after my box office shift that seemed to go on for an aeon i joined steen at clwb ifor. i say joined, i actually passed him on my bike and got there before him, which made me feel very smug indeed. we were there for the joint prowess of ISLET and RIGHT HAND LEFT HAND, both i've seen before and both give me butterflies when i'm watching them: they are great! the instrument swapping, hypnotic primal yell of islet was a great compliment to the urgent looping and guitar hero seriousness of right hand left hand. i know i bang on but it must be said, rhodri viney is a genius. loads of people were out for the gig and the atmosphere was really warm and friendly. there were parties afoot but i was quite tired and steen and i sneaked out and headed off home.
sunday i was ushering for STAR TREK, an enjoyable romp that i'd seen before (with a very hot spock) and then SUNSHINE CLEANING, the new film from the people who did LITTLE MIS S SUNSHINE. this was another film that was firmly located in middle america, showing you a people that usually get dismissed by mainstream films. when it started i was worried it was going to be a bit cutesy, an ex-cheerleader who starts up a crime scene cleaning business with her sister and often having her geek-cute little boy in tow. the family-in-a-van thing had already been done with their previous film. instead it was really quite nuanced and the performances kept it from being too unbelievable and contrived. amy adams was wonderful in many scenes such as when she is confronted with a reunion of her former schoolmates who live a dull and privaleged life in sharp contrast with the desperation of her life scratching out the living of a single mum. the grisly pragmatic job of cleaning up after the dead is turned into a compassionate turn by people who care about making everything better.
monday was another gig night, this time in the dreaded buffalo. thankfully they have replaced that godawful logo projection with a series of ace little youtube films including an obama-mccain presidential dance off, bettie page 7 veils strip (my favourite bettie page video!) and the horrific murder scene from american history x. JOY OF SEX were on first, with a new line up but the same shy but ballsy blasts of angular guitar and lo fi drums (very lo fi in this case, the new member was only playing one drum and looked so young he resembled the little drummer boy). i finally got to use some of my accountancy knowledge when max announced "this one's called double entry and its not about sex..." "is it about accountancy?" i heckled. "yes!" he laughed, surprised i got the reference. score! i didn't go to nightclasses for nowt! in fact i used to guffaw every time the teacher announced that we were about to do some double entry only to be given death stares by the class. did no-one else find this funny? clearly not. i was too immature for a career as an accountant. next up was TARTUFI. my friend anne said she'd looked them up and was looking forward to it but i'd not heard of them. well, good call anne, they were great. an unfussy woman with a guitar and three mics and a drummer looping sounds into gathered, fevered intensity. i loved them. will bought the album and i bought a beautiful print their friend had made for them (5/20). MARNIE STERN was the main attraction though and what an attraction, a female guitar hero with uninhibited ability and fun. the songs were great pop punk numbers that got everyone dancing along and they had a great approachable air. a good night!
tuesday i went bowling on a bar cafe staff do. something was learnt that night: i am shit at bowling. i scored something awful like 21 versus the three figured heights of my colleagues. it was fun, but i felt like i was only starting to get it in the second to last shot. hmph. i watched phil and nims do their thang on the dance mat and admired (although i'm not sure that's quite the word) the ugly beauty of the red dragon centre. horrible horrible most horrible.
wednesday was JUNKET CLUB DAY! woohoo! these are always so much brilliant fun. we arrived at the insole court, a beautiful building rendered gothic by the storm that had descended upon cardiff. since it was the junket fete it was quite appropriate for it to be sunny with showers, lisa and ben had created a brilliant atmosphere as usual and will and i had numerous goes on jonny bull's tombola and even a roll at paul barnett's rolly ball thing and went along with mike bubbins' banter at play your cards right. a lovely bit of cake from anna ellis and a cup of tea from iain and leah and we were ready for a bit of comedy. bridget christie was on first with her tales of being a dogsbody at the daily mail. she was very good and had some brilliant observances on working on the hate rag though sometimes she overplayed it a little, i preferred it when she was just telling the tale and not relying on being too hammy. in the interval i talked to my friend chris and the two steens went to watch willie downie and nic amongst others get themselves into funny positions during giant twister. superclump was on next, the brilliant improv group comprising of a few cardiffian comics and some london based ones. they had some really inspired sketches, my favourites were the grown up storybook heroes (the boy from the snowman and the famous five) trying to solve "the mystery of the tiny door" that turned out to be a catflap and the kabuki performer who is searching for work in the recession. the junket club is so much fun and they do loads to make it special, it is a joy going every time. long may they reign!
