My Glorious And Triumphant Return From The Other Room

Right.
Been a while.
Again, a friend emailed me and gave out a bit.
I didn't realise it'd been so long!

I've been accepted to college. That's cool. Just sent in my formal acceptance of a place. My girlfriend is changing jobs, she's going to work at the college i'm going to. Coincidence, I'm serious. Bizarre huh? I think it'll be kinda neat-O.

So the Golden Time...
You may remember if you've been a regular reader (Tricky, as I haven't been a regular blogger) that The Golden Time was the name I put on my period of inactivity before going back to college.
I have done almost nothing since October.

My mental health is off the scale, approximately 97% better than I was when i was working in my most recent corporate hell jobs.
I've been amusing and indeed irritating, and if I'm honest infuriating my friends by repeating the phrase "Work's For Saps" whenever anyone asks me what I'm doing at the moment.

I just imagined it'd be harder than this. That it would be more boring, or more difficult, something.

I've watched a million classic films, and it's spurred me onto an idea:
I started keeping a film diary.

Started back in I think April, bought a slightly swanky page-a-day diary, and every movie I watch I write some brief thoughts about it and give it a star rating, using the traditional five star method.

Sometimes I feel a little like it's too much responsibility. I'm not kidding. I feel like who am I to give this movie one star? Doesn't this director have kids to feed, after all? Now... I've never shown it to anyone. Not that I've hidden it, but I haven't inflicted it on anyone either. So this guilt could be called misplaced. Yet still I feel it.

And when I love something beyond all measure, and genuinely believe it's a timeless masterpiece, I find it really hard to give five stars. Again, who am I to judge?

Top films I've seen recently (Many of these are re-watchings, but I'm listing them anyway. I can if I want to.)
Be prepared, the list reads pretty random.

State Of Grace
Rope
Battle Royale
I am a fugitive from a chain gang (Pre Hays Code! Wild! And incredibly moving, and brave for its time)
The Haunting (Original)
The Tomb Of Ligeia (Roger Corman and Vincent Price! Screenplay by Robert Towne! )
36
Heat Vision And Jack (A faux-pilot for a fake show more than a movie, but it's fantastic)
Three Godfathers (Classic western, some religious overtones I could do without but just incredible.)

Other things have happened outside movies. I write about my life like films are all that happen.






A friend of mine killed herself.
We weren't that close to tell the truth. We used to irk each other a little sometimes, though she was so fucking cool when she was on form.
Her close friends gathered photographs, because everyone knew she loved to be photographed. At her parents request they made these pinboards of photographs, covering whole walls. I realised then that over the couple of years she'd been in my life a lot I'd taken hundreds of photographs of her. She loved the camera, I love to take pictures, and I was immensely comforted. As though whatever stunted friendship we had, at least it expressed itself there. At the gathering in her parents house afterwards, people walked around looking at the photographs, and I found it such a relief to be able to look at them and remember taking them, remember how we clowned around to get certain shots just right.
I'm not a very patient or tolerant person, and she's on my list of regrets now, people I wish I'd gone a little easier on. But those pictures take the edge off.

God, How I Love Talking About Me.

Okey dokey, so yeah, I've got lots of free time these days.

I've been batting around the whole back to college thing, and my little heart is all set on going to do film studies, so I'm hoping that pans out. Currently though, I'm just... taking it easy.
I'm living lazy.
I'm inactive.
I don't sleep much.

My job decided they were going to leave the country, and after a brief negotiation in which they offered to take me with them and I declined as graciously as possible, they left with a minimum of fuss.

Now, I'm looking to go back to college, and the state is fairly happy to help me with fees and so on. But there's a catch kiddo, there's always one, look out for it, the catch here is I have to be unemployed for several months to whet the state's appetite.


So... I'm really lazy... and it seems I can't work for a few months. When I first thought it was looking like I'd have to do this, I started referring ahead to it as "The Golden Time."

Now...
Well.
I'm sorry, but I have to admit it's marvellous. I'm kind of free to sit and be useless all the time. I have lots of time to do things like write on this blog, which can be observed by how I haven't written in it in a couple of months. I spend up to an hour in the video store renting three movies, and watch them all in a day. Y'know, some people kinda like their own company, but I'm thinking of proposing to mine. It turns out we like all the same stuff.

Hey lets talk about stuff I like. It's my blog, I can if I want to.

So recently I watched M, a Fritz Lang movie.
Okay, I'm not exactly the king of intellectual film watchers, but I do sometimes manage to appreciate a truly great movie.

