a rare quiet week

after the madness of the beer festival it was lovely to just relax and know that there was nothing too draining to do for a while. the film on the sunday was THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS, the new film from terry gilliam notable for it being the film heath ledger was working on when he died. it has had mixed reviews and as with most of gilliam's films it was a heroic mess but one i truly enjoyed. it mixes in elements of old gilliam films, the ramshackle oversized baroque paper cut outs from MONTY PYTHON and the ordinary everyday "real life" contemporary scenes that marked out TIME BANDITS. we meet a group of street performers setting up shop at a city centre at night, complete with violent vomiting club goers. one of them makes a grab for pretty valentina and ends up behind the mirror in the imaginarium (a tired looking theatre dragged along in a horse drawn gypsy caravan). here he finds himself in a world of his own making where he even looks different and given a choice: a hard climb up a step to redemption or a night in a nightclub with its easy entertainments. he picks the wrong one and the devil gets him. the film centres on the mysterious, boozed up dr parnassus (christopher plummer) who runs the theatre and his band of down and outs, conjurer anton (andrew garfield), aggressive assistant percy (vern troyer) and his daughter valentina (lily cole). they are involved in a race against time to win a wager with the devil (played by tom waits who easily steals the show) when they rescue heath ledger's character tony. it is a convoluted tale that you feel he could have told a bit more economically and been a lot more straight forward with, but then this is the man whose desperate attempt to end THE HOLY GRAIL was by breaking into reality and having the set shut down by some bumbling coppers, it would be churlish to expect something straight forward. the first time we meet heath ledger he is hanging from a noose under a bridge crossing the thames. there is something truly disturbing and shockingly confrontational about this but they are quite ingenious in coming up with ways to make the film with an incomplete performance by ledger. as the imaginarium works on the enteree's own mind their appearance can change once they are inside. when heath ledger's character steps inside he finds himself first as johnny depp, then jude law and finally as colin farrell. since he becomes more obviously seedy and evil as more is revealed about his character it seems fitting that the actors who he becomes get um, less attractive and seedy. i'm not sure how colin farrell would feel about this. i really quite enjoyed this although it frustratingly left unanswered questions about the characters, about the imaginarium and dr parnassus. there are some wonderful flourishes and it could only have been made with someone as truly imaginative and brave as dr parnassus, sorry, terry gilliam.

on monday steen and jarrett were djing joy collective stylee for the lovely people of LOOSE. it was one of those gigs where you want to curse the laziness of people who don't bother coming out on a monday night. there was only a scattering of people but it was good fun. first up were MWSOG who were pleasantly unexpected. bilingual songs that seemed to exist in their own world of theatrical sparks-lite pop seemed well suited to this strange little world in clwb with only us in. steen and jarrett did some djing, one of which was a comedy metal single that blasted out and i hated but apart from that it was good fun. i sat with liz and we awaited THE BALKY MULE who turned out to be my new favourite discovery. he did charming sweet but not sentimental little love songs that reminded me of a more subtle, scruffier version of sweet baboo. the headliners seemed to take an age to come on but once they did it was warm and nice and bluesy, very american and a bit forgettable. i enjoyed it ok at the time but the support acts were a bit more memorable, it was a BALKY MULE song i sang on the way home.

on tuesday i was asked to usher last minute so steen accompanied me to see GOODBYE SOLO. it was a wonderful film about two ordinary people who get to know each other under extraordinary circumstances. solo is a senegalese immigrant who has come to make a life in the US, striving for the american dream with his dream of being an air steward but at the moment is getting by being a taxi driver. as with many film taxi drivers, begins to take an interest in one of his clients: william is his fare. william is a man old and tired and longing for death. he hires solo to drive him up to a beautiful spot in the mountains where he intends to commit suicide. solo spends the movie trying to pull him out of it with sheer cheerfulness and good will. if this was a hollywood movie they would have a big sentimental talk about the value of friendship and william would move in with solo and become surrogate grandpa to his kids. but thankfully this is a indie movie by an iranian director and whilst it still delivers hope and a belief in the idea of life it does not offer such easy solutions. this was a good film about a hard subject, completely believable and moving.

on wednesday i was ushering for a strange film, part documentary and part fiction I WANT TO SEE was an uncomfortable mix. playing herself, catherine deneuve pays a visit to beirut for a film festival and requests a tour of the city to see the effects of the long, drawn out depressing war between israel and hezbollah. her host is actor bint jbail, a lebanese actor who takes her through town past destroyed buildings, to the town he grew up in that has been entirely destroyed and to the border road that the israeli army give permission for them to walk down but the cannot film. the script, such as it was, was apparently entirely improvised by the actors. deneuve is a fish out of water, an expensive carp amongst a school of sardines. she looks a bit strange, a plastic surgery smile and a look which you are never sure whether is sadness or disgust. it is odd to make a film based on the emotions portrayed by the protagonist when the protangonist can barely move her eyes. the situation is very sad and this film does not have any answers but nor does it seem to pose any questions, she simply "wants to see" to be a witness to this scene and due to the rigidity of her face and the height of her privaleged status you are not sure of her motivation. is this some sort of cruel tourism? there seems to be a moment that passes between the two of them at the end but i am not sure whether this was a conceit on the part of the director because i felt them not to have been linked at all.