thursday i was ushering for the BEYOND REPAIR dance company. the first performance was inspired by the women who helped the strikers in 1984 and was very measured and beautiful. the second performance i wasn't too keen on, it was a futuristic idea and felt a bit stylised and dated. i see so many established companies it was interesting to see a new young company that have not quite worked out their style yet.
on the sunday afternoon i had ushered for the entertaining but not in any way demanding NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 2 and the more effective PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE. comparing them is like oranges and apples but pippa lee was a wonderful film. it could have been a cliche-ridden nightmare, a middle aged woman moves house and considers her worth and looks over her life but everyone in the cast were surprisingly wonderful (keanu reeves, winona ryder, who i usually can't watch without wanting to tear the screen apart) and it was shot in candy colours and the character of pippa was sort of a blank sheet trying to write and understand her life story so it avoided being chick flick snooze enducing. wonderful.
we had planned that weekend to be in borth for the square festival but will got asked to dj for the FAIRPLAY FESTIVAL so we stayed in cardiff instead. i was working on the friday night, sleepy on the saturday but on the door for sunday so had to turn up! we caught most of the brilliant CYMBIENT and then i played with my friend's gorgeous baby alice for about an hour whilst taking money from friends and strangers, all for a good cause. it was a lovely atmosphere and i was sad that i couldn't make the rest of the weekend. it was truly like a festival in a pub. peaceful progress peeps had decked it out with artwork and every aspect of it was thought through to give locals a taste of hippiedom. ace. it left me with a wonderful warm feeling and a love for my friends and a real sense of family in canton. well done fairplay!
Showing posts with label junket club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label junket club. Show all posts
24 Jul 2009
24 May 2009
are we not men?
sunday's JUNKET CLUB began the "week of amazing fun" TM. this month's junket club was in CARDIFF MUSEUM, we were given a tour by our unreliable guides ben and elis. unreliable as in pointing at a picture of a man in restoration garb and declaring "this picture is an early portrait of tom jones..." type tour content. the jokes were a lot better than that though. we were first given colour co-ordinated dinosaur stickers to designate which tour we would be going on, another lovely little touch from lisa and ben. shamefully enough i'd not actually been properly to the art gallery, only really to see the bi-annual artes mundi exhibitions. for shame! its actually a really good collection and the building is beautiful. we vowed to come back and do it proper. after this elis did a turn, mildly embarrassing me when i signalled that i'd been to the dino exhibit when i was a nipper in the 80s and talking a lot about oakwood park. he is a handsome, talented chap. next up were GINGER AND BLACK, a sort of flight of the concords-style duo comprising of a black man and a ginger lady. they were awkward and funny. we had a break where we were treated to lisa's ace cakes and had a chat with our friends chris evans and carl chappel and headed upstairs to the law courts, an imposing looking dark wooded room where we were treated to LLOYD WOLF, a proper comedian who travelled from london via neath to treat us to his potential edinburgh show which is rejected versions of his show. it was great and it got us doing games like texting the last person in our phone odd statements and seeing what their reaction was. mine was steen, so that was boring, but one girl had a bloke who didn't have her in his phone and he got quite aggressive. brilliant!
monday was movie night! we went to see LET THE RIGHT ONE IN with the patti ladies and our friend david deans and on our own went to THE DAMNED UNITED. let the right one in was one of those movies that i'd heard rave reviews about and was afraid that it would turn out to be a bit disappointing but i needn't have worried. it was one of the most haunting, beautiful, creepy films i've seen in a long time. it was about a teenage boy in 70s sweden who is getting routinely bullied and dealing with his parents' break up. along comes a neighbour with similar feelings of alienation and isolation to release him from this misery, unfortunately the neighbour comes with her own problems. rather than being 12 she is an unknowable age but has just been 12 for a very long time. this was a vampire story told very straight and full of beauty and sadness. rather than a glamourous fantastic life, you feel eli's hunger and loneliness. THE DAMNED UNITED was an enjoyable romp. i don't know much about football and i didn't really need to know much to enjoy the story, which was a relief. this was more about brian clough's relationship with his team manager and his rivalry with leeds united's manager who bred a team of dirty winners. i love timothy spall, he's always great to watch and michael sheen did a great version of clough. the only criticism i would have is that it seemed like almost exactly the same story as FROST NIXON in places, written as it was by peter morgan, there was even a late night phonecall which may or may not have actually happened.
