08 gairrhydd
OCTOBER.06.2008
OPINION
OPINION@gairrhydd.COM
LA confidential?
Scott Hadley wonders if we ought to be keeping the finer details to ourselves
T
he one thing my mother ever taught me about sex (other than never to believe a woman is on the pill unless you actually see her take it - which implies a few things about her I'm not quite sure I like) was that discretion is key. The tabloid press and the magazines which shine like plastic make this point even clearer - everybody knows who is doing what to whom, all of the time, and to not know is to be out of the loop.
a scandalous tale of ‘Hollywood Youth Gone Wild’, than in a discursive piece on modern acting techniques. Which in itself is a failing of the system. The very idea of Celebrity and the public having a strong knowledge of what actors are doing with their lives was an American invention in the Golden Years of Hollywood in order to make possible audiences more aware of the industry as a whole. If people are thinking about the actors, they'll remember to spend money seeing the films. And for a while it worked, but increasingly it has become the person who is the issue, not what they do for a living, not what they're selling. They become the product. I mean, this works too; for years Jordan/Katie Price has had the media at her beck and call describing her sex/love life. She has even managed to wangle a television show about herself, too.
Lindsay Lohan is more likely to make the news in 'Hollywood Youth Gone Wild' The red tops rarely have a day go by without a front page alluding to someone's sexuality somewhere upon it, and Hello definitely doesn't. But the crux of this issue is that with many figures in the public eye, ‘private' lives seem to become more public than 'professional' ones. Lindsay Lohan, for example, has clearly hit a rough point in her career. It's largely accepted (at least in the circles I move in) that she'll never be in a film as good as Mean Girls ever again, and in the last few years she's been in and out of the press more for her
LINDSAY LOHAN: mainly an actress, you know drink driving, the parties she's been to, the ever-popular ‘climbing out of car' shots and, most recently, her affair with Mark Ronson's sister.
These things overshadow her work, the films she's been in and those she is working on at the moment. She's much more likely to make the news in
The importance of sexuality in these magazines is part of the culture of the voyeur This is impressive, but a different matter; she has been fashioned as someone for the public to know a lot about. Lohan, in contrast, was an ac-
tress first, becoming someone of interest later, when she became older and it was clear that her life was something that people had an interest in. Now an industry has developed around this voyeurism; magazines have been created just to tell followers what celebrities are doing, which sportsmen are cheating on which models with which singers, who has been seen with a larger stomach than before, whose tan-lines are an embarrassment and all manner of incidental, personal details.
The one thing my mother taught me about sex is that discretion is key The importance of sexuality in these magazines is also part of the culture of the voyeur, the idea that seeing a celebrity in the street is the same as knowing them personally, and the private aspect of sexuality makes the level of familiarity that much more intimate. One cannot blame the media for writing these articles, as they do sell magazines, and as no-one wants to feel lonely, it almost seems acceptable for us to know more about celebrities’ sex lives than our friends’. Or at least the ones who had mothers with life lessons like mine…
Canuck in Cardiff
Corey Shefman hits a brick wall of bureaucracy, and hits out at British banking
M
aybe it’s a Canadian thing: the stereotype that we’re supposed to be friendly and forgiving all the time, in contrast with the very British tendency to maintain your stiff upper lip, refusing to complain through the harshest of ordeals. I’m just going to come right out and say it: your banks suck! I had been warned before arriving in Cardiff to prepare for a battle in getting my bank account here set up, one Canadian friend currently studying at Oxford told me how she broke down in tears after her bank account was still not fully functional after 10 days of being in England. Hastening my own downfall, as befell the Germans at Vimy Ridge, I ignored the warnings of my fellow Canadian, my comradein-arms as it were. Where the courageous Canadians vanquished the enemy on Vimy Ridge so many years ago, however, I was left cowering, broken and defeated on Queen Street after a combined assault
by the forces of Abbey and Barclays. Many of my fellow international students – Canadian and otherwise – lay scattered across the City Centre.
Asking someone to go without a debit card for two weeks is unrealistic and unneccessary Dramatic? Maybe a bit. But seriously, if you ever want a new tactic for winning a war, forget the troops; just send in the British bankers to stonewall the enemy into submission. Skipping past the part where they make you get a pile of proof of address letters from the Union, it has taken my friends and I anywhere from two days to two weeks to just speak to a bank representative in order to open an account. So I finally got my bank account
open – that’s of course skipping over the part where they gave the group of people I was with totally misleading information, which we called them on after reading the information pamphlets. So my account is open, I hold my hand out expectantly, waiting to receive the bank card that a normal person needs today in order to survive, and after an awkward look, the account consultant shook my hand. Corey: So, I’m not getting a card I take it? Bad British Banker (BBB): No, I’m very sorry but we don’t have the facilities to produce the cards here: it’s all done in the central office. Corey: That seems like a fairly inefficient system: in Canada, we’re given temporary cards as soon as we open the account. How else are we expected to actually survive in this day and age? What if I need money on Sunday? And since you people won’t give me a credit card, it seems like pretty terrible customer service to leave your customer with no alterna-
tive but to come into the branch and speak to a teller. BBB: They give temporary cards right away in Canada? Well that’s brilliant! But I’m very sorry, we don’t have the facilities to produce the cards here, it’s all done in the central office. Corey: You realize that all of your ‘swiper’ machines here are capable of programming a blank card, right?
I'm just going to come right out and say it: your banks suck! BBB: I’m very sorry, we don’t have the facilities to produce the cards here: it’s all done in the central office. Oh, speaking of which, because you’re an international student, your paperwork also has to be approved by our head office in London, so it might actually take 10-12 working days instead of the 5-7 it takes for everyone else.
Corey: *stares* Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a playwrite, but you get the idea. To my knowledge, international students studying in other countries (certainly in North America) don’t face the kind of hoops we’re made to jump through here. Regardless of our temporary status in this country, banks are, to a certain extent, a public service. As silly as it sounds, asking someone to go without a debit card for two full weeks is as unrealistic as it is unnecessary. Unless all of the cards are produced by a single old lady sitting in her rocking chair, etched and magnetized by hand, there is absolutely no reason for it to take as long as it does to service their customers. International students make up a significant percentage of students in Cardiff, it’s time the banks, often our first point of contact with institutional Britain, recognized the important contributions we make to this country.