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Minimal Harm
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| So, you're asthmatic?
Yep - not as badly as I used to be, though.
Okay. Do you smoke?
No. [smiles] I don't smoke anything.
[raises eyebrow] Not even crack?
Well, sometimes.
It causes wars in Afghanistan, you know.
No, that's heroin. Crack and cocaine cause wars in Colombia.
Oh. Smart git. I prefer snowballs, anyway.
[sniggers]
You know, a mixture...
I know. It's just not what I normally think of when I think of snowballs.
What?
You need to Google for "snowballing".
[flicks computer to browser, then pauses] Erm.
I love how your browser is already on a page called "torn frenulum".
Err - yeah. Come on, tell me what this snowballing thing is.
It's swapping semen between your mouths.
Right.
You ejaculate in someone's mouth and then they spit it into someone else's mouth.
[laughs] You're a pervert - get out of here!
[laughs] Okay. Thanks.
Sure - take care of yourself, yeah?
Always do. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Current Music: | Jack and Julian; Bachelor Pad | | Current Location: | 119 | | Subject: | A Morning in the Life | | Time: | 01:34 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/thinking.gif) contemplative |
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| I fell late last night into a fitful sleep, as has been common of late. I drifted awake with a nightmare that I had again missed my doctor's appointment, and was being, again, excoriated for it by my suddenly implacable doctor. I looked at my clock, but couldn't make out what it said. My eyes must be woozy; I wandered over and poked it for a bit before realising that it was off. Odd: I checked the plug socket - nor working; flicked the room lights - not working. I mooched outside into the corridor to reset the fuses - but the fuses were working. Suddenly it dawned on me: my credit had run out: rather than getting billed in the usual way, I am on a meter, which I top up with credit at intermittent intervals. It emerged that I was in debt to the dizzying tune of 6p. Reflecting that complacency about this sort of thing led to the present recession, I resolved to leave immediately to purchase new credit; I was aided in speeding this quest by the emptiness of my powerless fridge (except for three bottles of hi-class lemonade) and the iciness of the water emerging from my powerless boiler.
Having topped up my credit key, I continued to drift down the Holloway Road in the grey morning light, pausing at a stationers to buy a box file (to store my expanding collection of bank statements and utility bills) and a VOIP headset, and ending up in Morrisons. Morrisons is perhaps my favourite supermarket, avoiding the uneasy odour of desperation that informs a visit to Lidl, the anodyne sterility that pervades the aisles of Tesco, the sinister feeling of soulless calculation that possesses Asda, and the dull self-importance of which Waitrose reeks. Its marketing is cheeringly normal, and the same applies to the products. It's food that I like imagining myself eating - even I am too insufficiently utilitarian to truly appreciate a food discounter's mountains of identikit cans, and conversely I am too pragmatic to enjoy the onanistic outpourings of the upmarket yet corporate gastronomic emporia. I filled a basket, then emptied my basket into a trolley, and ended by buying enough stuff that I needed a taxi to get home and wouldn't have to do any more shopping for a week.
As the taxi approached my flat, a combination of a traffic jam and a tireseome flurry of emergency vehicles prompted the driver to swing onto a side road and come at the problem from the opposite direction. As we made our final approach, we suddenly saw the problem: a road accident directly opposite - I mean, directly opposite - my flat. A pedestrian had been knocked over, probably while trying to reach the bus stop outside my window. The driver, an attractive young black lady, was being questioned by police, and kept glancing anxiously over at the huddle of paramedics, who seemed equally anxious. It made a vivid sight, the forest green uniforms intermingled with the yellow, white and black of the police, all crouched on the mottled grey ground surrounding an invisible figure on a scarlet stretcher. Next to them stood a gurney, ready to be wheeled into the waiting ambulance and whisked to the Whittington Hospital. A short, very thin Asian man wearing a mustard suit and a tightly clipped moustache was alternately running around trying to help and being asked questions by the police. I dropped my bags of shopping in the hallway and returned to ogle the scene. Akif, in the kebab shop downstairs, said he hadn't seen anything. A lady on the street asked me what had happened and I made up an exciting story that might have been true and which she certainly seemed to enjoy. Finally the prone figure ascended into the waiting ambulance and was raptured away.
