the good book

this week's diary is an extended cat edition. frankie continued to wear the cone and in the end sort of got used to it. he was walking around like a little gangster, the weight of the cone bearing down on his neck a bit. he was leaping around and clearly feeling a bit better and on tuesday i took him back to the vet. she gave him the all clear but as i had a lot to do that day she said to wait till we would be in the house for the rest of the day to take the cone off, so the responsibility fell to steen. poor steen. he took the cone off and frankie flew out of the room, jittered about the place freaking out over his new found freedom and then sat down in front of him and scratched open the room. ugh. when i got back from work that night steen met me at the front door with a panicky look on his face and the cat in his arms, it was the first time frankie had been still enough to be picked up all evening. we took him upstairs and he sat in my lap and we reattached the cone. fleeting freedom, back to square one.

tuesday was a bit of a stressy day for me all 'round, what with the vet visit, working in the evening and a big job interview all with me thick with cold and feeling like i was walking through fog. the interview was for the front of house manager at chapter, a job which is a bit like the duties i do now but more regimented, more power and much more money. i had managed to perk up during the interview, felt confident that i could do the job and answered all the questions with no trouble at all and described for them what i felt the job needed and what i could bring to it. the trouble was by the end of the interview the last question i faultered on: "if we offered you this role would you take it". i stuttered "i believe so" and have never felt so insincere. i was seriously doubting whether i wanted the job at all. the way my life works at the moment might mean i'm scraping the breadline every month but it is stress free and allows me to have a tonne of fun. added to that earlier in the day i was offered the role of looking after the film academy (the new screen school), involving admin hours as well as looking after the kids when they come for their lessons and films. i was completely chuffed about this and really looking forward to starting it and mentioned it in my interview. if i took on this front of house manager job it would mean a lot of stress, loads of troubleshooting and erratic working hours and i really wasn't sure whether i wanted that in my life. by thursday i had got a letter saying i had not been successful but had really impressed them in the interview. a perfect result as far as i am concerned. i'm not very ambitious, i'm not very good at being ambitious and although i try to gee myself up seomtimes i am quite happy how i am. its not officially been announced but if the rumour of who got it is true then i couldn't be happier. i get to keep my life, i get to do the film academy and the "contact a family" shifts too and things will tick over carefully but happily. ace.

wednesday i was ushering for the new nora ephron film JULIE AND JULIA. i remember hearing about the blog, later book a while ago and was interested to see how they would turn a blog into a film, especially a recipe blog. well, nora ephron has completely come up trumps. this film was hugely enjoyable, abley handled the dual narrative of 1940s julia child starting life in paris and discovering a love of food and julie powell a post-9/11 new yorker finding meaning in her life through julia's cook book. the two narratives work well together, reminding us of how different times were then and yet how similar. julia child's husband paul works with pressure from the increasingly paranoid mccarthy breathing down his neck and questioning the list of library books in the embassy library and, although it is not made explicit, it is interesting that julie powell is working for a 9/11 support service in an america where an american's own library take outs were being monitored for any sign of terrorism (or even dissent). it is also comparable how different the two wives look at their daily duties. paul child seems beset with worries about his life has played out, whether he has made a difference and so, conversely does julie. in an early scene we see her having lunch with a bunch of grotesque "friends" who are competitively trying to out do each other in a similar way we used to see men "doing" a liquid lunch and boasting about their sales figures. the film is rich with comparisons for the two ways of life for the women but the main thing that comes through is the love of food and life. julia and paul, on their first day in france stop off to have a meal that makes julia tear up with its richness and beauty and julie takes comfort in the ability to make something beautiful and delicious out of a few simple ingredients. the joy that julia takes in food (and sex) is life affirming. she seems to have lived life to the full and took personal disappointments such as the inability to have children and the constant reposting for paul's job to more obscure locations in her stride. it was refreshing to find a film that focussed on women but was not all about them searching for a man to complete their perfect world. this was a film about women finding themselves and finding their own joy. it also made me very hungry. when i got home from the film i was hoping steen had cooked me one of his wonderful curries and instead we warmed up a pizza. it was one of the biggest small disappointments i have ever experienced! seriously though, with the supportive husbands abound in this film it did turn my thoughts to sweet steen and how bloody ace he is. we both delight in food (hence my expansion over the past two years) and it is a shame he couldn't come and watch it with me but he was there in spirit, taking the place of the wonderful paul child (played by the fabulous stanley tucci) in my head.

wednesday night we dashed out to go to the MEZE FEST, in this case a cacophony of post rock from france, england and america. we turned up at 8pm and were the first there, a bit of worry abound about whether anyone else would come. we got a drink and started to play pool and then a flurry of people, starting with lovely businessman keith, gindrinker graf and ex-truckers ben turned up and we knew it was going to be o k. the bands started a bit later to ensure a bit more of a turn out. first up was SINCABEZA. they took to using the dance floor rather than the main stage so the neck of the bassist's guitar kept almost hitting me in the face. not a bad thing. they were fantastic to watch, mostly instrumental math rock noodling about occasionally broken up with yelps from the bassist that made me think of the amazing PONYTAIL gig at the start of the year. it was great to find out that the lead guitarist was a lovely chap as we chatted to him at length at the merch stall (this expensive bordeaux bands compilation? "not so good"... this 4 band compilation cd? "ah, that: it is free"). next up was SNORKEL. now, i've been going on and on about snorkel as being one of those brilliant finds we made at the last ever VENN festival. they were on in the dank, dark thekla and stormed it bringing an experimental quasi electro jazz music played with real instruments and seemed to have a million people on stage. i was intruiged to find out how they were going to fit them all in the meze. it turns out they limited their band to a guitarist, keyboardist, drummer and of course trombone player. they were ok, a little more ravey than i remember them being but much of their set was hampered by the extreme anger i was feeling for the students who had streamed into the venue on the premise for cheap beer and who had decided to heckle the band through the set. the trombone play is a giant of a man who menacingly looked into the crowd throughout and looked more than a little pissed off. bloody students, don't know they're born! i started to feel very old and grumpy at the sight of all these young 'uns totally ignoring the FREE and brilliant line up of bands in their midst. i went to university in swansea and remember the excitement of RACHEL STAMP playing. no-one played swansea then. i would have ripped someone's arm off at the opportunity of having the kind of line up the meze had. pah. anyway, i had fully vented my anger by the time PUBLICIST came on. i was really excited about this, my friend ol had introduced me to TRANS AM a few years ago and i hungrily devoured their albums. to know that he would be playing such a small venue and be inches away from me (another musician who favours the democratic dancefloor staging) was pretty exciting. i put in my earplugs, watched him set up his drum kit and got ready. his songs were heavy on the urgent, travelling trans am beat, where it feels like you're speeding down a road too fast with no lights on. he added some fantastic vocoder vocals that made it seem like some mental robot was talking through your car radio on the journey. it was great, i was dancing a bit and if i'd been drunk and if this gig had been full of music fans rather than plastic students then i might have been leaping around the room crashing into the hi hat. it was a strange old night but not a bad one. i still say that this MEZE FEST adventure is an ambitious one and one that i hope has paid off for jonny, every night i've been to has been loads of unpretentious fun (and for every one i've been to there have been loads more that steen has attended).

i spent thursday perfecting my housewife look, in order to better understand julia child. not seriously but i did do loads of housework and cooked tea. i was not up for going out again, for all the fun of the meze i have tended to be really bloody tired on that last train! i coerced steen into missing SIC ALPS and instead we stayed in with the cat really happily cwtched up in our laps and seeming almost back to normal and we caught up with THE DAILY SHOW (a teatime ritual. it makes me so happy we get this show over here now) and then i made steen watch TRUE BLOOD. i'd heard about this new hbo show from alan ball, the man responsible for SIX FEET UNDER and since i was a pre-teen goth quite fancied an intelligent drama about vampires. i was a little too old for BUFFY when it came out and i'm far too old for TWILIGHT so hoped i'd found a way to satisfy my urge for blood. steen didn't like it that much but i really enjoyed it. in this version of the present vampires have come out and trying to integrate into human society, this has been enabled by the japanese invention "true blood" a synthetic blood that can be sold at supermarkets. sookie, a virginal telepathe in louisiana comes accross one of such creatures when she saves one from being attacked by local drug dealers determined to drain him of his "v juice" (his blood) that has become quite an attractive new high. the first episode was a little lame in parts, batting you over the head with character traits to make them memorable but by the second episode they all felt a bit more imbedded and real and i really enjoyed it. there was a great little frizzle of chemistry between the lead vampire and little ol' anna and i loved all the vampire politics that kept hitting the news channels. i can see this being something i'm going to have to watch on my own on catch up tv as my dirty little secret.

