I just posted this over on the My Place or Yours blog, alongside a brief apology and all the poems I’d written during that residency. I was originally going to draw this with the character discovering her head, but I much prefer the idea of an EarPerson, especially if we’re illustrating poetry, and given that in general I read much more than I publish.

This weekend I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford to talk about plans for the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012. In conjunction with the Olympics, the powers that be want to create some kind of cultural side-dish to compliment the pole vaults and long jumps. I couldn’t attend the first bit of the weekend, but I got there this afternoon thinking it might be a a big, concrete discussion about what the RSC staff were planning, what was already in place and how they might consider moving forward. I got the sense from the others in the Poetry Society Team (Judith Palmer, Kayo Chingonyi and Alan Ward) that the workshops the previous day had been very good, but that many of the participants were AmDram enthusiasts and they may not have been the most useful group to consult about this festival.

This was proven by the bizarre, Dragon’s Den meets X-Factor competition that was held at the end. We all split off in to groups and devised mini pitches about how the festival might be organised around a particular idea. I chose the International approach, because a) it compliments the nature of the Olympics, b) It’d be interesting to see how Shakespeare is interpreted within different cultures and c) inviting practitioners from all over the world would invariably influence the structure of the event, making it distinct from all the other plodding festivals, not least because of the huge, online potential of the project. Alas. The winners of the contest were the group who went up under the guise of ‘Competition’. In fact the first thing they said was ‘Forget about competition! Let’s just have lots of AmDram groups put together performances of Shakespeare and the best ones could perform on the RSC stage! Then our dreary group from Bideford would be in with a chance!’ Never mind inventiveness, originality, scope, nor the rather conspicuous ‘WORLD’ in the festival title. Never mind the hordes of companies / acts who do more than reproduce Shakespeare’s plays on stage, but mix them together, animate them, rap them, dance, or create graphic novels. I realise live art is very much the RSC’s remit, but if we’re putting together a festival in league with the Olympics – the Olympics, people – then surely having a world Shakespeare celebration should imply an attempt to involve as much of society as possible, even if the live art element remains at the centre.

And all this from someone who has actively avoided Shakespeare since she arrived at University. I’ve seen one very, very good production of Romeo and Juliet and a less interesting production of Hamlet, but I’ve not been tempted to join any productions myself. After this weekend I feel my position shifting, and this is in conjunction with a play I’ve just finished called Nights at the Circus. I joined because the directors seemed as bored with the stultifying over-production of Shakespeare as I am, and as desperate to be involved in something unusual and ambitious. I don’t think there’s much argument against the level to which Shakespeare is ingrained in everything, and I think a festival – especially one run by a company as rich and well-connected as the RSC – should think outside the box, not only in terms of its productions, but the structures upon which they’re organised.

Other than that, a good Sunday. I’ve recently been thinking about a text I’ve not read called ‘Life is long if you know how to use it’ by Seneca; if I wrote anything with that title, I’d include day trips, which seem to pack 36 hours’ experience in to the usual 24. And of course I wandered around Stratford: ate at some Littel Tea Shoppe where the waiter gave me a knife and fork with my sandwich; bought fudge; peered in to the window of Shacky P’s birthplace; then hurried back to the station to catch the penultimate train (at six pm!) lest we be stranded ’til the following morning.

I really like this french woman’s work.

This summer I was part of the audience for Radio 4’s ‘Bookclub’ with Gillian Slovo, author of Red Dust. It’s a decent book about a young South African lawyer, torture, apartheid, generational shifts, truth, love, justice etc… I hadn’t heard of her father Joe Slovo before the interview, but she comes from interesting stock. Her mother, Ruth First, was murdered by a parcel bomb in 1982. It’s often tenacious ground interviewing the child of famous people, because they rarely have the integrity, insight or talent of their parents. Luckily, Slovo has written a thriller with an ambiguous ending and an interesting point of tension between the main character and her Old School mentor: the former is a prosecution lawyer, the latter has always been defence. Is one position inherently better than the other? Are you somehow ’siding with the law’ if you aim to prosecute someone? Are you unsympathetic to all the social and economic factors that brings a person to the stand? And what if the person you’re prosecuting says they were tortured? And what if that torture extracted a true confession?

