tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17993531682142169102024-02-20T20:38:00.792-08:00pixieglasreminder of things pastpixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-19180863684139690152015-01-03T04:39:00.001-08:002015-01-03T04:39:52.155-08:00New Hair Claire <p dir="ltr">Keeping in mind with various resolutions for years to come and using Cathryn's diaries as an inspiration I'm going to try and keep a diary. I won't force myself to do it every day but as long as I've posted weekly I won't feel so terrible.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Last year clearly did not work. </p>
pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-50980190991804710542014-01-01T12:08:00.001-08:002014-01-01T13:28:42.353-08:00Be resolute young lady! <p>Well, I'm sat watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and drinking camomile tea eating snacks on what has been the happiest Festive season for years (perhaps ever). </p>
<p>We went to Aberystwyth for a few days before Christmas, driven up by our lovely friend Sara Watkin. It was great spending time with Ciaran, he loved having his Uncle William to do rough, silly play with him. Whilst there we also had a really nice day walking around Aber getting drunk and watching the starlings. It was sad to leave. On Xmas Eve we got a local bus to Carmarthen, stopping off at a great organic shop for treats (best bought mince pies ever, and every year I do a taste test) and then a train from there to Cardiff. </p>
<p>Back in Cardiff we went for drinks with Mel & Graf, Rosie & Max, Tomos & Steph and Nic & Gareth took turns looking after the baby. It was nice but I was missing Caroline, who was having alternative drinks elsewhere. </p>
<p>Christmas Day was perfect. We were lazy and did nothing but get drunk, be really affectionate, watch silly films and play with Frank. Boxing Day was similar but we tried to go for a walk before it started raining. No plans, no pressure: just relaxing. </p>
<p>27th Steen went back to work and I did some cleaning and chatted with Cath. I'm going to really miss her when she leaves in a couple of months. </p>
<p>On Saturday night we went to Charlotte and Ryan's for drinks and had loads of fun. It was great chatting to Noel and we played ate love hearts. </p>
<p>Sunday we went to see my parents for lunch. Dad had an operation just before Xmas for his carpol tunnel (sp?) and is still in a bit of pain but was in good spirits. Auntie Lynn was there too and the whole thing was just nice. No arguments, just a really nice afternoon. They are still looking for a dog and apparently have found one in the last couple of days. </p>
<p>More cleaning, finished watching Battlestar Galactica and started watching Ru Paul's drag race took up most of the end of 2013. I must read more books this year. </p>
<p>Last night we had Rosie over for food / mulling and then eventually Mel & Graf, Adam & Ryan Caroline & Tom and some others. We then headed to Chapter for NYE. U had been trying to get Ewan in and right at the last minute it got sorted. I was sort of dreading it, Steen has a horrible cold and was being really grumpy about it but it got better. It was great seeing Mike Lollipop, Jim Kolmar and most of the people I know in Cardiff. It was a true success and I felt really proud of Chapter. I met the Lovely Eggs' giant baby too. Casey is so broody. I was drinking port from a smuggled in bottle and just hope Andy Eagle didn't see cos apparently he really frowns upon that (understandably). All the bands were great and it was wonderful that Alex Dingley band got extra exposure to a new audience. I did a lot of crazy dancing with Cath Angle and kissing everyone at midnight. It was good fun. Best for years, think it was the best we've spent together. We went to a party at Hannah Bayfield's where our mission was to try and hook up Rosie with Rob Sell. It didn't work but he was really drunk and it was 4am.</p>
<p>Today we've done similar things to Xmas: watch silly telly, snack and cuddle. It has been good. </p>
<p>New Year's resolutions? Last year I kept it simple but kind of serious to buy only vinyl and sort out our relationship and that went pretty well. </p>
<p>2014:<br>
Keep up my diary <br>
Read more books<br>
Get fit(er) <br>
Finish sorting out the house</p>
<p>Not too unrealistic, we'll see how I get on. </p>
<p>Currently listening to:<br>
*Brief Histories of Britain 1066-1485 / 1485-1668 / 1660-1864 <br>
*Life Itself by Roger Ebert<br>
*Lancaster and York by Alison Weir<br>
*Why E=mc2 and why should we care? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw</p>
<p>Currently reading:<br>
*Longitude by?? <br>
*Affinity by Sarah Waters<br>
*The Giant Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins <br></p>
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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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-16435037168793500242009-11-04T09:59:00.000-08:002009-11-07T09:12:04.493-08:00end of the season of exhaustionafter 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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!<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-3063245987519731992009-10-27T10:21:00.000-07:002009-11-04T09:59:46.596-08:00all hands on deck!well, so it begins. saturday night we shut up shop and were ready to re-open the new CHAPTER by tuesday. in the gap in between were two days of solid hard work! sunday i got a sort of lie-in (till about 9.30am, which for me is a late start on a sunday!) but we needed it, it was a whole two days of lifting, moving, cleaning, sorting, constructing, chucking out... and not much sitting down. the bloody wonderful lex did a lovely thing and cooked dinner for everyone on the sunday, it was only a bit of chilli or a bagette and chips but it was so appreciated. we all worked so hard those two days getting the place straight for the opening on the tuesday morning that i sat down at home and just fell asleep on the sofa. tuesday morning was inevitably HARD what with a million people asking questions / making approving noises and us lot trying to work out where we'd put everything ("where are the bins? oh yeah, they forgot to buy bins..." etc) but it was a good tired, like when you've done a good job.<br /><br />on tuesday night i invited a few people down for a drink so i could have a go and see what it was like to actually enjoy the place. i've spent almost two years helping to plan chapter and going in and out of the building site only to then spend time running around setting it up but didn't know what it was like to just sit and enjoy the space and decide if i really liked it or not! thankfully i did. i went with the lovely miss ginny head and beautiful spooner to see the DOTS SHORT FILM BAND play music alongside some local short films, most of which were quite beautiful and lovely. the brilliant ewan morris jones had a film he'd worked on years ago based on a short story by a jorge luis borges that had some wonderful ideas in it and showed off what a great film maker he is. the biggest surprise was what the composers did to ginny's former art in the bar installation "we are not what we seem". the lead composer described what she did and it sounded interesting but i did not feel it worked and of all of them i found it a little disappointing. afterwards i sat and had some food with steen and some drink with casey, ewan and leila, duffy and the lovely rhodri viney, who gave me a cd of his new work which i was very excited to receive. it was a shame that they still haven't got the speaker system in place as it felt odd sat in chapter with no beautiful music playing but a lovely evening and a bloody good way to have a nice relax.<br /><br />i did sort of get escape (although i dunno whether looking after full cinema's worth of teenagers is really an escape) when i ushered for the national schools film week's screening of SHIFTY. i remember it being advertised to look a bit like a guy richie gangster film but it was more mike leigh than guy richie. it was an authentic day in the life of an east london estate where a muslim drug dealer shifty has his beat. his best mate has come down to visit after a long absence and found him much changed from the "brightest kid in school" he once was. they spend a day avoiding his devout, successful brother; an addict who is ruining his life in the persuit of one more hit; the police; and his future. shifty has spent the past few years descending further into this life and his mate chris seems a little shocked about how he's ended up like this. he makes a few subtle hints that he does not approve but there seems to be some guilt that it maybe his doing that he has ended up like this. i was a bit worried when SHIFTY started as the first few scenes graphically showed people taking hard drugs and with coachloads of teens it gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach that it wasn't going to be appropriate or that i wouldn't know how to deal with questions afterwards but by the end of the film i felt safe that they had gone on a journey with shifty and discovered that this stupid, seedy life is for idiots and fuck ups. it wasn't patronising, it was honest and felt real. the relationship between daniel mays and riz ahmed as chris and shifty truly shone through and they had real chemistry, related to each other in a way that i felt those kids were totally going to get. a really good choice from the film education board.<br /><br />wednesday was an extended ushering day as i was asked to do the 6pm and 8pm as well as my normal matinee. first up was the new version of DORIAN GRAY. i loved the old version with angela lansbury and this unfortunately, did not manage to top it. as vapid as the character is, the subject should not be treated in such a light manner. it was a glossy remake and i did not think it was possible to make the story of a man who commits every sin imaginable dull, but dull it was. they also managed to make him seem not quite so queer, which seems like almost a feat. the famously gay novel written by oscar wilde which was even used in the prosecution case against him in france, turned into a sort of tame modern beautiful costume drama. they'd changed some of the characters around, pinned down the setting a little too clumsily and stretched the story a little too thin. its a great archetypical tragedy but it felt trapped in its new form. it wasn't unwatchable but it was a big disappointment. at times i longed for francis ford coppola's version of DRACULA as that outlandish camp film seemed a more credible an example of hedonistic victorianism.<br /><br />next up was 500 DAYS OF SUMMER. i'd been quite looking forward to this, being a big fan of joseph gordon levitt since i realised he'd grown up to be actually quite a nice little actor in greg araki's MYSTERIOUS SKIN. zooey deschanel is in it too, her of the "eyes dewey and wet like a baby seal" (which is one of my all time favourite hyperbolic quotes) and it promised to be an alternative to those gooey sit com romances that tend to be ten a penny these days. ooh for the days of smart rom coms that have never seen the green biro of richard curtis. well, it certainly was not a disappointment. in fact, there seemed to be an almost uncomfortable amount of facts that were very similar to my own life. i'm sure i'm not alone in this, i know many people who have had similar experiences, but it was almost creepy at times. tom (jg levitt) went to university to study architecture and couldn't get a job so ended up working in a boring office job but yearns for escape. a beautiful girl with a lovely smile called summer starts working in his office and when he notices enough small coincidences (they share a sense of the absurd and both like the smiths) he convinces himself that she is THE ONE and falls hopelessly in love. it won't spoil the movie if i tell you that she ends up breaking his heart because we find this out in the first scene. what director marc webb has cleverly done is to zip back and forth over the 500 days she was in his life to give a full vision of the relationship, to examine what went wrong. it gives the impression of what we all do after a break up. we see tom's initial shell shock at being dumped, we see the heady days of tripping around to our own soundtrack in a happy daze, we see him being severely depressed once its all sunk in and we see the first day of meeting summer. although it could get a little tiresome (i'm not sure i entirely believed in his little greek chorus of friends and family and sometimes i wanted to know a bit more about the distant, glacial summer) when it was good it was very very good. there were perfect little scenes such as visits to ikea where they imagined living in the fake rooms and a party that switched to split screen where tom's expectations and the reality played out heartrending and without dialogue. i used to really like romantic films before they started treating women like idiots who obsessed with getting married and wearing the right clothes. hopefully this will encourage people to make more films with a bit more of a bite.<br /><br />last up was ARMY OF CRIME, which told the tale of the french resistence was a sort of antidote to the more brash, hollywood INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. now, i must first make a confession. as much as i do take a keen interest in history and have watched many "war" documentaries with benny my knowledge of the french resistence is mostly coloured by having been a big fan of ALLO ALLO as a child. as much as i engaged with this wonderful, illuminating film i was secretly hoping for a cameo appearance of the madonna with the big boobies. sorry, very childish. i was listening out for the fake french accent of the police officers, paying keen attention to fat french restaurant owners and wondering where the two RAF officers were stowed in this episode. its sometimes so much easier to deal with difficult things if we make them flippant comedy than if we try to examine real emotions. the difficulty the french find with their history in world war two is legendary and also very understandable. at times this film felt more like THE LIVES OF OTHERS, the french - german alliance where neighbours inform on neighbours and the police are working for the nazis, it was a frightening time to be living in france. many thought that it was better to collaborate and try to preserve france where others more perceptive knew that it was impossible to collaborate, that the nazi ideaology would wipe them out eventually one way or the other. having seen KATYN earlier this year, about the polish nation's problems in a similar vein, this film serves as a poignant accompaniment. again, a true story, it follows the men and women who were on a famous poster put up in france mocking their attemps to turn the tide on the nazi regime, a propaganda attempt to turn the perception of these people from freedom fighters to dangerous criminals. it centred on armenian immigrant missak whose initial reticence at joining a group who are willing to kill slowly disippates due to the circumstances surrounding him. he becomes the heart of the group, a strong presence who knows what evil the nazi army can do (they all but wiped out the armenians) and has the experience of age to guide the young hot headed members of the resistance. the vichy government are leaned on by the nazis to wipe out this force and slowly and inevitably, the net catches all the members, leading to the line up and the famous photograph. it is fittingly human that under such inhuman times the betrayal was so banal and the characters who told on them so unheroic. a question every school child must have asked themselves when they study history is "would i or my family have been involved in this?" and it is important to have films like this to show the very real people who fight back against monsters like the nazis.<br /><br />to crown off the first weekend in the new CHAPTER we hosted part of the SWN festival and the entire MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES. i was a bit worried that we were hosting two festivals in one weekend, especially since one was named after an old japanese curse but it was all fine. all over chapter there were rooms filled with conferences about art forms today. i listened in on a couple and they all seemed really useful. its one thing to come up with an idea, another thing entirely about how to make money out of it. lots of different aspects of the art world were discussed and it was also nice that people were coming up with ideas and contacting each other and making friends. its what chapter was designed for! brilliant fun and i met so many lovely people. unfortunately it was only listening in and checking things were ok because i was working all the way through, no chance of getting time off when its all hands on deck! i wouldn't miss out on too much swn though. i was really excited about this not only because its a brilliant music festival and i get to see a whole load of bands but also because it would test us out to see how well we can do under the pressure of a billion people in the building. happily, it was all fine. a few oldies who didn't understand why we weren't doing the normal gorgeous menu, but apart from that everyone seemed to love it. i had a brilliant time working upstairs in the theatre. i was ushering and sort door control lady but it was a lot more fun than that. we were holding it in two rooms, the newly monickered "common room" in the west wing and the theatre. on thursday we had the bbc in with adam walton and bethan elfyn with bands like SCIENCE BASTARD and MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS. vern from science bastard decided to launch himself into the crowd mid-song and snog steen but in his place i would have done the same thing. they are bloody entertaining boys. marina and the diamonds were my favourites of the evening after that, having a great pop sound and a really interesting female vocalist. it all went suspiciously well, no disasters and no problems. curious! we had the lovely jenny and rich from that london down to visit and i was sad to be working all weekend but we got to spend some time relaxing on friday afternoon. i took the to the micro makers fayre, part of the MAYLIIT events. there was a man who made bikes that played a tune as the wheels revolved; a lovely lady who had a stall where you could make revolving paintings; badgemakers, knitters and my friend zoe who was getting you to cycle to power a blender that made smoothies. fantastic! we had a look at the EDDO STERN exhibition in the new gallery and we were all blown away by the beauty of the sculptures and laughed at the world of warcraft inspired animations. we popped into town for the SWN BINGO where we were frightened to hear exactly what FOGHAT sounded like in order to recognise them and didn't win but had a lovely time (thank you jonny et al). then i dashed back to chapter but thankfully friday night at swn was just a breeze (if you excuse the pun). it was the PEPPERMINT PATTI night and it was one i was really looking forward to as it was a sort of "greatest hits of patti" night. it also featured a first for patti, the performance by a solo MALE artist, our brilliant theatre programmer JAMES TYSON. i had never heard james perform so i was really curious to see what sort of thing it would be. his songs were beautiful and delicate pieces about love and yearning. gorgeous. in the common room space they i also caughta bit of the beautiful PAPER AEROPLANES, a ethereal folky loveliness floating up the corridor. soon after in the theatre it was the riotous KING ALEXANDER, who were brilliant as always. laura was the artist co-ordinator for swn in chapter so it gave her a good break from stressing about the bands to jump on stage and yell for a bit! EMILY BREEZE was on a while after and i was surprised by h0w much she had changed. when i last saw her. the cracked, edgy performance had a sheen on it that was not quite expecting and i'm not sure if i approve of yet! i'm still mulling it over, its difficult to look at emily breeze and her amazing, sexy performance and try to separate it from the music, she is so charismatic. WETDOG were amazing as always, they get better every time i see them and they are all so lovely. the night was topped off by a great, techinicolour performance by the VICTORIA ENGLISH GENTLEMANS CLUB who decked the stage in bunting and flowers and painted their faces like clowns gone wrong. i really like their angular, biting take on indie pop and i'm glad they're doing well. wish i'd been able to bring frankie down to see them play... but my highlight of the day was dancing with my friends davida's baby alba and martin and mary's baby sonny. the three of us were throwing some shapes in the theatre foyer and for me that was better being in a packed out gig any day. great fun. saturday was an all day swn event and it started right in front of my eyes with swn-mo wrestling in the entrance to chapter. it was great watching kids and hungover adults (including WETDOG) with perma-grins get suited up and bump into each other. there was also the OXJAM record fayre where i spent £20 on a massive bag of records. on a quick break from the box office i went and saw the PAST COLLECTIVE perform a wonderful piece in cinema one. on the screen were various welsh landscapes and the musicans on the stage beneath trying to articulate the memories of that place in their performace. it was really moving and i felt so proud of them. after my shift i hastily trod up to the theatre to take my place again at the final swn night. luckily it was lovely promoters liz and ryan from LOOSE. their gigs always brilliant so it was a treat to be their usher. throughout the night though a problem was looming: BROKEN FAMILY BAND. it was their last ever gig and word had got out. lots of people had bought day tickets just to see them but the swn wristband holders had priority. what if 200 wristband holders came over for the gig and we had to let down 100 day ticket holders with stamps on their hands?! ahghg! we were trying to warn everyone that were buying the day tickets but it didn't seem to put anybody off. as the day wore on and as we were getting closer and closer to the show the theatre foyer was filling up with people who i swear would have elbowed their granny out of the way to ensure a space. i decided to split the room prior gig into wristband holders and ticket holders. when the moment came i made a big announcement to make sure they separated and with some help from old mucker usher clive we managed to get them all in without breaking any laws! when the band started i was so full of adrenalin and relief that i just sat around dancing and didn't go in to watch we packed up shop, set up the merch stall for the band and relaxed for the first time in days. after they finished a very excited 10 year old girl, eyes big as saucers told me how the lead singer had shook her hand! no partying for me that night, i sloped off home with my honourary wristband on that laura had given me and went home for some much needed sleep.<br /><br />sunday i met my family for lunch as it was my nan's birthday and she liked her chapter soup, thank god! i was stressing about the lack of a sunday lunch (we're starting in november) and then i ushered for CREATION, the new film about charles darwin. it was an unexpectedly sad tale. i was expecting him rushing off the beagle to prod some birds and then fighting off the critics when his book is published but this was the story of what happened in between. he was married to a devout christian and his wife was not happy with his findings. they lost a daughter, who he paints in his visions of her as being highly intelligent and full of curiousity. his daughter's death haunted his thoughts in more than just the fact of her death. her ghost teases him, chastises him for not publishing his book. the film gives the impression that his agonies over his daughters death caused a textbook case of transference, a future echo of another thinker that shattered our perceptions of life, sigmund freud. it was a strange film with some beautiful scenes and very well photographed but did seem to be more in support of freud's theories than an explanation of how darwin came to his.