friday i was working for the DRONES COMEDY CLUB. it was a really good night and it reminded me how brilliant the people are who run nights like this. for £3 you can come and see a bunch of comedians who are trying stuff out, some on stage for the first time, some seasoned pros. last night was hosted by clint edwards and brought on some drones regulars, like dan thomas and frank honeywell (is ted an act? well, he certainly heckles well) and some new faces. it was brilliant as usual. at one point behind the scenes clint took a go on some of dan's snuff. he sneezed and creased all three of us up backstage. later on he explained to the audience what the noise was about and introduced a few members of the audience to the snuff that i turned down (on duty, y'know) but apparently tastes minty. hmmm. well, they all seemed to enjoy it. there was a running joke about a bunch of 16 year old girls (i didn't serve them booze, they were drinking water, despite what clint claimed) and a liberal mp in the audience. clint and dan just manage to work the crowd so everyone's having a great time, it feels fun and all at the same time professional and relaxed like a gig going on in your living room. they are lovely to work with and its always a good night.

saturday it was MACBETH as performed by the increasing un-amateur seeming amateur group EVERYMAN. this was a very well designed and often very well acted version of the play. i've seen quite a few macbeths and know the play almost off by heart (its my favourite shakespeare play) so i was impressed that i was so impressed! a few really good moments, such as a genuinely creepy scene where the macbeth seeks out the witches for a second time and a great use of the stage and set made it a really good version of the play. it was a simple modern dress costumed play with a few pieces that didn't work (a too long coreographed dance scene before the banquet where banquo appears) and a couple of the younger actors still seemed to say the lines like they didn't really know what they meant but these were minor quibbles. for a 3 hour play it went quite quickly and was always engaging.

now, sunday and monday is the new chapter move. exciting and frightening!

happy cat, poorly cat, bloody cat, sad cat

this has been a long week of no sleep. our lad frankie has not been well and it has dominated all our thinking time, any time off i've had. ugh. anyway, i'll moan about that a bit later. at the start of the week he was healthy and well and all was good and i took steen to see my friend gerald tyler's new play THERES SOMETHING WRONG WITH ABEL. gerald is a bloody lovely man who just happens to be an amazing performer and writer. i was lucky enough to be asked to usher for his previous play BIG HANDS in its two incarnations and its a joy to watch him work. his plays are thought provoking and beautiful but still retain the ability to have a universal appeal, anyone could enjoy them they are sublime without being pretentious. he works completely with his surroundings, the music in the show is not just a poorly thought out loop but music but in an organic way, it is an integral part of the show and uses a band called LIMBO during the performance like a greek chorus. the set in THERES SOMETHING WRONG WITH ABEL is a garden shed on a patch of lawn and the whole stage is used, nothing in this play is unneccessary. as with BIG HANDS (a beautiful play about a private detective who is given charge of a renegade angel) ABEL had a religious theme. gerald plays a man who at first appears to be a mad old bastard who lives in a shed and talks to himself but after the play is over you are not sure whether he is in fact cain, one of the twin brothers who started humanity and murdered his brother and has been placed in this present as pergatory by god to relive the murderous argument that ended his companions' life. in moments of comic genius and an attempt to contact god more directly he dials his number and finds himself on the end of a frustrating automated message giving him options to "if you are having problems accessing your faith dial 3". then he seems to re-enact his brother's murder, the initiation of evil in the world over and over again, in different ways, like groundhog day. these scenes are darkly comic. he is trying to spend some time day dreaming and is interrupted by a never seen and never heard presence in the shed that makes him vitrolic and he powers up his black and dekker making you sure that the other person hasn't come off so well. but is there really anyone else there at all? after these episodes he leaps up onto the top of his shed and convenes with god. in these moments cain is sad, measured and serene. we hear how cain thinks he has seen other biblical characters like judith on the bus but she seemed to not recognise him, he is always a heartbeat away from pleading with god to end this repetition and confusion. the play was tantilisingly short, leaving me wondering what had happened to cain. is he ok? is he really a biblical character or just a character in his head? it was very funny and fascinating study of madness.

on sunday the first film was ICE AGE 3, that we were showing partly for a kids party. it was a bloody awful experience, too many kids not enough adults and the adults who were there seemed not to care about them or the cinema. ugh. i won't dwell on this but i was very glad that the next film was ADVENTURELAND. i had liked the poster depicting two attractive looking indie kids in 80s ringer t-shirts and wasn't too put off by the fact that it was a new film by the man that did SUPERBAD. i thought it had michael cera in it. it didn't, it had jesse eisenberg in it, who is the kid from the ROGER DODGER movie that i enjoyed years ago and couldn't remember the name of till i imdb'd it a moment ago. in roger dodger he was fittingly irritating in that teenage precocious way, but he was still pretty irritating in adventureland and annoyed me all the way through. after being irritated immediately by jesse eisenberg i was then irritated by the 80s setting which seemed completely needless. why was it set in the 80s? i was hoping for some sort of plot development which meant it was essential to be the summer of '87 but none came. the effect made me wonder if it was just a cash in for the 80s nostalgia racket that leaves modern 10 year olds dressing a bit like i did when i was 10, which leaves me feeling a little like i'm wondering around in a sort of mass fancy dress party every time i'm on queens street. i'm not sure how relevant the 80s were as a setting but because the film was so good though, it put me in mind of those really brilliant 80s john cusack and john hughes teen dramas such as SAY ANYTHING, THE SURE THING, BETTER OFF DEAD, SIXTEEN CANDLES, SOME KINDA WONDERFUL, PRETTY IN PINK. i know i don't need to list them but i love the memories they evoke. as a introverted lass blessed with a tv in her room from a young age (thank you, rich relatives) i poured over these and thought i was the only one watching them till the internet nostalgia boom made me realise how popular they really were. this film stands up with them, which is massively to its credit. james (eisenberg) is a young rich kid who is planning a post-university trip with his pals in europe then told on the eve of the off that his parents can't afford it and he needs to get a job finds himself trudging up to the gates of the adventureland theme park to join a bunch of fellow poor outsiders. for a film set in the 80s these characters are pleasingly devoid of overdressing in every sense, they do not look like fancy dress characters, like the poor sods in THE WEDDING SINGER but seem like real people. james falls for emily, but she seems reluctant to fall for him, as she is otherwise engaged in a sleazy affair. he makes friends with the nerds that litter the park and gains some much needed humility. my irritation abated gradually during the film and by the end i was left with a feeling of what a lovely and quite old fashioned film it seemed, no gross out moments in a teen comedy is quite refreshing.

the next film i had a look at was the sumptious COCO BEFORE CHANEL. it was on my brilliant oldies shift and they bloody loved it. the film stock seemed to be printed on silk, it seemed to have such an expensive sheen. at first it seemed to have a bit too much in common with the previous big expensive french period drama LA VIE EN ROSE, a poor orphan and scenes in a dirty turn of the century bar being a bit too close to the previous story. but coco did not have the little sparrow's common touch. she quickly escaped to be the kept woman of a local landowner and made him fully aware that she did not wish him to ever mention that she once worked in such a place. it is made clear that coco always knew her own mind and although she was clearly using the landowner for status, her upkeep and power her honesty in the matter difficult to judge her poorly on it. audrey tatou is gorgeous to watch, those deep dark eyes of hers always hint at her glowering at those in her path but the film was a little dull. gorgeous but dull, like a lot of fashion.

