Archive for September, 2006

.
BEHIND THE SCENES

In the last few months, I’ve been involved in the programming committee for a new film club, GalleryFilm, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and it’s been an interesting ride, learning all about what’s involved in running a club and showing films. GalleryFilm is part of the Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which is entirely run by volunteers to raise funds for the Picture Gallery’s art exhibitions.

It all began when I was helping on a music video shoot at a nearby restaurant. The director was local film entrepreneur, David Grey. We bumped into the Chair of the Friends, Ingrid Beazley, and I introduced them. Ingrid is a dynamo of energy, always looking for ways to broaden the activities of the Friends. David knows anything you need to know about film - making them and showing them and raising funds for them and encouraging up-and-coming directors to make more of them.

Ingrid pulled together a core team of us volunteers, with David as consultant. We have Stephen Henden, who lives down my road, an IT whizz and local WW2 flying bombs expert, and Steve Slack, an editorial writer at the British Museum, who are both on the Friends’ main committee already. Apart from David, none of us knew anything about what goes on behind the scenes to put on film shows. All we knew was that we loved films and wanted to put on an evening of film a month locally so we didn’t have to trek into Central London to watch good movies.

With David’s guidance, we learnt all about getting a licence from the Council for premises to show films to the public and where you have to go to hire films with the proper permissions to show at public gatherings. We had some films on our list that those companies did not have on the “permitted public screenings” list so we had a go at tracking down the copyright holders to get express permission.

One search, for Deepa Mehta’s “Fire”, took me first to Pathe UK who told me it was not one of their films but I should try L.A. Pathe. L.A. sent me to the Directors Guild in New York, who sent me to the Canadian Directors Guild in Toronto, who sent me to another branch in Toronto, who said they would pass my request on to Ms Mehta’s representatives. A few weeks later, Ms Mehta’s colleague emailed me back to say that the rights were vested in Pathe UK. Which was where I had started in the first place. Aaaargh!

Amazingly, it has all pulled together and we have our autumn screenings set and we’ve issued a press release and everything. And tickets are selling hot and fast!

GALLERYFILM PROGRAMME

Here is the film programme:

16th October - the 1986 British film, Mona Lisa, starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson and Michael Caine, chosen to tie in with an exhibition connected to the painting of the same name. (”Sometimes love is a strange and wicked game. She was a tart. He was an ex-con. And she was about to shatter his life forever.”)

20 November - the Indian film, Earth, (”The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsee girl growing up in Lahore - A darkly fascinating and magical look at epic social upheaval and a remarkably affecting human tale that shines through it all”)

18 December - Peter Greenaway’s The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (”A deliberate and thoughtful film set in an elegant gourmet restaurant called Le Hollandais. Spica dines at this restaurant frequently, along with his gorgeous wife Georgina and his group of uncouth associates”.) .

GalleryFilm’s screenings will take place on the 3rd Monday of every month, at Dulwich Picture Gallery. There will usually be food, drinks and mingling, and various tie-ins with current exhibitions

HOW TO BOOK TICKETS AND WHERE TO GO

Screening will be at 7.30pm in the Linbury Room at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - “The most beautiful small art gallery in the world” - Sunday Telegraph. For directions, click here

Tickets are £5 for Friends and £7 for non-Friends. All profits go to the Picture Gallery, which is a charity. The Picture Gallery houses a magnificent permanent collection of old masters, including works by Poussin, Claude, Rubens, Murillo, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Watteau, Gainsborough and many others and has regular special exhibitions of other artists and artwork. Friends enjoy free entrance to the gallery and other benefits.

If you’d like to come along, please book tickets in advance by emailing galleryfilm@yahoo.co.uk - please state the number of tickets you need, which film(s) you want to see and whether you are a Friend or not. Also, please mention Fusion View!

Or, if you prefer, use the form below and I will forward your email to Stephen who is handling the ticketing.

PLEASE SPREAD THE GOOD NEWS!

Also, if you can think of 3 friends who may enjoy watching great movies in the lovely surroundings of an art gallery, please email them and copy & paste the link below to your email.

http://www.fusionview.co.uk/2006/09/behind-the-scenes-at-galleryfilm/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Useful links:

Dulwich Picture Gallery

David Grey, Village Film

Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Stephen Henden’s Flying Bombs and Rockets site

As a companion piece to the film last Monday, where we saw a very still but genius performance of Pachelbel’s Canon on an electric guitar by Korean rock god funtwo, here is another Asian guy strutting his stuff for all he is worth but with no other musical skill than attitude.

Ladies and gentleman - air guitar….!

—————–

—————–

A while back I featured a site that published Micro Short Stories - ie short stories in 55 words or less.