Satisfied at having had such an exciting morning, I restarted my electric, carried my shopping upstairs and put it all neatly away. It felt good to have a full fridge, especially one filled with such exciting promise of delicious meals to come. Opening my curtains to give me a better view of the aftermath of the accident - police had now cordoned off the area, leaving only the silver instrument of death and some police vehicles - I settled down to update my LiveJournal, as one must do at such moments. The phone rang. A recruitment agency? Der Partei? My mum? Jo? To my astonishment my phone told me that the number was the firm which I recently left. To my delight it was my old colleague Michael. To my astonishment and delight, he was offering me half a grand to finish off the "Mod 2" spreadsheet, possibly my greatest working achievement even in its unfinished state, and which contains some frankly inspired Excel formulae that I have been itching to get my hands on again. I said yes without much hesitation, though it must be said that the general response from my friends and family has been "You should have rinsed the bastards for every penny"! But I'm not bitter, and I don't hold a grudge: life works out the way it works out. It could be me being offered the half a grand from someone who's seemingly done me harm, or it could be me needing help and having to swallow my pride; it could be me on an ambulance gurney, or it could be me trying to save someone's life, or it could be me looking anxiously at the person who I've probably just killed. The police are still out there, over an hour on, as is the driver of the car (whose partner has arrived and is comforting her), and the pedestrian is by now either in hospital or dead. In my fridge is a glut of yummy food. This afternoon I am going to work on an Excel and go for a doctor's appointment. Que sera, sera. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| "I've been suffering from insomnia recently. Every day - every twenty-four hours, more or less! - night falls, and with it come the dark and the cold and the terrors. Other people miss out on it, and they're lucky.
Most mornings, I don't get to sleep until seven, eight, nine am. I've got into the habit of opening my curtains around six o'clock. And every day - every twenty-four hours, more or less - dawn arrives, and with it the light and the warmth and the connection to other human beings. Other people miss out on it, and they're unlucky, because no matter how cloudy the day or how tired the watcher, the dawning of fresh light sprawling across the skies is beautiful.
There is always night, and some of us have to see it. But there is also always dawn, and we get to see that too. Try to look forward to the dawn while you wait for the end of the night. xx" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Every Last Motherfucker Should Go Down; Jerry Springer - The Opera | | Current Location: | 119 | | Subject: | Booky Wooks | | Time: | 05:01 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) cheerful |
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| I have read a lot of books recently, which pleases me no end. I read a sympathetic history of the Peasants' Revolt, which I really enjoyed and have lent to my mum. I read Truth by Terry Pratchett, which was disappointing in that it recycled old jokes from his other books. I read The Dice Man, lent to me by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aster13, which was delicious and very enjoyable - I could see why friends of mine had ended up with nervous breakdowns after following its dictates.
The problem is what I should read next. I want to read another piece of non-fiction, and there are three options. One, a collection of essays by George Orwell. Two, a sympathetic history of the Levellers and other proto-communist groups of the English Civil War. Three, Zombie Capitalism, a contemporary Marxist analysis of the credit crunch. Which do you think would be best? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| First buy your chicken soup and leave in cupboard for emergencies. Next, purchase cheap Polish bread from 24-hour supermarket and put in freezer to prevent mould. Upon waking late at night and in need of food, open can of chicken soup and pour into pot. Heat at whatever the highest temperature your hob can manage is. Turn on your other hob, again to whatever full heat happens to be, and lay some slices of the frozen Polish bread on it, turning frequently both to thaw the bread equally and to prevent it from sticking to your hob. Remove bread when slightly toasted and repeat with new slices. Stir your soup and wait until it starts to bubble; this will ensure that it remains hot throughout your meal. Turn off hobs and pour the soup into a bowl - a blue plastic one will suffice - and dunk the hob-thawed bread in it. If you require more bread, continue thawing slices on the hobs which have retained their heat despite being turned off.
