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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing posts with label chapter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chapter. Show all posts
27 Oct 2009
28 Jun 2009
fun out of the sun
this 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
25 Jun 2009
the big unsleep
this week has been hot. hot and bright. i've been waking up at about 5am wide awake then falling asleep just before i have to get up. very annoying. monday passed by quite nicely, played with the cat after work then fell asleep in the garden and almost missed the FUTURE OF THE LEFT live instore performance in SPILLERS. i felt a bit groggy when i got there and found it packed full of people and airless. i found steen who was stood just behind matt and jonny (from JOY COLLECTIVE) and charlotte and jamie were next to me, a good placing. i tried to fend off fainting by waving my photomarathon topic card for the next half hour or so. they did 6 songs i think and it was very good. i especially liked the song "mark foley was right" cos he tends to be. i'm warming to future of the left. i thought they were great the first time i saw them (i think it was their first gig too) but never seemed to be in the mood for them since, which sounds like a complete diss but i always seemed to be doing something else when they were playing. it was good to see them here to remind myself that they are actually really good. apparently my friend james is moving into a house with falkous and matt, which will be the most cynical house of disgruntled males in cardiff, i can't wait to visit!
afterwards we went and had some tea in CHAPTER and went to see SYNECDOCHE, NY, the new charlie kaufman film. i was incredibly excited about this, dismissing the cries i've vaguely heard from the press about it being indulgent. ha! he's allowed to be indulgent, he's a genius, thought i. i was wrong. it was a mess. i started off enjoying it, gleefully noting that everyone in the cast list at the beginning was amazing (dianne wiest! catherine keener! jennifer jason leigh! phillip seymore hoffman!) and halfway through was longing for it to end. its the story of a writer in an unhappy marriage who starts writing a great masterwork on his life and that is all you can describe it as really. it is a valiant effort, in a way, he's trying to redefine film language, it is as massive an opus as the play the character is writing, trying to understand himself by getting it all played out in front of him, his personal life seems out of control so he tries to take control over it by reimaginging it on stage. a good effort but it didn't work for me. it felt like unfunny woody allen and just became a big sprawl of characters and went on a bit long. i understood where he was trying to get to but i felt like he needed a filter of some kind, someone to tell him where to stop. by the umpteenth time someone new was becoming his wife / daughter / assistant i just thought it would never end. a shame, but a grand shame which is the most interesting so not a waste of time.
wednesday i met some friends lou and rich from AMBERCOUCH for an exciting business meeting, we're thinking of starting a website. i came up with an idea a couple of years ago and asked how much it is to get a website and dismissed the idea for being ridiculously expensive but now they say it may be done! wow! we're doing research on it now, a sort of cardiff version of BUY OLYMPIA, one of my all time favourite websites. finding out if we can get grants, my time won't really be wasted but lou and rich's is a bit more precious since they'll be doing the actual work.
after that i went to usher for O'HORTEN, a norweigan film about a lonely train driver who has just retired and has to find something to do with his life. it was a wonderful, beautiful film. it could have been really depressing and sad, about the uselessness of retired life but instead it gives horten the chance to forge relationships with people and live for the first time in his life. the scenery when he was driving his train around the mountains and snowscapes was breathtaking and made me determined to try and do the train journey around europe steen and i have been talking about.
i zipped off to PULSE to buy some much needed toms of maine deodorant, soap pods for the laundry, kingfisher toothpaste and all those useful hippie things i am about to run out of and saw the lovely marc roberts and rob kennedy and morgan hall in there, a proper chapter away from chapter! then zipped back to chapter to see THE BIG SLEEP. i missed the raymond chandler talk last week but was determined to see this one, a big favourite. it was amazing to see it on a big screen. i'd forgotten the script was written by william faulkner till he came up on screen in the credits and its evident in some of the scenes, the first one with the general and marlowe, any with bogey and bacall... it crackles. the villains seem genuinely sleazy, the grime reaching all the way up to the upper class in hollywood. wonderful.
thursday i was entirely lazy. i caught up on some sleep by having a proper lay in and did lots of laundry (still trying to get through stuff from when the cat had fleas last week) and stayed in my dressing gown till about 3pm. at 6pm i got picked up by rob to be taken with will to bristol to THE CUBE cinema where we were going to watch "introduction to japanese sex films". we got some food first in CAFE KINO, a co-operative place which was basically exactly what sort of business i want to run when i grow up. it had all these little touches, all very much home-made and BOOK CROSSING posters (leave a book, post in a book crossing pamphlet and then it can be tracked every time someone new reads and then leaves it). the food we had in there was amazing, i had a spicy bean burger with amazing thick cut chips and steen had falafel. we dashed over to the cube, worried we'd be late but they're so laid back there it didn't start for another half an hour. i love it in the cube, we keep saying we'll have to go more often, if it wasn't for the shite cardiff-bristol train service i think we'd go every week. everyone (staff and customers) were sat outside having an impromptu bbq and chatting and drinking, very relaxed then we went in and was introduced to the film by a nice man called jasper sharp who has written a book about PINKU EIGA, the japanese sex film industry. the perimetres are quite tight: its 1 hour, budget of £20,000, at least 1 sex scene every 20 minutes and no pubes or real genital parts but apart from that you can do anything. the first film we saw was A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN, a rather sweet film about a farmer whose son has died and lives with his widowed daughter in law. he has gone a bit senile and gets up every morning to milk his favourite cow who has died so she pretends to be the cow. they love each other but feel they can't express their love and its really quite romantic. the second was SEXY BATTLE GIRLS, an altogether less sweet, more funny film about a schoolgirl whose father has installed a device in her vagina to exact revenge upon the man who stole her mother away from them. neither film was particuarly sexy, too much tit grabbing and the second film had a bit of tying up women to torture stuff in it which i found a bit uncomfortable to watch but it was more benny hill than anything else, just silly. afterwards we had a chat with jasper about how films like SHORTBUS are banned and yet art films can get away with loads of sex and how the cube got the most e-mails for showing these films than anything else recently. many famous political japanese directors got their starts on the pinku eigas as they could explore all kinds of themes without them needing to be commercial.