the rest of the week was taken up with cat-ness. on tuesday afternoon frankie leapt up into my lap (very uncharacteristic, he usually just wants to play fight) and just wanted to be held and stroked. i looked at him and saw he had a little scratch under his chin. no problem, thought i. but then it was bedtime and frankie came up to the pillow and we saw this massive bloody bald patch where he had been scratching. initially i was worried it was fleas again and we gave him a treatment and went to bed with plans to take him to the vet. frankie slept next to me completely still all night, i had my hand over his fur to feel for fleas but there was no twitching. the next morning, having been awake most of the night a bit worried i too him to the vet. i expected him to say "there is nothing the matter with him, ms vaughan. please give me £25 for taking a look at laughing at you" but instead he said he had an abcess and needed an operation. wah! i was a bit upset, he said he could do it straight away and that i could pick him up after 4.30pm. because we'd failed to get insurance (he's only been going outside for a month!) it would cost about £90. ouch. needs must. i went home and paced about the house with a lumpy throat until i went to work for a bit and dashed out phoning the vet to hear he was ok and went to pick him up. the vet said to keep an eye on him but he should be ok now. ace! that night he was still very poorly and again slept next to us silently all night. the next morning he was a bit more awake and as i went to do a big tidy up of the house he played with me and then sat down and scratched at his neck. aaaaghgh! it was gross. big gross pussfilled wound oozing blood. i rushed him back down to the vet and we fitted a plastic cone (which i now know to be called an "elizabethan collar". i want ruffs next time). he hated it and hissed and growled at the nice lady vet. he's going to be very unpopular since he scrammed the one who diagnosed him, leaving blood trickling down his face. we did it eventually and i was putting the blanket back on the carry case in the waiting room when... he pulled the collar right back off. back in the vets' office she and the nurse then put bandages on his feet and the collar back on. he won't be doing that again. he sat there and glared at me. sorry, frank. we got home and he sat in my lap and didn't move. in fact, he didn't move for the next day or so. he looked severely pissed off. we had another night of interrupted sleep as he couldn't walk easily in his new weird bandaged feet we had to get up to put him in the litter tray as he was trying to shit the bed. friday night i was at work so steen had to look after him and when i came back he announced that frankie had managed to take off the bandages. but he did keep the cone on. by saturday evening he was trying to run around and be normal again and since he'd taken the bandages off anyway we took him outside with the harness on. he walks around like a gangster, head heavy with cone and still a little pissed off but learning to live with this new weird element to his body.

thursday night my parents had bought me tickets to see JOAN BAEZ at st davids' hall. as steen had other plans that night i put out a call and found that no-one wanted to go to see joan baez. stupid sods. well, no-one apart from the lovely willy downie who stepped in last minute and braved the vaughans, my mum's hippie dancing (hard to do in your seat) and my dad's anxiety that we will be late for anything. it was a great show. i saw her here a couple of years ago and she was very regal and the show seemed sort of sedate but tonight she seemed to be really having fun. she and her band did a few accapella numbers and it was themed with many appalacian gospel numbers, which happens to be one of my favourite things. she even did a dylan impression in the verse of a cover of one of his songs which shows was a lot more relaxed at this show that previously. her voice is still very strong and her age rather than making it a big nostalgia fest, brings even more pathos to the murder ballads and folk numbers. brilliant.

quite different from joan baez was the fantastic trio of acts at the barfly on saturday night. GINDRINKER were wonderful as always and thanks to their dark themes and the lighting at the newly opened up barfly stage, could have easily been the house band at the black lodge in TWIN PEAKS. there were a lot of people there that night who i never see at gigs and they all loved GINDRINKER, calling them genius and a great and inkeeping addition to the line up. next up was the very funny and slightly frightening FRANK SIDEBOTTOM. i haven't seen frank come up on the "things we liked in the 80s and 90s" programmes and i think he still remains uniquely northern, a lot of people still haven't heard of him. i remember him from kids programme THE 8:15 FROM MANCHESTER on a saturday morning. even then i knew he didn't fit in and that there was a joke somewhere i was too young to get but still found him brilliant and though he was the best thing about telly at the time. i haven't youtubed or googled him or anything since so it was truly a sort of weird forgotten memory from childhood that i saw in the flesh (and the papier mache) that night in barfly. he sung medleys of manchester songs, punk songs, always ending with the catchy ending he employs for showbiz effect (and as he rightly points out, a lot better than a lazy fade out). it is hard to describe what is brilliant about frank, he is like a showbiz entertainer from another time, part childrens entertainer part blue northern comic but never offensive. but there is something unnerving about that head. ending the evening was JOHN COOPER CLARKE. i saw him at the coal exchange a few years ago supporting THE FALL and for a poet he still has that rock star haze about him, he is far more jagger than he is andrew motion. his stuff is funny and true and it feels very much like a stand up gig, some of the jokes are bloody old and creaky but its how he tells them, it seems impossible to tut and not laugh. it was a really nice mix in the audience, a lot of men in their 40s reliving old days and telling me afterwards that they first saw frank / johnny clarke in 1980something a really great night. if we weren't so tired from all this cat worry then we'd be drinking all night with everyone instead we flew off home to sleep and sleep and sleep.

messy meze fest begins

the busyness of the week began with another brilliant LOOSE gig. up first was FORMER UTOPIA, a man with a guitar who sounded like SMOG without it being too obvious and being from london helped with that. we really enjoyed his set and even more so when we got to the merch stall and discovered that he was selling his single for £4 with a bonus 20 (yes, twenty!) track cd. ace! there were not many people there but then most people are idiots, it gives us more space but i did worry about the jollity of the bands that have come here from canada to tour to 6 people. next up was the lo fi CONSTRUCTION DESTRUCTION. they were shy grungey types and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, she was great at singingand drums, he was good on guitar but they kept swapping instruments and so the quality ebbed and flowed. i really liked their songs though, some of them sort of like grungey lo fi indie disco. julie doiron came on stage and although i was not aware of her before she acted like the most comfortable, famous person in the room. she trawled through her melancholic songs with a sort of powerful ease and played for ages and ages, playing for over an hour. her between song banter made me very homesick, she was from the same part of the world as my beloved alison black and i had a chat with them afterwards about the weird and wonderful month i spent seeing in the millennium in the backwoods of nova scotia. i wanted to call miss black up straight away and force her to move in with us.

wednesday my matinee was the new judd apatow movie FUNNY PEOPLE. i think i knew what to expect even if my oldies audience didn't. i'm not sure if people really read the programme notes sometimes. my oldies went in expecting an old fashioned funny movie but this was more like a noughties THE KING OF COMEDY than anything else. calling in a few favours with old room mate adam sandler and trading on his insider knowledge of the business this film was at times quite dark exploration of what it means to be a huge comedy star of stupid movies watching the new generation bite you on the arse. adam sandler's character george simmons was pretty much what adam sandler would have become had he not got domesticated and found some humility. he is lonely and selfish and rich. his doctor tells him he has leukaemia and not much time to live and he keeps it quiet, hiring a new PA ira (the ubiquitous seth rogan) and trying to keep his head down, taking an experimental course of prescription drugs before popping his clogs. he and ira slowly become friends and ira takes it upon himself to try and pull george out of his funk by being a sort of mentor to his mentor, a moral compass and a reminder of the joy of friendship and comerarderie that he has been missing for the last few years. although this sounds predictible, it isn't. apatow manages to make this story, that could have very easily become a gross out joke fest with no soul, believable and moving. he draws it out slowly and carefully. although the film did feel a bit overlong (it clocks in at a "dances with wolves" style 2 and a half hours) he keeps the pace inkeeping. the only time it seemed to lack direction was in the extended subplot with laura, his big ex-love who he may have a chance with again. however, since this allowed for a surprising and very welcome cameo from eric bana as her new husband i forgave him this. ah eric bana, last week you made me weep for your career and pray that one day soon that i would re-watch CHOPPER and pretend you had just died or something and that you never embarrassed yourself so. here he is allowed to be funny and play on that dumb / not so dumb australian charm. he is a funny man, for gods' sake someone put him in a funny movie or at least a drama where he doesn't just have to look around bemused. please? the likelihood of a hollywood exec reading this is decidedly slim but i have to ask. anyway, sorry for the tangent but i really quite enjoyed funny people. it surprised me, as 40 year old virgin did before it. it wasn't stupid, it wasn't cliched, it featured some great cameos from some comedians i'd forgotten all about (another great exploitation of apatow's new hollywood crudentials). after getting a bit sick of seeing apatow's name attached to everything labelled "comedy" in the last couple of years it reminded me that he is the real deal, an interesting and fresh eye in mainstream hollywood films.

