The Maroon Diaries

Salma Hayek playing Frida Kahlo in Frida . I think this is the single most erotic scene ever filmed, and nobody even had to take their clothes off.     The Roxanne Tango from Moulin Rouge . I would barely average one trip a year to the cinema, but when Moulin Rouge was screening, I went five times to see it on the big screen. The Cell Block Tango from Chicago . Yes, I've just realised myself. These are all tangos. I must really like the tango. Okay, no more tangos, I promise. Michael Jackson's Thriller has so many layers of cultural references by now that I couldn't even begin to try to unravel them and watch this objectively. But it rocks as hard as it ever did. I have no idea what happened to this man in the end, but when you look back, my god, he was so extraordinarily talented. And there has to be some belly dancing. Something raw and authentic and unpolished, like Gadjo Dilo with Rona Hartner and Romain Duris. I couldn't decide be...

One of the best things about my childhood was that my mother was a functional alcoholic. I realise what an unusual statement this is, and I want to start with a kind of disclaimer and apology to anyone who might find it upsetting or offensive. I do realise that an enormous number of people have suffered terribly due to their parents' alcohol abuse. I know that the cost of alcohol abuse and related issues like drink driving is tragic and bitter and huge for our society as a whole, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was being disrespectful or flippant about the issue. But my story was different. I never even realised that my mother would, under current conventional terminology, be considered an alcoholic until I was in my late 20's. I happened to be visiting with her on the day of the weekly shopping trip. At this time she was living in a remote area, and had to stock up on all her supplies, alcoholic and otherwise, for the whole week. Her weekly budget of alcohol...

It's often not good for me to read books that are detailed descriptions of other people's mental illness. I'm glad that people are writing and publishing this stuff, it's vital for raising awareness in the wider community. But I find it difficult to immerse myself in such a book, to really go there along with the author. It just reminds me that I'm mad too, and of the suffering it causes in my life and others, and brings all that sensitive stuff up to the surface. I really appreciated this comment in this review on Readings - While I would suggest that this is perhaps not the book for those who are currently suffering deeply from mental illness themselves, it would serve as an invaluable resource for the people who work with and care for them. So when I found Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards in the library I wasn't sure I really wanted to read it. But there was one particular detail here that made me really want to try to read this book - the fact th...

Most of the neighbours at my new home are the non-human variety, which is just lovely. A lot of them are cows. The land we live on sits behind the road from another block of land, with a right-of-access road running through it to get to our home. This land is owned by a cow farmer, so we have to pass through a cow paddock to get in and out. I just love it. Unusually, there seem to be a lot of different breeds of cattle all together in one paddock. I wonder if the farmer just really likes cows and wanted to collect lots of different kinds, like I do with vintage crockery and suchlike. I'm not sure when the official cattle breeding season is meant to be but these cows seem to be producing young regularly. Every now and then there will be a new tiny baby cow in the paddock, following its mother and finding its feet. There's always a mixture of the young ones that stick by their mothers, and the older, more sedate and mellow mothers, and some feisty half-grown adolescents that we...

Happy New Year, everybody! Cheers! I meant to spend the New Year's Eve putting this post online, but instead, I spent the evening socialising with Loved Ones over drinky-poos like a normal human being. I'm so pleased with myself. So here we are with my Year in Books for 2013. 1. Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter by Lloyd Kahn 2012 2. The Joy of Less: A Minimalist Living Guide by Francine Jay 2010 3. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 1974 4. The Pickled Pantry by Andrea Chesman 2012 5. Wild Women edited by Sue Thomas 1994 6. Ignorance by Michele Roberts 2012 7. The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson 2012 8. European Mythology by Jacqueline Simpson 1987 9. The Stone Key by Isobelle Carmody 2008 10. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs 2011 11. The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson 2009, English translation 2012 12. World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler 2008 13. Precious ...

It's a long, hot day. There's been a lot of these lately; it's that time of year. I've had a certain song stuck in my head lately, just because it's called 'One Long Day.' The Summer. Sometimes that word sounds like a prison sentence to me. This is a hard time for me, every year. I don't cope well with the heat. I can't stand the bright sunshine. On days like these, I just have to stay indoors, and stay still as much as possible. If I move around too much on a hot day, that's enough to get overheated and feel terribly sick. So I spend most of these long hot days lying on my bed with the fan on, napping or reading or doing puzzles. I've certainly been getting through a lot of reading lately. Several excellent books have helped make the days fun and exciting, as long as I stay in the book. Then the sun goes down, and it gets cool, and I am reprieved of my sentence once more, until dawn. I can breathe again, I can move again. I have ...

Like most of my generation, I grew up watching an awful lot of television. An awful lot of crappy, often American television with all the brainwashing advertising in between. I certainly developed addictive behaviours toward televsion viewing as a child. Once I was grown up, I decided that that was bad. When I had my own place, I lived without television, and had no doubt that I was better off. When I thought of people who use television to deal with their moods, I had nightmarish visions of overweight women in pink, Tim-Tam-crumb-infested nighties watching Ricki Lake and home shopping infomercials. As long as I didn't have a television set, that could never be me. I sure as hell wasn't giving up the Tim Tams. However, I did go out of my house sometimes. Sometimes I was in other people's houses. So I still got to see plenty of television here and there over the years. And I came to understand that there's a lot of really good stuff on television, too, and to appreciat...