This place is our prison - it sells the bars
2009-11-17 ~ 11:15 p.m.
For my birthday it was through to Glasgow for some art and museum going and some belgian food and drink. Went to an excellent show at Mary Mary by Torsten Lauschmann, who had lots of weird projections. A so-so show at the Gallery of Modern Art, which I'd never been in, but is a nice building (lots of big columns). And to the Kelvingrove Museum which I last visited aged about 14. They've taken a very random approach to sticking stuff together, with not much in the way of meaningful labels, not a great deal of the collection actually on display, and no logical sequence. Some interesting stuff about St Kilda, the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition, some sculpture, and the famous Dali. Most of the other paintings were less impressive. And I think I prefer museums with lots of little cases and cupboards. Still, a good day, and some exciting Belgian beer at Brel's. Gueuze/geuze is interesting (bitter).
I've not been to the cinema in a little while. On pay-per-view last Sunday we watched Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel and Revolutionary Road. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is a low-budget British science fiction comedy set almost entirely in a pub, starring Chris O'Dowd and Marc Wootton, with a smaller appearance from Anna Faris in a wide range of wigs. It's inventive, clever, and generally fun, making a virtue of its low budget with significant scenes in the pub toilets, hallways, and even a cupboard, though the ending isn't too great and Faris doesn't get much chance.
I liked Revolutionary Road a lot more than I expected. I disliked the book because of the combination of beautifully elegant prose (from the F Scott Fitzgerald school though maybe a little less prissy) and mundane middle-class angst. The film was sometimes a little stagey (too much dialogue, too much ACTING, and bits of it were too close to the book, from the start which didn't entirely work without the book's description of the crappiness of the play, to the misogynistic ending). But generally it was moving and an impressive portrayal of a couple trying to work out if they're special little flowers deserving some great adventure in life, or are destined to be working in the exciting new field of computers. There's a lot of the tragic about Kate Winslet's character, an intelligent women with no outlet in suburbia, while Leonardo Di Caprio is equally good as her more morally ambiguous husband: truly the sprout-faced boy is now a man. I'm still not entirely convinced that Sam Mendes is a great director (at times it was like watching a stageplay, he seems to use beautiful images at random points to look nice rather than out of any relation to the narrative, and it could have used some more humour) but it's far better than the trite, cliched fantasy of American Beauty and the equally cartoonish Road To Perdition.
I'm continuing on with my OU creative writing course. It's a bit mixed. I've not actually seen if anyone commented on the story I posted (I had a quick look and couldn't see anyone, but it's not the easiest bulletin board interface, and I already know the story was a bit stupid). There don't actually seem to be many other people who've posted stories, and there's not much debate going on - though in fairness I've not posted anything for more than a week.
Currently it's about creating characters, which just isn't something I can do as an isolated task. I'm not 100% sure that characters really exist at all, without being up against something. Do people really have characters, or do they just act like they're expected to? If they're in a new situation, you don't know how they'll react. I'd rather start with someone very simple and then develop them through action and events, not write down their hair colour and where they went to school before I start.
The course, like most creative writing things, suffers because unless you already have an idea for a story and can fit it into the exercises, the tasks often seem a bit arid and pointless. One I was doing last night involved you had to take a cliched character and make him uncliched (miser with a heart of gold type thing), and I didn't get beyond the second-level cliche (I did a doped-up hippy getting really angry and vengeful, ugh). Also, most of the stuff we write is purely private and we don't show to the group. I'm taking this course because I don't want to be writing stuff that nobody reads.
But on the positive side, it is making me think a bit more about my own writing, or pushing me to get on with it, and I'm trying to finish a story I've been working on for ages, while I may have one or two new ideas worth developing into stories (even if most things involve violence, unconventional sex, and how you can never experience your own death). So it's probably just as well I don't have to submit my story-fragments about a middle-aged woman obsessed with a photo of a young black African boy soldier, because that's just not going to be tasteful no matter what way I go.
The Open University course gives me full access to their online library facilities which means I can read lots of journals that previously I only saw abstracts for. So for example tonight I followed a link from the British Psychological Society blog to the special issue on "psychological functioning of international missionaries" of the journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture. There was quite a range of papers, from a dreary list of Myers-Briggs results for missionaries, to an account of what makes missionaries and humanitarian aid workers stressed and burned out - apparently having support from your bosses and from God is good, but from your boss is more important.
And a more thoughtful (but jargon-heavy) qualitative study of Third Culture Kids: girls who were raised on the other side of the world from the culture their parents come from, because their parents were either missionaries or businesspeople working overseas, and they don't really fit into the place they were brought up either. Some of it was quite ridiculous - the author constructed "I poems" out of fragments of interviews with the people, discussed the difference between feminist and womanist analysis, and went on about constructivist ontology (I've no idea if she thought she was being nearly-objective, or being deliberately subjective and quirky).
But it's nice that there's a name for this kind of person (global nomad is the more ridiculous alternative term), and interesting reading of their experiences: they had returned to their home country either in their teens or to go to university, and found it hard to fit in, or to construct an identity and work out who they were - many seemed pleased to discover the label TCK. In foreign countries they had been obviously special and had stood out, but once they were back they were outwardly ordinary but still felt different inside, and no one recognised that. One was forced to choose a popular girl at school and copy her clothes, behaviour, voice, etc, so she could fit in. All kind of Mean Girls in a way.
I salute the new Editors album, In This Light And On This Evening. Their first album, they seemed to want to be Joy Division. On their second they showed worrying signs of turning into U2. Now, at their best, they're somewhere between Bauhaus and Gary Numan. Papillon is maybe the standout track, though Bricks and Mortar has gloriously melodramatic synth sounds, The Boxer is pleasantly 80s-sounding, and Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool has the truest title of the year. And they still have that Interpol quality of being completely ridiculous yet awesomely powerful.
New Dr Who episode last weekend. Although it was competently done, I found it a bit tiresome. Slight spoilers follow. Partly that was because it depended so heavily on the idea that there are fixed points in time that the Doctor can't alter and non-fixed points where he can save the day, and he can't explain what the difference is, he just knows. So he defeats the Daleks wherever in history, but couldn't stop Pompeii last season. It's a massively pathetic device to get the writers out of contradictions, and it's never been satisfactory. There are hints that the writers are going to explore this a bit more, possibly in the Christmas episode, but I don't have high hopes - the Russell T Davies Who may excel at the emotional side, but it's rubbish at the philosophical and intellectual stuff, even compared to Star Trek.
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RECENT COMMENTS ON MY DIARY
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