(Item #2462524 that I will miss about living here.)

Celebrities, like kings, have two bodies — the body natural, which decays and dies, and the body politic, which does neither. But the immortal body of the ‘image’, even though it is preserved on celluloid, on digitalised files or in the memory of the theatre-going public, always bears the nagging reminder of the former (‘She looks great. Isn’t she dead by now?’) As their sacred images circulate in the demotic swirl of the profane imagination, celebrities foreground a peculiar combination of strength and vulnerability, expressed through outward signs of the union of their imperishable and mortal bodies. Let those marks of strength be called charismata; the signs of vulnerability, stigmata. They work cooperatively, like muscles in opposable pairs, and their beguiling interplay, now widely heralded among acting teachers, has a long history as well as popular currency as the source of public intimacy.
…
When stigmata so far overrun charismata, the embarrassed celebrity becomes too available to the identification of the audience, and that special quality of apartness, which Glyn describes as ‘unbiddable’, disappears, taking ‘It’ down with it.
…
The publicity department at Paramount arrounged for Bow and Glyn to spend time together and to be seen in public doing so. To that end, striking redheads both, they sped around Los Angeles together in a large Packard, accompanied by the actress’s great red chow dog and a redundant driver provided by the Studio. Bow, who at best regarded speed limits and traffic lights as advisory, insisted on taking the wheel, while Glyn kept her upper lip stiff in the passenger’s seat and the terrorised chauffeur wept and prayed in the back. What inter-societal connection opened up between these two women in their work together cannot be rationally specified, but one did, and it must have had to do with ‘It’, which for both of them, in their different genres, meant the ability to stand as if naked in the middle of a crowded room as if alone.

- Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’”

*looks around* Seriously, did I just step through a time warp? There are way too many boybands touring this year.

(Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone into Media Studies or Sociology instead and write that big thesis on the positive effects of boybands on the cultural landscape and seek to de-trivialise them. Or something. At least I’d know where to go on the Internets to get survey participants.)

Earlier this evening while chatting on MSN to one of my Brit friends, she asked me why I didn’t watch Doctor Who or Torchwood. Now, I love John Barrowman, but mostly on the West End. And the news of David Tennant playing Hamlet in Stratford excited me more than his casting as the Tenth Doctor. And I do like sci-fi stuff, so that’s not an excuse either. Anyway, I said something along the lines of “I just feel like it’s wrong going into Who or Torchwood without really understanding their place in the British national identity,” to which I got the online equivalent of the WTF face.

Yeah, in addition to thinking too much, I’m definitely stuck between multiple cultural identities now.

I miss the trumpet so much it makes me cry when I think about it.

Earth tremor felt across England
The US Geological Survey’s website reported a quake of the magnitude of 4.7 and said the epicentre was 30 miles (50km) south of Kingston-upon-Hull.

Basically, it’s not very far from me. It’s practically in Yorkshire. There was a horrible rumbling, and then the ground shook for about 10 seconds. Everything was shaking.

I think I’m going to stay up a while more.

It amuses me that the boyband tag is the most used on this blog. I wonder what that really says about me.