<br /><br />after this i slid in to cinema two where chris buxton was doing a talk on the MOVIE MAGICIANS OF EARLY CINEMA. this time is my favourite period in film, an exciting time where anything could happen, cinema could have easily been just another circus attraction but instead took over as being the most popular and democratic art form of the 20th century. chris buxton was a wonderfully enthusiastic lecturer and really gave you a feel for how precarious this period was for film. he showed all sorts of gems of early special effects, including some things i'd not seen before but only read about such as DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND, a trippy film by edwin s porter about a man who has too much cheese before bedtime and then dreams he is flying over new york. he artfully demonstrated how it had started as vaudevillian stage craft and gradually became more artful and relied less on what went before and more on what it could be. he showed plenty of melies, including one i'd not seen before of him becoming a whole band by overlapping the film and it was so fantastic to see all those films on the big screen. <br /><br />after that it was off to the last swn party, DIM SWN, held at gwdihw. it started in the afternoon but i arrived at about 7pm just before MEANZ HEINZ started. they are so great and it was a treat to be able to spend time with jenny and show her this amazing band, that the musicians regard as a silly side project. i think they're in my top 5 cardiff bands! we had a chat with casey, ewan and lovely ben the cameraman for a bit and then settled to watch NIWL. steen had seen them at some other gwdihw event whilst i was working and told me they were great but i wasn't expecting to be just fall so quickly. amazing surf rock that had me dancing away and humming all the way home. it was so nice to just relax, even it was for a couple of hours! dim swn was such a great event, it felt like some sort of village fete, all cosy and full of family. it was a great way to end the festival and a very busy week.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-16395089263644498042009-10-16T04:42:00.000-07:002009-10-20T09:52:54.955-07:00the good bookthis week's diary is an extended cat edition. frankie continued to wear the cone and in the end sort of got used to it. he was walking around like a little gangster, the weight of the cone bearing down on his neck a bit. he was leaping around and clearly feeling a bit better and on tuesday i took him back to the vet. she gave him the all clear but as i had a lot to do that day she said to wait till we would be in the house for the rest of the day to take the cone off, so the responsibility fell to steen. poor steen. he took the cone off and frankie flew out of the room, jittered about the place freaking out over his new found freedom and then sat down in front of him and scratched open the room. ugh. when i got back from work that night steen met me at the front door with a panicky look on his face and the cat in his arms, it was the first time frankie had been still enough to be picked up all evening. we took him upstairs and he sat in my lap and we reattached the cone. fleeting freedom, back to square one.<br /><br />tuesday was a bit of a stressy day for me all 'round, what with the vet visit, working in the evening and a big job interview all with me thick with cold and feeling like i was walking through fog. the interview was for the front of house manager at chapter, a job which is a bit like the duties i do now but more regimented, more power and much more money. i had managed to perk up during the interview, felt confident that i could do the job and answered all the questions with no trouble at all and described for them what i felt the job needed and what i could bring to it. the trouble was by the end of the interview the last question i faultered on: "if we offered you this role would you take it". i stuttered "i believe so" and have never felt so insincere. i was seriously doubting whether i wanted the job at all. the way my life works at the moment might mean i'm scraping the breadline every month but it is stress free and allows me to have a tonne of fun. added to that earlier in the day i was offered the role of looking after the film academy (the new screen school), involving admin hours as well as looking after the kids when they come for their lessons and films. i was completely chuffed about this and really looking forward to starting it and mentioned it in my interview. if i took on this front of house manager job it would mean a lot of stress, loads of troubleshooting and erratic working hours and i really wasn't sure whether i wanted that in my life. by thursday i had got a letter saying i had not been successful but had really impressed them in the interview. a perfect result as far as i am concerned. i'm not very ambitious, i'm not very good at being ambitious and although i try to gee myself up seomtimes i am quite happy how i am. its not officially been announced but if the rumour of who got it is true then i couldn't be happier. i get to keep my life, i get to do the film academy and the "contact a family" shifts too and things will tick over carefully but happily. ace.<br /><br />wednesday i was ushering for the new nora ephron film JULIE AND JULIA. i remember hearing about the blog, later book a while ago and was interested to see how they would turn a blog into a film, especially a recipe blog. well, nora ephron has completely come up trumps. this film was hugely enjoyable, abley handled the dual narrative of 1940s julia child starting life in paris and discovering a love of food and julie powell a post-9/11 new yorker finding meaning in her life through julia's cook book. the two narratives work well together, reminding us of how different times were then and yet how similar. julia child's husband paul works with pressure from the increasingly paranoid mccarthy breathing down his neck and questioning the list of library books in the embassy library and, although it is not made explicit, it is interesting that julie powell is working for a 9/11 support service in an america where an american's own library take outs were being monitored for any sign of terrorism (or even dissent). it is also comparable how different the two wives look at their daily duties. paul child seems beset with worries about his life has played out, whether he has made a difference and so, conversely does julie. in an early scene we see her having lunch with a bunch of grotesque "friends" who are competitively trying to out do each other in a similar way we used to see men "doing" a liquid lunch and boasting about their sales figures. the film is rich with comparisons for the two ways of life for the women but the main thing that comes through is the love of food and life. julia and paul, on their first day in france stop off to have a meal that makes julia tear up with its richness and beauty and julie takes comfort in the ability to make something beautiful and delicious out of a few simple ingredients. the joy that julia takes in food (and sex) is life affirming. she seems to have lived life to the full and took personal disappointments such as the inability to have children and the constant reposting for paul's job to more obscure locations in her stride. it was refreshing to find a film that focussed on women but was not all about them searching for a man to complete their perfect world. this was a film about women finding themselves and finding their own joy. it also made me very hungry. when i got home from the film i was hoping steen had cooked me one of his wonderful curries and instead we warmed up a pizza. it was one of the biggest small disappointments i have ever experienced! seriously though, with the supportive husbands abound in this film it did turn my thoughts to sweet steen and how bloody ace he is. we both delight in food (hence my expansion over the past two years) and it is a shame he couldn't come and watch it with me but he was there in spirit, taking the place of the wonderful paul child (played by the fabulous stanley tucci) in my head.<br /><br />wednesday night we dashed out to go to the MEZE FEST, in this case a cacophony of post rock from france, england and america. we turned up at 8pm and were the first there, a bit of worry abound about whether anyone else would come. we got a drink and started to play pool and then a flurry of people, starting with lovely businessman keith, gindrinker graf and ex-truckers ben turned up and we knew it was going to be o k. the bands started a bit later to ensure a bit more of a turn out. first up was SINCABEZA. they took to using the dance floor rather than the main stage so the neck of the bassist's guitar kept almost hitting me in the face. not a bad thing. they were fantastic to watch, mostly instrumental math rock noodling about occasionally broken up with yelps from the bassist that made me think of the amazing PONYTAIL gig at the start of the year. it was great to find out that the lead guitarist was a lovely chap as we chatted to him at length at the merch stall (this expensive bordeaux bands compilation? "not so good"... this 4 band compilation cd? "ah, that: it is free"). next up was SNORKEL. now, i've been going on and on about snorkel as being one of those brilliant finds we made at the last ever VENN festival. they were on in the dank, dark thekla and stormed it bringing an experimental quasi electro jazz music played with real instruments and seemed to have a million people on stage. i was intruiged to find out how they were going to fit them all in the meze. it turns out they limited their band to a guitarist, keyboardist, drummer and of course trombone player. they were ok, a little more ravey than i remember them being but much of their set was hampered by the extreme anger i was feeling for the students who had streamed into the venue on the premise for cheap beer and who had decided to heckle the band through the set. the trombone play is a giant of a man who menacingly looked into the crowd throughout and looked more than a little pissed off. bloody students, don't know they're born! i started to feel very old and grumpy at the sight of all these young 'uns totally ignoring the FREE and brilliant line up of bands in their midst. i went to university in swansea and remember the excitement of RACHEL STAMP playing. no-one played swansea then. i would have ripped someone's arm off at the opportunity of having the kind of line up the meze had. pah. anyway, i had fully vented my anger by the time PUBLICIST came on. i was really excited about this, my friend ol had introduced me to TRANS AM a few years ago and i hungrily devoured their albums. to know that he would be playing such a small venue and be inches away from me (another musician who favours the democratic dancefloor staging) was pretty exciting. i put in my earplugs, watched him set up his drum kit and got ready. his songs were heavy on the urgent, travelling trans am beat, where it feels like you're speeding down a road too fast with no lights on. he added some fantastic vocoder vocals that made it seem like some mental robot was talking through your car radio on the journey. it was great, i was dancing a bit and if i'd been drunk and if this gig had been full of music fans rather than plastic students then i might have been leaping around the room crashing into the hi hat. it was a strange old night but not a bad one. i still say that this MEZE FEST adventure is an ambitious one and one that i hope has paid off for jonny, every night i've been to has been loads of unpretentious fun (and for every one i've been to there have been loads more that steen has attended).<br /><br />i spent thursday perfecting my housewife look, in order to better understand julia child. not seriously but i did do loads of housework and cooked tea. i was not up for going out again, for all the fun of the meze i have tended to be really bloody tired on that last train! i coerced steen into missing SIC ALPS and instead we stayed in with the cat really happily cwtched up in our laps and seeming almost back to normal and we caught up with THE DAILY SHOW (a teatime ritual. it makes me so happy we get this show over here now) and then i made steen watch TRUE BLOOD. i'd heard about this new hbo show from alan ball, the man responsible for SIX FEET UNDER and since i was a pre-teen goth quite fancied an intelligent drama about vampires. i was a little too old for BUFFY when it came out and i'm far too old for TWILIGHT so hoped i'd found a way to satisfy my urge for blood. steen didn't like it that much but i really enjoyed it. in this version of the present vampires have come out and trying to integrate into human society, this has been enabled by the japanese invention "true blood" a synthetic blood that can be sold at supermarkets. sookie, a virginal telepathe in louisiana comes accross one of such creatures when she saves one from being attacked by local drug dealers determined to drain him of his "v juice" (his blood) that has become quite an attractive new high. the first episode was a little lame in parts, batting you over the head with character traits to make them memorable but by the second episode they all felt a bit more imbedded and real and i really enjoyed it. there was a great little frizzle of chemistry between the lead vampire and little ol' anna and i loved all the vampire politics that kept hitting the news channels. i can see this being something i'm going to have to watch on my own on catch up tv as my dirty little secret.<br /><br />friday i was working for the DRONES COMEDY CLUB. it was a really good night and it reminded me how brilliant the people are who run nights like this. for £3 you can come and see a bunch of comedians who are trying stuff out, some on stage for the first time, some seasoned pros. last night was hosted by clint edwards and brought on some drones regulars, like dan thomas and frank honeywell (is ted an act? well, he certainly heckles well) and some new faces. it was brilliant as usual. at one point behind the scenes clint took a go on some of dan's snuff. he sneezed and creased all three of us up backstage. later on he explained to the audience what the noise was about and introduced a few members of the audience to the snuff that i turned down (on duty, y'know) but apparently tastes minty. hmmm. well, they all seemed to enjoy it. there was a running joke about a bunch of 16 year old girls (i didn't serve them booze, they were drinking water, despite what clint claimed) and a liberal mp in the audience. clint and dan just manage to work the crowd so everyone's having a great time, it feels fun and all at the same time professional and relaxed like a gig going on in your living room. they are lovely to work with and its always a good night. <br /><br />saturday it was MACBETH as performed by the increasing un-amateur seeming amateur group EVERYMAN. this was a very well designed and often very well acted version of the play. i've seen quite a few macbeths and know the play almost off by heart (its my favourite shakespeare play) so i was impressed that i was so impressed! a few really good moments, such as a genuinely creepy scene where the macbeth seeks out the witches for a second time and a great use of the stage and set made it a really good version of the play. it was a simple modern dress costumed play with a few pieces that didn't work (a too long coreographed dance scene before the banquet where banquo appears) and a couple of the younger actors still seemed to say the lines like they didn't really know what they meant but these were minor quibbles. for a 3 hour play it went quite quickly and was always engaging. <br /><br />now, sunday and monday is the new chapter move. exciting and frightening!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-66266913796057020312009-10-09T05:34:00.001-07:002009-10-14T04:12:25.058-07:00happy cat, poorly cat, bloody cat, sad catthis has been a long week of no sleep. our lad frankie has not been well and it has dominated all our thinking time, any time off i've had. ugh. anyway, i'll moan about that a bit later. at the start of the week he was healthy and well and all was good and i took steen to see my friend gerald tyler's new play THERES SOMETHING WRONG WITH ABEL. gerald is a bloody lovely man who just happens to be an amazing performer and writer. i was lucky enough to be asked to usher for his previous play BIG HANDS in its two incarnations and its a joy to watch him work. his plays are thought provoking and beautiful but still retain the ability to have a universal appeal, anyone could enjoy them they are sublime without being pretentious. he works completely with his surroundings, the music in the show is not just a poorly thought out loop but music but in an organic way, it is an integral part of the show and uses a band called LIMBO during the performance like a greek chorus. the set in THERES SOMETHING WRONG WITH ABEL is a garden shed on a patch of lawn and the whole stage is used, nothing in this play is unneccessary. as with BIG HANDS (a beautiful play about a private detective who is given charge of a renegade angel) ABEL had a religious theme. gerald plays a man who at first appears to be a mad old bastard who lives in a shed and talks to himself but after the play is over you are not sure whether he is in fact cain, one of the twin brothers who started humanity and murdered his brother and has been placed in this present as pergatory by god to relive the murderous argument that ended his companions' life. in moments of comic genius and an attempt to contact god more directly he dials his number and finds himself on the end of a frustrating automated message giving him options to "if you are having problems accessing your faith dial 3". then he seems to re-enact his brother's murder, the initiation of evil in the world over and over again, in different ways, like groundhog day. these scenes are darkly comic. he is trying to spend some time day dreaming and is interrupted by a never seen and never heard presence in the shed that makes him vitrolic and he powers up his black and dekker making you sure that the other person hasn't come off so well. but is there really anyone else there at all? after these episodes he leaps up onto the top of his shed and convenes with god. in these moments cain is sad, measured and serene. we hear how cain thinks he has seen other biblical characters like judith on the bus but she seemed to not recognise him, he is always a heartbeat away from pleading with god to end this repetition and confusion. the play was tantilisingly short, leaving me wondering what had happened to cain. is he ok? is he really a biblical character or just a character in his head? it was very funny and fascinating study of madness.<br /><br />on sunday the first film was ICE AGE 3, that we were showing partly for a kids party. it was a bloody awful experience, too many kids not enough adults and the adults who were there seemed not to care about them or the cinema. ugh. i won't dwell on this but i was very glad that the next film was ADVENTURELAND. i had liked the poster depicting two attractive looking indie kids in 80s ringer t-shirts and wasn't too put off by the fact that it was a new film by the man that did SUPERBAD. i thought it had michael cera in it. it didn't, it had jesse eisenberg in it, who is the kid from the ROGER DODGER movie that i enjoyed years ago and couldn't remember the name of till i imdb'd it a moment ago. in roger dodger he was fittingly irritating in that teenage precocious way, but he was still pretty irritating in adventureland and annoyed me all the way through. after being irritated immediately by jesse eisenberg i was then irritated by the 80s setting which seemed completely needless. why was it set in the 80s? i was hoping for some sort of plot development which meant it was essential to be the summer of '87 but none came. the effect made me wonder if it was just a cash in for the 80s nostalgia racket that leaves modern 10 year olds dressing a bit like i did when i was 10, which leaves me feeling a little like i'm wondering around in a sort of mass fancy dress party every time i'm on queens street. i'm not sure how relevant the 80s were as a setting but because the film was so good though, it put me in mind of those really brilliant 80s john cusack and john hughes teen dramas such as SAY ANYTHING, THE SURE THING, BETTER OFF DEAD, SIXTEEN CANDLES, SOME KINDA WONDERFUL, PRETTY IN PINK. i know i don't need to list them but i love the memories they evoke. as a introverted lass blessed with a tv in her room from a young age (thank you, rich relatives) i poured over these and thought i was the only one watching them till the internet nostalgia boom made me realise how popular they really were. this film stands up with them, which is massively to its credit. james (eisenberg) is a young rich kid who is planning a post-university trip with his pals in europe then told on the eve of the off that his parents can't afford it and he needs to get a job finds himself trudging up to the gates of the adventureland theme park to join a bunch of fellow poor outsiders. for a film set in the 80s these characters are pleasingly devoid of overdressing in every sense, they do not look like fancy dress characters, like the poor sods in THE WEDDING SINGER but seem like real people. james falls for emily, but she seems reluctant to fall for him, as she is otherwise engaged in a sleazy affair. he makes friends with the nerds that litter the park and gains some much needed humility. my irritation abated gradually during the film and by the end i was left with a feeling of what a lovely and quite old fashioned film it seemed, no gross out moments in a teen comedy is quite refreshing. <br /><br />the next film i had a look at was the sumptious COCO BEFORE CHANEL. it was on my brilliant oldies shift and they bloody loved it. the film stock seemed to be printed on silk, it seemed to have such an expensive sheen. at first it seemed to have a bit too much in common with the previous big expensive french period drama LA VIE EN ROSE, a poor orphan and scenes in a dirty turn of the century bar being a bit too close to the previous story. but coco did not have the little sparrow's common touch. she quickly escaped to be the kept woman of a local landowner and made him fully aware that she did not wish him to ever mention that she once worked in such a place. it is made clear that coco always knew her own mind and although she was clearly using the landowner for status, her upkeep and power her honesty in the matter difficult to judge her poorly on it. audrey tatou is gorgeous to watch, those deep dark eyes of hers always hint at her glowering at those in her path but the film was a little dull. gorgeous but dull, like a lot of fashion. <br /><br />the rest of the week was taken up with cat-ness. on tuesday afternoon frankie leapt up into my lap (very uncharacteristic, he usually just wants to play fight) and just wanted to be held and stroked. i looked at him and saw he had a little scratch under his chin. no problem, thought i. but then it was bedtime and frankie came up to the pillow and we saw this massive bloody bald patch where he had been scratching. initially i was worried it was fleas again and we gave him a treatment and went to bed with plans to take him to the vet. frankie slept next to me completely still all night, i had my hand over his fur to feel for fleas but there was no twitching. the next morning, having been awake most of the night a bit worried i too him to the vet. i expected him to say "there is nothing the matter with him, ms vaughan. please give me £25 for taking a look at laughing at you" but instead he said he had an abcess and needed an operation. wah! i was a bit upset, he said he could do it straight away and that i could pick him up after 4.30pm. because we'd failed to get insurance (he's only been going outside for a month!) it would cost about £90. ouch. needs must. i went home and paced about the house with a lumpy throat until i went to work for a bit and dashed out phoning the vet to hear he was ok and went to pick him up. the vet said to keep an eye on him but he should be ok now. ace! that night he was still very poorly and again slept next to us silently all night. the next morning he was a bit more awake and as i went to do a big tidy up of the house he played with me and then sat down and scratched at his neck. aaaaghgh! it was gross. big gross pussfilled wound oozing blood. i rushed him back down to the vet and we fitted a plastic cone (which i now know to be called an "elizabethan collar". i want ruffs next time). he hated it and hissed and growled at the nice lady vet. he's going to be very unpopular since he scrammed the one who diagnosed him, leaving blood trickling down his face. we did it eventually and i was putting the blanket back on the carry case in the waiting room when... he pulled the collar right back off. back in the vets' office she and the nurse then put bandages on his feet and the collar back on. he won't be doing that again. he sat there and glared at me. sorry, frank. we got home and he sat in my lap and didn't move. in fact, he didn't move for the next day or so. he looked severely pissed off. we had another night of interrupted sleep as he couldn't walk easily in his new weird bandaged feet we had to get up to put him in the litter tray as he was trying to shit the bed. friday night i was at work so steen had to look after him and when i came back he announced that frankie had managed to take off the bandages. but he did keep the cone on. by saturday evening he was trying to run around and be normal again and since he'd taken the bandages off anyway we took him outside with the harness on. he walks around like a gangster, head heavy with cone and still a little pissed off but learning to live with this new weird element to his body.