sunfeather

Dreams: unspoilt canyons in the American South-West and strange goings-on in a British rooming house. In my dream, I'm renting a large, cold, but characterful one-room apartment from a landlord who lives across the hall and has Nazi graffiti on his door. At first, I think he is responsible for these objectionable signs, but then I see him emerge with his similarly tattooed and pierced gay lover and realise that he is actually the target of this hateful scrawl. Meanwhile, shooing the landlord's little white terrier-type dog out of my apartment, I chase it into the road where it is hit by a car. As the local samaritans bring the broken canine into the building, I feign ignorance: 'Er, I think he has a dog,' I say sheepishly, pointing at the landlord's door...


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Today I fulfilled two long-held ambitions, both of which left me feeling kind of underwhelmed and unsatisfied.

First, I joined a gym, which I've been meaning to do for a while (read: years) but never really felt financially able before. I was prepared for the 30 monthly charge, but was a little miffed to be stung for a 65 'administration fee'. What a fucking scam.
Then I came home and discovered a rather alarming council tax bill.
I had hoped that my new job and new salary would finally allow me to live the kind of life I want to lead, but the opposite is true: once I have paid for my fancy apartment, and my car, and my loans, and my gym membership, and my broadband internet connection, I will have next to nothing left for any socialising. I may have lived in some tiny apartments in some run-down areas in Newcastle, and I may have struggled to feed myself at the end of the month, but at least I was going out all the time to gigs, and drinking with my students (oops!) and dining regularly with the fragrant Atsuko... And I may be comfortable and keen and getting-in-shape down here in my new place, but at this rate I'm never going to go out and, let's face it, you don't meet people by staying at home (present company accepted, of course, but, y'know, I can't touch you can I?). And I'm afraid, much as I might like to believe it, I don't really think you go out unless you've got the money to do so: not in this country at any rate, not in this century, and not at my age.

So I fell right into that little capitalist trap. To put it simply: I have a $1000 bed but no one to share it with.

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The second, and rather less pressing ambition I fulfilled was in finally getting to see Ren Clair's Paris qui dort from 1923. This is a silent film about a mysterious ray that freezes all the inhabitants of Paris in their sleep, and, as such, it's a sort of precursor to cult sci-fi classics like The Quiet Earth and Night of the Comet (both favourites of mine) and, I suppose, in a way, Romero's Dead sequence (only it's played more for comedy than for horror). But Paris qui dort is, I'm afraid, pretty disappointing, with relatively little of Ren Clair's usual camera trickery. Most of it consists of the (inexplicably) waking survivors mucking about on the Eiffel Tower above the deserted city and this is problematic for me because I suffer from killer vertigo and have never been able to make it above the second storey of the Eiffel Tower, so witnessing people dangle in thin air from the girders and wrestle on the edge of the platform is more than I can stomach. For an even more graphic depiction of same, see Louis Malle's film of Zazie dans le mtro from 1960.

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This is such a shit entry: I apologise.