Anna Chen's Blog - Madam Miaow Says ...
Exclusive to Anna's site - Charles Shaar Murray on David Bowie's 60th birthday
Site directory links:
Welcome page
Home page
Gallery
Press
Theatre
Writing
Poetry
Links
Anna Chen's news and journal
ME AND MY BIG MOUTH ...
News archive page 6
Wednesday 26th December 2007
Dr Wh(ed)o(n) strikes again: Dr Who Christmas special
Faster, faster. More, more! Raise voices to fever pitch then take it even higher.
Chuck in Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens slugging it out in a robotic exoskeleton and saying everything but "Get away from her, you bitch!"; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens Three, giving it large with the sacrifice as she plunges Christlike to a fiery doom (because Russell T Davies likes his "homages"); and an entire cast in relentless boggle-eyed hysteria. Just what we want after Xmas day with the relatives.
With one eye on the computer game, let's stick our heroes on a rickety bridge playing junkyard cricket with murderous cyborg angels and their lethal Odd-Job/Goldfinger stylee halo-blades.
Jeopardy, survival, fury, sentiment. These broadest of brushstrokes are apparently the only ones available to writer and series helmsman Davies, and he can no more vary these than he can the volume of the action which all VERY LOUD.
The Dr Who Christmas special was high in production values but signified very little as we are getting used to to by now. Lord knows we were all fed up with the plodding Brit (non) drama of old and someone was bound to borrow the surface characteristics of the far more exciting American shows sooner or later, especially after Whedon lit the shining path for all us believers. But, sadly, such emulation proved skin deep. How can you care about characters with only one unvarying dimensionless objective: survival. And for over an hour. Yeech!
I see from the Torchwood trailer they have recruited James Marsters (Spike from Buffy) to add some much-needed class to this sorry dog of a series. Davies has played in Joss Whedon's toybox for long enough, he may as well be up front about it. If we didn't get the greatness by association message via Anthony Head (Giles from Buffy) in Dr Who, he'll hammer it into us now til it bleeds.
Thanks to Louise for kicking off.
For photos of Anna and James Marsters, click here.
Sunday 23rd December 2007
HOW TO CLEAN YOUR SOUL: Tony Blair's makeover
How nice for Tony Blair to be absolved of his sins of the past decade by joining the Catholic Club.
If I were him, I too would be worrying about where my immortal soul was going to be spending the rest of eternity. There aren't many of us who can claim such a spectacular starring role in the deaths of over a million Iraqis, the first ever increase in the gap between rich and poor under a Labour government, such profligate waste of public money through privatisation of our services via the PFI back door and mad IT schemes, and rewriting Magna Carta regarding our liberties.
Blair has followed in Thatcher's footsteps in helping turn British society into Pottersville, Bifftown, Las Vegas-On-Sea. Now he wants the money, he wants the glory, he wants all the baubles the material world has to offer AND he wants to go to heaven. Does this boy want to have his cake and eat it or what?!
Spirituality is a major part of being human, but why, when organised into religion, does it turn into something repellent? If he thinks that saying a few Hail Marys and being chucked under the chin by a bloke in a big hat is actually going to change anything, he has a serious shock coming when he passes on into the void that is death.
And. Everything. Stops!
Friday 14th December 2007
CHING, CHANG, WHAT??!!
The other Tuesday I'm doing the washing up to Radio 4's "Word of Mouth", presented by Mike Rosen, when I nearly drop the antique Woolworth's teamug I'm scraping clean.
Today's subject being schoolyard rhymes, an "expert" (white, male, natch) has just described in avuncular fashion how the kids have a jolly rhyme to accompany a game of "Paper, Scissors, Stone", that starts, "Ching, chang, wally". To him, the words sounded "a bit zen".
For most British Born Chinese those words are a potent reminder of the misery we experienced when our peers wanted to target our Chinese "otherness". Nothing that starts "Ching chang", whether it's uttered by Ricky Gervais's character in "Extras", kids in the playground, or Rosen's "expert" will be anything other to most of us than the crude and cruel belittling it was always intended to be. Mockery of those in power is a wondrous thing to behold - taking the rise out of the sound of the language of a foreign minority with little social power is not. The original goes, "Ching, chang, chinaman". These are not benign, innocent words - they are loaded with meaning.