i had some great nosworthy coleslaw and a chat with the lovely rhian and then played with the cat until it was time to see the new show from CAI TOMOS: CALON. it was a moving tale of one man's life but it felt like the lives of all of us. when we enter he is suspended by red rope, reliant on his heartstrings, and as the piece moves on he moves in a gentle, graceful way. he is marking time. small events that had significance to him are turned into markers, the kiss he shared watching a movie as a teenager, the time he crashed his mum's car... these little moments are aired, reenacted in symbolic, pared down movements and made into reasons to be. it was a wonderful show that was truly joyous.

on bonfire night we eschewed the outdoor fireworks and headed down for food in the new italian that used to be dirty sues that used to be europa and found it to be very lush the headed to the POP QUIZ at y fwch goch. we teamed up with rich and rhian and did ok, coming joint second with half of cardiff! it was hard this month and it had a picture round that i excelled in (always good with faces, me) and i was very excited to get alice cooper as a young thing clutching a puppy. they had indoor fireworks to celebrate and mr ben potter lit them for everyone to gasp in amazement: it was like a big lump of snakey poo being lit with a green flame. awful. we then headed off to the CARDIFF ARTS INSTITUTE opening party. i was really happy when i heard this was being redeveloped. i went to the bar's previous incarnation INCOGNITO once and found it a dreary, souless place in that boring beige-and-burnt orange interiors way. this they had livened up with lego on the walls, girls excitedly playing ping pong in a hidden room at the top of the stairs and a black cab at the back showing the wacky races on a loop. as with any opening parties that are invite only there was a lot of wankers and we'd missed the live music as we'd been at the quiz so it felt a bit pointless being there. a shame but to be expected. keeping in mind the groucho marx line about never wanting to belong to a club that would have me as a member we spied a familar face in the shape of ed truckell and clung to it like driftwood in the ocean. as soon as we got there a lady told us to get off the bit of red carpet we were stood on. i steeled my face and uttered through gritted teeth "shall we leave, steen?!" before casey and ewan jumped on us with chants about "WILL FUCKING STEEN" and the world seems ok again. there were plenty of lovely people hiding outside. we had a good time for a while and i shrunk my eyes and tried to imagine this full of people there to see a gig rather than here to pilfer some free booze (not us, by the way) and see whom had come in with whom.

on friday it was a DRONES COMEDY CLUB special improv performace. in attendance were: the lovely ben partridge, laura and clint, dans mitchell and thomas and jenn champion, who i hadn't seen perform before. they were great. they came up with some truly brilliant moments like the check out girl played by dan thomas, the fisting of the alien's nan sketch and some great kung fu fighting from mitchell and champion. they were all really good but unfortunately the audience wasn't. an improv show is pretty dependent on how much the audience shout out but they were quite a sedate bunch. i laughed all the way through and had a brilliant time. i stopped by the bar on the way out and saw casey and caroline and had a chat about true blood (casey's a fan too) and then home to bed where i slept like a baby.

end of the season of exhaustion

after swn we sat back and though, "my, my! it will be nice to have a rest!" and then realised that the beerfest was only days away. yikes! beerfest is notable for a) massive selection of beers b) about 4000 people in chapter. more busy times! we also had noticed that a lot of people are checking out chapter, where we were expecting quite a few people to be walking through the doors we're having lots and lots and lots coming to have a gawp, which is great but we've all been rushed off our feet! every day has been a busy and we're all getting that adrenalin rush of talking to a billion people followed by the falling-asleep-the-moment-you-stop comedown.

to try and put some nice escapist distance between us and them i took steen to see KATALIN VARGA on monday. it was a really strange but wonderful experience. katalin varga is woman out for revenge. this is a modern romanian film (from a british director) that almost feels like a dark fairy tale. due to the slightly old fashioned dress in the smaller villages that gives the impression of a place stuck in time it feels like this is a story that could have happened at any time. after carrying the secret of the truth of her son's real father for 10 years she confides in a friend who quickly spreads it around the village. her husband kicks her out and she ventures out into the countryside with her son searching for something, someone to carry out her revenge upon. there are some wonderful moments that feel uncomfortable and make you frightened of the nature in a similar way to ANTICHRIST. nature, or human nature, is brutal and life has no meaning but is brutish and unfair. a wonderful film that i could not get out of my head afterwards.

for the next two days my mornings were spent at the half term screening of CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. this was a fun tale, a nicely surreal cartoon about a young inventor who goes from zero to hero in his seaside town after his new invention is accidentally shot in the sky and food literally rains down. it was a classic tale of how a young lad can be corrupted by fame and glory with a horrid, ever expanding mayor who wants more more more without thinking of the concequences and a nice reverse makeover of a dumb bimbo weathergirl who turns out to be a beautiful nerd underneath all along. it was well designed for kids and adults but didn't seem too clever, like a lot of the modern pixar cartoons seem to be. there was an entertaining monkey called steve, a defecating cloud and i loved all the depictions of giant food. ace!