on tuesday we went to an under-attended electronica gig at clwb with ANTONI MAIOVVI and ZOMBIE ZOMBIE. i think there was about 4 people there including us for antoni maiovvi. he played a set that sounded a bit old fashioned, it idled by well enough, if the crowd was right i'm sure it would go down well it really needed a massive field full of people to take off. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE came on and blew the boredom away. there was a bit more of a crowd for this, but still by no means full. one looked like a mad scientist and the other proto geeky indie boy but were both more interesting than that. indie boy was on the drums and mad scientist was tinkering behind a stack of synths and effects buttons that pleasingly reminded me of seeing pet shop boys and erasure on the tv as a nipper. the beats were erratic and urgent and the last song brought up thoughts of a zombie apocalypse with screams and paranoid synth sounds. they were great! they also had great merch. i really wanted to buy lots but funds being tight i just bought a bag that is so cool i might have to send it to the wife. i am developing a slow burning love of tote bags.
the next day was the day of DEVO! we caught an early bus to london and given the gift of nice weather decided to have a wander down to exhibition road, home of the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. steen hadn't been since he was a kid, which i was amazed by. the tate and the natural history museum are my most visited london landmarks, i always seem to incorporate them into my list of stuff to do every time i go. i showed him my favourite bit in the whole museum first, which is a tree from the petrified forest. i know it was created over millions of years but to me its still a work of magic. staring at the truck and counting the rings, all hardened minerals and a spectrum of reds just gives me goosebumps. we went into the dinosaur exhibit (which i still don't think is that great since they modernised it) and saw children crying at the animatronic t-rex. we then played in the hall of mirrors and went around the taxidermied mammals, ending up in the whale room and then up into the darwin exhibit. the animals are all great but the building itself is always my favourite, its so beautiful and i always notice something different, like the monkeys built into the rafters. amazing!
we then went to the VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM. to my shame i have never been inside before and we didn't have much time to look at it this time either. we did a quick look at the classical sculpture section, looked around the fashion exhibit and then spent proper time in the photography room. i was stunned to find the scream house, a bygone cardiff landmark in riverside, the first photograph when we entered the room.
but onward to DEVO! the gig was in the forum so we got off the tube and tried to find reasonably priced food. we were in london so presumed this would be impossible but found an amazing ichiban-style japanese restaurant with fantastic noodles for about the same price! then we went to the pub for a bit to see our friends jenny, jack and jenny and alex. it was lovely seeing them again and we had a good ol' natter. after a couple of pints and the sunny weather i was feeling warm and fuzzy and incredibly happy and all this was before devo! my excitement was growing and growing. we got to the venue, took our places and found it easy to get to the front. ROBOTS IN DISGUISE were the support and although they get criticised for being a bit inconcequencial and only famous for being involved with the mighty boosh but i've never seen the mighty boosh and i don't care, from what i saw they did a few ace pop songs and they had men dressed in cardboard robot outfits. surely, that's ace, right?! i enjoyed them. the crowd started to get burlier and drunker. these people are here for devo? i thought only geeks like us liked devo, there certainly was no-one who liked them when i was at school, only when i lived in the US did i find anyone who liked devo and again, they were geeks like me. this bunch of neanderthals seemed like they'd stumbled in from an oasis cocert. we were suddenly surrounded by 50 year old men on a devo trip like it was a rugby outing. ugh. i started to get a bit aggressive with one of them in particular when he started pushing me in an attempt to start an early mosh pit and resting his arm on my head, dislodging my glasses. this brought back horrendous memories of being at the front for ash in reading festival when i was almost crushed and i lost my glasses. not wanting to risk such a scarring moment a second time i relinquished my place at the front with steen and we hung back a bit, just in time to avoid a massive mosh pit. my expectations of the crowd shattered at least my expectations of devo were intact. they began with a video for an early single "secret agent man", one of my favourites that used to get played on oldies 101 fm in eastern washington! i was very excited. they played the entire album of "are we not men? we are devo!", an album i've heard over and over and so that made me very happy. there were lots of people wearing energy domes on their heads and i met two nice ladies in queues who were similarly excited about the gig. a very very very good night. we then went to meet jack at jenny's house and went to the west bank where he lives in a jewish area. i'm not kidding.
the next day we went with jack to check out the SAATCHI MUSEUM in sloane square. i'd read in the sunday glossies about the exhibition NEW MIDDLE EASTERN ART and thought it sounded interesting but wasn't prepared for how good it would be. it was on many different types of media, all expressing a myriad of ideas and emotions about what it is to be middle eastern, to be themselves, it was great. the list of favourites is long but the ones i couldn't get out of my mind were the out of focus photographs by halim al karim, the sculpture of women praying by kader attia and the sensual collage photographs by ramin haerzadeh.