the next film i ushered that day was a very different kettle of fish (ha! see what i did there?! ....sorry) the new andrea arnold film FISH TANK, but after the hollywood stylings of funny people this could not have been more different. set in an essex high rise estate we find mia, a skinny hoodie teen looking out of one of the high rise window contemplatively but who from the outset is shown in a number of acts that to be confrontational and dangerous. she is the type of teen the daily mail pants out headlines about every day to scare its readers into submission. we quickly realise that we're stuck with her, she may be unlikeable but she's going to be how we view the world and we are going to have to view hers. this initial recoil from our narrator in the first scene stands us in good stead for the rest of the film as rather than making us comfortable it immediately makes us wary and questioning. this is a tough world. i saw people walk out quite quickly after this first beginning, presumably offended by the language, the violence, the basic brutality of the state of things in mia's life. her family's affectionate terms alone would be enough to shunt the film well past the watershed. the estate is the fish tank in question, its inhabitants swimming around listless and unable to escape. as with her previous film RED ROAD, arnold tries to show the humanity behind the stereotype of the estate being a hive of scum and villainy. thanks to a wonderful performance from newcomer kate jarvis as well as a brilliant supporting cast (none of whom you doubt the authenticity of) we truly discover who mia is. she is a young woman who is not stupid, just trapped and longing to escape. she clings to anyone who offers hope of a different view of life, the traveller teen she meets when she tries to free his family's ailing horse and more dangerously, her mothers' charming new boyfriend connor. the attraction they have for each other is queasily and tragically played out but as sleazy as the attraction is, you never get the impression that connor is a predatory peado, played with great power by michael fassbender he is oozing with sexual energy and seems to be seduced by a different set of rules in an unnatural landscape. from the first outing where he takes them to a wild land and tells mia's incredulous little sister that the fish squirming in his hands is in essence where her fish fingers come from we know he is different from them, he is the wild salmon in this fairground goldfish bowl and when we finally see his house we realise he himself is trapped in a fancier kind of aquarium.

the next day will and i had off together, not that you'd guess since i had to go to a couple of important meetings. we finally reunited to go and see AFTERSCHOOL in the afternoon. this impressive first feature from antonio campo plays upon his previous short film theme of the pervasive impact of the internet in young people's lives. in a posh boarding school in the east coast of america robert is an introverted lad who doesn't really have any friends and not considered cool but not angsty enough to be a counterculture outsider, he is still at that stage where he wants to be cool and fit in. he listlessly watches clips on youtube of fellow teens in school beating up other pupils, doing stunts, the odd porn film. his brain is saturated with these real/unreal images. he joins the afterschool video club to get close to a girl he likes and finds himself again the watcher, able to control the image rather than just passively watching. but we find that he chooses not to control the image, their given assignment is to do establishing shots of the school and the camera statically sits on banal images of a corridor until a shocking event finds its way in front of robert's camera. the film is shot carefully, pulled back and inobtrusive and occasionally willfully badly framed. it feels like you're watching the events, a persistent voyeur in this boy's life. it is a film that sucks you in and makes you a little afraid for the next generation's ease with camera phones, cctv and the knowledge that whatever you do it will probably in some way (whether viewed by some camera somewhere or mentioned on facebook) become public knowledge.

in the evening we headed off for the first day of the glorious MEZE FEST! curated by will's joy collective boss jonny it is a formidable and ambitious project where there is at least 4 bands every night every day of the month (except for mondays) for the whole of october. my head hurts just thinking about it. october is going to be a very busy month for me, with the reopening of chapter and swn / mylit festivals as well as more theatre work coming up (really strong programme this autumn) i am planning to do as much meze-ing as possible but have the foreknowledge that it is not going to ever be enough for my liking. we discoverd happily that newport is only £3.60 away and that the meze is only 2 minutes fromthe station. score! i have vague memories of being here before but very briefly, i'm not sure what its incarnation was in 1997 but that was the last time i reguarly went to newport. we had a quick stop in the merenger pub, a happy old haunt that i had mistakenly thought had closed down (it just had a little refurb and a jukebox ban from new owners sam smiths. booo!) and then ambled over to see the first band of the festival THINKING WITH SAND. i'm not sure about the name but the music was great. dreamy and droney with some great beats from a man who looked like a younger version of those science blokes who used to turn up on open university late at night. we were hanging around with the very lovely mel and graf and matt jarrett who took us under his wing and showed will the hot snack bar, the equivalent of giving charlie bucket the keys to the chocolate factory. his eyes widened. the next band were not my favourite, they were little emo indie kids who had apparently brought in their own lighting to make themselves look moody. all style no substance so i went into the empty hot snack bar to do some writing instead. will found me a bit later and pulled me back in where he'd found newpart, a group of enterprising young art students who are going around gigs getting people to draw something, anything. steen draws a picture of a steak with a rainbow coming out. i draw a bad portrait of him that he drunkenly calls genius. hmmm. next up is STRAY BORDERS who i was very very excited about seeing again. we saw their farewell gig a few months ago supporting rock of travolta and jonny had convinced them to come out of retirement for meze, for which i am duly thankful. they are so good, still sound like the soundtrack to the best bit of a angsty teen movie, that bit where the heroine falls in love and doesn't know what to do with herself. last up were a band that no-one i could find knew anything about but CASPIAN turned out to be really amazing. like sigur ros if they discovered sludge and loud in that way that can just pound you to the ground. i'd thankfully remembered my new earplugs for this gig and was glad of them as my ears were ringing right through to the next day despite them. we travelled back on the train with the mel, graf and the equally lovely businessman keith lerego (whose surname fills me with joy each time i roll it around in my mouth). we shared a much needed taxi back (it was after midnight and my energy was ebbing away with each tick of the clock. it made us very excited for the month of fun that the clever charlotte braddick has named rocktober. bring it, rocktober!

back to the future

this week i have mainly been watching THE TIME TRAVELLER'S WIFE. i watched it 3 times: sunday, wednesday and thursday. thankfully i was paid for watching it because otherwise i may have considered it some form of weird torture. i have not read the book and maybe the book is better but the film was a big ol' manipulative schmaltzfest. i the story was interesting for a sci fi nerd like me. when he is 6 years old he and his mother are involved in a car accident but he disappears within the space of a few seconds travels back to a time when he is being read to by his parents as a younger child and awakes naked watching his mother die in the car crash he was momentarily in and a man appears to him (his older self) to tell him not to be afraid and let him know what is happening: he is time travelling. we next meet him at this time when he is presumably in his early 20s working in a library and disappearing at varying and unwanted times to appear in familiar places to him (places that will be important in his life we discover later on). a pretty young woman comes up to him and speaks to him as if she knows him and invites him to dinner. at this dinner she explains that an older version of himself has been visiting her by time travelling ever since she was 6 years old and she has known him all her life. they (very) inevitably fall in love and get married and somtimes the time travelling makes things awkward (almost missing the wedding ceremony, only to turn up as himself from another time line) but its only when they are trying to a child that things get slightly angsty in their life. unfortunately it never seems to get too angsty. the couple seem to have a ridiculously happy and stress free life, which is helped along by him time travelling to win the lottery, one of many plot holes. the wife and precocious child seem too perfect and forgiving of all the strange things that happen to them. the film seems to be bathed in warm yellow light and a little manipulative so this interesting premise is transformed into a giant schmaltz fest. if it was not for eric bana being brilliant as usual i might have knawed my arm off in boredom through these three long performances.

i did manage to break up the time traveller monotony on sunday with a showing of the german gangster film CHIKO. the cast and crew were all quite young and although it dealt a familiar tale of youth turning to violence and drugs to try and get out of the ghetto it seemed to have a really fresh energy so although you'd seen this sort of story before, you hadn't seen HIS story before. the islamic turks have as strong a family loyalty as the italians in the godfather and betray the same religious dichotomy of women as whores or wives and mothers but we felt sympathy for chiko despite his cliched gangster ways which shows how nuanced the performance was from denis moschitto. the hamburg suburb seemed like it had learned nothing from chiko's story and that this situation would just keepgoing on and on. a good little story.

anticipating the meze fest and the knowledge that we will not make it to the pop quiz this month we went over to the HALFWAY PUB QUIZ, a traditional affair with a fruity old landlord reading the questions covering topics that did not include knowing obscure facts about record labels. on our team was me and steen, small steen and his new lady, the formidable caroline duffy and ed and anwen. we came second and won a bottle of red wine which was a nice bonus, its good to know that we have knowledge in something other than pop music, it made me feel less ghettoised. having a crush on glenda jackson helped in this case.

on thursday it was the highly anticipated LOVVERS LOOSE gig. a bunch of people were going since lovvers are known to be very ace (we last saw them supporting jay reatard in bristol last year) and recently crowned kings of local scene ISLET were also on the bill. it started with SATURDAYS KIDS all brattish and punky. i took a shine to them despite the fact that i was probably old enough to have sired them. ISLET came on next and were expectedly brilliant. i've seen them a bunch of times since their inception a few months ago and they just get better and better, with mark playing guitar with juddering, quivering urgency only inches from my face. HARBOUR were not my cup of tea. for the first time in ages i had to leave. i was having a bad footware day and that did not help with me being a bit tired too so i headed downstairs with anwen to have a nice sit down with emma and mark from islet. we went back up to watch the LOVVERS where the lead singer looks like he doesn't care, sings like a high pitched teen playing at being a punk rocker in his bedroom but somehow through the tight fit of the music it all makes sense and it sounds convincing. so convincing in fact that when a mumbled version of "what do i get?" is flung out at the end it feels like lovvers, not the buzzcocks were the first ones to perform it. a great evening.

