A dark cloudy day in mid may 2008 failed to dampen spirits although energy level has been poor despite two adrenalin injections, the first cream slice and second a small bag of sweets, both punishable offences in land of lawless fatties.
There is no much art that I would drive across a country to see, well in the UK that is, but not so the USA as revealed by Artland USA which tours states meeting the great and the good and then people like me, although those portrayed have all completed their projects to an extent that they can be experienced and what they have produced achieves substantial visual impact. There is a builder who has personally created a Gaudi like castle from stone without machinery in the Colorado hills, and the man who has built a cathedral like structure out of junk. There is also an 86 year old former plumber who has spent thirty year in retirement crafting British imported toilet seat covers, some 800, into individual works of art, or a group of zany women who knit colourful covers for street sigh posts and other street and bridge furniture. These are egocentric and eccentric individuals devoting decades into creating one project or repeating the same item in different forms. I hope to be considered among the same company, one day.
Plans to go to the cinema this week have been abandoned as there are only evening performances and 90 mins each evening is being devoted to Britain's Got Talent. Last night two Asian dancers stole the show and were the outright winners going into Saturday's final and the judges, by a 2 to 1 majority put through a shy young girl with her amazing dog, thus eliminating a young man with West End show ambitions.
It is evident that the producers had a big hand in ensuring that judges included a couple of dud acts in each show reducing the serious contenders to six a night and then spread the most likely finalists over the ten shows so that in reality of the forty only twenty have a serious chance of gaining public attention in a voting system which only lasts a few minutes. This evening I predicted three acts out of four possible to reach the last three, an eight and nine year old who dance exceptionally well with great exuberance, a group of young hoody dancers who contribute to their community and the choir boy Andrew Johnson who did not have the same impact as he did the first time through the choice of song. The public were also of the same opinion and Simon was right to put through the Cheekie Monkies under ten year olds who did it on the night against their older counterparts.
The rising price of food and petrol continues to concern everyone. Today I decided to visit my material supplier for red glitter glue which I use to indicate the starting set number on the development files. I noted the price for 50 transparent pockets has risen over the past year that the price for 50 is the same as was being paid for 100, and which the superior quality I am getting from Asda. On the way back I went to Morrison's where the petrol price has risen 10 pence since the last visit and then into the store where at least the price of sliced and unsliced salami has only risen slightly and they were selling loaves of nutty Hovis was being discounted at 30p, so I bought two, freezing one and will see what happened when I defrost the other although if I had given the matter more thought I would have defrosted the pairs of slices desperately as I have done in the past. There was also inexpensive southern fried chicken pieces compared to what is available at Asda. They have also produced a series of own brand cornflakes, rice crispies, all ban, fruit and fibre bran and sultana bran for a third of the price of competitors. The cost of pick and mix sweets cost 100% more at the cinema than at either Morrison's or Asda, so it is evident that the firms are making every effort to keep the rises as low as possible. The government needs to do this with tax increases postponing new public expenditure plans as a consequence.
A measure of this is the public support for the action of road hauliers to day demanding government help, and with some threatening to blockade the ports and oil storage facilities, An as yet small group of Members of Parliament are also demanding the postponement of the green tax on larger vehicles. I believe government planners need to quickly decide which areas of public spending to put on ice and how to soften the rising costs.
Last night I watched, before being overcome by tiredness, three quarters of a challenging film by Bernardo Bertelucci who first shocked and challenged with Last Tango in Paris. The Dreamers is three films in one. It is a clever homage to film as the three central characters are fascinated by film, two former Siamese twins, spend their whole lives acting out scenes from past films. I suspect this will only appeal to film makers, film critics and people like me who have watched a lot of films during their lives. Sadly I only got a couple of the dozen references: when the female lead poses as Jean Seberg at the beginning of A bout de Souffle selling the New York Tribune, where surprisingly its American remake, Breathless is just as good; I also spotted that the American exchange student Matthew had a photo from the Ingmar Bergman film Personna in his room, but I missed the poster of Les Chinoise in the room of the brother twin. I recognised a dance performed by the girl twin but not its film Blonde Venus.