we got on the bus back but didn't have much time to cwtch the cat before we had to head to buffalo to see some bands LOOSE and LESSON #1 were putting on EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL and a couple of other bands tba. the tba was due to the fact that both the supports had had to pull out, meinz heinz due to steve being in west wales working on euros childs' album and king alexander cos simon had a poorly throat. i was excited about the gig for the supports alone so was a bit disappointed but then we managed to help RIFFMONSTER on the bill, a new project with steve from zail, tom raybould (aliases are many but does electronic music and owns acoustic wallpaper) and andy fung from cymbient, no thee no ess and way back when derrero. they were very math rock and it became intense and interesting, a very good first gig. PRETTY GIRLS i didn't see much of but quite enjoyed their noisy lads-in-bad-drag act. EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL had good songs and a nice bit of twiddly mathy guitar and urgent beats but my interest waned a bit, but that might have been the tiredness from the already ace week.
the final bit of joy for the week was the CHAPTER MAIBOCK. twice a year chapter bar puts on a german beer festival and very popular it is too. this one rocked. it was so busy people were queueing out the door and around the corner and we had to have a one in-one out policy! for a space less than half the size we used to have we took about 80% of the money, a fact that all us staff were very happy about. it showed off chapter's bar at its buzzing best and all of us spent the night with massive grins, running around busy but happy. i am getting butterflies in my stomach thinking about how great things are going to be when the building work is finished.
and that ended our "week of amazing fun" TM but then these days i seem to have a lot of fun most weeks!
monday was movie night! we went to see LET THE RIGHT ONE IN with the patti ladies and our friend david deans and on our own went to THE DAMNED UNITED. let the right one in was one of those movies that i'd heard rave reviews about and was afraid that it would turn out to be a bit disappointing but i needn't have worried. it was one of the most haunting, beautiful, creepy films i've seen in a long time. it was about a teenage boy in 70s sweden who is getting routinely bullied and dealing with his parents' break up. along comes a neighbour with similar feelings of alienation and isolation to release him from this misery, unfortunately the neighbour comes with her own problems. rather than being 12 she is an unknowable age but has just been 12 for a very long time. this was a vampire story told very straight and full of beauty and sadness. rather than a glamourous fantastic life, you feel eli's hunger and loneliness. THE DAMNED UNITED was an enjoyable romp. i don't know much about football and i didn't really need to know much to enjoy the story, which was a relief. this was more about brian clough's relationship with his team manager and his rivalry with leeds united's manager who bred a team of dirty winners. i love timothy spall, he's always great to watch and michael sheen did a great version of clough. the only criticism i would have is that it seemed like almost exactly the same story as FROST NIXON in places, written as it was by peter morgan, there was even a late night phonecall which may or may not have actually happened.
on tuesday we went to an under-attended electronica gig at clwb with ANTONI MAIOVVI and ZOMBIE ZOMBIE. i think there was about 4 people there including us for antoni maiovvi. he played a set that sounded a bit old fashioned, it idled by well enough, if the crowd was right i'm sure it would go down well it really needed a massive field full of people to take off. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE came on and blew the boredom away. there was a bit more of a crowd for this, but still by no means full. one looked like a mad scientist and the other proto geeky indie boy but were both more interesting than that. indie boy was on the drums and mad scientist was tinkering behind a stack of synths and effects buttons that pleasingly reminded me of seeing pet shop boys and erasure on the tv as a nipper. the beats were erratic and urgent and the last song brought up thoughts of a zombie apocalypse with screams and paranoid synth sounds. they were great! they also had great merch. i really wanted to buy lots but funds being tight i just bought a bag that is so cool i might have to send it to the wife. i am developing a slow burning love of tote bags.
the next day was the day of DEVO! we caught an early bus to london and given the gift of nice weather decided to have a wander down to exhibition road, home of the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. steen hadn't been since he was a kid, which i was amazed by. the tate and the natural history museum are my most visited london landmarks, i always seem to incorporate them into my list of stuff to do every time i go. i showed him my favourite bit in the whole museum first, which is a tree from the petrified forest. i know it was created over millions of years but to me its still a work of magic. staring at the truck and counting the rings, all hardened minerals and a spectrum of reds just gives me goosebumps. we went into the dinosaur exhibit (which i still don't think is that great since they modernised it) and saw children crying at the animatronic t-rex. we then played in the hall of mirrors and went around the taxidermied mammals, ending up in the whale room and then up into the darwin exhibit. the animals are all great but the building itself is always my favourite, its so beautiful and i always notice something different, like the monkeys built into the rafters. amazing!
