Found this on Digg today. You have to laugh.

Epiphinal Moments

Just found this in my phone - the epiphinal moment when I realised after acting sommelier for my family at Christmas that red wine should never ever be served straight from the bottle.

Post skiing

By flying from Amsterdam to Barcelona and then catching a coach I think I took a more circuitous route than strictly necessary to Andorra this weekend but it was worth every mile. I have to say the experience of traveling with teen-aged students on a bus made me a) appreciate how annoying I was and b) feel old and vaguely responsible. Oh if only they could capture that feeling and sell it, school masters everywhere would breathe a sigh of relief. (Note to self what else makes me feel like that?!)

Jane a great friend who I met when I was just a wee slip of an 18 year old lad accompanied me. She spent last season teaching English in BCN and then snow boarding every weekend in the mountains of Andorra. Oh the life!

I was only in Andorra, well Pal actually, for two days but the weather was almost perfect: it dumped thick wet snow the whole of Saturday while I was getting back into the groove. Viz was pretty poor but we knew the next day would be worth the pain upfront.

I had an amusing lesson with an Argentian guy who didn't really show me very much but laughed a lot, had cute italian teeth (don't ask!) and showed me round some of the mountain. I got a few blues under my belt and was cruising by the end of the day.

Sunday morning in true turnover day style the pistes were empty, and we had almost 15cm of powder - perfect! I did a blue run first thing, stumbled a bit but before I could say Nancy Reagen - I mean no - Jane pushed me onto the lift up to the top of Pic du Cubil. We could barely see 15m in front of us when we got there and the prospect of a difficult red run terrified me. As it happened I shot down enjoying the more challenging faster, thiner pistes, it dumped us onto the blue that was irking me earlier and I just breezed through finishing a la the Olympics in a spray of victory.

On the way back up we noticed there was this beautiful open slope off piste covered in untouched powder. A quick look around and we surreptitiously crept under the fence (bloody hard when you're in skiis - thank God for my limbo skills) and I had my first powder off piste experience. I tumbled, I fell, and then I switched my music off and concentrated on form: boy what a feeling, tight turns on fresh powder, the whole vallye below you and no one else around. Bliss.

I finished the day going back up to the Pic du Cubil and flew down the whole red and blue run listening to KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" stopping for no one and takng no prisoners. Man I wished I was staying for another day when I got to the bottom.

Still I'm off to Davos in a few weeks :-)

Thought for the day:

Once you have learned to love and accept yourself you will never waste your time again because you know how valuable it is.

Thought for the day ...

"I never met a man I couldn't drink handsome."

Judging Amy

So I was at the dentist last week and as she was peering over into my mouth, she asked do I watch Judging Amy? bit of a strange questions to ask, but I said I do actually (it's a cool program lots of deep issues and current themes while still being able to make you laugh, shame it just got cancelled). Anyway apparently I look like one of the characters - Kyle, who ironically is a recovering alcoholic.

Go figure, but the resemblance is kinda scary ....

We will fight them on the beaches ...

Over the last year or so I have been reading the biographies of the great leaders of the 20th century, I started by chance in LAX when I picked up the recent copy of Mao's biography by Jung Chang (Wild Swans) and her partner Jon Halliday. Being a historian myself I started reading the book with a fair amount of scepticism, there were far too many subjective comments or what i felt to be personalised interpretations. However one day as I started getting towards the end of the book I checked to see how many pages were left: well I'd almost finished because about 300 pages are references! I saw that this was such a detailed account of this man's life it startled me, the accounts of his duplicity, his wanton disregard for the value of human lifeand his cruelty have made me wonder if this is one of the most despicable human beings ever to have lived.

I moved on to Robert Southampton's account of Stalin's life, again riveting and then to John Toland's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Hitler which amazingly I felt the need after a week of comments everywhere I went (trams, cafes, restaurants, convent, swimming pool, ECT treatment centre) to cover with some innocuous paper (actually the inside of my ABN AMRO bank statement envelopes - inpenetrable!).

The mechanics of despotism are strikingly similar across all three nations: the essential planks of revolution are fear, uncertainty, and doubt (A.K.A. FUD). All used propaganda and violence to great effect, rallying people and pushing party membership as a method for building a power and money base. The violence and the terror machine deployed by each of the tyrants were all militaristic in nature and gained their mandate through force of arms (the Red Army, the Checka - later the NKVD - and the Gestapo along side the SS).

More interestingly International diplomacy also played heavily in all of their journey's to the top: Mao would never have got in if it hadn't been for the Russians intefering with Chiang Kai Sek and the Americans bumbling into the Korean war. Stalin would never have been able to halt the German progression without signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and constantly playing the Germans power-block off against the Anglo-French governments, and how about the Yalta Conference where the world was literally carved up on a piece of paper?! Hitter was the master of manipulation, famously pushing the British PM Neville Chamberlin into the Munich agreement and making them betray Czechoslovakia, something that they remember still unto this day.

Anyway I have read the 'bad guys' now and have started on the first William Manchester's three volume history of Winston Churchill, entitled Visions of Glory. It's easily the best written biography I have ever read, hugely engaging, and also manages to include an exceptionally astute sociological analysis of the times which really aids the reader to understand the behaviour of the main characters. I'll write more when I've finished, but will leave you with my favourate quote to date,

"Criticism may not be an agreeable feeling, but it is necessary; it serves a similar function to pain in the human body: it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things."