The second aspect of this film is the Paris student riots and revolt of 1968 and which with the anti Vietnam demonstration underlined the increasing violence of the twentieth century and the failure of non violent action in which I participated less than a decade before. The irony of this film is that had it been just about the violence of students and the greater violence of the police it would have received a lower censor's rating than it has because this film has male and female full frontal nudity, and explicit sex scenes with a hint of incest, all of which are unnecessary and a pander to contemporary extremism. At one level the film is about youth being wasted on the innocent and the inexperienced. Michael, the exchange student represents an inexperienced, impressionable and insecure middle American, who given the opportunity to experience European Culture, hides himself away watching old films at the films institute and appears to spend very little time at the university in studies. I can make one confession in that one of my most memorable experiences of Paris was watching the film, Reds, on a hot summer afternoon.
In the film the exchange student engages with the girl twin when she appears to have chained herself to the Film Institute after it has been closed by the government, although she is only pretending and releases herself when she decides that Matthews is more interesting. All three characters lack purpose or depth. While my going to the cinema as a child help me to understand human beings, especially myself these are unusually superficial individuals.
Mathew has such a poor understanding and view of himself and is without any ethical or religious framework that the twins been suicide bombers he would have joined them without the need for grooming or sexual seduction. His deplorable naivety ( am I talking about Mathew me I ask) leads him to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between the twins when he comes across them in a on a bed together. The film director gives us two strong clues about the actual nature of the relationship between the couple as he shows us the scars where they were conjoined and the girl is wearing pants, thus the audience immediately understands that the two continue to see their body as one, as well as sharing the same thought process and emotional reactions. Mathew on the other hand assumes they are involved in a purely incestuous sexual relationship although I accept there are many post garden of Eden who do not regard any aspect of sexuality as pure. Outside my professional client knowledge I know of parents, not naturists, who misguidedly encourage their children to go about naked until they are required to attend school and to have unrestricted access to the parental bedroom or to the bathroom/toilet irrespective of is using and doing what and that this has the opposite effect in later life to what the parents hoped for, such has been the misinterpretation of sixties child rearing modernism. There was a documentary on TV recently about a couple known locally as the naked gardeners who go about clotheless all the time in house and garden creating major problems for their son (they may have had more children as I was only paying half attention to the programmes and switched on to something more interesting) or more particularly the friends of the son who he invited home to practice in the band they were creating.
Mathew is therefore amazed to find that the girl is a virgin and remains oblivious to her needs and those of her twin brother as they continue to descend into a greater state of psychosis. It is simplistic to argue that the twins are a product of successful intellectual and wealthy parents, where the Paris flat is no more than the Town House so that when the parents drop by to say hullo to their children, no doubt pleased that they have taken up with a normal friend, they handle finding the ménage, sleeping together naked in a tent within the home, sensitively, walk away without disturbing appearing to be more upset by the chaos their home has become, although they make would could have been a fatal mistake of leaving a cheque for their children, thus signalling they have become aware of the situation, causing the girl to persuade the two others into a suicide pact which is only prevented as a rioting student throws a brick through the apartment window, causing release of the gas. I had to find out this development from the critical reviews.
Because I missed the ending I resorted to reading what a number of established critics had to say and while Dennis Schwartz echoes much of what I have written, he reveals that in fact the trio do engage in the increasing student activity which shut down Paris at one point. I also appreciated the observations of James Kendricke who makes a point I had intended to emphasis more strongly that in fact the trio in the film are too "callow and self absorbed", " kinky and silly", "deluding themselves", about having a depth which is not there. I suspect many of those participating in the actions of 1968, as well as in the mass civil disobedience movement of Lord Russell were similarly deranged and lacking in any political or moral framework, but my experience of those involved with the Direct Action Committee and Peace News was very different in that it brought me into contact with those whose starting position was religious, spiritual and political. Of course they were also interested and sometimes overwhelmed by sex and relationships and establishing an identity and life separate from the parents and families, and of course acts of anti social behaviour and lawbreaking had deep rooted causes, but this was all secondary to having studied what was happening in the world in general, defining their position and having the courage and determination to make a serious attempt to change things, putting to shame many professional politicians and law keepers, who thought similarly but did nothing.
I need to see the whole film as the critics reveal that through the film ending the trio start to redeem themselves. Fredericke and Mary Ann Besant, who do the Spirituality Practice reviews, always tend to take a more romantic, idealistic and optimistic view of human behaviour. They accept that the trio inhabit a twilight zone divorced from reality but see their behaviour as "an uninhibited voyage of discovery," whereas from the part of the film I experienced, I found them irresponsible and lacking empathy. This in not just the judgement of an old man. It was my judgement made in the 1960's. However while they harmed each other they were not intent on blowing up the world having first misused the natural resources and condemned vast number of children to starvation, unnecessary disease and to the blood shedding of governments. Anyway as an old man I have come to forgive the sins of others, but not my own.