There’s this fab photo group on the photo sharing site Flickr.com where you can Tell a Story in 5 frames. It’s open to anyone and some of the Micro Photo Stories are very cleverly done.

See this macabre one called Attack.

.

.

.

And this sinister take on the Snow White story.

.

.

.

If you’re inspired to submit a photo story to this group, please let me know by adding a comment and I’ll feature a link to the story on Fusion View.

My partner Angie Macdonald is from South Africa and after watching me blog from the sidelines, she has been inspired to contribute this Fusion Story about her experiences of reverse migration:

It was only when I emigrated to England that I finally came to understand my father. As an Englishman in Africa, my father never
fitted in. He was conspicuous in his baggy safari suits and pale skin that blistered pink in the sun. His broad Lancashire accent with its clipped vowels contrasted starkly with the leisurely pace of Durban English and the rolling r’s and throat-scraping sounds of Afrikaans. As for Zulu, he never even attempted it.

In South Africa, men love sports, drinking beer and cooking meat on a braai. My father is a trainspotter, does not believe in exercise, and a strict vegetarian. He embraced conservatism and the politics of apartheid, but beyond that he has always been an outsider.

In England he would fit right in with the tea drinkers and people discussing the weather and obsessing about bowel movements. He would find many to share his hatred of Maggie Thatcher and his passion for trains. Yet, since leaving England over fifty years ago, my father has never returned to his roots. And I have never heard him speak of England as ‘home’.

Like my father, I always felt an outsider in South Africa. I rejected the role of a typical South African ‘lady’ and drank beer from a bottle, wore trousers instead of floral dresses, cropped my hair and rode a motorbike. I dressed in black and preferred women to men. Culturally, I longed to be in England, to see the bands I admired like The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, to be able to go to the National Theatre and take my pick of bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. I was prepared to reject sub-tropical heat and eternal sunshine for the chance to wear a black trench coat and Doc Martin boots in the middle of an English winter.

I thought that when I came to England I would fit right in. I spoke the same language, had similar cultural references, English blood flowed through my veins. It would be like coming home.

I was wrong. Fourteen years later and I am still unsure where to call ‘home’. I speak of my past life ‘back home’ and yet I feel that my home is firmly in South London, with YM. For the first few years I was here, I suffered an identity crisis; I did not know where I belonged, nor did I feel any particular sense of belonging. In London, my accent marked me as an outsider. I had no shared past with anyone – I had not gone to school or university during the Thatcher years or experienced the bleakness of ‘70s Britain. No British TV programmes were shown in South Africa because of the Equity ban so there were no cultural references there. I had to get used to things like travelling on the underground, miles instead of kilometres, pounds and pence. Bank holidays and sandwich shops. And the fact that here I was one of many. There were no privileges because of the colour of my skin.

When I went back to Durban on holiday, I felt I no longer belonged there either. Being away meant that I had changed. I had experienced the challenges of starting life in a new country while my friends had continued with their lives as they were. And Durban had changed too. There were new roads, new shopping malls. Things that I had never been part of. My favourite restaurants, bars and clubs were no longer there and with them my history had vanished. Wiped out.

But I am gradually getting used to my new life. Now I pepper my speech with ‘i’n’it’ and say ‘all right?’ in place of ‘hello’. I indulge in long detailed conversations about the weather and enjoy gardening and listening to BBC Radio 4. I own a pair of wellies and numerous umbrellas. I have even eaten my sandwiches in the rain. In short, I think I am turning English.

And when I travel abroad I think of myself as a ‘Londoner’. I start missing winding cobbled streets, cosy pubs, ancient buildings and buses that run all night. I miss all the other people like me: the immigrants, with their different cuisines and exotic languages, and I become homesick.

Yet, there are still moments when I am at the seaside, or smell steak cooking on a BBQ and hear the life-affirming beat of the African Jazz Pioneers, when I long for my life in South Africa, for the sky and the sun and the sense of space and friends and the good times we shared. And with that comes sadness and nostalgia, and a deep knowing that, like my father, I have left that life behind. Forever.

Written by Guest Blogger Angie Macdonald

From our man on the scene, Fusion View brings you an eyewitness account of the recent Edinburgh Festival. David Grantley, poet and micro-short story writer*, reports:

For readers intrigued recently by Yang-May’s account of Brighton (the Saint Tropez of the English South Coast?), Edinburgh may be worth a visit. It is not so much trendy as the Piccadilly of the UK: everyone goes through at some point.

There are several festivals going on at the same time. The Film Festival (first showing of ‘Kill the Messenger’, that brilliant if no doubt controversial TV film), the International Music Festival (of music, opera, ballet), the Fringe (comedy and anything goes with hundreds to choose from), and the Book Festival (authors talk about their work).