You go Winston ;-)

More on Luke Slater

So Saturday night descended and my smile of expectancy grew, I'd gotten a few friends of mine together who I know appreciate some good music, had a big meal of sushi and medicinal sake, and rocked on down to Studio 80 just after midnight. The crowd was already enjoying themselves, the resident DJ called Mark / aka Recovery Sounds was really laying down a deep carpet of sexy dark techno and I just knew I'd come home. This was the first time I've been in a club since Ibiza last year that I wanted to just motherfucking dance! (Cue song from Jerry Springer the Opera)

Recovery Sounds played a storming set before Luke Slater came on (with a slightly unnerving bottle blond look) laying down his first tracks and taking no prosoners at all. His favourates came out through the course of the evening - Planetary Assault Systems, All Exhale, there was even a minimal mix of Freak Funk. After the first hour there was a bit of a let up and he moved more into his techno pop experimental sound, people took this as a natural break to grab an extra few drinks, get to know those around them, before the tempo picked up again. The rest I can't report on accurately, I left around 0530, feeling like one lucky sated bitch!

Good music / lack thereof

Without descending into a rant about the state of music *yawn* in the club scene I have recently been despairing about the good ol' days. I spent a week in London in December and if it hadn't been for the steady supply of strong liquor chasers and Magners cidar that has suddenly become de rigeur I wouldn't have made it through the clubs. The music is garbage, re-cycled 4x4 beats with a lame voice over by [insert dragqueen / diva name here].

Completeley by chance I was in a club in Amsterdam called Studio 80 recently, and was leaning against the wall in the toilets waiting for the multiple people in one locker to exit when my eyes were caught by a striking poster of one Luke Slater. I used to listen to his music back in 97 and 98 and was blown away by his mind fuck progressive futuristic blaze of beats. It turns out he was playing there the next week. I spent that week digging out my old CDs, getting them on my iPod and working out to them / cycling to work remembering how much fun they were.

He's got a huge body of work since I last bought anything, and I see also that he's now signed a contract with Fabric London to play there 5 times a year - next gig is on the 25th March. I'm so there :-) I can recommend the first disk of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's the best workout CD ever .. more later when the rest of my amazon container arrives, oh and more on the night as well!!

SO I was just in Rotterdam for the film festival which was a great hark back to the London days of the LLGFF and the LFF: camping out for 10 days in the same smoky cinemas, chatting late with producers, writers, talent, bar staff, anyone cute, anyone cute and unavailable, anyone that had a car and a driver ... you get the picture.

The festival had a strongly Asian slant (no pun intented!) and produced quite a mixed bag I thought. I was only there for a few days and three movies, hardly a good cross section but came away with some interesting observations.

I saw a movie late Friday night called Fresia which was very much of the Battle Royale genre, but this one was quite stilted acting, I came away with the sense that the director was trying to make the dialogue more poignant by interjecting long pauses. One bonus was you could take bottles of wine and glasses into the theatre :-)

Next morning (fog lifting) I saw a movie called How is your fish today? Now this movie evoked two responses in me. I'll start with the more positive: great shots of Beijing and this amazing town called Mohe, apparently the northernmost point of China. There's this great part where they're on a train to the north and there's this huge sheet of ice inside the train!!

The second: how more boring can a film get? Did the director set herself a trap? It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: the movie is about an author who writes a screenplay and uses his characters to try and escape the dull confined life he leads. The screenplay is sent back by the producer as the worst thing he's ever seen, and he then tries to re-write it by living the life of his one dimensional anti-hero.

Well the movie isn't much better! There is no empathy with the characters, the central actor just couldn't have killed his girlfriend (as the author realises 1/2 way through the movie) and I have never had an hour go so slowly I was looking at my watch thinking it had to be wrong. IN desperation I leisurely walked out to take a leak, exclaiming loudly as I exited into the beautiful morning sun 'ahh it's so boring' only to see the actor calmly observing me over a coffee and another of his interminable cigarettes. Oh well: the truth hurts.

Now the highlight of my day is this movie AFR. Can I just say I walked into this movie without reading anything about it. I like to consider myself a current affairs buff and was mildly surprised that I had never heard of this chap Anders Fogh Rasmutten who alledgedly was the Danish PM, but hey it's a small country and it doesn't make the news much! (ducking the retribution of my Danish friend Thomas!) . The movie is about the PM who has this gay relationship with a younger guy who turns out to be an anarchist. When they split up inevitably things get nasty it is ends up with the lover killing him. The movie twists and turns like a twisty turny thing and you never quite can make up your mind. Top points go to the cocky photographer who after he gets his new Leica video camera films himself cumming on a pier in slow motion!!

Basically I thought the movie was a real documentary and was electrified as it unfolded: it was so good! A bit fantastical, but they had amazing footage of this guy with all the european presidents and George Bush, loads of CNN footage etc. Anyway I felt very blond afterwards, but hey I got to feel elated for 85m - that's priceless. Go see this movie, it's brilliant.

OK, signing off more later.

Back in the sphere ....