The Farmstead

People, it's serious: inflation has hit the jelly bean world.

I was just buying a bag of Jelly Belly Sours and admiring the new packaging they've put them in, only to realise that they've shaved fifty grams off the 300 and kept them at the same price! Although the worst part is that I first was able to tell because the bag felt light... :/ And that's even though they've cleverly made the bag the same size as the old one, but made most of it opaque apart from a window at the bottom, so you can't immediately see that unlike the old filled-to-bursting cellophane bag, this one's only full part of the way up with a load of air at the top.

Honestly, it should go in the Retail Price Index. If I weren't pathetic I would have said they're now too expensive. (Even though I've lived through price hikes before, and relative to when I used to buy them pick'n'mix with my pocket money they represent a rather lower proportion of my income...) Stupid jelly beans.

I'm a bit boring at the moment, because the new academic year has kicked off and everything is busy! But, at the same time, I am also proceeding further with my flat purchase and thus wasting lots and lots of time looking at interiors...

So, something happened about a year ago when I decided I agreed with everyone in the know(...!) that pastels have somehow become edgy again. Maybe it's the bronies, though I doubt it, but they do remind me of the world I inhabited in the early 90s back when you could be a child and no one expected you to like anything cool. Also they remind me of sweets.

But! They are difficult. So even though I now dream of having some sort of pastelly bedroom, I find myself concerned it will not work. Because it is a very fine line between faded death by ugliness/that icy blue or mint going very cold and unwelcoming/that pink like some little madam got her dad to go to B&Q and zingy tasty pastelly joy, where the room is alight with E numbers.

The key seems to be in the clever use of neon, which appear to be pastels' natural friends - or so says Pantone, so it must be true:



But then the neon isn't quite neon, more like a very saturated primary. Argh! But isn't the combination amazing????

( ++ more evidence )

I also fear that the other key is a liberal and sensible use of white and pale grey, neither of which I can say I am naturally drawn to. Especially white walls; blech. I suppose this is the challenge! Because how can you say no to the 80s???


source

So, last week I posted a fic for seasonal_spuffy. There a four chapters: one, two, three, four.

It's called In Remission, and this is the summary I posted with it at the time:

In the five years Spike's been missing, the world around Buffy has irrevocably changed. The general population has woken up to vampires' existence and the kill count has dropped way down. She's sharing a house with a soulless vampire, still going by the name of Faith. But what does Spike have to do with it? And what does it mean for their future?

The thing is, I kind of came up with this summary a while before I'd written the ending and really worked out what the bloody heck I was babbling on about. I may have slightly written the whole thing in a forced rush. But I'm quite happy with it, all told, so I would love for you to read it! I do not know what title and wankier, more characteristic summary I would have come up with had I had more time, but I did realise eventually that the whole thing is a Foucault love-in. I don't even know where to begin explaining, but may I at least offer this quote from a conversation with Gilles Deleuze:

The other day I was speaking to a woman who bad been in prison and she was saying: "Imagine, that at the age of forty, I was punished one day with a meal of dry bread." What is striking about this story is not the childishness of the exercise of power but the cynicism with which power is exercised as power, in the most archaic, puerile, infantile manner. As children we learn what it means to be reduced to bread and water. Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. "I am within my rights to punish you because you know that it is criminal to rob and kill . . ." ... What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn't hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely "justified," because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.

Brutal, n'est-ce pas? I want to paste some more quotes, to encompass a bit more social theory/theory of human nature, but I can't find anything specific enough. But basically everything he says is gold. And dangerous. And what happens when Buffy is older and wiser and stops believing Chomsky and has to face this shit?

... That's basically it. And the quote really isn't that appropriate anyway. But stuff happens!

.

I love John Lydon. But you knew that. I also love John Hurt, and am still sad about the time my brother had me convinced for three minutes that he was dead. This was a post I meant to do, but didn't have time, so I'm doing it now.

I have recently discovered more music and shit. One track of which is Group Rhoda, who do like tropicana post-punk, which is the best. The track I want ain't on YouTube, so you'll have to trust me. But in other news, I also like Frankie Rose's Street of Dreams:



Naturally this is a cover of the Damned song from 1985, which is basically the same but with Dave Vanian and saxophones. The funny thing is, though, swapping in guitars for the saxophones, it's quite easy to recognise that the chord sequence and beat are essentially Billy Idol's White Wedding.

It's almost like The Damned and Billy Idol came from the same scene. Which they did. But fuck knows they don't want people to think it...

This is the end. It's not that interesting. But it is anyway!

Thanks for the comments on my fic, gang! Replying to them soon. The library's shut and I'm supposed to do some work at home today... But video!

ETA: OK, so the BBC embed code doesn't work properly. Link instead:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01csgqy

I dunno if it'll play outside of the UK...

gingerwall posted this interview with Mila Kunis on her journal, but I had to bring it over here so that anyone who hasn't seen it can. Basically, Chris Stark is really nervous about the interview, so Mila helps him out by letting him go off-piste in the subject matter, and then... They end up talking about going down the pub in Watford. Watford!!! He envisions this day of fun where they go to Nando's and then to the football and then get trashed down the pub. It's worth it for the Watford Nando's shout-out alone (♥), but in general is just brilliant.



