Big Brother - Summer 2012 (4)

CONTINUED FROM HERE

Marion wrote: "Asheligh's mouthhas erupted with herpes sores -"
Lessons and Lesions.
Oh what a report you've just given, Marion! So incisive, with such straight-eyed ironing-out of the unironic without abandoning a sense of irony for us to chuckle at. You should be employed by the national tabloids and by literary essay vehicles to portray this lesson in modern life as presented by BB, a vital lesson in social lesions, a lesson so often derided by the programme's detractors.
As to Ashleigh's cold sores, these are possibly the stigmata from the recent Confessional. I only say she has the best chance to win as she exemplifies best what I said above about life's lesions and what I predict will be the voting of people-not-like-us, Marion.
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(2 August): Marion wrote: "I think the White Room may turn out to be an epic bore."
I diisagree. Well, I would. In 2002 I published the world's first blank story in 'Nemonymous' - and produced another edition with blank covers, and many of the horror stories in Nemonymous were about blanks or nothingness or gaps.
Sara is becoming more interesting. Saying on her audition something that is evidently non-characteristic of her (i.e. doing striptease) and building up the tension and sensory deprivation / mental asylum angle of the White Room by acting out antipathy towards it. Constructing anxieties for the viewers that 'enhance' such a scenario. This is 'pure' Theatre of the 20th century (not 21st century) - something we had grown out of, until now. A happening. Even Conor benefited from the surrounding whiteness.
Deana claims she was 'excluded' from four schools not 'expelled'. Indeed, intriguing. She has a deeper backstory, like Sara's.
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Marion wrote: "I think the White Room may turn out to be an epic bore."
I disagree. Well, I would. In 2002 I published the world's first blank story in 'Nemonymous' - and produced another edition with blank covers, and many of the horror stories in Nemonymous were about blanks or nothingness or gaps.
Sara is becoming more interesting. Saying on her audition something that is evidently non-characteristic of her (i.e. doing striptease) and building up the tension and sensory deprivation / mental asylum angle of the White Room by acting out antipathy towards it. Constructing anxieties for the viewers that 'enhance' such a scenario. This is 'pure' Theatre of the 20th century (not 21st century) - something we had grown out of, until now. A happening. Even Conor benefited from the surrounding whiteness.
Deana claims she was 'excluded' from four schools not 'expelled'. Indeed, intriguing. She has a deeper backstory, like Sara's.
Although I agree with Marion on certain aspects of Ashleigh, she is the most natural person in the House. There is no side to her. The only one that comes close to her in that respect is Luke A. imo. {A series of reprises: here is a quote from one of my TTA forum entries in 2004 about that year's BB: "From my 56 year old perspective, last night's Big Brother was probably a bad influence on those involved and on those watching them - but the argument/fight was so well 'dramatised', 'stage-lit', 'acted', 'scripted', it was probably one of the greatest contemporary 'dramas' (full of accidental imagination, believeable grotesque characterisation, Shakespearean tragedy etc.) that TV has ever allowed to be broadcast."}
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Marion, a good White Room project would be on the constructively tedious end of things, I'd say -- a bit like a Robbe-Grillet anti-novel? With fleeting, barely caught expressions and moues in your avatar's gossamer wings or my numinous butterfly-net.
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Marion wrote: "She complained of no windows in the room, no freedom, no darkness, no sunshine and then burst into tears."
Sara is becoming quite a star, with natural idiosyncracies emerging from the pressure cooker that is the BB House and its inner White Room (we all have an inner White Room) rather than faux idiosyncracies. Also without makeup we see she has spots to match the ashen-lipped stigmata or lesions elsewehere in the house...
Her political non-rant of a rant was as off-kilter as her blind Royalism (it's OK being a Royalist in my book but Sara seems obsessive and she probably believes the Queen is a benevolent alien or an angel, to which state of being Sara herself aspires). As to voting Tory last time she voted, well, she probably lost a lot of votes and gained a few others as a result of making this admission (which she failed to make in the earlier Confessional).
Yes, shake-it-all-about Becky to go on Friday!
And thanks, Marion, for posting that wonderful Robbe-Grillet story. I had not read it before.
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Some very interesting points there, Marion. The chocolate on Becky's face "for the judges" passed me by because of inevitable temporary inattentions during TV watching. What on earth!
I did however think about Conor disrupting some Godgiven rule regarding the verities of the BB game with the usually default good sense of the audience having been by-passed by this event. Lessons / lesions indeed beoynd moral lip-synch.
Meanwhile, I agree that the 'white' quiz was probably the most hilarious thing ever on BB! Possibly ever in or out of BB.
I, too, was rather perturbed by the facial expressions of Becky during the interview: grotesque gurning with bulbous red lips and mad eyes that have fed on monstrous gossipings and bitchings incarnate and incarnadine.
A night stained with bad-blood, as well as chocolate. But a night also thankfully to rid ourselves of that bad-blood.
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Marion's Kipling quotes and Deana's 'soldiers' and last night's Team GB medals on a 'last balcony' before the world's financial, moral and, possibly, physical, state implodes towards an unpredicatble core of destiny ... I am left in an ambivalent mood. Conor was another medal winner, but a shameful, shameless one, with his case of money (symbolic of ill-gotten Libor gains) held aloft like a conscience-less version of a soldier going over the top of his own balcony towards an unknown destiny of recrimination in hiding beyond the public acclaim as winner that he once said he wanted. Both winner and loser. Luke S martyred.
