Odeon The Girl Next Door is the kind of film for which the term
fantasy really should be used, although thankfully not a single
orc appears. Instead, it depicts a creature far more readily
found in the collective imagination of the male contingent of its
adolescent target audience, and tells a story almost as
implausible as any sword and sorcery epic. This is the kind of fantasy where, whilst most of us spend our
teenage years living next door to smelly old crones with lots of
cats, one smart but overly-conscientious high school student
finds himself sharing a property line with the delicious Danielle
( 24’’s Elisha Cuthbert). As if that weren’t
enough good fortune, she adds the cherry on top and falls for
him. Alas, it turns out that the word cherry hasn’t been
used around young Danielle for quite a while; will her past as a
porn starlet ruin everything? The thought that such a thing could be considered potentially
ruinous, rather than merely a stroke of very good luck, may be
treated with incredulity by many young men out there. There are
feelings behind that swiftly-shed basque, however, and it is on
the people, rather than the porn, that the film focuses. Director
Luke Greenfield does surprisingly well and serves up something
that has a little more to it than most high-school movies. The
Girl Next Door is cute, funny, warm and well put together, with
few pretensions but more than enough coming- of-age wish
fulfilment to balance out the inevitable, and often very funny,
lashings of teen sex comedy. If the boys in the audience can suspend their disbelief (and
envy) regarding the unlikely coupling, and the girls can rein in
their jealousy when the camera lingers yet again on Cuthbert,
they’ll have almost as much fun as Dick van Dyke auditioning for Chitty Chitty Gang Bang.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004  

Miss Kittin is a female DJ and one of the main progenitors of
the electroclash movement. Electroclash happened in 2002, and we
all now pretend we never really liked it anyway. After work with
the likes of Felix Da Housecat, Tricky and Chicks on Speed comes
this, her debut solo album. And the results are quite dull. It goes on for a really long time, it’s quite European
and I bet some of you will think it’s really cool. Well, you
will be wrong. You see, Miss Kittin evidently has ambitions of
making a broad, diverse record which bursts out of the realms of
traditional electronica by mixing in some r&b, rock, dub,
soul and ambient noises. Which is fine. But I Com just sounds too damn polite and
conventional. I mean, Miss Kittin, come on, this is your debut
solo album, you should have tried a lot harder and made an album
which blows minds and will be played for years to come.
You’ve let yourself down. The ingredients are there but it’s all just crying out to
be a lot more spiky and exciting and fun. Kittin’s vocals
are thin and weedy. Her detached delivery doesn’t cut it
over a whole album. And the production by world renowned duo GLOVE
is flat and airless. An electronica record needs to sound
outstanding to be noticed in 2004. Too often, the music on this
album sinks into the background and occasionally it verges on bad
Europop. The single, ‘Professional Distortion’ pretends
to rock. On ‘Requiem for a Hit’ Kittin goes a little
blue with the call to “show me your tits and let’s make
a hit.” Most of the songs are steeped in irony, but she does try her
hand at sincerity on what proves to be the album’s emotional
fulcrum ‘Dub About Me’. Over seven gruelingly dull
minutes, Kittin opens her heart and asks, “Baby, what about
me?” She is responded to by a male robotic vocoder. Perhaps
worst of all, with ‘I Come.com’ Kittin gives us a title
which cannot deliver on its innuendo. And that sums the album up for me. It makes gestures to rock,
it attempts humour, it tries to be smart and it assumes
it’ll be the soundtrack to hip parties, but it never quite
gets there. The all too obvious comparison to Miss Kittin is Peaches.
