Hip And Happenin’ Blackheath

There’s no such thing. In its sedate qualities, Blackheath outclasses even Nelson. But there’s plenty of time in these two weeks to show Daniel the parts of London that roar. For now, jetlagged as he is, sedate is just what the doctor ordered.

On the tube and the train back from West to South-East London I find myself looking at him all the time, even as we chatter excitedly about a dozen subjects at once – that’s one aspect of our relationship that’s come back like it never went away. Other things have changed, however. Daniel was eighteen when I left for the UK, and he’s now twenty. He carries himself differently, appears older, wiser. He’s started tertiary education now too, and some of the maturity that requires is showing through. It’s not just the long hair, it seems.

After unloading his luggage at Hopedale Road we venture out into the crisp winter chill. I know a sudden change in temperatures can play havoc with one’s health and find myself mommying Daniel incessantly, enquiring whether he’s warm, whether he’s brought his coat, whether he’s alright in general. It’s not long before he starts hitting me, another dearly loved family tradition.

We’re off to see Greenwich, the borough that Blackheath is a part of. A brief excursion to the local area is about as far as I want to push it today, for my health as much as Daniel’s. After all, I was up at 4:30 this morning. Not that this will necessarily be boring. Greenwich Park used to be the original Elizabeth’s royal abode. Time is kept here. There’s even squirrels, which for people raised in Oceania is as much of a revelation as insects the size of one’s outstretched hand is normal.

It’s midday, and the Royal Observatory that stands atop a hill in the middle of the park is swarming with schoolchildren. The enthusiastic teacher has them all line up on one side of a streak in the pavement, and then jump to the other side on cue. This is supposed to not only engender an lifelong fascination with science but also give the experience of time travel. For this is, of course, the Prime Meridian Line, the thing people are talking about when they refer to GMT (although, when’s the last time you had a conversation about the nature of time?), the G standing, naturally, for Greenwich. The rest of the Observatory doesn’t offer much that’s revelatory (see what I did there?), what with us being too late for the planetarium shows. View’s nice, though.

Down the hill and towards the Thames, we come upon the Old Naval College. We mostly recognise it for being a location in the first Tomb Raider film. In fact, I earlier pointed out the Millenium Dome to him as being from Bond flick The World Is Not Enough, and one of the skyscrapers next to it as featuring in Bond parody Johnny English. It’s not really that odd – for us, much of the mystique of a place like London has come from seeing it on the big and small screen. If I had time (and, I admit, the inclination) I’d show Daniel ’round all the Harry Potter locations.

Part of the network of grand buildings that take up the northern edge of Greenwich Park is a museum called the Queen’s House, and presumably it once had royal-related things happening in it, but nowadays its focus, as that of all of Greenwich, Thames gateway as it is to the rest of London, is on seafaring. We’re in luck, because the gallery is currently showing an exhibition of Flemish masters and their visions of sea battles during the Dutch Golden Age. I study Daniel intently for his reaction to the museum, because if he’s not averse I’ll be dragging him to quite a few more of them. We, in turn, are studied by the museum sentries (I don’t know if that’s the correct term for them but it certainly feels appropriate) who must be confused by and suspicious of two people under fourty voluntarily visiting a place of learning. By the time we escape our self-imposed education it’s gotten dark and we find ourselves standing under a green laser being projected exactly along the Prime Meridian. We’re standing under time. That’s pretty groovy for about ten seconds.

Brotherly Concern

Politics has been finding its insidious way into this blog more and more lately*. Such is also the case today, but for once through no fault or preoccupation of my own.

Thailand is one of those innocuous Asian tourist countries that Western eyes only tend to see in terms of golden beaches and gold-flaked Buddhas. It wasn’t pulled into the vortex of the Vietnam war, doesn’t have a little red book and is not blowing America out of the water with its cars. The most autocratic thing about it is that putting your feet up is rude. They don’t even ban chewing gum like Singapore which, Lord knows, has embraced every other aspect of Western commercialisation. The Thai smile a lot, make excellent pineapple rice, and it pretty much ends there. It certainly seemed that way when my family and I were there years ago. But then, a child’s eyes see things differently. I was mostly preoccupied with having beer** for the first time and other such manly things.

But that has changed. I woke to an e-mail from my mum which told of a coup attempt by something called the PAD (the unironically titled People’s Alliance For Democracy; although surely they must be aware the acronym shows up countless times on restaurant menus in things like Khao Pad and Pad Thai) who were marching through the streets in yellow shirts and, worse, had taken over Bangkok’s international airport. Flights were allowed to land but not take off, stranding countless sunburnt tourists, as well as those who just stopped to refuel, in the no man’s land between Duty Free and the conveyor belts.

Guess who had a scheduled stopover in Bangkok? None other than my brother.

It was early morning and Paul, wiping the sleep from his eyes, found me worriedly pacing the kitchen, put on hold by Qantas for at least twenty minutes. He suggested we check the BBC for any updates and for the next hour it was like a scene from a disaster movie, the trembling loved ones gathered around the TV, straining to hear any new developments. The irony of it all was palpable. His first solo international flight, the first time in years we’d booked with anyone but Singapore Airlines and through anything but Singapore. Was my brother now going to be manhandled by men with billyclubs just because we could only afford this one flight?

