Sunday, July 05, 2009
Clothes
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 9:37 PM
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Charity shopping
Spoils from last week; Ronald Regan, Mary Pickford, mother of pearl box and Jocob's Room by Virginia Woolfe
Labels: shiny shiny products
Hey Powderpuff at 4:46 PM
Activity
I feel like it's been a year since I did proper outfit photos. It's probably inevitable seeing as I barely have time to do the things I absolutely need to do, let alone frivolous things like photograph myself every morning. But, I'm finding that living life unexamined (even in the most shallow way) make it so difficult to mark time. Months go by, I gain weight, don't cut my hair, wear the same skirt three times a week and no one picks me up on it.At least photographing myself every morning gave some much needed scrutiny.
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 4:40 PM
Caroline Weeks
From the launch of Songs for Edna in Dalston a few months ago. A really magical evening.
www.myspace.com/carolineweeks
Labels: music
Hey Powderpuff at 4:26 PM
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Mr Tesco
Wise words from Sire Terry Leahy:“There was no magic silver bullet, no new fangled business theory - just a series of improvements that we rolled out to deliver for the consumer, and earn loyalty...stick to the strategy of listening to customers. Never deviate from it, but accept that it means constantly changing tactics - in other words, how and what you deliver for consumers,” he advised. “Second, … nothing is sacred. Question everything - especially things which people tell you “can’t be changed”.”
“Third, loyalty has a price. It may demand short term pain - such as investing in lower prices - but it delivers medium and long term gain,” he added. “Finally, hold your nerve. Following the consumer means spotting trends and taking risks, not waiting for your competitors to move first....Find a business that has plans created on the basis of abstract theories and assumptions, not on what consumers say and think, and you have found a bankruptcy waiting to happen.”
Labels: work
Hey Powderpuff at 11:48 AM
Monday, June 01, 2009
Tweeds
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 2:32 PM
My Workspace
Labels: my room
Hey Powderpuff at 2:30 PM
Culture Shock!
I've had a bit of a subsidised culture bonanza this evening. Thanks the the magic of my ES card I have tickets to
COSSI FAN TUTTE
Directed by Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami.
&
THE WINTER'S TALE
and I gave £17 for both!
I am going on my own so no one will see my shame when I get my geek on.
Labels: pursuits
Hey Powderpuff at 1:54 PM
Sunday, April 26, 2009
PJ Harvey & John Parish, Shepherd's Bush, 20th April 2009
Character may be fate but there are some people in the world who can throw personas on and off like jackets. As proved tonight by Polly Jean and John Parrish. Never were there two more unassuming characters between songs. A middle aged man who says hello to the mike like a bashful substitute teacher and a scrawny woman of indeterminate age who can't even muster the words to thank the audience for listening. Yet thirty seconds later the same woman is yapping at the audience for 'Pig will not'. Who else could behave like a loon with such dignity, like a flamenco dancer gone mad on syphilis.
Hey Powderpuff at 3:56 PM
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
I'm so dumb I have to read kids' books
I have never felt I had gaps in my knowledge of history so much as chinks of knowledge in my gaps. I've always looked for general world histories but they just aren't fashionable nowdays (even bluffer's guides are time period specific) and old ones like H G Wells are so long that I have never found it possible to read them chronologically. I really need a short sharp entertaining overview to links together some of my knowledge and give me a structure to build on in the gaps. It has been pretty difficult to find and I've come across some dreadful books ( Like "Great Tales from English History" by Robert Lacey). Finally though, I've come across a treasure which I thoroughly reccommend to anyone as badly educated as me (or smart people with children).
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich- Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (A Little History of the World)
This humanist linear history was written when Gombrich was 26 in Vienna. Apparently in the morning he would read up on the day's period from an encyclopedia and look at source material and in the evening he would write his chapter- all in six weeks.
This goes roughly from the stone age to the First World War. An immesnse subject tackled in a really warm and accessible way with such an economy of detail. Read aloud to brainwash your child with the principles of the Enlightenment and the rights of man.
His postscript is especially moving. Returning to the book and adding the note, that he was a young man when he wrote the part about the First World War and didn't see things as they really are...
This book is wonderful and recommended by Philip Pullman. Read it, feel like like you know everything and then buy Gombrich's The Story of Art (1950)
Hey Powderpuff at 3:48 PM
Saturday, October 18, 2008
I was hunger and you fed me
"The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us."
Robert Louis Stevenson
"Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person."
