Silence
sometimes just grows
from the smallest thing:
happenstance or circumstance,
a thoughtless reaction,
an innocuous remark -
and then
before you know it,
becomes a gulf that seems
impossible to breach,
both struck dumb
by our tales,
half true, half imagined
of how this came to be.
Giving Music
As I sit here listening to music mixed by Seb Fontaine, who always reminds me of my dear friend Barry, I found something I wrote about the sharing of music:
When we give people music, we reveal something about ourselves.
Something about the giver and something about the receiver.
It becomes shared space.
Listening develops as a new thing, a shared thing, now.
A new storyline. Yet an unknowable storyline
because we can only really know our own experience.
We want people we like to like the music we do.
We are disappointed when they don’t.
But when they do, it becomes a common thread
Weaving its way through our lives, common DNA
That carries the emotions of its creation and
Now our relationship
Along with it.
Seeing the Light
Life is a challenge, meet it!
Life is a dream, realize it!
Life is a game, play it!
Life is Love, enjoy it!
Sri Sathya Sai Baba (November 23, 1926 – April 24, 2011)
A friend posted this on Facebook today and it reminded me that my mother had pictures of the guru Sai Baba when I was a kid.
In one he had long, straight black hair. In the other he had a frizzy Afro. She told me that his hair had gone frizzy from all his concentrated spiritual energy and I remember staring at the photos, trying to imagine this electrical current crackling up and down his hair.
She kept them on her dressing table and told me about a meditation technique using a candle. I remember sitting staring at the candle, in its old-fashioned candle holder, thinking over and over “I see the light.”
The next stage was supposed to be when you felt you were in the flame (“I am in the light”) and the final stage was when you became the flame (“I am the light”). I didn’t persist with it for long, though there was something very alluring about the whole thing. Perhaps too alluring for someone trying hard to be a good Catholic girl. (Yes, hilarious I know, but nevertheless).
Many years later, I have started to practice meditation and it has slowly encased me in its sultry tentacles. I am by no means an expert, but this quiet, still space pulls at me every day. Another of the gifts I didn’t even realize mum gave me till now.
Autumn
As I have been contemplating recent changes in my life – brought about by the fact that my work situation finally became intolerable – (though the horror of what has happened in Japan puts my little drama completely into perspective) these words found their way to me:
Last night the tongues of fire
Circled me around
And this strange
Season of pain
Will come to pass
When the healing hands
Of Autumn
Cool me down.
(Indigo Girls)
I found this quote in an old diary, written a lifetime ago, as I prepared to leave England for good and return home. And indeed, autumn is upon us, there’s a faint chill in the air and “strange season of pain” pretty much describes the last 5 months of my life.
As to my reasons for ending the work I was doing:
If you place a thing into the center of your life
That lacks the power to nourish
It will eventually poison everything that you are
And destroy you
As simple a thing as an idea
Or your perspective on yourself of the world
No one can be the source of your content,
It lies within, in the center.
(Faithless: Liontamer)
No regrets. I learned many things and formed relationships that I hope will last. But I am who I am: I believe in courtesy and kindness and respect. That it’s possible to make money and do business without crushing people along the way. And that this doesn’t make me weak or naive: it’s not that I don’t understand the system, it’s that I reject it.
It’s such a relief to be free.
Portion Sizes
Being part-owner of a pizza shop, one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s all about portion sizes.
The amount of dough, tomato, cheese and toppings that one puts on a pizza may seem small anyway, but the smallest variation in the amounts that are used will make a noticeable impact on the bottom line.
Though it’s a matter of taste, there’s a trend for thin crusts and to some it indicates a better class of pizza. The difference between a pizza in a take-away (like ours) and the pizza that you buy in a proper sit-down establishment. For the folks in our neighborhood, the latter would always be the preferred option.
The first two and a half years of owning the pizza shop was challenging, the learning curve was steep and The Hobbit spent all his time perfecting and tinkering with the system to scrape out every penny he could to keep it afloat. Part of this was managing portion sizes.