saturday morning i was ushering for the SCREEN SCHOOL showing DICK TRACY. i was a little disappointed with the selection and i presume the children were too, from the way they dashed out of the cinema like it was on fire once i'd said they could leave. i'd not seen it before, my family didn't really go to the cinema when i was a kid so i'd not got around to seeing it before. it was too much of an ego led production and very dated. it was like warren beatty saying "look who my mates are, i can get dustin hoffman and al pacino in loads of prosthetic make up!" the acting was baaaad and the cartoon style looked terrible compared to comic book adaptations like SIN CITY. the only high spot were the madonna songs. i played the I'M BREATHLESS album over and over and over so had expectations that there would be songs all the way through and i knew all the words, but no, it didn't even show off the songs by madonna, which in those days was a big deal. madonna was predictably terrible, its funny how you forget how bad she is. she is really really bad. this film was hardly even enjoyable and it made me curious to see what they're going to be saying in their feedback session next week, can't wait for that. "sir, this is shit, can we see more buster keaton?" maybe? i only hope.
afterwards we went and had some tea in CHAPTER and went to see SYNECDOCHE, NY, the new charlie kaufman film. i was incredibly excited about this, dismissing the cries i've vaguely heard from the press about it being indulgent. ha! he's allowed to be indulgent, he's a genius, thought i. i was wrong. it was a mess. i started off enjoying it, gleefully noting that everyone in the cast list at the beginning was amazing (dianne wiest! catherine keener! jennifer jason leigh! phillip seymore hoffman!) and halfway through was longing for it to end. its the story of a writer in an unhappy marriage who starts writing a great masterwork on his life and that is all you can describe it as really. it is a valiant effort, in a way, he's trying to redefine film language, it is as massive an opus as the play the character is writing, trying to understand himself by getting it all played out in front of him, his personal life seems out of control so he tries to take control over it by reimaginging it on stage. a good effort but it didn't work for me. it felt like unfunny woody allen and just became a big sprawl of characters and went on a bit long. i understood where he was trying to get to but i felt like he needed a filter of some kind, someone to tell him where to stop. by the umpteenth time someone new was becoming his wife / daughter / assistant i just thought it would never end. a shame, but a grand shame which is the most interesting so not a waste of time.
wednesday i met some friends lou and rich from AMBERCOUCH for an exciting business meeting, we're thinking of starting a website. i came up with an idea a couple of years ago and asked how much it is to get a website and dismissed the idea for being ridiculously expensive but now they say it may be done! wow! we're doing research on it now, a sort of cardiff version of BUY OLYMPIA, one of my all time favourite websites. finding out if we can get grants, my time won't really be wasted but lou and rich's is a bit more precious since they'll be doing the actual work.
after that i went to usher for O'HORTEN, a norweigan film about a lonely train driver who has just retired and has to find something to do with his life. it was a wonderful, beautiful film. it could have been really depressing and sad, about the uselessness of retired life but instead it gives horten the chance to forge relationships with people and live for the first time in his life. the scenery when he was driving his train around the mountains and snowscapes was breathtaking and made me determined to try and do the train journey around europe steen and i have been talking about.
i zipped off to PULSE to buy some much needed toms of maine deodorant, soap pods for the laundry, kingfisher toothpaste and all those useful hippie things i am about to run out of and saw the lovely marc roberts and rob kennedy and morgan hall in there, a proper chapter away from chapter! then zipped back to chapter to see THE BIG SLEEP. i missed the raymond chandler talk last week but was determined to see this one, a big favourite. it was amazing to see it on a big screen. i'd forgotten the script was written by william faulkner till he came up on screen in the credits and its evident in some of the scenes, the first one with the general and marlowe, any with bogey and bacall... it crackles. the villains seem genuinely sleazy, the grime reaching all the way up to the upper class in hollywood. wonderful.
thursday i was entirely lazy. i caught up on some sleep by having a proper lay in and did lots of laundry (still trying to get through stuff from when the cat had fleas last week) and stayed in my dressing gown till about 3pm. at 6pm i got picked up by rob to be taken with will to bristol to THE CUBE cinema where we were going to watch "introduction to japanese sex films". we got some food first in CAFE KINO, a co-operative place which was basically exactly what sort of business i want to run when i grow up. it had all these little touches, all very much home-made and BOOK CROSSING posters (leave a book, post in a book crossing pamphlet and then it can be tracked every time someone new reads and then leaves it). the food we had in there was amazing, i had a spicy bean burger with amazing thick cut chips and steen had falafel. we dashed over to the cube, worried we'd be late but they're so laid back there it didn't start for another half an hour. i love it in the cube, we keep saying we'll have to go more often, if it wasn't for the shite cardiff-bristol train service i think we'd go every week. everyone (staff and customers) were sat outside having an impromptu bbq and chatting and drinking, very relaxed then we went in and was introduced to the film by a nice man called jasper sharp who has written a book about PINKU EIGA, the japanese sex film industry. the perimetres are quite tight: its 1 hour, budget of £20,000, at least 1 sex scene every 20 minutes and no pubes or real genital parts but apart from that you can do anything. the first film we saw was A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN, a rather sweet film about a farmer whose son has died and lives with his widowed daughter in law. he has gone a bit senile and gets up every morning to milk his favourite cow who has died so she pretends to be the cow. they love each other but feel they can't express their love and its really quite romantic. the second was SEXY BATTLE GIRLS, an altogether less sweet, more funny film about a schoolgirl whose father has installed a device in her vagina to exact revenge upon the man who stole her mother away from them. neither film was particuarly sexy, too much tit grabbing and the second film had a bit of tying up women to torture stuff in it which i found a bit uncomfortable to watch but it was more benny hill than anything else, just silly. afterwards we had a chat with jasper about how films like SHORTBUS are banned and yet art films can get away with loads of sex and how the cube got the most e-mails for showing these films than anything else recently. many famous political japanese directors got their starts on the pinku eigas as they could explore all kinds of themes without them needing to be commercial.
