Life Less Literary

Mark says that M**** and S*** have been given a pub to run. Wonderful news, I hope it’s as good as the last one (but with less problems from the police). First thoughts: they should call it “The Dealer and Promoter”. Doesn’t quite have a ring to it though. I mentioned this to Ed and he came up with the much better name “The Trumpet and Turntables”.

I’m tempted to write a story about this lot, but nobody would believe it. Best M-related incident, which absolutely has to find its way into “fiction” one day: I went to a private view with him, an exhibition of early Britart in a small room above the antique watch shop on the Clerkenwell Road. At the back of the room was a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet, loaded with small cardboard medicine boxes. M went through them methodically, one-by-one, shaking them to check whether they had anything inside. Having been unsuccesful, he cleared a space on the bottom shelf, sweeping boxes aside with his hand, and proceeded to lay out a line of coke on the shelf. Shortly after this, he disappeared under a scrum of eager girls, all wanting to get their noses inside his medicine cabinet.

Since returning from Belgium, I’ve been immersing myself in film again. Got a rather dodgy video of Fellini’s Satyricon from the local library; been fascinated in all things Satyricon-related since reading about it in Against Nature (and I finally managed to get hold of a translation of Petronius’s original - thank you Keith). Watched it on the small screen, I think it deserved bigger, when I watch stuff on TV my attention gets distracted, it doesn’t feel as compelling. As a result, I felt that I missed a lot of what was going on in the film, most of it went over the top of my head. But I loved the beautiful-ugly sets and grotesque characters. I think I need to hire it out again and watch it bigger. But one thing I did really notice was the music and soundscapes. At one point some electro-accoustic noises jumped out at me and I thought “that can’t be anyone but Ilhan Mimaroglu”. Checking the credits, I was right. Also some music by Tod Dockstadter in there: I didn’t realise he was working in the 60s, thought he was a lot younger than that.

Then yesterday I hoofed it over to the Showroom to see Uzak: I’d wanted to see this film since I read a synopsis when it played at Cannes, and when Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian Review said “It is one of the best movies of the year, perhaps of many years - the work of a brilliant film-maker” then I knew I had to go. Well, perhaps not my favourite film of many years, but very good nonetheless, and extremely touching. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film with such long dragged-out painful scenes of nothing happening (except perhaps for Eraserhead). Yet despite this, the scenes are never too long, never dragged out to unbearability. The Turkish title of the film translates as “distance”, and everywhere in the film there is distance, particularly between the main characters but also between… everything else in the movie. It was wonderful.

Then even more perfect… in the evening we finally got around to watching the DVD of Requiem for a Dream. A perfect pop-video of post-Koyaanisqatsi narrative, this was gripping and moving every minute of the way. Wow. Didn’t exactly go to bed happy though.

Next week: Jules et Jim.

I lost my phone on the way back from Belgium (actually in Manchester, I think), my not-so-beloved Sony Ericsson T610. Well, I’ve had it for more than 12 months now which means that Vodafone will let me upgrade to a new phone for free - I called them and he reeled off a list of what he said were the best phones available free, I hadn’t heard of any of them. Felt strange, my first time picking a phone without doing any prior research. I plumped for the Motorola V525, on the basis that (a) it has Bluetooth and (b) the name “Motorola” gives me a slightly warmer glow than “Sharp” or “Panasonic” when it comes to mobiles. Anyway, the phone arrives on Friday, but reading the reviews on Amazon it seems like I may have made the right choice. Whatever it’s like, it’ll be nice having a phone which doesn’t take seconds to register every command, and doesn’t require you to navigate through about 20 screens just to send a picture message (Sony Ericsson, please take note!)

Lola’s full name is Lola Rae Sumption. But sometimes I call her Little Ray of Sunshine (and sing to her “You are my Sunshine”, just like grandma used to sing to me).

She’s taken this on board, and has started adding names of her own. If you ask her what she’s called, she’ll happily tell you “my name is Lola Rae Sumption Flower Sunshine Star”.

I bunged up some of the photos from my recent trip to Amsterdam, Assen and Antwerp. The text still needs editing, and hopefully I’ll write some more about it before too long.

I see that Swiss referee Urs Meier has had to go in hiding because of death-threats following his controversial decision in last Thursday’s England-Portugal match. Funny, I was in a pub toilet in Scunthorope (don’t ask) just after the goal was disallowed, and I overheard the following conversation:

“I wanna go to Sweden and find that referee’s family and kill them all, bastards.”

“Switzerland.”

“What?”

“Switzerland. He’s not Swedish. He’s Swiss.”

“Whatever.”