Visceral, Emotional and Indecorous

Like many practitioners, I prefer not to discuss my artistic worries with my mother; they near-to-bore her and make me feel worse than before. On occasion, however, this needs to be weighed against harvestmother’s other occasional function in my life, as the hearer of plaints which have gone beyond an everyday level of fretfulness.

So it was, around a week ago, that I sat in the family lazyboy (got by way of my late grandmother) and moaned extensively about my lack of progress with my manuscript this last couple of months. Out came the recurring worries: was I really up to this?–should I biff the whole thing and start something new?–did I really just need to suck it up and get typing?

No particular conclusions were reached, but the venting did the trick and within a few hours I was back working on it. So it’s been for the last week. A few more thousand words have been revised and I am feeling rather better about myself.

The way in which I work doesn’t lend itself well to a life of habit and structure: long fallow periods followed by shorter periods of intense writing, during which time all my other concerns simply recede and I live in a kind of happy bubble of words. There’s a flow-on, when I’m working on the manuscript, to other areas of my life: I can meet deadlines without busting anything and tasks which might otherwise have seemed onerous simply get done (or, if they don’t, I don’t care).

It’s the long dry spells in between that are rough on the mind and the self, most of all accepting that this is part of the process and that I’m not lazy. I spent more than four years working like this on my PhD and I never did quite convince myself of that fact.

But these worries, though I know they’ll come back, seem happily distant right now, after a weekend spent working on writing projects both high and low level, and, for recreation, reading. What a pleasure to have my life back in the alignment I like, and how brief this period may well be, until I’ve written myself out and have to wait again on my imagination.

For the rest of the week’s events, it’s probably best that I narrate them in fragments, since all energies have been focused around dog mating. It’s visceral, emotional and indecorous. Again, probably not something you want to share with your mother. Squatting on the floor of the vet’s surgery, each of us holding one of the dogs while the vet assisted Arthur into a specimen jar, inseminatory syringe at the ready, was an unsettling rather than a bonding experience.

Strange too to see the anthropomorphic cycles our conversation went through as the week progressed. Despite our best efforts not to go there, dog mating reminded us of human mating. Again, not memories one wishes to be having at the same time as one’s mother.

Still, three artificial inseminations and many deneiros later, we must now wait for a month before a scan will reveal the dogs’ success, or lack of it. In the meantime they are having a short holiday from each other until Millie’s super-duper-freaky-attractiveness abates.

And that, friends, is pretty much all that I’ve been doing: writing, working and mating dogs. My students continue to offer gems that challenge my own thinking: witness today’s assertion that life looks up for Orlando, in the eponymous film, when “she finds a man”. The trouble is, that’s not exactly false, it’s just that it’s not quite, to my mind, the spirit in which the film’s narrative is made.

I promised to review the movies I saw at the film festival. Let me see if I can do it in brief, for your edification.

Neverné hry/Faithless Games was satisfying and delightful, a Czech/Slovak tale of the troubled marriage of two young musicians. I liked especially the way the film unpacked the essential incompatibility between composition and performance, the former requiring tranquility and meditative isolation, the latter an urban, stimulative environment. The characters were marvellously craggy and sensual-looking, and the music in the dénouement made me cry.

Touch the Sound, about the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, I saw with harvestdad. Is Glennie the world’s greatest living musician, we wondered? She has the singularity and the uniqueness of a true artist, and the documentary succeeded, I thought, in getting the audience to listen to the world much as she does: absolutely and with our whole bodies.

Of Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues I felt indifferent: one in a series of PBS documentaries, a stronger narrative was provided by the equivalent episode of the Lost Highway series. It was interesting to hear from Hank’s stepdaughter and from people who knew Audrey well, but I wonder if his contemporaries are getting tired of telling the same stories of their friend?

2046 did not disappoint me. It was visually thrilling and emotionally harsh, not least for the spectacle of Tony Leung playing a player. Emotionally, it was close to the tone of the Cambodian scenes in In the Mood for Love, which it follows, when Leung’s character roamed the monastic ruins in search of his lost sense of self.

I grow increasingly convinced that east and south-east Asia itself is Wong’s text, so freely do the characters roam. Love–true love–is a believed-in quality in these films, but also a deeply damaging one. No-one who’s touched by it isn’t ruined.

I was intrigued by the premise of 9 Songs and surprised by how ineffective I found actual sex to be as a narrative device. Despite the nervous giggling around me in the theatre (which only applied to shots of female genital nudity: whenever an erect penis appeared, everyone went reverentially quiet. It made me think of Tom Cruise’s motivational speeches in Magnolia: “Respect the cock/Tame the cunt”) I found the sexual scenes quite dull in terms of their ability to carry a story: sex itself seems resistant to narrative.

Reviews I’ve read since then have done more to explicate the story than the film itself. I felt curiously unsympathetic to the characters. Having said that, the template of colours looked great and did much to further the connections between concert and bedroom. The whole thing seemed to me an interesting exercise, and probably successful in the terms it set for itself, though strangely unengaging.

Mysterious Skin I bought a ticket for by mistake, intending to see Girl in a Mirror, but it was a good, though difficult, experience, principally for the young actors’ performance and the way in which the 1980s/early 90s staging merged with the creepitude and misery of the narrative’s revelations. The past is an effective setting for sexual abuse narratives, in which the fashions of the time, which can look so “wrong” to us now, serve well as a metaphor for the wrongness of what’s taking place. Which is a pretty harsh indictment on 80s sports socks and shorts, but there you go.

Three Dollars I considered not going to, since it was screening the day after restructuring was announced at work, but I went all the same. In a sense it was misleading to advertise this film as a realist critique of (Australian) new-monetarism, since for me this was secondary to the way the film built up–or attempted to build up–its symbolic narrative.

What happened to the family, the fact that things ended hopefully rather than utterly desperate, was anticipated through the network of events and images throughout the story. In this sense, it wasn’t realist, though there are probably more than enough people who’ve marked events in their lives with “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for that assertion not to be true.

Yes lifted me rather higher: serious-minded and gorgeous-looking. Heavy with artifice–all dialogue in rhyming couplets, for one–it was at the same time determined to explore our current version of “why can’t we get along”, through an affair between an Irish-American woman and a Lebanese man, both in London. It was deft and beautiful, and I took delight in seeing Joan Allen so marvellously shot.

Little Bits of Light is an uncompromising local film, digitally filmed and using only natural light. As a narrative of depression, it’s relentless and in this way truthful, the difficulty of this truth heightened by long, long shots that saw many audiences members simply get up and leave.

But I’m glad it was made, and glad that I saw it, not least because the evening ended with joining the director, his partner the co-writer, one of the actors and a trio of other local film movers and shakers (hello Nick from Alice’s!) for drinks and that kind of satisfying conversation that ranges widely and lightly over several hours.

Just a couple more of which to write, but I’ll let them sit until next entry, which, if fortune and stamina allows, will come with a shorter break preceding it than this.