As it happened, Daniel was still in the air when all this went down and the flight was rerouted to Singapore in time. When I write this, the takeover has ended. It’s taken a week and ended the way the PAD wanted, with the dissolution of the reportedly corrupt government and the resignation of the Prime Minister. The new government is likely to be a potpourri of royalist, big business and military interests – the usual groups to profit in coups that actually have the financial resources to succeed. But the protesters at the airport did clean up after themselves, which is nice of them.

I went to bed relieved that night and woke up at 4:30 in order to be at Heathrow in time for his 6:30 arrival. In the end the whole debacle has meant he actually arrives at 9:20. He’s strangely tall and his hair’s as long as a lion’s mane but he’s remarkably chipper for someone who’s just been on a plane for a good 24 hours and narrowly avoided becoming a news item. When he emerges with his luggage trolley, our reunion hug is again like a scene from a movie. I may even have headbutted him in my excitement. Still, better me than a Pad Thai.

*In fact, talking about writing has just about sunk to third place on this blog. At number one is, as ever, me waxing philosophical about whatever is to hand and then forgetting what I’ve said a day later.

**A foul Thai brew called Tiger. At the LFS we used to get supplied with beer from its sponsor Cobra, an Indian brand. That it was free made it palatable, but only just. Asia has the coolest beer names, but they can’t seem to follow through and actually make their brews drinkable. Perhaps good beer can only come from nations with a history of Christian monks.

Take It As Read

Yesterday morning I dreamt I was being woken by my mum calling me, just before actually being woken by my mum calling me. I guess it’s an extention of that strange phenomenon that makes you wake up just before your alarm goes off. In any case, it was a fittingly unusual way for a rather unusual day to open.

Pretty much since finishing at the LFS (I can’t yet say ’since graduating’, because the ceremony won’t be until the 8th of next month) I’ve been sending out work to every competition that I may possibly have something suitable for (and more than once I’ve twisted something that wasn’t suitable until it was). Several weeks back I sent off a package for consideration at this year’s BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum, an annual event where three pieces of writing (open to any format, but because of its sponsor most are film scripts) get an extract performed in a staged reading by professional actors, with a Q&A of the writers headed by David Parfitt, the Chairman of BAFTA and about as big a ‘big name’ as you can get in this town.

I submitted two pieces – the first half of stylised psychological mystery drama (some have described it as a “mindfuck”) short Thoughtless, and a part from The Children’s Crusade. My writing schedule was such that I only got my act together the day before the deadline. I considered for a while whether it was worth paying close to £5 in order to get it there on time, but I eventually decided to be safe rather than risk being sorry.

And it’s a good thing I did, because just as I’d forgotten I’d ever sent the stuff – it’s always best not to lie in wait when it comes to competitions; it’s far better to be caught off guard – I received an e-mail saying that though The Children’s Crusade hadn’t been selected (only narrowly missing out, as I was later informed) Thoughtless was long-listed. And it must have been short-listed as well because a few days later another e-mail let me know that my presence would be required at the BAFTA building, 195 Piccadilly, on the evening of the 13th November. I was one of the three.

I invited pretty much everyone I know in London, as well as a fair number of agents and producers. These events are showcases for the writers, the creative equivalent of a horse show, and I thought it important to appear my best, and to be seen as such by as many people as possible. To this purpose Lizzi took me to a vintage clothes shop where I found a dark blue cashmere jacket and matching trousers for £50. In London that’s a spectacularly good deal. So I’ve been told, anyway. I tend to wear shirts made of flax and spiderwebs – fashion is not my forte. It’s good to have such luxurious things to hand, though, for emergencies. I even have new black shoes. Apparently sneakers are a no-no at prestigious functions. The things you learn.

For two weeks or so before the 13th I had regular phone conversations with Paul Cavanagh, the director of my piece. We discussed everything from the background that would be projected on stage to the casting of the characters to our respective takes on theme, style and purpose. To be working on a project of my devising in collaboration once again, after such a long time without, was a revelation. The cast we ended up with was a fine body of professional talent as well (one I spoke to even turned out to have had a named and speaking part in my hero Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Oliver Twist) and all were both willing and very able, considering we had only an hour’s rehearsal for the most important blocking before they had to get on stage. I even got a part for Lizzi, and though she did not have any lines (hence Paul Cavanagh’s initial suggestion to cut the character out) she did a lot with a gesture and expression.

After the show was over I was asked on stage by Farah Abushwesha, organiser of the event, and interviewed by her, David Parfitt and members of the audience for what could have been ten minutes or an hour. I’m quite a confident public speaker, and I do remember eliciting laughter at several occassions (good laughter, elicited at times when I wanted it to be) but somehow I tend to forget half of what I’ve said after I’ve gotten off stage again. On the whole, I do prefer it to over-preparing a speech. As with acting, most of the fear comes in the build-up.

After all three pieces had been performed we retired to the BAFTA building’s classy bar to, as they say, mingle. For once at these sort of events I wasn’t just a wanderer trying to engage other, more important folk; I was one of the three people the evening centred around, and others were for once eager to speak to me. So I networked like my life depended on it, talked like verbal communication was going out of style. I was a livewire, and it was not just the alcohol that was the cause, but more the adrenaline. I ended the evening with several contact details, a couple of them producers, and today one’s already asking for the full script of Thoughtless.