Serves 1. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| The time is 3.30am and I've just had probably my most productive several hours in months. I've washed, tidied, uploaded, burned, made, everything. This followed a daytime period of several hours in which I lay on my bed and giggled at demotivational posters.
What is it about the early hours of the morning that focus my mind? I think it's a combination of things. Firstly, there's no one else about to distract me, even if that distraction is only in my head, as in fidgety checking of email and Facebook for possible new messages. At 3.30am I know that no one will have emailed me or updated their status, and I can relax and focus on Stuff. Secondly, I put cool music on late at night. During the day I tend to listen to pop, but in the wee hours I stick on the indie, which seems to pep me up to do the aforementioned Stuff. It's been helped tonight because one of my tasks was to rip my collection of "random Britpop and associated stuff" (i.e. not one of the major bands like Oasis, Radiohead, etc). Thirdly, I think being tired helps: when I'm tired I can focus on just one thing rather than wanting to think about twenty things all at once. The music will help with that, too: I can fill up a lot of my conscious mind with the singing of the songs, and the appreciation of the art - perhaps in a way that isn't possible with cheesy pop - leaving just enough space left for focussing on the task in hand. Normally I drift off and think about prime numbers or historical materialism or Dominion strategies or what the next chapter of my latest book will be or whether Wesley was more annoying than Neelix or justified true belief versus understood perception or more likely all of the above, plus a million other things none of which are balling my socks.
Daytime sucks. Nighttime rocks. I swear that if I could work flexible hours, I would get vastly more work done by doing everything at night, and probably do that work in less time. In the absence of that, maybe there are some things that I can do. I can stop myself from checking my emails. I can listen to good music. Also, I can keep on top of tidyness - it's easier to make a small effort to tidy up what's messy than to rouse myself to tidy a vast mess. This is better than the alternative - although I am productive late at night, it makes me, shall we say, less productive during the day. It's now almost 4am and I have to be up at 8am. 4 hours of sleep is not enough, especially since I have things to do at lunch (i.e. instead of having a nap). Still, that's a thought process for tomorrow: for now I'm just happy to have got so much done tonight, and just in time for my friend Ged to arrive tomorrow. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I watched my DVD of the film The Counterfeiters tonight. It's a very good film that I watched when it came out a the cinema, and then bought on DVD upon seeing it in Zavvi's closing-down sale. It occurred to me at the end that part of the reason why I like it may be because of a sense of guilty empathy. Throughout the film, we have seen the Jews in the concentration camp's counterfeiting division struggling with their surroundings - but they are clothed, fairly well-fed, have proper beds, showers, etc. In the closing scenes, the other Jews in the camp find them, and their suffering, though real, becomes suddenly insignificant next to the walking corpses around them. Similarly, my past pain, though real, is nothing compared to what other people have gone through. That's maybe a trite and underwhelming statement but I think it's valid nonetheless.
Still, it is hard at times. It's relating to the world that is difficult, a world that's cocooned - cocoons itself - from pain and hardship. I don't blame it; it's hard to understand pain without experiencing it, and even then the experience makes some shy away from it: in the film the protagonist experiences a tension between one fellow inmate's near-suicidal idealism and another's pragmatically fawning collaborationism. Which way to go? I think I would like to be idealistic but shy towards pragmatism, and probabl find an unstable medium as I go.