<br /><br />thursday night my parents had bought me tickets to see JOAN BAEZ at st davids' hall. as steen had other plans that night i put out a call and found that no-one wanted to go to see joan baez. stupid sods. well, no-one apart from the lovely willy downie who stepped in last minute and braved the vaughans, my mum's hippie dancing (hard to do in your seat) and my dad's anxiety that we will be late for anything. it was a great show. i saw her here a couple of years ago and she was very regal and the show seemed sort of sedate but tonight she seemed to be really having fun. she and her band did a few accapella numbers and it was themed with many appalacian gospel numbers, which happens to be one of my favourite things. she even did a dylan impression in the verse of a cover of one of his songs which shows was a lot more relaxed at this show that previously. her voice is still very strong and her age rather than making it a big nostalgia fest, brings even more pathos to the murder ballads and folk numbers. brilliant.<br /><br />quite different from joan baez was the fantastic trio of acts at the barfly on saturday night. GINDRINKER were wonderful as always and thanks to their dark themes and the lighting at the newly opened up barfly stage, could have easily been the house band at the black lodge in TWIN PEAKS. there were a lot of people there that night who i never see at gigs and they all loved GINDRINKER, calling them genius and a great and inkeeping addition to the line up. next up was the very funny and slightly frightening FRANK SIDEBOTTOM. i haven't seen frank come up on the "things we liked in the 80s and 90s" programmes and i think he still remains uniquely northern, a lot of people still haven't heard of him. i remember him from kids programme THE 8:15 FROM MANCHESTER on a saturday morning. even then i knew he didn't fit in and that there was a joke somewhere i was too young to get but still found him brilliant and though he was the best thing about telly at the time. i haven't youtubed or googled him or anything since so it was truly a sort of weird forgotten memory from childhood that i saw in the flesh (and the papier mache) that night in barfly. he sung medleys of manchester songs, punk songs, always ending with the catchy ending he employs for showbiz effect (and as he rightly points out, a lot better than a lazy fade out). it is hard to describe what is brilliant about frank, he is like a showbiz entertainer from another time, part childrens entertainer part blue northern comic but never offensive. but there is something unnerving about that head. ending the evening was JOHN COOPER CLARKE. i saw him at the coal exchange a few years ago supporting THE FALL and for a poet he still has that rock star haze about him, he is far more jagger than he is andrew motion. his stuff is funny and true and it feels very much like a stand up gig, some of the jokes are bloody old and creaky but its how he tells them, it seems impossible to tut and not laugh. it was a really nice mix in the audience, a lot of men in their 40s reliving old days and telling me afterwards that they first saw frank / johnny clarke in 1980something a really great night. if we weren't so tired from all this cat worry then we'd be drinking all night with everyone instead we flew off home to sleep and sleep and sleep.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-16623321477809445712009-10-09T05:06:00.000-07:002009-10-11T16:21:44.925-07:00messy meze fest beginsthe busyness of the week began with another brilliant LOOSE gig. up first was FORMER UTOPIA, a man with a guitar who sounded like SMOG without it being too obvious and being from london helped with that. we really enjoyed his set and even more so when we got to the merch stall and discovered that he was selling his single for £4 with a bonus 20 (yes, twenty!) track cd. ace! there were not many people there but then most people are idiots, it gives us more space but i did worry about the jollity of the bands that have come here from canada to tour to 6 people. next up was the lo fi CONSTRUCTION DESTRUCTION. they were shy grungey types and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, she was great at singingand drums, he was good on guitar but they kept swapping instruments and so the quality ebbed and flowed. i really liked their songs though, some of them sort of like grungey lo fi indie disco. julie doiron came on stage and although i was not aware of her before she acted like the most comfortable, famous person in the room. she trawled through her melancholic songs with a sort of powerful ease and played for ages and ages, playing for over an hour. her between song banter made me very homesick, she was from the same part of the world as my beloved alison black and i had a chat with them afterwards about the weird and wonderful month i spent seeing in the millennium in the backwoods of nova scotia. i wanted to call miss black up straight away and force her to move in with us.<br /><br />wednesday my matinee was the new judd apatow movie FUNNY PEOPLE. i think i knew what to expect even if my oldies audience didn't. i'm not sure if people really read the programme notes sometimes. my oldies went in expecting an old fashioned funny movie but this was more like a noughties THE KING OF COMEDY than anything else. calling in a few favours with old room mate adam sandler and trading on his insider knowledge of the business this film was at times quite dark exploration of what it means to be a huge comedy star of stupid movies watching the new generation bite you on the arse. adam sandler's character george simmons was pretty much what adam sandler would have become had he not got domesticated and found some humility. he is lonely and selfish and rich. his doctor tells him he has leukaemia and not much time to live and he keeps it quiet, hiring a new PA ira (the ubiquitous seth rogan) and trying to keep his head down, taking an experimental course of prescription drugs before popping his clogs. he and ira slowly become friends and ira takes it upon himself to try and pull george out of his funk by being a sort of mentor to his mentor, a moral compass and a reminder of the joy of friendship and comerarderie that he has been missing for the last few years. although this sounds predictible, it isn't. apatow manages to make this story, that could have very easily become a gross out joke fest with no soul, believable and moving. he draws it out slowly and carefully. although the film did feel a bit overlong (it clocks in at a "dances with wolves" style 2 and a half hours) he keeps the pace inkeeping. the only time it seemed to lack direction was in the extended subplot with laura, his big ex-love who he may have a chance with again. however, since this allowed for a surprising and very welcome cameo from eric bana as her new husband i forgave him this. ah eric bana, last week you made me weep for your career and pray that one day soon that i would re-watch CHOPPER and pretend you had just died or something and that you never embarrassed yourself so. here he is allowed to be funny and play on that dumb / not so dumb australian charm. he is a funny man, for gods' sake someone put him in a funny movie or at least a drama where he doesn't just have to look around bemused. please? the likelihood of a hollywood exec reading this is decidedly slim but i have to ask. anyway, sorry for the tangent but i really quite enjoyed funny people. it surprised me, as 40 year old virgin did before it. it wasn't stupid, it wasn't cliched, it featured some great cameos from some comedians i'd forgotten all about (another great exploitation of apatow's new hollywood crudentials). after getting a bit sick of seeing apatow's name attached to everything labelled "comedy" in the last couple of years it reminded me that he is the real deal, an interesting and fresh eye in mainstream hollywood films.<br /><br />the next film i ushered that day was a very different kettle of fish (ha! see what i did there?! ....sorry) the new andrea arnold film FISH TANK, but after the hollywood stylings of funny people this could not have been more different. set in an essex high rise estate we find mia, a skinny hoodie teen looking out of one of the high rise window contemplatively but who from the outset is shown in a number of acts that to be confrontational and dangerous. she is the type of teen the daily mail pants out headlines about every day to scare its readers into submission. we quickly realise that we're stuck with her, she may be unlikeable but she's going to be how we view the world and we are going to have to view hers. this initial recoil from our narrator in the first scene stands us in good stead for the rest of the film as rather than making us comfortable it immediately makes us wary and questioning. this is a tough world. i saw people walk out quite quickly after this first beginning, presumably offended by the language, the violence, the basic brutality of the state of things in mia's life. her family's affectionate terms alone would be enough to shunt the film well past the watershed. the estate is the fish tank in question, its inhabitants swimming around listless and unable to escape. as with her previous film RED ROAD, arnold tries to show the humanity behind the stereotype of the estate being a hive of scum and villainy. thanks to a wonderful performance from newcomer kate jarvis as well as a brilliant supporting cast (none of whom you doubt the authenticity of) we truly discover who mia is. she is a young woman who is not stupid, just trapped and longing to escape. she clings to anyone who offers hope of a different view of life, the traveller teen she meets when she tries to free his family's ailing horse and more dangerously, her mothers' charming new boyfriend connor. the attraction they have for each other is queasily and tragically played out but as sleazy as the attraction is, you never get the impression that connor is a predatory peado, played with great power by michael fassbender he is oozing with sexual energy and seems to be seduced by a different set of rules in an unnatural landscape. from the first outing where he takes them to a wild land and tells mia's incredulous little sister that the fish squirming in his hands is in essence where her fish fingers come from we know he is different from them, he is the wild salmon in this fairground goldfish bowl and when we finally see his house we realise he himself is trapped in a fancier kind of aquarium.<br /><br />the next day will and i had off together, not that you'd guess since i had to go to a couple of important meetings. we finally reunited to go and see AFTERSCHOOL in the afternoon. this impressive first feature from antonio campo plays upon his previous short film theme of the pervasive impact of the internet in young people's lives. in a posh boarding school in the east coast of america robert is an introverted lad who doesn't really have any friends and not considered cool but not angsty enough to be a counterculture outsider, he is still at that stage where he wants to be cool and fit in. he listlessly watches clips on youtube of fellow teens in school beating up other pupils, doing stunts, the odd porn film. his brain is saturated with these real/unreal images. he joins the afterschool video club to get close to a girl he likes and finds himself again the watcher, able to control the image rather than just passively watching. but we find that he chooses not to control the image, their given assignment is to do establishing shots of the school and the camera statically sits on banal images of a corridor until a shocking event finds its way in front of robert's camera. the film is shot carefully, pulled back and inobtrusive and occasionally willfully badly framed. it feels like you're watching the events, a persistent voyeur in this boy's life. it is a film that sucks you in and makes you a little afraid for the next generation's ease with camera phones, cctv and the knowledge that whatever you do it will probably in some way (whether viewed by some camera somewhere or mentioned on facebook) become public knowledge.<br /><br />in the evening we headed off for the first day of the glorious MEZE FEST! curated by will's joy collective boss jonny it is a formidable and ambitious project where there is at least 4 bands every night every day of the month (except for mondays) for the whole of october. my head hurts just thinking about it. october is going to be a very busy month for me, with the reopening of chapter and swn / mylit festivals as well as more theatre work coming up (really strong programme this autumn) i am planning to do as much meze-ing as possible but have the foreknowledge that it is not going to ever be enough for my liking. we discoverd happily that newport is only £3.60 away and that the meze is only 2 minutes fromthe station. score! i have vague memories of being here before but very briefly, i'm not sure what its incarnation was in 1997 but that was the last time i reguarly went to newport. we had a quick stop in the merenger pub, a happy old haunt that i had mistakenly thought had closed down (it just had a little refurb and a jukebox ban from new owners sam smiths. booo!) and then ambled over to see the first band of the festival THINKING WITH SAND. i'm not sure about the name but the music was great. dreamy and droney with some great beats from a man who looked like a younger version of those science blokes who used to turn up on open university late at night. we were hanging around with the very lovely mel and graf and matt jarrett who took us under his wing and showed will the hot snack bar, the equivalent of giving charlie bucket the keys to the chocolate factory. his eyes widened. the next band were not my favourite, they were little emo indie kids who had apparently brought in their own lighting to make themselves look moody. all style no substance so i went into the empty hot snack bar to do some writing instead. will found me a bit later and pulled me back in where he'd found newpart, a group of enterprising young art students who are going around gigs getting people to draw something, anything. steen draws a picture of a steak with a rainbow coming out. i draw a bad portrait of him that he drunkenly calls genius. hmmm. next up is STRAY BORDERS who i was very very excited about seeing again. we saw their farewell gig a few months ago supporting rock of travolta and jonny had convinced them to come out of retirement for meze, for which i am duly thankful. they are so good, still sound like the soundtrack to the best bit of a angsty teen movie, that bit where the heroine falls in love and doesn't know what to do with herself. last up were a band that no-one i could find knew anything about but CASPIAN turned out to be really amazing. like sigur ros if they discovered sludge and loud in that way that can just pound you to the ground. i'd thankfully remembered my new earplugs for this gig and was glad of them as my ears were ringing right through to the next day despite them. we travelled back on the train with the mel, graf and the equally lovely businessman keith lerego (whose surname fills me with joy each time i roll it around in my mouth). we shared a much needed taxi back (it was after midnight and my energy was ebbing away with each tick of the clock. it made us very excited for the month of fun that the clever charlotte braddick has named rocktober. bring it, rocktober!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-72016653178322922232009-09-26T08:49:00.000-07:002009-10-10T08:23:56.000-07:00back to the futurethis week i have mainly been watching THE TIME TRAVELLER'S WIFE. i watched it 3 times: sunday, wednesday and thursday. thankfully i was paid for watching it because otherwise i may have considered it some form of weird torture. i have not read the book and maybe the book is better but the film was a big ol' manipulative schmaltzfest. i the story was interesting for a sci fi nerd like me. when he is 6 years old he and his mother are involved in a car accident but he disappears within the space of a few seconds travels back to a time when he is being read to by his parents as a younger child and awakes naked watching his mother die in the car crash he was momentarily in and a man appears to him (his older self) to tell him not to be afraid and let him know what is happening: he is time travelling. we next meet him at this time when he is presumably in his early 20s working in a library and disappearing at varying and unwanted times to appear in familiar places to him (places that will be important in his life we discover later on). a pretty young woman comes up to him and speaks to him as if she knows him and invites him to dinner. at this dinner she explains that an older version of himself has been visiting her by time travelling ever since she was 6 years old and she has known him all her life. they (very) inevitably fall in love and get married and somtimes the time travelling makes things awkward (almost missing the wedding ceremony, only to turn up as himself from another time line) but its only when they are trying to a child that things get slightly angsty in their life. unfortunately it never seems to get too angsty. the couple seem to have a ridiculously happy and stress free life, which is helped along by him time travelling to win the lottery, one of many plot holes. the wife and precocious child seem too perfect and forgiving of all the strange things that happen to them. the film seems to be bathed in warm yellow light and a little manipulative so this interesting premise is transformed into a giant schmaltz fest. if it was not for eric bana being brilliant as usual i might have knawed my arm off in boredom through these three long performances.<br /><br />i did manage to break up the time traveller monotony on sunday with a showing of the german gangster film CHIKO. the cast and crew were all quite young and although it dealt a familiar tale of youth turning to violence and drugs to try and get out of the ghetto it seemed to have a really fresh energy so although you'd seen this sort of story before, you hadn't seen HIS story before. the islamic turks have as strong a family loyalty as the italians in the godfather and betray the same religious dichotomy of women as whores or wives and mothers but we felt sympathy for chiko despite his cliched gangster ways which shows how nuanced the performance was from denis moschitto. the hamburg suburb seemed like it had learned nothing from chiko's story and that this situation would just keepgoing on and on. a good little story.<br /><br />anticipating the meze fest and the knowledge that we will not make it to the pop quiz this month we went over to the HALFWAY PUB QUIZ, a traditional affair with a fruity old landlord reading the questions covering topics that did not include knowing obscure facts about record labels. on our team was me and steen, small steen and his new lady, the formidable caroline duffy and ed and anwen. we came second and won a bottle of red wine which was a nice bonus, its good to know that we have knowledge in something other than pop music, it made me feel less ghettoised. having a crush on glenda jackson helped in this case.<br /><br />on thursday it was the highly anticipated LOVVERS LOOSE gig. a bunch of people were going since lovvers are known to be very ace (we last saw them supporting jay reatard in bristol last year) and recently crowned kings of local scene ISLET were also on the bill. it started with SATURDAYS KIDS all brattish and punky. i took a shine to them despite the fact that i was probably old enough to have sired them. ISLET came on next and were expectedly brilliant. i've seen them a bunch of times since their inception a few months ago and they just get better and better, with mark playing guitar with juddering, quivering urgency only inches from my face. HARBOUR were not my cup of tea. for the first time in ages i had to leave. i was having a bad footware day and that did not help with me being a bit tired too so i headed downstairs with anwen to have a nice sit down with emma and mark from islet. we went back up to watch the LOVVERS where the lead singer looks like he doesn't care, sings like a high pitched teen playing at being a punk rocker in his bedroom but somehow through the tight fit of the music it all makes sense and it sounds convincing. so convincing in fact that when a mumbled version of "what do i get?" is flung out at the end it feels like lovvers, not the buzzcocks were the first ones to perform it. a great evening.<br /><br />saturday night i was ushering for the uhhuhuh dance company's production THE CELL in the theatre. the seeds of the show were sewn when the director happened upon an article that mentioned that when joseph mengele was arrested for war crimes he was put in a cell with a travelling musician who was disabled, the kind of person his life's work was dedicated to ridding the earth of. the incomparable jon luxton is at the heart of the theatre company and so it was charged with the knowledge that had he succeeded people like jon would not have been allowed to have been living. the play began with an extreme close up of a man's mouth, mengele's spouting nazi tract about the "need" to harness the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest to weed out the "bad" in society. it was bone chilling stuff. a woman entered the cell and her and jon seemed to lock horns, flirting and attracted and at the same time repulsed. jon's work in his chair was quite stunning to watch, it was graceful and beautiful but at the same time severely muscular and brutal. unfortunately the mood was broken with modern day jokey segments of dialogue with jon and jodie where they argued over whether to turn away from things that are wrong is comparable with german citizens in the 1930s. these pieces did not work for me and i think the show was an intense and facinating study just based on the movement alone. they seemed not to trust the value of the surreality of their show and this seemed a bit of a shame. the parts i enjoyed were indelible though and i hope to see their next production.<br /><br />next week i hope to see more new things as this week i felt like i was on a repeat button seeing the time traveller's wife again and again, i saw the cell twice and ended up going to see the fantastic TRACES show again on wednesday so bring on the new!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-65538749535234841742009-09-19T07:05:00.000-07:002009-09-26T08:49:33.544-07:00freeeeedoooom!well, this week has mostly been focussed on two things: me being a bit poorly and the cat being released into the wild. last week working in the box office i had an increasingly hurty head caused, i thought, by the thump thump of the flamenco dancers who have a class in the room above us. on returning home to steen i asked if we could just wrap up and watch movies instead of going out so that's what we did.<br /><br />sunday was mental busy in the cafe, which didn't make me feel much better but then i was ushering in the cinema for MESRINE PART ONE: KILLER INSTINCT. having watched part two last week i have seen these in the wrong order really but part one was still worth watching. it is faster paced, there is more jam packed into it and rather than the bloated remorseless killer in PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, mesrine was on his way up the learning curve and this in itself was more interesting. KILLER INSTINCT set up the idea of mesrine as a brutal killer, but one was maybe formed by the french government: the brutalising of teenage mesrine in the algerian war and the problem of what to do with a young man who has been taught that might is right and the rough treatment he sustained in the montreal prison. but for all this there are moments when you realise that mesrine had a choice, he came from a middle class background but thrived in the underworld and surrounded himself with people who were seduced by and scared of him in equal measure. it is a fascinating story, more so for knowing that the french were so curious about him and how romanticised he was in his own country.