Movie meme

1 Movie you love with a passion.
Time Bandits.

2. Movie you vow to never watch.
Carrie. Because the cover of the book gave me nightmares when I was a kid - I used to run past it on the shelves in Woolworths with my hands over my eyes.

3. Movie that literally left you speechless.
Mulholland Drive. Also frightened, shaken & freaked out, in a good way.

4. Movie you always recommend.
The Big Easy, because not many people have seen it but it's so sexy and funny and good. Though they always chop the last 5 minutes when they show it on TV, which is sacrilege.


5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.
James McEvoy, I draw the line at Gnomeo & Juliet though.

6. Actor/actress you don’t get the appeal for.
Matthew McConnaughey, I find him repulsive.

7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you’d love to meet.
No no, they are for staring at on the screen and fantasizing about, not for meeting. Though I bet Mae West would have been a riot to go out with.

8. Sexiest actor/actress you’ve seen. (Picture required!)

Phwoar!







9. Dream cast.
Good lord, have you seen the cast for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?

10. Favorite actor pairing.
I really enjoyed Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock. Great casting. Sherlock was brilliant. I also fancied them both immensely. Hurrah! (no it's not a movie. I cheated.)

12. Favorite decade for movies
The thirties & forties were better for women in the movies all round.








It really started to go horribly wrong for us in the 50s.








13. Chick flick or action movie?
Action movies can be great (even when dumb) but chick flicks are usually only indifferent. If they're any good, they're not really chick flicks, they're dramas.

14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?
Hm. Batman - boring. Joker - interesting. Women aren't allowed to be anti-heros, except for in one of my favourite ever ever films, Vagabonde by Agnes Varda. See it if you can, it's a piece of work.

15. Black and white or color?
Why not both?

Dark side of Twitter

I am quite enjoying Twitter, though I don't think I have the right kind of approach for it to really work for me (the right kind of approach seems to be almost continual updates & lots of interaction.) I enjoy the chance to follow people without being compelled to comment, which is different from blogs.

Yesterday made me pause. One of the people I follow, a popular, prolific woman (who doesn't follow me), someone who updates all day long but is funny and amusing, someone who gets drunk and fires out random nonsense, last night posted some increasingly random thoughts and then something about not even being able to kill herself successfully. Then she posted photos of her slashed wrists.

Someone on Twitter (who must have known her) called the police, who took her to hospital. This morning she blogged about why she had done it, reassured people and thanked them for their concern.

It was clear that it was a cry for help. But the nature of Twitter, the constant continual updates, the ease of tweeting every passing thought that flashes through your brain if you want to, the legions of followers which give the impression of company, it must make it easy for people who are ill to feel like they are being supported. And I guess that is better than nothing.

But then as a 'follower' this level of voyeurism makes me feel very queasy. I don't know this woman, I don't know her address. Whether she knew it or not, she was asking for help but most of the people reading it wouldn't have been able to help her.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, just that it was very very disturbing and felt all wrong.

People must try to commit suicide all the time, you just don't usually get a ringside seat.

Sword of truth

Here are my weapons of mass instruction, courtesy of Amazon.

Bring it!

Berlin

It's never long enough.

Thanks to Susanna for keeping us company, it was fabulous.

An honest opinion

I had an interview for a two year Fine Art course at City Lit.

I'd love to do a foundation degree but you can't really do them part time.

This is the first time I've shown my work to anyone, seeking an opinion. (At the studio they just teach us techniques but never offer criticism.)

But they are lovely and positive. Also direct and honest. They tell me they like my work and my ideas. I've got a good eye, I have good design skills.

But I don't have enough experience in painting and especially in drawing. If I start the course in September I'll be behind the other students. "What's your background in art?" "Er..."

They leaf through my work. I'm embarrassed about the life drawing especially. They say it's like my ideas have leapt ahead. "I want you to join the course. I'm excited to see the work you will produce... Hmm... How about if I make you an offer, to start in January instead? In the mean time you can take some life drawing courses here, then by the time you start you'll have caught up with the other students..." They tell me to keep a sketchbook too.

I'm quite pleased with this, I think they are right. I feel the gaps in my skills and knowledge and feel I'm having to cheat my way around them.

The truth doesn't hurt when it's offered constructively.

Referrer

Ok, hands up. Who's the closet MP amongst you?

I send a cross email

This looks very much my cup of tea. A spectacular theatre company putting on an immersive production with an exciting theatre, in an East London house.

Unfortunately, the run finished an hour ago.

Which is particularly unlucky as I signed up for the Arcola's mailing list months ago and I actually paid £20 to join bloody Punchdrunk's bloody mailing list.

Have either of them ever emailed me with updates? No, they have not.

Arcola are too busy recycling their coffee grounds & weaving yoghurt, and Punchdrunk are too busy pimping Stella Artois and Dr Who, and buggering off with their (UK) Arts Council grants to New York.

Rip off merchants.

I sent Arcola a cross email. I would try doing that with Punchdrunk but their *FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!* website is impossible to navigate & enough to drive you mental.


Oh well. Will just have to look forward to Decade in St Katherine's Dock in September instead.

Militant atheism

Update: thanks to LC for the picture.


I was thinking of getting in touch with Richard Dawkins but it appears he's buggered off to America. His educational foundation, which might have saved us, seems to be all in the States.

If my school is anything to go by, there's a crisis going on in primary education, and it is this: RE is a statutory part of the curriculum, and science teaching is very, very, very poor. Totally neglected.

Without even checking, I can guarantee you, out of the 400 odd kids at our school, none of them will have heard of evolution or Charles Darwin. That might not seem important - won't they get it at secondary school? Not necessarily.

But since the age of 4 when they enter formal education, they will hear about religious books, stories from the Bible, the Koran and the Guru Granth Sahib. They will believe that some supernatural being made us fully formed.

They will laugh at the idea we are descended from monkeys because the myths of religion will be fully entrenched. Even if you are religious, you will surely agree that it is fair to provide balance by teaching the scientific explanations of the world alongside the religious ones.

Why is it like this? One member of staff, who has been there for years, is a committed Christian, and passionate about RE. Nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing to balance it out.

I can just imagine how well it would go down though if I suggested we introduce the concepts of natural selection and evolution into KS1 and KS2 though. I'd be shouted down because it is ISN'T IN THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM.

We might as well be living in medieval times. These kids practically are.

(I'm going to buy David Attenborough's DVD on Darwin though, and play it to them this year. Fuck it. )

I suffer for my art

Anyway, enough of all that tedious shit. My print is nearly finished, check it out here.

If you're in Leytonstone, (and why wouldn't you be? It's lovely) you can see my mobile hanging from the ceiling in the kid's section of the library as part of the Leytonstone Arts Trail, as one part of Create, the East London Arts festival.

I had to go up a ladder to hang it from a light fixture because the library, which is 1930s Art Deco & beautiful, has very very high ceilings. It wasn't the best moment to discover I have vertigo.