The ladies in the kitchen started calling him “Cups” because he was always on at them to use the designated cups for measuring out the correct amounts.
Then he had a bright idea: roll the bases thinner. You kill two birds with one stone: make the product seem more refined and therefore more appealing to our market, and cut down on the amount used.
It’s made a significant difference.
Every business must be like that. Though the one I know most about is not pizzas, but film and tv. And here too, it’s all about portions.
It’s about working out exactly what you need to produce the kind of show or story you are making. And doing this in such a way that hundreds or thousands or millions of people (depending on your goal and medium) will watch it, enjoy it and, in some way, create a flow of energy (usually in the form of money) towards the people who produced it.
There’s a process of gathering money and resources to this concept for the creation of a thing that exists at this point only on paper. And sometimes only in someone’s head.
Then – depending upon how much you have to spend – cutting, shifting and juggling until you meet a point (hopefully), where the essential part of the film still exists, but within your means, and you have a workable plan.
So it’s important to know the system well enough to provide exactly the right amount of resources for what’s required. And then managing the process that so that these resources are adequate.
The perfect team is lean and fit and inventive. People that can get the best out of the situation that they’re presented with. Not too many of them and not too few.
The question always is – what are the elements you need for your production? What are each of the elements worth in terms of resources? What is their order of importance? Are too many resources going into the creation of an element that is ultimately not that valuable to the end result, but that someone is attached to, for some reason, usually something to do with ego.
Checks need to be in place so that resources are not squandered due to incompetence, laziness, inexperience or arrogance. Arrogance is usually closely associated with power, so this can be tricky but important to manage, to the extent that this is a saleable skill.
And I have the feeling that human history is going be shaped by portion sizes when it comes down to it. We’re still in denial, unable to countenance a world in which enough has to be enough for us to persist. We are attached to convenience and appetite and ego to the detriment of all else.
This has brought us to a very dangerous place. But perhaps we were always destined to get here because of the way we are made.
Because it’s the times when your back is really against the wall, times when you have too little for what you need, and are close to losing it all, that you are at your most creative and find out what you’re really made of.
What are we humans made of, I wonder?
Saturday Songs
Faithless is banging in my head still. When you arrive and see two massive drum and percussions kits on stage, there really is no more to be said. Their music has been the soundtrack of the last 16? 17? years. That one tone, that endlessly reinvented top-note, uniquely theirs, that lifts a crowd into the air, scoops them up and deposits them onto a relentless, driving groove. Maxi Jazz presiding over events in a shameless display of vanity: parading, crooning, commanding, rapping out his words of poetry.
You’re the left eye. I’m the right. It would be madness to fight.
A year ago I celebrated my 40 years on this earth and asked only for music. The music that has defined our relationship or that brings joy, whatever music people wanted to give me. And for the last year I have been taking a random walk through this and other stuff that has found its way onto my harddrive. It is an endlessly evolving gift. I have been pulling tracks out of it into what I’ve called supercool playlists. Here are a few songs from the soundtrack of last year.
This one got me through July and August.
Not only an amazing song, but a really cool, single tracking shot…
The best cover ever.
Opening scene of The Angel.
Techno Babel
So here I am mindlessly copy video files (“media” in my world) from one hard drive to another.
Well, not mindlessly exactly. A lot of thinking went into it, but what a pain in the ass.
Basically I’ve been given media on a Mac drive – as it came from an editor that has a Mac system. Mine is of course a PC system. Not “of course” in the it-absolutely-must-have-to-be-PC sense of the word, but in the of-course-it-would-f***ing-be-the opposite-of-what-I-need-and-now-life-is-difficult sense of the word.
You can get a piece of software that allows a PC to read a Mac drive. It’s called Macdrive6, bizarrely enough.
But I also have media on a PC drive. And when I have them plugged in at the same time as the Mac drive, it malfunctions. So I can’t access video material from both drives simultaneously – which is a leetle bit of a problem if I need to use shots off both drives in the programme I’m editing.