Then there is an intermediate thing (I think) which includes The Lady Boys of Bankok (my cousin didn’t fancy, and five minutes for me would be enough) and the something or other of the Penis (Spanish friends recommend, but cousin’s husband didn’t fancy: he doesn’t like looking at what he calls human ‘bits’).

And there are art exhibitions, some good, some ‘interesting’ (cousin insists I see). It wasn’t until I got to Newcastle (the capital of England-lah, if you are young enough to survive it) on the way home that I found the contemporary Scottish artist I like: Michael McVey (please don’t spread the word about until I have bought one). Finally, (still in Edinburgh) there is street theatre (anything goes again). Food is plentiful, inexpensive and varied.

I had been booked to hear Andrew Rowson, cartoonist, on his cartoons, a man called Johnson who wrote the wine map of Europe (his love is only for the wine of France so only gets part of my vote), and Andrew Motion, the poet laureate talking about his autobiography: he came over as a very pleasant very English man (tall, too).

As ever I made a bee-line (wasp, hornet?) for the street theatre. My favourites: Peruvians singing in Spanish and playing all manner of pan-pipes: very jig-enticing sound when not deeply sad. Then some Tibetans, men and women, playing all manner of drum-like objects and a strange trumpet while a tall Tibetan does a dance with a long circular ribbon (if not Tibetan what could they be?). New ears needed: none of the guessable tonalities or tunes of any music I know (Indian, Moroccan, African, Chinese, Beethoven) but fascinating. There are also various magicians and excellent circus-like climbing and juggling acts, and even, this year, a ten-year old (I suppose) doing elementary juggling – he had to get two members of the audience to hold him up so he could be seen. All this free, of course, though donations expected (‘for foreign tourists the £5 note is the one with 100 written on it’).

Can’t imagine a cheaper holiday in the UK once accommodation is found.

Then there are constant oddities. Why was the wine talk sponsored by a whisky company? I came out with a wad of vouchers for free drams of their 12 year old single malt product. A dram is a very generous pouring out of a bottle into a generous glass. Whatever their reputation, the Scottish are never mean with the drink. The drams were poured in a refreshment tent-pub with tables and comfortable seats to the accompaniment of a skiffle and US country-music band. You don’t have to pay for a book-talk to use it. Free kazoos if you want to make a noise. As for the whisky, I like it, but it doesn’t like me. The morning after it takes half the day to stop hating the emphasis on thistles and tartan and everything Scottish (even Lloys-TSB is Lloyds-TSB SCOTLAND). Notable at all the events is the large number of local (= Edinburgh or Scotland in general) people out to enjoy themselves.

Of course I’ve forgotten to mention the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (bagpipes, marching and heavy-metal). But not for me, I’m afraid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Inspired by a post on Fusion View about writing short stories in 55 words only, David submitted a macabre tale to micro short story site www.55fiction.com. Read more here.

Following on from my post Blind Date with a Literary Agent (Part 1), I had made dates to meet three literary agents.

On the appointed day, I went to see Agent No. 1 in her office in Central London. It was a bright spring morning and I felt like I was in a dream. Sitting in her booklined office, I realised I was “on the inside” now. I had got beyond the door that was closed to so many would-be writers and I was actually in a literary agent’s office meeting face to face.

She took out my manuscript and said, “Well, it’s not Wild Swans, is it?”

This did not sound good. “Ummm, no.”

“I was expecting another Wild Swans. That’s what’s hot at the moment.”

“Oh.”

How was I going to explain that the whole point was that this was the anti-Wild Swans. No bound feet, no sob stories: just a feisty, modern Chinese heroine in a battle of wits against gangsters in a John Grisham-esque plot.

“It would be hard to sell,” she went on. “But if you want me to represent you, I can do that. You’ll need to do some work to this draft, though.”

She thought Jasmine was unsympathetic and I needed to make some changes to soften her hard edges.

I left somewhat deflated. Could an agent who didn’t “get” what I was trying to do really represent me properly?

Agent No. 2 was more enthusiastic. She loved it, it was marvellous, I wrote well. etc. But Jasmine needed softening again.

“OK, what needs changing?” I was too close to Jasmine and the settings I had placed her in to see clearly what I needed to do. I needed someone to give me clear guidance - someone to say: here, in this scene, do this; over here, when she says that, show her emotions behind it…

I took out my notebook and paper, poised to take some notes. Agent No. 2 talked around the first few chapters in what seemed like a cloud of sensibility but there was nothing specific I could write down. I left with a blank notebook.

