Francis Ford Coppola is an incredible filmmaker, he helped change the face of cinema and I have a huge amount of respect for him, however I was reminded of this quote from Hearts of Darkness recently.

This was Coppola’s prediction about the future of cinema and that cheap video cameras will allow just about anyone to make movies:

“To me the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them, and – you know – suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart – you know – and? make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera…corder – and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed. Forever. And it will really become an art form.”

It irks me beyond belief. I may be being slightly over-sensitive, but why does he have to refer to the ‘unlikely filmmaker of the future’ as being fat?

Is it more of an achievement due to her being fat? Does the analogy work because it’s more unlikely that it would be a ‘fat girl’?

‘Fat Girl in Ohio’ is now used as term within filmmaking and there are production companies and blogs named as such.  I hope there is a future in which the idea of a ‘fat’ girl succeeding isn’t seen as more unlikely than her thinner counterpart, and more to the point, people realise that it’s unnecessary.

It’s now August and, although the past 7 months seem to have gone past in the blink of an eye, a lot has happened. It’s time for a re-cap. I used to do this on MySpace along with my list of things I was hoping to do and making something like that visible, even though there is no real intention of people reading it does help to motivate (or at least that’s what I tell myself)

2009 so far…

• Lived on my own for the first time, and loved every minute of it.
• Taken more photos than I did over the last few years, and they’ve been some of my best.
• Became a home for waifs and strays – worked out for the best. I loved living on my own, but living with K is so much fun (although I think I am destroying her life with my nocturnal tendancies)
• Took on a 2nd job. It has made me ridiculously busy which is just how I like to be.
• Got over a particularly heart wrenching breakup and found I really enjoy being single. Something I plan to maintain for a good long while.
• Started to check off my ‘life-goals’ list by going to Cuba. It was one of the best experiences I have ever had and combined with a week of my own company was just what I needed.
• Went to the first ever film screening at 10 Downing St. and wore jeans. my Mum was horrified.
• Can I put the new Phoenix album? Of course I can. It was my soundtrack to Cuba and when I came home my last.fm account told me they were my second most listened to band overall. I rarely listen to either of their other albums so that verges on obsessive listening. I have no shame, the album’s amazing.
• Got trapped behind a wardrobe. Luckily I managed to wiggle out before it had been long enough for the cat to start trying to eat me.
• Briefly took up golf.
• Had my best festival experience so far at Pitchfork in Chicago.
• Read a book a week for the majority of the year. That has slipped of late due to my insistence at trying to read War and Peace (how do you remember who everyone is?!). The sane thing would be to shelve that for now.
• Decided what my next film will be and started work on it. It’s going to be a long research period and is far more ambitious than the last, but what’s the point otherwise?
• Became editor of a fairly large website, of which there are enormous future plans for.
• Spilt coffee down myself every time I wore white to work, every goddamn time. And still failed to master poached eggs, but it doesn’t hurt to have goals to work towards.

Things I will (attempt) to achieve in Aug/Sept….

• Sell-out screenings for my film festival
• Sort out the Stats for the club’s website – they are all over the shop. Various places read 12, others read 120-50k
• Finish reading Imagining Reality and Pygmy
• Keep up exercise and eat better
• Sleep a minimum of 7 hours a night – please, please
• Get ahead of myself with work so I have more free time (and so my friends like me again, sorry)
• Get the amazing season I have planned for October confirmed (fingers crossed)
• Write more, I have missed it so much,

I have to say I was a little apprehensive about going to a festival on my own, I envisaged myself standing in amongst thousands of people and taking to no-one for three days. Luckily my pessimism was proved wrong and I had the best festival experience I have ever had.

Pitchfork is a fairly small festival but it just gets it right in every way (I am told the only downside was the drinks queue, but I managed to avoid that). Within 10 minutes of arriving I had befriended an incredibly cool photographer from Yahoo Music called Taleen. After seeing her disappear into the photo pit for Yo La Tengo I knew I should probably get my press pass sorted, which luckily I did.

The next morning I dashed to a photography wholesalers and persuaded them to lend me a lens, which was tricky as I didn’t have the required $2000 spare on my credit card as a deposit… gulp, but they were kind and let me loose with one. Photographing a festival was one of the toughest things I have ever had to photograph. You are limited to the first three songs, and combined with ever changing light and the scrum of the other photographers, if you aren’t used to photographing fast you will be after.

Seeing bands from the photo pit was incredible, you are obviously closer than anyone else, but with a zoom lens you view the band from an almost intimate perspective. I tried to photograph everything, and although that meant missing the rest of a set, I saw many more bands than I would have done.

