Scarier than the IMF

Jeff Wayne was the guy who composed the famous 1970s Gordon's Gin ad jingle that was sampled by the Human League so often (recognise this?). He also happens to be the guy who composed the iconic musical interpretation of HG Wells's War of the Worlds into a double album in 1978. I got to meet him when he was in Dublin in March of this year - today's Indo carries my interview with him as he prepares to bring the War of the Worlds to the 02 on November 29. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

UNHEAVENLY CREATURES: Why the War of the Worlds still frightens the bejaysus out of us.

A RACE of terrifying creatures with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” are set to invade Dublin next week. Relax. It’s not a second batch of IMF officials coming to town - just some deadly 35ft-high Martian killing machines.
They are part of the War of the Worlds stage show, inspired by the 1898 HG Wells novel of alien invasion and the iconic soundtrack recorded by composer Jeff Wayne exactly 80 years later. Wayne’s concept album, full of terrifying Martian war cries, synthesizers and hit singles, sold 13 million copies and stayed 235 weeks in the UK charts after its release in 1978.
A colleague mentions how he was left alone in the sitting room as a child in the early ’80s with the album playing. His mother returned 20 minutes later to find him hiding behind the couch, sobbing that the Martians were coming. Audiences should be afraid, very afraid.
War of the Worlds and its central premise in which Martians attack an Earth powerless to defend itself has inspired films, artworks, video games, TV series and at least one very powerful radio play (see panel). Wayne, 67, who still conducts the stage show himself, says there are reasons why War of the Worlds still resonates.
“HG Wells was a very young man when he wrote this story in 1897, created these Martians with extendible tentacles,” says Wayne. “What he was doing was taking a pop at the ever-expanding British empire, these tentacles of power.
“Power, even if it’s used by your own nation, if it’s wrongly used, then it’s just wrong. It’s relevant today: Look at the world we live in. It’s about territorial expansion and one faith against the other.”
It also has some resonance in Wayne’s personal story. His father Jerry was an actor and singer of some note in the States in the 1950s. “In his heyday in America, he was a pop star,” says Wayne. “I’ve a poster in my studio of a No1 he had and in order of billing: he is above Frank Sinatra.”
Unfortunately for Jerry, he was blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee for performing at a benefit concert for another victim of the Committee, singer Paul Robeson. He went to England to play Sky Masterson in the original West End production of Guys and Dolls and brought Jeff with him for a few years. His father introduced Jeff to music production, and he became business partner with him on the War of the Worlds album. He had been the one to hand Jeff the Wells book to read for inspiration.
“He knew as a writer and a composer that I wanted a challenge that would go beyond my career.”
Wayne had to that point made a lot of money from composing advertising jingles – “I did about 3,000 in one 10-year period” – and theme tunes to TV shows like BBC’s 60 Minutes, The World of Sport and Good Morning Britain.
War of the Worlds was a different, well, world. In the 1970s, he had to literally invent sounds to bring Wells’ novel to musical life. “I was there, looking for ways to make the sound of a snowflake!” laughs Wayne. Gongs submerged in a tank of water, a saucepan rattled against a toilet bowl, electronic voiceboxes – all were used to generate the unsettling soundtrack that sent my colleague diving behind his mother’s sofa.

Now it is the stage show breaking new techy boundaries – a 35ft Martian that shoots death rays at the audience, CGI graphics from an animated feature version of the story that Wayne still hopes to make, pyrotechnics, a 3-D hologram of Richard Burton. Burton is 26 years dead but the miracle of modern geekery has him return to the role he voiced as The Journalist on Wayne’s 1978 album.
The Artilleryman, originally played by David Essex, is filled by Jason Donovan. Thin Lizzy’s Irish frontman Phil Lynott played the original Parson Nathaniel, a clergyman sent crazed by the invasion.
“He just had it in his voice and character to play this mad Parson,” says Wayne, “Phil Lynott had that something singular about him.”
So who could possibly replace him? For this show, it’s X-Factor Welsh signer Rhydian with a dark dye job. There truly are greater things on heaven and earth to fear than the IMF.
• Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds is at the 02 next Monday, November 29. Tickets from Ticketmaster.

A WORLD AHEAD: Influence of Wells’ novel through the years…
• HG Wells’ novel War of the Worlds in 1898 was a metaphor for imperialism, religious mania and Darwinism: it also played on the Victorian fear of ‘fin de siecle’, a superstition that the apocalypse would arrive at midnight on December 31, 1899. It didn’t.
• Robert H Goddard was 16 when Wells’ book was published. It inspired him to invent rockets: the Apollo moon landings were the culmination of research he began.
• Orson Welles recorded an infamous 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, reading it as a series of news bulletins set in contemporary America. Many listeners believed a real alien invasion was in progress. Adolf Hitler would claim that the public panic the radio play had caused was “evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy”.
• At least six ‘faithful’ movie adaptations have been made of the novel, including Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version with Tom Cruise. Spielberg kept the screenplay secret from the actors, only emailing the bits of it that were relevant to them on any given day.
• Spoof films like Scary Movie 4 and Mars Attacks have had a field day with WotW. Jeff Wayne says that even Independence Day, “in its way, is a send-up of War of the Worlds”.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-aliens-have-landed-and-they-sure-can-put-on-a-show-2432982.html http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/arts/a-world-ahead-the-influence-of-wells-novel-through-the-years-2432983.html

Celebs self-helping themselves

By Susan Daly
Wednesday Sep 15 2010

Even the wealthy, the beautiful and the famous need a hand to be happy from time to time. Religion, after all, is not only the opiate of the masses.

Tom Cruise gets his jollies from Scientology, Richard Gere found peace with Buddhism and Madonna has embraced Kabbalah.

