If you have tears to shed... start your laughing now

Prestelle are to divorce.

Someone better get word to Ziggy and Chanelle in the Big Brother hoose...

This is priceless....

Watch the woman behind Harriet Harman when it's announced Harman won the Deputy Leadership

Ok enough's enough....

From the Beeb News website

"The McCanns are also considering releasing a cover version of the Bryan Adams' song Everything I Do, I Do It For You, in an effort to raise more money for their campaign"

Could someone PLEASE give this kid back...

This afternoon I finished THE FABULOUS SYLVESTER by Joshua Gamson and what a great read it was.

When I first saw Sylvester in the jaw-dropping video for MIGHTY REAL on TOP OF THE POPS back in the day (see here) I knew I had found a musical heroine. Although I never got to see him - I hate you Dawn Coates - he has always been on my walkman/portable cd/MP3 player/iPod down the years.

Gamson's sparkling biography gives Sylvester a flawless setting.
From a little boy startling the church goers with a soaring soprano to the adolescent sissy hanging with fellow drag teens The Disqotays, from his move to San Francisco and performing with the hippie commune drag gayers The Cockettes, from his frustration at their unprofessional attitude to his singing with the soul-funk Hot Band and ultimately his solo success at Fantasy Records as one of Disco's brightest stars.

Joshua Gamson sets against Sylvester's almost Hollywood movie-like rise to fame and fortune the times he lived through and more importantly the city of San Francisco which becomes almost a character in itself: the city of the late 1960s with it's radical politics and hippie communes, the early 1970s with the birth of a gay political movement and identity which transmuted towards the end of the decade into the sexual hedonist years of the baths and the clones to ultimately the Ground Zero of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s.

What struck me from reading the book was that throughout Sylvester's working life he was surrounded by producers and musicians who mistrusted his style - Ben Sidran, Harvey Fuqua and even James 'Tip' Wirrick who worked with him through the glory years had ambivalent feelings about the work they were doing. I am sure he could be difficult and frustrating to work with, pulling diva strokes when he hadn't earned the right to do it but his sheer joy of living and being Fabulous means it is impossible for the reader to dislike him.

Gamson also writes illuminatingly about the two waves that checked Sylvester's career: the 1980s backlash against Disco music which can now be viewed as much as being about racism and homophobia as it was to do with musical taste and the slow dawning of the cold white light of the AIDS pandemic. Sylvester's own battle with it is told movingly and his quiet dignified end watched over by his mother and sister is enough to moist any eye.

His magnificent backing singers Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes add their their voices to the book too, although sadly Izora died before the book's publication. After they left him to add their own moment in Disco history as The Weather Girls he recruited Jeannie Tracy to back him and she too continued the tradition in his life of strong women.

Joshua Gamson's style is insightful but with the right beaucoup attitude too - "there is no weapon more powerful than the right hair".
Sylvester would have been 60 this September. Would he still be performing? Who knows but his wonderful cameo in 'Diana' drag in Bette Midler's THE ROSE and the music lives on... a perfumed and painted extravaganza of joyful dance music... Go 'head on girl.

I am still kerklempt... Suralan Sugar picked Simon over Kristina in THE APPRENTICE final.
I am sure she will get a better job than the one that Simon will be heading up, developing a hotel and golfing complex near Stansted Airport.

Owenwatch:

Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlours... he's out!

I got a call from himself around 10:30 this morning - obviously not THAT well to remember I am monosyllabic till at least 3pm on a Sunday - to let me know that the physio was happy with his walking to let him go home.

After an interminable wait for a taxi we arrived back in Streatham after 3pm.

It's good to have Owen back where he belongs.

I will of course be drinking both the flutes of fizz... well, he's on so much medication....

Owenwatch:

I saw him tonight and he wanted you to know he has a new morphine machine, the last one was acting up a bit. He is at the stage where the shock of the new has worn off and the adrenalin/fear of the upcoming operation has gone... so boredom is beginning to creep into his day. Sleep has been difficult at night too. The ward bay he is in has only 6 beds and the past two nights have seen a new patient being admitted around 3am each time! Oh and the Alter Kocker in the end bed talks to himself all night.

It now looks like he won't be out till Monday, the troublesome disc has caused more internal damage than was originally thought so the surgeon wants to keep him in for a bit longer to make sure he's responding as he should.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is a big day.. he is going to attempt to stand for the first time since the op... say a prayer to your personal Jesus.

On other matters...

Just finished reading Jill Dawson's WATCH ME DISAPPEAR which is about Tina, a woman in her 40s, returning for her brother's wedding to the Cambridgeshire village where she grew up. Inspired by the Soham schoolgirl case of a few years ago the book tells of Tina being haunted by the memory of her best friend at primary school who disappeared one summer afternoon and was never seen again. She also cannot shake the gnawing fear that her own father might have the murderer.

Dawson certainly conjures up the strange sunlit world of a ten year old girl that contains the long shadows of sexual curiosity and unspoken family tension. She also captures the limbo of guilt and unresolved feelings that Tina feels at her friend - who she had recently had a falling-out with - disappearing yet being present in the newspapers and television re-invention of her personality. This all comes to a head when Tina is asked by the police to "be" her friend in a televised reconstruction of the girl's last known journey.

So there was I, being quietly gripped by the narrative and in particular the spot-on evocation of growing up in the early 1970s when suddenly there it was, staring out at me on page 195...

"...cutting out pictures of Clodagh Rogers winning the Eurovision Song Contest..."

OI DAWSON NO!
Clodagh RoDgers didn't win bloody Eurovision!!

I should know... I was watching the bloody thing through teary eyes.

Now over the years I have learnt to gloss over cultural references in books or tv shows where an actor or a film are muddled up - but it's hardly like Eurovision isn't well referenced on the damn internet.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Constant Reader

I would like you to know that Owen had his operation at lunchtime today. I saw him this evening and he seemed a lot more 'together' than I was expecting. I am sure the fact that he had a handheld button that released morphine into him when he felt any pain had absolutely nothing to do with it. The surgeon sees him tomorrow to assess how he is doing but it looks like he may have to stay in until maybe Sunday.

Don't worry I filled him in about Emilygate on BB. Did we watch it tonight?
A total riot - loved Shabnam trying to find out what had been said while Charlie and Emily were both telling her to drop it, Shabnam saying she totally wasn't interested anymore...... "But what did you say though?" - all talking over each other - a hoot n a half.

And the clever way Charlie didn't want anyone to know what had happened. So proceeded to tell everyone in the bedroom that someting happened but she couldn't discuss the really really bad thing that Emily had said to her and not to ask her. No she couldn't discuss it, it was between her and Emily so don't ask her. About what Emily said to her. 'Cos she wouldn't tell them. No.

This pleading denial was topped only by the response from Ziggy saying "Ohhhh I know, yeah.... she fancies you, right?"

That was me on the deck.

Two more blokes are being released into the house on Friday instead of the eviction. Dear lord let them have a bit more spunk about them. As t'were.