Marks and Spencer's frump-dump sends profits plummeting: the great bra hunt

So profits have plummeted at Marks and Spencer, former underwear holy of holies, fallen from grace and no longer a Mecca for women on a budget who want to look nicely turned out. Heads have rolled, hands are being wrung and people want to know WHYEEE?! I'm no delphic oracle but even I can answer that one.

Yesterday, I went looking for a bra. Nothing fancy, just something plain and black that keeps my bosoms from their downward trajectory. They're not huge — I've never tripped over them yet — and there are only two of them so you'd think the search would be straight forward.


Lingering in lingerie, I reckon 80 per cent of the acres of bras on display were of the horrible "preformed cup" variety, looking like they were modelled on Imelda Marcos's armoured tit-slings. You can rap out morse code on these things and be heard in the next postal district. Why do sistahs buy them? They give your bosoms a huge matronly udder shape, not the pert upward tilt of Hollywood starlets and Modesty Blaise cartoons which is the look I am broadly going for. The preform, on the udder hand, is an ageing look, one that fits with the frump-dump of dresses on the ground floor.

I want my nipples pointing skyward even if I have to resurrect Howard Hughes and his aeroplane technology to do it: I want maximum lift and thrust in a full-cup underwired bra. In black.


In Debenhams it was almost as bad but at least they had Playtex, still lifting and separating after all these years. Perfect fit, but only in cotton so the contraption gradually shrinks with every handwash and you end up with the dreaded breast quartet to go with your VPL and camel-toe. Mmmm, attractive. (Please, Playtex, make your lovely nylon model in black and I promise not to complain about the static shock.)

Then there are the Palazzo pants as championed by fashionistas such as Gok Wan, lovely comfortable wide legged pants that made me look long and lean. A year on from buying my first pair at M&S, I tried to replace them only to find some designer had had a fit and incorporated a myriad of pleats at the waistband, making them balloon out at the hip and making you look twice your size, totally defeating the object.

In the meantime, I'm saving up for the beautiful Rigby and Peller lacy black number that gives me the chesticles of a 14 year old — and she's not getting them back.

I WANT!!!

OK, 'nuff of the fripperies. We return you to politics and your usual service.

Madam Mao's Golden Oldies: Anna on the Chinese model operas, BBC R4

MADAM MAO'S GOLDEN OLDIES
BBC Radio 4 11:30am, Tuesday 17th July 2012
Presented and co-written by Anna Chen
Produced by Mukti Jain Campion for Culture Wise

In Madam Mao's Golden Oldies, I revisit the Chinese Cultural Revolution Model Operas that I first heard as a child in the 1960s and 70s and discover how they are, somewhat surprisingly, enjoying a new lease of life.

Growing up as a London-born red-nappy kid with Beatles and Bowie as my soundtrack, I was occasionally dragged by my parents to the Chinese legation in Portland Place (it had lost its official embassy status due to the cold war ruckus) for screenings of the latest movie spectacular to emerge from the arts commissar, Chariman Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. These were the Yangbanxi, the Eight Model Operas; films with titles such as The Red Detachment of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.

These state-sponsored works combined opera and ballet with simple plots about brave peasants uniting to defeat evil landlords, Japanese invaders and other enemies of the revolution. Heroes looked like heroes with rouged faces, kohl-lined eyes and great hair, while villains were easily identified by their sneaky demeanor and bad porn moustaches.

My Hollywood sensibility found these crude melodramas puzzling and somewhat turgid but then they weren't made for (relatively) pampered East End kids like me: they were made for the peasants and workers who had rarely if ever been represented in their own culture.

Within living memory, mass starvation, imperialist conquest and the horrors of the Japanese invasion had devastated the nation. Barely twenty years into its communist revolution, the population was struggling to get back onto its feet.

Madam Mao not only banned the traditional Beijing opera and their stories about emperors and princesses, but also cast out decadent western music and movies as being a corrupting influence on the masses. Quelle surprise when it later transpired that the former actress was fond of indulging her tastes in the privacy of her own screening room. But Jiang Qing was canny enough to harness the emotive power of these works with the help of the Chinese cultural intelligentsia who hadn't fallen out of favour.

In the programme, a variety of people who were intimately involved in the model operas recount their experience. Among them, Anchee Min, author of Red Azalea, had been plucked from working in the fields because she was used to "carrying 300 pounds of manure". Jingdong Cai is now conductor at Stanford but learnt his trade in Madam Mao's army of young musicians

Madam Mao's favourite films? The Sound of Music and Jane Eyre. No, not the classic Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine version, but the crappy George C Scott remake. Now, what does that tell you about arbiters of taste?

MADAM MAO'S GOLDEN OLDIES
BBC Radio 4 11:30am, Tuesday 17th July 2012
Presented and co-written by Anna Chen
Produced by Mukti Jain Campion for Culture Wise
Available for seven days after broadcast on iPlayer

Before I say "enough of me", if you are around, I'm giving a talk at the China In Britain event on Wednesday 18th July at Westminster Uni, Regent St, with poetry, music and everythang. 4.45pm. Free but you have to book.
E: anne@translatingchina.info

And keep an eye open for my upcoming collection of poetry, REACHING FOR MY GNU, out as an ebook on Aaaargh! Press very soon.

