As requested, here are the tracklistings for Volumes I, II and III of How to Seduce a Straight Man:
How To Seduce a Straight Man Volume I
Takk - Sigur Rós 2001: A Space Odyssey Spank – Jimmy ‘Bo’ Horne Killer – Adamski My Insatiable One (piano version) – Suede U Talk 2 Much – Sultans of Ping F.C. Witch Doctor – David Seville Soldier Boy – The Beatles Pushin’ Too Hard – The Seeds Tonight We Fly – The Divine Comedy Wicked Little Town – Hedwig and the Angry Inch Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein – Matmos I Feel Love – Donna Summer Girls and Boys – Blur I Open at The Close – The Sorting Hat Wig in a Box – The Polyphonic Spree Shut Up and Sleep with Me – Sin With Sebastian Time to Pretend – MGMT Golden Gun – Suede This is Hardcore – Pulp In the NA – The Hidden Cameras I Would Die 4 U – The Space Cowboy Pam V – Super Furry Animals Xxzxcuzx Me – Crystal Castles Was it Something I Said – OMD Origin of Love – Hedwig and the Angry Inch
How To Seduce a Straight Man Volume II
Vicious – Lou Reed Don’t Cry Out – Shiny Toy Guns Sound – James Jackie – Scott Walker Johnny Chrome & Silver – Nancy Boy Cream – Prince Ice Cream – New Young Pony Club Interesting Drug – Morrissey Plastic Bag – Minty Mama Didn’t Lie – Jan Bradley Don’t Leave Me This Way – Thelma Houston Power of the Flower – Praga Khan Soul Makossa – Manu Dibango The Black Queen’s Chamber of Doom – Azzido Da Bass Vs The Bob Crewe Generation Orchestra Violently Happy – Björk Good Time – Crystal Castles Love To Hate You – Erasure Love Today – Mika Superstition – The Kills Goin’ Down – The Monkees Stand Up (The Tynick Trip Mix) – Nick Jones Experience featuring Delvin ‘Shake’ Williams 2 Hearts – Kylie Love’s Unkind – Donna Summer Don’t Leave – Fflwcs Rainbow Island – Seb Adored and Explored – Marc Almond
How To Seduce a Straight Man Volume III
Jam Band Reprise Part I – Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes Stay With Me – Manic Street Preachers Fermez La Bouche – Help She Can’t Swim (Call Me) Number One – The Tremeloes Just To Hold My Hand – Dee Dee Sharp Safety Dance – Glee Cast For Your Love – The Yardbirds Modern Boys – Suede Jericho – The Prodigy/Dirt – Death in Vegas What’s the Excuse This Time – McAlmont & Butler Hold Me Now (Live) – Elastica Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide – David Bowie Like a Motorway – St Etienne I Miss You (Dobie Rub Part One - Sunshine Mix) – Björk Sweet Freedom (Part 1) – Positive Gang W.S.D. – Suede Reviewing the Situation – Sandie Shaw Colquohons Story – Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman Girlfriend in a Coma – The Smiths Warning – All Too Much In My Life – The Beatles Dub Be Good To Me – Beats International Jack the Ripper – The Horrors Walk On – The Hidden Cameras I Like to Move it (Clubasse Remix 2004) – Reel 2 Real Earth Intruders – Björk Hear the Drummer Get Wicked – Chad Jackson I Like to Move it (Clubasse Remix 2004) – Reel 2 Real/Catwalk – Peter Moore I Like to Move it (Clubasse Remix 2004) – Reel 2 Real/Game Boy – Shampoo I Like to Move it (Clubasse Remix 2004) – Reel 2 Real/La La Land – Green Velvet
A selection of songs that attempt to describe how to seduce a straight man, a useful little musical guide for the discerning homosexual in us all. Three eclectic mixes including: Sigur Rós, Adamski, Matmos, The Hidden Cameras, Crystal Castles, Hewdwig and the Angry Inch, James, Scott Walker, Praga Khan, Prince, Manu Dibango, Fflwcs, Kylie, Shiny Toy Guns, Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, The Manic Street Preachers, Dee Dee Sharp, Glee Cast, The Tremeloes, Suede, The Prodigy, Björk, David Bowie... and many more.
The three Volumes are available for free download:
Volume III (which you can listen to below. Player might not work with all browsers. Sorry)
DISCLAIMER: Following these instructions does not guarantee you will seduce a straight man. My tongue is firmly in my cheek here. You can't pull straight men. If you do ever pull a straight man, then he's not straight, dear.
I have been working so hard, and the house looks like a shithole. It's quite disheartening. My mam and dad have been telling me that as soon as we start to put things back, it'll all go quickly. I'm just waiting to be out of the rubble! I am very happy with how big the living room is, now that I've totally opened the stairs up. I kept all the original tiles from where the fireplaces were, and I'm going to use them as edging to the patio. They're free, and they belong to the house. Perfect recycling!
I decided to keep the fireplace in the spare bedroom/studio as I found out it's a proper old cast iron one. Under layers and layers of gloss paint that my mam has been scraping away at, this is what it looks like underneath. Beautiful. In the rubble and mess underneath the stairs, I found the original suspended floor from about 1890-1900. Something caught my eye, so I leaned over and pulled out a lovely Victorian black glass hatpin! I gave it to my mam as she collects them. I felt like I was on Time Team. View the whole project: before, during, and in 4 weeks (hopefully) after.
I haven’t done a Folksy Friday for ages, been too busy knocking down walls and stripping wallpaper! We’re having quotes for damp proofing done today, so (kind of) to match that; the theme this week is ‘mushrooms’.