Next to all this gladhanding I did of course see friends, but little more than that. Even with strangers I had to be conservative with my time – if I found myself talking not to an influential director or producer but to a fellow writer I tried to make my excuses as quickly as possible. Paul and Michael wanted to catch the last train home, and did, but I went off with Lizzi and Paul Cavanagh and a few of his friends. We ended up in a succession of three bars: a Moroccan lounge underground somewhere in Soho, a pub adorned in kitschy Christmas decorations where we danced to 80s classics, and then a rickshaw ride (which quickly turned into a rickshaw race between the men and the women) through town to a place called Archway which had a lightshow going on even though there was barely anyone there. By this point it was 3am so I wasn’t too surprised.

Dawn. Shops were starting to cart their wares in as I crossed the bridge back north and headed to the train station; the first trains were already running but the gates were open so I got on for free. By the time I arrived home it was 6:30am. I woke at 2:15pm. At 4 I headed back into town to, as drunkenly promised, meet Lizzi at the Borough Market. She’d been trying to get me to go for months and even after sleeping during the day and enjoying the gentle touch of a hangover I was still keen on the idea. Borough is a farmer’s market of such size that it’s advertised in brochures and pointed out with signs, as if it was St Paul’s itself. The array of cheeses would do Holland proud, the fruits looked to be straight from the garden of Eden. You could gorge yourself on tasters alone, and we pretty much did. Amazing place.

Afterwards, with night having fallen once again (we know winter is not far of when it’s pitch black by 5pm) I wandered past the actual St Paul’s Cathedral on my journey back to the trains. Words, including Arabic script as well as things like ‘God is a concept’ were projected on the dome and the front. Fascinating, especially because I’ve attended a service at St Paul’s and found the priest to be, at the very least, dogmatic. Do they know what’s happening on the outside of their place of business after lights out? Tomorrow morning, I’ll call my mum and tell her all about it.

The Quick Notes And The Dead

Pleasant surprises, it seems, go hand in hand with unforeseen disappointments. Some of the below will illustrate.

It wasn’t that long ago that I sung the praises of comedian Russell Brand on this here bloggy-wog. He’s one of several pleasures I’ve been introduced to in the past year that have since set about consuming some part of my time – Russell did it mostly in the form of a weekly BBC radio show that thankfully you can (or could, see below) access through the internet, because I don’t have a car and nobody listens to the radio anywhere else these days.

But no longer. Some while back Jonathan Ross was the guest host in Russell’s studio and as part of the seventy minutes they had to fill they called up Andrew Sachs, he of Fawlty Towers, for a phone interview. He wasn’t in, so the two filled airtime and his voicemail by riffing on fame, Fawlty, and the fact that Brand had had a relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter. They then called back and apologised on his answerphone for this impromptu cock-up, then called again to apologise for the bungled apology, then apologised in song, and so on. Completely improvised, completely hilarious. I actually noted down mentally how exceptionally good this episode was, instructing myself never to delete it. And I certainly don’t intend to now*.

It was a full week after broadcast that several rather loud and unsubtle UK newspapers – owned, not entirely coincidentally, by media dictator Rupert Murdoch, who’d love nothing more than to give his state-sponsored BBC rivals a bloody nose – began what can only be described as a hate campaign against the “filthy” comedians who so upset treasure of the nation Andrew Sachs. Outraged centenarians wrote letters to the editor and fretted about their licence fees being wasted on this decadent young people humour. A non-entity of a story was blown out of all proportion and has now resulted in Jonathan’s TV show being put on probation for the rest of the year and Russell’s radio show getting permanently cancelled. All that over a prank.

The problem starts with the incident being described as a “phone prank”. The three people who actually listened to the broadcast will know everything started with Sachs not showing up for the interview and Brand and Ross simply tried to make the best out of the situation, a task they accomplished with verve. Secondly, Sachs’ granddaughter is part of a group of burlesque dancers known as the Satanic Sluts and has used her fifteen minutes to pose semi-nude for a lads’ mag. Also, Sachs made his fortune playing a broad (if brilliant) caricature of a Spaniard in Fawlty Towers. Neither has a leg to stand on when it comes to their sensibilities being offended. And finally, for the sake of all that is unholy, they are COMEDIANS! Standing on the toes of the supposedly good and proper is in their job description.

But in all darkness there is a spark of light. Lizzi has returned. At the tail end of summer she set out to travel Europe and now she’s back in London to regale me with tales of her journey and feed that green-eyed monster Jealousy, which, even in a vegetarian like me, doth mock the meat it feeds on. Since we last met, she has broken up with her boyfriend Kurt, had her passport stolen while skinny-dipping in Croatia, spent Halloween in an Italian castle… Whenever I dare to think that my life is rather eventful… One of the things she got up to was picking hazelnuts as a WWOOFer, as those who sign up with the rather unfortunately named Willing Workers On Organic Farms organisation are known. For several years now my mother has had Woofers over at her place in New Zealand as well, doing odd jobs, tending the garden, painting the recycling bins, in exchange for bed and board. It’s like being an au pair but without the snobbish toddlers.

