Shock and Awe

With the seats of the Kino in perpetual abandoned darkness, the inhabitants of my little city are at the mercy of the mainstream cinemas. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Some of the most beautifully filmed, lyrically written, intellectually challenging movies have been made in Hollywood. I saw ‘The Road’ last week; it was one of the most emotionally draining films I’ve seen in a long time, but I adored it’s cinematography and it’s moral ambiguity. Though I haven’t read McCarthy’s book, I found myself dying to read it after the film, if only to further experience the world they depicted. I’m sure they must have used a bit of CGI for some of the scenery but if there was any, it was slight and barely noticeable, making the whole film feel very real and immediate. Unfortunately, a film like ‘The Road’ doesn’t come along to mainstream cinemas too often. Hollywood seems to have lost some of its ability to create genuinely affecting cinema.

But if there’s one thing Hollywood is definitely good at, it’s big in-your-face, explosion-aplenty, unambiguous blockbusters. Just last Sunday, I finally managed to catch Avatar. I had read how visually amazing it was, but I was sceptical. I’d heard it was basically Pocahontas in Space and any film that involves mining for a mineral called “Unobtainium” is hardly going to be up for Best Screenplay come Oscar season.

(Unobtainium!?! You have to wonder, if that’s the name James Cameron settled on, what names did he not go for? Hard-to-getium? Insecurium? Tough-to-findium? Was a Latin dictionary that unobtainable?)

These Days, I’m Mostly Listening To…

The weakness of music reviews isn’t so much that it’s one person’s mere opinion of the music, however informed and experienced that person may be. It’s not simply that 500 words or less and a numerical rating of somebody’s art is reductive and simplistic. Music is not fact, it’s not a science. It’s the product of so many variable whims, moods and emotions of the creator and is subject to those same things in the listener. We have an emotional reaction and attachment to the best music. But you have to be in the mood for it. You don’t listen to dreamy, ambient electro when you’re pumped and excited. You don’t listen to happy-clappy pop when you’re sad or depressed. So the weakness of music reviews is that it’s as much a snapshot of a moment in time in the life of a reviewer, a snapshot of their emotional state, than an accurate account of a body of work.

What can seem like a boring album after three listens on a dark wet Monday can reveal itself to be a more nuanced and impressive album on a sunny Friday evening. One’s enjoyment of an album can have as much to do with the time and the place as the quality of the music, something that’s incredibly subjective in its own right.

A Winter of Discontent

I thought it was just me, with this itchy feeling of frustration at the back of my mind and a ball of dissatisfaction in my stomach. I’m struggling to keep up with my college course. It seems to have stifled that desire of mine to photograph things and in my mind I now equate cameras with work. But if I do want to be a photographer, that’s surely something I have to overcome.

The ‘if’ is an important part of that sentence.

I know the direction they’re trying to push me in is a good one, but I’m struggling to find the drive to go there.  My intentions of a more productive, proactive new year have come to nothing so far, falling back as I have into my old ways. I remain, as I was in October, restless and dissatisfied with life but also dissatisfied with my piss-poor attempts to do anything about it. If that makes sense.

But I’ve noticed lately that I’m not the only one. An air of discontent seems to have settled on Cork, lying thick like the fog last night. It’s not all that surprising, given the winter we’ve been having here. If we haven’t been wading through flood waters, we’ve been sliding on ice. Three weeks of frigid cold with only half a day of snow for our troubles. Then more flooding. It’s no wonder people seem to be itching to leave. Or itching for something at least. I’ve noticed it in the way people talk, in their attitudes, even in their Facebook statuses. People seem to more ready to up and leave, head for bigger cities and more opportunities. It seems this little city is losing it’s attraction.

Upular

It’s been a few weeks since I was shown this and I’m still not tired of it. Fantastic. I love when the old man kicks in at about the 1:30 mark.

It’s Cold Outside

It hasn’t snowed like that since I was … I don’t know. Six? Sounds right. I remember rolling snowballs around Noreen-across-the-road’s garden with the other kids as we built a huge snowman. He wasn’t that big, but he was massive in our small eyes and my hazy memory. We gave him the carrot nose and the coal eyes and a tweed rain hat that had frozen stiff-solid by morning, when I found him, fallen in the snow. There are photographs of those snow days. The one I remember most is of me, trudging up our driveway, head down. The photograph doesn’t show that I was crying, after receiving a snow ball to my six-year-old face at full force.

I wrapped myself up yesterday, plenty of layers, long johns, gloves, the whole thing. I had college work to catch up on so grabbed both my cameras – digital and film – and set off, telling my dad, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” like Captain Oates before he disappeared into the Antarctic. Taking long, deliberate steps in the snow, I listened to the crunch, wallowing in the sound and texture. If only walking always sounded like this.