M is in German, it's long, it's from 1931, and it's... incredibly accessible.
It's a little slow in the beginning, but it very quickly becomes one of the most interesting moral debates I've ever seen on film. It's full of clever shots and cuts that would have seemed wildly innovative if I'd seen them in a fifties movie, and Peter Lorre is a central figure, an odious child killer, and he's incredible. His performance is remarkable, everywhere from cringe-inducing to oddly sympathetic at the least expected moments, Lorre captures a tortured soul with incredible truthfulness. However horrible he may be, his character is on some level suffering, and Fritz Lang and Lorre do not allow us to ignore this.
Don't get me wrong, I can't count how many insufferably arty and utterly joyless films I've seen described with terms like "The director never allows us to become comfortable"... but sometimes a description like that isn't far off the mark.

M keeps you guessing, keeps you thinking, and doesn't let you pick a platitude and stick by it. You have to watch to the end, you have no other choice, no other way of making your mind up.

Plenty has been said about its political side, it was an indictment of Germany's decline into fascism, and was banned by the mid thirties. The wonderful thing for me though, is that this indeed intensely topical political film still feels incredibly topical now, over seventy years later.


Wow, that post started out about me, and ended up being mostly about a movie...

Ah well you're better off, I was only going to talk about sleep deprivation, laziness and tea anyway.

If The Slacker Movement Is Over, Is It Okay If I Just Keep Going?

I'm just one of many like me, lazy types who talk like intellectuals but don't have the brain muscle to back it up. Slacker is getting old as a term, what about those of us who get left behind? I don't know what to do next, you see.

Is everyone else moving on? I discovered the slacker movement as a teenager, and felt great about it, it seemed to be stuff I could relate to, and indeed stuff I was already doing. Exciting to feel there's a movement in the world that you have membership to. Now there's less talk about it... Remember that line in Withnail & I ?

The drug dealer says "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man..." signifying that it's over, the sixties is over, and hippie ideals are done with. Well, movies have had a stock slacker comic relief character for some time now, is that the same thing? I think it might be.

So the slacker movement. It was about smart-sounding folks, some of them actually smart, who didn't really want to do anything, but watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books. They would then expound on those books and movies, and the pointlessness of doing any real work. And they'd embark on projects and never finish them.

So what happened?
Somewhere along the way everybody finished their projects, and became writers, artists, or whatever?
Er... I haven't really done anything yet. I'm not ready, coach, I need to bum around for a few more years.

So I want to go to college and do film studies, I can really see myself as a cardigan-wearing film historian who thinks all the first year students fancy him, though in reality they find he reminds them of their dads. I'm hoping to circumvent growing up completely, everybody's got a goal, right? I mean the Slacker ideal is kind of bereft of goals, but as we've seen, slacker ideals are done with. So that's going to be my goal, if that's okay. I'm going to try to get through it all without ever being responsible or grown up. I've worked for years in the corporate world, and always felt like I was just playing at it. I never want to feel like I'm not playing at it.

A friend of mine promised me I could read her blog if I posted something again. This is very flattering, as it suggests to me she actually wants to read my dribblings, so I responded the only way I could; I procrastinated about it for six weeks, and then posted this non-post about nothing much at all.

I want to get to a point in my life where I never have to say "We" again, while meaning "The Company I Work For."

"-Your blog is very lazy."

A friend of mine said that to me.

I was struck by it, because, hey, that's the point.
I'm lazy, my blog is about laziness, and my blog is by extension lazy.

But the thing is he was saying it was lazy because I don't update it much. So that's kind of the ultimate expression of my laziness, but kind of self-defeating too.

So I'm busily vacillating between options for my life at the moment. I don't hate my job, but I don't want to go there either. I have all these really great fantasy jobs, like photographer, and if my hair goes grey soon I think I'll make a rather dashing psychotherapist, and recently I've felt like I'd like to study film.

I don't want to make films, not really, but I love reading about them, and maybe I could make a living out of that. Er... so how do I do that? Not sure.
It's a lovely idea though. Academic life would suit me. Lazy nonconformist that I was I never even applied to go to college, and I've been working since I was eighteen... I'd like to have that kind of lazy dazy going to lectures or not feeling.

I love films, and I think there's a lot of great film writing out there, but so much of it is so bitter...
I don't get it, I know a lot of film critics are kind of in some way connected to the industry and that causes bitterness, but think of how many of them just went to college, to do film studies, then became reviewers, and started being unpleasant about other people's work?
Why study films if you don't really like them that much?

I'd like to write a book about fifty films that I think have worth because they've got heart and they were made with real dedication and love by their creators. That could be a tough sell though, it's kind of lowbrow.