It's my birthday on Tuesday - 26, doubly unlucky, you might say. My 26th year has been a particularly bad one; just a really appallingly bad year all round. And yet it could have been worse. I am still alive and in employment and in possession of passable health and a circle of friends. Still, if it's all the same to you, universe, I'd rather not have another year like the last one! | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Girls And Boys [Live]; Blur | | Current Location: | 119 | | Subject: | Party Music | | Time: | 01:39 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/energetic.gif) bouncy |
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| | I am ripping my CDs to my hard drive - a pleasant process, letting me listen to my favourite tracks while I do it - in preparation for making some "mix CDs" to take on the 12th. This is where you come in: you could leave me to my own devices and trust to my excellent taste in music ... or you could put in some specific requests from my collection for songs you think would be good. I have mostly Britpop (various sorts) and some classics like The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Queen, etc, intermingled with pop like ABBA or Lily Allen and various odds and sods such as a Fatboy Slim compilation. Any tracks you want to hear that you think I'll have? I will attempt to accommodate even odd requests! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | On the Tube today from Euston to Highbury, I sat opposite what appeared to be a 20-something man and a 40-something woman who were huddled close together and murmuring to each other. That's odd, I thought; looked down - yes, they were holding hands - in fact he was caressing her hand with his. I wondered what I thought of it. Though I try to be open-minded in the general and polite in the specific, I've always found very large age gaps in relationships a bit icky, and that's the case regardless of whether the man or the woman is older. I decided as I sat there that I probably found it a bit wrong. I suddenly noticed the man glancing at me half-suspiciously, and it was only at this point that a number of things dawned on me: one, he was a black man and she was a white woman; two, I'd spent a good few minutes sat staring at them and judging the validity of their relationship on age grounds, probably quite visibly; three, leaving aside the fact that it was quite rude to stare at them anyway, he had no way of knowing that I thought his partner just looked old and quite probably thought I was a card-carrying BNP member. I smiled inanely at him and considered briefly the possibility of leaning over and reassuring him, "I just thought she looked a bit too old for you," before wisely rejecting this option. "The next station is Highbury and Islington," cooed the speakers. Saved by the bell. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a really, really crap dater. Tonight, however, was perhaps my greatest achievement to date. I can only do justice to the events in two distinct sections.
=== PREPARATION ===
I had prepared yesterday by having a first shave with my barber's razor, which cuts the hair down to a size that's manageable by a normal shaver. So far so good. All that was needed was to finish it off with my normal shaver. I've lost the charger for this, and though the replacement charger isn't coming till later this week, it had enough charge left to do the job today. Or so I thought. Halfway through my shave, it suddenly died. I felt the familiar pre-date nausea in my stomach. "Work, damn you...!" It refused. I was half-shaven. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I stumbled out of the bathroom in a disarray - and my wet feet slipped on the floor. I crashed to the floor and my leg flew out in front of me, ramming my foot under the bed where the top layer of skin was scraped off. I sat for a few moments absorbing the pain and breathing deeply, before staggering up. Screw it. I would just go: any longer here and who knows what might befall me!
=== THE DATE ===
I arrived at the station ten minutes early to find her waiting. She'd been waiting for half an hour - only because she'd got there forty minutes early due to massively misjudging the travel time, but she had been waiting bored for half an hour nonetheless. She was untalkative and frankly looked disappointed to see me. I walked her to the pub, completely forgetting where it was in my nervous funk and spending ages anxiously looking around for it when I knew perfectly well that it was further along the road, exactly where it should be. The pub had been redecorated since I last went and was now very "wine bar"-esque, whereas before it had been merely "nice pub"-ish, which had been more the feel I had been going for, and she commented that she preferred normal pubs. I bought her a bottled drink, and forgot her glass, having to go back to the bar to pick it up when she pointed out that she didn't have one. I then proceeded to ramble inanely about any boring topic I could, mostly to fill the increasingly awkward silences. The low point was when I said, as part of a bizarre extended metaphor that went horribly wrong, that she was a gravity well.
She finally called it quits after two hours, which demonstrated quite some endurance on her part. "Did you enjoy it, at least a bit?" I asked her as we got to the station. "Thanks for the evening," she replied.