I asked two Chinese, one black, and one Jewish person what they thought about it and each one was stunned that the item could be broadcast with no comment or challenge from the presenter.
How many Chinese kids heard the programme with dismay that one of the weapons in the fledgling racist's armoury has now been legitimised by the BBC?
They're laughing at us, Mike, not with us. I'd like to see if Rosen would present so eagerly a rhyme that went, ooh, off the top of my head, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, Catch a tiger by it's toe", only not with "tiger". Or some of the charming People's Poetry that zipped round the East End in the days of the skinhead about the wave of Bangladeshi immigrants, only they weren't called Bangladeshis in the poems.
I did contact the programme to explain the significance of those words which they evidently don't get. I'm still waiting for a reply.
What makes this unconscious racism very sad is that Mike Rosen is a lefty of long-standing who would never deliberately hurt a minority. I just wish he'd wake up and have the humility, as one who does the commentating, to learn from those who are doing the experiencing.
As for sounding "zen", I'm speechless. And not in a "zen" way.
Sunday 25th November 2007
BUSH MUST GO!
No, not that Bush. The other one!
Waiting for the third season DVD of Battlestar Galactica to drop in price, I'm filling in with Rome, the plush HBO double season box set telling the epic story of Julius Caesar's rise to power.
Boy! There's a lot of pre-Christian debauchery we only saw alluded to in I, Claudius, including lashings of lashings, pervy sex (you know, with the woman on top) and gore galore.
It's educational, as well. Did you know that the Brazilian wax was invented in ancient Rome? Funny (or furry), as even into the 1970s women sported magnificent unshorn thatches you could knit into a sweater until the men's mags gave us something else to be neurotic about. But in Rome the women have the sweetest little zebra-stripe landing-strips of fuzz. We know this from the mandatory full-frontal bonkathon in every episode.
Guy-talk transcends time: Roman geezers discuss women and we learn that in those days skinny = unattractive. Yet here are the women all looking like supermodels in their size zero frames. I reckon the vomitorium got a good work-out for this series. It's not even as if the lads could pop out for a quick one with big healthy women as the brothel workers (ooh, doggy style) all look like they moonlight for Pan's People.
Fat birds with big bushes. Heaven forfend! Even the famously sophisticated HBO audiences may not be quite ready for that.
Kenneth Cranham gives it some class as Pompey Magnus much as Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren did in Bob Guccione's Caligula, starring a pop-eyed Malcolm McDowell. The 1970s audiences were pop-eyed, too, what with all the porny bits Bobby spliced into the movie when the talent wasn't looking. However, a deft cut spares Cranham the indignity of grunting over the teenage Octavia, foisted on him by her evil mother who is, aiming high but falling short thus far, not a patch on Sian Phillips's Livia.
Brutus is played as an upper class twit from the nobility who is destined to land the first regicidal blow in the defence of his class, while all the other characters are merging into mush at the moment.
I just found this over at Beaver Shaver, so it must be true.
"The Romans also disapproved of pubic hair; young girls began removing it as soon as the first hair appeared. They used tweezers, which they called the "volsella" as well as a kind of depilatory cream called the "philotrum" or "dropax" which was sometimes made with bryonia and foreshadowed modern depilatory creams. Waxing with resin or pitch was also used to depilate. Furthermore, the practice of pubic hair removal wasn't unique to Rome - it was practiced in even the most remote parts of the empire. Julius Caesar (101-44 BC) writes that, "The Britons shave every part of their body except their head and upper lip." It is reported that Poppaea, wife of the Roman Emperor Nero, used depilatory creams to remove unwanted body hair daily. At that time, the latest available creams included some wonderful ingredients like resin, pitch, white vine or ivy gum extract, ass' fat, she-goat's gall, bat's blood, and powdered viper."
Saturday 24th November 2007
We love your food but youse can sod off!
The UK got its first Chinese politician this year (at MP level - it's complicated) but, as luck would have it, she's an MLA in Belfast, a city not most famed for its universal love.
