new beginnings

there is a lot of change going on in my life at the moment. some of this change is being enforced by me and some of it is happily and unhappily going on around me.

one happy event was the inauguration of president barack obama. i am certainly not alone in thinking this is one of the most exciting things to have ever having witnessed, most of the world, everyone is raptuous at the moment but i couldn't let it pass by without saying a few words.

a couple of days before i was reading a summation of black history in one of the newspapers and had to stop because i was in public and about to have a little cry. i studied american politics at university and the project i did on the presidential race was the most facinating to me. what factors make the millions of people vote for one man (and it is one man, not one party, like in britain) to govern their country and be an influential power in the world? what does this man represent? does it even have to be a man, why not a woman? all kinds of questions have been raised during this campaign and it has brought the most delightful and intruiging outcome: the election of a barack obama. someone of mixed race, considers himself black and who would most certainly have not been laughed out of the room 50 years ago.

i turned on the tv at 4pm for the inaugural ceremony and saw aretha sing. her voice just cut through with such beauty. aretha is one of the people who changed my life. when i was 11 or 12 i found one of her albums in my mum's record collection. from that moment i stubbornly refused to listen to the radio and tut tutted at top of the pops and listened only to aretha for about 2 months. i would turn out all the lights and stand at my window and look out at the garden and her voice would transport me somewhere else. because of that album i listened to everything else my mum had (a lot of blues, prog and folk) and went around charity shops looking for more. my tastes changed and i've never been the same since. i expected more.

i sat through the religious addresses, tidying up and playing with the cat in the process and then came the newly pronounced president obama's address. it was everything i'd wanted to hear. i was amazed. i poured over presidential speeches, learnt the words of many of them to quote in exam essays and never have i heard such a clear, provocative, serious, liberal statement. phrases such as "collective responsibility" and "the energy we use is strengthening our enemies and threatening our planet". politicians just don't use that sort of language. politicians use language that is fuzzy, deliberately vague so they never have to make good on it. i found myself exhilarated and clapping with genuine delight.

i am afraid of getting my hopes up. i was always quite a politically aware child and remember that feeling in 1997 when i was 18, had voted in the government and truly believed that the world would change and that things would only get better. i don't want to get into bitter rants all the disillusionment i felt a few years after that but it did cast a dim palour on the day, a sort of crouching cobold in the white house doorway. but then day after day announcements come through about guantanamo being closed, abortion education refunded, emmissions reduction legislation... its all very exciting and points the way to a more enlightened future.

obama's speech is already having its effect on the way i live my life. i had an important meeting and i'd been depressed about it for about a week previous, i thought i had nothing left to fight with on an issue that could signify a change in the wrong direction for a beloved institution. in the meeting i kept the idea in my head that i DID have the power to change things, that as long as i kept my cool and did my best to speak eloquently and clearly then all was not lost. it worked. it was a good result, i pulled some sort of hope out of the hat and won the battle, for the moment. i thank obama for that, for giving me courage and strength back.

i am really proud of americans for having the strength and courage to vote him in, let us all just hope he doesn't screw it up.

rocket man (and lady)

the junket club presents josie long and mike wozniak in techniquest:
to illustrate how good this was, by the end of the night i had a happiness headache. i felt like a kid who had eaten too much candy. we got to techniquest and immediately started playing like 5 year olds. well, i know i did. i think i heartily annoyed my boyfriend with attention defecit disorder behaviour and leaping (in some cases literally) from one science project to the next. this was halted when we were about to go into the comedy showroom (a "lecture area" with 30 kiddie chairs and a pull down screen) and the ball bouyed by air that i was playing with was subsequently turned off and fell disappointingly slowly to the ground.

but hark! there is the lovely benjamin partridge introducing mike wozniak and a hand made animation of a space rocket! despite the lights dimming his set and being forced to do his act with a gestapo lamp shining in his face, mike's act was very good. he told us about his polish grandfather and his amateur science experiments and his guinea pig being rogered to death by a rabbit called "the punisher". he was shouty, but not in an annoying way.

but its halftime and the treat of chemically enhanced milkshake, star trek cupcakes and lisa jones introducing the tony hart-inspired "build a universe" art project had us putting on our concentrating faces and making aliens, planets and cock-shaped rockets. it was a bundle of fun. then we got lead away to the planetarium to see josie long and some stars. she was a very nice lady and i liked her stories. a very successful junket club but it does leave me worrying how many more amazing places lisa and ben can take us to. i was impressed enough with carl's house...

the start of things

i am going to attempt to keep a diary but this will be easier if i just do it online. i want to train my brain to type again.

this week is almost at an end, although since i started working crazy hours and weekends week ends don't really exist any longer, there are just days and days and events and work and home. today is a sunday though, the newspapers are big and everywhere was asleep this morning.

