staying in is the new going out

after the magical holiday we were brought back down to earth with a gig in bristol. this was intended to be an exciting musical bang end to my birthday week but ended up being an expensive gig. two tickets for PJ HARVEY AND JOHN PARISH were £45 and the trains to bristol that day were being interrupted so we had to get a bus back so ended up paying twice for travelling, totalling another £40. with a £10 taxi to the anson rooms venue due to the trains being delayed and a drink each we waved bye bye to a hard earned £100! oof! it being my birthday week and it being pj harvey it was all forgiven, despite the anson rooms being a venue of peeling cardboard soundproof tiles and no air conditioning. but boy, did it make us appreciate what we have in cardiff. we have a bunch of hard working promoters putting on a tonne of gigs, the quality is usually excellent and its venues tend to be in the centre of town and fairly reasonable. i'm always appreciative on the fact that despite my miniscule income i still get to enjoy myself and see some great stuff. but getting back to pj, she was excellent. the night began with us getting there in time to see support who turned out to be HOWIE GELB from the band giant sand. i haven't been to a big gig for a while and it was very irritating to realise that many people just go to see the headliner and talk through the support. you've paid the same amount! why gab when you can discover something you've not heard before? pah, idiots. i had to throw a look at a set of posh lasses behind us who were talking loudly about how drunk they were at last night's party. it was really frustrating to be hearing the great howie gelb, hero of alt country, do some great acoustic numbers and reel off some amusing banter to a disinterested audience who would later hang off polly's ever word. its a good job they did shut up cos when she came on stage she was very quiet and nervous, looking glamourous in a lacy white dress and an amazing beaded headpiece with tassles that swung when she moved. i'd not heard the album they were performing from and wasn't sure what sort of set she would do but it was really strong. there was a few off the albums she had previously done with john parish, one that sounded VERY nick cave and a couple that sounded like david lynch scores. it was really good and worth the heat and the work of finding a window between the heads of the tall people of bristol.

things very quickly got back to normal after my birthday. since i'm trying to catch up i'll do this in a two week chunk. i saw a lot of movies in the next couple of weeks and not many gigs. the first one was TOKYO SONATA. i got the wrong idea about this from briefly reading the synopsis and just read that the director was a big name in j-horror. i kept expecting the ghosts to appear but the only ghosts were metaphorical. this was a beautiful, timely film, about the japanese recession. a family man in a managerial 9-5 gets fired and unable to express his career failure to his wife and children he carries on the routine of getting up and coming home to throw them off the scent but instead goes to the dole office and the free food queue at lunchtime. he befriends another man in a similar position who ends up killing himself and then to his shame finally finds a job as a cleaner, all the while becoming increasingly authoritarian at home in an attempt to have some sort of power over things in his life. the film quietly follows his wife and children as they rebel against his needless dominance, his youngest son discovering the joy of playing piano and his eldest hoping for a new life as an american citizen after joining the army. it was really delicately handled and believable, a scary portrait of what can happen when you cling to the past.

on friday will and i saw the FRANKLYN matinee. the write up sounded intruiging: a alternative futuristic world ruled by the church intertwines with contemporary london, but it wasn't quite as sci-fi as i thought it would be. it begins with the character of priest, explaining his godlessness in a world where everyone has one religion or another. he is a vigilante on the trail of a child killer and spends the movie coming into contact with various nefarious characters on the way. back in our london a set of characters, including sam riley and eva green are all trying to resurrect themselves from traumas in the past. eva green's character faking suicide attempts in the name of art and sam riley trying to find love after being jilted at the altar. their stories start to bleed into the same story and the world of priest also spills over, with characters being echoed. we see by the end how the two have been coexisting but one of the worlds needs to go in order for priest to be healed of his pain. it was a movie about how we deal with pain and the worlds we construct to take ourselves out of that. it was interesting but sometimes a little too much style over substance. the characters were not wholly believable and sometimes just plain irritating. however, it was a first movie and for a stab at it i think it was a good start.