I am the worst dater in the world. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I was very excited to go to Southampton, the furthest south I have ever been in England, and wanted to go down to the seaside. I peered out over the docks at the water and was happy. I then went into the Maritime Museum to look at its Titanic exhibition, where I noticed on the last exhibit that it said that Southampton is on the River Test. Confused, I asked the voluble old gent on the reception desk.
So is Southampton not on the sea?
No, it's on the Test - that's a river, not a sea.
But the Test goes into the sea?
No, it goes into the Itchen - that's a river too, not a sea. Then it gets to the Isle of Wight.
And that's where it goes into the sea.
Nooo, there it goes into the Solent. That's not a sea!
But then the Solent goes into the sea, right?
The Solent goes into the English Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and very big. But it's not a sea, it's a channel.
And a channel isn't a sea?
No - it's a channel.
Oh. So the Titanic really only got to sea when it passed Cornwall.
That's the Atlantic Ocean - 's'not really a sea, it's a ocean. You've got the English Channel up to the end of Cornwall, then the Atlantic Ocean. And above that, the Irish Sea.
I suppose the Irish Sea isn't a sea either.
[long pause while he assesses whether I really am an idiot] Of course the Irish Sea is a sea.
I am an idiot. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Gold Against the Soul; Manic Street Preachers | | Current Location: | 332 | | Subject: | Poetry Night | | Time: | 12:30 am | | Current Mood: | bouncy |
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| If I had a machete,
I would, like all my family, plant us a garden.
If I had a gun,
I would shoot locks off treasures, open vaults.
If I had a bomb,
I would defuse it, neutralise the very thought.
If I had power,
I'd rule it, free the passage from the start.
But if I had you,
I would be overwhelmed.
[Love Song, Jean Binta Breeze]
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The scene is Friday night at Marxism 2009. It's been a good day, by and large. I've met up over lunch with old friends from my more active socialist days back in Tooting, and met new people. I've been to one disappointing talk (the speaker was clearly well-read and intelligent, but a poor public speaker) and one stellar talk (given by the always excellent Chris Bambery). I'm now (having arrived a bit late) in the evening performance poetry session, with someone I got chatting to after the latter talk. The session is in memory of the radical poet Adrian Mitchell, most famous for his poem To Whom It May Concern - I encourage you to click the link.
I was mostly there to see Michael Rosen. I always appreciate his writing in The Guardian, I've enjoyed his performances on TV, and I love, love, love his poetry anthology Fighters for Life. I wanted to see him in person, to experience the full "performance". I wasn't disappointed. He was funny, both in his banter between poems and in the poems themselves, and the audience belly laughed almost non-stop throughout his section. He was clever and passionate in his lucid explanations of the politics behind his brilliantly-crafted verses. And, best of all about the live experience, he got everyone involved in the performance. "JACK THE RIPPER!" Maybe you had to be there - but if that's true, then I'm even more bloody glad that I was.
Jean Binta Breeze was a Jamaican poet I'd heard of before but had never read / heard / seen (hard to pick a verb for consumption of performance poetry). Where Michael Rosen's poems made me laugh, her poems sent shivers down my spine. I loved her story about being commissioned by the BBC to write a poem about the Old Testament, and bravely writing a poem called Isaiah, after the prophet who told Israel to mend its wicked ways. It takes nerve and integrity for a "Third World Girl", as a poem excoriating arrogant Western tourists was entitled, to take the opportunity offered by one of the old imperial power's greatest bastions of cultural privilege and subvert it to stand up against one of the world's greatest injustices. (Of course, the BBC said her poem was "anti-Semitic", that quick and easy route to instant censorship, and rejected it.) She performed Adrian Mitchell's To Whom It May Concern with reverence, updating it only at the end to expose its continuing relevance. Above all, though, sentimental fool that I am, I loved her Love Song (transcribed above). She set it up beautifully. "This," she said, "is called Love Song. A friend of mine once called it the perfect 21st century love poem." She paused, and the audience settled to listen to a love poem. "IF I HAD A MACHETE!" she shrieked, and we all jumped, then howled with laughter. Wonderful - and the kicker at the end was even better, and the collective "Aaawwww!" was possibly even louder than the earlier laughter.