Carla makes a new friend.

The perfect photograph of Carla Bruni and her homeless friend?

Screenshot taken from Newser.com – http://www.newser.com/story/76737/carla-bruni-befriends-homeless-man.html

(College work is pretty much done. Blogging shall return presently.)

A Break in the Rain

And then, with customary abruptness, the rain stopped. Turning the corner onto Oliver Plunkett Street, I was blinded as the autumn sun made the street a mirror; a harsh glare turning the people into living silhouettes. The film in my camera was full of photos of women binding and embossing books and my darling digital SLR lay idle at home. So I had to rely on my phone, though I could barely make out the screen, so blinded was I by the footpath.

A birthday blog.

A hastily written, rambling blog; a small birthday token for a friend.

This friend tells me I don’t blog enough. I think she checks in daily – perhaps the only one who does – to see if I’ve posted something and she’s usually disappointed. There are reasons for my spasmodic blogging. Life, college and more than a little procrastination get in the way, certainly.But I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to writing. It can take me days, even weeks to work on a post until I’m satisfied with it. I craft the posts, attempting to make them solid pieces of writing. I like to think I want to be a writer “when I grow up.” But I’m 24 now, I’m not going to get much more grown up than this I suppose. But for now I put my energy, when I’m not distracted by photography or art, into perfecting blog posts that only a handful of people read. Maybe I need to start trying to work on something a bit more substantial.

This friend has told me too that my blog isn’t personal enough, that there isn’t enough of me in the writing. I seem to reveal next to nothing about myself. I realised, of course, that this was true and it annoyed me. Every writer, every artist (not that I could ever call myself either of those things), has to put themselves into their work if it’s ever to connect with others. But I’ve never been one for the confessional blogging really. Even at my most open, I conceal much of the emotions in language and abstraction. This friend has a blog that almost no one she knows has read. She pours out her feelings and thoughts with a raw candidness that I like. But her blog, as she’ll readily admit, is full of spelling mistakes and errors in syntax. This is fine; emotions don’t care much for spelling and grammer when they’re pouring down fingers, through keyboards and onto the internet. But for me this blog isn’t about catharsis or emotional release. It’s about creating something. But I suppose I should try to put myself in the writing more, to create a more emotional connection. A little more substance and a little less style maybe.

I haven’t finished writing about Thailand yet. There’s a lot more left to cover. I have it planned out, I know what I want to write. But I’ve been stuck on this one post for the last few weeks, trying to wrestle all I want to say and describe into something I’d be happy to let people read. Hopefully I’ll manage it soon. Once I have all the Thai blogs written and the photos of the trip up on Flickr, I can move on in my head, because a part of me is still there. I feel homesickness for a place that isn’t my home.

I’ve been 24 for just over two weeks now. It’s easy to forget how fast time moves. A year since my last birthday. Over a year since The Teacher left. It’s been a year of adjustments, of learning things about myself that I didn’t know and frustration at the things about myself I haven’t fixed. I’m not happy with my life right now. It’s true that I’m surrounded by great friends who love me. I’m back in college, learning more of a craft than a subject, something that challenges but excites me too. But there’s an uneasiness. I feel like I should have achieved something more by now. I wasted much of 2008 and 2009, I don’t want to do that again. And, truth be told, I’m lonely. I want to have fixed this things by next year. I just need two things – courage and discipline. Easy peasy.

There, I’ve blogged. Happy now?

Happy birthday.

The Thailand Trip – Part 2: Into The City

(Sorry it’s so fragmented.)

The heat hangs in the air, semi-solid. Stepping from the cool sterility of the airport into the Bangkok morning, I suddenly feel submerged, enveloped by the atmosphere. Like diving under slept-in covers or hiding in a hot-press of damp linen.

Kicker and I are brought to a taxi, a spacious air-conditioned relief after only minutes of thick heat and for a moment I consider spending the rest of the holiday here.

The billboards crowd the sides of the highway from the airport, mammoth wire-framed constructions screaming consumerism and gadgetry. They seem as long as football fields and maybe eight stories tall. I’ve never seen any so big and I stare at them with a mixture of awe and disgust as they loom over us.

Almost obscured by these commercial monuments lie clusters of squat red-roofed houses surrounded by fields marked out by clumps and lines of palm trees, long ponds and small lakes; fitful agriculture suggesting the outer edges of the sprawling city. I watch the fields get smaller and the houses multiply and grow as we tear along the road.

A Swarm of Childhood

It floated down Pana, a conflagration of violent colour, a horde of cartoon characters shifting, contracting and expanding. A helium fueled swarm of childhood gliding through an adult world.