There is no much art that I would drive across a country to see, well in the UK that is, but not so the USA as revealed by Artland USA which tours states meeting the great and the good and then people like me, although those portrayed have all completed their projects to an extent that they can be experienced and what they have produced achieves substantial visual impact. There is a builder who has personally created a Gaudi like castle from stone without machinery in the Colorado hills, and the man who has built a cathedral like structure out of junk. There is also an 86 year old former plumber who has spent thirty year in retirement crafting British imported toilet seat covers, some 800, into individual works of art, or a group of zany women who knit colourful covers for street sigh posts and other street and bridge furniture. These are egocentric and eccentric individuals devoting decades into creating one project or repeating the same item in different forms. I hope to be considered among the same company, one day.
Plans to go to the cinema this week have been abandoned as there are only evening performances and 90 mins each evening is being devoted to Britain's Got Talent. Last night two Asian dancers stole the show and were the outright winners going into Saturday's final and the judges, by a 2 to 1 majority put through a shy young girl with her amazing dog, thus eliminating a young man with West End show ambitions.
It is evident that the producers had a big hand in ensuring that judges included a couple of dud acts in each show reducing the serious contenders to six a night and then spread the most likely finalists over the ten shows so that in reality of the forty only twenty have a serious chance of gaining public attention in a voting system which only lasts a few minutes. This evening I predicted three acts out of four possible to reach the last three, an eight and nine year old who dance exceptionally well with great exuberance, a group of young hoody dancers who contribute to their community and the choir boy Andrew Johnson who did not have the same impact as he did the first time through the choice of song. The public were also of the same opinion and Simon was right to put through the Cheekie Monkies under ten year olds who did it on the night against their older counterparts.
The rising price of food and petrol continues to concern everyone. Today I decided to visit my material supplier for red glitter glue which I use to indicate the starting set number on the development files. I noted the price for 50 transparent pockets has risen over the past year that the price for 50 is the same as was being paid for 100, and which the superior quality I am getting from Asda. On the way back I went to Morrison's where the petrol price has risen 10 pence since the last visit and then into the store where at least the price of sliced and unsliced salami has only risen slightly and they were selling loaves of nutty Hovis was being discounted at 30p, so I bought two, freezing one and will see what happened when I defrost the other although if I had given the matter more thought I would have defrosted the pairs of slices desperately as I have done in the past. There was also inexpensive southern fried chicken pieces compared to what is available at Asda. They have also produced a series of own brand cornflakes, rice crispies, all ban, fruit and fibre bran and sultana bran for a third of the price of competitors. The cost of pick and mix sweets cost 100% more at the cinema than at either Morrison's or Asda, so it is evident that the firms are making every effort to keep the rises as low as possible. The government needs to do this with tax increases postponing new public expenditure plans as a consequence.
A measure of this is the public support for the action of road hauliers to day demanding government help, and with some threatening to blockade the ports and oil storage facilities, An as yet small group of Members of Parliament are also demanding the postponement of the green tax on larger vehicles. I believe government planners need to quickly decide which areas of public spending to put on ice and how to soften the rising costs.
Last night I watched, before being overcome by tiredness, three quarters of a challenging film by Bernardo Bertelucci who first shocked and challenged with Last Tango in Paris. The Dreamers is three films in one. It is a clever homage to film as the three central characters are fascinated by film, two former Siamese twins, spend their whole lives acting out scenes from past films. I suspect this will only appeal to film makers, film critics and people like me who have watched a lot of films during their lives. Sadly I only got a couple of the dozen references: when the female lead poses as Jean Seberg at the beginning of A bout de Souffle selling the New York Tribune, where surprisingly its American remake, Breathless is just as good; I also spotted that the American exchange student Matthew had a photo from the Ingmar Bergman film Personna in his room, but I missed the poster of Les Chinoise in the room of the brother twin. I recognised a dance performed by the girl twin but not its film Blonde Venus.
The second aspect of this film is the Paris student riots and revolt of 1968 and which with the anti Vietnam demonstration underlined the increasing violence of the twentieth century and the failure of non violent action in which I participated less than a decade before. The irony of this film is that had it been just about the violence of students and the greater violence of the police it would have received a lower censor's rating than it has because this film has male and female full frontal nudity, and explicit sex scenes with a hint of incest, all of which are unnecessary and a pander to contemporary extremism. At one level the film is about youth being wasted on the innocent and the inexperienced. Michael, the exchange student represents an inexperienced, impressionable and insecure middle American, who given the opportunity to experience European Culture, hides himself away watching old films at the films institute and appears to spend very little time at the university in studies. I can make one confession in that one of my most memorable experiences of Paris was watching the film, Reds, on a hot summer afternoon.