saturday morning i was ushering for the SCREEN SCHOOL showing DICK TRACY. i was a little disappointed with the selection and i presume the children were too, from the way they dashed out of the cinema like it was on fire once i'd said they could leave. i'd not seen it before, my family didn't really go to the cinema when i was a kid so i'd not got around to seeing it before. it was too much of an ego led production and very dated. it was like warren beatty saying "look who my mates are, i can get dustin hoffman and al pacino in loads of prosthetic make up!" the acting was baaaad and the cartoon style looked terrible compared to comic book adaptations like SIN CITY. the only high spot were the madonna songs. i played the I'M BREATHLESS album over and over and over so had expectations that there would be songs all the way through and i knew all the words, but no, it didn't even show off the songs by madonna, which in those days was a big deal. madonna was predictably terrible, its funny how you forget how bad she is. she is really really bad. this film was hardly even enjoyable and it made me curious to see what they're going to be saying in their feedback session next week, can't wait for that. "sir, this is shit, can we see more buster keaton?" maybe? i only hope.
moshing in buffalo and other delights
getting 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
topics
1. topic number / colourful
2. contained
3. roll with it
4. chip
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.
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
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
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
2pm next topics released
5. age
6. crunch
7. black and white
8. social network
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.
6. i took a bite out of a crunchy biscuit (again, a bit lame, not sure about that)
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
8. i went into chapter bar and saw uncle simon et al. i said "don't move". that was my photo done!
steen texted me the last 4 entries due to my being at work
9. spillage
10. missing
11. dressed to impress
12. winner
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
10. made a little paper saddle for the ceramic horse in the gallery display cabinet with "shurgar" on for missing
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.
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.
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.
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.
what a great week to come back to!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
topics
1. topic number / colourful
2. contained
3. roll with it
4. chip
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.
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
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
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
2pm next topics released
5. age
6. crunch
7. black and white
8. social network
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.
6. i took a bite out of a crunchy biscuit (again, a bit lame, not sure about that)
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
8. i went into chapter bar and saw uncle simon et al. i said "don't move". that was my photo done!
steen texted me the last 4 entries due to my being at work
9. spillage
10. missing
11. dressed to impress
12. winner
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
10. made a little paper saddle for the ceramic horse in the gallery display cabinet with "shurgar" on for missing
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.
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.
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.
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.
what a great week to come back to!
29 Mar 2009
week of work work of week
by the end of today i will have clocked up 74 hours in work in total. eek. that's like two work weeks in one week. no wonder i kept falling asleep after work. to be fair, most of it doesn't seem like work. chapter still feels like somewhere i go to hang out, although i do work hard i tend to think about it like i'm volunteering somewhere. i'd do a lot of this for free, but don't tell that to dark mavis...
the first "work" thing i did that was good fun was to usher for the turkish film THREE MONKEYS. it was the story of a rich politician who kills someone in a hit and run one dark night and convinces his chauffeur to take the blame for it, reasoning that he would be out in a year and would get a nice cash payout. the driver takes it and his wife and son get his wages for the time he is in prison. whilst there his son gets involved with some kids he shouldn't and his wife gets involved with someone she shouldn't: the rich businessman. it was a really great film, beautifully shot. it was claustrophobic and you could feel the heat coming off the camera, many shots were so tight on the actors that you could see the sweat drip from their skins and each dark folicle of facial hair. it was very atmospheric. it was part of the WALES ONE WORLD film festival we have at CHAPTER and every year we get a bunch of films that stick in my brain and never leave but don't get much publicity and small audiences because they're "foreign". i think things have changed quite a bit over the years but you still don't get enough people going to these films.
tuesday was a different story. tuesday was massively over-subscribed. EVERYMAN were putting on PEER GYNT and had a cast of thousands and an audience of about 6 people for every cast member wanting to see their sister / father / friend on stage and it sold out every night. everyman are an amateur company with huge ambitions. to put on peer gynt (a play that was written not to be performed but to be read) and keep it to the 3 1/4 hour length is a mammouth task and i think to a large extent they were successful. unfortunately the first night was a bit of a disaster because to peer #1 getting shitfaced prior to going on stage due to nerves. they had to rewrite dialogue and replace him after he intially left the stage in the first half hour. i, being naive, didn't realise he was drunk, i just thought he was a terrible actor. he was throwing himself around the stage and messing up the dialogue and just looked a mess. thankfully everyman has a team of good actors, a couple of which have clearly missed their calling to become lawyers and civil servants. i must admit that i didn't really enjoy it. i'd seen peer gynt when i was at school and completely hated it but since then had studied it and saw it as ibsen's most interesting play. however, i do HATE ibsen. maybe its better in norweigan? for me i think his plays are leaden and every staging i've seen of them has been unintentionally hilarious. i often quote the heavy handed "torvald, i've changed" bit from A DOLLS HOUSE and still think its a bit of a stretch that many people compare GHOSTS to HAMLET. at least shakespear was playful in his language. my friend mja was in the play and i enjoyed seeing her in it. it did feel like it was never going to end and a few of the oldies (it had a majority elderly audience) left in the interval.
wednesday "work" was watching CHE: PART 2. unfortunately i hadn't seen CHE: PART 1 and this felt like an extended battle scene. you could tell it was technically perfect; every character, however minor, was named; each location authentic. but i didn't feel it had much story to it. i did find out a little more about che guevara and thought benicio del toro was truly brilliant in it but it just didn't penetrate my brain very well. i think this is probably my fault for coming into the story mid-through, like complaining about a film when you've missed the first hour, it did make me want to see part one, i think there may be more talking and story in that one.