I had a couple of hours before I was due to see Agent No. 3. I went home and lay down on the sofa with one arm over my eyes. This was not turning out how I had imagined. I felt vague and befuddled by Agent No. 2’s suggestions - I had no idea what she wanted me to change. I felt depressed by Agent No. 1 who had been hoping to sell another Chinese hard luck story.

“It all hangs on Agent No. 3 now, ” I said to Angie as I left for Westbourne Park. The sky had turned grey. Spring had shrunk away.

Agent No. 3 had a clear, clipped voice and no-nonsense manner. She reminded me of a lawyer. She asked me precise questions about who I was, where I’d come from and where I was planning to go with my writing. She set out clearly what she was going to do for me and what she wanted from me. She told me I had to rewrite the whole of the first chapter and put Jasmine in context. We needed to see her feelings and her conflict about her past in contrast to her apparently gilded present. I took notes.

This was my kind of agent. A lawyer-type agent. It turned out she came from a long line of lawyers, including some judges. I left her office that evening with a jaunty swagger and a spring in my heart. This blind date was the one for me!

It was going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you take away one thing from this tale of blind dates:

Give yourself the chance to find the literary agent that clicks with you and your style.

The latest rock god of the wired world is a young Korean guy known to all as funtwo. He posted a video of himself playing a rock arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon on YouTube.com and it is now one of the top ten most viewed clips of all time on that site with 7.35 million views. The arrangement is by another Asian-Pacific guy JerryC who posted his score on the internet. The New York Times reported (27 Aug 2006) that if these guys had had a record deal with this piece, they would have gone gold.

The newspaper comments that these two seem typically Asian in being self-deprecating and not seeking out publicity - rare in a world full of celebrity wannabes obsessed by celebrity culture. The paper also reports that there is a whole world of ordinary people playing their music for the sheer love of it and who have a passion to share their knowledge and skills and to take inspiration from each other. Through that dialogue, it suggest, the great music of today and the future will be born.

The key factor in my mind is that money is not involved. None of these people experimenting with guitars in their back bedrooms or making music in their garage is being paid to do what they are doing. They share their music and techniques for free on the internet. Outside the control of the moneymen, the music can be and do whatever it wants. The artist doesn’t have to think about marketability or how much they can earn from that creative piece. They can experiment, improve, fail, create pure joy. That, perhaps, is true creativity.

Watch and listen and be wow-ed….

—————————–

—————————–

You can read the full NY Times article here

My thanks to Ilin for telling me about this video for Fusion View.

The prize draw to win a signed copy of Winnie Loo’s motivational book “A Cut Above: Built on Hard Work, True Grit and a Pair of Scissors” has now closed.

Winners

The winners, picked at random from the Fusion View email subscribers list, are (for privacy reasons, using their first names from their email addresses only):

# jade

# monika

# miffy

I have sent emails to them direct to notify them.

My Thanks to Everyone

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I would like to take this chance to say thank you to all my email subscribers and also to everyone who checks back from time to time to read Fusion View. It’s been a really fun few months getting this blog off the ground and very rewarding to receive your comments and feedback.

I will aim to continue posting relevant and interesting material. If you have any suggestions or thoughts about what topics you would like to see more of on Fusion View, please drop me a line using the form below - or add a comment. (I may not be able to help in all cases but it would be great to chat through your ideas.)

The New Straits Times, a Malaysian Newspaper, has reported that there is 471 million Malaysian ringgit (£117 million sterling) sitting in the official trustee’s bank account which is waiting to be distributed from the estates of deceased Malaysians. The fund has accumulated from people who died before they were able to make their wills and there are cases where their heirs then also died without making wills.

The paper reports “Dusuki Ahmad, chairman of Amanah Raya Bhd, as saying the majority of cases were unresolved because families squabbled over assets in the absence of a will, or because the original beneficiaries could not be bothered to distribute the rest of the estate — sometimes for two or three generations.”

This makes me think of Charles Dickens’s novel “Bleak House” which opens in a shroud of London fog. For generations, the Jarndyce family has been fighting over a will in the case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce and it has become so complex with so many litigants and so many lawyers that no-one knows where it started and where it will end. The phrase Jarndyce v Jarndyce has passed into common parlance to describe court cases that spiral out of control with no end in sight.

Who will be the Malaysian Dickens and write a story of feuding families and generations torn apart by dispute?

I can see the opening chapter now:

“Kuala Lumpur. Haze {substitute “haze” everytime “fog” appears} everywhere. Haze up the river, where it flows among green lalang and padangs; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Haze on the Selangor marshes, Haze on the highways. Haze creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; Haze lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Haze in the eyes and throats of ancient Cheras pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; Haze in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; Haze cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his sweating little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of Haze, with Haze all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A copy of Bleak House and other books discussed on Fusion View can be found at the Fusion View Store