we then went to the VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM. to my shame i have never been inside before and we didn't have much time to look at it this time either. we did a quick look at the classical sculpture section, looked around the fashion exhibit and then spent proper time in the photography room. i was stunned to find the scream house, a bygone cardiff landmark in riverside, the first photograph when we entered the room.
but onward to DEVO! the gig was in the forum so we got off the tube and tried to find reasonably priced food. we were in london so presumed this would be impossible but found an amazing ichiban-style japanese restaurant with fantastic noodles for about the same price! then we went to the pub for a bit to see our friends jenny, jack and jenny and alex. it was lovely seeing them again and we had a good ol' natter. after a couple of pints and the sunny weather i was feeling warm and fuzzy and incredibly happy and all this was before devo! my excitement was growing and growing. we got to the venue, took our places and found it easy to get to the front. ROBOTS IN DISGUISE were the support and although they get criticised for being a bit inconcequencial and only famous for being involved with the mighty boosh but i've never seen the mighty boosh and i don't care, from what i saw they did a few ace pop songs and they had men dressed in cardboard robot outfits. surely, that's ace, right?! i enjoyed them. the crowd started to get burlier and drunker. these people are here for devo? i thought only geeks like us liked devo, there certainly was no-one who liked them when i was at school, only when i lived in the US did i find anyone who liked devo and again, they were geeks like me. this bunch of neanderthals seemed like they'd stumbled in from an oasis cocert. we were suddenly surrounded by 50 year old men on a devo trip like it was a rugby outing. ugh. i started to get a bit aggressive with one of them in particular when he started pushing me in an attempt to start an early mosh pit and resting his arm on my head, dislodging my glasses. this brought back horrendous memories of being at the front for ash in reading festival when i was almost crushed and i lost my glasses. not wanting to risk such a scarring moment a second time i relinquished my place at the front with steen and we hung back a bit, just in time to avoid a massive mosh pit. my expectations of the crowd shattered at least my expectations of devo were intact. they began with a video for an early single "secret agent man", one of my favourites that used to get played on oldies 101 fm in eastern washington! i was very excited. they played the entire album of "are we not men? we are devo!", an album i've heard over and over and so that made me very happy. there were lots of people wearing energy domes on their heads and i met two nice ladies in queues who were similarly excited about the gig. a very very very good night. we then went to meet jack at jenny's house and went to the west bank where he lives in a jewish area. i'm not kidding.
the next day we went with jack to check out the SAATCHI MUSEUM in sloane square. i'd read in the sunday glossies about the exhibition NEW MIDDLE EASTERN ART and thought it sounded interesting but wasn't prepared for how good it would be. it was on many different types of media, all expressing a myriad of ideas and emotions about what it is to be middle eastern, to be themselves, it was great. the list of favourites is long but the ones i couldn't get out of my mind were the out of focus photographs by halim al karim, the sculpture of women praying by kader attia and the sensual collage photographs by ramin haerzadeh.
we got on the bus back but didn't have much time to cwtch the cat before we had to head to buffalo to see some bands LOOSE and LESSON #1 were putting on EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL and a couple of other bands tba. the tba was due to the fact that both the supports had had to pull out, meinz heinz due to steve being in west wales working on euros childs' album and king alexander cos simon had a poorly throat. i was excited about the gig for the supports alone so was a bit disappointed but then we managed to help RIFFMONSTER on the bill, a new project with steve from zail, tom raybould (aliases are many but does electronic music and owns acoustic wallpaper) and andy fung from cymbient, no thee no ess and way back when derrero. they were very math rock and it became intense and interesting, a very good first gig. PRETTY GIRLS i didn't see much of but quite enjoyed their noisy lads-in-bad-drag act. EXPERIMENTAL DENTAL SCHOOL had good songs and a nice bit of twiddly mathy guitar and urgent beats but my interest waned a bit, but that might have been the tiredness from the already ace week.
the final bit of joy for the week was the CHAPTER MAIBOCK. twice a year chapter bar puts on a german beer festival and very popular it is too. this one rocked. it was so busy people were queueing out the door and around the corner and we had to have a one in-one out policy! for a space less than half the size we used to have we took about 80% of the money, a fact that all us staff were very happy about. it showed off chapter's bar at its buzzing best and all of us spent the night with massive grins, running around busy but happy. i am getting butterflies in my stomach thinking about how great things are going to be when the building work is finished.
and that ended our "week of amazing fun" TM but then these days i seem to have a lot of fun most weeks!