on thursday we saw DOUBT which was purely recreational. i went to catholic brownies (long story) and wanted to be a catholic for years. i loved the idea that if you did something wrong you could just go to confession, have some cool bread circles and jesus juice and it would go away. guilt gone! of course, its not that simple. the catholics are the guiltmeisters and tell you what to do all the time. my pre-teen OCD love of rituals would not make up for being guilty for being born. but hey, the movie was great. meryl streep was amazing, terrifying and unforgiving like nature and phillip seymore hoffman creepily charismatic. i loved the way that everything that was mentioned, even incidentally was concerned with doubt and faith: lessons about roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and believing in yourself and not gossips, it was stunning.
last night we went out for my friend casey's birthday drinks. in the end there were something ridiculous like 5 birthdays this week. an expensive week in cards! lovely rhodri had some birthday drinks with us as well, humble little chap didn't make a fuss of it and went somewhere quieter since it had got mad busy in chapter. casey got for his birthday a cross stitch of jesus from caroline, a weird bloody prosthetic hand from ewan and a card made from a sexually abused children's report from amy. i occasionally think me and casey have the same brain.
tonight there are a bunch of gigs and films and things but i just want to go home with my cat. i haven't got a plan today and i just want to cwtch with my cat and watch him playing. casey's film night is, again, on the list. cross fingers i don't fall asleep...
the first "work" thing i did that was good fun was to usher for the turkish film THREE MONKEYS. it was the story of a rich politician who kills someone in a hit and run one dark night and convinces his chauffeur to take the blame for it, reasoning that he would be out in a year and would get a nice cash payout. the driver takes it and his wife and son get his wages for the time he is in prison. whilst there his son gets involved with some kids he shouldn't and his wife gets involved with someone she shouldn't: the rich businessman. it was a really great film, beautifully shot. it was claustrophobic and you could feel the heat coming off the camera, many shots were so tight on the actors that you could see the sweat drip from their skins and each dark folicle of facial hair. it was very atmospheric. it was part of the WALES ONE WORLD film festival we have at CHAPTER and every year we get a bunch of films that stick in my brain and never leave but don't get much publicity and small audiences because they're "foreign". i think things have changed quite a bit over the years but you still don't get enough people going to these films.
tuesday was a different story. tuesday was massively over-subscribed. EVERYMAN were putting on PEER GYNT and had a cast of thousands and an audience of about 6 people for every cast member wanting to see their sister / father / friend on stage and it sold out every night. everyman are an amateur company with huge ambitions. to put on peer gynt (a play that was written not to be performed but to be read) and keep it to the 3 1/4 hour length is a mammouth task and i think to a large extent they were successful. unfortunately the first night was a bit of a disaster because to peer #1 getting shitfaced prior to going on stage due to nerves. they had to rewrite dialogue and replace him after he intially left the stage in the first half hour. i, being naive, didn't realise he was drunk, i just thought he was a terrible actor. he was throwing himself around the stage and messing up the dialogue and just looked a mess. thankfully everyman has a team of good actors, a couple of which have clearly missed their calling to become lawyers and civil servants. i must admit that i didn't really enjoy it. i'd seen peer gynt when i was at school and completely hated it but since then had studied it and saw it as ibsen's most interesting play. however, i do HATE ibsen. maybe its better in norweigan? for me i think his plays are leaden and every staging i've seen of them has been unintentionally hilarious. i often quote the heavy handed "torvald, i've changed" bit from A DOLLS HOUSE and still think its a bit of a stretch that many people compare GHOSTS to HAMLET. at least shakespear was playful in his language. my friend mja was in the play and i enjoyed seeing her in it. it did feel like it was never going to end and a few of the oldies (it had a majority elderly audience) left in the interval.
wednesday "work" was watching CHE: PART 2. unfortunately i hadn't seen CHE: PART 1 and this felt like an extended battle scene. you could tell it was technically perfect; every character, however minor, was named; each location authentic. but i didn't feel it had much story to it. i did find out a little more about che guevara and thought benicio del toro was truly brilliant in it but it just didn't penetrate my brain very well. i think this is probably my fault for coming into the story mid-through, like complaining about a film when you've missed the first hour, it did make me want to see part one, i think there may be more talking and story in that one.
on thursday we saw DOUBT which was purely recreational. i went to catholic brownies (long story) and wanted to be a catholic for years. i loved the idea that if you did something wrong you could just go to confession, have some cool bread circles and jesus juice and it would go away. guilt gone! of course, its not that simple. the catholics are the guiltmeisters and tell you what to do all the time. my pre-teen OCD love of rituals would not make up for being guilty for being born. but hey, the movie was great. meryl streep was amazing, terrifying and unforgiving like nature and phillip seymore hoffman creepily charismatic. i loved the way that everything that was mentioned, even incidentally was concerned with doubt and faith: lessons about roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and believing in yourself and not gossips, it was stunning.
last night we went out for my friend casey's birthday drinks. in the end there were something ridiculous like 5 birthdays this week. an expensive week in cards! lovely rhodri had some birthday drinks with us as well, humble little chap didn't make a fuss of it and went somewhere quieter since it had got mad busy in chapter. casey got for his birthday a cross stitch of jesus from caroline, a weird bloody prosthetic hand from ewan and a card made from a sexually abused children's report from amy. i occasionally think me and casey have the same brain.
tonight there are a bunch of gigs and films and things but i just want to go home with my cat. i haven't got a plan today and i just want to cwtch with my cat and watch him playing. casey's film night is, again, on the list. cross fingers i don't fall asleep...