And this is why I am laborious copying stuff I’ve selected off the Mac drive, first onto an internal drive, turning off the Mac drive, plugging in the PC drive, and then copying it onto that.
It’s a pain in the ass, I tell you!
But it did make me thing about languages. Well, watching hundreds of files being copied over, not once but twice, made me think a lot of things. One of them was about language.
In the film and television world, it’s become a minefield because of all the new formats. Everything speaks a different language and every company that produces technology seems to make a point of ensuring that communication between the platforms is as difficult as possible.
So there are issues between Sony and Panasonic. There are issues between Mac and PC. There are issues between editing software, where it’s FinalCutPro versus Avid. There’s a choice between working progressive or interlaced. And woe betide you if you end up with a project that contains a mixture of the two.
The formats you can shoot or deliver films on range from High Definition tapes, discs and cards – all of which require special players or readers – to Digibeta, DVcam and mini-DV tapes – again, which require special players. Not to mention DVD, because that really would get me going. Writing DVDs should be the easiest thing in the world, but It. Just. Is. Not.
Everything speaks a different language, requires some kind of special machinery that understands that particular language and connects in a different way to your edit platform.
There’s also a little something called a codec, which no one really understands, but makes life even more difficult.
And at the moment nothing much speaks to mine very easily.
I’m in a techno Tower of Babel.
Elephant’s Trunk
(A poem-like thing I found in one of my notebooks that made me smile recently. Trinity aged 4.)
My daughter very carefully draws some kind of creature with a big nose.
“What’s that?”
“An elephant. Can’t you see the trunk?”
She points at something that looks more like a semi-flaccid penis than an elephant’s trunk, right down to the bulbous head.
“Ah beautiful,” I say. “What a good elephant.”
Doggy Doo
Every so often your children do or say something that cuts right to the heart of the matter, that reminds you that no matter how little they are, they see you in all your naked glory.
It’s good to be reminded occasionally that kids are mirrors of what’s going on with you, how you deal with them, with others, your relationship. It’s not always a comfortable reflection but it’s cheaper than going to the shrink.
What’s that got to do with doggy doo?
Every relationship has those little things, stupid things, that can escalate into all-out war, and with us, it’s dog shit. Well, actually it’s the dogs, but the focus is mostly on the excrement.
It’s probably not wise to admit this publicly, but I’ve never been that keen on dogs. I don’t know why, I’m just not. I don’t like being licked, jumped on, having my bum sniffed or a canine nose in the crotch. That doesn’t mean I wish bad things on them (okay I admit, I have occasionally stepped on the toes of a crotch sniffer to get them to stop without offending the owner), I just want them to leave me alone. Horses and cats on the other hand, I do like. But unfortunately I’m allergic to both.
As soon as we bought our first little cottage, the Hobbit immediately wanted to get a dog. It was one thing he’d always wanted to do and the one thing I had always, categorically, known that I didn’t want to do. So there was a big debate – and it was a toughie because it came down to who we were fundamentally as people.
Admitting that you don’t like dogs is a little like admitting that you pick your nose and eat it. Not that I do that, of course, but it’s kind of socially unacceptable. There must be something wrong with you. And there probably is, but I felt it was better to come clean rather than go along with things and be blamed later for being a horrible person because I couldn’t love the dog.
The main thing really was that I didn’t want to have to deal with the excrement. The Hobbit likes to tell people that I’m dog-shit-phobic like this is something extraordinary. But yes I am, and goddamit, it’s not unreasonable. It smells appalling. It’s extremely sticky and difficult to get off the bottom of your shoe. Even worse if it’s your bare foot. And all of this I know from personal experience.
I grew up in house of animal lovers, so there was always a gang of dogs ranging from big to chihuahua sized. A chihuahua called Dinky in fact. There were a series of Yorkshire terriors, most of whom met a sticky end, in very much the same way that the Yorkies in a Fish Called Wanda. And absolutely nothing to do with me, I swear.
