Taxi driver, be my shrink for the hour, leave the meter running
2013-08-29 ~ 7:54 p.m.
OK.
Festival/fringe.
La Belle et La Bete (Philip Glass soundtrack). A great Cocteau film, converted into an opera by Mr Glass's band.
Philip Glass and Patti Smith: The Poet Speaks. Being a tribute to Allen Ginsburg, with various of his poems read by Smith over a piano backing written and played by Glass. Also, Smith did a few of her songs and read some Robert Louis Stevenson poetry. And Glass, who is considerably less charismatic than Smith, played three of his songs.
Tony Law. Very funny. Complete with heartwarming space puppets. He did sweat a lot, and I was very close to the front.
David Kay. Also very funny in completely odd and seemingly unpromising ways. Excellent jokes about nonsense, carried by his deadpan manner and naturally comical voice.
Bridget Christie. Very funny. Particularly the first half, which was about topics such as Bic pens-for-girls and the Brontes. The second half was more polemical, about lad mags and female role models.
The Secret Agent. A totally ridiculous adaptation of Conrad, good for the first half which included music-hall songs, a Cabaret-the-film/musical-style MC, bad ventriloquism, audience participation (which went catastrophically wrong when they got too many people on stage - which just might have been deliberate - and somebody dropped the box of biscuits everywhere - which definitely wasn't planned), nice wordplay, and some real joy over the prospect of meaningless nihilist propaganda of the deed (blow up the Greenwich meridian? or the Greenwich observatory?). Then they forgot about all that and it got really confusing and failed to say anything interesting about terrorism or suicide bombing or anything.
I'm going to see Berg's Lulu this weekend.
As far as the studies go, I submitted what should be the last draft last Monday. I have to print it out and send it off in a couple of weeks. And probably do a bit of editing. And sort the illustrations. And hopefully come up with a better title. And probably there will be work on the abstract and conclusion and potentially the personal statement. And I got to read it over again.
But the end is in sight.
Continuing the online dating. There have been dates, but nothing has come of it. It starts to feel increasingly weird. Although there are evidently interesting, nice, pretty girls out there, as yet I've not got anywhere with any of them. I seem to have moved on from art school girls to social workers. There's one girl who I seem to have a lot in common with, from music and film to cookery, and she's really pretty. There's someone else who maybe we have less in common with in terms of interests, but there's still some ability to write each other about nonsense, and personality-wise we're probably similar.
It just feels weird, firstly that I'm almost always emailing more than one woman at a time, knowing that I'm going to have to say no to all the rest of them. And all this effort writing to them when I'm not emailing my actual friends. It just feels a bit fake, like I'm trying to trick people, even though hopefully the actual communication is generally fun. And how do I actually know when I've found someone? The dates have varied: one where we both agreed to be friends, one where the girl announced 15 minutes in that she'd have to go soon (that made me sad because she was the person I felt I had most in common with, and I ended up writing poignant verse on Twitter about her), and one where she was only in town for another week. But there was also one where we got on ok, but there didn't seem to be a real spark, and I didn't write her for a few days after, which seems a bit mean, because she was friendly and quite nice, although we didn't chat about anything very important, are you necessarily going to do that?
I've never really gone out with anyone I've got to know as a friend and then started a relationship with. Both of my long-term relationships were through the internet and we slept together on the first date, though there had been a few weeks of email in each case. There have been people I've not slept with on the first date.
I am wondering how best to do more blogging. I started a tumblr, which I'm using for creative writing, or creative offensiveness at least, and I'm still abusing Twitter and Facebook with stories of French popular music and Belgian theme parks. I was wondering about starting a blog on Scottish art: just writing on pictures that interest me from whenever. I might also revive my art-music-film Blogspot blog. If you want any more info let me know.
I'm trying to track down the album Swiss Kult Hits vol 2, full of punky/new wave goodness like:
Stephan Eicher - "Noise Boys Song"
Hungry For What - "Misanthrope"
Far away - 2014-02-16
Finally found someone I love more than the rain - 2013-09-17
Taxi driver, be my shrink for the hour, leave the meter running - 2013-08-29
Dear friend, I cannot tell the reason why we started well - 2013-08-06
I saw this movie one time called Imitation of Life. The movie was really kind of shitty but I loved the title. - 2013-07-12
mail note tunes cabbages sprouts
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