As for those who believe that God helps those who help themselves, the self-help industry is booming.

Julia Roberts is pounding red carpets all over the world right now to bring her movie version of Elizabeth Gilbert's self-discovery memoir Eat, Pray, Love to the masses. The Power, the follow-up to bestseller The Secret, is flying off the shelves.

The self-improvement biz is worth billions and self-help books sell in their millions. Some celebrities have decided they know so much about success that they are qualified to write their own.

Two recent additions to the genre come from Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall who wrote Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life, and pop singer Jessica Simpson who penned I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding. Because you want your teenage daughter to take tips from Samantha Jones, and you really want wedding advice from a woman who put her newlywed life on reality TV and then got divorced.

Some celebrities wisely stick to being believers. Demi Moore is a big fan of spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Naomi Campbell has applauded the work of I Can Make You Thin hypnotist Paul McKenna.

What better endorsement can a self-help book have than to be photographed under the arm of a celebrity?

We take a look at what star has been spotted carrying which self-help book -- and whether they seem to be learning anything from them ...

THE BOOK: Toxic Friends -- The Antidote For Women Stuck In Complicated Relationships, by Susan Shapiro Barash

THE CELEB: Lindsay Lohan.

Spotted with the book in July, a week before entering jail for violating her probation.

DID IT WORK? The book helps the reader to identify 10 types of 'toxic' female friends that need dumping.

These include The Trophy Friend, The Doormat and The Misery Lover, who only likes you when you're down.

Ah, that explains it. Li-Lo's troubles were because she had the wrong people around her. Problem solved.

THE BOOK: Living In The Moment by Gary Null

A natural health guru advises how to have a "blissful" existence by freeing yourself from consumerism and slowing down your life.

THE CELEB: Paris Hilton.

She displayed the book on walkabout in front of the paparazzi after a break-up with a boyfriend in 2008.

DID IT WORK? Null believes in freeing oneself from the traps of materialism. In July, Hilton spent €3,000 on 12 pairs of sunglasses while on holiday in St Tropez.

In August, she was charged with cocaine possession. It is possible Hilton misread the subtitle of Living In The Moment: A Prescription For The Soul for self-medication of an entirely less spiritual type.

THE BOOK: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Former depressive Tolle discovers that the ego, with all its emotional baggage of memories, stands in the way of spiritual awakening.

THE CELEB: Jim Carrey.

The actor opened a lecture for Tolle last year saying he now understood "how thought was just an illusory thing and how thought is responsible for some, if not, all the suffering we experienced".

DID IT WORK? Some would argue that with a man who built his success on Dumb and Dumber is already a convert to not thinking too much.

Saying that, a Time magazine interviewer to whom he recommended Tolle's work in 2007 said that Carrey "wasn't at all annoying. Yes, he's a little too happy, but he seems very comfortable and mellow and unguarded and unpretentious."

THE BOOK: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

Every positive thinking message spouted in the past 80 years repackaged as an ancient guide to having it all.

THE CELEB: Oprah Winfrey.

The queen of book endorsements. She dedicated two of her 2007 shows to The Secret.

DID IT WORK? The Secret claims you can have the perfect life if you just wish hard enough for it.

Oprah is certainly worth a bundle but with her ever-fluctuating body weight, we wonder what she thinks of The Secret's advice to weight watchers: "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it." That's right. Only look at Oprah when she's down to a size 12-14.

THE BOOK: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider

Two dating coaches teach women how to snag a husband by responding to one out of every four emails from a guy and not having sex until the third date at the earliest.

THE CELEB: Beyoncé.

The Rules gals quote B on their website as telling US Weekly that although "there are certain things in there that are unrealistic, it [The Rules] has worked for me".

DID IT WORK? Well she's married, ain't she?

She dated rapper Jay-Z for six years before they wed. That's in direct contravention of Fein and Schneider's rule that if he likes it, then he should put a ring on it after no more than two years.

Nor is it easy to picture her taking on this top 10 tip from the ladies: "Take care of yourself, take a bubble bath and build up your soul with positive slogans like, 'I am a beautiful woman. I am enough'."

THE BOOK: Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

"A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and look fabulous."

THE CELEB: Victoria Beckham.

The former Spice girl was papped taking the book down from a shelf in an LA boutique in 2007.

DID IT WORK? Surely the question should be, 'Did she need it?'

Posh Spice was already thin as a rake when she brandished the diet book. It is possible that she was having a laugh at her own expense and at critics of her pin-thin figure by waving it at the paparazzi.

The book's straight-talking advice sounds pretty suited to Victoria's rigid body control though -- the authors tell readers "you are a total moron if you think the Atkins Diet will make you thin" and that "soda is liquid Satan".

THE BOOK: Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, 1948-1984

Not quite a self-help manual but Walcott, who emerged from the isolation of an ex-British colony in the West Indies to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably an inspiration to the self-made man.

THE CELEB: Barack Obama.

Not quite a celebrity, but definitely rather famous, Obama was spotted carrying it while leaving his daughters to school the morning after winning the US Presidential election in 2008.

DID IT WORK? One of Walcott's most famous works is his 1973 autobiographical epic poem Another Life in which he tells the reader: "You want to hear my history? Ask the sea."

Obama could adopt it as the perfect talk-to-the-hand response to the 'birthers' who claim that he is not an American citizen because he was born in Hawaii.

That should keep them guessing.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/lilo-has-toxic-friends-beyonceacute-plays-by-the-rules-and-posh-is-a-skinny-bitch-2337799.html

The Secret to (her) success

The author who found The Secret to success with a best-selling self-help book is about to unleash a new tome on having it all.
(I wrote this for last Saturday's Review section in the Irish Independent - The Power was published yesterday)

The key to success is apparently now one of the world's worst-kept secrets. When self-help manual The Secret was published in 2006, it claimed to contain a formula to personal fulfillment that had been jealously guarded by some of history's finest minds down through the centuries. Four years later, The Secret has been imparted to around 16 million people who have bought the book.