Anna Lo is the first ethnic politician to be elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly (Alliance Party) so you just knew there would be, ahem, "problems".
These have now arrived by the truckload. Today sees a march against Ms Lo by loyalists whose original intention was to go through Donegall Pass, the region's Chinatown. And not just the usual suspects including the BNP - the Lord Mayor waded in with his support of the march when the route was forced to change and will now go through the city centre.
The pretext for the unleashing of all this bigotry is that she had written a letter complaining about a previous parade which had prevented one of her constituents getting to their job at the hospital. With their tiny brains short-circuited by the uppity ethnic, revenge would be swift and lumpen.
The Chinese can rest assured that the march is not racist now that the organisers have said they will probably have a nice takeaway afterwards. And the community should take comfort from the letter posted through the door of every Chinese household telling them this wasn't personal (but we know where you live).
I hope they piss in the marchers' prawn balls
Reminds me of a variation of the old Jewish joke. Anna Lo is walking home late at night when she'd stopped by some thugs.
"Are youse Catholic or Protestant?" they demand.
"Look at me, I'm Chinese Taoist," she says.
"Yes, but are youse Catholic Chinese Taoist or Protestant Chinese Taoist?"
And then proceed to give her a kicking anyway.
Thanks to Splintered Sunrise for the tip.
STOP PRESS: Update - loyalist parade called off.
Thursday 8th November 2007
Yo! What happened to health and safety?
My mate, punk-rock blues guitarist Gary Lammin, witnessed a fine bit of irony at the public launch of the "Yo! What Happened to Peace" exhibition at The Foundry in trendy Shoreditch on Tuesday.
Some bright spark had decided that mood of the cafe upstairs from the collection of anti-war posters would be enhanced by the use of naked candles stuck into the necks of wine bottles.
This being the opening of the UK leg of the international tour, it drew a heaving crowd.
You know what happens next.
One young black woman in a long scarf and permed hair passes too close to a candle and the next thing her scarf's alight, her coat's alight and her hair's on fire. Everyone's gawping while she's screaming. Gary has the presence of mind to leap across the room and smother the flames, singeing his own fingers in the process, not an ideal situation for a guitarist about to head off to America and record with Pierre De Beauport, the Rolling Stones' guitar specialist.
She's in shock. Gary's in shock. No-one calls an ambulance and now the venue managers are apparently telling her it's her fault because she was wearing a long flammable scarf.
The cherry on the icing on the cake is the reaction from the yuppie at the bar. Before dashing over to save the distressed damsel, Gary had plunged his hands into the nearest liquid in the room: a pint sitting on the bar.
He returns to the bar and the disgruntled yuppie who says,
"Excuse me, that was my drink."
"Frightfully sorry. Would you like me to buy you another one?"
"Yes, that would be the thing to do."
Gary, his blood up, racing with adrenalin, and still with the smell of burning flesh in his nostrils, is commendably restrained for a diamond geezer. He says,
"I will buy you one, mate. But before I do, consider this. You won't be drinking it, you'll be wearing it."
Gary and his mate Mark leave the yuppie scum to their deathtrap jollities and head off to find one of the few remaining working-class pubs in the area where the clientele act like human beings and not Fellini grotesques.
Wednesday 5th September 2007
DEATH BY HOOTERS
It's official. My tits are lethal.
Maybe it was a fit of marsupial envy which first led me to discover that I could stash my iPod in my bra. Handy for access without breaking stride, and for those stupidly short earbud cables.
Perhaps it was hubris that made me think I could increase my cleavage's handbag potential. Just one more small electrical appliance. Couldn't hurt - could it?
The iPod had the protection of a snazzy leather cover. The mobile phone was naked. The sun was shining. I was glowing. Plugged in to my music I didn't have to worry about hearing the phone ring when my mate called to announce her arrival for our regular skive dahn the Sarf Bank. I could feel it vibrate. And very nice, too.
I forgot about the phone.
Until, that is, several hours later when I remembered to call Babes and announce my imminent departure for home. To my horror, upon retrieval, I found the screen steamed up with perspiration and on the fritz, none of the buttons connecting to anything.