Where Peaches succeeds is her ability to inject her music with
some blood, tits and ass. Judging by this dreary listen, Miss
Kittin has just confused cool with conservatism.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Canadian band The Stills sold out The Zodiac, promising an
interesting plunge into ‘80s mope-rock, whilst trying not to
be upstaged by the ought-to-be-huge Walkmen. Given just how good
the latter were, The Stills had some work to do. They began well:
Dave Hamelin on drums set a frenetic pace and didn’t put a
stick wrong all night. The guitar lines were clever, complemented
the vocals and created some complex and beautiful harmonies, and
the gravel- throated singer/guitarist swayed and posed and fawned
as well as any frontman. And when the band were static they had
an excellent animated video playing behind them. The problem was how safe this all was. The four guys played an
amazingly tight set, with everything in its place and everything
where they wanted it to be; this, as much as anything else, was
what was wrong. The stage was never for a second threatened with anything
spontaneous, unexpected or, in fact, interesting. They played
multiple false endings, they left the stage after half an hour (a
joke which might have been funnier if they had played more than
40 minutes in total), and never pushed themselves at all. It only got interesting during the final song when the drummer
took over vocals and sang his heart out. There was more to get
excited about in that one track than the whole of the rest of the
set. In short, anything The Stills might have to offer is
available on a CD, and at least you can play a game of solitaire
while listening to a cd, which would be considerably more
inspiring than watching them play live.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Textile from the Islamic World
Ashmolean Museum
Until 13 June Islamic Art never fails to fascinate with its strong sense of
aesthetics. From pottery to carpets, paintings to architecture,
miniatures to fabrics, there is a vast array of styles. The
aftermath of September 11 has almost totally erased awareness of
this diversity from the popular imagination, replacing it instead
with a rather one-dimensional and bleak idea of the religion.
Media representations of Islam have focused entirely on the
aspect of jihad, adding fuel to the Western misconception that
Islamic culture is devoted to terrorism and oppression. As a
consequence, Islamic culture in the Western imagination is tied
up with nihilism and creative sterility. A new exhibition at the Ashmolean, which is drawn from the
private collection of Lloyd Cotsen, dispels exactly such a
stereotype. Textiles from the Islamic World showcase a small but
wide-ranging selection of textile fragments from Central Asia and
the Near East, spanning the pre- Islamic period of the First
Millennium A.D. to the 17th and 18th century Safavid Persia. This
seems an ambitious timescale to attempt in what is admittedly a
presentation of “traces of textile art, rather than
monumental pieces”. However, the collage-like assembly of
fabric manages to evoke the impression of an elaborate culture in
miniature. Although many fragments are in faded and frayed
condition, the intricacy of the swatch-pattern makes it a small
effort to imagine the original grandeur of the fabrics. They
display brocades, compound weaves, lampas, plain weaves, samite,
tapestry and twill to provide a snapshot of the expansive weaving
styles of Central Asia. There are only two ’whole’ examples of textile,
which is initially slightly disappointing. It is inevitably
somewhat of a barrier when one is seeking to achieve a sense of
perspective. One of the whole pieces is a fuchsia pink Ottoman
Velvet Carpet from 17th Century Turkey. Indeed, as the
centrepiece of the display there is a marked contrast between its
sprawling size and intact nature, and the other framed fabric
pieces, some no more than six inches in width. This is, I think,
the single criticism that can be levelled against the exhibition:
that the tiny scraps of fabric seem more to be swallowed up by
their incongruous frames, than to have their detail of work
complemented. It is a shame for works that have survived the test
of time to be obscured by their presentation. The outstanding features are the fabled ‘Mongol’
cloths of gold. One feels almost a shade of sadness on viewing
the gold threads dispersing an attenuated shimmer through the
small thin material. I certainly mourned the modern age’s
premium on plastic and lycra in lieu of gold and silver. The
brocade incorporates Chinese symbols such as the dragon, fusing
Islamic motifs like vine and floral patterns with a distinctly
Far-Eastern style. This exhibition is a powerful example of how
broad the cultural influence of Islam was in Asia and the diverse
character of its complex culture. It must be seen to be believed.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Shoe Fly Baby, the 2004 Asham Award short story anthology, is
eclectic to say the least. Taking us from a London brothel, to a
cancer ward, to a “utopian” state in which Ritalin is
added to the water supply, these stories reflect a wide range of
human experience. However, I would also argue that they vary in
quality. While some of these stories stand out for their
emotional intensity, stylistic sophistication or, in two cases,
downright strangeness, others are less engaging and even banal.
Nevertheless, the wide variety within this collection makes it an
enjoyable read. The Asham Award, named for the house in Sussex
where Virginia Woolf once lived, aims to encourage new female
writers. One of the questions that this anthology left me with,
however, is whether or not an anthology containing solely women
writers is actually necessary. In addition to revealing their own experience, these authors
are also just as deft at revealing the perspective of men.