Not content with sparking one global pop cultural phenomenon, The Secret's Australian author Rhonda Byrne is launching a follow-up, The Power, next Tuesday. Her publishers say it is set to reveal everything Byrne has learnt and attracted to herself since the release of her first book.

The basic premise of The Secret was that if you focus hard enough on what you want most from life, the universe will deliver it. It's a simple credo that certainly seems to have worked for Byrne. The slim tome became an instant hit, championed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. It went to No 1 in Ireland on its publication here in 2007. It has remained on the hardback bestsellers' list for so long that the publishing industry hasn't been this geared up for a sequel since the release of the second Harry Potter book.

Byrne herself has somewhat retreated from the public eye since the 2006 launch of The Secret. Time magazine named her one of the world's most influential people in 2007 but she hasn't given any major interview in the past two years. She doesn't need to: the global spread of The Secret has taken on a self-promoting life on blogs, TV chat shows and by sheer word-of-mouth.

Back in the early 1990s, Byrne was a prominent reality TV producer in her native Melbourne. Even then she showed a knack for having a finger on the pulse of popular culture: she specialised in programmes about UFOs and near-death experiences. Her Prime Time production company created the much-syndicated World's Greatest Commercials series and Sensing Murder, which had 'psychic detectives' tackle famous unsolved murders. Former colleagues recalled that she was ambitious and hard-working.

By 2004 however, Byrne experienced a plunge in her personal fortunes. She was divorced and a single mum to two children, she had fallen out with her business partner and her father had just died. It was at this low point that her daughter handed her a copy of The Science of Getting Rich, a get-rich-quick classic published in 1910. Byrne began to devour other self-help manuals and realised that they had a key message in common: the power of positive thinking.

Doing what came naturally to her, Byrne decided to make a TV documentary based on the teachings of several self-help gurus and motivational speakers. These "transformational experts" as she calls them included already established names in the genre like Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Byrne managed to source funding from Australian and US sources but she also mortgaged her own house to make the film.

The risk paid off. (Although The Secret would say that there is no risk involved: if you just focus hard enough on your heart's desire, the universe's Law of Attraction will bring it to you.) A trailer for the DVD became a viral success on the internet, and linked to where the film could be streamed -- for a price. The film is reported to have grossed nearly $20m in its first eight months online and Byrne wrote the book to go with it.

The core message of the book doesn't seem that revolutionary. The power of positive thinking has been a mainstream pop psychology subject since Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People was published in the Great Depression in 1936. Byrne's readers are exhorted to "Ask, Believe, Receive" -- a theory of 'prosperity consciousness' that goes back to Christian Scientists in the 1800s.

The Secret, and Byrne, have their critics. Some question the materialism of the success being sold and the ease with which readers and viewers are told they can achieve it. In the movie, dramatisations show a little boy dream of owning a shiny red bicycle. In the next frame, one appears outside his door. A woman gazes longingly at a necklace in a shop window -- and suddenly, it is around her neck.

More serious criticism has been aimed at messages like the one where readers are told that to avoid getting fat, they should not look at people who are overweight in case the negative image is catching. "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it," says the book.

Byrne writes: "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." When asked by one interviewer if this meant that the Jewish people were responsible for the Holocaust, she replied that "many factors" cause millions to die in tragedies such as the Holocaust, but "if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted".

Nonetheless, the simplicity of The Secret is also its power. Wish the dream and then live the dream. Byrne herself claims that she got rid of her reading glasses in three days flat by thinking correct thoughts about her eyesight. Its universally accepted repeat rule that positive thoughts are good; negative thoughts are bad is easy to sell. Oprah Winfrey thought so -- she devoted two shows to The Secret in 2007, exposing it to her audience of 23 million people and leading to a huge sales boost.

The American Spectator has called the initial internet campaign to launch The Secret, "the greatest success story in the annals of viral marketing". It used tease advertising and personal recommendations on blogs to pass information along in a word-of-mouth way that seemed authentic and intimate.

Even the name, The Secret, is genius. It layers up on the persuasive argument of the book that there is just one overarching powerful secret to success that has been known to the best and brightest in history -- and now it was available to you and me. Plato, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein are all name-checked as 'keepers' of The Secret.

Donavin Bennes, a buyer for major US book chain Borders Books said: "We all want to be in on a secret. But to present it as the secret, that was brilliant."

The now instantly recognisable cover of the book was made to look like a reproduction of a medieval scroll, complete with scarlet wax seal. It's the Da Vinci Code of self-help: seductively suggesting that this is tapping into a vein of ancient wisdom.

"The Secret reveals the most powerful law in the universe," reads The Secret's official website. "The knowledge of this law has run like a golden thread through the lives and the teachings of all the prophets, seers, sages and saviours in the world's history, and through the lives of all truly great men and women."

The Secret also harnessed an immediate fanbase from the already-popular spiritual and self-help experts who contributed to the initial film, such as Jack Canfield and Esther and Jerry Hicks who had already published best-selling books around the laws of attraction. The Hicks declined to appear in a second version of The Secret film.

Now that Byrne has passed on The Secret to the world, it might seem her work here is done. However, her publishers at Atria say that she was inspired to write The Power as a response to the thousands of letters written to her by readers of the earlier book. Of the sequel, her publishers will only say that "Now with The Power, Rhonda reveals the single greatest force in our universe." This air of mystique has understandably sent fans flocking to book advance copies.

As for Byrne, the 59-year-old has become the best advertisement for The Secret she can be. She ended up buying a prestigious gated home in California, just down the road from her celebrity fan Oprah Winfrey.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/shes-got-the-power-2297040.html

Who cares if these guys are just not into you?