That night I turned it off, removed the battery and prayed for it to dry out and miraculously recover overnight.
It didn't.
This wouldn't have happened with a pen and pencil.
To add insult to injury, the mobile company won't send me another one until I'm due for my upgrade in December 'cause this counts as my fault and I would be stuck with the bill for repairs and I really don't want to argue this one in court. Or anywhere.
The decolletage of doom. The hooters from hell. Luddite breasts. That's me.
The horror. The horror.
Friday 31st August 2007
PRINCESS DI - SHE DEAD!
Ten years on ...
Yes, she wanted to be queen and rule over us. Yes, she wanted her "boys" to continue the monarchy. Yes, she had dreadful taste in music. And men.
But having been used as a brood mare, Diana refused to play the game and sod off and die. Her subsequent upstagings of the dull royals were a source of amusement as she fought back with wit and style. And only someone with a heart of stone wouldn't give a person points for resisting their oppression which, as her experience showed us, exists even at the top of society.
She did seem to genuinely care about people in pain, although my hopes of her shaving her head, getting pierced, developing her concerns about injustice into a discovery of Marx and taking a humanities course at some Redbrick uni as the ultimate in revenge, were always going to remain an unrealised fantasy.
I was watching the late movie on the BBC when the news of the Paris tunnel crash first broke - Reds, directed by Warren Beatty, about American journalist John Reed's time with the old Bolsheviks who, in weird synchronicity, killed off their monarchy. Ironic, huh? Life imitates art. Kind of. Should do.
What's fascinating is the amount of pain we have collectively locked away that was triggered by the death of the hugest household name of the era.
No point rubbishing it - acknowledge its existence and then look at its roots. I'd say there's a ton of misery around, seeping out at the edges and manifesting in some weird ways, the widespread grief over Diana being only one form.
Something's gone very wrong in our society. I'd like to see a return of some sort of brotherly/sisterly love, a shared kinship of spirits so we can start relating to each other again instead of having to project outwards onto constructions like Diana.
BTW, my overriding image of her, once I learnt her coffin was made of lead, is of Di soup. Poor thing wasn't even allowed to dissolve back into the earth but is glooping away on some tiny island. Yich!
Tuesday 21st August 2007
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED AT MIRTH CONTROL
It's not only TV which batters you with an avalanche of fear and testosterone-fuelled aggression. A night out with mates increasingly means running the gauntlet of nutters and bullies.
At a recent London Mirth Control gig, a burly thirty-something comic, who the MC assured us was "the next Ricky Gervais", went into meltdown and threatened to fight my friend, a bespectacled grey-haired intellectual some 20 years his senior, because he hadn't laughed the last time he was at the venue. In full-on tantrum mode from the moment he took the stage, and throughout the entire course of his "set", the comic heckled us, demanded my friend be thrown out or he wouldn't continue, then demanded that we both leave or he wouldn't continue.
We stayed and he continued, breaking off every few moments like a diva whose dressing room has been painted the wrong shade of lavender, to shout at my friend whom he said he hated because he didn't like his "attitude".
Meanwhile, there were big rugby player types who the comic didn't threaten to fight. But he did bravely simper and ask who their favourite rugby player was.
The comic declaimed that we should appreciate his tremendous success, playing, as he had, the Labour Party Conference in 2005, the troops in Iraq, and having been booked for a ship's cruise a la Jim Davidson. He was clear that, apart from being posh and Oxbridge, he was now so famous that he could behave as he liked with impunity.
More shouting at my friend along the lines of, "I can't perform with you in the room, it's all about love and I'm not getting it from you. Leave. Leave now." "My (Irish) wife knows dodgy people and they'll come and do you." "C'mon, upstairs, I'm going to fight you." Variations on this last one went on for ages as he tried to whip up a lynch mob to get us turfed out. Sycophantic titterers and a craven MC aside, the audience was having none of it, and several expressed their shock and empathy in the interval.
I note that the comic's Unique Selling Point is "the traumas of being a sensitive man in a macho world".
Is this satire?