22 Mar 2009
breathe, vaughan, breathe!
this week i did things that scared me. i didn't mean for lots of challenges to happen all in one week, they just presented themselves and it was up to me to slay the dragon or let it turn me to flames. the first happened on monday afternoon. my lovely friend paul asked me to cut his hair. i warned him that i'd never cut hair before but was willing to give it a go. he bought a sharp pair of scissors and away we went. it was only about 3 minutes in that i suddenly froze with panic. he'd asked for a very simple "same length all over" cut and i was taking huge chunks off and realised that i can't cut hair. not only am i not qualified, i have no idea what i'm doing. i've cut my own hair often and trimmed other people's hair before but i don't know how to take someone's hair and fashion it into some sort of sexy do and this point had escaped my attention till this very moment. i'd started on the side and the back and it was too late to go back. "its ok," reassured paul, "if its really bad i'll shave it off". he dropped into conversation that wedding that he was being best man at. it was this coming weekend. the haircut i was giving him was going to be in someone's wedding album for the rest of their lives. eek. i had to just keep going and developed a reliable method of sort of brushing my fingers through the hair, snipping as i went. i realised how much we take for granted when we go to the hairdressers, like going to the doctors, you just assume that this person knows exactly what they are doing and is blessed with magical powers. it aint true. they might just be making it up as they go along just like you. it was ok though, paul was pleased with it, although i know it wasn't a real haircut, i knew it was pretty much the same all over, which is what he wanted. it was OK and that was good enough for me.
i then had to confront someone on a work issue. i hate confrontations but i'm not afraid to just do them and get them over with because i know that if you leave things to fester then they can infect all sorts of things, a stone left unturned can hide nasty diseases. so i had a little chat and felt an awful lot better for it and it made lots of work things go a lot better subsequently. i have ideas form plans and i can get defeatist about a thing unless i'm sure it is worth seeing through. i can take my job a little too seriously but its because i care about it so much. i feel the weight of the responsibility in my hand, here is this precious thing and it needs to be nurtured in order to grow and succeed. in our meeting on wednesday we were talking about the future of chapter again and i found myself getting so excited, seeing all the possibilities. its already my favourite place in the world and its only going to get better.
the last thing i did was the biggie. on wednesday, after i'd finished my ushering shift in the cinema, graham the projectionist asked me if i'd be available to do a meet and greet with someone coming to speak at the film on friday "get him a cup of tea, make sure he's ok till he has to go on". obviously, this didn't present a problem. then sally the lovely new cinema programmer bounded over to ask if i "didn't mind hosting the Q&A session too". full of confidence that i cannot fathom the source of, i said yes. i think it was due to the sudden influx of vitamin A from all this recent unexpected sunshine. it was only the next day, when i spoke to carol, head of marketing, who went over my duties for that evening that i started to get a little nervous. the speaker was MARK LYNAS, a climate change expert who had contributed to the making of THE AGE OF STUPID, a documentary-cum-fiction film staring pete postlethwaite about the effects of climate change. i'd seen it in a preview screening the week before and enjoyed it, if it did frighten me a little. i'm quite careful with my carbon footprint (i have a bicycle, not a car; i buy ecologically sound cleaning products and organic food; i never put shopping in plastic bags; turn the light / heating off when not needed; etc) but i know others are not so careful and i know that there is shit going on all over the world in other countries that i have no power of controlling. you get the picture. carol warned me that i may get the odd nutter in the audience (it is chapter after all, i'm used to nutters) and an e-mail from dan, the WALES ONE WORLD FILM FESTIVAL organiser advised me that mark has had a lot of problems with audiences recently due to coming out as pro-nuclear, which he likened to coming out as gay to your wife. suddenly these images flashed into my head of dreadlocked tie-dye wearing hippies spitting at him on stage and a whole room full of people shouting at him and it being *all my fault*. nerves. shaking. waaah! i spent the afternoon researching the subject and went on mark's website to try and get an idea of who he is. i was terrified of cocking up. i went in at 5pm to check the mics were working and got reassured by the amazing rob and graham that i'd be fine. lots of people heard what i was doing and told me i'd be great. it kind of made me worse, thinking "all these people believe in me, they don't know i'm going to cock i up". of course, it wouldn't be the end of the world, its only one bloke coming to chapter, its only a small thing really. but the fear was gripping me. the voices in my head started "no-one would blame you if you pulled out, you're not really qualified to do this, they'd understand"... "you could lie and pretend to be ill, then it wouldn't be your fault"... "maybe if you get yourself so worked up you will genuinely be ill and they won't let you do it anyway"... its very hard to ignore the voices of doubt in your head. i was determined to do it. i remember when i was about 13 i was asked to accompany my friend for a national youth theatre audition. i had to sing, although i couldn't sing, i wanted to do backstage things. i got so nervous and worked up i had a bad tum that day and my mum said it was probably best i didn't go. i am still so ashamed that i allowed myself to get so nervous that i made myself ill and missed the chance of doing something i loved. i sat in the house that day and felt numb with relief and disappointment. i thought about that time when i was 13 quite a lot on friday before the talk and determined that it wouldn't happen again. for goodness sake, i'm almost 30, i've done plenty of public speaking before and have to speak at meetings and things, for some reason this felt like that audition all over again.
i met mark at 5.30pm and he was a very nice man. it was a little bit awkward, meeting a stranger and pretty much babysitting him for half an hour. i was relieved that he wanted to watch the film before the talk, he said he'd seen it in so many different incarnations during the years it was being made he wanted a refresher on which one this was, it meant i would have it fresh in my mind too and i wouldn't have to make awkward chit chat for an hour and a half. we chatted about cardiff and i told him about chapter. i'm proud of my city and where i work, i had no problem filling the time. we chatted about the film's subject matter, he wasn't as militant green as i was expecting, he was professional and sensible but just had a lot of integrity. he was really kind to me, i told him it was my first Q&A and he said he'd help me out if he thought i needed it, he'd done hundreds! it was fine. i completely garbled the introduction, i'd rehearsed it a few times in my head but still managed to come accross as nervous. once the film was over and i'd helped put the chairs out i felt at home, it was fine. it was quite enjoyable and though there were dissenters in the audience, the pass-the-mic work by my friend rose was perfect and i did the whole "yes, the man in the blue jumper" bit ok. mark was quite comfortable and i managed to come up with some interesting questions for him (obama and the current economic climate and its impact on the issues, the severn barrage etc). i felt really proud of myself by the end and was on a massive grinny high for the next couple of hours.
