Make Mine Silvine. Mary Pret a Portas.

I don`t watch a great deal of TV but I made a point of watching Mary Queen of Shops, the one about the elephants` graveyard of the 1990s [ Brighton].

Then she was in Sunday Times Style magazine. Several things about this have nagged at me all week.
I wanted to like Mary Portas. I quite liked this:

`People say they love American fashion. I say `Sorry?` I mean it is so safe. Abercrombie and Fitch is just Gap in a nightclub, isn`t it?`

Well, shit nightclubs and David Lloyd sports centres.

Does Mary look dangerous? They tried to style her for TV but she wasn`t having any, not when she`s got `Last winter`s most-coveted accessory, those YSL platform ankle boots`. Accessory? To what?

Oh Mary, skewer me now. `I didn`t turn up to a meeting with Armani because it was Mylo`s [ her son, not the rock`n`roll-destroying nuisance] sports day`. Silver bells and cockle shells...

Then there`s the things in Mary`s world. She never leaves home without her little red Smythson notebook [from £28]. I never leave home without a Silvine exercise book [ from 28p]. `The affordable new YSL jewellery line is addictive [ring, £70]`. When you`re done with this addiction pop the YSL ring in a party bag, the recipient will be none the wiser.

Mary wants [and she Quants] to `Put the joy and glamour back into shopping`. But Mary, what are you wearing in your self-styled photo?
Part Purdey New Avenger, part Eric B and Rakim. You know those secondary parade ladies` dress shops which are all closing down as we speak? You know the last two items they can`t shift as the bailiffs hover? Mary`s stitched them together. You`ll get more joy and glamour at a church fete.

What did she do in Brighton? She New Rave`d them up is all, still it`s better than tripping over a didgeridoo and putting your `accessory` through a bodram. Mary, you`re such a checklist - Mark Jacobs, Notify, Theory, Hamish Morrow, YSL, Armani etc. Mary is `All emotion` - how dare they run around in their affordable, replica fashion - where`s the joy, the excitement in `Stacking my bag with tons of identical clothes that add up to less than £50?`

As if she would. Millions of people have no choice but to think hard about where £50 will go, all of them no doubt in need of a make-over.



Next Guru please.

Introduction.

I hadn`t really thought about what to call it.
I reasoned I would find it helpful to [re]join the blogging community here perhaps as a kind of nursery slope, a sharpening of tools, a jumping of the gun, a tennis ball punted into naive orbit.
To find my condition.
Lost? Could say.
Remembrance of things lost. And live action, of course.
Hiatus. Has to be called Hiatus, because that`s what it is. I am in hiatus. It`s not my fault and yet it must be.


I like to lay into obvious sycophants and hypocrites especially those who get paid for excruciating banality.


Images and texts which snipe at the passer-by. We are all treated as though we are adolescent, pubescent, nascent,unfinished, incapable of individual identity. We are all houseplants at their focus groups.
The pitches of High Street brands especially when they`re grooming young people. Or shafting the stylish sophisticates. Or necrophobics.
And `Ethical` consumerism. Foot-in-mouth disease.

Accelerated times.
We are beyond the Spectacular, beyond Simulation. There is certainly a scramble towards digitalia. A massive shift in our use of time. I sit on the fence. An unpainted spiky metal fence around a flagpole`d mews-y newbuild. Fucking hurts.
Many of the strongest words ever written seem to apply, as though on a loop. I feel I am being consumed by a blossomdrift of Post-it notes wafting in from history and herstory. Genii and lunatics in sync. Lautreamont, Mary Daly, Baudrillard, Anais Nin,Vaneigem and many others. They`re all on Jonathan Ross tonight.

I`ve got a catapult of twig and elastic, doubles as a bullshit divining rod. And I`m going to use it.