We meet at Trafalgar Square and wander down the Thames in the opposite direction of the one I usually go in, until we pass the MI6 headquarters that I know so well from the Bond films (is it truly wise to situate the Secret Service in such an iconic building on the waterfront?) and arrive at the Tate Britain. Before the opening of the Tate Modern this was just the Tate proper, and looking at the collection it does feel as if the museum’s been saddled with leftovers. Of course, any museum in New Zealand would gladly commit double murder to get the Turner and Rossetti on display here, but in art-rich London the National Gallery has already cornered most of the market the Tate Britain dabbles in.

We’re in Pimlico now, Mayfair’s little brother, known for its vintage clothing shops. I need to get kitted out with a suit or at least a jacket for my night on the BAFTA stage later this month (on which more next entry) and Lizzi knows all the bargains. In fact, she knows how to get the most out of a city like London in pretty much all ways. As she tells it, she goes to Harrods wit regularity and has herself covered in a mist of perfume by the sales assistants on the mere suggestion of showing interest to buy. I am at times tempted to have myself measured at a Savile Row tailor the same way, just to see what it’s like. For today, though, I stick with a cashmere jacket and matching trousers. I’m not a formal sort of person, but seeing myself in the mirror with such pronounced shoulders, I can suddenly understand the attraction.

Lizzi stays the night at mine, making garlic bread and leaving me with so much surplus that I might as well open a stall at the Sunday market. The next morning, she departs to vote. Yes, it’s easy to forget in the face of the whirlwind that is the US election, but New Zealand has a decision of its own to make. As a permanent resident I would also be entitled to vote, if not for the unfortunate fact that I’ve been out of the country for more than 12 months. New Zealand is largely a two party system, with National on the right and Labour in the centre, as well as various smaller parties in the periphery. Lizzi votes for the Greens, who’ve never been able to get more than 9 people into government. For a country that prides itself on being a modern-day Eden, that’s rather ludicrous.

By the time I sit down to write this, the decision has already been made and New Zealand has a National government and a male PM. But that’s not all. Word comes from California. Proposition 8, which is to ban gay marriage after a Supreme Court ruling back in May permitted it throughout the state, has passed into law. The cloud inside the silver lining grows.

The night after Lizzi leaves, there is trouble on the streets. On our street, to be more specific. Hopedale Road isn’t actually in sedate, up-market Blackheath, but rather in neighbouring Charlton, which is slightly rougher around the edges. However, there’s only a bridge over the interstate and a twenty minute walk separating us from Blackheath village, while Charlton centre is further away both in geography and mindset, though fortunately not in council tax bracket. This is the only explanation I can offer for two gangs of – always sad to see the stereotype supported – black youths having something of a Montague/Capulet fracas outside our front door. Bottles are brandished like knives, insults fly like missiles, the greater advances on the smaller group, who eventually, some having to be dragged off by their mates, choose the better part of valour. We keep our lights off and watch nervously from in between the blinds. Have we suddenly found ourselves in South Central LA?

And now, to end on brighter news. It will soon be December, with all the Yuletide cheer that entails. Paul and Michael both have plans and homes of their own, and I might have faced a dreary, lonely winter had it not been for one thing. Well, two. There’s also Lizzi, bless her. But greater things are afoot. My brother Daniel is coming. Tickets have been arranged and dates set. He will arrive on the 27th and we’ll do touristy things until my graduation on the 8th, then we’re both flying back to the New Zealand summer for Christmas and New Year’s.

Just sent mum £1500 to help pay for it all. I should probably be more worried about my financial situation – and I am, believe me – but by the time my father’s contribution is projected to run out (at the same time as my lease, in October next year) I should be making my own money anyway. This added lack just lights more of a fire under my, excuse my English, arse to write myself into a career.

*That used to read “certainly won’t now” but finalities scare me.

OBAMARAMA!

“Man is by nature a political animal.”
- Aristotle.

One of my guilty pleasures is going on discussion boards and reading what other people – often people I vehemently disagree with – think about politics. I haven’t really added to the discussion since burning some bridges at a James Bond forum back in 2003 with the onset of Gulf War Part II. No, I just read. That’s how I get my jollies. And the more vocal the disagreeing sides are the better. Interestingly, Bond fans tend to veer to the right a lot more than Lord of the Rings fans. At the same time, they are also a lot more politically aware, though the view may be skewed somewhat by the influx of teenage girls into the Rings fandom due to Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom. Although I think even these hormonal lolitas were politically wide awake yesterday, as history was being made.

Allow me to be controversial just for a second here. George W. Bush, current Commander-In-Chief of the United States of America, is an idiot. He may very well be functionally retarded. Most people worth having an intelligent conversation with agree that somebody, anybody, anything could do a better job. Cartoonists have compared him to a monkey but that’s an insult to all simians. In fact, a bonobo would be much preferable to the current occupier of the White House. Conflict resolution through sex? I could get with that. Would certainly make diplomatic summits a lot more lively.

