I've made notes as I've gone along to include in this post but it's proving somewhat difficult to read my handwriting and some of it must have clearly made sense at the time but now in my somewhat painkiller addled state I'm thinking eh? wtf did I mean by that and whilst I have got into a better habit of harvard referencing books in my notebooks and making notes of the page numbers where I've seen the quotes I've not got into that habit on the post it notes that I've started keeping next to the computer that I scribble the ideas on for my blog posts.... I think I shall have to start doing that to.....
Anyway like I said I love the physical process of loading it - from the ripping of the cardboard box, the popping of the plastic lid, the slight chemical smell from the film canister, to the satisfying click the back of the camera makes as you open it and load it and then the noise of the motorised wind on mechanism as it advances the film ready for you to use.
I loaded it with colour film - partly because I was given some free but mostly because I thought the colour film (Kodak Colour Plus ISO200) would capture the bleak greyness better than my usual black and white. This is in slight contrast to my usual mantra of 'everything looks better in black and white' which I still believe (and I still prefer monochrome prints) but in this instance colour film will (hopefully) capture the lack of colour better. I don't know if they've come out or not yet as I still need to pick them up from the developers. We can do (I say we - my husband can do colour film in the pop up lab in the garage whilst I make him cups of tea) but the chap in Headingley (The Photo Shop 17a North Lane) does them so much better so I tend to take them to him instead. Plus it is not far from the library so a visit kills two birds with one stone so to speak.
Contradictions are increasingly giving me food for thought - my own that is, but as I've never claimed to be consistent I reckon I can (mostly) get away with it - I'm thinking of contradictions or maybe juxtapositions between what I most agree with or want and what I do - for instance I am a republican but collect royal family memorabilia - all of it is crap but I collect the crappiest of it - and I am especially fond of Charles and Diana wedding mugs - especially ones with photographs taken from newspapers on them so you can still see the black and white pixels. I am an atheist but collect christian religious tat - in the shape of fridge magnets, candles, statuettes, pictures and all that kind of thing. If anyone walked in to my house they could be forgiven for thinking I am a royalist devout roman catholic and yet nothing could be further from the truth....
I am very aware of class as a social issue and am proud of my working class background - in old school marxist terms I have become bourgeois by virtue of my education and yet a lot of the reading I do for pleasure is predominantly about the upper class - the latest being the Fay Weldon Love and Inheritance trilogy and am happiest when watching lovely old black and white british films in which most of the people talk with cut glass accents. But this is something I'm still thinking about so I haven't quite reached any conclusions other than I am a contrary madam...something my Nana used to tell me often when I was little.
One thing I have noticed though is a change in the way I'm doing my research - I much prefer to read a paper book but a lot of the books I'm reading like Puckle's wonderful Funeral Customs (self explanatory title) and George Gissings The Netherworld - a novel from 1889 which features 3 different funerals are more easily available online as pdfs. Sometimes I download them to my husbands kindle thing and sometimes I just read them on the main computer screen. Which is another contradiction in a way - I much prefer old school ways of doing things - paper books, film but am increasingly using the newer types of technology whilst professing to be a luddite. But then I have the enviable and easy position of being married to an early adopter so I can maintain my semi ludditeness whilst still getting the benefit of fast broadband, digital cameras, negative scanners, kindles etc....
I'm making myself concentrate on things on screen though and resisting (mostly) the urge to keep flicking back to Farcebook and Twitter and whilst I still find it difficult and less satisfying than a paper book I'm getting there...
In some ways I feel a bit like Jonny 5 from the film Short Circuit in terms of his constant demand for input as each book I look at like Puckle's Funeral Customs or a paper about the similarities between Dracula and embalmers opens up other wonderful avenues of learning to meander down - namely customs around the dead in Brittany which get lots of mentions in Puckle's book and some seem quite bizarre to my 21st century eyes (like the custom of leaving honey in a room with the deceased so that the fly which appears on the mouth of the dead can then have some honey and so be sustained for its long journey into the afterlife as apparently the fly is the soul) but I lack Jonny 5's eidetic memory and also I need to so some doing to - not just reading.
The quote on my post it note reads ' surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect' and whilst I am heartily in agreement with its sentiment I'm buggered if I can remember where I read it. There is also a note about red cups - I went to see Beyond Clueless at ever wonderful and fabulous Hyde Park Cinema. It's an unusual documentary film made up of clips of teen films most of which I'd never seen (but I have to see Idle Hands which is a film about a teen who chops off his masturbatory right hand and it then develops a murderous masturbatory life of its own) and the director in the Q+A afterwards talked about how when they were showing it in Texas he asked if they could have red cups - red cups being a ubiquitous symbol of alcohol transgressions in american teen films or rather that's how they are perceived over here whereas over there they are so ubiquitous the chap at the cinema said no, it'll just look like we've run out of cups and had to go buy some from the local 7-11. A good example of what looks like one thing to one person looks like something else entirely to someone else....
Along with Beyond Clueless last week I also watched the british version of Hitchcocks Stranger On A Train - it reminded me that I am ever so slightly in love with Farley Granger, in awe of Hitchcock and his wife's consummate film making skill and also just how much their work has influenced my work too - reflections and looking through things are all features of my work too. Plus it also taught me not to go on either Tunnel of Love rides or carousels....
Well the pain from my tooth is getting so much that I need to go and have a lie down - please keep fingers crossed for me that all goes well at the dentist.
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