George Eliot - Middlemarch - Chapter XXVII
Labels: quotes
Hey Powderpuff at 7:04 AM
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Poetry
There must be some extra arts council funding sloshing about in the media at the moment. I've just finished reading my seocnd article about how learning poems by heart will make you cleverer/kinder/better.Good for them and all, but can anyone ever really learn anything off by heart? Last time this what the hot topic (2006 actually) I lapped it up and tried to learn to Wordsworth's We Are Seven. And I did. For about two weeks before it evaporated again and I could vaguely remember the title and that it was creepy for him to call her a little maid. Am I alone in having a weak, sieve-like memory? 'Cos apparently Jeanette Winterson doesn't need to take books on train journeys because she can just recite to herself. Freak.
I guess I need to train up and step up to the plate. The Sunday Times have given me some steps to follow:
How to learn verse
1 Read the poem to yourself
2 Now read the first line of the poem out loud. Take your eyes from the page and immediately say the line again. Glance back to make sure you got it right. If you made a mistake, try again. Now do the same with the second line. Repeat the procedure for every line in the poem.
3 Go back to the beginning. This time, read the first two lines out loud, look away and repeat them aloud. Check. If you made a mistake, try again. Now move on to the next two lines, going through the whole poem two lines at a time.
4 Repeat the process three lines at a time, then four lines at a time, then five and then six. By the sixth pass, no matter how long the poem, you will have it memorised.
5 Recite the whole poem just before you go to bed at night.
6 Crucial: stop thinking about the poem. Your sleeping mind is very important for memory.
7 The next day, you should find (after a glance at the first line to bump-start your memory) that you can recite the whole poem
Having some good all pupose poetry off by heart does sound like an excellent idea. I like the image of me rearing up in Ted Hughes-like to recite Chaucer at cows from rowing boats (watch 'Sylvia' if you haven't). So my new good intention is to learn a poem every fortnight. First two are below, wonder which one will prove to be most useful for spontaneous recitals.
the boys i mean are not refined- e e cummings
the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night
one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined
they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite
the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss
they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance
I Had a Hippopotamus- Patrick Barrington
I had a hippopotamus; I kept him in a shed
And fed him upon vitamins and vegetable bread.
I made him my companion on many cheery walks,
And had his portrait done by a celebrity in chalks.
His charming eccentricities were known on every side.
The creature's popularity was wonderfully wide.
He frolicked with the Rector in a dozen friendly tussles,
Who could not but remark on his hippopotamuscles.
If he should be affected by depression or the dumps
By hippopotameasles or hippopotamumps
I never knew a particle of peace 'till it was plain
He was hippopotamasticating properly again.
I had a hippopotamus, I loved him as a friend
But beautiful relationships are bound to end.
Time takes, alas! our joys from us and robs us of our blisses.
My hippopotamus turned out to be a hippopotamissus.
My housekeeper regarded him with jaundice in her eye.
She did not want a colony of hippopotami.
She borrowed a machine gun from her soldier-nephew, Percy
And showed my hippopotamus no hippopotamercy.
My house now lacks the glamour that the charming creature gave.
The garage where I kept him is as silent as a grave.
No longer he displays among the motor-tires and spanners
His hippopotamastery of hippopotamanners.
No longer now he gambols in the orchard in the Spring;
No longer do I lead him through the village on a string;
No longer in the mornings does the neighborhood rejoice
To his hippopotamusically-modulated voice.
I had a hippopotamus, but nothing upon the earth
Is constant in its happiness or lasting in its mirth.
No life that's joyful can be strong enough to smother
My sorrow for what might have been a hippopotamother.
-- Patrick Barrington
Labels: books, famous person makes me like stuff, poetry, wikipedia is my oyster
Hey Powderpuff at 4:00 PM
The great wine swindle...
"...fundamentally, wine doesn't taste of anything."I'm about to celebrate a year of my wine related job and I have to admit that I've had to choke back those words more than once during my time here. In no aspect of my character does my immaturity show so much as in my opinions about wine. Or rather my one opinion about wine. That it is nicest when it tastes of juice. When it comes down to it, I'm just drinking wine until someone works out a legal way of making alcoholic strawberry juice. Obviously I don't want to to admit this to my wine-loving colleagues and look like a cretin so I've gotten into the habit of using this useful quote from Iris Murdoch:
"In food and drink, as in many (not all) matters , simple joys are best as any intelligent self-lover knows. Sidney Ashe once offered to initiate me into the pleasures of vintage wine. I refused with scorn. Sidney hates ordinary wine and is unhappy unless he is drinking some expensive stuff with a date on it. Why wantonly destory one's palate for cheap wine? One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of them can be if some of these can be inexpensive and cheaply procured so much the better... "
The sea, the sea - Iris Murdoch
Sixty per cent of the time, it works all the time...