A few years ago, a book title proposed a simple six-word explanation for shoddy male romantic behaviour: He's Just Not That Into You.

The book was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City -- of course -- in which Carrie's boyfriend Berger claims that women waste too much time trying to analyse why men turn cold/avoid commitment/don't call when they say they will.

Don't take it personally girls, says Berger. When a man behaves like this it is because 'he's just not that into you'. Forget him and find a man who is.

Liberating as this little aphorism is, it is beyond simplistic. It also implies that if a guy is acting peculiar, it's not him, it's you.

Dating columnist Zoe Strimpel decided that there must be more behind the mixed messages women receive from men than simple disinterest. (There's probably a book waiting to be written about signals flying from the opposite direction too.)

Instead of torturing herself over cocktails with her girlfriends about what goes on inside a man's mind, Strimpel spent a year interviewing hundreds of men for her new book: What The Hell Is He Thinking? She stresses that the men she interviewed were “all articulate, smart, thoughtful and basically good guys”.

Yet even the saintliest of these -- even if they didn't condone certain bad behaviour among their cohorts -- could at least explain why it happens.

“The name of the game is not to be thrown when a guy does something weird,” says Strimpel. “Rather, to recognise what it might mean, and where it's coming from.”

So, straight from the horses' mouths came these surprising revelations:

Men read women's magazines ...

Some men do actually pick up tips from women's mags -- and it is not necessarily a good thing. Strimpel relates the tale of Christian, a guy who brought her on luxurious dates, bought her a toothbrush to keep at his, and texted her loving messages while away on business.

After a perfect weekend together, he left her at a train station on Sunday evening with a chilly 'Don't be a stranger' parting.

One man explained: “Unlike dogs, men can and do read what's written about them, so they also know how to manipulate perceptions.

“While it suited him he was more than happy to keep the relationship going, and pulling all the tricks he'd learnt from reading girlfriend's copies of Cosmopolitan... But when it didn't suit him he let it slip.”

Your mum wasn't wrong when she said, 'Once a cheater, always a cheater' ...

Most of the men interviewed were clear about one thing with adultery: if you end up in a relationship with an attached man, never fool yourself that you were simply too irresistible.

Says Gary: “The chance to cheat is constantly available and yet so far I've resisted it. I could do all sorts of psychoanalysis, but the bottom line is: that's just who they are. And the bottom line for (a cheater): that's just who they are ... . If he cheats on you, he's an adulterer at heart.” We have been warned.

Some women end up finishing a relationship -- when it's really the man who wants out ...

A woman ends a relationship because she can't seem to make her man happy: why then does she feel so bad when she's the one who has done the dumping?

Barry, a “lovely guy” and old school friend of Strimpel's, explains: “Obviously if you've been going out with a girl you like her, so you don't necessarily want to dump her and you don't want to hurt her. So you just make the relationship deteriorate until she is forced to dump you.”

Rob, a serial monogamist, is more blunt: “Men are cowards. If we can avoid confrontation and letting someone down, we will.”

So women get to do the dirty work. Thanks guys.

A man who doesn't mind if you leave a whole set of clothes at their house might freak out over a few bracelets left by the sink ...

Women are supposed to be the drama queens in relationships but if some of the men in Strimpel's book are to go by, we don't read half as much into the little things as men do.

One guy dumps a new-ish girlfriend when she leaves her watch and bracelets in the bathroom. Many of her male interviewees understood his reaction.

“I wouldn't mind if my girlfriend, who stays at mine regularly, leaves in my room a toothbrush, contact lenses liquid or even a spare pair of pants for practical reasons,” says Peter.

But anything other than purely functional items are seen as precursors to leaving a lot more, “and then, basically, her moving in “.

Men have feelings too ...

There is a common perception that men are more libidinous than women and that if they are not looking for some action of an evening they are tired, burnt out or drunk.

Sometimes men -- just like women -- lack the confidence to make the first move.

“It's not that I have any weird issue with it, “ says one poor soul, “It's like you're frozen by an irrational fear of being rejected, even though you know you won't be.”

Intelligence can be a turn-off ...

I know, I know. All those bras burned for nothing.

“Women should be intelligent, yes, but lovely and smelling of roses,” says a charmer called Rob. What?! “It's just biology: it's hard-wired into us.”

Thankfully many of Strimpel's interviewees disagreed.

“Maybe it comes down to ambition rather than intelligence,” suggests one.

“No one, man or woman, wants to feel like they'll play second fiddle to someone else's career. There are ways to talk about how much you like your job that don't make it seem it's the only thing in your life.”

Women need to toughen up ...

Clearly, men are not all either wimps or bastards, but there are some serious bad pennies out there.

The key to not getting landed with one, say Strimpel's men, is to demand to be treated well and to leave if you're not. Women should take more responsibility, they conclude.

“Hardly the response you'd expect when the guy is the one acting like a tosser,” says Strimpel.

“But we need to get tough and have the courage to walk away. If we hang about for sub-standard treatment, it's our fault when we get it.”

What The Hell Is He Thinking: All the questions you've ever asked about men answered. By Zoe Strimpel, published by Penguin, €10.80, on sale now.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/revealed-the-real-reasons-why-hes-just-not-that-into-you-2263848.html

WHAT THE BADLY BEHAVED MALE SAYS (AND THINKS)

What he says: I bought you a toothbrush to keep at my place.

What he means: I've seen Sex and The City. I know a toothbrush will buy me time before you want to actually move in.

What he says: I'm not in love with my ex but I think her new guy just isn't right for her.

What he means: I'm still in love with my ex.

What he says: I would love to have sex but I don't want to ruin our friendship.