He ended by flouncing out, vowing never to play this Mirth Control again.
Should we break open the champagne in celebration?
Thursday 12th July 2007
Sad news in the garden, a study of nature red in tooth and claw ('scuse me if I'm sounding like Vita Sackville farkin' West). I was just clearing up the rotting remains of the loquat fruit crop on the dandelion lawn, chewed up by squirrels and dumped on the ground before we got a look-in, when I came across the distinctive flecked blue fragments of a blackbird's egg.
Earlier this year a pair of blackbirds built a nest in a bush, right next to where the downstairs cat likes to perch. She's already had a fledgling from the nest and now it looks like the squirrels have finished off the rest.
The nest has been abandoned (wonder why!) so I sneaked a peek. Inside was half a loquat deposited by a squirrel as one of its hidey-holes, and underneath, two perfect, unbroken blackbirds eggs - stone cold.
I love cats and squirrels but they really are decimating the bird population. Dunno whether to pet them or squirt them with the high-powered water-pistol now in my possession ...
Thursday 5th July 2007
Pam Ann, a comic - allegedly, came to Chinatown recently. Oh, how we laffed.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=5274677
In case you can't be bothered to check out this meisterwork, it goes something like this ...
Big butt-faced trannie woman makee video in London Chinatown, postee on MySpace. For the purposes of the furtherance of her art, butt-faced woman does two minutes' research, learns one sentence of cod-Cantonese for her character of "Lilly", a butt-faced trolley-dolly from Singapore, where they actually speak Mandarin. Character appears to possess no character.
To endear herself to the Chinese community, butt-faced woman dresses in Japanese fright wig. And velly funnee slit-eye grasses. Polyester slitty dress continues the slitty theme.
To rinky-dink musak, butt-faced woman then accosts the locals with inane grin which she thinks is an accurate reflection of how locals feel about themselves. Single Cantonese sentence, "Hurry-up," used to full dramatic effect; exactly what I am thinking as video is starting to feel like a life-sentence.
Butt-faced woman says "Hello Kitty" and flashes up picture of Hello Kitty to velly kindry make local Chinese community aware of their Japanese heritage. Ho ho, butt-faced woman laugh, convinced of own comic genius at work.
In Chinee shop, little girl goes into shock when she turns round to see butt-faced woman looming over her in what is likely to haunt her nightmares forever. A life-time of therapy beckons – parents consider suing.
No jokes yet but comic genius just warming up. "Crispy duck" looms large in butt-faced comic genius's world. Says "crispy duck" many time like mantra. Mantra fails – still no jokes.
Velly funny watching butt-faced woman mistaking bemused Asian people's politeness for gaiety. Their WTF vibe completely inscrutable to big lolloping comic's highly developed sensibirities.
Big butt-faced trannie woman planning to take show to Edinburgh where local Chinese community busy preparing warm welcome.
Tuesday 3rd July 2007
CANARIES, HEADLESS CHICKENS AND RATS IN A SACK.
There's a lot of fear around which is manifesting as aggression. I'm noticing this in political debate, the comedy scene, and in the kids who are killing each other in the UK. Children and comics are revealing themselves to be society's canaries and they are keeling over as society disintegrates. The current spate of failed terrorist attacks on innocent people is another manifestation of this madness, only without the sympathetic bits.
To continue the animal metaphor, we're behaving like rats in a sack. I admire the theatre of cruelty but the comics bigging themselves up at audience members' expense should remember that the much admired comedian, Bill Hicks, picked on targets bigger than himself. There was a lot of love in his act, fuelling his attacks on the powerful and the ignorant in defence of the oppressed.
Last Wednesday, on the day that Tony Blair finally left office and comics and satirists everywhere should have had fun, I watched a veteran of the circuit intimidate an audience into shutting up about Blair while he attacked those of us who had answered his question about our feelings for the former Prime Minister. From his vitriol you'd think it was we who helped kill 600,000 Iraqis and start World War III, and not our grinning friend.
The comedy clubs have been beset by a wave of, "I feel powerless so I'm going to kiss up to the powerful, and make you feel crap in order to make myself feel strong.' While that's always been there, I've never seen what's actually quite cowardly dominate the scene to such a degree. It's horrible. Get a grip, guys and gals.