Rachael McGill’s ‘Butter Fish Parrot Fish’ shows
us a man carrying his baby daughter into a pub, while Naomi
Alderman’s ‘Gravity’ quite successfully narrates a
man’s entire life in the span of 14 pages. The most
impressive of these efforts to assume a new perspective is
undoubtedly the First Prizewinning story by Victoria Briggs. Set
in a North London brothel, ‘Shoe Fly Baby’ tells the
story of Halim, who stares in awe at a shop window lined with
trainers, and that of Debra, the prostitute who dances for him in
five-inch heels. Repudiating any preconceptions the reader might
have about power relations and victimisation, this story is
strong and unsettling. In my opinion, it resonates quite well
with Francine Stock’s ‘Antechamber’ in which a
cancer patient tells us about her experience with strength,
humour, and not the slightest trace of sentimentality. In a sharp contrast to this, Carey Jane Hardy’s
‘Face to Face’ takes on a tone of deep emotion as a
woman most slowly come to terms with her loss of eyesight.
Selected from over 900 entries, the stories in this collection
are of high quality. And the wide range of stories offered by
Shoe Fly Baby ensures that every reader is likely to find at
least some appealing. While you probably will not like all of the
stories in this collection, it undoubtedly a great way to spend
an afternoon. Bloomsbury, Paperback, £6.99ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Martin is a man of destiny – or at least we are assured
as much with mounting insistence throughout Swallowing the Sun.
He has escaped, by dint of stubborn grit, from his brutal
childhood in a Belfast slum, but in his new middle-class
existence he feels awkward and uncomfortable. He is suspicious of
this bourgeoisie to which he suddenly belongs, and is overawed by
money and soft furnishings. Furthermore, he has an old taste for
violence (instilled of course by his father) that is only lying
dormant. And when things in the cosy family unit start to fall
apart, the old horror returns. David Parks makes so much of these tragic totems that you
feel, after a while, like enquiring as to the precise nature of
Martin’s relations with his mother, and whether he has
consulted an oracle recently. But to give away anything much of
the plot would be to spoil the most enjoyable aspect of this
novel. Parks tells a good yarn, and the pace of the narrative mounts
steadily and effectively, even if it seems to lack an ending. But
Parks isn’t content just to say what happens next; he wants to
have a deep and meaningful dialogue with you. Sometimes this
means that he overloads sentences, describing characters’
thoughts with overweight diction, as when Martin has a moment of
reflection in the school hall. However, Parks can show great
sensitivity to the significance of places and objects; a mobile
phone that reappears several times, effectively registers the
shifting boundary between public and private speech in the novel. The objects in Martin’s museum form a lapidary bulwark against
the ravages of time and Martin’s demons. David Parks might
sometimes sound like he’s swallowed a thesaurus rather than the
sun, but he writes compellingly when telling a story and not
thinking about fate. Bloomsbury, hardback, £14.99ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004

Ever since Byron immortalised the famous simile “like
dervishes, who turn as on a pivot” in Don Juan, the dervish
has remained an enchanting fixture in the Occidental imagination.
Sari Gul, the only group in Europe trained in the mystical art of
whirling, mesmerised Oxford audiences into a reverie. For two
blissful hours, the Sheldonian metamorphosed into a cosmic
playground. As followers of the Mevleviyya Sufi order, the entire evening
was conducted more as a religious ceremony than as a performance.
Prayers in Arabic and poetry in Persian accompanied the highlight
of the evening, ‘The Dance of the Planets’, which
symbolised the spiritual journey of every human. With one hand
turned upwards to the heavens, and the other down to the earth,
Sari Gul’s white robes bloomed like luminous corollas, as
the whirling gust beneath their garbs guided them to
enlightenment. They mimicked the harmonious play of the planets
above. Each movement was wrought with such hypnotic grace, that every
individual in the audience sat captivated in leaning pose. One
could still feel the constraints of Western classical notation in
a music style that demands improvisation, a legacy of Sari
Gul’s European background. Nonetheless for one night, Oxford
watched philosophy in action. ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004