archive for March 08
Monday, March 31st, 2008
In February 1980 I drove out one afternoon to find paratroopers of the Rhodesian SAS on the street corners in full combat dress and dangerously armed. It took me a while to catch on that the Rhodesian generals intended to obliterate the nascent Zimbabwe and install a doomed new Rhodesia run by deranged white military men. Then someone spoke calmly to the generals, and the soldiers were collected and taken home. Maybe someone is talking to Mugabe. Maybe his wife can do the trick. Anyone.
– Jan Raath, The Times
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Sunday, March 30th, 2008
Our second film at the NFT today was A Jihad for Love, a moving documentary about the lives of various brave people from India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and France who are trying to reconcile their homosexuality and their Islamic faith.
Being both Muslim and gay in the modern world is a hard path to tread, but the film does show how many people are doing so, sometimes in quiet and everyday ways. The individuals profiled in the film are almost all very devout, striving in the path of god to understand and accept their sexuality, this personal struggle being the Jihad for love of the film’s title.
I found it very easy to see that Islam, and indeed Christianity, have ample space within them for gays and lesbians. There were some wise voices in the film: the one that really struck me was a middle aged Muslim social worker who met a gay ex-imam to discuss sexuality and Islam and said at the end of the meeting that believers too often listen to the priests in charge, and forgetting that god has charged every individual to learn and decide what is right and what is wrong for themselves.
On the other hand, I found it hard to understand how this all-encompassing faith sustained these people so much. I just run up against the unassailable fact in my head that god clearly does not exist. But all in all, a very enriching film.
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Sunday, March 30th, 2008
We saw a lovely film at the NFT today, about a straight acting gay couple who find themselves having to adopt their nephew, an incredibly camp eleven year old who is like a miniature Quentin Crisp, complete with feather boas, a musical hairbrush and a pink poodle belt, an amazing performance by the child actor involved. The gay couple, one of whom is a fairly in the closet hockey star, find Scot’s unusual behaviour difficult to deal with and have to confront their own internalised homophobia.
It’s quite sentimental at times, but very well done. It makes you want to be a parent, no mean feat! It also has the distinction of being the first gay film to be endorsed by a major sporting association. The Toronto Maple Leafs, the hockey team featured in the film, and the National Hockey League, gave permission for their jerseys and film clips to be used.
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Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Went to the NFT for our first London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival outing today, a collection of shorts called Days Like These.
The highlight was the first short, The Saddest Boy in the World, a Tim Burton style brightly coloured Canadian suburban dark comedy about a tragic nine year old boy. Nothing goes right for him, and relentlessly so, so he commits suicide. You feel quite bad about laughing at times, but it is very funny, with lovely comic timing and a host of dysfunctional characters.
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Saturday, March 29th, 2008
We spent a little time in the British Library today at their exhibition on the European Avant Garde of the first half of the twentieth century: Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and so on. Lots of “isms” and manifestos proclaiming various Utopian futures. There’s some fun stuff on Futurist revolutionary cooking: mostly unappetising meals of weird combinations, often sculpted into things like buildings or aeroplanes, adhering to an idea of science and modernity. Amazing that it was an Italian movement, though it totally failed to take off, unsurprisingly.
Carrot + Trousers = Professor
A raw carrot standing upright, with the thin part at the bottom, where two boiled aubergines are attached with a toothpick to look like violet trousers in the act of marching. Leave the green leaves on the top of the carrot to represent the hope of a pension. Eat the whole thing without ceremony!
- Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook
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Saturday, March 29th, 2008
We had Sean and his boyfriend Warren over to dinner last night and ate our first spring lamb of the year! We also made it a cocktail night and got us all completely pissed.
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Andy and Jo had me round for sauteed potatoes (yum!) and an introduction to the statistical software package SPSS (aaargh!) … they were very patient as I struggled with the maths. It’s not my strong point it has to be said.
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Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Matt took me on a surprise trip last night to see Michala Petri, the world’s foremost recorder player, and Lars Hannibal, her lute-strumming husband, down at the Petersham Festival. We’re pretty much Michala groupies now and it was nice to see her once again, entering the intimate surroundings of the lovely little St Peter’s Church, clutching a handful of recorders.
I’ve never been to Petersham before. It’s a seriously posh little place near Richmond, somehow contriving to feel like a Somerset village, and only half an hour or so from Waterloo.
Michala and Lars were on good form. They began their set with Andrew Skidmore on the cello, then it was just the two of them. Music ranged from Bach to Beethoven, with a bit of humourous recorder and guitar tango in between. They did the Devil’s Trill, and the alternating recorder cuckoo song, and various other party tricks too.
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Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Here are the films ITV Wales made from our visit to Ghana. There’s one showcasing our first video conferencing session between kids in Ghana and Wales.
This one was the first report all about Wales and its links with Fairtrade and Ghana. This one focuses on Fairtrade cocoa farming. more generally on how Fairtrade in Ghana links to Wales. And this one is about women and their role within Kuapa Kokoo.
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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
To the Canal Café Theatre in Warwick Avenue for the second Dog Ate Cake production from Henry Bell and his talented troupe. The performance started auspiciously with a dog on stage actually eating some cake! Nice.
Then it was a mid-nineteenth century farce concerning a man who was worried he would become too “stout” and his wife would leave him, with all kinds of hilarity as he tries to lose weight. It was great fun. They’d updated the text quite nicely, at one point apparently metamorphing a rather crude joke about hard of hearing people being a bit crap into a more subtle, and funny, joke about hard of hearing people being equally valued employees of a gentleman’s household.
There was lots more physical humour than in the first Dog Ate Cake performance, with amusing key words like “pumpkin” which whenever stated would cause everyone to look up over the audience with a wistful gaze, or “poo” which would cause everyone to check the underneath of their shoes. It was good. All the Bell Clan were in attendance too, so it was nice to see them all.
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