this week i also saw the czech film BOOGIE which was about a man going back to his home town and having a night out with the boys when he should have been at home with his wife and son and took him outside of his normal life and back to a world of heavy drinking, prostitutes and bad nightclubs. i was underwhelmed. it was a bit dull and reinforced the stereotypes of machismo in the eastern european countries, it made me a bit depressed but films like this are always worth a punt. i also watched the last episode of RED RIDING on channel 4. i've really liked getting into an event like this, watching something live on tv but it has made me realise again how much i hate adverts, iplayer / tv on demand is so much better. its been such a beautifully shot, well executed drama, full of filth and corruption. the final episode tied up a lot of loose ends but still left you full of the suspicion that the community was rotten to the core and so riddled with dirty old secrets and trauma that it would never be properly well again.
tonight we go to see THEO in buffalo. woo! he is a boy genius. i love his two eps so much, they are full of magic and sadness. if possible we will try and make it over to gwdihw for casey's film night that i have shamefully missed these past two weeks previous. its ridiculous that CLUBFOOTFOOT shows pretty much exactly on-the-button stuff that i love and hold dear yet i haven't made it to all his nights yet. shame on me but sleep often overtakes me on a sunday.
i then had to confront someone on a work issue. i hate confrontations but i'm not afraid to just do them and get them over with because i know that if you leave things to fester then they can infect all sorts of things, a stone left unturned can hide nasty diseases. so i had a little chat and felt an awful lot better for it and it made lots of work things go a lot better subsequently. i have ideas form plans and i can get defeatist about a thing unless i'm sure it is worth seeing through. i can take my job a little too seriously but its because i care about it so much. i feel the weight of the responsibility in my hand, here is this precious thing and it needs to be nurtured in order to grow and succeed. in our meeting on wednesday we were talking about the future of chapter again and i found myself getting so excited, seeing all the possibilities. its already my favourite place in the world and its only going to get better.
the last thing i did was the biggie. on wednesday, after i'd finished my ushering shift in the cinema, graham the projectionist asked me if i'd be available to do a meet and greet with someone coming to speak at the film on friday "get him a cup of tea, make sure he's ok till he has to go on". obviously, this didn't present a problem. then sally the lovely new cinema programmer bounded over to ask if i "didn't mind hosting the Q&A session too". full of confidence that i cannot fathom the source of, i said yes. i think it was due to the sudden influx of vitamin A from all this recent unexpected sunshine. it was only the next day, when i spoke to carol, head of marketing, who went over my duties for that evening that i started to get a little nervous. the speaker was MARK LYNAS, a climate change expert who had contributed to the making of THE AGE OF STUPID, a documentary-cum-fiction film staring pete postlethwaite about the effects of climate change. i'd seen it in a preview screening the week before and enjoyed it, if it did frighten me a little. i'm quite careful with my carbon footprint (i have a bicycle, not a car; i buy ecologically sound cleaning products and organic food; i never put shopping in plastic bags; turn the light / heating off when not needed; etc) but i know others are not so careful and i know that there is shit going on all over the world in other countries that i have no power of controlling. you get the picture. carol warned me that i may get the odd nutter in the audience (it is chapter after all, i'm used to nutters) and an e-mail from dan, the WALES ONE WORLD FILM FESTIVAL organiser advised me that mark has had a lot of problems with audiences recently due to coming out as pro-nuclear, which he likened to coming out as gay to your wife. suddenly these images flashed into my head of dreadlocked tie-dye wearing hippies spitting at him on stage and a whole room full of people shouting at him and it being *all my fault*. nerves. shaking. waaah! i spent the afternoon researching the subject and went on mark's website to try and get an idea of who he is. i was terrified of cocking up. i went in at 5pm to check the mics were working and got reassured by the amazing rob and graham that i'd be fine. lots of people heard what i was doing and told me i'd be great. it kind of made me worse, thinking "all these people believe in me, they don't know i'm going to cock i up". of course, it wouldn't be the end of the world, its only one bloke coming to chapter, its only a small thing really. but the fear was gripping me. the voices in my head started "no-one would blame you if you pulled out, you're not really qualified to do this, they'd understand"... "you could lie and pretend to be ill, then it wouldn't be your fault"... "maybe if you get yourself so worked up you will genuinely be ill and they won't let you do it anyway"... its very hard to ignore the voices of doubt in your head. i was determined to do it. i remember when i was about 13 i was asked to accompany my friend for a national youth theatre audition. i had to sing, although i couldn't sing, i wanted to do backstage things. i got so nervous and worked up i had a bad tum that day and my mum said it was probably best i didn't go. i am still so ashamed that i allowed myself to get so nervous that i made myself ill and missed the chance of doing something i loved. i sat in the house that day and felt numb with relief and disappointment. i thought about that time when i was 13 quite a lot on friday before the talk and determined that it wouldn't happen again. for goodness sake, i'm almost 30, i've done plenty of public speaking before and have to speak at meetings and things, for some reason this felt like that audition all over again.