The big ones mostly slept outside, but the little ones were firmly ensconsed in the house and on occasion felt quite fine to use it as their toilet. And 99.9% of the time, if anyone was going to tread in their offering, it was me. Okay, it usually wasn’t as dramatic as the time I skidded in dog diaorrhea at 2 o’clock in the morning after a night out, but treading in shit lurking just beneath your bed frill just as you’re climbing into bed does tend to put a damper on the night. The rest of the family thought it was hilarious and I have a clear memory them all laughing at my hysterical rage one evening around the dinner table.
When I grew up, I swore, and had a house of my own, there would be no dogs, and therefore no dog shit.
But of course, if the love of your life has always wanted a dog, you become a horrible person if you prevent that… So there were conditions. It had to be a dog that wasn’t irritating and I absolutely was not going to deal with excrement or vomit. Promises were made. Promises as important as marriage vows. However reality is always a little different.
Those who have visited us will know that our little Cairn terrior Griffin is a complete handful. Male Cairns, though cute, are a bit wild, extremely territorial and very, very naughty. He is calmer now that when he was younger and dog-training did help. But he still jumps on everyone who comes to visit, digs up my garden enthusiastically in the pursuit of small rodents (I’m talking gigantic holes here) and if we don’t watch him marks his territory inside.
His sister Zoe is rather more sedentary and only goes outside to do her ablutions which, if we don’t watch HER will be on the steps leading to the garage. Or right outside the front door, if it’s raining.
When my kids were putting everything in their mouths, I lived in horror of them finding dog shit and eating it. (One of our friend’s kids did that: “Horrible chocolate mummy.”) Kita did walk in one day with a handful, but thankfully didn’t fancy a taste.
The one benefit – touch wood – of having our particular dogs, is that they both have such a high-pitched, hysterical bark (you have to hear it to believe it, seriously) that I think this might have put off anyone thinking of breaking into the house.
I am actually quite fond of both our dogs, though they drive me wild at times. But as with children, your relationship is really tested.
Because of course, I do have to deal with dog excrement and vomit. The Hobbit isn’t always around to do it. And often doesn’t do it quite as fast as I’d like. And sometimes just doesn’t want to respond instantly to me nagging like a deranged harpy. There are times that I wait to see just how long he’ll shepherd the kids around the pile on the path going to garage (“I’m waiting for it to dry, so it’s easier to pick up.”). Especially fun in the Cape winters when it rains a lot.
As you can imagine, there have been a lot of heated discussions on the topic. Ridiculous, I know, but one thing I have learnt about family life is that the little things are what it’s all about. It’s lovely to have the kids, dogs, birds or hamsters – but they do need looking after. And there’s no respite unless you have a platoon of helpers. Which we don’t.
So this is why I got quite excited when, on my travels around the internet, I found an article about a robot that eats sticks. It trundles around, picking up and consuming biomass, which is then used to generate energy to keep it going. So no batteries or plugging it into to recharge.
Imagine a robot that eats dog shit! I guarantee the person who produces that will make a fortune. It’s the ideal product. Gets rid of something that no one in their right mind enjoys picking up – and only do it out of love for their animals and intense societal pressure. And it uses the poo as an energy supply. It would be fantastic!
So I’ve been going on about this to The Hobbit and anyone else who will listen. It never occurred to me that Trinity might also be paying attention.
She and I were having a discussion the other day in the kitchen about the fact that she wants to be a scientist. At six, she’s a Discovery Channel fan and just loves finding out how stuff works. When she learnt that this was something you could do for a living, that was it.
So what kind of stuff are you going to make, if you’re a scientist? I asked her. She fixed me a knowing look that went right to my very soul. “ I don’t know. Probably a robot that eats dog shit.”
That’s my girl!
(And yes, I did explain to her that shit wasn’t a word she should really be using 
What a billion looks like
Just in case you were wondering what a billion looks like – this amazing infographic puts it in perspective. Especially the great big yellow square. This is where all your money is, folks.