Accessibility is not a crime...

The title of this post is the real point though, I've been called a nazi while working for a large corporation, and it didn't hurt that much, but it pissed me off. And I don't like being pissed off much more than I like being hurt.

Wouldn't it be great to only talk in work in terms of "I" ?

I'd need a new method if I were to write about films... I don't think you can bitch about the horrors of the corporate world and do film criticism at the same time. And anyway, I set out not to complain on this blog.

Good things lately:

Still sleeping badly, but my girlfriend was away a week and it's been a lot of fun to have her back. We live together, and a week away makes you realise how much you miss her, and even makes you feel a little like vacuuming.

Saw a play of the Importance of Being Earnest. It was beautiful. Started with Oscar Wilde sitting in a cafe in Paris, remembering his old triumphs, and he starts to think of The Importance Of Being Earnest, his finest hour. Suddenly the all male patrons of the cafe start appearing as the cast, and the play is enacted on the cafe set, with set changes done in-character by cafe employees. Obviously the female characters are played by men too, but it was handled well, played for laughs, but never with that strange mysogenist feeling that often happens in drag-comedy. They were quite well counterpointed, one of the girls was convincing, the other had kind of heavy eyebrows and a dodgy voice, but bounced around like certain kinds of teenage girls do. So yeah, go see it. If you're in Dublin, go to the Abbey and catch it.

Post for no good reason other than insomnia...

So I can't sleep.

I get that all the time.

Things I do when I can't sleep:

Watch movies.

Read.

Try to write something.

Play video games.

Drink tea.

And combine various of the above.

Things I like about not being able to sleep:

Guilt-free time to yourself:
You're not being difficult or a loner, you just can't sleep, so you're up when the world is asleep.

Dawn:
I'm lazy and don't get up early. And I like to take photographs, so insomnia is my best shot of taking dawn shots. I live in the centre of Dublin, opposite the Ha'Penny bridge. Sometimes when I can't sleep I go and wander the city from there outwards, up along the river, and the city looks beautiful at dawn, like a lot of cities do. Sometimes people come up and talk to me, but there's a strange blessed feeling to that kind of insomniac wandering... nobody picks on you. They ask you about your photographs, they talk to you about the night they had, and then they wander off.

Late Night Movies:
Movies I wouldn't otherwise have taken a chance on start to look pretty good at three a.m.
Ever seen Frankenhooker? I have, buddy. It's pretty funny. And no, it's not as graphically horrid as it sounds. It's a bad eighties comedy. But kinda funny. Ever watched Citizen Kane and Starship Troopers 2: "Hero Of The Federation" both within a six hour period? Actually... I wouldn't really recommend that. Though it does help to highlight how good Citizen Kane is. And I don't mean that in some pretentious beret-wearing way... In fact I'll probably do a whole post about this soon, but for the moment, I like great movies that are also good movies. Kane is an example: you watch it knowing you're witnessing greatness, but it's also really entertaining.

Drink Tea:
Listen kiddo, a cup of tea when you're sleep-deprived at, say... 6.06 AM on a Sunday morning... It just tastes so damn good. Your body soaks it up so easily you feel like you could ingest it through your skin if necessary. Actually... I'm gonna have to make a post about tea as well now.

Another thing I like about being up when nobody else is:
There's not much to be pissed off about. You don't feel angry at the world, or at people, or at least I don't... You just feel a kind of detachment, that to be perfectly honest is just a teency bit addictive.

Inauguration is often dull.

You wouldn't believe the temptation to write for pages and pages about why I've finally decided to start a blog.

I'm struggling, so bear with me if I lapse.

Right now I'm 28, and my life is good, but I've never achieved anything that I'm aware of. I have a girlfriend, and I make her happy most of the time, which is I think the best thing I've ever done, but I don't think I even get that right all the time.

But I'm kind of a cool guy, everybody likes me, and I get by just fine. So there's the question. How far can you progress, how much can you get out of your life while still completely avoiding any major undertaking, or any achievement?

I like to take photographs, and I've started an online gallery at http://www.freakyjesus.com but they're not that good, and I haven't taken enough. I like to write short stories, but I haven't written one in over a year.

I'm going to see if I can make any sense of it, and by reading this, you can watch me fail, but I'm hoping to fail with panache and wit.

Once somebody quoted something clever Hemingway had said while they were talking to F Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who had been friends with Hemingway, replied something like. "Yes...Hemingway speaks with the authority of success. I, on the other hand, speak with the authority of failure."

Great quote, but I haven't written any great novels like The Great Gatsby yet, so I probably shouldn't be closing this entry on it.