21 Jan 2009
rocket man (and lady)
the junket club presents josie long and mike wozniak in techniquest:
to illustrate how good this was, by the end of the night i had a happiness headache. i felt like a kid who had eaten too much candy. we got to techniquest and immediately started playing like 5 year olds. well, i know i did. i think i heartily annoyed my boyfriend with attention defecit disorder behaviour and leaping (in some cases literally) from one science project to the next. this was halted when we were about to go into the comedy showroom (a "lecture area" with 30 kiddie chairs and a pull down screen) and the ball bouyed by air that i was playing with was subsequently turned off and fell disappointingly slowly to the ground.
but hark! there is the lovely benjamin partridge introducing mike wozniak and a hand made animation of a space rocket! despite the lights dimming his set and being forced to do his act with a gestapo lamp shining in his face, mike's act was very good. he told us about his polish grandfather and his amateur science experiments and his guinea pig being rogered to death by a rabbit called "the punisher". he was shouty, but not in an annoying way.
but its halftime and the treat of chemically enhanced milkshake, star trek cupcakes and lisa jones introducing the tony hart-inspired "build a universe" art project had us putting on our concentrating faces and making aliens, planets and cock-shaped rockets. it was a bundle of fun. then we got lead away to the planetarium to see josie long and some stars. she was a very nice lady and i liked her stories. a very successful junket club but it does leave me worrying how many more amazing places lisa and ben can take us to. i was impressed enough with carl's house...
to illustrate how good this was, by the end of the night i had a happiness headache. i felt like a kid who had eaten too much candy. we got to techniquest and immediately started playing like 5 year olds. well, i know i did. i think i heartily annoyed my boyfriend with attention defecit disorder behaviour and leaping (in some cases literally) from one science project to the next. this was halted when we were about to go into the comedy showroom (a "lecture area" with 30 kiddie chairs and a pull down screen) and the ball bouyed by air that i was playing with was subsequently turned off and fell disappointingly slowly to the ground.
but hark! there is the lovely benjamin partridge introducing mike wozniak and a hand made animation of a space rocket! despite the lights dimming his set and being forced to do his act with a gestapo lamp shining in his face, mike's act was very good. he told us about his polish grandfather and his amateur science experiments and his guinea pig being rogered to death by a rabbit called "the punisher". he was shouty, but not in an annoying way.
but its halftime and the treat of chemically enhanced milkshake, star trek cupcakes and lisa jones introducing the tony hart-inspired "build a universe" art project had us putting on our concentrating faces and making aliens, planets and cock-shaped rockets. it was a bundle of fun. then we got lead away to the planetarium to see josie long and some stars. she was a very nice lady and i liked her stories. a very successful junket club but it does leave me worrying how many more amazing places lisa and ben can take us to. i was impressed enough with carl's house...
18 Jan 2009
the start of things
i am going to attempt to keep a diary but this will be easier if i just do it online. i want to train my brain to type again.
this week is almost at an end, although since i started working crazy hours and weekends week ends don't really exist any longer, there are just days and days and events and work and home. today is a sunday though, the newspapers are big and everywhere was asleep this morning.
it still being early in the year, there have not been many gigs as yet but i have been supplying my brain with films to distract it instead. this week i watched the baader meinhof complex, dean spanley, the reader and patti smith: dream of life in the cinema and mother night and don't look now on dvd. that looks like a lot, doesn't it. tonight we are going to techniquest to watch josie long in the planetarium doing comedy. excitement brought to us by lisa and ben of the junket club.
baader meinhof complex:
this was a slightly dissatisfying film. maybe i didn't know enough about it going in or maybe i was bringing too much of my own baggage from spending time with so-called anarchists when i was younger but i didn't think these were a glamourous bunch of freedom fighters, just a bunch of heartless twats. having seen hunger just before christmas and finding it really effective and beautiful, this just left me a bit cold. andreas baader: cock. ulrike meinhof: middle class guilt queen. i just felt that there were so many needless deaths and especially since the 60s hippie dream resulted in the capitalist wank fest of the 80s and the collapse that is going on at the moment it just seemed really hollow. or maybe it was just me being cynical. i dunno, i suppose it was quite well made, the cast was like a greatest hits of all the best german films i've seen in the last 5 years but i didn't think it clung together very well. i just wish i'd read a book instead.