<br /><br />the film after that was THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD. the yes men are two anti-globalisation protestors who take part in "culture jamming" where they put up fake versions of corporate websites and pretend to be spokespeople for VIPs at conferences. whilst jigged up in their various disguises (usually just smart hair cuts and suits) they take the corporations' ideas to the extreme then give speeches to the delegates and members of the public and see how far they can take the joke. sometimes they get found out immediately and ushered out of the auditorium and sometimes the means has a very useful end. in the past they have provoked bush into famously saying "there should be limits on freedom" after theypublicly embarrassed him and here the biggest stunt had them posing as chemical company DOW's spokespeople and announcing that they would right their wrongs and compensate the people of bhopal for the chemical tragedy caused by their company in 1984. they managed to get on the bbc to announce this and used it to force the issue and make the company react but instead the company simply printed a retraction statement and saw their shares dip nearly 3%. another stunt here sees them getting an official haliburton deligate dress up in a giant blow up condom looking like a space bee and suggest to them that it had military and global warming potential and asking them if it would be possible to attach weapons to the suit. ludicrous. all of this has a point. if DOW made this announcement the share market would punish it, but it would be the right thing to do. DOW will never do this. it was an interesting film and the yes men were thankfully not smug, just engaging and funny.<br /><br />after this i hot footed it to town to meet steen who was djing at the loose gig for BLITZEN TRAPPER. since it was so late i didn't think i'd make it with any time to see songs but i saw about four songs. i wasn't impressed to be honest, very alt country veering on lynryd skynyrd territory with one bit of feedback i liked that lasted about 30 seconds so i wasn't sorry i'd missed it. more sorry to miss the lovely MARTIN CARR do his thing with a big bunch of cardiff lovelies. pah! next time, gadget! but i was starting to feel a bit under the weather too, which would stop me from missing the brilliant SHE KEEPS BEES gig on the monday too. booo! one week where there is a gig per day of great quality andi've missed almost all of them!<br /><br />one that i didn't miss was on wednesday: TIMES NEW VIKING. we saw them last year in clwb and they weren't just bloody brilliant but really lovely when we had a chat with them afterwards. subsequently they have had a lot of press and i was worried they would be a bit polished and arch but was still looking forward to it very much. the first support band on was the inimitable GINDRINKER. they did a sort of greatest hits set which played to the crowd nicely. they have a lot of bloody great songs that make your mouth curl up in a half smile, half grimace. BANJO OR FREAKOUT were on afters and steen likes them mucho. i liked them too, even if a tardy week later i can't remember much about their set, sorry. what i do remember is TIMES NEW VIKING coming out a little slicker than previously (certainly the singer's hair, which looked well silky) but still sounding diy and fresh. a mean feat. they do excellent pop songs that deserve to be danced around by teenagers in their pants in their bedrooms (well, this is what i would do if i'd heard them as a teenager, i've certainly done it as an adult). we immediately go out and i spend the money i was saving for things like food on things like 7" singles. oops.<br /><br />friday will and i had the afternoon off together so went to the cinema to see the new almodovar film BROKEN EMBRACES (LA ABRAZOS ROTOS). i'm a big fan of his and was really excited about seeing this film. i had a picture of almodovar on my folder at school when i was 14 and made an effort to see as many films of his as possible. i loved all the candy coloured sets, flamboyant characters, the comedy and the melodrama. in recent years his films have matured with him and especially since the moving TODO SABRE MI MADRE (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) they have taken on a seriousness he previously avoided. one of my all time favourite films is still HABLA CON ELLA (TALK TO HER) and that got very dark and introspective in places, the colours muted and the joy mixed with sadness. BROKEN EMBRACES has a blind scriptwriter's assistant needs to leave town for a while and leaves her son diego looking after him, who in turn has an accident himself. diego digs into the big secret about events that led to him giving up directing and becoming blind. the film has famously been described as almodovar's love letter to penelope cruz, his latterday muse, it is about a director's relationship to an actress and the difficulty of making a great film. unfortunately i did not think this was a great film. the melodrama was predictable (never something i have thought him capable of) and a little dull and the film within the film "comedy" of candy-coloured film "girls and suitcases" was not very convincing despite the joyous appearance of his previous muse rossy de palma. it had wonderful flourishes and he will probably never be able to make a film that is not interesting and without merit but after such a run of high drama and full, rich almost voluptuous films this felt a bit lacking in substance, tall (2 hours plus) but thin. <br /><br />later that evening i was the barlady for the DRONES comedy club upstairs in chapter. due to all sorts of silly circumstances i haven't been able to do this shift for a long while and i'd forgotten how much fun it can be. the two dans and clint are great company and they were all out celebrating laura bryon's birthday the night before so how they stayed so sparky on stage was no mean feat. joined by so many other comedians i lost count but one of them being the very lovely ben partridge it meant that this night did not feel at all like work and instead i chuckled behind the bar all night. after running around like a mad thing to get the booze downstairs i returned home all smiley and happy. good nights' work!<br /><br />the main event that has dominated this week has not been a film or a good gig but instead the emancipation of our cat frankie. i picked him up from splott library about a year ago and have done my darnedest to make sure he is well looked after like the baby substitute he truly is! i read up all my cat books, got advice from the vet and all of them say that its best to not let a cat out at least until its over 6 months old and spayed (some saying as old as a year old) and certainly not let them out at night. as he was a curious little sod who kept trying to escape every time we left the house we bought a harness and took him outside as often as we could so he could get used to it. just after 8 months when the weather was good i ordered a catflap and waited for him to pop his head through it. i had to wait a long time. he would look at the catflap and mew with incomprehension. we started lifting the lid of the catflaps so he'd get the idea. he didn't. so, about 4 months on, on sunday, i was stood in the kitchen and he was pawing at it and actually pushed through! joy! mixed with worry! this meant that the cat would actually be able to properly use the catflap. this meant that he would be able to go out by himself and i would not be able to guarantee his safety. like a mother who can't cut the cord i was suddenly all upset and wanted him to regress to kittenhood again. me and steen took turns to let him out and watch him come back in but i still wasn't happy with leaving the catflap open whilst we were out. then tuesday i had to go home from work ill and was forced to spend the whole day in the house so i thought i'd be brave and just let frankie do his thing. happily he came in and out of the catflap with ease and i was completely reassured. a week on from this and he seems like a much happier cat, no longer anxious to go outside and see what is going down, he comes through the catflap cooing when he sees us. its made things easier for us too, whilst the harness is useful it felt awful having to limit his travels when he is such an adventurer and it has made steen hunger for a cat cam he's seen on the internet, eager to find out where he's been in his day. all together a much happier household!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-5543336778412890422009-09-12T02:49:00.000-07:002009-09-12T08:26:01.358-07:00filling the theatresaturday night we celebrated the return of CHAPTER THEATRE. for the past year we have been using the LLOFFT space above the bar (limited as it can only fit 40 people) and outside spaces for shows and it has felt a bit like doing a show in a school hall at times so it was a relief and a joy to finally open the theatre for the new show by TANYA RAMAN called TRACES. it was a shame we couldn't have had a more grand reopening with champagne and party poppers because the show itself was simply one of the best things i have seen in the theatre and the perfect way to show off the staff and facilities here at chapter. we started off in complete darkness then old photographs appeared on the screen and we were surrounded by voices talking of memories and the lapping of water and a low drone. the photographs bled into the image of a woman in the dressing room looking into the mirror, barely moving. after a few beats there was another woman in there, a replicated image moving differently. then there was another. she looked out from the screen to us. this in turn faded and we could see the woman appearing at the back of the stage. she moved carefully around the stage and stopped for us to see this repeated on a projection on the screen in front of her. her movements would overlap with the movements of the ghost people on the screen and then went black. the next stage was her costume of light moving around the stage with her movements, only to be captured and flashed back on the screen. john collingsworth then took a light pen and drew around her body in its pose and these flashed on, then he tried to pin her down in pencil drawings. it grew more fevered and exciting and then faded again. it was so intense and beautiful it made me cry. it is difficult to describe how this effected me, it was only part way through the show that i recognised my voice amongst the whispering sounds on stage. my friend jon had asked me months ago to contribute a few memories to be used for his soundscape for the piece but i had entirely forgotten about this. one of the memories i had was being in the village where i was born, me and my brother being woken up early in the morning by my mum to see the cove near our house that had frozen over with the frost. i was overcome by the beauty of the images in front of me, by the movement of tanya's body and the swell of the music, by the realisation that all our memories will one day fade but that we leave traces of ourselves behind. it was a wonderful experience.<br /><br />we were jolted out of that to go see our friend colin have a birthday do in the landsdowne pub. it was fancy dress and the theme was "characters from S4C". we couldn't go from the theatre to fancy dress so i just went in red and black (sort of welsh dress). it was fab evening with many sali malis, farmers, a superted and lots of cheesey dance music. we spent most of the time hanging out by the amazing buffet with gar, ange, rich and rhian and pedro and darren. good times.<br /><br />sunday was a marathon cinema day. my matinee was an italian film MID AUGUST LUNCH (which is a bit of a crap meaningless title, they should have kept it as FERRAGOSTO, which is actually the religious holiday that makes the lunch special). it was absolutely delightful. written, directed and starring gianni di gregorio it is the simple tale of a middle aged man who lives with his elderly mother in a shabby but tidy apartment in rome and is behind with the rent and a bit down on his luck. the landlord persuades him to take in his mother for the ferragosto weekend in exchange for the arrears and a bit of extra cash and when he turns up he has also brought his elderly aunt. the doctor comes to see his mother and mentions that his own mother will be on her own for the festival as he has to work in the hospital. gianni agrees to take her in too, in exchange for the medical bill. finding himself in the company of four elderly slightly fussy ladies gianni is graceful if a little beleaguered, smoking cooking and pouring wine sometimes all at once and trying to keep everyone happy. the farce element of the story is played down and the tone is kept light. it never feels patronising to the old ladies, they are people rather than dotty old biddies, the warmth of the family and community just glows and the whole thing feels like a perfectly baked souffle. a lovely little film.<br /><br />up next was a really interesting set of documentaries by HUMPHREY JENNINGS. he made some important films around the second world war about life in britain, some of them for the purpose of propaganda. the first one was called "spare time" and talked about the working man in mining and manufacturing towns and what they did when they no longer had to be in the dark dank factories and mines. there was dancing, drinking, games and meals with the family. it had some lovely footage of ballroom dancing in blackpool and pubs in pontypridd. the next film was "the silent village" a wonderful propaganda piece about a mining village poland that had been taken over by the nazis. jennings cleverly mirrored this with a mining village in west wales. we watched the people of the village getting on with their business: going to the local shop for food, working down the mine, going to the pub, going to community meetings only to have this interrupted by the nazi invasion. we never saw more than one soldier but heard the german accented message barked out that the village had been taken over by the nazi party and that they had to obey orders. the villagers saboutaged the mine resulting in the men being shot and the women and children taken to concentration camps. all this happened to the village lidice in poland and the reality of it really hit home. using the people of the village rather than actors gave it a tinge of reality and steely resolve at the end not to let happen in britain what happened in poland. the pit manager at the end said that although the village was wiped off the map with the people gone and buildings destroyed they would not be forgotten as they had been through that experience. the film was really effective, gave a real sense of the way the people of britain reacted to the humanity of the war and the community spirit. the one feeling the documentaries left me with was the sadness that the nazis may not have taken away our way of life but thatcher managed to destroy the mines in the 80s and how different things are now. it was odd looking at that life that is only our grandparents' generation but to today's children must seem like the stone age. things are so so different now. its stupid to say everything is shit these days but the simple, gentle life of the people humphrey jennings shows makes you feel incredibly selfish and shallow and long for the past.<br /><br />i didn't leave the cinema once i'd finished ushering but instead changed screen and went to cinema 2 for the BAD FILM CLUB: SNAKES ON A TRAIN. i was glad i'd got tickets for will and i and that our friend katy had got in since the cinema was packed, in fact bizarrely they had oversold the tickets. as i work in the box office i know that this is not possible to do unless something has gone very wrong! i think it was something about switching screens but nicko was surprised as anyone that they had sold out. clint did the commentary with her but it hardly needed any, it was a very stupid wonderfully bad film. the first 15 minutes was entirely in spanish which is fine but when they got on the train itself the characters spoke in english so that didn't even make any sense. a lot didn't make any sense. the main character was throwing up snakes and her boyfriend was keeping them in a jar. the reason he is doing this is because she has been cursed by her family. she "has snakes" is the explanation. riiiight. once on the train we meet some of the other, pointless cliched characters and their way of sort of spurring on the plot and we see a lot more snakes thrown up by this poor woman. at one point they have sort of overtaken her and this giant snake comes out of her or she becomes a giant snake or something and everyone jumps off the train just in time before she swallows the train whole. an amulet that was being used by her boyfriend finally comes in handy as it glows white and causes a huge tornado to swallow up the giant snake as if nothing happened. rubbish. it was so silly and ridiculous. nicko cleverly makes it seem like we've all been through this terrible experience together, taking you out of the usual film experience of sitting in the dark with the images coming into your head and turns it into almost a music hall style theatre show.<br /><br />monday we were back in the cinema but this time for CHAPTER MOVIEMAKER for the premiere of two of the music videos we've worked on in the last few months. ryan owen and ben reed's work on RACE HORSES "cake" and ewan and casey (raymo)'s work on CATE LE BON's "hollow trees house hounds". they are both really good and very different from each other. race horses video is fun, featuring steen being hit in the face by a big cream cake and cate's is trippy and psychey with great mutant animations and you get to see me and my friends burn. the moviemaker is a strange little entity where all sorts of things are shown, from amateur shorts that people are trying out to professional films. we also saw the pilot of a tv show that didn't get picked up, a small documentary about a singer who was killed by pinochet's troups in chile and the new one from the fiction factory. afterwards we went for a drink with raymo and the gang but i was hideously broke and tired (i'd already spent far too much time in chapter over the last 72 hours) so went home to watch MEAN GIRLS instead and muse on the fact that lindsay lohan had the world at her feet and chucked it all for crack and hanging out with paris hilton.<br /><br />tuesday i was ushering for one of michael kelligan's readings, this month it was the new patrick jones play DANDELION. it was a real treat as it was well acted and full of wonderful lines. the cast had the script in their hands but already seemed to know the characters really well. the setting was an old folks home where earnest is trying to rebel, get the old ladies thinking about the world around them. at times it felt a bit like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST when the characters talk about fleeing, but what to? this is a world that has finished with them. i thought it was a bit overlong, the romance element seeming to be a bit tacked on but it was wonderful and made you think about how we treat the elderly, especially after seeing MID AUGUST LUNCH.<br /><br />on wednesday i was ushering for SLEEP FURIOUSLY again (wonderful every time but still makes me sleepy) and then was doing some cover for the cinema department in the evening. first up was the BAFTA PREVIEW SCREENING of THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. a little thrill of excitement went through me when i heard that this is what it was, i had hoped to see it at some point so it was nice to get to go to the preview. the september issue of vogue magazine is the most important of the year, one commentator said that it is like the new year for fashion, out with the old in with the new and everyone wants to know what the new is. what is new is partly determined by anna wintour, the editor of vogue. she and her team go around all the fashion shows and decide what the narratives of the collections are, what ideas are put forward and who should be showcased. anna wintour is a very powerful lady, many know her better as "nuclear wintour" for her icy demeanour. she is the person who they based the scary editor of the magazine in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, for years she has been a sort of archetype of fashion women and career women. this film gave her and her industry more depth and showed just what they do. someone who shone throughout the film was the magazine's stylist grace coddington. grace started at vogue at the same time as anna and the two know and respect each other a great deal, despite the odd disagreement about dropping pages from a photoshoot. grace is obviously very good at her job that she clearly loves and feels passionately about. to put it in a simplistic way grace is the beauty and anna is the brains but of course the truth is a lot more complicated than that. the film made the jobs of these people very important, almost seeming to be life or death but it also exposed how silly the whole thing is. a lot of the fashion industry seems to be like the emporers' new clothes. anna decides something is good so it is good and no-one questions her. they fuss and pout about these things (behind her back, to her face they just agree) but no-one challenges her. the one person allowed to challenge her was her daughter. in a bubble bursting moment she mentioned that her mother wants her to be an editor (to follow in the family tradition, anna's father was the editor of the evening standard) but she wants to be a lawyer as she finds it all a bit stupid, anna was not present for this interview. there was a real sadness about anna wintour that came out in the film. despite its protestations the commercial side of fashion tends to make people despise themselves and you got the feeling that its a profession that makes you in turn feel a bit worthless in the end. it was thrilling to be taken on this journey with them.