The Pleasures/Perils of Keeping a Diary 😂
We're not all Bridget Jones. Plus, how peculiar was Prince???
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Hello, Lovelies, How the hell are you? Do you ever feel like Kafka’s been reading your journal? Hmmm…
So, here’s a funny story of how people stay awake in parliament when they’re not busy shouting at each other with hagiographic monikers (“his lordship, the fair and honorable gentle-yadda…”) while sporting powdery wigs…
The rules of parliament do not allow you to read books in committee, but you can write them. (Though, apparently, one minister did manage to read all of War and Peace while serving on the Finance Bill Committee, by photocopying 50 pages a day and tucking them inside the Budget Red Book. Can you imagine a US Senator going to such nefarious lengths to read??? Never mind Tolstoy! We’re such a dumb lot.
“I always say, keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you,” says Gyles Brandreth in Literary Review. He started at age 11 when his great aunt gave him an abridged— “and thoroughly expurgated”—edition of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, which inspired him to keep his own, which invariably led years later to…
“Mildly squiffy” in the Commons library at 2 am, I once wrote a highly colorful account of a late-night spat I’d witnessed between the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor. The next morning, “sober and aghast”, I couldn’t find my diary anywhere…
He searched high and low before remembering where it was. He rushed to the library and saw Peter Mandelson, already then known as the Prince of Darkness, leafing through his papers. “My heart stood still.” Peter looked up and smiled: “I’ve found it.”
Mildly squiffy… Do your WORST, my good sir! I love diaries.
Doofus of the Week!
Miami: zoning for branded towers
Miami is increasingly crowded with “branded towers”, says Curbed: apartment blocks sponsored by luxury companies. Porsche, Aston Martin, Mercedes, Bentley, Armani, Fendi, Missoni, Dolce & Gabbana – all have their names attached to posh condo projects. And buyers, “besides the thrill of swimming beneath a giant Mercedes logo”, know that a company “they adore and trust” has signed off on their new pad. Does this mean you are now technically living in your car? Meaning is officially kaput.
I can see the AbFab architects now…
Doofus Honorable Mention: il Papa Ancora!
Pope Francis, again, for apparently telling a group of young priests that “gossip is a women’s thing” and that men have to do the talking because “we wear the trousers”.
Hello? Have you all looked in the mirror lately?
The comments came only a week after the 87-year-old pontiff apologized for using the Italian homophobic slur frociaggine, which roughly translates as “faggotness”. Just atrocious. I think maybe the Pope should stop talking. He needs one of my cards.
They work extraordinarily well.
And now for some marvels…
Cyndi Lauper… on her farewell tour, documentary, and being solely herself. (Gift Link)
Lauper’s ambition and visibility are something we should celebrate. Still, I wonder when women like J Lo (who I have found insufferable times—just given the diva factor) are punished for their ambition. Why is she catching such heat? As Jen Romolini put it, we shouldn’t question why women are ambitious, but rather what are they ambitious for. And how can we enable it? Because we need midlife women’s cultural visibility more than ever.
“Oh, Moon’s been in, has he?”
On Alan Edwards’s first day as a music publicist in 1975, says Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph, the Who drummer Keith Moon arrived at the office in Pimlico “wearing a fur coat, monocle, and top hat, and introduced himself by tipping over a desk and trashing the place”. Edwards thought he’d be sacked, but when his boss returned from lunch he just looked around, shrugged, and said: “Moon’s been in, has he?”
In a scene straight out of The Night Agent, Keith Richards once left him “waiting for seven hours in a tiny room with a single chair and a broken window”, before bursting in and interrogating him on blues and reggae.
Other clients were just as weird. During his tenure with Prince, the artist had a suitcase adapted so he could hide inside it and spy on meetings. This almost went very wrong during an American tour, when the case was accidentally packed with others in the corridor ready to be transported thousands of miles, “with Prince still inside”. I mean… I’m probably the most claustrophobic girl I know, but can you imagine being the assistant who had to zip Prince into a carry-on? It's just too surreal—even for me.
I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards is available everywhere.
Feelings Without Names
If you don’t already know Grant Snider’s work, prepare to be enchanted.
Janet Planet: such a poetic debut by playwright Annie Baker
Love, love, love this magical Berkshires summer.
Stay safe, Lovelies, and know I’m thinking of you in between edits and much change – xoxo, gotham girl
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Prince was just doing what all of us have wanted to do at one time or another... we just weren't small enough to do it. LOL
ya
"where the men are men...and the sheep are all nervous"
😉