Diet of Cheese

Two weeks with no post on here is unheard of (although I have some way to go to break Michelle Lipton’s 26 days of silence), but I have excuses! Lots of them. And they all seem to revolve around cheese.

25th February: dinner here with a soon-to-be-stratospherically-successful screenwriter (STBSSS), and the cheese diet is go! Macaroni cheese and cheesecake (is there actual cheese involved in the making of cheesecake? These are important questions, people). The STBSSS goes for something called a delice, which involves a large lump of cake, a huge flower and something that looks like a chocolate covered twig, which she bravely bites into: I’m pleased to report that it was edible.

26th February: dinner here, and the cheese theme continues. Ginos seem to cook almost exclusively with cream (apparently they have tankers of the stuff shipped in on an hourly basis*), but that’s not good enough for me: no, sir. With the infamous transglyceride incident still at the forefront of her mind, my wife gives me the filthiest of looks. But I don’t care: I’m on a cheese roll (well, not really, but you get the idea).

Medical aside: a couple of years ago, I had a routine cholesterol test, which flagged up a transglyceride (a nasty but delicious fat) level of about 16 - apparently, this is bad; very bad. The consultant accused me of going out on a fifteen pint bender the night before the blood test. Not me, guv. Then perhaps you ate twelve handfuls of butter? Nope: I’d remember that (I hope). We continued in this vein for at least thirty minutes: much hilarity ensued.

27th February: dinner here, in the library no less. Arf! However, I suspect that most of the books on display have been purchased from one of those places specialising in slightly worn but artful decor: the titles prove it – Domestic Fowl Rearing, The Poultry Keeper. At least they’re not books about cheese: by now I’m suffering dairy overkill, so I lay off the cheese for one night. That said, the dessert tasted suspiciously like mascarpone, but I’m past caring.

Telly box aside: does anyone remember that BBC series a few years back with Phil Daniels where he played a restaurant critic? Can’t remember the title of it (Holding On?), but in one memorable sequence, he goes to a restaurant, where he stuffs his face like Mr Creosote. However, he has another restaurant review to do that night, so he visits the gents, where he sicks up his dinner before waltzing off to his next assignment. Just thought I’d mention it ;-)

28th February: lunch here, and dinner here, where my wife and I seem to have the entire place to ourselves. No cheese on the menu (for which I thank the good baby Jesus above), but by now another problem has manifested itself: I'm bankrupt. I consider selling an internal organ, but decide that I would only eventually replace it with more cheese.

1st March: afternoon tea (!) here, where we sit next to an old lady who looks like a bad transvestite (I work with two transvestites – one of them has bigger biceps than me). I rapidly come to the conclusion that these are the only people who would be seen dead taking afternoon tea. More clotted cream than you shake a dainty cake fork at. By now, I’m starting to suffer from dairy-based hallucinations.

2nd March: back to (relative) normality with sausage and chips from here.

Once I’ve gotten over the hundredweight of cheese I’ve ingested over the last two weeks or so, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
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* Obviously a lie. It's at least every thirty minutes.

Off on a Tangent, part 7 – Monarch: The Lost Album of Leslie Feist

Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head) was Leslie Feist’s first solo recording, released in 1999 when she was just 23. Subsequent releases have had the benefit of major label clout behind them, but Monarch was released on a tiny Canadian label, and was predominantly sold at shows. It’s been out of print for years, and apparently copies go for more than $500 on EBay (when they ever appear that is).

Even getting to hear the songs on the album is difficult enough. There’s a dodgy Russian mp3 website that apparently has the whole thing available as a download, but my credit card doesn’t have a death wish, so that’s out. However, there have recently been a couple of BitTorrent sites with the whole album available for download (one’s here). My technical ability in this area is positively laughable, but over the weekend I managed to grab all eleven tracks in glorious all singing, all dancing MP3 format.

And it’s absolutely fantastic.

There’s obviously a reason as to why this album has been out of print so long, but I’m damned if I know why. If it was a major departure from Let It Die or The Reminder, then I could understand – but it isn’t. Songs such as It’s Cool to Love Your Family or One Year AD wouldn’t sound out of place on Feist’s new long player, and a song such as La Sirena (two fifths Cocteau Twins, two fifths torch song, one fifth ambient guitar wig out) is as gorgeous as anything that Feist has ever recorded (sorry, I haven’t a clue how to post MP3 files on this blog thing – someone write and give me a tutorial).

However, all this leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I used to work with a guy who downloaded all his music for free using a variety of undoubtedly dodgy websites, which to me is a crime on a par with touting concert tickets on EBay. The problem with Monarch is that it’s simply not commercially available in any form, nor is it likely to ever be so. All the 'official' MP3 sites I looked at turn up nothing but dead ends, so what’s a guy to do? I could send Ms Feist a few Canadian dollars, but unfortunately I don’t have her PayPal details ;-)

So for the moment, I’m enjoying the album for free, which just doesn’t seem right somehow.

Perhaps I need to make a donation to some musician’s benevolent fund or something ;-)

Times are Tough

Bearing in mind the current WGA Writer's Strike and the negotiations concerning DVD residuals, here's an interesting article in today's Guardian by David Teather. Here are a couple of extracts::

GMI estimates that DVDs made $8.5bn of profits for the six major studios in 2004. By 2006, those profits had dropped to $6.9bn.

Note that we're talking profit here, not turnover.

It is not immediately apparent where the revenue to replace slipping DVD sales will come from. It seems unlikely that consumers will pay the same amount for a download. Still, Gubbins thinks the current financial state of play will lead the studios to push more quickly into new forms of media. "I think we will see an acceleration into things like video on demand and downloading your own content. They are small at the moment and they have been kept artificially small. No one will risk the existing revenues when they can't yet be sure of new media. But I think that there will be a lot more attention and a lot more of a push to accelerate this new world and to make it happen."

If you ignore the rather dubious timing of the appearance of this article, it seems to me that the door is wide open negotiation-wise for the WGA at the moment. Go guys!

Code 46 - Postscript...

Leanne commented that none of Michael Winterbottom’s films ever seem to set the box office alight, so I thought I’d have a dig about for Code 46. And whaddya know:

Budget; $7,500,000
Worldwide Theatrical Gross: $741, 273

Add DVD rentals and sales, and I guess you might be looking at a generous estimate gross of about $1 million.

I think we can safely say that these figures are a disaster.

So who’s to blame when a film such as Code 46 goes tits up with a barely a whimper? Search me, but perhaps The Washington Post sums it up best:

It will almost certainly attract a cult audience - it has the kind of self-serious grandiosity that swindles the young and feckless into believing it's significant - but it could have used a few ray guns and mind melds.

Pip pip!