What he means: I don't want you to be my girlfriend but I quite fancy having a friend-with-benefits.

What he says: I was going to tell my wife about us last night but she was ill/busy with the kids/upset about the dog dying.

What he means: I will never leave my wife. Why would I? I am having my cake and eating it too.

What he says: It's not you, it's me.

What he means: It's not me, it's you. I just want you to end up comforting me as I break your heart.

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/what-the-badlybehaved-male-says-and-what-he-actually-means-2263850.html

THE QUICKFIRE ROUND: Honest answers on love's big questions:
What's the maximum number of guys a girl can have slept with for you to feel comfortable?

"Ten is the absolute max. If it's more than that, just lie." -- Victor

How do you feel about a girl making the first move?

"I think it's brilliant! It's only too forward if you're not actually all that keen on the woman." -- Tim B

Is intelligence more important than beauty in a woman?

"Sure I'd date a stupid woman. I'm not sure how long it would last." -- Tim V

What is so scary about moving in with someone?

"Moving in together feels like an all-to-play-for move. If you've ever had to move out of a place you've shared with a girlfriend, you know that it feels like 'My Little Divorce'." -- James E

What is the most common excuse men use to keep things casual?

"If you're not that into her, you'll say, 'I'm going out with the boys, come meet me afterwards', rather than ask her to 'come with'. It's a subtle booty call which is a big hint." -- Victor L

Book review: Without Him by Fiona O'Brien

Published in Irish Independent Review, Saturday, July 10, 2010

The decadent antics of Dublin socialites have been a rich seam of inspiration for author Fiona O'Brien this past eight years.

A former advertising executive who was born, bred and is still living in the D4 area, she has written entertainingly and with authority on multi-millionaire businessmen, their brittle, stick-thin wives and champagne lifestyle.

Although her fifth novel again mines this familiar territory, the premise of Without Him is more intriguing for the D4 set's recent fall from grace. The Veuve Cliquot has stopped flowing and the high-fliers are now at the epicentre of the economic crash. This is an opportunity for O'Brien, one of the smartest writers of popular fiction around, to get her teeth into deeper, seamier material.

The opening chapters don't disappoint. Shelley is the beautiful wife of charismatic developer Charlie Fitzgibbon. They once had a dream life: three gorgeous children, a suburban mansion, pots of money and social status.

When we meet Shelley, the dream has crumbled. Charlie's business has collapsed, he has fled the country to God knows where and she and the children are forced to move into the modest home of Charlie's estranged mother Vera after their mansion is repossessed. Charlie, the cad, has forged Shelley's co-signature on the house deeds and handed them over to one of his more demanding creditors.

Pity has been in short supply for those whom we have come to see as the architects of the nation's financial woes, but O'Brien makes a strong case for considering the fallout on the families of the central players. (The property big boys in the novel are fictionalised, of course, but O'Brien is clearly influenced by certain high-profile cases.)

A scene in which workmen come to remove the designer kitchen from Shelley's luxury home is powerful and poignant. Shelley's devastation is utterly believable.

It is not all doom and gloom. A touch of escapism arrives in the unlikely form of sultan of bling, Lukaz, a Russian oligarch looking to buy up half of Dublin. His outrageous tastes inject enough fun and fantasy to qualify the book as a rollicking holiday read.

The character of Charlie is less exciting. Absent for most of the story, he is a charismatic enigma when portrayed through the eyes of his mother, his wife and his children. When we get the full truth of the family secrets that have shaped him, he emerges as some sort of victim of circumstance both in business and in his personal life.

O'Brien may have misstepped here. Her readership is paying dearly for the greed of failed fat cats in real life. Will they be happy to swallow a fictional Champagne Charlie who claims to have simply been misunderstood?
- Susan Daly
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-without-him-2253360.html

My words are bigger than yours

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/my-words-are--bigger-than--yours-2090773.html

Martin Amis and his verbal brawls are no classier than Pete 'n' Kate's split, writes Susan Daly

Saturday March 06 2010

He says he's misunderstood. She says he's a selfish cad. His friend calls her spiteful. The parties involved, all well-known faces, chose to air their dirty linen through the pages of a British national newspaper rather than settle their grievances in private.

You would be forgiven for thinking this to be the latest volley in the bitter split between glamour model Katie 'Jordan' Price and pop-singer Peter Andre. The protagonists in this petty tit-for-tat, however, would be horrified by the presumption. Martin Amis is the enfant terrible of modern English literature. Anna Ford was once the face of BBC news. Surely a spat between them is of public importance?

It was certainly reported as such. The row was sparked when Amis complained to The Guardian newspaper that the press made a habit of twisting his quotes and making him look controversial when, really, he's just a nice old man. Ford, whose late husband was a close friend of Amis, took umbrage at this image of victimhood and called Amis to tell him to get over himself.

Except, of course, she didn't. She aired her accusations that Amis had been disrespectful at her husband's deathbed and neglectful of her daughter, his godchild, in a letter to The Guardian newspaper. Amis vowed to reply to Ford "personally". It transpired that to Amis, this meant a rebuttal fired off to the letters page, admitting his shortcomings as a godfather but calling her other grievances an "unworthy farrago".

A few days later, novelist Christopher Hitchens, a mutual friend of Amis and Ford's late husband Mark Boxer, stuck his oar in to take Amis's side in what he described as this "cultural free-for-all".

Hitchens was right about one thing: it was a free-for-all. The row was as undignified as drunken fisticuffs on a Friday night -- and every bit as trivial. Yet because this bit of luvvie hand-flapping was conducted through the pages of a liberal broadsheet, it acquired the sheen of intelligentsia.

The chattering classes had a licence to gawk at what was essentially a tabloid smackdown with bigger words. (Who uses 'farrago' as a term of abuse?)