It is a byproduct of our current capitalist/globalist epoch that I, a Dutchman raised in New Zealand and living in the United Kingdom, know as much if not more about the American political process and its major players than I do about those of any of these three countries. Since the assassinations of gay extreme right-wing politician (only in the Netherlands) Pim Fortuijn and controversial left-wing filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (yes, related to the Van Gogh) Holland has reacted by burdening itself with a conservative Christian government headed by a guy who looks like Harry Potter and has the force of will of a piece of white bread soaked in milk. New Zealand, the first country to give women the vote, has been governed by the fairer sex for ten years, but also considers anything left of centrist to be radical and has a disproportionate number of fundamentalist reactionaries and people who just can’t seem to grasp how lucky they are to have the natural heritage they do. Great Britain, finally, had the charming Tony Blair, who had us all fooled he was on our side until the Collaboration Of The Willing. Now it has sadsack Gordon Brown, who isn’t fooling anybody.

But all of them, even the guy living in 10 Downing Street, are small fry compared to whoever is behind the desk in the Oval Office. The American Presidents are the kings of today. There is more ceremony, more pomp and circumstance, more traditions, symbols and worship of both, than in the governments of any other on the planet, save a few tinpot dictatorships. Which is surely a coincidence.

And now, or rather on the 20th of January, because unlike most of the rest of the world the transfer of power is not immediate in the US, we – and I do mean we, we’re all affected in a way – have a new President, and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. I hadn’t heard of him a year ago, but then, neither had I heard of John Kerry before 2004. Unlike the man who married into a baked beans family, Obama has industrial amounts of charm, a way with speeches, and from what I can tell so far some genuine progressive policies. I’m not the first to describe him as our generation’s JFK – hopefully with a less messy ending. Indeed, having someone one can admire in the White House may take some getting used to, and the Presidency will not now function as the punchline to a cheap joke. We can no longer take for granted that the Americans will automatically do the absolute worst thing in any given situation.

I stayed up all night to watch it play out; in fact, I was the only one who stuck it out until dawn and the final ballots, although by then it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. By the time John McCain, the weathered and weary Republican candidate, finally came out to give his concession speech, supported by his family and the caricature known as Sarah Palin, the margin separating the winner and the loser was more than 6%. McCain seemed almost endearing. His audience let him down by booing every time he mentioned the President-elect’s name.

And then it was Obama’s turn. “Change has come to America,” he said. And it sure has. For one thing, we should not underestimate the symbolic power of a leader of the free world with a non-Western name. Kenyans claim his as their own, with scenes of joy I haven’t seen since Usain Bolt won gold for Jamaica. Race is a huge factor. If Hilary Clinton had lasted the distance we would have had our first female President, and our first First Husband. But Obama’s has been the greater feat. As a popular phrase that’s doing the rounds has it: “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin walked so Barack Obama could run.” And for the first time, my dream of a pagan lesbian Arab President is now possible.

Even empty platitudes are better than all-out hate, which is what the neo-cons have been spouting with the regularity of fountains. But not Obama. There’s something energising about his optimism, about the hope and humanist faith he seems to secrete from his very pores. I was not alive for the speeches of MLK and JFK, and it is of course ridiculously early to place BHO on a similar pedestal. But the possibility is there. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance at regaining our sanity.

For me, social and geopolitical, issues are astronomically more important than economic ones. What a man stands for will define his actions. Economic policy is slave to the moral compass of politicians – what will their heart allow them to get away with? Gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose, alternative means of energy, these are the sorts of choices that forge a man’s soul. Is Obama perfect on these issues? No. For instance, though he supports civil unions he’s against gays actually getting married, although that may be a ploy to avoid political suicide by alienating a whole bunch of supposed ‘moderates’ who somehow base their entire world view on opposing gay marriage.  Personally, I always figured the legal ramifications should be limited to the civil union and available to everybody, while the marriage, hand-fasting or whatever you want to call your ceremony can be conducted at whatever church, temple or sacred circle accepts it. Otherwise the cloud of that hateful phrase ’separate but equal’ will continue to linger in the air.

The US election coincides with Guy Fawkes here in the UK, and fireworks have been going off outside my window for a few nights now. Guy was a revolutionary, a rebel intent on bringing down the system in the most literal way possible. What we’ve just seen may be the revolutionary sneaking in through the front door, not to blow the place to pieces but to rebuild it, in the subtlest way possible: with the people’s permission.

It may just be. We continue to live in hope.

A Week In Progress

I managed to score a free ticket to Frost/Nixon, one of the films playing at this year’s London Film Festival (most of which is too dear for my blood). As the title already states quite simply the film is about the interview British journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen) conducted with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), then only recently out of the White House under the cloud of the Watergate cover-up. Nixon had not accepted any guilt or uttered any apologies for his actions, and the film follows Frost’s attempt to to get this out of him, in the process serving as a character study for both himself, a gladhanding entertainer who finds his moral centre, and the fallen President, a toothless bulldog whose intentions are noble even though he does not fathom how his actions are wrong.