My partner in crime, Taleen

For some reason Taleen and I had also been given VIP passes and so we got to spend our time backstage. It was very different to what I was expecting. Obviously better toilets and free booze (although I do not recommend Sparks, alcoholic-lucozade certainly keeps you going, but you feel very strange in the morning). Taleen loved approaching people in bands and set about talking to anyone and everyone, I’m awful at remembering who people are and this worked in my favour as I didn’t become a blithering idiot. I did manage to maintain my ability to say daft things at the worst times but I think (hope) my accent allowed me to get away with it.

There were a few bands that I was more excited about getting to see so close, rather than taking their picture, and Grizzly Bear were definitely one of those. There was a brief panic when my camera ran out of battery (amateur, I know) but I had also taken my Pentax film camera and bizarrely those ended up being the photos I like the most.

Flaming Lips was certainly an experience.We knew they would be the hardest to photograph as the scrum would be the most competitive. Taleen wasn’t really up for it but I was too curious to miss it and dragged her over. The first set of photographers had been let and and there were hundreds of them squished into the few metres the photographers get. We were held back and told that everyone was only getting one song. We obviously missed the ‘one song’ that included Wayne Coyne coming out onto the stage through a backdrop of a woman with her legs open in his trademark bouncy ball and out onto the crowd. However it was a great sight to see and when we finally got in I was thankful that we only had the one song as the previously courteous photo pit had turned into a feeding frenzy with elbows being thrown left, right and centre. Although I am not a huge Flaming Lips fan, they certainly put on a show and the atmosphere they created was the perfect way to end the festival.

If you are more interested in reading about the bands than my daft experience see below:

My review for Drowned in Sound is here – Close to P4K-tion: DiS does the Pitchfork Music Festival

It was wonderful being back in Chicago, I managed to have nearly two days either side of the festival and was taken to the most amazing places to eat by my Chicago-an friend Kevin. Hopefully the line-up for Pitchfork will be as good next year and I can hotfoot it over there again.

The rest of my photos are in this fancy slideshow below:

and look, there I am….

It’s quarter to nine and I am absolutely exhausted. My first full day in Cuba and it feels as though I have taken in a week’s worth of sights and experience. I feel like I am in a different world, and of course in many ways I am.

No less than 10 minutes after leaving the hotel this morning and I was whisked off by two local women, Betty and Isobel, who walked me round the city to see salsa bars, historical places and a lesson in Cuban culture, it’s economy, delights and downfalls and all for the price of a round of Mojitos. A bargain in my eyes.

I spent the rest of the morning walking the obvious tourist areas and parks and just tried to soak up the city as I walked around. The only downside to being 6 foot and blonde in Havana is that there is no way you could be anything but a tourist, a feeling I haven’t felt anywhere since visiting Hong Kong.

Tourism is Cuba’s main industry and this is strongly felt as you walk around turning taxi drivers, horse and carriage drivers, artists and vendors down with a huge sense of guilt knowing how much your convertible tourist peso means to them. It took a lot of strength to say no to certain people pleading for me to take them up on whatever they were offering, the main factor really being just how expensive things are in the convertible peso. Cuba is not cheap as a tourist but you really can understand why with all the trade embargoes the country is under. I allowed myself to get completely ripped off by artists on the steps of the Capital building, for an extortionate amount, purely because I really enjoyed talking to them. You really can’t help but feeling like a walking wallet but it comes with an unusual sense of empathy.

In other countries you feel happy to barter and bargain your purchases, in Cuba you feel almost cruel. This also comes with other mixed feelings. In countries such as Sierra Leone I felt happy to be persuaded into buying jewellery or carvings I may not necessarily have wanted as they were for so little money, whereas here we are talking prices above those in England and a round of mojitos or a meal can cost you more than £20 easily.

I quickly learnt to look out for crowds of Cubans piling into ice cream shops and supermarkets to buy food on the go and avoid extremely high prices. Obviously anything imported is far more expensive and it’s really an experience to try the Cuban versions of various foods, and as I had read, the food is nothing short of interesting. In the hotels and more touristy cafes the food is labelled in western terms but you really can’t predict what you are going to get no matter what you order. The fruit is delicious, and the coffee is by far the best I have ever tasted. The breakfast bar at my hotel is a very bizarre concoction of delights on offer, which as anyone who knows me well knows, is pretty much how I construct meals and so suits me beautifully. This morning I had a strange mixture of Serrano ham, fruit, quiche, pastry and a stilton-like cream cheese.