Pete 'n' Jordan's bitchfests are in the tuppenny place to the tawdry squabbles of Amis and his literary cohorts. Amis -- the misunderstood guy, remember -- is as prolific in making enemies as writing novels. He threw over Pat Kavanagh, his agent of 22 years, in favour of a bigger advance in the early 1990s, losing his long-time friend Julian Barnes, Kavanagh's husband, in the process.

He dirtied his bib chez Kavanagh a second time by replacing his lover Julie Kavanagh, sister of Pat, with her best friend. He left his first wife, also for her best friend, the writer and now current Mrs Amis, Isabel Fonseca.

Amis's second in his recent duel, Christopher Hitchens, is no less generous with his sabre. An extract from his forthcoming memoir -- and it is forthcoming in many ways -- detailed his trysts in college with two young men who would later become members of Margaret Thatcher's government. He also included the nugget that he had slept with Sally Amis, Martin's younger sister. Amis himself has detailed Sally's battle with the alcoholism that would eventually kill her and what he called her "pathological promiscuity".

If this level of tawdry detail spilled over the pages of Heat magazine, it would be deemed tacky. Literary giants don't do sordid though -- they have grand passions.

Amis is a magnet for negative publicity that he says he does nothing to create. In the column that got Ford so riled up, Amis claimed a "mishmash of quotes" were responsible for reports that he had called for euthanasia for the elderly, and expressed dismay that women have "too much power for their own good".

His talent for generating attention is ironic considering comments he made about Katie Price a few months ago, reducing her appeal to "two bags of silicone". Amis feels he too is being reduced to the sum of his most gossiped-about parts, and his work overlooked. (He has a book out, you know.) He wrote: "The vow of silence looks more and more attractive."

It's a threat unlikely to be carried out. Amis's wordy circle can't resist the frisson of a bit of verbal mudslinging. Salman Rushdie has had a long-running feud with Germaine Greer since she -- he says -- dubbed him a megalomaniac almost 20 years ago. He in turn calls her "sanctimonious".

Chris Hitchens called Gore Vidal a "crackpot" last month and fell out with his journalist brother Peter for years, their dispute re-ignited from time to time in various publications.

The roots of such arguments are as banal as any in the world of celebrity -- professional rivalry, sexual jealousy, sheer bitchiness -- but are elevated by the self-importance of some literary showboats.

Yet, somehow, an obsession with the marriage of the Beckhams or the Coles is regarded as purely for the hard of thinking.

Take the case of VS Naipaul and Paul Theroux, who broke their 30-year friendship in 1996. Theroux later took the trouble to paint a thinly-veiled Naipaul as a miserly snob in his novel Sir Vidia's Shadow. The initial bone of contention between these two literary megaliths? Naipaul had married a "new and hostile" wife.

Essentially, they fell out because one didn't like the other's missus.

Harry Potter and the Dead Ringers

My books essay in the Independent's Review this weekend:
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/harry-potter-and-the-dead-ringers-2061740.html

As the film of the Percy Jackson novel 'The Lightning Thief' opens this weekend, Susan Daly reports on the rush to emulate JK Rowling's spell-binding success

Does the name Tanya Grotter ring a bell? She's an 11-year-old orphan who attends the Abracadabra school of witchcraft and rides a magical double-bass in a bestselling series of Russian children's books. Next door in Belarus, they have Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, author JK Rowling must be beside herself with pride. The outlandish success of her creation Harry Potter -- 400 million books sold worldwide and counting -- has spawned a predictable number of imitators.

Some claim to be parodies. This is clearly the case with Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody by American humorist Michael Gerber, which features some very adult behaviour at the Hogwash School of Wizardry and Witchcrap.

Some, however, tread a very fine line between parody and plagiarism. Tanya Grotter has been slapped with a cease-and-desist order by Rowling's lawyers and its publication in English is prohibited. There are unashamedly brazen rip-offs: In 2002, a book called Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk Up To Dragon appeared in China, purporting to be the fifth instalment in the series. Tiny problem: Rowling was still at home in Scotland beavering away on the real fifth book at the time.

Suspicions were also raised by the plot, which hinged on a shower of sweet-and-sour flavoured rain turning Harry into a hobbit.

While not all 'homages' to Rowling's fiction have been quite so bonkers, there has been a rush to emulate her billion-dollar success. Much as record labels like to mould and market new performers as the next Beyonce or this generation's Bob Dylan, book publishers are constantly scouting for the 'next' Harry Potter.

Percy Jackson is the current contender for the tween fiction throne. Like Harry, Percy is an ordinary young boy who discovers he has extraordinary powers. Like Harry, he struggles with life in the 'real' world. He suffers from dyslexia and ADHD and thinks he's a loser -- until he finds out his father is the ancient Greek god Poseidon.

The Percy Jackson books have been huge sellers from the moment US author Rick Riordan sold them to a publisher in 2005, two years before Rowling wrote her seventh and final Potter instalment. There are some clear intersections between Percy's world and Harry's -- both boys attend magic schools: Hogwarts and Camp Half-Blood; and Percy has his own Ron and Hermione sidekicks in the shape of Grover and Annabeth.

Movie bosses, encouraged by the success of the Harry Potter movies, were not slow to greenlight a screen version of Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief. It opens in Ireland this weekend -- a fact that will already have been drummed into you if you are the proud owner of a child aged anywhere between eight and 13.

At the helm of the movie (as is very clearly stated on the promotional posters) is two-time Harry Potter director Chris Columbus. He says he recognises there are "similarities" between Percy and the more famous boy wizard. "We would be fools not to hope for the same kind of audience."

Indeed they would. The six Harry Potter films so far have raked in $5.4bn at the box office -- the final two instalments, to be released at the end of this year and the start of 2011, are expected to continue the cash-in.