The film is based on a play, where Sheen and Langella originated the roles, and the best moments are those when the camera simply lingers in close-up on the faces of its protagonists. Sheen is fine, though Frost is a little similar to another head of state, one Sheen is himself famous for interpreting in such movies as The Queen, Tony Blair. Initially Langella’s interpretation of Nixon’s voice seems more like a parody, but after a while you begin to understand he is trying to get to the heart of the man, his voice drooping as much as his shoulders, his sadsack grin an imitation of the Cheshire thing it once was. You almost feel sorry for the man.

At the screening I ran into Steve Rayner, one of the MA Filmmakers whom I’ve been circling, and whose been circling me, in the hope of eventually doing something together. We fell into a threeway conversation with one of his fellow students, a woman who is making a feature documentary – with British funding – on an elderly woman who’s the sole remaining inhabitant of an American ghost town. The way she’s telling it, it will be an amazing story. The documentary is a viable artform again, and not just in the field of politics. This is, of course, another possibility – get a good concept, an intriguing person or a hot issue and stick a couple of cameras on it. Certainly cheaper than fiction, and people are also more likely to be forgiving of production values that reflect that. For someone with my budget that’s a really good thing.

**********

It’s only been a few days since the free movie but now I got to see mischievous stand-up comedian Russel Brand for only £10. He was there for about an hour and signed autographs too. His stand-up show isn’t much longer and costs five times as much. So, a good deal. He was in town to flog his newest book, a collection of Guardian columns called Articles Of Faith. The columns largely centre around football, and that was ostensibly what the Q&A conducted by David Baddiel was going to be about as well. But there were a large number of screaming, hormonal girls in the audience (at one point Baddiel pleaded to please field a question from a guy for once) and what ended up being the subject of the day was Brand’s reputation as a lothario and Dickensian pin-up.

Brand took it all in good humour, though I did notice a fearsome bodyguard lurking at the edge of the stage for the duration. But sex jokes are easy, even the inventively vulgar ones (in a running joke Russel mused on the subject of whether it was legal to be a “child pedophile”). He was, however, also surprisingly candid and emotional. Russel has an interesting take on masculinity. On the one hand he dresses in skinny jeans, has hair that late 60s Beatles would find ungainly, speaks like he swallowed a dictionary as a boy and is, by his own admission and description, a fop. On the other hand his tally of bedded women would shame James Bond in his prime, and though he has many close gay friends (another favourite of mine, Simon Amstell, among them), his one attempt “try sex with a bloke” in order to find out more about his own sexuality (and to make good post-watershed telly) ended in messy failure. On the subject of football he turned out to be just like me: couldn’t begin to understand the inner workings enough to shout strategies at the television, but fascinated by the pomp of it all, the rivalries, histories, tragedies and successes – the mythology of the beautiful game.

**********

A while back Paul and I quickly (in one day, in fact) put together a fifteen minute episode of our comedy project Counter Culture for a competition called the Sitcom Trials, where the idea is that you have two or three pieces performed on stage each night, with the audience deciding who goes on to the next round. Simon Wright, who runs the endeavour, is close to many powerful people in television land and can get the winners meetings with producers and the like. More than one success story has been born out of the Trials in the past, and we thought we’d toss something off and place ourselves in such august company.

However, and I blame the deadline rather than a lack of vision or talent for either of us, we didn’t get through. Something called Cafeteria Culture did, which irritated me to no end because they didn’t even have the double meaning. A short while after this, however, I got an e-mail from Simon saying they were organising a one-day workshop for scripts that only just missed the cut, to hopefully improve them to the point where they would be ready next time. I paid £25 for the privilige of attending but it was money well spent. These sorts of things are networking sessions as much as anything and I got to spend the day buttering up Simon Wright and scoping the competition. Not really, of course. ‘Networking’ is really just another word for ‘making friends’.

The first half of the day was given over to developing a new sitcom as a group – and I’m pleased to note (pleased to gloat, really) that of the ten or so of us there (with me dragging the median age from about 40 to 30) my concept was chosen to be worked on for the rest of the morning. The afternoon was good too. I’d rewritten the piece especially for the workshop, and it flowed a lot better this time. That we had developed the characters a lot more since the initial script helped a great deal. But the best part of the day was most definitely when we met for drinks afterwards (no surprise, really; the part that features a bar is generally the best part of a day) and I not only got Simon into the idea of doing the Sitcom Trials through Youtube, with a far greater audience voting and none of the constraints that live staging poses, but he also got me the number of a guy he works with who directs comedy skits for the internet. I called the guy and he expressed interest in our work. So that’s another one on the to-do list: turn Counter Culture into something viable for the internet.

**********

Though we’re out of the School for some months now we’re still being sent things through the LFS message board. The classroom minutiae are an annoyance but the invitations to free screenings and the like are a far greater boon. It was through the message board that I learnt about Working Your Future, a series of lectures being held at the BFI, with a free movie from the Festival (which is now in its final days) to follow. I confess it was more the screening than the lectures that lured me to the Southbank, but they proved to be rather interesting as well, especially the discussion on development funds. Apparently you can submit scripts to be selected for ‘development’, which is pretty much everything up to the point of production. Even though it does not guarantee the movie getting made, it certainly greatly improves your chances. At the very least it gets the work, and the writer, noticed. The formal part of the day was wrapped up with a speed-dating session with various representatives of funding bodies and film festivals. I realised these things were mostly set up for directors, especially ones with showreels to their name. The eternal question of the chicken and the egg – can I get work without a showreel of work? – continues. I also ran into my ex-classmate Nina, which shows I’m not the only one slugging along.