saturday night i was ushering for the uhhuhuh dance company's production THE CELL in the theatre. the seeds of the show were sewn when the director happened upon an article that mentioned that when joseph mengele was arrested for war crimes he was put in a cell with a travelling musician who was disabled, the kind of person his life's work was dedicated to ridding the earth of. the incomparable jon luxton is at the heart of the theatre company and so it was charged with the knowledge that had he succeeded people like jon would not have been allowed to have been living. the play began with an extreme close up of a man's mouth, mengele's spouting nazi tract about the "need" to harness the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest to weed out the "bad" in society. it was bone chilling stuff. a woman entered the cell and her and jon seemed to lock horns, flirting and attracted and at the same time repulsed. jon's work in his chair was quite stunning to watch, it was graceful and beautiful but at the same time severely muscular and brutal. unfortunately the mood was broken with modern day jokey segments of dialogue with jon and jodie where they argued over whether to turn away from things that are wrong is comparable with german citizens in the 1930s. these pieces did not work for me and i think the show was an intense and facinating study just based on the movement alone. they seemed not to trust the value of the surreality of their show and this seemed a bit of a shame. the parts i enjoyed were indelible though and i hope to see their next production.

next week i hope to see more new things as this week i felt like i was on a repeat button seeing the time traveller's wife again and again, i saw the cell twice and ended up going to see the fantastic TRACES show again on wednesday so bring on the new!

freeeeedoooom!

well, this week has mostly been focussed on two things: me being a bit poorly and the cat being released into the wild. last week working in the box office i had an increasingly hurty head caused, i thought, by the thump thump of the flamenco dancers who have a class in the room above us. on returning home to steen i asked if we could just wrap up and watch movies instead of going out so that's what we did.

sunday was mental busy in the cafe, which didn't make me feel much better but then i was ushering in the cinema for MESRINE PART ONE: KILLER INSTINCT. having watched part two last week i have seen these in the wrong order really but part one was still worth watching. it is faster paced, there is more jam packed into it and rather than the bloated remorseless killer in PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, mesrine was on his way up the learning curve and this in itself was more interesting. KILLER INSTINCT set up the idea of mesrine as a brutal killer, but one was maybe formed by the french government: the brutalising of teenage mesrine in the algerian war and the problem of what to do with a young man who has been taught that might is right and the rough treatment he sustained in the montreal prison. but for all this there are moments when you realise that mesrine had a choice, he came from a middle class background but thrived in the underworld and surrounded himself with people who were seduced by and scared of him in equal measure. it is a fascinating story, more so for knowing that the french were so curious about him and how romanticised he was in his own country.

the film after that was THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD. the yes men are two anti-globalisation protestors who take part in "culture jamming" where they put up fake versions of corporate websites and pretend to be spokespeople for VIPs at conferences. whilst jigged up in their various disguises (usually just smart hair cuts and suits) they take the corporations' ideas to the extreme then give speeches to the delegates and members of the public and see how far they can take the joke. sometimes they get found out immediately and ushered out of the auditorium and sometimes the means has a very useful end. in the past they have provoked bush into famously saying "there should be limits on freedom" after theypublicly embarrassed him and here the biggest stunt had them posing as chemical company DOW's spokespeople and announcing that they would right their wrongs and compensate the people of bhopal for the chemical tragedy caused by their company in 1984. they managed to get on the bbc to announce this and used it to force the issue and make the company react but instead the company simply printed a retraction statement and saw their shares dip nearly 3%. another stunt here sees them getting an official haliburton deligate dress up in a giant blow up condom looking like a space bee and suggest to them that it had military and global warming potential and asking them if it would be possible to attach weapons to the suit. ludicrous. all of this has a point. if DOW made this announcement the share market would punish it, but it would be the right thing to do. DOW will never do this. it was an interesting film and the yes men were thankfully not smug, just engaging and funny.

after this i hot footed it to town to meet steen who was djing at the loose gig for BLITZEN TRAPPER. since it was so late i didn't think i'd make it with any time to see songs but i saw about four songs. i wasn't impressed to be honest, very alt country veering on lynryd skynyrd territory with one bit of feedback i liked that lasted about 30 seconds so i wasn't sorry i'd missed it. more sorry to miss the lovely MARTIN CARR do his thing with a big bunch of cardiff lovelies. pah! next time, gadget! but i was starting to feel a bit under the weather too, which would stop me from missing the brilliant SHE KEEPS BEES gig on the monday too. booo! one week where there is a gig per day of great quality andi've missed almost all of them!

one that i didn't miss was on wednesday: TIMES NEW VIKING. we saw them last year in clwb and they weren't just bloody brilliant but really lovely when we had a chat with them afterwards. subsequently they have had a lot of press and i was worried they would be a bit polished and arch but was still looking forward to it very much. the first support band on was the inimitable GINDRINKER. they did a sort of greatest hits set which played to the crowd nicely. they have a lot of bloody great songs that make your mouth curl up in a half smile, half grimace. BANJO OR FREAKOUT were on afters and steen likes them mucho. i liked them too, even if a tardy week later i can't remember much about their set, sorry. what i do remember is TIMES NEW VIKING coming out a little slicker than previously (certainly the singer's hair, which looked well silky) but still sounding diy and fresh. a mean feat. they do excellent pop songs that deserve to be danced around by teenagers in their pants in their bedrooms (well, this is what i would do if i'd heard them as a teenager, i've certainly done it as an adult). we immediately go out and i spend the money i was saving for things like food on things like 7" singles. oops.

friday will and i had the afternoon off together so went to the cinema to see the new almodovar film BROKEN EMBRACES (LA ABRAZOS ROTOS). i'm a big fan of his and was really excited about seeing this film. i had a picture of almodovar on my folder at school when i was 14 and made an effort to see as many films of his as possible. i loved all the candy coloured sets, flamboyant characters, the comedy and the melodrama. in recent years his films have matured with him and especially since the moving TODO SABRE MI MADRE (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) they have taken on a seriousness he previously avoided. one of my all time favourite films is still HABLA CON ELLA (TALK TO HER) and that got very dark and introspective in places, the colours muted and the joy mixed with sadness. BROKEN EMBRACES has a blind scriptwriter's assistant needs to leave town for a while and leaves her son diego looking after him, who in turn has an accident himself. diego digs into the big secret about events that led to him giving up directing and becoming blind. the film has famously been described as almodovar's love letter to penelope cruz, his latterday muse, it is about a director's relationship to an actress and the difficulty of making a great film. unfortunately i did not think this was a great film. the melodrama was predictable (never something i have thought him capable of) and a little dull and the film within the film "comedy" of candy-coloured film "girls and suitcases" was not very convincing despite the joyous appearance of his previous muse rossy de palma. it had wonderful flourishes and he will probably never be able to make a film that is not interesting and without merit but after such a run of high drama and full, rich almost voluptuous films this felt a bit lacking in substance, tall (2 hours plus) but thin.

later that evening i was the barlady for the DRONES comedy club upstairs in chapter. due to all sorts of silly circumstances i haven't been able to do this shift for a long while and i'd forgotten how much fun it can be. the two dans and clint are great company and they were all out celebrating laura bryon's birthday the night before so how they stayed so sparky on stage was no mean feat. joined by so many other comedians i lost count but one of them being the very lovely ben partridge it meant that this night did not feel at all like work and instead i chuckled behind the bar all night. after running around like a mad thing to get the booze downstairs i returned home all smiley and happy. good nights' work!