Percy author Riordan readily admits that Rowling was an influence and that he "took some lessons" from her ability to blend fantasy, humour, thrills and character. Riordan draws on a lot of personal inspiration that can't be attributed to Rowling -- he began writing Percy Jackson to comfort his own son Haley, who is also dyslexic and has ADHD.

He adds that while Percy is like Harry in many ways, it is not because he is modelled on him. "It's because they are both models of the same archetype," he says, "A lot of what JK Rowling does so well is drawn from Greek mythology."

Yet even Riordan admits that without Harry Potter, he may never have got published. "It [HP] made publishers aware there was a market for children's literature," he says.

Not just any old children's literature though.

Since the first Potter book hit the stands in 1997, there has been a surge in publishers and authors latching on to the fantasy novel. The question could be asked: What first attracted you to the genre that made JK Rowling a billionaire?

None of these authors has come close to sniffing the level of success or critical acclaim of the Potter books. Riordan's books have sold over six million copies -- very respectable, but only a fraction of Rowling's worldwide sales. The trumpets were previously out for The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black, which first appeared in 2003. It too spawned a film, starring young Irish actress Sarah Bolger, which has almost doubled the return on its $90m budget, but earned nothing close to what the average Harry Potter film would have made.

The Shadowmancer series by GP Taylor; the Wolf Brother books by Michelle Paver; Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; Alison Goodman's Eon series -- all fine books set in the realm of children's fantasy; none reaching the dizzy heights of Harry on his magic broomstick.

Riordan thinks it's foolish to call anyone a rival to Harry Potter. A former teacher, he says: "I had students who read these books 13, 14 times and I would say, 'Great book, but don't you want to try something else?' And they would say, 'There's nothing else this good.'

"There is no 'next' Harry Potter. There never was a Harry Potter before Harry Potter. It's completely unprecedented in children's literature."

It's a thought echoed by Darren Shan, Irish author of the very successful Cirque du Freak children's horror series.

Addressing young fans on his blog last Sunday, Shan remarked that "while success in any field breeds imitators and copycats" and many of these do well, "you just don't get the same buzz if you read a book about a school for wizards that was written to cash-in on the success of the HP novels."

Shan is absolutely correct. Ironically enough, his own fiction holds a key to the trend that is overtaking young adult fiction as fans of the boy wizard grow up and away. Shan's fantasy world has been populated by vampires and demons since he published his first kids' book in 2000 (he has sold 15 million copies worldwide).

Five years later, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series came along, selling 85 million copies and proving that the sexy teen vampire is taking a real bite of the competition.

Irish Independent

Reader, I hated him

You know you were a nerd as a kid when all your crushes were 19th century literary creations....

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/under-the-covers-with-my-first-love-1923465.html

Under the covers with my first love
Susan Daly trembles at the knees as she delves into the Mills and Boon poll of the ultimate romantic literary heroes

Saturday October 24 2009

My first love was well over 150 years old and had "a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance" when I fell for him. No Eamon Dunphy jokes please -- I was a tender-hearted 13-year-old and this was serious.

Never mind that Mr Darcy had seduced generations of young girls before me. He had me at hello. Or rather, at the first mention of his "fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien" in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

If he had a bit of a puss on him, that was acceptable: at least he had some gravitas. When your real world is populated by teenage boys for whom seduction is twanging bra straps in class, a man with sophistication and the ability to grow impressive sideburns can turn a girl's head.

I take it quite personally that Mr Darcy (first name Fitzwilliam, but best not to dwell on that) has not topped a new list of the most romantic literary heroes as voted by Mills and Boon readers. That spot went to Mr Rochester, keeping wives in attics since 1847.

I understand that taking umbrage over which 19th century figment of the imagination fills his fictional breeches better is a bit like debating whether Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran was the finer band of the '80s. They were both a bit ridiculous, if we're honest.

Nonetheless, the first literary hero you take under the covers with you, reading by torch when your mother yells up the stairs to turn out the light, is special. Edward Rochester was not a man you would want to be alone with in a darkened room.

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, he was dismissive of his daughter, uncharitable towards his wife and menacing towards Jane. Reader, I despised him.

At one point, when Jane refuses to become his mistress (because that's what she would be, what with the first Mrs R still wearing a hole in the floor upstairs) he threatens that he may not be able to control his passion. "His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild licence," wrote the breathless Bronte. An implicit threat of rape -- hardly the stuff of fairytale romance, is it?

Mr Darcy was not without his faults but the whole attraction was that he repented and changed his ways through the love of a good woman. The words leopard and spots had yet to become linked in my very limited lexicon of love. Rochester, I seem to remember, needed to be blinded and crippled before he came to his senses.

Darcy is loyal and constant but misunderstood. As the book progresses, we are dropped little tidbits about his discreet kindnesses. We are made to fall in love with him much as Lizzie does. He ignores his family's protests that she is socially inferior, fulfilling our teenage fantasies that we are all Cinderellas just waiting for someone to see past the rags/acne/lack of status to the princess within.

In truth, I wonder how much of my crush on Mr Darcy would remain were the image of a wet-shirted Colin Firth not burned on my brain. Firth became the definitive Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, emerging damp and magnificent from a lake into which he had dived to quench his unvoiced passion for Lizzie Bennett. He was everything I had imagined he would be -- and more. Purely for research purposes, I looked up the scene on YouTube this week and can confirm that it remains what might politely be termed, a knee-trembler.

I will also admit to being influenced by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow at their most ethereally beautiful in the film version of The Great Gatsby, which I saw just before I read the book.

Blinded by Jay and Daisy's physical perfection, I wanted their champagne lifestyle, debauched and doomed though it was.

Rochester, by contrast, is merely terrifying as played by William Hurt in 1996 or, bizarrely, almost too handsome and suave in the hands of Timothy Dalton in the 1980s miniseries.