Okay, from top left: These are the most beautiful mushroom brooches I have seen! The stalks are made of crocheted cord sewn with vintage lace. I love them. This mug appeals to the Victorian botanist in me. I think these bowl are amazing. I think that crushed glass is put into them before firing to create the beautiful effect - but I'm not a potter, so who know how it's really done! The detail in this print is truly amazing. I know that there are LOADS of Alice-related things on Folksy, but this one caught my eye. It's dainty and subtle, some of the other Wonderland stuff is too show-offy for me - this necklace is just right. Cute. Big. Mushrooms. 'Nuff said ;)
I'd seen pictures of this artist's crochet guns in a magazine and thought they were absolutely amazing. Of course I immediately forgot all about them until I stumbled across his website yesterday, and I couldn't believe the magazine didn't use any pictures of him. He's a total hottie. His work uses masculine imagery, worked in a traditionally feminine form, crochet. Nathan Vincent is a lot like his art: masculine, but full of boyish fun. And like I said, totally hot! Check out his website.
I've made rose hip syrup, the first fruits of my recent obsession with foraging. Patrick and I picked a carrier bagful of big juicy hips from the green on Aberaeron harbour on Saturday, and by Sunday night it had turned into five jars of sweet syrup. I haven't tried any yet (other than the occasional lick of the wooden spoon as I was reducing it), but I have given a jar to my lovely friend Sarah. She's very appreciative of homemade gifts. I recommend the River Cottage Handbook No. 2 by Pam Corbin, which you can buy here. It has loads of delicious recipes. My next experiment is going to be blackberry gin, and apple and blackberry vodka.
I was aware of fanfic already; had read a bit from some of my favourite universes (from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings) because I was curious why X said that to Y, what Y really thought of Z, and how the drama of X and Z finally getting it together would play out – but hadn’t thought about how or why fanfic writers went about doing what they did. I’d even written some, without really knowing my reasons for doing so. Pugh’s incredibly well-researched investigation into the genre answered those questions, and raised many more. I must admit that I had always dismissed fanfic (and all its sub-genres) as a silly little aside that ‘real’ writers did for fun; or something that people not good enough to be ‘real’ writers did because they loved the characters that they’d come to know so well from books, films and TV.
Not having explored other fandoms online, I was amazed at how many there were, and the diversity of that range. The Bill, Men Behaving Badly, Hornblower, Blakes Seven… I can understand why people would want more from those universes, but for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would want to read any more Jane Austen that they had to at school! Since reading The Democratic Genre, I’ve gone on to read and enjoy many excellent stories mentioned or quoted in Pugh’s investigation, even from The Bill which I have never really watched.
My opinion of the genre has changed, and I can totally see the literary tradition that helped to shape modern fanfic. Shakespeare took well known stories, and wrote his own versions of them; correcting what he didn’t like and making the characters interact in the ways he wanted to see them doing (Macbeth killing Duncan in Macbeth’s own castle, for instance). Pugh’s own novel Kirstie’s Witnesses is basically fanfic, from the foreword: “The real Kirstie’s story is contained in several documents, notably the minutes of the Parochial Board, an application form, and evidence given at a trial and an inquiry. These items are all in the Shetland Archive.” She took these facts, and weaved a life out of them; isn’t that what fanfic writers do? The only difference I can see between this and typical fanfic is that the character was a real person, the methods used to write the novel remain true to fanfic's narrative forms. The same can be said for Tom Stoppard’s amazing play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; it could have been written as a book or story, but Stoppard, in keeping with the source material (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) he made it a play. Fanfic writers use the source material to generate new stories for their characters, in the style of the original. Pugh gives an example of a Bill fic that is written as a screenplay, using “the narrative techniques of [the] source material.”
I’ve read slash stories for various reasons: titillation; the oddness of seeing two people together who would never be like that in real life (the real life of the universe in which they live, that is); the enjoyment of queer writing; the exploration of sexuality. Pugh herself once said “anyone, up to and including a serial killer’s head, is legitimate territory for a writer to explore”. I embrace that sentiment, as have many other writers. For slash writers, changing the sexuality, or at least questioning or challenging it, is that same legitimately explorable territory. I still find it hard to understand why there are so few male slash writers. The answer to the question of why there are so many female writers and readers of slash was always obvious to me, and Pugh answers it so nicely “two good-looking men getting it on appeals to some women just as the reverse scenario does to some men.” She continues "some slash writers who were themselves gay may have wanted to explore this territory partly for ideological reasons, but many fanfic writers, both gay and straight, just followed their insatiable curiosity about alternative scenarios.” They are my reasons for reading and writing slash.
Pugh's investigation has deepened my interest in the genre by showing how fanfic can be a literary genre (albeit a rather odd one), as surely as the writing of the beat generation, pulp fiction or steampunk are. Yet fanfic can also be so much more. Some of the writers Pugh has interviewed in the book have explored their chosen characters by plunging them into different universes: a Blakes Seven/Cabaret crossover; Green Eggs and Hamlet (a particular favourite of mine); the first person tale of a mutoid from the B7 universe slowly reverting to humanity. When reading a book, my partner will often stop and stare at the wall or sky for minutes on end; he recently told me that what he’s doing is continuing the stories and conversations, in his head – what if X took Y to one side before the start of chapter six and explained about Z’s behaviour? Pure fanfic. I’ve told him to start writing them down! Another thing I found refreshingly positive, is Pugh’s assertion that just because someone is not paid for their writing, it doesn’t mean that it’s not good writing. I’m paid for hardly any of my writing! My own experiments in fanfic (mostly slash, I’ll admit) have been shorter fics and drabbles (100 words), character studies, or little in-between scenes to get to know a quirk I’ve read or imagined – but now I want to write more, something as clever and furiously inventive as the stuff Pugh introduces in her book.
Please do not reproduce or sell my patterns, or items made from my patterns. Please contact me if you want to make things to sell for charity - and then I'll say yes!
