the big unsleep

this week has been hot. hot and bright. i've been waking up at about 5am wide awake then falling asleep just before i have to get up. very annoying. monday passed by quite nicely, played with the cat after work then fell asleep in the garden and almost missed the FUTURE OF THE LEFT live instore performance in SPILLERS. i felt a bit groggy when i got there and found it packed full of people and airless. i found steen who was stood just behind matt and jonny (from JOY COLLECTIVE) and charlotte and jamie were next to me, a good placing. i tried to fend off fainting by waving my photomarathon topic card for the next half hour or so. they did 6 songs i think and it was very good. i especially liked the song "mark foley was right" cos he tends to be. i'm warming to future of the left. i thought they were great the first time i saw them (i think it was their first gig too) but never seemed to be in the mood for them since, which sounds like a complete diss but i always seemed to be doing something else when they were playing. it was good to see them here to remind myself that they are actually really good. apparently my friend james is moving into a house with falkous and matt, which will be the most cynical house of disgruntled males in cardiff, i can't wait to visit!

afterwards we went and had some tea in CHAPTER and went to see SYNECDOCHE, NY, the new charlie kaufman film. i was incredibly excited about this, dismissing the cries i've vaguely heard from the press about it being indulgent. ha! he's allowed to be indulgent, he's a genius, thought i. i was wrong. it was a mess. i started off enjoying it, gleefully noting that everyone in the cast list at the beginning was amazing (dianne wiest! catherine keener! jennifer jason leigh! phillip seymore hoffman!) and halfway through was longing for it to end. its the story of a writer in an unhappy marriage who starts writing a great masterwork on his life and that is all you can describe it as really. it is a valiant effort, in a way, he's trying to redefine film language, it is as massive an opus as the play the character is writing, trying to understand himself by getting it all played out in front of him, his personal life seems out of control so he tries to take control over it by reimaginging it on stage. a good effort but it didn't work for me. it felt like unfunny woody allen and just became a big sprawl of characters and went on a bit long. i understood where he was trying to get to but i felt like he needed a filter of some kind, someone to tell him where to stop. by the umpteenth time someone new was becoming his wife / daughter / assistant i just thought it would never end. a shame, but a grand shame which is the most interesting so not a waste of time.

wednesday i met some friends lou and rich from AMBERCOUCH for an exciting business meeting, we're thinking of starting a website. i came up with an idea a couple of years ago and asked how much it is to get a website and dismissed the idea for being ridiculously expensive but now they say it may be done! wow! we're doing research on it now, a sort of cardiff version of BUY OLYMPIA, one of my all time favourite websites. finding out if we can get grants, my time won't really be wasted but lou and rich's is a bit more precious since they'll be doing the actual work.

after that i went to usher for O'HORTEN, a norweigan film about a lonely train driver who has just retired and has to find something to do with his life. it was a wonderful, beautiful film. it could have been really depressing and sad, about the uselessness of retired life but instead it gives horten the chance to forge relationships with people and live for the first time in his life. the scenery when he was driving his train around the mountains and snowscapes was breathtaking and made me determined to try and do the train journey around europe steen and i have been talking about.

i zipped off to PULSE to buy some much needed toms of maine deodorant, soap pods for the laundry, kingfisher toothpaste and all those useful hippie things i am about to run out of and saw the lovely marc roberts and rob kennedy and morgan hall in there, a proper chapter away from chapter! then zipped back to chapter to see THE BIG SLEEP. i missed the raymond chandler talk last week but was determined to see this one, a big favourite. it was amazing to see it on a big screen. i'd forgotten the script was written by william faulkner till he came up on screen in the credits and its evident in some of the scenes, the first one with the general and marlowe, any with bogey and bacall... it crackles. the villains seem genuinely sleazy, the grime reaching all the way up to the upper class in hollywood. wonderful.

thursday i was entirely lazy. i caught up on some sleep by having a proper lay in and did lots of laundry (still trying to get through stuff from when the cat had fleas last week) and stayed in my dressing gown till about 3pm. at 6pm i got picked up by rob to be taken with will to bristol to THE CUBE cinema where we were going to watch "introduction to japanese sex films". we got some food first in CAFE KINO, a co-operative place which was basically exactly what sort of business i want to run when i grow up. it had all these little touches, all very much home-made and BOOK CROSSING posters (leave a book, post in a book crossing pamphlet and then it can be tracked every time someone new reads and then leaves it). the food we had in there was amazing, i had a spicy bean burger with amazing thick cut chips and steen had falafel. we dashed over to the cube, worried we'd be late but they're so laid back there it didn't start for another half an hour. i love it in the cube, we keep saying we'll have to go more often, if it wasn't for the shite cardiff-bristol train service i think we'd go every week. everyone (staff and customers) were sat outside having an impromptu bbq and chatting and drinking, very relaxed then we went in and was introduced to the film by a nice man called jasper sharp who has written a book about PINKU EIGA, the japanese sex film industry. the perimetres are quite tight: its 1 hour, budget of £20,000, at least 1 sex scene every 20 minutes and no pubes or real genital parts but apart from that you can do anything. the first film we saw was A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN, a rather sweet film about a farmer whose son has died and lives with his widowed daughter in law. he has gone a bit senile and gets up every morning to milk his favourite cow who has died so she pretends to be the cow. they love each other but feel they can't express their love and its really quite romantic. the second was SEXY BATTLE GIRLS, an altogether less sweet, more funny film about a schoolgirl whose father has installed a device in her vagina to exact revenge upon the man who stole her mother away from them. neither film was particuarly sexy, too much tit grabbing and the second film had a bit of tying up women to torture stuff in it which i found a bit uncomfortable to watch but it was more benny hill than anything else, just silly. afterwards we had a chat with jasper about how films like SHORTBUS are banned and yet art films can get away with loads of sex and how the cube got the most e-mails for showing these films than anything else recently. many famous political japanese directors got their starts on the pinku eigas as they could explore all kinds of themes without them needing to be commercial.

saturday morning i was ushering for the SCREEN SCHOOL showing DICK TRACY. i was a little disappointed with the selection and i presume the children were too, from the way they dashed out of the cinema like it was on fire once i'd said they could leave. i'd not seen it before, my family didn't really go to the cinema when i was a kid so i'd not got around to seeing it before. it was too much of an ego led production and very dated. it was like warren beatty saying "look who my mates are, i can get dustin hoffman and al pacino in loads of prosthetic make up!" the acting was baaaad and the cartoon style looked terrible compared to comic book adaptations like SIN CITY. the only high spot were the madonna songs. i played the I'M BREATHLESS album over and over and over so had expectations that there would be songs all the way through and i knew all the words, but no, it didn't even show off the songs by madonna, which in those days was a big deal. madonna was predictably terrible, its funny how you forget how bad she is. she is really really bad. this film was hardly even enjoyable and it made me curious to see what they're going to be saying in their feedback session next week, can't wait for that. "sir, this is shit, can we see more buster keaton?" maybe? i only hope.