ETA: Heeee, more reaction. As far as I'm watching, this basically breaks down the video, but it explains the set up more too.

Confessions of a Shopaholic's on iPlayer at the moment, so I watched it, for dubious reasons known to no one. I can't say it was very good, but it got surprisingly close to actually dealing with addiction (actually) at a few points. There were a few beats when it really could have broken into some sort of Trainspotting-esque reality and you realised that the shopping had been a metaphor all along and the frivolous world of New York magazine journalism was in fact the imaginings of someone in a hovel somehow managing to catch repeats of Ugly Betty...

But, anyway, it made me miss the early days of Being Human, when it was all just a heroin addict, a domestic abuse escapee and an HIV-positive randomer trying to make a go of it in Bristol. I don't know why they never realised that the world they'd created wasn't epic fantasy so much as something very, very small. :(

I had a weird mind-wander as I was getting ready today where I thought about what I would do if I won the lottery, as in actually what I would do from the first moment of getting the cheque onwards. It was odd. I ended up deciding that I would find a massive influx of money very stressful and confusing, because at heart I rely too much on being part of an (academic) institution to want that much financial independence. But at the same time I am and will always be a magpie, so I really wouldn't mind some posher clothes and posher food in my life, as well as a new computer and a decent electric whisk (my Asda Basics eight quid one has just broken). And I still really want to do the whole Trans-Siberian Railway one day. But maybe when I'm retired. And have learned Russian and Chinese.

All in all, I think I want to learn more languages. And have decided that thinking about the future is strange.

Has there been a better thing on television in a long time? I really don't know because this is just so clever. I can't even sum it up, just...

OK, so we start with the industrial revolution, with all its dark satanic mills and dreams for the future - are we Blake dreaming of a world without industry (just cricket), or Caliban!Brunel dreaming of a world of noise and riches? No matter the answer we go through to the 50s (ish) anyway, getting noise and darkness and yet achievement, the Olympic rings wrought out of steel.

We then get to 'Second to the Right and Straight on till Morning': the NHS, children, fantasy literature and the moment between sleep and waking - still caught up in dreams and nightmares. Through jazz and the outfits this is also definitely pitched as a historical transition between the Industrial Revolution and the digital age pageant later. It's like an investigation of what the Industrial Revolution produced - the end of infant mortality as a fact of life (labour, if we imagine child labour, transforms into children being looked after in bed and at GOSH) plus the rise of literacy. Put these two together and the main threat to childhood shifts from actual death to fantasy figures, Voldemort like a pantomime grim reaper and Mary Poppins the image of childcare and education. Everything ends happily like a fairy tale; 'childhood' as a safe bubble away from work and threat is banishable even as a nightmare. But this is even undercut by the nurses doing folk dances, as if they're pretending to still live in the idyll. Which we know has gone.

This establishment of childhood and safety then inevitably spreads to produce Youth Culture as a whole in the digital age, which gets it's own celebration in 'Frankie and June Say Thanks, Tim'. (The whole ceremony is about handing over to the next generation; the narrative of the show is about how that happened with cultural authority.) But even that's shadowed by this tension between illusion and reality (all the dancing backdropped by fictional representations of life that is constructed media culture, embellishing on children's literature), and this sense of darkness. I can't catch all the lyrics in the chronological montage, but it's so heavy once you get past the romance:

( My sketched transcription... )

So even with this massive upheaval, from rural idyll through industrial pain through childhood's invention and welfare and Teh Yoof taking control; the shift in power from Top Hat Man to Multicultural Dancing Everyone, we're still caught up in this dark, fearful, shifting space between reality and illusion, dreams and hope and dissatisfaction. (The defiance in this section - And we don't care / I just think I'm free / We will be victorious - only comes to segue into uncertainty - Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me.)

... So, that's just how I read it (expressed very badly). But I can't help but think it's one of the most interesting national portraits I've seen in a long time. I like this bloke Boyle... :D

(God, I have do something today... Why haven't I done anything?)

So, I've signed up for a Pinterest invite... I saw the button on the Topshop website and thought to myself, 'you know, I would actually have a use for a service where I could store a mood board of aaaaaaall the clothes I'm lusting after - it might even help some buying decisions'. I'm going to sign up under my fandom name, because I can only ever imagine linking to it here for some reason - but, erm, I doubt anyone will be that interested in my obsession with dark red, jewel tones, leather, silk and wool and gold and BRIGHT THINGS (you see why I can never afford anything and have to lust)...

But! Does anyone have a Pinterest account? Do you use it? Is it fun? Browsing, there seems to be lots of tasty pictures of cake and cocktails, but considering I am always in the mood for a margarita anyway I'm not sure this is sensible to have in easy access. Oooooh, mood board of sweets!!

This is brought you by Gold Jacquard Mini Skirt, which makes me miss an old skirt I used to have in gold brocade. :( Also, I own two pairs of this style of jeans in dark grey and marine blue... But I cannot buy a pair in dark red, because otherwise most of my jumpers would make me look like I don't even know what. But it would be nice to have a reminder they exist. Also, eighteen pound jumper? Bargainous. Plus they do the same in a lovely heathered black...

I LOVE AUTUMN/WINTER AND AM SO GLAD TO SEE THE BACK OF SPRING/SUMMER AND ITS PASTELS.

ETA: Lavender mojito!!