Tuesday 26th June 2007
Who says satire's dead? Tony Blair appointed Middle East envoy after helping to engineer the beginings of World War III in the region and foisting the unelected, blatantly partisan Lord Levy on us as Britain's representative there?
Meanwhile, tution fees are set to go through the roof as Labour introduces naked market forces into education, meaning that top-notch universities like Oxford and Cambridge will be able to charge "according to demand". So back to a world where only the children of fat cats paying less tax than their cleaners will be able to afford access to prime intellectual resources.
Labour's tax-avoiding buddies may be sucking billions out of the economy but, luckily, Blair's vomit-inducing government keeps a watchful eye and a firm hand on that scourge of society; the single parent. Women who have been raped, or terrorised, or for some other reason consider the paternity of their children no-one else's business, are fined £200 for refusing to name the father on birth certificates. And now, in a caricature of egalitarianism, the fathers now face fines. How's that for prioritising?
Thursday 11th June 2007
This is great. Crazy Ping-Pong ...
Monday 11th June 2007
Here we go again, Groundhog Day in the press.
Yesterday's Observer contains a repetition of the 2001 smear that Chinese are smuggling into the UK contaminated meat linked to the 2001 outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, successfully refuted at the time and shown to have no factual basis.
Read Jamie Doward's article and you'll see his statement that "Much of it is smuggled from ... China," is not backed up in the article. And I've never heard of T-bone steaks in Britain costing £40-50 each as is claimed, unless it is at the sort of joint where a Home Affairs ed might care to bump up his expenses.
Is this a warm-up for the Beijing Olympics? Or something worse? There's nothing about illegal meat from China on the DEFRA site, and despite DEFRA minister Ben Bradshaw's quote in the article citing 104 tons of illegal meat last year, DEFRA can't tell me what how much of it was imported from China, if any, and what it consisted of. Their figures are for general geographical areas only - there are no figures for China. So why has Doward focused on China?
Doward has form. In The Observer in 2005, he tried to link the Chinese to the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak despite the apology from MAFF and no scientific proof.
He writes:
"Customs have also been plagued by tones [sic] of illegally imported canned meat entering the UK from China, a country which doesn't meet a number of hygiene requirements." (Note the use of the buzzword, "plagued.")
and ...
"Following the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, which cost the UK £8 billion and was the result, many experts believe, of infected pork being smuggled into the UK where it found its way into the animal food chain, the government promised to get tough on the illegal meat trade."
What actually emerged at the time was the lack of any evidence that infected pork smuggled into the UK from China had started the outbreak. MAFF considered the problem to be the feeding of unprocessed swill to pigs. So what is Doward and the Observer's agenda?
The late, great Hugo Young put his foot down over the unfounded accusation when it appeared in the Guardian in 2001. What's going on at the Obs? It is of concern to see genuine public health issues hijacked and used to scapegoat a specific minority. If we are going to have this ill-informed, bigoted crap recycled every few years perhaps certain journos should take to wearing swastikas because the tone of this reminds me of how another group in the not-so-distant past was linked to filth and pestilence by malign forces.
Tuesday 24th April 2007
The series I'm presenting for BBC Radio 4 finally goes out next Monday (30th) over two weeks.
Chinese in Britain - BBC Radio 4, 3.45pm weekday afternoons from Monday April 30th 2007
1 The First Chinese
2 The Creation of Chinatown: the myth and the reality
3 From Ship to Shore: experiences of Chinese seamen in Britain
4 Steam and Starch: life in a Chinese laundry
5 Educated in Britain : the history of Chinese students
6 Feet unbound: pioneering Chinese women in Britain
7 Mixed Blessings: growing up half Chinese
8 Artistic Pursuits: stepping out on Britain's cultural landscape
9 Screen Beginnings: the first British Chinese screen actors
10 Peking Duck... and Chips: early Chinese restaurants
All programmes will also be available to hear again online for seven days after broadcast at BBC Radio 4
News archive pg 5 (previous) >>>