The movie I partnered all this with was The Brothers Bloom, which I chose on the strength of two of its stars, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, both of whom I think are terrific. Unfortunately, the film (the tale of two sibling conmen who involve a wealthy eccentric young woman in what the older, more fanciful brother assures the more hesitant younger one will be their last job) forces American accents on them, as well as some heavily quirky behaviour. There’s a few lovely locations, support work from Robbie Coltrane as – of all things – a Belgian, and philosophising about seeing storylines in our actual lives. But there’s not enough humanity in the characters, too much labour involved in explaining their actions as anything more than novelty, and in the end this is not the indie Ocean’s Eleven it wants to be. The chirpy young director was there for a Q&A but I did not stay to watch, mildly grateful that all I lost on the day was train fare. At least it serves as a distraction from Vanitas & Veritas, which has now entered crunchtime.

**********

My first draft for Waithera, now finally completed, has gotten more complicated than I had anticipated. I’ve now fed so much symbolism down its throat it’s starting to resemble an unlucky French goose. She asked for something around ten pages (which would usually mean ten minutes, which is about the length most short film festivals favour) but I gave her twenty. Ah well. I’m happy with what’s on the page and a first draft is allowed to be broad. You can always trim things later.

Because, as the above attests to, I can be a tad verbose.

Dancing Shoes

I have wonky feet. They’re big, flat, and curve inwards to the point that – apparently; I don’t notice any of this myself, not having eyes in the back of my head – it looks as if I’m walking with two broken ankles. When I do try and go the ‘balls of your feet’ route, for the few minutes I remember to keep it up, I look like a mental patient or a chimp. Support soles only do so much, and, though I have endurance, long journeys on foot are a pain. As, when done in excess (and in London it’s difficult to do anything else), is dancing.

When I’m drunk enough to dance, I do genuinely enjoy it. I actually have an advantage over most of the Brits surrounding me in that, as a decadent mainland European, I’m not completely crippled by embarassment and my movements can, on occassion, be mistaken for a decent groove. This has actually improved with time. During my primary school playground-wandering days my body awareness was such that I would excitedly wave my arms around, a cruel nervous tic caused by and the cause of bullying. I would also do some apeman chest-thumping, movements as involuntary as breath.  For some reason this display of animal machismo did not make me cool at school, nor did the girls and their freshly unpacked libidos lust after me. Not as far as I know anyway, I have a terrible sense of these things and at those time that I was aware of interest it was usually because friends pointed it out after the fact – sometimes so far after the fact that I had to wonder how good a friend they really were.

All of this is, of course, only set-up, filler, waffle. But you must sympathise. It is really difficult to talk about fun things in any terms other than ‘fun’. Who actually reads five star reviews these days?

Today Paul, Michael and myself went to the Millenium Dome, once an expensive “exhibition and experience” blunder, now a concert venue and event hall redubbed The O2, the name of its mobile phone company sponsor. We went to celebrate that brave, mud-soaked city of New Orleans. You might well ask why the most space-age building in London was chosen to host a festival for the most retro of American cities. Maybe it’s a reference to the Louisiana Superdome. Maybe it’s just because the Yanks like things large. Hurrican Katrina is, naturally, the cause of this weekend of festivities. It is, basically, a marketing exercise. “Come back to New Orleans,” the organisers don’t say. “We have music and moonshine and you’re more likely to die through misplacing a voodoo doll than drowning.”

The whole thing is also free, which was our chief motivation to take the twenty minute walk from our house to the Dome’s Disneylandesque entrance pavilion. There are twenty bands playing in total, though we stopped at four. There’s also Louisiana cooking happening, though the prices are authentically British and I stuck with a rather suspect quiche. In fact, the whole thing has a rather dry, regimented English air to it, quite the opposite of the chaos I experienced at the Jamaican-flavoured Notting Hill Festival earlier this year.

That said, however, the music itself was second to none. There were fiddles and drums and a man with a baritone voice calling himself Kermit. And perhaps a certain reverence was indeed appropriate, because the last to take the stage tonight was the venerable Allen Toussaint, a man that even I, pretty much a rhythm ‘n blues virgin, had heard of because of his creation of Here Come The Girls, a charming ditty that has been covered by many and plays regularly during TV ads. Just regularly enough, in fact, to remain on this side of the charming/irritating fence.

My personal pick, however, came just before that, with Beau Soleil, a group of Cajun gypsies who played their violins as if they were trying to start a fire in a snowstorm. I danced – I tapped, I swayed, I shook my hips and tossed my head about like salad. And I can safely say – because you weren’t there to see it – I did a bang-up job.

Quaintity Not Quantity

Oh. Ooooh that title is bad. Forgive me my sins and bring back my creative edge.

The point is that Blackheath, which I’ve now had a chance to fairly thoroughly explore, is quaint; is, in fact, as English as the village from Midsommer Murders. And, like Midsommer, it’s so beautiful that many people would willingly overlook the murder rate to live here. Not that Blackheath seems particularly dangerous – if anything, it’s more sedate than Ealing.