The final poet was half-English, half-Iraqi rapper Lowkey (emphasis on the "Low"), with whom I obviously felt an immediate phonetic affinity. Any qualms were instantly dismissed with his stellar updating of (again) To Whom It May Concern: "So serenade my ears with love songs, / Provoke my peers with propaganda, / Dissolve my tongue with Coca Cola, / Seduce my brain with celebrity, / Burn my eyes with The Sun, / Muffle my mouth with McDonalds, / tie my feet with Nike's, / Tell me lies about Palestine..." He spat the words with a fiery passion that told you he knew what he was saying and that he truly felt it. He carried on with some more political poems, before dazzling the room with a slice of rap virtuosity entitled Alphabet Assassins where he slickly slid through a series of super-fast raps each dedicated to a different letter of the alphabet (I particularly giggled at the English-Iraqi's wry "I may be a mad mongrel and a manic Mesopotamian maniac").
If only all evenings could be that good. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I just watched The Princess Bride, a film from some time some time ago (Wikipedia tells me 1987). purplesparkler and Paul were insistent that I watch it, Paul even getting quite upset at my reluctance, so being the amiable chap I am I agreed to watch it. It was not the film I worried it would be from their descriptions (another Red Sonja clone). Yet in some ways, it was. The problem of assessment lay in that divide.
The film treads the line between a dull, ridiculous fantasy adventure story and a loving satire thereof. The characters intermittently come out of the scene, and many minor characters never really inhabit the scene at all, Peter Cook, Mel Smith and Billy Crystal especially so. The frame with Peter Falk is nice. But the jokes are too weak and ultimately too gentle and the satire too shallow. The story is made ridiculous and therefore dull for the sake of the satire, but the film cannot bring itself not to also take the story seriously. The result is a directionless mess which is just disappointing. It needed more frame, less in-scene, false trails that had to be wrapped back. It feels churlish to complain about a star-studded Hollywood version of what could perhaps be a good idea for a film. But if nothing else I am a believer in absolute values: if the film is not good enough, then no amount of comparison to even worse films from within the same system can really justify it.
Ellen suggests that it is a film that has to be seen first as a child to be appreciated. Perhaps I'm being unfair to criticise it, seeing it as an adult. There are all kinds of crap kiddie things that we retain an affection for in adulthood because our crap-detectors are less developed as kids and sentiment overrides our growing awareness. The basic introduction to meta-storytelling probably is interesting to a 6 year old. I guess my problem is with it getting touted as a good film in its own right. I read on Wikipedia that it still gets placed on various "top" lists. "In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted The Princess Bride the 38th-greatest comedy film of all time." Really? The 38th greatest comedy film of all time? The voters had seen all of the other contenders, had they?
This is all part of a wider problem: the simultaneous infantilisation and parochialism of society. Our culture's spiralling fetishisation of jeunesse results in prioritising artefacts of childhood over artefacts of adulthood. But it is the artefacts of adulthood that make for a historically worthy culture. I'm not saying that everything has to be serious: a sense of creativity and fun is a source of vitality. But it is channelling that creative spirit into something of lasting quality in which consists an activity of value. On a similar note, society has the desire to value dearest what it knows. This is a natural behaviour, but a stultifying one. "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Or, to misquote Bernard Shaw, "The reasonable man is content with what he knows; the unreasonable one persists in trying to discover new things. Therefore, all discoveries depend on the unreasonable man." So, live a little, but grow up too. Keep up your sense of curiosity, but make a decision that the next thing you'll be curious about is something that stretches you. And who knows - perhaps one day you'll stretch other people too. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | I Want You Back; Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 | | Current Location: | 332 | | Subject: | RIP Michael Jackson | | Time: | 01:24 am | | Current Mood: | shocked |
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| The King is dead.