<br /><br />the next film was the epic MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS. i went to this not sure what to expect. i'd heard it was well respected and that paul schrader, george lucas and francis ford coppola all contributed to it in their early 80s heyday (part of their well known worship of japanese film and mythology) but that was all. it turned out to be a highly stylised facinating study of a man's life. again, i had heard of japanese writer yukio mishima but did not know the details. the film attempted to illuminate his life through his works, the chapters beauty "the temple of the golden pavillion", art "kyko's house", action "runaway horses" and the harmony between the pen and the sword which runs throughout the film and culminates in mishima's death by suicide. this film is so controversial in japan that it is officially banned, mishima's politics that hark back to the days of imperialism being too difficult to discuss. the film was interesting and intense and as an experiment in illustrating a man's life via his work it really worked. the famous score by phillip glass was just amazing and it was a thrill to be surrounded by those vivid colours and the escalating cascade of synths and strings. however, it did seem a little old fashioned and i was very aware all the way through that it was a film made by bunch of foreigners, i wasn't convinced that they were not too in love with the idea of mishima and took him a little too seriously. his politics and the way he lived his life made him seem very callous and petty at times. <br /><br />i went home after that and will had bought a lovely bottle of wine and we drank and chatted happily, as we got to spend the next day together! we don't get many days off together since i work on a sunday. we both had thursday off and steen decided that since i'd been paid it was time for a bit of a day out so we went to penarth to see the new FFOTOGALLERY ANNA FOX: COCKROACH DIARIES show and did some charity shopping and had an ice cream on the pier. perfect! the exhibition was interesting, she lived in a shared house in london in the early 90s and documented the strange things previous tenants had left there or drawn on the walls and the infestation that reading the diary entries made her life seem not really a britpop era fun time but instead a few scenes from THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. we found some good bargains in the brilliant charity shops in town (i think we counted 6) including the FABER BOOK OF POP MUSIC, essays edited by hanif kareshi, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (a book i read and owned but left with another student in america), a hip flask and a brilliant bag covered with racing cars. i tried on a couple of dresses that didn't look right and steen tried on a coat that he didn't like but i loved (i took a photo of it to remind myself). we dashed back to cardiff to catch early orders at ICHIBAN. <br /><br />we got back and played with the cat for a bit before i had to head back to chapter to usher for EMti, the new play from angharad evans by the real life theatre company. my friends cathryn and hef were planning to go and i was excited to see them but also dreading it, i'd seen the last play they'd put on and thought it was one of the worst things i'd seen: horribly pretentious and horrible acting. luckily, it wasn't as bad as that! they had a very good cast and the play was well put together. inspired by her own brother's suicide the play was about a young man struggling between an oppressive family and the release of death. apart from the unnecessary and frankly humourous "movement" from dominque fester (was she supposed to be an angel? i'm not sure, but her presence was intrusive and unhelpful) the scenes were powerful and grew increasingly intense. evans' work still suffers from the feeling that it could have been written by a younger more inexperienced playwright but here there was at least hope that the company will improve, the inclusion of other performers seemed to truly be a good path to take. i had a lovely drink with cathryn and hefin, it was lovely to see them again after so long. <br /><br />friday i was ushering for MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1 (PART2). this was fairly annoying since i'd not yet seen part 1 but ho hum. it wasn't hard to follow. jacques mesrine was the most notorious gangster of the 70s in france, a charismatic self aggrandiser who liked being known as an "honest gangster" and even tried to style himself into a baader-meinhof revolutionary towards the end of his career. he wrote a book bragging of his deeds and gave interviews with the press to increase his notoriety and enjoyed the idea of being the number one hate figure with the police, thinking of himself as a modern day robin hood. although i've missed the first (and apparently better) half of the story, the central performance by vincent cassell made the whole thing very easy to follow, you were drawn to mesrine. you didn't know whether he would be loving and affectionate or murderous and frightening, i don't know many actors who could have pulled that off.<br /><br />well, i end this week looking forward to maybe a night off from chapter. for all the wonderful things i get to do here i will be savouring a night in maybe just listening to music or reading. it is great to see it busy and full and we have such great shows here its well deserved. but it has been a busy week, as usual and i am looking forward to playing with the cat and being away for the evening.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-11717829721290089792009-08-31T08:36:00.000-07:002009-09-05T04:40:37.908-07:00autumn days and cosy nightssunday was a cinema marathon at CHAPTER. first up i was ushering the "listening event" JEFF WAYNE'S WAR OF THE WORLDS. this is an experiment for us, we had the enhanced cd playing on 5 channels so it was surround sound in the gorgeous cinema 2 with all the lights out apart from the starry night house pinprick lights. i introduced it and we sat in the twilight listening to the dramatic score. i'd forgotten how much i enjoyed it. rob the projectionist who i was working with is an old punk and thinks its a load of codswallop but he was great and really helpful as always and answered any techie questions people had. the audience seemed to love it and a lot of them filled out feedback forms with ideas they had for albums or audiobooks if we were to do it again. i really hope so because it had a really enthusiastic and positive response. the lovely spencer and kirsten were there, grinning away, a couple of fathers and sons (doing a rights-of-passage thing) and i had a good chat with noel afterwards who echoed what a few people of said about how it put them back to feeling like teenagers again. in these modern times of downloading a track from itunes and listening to bits and bobs few people seemed to sit there and listen to a record. noel said it was like making a date with yourself to sit there and concentrate on the music and really enjoy it and that it had been a valuable experience.<br /><br />after that i had a short break and then in for the surreal RUMBA. this film was more like a silent comedy, a jacques tati film than a romantic comedy. a gangly, odd looking couple spend their very happy lives teaching english and p.e. respectively, in a school in france whilst attending latin dance competitions. on the way back from a win at one of these they have a car crash and it sends them into a spiral of losing things: legs, memories, jobs and eventually each other before a new life is found. this is all played marvellously for slapstick laughs by fiona gordon and dominique abel. it was a strange little film that i think wrongfooted a few people who had come wanting to see a more traditional romantic comedy but i really enjoyed it, i thought it was joyous with its riotious primary colours. everyone in the film seemed to be having a wonderful time.<br /><br />next up was SIN NOMBRE. a few of the cinema department have been wearing the brilliant t-shirts around for a few months with the big gothic gangster tattoo lettering and i was intriuged about what the movie would actually be like, whether it was all gangster hype and violence. i was pleased to discover that it was a lot more meaningful and thought provoking than that. the fuller story that involves people from south america travelling up the continent to try and make it to the US. its part tragic love story, part road movie (with beautiful and terrifying scenes atop a freight train travelling up from honduras to texas) and part gangster thriller. the two main leads were both fleeing from their home towns for different reasons but you felt that wherever they went it was not going to escape where they had come from. sayra looked out at honduras and her uncle told her how there was "nothing for you here" but what better life would there be in new jersey? casper fled his barrio but was told that the gang he had rebelled against had chapters in the US so it was likely he would never get out. the poverty trap, indeed: it felt that there was no real escape for the poor of the world and especially with the current financial climate it made you feel like there was nothing worth escaping to.<br /><br />the rest of the week has been relatively quiet, no gigs to go to and i'd seen most of the films in that one day i'd wanted to see! it was quite lucky for i am very broke till payday next week so taking temptation away is always good. monday we had our veg box from the lovely tom frost at BLAENCAMEL FARM so it gave us the chance to do some good meals. the best of these was the stir fry i did with kale, spinach, shredded carrot, soya, pumpkin seeds and pine nuts, one of CHRIS FOWLER's chillis and peppers and some lovely noodles from HUNGRY PLANET. tasty!<br /><br />i took tuesday off work because will had an extra day and i wanted to spend some time with him. we went to ST FAGANS to see the POP PETH exhibition. it was a lovely day for st fagans, actually quite sunny and warm and not too many children running around. after being lazy in the morning we didn't leave till quite late but i assumed will had been a million times like me, unfortunately he hadn't been for years so we didn't have time to go around everything like we should've done really. i showed him my favourite house (with the bed in the cupboard) and we bought some old fashioned sweets from the sweetie shop and got around just about everywhere apart from the future house because it was closed for an education day (is it still called the future house? its been open for years now). most importantly we had a good old root around the pop peth exhibition. we watched a video interview with the lovely nick and ashli todd from spillers talking about what the shop means to them and afterwards there was some videos of welsh bands from the 80s and 90s. the exhibition was great, there was a section where some fanzine writers had recreated their university bedroom complete with posters and flyers and a big SPILLERS section with badges and photos of the gang. it was great!<br /><br />it was a week for watching movies on the sofa wrapped in a duvet. we watched THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on tuesday night. i'd seen it in the cinema and hated it (having been a big fan of the tv series when i was a kid) but seeing sam rockwell in MOON and zooey deschanel in various romantic comedies recently made me want to re-watch it. it wasn't as bad as i'd remembered but then again a little confusing and disappointing. i'd read the book and seen the tv series and listened to the original radio version when it was re-broadcast on radio 4 a couple of years ago you could say i was well versed in what it was all about and had expectations of what the characters should look like, what scenes should be included. i was bound to be disappointed so tried to just enjoy it. it was lovely to look at but i found it a little confusing. some of the performances were great, i especially enjoyed mos def as ford prefect and bill nighy as slartibartfast. the effects were great in that home made, organic way (brilliant jim henson and that ace scene where the improbability drive turns them into knitting) but it just didn't hang together well enough for me. we watched the "making of" afterwards and i think i enjoyed that more. i felt guilty because everyone involved was so passionate and happy making it but for me it just didn't work and i found the hollywood romanticising of it with the love story almost offensive. it made me wish that they'd just had the guts to do a big new tv version where they could play around a little more leisurely and still have tonnes of fun.<br /><br />on wednesday we were meant to be going to my friend rosie's birthday do but i started to feel really ill. to perk me up we made cupcakes watched the mike leigh film NAKED. when i was a teenager this was one of my favourite films but i haven't been able to bring myself to see it for years. its been one of those films that i pick up the video for, remember that its hard going and put it down again for something else. steen really wanted to see it though and rented it from the library so after ignoring it for a week i agreed. it was as difficult and depressing as i remembered, it felt like i'd been pummelled with a rock afterwards but it is a fascinating study of class in post-thatcher britain. johnny, a highly intelligent but troubled young man flees manchester in the first scene after having raped a girl in the street, he heads for london to hook up with an ex girlfriend and gets involved in her life and wonders around trying to find meaning in the streets of london talking to people who no-one else would think of talking to. by the end of the movie we feel slightly more sympathetically for johnny, knowing that he is capable of so much but spends his life bitterly contemplating humanity and waiting for the end of the world. he seems to find and spread misery wherever he goes and leigh paints a very bleak picture of life in the early 90s. i found out a few years ago that apparently this was his first film after splitting up with his wife alison steadman and he was very depressed at the time of making it. i think it is fitting that i enjoyed it as an angry teen.<br /><br />thursday night was POP QUIZ time! it came around very quickly and i must admit that i was not really in the mood to go. after spending most of the week confined to the house with autumn chills forcing me into my big jumpers i was feeling very cosy. steen convinced us to go though and we were hoping the patti ladies would accompany us as team members. in the end anwen went on noel's team (he had asked last month, fair enough) and the patti ladies couldn't make it so we ended up on a team on our own. it was actually amazing fun. we got a bit drunk and tottered on our bar stools and did impressions of tina turner to each other. we didn't hope to come anywhere near the top like we did last month but we surprised ourselves by coming 3rd! it wasn't bad going seeing as we beat most people in teams of 5 or 6 so it was as good as winning for us. we had a lovely time talking to leah, iain, rylett and grace then went to dempseys for afters with noel, ed and anwen. what a great night!<br /><br />friday i booked the night off work so we could go to see MARGARET ATWOOD do a reading at llandaff cathedral. we found out about it through the hay festival web post and were intrigued not only as she was coming to cardiff but that they said it was due to have choristers. wow, how odd! this week we heard her being interviewed by mark lawson on the radio 4 review show and it all became clear. her new novel THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD is set in a world already sketched out in the apocalyptic ORYX AND CRAKE, where alternative characters in the years preceding this have devised a religion, "god's gardeners" are vegetarian and hope to cultivate the land to get it back to eden. in the novel are some of the hymns she has devised for her fake religion. i've heard atwood speak before and her voice dripped with its usual sarcasm as she talked about what she thought about these characters and their religion. i was excited to see what all this would add up to when we went to llandaff cathedral. we had a really nice walk up through llandaff fields and it was pretty full by the time we got there. it was a very strange experience, being in llandaff cathedral. i felt like i had this in-built reverence that i think was there in part due to the overwhelming middle class middle aged audience. i don't know why i felt so censored, i've been to hay lots of times and nowt posher than hay festival but here in a church i felt stifled and immature. a tongue in cheek sensibility was brought back to proceedings by margaret atwood and her performers (including the amazing actress diana quick) as they walked single file up the aisle carrying hippie-looking placards with pictures of bees and flowers. she gave a quick explanation that her book tour was unusual due to her trying to keep the carbon footprint down and all proceeds were going to local charities (in this case the RSPB). despite the seemingly mocking attitude to religion you could tell that atwood had respect for the situation we were finding ourselves in with the destruction of the planet and her understanding for the hope that religion, any religion brings. the readings themselves, some performed or rather introduced by atwood were moving and punctuated by hymns that had been arranged by a musician friend of hers. we took out the pamphlet given to us on arrival and it felt like a sunday service. the woman next to me even sang along with gusto along to the reprise at the end. the excerpts felt like the novel was a mix of both oryx and crake with the character toby looking out of the bubble she has protected herself within and occasionally THE HANDMAIDS TALE where the character wren described the life inside the sex workers' section of the city. it was intriuging and certainly made me want to rush out and buy the novel. unfortunately, funds being what they are i couldn't afford it. it would have been nice to have a copy signed by margaret atwood but it is not hugely important to me. instead we made a donation to the charity and got a canvas bag, i was excited enough about the bag but will certainly buy it in future, as i have all her other novels. leaving llandaff cathedral i felt very privaleged that i had managed to attend the event, one that will stay with me for years to come. margaret atwood is my favourite living author, every time i read a new book by her its like having a luxurious hearty meal and its wonderful that i have had two chances to see her speak now, i feel very lucky indeed.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-78369805539202575042009-08-26T05:14:00.002-07:002009-08-29T03:37:55.717-07:00people powerto start the week after green man proper we thought we'd celebrate with a documentary made up entirely of footage from another festival! SOUL POWER is the story of the concert in zaire in 1974 to bring together the biggest names in african and african-american music to celebrate the rumble in the jungle fight between george foreman (he of the grill) and muhammed ali (he of the massively inflated ego an exaggerated pronouncements of his greatness). james brown, bill withers, the detroit spinners, sister sledge and celia cruz were amongst the american names and the movie started off with a little context of the promoters trying to get in the money then all these people gathered on the plane, treating it like a drug fuelled tourbus, singing and dancing and elated with the occasion. the biggest thing to come out of this section of the movie was the social conscience that the performers had. with james brown declaring "i'm black and i'm proud" they all talked about going "home" to africa and although when they got there and finding people living in poverty once they met the african performers found they had more in common than first seemed. it was quite quaint seeing people so excited and naive about a country like africa, so unaware of the politics as they are now. but it was also quite sad, knowing that many performers today such as akon who displays such ignorant insensitivity to diamond mines and the rap world's misogyny. anyway, aside from politics the film showcased some marvellous performances. bill withers, ever my favourite and oft neglected performer, made me cry. he performed "hope she'll be happier" which is about a man's ex moving on and how sad it makes him feel. very prescient when i found out who was in the audience. we had a drink with pedro afterwards and it was nice to see him but the song had lingered in my head all night and i was sad he was sat behind me and i hoped it had not made him upset.<br /><br />wednesday i had the feliecitous opportunity to go usher for ADAM, a romantic comedy about a woman meeting a man with aspergers syndrome. when i had a quick look in the programme at this my heart sunk. a) a romantic comedy b) an actor "doing" autism. i shuddered at memories of FORREST GUMP and RAIN MAN (and smirked at seeing the posters of neil morrissey playing the dustin hoffman character in a theatre in cardiff coming soon). but thankfully all my fears were unfounded. this was a sweet, but not saccharine story that treated the character of adam with dignity but didn't make him overly serious and certainly didn't do scenes showing his freaky abilities. he seemed like just an ordinary man with social problems. the film left me feeling warm and satisfied afterwards, like i'd got to know someone better. the film also linked in marvellously with what i did on thursday. i was ushering for ADVOCACY MATTERS, which is a group of people who have various types of learning disabilities and offers them advocates, a sort of friend finder to help them get on in the world. they had made a dvd themselves (martin proudly told me how he'd held the boom, sandra did the interviews etc) and they were premiering it in CHAPTER. it told the story of how you get to become an advocate and what they are like as people, how they want to be treated as individuals not just put in a ghetto and forgotten about. afterwards i stayed in the room as they needed extra space for the people with aspergers. one of the signs of the condition is feeling a little claustrophobic and need space and less people around them. i sat talking with the group for about an hour and we talked about ADAM, some of them had seen it and were impressed with how it didn't patronise them. after watching the advocacy video and seeing adam it made me want to make everyone see them, to make them more human and less like some stereotype. it meant the week was a real education for me.<br /><br />any spare time i had on wednesday i spent most of day sorting out the end of a project i'd been doing for steen: making a covers cd. he'd not asked me to do it but i'd had the idea after thinking of a great cover i'd heard and then getting some ideas from friends and seeing some stuff on the internet. i found some great things: tiny tim doing both the sonny and cher parts on "i've got you babe"; peter sellars doing the beatles' "she loves you" in a dr. strangelove accent; the residents doing "its a mans world" as well as the more sublime dreamy covers that he's probably heard but i didn't care, like joan jett doing "crimson and clover" and this mortal coil's version of "song to the siren". lush. he's listening to it right now so i'll find out what he thinks of it when i get back.<br /><br />wednesday night the swooning started. thanks to the valiant efforts of the amazing charlotte braddick we cardiffians (yes, most of us) went to the lovely THEKLA in brizzle to see the dreamy BILL CALLAHAN. someone there talked about it being the gig of the year and it definitely is right up there as one of the most intimately beautiful gigs i've seen for a long time. we dashed in and caught almost all the support, SOPHIA KNAPP. she was a massive disappointment. we've been to so many gigs in the thekla with amazing support acts that i think we have been spoilt. she was brought over by bill himself but she was woefully dull. terrible lyrics (hold my hand, understand...) and and uninteresting voice its the first time i've been bored enough to want to walk away and have a chat upstairs. of course, i would never do that with bill callahan. oh, that man. after me, steen and leah and snaked our way to the front and descended into a swoon as soon as he came on. the experience of watching bill callahan reminds me of a teacher i had at university. he was very dignified and quietly spoken and he once swore to make a point and it made me blush. bill callahan makes me blush, he makes me feel his songs so intently i blush and i cry, its like entering another world. afterwards we hugged each other, hugged ashli more (she was shaking) and then went outside and caught up with his band, one of whom did a gig for noel and adam's lesson #1 a couple of years ago. good times. an intense evening broken up with laughter like whistling in the dark.<br /><br />i was working on thursday so instead of going out for holly's leaving do we just watched a dvd will had gotten from the library RED ROAD. i remember this coming out and missing it in chapter and heard such good things about it i was kicking myself. it was certainly one of the most tense movies i've seen. jackie, who works in a cctv police servicewatches the screens voyeristically, catching people in acts of violence, lust and love. small moments of the lives of the citizens of glasgow are on view for her. you feel there is something a little sinister about this but not that she is a creepy person, just a little sad and lonely. one day she catches sight of someone who was important to her on the screen and this starts a dangerous path towards finding out more about him and his life. the film is acutely focussed on the characters and the actors make these people very real, properly rounded. it was also about a place, the red road estate and what places like that mean to us. the cctv views everything with an objective unfeeling eye, reducing human beings to pixellated dots and that is what we do to people in society. the red road flats are a monolith of "bad, scary, dangerous" but there are individuals living inside each with complicated problems. compared to everything else i did this week this meant made me consider the way we lump people into easily dealt with lumps rather than looking at each person's needs. that great line from HAROLD AND MAUDE where they are in a field of daisies and she tells harold that each daisy is different but people so frequently think that they are all the same. <br /><br />what an interesting week! well, tonight we are cooking food for smallsteen to celebrate his birthday and have made cakes and as yet have no plans. tomorrow i am doing a marathon shift in the cinema before going to gwdihw for another all dayer (well it'll be a single band by the time i get there) so loads to look forward to!