In the film the exchange student engages with the girl twin when she appears to have chained herself to the Film Institute after it has been closed by the government, although she is only pretending and releases herself when she decides that Matthews is more interesting. All three characters lack purpose or depth. While my going to the cinema as a child help me to understand human beings, especially myself these are unusually superficial individuals.
Mathew has such a poor understanding and view of himself and is without any ethical or religious framework that the twins been suicide bombers he would have joined them without the need for grooming or sexual seduction. His deplorable naivety ( am I talking about Mathew me I ask) leads him to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between the twins when he comes across them in a on a bed together. The film director gives us two strong clues about the actual nature of the relationship between the couple as he shows us the scars where they were conjoined and the girl is wearing pants, thus the audience immediately understands that the two continue to see their body as one, as well as sharing the same thought process and emotional reactions. Mathew on the other hand assumes they are involved in a purely incestuous sexual relationship although I accept there are many post garden of Eden who do not regard any aspect of sexuality as pure. Outside my professional client knowledge I know of parents, not naturists, who misguidedly encourage their children to go about naked until they are required to attend school and to have unrestricted access to the parental bedroom or to the bathroom/toilet irrespective of is using and doing what and that this has the opposite effect in later life to what the parents hoped for, such has been the misinterpretation of sixties child rearing modernism. There was a documentary on TV recently about a couple known locally as the naked gardeners who go about clotheless all the time in house and garden creating major problems for their son (they may have had more children as I was only paying half attention to the programmes and switched on to something more interesting) or more particularly the friends of the son who he invited home to practice in the band they were creating.
Mathew is therefore amazed to find that the girl is a virgin and remains oblivious to her needs and those of her twin brother as they continue to descend into a greater state of psychosis. It is simplistic to argue that the twins are a product of successful intellectual and wealthy parents, where the Paris flat is no more than the Town House so that when the parents drop by to say hullo to their children, no doubt pleased that they have taken up with a normal friend, they handle finding the ménage, sleeping together naked in a tent within the home, sensitively, walk away without disturbing appearing to be more upset by the chaos their home has become, although they make would could have been a fatal mistake of leaving a cheque for their children, thus signalling they have become aware of the situation, causing the girl to persuade the two others into a suicide pact which is only prevented as a rioting student throws a brick through the apartment window, causing release of the gas. I had to find out this development from the critical reviews.
Because I missed the ending I resorted to reading what a number of established critics had to say and while Dennis Schwartz echoes much of what I have written, he reveals that in fact the trio do engage in the increasing student activity which shut down Paris at one point. I also appreciated the observations of James Kendricke who makes a point I had intended to emphasis more strongly that in fact the trio in the film are too "callow and self absorbed", " kinky and silly", "deluding themselves", about having a depth which is not there. I suspect many of those participating in the actions of 1968, as well as in the mass civil disobedience movement of Lord Russell were similarly deranged and lacking in any political or moral framework, but my experience of those involved with the Direct Action Committee and Peace News was very different in that it brought me into contact with those whose starting position was religious, spiritual and political. Of course they were also interested and sometimes overwhelmed by sex and relationships and establishing an identity and life separate from the parents and families, and of course acts of anti social behaviour and lawbreaking had deep rooted causes, but this was all secondary to having studied what was happening in the world in general, defining their position and having the courage and determination to make a serious attempt to change things, putting to shame many professional politicians and law keepers, who thought similarly but did nothing.
I need to see the whole film as the critics reveal that through the film ending the trio start to redeem themselves. Fredericke and Mary Ann Besant, who do the Spirituality Practice reviews, always tend to take a more romantic, idealistic and optimistic view of human behaviour. They accept that the trio inhabit a twilight zone divorced from reality but see their behaviour as "an uninhibited voyage of discovery," whereas from the part of the film I experienced, I found them irresponsible and lacking empathy. This in not just the judgement of an old man. It was my judgement made in the 1960's. However while they harmed each other they were not intent on blowing up the world having first misused the natural resources and condemned vast number of children to starvation, unnecessary disease and to the blood shedding of governments. Anyway as an old man I have come to forgive the sins of others, but not my own.
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