Dirty Havana Trilogy pt 1 Day 6-7 , Zona Day 2-3, Stalker, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 18

So a messy weekend and a quiet, crawl back under a duvet whenever possible Monday. In fact i watched the Stalker on YouTube, where all of Tarkovsky's movies are now, on my Nexus, because I'm reading Zona, which goes through the entire film step by step. Third time,maybe fourth, watching Stalker  and maybe the best time. The sound is quite faint so I used my iPod earphones and lay in bed watching this small but clear screen.  I could stop whenever I wanted, and somehow, even tho' it's only a 7 inch screen it was more immersive than watching it on the TV in the sitting room, with all the intervening space of floor, rug, coffee table getting in the way of you and the film. It's why I like cinema so much more than watching a film on TV - it's dark, it's quiet (unless you're watching a blockbuster in some prole pit like the Odeon, when people just can't shut up), it fills your vision without interruptions.  Amazingly watching on the Nexus captured some of that feeling, and my attention was kept on the images.

There's a famous sequence, where the Stalker and the Writer and the Professor are on a small petrol driven rail cart, rail clanking along at a steady speed - we just see the backs of their heads, each in turn, while this grey, ruined mix of countryside and abandoned buildings and industry passes by. It's restful, interminable in a good way. Then the cart stops, and the film immediately goes from this weird monochrome to full colour, a long steady shot of greenery, trees, long grass, big weeds, overgrown meadow.  It's a very gentle startling moment of great power, I'm not sure why. I've seen it done before, in Heimat, where in a time of leanness and hunger the camera focuses on potato cakes frying in a pan in black and white - they fill the whole screen, until colour floods in and blasts you with the smell and taste to be of the potato cakes, a kind of cinematic synaesthesia. Zona is good enough, it has a real respect for Tarkovsky, while not sidestepping the issue that so many auteurs can be such wankers. Just had to quickly look up auteur, to make sure I was using the right word, and I think I was. Yet again the internet's availability changes reading, having the film of Stalker right by me, in my fucking hand, watchable in an instant while I'm reading Zona, changes how I would have read the book.  I can instantly see where he's right or wrong - he's mainly insightful and right, but it is a beetle that crawls over the Stalkers hand , not a fucking ant. Unless they have huge ants in Russia. That look like beetles. I could go and check again, but I can't be arsed.

I've finished the first book in the Dirty Havana trilogy, which ends abruptly in rural idyll, staying in a hut on his cousins farm, helping out with crops, 5am starts in sky, land and sun.It works this ending - you just feel that the intensity of Havana has got too much, everybody needs a break, even the reader, everybody needs to go somewhere quiet, natural and away. 

The New Yorker Magazine though. Crazy magazine, but so much more interesting than any English equivalent - though maybe I should check out an issue of the New Statesman but I hate well meaning po-faced left journals nearly as much as shit slinging right wing rags like the Spectator.  

I read these long articles on:

• Transgender reassignment, pre-puberty issues and more
• The throwing of acid in the Bolshoi directors face earlier this year
• The Republican leader and their retreat to lick their wounds after their defeat
• Florida's sinkhole peril
• a profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( a Supreme Court Judge)
• Aaron Swartz - the guy indicted for downloading millions of articles from an academic database, who then committed suicide

Highlights might be:

• advice given  to (male) Republican politicians in campaigning - don't talk about rape
• The history of the sheer corruption and in-fighting at the Bolshei ballet - always a badge of respectability for every tyrannical politician from Stalin to Putin
• said of Swartz - he had " a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion"
• it costs over $100,000 to get a dick made out of your vagina if you are F.T.M (Female to Male), but it's cheaper and easier the other way round (M.T.F). That's a bit of a cheap thrill highlight actually - the article does spend time explaining that sexual identity isn't all that gender re-assignment is about. 

The New Yorker Magazine is great for reading at the table, around 7am, when I've made coffee, breakfasts, sandwiches and am drinking my own black liquid kick-start and beginning to feel ready to face the day.