I can hardly vait vor dis one

From an interview with Ricky Gervais in the The Observer. He's talking about his and Stephen Merchant's new telly series. The journalist was expecting the hysterical giggler from all those DVD extras we know and love, and instead found this calm, brainy guy.

The working title, says this oddly serious Ricky (a change I like but which I find strangely disconcerting nonetheless), the working title is The Men from the Pru. It’s about a group of twentysomethings working in an insurance company in the early Seventies. In Reading. This is where Gervais was born, in 1961. ‘It’s a period piece for a couple of reasons,’ he says. ‘We wanted to show, for instance, that the sexual revolution was only really going on in Carnaby Street. Not Swindon. Not Reading. It is, essentially, about blue-collar people getting white-collar jobs.’ And it is about people who would live and die in one town. ‘Which was one of the big differences between then and now,’ he says. ‘So much, we forget, was door to door. Ten pence for a duster, the man from the pools, the insurance man; people saving a penny a time for their funeral. Tens of thousands of people knocking on doors. Also, you would get married at 18 and still live with your mum. And then, at that time, some would watch the telly, have their eyes opened to different countries. There’s a line in it where we have a character being asked, “What do you want to go abroad for, there are parts of Reading you haven’t seen?”, so it’s a bit like that.’

When I was a kid, in the early 70s, we still got orange juice on the doorstep.

I love that idea too, of the place the social revolutions forgot. Which was just about everywhere, really, except Haight-Ashbury and Carnaby Street, and who was there? No one we know. As for me, I was in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the Southern Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, as I styled it in those days. The sexual revolution didn't seem to hit our house in any way that impacted on me, but mum did turn in to a bit of a hippy, doing pottery classes & growing native plants & etc.

The interview's terrific. Read it all, if Ricky's your thing, which he is.

Intricate paper cut outs

They're so delectable.

WIGMDVC* I'm going to make a mini-docu about little things. My favourite little things are little cut out things. For example:

Peter Callesen's amazing A4 pop-ups. See —>

Hannah Maybank's beautiful silhouettes. (This opens a pdf file.)

Hélène Delprat's delicate cut-outs. See below.

Stick Meon's super cut sticky wall cut outs.

& etc





















* When I Get My Digital Video Camera

It makes my heart sing

According to Salon, feminists can be funny chicks and totally sexy, even if they are only at the very upper end of averagely attractive!

Here's a bit from the Amy Poehler interview:

Poehler, a self-proclaimed feminist ("Absolutely I am!" she declared without hesitation when I asked her), once told Bust magazine, "I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled." She has also delivered some of "Saturday Night Live's" most female-friendly material, like her Weekend Update routine exhorting Hollywood's young stars to stop removing all their pubic hair. ("Ladies, what's up with all the deforestation going on down there? You need hair down there! ... There was a time when a lady garden was as big as a slice of New York pizza!")

I have a woman's crush on her.

Vanity Fair on the same topic, but which I mean comediennes in general and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in particular. You'll remember it was in Vanity Fair that Christopher Hitchens had his "Why Women Aren't Funny" spac attack.

How excellent is this?

The problem with my old blog was that I should have guarded my anonymity far more jealously. I shouldn't have told everyone I had ever met where to find it, then crapped on quite so pathetically and fulsomely about my general, you know, emotions. Who wants to hear deeply personal stuff about biological clocks, right, from someone you must then encounter at work, or at a mutual friend's for dinner? I overshared. Suddenly everyone knew a damn sight more about my life than I did about theirs. It got awkward, with some people. Or maybe it was just me that didn't feel comfortable.

But I like it here already. I feel very safe. Mostly because I know absolutely no one is reading this at all.

But less of all this later.

In art news, I though y'all might like to see the portrait I think should win the BP Portrait Award finalists. That's Amanda Smith at Vincent Avenue by Simon Davis to below. I know nothing of Simon Davis except he's 39 and from Birmingham and he's a comic book artist.



Amanda Smith is his friend. Look at her hands. Aren't they beautiful?

You can see the other finalists here and here.