the main event that has dominated this week has not been a film or a good gig but instead the emancipation of our cat frankie. i picked him up from splott library about a year ago and have done my darnedest to make sure he is well looked after like the baby substitute he truly is! i read up all my cat books, got advice from the vet and all of them say that its best to not let a cat out at least until its over 6 months old and spayed (some saying as old as a year old) and certainly not let them out at night. as he was a curious little sod who kept trying to escape every time we left the house we bought a harness and took him outside as often as we could so he could get used to it. just after 8 months when the weather was good i ordered a catflap and waited for him to pop his head through it. i had to wait a long time. he would look at the catflap and mew with incomprehension. we started lifting the lid of the catflaps so he'd get the idea. he didn't. so, about 4 months on, on sunday, i was stood in the kitchen and he was pawing at it and actually pushed through! joy! mixed with worry! this meant that the cat would actually be able to properly use the catflap. this meant that he would be able to go out by himself and i would not be able to guarantee his safety. like a mother who can't cut the cord i was suddenly all upset and wanted him to regress to kittenhood again. me and steen took turns to let him out and watch him come back in but i still wasn't happy with leaving the catflap open whilst we were out. then tuesday i had to go home from work ill and was forced to spend the whole day in the house so i thought i'd be brave and just let frankie do his thing. happily he came in and out of the catflap with ease and i was completely reassured. a week on from this and he seems like a much happier cat, no longer anxious to go outside and see what is going down, he comes through the catflap cooing when he sees us. its made things easier for us too, whilst the harness is useful it felt awful having to limit his travels when he is such an adventurer and it has made steen hunger for a cat cam he's seen on the internet, eager to find out where he's been in his day. all together a much happier household!

filling the theatre

saturday night we celebrated the return of CHAPTER THEATRE. for the past year we have been using the LLOFFT space above the bar (limited as it can only fit 40 people) and outside spaces for shows and it has felt a bit like doing a show in a school hall at times so it was a relief and a joy to finally open the theatre for the new show by TANYA RAMAN called TRACES. it was a shame we couldn't have had a more grand reopening with champagne and party poppers because the show itself was simply one of the best things i have seen in the theatre and the perfect way to show off the staff and facilities here at chapter. we started off in complete darkness then old photographs appeared on the screen and we were surrounded by voices talking of memories and the lapping of water and a low drone. the photographs bled into the image of a woman in the dressing room looking into the mirror, barely moving. after a few beats there was another woman in there, a replicated image moving differently. then there was another. she looked out from the screen to us. this in turn faded and we could see the woman appearing at the back of the stage. she moved carefully around the stage and stopped for us to see this repeated on a projection on the screen in front of her. her movements would overlap with the movements of the ghost people on the screen and then went black. the next stage was her costume of light moving around the stage with her movements, only to be captured and flashed back on the screen. john collingsworth then took a light pen and drew around her body in its pose and these flashed on, then he tried to pin her down in pencil drawings. it grew more fevered and exciting and then faded again. it was so intense and beautiful it made me cry. it is difficult to describe how this effected me, it was only part way through the show that i recognised my voice amongst the whispering sounds on stage. my friend jon had asked me months ago to contribute a few memories to be used for his soundscape for the piece but i had entirely forgotten about this. one of the memories i had was being in the village where i was born, me and my brother being woken up early in the morning by my mum to see the cove near our house that had frozen over with the frost. i was overcome by the beauty of the images in front of me, by the movement of tanya's body and the swell of the music, by the realisation that all our memories will one day fade but that we leave traces of ourselves behind. it was a wonderful experience.

we were jolted out of that to go see our friend colin have a birthday do in the landsdowne pub. it was fancy dress and the theme was "characters from S4C". we couldn't go from the theatre to fancy dress so i just went in red and black (sort of welsh dress). it was fab evening with many sali malis, farmers, a superted and lots of cheesey dance music. we spent most of the time hanging out by the amazing buffet with gar, ange, rich and rhian and pedro and darren. good times.

sunday was a marathon cinema day. my matinee was an italian film MID AUGUST LUNCH (which is a bit of a crap meaningless title, they should have kept it as FERRAGOSTO, which is actually the religious holiday that makes the lunch special). it was absolutely delightful. written, directed and starring gianni di gregorio it is the simple tale of a middle aged man who lives with his elderly mother in a shabby but tidy apartment in rome and is behind with the rent and a bit down on his luck. the landlord persuades him to take in his mother for the ferragosto weekend in exchange for the arrears and a bit of extra cash and when he turns up he has also brought his elderly aunt. the doctor comes to see his mother and mentions that his own mother will be on her own for the festival as he has to work in the hospital. gianni agrees to take her in too, in exchange for the medical bill. finding himself in the company of four elderly slightly fussy ladies gianni is graceful if a little beleaguered, smoking cooking and pouring wine sometimes all at once and trying to keep everyone happy. the farce element of the story is played down and the tone is kept light. it never feels patronising to the old ladies, they are people rather than dotty old biddies, the warmth of the family and community just glows and the whole thing feels like a perfectly baked souffle. a lovely little film.

up next was a really interesting set of documentaries by HUMPHREY JENNINGS. he made some important films around the second world war about life in britain, some of them for the purpose of propaganda. the first one was called "spare time" and talked about the working man in mining and manufacturing towns and what they did when they no longer had to be in the dark dank factories and mines. there was dancing, drinking, games and meals with the family. it had some lovely footage of ballroom dancing in blackpool and pubs in pontypridd. the next film was "the silent village" a wonderful propaganda piece about a mining village poland that had been taken over by the nazis. jennings cleverly mirrored this with a mining village in west wales. we watched the people of the village getting on with their business: going to the local shop for food, working down the mine, going to the pub, going to community meetings only to have this interrupted by the nazi invasion. we never saw more than one soldier but heard the german accented message barked out that the village had been taken over by the nazi party and that they had to obey orders. the villagers saboutaged the mine resulting in the men being shot and the women and children taken to concentration camps. all this happened to the village lidice in poland and the reality of it really hit home. using the people of the village rather than actors gave it a tinge of reality and steely resolve at the end not to let happen in britain what happened in poland. the pit manager at the end said that although the village was wiped off the map with the people gone and buildings destroyed they would not be forgotten as they had been through that experience. the film was really effective, gave a real sense of the way the people of britain reacted to the humanity of the war and the community spirit. the one feeling the documentaries left me with was the sadness that the nazis may not have taken away our way of life but thatcher managed to destroy the mines in the 80s and how different things are now. it was odd looking at that life that is only our grandparents' generation but to today's children must seem like the stone age. things are so so different now. its stupid to say everything is shit these days but the simple, gentle life of the people humphrey jennings shows makes you feel incredibly selfish and shallow and long for the past.

i didn't leave the cinema once i'd finished ushering but instead changed screen and went to cinema 2 for the BAD FILM CLUB: SNAKES ON A TRAIN. i was glad i'd got tickets for will and i and that our friend katy had got in since the cinema was packed, in fact bizarrely they had oversold the tickets. as i work in the box office i know that this is not possible to do unless something has gone very wrong! i think it was something about switching screens but nicko was surprised as anyone that they had sold out. clint did the commentary with her but it hardly needed any, it was a very stupid wonderfully bad film. the first 15 minutes was entirely in spanish which is fine but when they got on the train itself the characters spoke in english so that didn't even make any sense. a lot didn't make any sense. the main character was throwing up snakes and her boyfriend was keeping them in a jar. the reason he is doing this is because she has been cursed by her family. she "has snakes" is the explanation. riiiight. once on the train we meet some of the other, pointless cliched characters and their way of sort of spurring on the plot and we see a lot more snakes thrown up by this poor woman. at one point they have sort of overtaken her and this giant snake comes out of her or she becomes a giant snake or something and everyone jumps off the train just in time before she swallows the train whole. an amulet that was being used by her boyfriend finally comes in handy as it glows white and causes a huge tornado to swallow up the giant snake as if nothing happened. rubbish. it was so silly and ridiculous. nicko cleverly makes it seem like we've all been through this terrible experience together, taking you out of the usual film experience of sitting in the dark with the images coming into your head and turns it into almost a music hall style theatre show.

monday we were back in the cinema but this time for CHAPTER MOVIEMAKER for the premiere of two of the music videos we've worked on in the last few months. ryan owen and ben reed's work on RACE HORSES "cake" and ewan and casey (raymo)'s work on CATE LE BON's "hollow trees house hounds". they are both really good and very different from each other. race horses video is fun, featuring steen being hit in the face by a big cream cake and cate's is trippy and psychey with great mutant animations and you get to see me and my friends burn. the moviemaker is a strange little entity where all sorts of things are shown, from amateur shorts that people are trying out to professional films. we also saw the pilot of a tv show that didn't get picked up, a small documentary about a singer who was killed by pinochet's troups in chile and the new one from the fiction factory. afterwards we went for a drink with raymo and the gang but i was hideously broke and tired (i'd already spent far too much time in chapter over the last 72 hours) so went home to watch MEAN GIRLS instead and muse on the fact that lindsay lohan had the world at her feet and chucked it all for crack and hanging out with paris hilton.