The village is filled with French bistros, Italian restaurants, wholefood delis, and swanky interior design outlets. It’s across the green, where the Moscow State Circus has currently pitched its tent, conjuring up fond memories of Popov the clown, although I wondered even as a child why the official circus of the erstwhile Communist utopia would deign to visit places like Steenwijk, the town in Holland where I saw them.

New people have moved into 49 Corfton Road and Foxtons is kicking up a fuss about it not being professionally cleaned, though I left it far better than I found it. I’m about ready to just pay for the extra cleaning and be done with it, which is, I suppose, exactly why these Foxtons people use the tactics they do. You may have right on your side, but they have time and energy to spare and eventually they’ll wear you down. Anyway, the actual tenants are far more pleasant and have offered to keep watch for any mail meant for me, so I can pick it up when convenient.

Vanitas & Veritas is the name of my script for Waithera. Freely translated it means Vanity & Truth. They’re also painter’s terms, which is appropriate because the tale is about an artist whose canvases foretell and perhaps even influence the future. It’s occupied my days recently, to the point where my housemates get to see so little of me I might be mistaken for a ghost. It’s worth it, though, to be back in the saddle, even if I am adapting rather than writing something original. The short story is bare-bones enough for me to turn it into my own thing anyway.

All Change

Tomorrow – if all goes well – we should be getting the internet installed in our place, so this may be unnecesarily jumping the gun a bit, but we happen to find ourselves in the LFS computer ’suite’ at the moment – one of the perks of being an alumni – and I’ve already done the printing I needed, so I might as well.

Today’s my brother Daniel’s 20th birthday. Being in New Zealand he’s had it already, of course – I called him out of bed last night and sang Happy Birthday over the phone. He was eighteen when I left. It’s strange to think he’s growing up without me present – in my mind he’ll always be my little brother, and in a biological sense I guess that will always be the case, but he has his own plans now, ambitions, studies in a different city, a life. My mother, too, is busy, having just completed a summer programme for children at the therapy centre she runs. When your life is so full, it can be easy to forget that other’s are too. Nothing is static. We are all changing, from the molecular level on up.

I’ve just finished working as an intern at Slingshot. Monday was my last day, and not a moment too soon as well. Deadlines have been piling up (I’ve got four left for October alone) and for a week I lived out of a suitcase, not having had the time to unpack and install myself properly in 46 Hopedale Road with all the working and commuting (75 minutes each way on a good day) I’ve been doing. Which is not to say that it wasn’t an interesting experience – because it was. The writing of script reports was especially valuable, because it showed what’s out there at the moment (council estate gangster dramas, mostly) and how high the bar is (not insurmountable, I’d say). But it’s time to move on now, and I’m excited about finally getting some writing done again. It’s incredible how doing what you actually like doing, even if its just for a little bit each day, can lighten your mood.

Blackheath is slowly starting to feel like home. I’ve got my clothes on hangers now, my own spot in the fridge and my DVDs, if not alphabetised just yet, at least put away in a cupboard. I’ve found the Sunday market with its nuts and apricot bread, made friends with Sylvester the neighbourhood cat, and – thanks to Paul and Michael’s shared passion for it – seen more American Football than I ever had any ambition to. My days are mostly spent in writing, for Waithera, for competitions, treatments, synopsii, dialogue, breakdowns. Not because of class, not to measurement, not in between work and sleep. It dominates my day now.

And it’s a revelation.

A Cup Half Full

Or half empty. Or overflowing, as is my situation at the moment. Not with joy – not yet anyway – but just with things in general. I’ve had a week of work now, and it feels like far longer. Ten hour days, including travel time, are draining. It’s been windy in London too, and I’ve spent several rainswept autumn afternoons running around London, company credit card in hand, looking for rare DVDs to fetch by a tight deadline. There’s also been a lot of paperwork, and sorting through cupboards full of paperclips and other paraphernalia. The script reading has had to take a backseat, though I’ve done a few reports. I know one has to pay one’s dues in this business, and building trust and a network of contacts is key, but I can’t afford to spend too much more time working out somebody else’s issues either.

Why? Because everything is coming at me at once. I’ve only just sorted out the cessation of services to here in Ealing, my deadline for Waithera’s first draft is drawing ever closer, there’s two competitions this month I want to submit to, I’ve just been asked for several ‘trial reviews’ by an online film magazine that’s accepted my application for a job.

And then there’s the moving. I’ve already spent four hours today transfering a suitcase full of stuff to Hopedale Road, Blackheath. It will occupy most of tomorrow as well. Then I’ll have to spend the afternoon setting up my room, because – and this does fill me with sadness a bit – the next day I’ll be at Edgware Road, earning my £50 a week. Michael’s arriving on Monday, after I leave for work. I won’t get the chance to wander around the area, exploring, at least during the day, until the next weekend. There’s so much going on there’s no real time to savour the ‘bigness’ of this moment – a home of my own, housemates for the first time, a new scene in the play of my life.

Of course, the chaotic and possibly at times internet-less nature of the situation I’m currently in means I might be out of the air for a bit. Not that you’d notice with the frequency I update in a normal situation.