Koyaannisqatsi

I first saw and heard  Koyaannisqatsi on a bad quality VHS tape on a video player borrowed from the social work centre where I worked. It was stunning then, and through the years I watched it again on a DVD - took Thomas and Jacob to see it at the cinema one afternoon when they were six and nine (that was amazing), then a couple of years ago(?) Tom and I saw Philip Glass and the Ensemble perform it live in the Brighton Dome. Now I listen to it more than see it as all the images are in my head anyway. One sticks though. Always when I watch it  I try to make myself  pay attention to each person that appears (it's a bit manic in the crowd scenes, so I often try to see people I haven't seen before). But I have my favourites - and the best is this - the hot lazy beach, a woman sleeping in the sun on a towel with her child sleeping beside her, then the camara pans out and up the beach to bring the San Ofre Nuclear Generating Station - just up the coast from San Diego - into focus. Who is / was she who is /was the child?  - there's a whole pointless quest where I'd like to know what happened to every single one of the people in the film. But this image stays with me  on its own. I don't need or want to know anymore, it's perfect.

Scenes from an unclerical life 2

extract from "Scenes from an unclerical life" - "The Unreliable Narrator"
"What they loved was a crisp shining New Years day with the fire fresh lit in the grate, the Christmas lights still shining, friends popping round for mince pies and mulled wine, the New Years Concert from Vienna playing as it happened - a complete first - remembered, switched the radio on, actually listened to it. Glowing and rosy cheeked from their morning walk they all gather round the fire - everyone's up, friends have decided to stay on for tea and drinks. The day before, he had made a vast turkey and ham pie with an equally vast salad with two dressings, one hot and strong it's little fiery tips of chilies peeping out from the glistening oil like the pointy ends of elves  boots, another flush with the green of basil plucked fresh from the plant on the window sill.

But all this is not so.

New Year finds our hapless couple in the throes of sickness and self mortification, unable to rise from their rumpled bed without vertigo, nausea and blunt shafts of pain that take the place of any sunshine that might have shone into their room if the curtains were open and if there were any sun anyway. A peep though the gaps shows a light but dull grey, unbroken seamless cloud. She tries to remember what they did last night - did they actually finish? - an exploratory hand confirms that she is wet and swampy, and the involuntary sniff of her fingers confirms, also, the cod liver fish oil smell of last nights sex. "

The writing conveys the listless regretful sense of too much partying for too little gain. A realistic bit ultimately depressing picture that I enjoy all the more because I am bright, awake and unhungover - I may have missed the New Years Concert but it's all eminently repeatable on Spotify. Janice has been up for hours, deciding to clean the kitchen and bake cheese straws to eat round the fire - so thankful that we ordered that extra load of logs so that we didn't run out for the New Year. Jacob and Marisa are cooking a fragrant Thai curry with lemon grass and lime leaves for supper later. The house vibrates with positive energy and thankfulness for an other years dawn.  There is something fragrant and life-giving in making the decision to stay in, watch a joyful Jools Holland and go to bed about 1.30am. 

Scenes from an unclerical life

The relationship book I'm reading has cracking dialogue. In one scene one of the couples around whom the book is centered are sitting in bed, a soft stuffed animal propped between them (why is never explained, but somehow it adds to the atmosphere - perhaps it's hers from childhood, perhaps it's one of their grown up children, who knows).
he says
"I really need psychoanalysis , not counselling, psychoanalysis, someone who will just shut the fuck up and listen to me."
"That's me isn't it" she says.
"No, you answer back."

The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan, oh and Terms of Enlistment - Marco Kloos

So the Garden continues along its slow path, but less garden and more relationship, so the juxtaposition of formality and beauty against politics and war is muddied by the silt of the protagonist's relationships. It's as if we are dipping into the mundane - well people have to live - even characters in books. Where the book felt like a spacious canvas, on which well spaced pebbles and plants were lining up for the perfect formal garden, now we are stuck in one of the service paths, overgrown with all sorts of plants that shouldn't really be there, if we want to keep our beauty intact.