i met mark at 5.30pm and he was a very nice man. it was a little bit awkward, meeting a stranger and pretty much babysitting him for half an hour. i was relieved that he wanted to watch the film before the talk, he said he'd seen it in so many different incarnations during the years it was being made he wanted a refresher on which one this was, it meant i would have it fresh in my mind too and i wouldn't have to make awkward chit chat for an hour and a half. we chatted about cardiff and i told him about chapter. i'm proud of my city and where i work, i had no problem filling the time. we chatted about the film's subject matter, he wasn't as militant green as i was expecting, he was professional and sensible but just had a lot of integrity. he was really kind to me, i told him it was my first Q&A and he said he'd help me out if he thought i needed it, he'd done hundreds! it was fine. i completely garbled the introduction, i'd rehearsed it a few times in my head but still managed to come accross as nervous. once the film was over and i'd helped put the chairs out i felt at home, it was fine. it was quite enjoyable and though there were dissenters in the audience, the pass-the-mic work by my friend rose was perfect and i did the whole "yes, the man in the blue jumper" bit ok. mark was quite comfortable and i managed to come up with some interesting questions for him (obama and the current economic climate and its impact on the issues, the severn barrage etc). i felt really proud of myself by the end and was on a massive grinny high for the next couple of hours.
this week i also saw the czech film BOOGIE which was about a man going back to his home town and having a night out with the boys when he should have been at home with his wife and son and took him outside of his normal life and back to a world of heavy drinking, prostitutes and bad nightclubs. i was underwhelmed. it was a bit dull and reinforced the stereotypes of machismo in the eastern european countries, it made me a bit depressed but films like this are always worth a punt. i also watched the last episode of RED RIDING on channel 4. i've really liked getting into an event like this, watching something live on tv but it has made me realise again how much i hate adverts, iplayer / tv on demand is so much better. its been such a beautifully shot, well executed drama, full of filth and corruption. the final episode tied up a lot of loose ends but still left you full of the suspicion that the community was rotten to the core and so riddled with dirty old secrets and trauma that it would never be properly well again.
tonight we go to see THEO in buffalo. woo! he is a boy genius. i love his two eps so much, they are full of magic and sadness. if possible we will try and make it over to gwdihw for casey's film night that i have shamefully missed these past two weeks previous. its ridiculous that CLUBFOOTFOOT shows pretty much exactly on-the-button stuff that i love and hold dear yet i haven't made it to all his nights yet. shame on me but sleep often overtakes me on a sunday.
1 Feb 2009
quiet is the new loud
oh dearie, i seem to be turning into some sort of hibernating creature obsessed with my cat. i am working at getting this winter out of my system somehow, maybe by going to some good gigs... by all accounts the pedigree falcon gigs this month have been good but i've not been able to attend due to too much bloody work on a sunday but this week sees loose and forecast putting stuff on midweek: hooray for february!
on saturday 24th i was an usher at the mr and mrs clarke production CABBA HEY! which was a big load of pretentious fun. how to describe mr and mrs clarke? have you ever seen that bit in chitty chitty bang bang when dick van dyke and his girlfriend pretend to be dolls for the king? mr and mrs clarke are like the raggy doll version of that. childish, sexual, extroverted, they perform dance pieces and sing songs and tell jokes like those dirty kids from down the estate who were cleverer than they let on. with a fantastic turn from jayde adams as a post-christmas christmas tree it was a great show that didn't let itself get taken too seriously.
monday is pub quiz day in our 'ouse. i am not naturally competitive or ambitious until it comes to board games and quizzes. we do the pub quiz in the halfway on cathedral road with our friends gary, markie, liam, ol and lyns. every week i aim to win and it was looking good for the first few rounds until we came to the always-tricky round 4, where the questions are toughies and the sinking feeling of loserdom comes creeping in. happily, however, the only really important thing at the pub quiz is if there are too many people and we have to split into two teams, that i beat gary. and gary was beat HA! this all depended pretty much on me remembering the names of the children of jr and bobby ewing in dallas, who sat impishly on the tip of my tongue, a very difficult task and the pressure was on since i LOVED dallas and had public expressed so on facebook this week. all eyes on me for those names. i didn't get em all but my friend anna's gibb spotting won us the round. woohoo!
wednesday was an exciting day. chapter arts centre is having a refurb, which is painfully obvious to the freezing staff who work there and have to listen to drilling through most of the day. but a part of it has been completed: cinema 2! the staff had a free screening to test out the new seats and very nice it is too. it has twinkly fairy lights that look like stars and very comfy seats, a big contrast to what went before. but it has less capacity, which i was slightly disappointed with, but it does make for a more intimate feel. we saw les liens du sang - rivals, a french film about two brothers in the 1970s. it was all right but i wouldn't have seeked it out myself. the nicest thing was sitting there with my colleagues and feeling all warm and fuzzy that SOMETHING was finished and that the end of the project was in sight. lovely.
it was also book group day! the STAR centre in splott does an excellent little book group in the library at 7pm the last wednesday of the month. its a good way of getting into some things i wouldn't normally read. this month was the woman in black by susan hill. i read this on new year's day and bloody scary it was too. its quite deftly written, fantastic descriptions of the weather and she builds the tension to make it really creepy. apparently its been on the stage for 20 years and on the tv lots but i've never seen it so didn't know what to expect, just that it was a classic ghost story. happily most people in the book group loved it and we had a nice little discussion about it and the recent guardian "books you must read" list.
after that we dashed like lightening over to clwb to see max tundra. as the group didn't finish till 8pm we missed pagan wanderer lu's set, which was a shame but we caught ben butler and mousepad's fantastic synth jibes. close your eyes and you'll feel like you're riding a chopper in an 80s kids movie. my friends were insanely happy since it was joe from gay against you's new project and they are massive fans. i was feeling a bit unwell and stuck to water which was quite a good thing since i got horribly ill all the way through max tundra's set. £8 in clwb (bloody expensive too!) and i heard it from the toilet. never mind. what i did see was a very good little mix of yelps and squelchy electro and it was very good. he told a few good jokes too. but hey ho, home for me and my stupid belly.