dean spanley:
a shaggy dog story. really moving and gentle and different to the films i usually see. peter o'toole is an old cumudgeon who is visited by his son every thursday and his son is getting increasingly irritated by this routine seeing as his father is at that age where it seems only correct to be as much of an awkward old bastard as is possible. an encounter with an indian holy man talking about reincarnation and the dean of a local church leads him to believe that the dean is a reincarnation of his father's beloved dog wag, who ran away years ago and seems to be the only thing he grieves (although he also lost a son and a wife in the last few years). it was a lovely little film and made me cry buckets (the o'toole character reminded me of my bamp who died a few years ago). it had bryan brown and sam neill and was quite delightful and thought provoking. i really enjoyed it.
the reader:
nazi tits. sorry, had to get that out of my system. its been sitting in my brain like some sort of mental tourettes. kate winslet is naked for a lot of this movie. this is a good thing and yes, its integral to the plot etc. she starts an affair with a teenager (15 years old) in post-war germany and although happy in the moment, seems sad most of the time. he is naive and lost in this first love and then she suddenly leaves him. years later he is a law student and attends a war crimes trial where she is a defendant and her secrets are discovered. this marks him for life and makes him profoundly sad. again, i think the book was probably better than the film but it was filled with lots of good performances and has the great bruno ganz in a supporting role.
patti smith: dream of life:
dreamlike and fragmented, this documentary does not tell a chronological tale of her life but you get to the bare bones of the woman far more directly. filmed over 10 years, this film has intimate moments looking at trinkets in an apartment and having tea with her parents as well as some very public moments like demonstrating against the iraq war and firey possessed performances. i went to see patti smith a few years back in the coal exchange and it reminded me how inspired i found her, how i just felt so enthused and energised having witnessed her on stage. i've read books on patti smith and have her poetry but nothing came close to seeing her flirt girlishly with old love sam shepherd and pouring out the remains of her friend robert mapplethorpe, gazing at them at saying they were more like "shells", sparking lots of images in my head and thinking about lost loved ones. wonderful.
mother night:
this adaptation of a kurt vonnegut novel is on loan from my friend carl, a similar vonnegut obsessive (who, to my delight, has a signed picture drawn by vonnegut in his house). the film was strange, the story was pure vonnegut in its surreal distorting of history. nick nolte plays an american writer living in germany in the 1930s. when war breaks out he gets a visit from an american who asks him to be a spy for his country but only on the condition that no-one will ever know that he is a spy. he becomes a successful propaganda radio dj and is happy with his wife and their "nation of two". when she dies he flees to america where he lives a dull life, waiting for his own death but then the secret gets out and he is discovered. for shame, i haven't read the book its based on but it felt very much like a vonnegut book in style. its the first film adaptation of a vonnegut book i've seen and i'm a big fan and wasn't that impressed. he's a very funny dark writer and moves back and forth in time, but film was a little dull, seemed to go on a bit long and despite having alan arkin in it wasn't that funny. it was interesting but i wouldn't point people towards it, really.
don't look now:
always worth watching, i don't even know when i first saw it, it seems to have always been there in my life. such a beautifully executed tragedy with nic roeg's classic heightened reality and oddly framed angles. the use of colour is extraordinary, with its red reds and its spidery greys and browns. i was introducing it to someone tonight but disappointingly he had already seen so much and its been so often referenced in popular culture the ending was not a surprise and i think the magic was taken out of it a bit. when i watch it i am still rooting for donald sutherland and hoping afresh that he'll realise his fate and not go down that alleyway and i cry buckets in the first scene, almost unaware of what is about to come. the supernatural elements often overlook the intimate portrait of a falling apart marriage which makes up the bulk of the film, it is all together perfect.
this week is almost at an end, although since i started working crazy hours and weekends week ends don't really exist any longer, there are just days and days and events and work and home. today is a sunday though, the newspapers are big and everywhere was asleep this morning.
it still being early in the year, there have not been many gigs as yet but i have been supplying my brain with films to distract it instead. this week i watched the baader meinhof complex, dean spanley, the reader and patti smith: dream of life in the cinema and mother night and don't look now on dvd. that looks like a lot, doesn't it. tonight we are going to techniquest to watch josie long in the planetarium doing comedy. excitement brought to us by lisa and ben of the junket club.