on the monday it was time for something a little different. EUGENE ROBINSON from the band oxbow was doing a spoken word performance at chapter, organised by the brilliant blokes of LESSON #1. i was really intruiged by this, will had seen oxbow a few years ago and its in one of his top ever gigs: screaming, sweaty, aggressive punk where the singer got down to his tighty whiteys. eugene robinson has the reputation of being a frightening man, violent and confrontational. as well as the band he does a sideline in boxing and is actually very good. he has also written a book FIGHT. i went along to see what the fuss was about. i wanted to sit at the back but all the seats were taken so front row for us, i just hoped he didn't punch me. luckily for us, the brilliant D C GATES of GINDRINKER was on first. i love dc. i really do value and treasure that man, he should be fashionable and lauded with front page of the western mail or something as one of cardiff's landmarks but he would hate that and so would i. he brings a slab of intelligent bile to his work that is pregnant with disappointment and anger. his spoken word set was not different to a gindrinker gig but without the distraction of graf's razor-like guitar punctuating the sentences, it made you focus more on the delivery and the drama in the rants and observations. he came on stage, shabbily shambolic in his blazer and collection of notes, which included the back of microwave "meals for one" packets and discintegrating notebooks and read tirades about how "alan de botton is a cunt" and biblical passages denouncing capitalism. it was wonderful. my friend ash was in the audience and we just gushed "we're so lucky to have him in cardiff" to each other in the interval. he's a beligerent alcoholic but he's OUR beligerent alcoholic. long may he reign. next up was eugene robinson. the stage was dressed a single punchbag on stage and some sawdust. contrary to my expectations, eugene robinson turned out to be a graceful, literate, searingly intelligent gent with a slow drawl. he spoke eloquently about his childhood and his first fights and rites of passage to becoming handy with his fists. he was a wonderful speaker and gentle, genial soul who did a long q&a at the end where he explained how he tried to avoid violence unless it was truly necessary. a wonderful evening.

on the wednesday the film i ushered was the french documentary MODERN LIFE. maybe it was the late night i'd encountered the previous night but it did send me to sleep. it was beautifully shot and told the story of a community of hill farmers in the south of france whose way of life will probably die with them. they are men in their 80s who are still working the land and tending to their flocks each day out of neccessity, theirs is a tough life. it was good work from the director, sometimes getting a full sentence out of these men who don't often have full conversations from year to year. sometimes it was little hard going to have a question put to the interviewee a long, lingering shot on his lined face followed about 3 minutes later with a closed "yes" or "no" answer. it was worth seeing but it felt like a very long hour and a half.

later that day i went to see WENDY AND LUCY, the new picture from kelly reicthart who did the exquisite OLD JOY with will oldham. this film was similarly slow paced and prettily filmed in northwest 'burbs and again about friendship, but in this case it was between wendy (played by the brilliant michelle williams) and her dog lucy. they are travelling up the coast to alaska in her old car, hoping to start a new life, running away from whatever went before with no money but a lot of hope. early on wendy leaves lucy outside a shop, gets caught shoplifting and when she gets back finds lucy is gone. the guilt and relentless search for wendy's only friend makes up the majority of the film and her determination and devotion to lucy is heartbreaking. michelle williams is at the simultaeously vulnerable, one moment away from a flood of emotion and tough and purposeful. reichthart captures the people of the northwest perfectly and made me long to be there again.

thursday i was proud to be the usher for new theatre group zandeh's play POLITICS IN THE PARK, brought to the stage by becca knowles. it is the story of two elderly sisters who meet on a park bench and rib each other about their lives. it was a delightful, beautiful and simple play about domestic politics and what holds people and families together. i really enjoyed it and the performances were so good i felt like i would meet the old ladies downstairs for a drink afterwards.

a quiet couple of weeks all in, but it was about to get busy all over again!