On that note, Christopher Hitchens  being voluntarily tortured:

A show on the BBC, ‘The Torturer’s Tale’ which tracked down torturers willing to speak about their experience.

And Thomas Glave’s story The Torturer’s Wife.

Anyway, I asked a few questions and hopefully one of them was good enough to remain in the final show which airs on Sunday 4th October, at 4pm.

Last night I ate my dinner in front of Ghost (1990, dir. Jerry Zucker), starring the late Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore. Having endured Almodovar’s Broken Embraces the night before, I was in the mood for some straight-up cinema with a linear plot, a central hero and some good old fashioned resolution at the end – in this case, Swayze’s ascent to Heaven, having just sent the bad guy screaming in to Hell.

But what really got me was Demi Moore’s costume. Lead heroine in a button up shirt? One reviewer points out that “the only thing that is possibly more outdated than the visual effects is Moore’s infamous close-cropped hairdo.” But I thought it was kind of refreshing. After seeing Broken Embraces Housemate A and I sat and talked about the Penelope Cruz Porn that we’d been subject to; Penelope Cruz looks at herself in the mirror; Penelope pouts; Penelope walks down the hall in a tight suit; Penelope has sex; Penelope is crushed to death by a speeding vehicle. Thankfully.

In fact, scrutinising Demi Moore’s outfits and appreciating Whoopi Goldberg’s turn as ‘the store front mystic’ made me think of a show I happened upon last week. It was billed as ‘television’s first feminist tv series’ and aired on channel 4 in 1998. It’s called Big Women. Amazingly, the channel’s Test Tube Telly site has all four episodes available, so I spent two evenings in a bizarre feminist time warp. The series charts the humble beginnings of a feminist publishing house in 1971 and its eventual sale to a giant corporation in 1996. In an interview with The Independent, the writer, Fay Weldon, said:

“The series was [Tariq Ali's] idea. But I go on thinking that anything that is done by men and women together has a kind of energy and life as God intended. Things that women do together tend to be more dutiful.”It’s amazing this is the first drama about feminism there has been on television. But for so long we haven’t been able to see the wood for the trees.

“Perhaps the series will show how dangerous ideologies and isms are … you’ve got women with permission to hate men now and that’s what we have to pull back from.”

It is amazing that Big Women was the first feminist drama, but actually it’s Feminist Backlash drama. There are several main characters who create the publishing house Medusa, and they bicker and back-stab each other relentlessly from the start. One leaves her husband and children behind, becomes a lesbian and by the end is a miserable wreck; another is a lascivious home breaker; another is a cold, heartless, commercially minded mega-bitch who eventually sells the firm after essentially saying “well we have to because no-one in the room is as good at running the business as me, and frankly, I want to resign”; another is a sanctimonious Oxford scholar. There is also the problem of the Token Black Woman (who randomly asks “how many black women do you see in this room?” tragicomedy if ever I saw it.) Big Women seems to highlight the issues within the feminist movement as well as the issues of sexism that have taken on a new form because of women’s efforts. It’s tricky stuff and I don’t think there has been another overtly feminist TV series in response.

However Far Out is about to have its premier in London. Apparently it’s going to be the UK L-Word, and though it has none of the production values, it is full of great UK references like DIVA magazine, First Out Cafe near Tottenham Court Road and Stonewall’s poster campaign: “Some people are gay. Get over it!”

The online preview is charming, but reminiscent of Big Women in its poorly delivered speech about sex by the bar-maid. It’s actually a great piece, very well written, but for some reason discussions / arguments about gender/feminism/lesbianism are always delivered in a tone comparable to The Fat Conductor from Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a baffling and unhelpful part of the current lesbian aesthetic.