Walking around I had amassed at least 200 photos in a matter of hours with about 70 I truly liked, which isn’t a bad ratio. There is something beautiful to photograph every step you make in Havana, much to the bemusement of the locals. In the afternoon I walked down to the Malecon, an extremely long road which attracts Havana’s youth in the evenings. I walked to the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Art, I was very much in the mood to continue walking but couldn’t help but stop and marvel at the enormous bugs on the outside of the Art Museum.

So far my favourite aspect of Havana just has to be the run down 14th Century plazas in their various states and colours. They are just breathtaking and you can’t help but imagine what they were like when they were in prime condition.

By late afternoon the temperature had begun to get incredibly high and so I went back to the hotel to cool down. I found myself on the rooftop pool and realised I had very little idea really how to be ‘on holiday’ I haven’t travelled in a non-work capacity for years and really felt as though I should be doing something rather than sitting on a pool lounger. However, the jetlag had taken hold and I was just incapable of doing anything other than enjoying the incredible view and reading my book. It was a beautiful way to see the sunset and people watch in the streets of Havana below. After a welcome break I am ready for another mojito and can already hear the music beginning in the streets outside.

So I’m in Cuba. The flight was incredible. I have never been one to look out of the window but the light was beautiful and the sky so clear that as we crossed the Atlantic I could see ships crossing the ocean. I couldn’t help but put my iPod on and just stare out across the Atlantic. It was so vast, which slightly terrifies me but it was just incredibly beautiful. Then after a few hours suddenly there was a tiny island surrounded by a beautiful turquoise coastline, Bermuda.

I arrived in Cuba just before 6pm and it was startling to walk off the plane to an airport full of workers wearing face masks. We then all had to fill in a sanitisation form declaring we hadn’t suffered from certain symptoms. It seems Cuba is not taking any chances when it comes to Swine Flu. The other aspect of the airport that I found myself marvelling at was people standing around smoking cigars in the terminal. It truly shows how quickly we have adapted to the smoking ban in the UK.

The only way to get your hands on Cuban currency is to exchange it at the Cuban airport, it was my first experience with indifferent Cuban service but finally I got my convertible pesos and got into a taxi to take my into Havana and on to my hotel. The taxi driver delighted in putting on his special CD for my benefit. It consisted of serious 80s power ballads, the Beatles and the Eagles. It certainly was in interesting soundtrack to my first views of Cuba. Driving into Havana my eyes couldn’t help but boggle at the ranges of cars from Chevys to Ladas, we drove pass tiny cars in pieces wedged into the backs of buses. We had to stop for my taxi driver to exchange a few more of his special CDs with another cab driver. Through factories, apartment blocks and government buildings we then entered Havana and the streets full of hoards of people waiting for buses amongst incredible old and run down buildings. The taxi driver gave me a guided tour of the monuments in Spanish.

I realised that I was responding to him in a mixture of French and Italian and vowed that I would go through my Spanish phrase book as soon as I arrived at the hotel. We managed to be in fits of giggles through the mixture of his Spanish and my pigeon mix of languages and then arrived at Hotel Saratoga which stands out like a sore thumb of decadence among the other historic and shabby buildings.Across from the hotel is the capitol building, which is a carbon copy of it’s US counterpart. After a strawberry daiquiri and some very strange Cuban national television I am going to bed with my bag packed full of camera, film and maps for a day on foot into old Havana for coffee and photos. It is beautiful here and I can’t wait to hit the streets.

It is nothing other than disgraceful that I haven’t kept this blog up to date. I made the fatal error of stopping blogging during my experience with Hurricane Ike, if I had a readership they could be forgiven for thinking I had perished in the storm. The problem with getting sidetracked half way through a story is that you feel that you can’t resume unless you finish it. And so I will, but before I do, the real truth behind my blogging absence is that my life got in the way.

Aspects of my life that I thought were unshakable hurled me upside down, shook me a fair bit and then spat me out into a completely different life to to one I thought I was heading towards. Needless to say the last few months have been somewhat of a journey. I am still dusting myself off and re-assembling everything. In many regards having a life shake up was good for me, certainly gave me time to really have a think about what I want from life, but I did lose something very important to me, however life is weird and wonderful and (insert cheesy phrase).

Needless to say, the blog is back with a re-design and a more regular output of my odd writings.

Welcome

The man in the picture above is Errol Morris. I love him. I cannot explain how much, just know that I do

No documentary filmmaker has inspired me as much.

“The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.”