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-81585007361670932522009-08-26T05:14:00.001-07:002009-08-28T05:56:59.839-07:00pagan gods be praised! a dry green man!its funny what a difference a nice bit of weather can make. after last years' quagmire everyone i knew was anxious about this years' GREEN MAN festival. i spent a good week searching the internet and going into millets and outdoors pursuits shops getting advice on what best to do. last year was fun but exhausting and we all went to this year with a sort of militaristic zeal, going to battle with nature. the morning of the festival i joyously went to get our twin sleeping bags (they zip together to form a double sleeping bag for cwtching comfort) from the attic will only ot be stopped in my tracks by the realisation that the CATS IN PARIS had taken one of them by mistake (no hard evidence but i remember commenting that we had the same sleeping bags when they came to stay in may...) so after a little diversion to blacks to replace the left hand bag we were on our way. we were going with the lovely jon ruddick and nic finch, hereby to be known as the ruddy finch and the rain lashed it down. the four of us looked at the sky with trepidation and put on some tunes. hearing the ruddy finches doing voices and singing along to the tape player put us in a better mood and from the back of the van we could see blue poking in between the clouds. we got there and it was suspiciously not raining and not even muddy. we immediately put on our wellies and headed down to the camp site, nabbing what i think was the best spot we've ever had. we were near the toilets (but not too near) close to a tree (landmarks) and only 5 minutes away from the entrance. score! it was dry enough at this point for me to discard my wellies (which had been rubbing my ankle on the way in) and i am happy to report i did not need them for the whole festival. joy! first stop, the green man shop to pay a ridiculous £5 for the programme, which we shared between the four of us. i love green man and think they do an amazing job but there was no way you could get the times for anything (neither internet nor t'otherwise) unless you bought a programme which felt like a bit of a rip off. steen kept his rather dangerously in his back pocket and it only fell out once. we acclimatised ourselves, finding out where the folky dolky tent had gone (replaced by the far out stage which is where the cinema tent used to be) and where the green man cafe was (now the green man pub, now in the walled garden). i liked the new layout very much, it is still the loveliest setting and it made more sense to swap things around a bit. <br /><br />after a our wonder, which took in some of THE GENTLE GOOD and some of cate le bon doing songs for will hodgkinson's tour of britain, quite a lot of cider and most of cardiff we settled to watch PIVOT. they looked like sons of the THOMPSON TWINS and their music got us dancing to some 80s electronic. at one point i remember thinking that if it didn't have the thumping beats behind it there was no way to distinguish it from an authentic song of the time. the haircuts were to be a bit of a theme, it seems all the youngsters now want to look like the thompson twins, well good luck to them. i wanted to look like them in the 80s too but my mum wouldn't let me get my hair cut. by the time she did she told the hairdresser to make me look like demi moore not the "short back and sides" dykey look i was going for. i was only 10 though. more wondering took us to see GANG GANG DANCE on the main stage. they were amazing, just the sort of multi-instrumental mishmash of tribal beats, electronicy synths and bluesy singing. it was unlike anything else there that weekend, properly joyous. we were dancing on top of the hill and just grinning.<br /><br />we headed over to see WOODEN SHJIPS but i was a bit underwhelmed. maybe it was due to the sunny weather and the comparison to gang gang dance but they just seemed a bit beardy and proggy (which is odd cos i usually like that sort of thing). it was most people's highlight but it left me feeling bored. the next thing that i didn't want to miss was ROKY ERICKSON. i became a fan when i went to see a film where 13th FLOOR ELEVATORS was on the soundtrack back when i was in wazzu. we'd been to see the film at a test screening at the cinema on campus and the promoters were giving out free soundtracks and t-shirts. i tried to find anything else by them ever since and years later it is still a bit of a problem as roky went a bit mad and became a beardy recluse. the 80s rock stuff wasn't brilliant but still had that amazing intensity. he did "you're gonna miss me" as an encore and i was a pogoing fiend. steen photographed me still grinning insanely afterwards. we saw a bit of ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, who were good but unmemorable and then headed over to the cinema tent to queue for THE MAN OF ARAN, an old silent film documentary with a new score by BRITISH SEA POWER. it was a beautiful film that made you feel a part of the community, struggling on the isle against the elements to eke out a life. the score was moving and powerful and one of my highlights of the whole festival, sitting in a tent that put me in away from the brecon beacons and out on the cliffs of west scotland. <br /><br />the next day we went for breakfast in the quite wonderful TEA AND TOAST caravan near our tent which served the bargainous 2 slices of delicious marmite on toast (cut into triangles) for £1.50 and then wandered up to see the lovely laura bryon do a set of her LE B songs. by this time the idea had set in that it was going to continue NOT to rain and a bunch of us sat on the grass slowly getting drunk and happily watched a little tot dancing at the front like laura was playing just for her. it pretty much summed up the loveliness of the festival. saturday was characterised with a lot of wandering around, drinking and sunning. we passed by lots of things that day, MISSISSIPPI WITCH, THE PHANTOM BAND before sitting near the far out tent to listen to a brilliant set by RICH JAMES. we had food from the ever tasty paella stall and went to the literature tent to hear readings from joe boyd's book accompanied by robyn hitchcock illustrating it with songs of the time. a highlight of the afternoon was the norman blake - euros childs duo JONNY, doing a some gorgeous songs and being amusing and lovely. i was excited to see THE ALIENS but i was a bit disappointed, they seemed in contrast to a lot of other things at the festival, almost britpop blokey and took in a few other things, including a much needed stop for some of PEACEFUL PROGRESS chai tea and a chat with my friend catrin and her gorgeous little 'uns, before seeing an ok-but unmemorable set from GRIZZLY BEAR and then made a bee-line for JARVIS COCKER. he was a good showman but the songs were not PULP songs and a little too melodramatic and not quite sleazy enough for my liking, but it was great to see him on stage. <br /><br />sunday we said goodbye to the ruddy finch, for they needed to be back in cardiff by 4pm. we hurtled up to the cinema tent to catch some silent comedy films with a live piano score. we caught a LAUREL AND HARDY and BUSTER KEATON films. it was so nice sitting there hearing all the kids laughing, it makes such a difference to watch them with an audience. we then did the green man POP QUIZ in the literature tent with iain and leah, anna and john. despite the combination of the two top teams in cardiff we did pretty badly but it was a lot of fun, i do like a good quiz. after that we headed over to get some SCRABBLE SUNDAY action. the weather turned weird with black skies and hard hot sun and we got a bit lazy and relaxed listening to 9 BACH and ROZI PLAIN but we still managed to get some great words in (trounced was my favourite) before will and i parted ways (partly because i was going to pee myself trying to get him to finish his go) so i could go and dance like a loon to the brilliant RIGHT HAND LEFT HAND. <br /><br />we met up again to see DAVE THOMAS do some ramshakle drunken poetry in the literature tent and watch a bit of the truly terrible BAD FILM CLUB'S SNOWBEAST before going to watch THE PICTISH TRAIL who were great and who gave a shout out to JOSIE LONG, who ended up being the giggling girl behind us. speculation whether they snogged later ensued whilst we got some food waiting for the brilliant CRANIUM PIE who made us wig out some. we saved the psyche for later and headed down to the main stage to lay on the grass and fall asleep to CAMERA OBSCURA (or at least i did) and saw a little bit of RODRIGUEZ before running up to catch more wigging out from AMORPHOUS ANDROGYNOUS. they seemed to have everyone and the kitchen sink on stage with them, a wailing alisha sufit, a sitar player. in many ways they were a cliche psyche band but so much fun and lots of dancing was done. we ran over back to the main stage to catch what turned out to be our highlight of the weekend, the immensely beautiful DIRTY THREE. they completely transported you to somewhere else; their dark, poetic, solemn shanties that came close to making me cry was belied by their entertaining stage banter. a wonderful set. WILCO were ok, a bit dull but still lovely and thus ended our musical weekend. <br /><br />we travelled back with the lovely charlie bull, rob sell, larego, oli, steph and friends in a fab vehicle called serge vansborough and had a nice hot bath and a plate of chips when we got back. even the vom in the sink from chris' alternative party weekend couldn't spoil our mood. green man is brilliant!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-31938308938374240612009-08-19T04:25:00.000-07:002009-08-26T05:14:02.539-07:00everyone'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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-63878232748951380622009-08-14T07:56:00.000-07:002009-08-15T07:33:41.371-07:00all quiet on the west cardiff frontthis week we haven't really done much, not many gigs on (and found out too late for the ones there were) so spent a lot of time cwtching on the sofa watching movies. sunday we switched on THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW for allegedly 5 minutes cos i wanted to see the appalling "toast to man united" scene and ended up watching almost the whole bloody film. silly but fun. monday we went to the duchess (duke of clarence), a pub only 4 doors away from our house that i used to practically live in a few years ago, to have a drink with the patti ladies. we nattered and had a proper catch up and discussed green man, atp, canal breaks and other possible holidays together. they are such wonderful and lovely people, very glad they are our friends.<br /><br />tuesday i finally got steen to watch THE LAST UNICORN. i was very excited, steen less so. this is one of my favourite films from when i was a kid and then when i discovered the amazing alison black liked it when we were at university we would make everyone watch it weekly after going out (often this coupled with FIRE WALK WITH ME was the ultimate in endurance tests for newcomers to the house like prospective friends and boyfriends). it has the wonderful voices of jeff bridges, alan arkin, tammy grimes and mia farrow; the music of soft rock psych band america; and gorgeous japanese animation. happily, steen did like it and even ignored the fact that i got tearful / excited / scared / did unicorn impressions even though i've seen it a million and one times.<br /><br />wednesday whilst steen fiddled with some computer software and had to listen to INME for buzz magazine (i refused to be in the same room after having to endure something similarly horrible last month) i watched THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. god bless film4. i wouldn't normally sit down to watch this but since reading THE WATCHMEN have a bit of a low level alan carr obsession and wanted to know how true it was to his ideas. it was ok, lively enough, not nearly as good as the book as you would expect but some nice fun entertainment and sean connery was still quite sexy and believable.<br /><br />thursday night we went with the patti ladies and it seems most of chapter (including raybould, jon, benny, anne and the gang) to see MOON. this was so powerful it gave me funny dreams last night. it starts with a pr film for lunar industries who have solved the world's power problems by harvesting energy on the moon. this brought up all sorts of sci fi references (TOTAL RECALL for example) and is actually wholly believable as i read an article ages ago in the NEW SCIENTIST talking about this very same potential idea. when we start a very beardy sam rockwell is talking to robot gerty about how he only has 2 weeks left before going home, ending his 3 year contract as the sole engineer on the moon harvesting energy for the earth, again leading to references of creepy tension in space, to 2001 and SILENT RUNNING. but when sam starts seeing things in the corner of his eye, like little blips in a computer program, the tension mounts and starts leading you towards EVENT HORIZON and SOLARIS. but it takes a different turn, it quickly stops from being a cliche. it has wonderful solid, old fashioned effects, a good script and a great performance (or should that be performances) from sam rockwell. he is the only person we actually see on screen who isn't a fuzzy mirage or video but he is never unwatchable, you never get bored of wondering how he is, wondering what he is going to do. the film is actually all about loneliness and sacrifice and the human spirit rather than how many things we can blow up in space, a refreshing change.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-91968561761788726902009-08-06T08:50:00.001-07:002009-08-14T07:56:16.796-07:00everything elseafter ANTICHRIST i spent the whole day thinking about it and wrote a blog dedicated to that powerful, beautiful film. however, immediately after antichrist i was plunged into an entirely different kind of reality. i was in mexico for a silly football comedy called RUDO Y CURSI. it was another group project from director carlos cuaron reuniting him with diego luna and gael garcia banal. it was wonderful fun. they effortlessly played two poor brothers who fought but loved each other (like better looking gallaghers) and got a chance to get out of the slums by playing football and once there were given their nicknames rudo and cursi (meaning soft, sentimental). it was all about chasing dreams that will never come to fruition, rudo (diego luna) is a compulsive gambler and whenever he has anything for 5 minutes has pawned it or lost it in gambling debts; cursi (gael garcia banal) plays the accordian and wants to be a big singing star, but has no talent to back it up. one of the funniest moments comes when cursi pays for a music video, a spanish cover of cheap trick's "i want you to want me" complete with silly dancing, outrageously camp cowboy outfit and his trusty accordian. very engaging and watchable, i'd recommend it to everyone.<br /><br />wednesday i was ushering for BURMA VJ, a documentary about the video journalists who risk their lives every day to bring pictures from the closed society in burma. it was narrated by one who had to escape to thailand and centred on the protests led by monks last year. it was very interesting and seeing the lengths these people were going to be free made me just go into sobs. it was inspiring and heartbreaking, with the foreknowledge that aung san suu kyi is on trial again at the moment.<br /><br />in the evening we had a bloody lovely catch up with the canton youth (rich and rhian). shamefully we hadn't been around to their new house after countless invites so we went over there with a bottle of wine (which the four of us finished pretty sharpish) and saw their bloody gorgeous and amazing new house in the heart of leafy upper canton. i highly doubt steen or i will ever have enough money in our pockets to buy a house like this so its nice that the nosworthys have already allocated a spare room for me (with a secret room attached!) in the attic that includes a life sized luke skywalker. ace!<br /><br />thursday was the day of triumph. having come third in FWCH GOCH POP QUIZ two months in a row we were determined to maybe come third again or maybe lower. as far as i was concerned we were lucky to come third twice. but in fact we won. came first. beat the whole of cardiff at pop! this was not an easy victory. we (me, steen, deans, anwen and anwen's lovely friend jenny) were tied in first place with a dream team (rylett, nay, grace, leo, iain and leah) and had to shout out the tie breaker: the year ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars album came out. we all screamed "73!" at once so mr dc gates instead asked us to write down the answer to the highest chart position instead and hand it in. the tension built, steen was biting his nails more than usual. we won! woop! very very excited and a little drunk we got a round of drinks (making us more drunk and missing mel's birthday party in gwdihw) and a whole bag of gifts. out of these i got a spillers mug and some pens (score! my biro had run out that morning) and steen got some cds. since we'd already purchased mum tickets, anwen and deans had this and jenny had the remainder of the cds. we all went home elated. <br /><br />the next day i was excited and a little nervous: the steens were visiting, all of them. excited as i hadn't yet met the littlest steen, ciaran and nervous cos i hadn't seen them for ages and had the usual "what if they hate me" nerves. i'm sure they don't and as much as i was trying to reassure myself that i was being very silly i still tidied up the house like a whirlwind so they didn't make will move out of the pigsty he'd ended up in. it was a lovely visit. we went for an ice cream in the park and i played with little un (don't babies have serious faces? my friend's little boy sonny is the same, the boys especially look like little old men!) and gave laura her birthday gifts and went up to rob's house (that weirdly enough after knowing him about 2 years had not been to). it was great. they didn't come to the house but i felt better for my tidying. all good.<br /><br />saturday i finished at 5.30pm so i could go to timmy and macca's french themed leaving party. i iced cakes with french themes and steen cooked a lovely tea in preparation for a night's drinking. and we fell asleep. dead away. we missed the party and now, almost a week later i still have 12 (well, not 12, i've snacked on a couple, i think more like 8 now) iced buns that were meant to be eaten by my friends. oops!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-58904906731362619922009-08-04T06:12:00.000-07:002009-08-06T08:50:10.527-07:00immediate thoughts on antichrist *SPOILERS*this is my experience on monday night watching ANTICHRIST. it was extraordinary and nothing like the hyped up gore fest i had heard about. it was the story told in chapters with a prologue and epilogue about a couple dealing with the death of their young son and the cruelty and indifference of nature. i purposefully did not want to know too much about it before going in but cannot avoid speaking about it fully here so if you haven't seen it look away now but take my word for it, its worth going to see what your reaction is.<br /><br />it begins in beautiful slow black and white. a toddler gets out of the safe confines of his cot and manages to open the stair gate then seeing the snow is fascinated and plummets to his death. interspersed with this is the sight of his parents, only referred to as he and she, fucking. the harshness of the word must be used for the sight of it is graphic and carnal. it is not pornographic but it is natural and if it was not so beautiful it would be almost clinical. it is clear that the couple were having a shower, wanted each other and started doing it all over the house, ending up in bed.<br /><br />the next chapter deals with the initial grief. the woman has been sedated since her grief and guilt is so profound and he (now identified as a therapist) tells her she doesn't need the drugs and he can help her through this. he wants to protect her and guide her through her grief. he probes and prods at her feelings, trying to control the situation and her. she has anxiety attacks and can hardly breath, he identifies that she has a fear and he wants her to examine her fear so takes her to the countryside, a log cabin they have in the forrest called eden. he will not comfort her with sex, will not let her escape and soothe her grief but only talk her out of it.<br /><br />once in eden the surroundings seem to suck them in, at times the lush greenery seems distorted, like its twig claws are pulling them into its darkness. she complains that the ground is burning her, he identifies a freudian cure and draws a pyramid to help explain, identify exactly what the problem is. he sees eden, this place, nature as top of the pyramid of fear. she seems to see this as intrusive but he will not stop. he seems to start to become suspicious of nature, not understanding things about it the way she does. the acorns dropping on the roof (completely natural) seem to be like bombs. he starts seeing animals in the forrest that seem to be warning signals - a doe with a stillborn baby still hanging from its womb, a bloody fox and a screaming crow. she tells him that she was researching her book gynicide (a study of medieval witch hunts and a discussion of the innate evil of women and original sin) last summer when she heard a scream, thought it was the baby but realised it was the scream of all things that will die. the acorns falling on the roof are all essentially sperm that will not fertilize the earth and she says she can hear them crying. she also states that nature is satan's church. she demands sex and they make love in a tree root surrounded by human bodies.<br /><br />the next chapter is when she turns on him. she can't find him when she wakes and certain he has left her she knocks him out, rams a log into his crotch to emasculate him and whilst passed out masturbates him (he climax spurts blood and semen) then screws a heavy stone to his leg and retreats to the forrest. when he wakes he crawls out and finds shelter in the tree root where a crow gives him away. she finds him and buries him alive. later she seems to come back to rationality and digs him up, drags him back and holds him. she then masturbates and has a memory of seeing her son plummet as she orgasms and finding the guilt at her enjoyment of sex unbearable, takes a pair of scissors and cuts into her clitoris. he awakes and sees the deer, fox and crow surround her, takes off the grindstone and strangles her. he then burns her body on a pyre and escapes on some crutches.<br /><br />again in black and white we see him leaving eden but then hundreds of faceless people, clothed, climb into the forrest, possibly the souls of all living things whose destiny is to die.<br /><br />i am still thinking about this and feeling this film. there are a hundred things i could say about it but the first thing i was reminded of was when i was about 9 years old being on holiday in cornwall with my family. i'd not been very well in the day and woke up and it was dark. i went to see my mum and couldn't find her. everyone was in bed and asleep, i awoke my dad and he said she'd taken the dog for a walk. i sat in the living room and heard a scream. the most accurate thing i have ever heard in real life that could be described as "blood curdling". i went cold. i was convinced that my mum had been attacked. i tried to wake my dad but he wouldn't, he said it was just a fox but i remember being out of my mind with fright. maybe it was only half an hour but it felt like an eternity stood in the garden of that house that was in the middle of nowhere in the forest calling for my mum and seeing only the blackest night, nature staring back at me. it also made me think of the hurricane at the end of the zora neale hurston novel "their eyes were watching god". nature is uncaring, indifferent. it seems cruel but it has no feeling it just is and it is much stronger and powerful than any human, it cannot be tamed. this is one of the best films i have seen and will leave me thinking for weeks.