w/e 2019-08-18
Hello, another week has gone.
This week’s music comes from Randolph Leap’s 2014 album Clumsy Knot:
Making a video from public domain footage found on archive.org is a nice idea.
The most exciting events of the week were two days that included wardrobe and makeup fittings/tests for the TV ad that shoots next week. I would love to write about those but the contract prohibits posting anything on social media and I guess this is social media and I err on the side of caution. Sorry. But I did see Charles Dance going to a wardrobe fitting for some other thing. Which was nice.
I also continued to type away on Job Garden which, like all of my internet typing work for clients, I don’t write much about in weeknotes because writing about day-to-day work activity isn’t very exciting. Or reading about it. Like Nat said last week, “if I wanted to read a detailed report on the work you did in the past week, I’d become your boss.”
We watched Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992, Jeremy Deller’s sort-of-documentary about acid house and more, which was good. It’s very nice to see a factual programme with a different format – no documentary-maker walking towards the camera talking, or pretending to “discover” something in archives, or showing re-enactments, or nodding in front of interviewees, etc, etc.
And it’s very nice to see something with an opinion. I wasn’t entirely convinced by some of his connections between events — I’m still not sure of the direct relevance of the Miners’ Strike — but at least he presented these as his own possibly tenuous ideas. If, say, Adam Curtis had worked on the same topic it would all be presented as a great revelation of hidden facts, the unknown truth, leading from a handful of shadowy people, through the Strike, and on to inevitable unintended consequences including the rise of Paul Staines and no doubt Brexit and everything else that’s terrible.
The setting of the programme — Deller showing TV clips to an A Level politics class — was quite fun. It also demonstrates that every generation will continue to try and convince younger generations how important their formative years were. Having had Boomers banging on about the 50th anniversaries of the Moon landing, 1968, Woodstock, etc, Generation X is showing it can do just the same with the events of a few decades later. I expect every new generation rolls its eyes at this tendency in the older generations, but no doubt Millennials will be doing the same with their thinkpieces on Trump, Brexit, etc. around 2066.
Talking of banging on about the events of decades ago… we went to see Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood which was, you know, slick Tarantino fun. As usual it slides down pleasantly, with some laughs, taking longer than you think it should, only getting a bit stuck in your throat when you reach the inevitable excessive violence. Otherwise I enjoyed it I guess. But in every scene, every moment, I can imagine Tarantino getting excited about how it’ll be So Cool! Which is nice for him, and it is a good ride, but unless you get heartbroken over successful middle-aged white guys realising they’re a bit past it, there’s not much to feel. Maybe that’s not the point of some movies.
That’s all. Have a good week.