tuesday i was ushering for one of michael kelligan's readings, this month it was the new patrick jones play DANDELION. it was a real treat as it was well acted and full of wonderful lines. the cast had the script in their hands but already seemed to know the characters really well. the setting was an old folks home where earnest is trying to rebel, get the old ladies thinking about the world around them. at times it felt a bit like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST when the characters talk about fleeing, but what to? this is a world that has finished with them. i thought it was a bit overlong, the romance element seeming to be a bit tacked on but it was wonderful and made you think about how we treat the elderly, especially after seeing MID AUGUST LUNCH.

on wednesday i was ushering for SLEEP FURIOUSLY again (wonderful every time but still makes me sleepy) and then was doing some cover for the cinema department in the evening. first up was the BAFTA PREVIEW SCREENING of THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. a little thrill of excitement went through me when i heard that this is what it was, i had hoped to see it at some point so it was nice to get to go to the preview. the september issue of vogue magazine is the most important of the year, one commentator said that it is like the new year for fashion, out with the old in with the new and everyone wants to know what the new is. what is new is partly determined by anna wintour, the editor of vogue. she and her team go around all the fashion shows and decide what the narratives of the collections are, what ideas are put forward and who should be showcased. anna wintour is a very powerful lady, many know her better as "nuclear wintour" for her icy demeanour. she is the person who they based the scary editor of the magazine in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, for years she has been a sort of archetype of fashion women and career women. this film gave her and her industry more depth and showed just what they do. someone who shone throughout the film was the magazine's stylist grace coddington. grace started at vogue at the same time as anna and the two know and respect each other a great deal, despite the odd disagreement about dropping pages from a photoshoot. grace is obviously very good at her job that she clearly loves and feels passionately about. to put it in a simplistic way grace is the beauty and anna is the brains but of course the truth is a lot more complicated than that. the film made the jobs of these people very important, almost seeming to be life or death but it also exposed how silly the whole thing is. a lot of the fashion industry seems to be like the emporers' new clothes. anna decides something is good so it is good and no-one questions her. they fuss and pout about these things (behind her back, to her face they just agree) but no-one challenges her. the one person allowed to challenge her was her daughter. in a bubble bursting moment she mentioned that her mother wants her to be an editor (to follow in the family tradition, anna's father was the editor of the evening standard) but she wants to be a lawyer as she finds it all a bit stupid, anna was not present for this interview. there was a real sadness about anna wintour that came out in the film. despite its protestations the commercial side of fashion tends to make people despise themselves and you got the feeling that its a profession that makes you in turn feel a bit worthless in the end. it was thrilling to be taken on this journey with them.

the next film was the epic MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS. i went to this not sure what to expect. i'd heard it was well respected and that paul schrader, george lucas and francis ford coppola all contributed to it in their early 80s heyday (part of their well known worship of japanese film and mythology) but that was all. it turned out to be a highly stylised facinating study of a man's life. again, i had heard of japanese writer yukio mishima but did not know the details. the film attempted to illuminate his life through his works, the chapters beauty "the temple of the golden pavillion", art "kyko's house", action "runaway horses" and the harmony between the pen and the sword which runs throughout the film and culminates in mishima's death by suicide. this film is so controversial in japan that it is officially banned, mishima's politics that hark back to the days of imperialism being too difficult to discuss. the film was interesting and intense and as an experiment in illustrating a man's life via his work it really worked. the famous score by phillip glass was just amazing and it was a thrill to be surrounded by those vivid colours and the escalating cascade of synths and strings. however, it did seem a little old fashioned and i was very aware all the way through that it was a film made by bunch of foreigners, i wasn't convinced that they were not too in love with the idea of mishima and took him a little too seriously. his politics and the way he lived his life made him seem very callous and petty at times.

i went home after that and will had bought a lovely bottle of wine and we drank and chatted happily, as we got to spend the next day together! we don't get many days off together since i work on a sunday. we both had thursday off and steen decided that since i'd been paid it was time for a bit of a day out so we went to penarth to see the new FFOTOGALLERY ANNA FOX: COCKROACH DIARIES show and did some charity shopping and had an ice cream on the pier. perfect! the exhibition was interesting, she lived in a shared house in london in the early 90s and documented the strange things previous tenants had left there or drawn on the walls and the infestation that reading the diary entries made her life seem not really a britpop era fun time but instead a few scenes from THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. we found some good bargains in the brilliant charity shops in town (i think we counted 6) including the FABER BOOK OF POP MUSIC, essays edited by hanif kareshi, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (a book i read and owned but left with another student in america), a hip flask and a brilliant bag covered with racing cars. i tried on a couple of dresses that didn't look right and steen tried on a coat that he didn't like but i loved (i took a photo of it to remind myself). we dashed back to cardiff to catch early orders at ICHIBAN.

we got back and played with the cat for a bit before i had to head back to chapter to usher for EMti, the new play from angharad evans by the real life theatre company. my friends cathryn and hef were planning to go and i was excited to see them but also dreading it, i'd seen the last play they'd put on and thought it was one of the worst things i'd seen: horribly pretentious and horrible acting. luckily, it wasn't as bad as that! they had a very good cast and the play was well put together. inspired by her own brother's suicide the play was about a young man struggling between an oppressive family and the release of death. apart from the unnecessary and frankly humourous "movement" from dominque fester (was she supposed to be an angel? i'm not sure, but her presence was intrusive and unhelpful) the scenes were powerful and grew increasingly intense. evans' work still suffers from the feeling that it could have been written by a younger more inexperienced playwright but here there was at least hope that the company will improve, the inclusion of other performers seemed to truly be a good path to take. i had a lovely drink with cathryn and hefin, it was lovely to see them again after so long.

friday i was ushering for MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1 (PART2). this was fairly annoying since i'd not yet seen part 1 but ho hum. it wasn't hard to follow. jacques mesrine was the most notorious gangster of the 70s in france, a charismatic self aggrandiser who liked being known as an "honest gangster" and even tried to style himself into a baader-meinhof revolutionary towards the end of his career. he wrote a book bragging of his deeds and gave interviews with the press to increase his notoriety and enjoyed the idea of being the number one hate figure with the police, thinking of himself as a modern day robin hood. although i've missed the first (and apparently better) half of the story, the central performance by vincent cassell made the whole thing very easy to follow, you were drawn to mesrine. you didn't know whether he would be loving and affectionate or murderous and frightening, i don't know many actors who could have pulled that off.

well, i end this week looking forward to maybe a night off from chapter. for all the wonderful things i get to do here i will be savouring a night in maybe just listening to music or reading. it is great to see it busy and full and we have such great shows here its well deserved. but it has been a busy week, as usual and i am looking forward to playing with the cat and being away for the evening.

autumn days and cosy nights

sunday was a cinema marathon at CHAPTER. first up i was ushering the "listening event" JEFF WAYNE'S WAR OF THE WORLDS. this is an experiment for us, we had the enhanced cd playing on 5 channels so it was surround sound in the gorgeous cinema 2 with all the lights out apart from the starry night house pinprick lights. i introduced it and we sat in the twilight listening to the dramatic score. i'd forgotten how much i enjoyed it. rob the projectionist who i was working with is an old punk and thinks its a load of codswallop but he was great and really helpful as always and answered any techie questions people had. the audience seemed to love it and a lot of them filled out feedback forms with ideas they had for albums or audiobooks if we were to do it again. i really hope so because it had a really enthusiastic and positive response. the lovely spencer and kirsten were there, grinning away, a couple of fathers and sons (doing a rights-of-passage thing) and i had a good chat with noel afterwards who echoed what a few people of said about how it put them back to feeling like teenagers again. in these modern times of downloading a track from itunes and listening to bits and bobs few people seemed to sit there and listen to a record. noel said it was like making a date with yourself to sit there and concentrate on the music and really enjoy it and that it had been a valuable experience.

after that i had a short break and then in for the surreal RUMBA. this film was more like a silent comedy, a jacques tati film than a romantic comedy. a gangly, odd looking couple spend their very happy lives teaching english and p.e. respectively, in a school in france whilst attending latin dance competitions. on the way back from a win at one of these they have a car crash and it sends them into a spiral of losing things: legs, memories, jobs and eventually each other before a new life is found. this is all played marvellously for slapstick laughs by fiona gordon and dominique abel. it was a strange little film that i think wrongfooted a few people who had come wanting to see a more traditional romantic comedy but i really enjoyed it, i thought it was joyous with its riotious primary colours. everyone in the film seemed to be having a wonderful time.