thursday evening was a real treat, the HARMONIE BAND contributed live music to the carl dreyer classic VAMPYR, it is a talkie but as it is an early film has little dialogue so it suited being transferred to a live score. i had seen stills from this film before but never had been able to see it properly and was stunned by the beauty of the film. a young man enters a cut off village full of sad lost souls and has to spend the night in an inn. he is awakened during the night by an old man who enters his room and leaves a package so he gets up and walks around to try and find out what has happened, he passes a castle with an old woman and a doctor and then comes across the old man's house and witnessess his death. the man had two daughters, one of whom we learn has been bitten by a vampire. he calls the doctor who tells him the daughter needs a blood transfusion, which the young man readily agrees to. he falls into a sleep and when he wakes realises the doctor is not all he seems. i was very tired when i saw this film, it was the end of a long couple of weeks, a long day and i must admit that i started to drift into that strange place between waking and sleeping for a few minutes at the start. it added a strange frission to my enjoyment of the film. i started to drift just as the young man was in the first few scenes and awoke to find the image of the old man creeping, almost gliding into the room and it was extremely creepy. all through the film were shots of extreme beauty, the light quality was very subtle and it reminded me most of the murnau film SUNRISE. it was claustrophobic and perhaps aided by how tired i was, had a hypnotic seductive quality. i felt i was truly under a spell.

after that i rushed off to newport to catch the last MEZEFEST gig. it was a good one too! i jumped off the train first up was LITTLE DEATHS, a brilliantly unexpected math rock treat. they were unpretentious and seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves which is something you rarely see with such musos. next up was MIDORI HIRANO. i saw her at a LOOSE gig earlier in the year and it seems that despite that there seemed to be a low turn out for her, which is a shame because her music is so beautiful, she seems so shy and eager for people to enjoy it. it reminds me of icebergs melting and light falling on grass, its just so delicate and subtle. the next lot up were a horrible bunch of rapping boys with plastic looking hair. i read my book in the back room instead. they were called DIRTY GOODS and they had day-glo merch and customised goggles. ugh. luckily MAX TUNDRA was up next. he is someone i saw earlier in the year too but unfortunately it didn't quite count. that evening i started throwing up and that kept me in the toilet for the entire gig. poor max tundra, i don't think it was his fault. he came on stage and lo! he didn't make me vom. he was very funny, brilliant dance moves and little gems of songs that made me dance with a small little bunch of lovelies at the front. a brilliant show that enabled me to neglect my tiredness for a while. i dashed out just before the end to make sure i could collect my bike from the train station (a man let me keep it in the staff room because we couldn't find the bike racks!) and slept well that night!

bloody good i did get some sleep because it was the CHAPTER OKTOBERFEST that weekend and i was doing the looong shift on friday. i started at 6pm (2 hours earlier than usual) and finished at 2am (about an hour longer than usual) and it was hard. there were times when i thought people were just drinking really quickly because i seemed to be serving them a lot and by the end of the evening i worked out that it was just the time going quickly and being too busy to take stock and wonder what time it was! chapter dealt with it really well and we had a record breaking weekend as far as i can tell, i find out the true figures this week. it was great to be able to have the space not to have a one-in-one-out system like we had to do for the stwidio cafe bar.

by the next day i felt like i had been battered and bruised by all the tiredness so it was a quiet hallowe'en for us. we had plans to go and see the lovely multi talented rhodri viney then go dancing in TWISTED but first i was ushering EDDIE LADD: THE BOBBY SANDS MEMORIAL RACE in the theatre. i love eddie's shows, she has such a wonderful muscular energy. she has a lithe, androgynous look and it combines with her femininity to make her a graceful, beautiful performer. the idea for this came when she discovered that a town in america has a memorial race each year for hunger striker bobby sands. he wrote an article about running and ladd uses the sport and the idea of the marathon, going the distance as an allegory for his form of protest. in the centre of the stage is a line of lasers running down the length of a giant treadmill. voices echo around, a northern irish voice (bobby sands' writings) and the welsh translation (eddie ladd's commentary) telling of how he was a runner in school and then got sent to prison and tells the tale of him trying to keep up, striving to keep pace. she stands on the treadmill and it gathers speed. the click click and the hum of the machine providing an interesting backdrop to the atmospheric music from guto puw. through the words and her movements we imagine bobby sands running, running, trying to make it to the end. it is a very powerful piece and the lighting was so subtle she seemed to go from fit and lithe to fragile and sinewy by the end.

present at the show were our friends anne and helen and since the show had finished too late to catch mr viney we went back for a cup of tea at theirs. very rock and roll. but by gum, it was nice. we just sat and ate biscuits and drank tea and had a chat and i think it was the quietest hallowe'en i've had for years but it was perfect.

it was a good end to a bloody brilliant but exhausting month. november is looming and there are a couple of big things on the horizon there. i keep saying its going to slow down but i'm not sure if it is! its great working here and living with steen and seeing so many brilliant bands all the time but i do keep having to remind myself to sleep!