Deana was also in an ambivalent mood. But what lies behind her lispy pragmaticism? Four exclusions or expulsions from school in her past? For what? This is probably her own version of paying off any of her own debts following the less serious form of Confessional that BB earlier provided: i.e. to emerge as the Winner: the ultimate act of not being excluded or expelled.
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(6 August): I don't think Scott can nominate Luke S any more, Marion. Luke S now only needs to think of the public vote in the final. He needs to dress up the buzzer push as a reflex action and, as you say, get the gay icon vote. He needs to be both mansion and cottage. He's not clever enough to pull this off, though. But clever enough, however, to have these goals in mind and to have worked out a strategy.
Deana went off-the-wall, both tipsy and lispy, with her mockingly seeking the ontology as well as teleology of the buzzer push. A drama worthy of the Wednesday Play when watching Luke S's reaction.The ins and outs of that White Room climax will be spoken of darkly forever within arcane BB discussion groups. Perhaps a good ploy, after all, by BB, having that stunt?
Meanwhile, the smoking mimesis-potion 'task' was SILLY. Housemates and BB in collusion - but nobody was fooled. It was just a mindless way to fill a day.
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Marion wrote: "Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee"
....like Marion's avatar on the TTA Forum, if not Marion herself!
Meawhile Sara storks like a daddy-long-legs.
I haven't got anything to add to Marion's exhaustive and helpful and unarguable report on last night's proceedings.
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I thought Scott's task was interesting, making one wonder if there is a difference between (a) a genuine 'mole' or double-agent and (b) someone just doing various things he wouldn't otherwise have done but without changing his character, his me-ness...
The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory theme echoed earlier chocolate finger task, and Becky's chocolately face and Caroline actually making the House tantamount into a Chocolate House... Deana certainly gives off the aura of Valkyrie and She who must be obeyed whatever ostensibly nonsensical incantations she recites as spells to dig deep into others' souls.
Just for House 'interest' interests of character-mix rather than for intrinsic goodness or otherwise as a human being, I hope Adam goes on Friday.
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Yes, it was an amusing task. A living museum of human-filled inanimate objects from the past ancient and near modern. Another effective semi-theatrical happening. Reminded me of the 'panoply' in my 'Yesterfang' and other incidents in the overall 'Last Balcony' (and 'Weirdtongue') if I may be self-referential regarding my published work for a moment, the comparisons seeming to be relevant - at least to me! :|
I don't *think* Ashleigh actually started the food fight proper but the Proximate Cause was something being put down her back after a previous minor infringement of throwing?
Sara's new rant-in-the-cups was not something I enjoyed. But she has actually become a *personality* in the House while for the early weeks she was just eye-candy.
I now know who Scott reminds me of most: the late Kenneth Williams.
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Yes, 'metrosexual' is a new word for me. A combination of being streetwise and engendering a wide spectrum of sexual orientation geared to opportunism?
I can't think who I want to go tonight. Perhaps there will be two evictions before the final. I feel very little loyalty to any of them.
But I think Ashleigh deserves to win for being herself (with all the faults of that self) and not having cuppish right-wing rants like Sara. I am suspicious of Luke A's claims regarding his backstory. And Deana is too artful for her own good, lispy, tispy, incantatory, wayward, sleek and slithy. Adam too laid back. Scott just a cipher acting a 'Carry On' cameo role. Luke S is a metrosexual ready to push any buttons that work for that self-image. Have I missed anyone out?
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Marion wrote: "She really is funny in a light waspish way."
If about Marion, I can only agree. I'd add 'perceptive' and 'astute', with a constructively stubborn touch of never forgetting why she likes or dislikes an HM - till beyond the very end of each season's audit trail of events and emotions.
And I was wrong about Ashleigh's potential popularity as a salt-of-the-earth character from within a poor bunch of wispy HMs. Perhaps because I live in Essex. But she is a far better woman than she gives herself credit for.
I was surprised, too, that Scott went before the final.
And I am shocked that Celebrity Big Brother starts on Wednesday!!
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Yes, I have to admit the three musketeers or 'soldiers' in their little demob ceremony were both touchingly ironic and BB-iconic.
Mr Snuggles was the best evil clown I've ever seen. A wonderful Horror genre scenario. Coincidentally, I had real-time reviewed 'Hangfire Bubbler' by Rhys Hughes earlier in the day, a story *about* coulrophobia!
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Sara's treatise upon Meatloaf and the Queen was probably the most bizarre of conceits ever straddled across by one brain. She could win, I suppose. And, marginally, I hope she does win.
Adam and Deana and Luke A are all OK-ish - and the memory-monologues about their experiences in the show were dressed up well by the BB production team. Gave them good grounds for winning. I won't be too upset about one of them winning. Especially for their communal demob speeches and mimes the other night.
The only one I definitely don't want to win is Luke S.
Mr Snuggles with Conor inside (not Brian D) awaits us all, one day, at the end of our own life's BB ramp of booing and cheering...
Watching CBB this Wednesday everyone?
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In many ways a disappointing finale to an often disappointing series, with its odd highlights along the way since the beginning of June. Without the White Room stunt it would have lost a lot of interesting friction and motivational debate etc., for example.
Luke A is likeable enough - but a winner? Reminds me of that likeable but nondescript lady who once won - Rachel Rice.
For me, Deana was crafty and her 'soldiers' and prayers won the day, so all credit to her.  She strongly implied in her interview that some people took a dislike to her for no obvious reason even before getting to know her - in fact she said it many times in different words - and one can only infer that she is referring to racism.  She may be right.
Thanks again, Marion, for your wonderful reports.
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CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER: SUMMER 2012 HERE