The Anti Room

I used to not have much time for Pink. When the former Alecia Moore first emerged in the late ’90s, she seemed like yet another pop starlet, but one with a contrived, “alternative edge”. Her music was cheesy, bland pop, but she had tattoos. Ooh, edgy! There are few things that annoy me more than [...]

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One of the worst things about the weather this godforsaken summer is that I can’t cycle into work every day (well, I could, if I wanted to cycle in lashing rain, but I don’t). When I got my bike last year and started cycling regularly for the first time since I was in college, a [...]

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Tonight on RTE 1 the beauty pageant relic that is The Rose of Tralee kicks off. Growing up I loved its beauty-with-brains-and-jigs approach to making women don pastel coloured dresses and compete against each other. This was mainly because along with the Eurovision and the Late Late Toy Show, it was one of three events [...]

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So, all this talk of Liz Phair’s album yesterday got me thinking about her song ‘Fuck And Run’. Romantically speaking, I don’t think there is anything worse than the feeling of someone edging you out of their gaff after a night of passion. Unless that is the feeling of trying to get rid of someone from [...]

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I fell in love with Liz Phair in January 1995. It was a year and a half after the release of her debut album Exile in Guyville, but until a friend lent me the album I hadn’t had much interest in listening to it. Phair had received scant attention in the British music press (which [...]

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Am off on holidays and desperately looking for book recommendations to bring with me. Now, here’s the caveat: I’m a ridiculously fussy when it comes to books. Someone bought me – actually bought me (I don’t know which word to italicise for best effect there) – a Claudia Carroll book a while ago. Friend, do [...]

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I’m a relative newcomer to the joys of Gok Wan. Previously, I had only seen him as a panelist on quiz shows or a judge on reality shows and never quite knew who he was or what he did. Last week I read an interview with him, watched How To Look Good Naked and his [...]

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We’ve talked about hot girl crushes, we’ve talked about role-dependent crushes, but now it’s time to talk about the crushes that dare not speak their name. Yes, the crush you know is wrong, wrong, wrong (or, to put it more accurately, embarrassing) but can’t help it. The men or women you know aren’t really attractive [...]

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In today’s Guardian there is an In Defense of Madonna-style article by Aida Edemariam (oh to have a name like that) giving out about the fact that people like Camille Paglia, Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill have all turned on the 50-year-old pop star. Why is Madonna causing such disapproval amongst her purportedly feminist sistas? Aida [...]

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Okay, so this is frivolous, but seriously, following on from my last post about how I was going to get myself out of my rut and glam up, it’s proving more difficult than I thought. Mainly due to the weather. I spent much of my adolescence in mid-west America and the months of November through [...]

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