Back from hiatus with a kneejerk response to: Synecdoche, New York
So, I quit doing Budo for Litro a few months ago because I didn’t have time. Term is coming to an end, however, and I’ve been dying to produce something, anything, that isn’t an essay / commentary. Of course it’s never that simple and I will stew for weeks – months – without setting pen to paper, despite knowing it’s the only thing that will make my day worthwhile. I’m sure lots of us do this and I believe the term is procrastination. It’s ancient, humdrum stuff. But yesterday I watched a documentary about Irish monks who sailed from the north of their country to the place we now call Scotland; if they could paddle across the sea, build a monastery on the island of Iona and create the Book of Kells – coloured with lapis lazuli from a mine in Afghanistan! – in the 6th century, I can draw a grammatically fraught comic about a film I went to see in the comfort of the 21st.
Just sayin’
“I can say with hand on heart that I’ve never seen a digital film that can do quite what one originated on film does. (And yes, I’m aware that nearly all celluloid-originated films get transferred to digital for the editing process before returning to celluloid.) It’s not just the obvious things – inferior representation of movement, synthetic-seeming colours, the sense of that rigid, invisible bitmap that can’t swirl or flicker as celluloid grain does – it’s something ineffable, a feeling that the analogue photographic image retains a contact with its human subjects and the way the light falls that digital somehow distorts. [...] And while we’re knocking digital, let’s kill off its premiere myth, which is that its cheapness would open the door for new waves of talent. [...] Rather, it has made cinema overall seem more underwhelming and less important than it was, in part because the overall standard has fallen for the first time since the 1980s.
- Nick James, Editor of Sight and Sound, April 2009 (Volume 19, Issue 4)
LLGFF / DIVA
So I finished my internship at Diva Magazine. I learned that people want to be shown in a positive light and this is okay; that people are willing to talk to you and respond to challenges if you avoid attacking them; that there are genuine nutcases in the world; that writing clearly/simply is as great a skill as writing technically/academically; that you should spell things out; that *everyone* I meet once worked with or was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party; that people who work for magazines have to *think of things* to write about and aren’t magically bestowed with knowledge; that editors might – shock, horror – ask others for their opinion; that the media is probably where I want to spend the rest of my life.
Red
So Yemisi challenged me with ‘red’ after I declared D40 war on him. I thought this was pretty disgusting.
It’s bright in here and it smells
I haven’t posted the last few Budos. This one was apt as Ms. Goody has finally passed away. I was weirdly moved by the news; I don’t think I’ve ever had any strong feeling towards her, except when she insulted Shilpa Shetty. Otherwise, there was just nothing going on. But I recognise a brilliant story and god, I wish I’d written it. The times quietly side-stepped the news and instead reported the death of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia and Ted.
Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.”
I admit to that. Which is why the sudden change in tone has been so disconcerting. The newspapers want stories because we want stories. When someone is alive and well we do everything we can to find out the moist, intimate, details, then we broadcast them as loudly as possible. I’ve never noticed this before, but the redtops shout stories. Then, when someone is about to die or dies, we change. We forget completely the hatred and irritation we felt.
Two-faced? Double standards? I was listening to Radio 4 soon after Cecilia Tsvangirai died and the interviewee said that where he comes from there is a saying: a man can be bad in his life, but once he dies he becomes good. You can feel compassion towards the worst child-murdering bastard who is being ill-treated. I, for one, do not support the death penalty or torture or anything else that reeks of revenge, because it goes against my basic, primal, knowledge that people are helpless in the face of death. We’re pathetic when it comes to The End. I wouldn’t (seriously) wish death on anyone because there is nothing more terrifying or more final. That’s it! You’re gone! Curtains! You will never walk on this earth again. This brilliant, magical thing called life which can be so oppressive, is all we have. There’s nothing else. So as hypocritical as the papers seem, I think the sudden shift in attitude is a sign that, at bottom, we’re still humane – we wouldn’t go on slating the woman out of spite or stubbornness.
I have no problem with Jade’s, or anyone else’s, funeral being televised. Why do we see the births, marriages and deaths of royalty, but not an ordinary woman? Why was it tasteful, even obligatory, to film the two princes slow-marching at their mother’s procession? We live in the information age. There are far more sordid, vulgar things on TV, but perhaps we’re wary because Jade Goody is something of a construction; she isn’t quite real, and her death, with the accompanying twist of fate, means she has blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction to an uncomfortable degree.
“Wow. Are we still exploiting her?”
“Yes, yes we are.”
“Well, we’ll follow her to the edge of the universe, but uh, I think we should stop there…”
Her disappearance from our television screens is not the ordinary passing which is usually forgetfulness and neglect, nor is it the spectacle of a car crash/assassination/suicide. It’s tragicomedy. It’s ridiculous. It’s farce. It’s awful. It’s in digital. It’s a compelling mix of stark flesh and indignity. It’s pornographic. It’s like being sucked in to the strange rhythm of two people going up and down. It’s ‘Ugh!’ But it’s ‘Oh…’
Doodlez
I'm thinking of printing a t.shirt...
During the open mic I doodled some of the readers. Not all, mind, as I ran out of space, but most. I’m thinking ‘Bastard Surrealist Coppers’ deserves a t.shirt of its own…
StAnza
Part of the crumbling abbey right by the coast.
So I went to St. Andrews in Scotland to do a reading for this festival. Ben Wilkinson (another of the young writers) and I were trying to work out how many festival-y type things we’ve done. At the time I could only think of LitCamp which took place last year, but on second thoughts there’s been YLAF, SpitLit, The Battle of Ideas… I like this festival thing. St Andrews was tiny – smaller than Oxford – comprising three main streets, many crumbling castles/abbeys/cathedrals, and a lot of coast. On my first night I wandered around a haunted beach, ate at a nice little place called BeanScene, then went to a reading by Kate Clanchy and Robert Crawford. Well, the latter was brilliant. I later discovered that he has a very academic Glaswegian accent, but since I am deaf to the subtleties of any accent above the Watford junction, I just appreciated the boom in his voice and the very soft Rs and the fact that melancholy/ irony/dead-pan humour sound so much better than in RP.
Not many things make me laugh…
But I am liking Fart Party by Julia Wertz. How true this comic is.
