Highlights from the Set Design of the Glass Spider Tour.

I couldn't sleep last night so I ended up debating with myself whether David Bowie somehow rendered himself impervious to the cheesiness of successive generations (patchouli and astrological charts in the sixties, star-shaped glasses and rainbow wigs in the seventies, etc.) by being the great transcendent strange one. But then I remembered the Glass Spider Tour and found the following document. It appears that no one surveyed the Eighties unscathed – no one.

Click to read more ...

Parenthood Is

...the last-remaining flesh of your ego being scooped out and replaced with a tsunami of fear, love, sleep deprivation, money worries, education worries, health worries, environmental worries, zombie apocalypse worries and shopping lists.

Just saying.

Is it a legitimate excuse to say you've not written anything on your blog for the past two months because a deliberate silence feels more profound than anything you might say and you're also feeling a bit exhausted by the internet's insatiable appetite for narcissistic noise?

No, I didn't think so.

Galadriel's Choice.

Scary GaladrielYou know that bit in LOTR when Frodo offers Galadriel the ring and she thinks about it a bit and then goes all scary and then gets all sad and normal again before saying, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West'? First of all, it's a bit Craig David to refer to herself in the third person like that. Second, I've come to realise this is the defining metaphor for growing old. Here she is being offered everything she could ever conceivably want: power, immortality, a life without fear. However, knowing as she does that she can't make the selfish choice without corrupting herself or the sacred balance of the universe, yadda-yadda-yadda, she says no. And that's just like getting old. Sure, you can be a dick about it and cling onto the dream of your youth, when you were amazingly wonderful and important, if only to yourself. But that, as Sauron learned the hard way, does not get you invited to Elrond's birthday party. Alternatively, you can be unselfish and let the natural course of things diminish you gradually, without eradicating whatever it is you still believe in. This is probably how it feels to be a cliff: you stand there every day getting eroded, and after a while you're pretty much unrecognisable even to yourself – but you're still a cliff. There's a certain comfort in thoughts like these. And that's probably why I find myself – most often in the shower when I've noticed some new travesty inflicted by my body's ongoing attritional war with time, whispering to myself, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West.' 

Beans, Beans, Beans.

Some feijão.My wife complains whenever I eat feijão, the staple accompaniment to every Brazilian lunch. She says it makes me smell 'empty'. How is that even possible? And even assuming it IS possible, what am I supposed to do about it? Does she think I don't have enough to worry about, without her accusations of metaphysical halitosis as well? Jesus.