REACHING FOR MY GNU: Anna's poetry book out soon

Coming soon to an eReader near you, my first collection of poetry, the very fine "Reaching for my Gnu" on Aaaargh Press.

Designed by Paul Anderson, adorned with my favourite pic of me by Sukey Parnell, and with an intro by Charles Shaar Murray.

Watch this space ...

Shiny phallus dominates London: Shard puts Tyrell Corporation in the shade

Children, I was there when the Tyrell Corporation opened its mega-building in London, dominating the city skyline with its architectural statement of intent.

Skynet were the first occupants of the tower and now look where we are: terminated by the technocrats who serve the elite, skulls cracked under tank treads, children barely surviving in whatever cracks they can find in our crumbling society.

But what a pretty laser show they put on, a fitting match for the Unethical Olympics and the end of the Elizabethan era of plenty that came to a close with the Diamond Jubilee that year, 2012. If only we'd known that the lasers would soon be replaced by Skynet's working models, first tested out on a populace taken by surprise by missiles placed on the roofs of tower-blocks occupied by people who'd once had jobs and had shared in the wealth of the nation in their own humble way.

They told us it was all the fault of angry youth, the feckless over-breeding poor, the elderly who clung to life for too long, the dole-scroungers (but not the royal family or the lucky few at the top who resented paying for the shirkers in the form of tax) and the immigrants who worked for crumbs to shore up the remnants of our infrastructure. And then they set the Cyberdyne Systems T101s on us, the ones who looked like Jeremy Paxman and Allegra Stratton, only their hatchet faces and thousand-yard stares giving the game away.

The Mayans may not have been totally correct in predicting 2012 as being the year the world ended but it certainly felt that way.

Greg Palast's Vultures' Picnic UK launch: first videos

Great news; we're finally getting the videos of Greg Palast's inspirational week in London posted.

Anna Chen MC introduces the evening: "Capitalism's not dead, it just smells funny," she said paraphrasing the great Frank Zappa's comment about jazz. "Capitalism is mutating and going places only, this time, it's not taking us with it."



Greg Palast's talk covering who's backing Mitt Romney (Vultures, of course); BP corruption, cheap cement and prior blowouts; how the Euro was designed to bring down the European economy and free up public services for private take-overs. Part I:



Greg Palast talk Part II.
Greg Palast talk Part III.

Writer Warren Ellis speaking at the launch:



Thanks to Oliver Shykles who organised the event and Paul Anderson who came and wielded my camera so well.

Videos to come:
Panel discussion with John Hilary (War On Want), Nick Dearden (Jubilee Debt Campaign) and journalist Laurie Penny.
Greg Palast's Housmans talk.
Highlights.

Vultures backing Mitt Romney and other revelations from Greg Palast's excellent book launch

L to R: John Hilary, Greg, Anna, Nick Dearden, Laurie Penny (pic by John Paul O'Neill)

L to R: Oliver Shykles, Greg Palast, Anna Chen, Warren Ellis after the book launch at ULU (pic taken by Liz Milout)

VULTURES' PICNIC
A TALE OF OIL, HIGH FINANCE AND INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
From New York Times bestselling author GREG PALAST

LONDON UK BOOK LAUNCH - PALAST'S INCENDIARY REVELATIONS
Tuesday 26 June 2012

Greg Palast told a rapt audience of 300 at last night's UK launch of Vultures' Picnic:
- How the Vultures are currently trying to raise over $500 million to buy the White House for the Republican hopeful Mitt Romney. Palast points out 'with these Vultures Obama has a fight on his hands to prevent them picking the bones dry of the democratic process'.
- Palast dug into the billionaires, the debt-exploiters, who are the chief funders of the Mitt Romney's Presidential campaign: people like Paul “The Vulture” Singer and his Vulture colleague known as “Goldfinger.”
- A panel chaired by writer and poet Anna Chen included writer Warren Ellis, journalist Laurie Penny, John Hilary from War On Want and Nick Dearden from the Jubilee Debt Campaign alongside Palast. Chen asked, 'In this unseen brinkmanship battle between the hedge funds and the banks, are we supposed to support the banks against the Vultures...and who is going to win'? Palast replied that this battle of the titans was like "war between the Bloods and the Crips" and sees a protracted war to the death.
- Palast continued, 'These Vultures just don't care about the system that made them billionaires. The Vultures are prepared to go right to the brink of economic collapse and wreck governments, like Greece, or the system itself. The stakes are very high, as it's ultimately between financiers to run the World and where elected politicians are marginalized; where the desire of vultures is to make politicians extinct'.
- Anna Chen observed that "Capitalism isn't dead, it just smells funny. Capitalism is mutating: it's going places, it's just not taking us with it."
- The panel were positive. Journalist Laurie Penny said 'I am, even though there has been a sustained attack on investigative journalism, very hopeful that bloggers and citizen journalists of all ages will challenge and watch every move of these so-called Vultures'.

Warren Ellis's "Money isn't real" comments here.

Azerbaijan whistle-blower Leslie Abrahams and Greg Palast

MORE PIX PLUS VIDEOS COMING SOON