And then there's Terms of Enlistment - free again through Kindle Unlimited, in the sub-genre Military Sci-fi, and firmly entrenched in every single cliche of genre - but nonetheless readable for that. It is Starship Troopers written all over again - Heinlein perfected the genre even as he started it (well he may not have started it but he was the first one that I read). I am a sucker for these - the escape into the platoon, the training and the drill sergeants where most people drop out - everything the same even down to the female recruits being the ones who get to be the pilots (so much less messy than being a marine don't you think). I suppose I'll finish it, but I have a feeling that it ain't going anywhere that I haven't been before.

The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan

One of the first books I saw for my trial subscription on Kindle Unlimited. I had clocked it in a Guardian review and put it on the back burner - I can't buy every book I read about. But, here, for free - absolutely. But it is far better than that. So far so generic - so to say something meaningful about it.  The descriptions ( fuck this is going to sound like a school essay) of the garden are so wonderfully peaceful and well formed. They contrast with the horror that is laid on in spades of the wars and politics that surround the concept and making of the peaceful garden. The cruelty of the Japanese internment in Malaysia, the Malaya "Emergency" - a war by any other name but so called so that the planters could still claim on their insurance (apparently - source Wikipedia), the Boer Wars and the British savageries there - don't forget the Brits invented the concentration camp. There is a beautiful moment where the protagonist dips her head to take some water from a stone basin, and in the act of doing so is able to see the mountains framed by a gap in the hedge only visible if you dip your head to take the water. It is a mimicry or copy ( wrong words) of a famous garden in Japan where, against all the advice a master gardener cut off the view of the mountains with a hedge  as it  was too precious to be seen without effort and humility.

The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza)

Well Italians (well Romans) seem to have to go clubbing at a much higher age than In Brighton. This film..   Tree of Life meets Human Traffic, but with a 65 year old protagonist, a tremendously expressive and interesting portrayal of writer turned playboy Jep Gambardella by actor Toni Sevillo - he's got such a great face, aged but young, deeply jowled and wrinkled but shapely.  A lot of the women characters are old too - they too have wrinkles and jowls, they're not perfect, but they are still partying and snorting lines of coke off the kitchen table in front of the disapproving, but tolerant eye of Jep' housekeeper. 


 The party scenes are a  continual visual and aural cinematic experience that gets you bouncing in your seat to them dancey rhythms, but a lots and lots of changes of pace, of perfect witty cameos of the characters  and situations that surround him, great satire ) and surreal scenes that suddenly envelop the screen seamlessly and effortlessly. Always interesting - this is a long film, a long winding non-narrative that has to change gear abruptly at times, as we see into 


Wants to have its cake and eat it with the Catholic church - the cardinal and  future pope hopeful is always describing his recipes, the Mother Teresa figure is so old and decrepid, stage managed in all sorts of pictures and events on her trip to Rome, but she also has some of the best lines
"You cannot speak poverty. You have to live it".

Karl Ove Knausgaard - Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3), New Statesman magazine(pitiful again)

A while ago I picked a copy of the New Statesman in London (thinking about it, it's over a year ago), and except for a brilliant piece by Will Self on Costa coffee it was nauseatingly familiar in its snipey I know better than you tone. I really didn't like it. So when half way though Boyhood Island I stop and look up some of the reviews, and read the New Statesman review it was truly sick making in its superior tone as it said how bored the reviewer was reading the book:

  "To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention"

- what a condescending piece of shit that sentence is.  Of course he has to say that the book is good (which it is, oh yes it is, a searing portrait of child hood I'd say, both because I mean it and because I can't be bothered to think up a less cliched phrase). He does say

 "he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, ...  calls 'the inner core of human existence' ".

But he says it begrudgingly. It's a really bad review (you can read it here if you want to: NS Review) , because it's pretentious, over- intellectual ( being intellectual isn't bad, being a clever little show off is) and really hasn't opened up to the experience of the book (if I can loosely call it that). Because  Boyhood Island is intense raw "ordinary" childhood, written so clearly, so fiercely and so boldly, in simple everyday language that makes it punch you hard, in the head, in the gut, in the soul. Above all he captures the distress and panic of being a child where small things in themselves figure as cataclysmic tragedies , and the highs and joys as well, which arise out of similarly small things. And there is true horror in his terror of his probably alcoholic angry father. It makes you rethink you own childhood, and if you are a parent, your own parenting.