Anyway, I've recently decided to back down from my position of militant ignorance and have spent the last two Mondays tasting wine and spitting it into paper cups in front of strangers. And I think it's working! Last week I tasted a super-dooper white burgundy that cost more by the bottle than I made that day and some of my usual alco-juice and for the first time I wasn't lying when I said I preferred the expensive one! Woo!
Being me, I've naturally been getting into the non-practical side and have spent a few nights staying up late reading about chaptalisation and other fun stuff. I haven't got the money or the inclination to stop enjoying cheap wine, but I think I've found a new geek subject for myself- through wine you can study history, geography, climate, food science, EU politics, international logistics and terrorism. Apart from being fascinating, it has to be up there with golf and a working knowledge of latin in terms of impressing 'grown-ups'.
I strongly recommend Jancis Robinson for wit and wisdom on wine.
Another wine related matter- Channel 4's Dispatches programme has made an episode on the wine industry and its methods. They raised some legitimate questions about why alcoholic drinks don't label for ingredients, but they also tried to smear producers for using yeast in production... shurely shome mistake? It makes me wistful and a bit sad that they would try to finger the additive essential for making wine alcoholic. I'm not entirely sure what message they wanted us to take away from that segment.
Labels: wikipedia is my oyster, wine, work
Hey Powderpuff at 3:16 PM
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Orchard
This week I have been mainly eating, looking beastly and doing my job unusually well.
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 1:43 AM
Sunday, July 13, 2008
I'm the ugliest guy on the Lower East Side ... but I've got wheels and you want to go for a ride
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 8:44 AM
Monday, July 07, 2008
James Purnell
Our Secretary of State for Work & Pensions making some interesting points in a speech to Progress. I'll blame my Nu-Labour Educashun for the fact I don't have any arguements to throw at him except that he could practically be Tory leader himself."...their emptiness is grounded in the conservative intellectual tradition.
The philosopher Ted Honderich concludes his book on Conservatism by saying that, in the final analysis, it is a tradition that has nothing to say for itself. A political ideology which claims not to be an ideology and which has no faith in politics. There's not much to be done, and if there were, the state shouldn't do it.
That's why, historically, the Tory always turns up late to the party. Think of Peel in Tamworth in 1834 belatedly conceding that they might have to put up with the Great Reform Act. Peel's successors today have grudgingly accepted the minimum wage, tax credits, Bank of England independence. They have adopted the usual conservative position - committed to defending a world they would not have made.
What a strange rallying cry: stop the world. I want to get on. I can't stress enough what an inadequate response to the modern world this is. In an era in which whole industries rise and fall within a generation, in which capital traverses the globe in an instant and labour crosses borders to meet the urgent request from employers for high skills, what is the value of conservatism?
...
The modern world is not moving at the slow pace that conservatives like. The nation-state can no longer act alone. The institutions on which conservatism has based its claim to power have all required modernisation."
"...in policy areas where they are forced to act, they get it hopelessly wrong. On welfare reform, they have to do something because they are making an enormous claim. They are saying that Britain is a broken society.
When they say that what do they mean? Who do they mean? Are they talking about you? Is your world broken?
They don't want to upset you, so they pick on imaginary groups usually named after television programmes: Shameless parenting, the Jeremy Kyle generation. It's no accident that the groups they target are minorities who are easy to stigmatise - young men, ex-offenders and migrants."
"The correct position on the use of the state is an agnostic one. If it helps solve a problem, it's a good thing. If it doesn't, it's not. And there is no doubt that, in welfare, if you eschew use of the state for ideological reasons, you'll find yourself in big trouble."
"They are so obsessed with the size of the state that they will never work it out. We offer pragmatic radicalism; they offer ideological conservatism."
Labels: politics
Hey Powderpuff at 2:00 PM
Monday, May 19, 2008
Shark Skirt
London Wine Fair for the next three days and then off to Denmark.
One week on the weather beaten west coast of Jutland with no Hansard, no Mr Mercer and no English.
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 3:06 PM
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Recent things
It's been so long since I last posted but I've still been shopping like there's no recession and eating like there's no food crisis. What brute.
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 4:28 AM
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Pierrette
Labels: Outfiy
Hey Powderpuff at 2:20 PM
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Disco Deer
Labels: my room
Hey Powderpuff at 1:07 PM