Feeling my age as it feels me

Thirty five is officially half dead. Or so I had thought. But no. Thirty five is the age of opportunity. A pediatrician with whom I was conversing this weekend told me that my whilst my fertility would throw itself off a cliff when I hit thirty nine, the years preceding would remain fruitful but more likely to bear a different fruit.

"Oh you mean Downs?" I asked.

No. Apparently not. My pediatrician friend had a theory of his own. The older the couple, the increased likelihood of conceiving dwarf babies. Interesting. Dwarf on dwarf action can result in stillborns.

IMing with the Krucoff today, we agreed that the potential outcome was more than likely to result in circus-fit offspring if we ever copulated. Wear those tin hats people.

Basically though since I am now too old to die young, maybe dwarf babies are the answer.

You have to hope for the diamonded up to the eyeballs Ellen Barkin that husband number three will really be a great friend. I have always thought her to be one of the most gorgeous of actresses. Non-stereotypically beautiful and looking like a total slut. Husband number one was the hottster Gabriel Byrne – and definitely a love match – I have seen Sea of Love and can confirm this.

But number two?
Ouch. He may be a billionaire but if he is relying solely on the advice of Morgan Stanley then he’s obviously not all that of a smart one. So what is there to respect?

Well though, she did get eight billion dollars to spend doing up her five story town house in the east 60’s. A wall of refrigerators! Congratulations! Still I am not convinced this was a fair trade. Let's hope this wasn't part of the Morgan Stanley shenanigans.

Her bed linens are Pratesi! Interesting to note that she likes to sleep with all the kids – yes I don’t blame her. Keep the Ronnster chaste at all costs. My favorite quip however was the fact she sleeps in her copious diamonds. You would need to with that oinker on the other side of the bed. Constant reinforcement of goals. Constant reinforcement of goals. The mantra of the Ellen.

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.


Ha! Hilarious story on CNN.

I went to the last concert in my Carnegie Hall Series of International Festival of Orchestras II this evening. Dresden Staatskapelle played Beethoven's Third and Sixth extremely competently and fairly devoid of emotion. As if they were on the football pitch. Ah but enough of the cheap but fabulous jibes. I used to speak decent German and I know what it means when the lady viola player (what -ist is that?) turns to her colleague, shakes her pratical short-haired head and says "Schlecht."

For once though the orchestra reflected the audience. Old. Really old. Why is it that only the over 60s and I go to Carnegie Hall? Last week as I rose from my seat to standing ovate the immaculately tailored Valery Gergiev and the Kirovs, who looks a lot like Sir Ollie Reed on an extremely good day, I was informed by my sense of smell that someone's Depends had let them down.

Tonight held new pleasures with the persistent comedy-style farting of the elderly lady in her late eighties two to my left. There had been a vacant seat next to me when I arrived just before eight and she was obviously peeved that I was nearly tardy.

"Where's your boyfriend?" She asked.
"I am on my own."
"Oh yes, you are always on your own. Don't worry though we'll buy you a drink at the intermission."

She didn't however. She let rip instead. But I suppose you can get away with it there: everyone is deaf.

Next season I am not doing the subscriber thing, except for the American Composers Orchestra, which includes Pilobolus Dance Theatre, Tech and Techno (with Ryuici Sakamoto on "Laptop" for Daniel Roumain's "Concerto for Laptop). I need to be with my own people. They go to Zankel Hall.

Quintessence of my balls: New favourite saying.

'As a result, producers are forced to sell their wine as low grade 'vin de pays', while Didier Daguenau, who produces outstanding Pouilly-Fumé wines, obtained an AOC label for his worst production, made with bad quality grapes, and which he calls "quintessence of my balls".'

From an interesting article on terroir. Terroir, who knows? I just think that years ago some Frech geez was taking the piss when some probably extremely earnest Englishman asked him why his wine was so good.

Am planning on seeing Mondovino tonight. It better make me laugh

“And the third level of humility is not even considering your personal humility….”

“Hey jerk off, over here.” The drunk guy in the wheelchair with the swollen face interjected loudly over crazy lady’s preaching. “Hey jerk off I will show you papers. I killed over fifty of your type when I was in Vietnam.”

“Please be quiet!” Crazy lady admonished him.
“You, shut the fuck up!” he yelled back.

Ahahah, how I like to spend my Monday nights, the ER at St Vincents. It is life affirming. Some one had defecated all over the male bathroom floor apparently. The door to the ladies was not opening properly and despite the valiant efforts of the janitor to kick it down, the security guard had to let me in with a key. It was exactly this kind of shennangans I wanted to avoid seeing as I had to pee into a beeker. It’s not an easy task when the lock doesn’t work on the stall door which repeatedly tried to knock me off-balance.

Still, it was fascinating. I have never been to an ER anywhere for myself. It is full of quite the most amazing crazies. People check in, fill out the forms, sleep on chairs and then just leave without being called. Some people just sleep. I saw at least two inpatients that looked like celebrities. Neil Young checked in and then out. Jeff Goldblum was there clutching his stomach. I quite liked the crazy lady. She was wearing an eighties T-shirt dress with leg warmers and had a cart. She also did tai chi in the waiting room.

The other major plus was that Miss USA or Miss America, whatever, was on television last night and I correctly called Miss North Carolina as winner. She had the nicest dress. They all had exactly the same teeth. Exactly. Last year's winner had fake boobs. Miss Carolina gets to stay in Trump Palace apartments for a year. She also won a chandelier and $3,000 of Steve Madden shoes. Quite sad really.

Kidney infections suck. Next time I think something is up I am going straight to the doctor for drugs. None of this homeopathic cranberry shit.

Polly Toynbee's article on the Pope from The Guardian.

But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our approval for this? Will he think of Africa when on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great Vatican crime.