Errol Morris

I bought this month’s Filmmaker magazine and was excited to see that they had an interview with Morris about his new film Standard Operating Procedure and then literally gasped with excitement to learn that Morris had enlisted the other man that has inspired me and led me to follow my dreams (via a tattoo of one of his designs) Kyle Cooper to do graphics for his film.

Needless to say this is now the most anticipated film of the year for me.

The Filmmaker interview is here

If you aren’t aware of him you may be aware of Fog of War

But if you haven’t seen any of his films I urge you to watch Thin Blue Line

and there is more on Kyle Cooper below…. excuse any gushing about his brilliance

Kyle Cooper

Directors don’t call on Cooper for a signature style; they hire him to dig under the celluloid and tap into the symbolism of a film.

Wired, 2004

Kyle Cooper is regarded as one of the most important opening title designers on history (the only other person regarded as highly is Saul Bass, the pioneer of titles)

Cooper revolutionised opening title design with the titles for Se7en (click to see below)

another highlight are the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang titles below: (I would’ve loved to have shown the title for Donnie Brasco as I absolutely adore them but they seem too hard to find, check them out if you can though)

for more of his work please take a look at his website Prologue

I had an interesting visit to the doctors this week, I am notorious for not going to the doctors for a while and storing up numerous queries and predicaments to bombard the poor doctor with as I sit down. This time I thought I had one that would be swiftly brushed aside. I fall over quite regularly and have done for years. However I fell over twice last week.

I realised I never look at these kind people, I would have no idea who they were if I bumped into them at another time. Even if my mum rushed to help me I honestly don’t think I’d know. The desperate need to escape the situation so I can limp off and wince in sheer agony at yet another layer of skin that has been removed from my knees overpowers any sense of what is happening.

So I merrily mentioned this to the nice doctor at the surgery this week. The first question, and a fair one knowing me, is whether it was likely I was falling over my own feet. Surprisingly no, my ankles just seem to disappear from under me. He checked my breathing, still not entirely sure how relevant that was but what I do I know, and then I was instructed to hop up onto the bed so he could check my ankles.

After about 30 seconds he asked me with a sense of horror in his voice whether his bending of my ankles was hurting me, nope, fairly normal I said. “You could join the circus, I have never seen anything like it” exclaimed the doctor. Marvellous, I thought.

Hyper-mobility syndrome, so I’m told. I prefer Freak of Nature, adds a little exciting element to some sort of disorder, or as my Dad loves to say I am far too bendy…. Brill, of all the ‘syndromes’ to have being far too bendy isn’t too bad.

Looking into it in more detail there are a series if tests to determine whether you have this peculiar oddity.

If you can do any one of these then you may be ‘joint hyper-mobile’, I can do all of them.

What a wonderful development in one week, I’m a real-life Stretch Armstrong

images: ©tkdtutor.com, maitrise-orthop.com, communigate.co.uk

I often grumble that our flat is a mile away from the station, especially walking to the bus stop early in the morning, but it’s days like these when I remember how lucky I am to wake up every day and look at one of the most beautiful places in the London area, Richmond Park.

Henry seemed very confused as to what exactly had happened outside, but I think he sensed my excitement and joined in.

There are very few occasions that I will ever be happy to be woken up when I could sleep longer, but this was definitely worth it

I’ve found, over the last few weeks, a need to get away from anything to do with the course, my film, and the documentary industry in general. This complete u-turn from my previous existence of living and breathing documentary worried me at first. The common trap among those in my situation of new-found academic freedom is to gain a job, enjoy having money and put all their previous dreams and aspirations on hold. I felt that I was dipping my toes into this sea of boredom and bitter regret.

Strangely I’ve found, as the days have passed, a gradual passage through different feelings towards my current situation from my initial grumblings about getting up early and a vicious commute, to my fears that I was putting my dreams on hold; actually not caring about them at all, to feeling curiously liberated. Having worked with fewer people than I could count on one hand for the last year at my previous job I am now amongst thousands and it’s so wonderful to be amongst a huge variety of people again. I find it inspiring, fascinating and oddly comforting.

In theory being amongst such a large group of people should have made my self-conscious nature paralyse any ounce of confidence I possess, however I’ve actually found it’s really helped me. I feel that slowly I’m beginning to finally realise the person I have been striving to allow to emerge for my entire life. I notoriously mentally beat myself and find myself walking along giving myself a constant bollocking for the many things I haven’t done. This new environment, instead, seems to have produced a small level of pride as to who I am and allowed to me to believe I am capable of achieving the many things I want to, and for no discernible reason.