It feels odd to be affected by a popstar's death, but Michael Jackson is - was - no ordinary popstar. A fractured, vulnerable genius. An enormous talent that perhaps even so was never fully realised. Cause for sombre reflection. One can only hope that he's resting now in the peace that he never seemed to find in life. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Dream World; ABBA | | Current Location: | 332 | | Subject: | Fun Brainteaser | | Time: | 10:53 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/wink.gif) silly |
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| Titus Oates, an "English conspirator".
Frida Kahlo, a bisexual Mexican painter.
What links those two people?
Prizes for the first person to work it out! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Here's to us; one more toast and then we'll pay the bill
Deep inside, both of us can feel the autumn chill
Birds of passage, you and me
We fly instinctively
When the summer's over and the dark clouds hide the sun
Neither you nor I'm to blame, when all is said and done
[ABBA]
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Those of you who are more familiar with ABBA's back catalogue (which is none of you: it's just a hackneyed sub-journalistic trope) may be asking yourself why I didn't choose The Way Old Friends Do. Perhaps you'll understand once you've reached the end.
Last night was one of a good film (Ken Loach's simply wonderful Looking for Eric), good food (well, relative to some food emporia) and good company (Boo and her partner Francis - I can't really say "boyfriend" about someone she's moved in with). It was lovely to find Boo in such fine form and with someone with whom she seems both so happy and so naturally right. They seemed so relaxed in each other's company, and their personalities seemed to mesh snugly - on each other's wavelength, as she put it. What makes two people a good emotional match, not specifically as lovers but as companions? I suspect that we can only give an extensional definition, that any attempt at intensionality would elude us. Of all my friends from my 23 years in the north, Boo is the one with whom I spend the most time (though even that isn't very much). Why should that be? There are many reasons, most, if not all, different to the reasons for the other two of my northern friends with whom I spend any time at all. What matters, really, is that we, for now at least, choose to remain friends. That emphasis on choice is important, because it applies the other way, too: when we choose to no longer be someone's friend, that is also a valid choice, and one that we are capable of enacting with dignity. And that is what I like about the song lyrics above. The steadfast acceptance of the end of the affair, the ability to say: this thing has run its course; we had fun, but now it is over; we leave with no regrets and no grudges, but also no duties. I have a number of ex-friends with whom I am in this situation, and in the ultimate analysis I hope that I and the world will part on the same terms. Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run. There's no hurry any more. All is said, and done. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The BFI has a series called "Passport to Cinema" in which they show classic films that you'd be hard-pressed to find showing elsewhere. I've had a wonderful time with these recently, watching the emotionally harrowing La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Fellini's 8½. Tonight I saw Akira Kurosawa's epic (as my numb bum by the end of its three and a quarter hour running time testified) Shichinin no Samurai - Seven Samurai, the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven.
It was fascinating to see the "posse" genre at what I'm told is arguably its genesis. There's something weird in a quiet Japanese village, and it don't look good. Who you gonna call? Fucking SAMURAI, that's who. None of this messing around with proton packs when you can have a giant fuck-off katana. Just like the Seven Dwarfs (sorry JRR), each of them has his own distinct personality. My favourites were the overly earnest young one who idolises the older, more seasoned samurai, and the old sword expert with a practiced line in both taciturnity verging on moroseness and effortless competence. I got the feeling that the academic introducing the film liked the fool "Kikuchiyo" best from his description, but I never particularly feel for the wacky joker character in these things.
( Cut for spoilers ) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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Minimal Harm
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![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sick.gif){kind=small}
nauseated![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/blush.gif){kind=small}
embarrassed![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif){kind=small}
disappointed![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/blah.gif){kind=small}
sombre