everyone's old, even the 9 year olds...

this week has been mainly been spent getting excited for green man this weekend but we have managed to get out of the house a little bit. saturday i went back 'ome for a family party with my friend louise who is going travelling after wanting to and talking about it for the last 15 years or so. she is doing a big trip with her boyfriend alan to india and thailand and has been saving for over a year and getting things in order, finding a home for her beloved cat and all that gubbins. i had a great time travelling but i know that once you get the itch it is hard to stop scratching, i've spent my post-travelling life trying to find ways to get out and about again. i think lou is doing things the right way, she already has her career set up and she will easily get back into it and she has enough savings to really go off and enjoy herself. i'm sure she will have a great time! it was lovely seeing louise's family again and my old mucker boo who was also at the party. good cakes too!

on the sunday i was ushering for ICE AGE 3: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS. i haven't seen any previous ice age film before and quite enjoyed it. as it was a kids film it wasn't hard to follow and the characters seemed well established. i cringed with embarrassment when realising that when the kids in the library originally wanted us to name our cat diego it was due to one of the characters (a sabre toothed tiger)! there i was thinking they were being really cosmopolitan and that they knew names of people from all over the world... we named him frankie of course and i don't even care that frankie vaughan is apparently rhyming slang for porn, its better than taking his name from another character. anyway, the film was warm and quite funny and the kids seemed to love it. i liked the fact that it has no bearing on reality whatsoever (the dinosaurs are found in a protected rainforrest under the ice... hmmm) but it was fun, a sort of kiddies take on the land of the lost. there was a weird weasel / rat thing apparently voiced by simon pegg but he had such an appalling mockney accent i wasn't sure if it was dick van dyke. maybe i'll appreciate these films more when i'm a drooling mother with a drooling baby.

sunday night we stayed in and watched W, oliver stone's take on the bush junior presidency. i'd seen it before but steen missed it and it was interesting watching it again. the first time i was bitterly disappointed, i'd written essays on what a meaty film NIXON was so found W very slight and weak. however, this time i understood the comedy of it a little more, having someone watching it with me and laughing. the incidental music is quite a delight in its comic timing.

monday i finished work, played with the cat and headed into town to see ORPHAN. it took me a while to get there, since the bloody st davids 2 project closes off different pedestrian paths each week. but by the time i found the way to the cinema i dived it just as the film started. we were at a catholic orphanage and the dad (the amazing peter sarsgaard) was peeking into a room where a little girl was doing extraordinary paintings. they got chatting and picked her. but they were wrong! it was a great little film with some great red herrings and a cunning little twist at the end.

in the evening i met will in town and we bought a little picnic and a bottle of wine and got merry outside the museum. the sun was shining and the world was a warm glowing sphere for straight after we'd downed the wine we went to see MUM in the reardon lecture theatre. we were last there to see a bit of euros childs and the entire beautiful set from young marble giants at swn and it kept that same lovely atmosphere. everyone was excited and on their best behaviour in such a special venue. we became very confused at first. where to sit? we're unused to sit down gigs and it felt a bit odd being in the front row for this. since the lovely annas ellis and macca and the lovely iain and leah were at the back we decided to go and sit with them and have a natter pre-gig. first on was GRAVENHURST doing a looping guitar set then along came mum. they were less electronic-y than i thought they would be, they reminded me more of arcade fire than the post rock noodlings i'd expected. we had a great time. it really felt like summer and a lot of our friends were there. good times.

tuesday we went to see the german film CLOUD 9. we'd started showing the trailer a while ago in chapter and i was really looking forward to it. the trailer advertised the fact that it was about old people falling in love and definitely having sex but having fun and not caring what the world thought, the trailer shows an old man telling his lover a joke in bed. we were a little bit misled. the film turned out to be a partially improvised naturalistic drama about a woman in her 60s who, indeed does find love with a man a little older than her and they do have bloody great sex but it turns out that she is married and the film was less about enjoying life in your later years and more about the pain that occurs when one partner cheats on the other, no matter what age you are. it was joyous to see older people portrayed realistically having sex and not just playing the grandma role, but having a fuller life. i always get frustrated when fiction portrays the story of life as having a best before date, that once you have kids or get past 30 society expects you to settle down and become invisible, that certainly is not my experience. but this film was a little depressing and melodramatic and just made me sad. not a bad film but not what i was expecting.

wednesday i was ushering for an indian western THE LAST THAKUR. i have never been a big fan of the western genre. when i was doing american studies we had to watch so many, it being deemed the only true new genre in fiction, but it bores me. it always seems so full of machismo and repressed barbaric souls. this was no exception. set in an indian village along a river the thakur (a blast from the colonial past, the rich landowner) stumbled along half mad helped by his only friend, a blind beggar. everyone hates him because he has taken their land to build a shrine to a woman he loved that he is forcing them to construct. a stranger with a gun walks into town looking for information about his mother and meets the chairman, who our unreliable narrator tells us is a wonderful man but the images of him bullying his son tell us otherwise. it fits all the cliches of a western and was mostly successful in its attempts to transfer the genre to india and felt timeless and yet... it was lacking some punch for me, the pace was a bit slow and the characters a bit too one dimensional. reimagined westerns can be powerful (australian film the proposition or the ballad of little jo for instance) but this felt a bit limp. the audience hated it, one old couple amusingly kept falling asleep in turn and she told me it was the worst film she'd seen! it wasn't the worst film ever but it was a bit boring.

luckily, wednesday night was not boring. taking a car trip with the lovely adam and ben we went off to see ONEIDA in the croft in bristol. first on was TEETH OF THE SEA a funny looking bunch with one particular annoying guitarist who seemed to think he needed to make up for something lacking by jumping around like a mental with a comedy punk gurn on his face. it wasn't needed. they did great fuzzy anthems and the set seemed to be curtailed a little for my liking. less gurning next time and more songs, please. oneida were predictably brilliant. long organ jams and an extraordinary bit of fast drumming make claire a happy lady added to that the brilliant wig out projection behind them it made me grin like a loon. to compound the joy at the end of the night i go up to one of them and ask if anyone knows my friend dave oprava. i pass on the apology message, dave was meant to be here tonight but family committments blah blah blah meant he couldn't make it. he says the name doesn't ring a bell but then i see him talking to oneida founder bobby. his eyes light up and he rushes over all sweaty and asks how i know dave. he tells me how much he loves him, tells me how they went to school together and he misses him etc etc. it was wonderful, i felt like cilla on surprise surprise. he brought over other long time band members and frantically looked for a cd present and a pen and scrawled an essay sized message for dave on the packaging and gave me a sweaty hug for dave. love love love. what lovely people and what a great evening.

before packing for green man, thursday i was locked in a room all afternoon interviewing some amazing artists who had applied for the CHAPTER LIGHTBOX commission and discussing it afterwards. as it has not been announced i'd be an idiot to talk about who was chosen here but all of them were so interesting and it was facsinating getting an insight into how the artists work and what they thought they could do with the space. everyone short listed impressed me immensely and we had a very tough time deciding what to go with. often it was like discussing what was best: apples, bananas or oranges. i kept making a case for one then making a case for another and finding myself loving each of them for different reasons. i am very glad i did not have to make the decision on my own. the lightbox is a fantastic opportunity and i think it will become such an amazing centrepiece for chapter. i really enjoyed the process and am getting increasingly excited about the reopening.