it still being early in the year, there have not been many gigs as yet but i have been supplying my brain with films to distract it instead. this week i watched the baader meinhof complex, dean spanley, the reader and patti smith: dream of life in the cinema and mother night and don't look now on dvd. that looks like a lot, doesn't it. tonight we are going to techniquest to watch josie long in the planetarium doing comedy. excitement brought to us by lisa and ben of the junket club.

baader meinhof complex:
this was a slightly dissatisfying film. maybe i didn't know enough about it going in or maybe i was bringing too much of my own baggage from spending time with so-called anarchists when i was younger but i didn't think these were a glamourous bunch of freedom fighters, just a bunch of heartless twats. having seen hunger just before christmas and finding it really effective and beautiful, this just left me a bit cold. andreas baader: cock. ulrike meinhof: middle class guilt queen. i just felt that there were so many needless deaths and especially since the 60s hippie dream resulted in the capitalist wank fest of the 80s and the collapse that is going on at the moment it just seemed really hollow. or maybe it was just me being cynical. i dunno, i suppose it was quite well made, the cast was like a greatest hits of all the best german films i've seen in the last 5 years but i didn't think it clung together very well. i just wish i'd read a book instead.

dean spanley:
a shaggy dog story. really moving and gentle and different to the films i usually see. peter o'toole is an old cumudgeon who is visited by his son every thursday and his son is getting increasingly irritated by this routine seeing as his father is at that age where it seems only correct to be as much of an awkward old bastard as is possible. an encounter with an indian holy man talking about reincarnation and the dean of a local church leads him to believe that the dean is a reincarnation of his father's beloved dog wag, who ran away years ago and seems to be the only thing he grieves (although he also lost a son and a wife in the last few years). it was a lovely little film and made me cry buckets (the o'toole character reminded me of my bamp who died a few years ago). it had bryan brown and sam neill and was quite delightful and thought provoking. i really enjoyed it.

the reader:
nazi tits. sorry, had to get that out of my system. its been sitting in my brain like some sort of mental tourettes. kate winslet is naked for a lot of this movie. this is a good thing and yes, its integral to the plot etc. she starts an affair with a teenager (15 years old) in post-war germany and although happy in the moment, seems sad most of the time. he is naive and lost in this first love and then she suddenly leaves him. years later he is a law student and attends a war crimes trial where she is a defendant and her secrets are discovered. this marks him for life and makes him profoundly sad. again, i think the book was probably better than the film but it was filled with lots of good performances and has the great bruno ganz in a supporting role.

patti smith: dream of life:
dreamlike and fragmented, this documentary does not tell a chronological tale of her life but you get to the bare bones of the woman far more directly. filmed over 10 years, this film has intimate moments looking at trinkets in an apartment and having tea with her parents as well as some very public moments like demonstrating against the iraq war and firey possessed performances. i went to see patti smith a few years back in the coal exchange and it reminded me how inspired i found her, how i just felt so enthused and energised having witnessed her on stage. i've read books on patti smith and have her poetry but nothing came close to seeing her flirt girlishly with old love sam shepherd and pouring out the remains of her friend robert mapplethorpe, gazing at them at saying they were more like "shells", sparking lots of images in my head and thinking about lost loved ones. wonderful.

mother night:
this adaptation of a kurt vonnegut novel is on loan from my friend carl, a similar vonnegut obsessive (who, to my delight, has a signed picture drawn by vonnegut in his house). the film was strange, the story was pure vonnegut in its surreal distorting of history. nick nolte plays an american writer living in germany in the 1930s. when war breaks out he gets a visit from an american who asks him to be a spy for his country but only on the condition that no-one will ever know that he is a spy. he becomes a successful propaganda radio dj and is happy with his wife and their "nation of two". when she dies he flees to america where he lives a dull life, waiting for his own death but then the secret gets out and he is discovered. for shame, i haven't read the book its based on but it felt very much like a vonnegut book in style. its the first film adaptation of a vonnegut book i've seen and i'm a big fan and wasn't that impressed. he's a very funny dark writer and moves back and forth in time, but film was a little dull, seemed to go on a bit long and despite having alan arkin in it wasn't that funny. it was interesting but i wouldn't point people towards it, really.

don't look now:
always worth watching, i don't even know when i first saw it, it seems to have always been there in my life. such a beautifully executed tragedy with nic roeg's classic heightened reality and oddly framed angles. the use of colour is extraordinary, with its red reds and its spidery greys and browns. i was introducing it to someone tonight but disappointingly he had already seen so much and its been so often referenced in popular culture the ending was not a surprise and i think the magic was taken out of it a bit. when i watch it i am still rooting for donald sutherland and hoping afresh that he'll realise his fate and not go down that alleyway and i cry buckets in the first scene, almost unaware of what is about to come. the supernatural elements often overlook the intimate portrait of a falling apart marriage which makes up the bulk of the film, it is all together perfect.