Author: Matthew

Five, ohhh…

I keep thinking I’ll write something about the passage of time and miscellaneous fun things happening along the way, but then the world keeps dropping another load of WTF and I lose the will to. Bitching about the likes of Alien Covenant, for example, no longer holds the appeal it used to.*

Still, time passes whether blogged or not, and really a fuck of a lot of it seems to have passed by this point. Just today my current PI isn’t in the office because it’s his 50th birthday. Meaning, yet again, I’m the oldest person in my lab, albeit by a mere 7 days. Is there anything else to say about being a demicenturion? I’m thinking not.

The event itself was pleasant enough, of course, with a fair amount of fine wine and fine food consumed in some pretty good company. For me the highlight was the preceding night’s American Style, a self-described “jam session” by Philip Glass & Laurie Anderson, plus cellist Rubin Kodheli, one of the loveliest shows I’ve seen in quite a while. It was uneven and meandering — aren’t we all? But even in the occasional creaky moments (their rendering of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Democracy’ didn’t really gel for me, for example) it was still mesmerising, and much of it was completely transcendent. Hard to complain about ageing against such a backdrop.

But, just to put down a few markers for the aforementioned whatthefuckery, so I can maybe remember later: Theresa May is holding what she seems to hope will be the last general election ever. Trump is On Tour. A suicide bomber struck an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. GOP special election candidate wrestled a journalist to the ground, thereby doing wonders for his image. Brexit staggers onwards towards its cliff-edge. And every motherfucker seems to want to make every fucking thing fucking worse. It’s perfectly possible I’ll be looking back on this list in 10 years time with nostalgia, harking back to a comparative Golden Age given what comes next.

Happy days, everyone!

*TLDW: it’s rubbish.

City Jitters 20

Every dog has its day,
and a good dog
just might have two days

City Jitters has been a pretty good running dog here on WT, with almost 10 years under its collar now, but I think it has pretty much had its day. I’m not sure much new ground has been broken in many of those years. I’m a creature of habit, photographically as in so much else, endlessly returning to the same old places, taking the same old pictures. Perhaps the ever-decreasing frequency of CJ posts reflects that. But whether that’s true or not, I’m calling time on this thing that was never even intended to be a project in the first place. Time to do something else.

Too Short

I seem to have got slightly more into the habit of walking out of films, despite going to too few of late. More in the last three weeks than the preceding 20 years, I think.

But really, Assassin’s Creed doesn’t deserve 20 minutes of any viewer’s time; nor Lego Batman, at least when said viewer is a grownup without half term brats in tow. The latter is mawkish, smug and tiresome where its predecessor was charming and sharp; the former just another shit videogame flick in a population that is unimodally shit with near-zero variance.

Why would any sensible person go to either? You might reasonably ask. I’d say the choices have been underwhelming since Rogue One, but it turns out Hidden Figures was released the same week as Lego B, so there’s really no excuse. And I haven’t even seen La La Land yet.

Roadmarks was excellent, by the way. Literally everything I remembered and more. Someone should republish it. And Masurca Fogo. That was excellent too. And I’m a computer scientist now. Perhaps I should’ve mentioned that. I’ve been writing shader code and everything. That’s science, right?

Right?

Nobody Watching

Dance like there’s…

So goes the platitude. Thing is, these days it’s not so much an exhortation to uninhibited joy as a prescription for the opposite. Almost always, now, at my age, at your age, at my age, at your age, young man! Almost always, now, I dance when there literally is no one watching. And only then.

But not tonight, strictly speaking. Not that anyone was watching, particularly, but it wasn’t the usual enforced seclusion. 2016 ended. I wasn’t the only one it ended for.

There was, peripherally, dancing. There were others present. Quite a few. I guess, peripherally, they saw the dancing happen, not that they had any particular reason to notice.

Noticing isn’t the point.

Pointlessly, I danced. The world didn’t end, only the year.

And what a year it’s been. May we never see its dreadful like again.

I can’t tell, through tears, whether the same should be said of the dancing.