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-62694087344441600162009-08-04T04:05:00.000-07:002009-08-08T04:18:15.212-07:00warm and fuzzythe week started quietly well. on tuesday i ushered for the dance double bill, PERIPHERAL LANDSCAPES performed by eeva marie mutka and titta court (in collaboration with gaby agis) and TOUCHED performed by gaby agis and douglas hart. there was a video playing in the foyer to give some background to the pieces, a facinating exploration of the skinner release method of dance practice, which is to be as fluid as possible and creates improvised unstructured movement very different to the usual disciplines of hard lines and routines of traditional dance. we saw the dancers (one finnish one from north wales) work on internal and external landscapes. as i have not studied dance but go to see a lot of performances it was really interesting to see how the work evolved. the dance piece itself was truly beautiful. eeva and titta were like twinned souls, beginning a slow, drone-like prescriptive ballroom dance and then finding each other and becoming light and moulding into each other. one would raise an arm and the other would fall into her and they would swap over, joyously. at the end something happened to stop this organic flowing movement and they were both alone again, calling out for their other half. it reminded me of my wife, erin. ah, how i miss her. it was a really moving work. the second seemed to be about the connection between the body and music. doug hart (who help found the jesus and mary chain. fact!) played a bass line and gaby agis, dressed in rock chick fur coat and boots flung off her clothes and moved to the music. this was less effective for me, they added a backing track that i found unneccessary and there was not enough variety in the movements but it was still a interesting work.<br /><br />on wednesday our friend filmryan was making a video for race horses (the new project from people wot was in radio luxembourg). the big idea was a wild west bar brawl with loads of cake. i tried to get free cake from the local greggs, tescos, hotels etc but found myself up against health and safety law (ALL CAKE MUST BE DESTROYED!) so raced out to get the cheapest, nastiest looking sponges (who knew that you could get a "raspberry sponge"* (*doesn't contain any raspberries) for 45p?! i wasn't needed for much techie work (booo) so helped lovely sara do wardrobe stuff. the golden cross is such a lovely building, so beautiful inside it was a joy to be somewhere so ornate.<br /><br />i had to race away to work for i was ushering for PUBLIC ENEMIES the new film by michael mann about the bank robber john dillinger. i remember passing over the dillinger notoriety when i was studying american popular culture in university and as i recall he was one of those public anti-heroes popular in the 1930s when gangster culture was rife. unfortunately the film did not really tell me an awful lot more about him. johnny depp was brilliant as dillinger, it was nice to see him playing straight (no cap'n jack campness or creepy jacko impersonations) and certainly made you believe in this man's charisma but it was lacking in back story and still very long. it detailed the end of his career when he was being chased by the FBI and mann took it in fairly predictible territory by showing the cop and the robber as two sides of the same coin, both career hungry and competitive. it was well made but left me a bit cold. it was nice to see british actor stephen graham as psycho "babyface" nelson.<br /><br />dashing straight from one thing to another i played with the cat and then sped off to have tea with steen in the rummer and then to splott library for the BOOK GROUP. we were discussing angela carter and charlotte perkins gilman. i'd actually not read the angela carter book but have read most of hers (i'm a big fan) and studied the perkins gilman in university so didn't have it fresh in my mind but it was great talking about it and hearing other people's reactions. the other women in the book group had not read any feminist literature before and really enjoyed it and i was really relieved to hear that. there was a report in the times on monday about the end of feminism and it is something that worries me a lot, it seems only the older generations seem to care about preserving a feminist dialogue and younger girls are disgusted by it and are obsessed with consumerism and reading magazines that criticise their bodies. i have now started "nights in the circus" and am greatly enjoying it. angela carter, i missed you!<br /><br />thursday we spent the day in swansea. it was bloody lovely. after stressing about rain macs for green man and the death of summer it was truly a beautiful sunny day. we went to the GLYNN VIVIAN museum to see the mark wallinger curated "THE RUSSIAN LINESMAN". it was amazing, it was so well thought out, one of the best shows i've ever seen and a real coup to have it in swansea. the idea was that in the 1966 world cup the england goal was on the line and it had to be called out by a russian linesman. they had a photo of it there as an example. it was far too close to call but he gave it to england therefore facilitating one of the big myths about the golden age of british football. we've been riding on that wave for years. it was a moment where there was a clear alternate reality and this is what the show was about: mirror images, alternate realities, optical illusions. it was wonderful. the signature piece was by wallinger, his mirrored tardis that seems to blend in as if it is just about to disappear and carry on its journey through time and space. there were so many things that i just can't stop thinking about though: bertelli's continous profile of mussolini; the footage from the helicopter that was sent up to take pictures of phillip petit tightrope walking between the twin towers; the muybridge photographs... i could go on, it was full of amazing small things. afterwards we met my old chum boo for lunch. we went to verdis (why ruin a wonderful tradition?) and had lovely pasta meal served in seconds and then the most amazing ice cream in the world served in a chocolate wafer cone with millions of nuts on top. oof. boo had to go into mumbles shops to get a present and steen and i went on the "beach". i don't know if this constitutes a beach cos it was mainly mud and stones and detrius but we had fun trying not to get muddy and looking into dark holes. boo then took us for a little drive up to clyne to see the new flats built on top of my old dorm room (i did hate that place, i hope they toiled the ground with salt first) and then back to her flat for a quick drink. my plan was to try and go back into town and meet our friend joan but we started drinking gin and catching up and suddenly it was after 9pm. we completely missed the sweet baboo gig we'd planned to see and missed meeting up with the patti ladies. oops! but it was a lovely day and i really appreciated catching up with lovey boo.<br /><br />saturday was quiet, i got angry in town in the morning trying to buy mum tickets at spillers. nothing to do with spillers or the lovely nick who sold them to me, i hate being in town when its busy and they have added traffic problems didn't help. i was running a bit late anyway due to spending almost an hour in the "up and under" outdoor pursuits store near victoria park talking to a really nice man about raincoats. i'd been researching them online all week, trying to decide what to get and how much to spend. i've had a few since getting my bike (pointless trying to exist without a raincoat when you ride a bike) but none have stayed waterproof for long. the bike shed recommended ones that are over £100 so i thought i'd get some proper advice. since i'm going to green man in a few weeks i had it in mind to make sure my rainproof wardrobe was sorted by then. it turns out the coat for me, the best one you can get that will last for years and is breathable so won't make you sweaty and annoyed is... £144. ah. right. he was a really nice man, not out for the hard sell but he said i'll probably just keep buying cheaper coats every winter and its a bit of a false economy. of course he is right but i don't have that sort of money. another one for the "save up" list. instead i found a long yellow coat that is in no way breathable but looks at least waterproof on ebay for £10 incl p&p. i will look like a rubber duck in green man but at least it'll get me through.<br /><br />sunday i was ushering for MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS which was ok, a bit too flash in that way that a lot of modern cgi cartoons can be but it had a great central female character. the message was very much "accept yourself" and "freaks are ace". which is a message i wholly endorse. after work i zipped off to meet steen and deans at the BIG WEEKEND. we watched a mightily powerful EBONY BONES do her thing and make all the teenage boys shake their booty and take photos of her and then had a look around and got ready for CAMERA OBSCURA. they were great when we saw them last year but i was a bit disappointed this time. they seemed miserable, the weather turned a bit drizzly and the sound was appalling. my friends rich and pete turned up and we ended up going at the back and having a natter for a bit before decamping to dempseys to get warm and drunk. all in a good week of catching up with old buddies.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-48209667209022330782009-07-24T05:20:00.000-07:002009-08-04T04:04:48.065-07:00bloody great gigsafter my box office shift that seemed to go on for an aeon i joined steen at clwb ifor. i say joined, i actually passed him on my bike and got there before him, which made me feel very smug indeed. we were there for the joint prowess of ISLET and RIGHT HAND LEFT HAND, both i've seen before and both give me butterflies when i'm watching them: they are great! the instrument swapping, hypnotic primal yell of islet was a great compliment to the urgent looping and guitar hero seriousness of right hand left hand. i know i bang on but it must be said, rhodri viney is a genius. loads of people were out for the gig and the atmosphere was really warm and friendly. there were parties afoot but i was quite tired and steen and i sneaked out and headed off home.<br /><br />sunday i was ushering for STAR TREK, an enjoyable romp that i'd seen before (with a very hot spock) and then SUNSHINE CLEANING, the new film from the people who did LITTLE MIS S SUNSHINE. this was another film that was firmly located in middle america, showing you a people that usually get dismissed by mainstream films. when it started i was worried it was going to be a bit cutesy, an ex-cheerleader who starts up a crime scene cleaning business with her sister and often having her geek-cute little boy in tow. the family-in-a-van thing had already been done with their previous film. instead it was really quite nuanced and the performances kept it from being too unbelievable and contrived. amy adams was wonderful in many scenes such as when she is confronted with a reunion of her former schoolmates who live a dull and privaleged life in sharp contrast with the desperation of her life scratching out the living of a single mum. the grisly pragmatic job of cleaning up after the dead is turned into a compassionate turn by people who care about making everything better.<br /><br />monday was another gig night, this time in the dreaded buffalo. thankfully they have replaced that godawful logo projection with a series of ace little youtube films including an obama-mccain presidential dance off, bettie page 7 veils strip (my favourite bettie page video!) and the horrific murder scene from american history x. JOY OF SEX were on first, with a new line up but the same shy but ballsy blasts of angular guitar and lo fi drums (very lo fi in this case, the new member was only playing one drum and looked so young he resembled the little drummer boy). i finally got to use some of my accountancy knowledge when max announced "this one's called double entry and its not about sex..." "is it about accountancy?" i heckled. "yes!" he laughed, surprised i got the reference. score! i didn't go to nightclasses for nowt! in fact i used to guffaw every time the teacher announced that we were about to do some double entry only to be given death stares by the class. did no-one else find this funny? clearly not. i was too immature for a career as an accountant. next up was TARTUFI. my friend anne said she'd looked them up and was looking forward to it but i'd not heard of them. well, good call anne, they were great. an unfussy woman with a guitar and three mics and a drummer looping sounds into gathered, fevered intensity. i loved them. will bought the album and i bought a beautiful print their friend had made for them (5/20). MARNIE STERN was the main attraction though and what an attraction, a female guitar hero with uninhibited ability and fun. the songs were great pop punk numbers that got everyone dancing along and they had a great approachable air. a good night!<br /><br />tuesday i went bowling on a bar cafe staff do. something was learnt that night: i am shit at bowling. i scored something awful like 21 versus the three figured heights of my colleagues. it was fun, but i felt like i was only starting to get it in the second to last shot. hmph. i watched phil and nims do their thang on the dance mat and admired (although i'm not sure that's quite the word) the ugly beauty of the red dragon centre. horrible horrible most horrible. <br /><br />wednesday was JUNKET CLUB DAY! woohoo! these are always so much brilliant fun. we arrived at the insole court, a beautiful building rendered gothic by the storm that had descended upon cardiff. since it was the junket fete it was quite appropriate for it to be sunny with showers, lisa and ben had created a brilliant atmosphere as usual and will and i had numerous goes on jonny bull's tombola and even a roll at paul barnett's rolly ball thing and went along with mike bubbins' banter at play your cards right. a lovely bit of cake from anna ellis and a cup of tea from iain and leah and we were ready for a bit of comedy. bridget christie was on first with her tales of being a dogsbody at the daily mail. she was very good and had some brilliant observances on working on the hate rag though sometimes she overplayed it a little, i preferred it when she was just telling the tale and not relying on being too hammy. in the interval i talked to my friend chris and the two steens went to watch willie downie and nic amongst others get themselves into funny positions during giant twister. superclump was on next, the brilliant improv group comprising of a few cardiffian comics and some london based ones. they had some really inspired sketches, my favourites were the grown up storybook heroes (the boy from the snowman and the famous five) trying to solve "the mystery of the tiny door" that turned out to be a catflap and the kabuki performer who is searching for work in the recession. the junket club is so much fun and they do loads to make it special, it is a joy going every time. long may they reign!<br /><br />thursday i was ushering for the BEYOND REPAIR dance company. the first performance was inspired by the women who helped the strikers in 1984 and was very measured and beautiful. the second performance i wasn't too keen on, it was a futuristic idea and felt a bit stylised and dated. i see so many established companies it was interesting to see a new young company that have not quite worked out their style yet.<br /><br />on the sunday afternoon i had ushered for the entertaining but not in any way demanding NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 2 and the more effective PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE. comparing them is like oranges and apples but pippa lee was a wonderful film. it could have been a cliche-ridden nightmare, a middle aged woman moves house and considers her worth and looks over her life but everyone in the cast were surprisingly wonderful (keanu reeves, winona ryder, who i usually can't watch without wanting to tear the screen apart) and it was shot in candy colours and the character of pippa was sort of a blank sheet trying to write and understand her life story so it avoided being chick flick snooze enducing. wonderful. <br /><br />we had planned that weekend to be in borth for the square festival but will got asked to dj for the FAIRPLAY FESTIVAL so we stayed in cardiff instead. i was working on the friday night, sleepy on the saturday but on the door for sunday so had to turn up! we caught most of the brilliant CYMBIENT and then i played with my friend's gorgeous baby alice for about an hour whilst taking money from friends and strangers, all for a good cause. it was a lovely atmosphere and i was sad that i couldn't make the rest of the weekend. it was truly like a festival in a pub. peaceful progress peeps had decked it out with artwork and every aspect of it was thought through to give locals a taste of hippiedom. ace. it left me with a wonderful warm feeling and a love for my friends and a real sense of family in canton. well done fairplay!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-35693427580937305722009-07-17T04:52:00.000-07:002009-07-18T08:09:35.180-07:00explaining the 20th centurythis week has mainly be filled with death, not an immediate member of the family (although my dog, fender sadly died last week) but during my cinema ushering shifts. through a cruel twist of fate i was ushering for BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA and then KATYN three times in one week. by the end of this week all i want to do is watch comedies.<br /><br />the BRIDGES OF TEREBITHIA was part of SCREEN SCHOOL. i'd not seen it but heard it was about kids who create a magical world. it was a lot less cgi laden than i had feared, the story mainly focussing on two bullied kids becoming friends and then going into the forest to build a treehouse and explore a make believe world they had created, their foes and heroes are clearly very real. it meandered along perfectly ok, a bit cheesey for me, but then i'm not 10 years old, it pleased me that the girls were ballsy and the situation seemed real. but was shocked at the end when *SPOILER ALERT* the little girl died! the kid came back from a museum visit to find his best friend dead! i thought he'd go to their magical place and she'd be there after all but she wasn't! the kids seemed to deal with this better than me. i spoke to the lecturer wynn thomas who said he'd chosen it because it was a mature film that would teach them about script writing and story.<br /><br />the next day i was in for the long haul. i had a double shift of polish film KATYN, which i was also down for on my wednesday afternoon shift. it is the story of how the soviets killed 12,000 polish officers in world war two and blamed the nazis, the truth only coming out in the 1990s when peristroika open up the records. the majority of the army was made up of reservists: lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors; people who were needed to rebuild poland after the war so stalin decided that they were too valuable to live, that to increase the sense of chaos the soviet government could control he needed to execute them. director andrejz wadja is in his eighties and his father was one of those officers who just "disappeared", his mother believed till the day she died that one day he would come back to them and he wanted to tell the story of the massacre and the lie. the film expertly does both of these, showing a handful of families who lose people and try to cling on to some semblance of the truth. i suppose it is a kind of polish version of SCHINDLER'S LIST but without the hope at the end of escapees. anyone connected to the story who knew the truth was made to keep quiet or taken to the gulag for imprisonment or murdered. i was in pieces all three times. i kept thinking, "how do you explain this to children?" "how can we explain these crimes?" "why are they allowed to continue in countries like rwanda?" i was in a spin all week. some scenes were so painfully and brutally beautiful: the smoke obscuring the view in the first scene where the country becomes invaded on two sides; the washing away of the bloody in the factory-line style asassination chamber; the sandy earth being bulldozed over the bodies in the mass grave; the blank pages of the diary after the death of the officers.<br /><br />i was very glad to get to work with casey and ewan again, to escape from there. i went to the museum where they were filming the rapey monster scenes. it sounds dark but was in fact wonderfully funny, i have had many ed wood moments on this shoot. mainly i was helping leah do some clean up and wrangling one of the reds behind the monster in the cave. there were museum staff on hand who were very helpful and nice. on a monday, when the museum is closed they do a stock take to make sure things haven't been tampered with and need to leave all the lights and videos running so it was wonderfully surreal being in the fibre glass cave and hearing a disembodied voice on a loop telling me about the ice age. every so often casey's voice directing chrissy the rapey monster would be drowned out by the woosh of the wind and the roar of a wooly mammouth. it was great! but we got very wet on the way home. i clearly need to re-waterproof my waterproof coat.<br /><br />since the weather was so awful we spent a lot of nights in and i kept hankering for escape: romantic comedies, silly films. i made steen watch SINGING IN THE RAIN against his will but i think he quite enjoyed it. i laugh at donald o'connor's mugging in "make em laugh" and swoon at gene kelly every time i see it but i think steen was a bit bored. musical hater! the peak of silly films was reached on sunday night after getting back from work and finding brit com CONFETTI on tv. i was flicking around and saw the bloke that isn't david mitchell from MITCHELL AND WEBB with his knob out and kept watching. as it was bbc there were no adverts to break the spell and i ended up watching the whole thing. it was very high concept, a wedding magazine does a special on unusual weddings and pits three obsessions against each other to win a dream home: naturists, tennis and musicals. the musicals are clearly going to win the prize all the way through and the tennis pair were horrible and quite funny but the naturists were really sweet and nice and i really wanted them to win. steen didn't watch this with me but he said later he'd seen it in the cinema to see the lady from PEEP SHOW with her clothes off, so i found it funny that we'd been drawn to it for similar reasons.<br /><br />another way to shake off the horror of the 20th century was pure escapism in the form of HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. i have no shame in liking harry potter, it doesn't make me an idiot and it doesn't make me a weirdo goth doing reenactment dressing up like a witch, either. i read the first book from a recommendation to keep my brain reading something light when i was on a break in the middle of my final exams at uni and quite enjoyed it. its not serious, its a kids book. you do get drawn in but i get drawn in by all sorts of things (archers plotlines, for example) but i'm not about to start calling actors by their character names in the street or anything. sorry if i sound defensive, i've had 10 years of ridicule. anyway, the film was all right. i wouldn't really care too much if it wasn't, i just want to see how it looks in someone else's head. i still have a problem with harry and hermione, in my head they were nowhere near as posh sounding as they are on screen but there we are, generally its very close to the book, the only one i've really hated has been the first one cos it was chris columbus directing and i find his stuff overly glossy, sluggish, mawkish, generally many kinds of "ish".<br /><br />to finish off my week i've been reading jane fondas' autobiography MY LIFE SO FAR. i meant to go and see her speak at hay festival a couple of years ago when this came out, i've always liked jane fonda (stemming from a childhood obsession with BARBARELLA) and although its chocablock with californian therapy speak its really very candid and an good read. she's an interesting lady who has lived an interesting life. ah, well a week later since all that began i'm starting to feel a little heavy with the weight of all that history but i am very glad i was able to see KATYN.