‘Mrs Blair’ is spot on.

Governments must be prepared as well to stand up to cultural pressures, however strong, to enforce existing legislation. Many of the countries where widows are treated worst have good laws in place to protect them. The problem is that they are routinely ignored by local communities and seldom enforced.

Oh, ho ho ho ho ho! This is soooooo funny. You know what they need to sort out their mess? Indians. They’re good at everything!

Now, call me shallow, but my first thought on seeing the Guardian story is ‘isn’t Nick Griffin SPECTACULARLY ugly??!!’ I mean, not just unattractive, but EXTRAORDINARILY gob-smackingly repulsive. Imagine waking up in the morning and seeing THAT in the mirror.

[We liberal, progressive, left-leaning English nationalists on the other hand .... oh, we're all gorrrrrgeous! xx]

Well, I suppose this is good news. Turns out a young woman won’t be getting 200 lashes for having the nerve to be gang-raped after all.

But [and isn't there ALWAYS a 'but' with these things] why can King Abdullah not just accept that the original verdict is wrong? Why does it have to be dressed up in caring about the ‘psychological effects’? Still, suppose it makes no difference to her.

 [UPDATE: It gets worse. Kudos to the New York Times for pushing the issue. Turns out she’s had death threats. But they’ll let her live in a safehouse if she wants (though I imagine this is less like a feminist commune run by north London liberals and more like a, well, er ‘prison’). Instead of, you know, actually PROSECUTING the people who threaten her. Merry Christmas to our fascist friends in the Middle East.

All right. Who got a My Bloody Valentine ticket then?

This. I can’t wait to see.

MY STRUGGLE, BY PARIS HILTON
Paris Hilton has grown up, apparently. The 26-year-old heiress has vowed to change her image after being jailed for 23 days for breaking her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case.
“There are a lot of bad people in LA. Before, my life was about having fun, going to parties - it was a fantasy,” she tells Newsweek magazine in its next issue.
“But when I had time to reflect, I felt empty inside. I want to leave a mark on the world.”
Hilton says she is now committed to using her celebrity status for the greater good. Next month, she plans to go to Rwanda to bring attention to the African country.
“I’m scared, yeah. I’ve heard it’s really dangerous,” she says. “I’ve never been on a trip like this before.”
Hilton, accompanied by a children’s charity called Playing for Good, will visit schools and health-care clinics as part of a five-day charity mission. The trip will be filmed.
“I love having everything documented,” says Hilton, who hopes to turn the footage into a film. “It shows people what everyday life is like for me, how hard I work. There are a lot of misconceptions about me.”
Hilton says her dating life is not as wild as the tabloids make it out to be.
“I’ve been linked to so many guys, but there’s nothing romantic going on at all,” she says. “I get along better with guys than girls. I trust them more. They don’t get all girly and mean. Girls have drama.”
-AP

three panel hollywood

om nom nom nom

not nemi

I’ve lived with it for three weeks now and can finally say the new PJ Harvey album, White Chalk, is astonishing. The shift to writing on piano has subtly twisted the songs [ironically similar to the way Nick Cave got a new angle by moving from piano to guitar on the Grinderman album] leaving a lot more space for texture. Two/three minutes into To Talk To You there’s all kinds of strange static noises buzzing away deep in the mix.

Even when songs start off as “normal” PJ creations - The Piano’s “Hit her with a hammer. Teeth smashed in. Red tongues twisting. Look inside her skeleton” over a Rid Of Me style guitar throb - it doesn’t take long before the sound goes off into all kinds of new directions with harp and zither. Which makes the “Nobody’s listening” and “oh God, I miss you” refrains even more spine-chiling than they would have been over a straighter rock backing.

The much-hyped “amateur” keyboard playing is interesting [sounds rather like me finding a piano at three in the morning after copious amounts of vodka]. She’s using the piano in a very repetitive, percussion way with lots of repeated phrases and hammered on-the-beat notes. The effect is sometimes like that Richard James was aiming for on the slower more Satie-esque tracks on Aphex Twin’s Druqs. Also, it carves out routes back to Polly’s roots - other Too Pure artists like Pram and Moonshake.

The whole vaudevillian schtick with the hair and dresses made me think first of the new American folk revivalists. You can almost imagine her out in some backwoods in Louisiana jamming for four hours on a broken banjo. But the outfits are also peculiarly English, harking back to a kind of English rural 19th century naturalist art. Makes me think of Thomas Hardy. You can imagine Polly [even the name works] heading out on a moonlit night to take the short walk over the hill to relatives in the neighbouring village. It can only end in tragedy.

The title track, White Chalk, is the most explicitly “placed” with the line “white chalk sticking to my shoes” showing just how much she’s not only connected with her home landscape, but just how much that landscape has, literally, rubbed off on her. And it’s an old trick, of course, the idea of getting a sense of mortality by looking at landscape and geology. But it’s still spine-tingling when she says “I know, these chalk hills will rot my bones.” I know I will die. I know I will be buried here. Or, I know that if I stay here these chalks hills will rot me.

And on Silence. “All those places where I recall the memories that gripped me and pinned me down. I go to these places pretending to think. I can think of nothing … I freed myself from my family. I freed myself from work. I freed myself and remained alone.”

The final track, The Mountain, is one of the most astonishing. Beginning with a swirling piano figure that almost recalls Joanna Newsom, but she doesn’t give that piano any space or room to breathe. It just gets more and more dense and dark and murky. A feeling added to by an insistent scary bass line and a thrilling ending with Polly pushes her voice right to the top and turning the lines after “… since you betrayed me so” into almost a scream.

It will be interesting to see where she goes from here. Hopefully it won’t be a one-off meander into more experimental territory, but the start of an artist who has always been interesting [but on the fringes of my interest] really pushing to break free. If she’s going to walk down some dark paths then I’ll be sticking with her.

… is THIS? I sense a heated debate on the last.fm artist profile wiki coming on.

Phrases you could never imagine Lawrence coming out with, part 1: “We’d like to send out an extra-special thanks to our friend Stefani who was crazy enough to go out on the road with us as our merch girl/guitar hero shark.”

This, I think, [though I haven't seen it yet, so may change my mind] is the most disappointing of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installations so far. God only knows why the Guardian piece is being so mysterious about how it’s done. Even from that one tiny photo they’ve printed you can see that the steps to the left of the hall, as you walk down, which used to follow the level of the floor, now sink into the floor. Quite clearly it’s a false floor. With a crack in it. As for “enigmatic about how it was achieved”. Crikey. I was there three weeks ago and the slope down to the Turbine Hall entrance was FULL of trucks, workmen, diggers, little cranes, all kinds of shit.

It’s “about” the experiences of immigrants and racial segregation. Come on! Give me a break! Must we make it all so literal?! “How was it done?” “What’s it about?”

It makes me pine for Olafur Eliasson’s wonderful The Weather Project, a pic of which I’ve bunged up there just to brighten up this blog, which was drifting into monochrome dark grey overcoat Salford mid-80s territory. Blame Anton Corbijn.

Jon Savage on it all in The Independent.

Been thinking more about Billy Liar, and yes you could quite easily see Ian Curtis as Billy Fisher, Annik as Julie Christie as Liz with her fancy London/European ways, and homely Deborah as … well, not the tarty Rita, but certainly the well-meaning besotted Barbara. Liz drifts into Billy’s life revealing his dissatisfaction with How It All Is. But Keith Waterhouse and John Schlesinger can play it for laughs because nobody has any real ties in Billy’s world. It WOULD be quite simple for him to get on that train. Things become a lot more complicated when there’s a kid involved. Not to mention Britain’s premier post-punk outfit.