Read it. It's good.

I have to agree with John Rockwell on pretty much everything he has noted about the National Ballet of Canada's The Contract. I thought it worth not leaving after an hour only to see whether the sweat coming off Martine Lamy made her diaphanous top see-through. Why do Canadian ballet companies like their ladies topless? Not complaining, only asking. It's hard to like dancers being wooden, though through no fault of their own - the choreography sucked - but even more so when they are dressed like the Amish.

Anyway, someone please remind me next time I am plugging in credit card numbers into websites that I don't like the story form of dance. I like abstract. And short skirts. Let me see the legs.

Only joking. Or is he??

Be nice to our Vic. He's from Darlington.

The NYT is full of hilarity today. This artilce about Andrew Motion , the UK poet laureate had me laughing out loud.

The great poet Ted Hughes, Mr. Motion's predecessor, once wrote a poem celebrating Prince Andrew's wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 that included the lines: "A helicopter snatched you up/ The pilot, it was me." (The marriage ended in divorce.) In a poem observing the 40th anniversary of the Queen's coronation, he praised her corgis without apparent irony.


Referring to two of the many royal scandals that seem to cry out for comment by an anti-laureate, Mr. Raine wrote: "It isn't that I'd like laureate poems entitled, 'On the Occasion of James Hewitt Visiting Princess Diana for the Purpose of Consolation,' or 'Imagine Being a Tampax: Intimate Thoughts on the Mobile Phone.'

"Well, maybe I would."



And the there is this utter tripe about the Wwanks. Check out the slideshow. It is hideous.

Even as her celebrity has soared, Ms. Swank has deliberately cultivated a low-key image. "I'm just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream," she said in her Oscar acceptance speech, referring to her upbringing in Bellingham, Wash.

So she was playing to character when she passed up the familiar list of decorators with celebrity clients in favor of Mr. Zeff. When she and Mr. Lowe called him on a friend's recommendation and described what they wanted, Mr. Zeff invited them to visit his roomy prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, which has a blend of Moroccan chandeliers, mirrors, a George III bureau and Bibendum chairs by Eileen Gray.

It was, he said, "exactly what they were describing: a mix of things that don't necessarily go together but look great together." They hired him within a week.

Copy by David Brent

I was cleaning out my cupboards this afternoon and I found something called "Sebastian Holding Mud". On the back it reads:

WHAT YOU WEAR BEGINS WITH YOUR HAIR. What's on your body....cargo pants, alternative wear. What's in your hair...MOLDING MUD, the bondin agent to make your hair's fabric street chic. Like something out of the culture. It's your option. Make something happen with this fiber-forming hair mud.

It's now in the bin.

Today will be a celebration of the INS.

Guys, nice job.

Sir Mark Thatcher has been refused a visa to enter the United States in the wake of his conviction in connection with an African coup plot.


Am I alone in finding Graeme Souness insanely hot?

Also hot is the Martin MacDonagh, although somehow I can't help thinking that he is in fact a complete tool.

It has to be the most disgusting day in the world today. The weather is most foul and I am spared only thanks to a temperature in the 50s. One must be thankful for the small mercies in life.

And so it was that I took my beloved camel coat which had sustained a cigarette burn in Montreal to French American Reweaving on 57th Street.

"It's beautiful coat" he told me. "I'll see what I can do. The problem is the herringbone but I will say I probably can get between 80 and 100%."

"Oh if you could that would be wonderful." I whined. I absolutely whined and could hear myself as it came out. The one thing I hate about the boyf's bluetooth is the delayed echo playback of my whining. Why he never hangs up on me remains a mystery: I sound nauseatingly pathetic.

All for $75, which sounded like a bargain to me and I left feeling as if I had just had forty needles stuck down my spine.

Downtown to McNulty's. Why have I never been in here before? I think this is my new favorite shop in New York. Lots of jars in which to stick your nose and inhale. Fabulous service of the kind where you both stand there for twenty minutes trying to out thank one another. They don't sell Marriage Freres tea, there is no US distributor, apparently, but the loveliest gentleman in the world took me round the store whipping off glass lid after glass lid, explaining how I could mix up something similar. I came away with Nectar, Holiday Mint, Russian, Earl Grey, Moroccan Mint. I am always tempted by the jars of tiny perfect rose buds, I almost bought these to see how they would look after infusion, but I don't do the florals so well. I have to be careful with Gewurtztriminer.

And then we discuss my expectations with coffee and in his hands I am a big blob of goo, thrashing around and desperate to be stroked. He grinds me Sumatra. "I think this is what you have been looking for."

He's damn right. I love him.

What has this country done to me? And perhaps more than anything else, what has New York done? Someone who wasn’t Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one should leave New York before one becomes too hard. Well that time has now passed for me. I know what a New York minute is. It is three seconds. Three seconds being the exact period of time I will wait for passengers to exit a subway car before I move on in myself, regardless of whether the car has finished exiting. I know this along with everyone else. I know also that it is of the utmost rudeness to loiter on any kind of subway exiting. I don’t care if you are crippled or old. And actually I don’t.

Anyway, prior to my arrival here I regulated weight with cigarettes and coffee, increasing dosage if I was feeling fat. Now I am the gym freak or at least I try and put in a good show once in a while. I stare intently at flesh as I pull it off my bones and sigh. I don’t think I even looked at myself naked when I was in London. I layered up with clothes and scowled quickly as I ran past mirrors. My eyebrows covered most of my forehead and I kept knickers on during waxing. It all seems so far away now. Not that I am groomed particularly since that would involve a degree of being arsed which I have not yet attained. Plus I have a job.

No, but here I am on a Friday, the first in April, wondering if should get my forearms waxed. Wondering if anyone else does. I mean really. What has happened?