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-53408396597776867412009-07-10T05:19:00.000-07:002009-07-17T04:52:13.911-07:00moving in, moving upthe week started well, with another adventure to bristol. it was a dark and stormy night, the weather had broken at last and it broke with aplomb. after all this hot weather it felt almost pleasant to be in a thunder storm by the sea, it feels very appropriate looking out of the portholes in a boat on a night like this. we were in the THEKLA to see ST VINCENT on the promotional tour for her new album, "actor". the thekla is a wonderful venue for intimate gigs and it was with a bubble of excitement that we went downstairs to discover a wall of warm noise from THIS IS MY NORMAL STATE. going down the harsh metal steps of the boat was like descending into a different realm, the echoing vocals pulling you into a subterranean world. the female japanese singer on stage sang trance-like, channelling the stylings of sigur ros accompanied by a cellist and grungey guitar loops. it was a magical moment and when they finished and the lights came up i felt like i had been woken up from a blurry dream. for the first band on to have this effect is rare and precious and made me curiously excited for what was to come. a couple of cans of strongbow was to come next, folllowed by the beautiful psyche folk of BLUE ROSES. she seemed nervous as she took the stage but the nerves slipped away when she began playing, first on the piano and then acoustic guitar. these were hypnotic, meaningful songs with dreamy melodies sometimes harmonised with her violinist but often alone, speaking to a spurned lover with sorrow and hope. a little wait for ST VINCENT and we're getting anxious. bristol is a great place, with a great number of venues and ace promoters but a shit train timetable. its pushing 10pm and we're going to have to leave at 10.40pm to get the last train. people get on stage and get off stage, she is testing the mics from off stage so a disembodied annie clark voice trills over the dj. and we wait. this is not her fault but it does mean that we miss the end of her set as she doesn't come on till 10.15pm. arse. but what we do see is an amazing musician playing around with vocoders and effects pedals without detracting from the powerful melodies that have you humming her songs down the street for weeks. live she comes off as far warmer than the porcelain, chastising voice that dominates her album "marry me". i was expecting someone far more poised and cold but found her friendly and coltish on stage. she engaged with the audience to the extent that she turned her routine into a impromptu stand up routine when technical difficulties struck. standouts from the set were the powerful "now, now" the sarcastic "marry me" and the mesmerizing "the strangers". turning to run for the train with pained expressions on our faces we will definitely be catching ST VINCENT and indeed everyone on the bill, next time they come to town.<br /><br />tuesday was PANEL 9 FROM OUTER SPACE day! the boys from the DRONES comedy club in CHAPTER (whom i never get to see cos i'm always downstairs in the other bar) have a panel game and it is a lot of fun. clint, dan and laura bryon are the regulars and joined by guest comics, this month being spencer mcgarry, huw evans and some bloke also called dan (who i thought was rubbish but turned out to be dan glyn who is very famous for doing a very good kids programme on s4c - maybe he's a better writer than performer...). as with most comedy its pointless telling you how good it was without telling you the jokes, which always sound awful when written down and repeated. rest assured, it was a good time and i laughed a lot. huw tended to whitter on about peados, spencer was a comedy natural (he's like this in real life, i can vouch for his comedy chops) and clint was sardonic as always. my friend anwen even got to win a book that from the front cover looked like bill bailey in a hitchhikers' guide scenario. <br /><br />wednesday i ushered for FRENCH FILM, a sub-richard curtis "comedy" that wasted wonderful acting talents with its poor script. the story is of an urbane posh london journalist is doing a piece on a director of romantic french films and it makes him think about the romance in his own life. everyone in this film (whether they are employed or not) seems to have very swish apartments in the heart of london with gardens and well designed furniture. they partner swap and the urbane journalist talks a lot. remind you of someone? this whole plot could have been lifted from a woody allen but the silly "oh arn't we everso english, it'll turn out in the end" script was pure richard curtis and also reminded me of THIS YEARS LOVE and that spate of sub-FOUR WEDDINGS films that came out in the 90s. it was pretty dire. the cast were very good: hugh bonneville, anne marie duff, douglas henshall, victoria hamilton in the lead roles and it seemed to me to be such a shame that we're still making films like this. some moments in the film i could just see the script written in front of me, which is obviously a very bad sign. the saving grace was eric cantona playing the film director that the journalist is obsessed with, he seemed to be the only one having fun. <br /><br />thursday was will's day off work that week so we did a blitz on the house. will moved in at the start of the month but the first week we were busy with casey's video and this was the first day we'd had to really put stuff away properly. when he temporarily lived with me last year we kept stuff here so there was just cds and a few books to put up and clothes. ah yes, the clothes. i already have too many clothes and two wardrobes (comes of filling up two wardrobes in my previous house) so we had to do some moving around of furniture to make room for more storage. we mostly just put amalgomated our badge collection and put these badges on a curtain. lazy! but it was an enjoyable job and got us talking about other things we were going to change around. very exciting! in the early evening we made a tasty italian style pasta meal with lots of red wine. then continued to drink the bottle and another. then went to the FUWCH GOCH POP QUIZ and drank another bottle each. wankered. i haven't been so drunk since, um, the last pop quiz. we came third AGAIN! and went to DEMPSEYS for afters but still had loads of fun apart from the guilt at realising that i'd given a couple of wrong answers (in the picture round mistook miles davis' bitches brew for miles smiles and said it was the doors' la woman instead of strange days. ooooh the shame). i felt awful but happy the next day. the next two days in fact. ooof. i had some great soup in CHAPTER on the friday for lunch which perked me up, a very creamy tomato. you know when you taste something and it seems like the best thing you've ever tasted? well, that was my experience and rounded the week off nicely.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-78684617711593192462009-06-28T11:07:00.000-07:002009-07-11T08:27:28.990-07:00fun out of the sunthis week was marked like a hot brand on the skin by our part in the casey and ewan (hereby to be known as raymo) directed video for CATE LE BON. it was the hottest week of the year so far, the sort of weather people leapt into wearing nothing but shorts and people in offices complained about the lack of air conditioning. our working environment was the llofft theatre space above the chapter cafe bar with blacked out windows and at least 4 500 watt hallogen bulb lights at any given time. with no fan. if this was a professional production everyone would have sued! but it was casey and ewan, top creative minds of our time and we gave our time freely and happily, because its far more fun than anything else we do normally. poor cate, she gave birth to an egg, attacked by tree people, raped by a monster and her head pulled off and then lynched by an angry mob. a friend of mine came upstairs to help at one point and said i looked completely calm and at home. i was, i love all this stuff, its what i imagined myself doing when i was a kid. things being what they were and the little twists i took to veer off this path i've ended up doing something different but its always nice being back in that atmosphere where saying things like "i think we should move her eyeball to the right a little more" seem completely normal. we did our normal work and then dashed upstairs to help out till about 11pm from monday and friday and usually got a pint in at the end of the evening. a bloody brilliant way to spend a working week.<br /><br />other things i did that week that was exciting was attend lots of CHAPTER meetings. this may sound dull to some but it was to discuss moving back to the other side of the building and all that entails: very exciting indeed! our visual arts director, hannah firth, gave us a presentation on the interior design she, angela giddens and marc rees had co-designed (old school) and we saw the finalised signage (neon neon!) and we talked about all that needed to be done. as soon as we move back we have arts festivals WONDERCULTURE and MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES and then hot on their heels is SWN festival and EXPERIMENTICA. the capacity is going to be huge, a real leap from what we have now (currently at about 200 we will have capacity for 660 in the new concourse) so its important we do a lot of planning. it was revealed that we will also have far more commissioned spaces for art and the idea of what it is going to be like just made my stomach bubble with joy.<br /><br />on the friday we said goodbye to the raymo team to attend the JOY COLLECTIVE benefit gig in aid of the hospice that looked after jonny's dad when he was dying. it was an opportunity to go to TJ'S and see FUTURE OF THE LEFT and jonny's new band SCIENCE BASTARD. it was very odd going into tjs again. i worked out that i hadn't been there since 1997 when we shot the catatonia video mulder and scully in the xmas break from uni. that is 12 years ago. frightening. it hadn't changed much, apart from the wall to the quiet room moving a bit and the toilets relocated, it had the same feel. i was flashbacking all over the place. NINJA NINJA were on first, they were ok. deans and steen did not like them but i thought they were all right, they seemed to need a bit more practice. SCIENCE BASTARD were full of energy and good fun but the night truly belonged to FUTURE OF THE LEFT, they really are so good live. kelson stage dived at one point and was playing his bass whilst being held up by the crowd. it was a strange contrast that the last time i'd been in there kevin allen, the director of the catatonia video staged a stage dive with cerys that took many attempts to muster into looking like the real thing.<br /><br />on the sunday we had a film day, since i was ushering for the ken loach season. we saw LOOKING FOR ERIC followed by KES. it was interesting to see how much and how little his style had changed over the years. everyone's seen (and been traumatised by) kes, its up there with WATERSHIP DOWN with one of those films you saw when you were a kid that made you cry your eyes out and this wasn't even accompanied by art garfunkel crooning comfort over the credits. it was odd to look back at the 70s in a very real way, without some bouncy voiceover telling you how great spacehoppers were. some people in the older part of my generation than me had taken their tween children to watch it and it suddenly made me feel very old. i remember things looking like that, i remember that life, if a little distantly and dreamlike, but to them it must seem like how things were in victorian times. it is such a true picture of how brutal things were, the children were as wild as the animals, loach seemed to be portraying human society as a lie of civilisation. it may be my age, but it feels like everything is mapped out that children are never allowed outside on their own to play, their every moment is monitored, closing in on their imagination. LOOKING FOR ERIC was in contrast to that, quite a feelgood movie. it begins with postman eric having a panic attack. his life is at a turning point, his partner has left him and his first wife, lily is back in contact through their grandchild and the remembering of how he screwed up the first time has him reeling. added to this he has two very lazy, abusive, drug taking teenage stepsons that somehow he has ended up solely responsible for. seeking guidance in his life he takes some of the eldest's weed and tries to calm down, in the process hallucinating eric cantona. cantona gives mysterious gallic advice but as most good counsellors tend to do, he lets eric the postman work things out for himself. it was a delightful film, about being and becoming a man, from the teenage sons' maturation and veering away from false idols and how if working class men became better at expressing themselves and learning to deal with their responsibilities. it was also a relief that it was not as depressing as some loach films can be.<br /><br />to get completely over the hot week we went to the BAD MOVIE CLUB to see lindsey lohan in I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. nicko warned us it was bad. she even said it was worse than THE SWARM. "pah!" i declared, "nothing is worse than the swarm". i was wrong. at least the swarm made some sort of internal sense. it was stoopid but didn't make you go "whaaa?". the plot is such: lindsey lohan is an ordinary middle class virginal teen called aubrey and in her town is a serial killer who lobs off bits of teens then leaves them for dead. one day she goes missing. we see lots of horrific footage of her limbs being frozen off, hacked into by bits of fancy sculptured blue glass and then she is found at the side of the road. when she awakes she tells the doctors and her family she is not aubrey but dakota, her twin. the only way to see this movie is in the company of the bad movie club. i was laughing my socks off. nicko and joe's gaffawing at some of the terrible terrible lines and gaping plot holes made it all worth it. the plot barely made sense and the twist at the end just made you go "no way!". a brilliant way to end the week.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-24330846308758794742009-06-25T08:49:00.000-07:002009-06-28T11:07:25.379-07:00the big unsleepthis 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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1799353168214216910.post-65046201844056908302009-06-25T05:10:00.000-07:002009-06-25T08:49:20.489-07:00moshing in buffalo and other delightsgetting back from the holiday we had a nice lay in and a massive fry up in the morning before i headed for work and then dashed straight over to HASSAN HAJJAJAN's SOUK space in CHAPTER. there were 4 artists doing soundscapes: jon ruddick, matt cook and odysseus constantinou (and the fourth i don't know the name of, i'm sorry. i think its duncan... but i really don't know) over middle eastern silent films. i missed the first two short films but stayed for the final one which was of burning oil fields just after the kuwait - iraq battles in the early 90s. there was a helicoptor going over the dessert and the landscape looked incredible, like another planet. when we got to the oilfields burning it looked like hell. knowing that the burning of these oil fields meant that the world lost hundreds of years worth of energy in times where we're looking at the loss of all oil energy in the next 100 years was heartbreaking. the music the set it to took us on this otherworldly journey and was just beautiful. afterwards jon and i had a big party in our house where the musician richard james broke a dining chair. the only other place i've lived where a chair was broken was also by a musician: ringo starr's son zac starkey when he came to visit my friend stef in barcelona. this is a random fact that isn't entirely relevant but i found it quite funny at the time. poor rich, he was embarrassed and very apologetic. it was quite a nice party from what i can remember. steen had the record player going and many people saw my appalling collection of 80s hits. goodbye, sweet credibility!<br /><br />on monday we went to see BLUE EYELIDS at chapter. i picked this merely for the poster, which was a gorgeous drawing of the girl in the film in blue on a pink background. maybe more choices of films should be based on the poster, cos this was a good 'un. it was an offbeat romance like a fairytale, but much darker than that makes it sound. shy marina, who seems almost not there in some scenes, wins a trip for two to a beach resort. after her sister lets her down she realises she has no-one to take so pretty much takes the first person she finds: victor, who claims to know her from school (but she seems to remember scant details of this time). they getting to know each other better and its here the story really takes off. its scenes of quiet, awkward first dates are quite wonderful. it could be bleak and heartbreaking but stayed with me as a beautiful little film.<br /><br />the next day was the SLEEP FURIOUSLY night at CHAPTER with a Q&A with GIDDEON KOPPEL. the film was slow and beautiful, focussing on the little yellow library van going around the surrounding villages and meeting people, such as koppel's sculptor mother and children at the school which is due for closure. it sounds really crass but i kept thinking of postman pat and his van afterwards, it had the same dreamlike quality that the first scene in postman pat used to make me feel when i was watching it as a child, the little village where things were stuck in time and would just go on tomorrow whether we were watching or not. i don't think koppel would like my childish comparison though, he didn't seem to like any of the other comments on his film that viewers made in the q&a very much. he was an arrogant pompous man and almost made me dislike the film. i don't like being so harsh with people but he seemed to want to alienate the audience talking about academic film language when people wanted to tell him how beautiful they found it and it made me a little angry. i know who john berger is and i've read his books but i don't think name dropping in that manner helps with film education, i believe that if you try and keep it simple you can explain difficult concepts to people and make them happier and enlightened rather than make them feel stupid and not clever enough to understand your masterwork.<br /><br />will and i had a day off together on thursday so we had a nice breakfast and lunch then headed off to see the DIANE ARBUS EXHIBITION at the national gallery. as we were running short on time (partly due to me stopping off in the bike shed for a new bell for my increasingly amazing looking spruced up bike) we didn't stop at any of the other bits but just headed straight for arbus. it was a good comprehensive showing of her work, nestled quite appropriately next to the bacon and modern art section. it had a few of the old favourites there, the boy with the granade, the christmas tree, the mixed race couple as well as a few i'd not seen bigger than in my a4 sized book at home, which was a real treat. it reminded me to show steen the FUR film that they made a couple of years ago based on arbus' introduction to photography.<br /><br />later that evening it was the LOOSE night. liz and ryan again outdid themselves with an amazing line up. ISLET, only their 3rd gig, i think they said were amazing, lots of instrument swapping and funky bass post rock stuff. i was grinning throughout. the grinning did not stop there, however for next on was THE LOVELY EGGS, who were very much fun. they sounded better live than they do on tape, the tongue in cheek-ness fully present and brilliant banter. when SHONEN KNIFE came on no-one could believe that it was the same band that have been gigging since the early 80s, they were full of energy and kept up a marathon set that got loads of people moshing at the front (and in buffalo!) this is the second time i've witnessed "atmosphere" created at the direst of wanker venues, buffalo and both times its been a loose night. no coincidence there, i think. liz puts on amazing gigs. afterwards we went out to celebrate 3 birthdays: john, lovely ben and noel (who was proudly showing off a sabrina "boys boys boys (summertime love)" single amongst his presents). i ended up getting much more drunk than i expected and staying out much too late.<br /><br />on friday we went to my friend KATY'S WEDDING PARTY. they'd been together for 20 years but decided to suddenly go to registry office and become official, it was at the yacht club in cardiff bay and had lovely views and was a lovely do. we sat talking to our friend chris fowler most of the night and i danced a bit with my friend rachel. we went home fairly early but still pretty tired after a beautiful day.<br /><br />unfortunately for me i got a bit drunk at the wedding party and even more unfortunately i had to get up at 6am. fortunately though, this was to help out at the PHOTOMARATHON! matt and betina had asked me to be on a radio programme at 7am. matt picked me up just before 7am and there was nary time to finish my cup of bbc tea before we were in the studio. i thought i'd be really nervous but it was absolutely fine and i felt quite relaxed. we talked about the photomarathon between the expenses scandal and the lions game (i don't know what this refers to but someone said it was rugby later). it was fine. we then went down to the millennium centre and met the press officer, ruth, who helped us set up the tables ready for the big day. it all went by in a bit of a blur. photomarathon baseball caps handed out, hundreds of people queueing for their film and registration card and then the topics were announced. i was as much in the dark as anyone else, keen to start and by 10.30am i finally saw the topics and went off with rich, rhian, darren, ian and mike and steen to go off and shoot!<br /><br />topics<br />1. topic number / colourful<br />2. contained<br />3. roll with it<br />4. chip<br /><br />1. i did a bunch of sweets on a green table, pleased with it i was. steen did a brilliant bit of shoelace work that pissed on my first entry.<br />2. i did a shut-up building down the bay only to be again trumped by steen's amazing gravestone in the centre of town<br />3. i made steen do a forward roll for me (not sure if this came out properly or not unfortunately) and steen got me to take a picture of him on a bin like a sort of failed superman<br />4. i wrote "c" on steen's hip. lame. steen cut a chip size out of a potato and photographed the potato, which i liked<br /><br />2pm next topics released<br />5. age<br />6. crunch<br />7. black and white<br />8. social network<br /><br />5. i took a picture of some mould on a piece of wood that i liked. at this point steen and i had to split up, i was due in work at 5.30pm and getting a bit tired and grumpy to boot. we had time to take a great picture of the park behind the law courts for his age entry.<br />6. i took a bite out of a crunchy biscuit (again, a bit lame, not sure about that)<br />7. i found an expenses claim for lembit opik, a summons for his council tax (so we paid an extra £50 to him for forgetting to pay it!) and took a photo of that<br />8. i went into chapter bar and saw uncle simon et al. i said "don't move". that was my photo done!<br /><br />steen texted me the last 4 entries due to my being at work<br />9. spillage<br />10. missing<br />11. dressed to impress<br />12. winner<br /><br />9. in chapter i was limited about what i could do but i found a mug and filled it with box office paperclips for spillage<br />10. made a little paper saddle for the ceramic horse in the gallery display cabinet with "shurgar" on for missing<br />then ran home to get a prop for steen and dressed up the cat in a shimmery sequinned top for 11. and then photographed rhys with his fake trophies (he found them) for winner.<br /><br />ace! done! i cycled like a bandit to get to the millennium centre in time to hand them in before 10pm and saw the gang all there, including pedro. we had a nice long chat and then headed home defeated. it was close to midnight and the lack of sleep was unreal.<br /><br />the next day i began my new life as free of backpackers! i started in the cafe at a relatively decadent 9am and had a lovely shift of "getting jobs done" before ushering in the cinema for PRINCES QUEST, a french animation telling the story of two brothers from the middle east who have to work together to free the djin fairy. i'd seen it before and really enjoyed it again the second time around, some of the set pieces are beautiful, with the middle eastern patterns and layering of colours.<br /><br />that evening was marc robert's gig upstairs in chapter with ZEUK followed by SHELLEYAN ORPHAN. they hadn't gigged for 16 years and it was a bit shambolic but i did love it. they were at their best when they just relaxed into it and let their dreamlike songs surround you. her voice sounded very much like the lady from the SUNDAYS and they did a great nick drake cover.<br /><br />what a great week to come back to!pixieglaspickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07288011386656857618noreply@blogger.com0