Anyway, the premier is October 4th, and provided I’m not stuck on another allotment in South London, I’ll be there.

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.

“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)

“I’m old-fashioned; I’m a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it – you don’t have to wait for the dailies.”

- Werner Herzog

“The evolution of the digital age [represents] the existence and transfer of informational data without the medium of human consciousness, essentially creating a simulation of the human cognitive process – an artificial being – that, as the alterego [of Aldous Huxley] comments, has “distinct memory but no resemblances”.

- ‘Acquarello’ on ‘Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light (1996), Strictly Film School

So. Is anyone else feeling nervous?

Maybe it’s me, but everywhere I go there are hordes of police officers standing around. I came out of the train station today and was met by a group of about ten guys in full body armour and bright yellow jackets.

A few days before there were several van-loads of pigs at Victoria waiting to escort a group of guys from the platform to the pub.

Their latest ad campaign is fucking ridiculous:

I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know what can be done to tackle an entire army.

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.

I also spent the last two weeks getting about four hours of sleep every night because I was at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the BFI, Southbank. Oh how I love this festival and this year was particularly good because it involved LOTS OF BEER, a pink card!, two minutes of fame and glory as a chair on one of the panels, lots of beautiful people, interviews!, and yeah, there were some good films as well. Someone, who shall remain nameless, was disparaging in an email and I sent back three paragraphs explaining why, and how, the festival was a good thing. It so is! For roughly 355 days of the year we’re all scattered across the country/globe, working, busy, poor etc. Then the festival comes and EVERYONE is there. I imagine it’s more fun for me, since this is the first time I’ve known a significant amount of people – thus novelty, thus joy – but if *I* can go, mingle, hang about in the cafe and make sleazy passes at interesting people, ANYONE CAN. I’ll admit that there’s a bit of a boy/girl split. And at one event I was so disgusted by the painfully fashionable druggy dykes I saw congratulating themselves on their Shane-esque aloofness that I left early. But other than that, there’s so much to be gained by going.

I was particularly impressed with Bi The Way, which looked at the notoriously sticky issue of bisexuality. It was affirmation of what I already felt; yes, bisexuality exists and in fact, could be the more enlightened position. I really liked Against a Trans Narrative because it wasn’t completely positive in its portayal of FTM transsexuals. By this I mean that it brought up all the taboos that the rest of us – and probably trans people themselves – think but are afraid to say. It also made me realise that there is a feminist / non-feminist dichotomy and something needs to be done about this. I’m all for Queer being an umbrella term, but, as someone rightly pointed out this alienates the older generation for whom Queer is an insult. Okay – but are we trying to be inclusive or accurate? Both lead to infinite regress; if we approach this as individuals then *everyone*, by virtue of being themselves and not someone else, would need their own label. On the other hand, by attempting to be inclusive we have a list of letters: LGBTQQIAA, anyone? What the hell does that even mean?

As Diva rightly pointed out, black lesbian cinema appears to be having a moment. Though it’s all from across the pond. I imagine this is because the Jay Bernards of London, England are blogging, rather than shooting. black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent was great because as one of the participants put it, it showed ‘regular ass women’ talking about their lives. It’s nice to see all three major aspects of myself on a screen. Really, it is. The testimony of the cousin of Sakia Gunn in Dreams Deferred broke my mother fucking heart. I *cried*. In public. Still Black was dull in parts, but it was fascinating to see these peopleat various stages in their transition.

I’m thinking next year I’d like to submit a film. First, it will shut me up and give me a deeper appreciation for all the peeps who make films, regardless of their lack of technology / funding / support / talent / ability. If I can spot the flaws, maybe I can avoid them. Allyson Mitchell made a great point about this during her Deep Lez discussion: stop criticising and start contributing, bitch.

Films I’m pissed I didn’t see

Society
Noah’s Ark
OMG / HaHaHa
Travel Queeries
Fig Trees

So Yemisi challenged me with ‘red’ after I declared D40 war on him. I thought this was pretty disgusting.