luckily i got over my illness by.... going to newport, not everyone's ideal cure-all. we wanted to check out the museum and art gallery. the museum was ok, bits of it were shut and the art gallery was in change over period so no art. harumph. it was odd for me as i was a teenager in newport and found it difficult to get my bearings. this was never more apparent than when i proudly took my boyfriend to diverse record shop. well, tried to. i bought many albums in diverse with my babysitting money and haven't been there for about 13 years. i marched determinedly up to where it should be, then spent the good part of an hour trudging around newport confused and lost. diverse has MOVED. i asked the man in a music shop nearby and he told me it moved 10 years previous. has it been that long since i've been back? evidently. we had a good time talking to the very lovely matt and scanning the racks for treasure. i was overjoyed to see the sale rack, where i purchased my first throwing muses album and got all kinds of flashbacks about shyly asking the man at the counter his opinion about pavement and tom waits albums, it was really nice to go back there. i bought the kitty, daisy and lewis album and had a punt on a tom verlaine cd i hadn't heard of and an art of noise lp, as well as buying a big selection of vinyl for the wife. a good day all in. and dodgy tum seems to have calmed down.
this week promises much. gigs! matinees in cinema 2! unfortunately no scrabble sunday, as i'm working again but i will try and play some at home instead once i've finished. word!
on saturday 24th i was an usher at the mr and mrs clarke production CABBA HEY! which was a big load of pretentious fun. how to describe mr and mrs clarke? have you ever seen that bit in chitty chitty bang bang when dick van dyke and his girlfriend pretend to be dolls for the king? mr and mrs clarke are like the raggy doll version of that. childish, sexual, extroverted, they perform dance pieces and sing songs and tell jokes like those dirty kids from down the estate who were cleverer than they let on. with a fantastic turn from jayde adams as a post-christmas christmas tree it was a great show that didn't let itself get taken too seriously.
monday is pub quiz day in our 'ouse. i am not naturally competitive or ambitious until it comes to board games and quizzes. we do the pub quiz in the halfway on cathedral road with our friends gary, markie, liam, ol and lyns. every week i aim to win and it was looking good for the first few rounds until we came to the always-tricky round 4, where the questions are toughies and the sinking feeling of loserdom comes creeping in. happily, however, the only really important thing at the pub quiz is if there are too many people and we have to split into two teams, that i beat gary. and gary was beat HA! this all depended pretty much on me remembering the names of the children of jr and bobby ewing in dallas, who sat impishly on the tip of my tongue, a very difficult task and the pressure was on since i LOVED dallas and had public expressed so on facebook this week. all eyes on me for those names. i didn't get em all but my friend anna's gibb spotting won us the round. woohoo!
wednesday was an exciting day. chapter arts centre is having a refurb, which is painfully obvious to the freezing staff who work there and have to listen to drilling through most of the day. but a part of it has been completed: cinema 2! the staff had a free screening to test out the new seats and very nice it is too. it has twinkly fairy lights that look like stars and very comfy seats, a big contrast to what went before. but it has less capacity, which i was slightly disappointed with, but it does make for a more intimate feel. we saw les liens du sang - rivals, a french film about two brothers in the 1970s. it was all right but i wouldn't have seeked it out myself. the nicest thing was sitting there with my colleagues and feeling all warm and fuzzy that SOMETHING was finished and that the end of the project was in sight. lovely.
it was also book group day! the STAR centre in splott does an excellent little book group in the library at 7pm the last wednesday of the month. its a good way of getting into some things i wouldn't normally read. this month was the woman in black by susan hill. i read this on new year's day and bloody scary it was too. its quite deftly written, fantastic descriptions of the weather and she builds the tension to make it really creepy. apparently its been on the stage for 20 years and on the tv lots but i've never seen it so didn't know what to expect, just that it was a classic ghost story. happily most people in the book group loved it and we had a nice little discussion about it and the recent guardian "books you must read" list.
after that we dashed like lightening over to clwb to see max tundra. as the group didn't finish till 8pm we missed pagan wanderer lu's set, which was a shame but we caught ben butler and mousepad's fantastic synth jibes. close your eyes and you'll feel like you're riding a chopper in an 80s kids movie. my friends were insanely happy since it was joe from gay against you's new project and they are massive fans. i was feeling a bit unwell and stuck to water which was quite a good thing since i got horribly ill all the way through max tundra's set. £8 in clwb (bloody expensive too!) and i heard it from the toilet. never mind. what i did see was a very good little mix of yelps and squelchy electro and it was very good. he told a few good jokes too. but hey ho, home for me and my stupid belly.
luckily i got over my illness by.... going to newport, not everyone's ideal cure-all. we wanted to check out the museum and art gallery. the museum was ok, bits of it were shut and the art gallery was in change over period so no art. harumph. it was odd for me as i was a teenager in newport and found it difficult to get my bearings. this was never more apparent than when i proudly took my boyfriend to diverse record shop. well, tried to. i bought many albums in diverse with my babysitting money and haven't been there for about 13 years. i marched determinedly up to where it should be, then spent the good part of an hour trudging around newport confused and lost. diverse has MOVED. i asked the man in a music shop nearby and he told me it moved 10 years previous. has it been that long since i've been back? evidently. we had a good time talking to the very lovely matt and scanning the racks for treasure. i was overjoyed to see the sale rack, where i purchased my first throwing muses album and got all kinds of flashbacks about shyly asking the man at the counter his opinion about pavement and tom waits albums, it was really nice to go back there. i bought the kitty, daisy and lewis album and had a punt on a tom verlaine cd i hadn't heard of and an art of noise lp, as well as buying a big selection of vinyl for the wife. a good day all in. and dodgy tum seems to have calmed down.
this week promises much. gigs! matinees in cinema 2! unfortunately no scrabble sunday, as i'm working again but i will try and play some at home instead once i've finished. word!
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