baader meinhof complex:
this was a slightly dissatisfying film. maybe i didn't know enough about it going in or maybe i was bringing too much of my own baggage from spending time with so-called anarchists when i was younger but i didn't think these were a glamourous bunch of freedom fighters, just a bunch of heartless twats. having seen hunger just before christmas and finding it really effective and beautiful, this just left me a bit cold. andreas baader: cock. ulrike meinhof: middle class guilt queen. i just felt that there were so many needless deaths and especially since the 60s hippie dream resulted in the capitalist wank fest of the 80s and the collapse that is going on at the moment it just seemed really hollow. or maybe it was just me being cynical. i dunno, i suppose it was quite well made, the cast was like a greatest hits of all the best german films i've seen in the last 5 years but i didn't think it clung together very well. i just wish i'd read a book instead.
dean spanley:
a shaggy dog story. really moving and gentle and different to the films i usually see. peter o'toole is an old cumudgeon who is visited by his son every thursday and his son is getting increasingly irritated by this routine seeing as his father is at that age where it seems only correct to be as much of an awkward old bastard as is possible. an encounter with an indian holy man talking about reincarnation and the dean of a local church leads him to believe that the dean is a reincarnation of his father's beloved dog wag, who ran away years ago and seems to be the only thing he grieves (although he also lost a son and a wife in the last few years). it was a lovely little film and made me cry buckets (the o'toole character reminded me of my bamp who died a few years ago). it had bryan brown and sam neill and was quite delightful and thought provoking. i really enjoyed it.
the reader:
nazi tits. sorry, had to get that out of my system. its been sitting in my brain like some sort of mental tourettes. kate winslet is naked for a lot of this movie. this is a good thing and yes, its integral to the plot etc. she starts an affair with a teenager (15 years old) in post-war germany and although happy in the moment, seems sad most of the time. he is naive and lost in this first love and then she suddenly leaves him. years later he is a law student and attends a war crimes trial where she is a defendant and her secrets are discovered. this marks him for life and makes him profoundly sad. again, i think the book was probably better than the film but it was filled with lots of good performances and has the great bruno ganz in a supporting role.
patti smith: dream of life:
dreamlike and fragmented, this documentary does not tell a chronological tale of her life but you get to the bare bones of the woman far more directly. filmed over 10 years, this film has intimate moments looking at trinkets in an apartment and having tea with her parents as well as some very public moments like demonstrating against the iraq war and firey possessed performances. i went to see patti smith a few years back in the coal exchange and it reminded me how inspired i found her, how i just felt so enthused and energised having witnessed her on stage. i've read books on patti smith and have her poetry but nothing came close to seeing her flirt girlishly with old love sam shepherd and pouring out the remains of her friend robert mapplethorpe, gazing at them at saying they were more like "shells", sparking lots of images in my head and thinking about lost loved ones. wonderful.
mother night:
this adaptation of a kurt vonnegut novel is on loan from my friend carl, a similar vonnegut obsessive (who, to my delight, has a signed picture drawn by vonnegut in his house). the film was strange, the story was pure vonnegut in its surreal distorting of history. nick nolte plays an american writer living in germany in the 1930s. when war breaks out he gets a visit from an american who asks him to be a spy for his country but only on the condition that no-one will ever know that he is a spy. he becomes a successful propaganda radio dj and is happy with his wife and their "nation of two". when she dies he flees to america where he lives a dull life, waiting for his own death but then the secret gets out and he is discovered. for shame, i haven't read the book its based on but it felt very much like a vonnegut book in style. its the first film adaptation of a vonnegut book i've seen and i'm a big fan and wasn't that impressed. he's a very funny dark writer and moves back and forth in time, but film was a little dull, seemed to go on a bit long and despite having alan arkin in it wasn't that funny. it was interesting but i wouldn't point people towards it, really.
don't look now:
always worth watching, i don't even know when i first saw it, it seems to have always been there in my life. such a beautifully executed tragedy with nic roeg's classic heightened reality and oddly framed angles. the use of colour is extraordinary, with its red reds and its spidery greys and browns. i was introducing it to someone tonight but disappointingly he had already seen so much and its been so often referenced in popular culture the ending was not a surprise and i think the magic was taken out of it a bit. when i watch it i am still rooting for donald sutherland and hoping afresh that he'll realise his fate and not go down that alleyway and i cry buckets in the first scene, almost unaware of what is about to come. the supernatural elements often overlook the intimate portrait of a falling apart marriage which makes up the bulk of the film, it is all together perfect.
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