On the other hand, Wuthering Heights has somehow seen Heathcliff and Cathy's doomed passion recast as epic romance in screen versions. It helps with the bosom-heaving that he has been portrayed by the very beautiful Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes. I have a suspicion that although we're all meant to be feminists now, the adolescent attraction to unsuitable bad boys lingers. Heathcliff -- so singularly demonic that he doesn't even have a last name -- is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Yet there is not one girl-child of the 1980s who has not looked wistfully out her bedroom window, practising her best Kate Bush wail: "Heathcliff, It's me, It's Cathy, I've come home ... "

As with most formative experiences, it's often a case of meeting the right romantic hero at the right time. Theodore 'Laurie' Laurence is a heart-throb as the wealthy, orphaned neighbour of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. But his appreciation of the qualities of bookish, headstrong tomboy Josephine was encouraging for those of us who spent teenhood hiding behind a book.

And sometimes there is just no accounting for taste. My biggest teenage crush, less literary than pulp fiction, was Kit Fielding, a jockey-slash-detective from the Dick Francis series of potboiler books. One scene in which he ravishes a lucky lady on some dustsheets in a renovated house and then heads off to ride seven winners at an evening race meet sticks in my mind, and I really wish it wouldn't.

I'm not alone. When I asked women of my acquaintance what literary heroes kept them turning the pages as teens, I got some interesting feedback. Heathcliff made it, of course, and Mr Darcy but also Adrian Mole, he of the secret diary and unrequited crushes, and Holden Caulfield of JD Salinger's Catcher in The Rye.

Another mentioned The Fat Controller, but I hope she was joking. A lust for Heathcliff might be so wrong it's right, but some passions are just, well, wrong.


FRANKLY, WE NOW GIVE A DAMN
Sometimes you only know you love a literary hero when you see them on screen. The following characters’ leap from book to script has only increased their attractiveness:

RHETT BUTLER – GONE WITH THE WIND: Margaret Mitchell’s novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 before it was given the Hollywood treatment two years later with Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. The novel’s Rhett was violent and brutal with women, based as he was on Mitchell’s first husband, a bootlegger and abuser whom she divorced. In the movie, Rhett is somewhat more dashing with Gable and his moustache ensconced locked in a classic flirt-flight epic with Scarlett.

ROMEO MONTAGUE – ROMEO AND JULIET: I never understood the attraction of Romeo – all mouth, no trousers and kills himself unnecessarily. What use is that? Then Leonardo diCaprio’s delinquent Romeo swaggered into the picture in Baz Luhrmann’s inspired Romeo + Juliet in 1996 and it all became clear. Especially in the scene where he rips his shirt off in the rain.

ROB GORDON – HIGH FIDELITY: As in most of Nick Hornby’s books, the male protagonist needs nothing more than a good shake. Director Stephen Frears made Rob Gordon (Fleming in the book) infinitely more attractive and less pathetic by casting the indie woman’s crumpet John Cusack in the role in the 2000 film. Record store owner and compulsive list-maker Rob learns to lose his fear of commitment and makes the perfect romantic mix tape.

ROBBIE TURNER – ATONEMENT: If Ian McEwan’s masterpiece had been around in my teenage years, I would have seized on the budding sexual tension between the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis and the poor-but-proud Robbie as the ultimate coming-of-age tale. Joe Wright’s 2007 film puts flesh on Robbie’s bones by casting the delicious James McAvoy. Thwarted love, heroic death and a full-blooded knee-trembler in the library: what more could a girl want?

EDWARD CULLEN – TWILIGHT: Stephanie Meyers did something clever with her Twilight series of teen books: she made her romantic hero the ultimate bad boy – a vampire. But her best trick was to allow the books to be optioned. By the time the first Twilight film came out last year, you could hear the anticipatory teen girl screams in space. And Meyers quite rightly gave Robert Pattison the stamp of approval as the Edward she had pictured in her head, managing to look both “dangerous and beautiful” at the same time.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC - CYRANO DE BERGERAC: We will ignore Steve Martin in the American film version Roxanne and concentrate on Gerard Depardieu in 1990 as the big-nosed lover who overcomes his facial shortcomings with beautiful words. Depardieu makes him an utterly believable, vulnerable character and let’s face it, the actor is not a man who has ever let his sizeable schnoz stand in his way with the ladies.

ARAGORN – LORD OF THE RINGS: In the Tolkien cycle of books Aragorn is a noble warrior for sure, but the description of him with shaggy dark hair “flecked with gray” and a stern, pale face hardly leaps off the page at you. Enter the ruggedly handsome Viggo Mortensen in 2001 in the first of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy and suddenly it becomes a little easier to picture him being adored by the masses of Middle Earth.

JAMES BOND – THE 007 SERIES: Ian Fleming wrote that his fictional British secret agent James Bond had a noticeable scar on his cheek, “a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold”. Doesn’t sound much like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan, does it? He also abhors killing people which is quite a remove from the devil-may-care physicality of the screen Bonds who seduce and assassinate with equal vigour.
The ladies’ man bit is consistent with Fleming’s books – although the written Bond also has a habit of slapping his Bond girls about which is something the screen Bond would never get away with (Sean Connery off-screen comments notwithstanding).

RICHARD SHARPE – SHARPE: A fictional British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, Richard Sharpe is a man with a dark, possibly murderous past, in Bernard Cromwell’s series of books. He is also dark, long-haired and scarred. In the 1990s TV series, Sean Bean – blonde, beautiful, not at all scarred – romanticized the role. A fine, er, swordsman he was but his three marriages ended poetically badly: two wives die and the third betrays and steals from him. There, there Sharpe, let us comfort you on our heaving bosoms.