or boiled rice (not fried, sadly).

Goat's cheese
Not just goat, though. Blue Stilton, that's got to be good for you. And white's even better, if you can get it without the fruit salad stuck in it. Goes off in no time, mind you. So that's white Stilton before it goes off. Careful now.

Fruit and stuff
Yeah, I suppose.

Healthy Drink

Anything fizzy
Well, OK, not anything. But mineral water, certainly, and basically anything non-alcoholic. And a nice gin and tonic, that's got to be good for you.

Beer with yeast in the bottom
Bound to be healthy, isn't it? (As long as you drink the yeast. Whether you do this by swirling it up and drinking it out of the bottle or swirling it up and pouring it into the glass depends entirely on the type of beer. But you knew that.)

Beer
Not all beer, obviously. Not stout, and only some porters. And not keg beer, obviously. A nice well-kept bitter, that's what you want. Mild's even better.


So there you have it. Of course, you wouldn't want to let your life be governed by a list like this. Variety is important; custard, Guinness and curry are fine in moderation. But if you really want to pig out, go for Stilton, Hefe Weizen and a nice Chinese.

And ginger. Anything with ginger is good for you.

Becoming more like Alfie

It seems to be compulsory for reviewers of Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5.55 to get in a couple of references to her father. This is unfortunate; the fact that the singer is the daughter of the more famous Serge is certainly an angle, but it's not one that tells us a lot about this album.

So forget Serge; forget Charlotte, even. Consider 5.55 for what it (mostly) is: a set of songs composed and played by Air, with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon. Godin and Dunckel, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon, together at last. And a French actress supplying the vocals.

No, it's not as good as that sounds. But it's not far short.

Air never were particularly spiky, and over the years they've lost a lot of the rough edges and homed in on a lush, lounge-friendly sound; played after "Cherry blossom girl" or "Alone in Kyoto", Premiers symptomes sounds positively avant-garde. The instrumentation of 5.55 is very lounge; most tracks are dominated by Dunckel's grand piano, backed by a string section. What redeems it and makes it interesting is a couple of oddly spare, pared-down elements amid the general lushness. One is the composition itself, which centres on simple, repeated patterns of five or six notes on the right hand; not so much Air, more Beta Band. The other - and the really unique feature about the album - is Gainsbourg's singing voice, which is quiet, light, delicate and frankly rather weak. But the contrast between that voice and that accompaniment - the sweeping strings and the lush, circling piano figures - is arresting; it makes you listen.

And there's a lot here to listen to. There are three songs which slide back and forth between English and French. The Godin and Dunckel composition "Tel que tu es", beautifully sung - and beautifully enunciated - by Gainsbourg, had me struggling for a translation: "such as you are"? "how you are"? "just the way you are"? The last verse is in English; the line is "Come as you are". Very nice. "Jamais" similarly plays with the different expressive qualities of the two languages. Each verse sets up a rejoinder of "Never", which is delivered in French:

You think you know me, that's your trouble
Never fall in love with a body double
Jamais

The word 'never' is an undramatic trochee - one stressed syllable and one 'uh'; 'jamais' is much more satisfactory, with two good vowels and a stress on both syllables. Lyrically it's fine stuff:

I can act like I'm dumb, I can act like I'm clever
You thought that was me? Well I never!
Jamais

And then there's the title track, a fragile, bruised meditation on insomnia, which gets a lot of its effect from the sound of that pre-dawn time-check in English and French: 'five fifty-five', resigned, hopeless, here I still am; 'cinq heures cinquante-cinq', nagging, insistent, isn't it morning yet?

A cinq heures cinquante-cinq
Nothing will ever change
On the altar of my thought
I sacrifice myself again
And again and again
Five fifty-five

Two songs are co-written by Neil Hannon, who even plays guitar on one of them; I suppose he must have been passing. "Beauty mark", I'm sorry to say, stinks. I've never really understood - or believed - the classic film reviewer's dismissal of porn as 'boring', but I must admit that this track's attempt to conjure a certain kind of atmosphere rapidly gets tedious. "This darling bud... this little death..." Yes, yes. Put it away now.

Hannon's other song, "The songs that we sing", is one of the album's highlights.

I saw a photograph:
A woman in a bath of hundred-dollar bills
If the cold doesn't kill her the money will

I read a magazine
That said, by seventeen your life is at an end
Well, I'm dead and I'm perfectly content

What really lifts this track is the animation in Gainsbourg's voice; it's a perfect match with the lyrics.

And these songs that we sing,
Do they mean anything
To the people we're singing them to?
Tonight they do

The vocal on this track is particularly powerful precisely because of the contrast with the previous track and the next track; it's certainly not that strong in itself. (Charlotte Gainsbourg sings Ethel Merman will not be appearing any time soon.) It's a trick that can be pulled perhaps twice in the space of an album. The second time, and the album's other highlight, is the penultimate track, "Everything I cannot see". By the standards of this album it's a big production number. Gainsbourg pushes her voice to the limit: she peaks with a kind of petulant mew, bizarrely affecting in the emotion it doesn't quite convey. Dunckel's piano-playing similarly lets rip, sprouting flourishes and curlicues of melody in all directions. Even Jarvis's lyrics jettison all traces of irony and pitch for heartfelt without worrying about overshooting:

You're my friend, you're my foe
You're the miles left to go
You are everything I ever wanted
And you are my lover

After that, the album closes with "Morning song", whose lyrics (in English) are by Gainsbourg herself; it's either about falling in love with a ghost or about spending the night with an ex-lover, it doesn't really matter which. All that matters at this point in the album is the still, trembling presence of Dunckel's vibraphone and Gainsbourg's half-whispering voice, gently promising or warning:

Ah, but to get to the morning, first you have to get through the night...

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On the subject of Serge Gainsbourg, I'm pleased to report that What I wrote is now hosting the first in a series of extracts from the recollections of Sir Frederick William Jefferson Bodine, a man equally at home in theatreland, Hollywoodland and the Land of Green Ginger. In part 1 of his showbusiness memoir Remembering Judy Garland, Sir Frederick brings to life the Serge Gainsbourg he knew:

the uke had to go, for a start. The songs got a lot slower, and of course their lyrics had to be translated into French, pretty much in their entirety. Even then, they didn't really take to him. Eventually I realised the name was giving us problems: we'd changed everything else, but Alfie was still going out with an English name. So out went 'Khaki' Gainsborough and in came 'Serge' Gainsbourg.

And more, much more than this.