Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Tits oot for the commissioning editors!

Cancelled my subscription. If they're so keen on Raefists to read them then they can take their money, not mine.

Incredibly long, dreadfully bad interview, like a parody by 1980s Amis maybe:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/celebrity/story/0,,2269466,00.html

not sure what it has to do with 'health'

Wow, terrible!

She has a hangover. So it's about binge drink Britain. Clearly.

I like to turn Freshly Squeezed on in the morning. Two seconds of those smug wankers has me out of bed and running to get to work.

eggs benedict is not healthy, that article made me think

i was stuck in such a deep thought i stopped reading pretty much after that.

i just read further. i don't like how the article described her as "stupidly beautiful". What does that mean? She is beautiful in a stupid way?

Does listening to Roy Orbison make you cool and a hep-cat and whatever-the-fuck Alexa Chung is meant to be*? Really?

* and how cool is someone who serves as a comic foil to Ben Elton? Eh?

Btw, those hepcat party pix are at cobrasnake.com and not .co.uk

Rubbish and pointless hackdom but her favourite book is Revolutionary Road (does that mean she's ever read it?) so that's supposed to make it OK holocaust.

the estuarine straggle of her voice

But she's a posh girl from Hampshire. Also makes me think of that Syd Barrett line:

"She straggled the bridge by the water"

God forbid the Guardian should ever feature working class writers writing about working class people.

i think working class is fine but that article was just beautifully stupid

http://991.com/newGallery/Beyonce-Knowles-Beautiful-Liar-395266.jpg

"I'll never forget the first time I heard the strains of "Beautiful Liar." The strains were emanating from just the other side of the Everest summit, as I sat on the icecap sipping Doritos and munching Django Reinhardt strawberry plectra."

* insert Bobby Gillespie skit here *

"Aw, Django hud his haund stuck in the pencil sharpener an' ah pulled it oot too quick like and wan a' his fingers goat stuck in there and ah goat the belt...no' a bad guitarist, right enough, but ah suggested gettin' in the fiddle the same as ah told LaMonte Young when he wis playin' pies and peas back in Newarthill."

Laura Barton says her favourite book is Yates's RR - I've never read it, but perhaps it squares with her musical Americana tastes (she likes the Boss and J Richman)? Chung says you have to be obsessed with Nabokov to be her friend, but says nothing about what she thinks of VN or what he actually did. Even if she knows the work, I doubt all those friends of hers do.

It really was an unbelievable interview, one for the Max Gogarty era, I thought; though perhaps the Guardian is already beyond belief?

I guess the moment when she says she doesn't have time to read cos she has to read 'scripts' - ie: for gameshows or breakfast TV - was what reminded me of Amisworld.

Does Ms Chung see the spoken word as her tool? And can she get on with prince or pauper?

actually, as someone said above: amazing idea that loving Roy Orbison makes you hepcat / It Girl - if this were the case, then half the counry's grandparents / great-aunts / sentimental 50sth geezers leaning on the bar of Charlton boozers, et al, would be the in crowd. For heaven's sake, is there no limit?

If Robin C were here he could tell us where 'Stranger On The Shore' might fit in to this new cartography of taste.

Sorry, that's been appropriated by Dissensus hauntologists and thing.

"the Max Gogarty era"

chilling, but accurate

seems a million years ago

The RAEF era morelike

What is Raef?

Tool of our times.

there's nothing wrong with loving roy o, surely?

that vanity lair pogramme is hideous, odious, reprehensible.

of course there's nothing wrong with it: I just don't think it makes you hip

it does if you look like alexa chung

this is the interview mentioned in the ... interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzaJoIUV57E

OK, the band seem rubbishy, stupid and complacent, and Chung (without having to do anything) thus comes off slightly better than them - but my goodness, Laura Barton's idea of her impishly 'correcting their grammar' = ... she says 'any', rather than 'either', once. ... That's ... it.

lol insipid

ha, the chung article was the 'most read' on the website yesterday.

why do we even bother

I'm not sure if there's much point in endlessly picking at lifestyle fluff when there's so much worse than gets printed in the main section of this and the Observer. Max Hastings on Boris being the latest offender.

'OMG HERE'S A FEMALE JOURNALIST WRITING ABOUT HER HOLIDAY BURIED ON PAGE 7 OF THE SUPPLEMENT WHAT HAS BECOME OF THIS FINE OLD INSTITUTION?!"

Women shouldn't write

^^^real talk

OK, DC: endlessly pick at other, worse things.

Well, Hastings on Johnson is exactly what anyone would expect him to have written, and nothing more than I would expect from a canting, ranting rightwing rag like the Observer.

Whereas you were expecting maybe Pulitzer prize winning journalism from Laura Barton interviewing Alexa Chung?

Matt's point is a good one.

I haven't read "The Observer" in over a year. I don't know why anybody would read it, it's BORING.

"Dear Mariella" is always v. v. good. Basically because she invariable tells whinging men to pull their socks up and don't be such cunts. She'd sort the boys on this thread out, straight away.

there's fluff and fluff, entertainment journalism and entertainment journalism. an interview with chung is what it is, but laura barton is less good at it -- certainly less guardian-y, if that means anything now -- than she ought to be, given how much she is asked to churn out. maybe that's the real issue, the sheer amount of crap.

which i half-read and link to lol.

xpost

Like she sorted Jobbers out? (xp)

Well we all know how she got where she is today...

The question is why the Guardian should be interviewing a nonentity like Chung in the first place.

the boys on this thread

where?

She likes the boys in this thread/She said that I'm her all-time favourite

Remember, ILxors: Frostrup thinks you're scum.