next up was SIN NOMBRE. a few of the cinema department have been wearing the brilliant t-shirts around for a few months with the big gothic gangster tattoo lettering and i was intriuged about what the movie would actually be like, whether it was all gangster hype and violence. i was pleased to discover that it was a lot more meaningful and thought provoking than that. the fuller story that involves people from south america travelling up the continent to try and make it to the US. its part tragic love story, part road movie (with beautiful and terrifying scenes atop a freight train travelling up from honduras to texas) and part gangster thriller. the two main leads were both fleeing from their home towns for different reasons but you felt that wherever they went it was not going to escape where they had come from. sayra looked out at honduras and her uncle told her how there was "nothing for you here" but what better life would there be in new jersey? casper fled his barrio but was told that the gang he had rebelled against had chapters in the US so it was likely he would never get out. the poverty trap, indeed: it felt that there was no real escape for the poor of the world and especially with the current financial climate it made you feel like there was nothing worth escaping to.

the rest of the week has been relatively quiet, no gigs to go to and i'd seen most of the films in that one day i'd wanted to see! it was quite lucky for i am very broke till payday next week so taking temptation away is always good. monday we had our veg box from the lovely tom frost at BLAENCAMEL FARM so it gave us the chance to do some good meals. the best of these was the stir fry i did with kale, spinach, shredded carrot, soya, pumpkin seeds and pine nuts, one of CHRIS FOWLER's chillis and peppers and some lovely noodles from HUNGRY PLANET. tasty!

i took tuesday off work because will had an extra day and i wanted to spend some time with him. we went to ST FAGANS to see the POP PETH exhibition. it was a lovely day for st fagans, actually quite sunny and warm and not too many children running around. after being lazy in the morning we didn't leave till quite late but i assumed will had been a million times like me, unfortunately he hadn't been for years so we didn't have time to go around everything like we should've done really. i showed him my favourite house (with the bed in the cupboard) and we bought some old fashioned sweets from the sweetie shop and got around just about everywhere apart from the future house because it was closed for an education day (is it still called the future house? its been open for years now). most importantly we had a good old root around the pop peth exhibition. we watched a video interview with the lovely nick and ashli todd from spillers talking about what the shop means to them and afterwards there was some videos of welsh bands from the 80s and 90s. the exhibition was great, there was a section where some fanzine writers had recreated their university bedroom complete with posters and flyers and a big SPILLERS section with badges and photos of the gang. it was great!

it was a week for watching movies on the sofa wrapped in a duvet. we watched THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on tuesday night. i'd seen it in the cinema and hated it (having been a big fan of the tv series when i was a kid) but seeing sam rockwell in MOON and zooey deschanel in various romantic comedies recently made me want to re-watch it. it wasn't as bad as i'd remembered but then again a little confusing and disappointing. i'd read the book and seen the tv series and listened to the original radio version when it was re-broadcast on radio 4 a couple of years ago you could say i was well versed in what it was all about and had expectations of what the characters should look like, what scenes should be included. i was bound to be disappointed so tried to just enjoy it. it was lovely to look at but i found it a little confusing. some of the performances were great, i especially enjoyed mos def as ford prefect and bill nighy as slartibartfast. the effects were great in that home made, organic way (brilliant jim henson and that ace scene where the improbability drive turns them into knitting) but it just didn't hang together well enough for me. we watched the "making of" afterwards and i think i enjoyed that more. i felt guilty because everyone involved was so passionate and happy making it but for me it just didn't work and i found the hollywood romanticising of it with the love story almost offensive. it made me wish that they'd just had the guts to do a big new tv version where they could play around a little more leisurely and still have tonnes of fun.

on wednesday we were meant to be going to my friend rosie's birthday do but i started to feel really ill. to perk me up we made cupcakes watched the mike leigh film NAKED. when i was a teenager this was one of my favourite films but i haven't been able to bring myself to see it for years. its been one of those films that i pick up the video for, remember that its hard going and put it down again for something else. steen really wanted to see it though and rented it from the library so after ignoring it for a week i agreed. it was as difficult and depressing as i remembered, it felt like i'd been pummelled with a rock afterwards but it is a fascinating study of class in post-thatcher britain. johnny, a highly intelligent but troubled young man flees manchester in the first scene after having raped a girl in the street, he heads for london to hook up with an ex girlfriend and gets involved in her life and wonders around trying to find meaning in the streets of london talking to people who no-one else would think of talking to. by the end of the movie we feel slightly more sympathetically for johnny, knowing that he is capable of so much but spends his life bitterly contemplating humanity and waiting for the end of the world. he seems to find and spread misery wherever he goes and leigh paints a very bleak picture of life in the early 90s. i found out a few years ago that apparently this was his first film after splitting up with his wife alison steadman and he was very depressed at the time of making it. i think it is fitting that i enjoyed it as an angry teen.

thursday night was POP QUIZ time! it came around very quickly and i must admit that i was not really in the mood to go. after spending most of the week confined to the house with autumn chills forcing me into my big jumpers i was feeling very cosy. steen convinced us to go though and we were hoping the patti ladies would accompany us as team members. in the end anwen went on noel's team (he had asked last month, fair enough) and the patti ladies couldn't make it so we ended up on a team on our own. it was actually amazing fun. we got a bit drunk and tottered on our bar stools and did impressions of tina turner to each other. we didn't hope to come anywhere near the top like we did last month but we surprised ourselves by coming 3rd! it wasn't bad going seeing as we beat most people in teams of 5 or 6 so it was as good as winning for us. we had a lovely time talking to leah, iain, rylett and grace then went to dempseys for afters with noel, ed and anwen. what a great night!

friday i booked the night off work so we could go to see MARGARET ATWOOD do a reading at llandaff cathedral. we found out about it through the hay festival web post and were intrigued not only as she was coming to cardiff but that they said it was due to have choristers. wow, how odd! this week we heard her being interviewed by mark lawson on the radio 4 review show and it all became clear. her new novel THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD is set in a world already sketched out in the apocalyptic ORYX AND CRAKE, where alternative characters in the years preceding this have devised a religion, "god's gardeners" are vegetarian and hope to cultivate the land to get it back to eden. in the novel are some of the hymns she has devised for her fake religion. i've heard atwood speak before and her voice dripped with its usual sarcasm as she talked about what she thought about these characters and their religion. i was excited to see what all this would add up to when we went to llandaff cathedral. we had a really nice walk up through llandaff fields and it was pretty full by the time we got there. it was a very strange experience, being in llandaff cathedral. i felt like i had this in-built reverence that i think was there in part due to the overwhelming middle class middle aged audience. i don't know why i felt so censored, i've been to hay lots of times and nowt posher than hay festival but here in a church i felt stifled and immature. a tongue in cheek sensibility was brought back to proceedings by margaret atwood and her performers (including the amazing actress diana quick) as they walked single file up the aisle carrying hippie-looking placards with pictures of bees and flowers. she gave a quick explanation that her book tour was unusual due to her trying to keep the carbon footprint down and all proceeds were going to local charities (in this case the RSPB). despite the seemingly mocking attitude to religion you could tell that atwood had respect for the situation we were finding ourselves in with the destruction of the planet and her understanding for the hope that religion, any religion brings. the readings themselves, some performed or rather introduced by atwood were moving and punctuated by hymns that had been arranged by a musician friend of hers. we took out the pamphlet given to us on arrival and it felt like a sunday service. the woman next to me even sang along with gusto along to the reprise at the end. the excerpts felt like the novel was a mix of both oryx and crake with the character toby looking out of the bubble she has protected herself within and occasionally THE HANDMAIDS TALE where the character wren described the life inside the sex workers' section of the city. it was intriuging and certainly made me want to rush out and buy the novel. unfortunately, funds being what they are i couldn't afford it. it would have been nice to have a copy signed by margaret atwood but it is not hugely important to me. instead we made a donation to the charity and got a canvas bag, i was excited enough about the bag but will certainly buy it in future, as i have all her other novels. leaving llandaff cathedral i felt very privaleged that i had managed to attend the event, one that will stay with me for years to come. margaret atwood is my favourite living author, every time i read a new book by her its like having a luxurious hearty meal and its wonderful that i have had two chances to see her speak now, i feel very lucky indeed.