The 1980s xmas classic playing over the utter stillness of the figures in the Rotary Club's Nativity display: surrealism, almost beyond Phoenix Nights. What most interests me this time in Wilde's Complete Letters: his gradual assumption of command at the Lady's World, henceforth Woman's World. A gender politics in the change of name and in his insistences about content - yet what a strange class politics endures in his repeated lists of contributors! 'The Princess Christian, Lady Portsmouth, Miss Thackeray, Mrs Francis Jeune, Lady Meath, Lady Wentworth, Mrs Fawcett, Mrs Craik, and others have promised to write...'! The tender gothics who gather still outside the ghost of their favourite record shop, as if drawn to its absence - or rather, as though coming to realize it was always an excuse for them to gather here. 'Santa in red', writes Robert Lowell in 'Christmas Eve Under Hooker's Statue', 'Is crowned with wizened berries'. Poignancy of the department store - whose structure makes me wonder if it is a direct evolution from the simple idea of a market with different stalls - classy, yet uncrowded while lesser shops teem. Taking Sides: 'One More Time' vs 'A Thousand Hours'. How bog standard to see Ross and Gervais, I mean, Greavsie, trying to make something unfunny funny, and falling into the gutter. Yet the next night Coogan and Brydon rise above the trashy interlocutor and the dull smut, and as they compete with each other's impressions a warm, clever comedy flies marvellously free. They no doubt rightly say that the iPod can make music newly unpredictable. But so on occasion can our old chum the old tape. I stick on my 1990 round-up and wait. Radio highlights of England vs Germany... the crowd noise drifting into that announcing Dylan, singing 'Forever Young' in Hammersmith... and that of the Glastonbury folk as the Cure launch 'Just Like Heaven'. 'I Won', less than a year old; Adam Ant's final February hit 'Room at the Top'; 'The King of Wishful Thinking'. 'A New England' reminds me how late I discovered so much; perhaps my sense of my own experience pop history has been planed down to agree more than once it did with pop history itself. 'Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty.... Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l'Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent facade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of Le Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire'. Merry Christmas, sinister! __________________________________ Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year. http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+