This week I have…
…been to the theatre twice. Firstly to see White Boy at the Soho Theatre, which was disappointing. Secondly to see the dress rehearsal for Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter. Which was brilliant. A bunch of us from school went (those free tickets work a treat) and it was really uplifting to see end a hard week with a show that realises so many of the ideas that are being thrown at us every day about what makes good theatre. This was a great show, with loads of really simple but brilliantly executed ideas, a simple, beautiful story and a ridiculously talented cast. I left the theatre feeling very guilty that I’d ever given up playing the clarinet. This was my first Kneehigh production, and I think I now understand the hype that surrounds them. It also changed my ideas about Noël Coward’s material being old-fashioned, white and unappealing. Turns out I was just a little bit presumptuous on that one. Anyway, Brief Encounter. Go see it.
…seen No Country for Old Men. A weekly trip to the cinema might just be one of the better ideas I’ve had this term. No Country is a great thriller, with some brilliant tense moments, a great cast (including a cracking performance from Javier Bardem as a psycopathic killer), and a pleasantly un-Hollywood ending. The dialogue is great as well, with some brilliant comic lines creeping in amidst all the doom and gloom. Hopefully I’ll get round to reading the novel it was adapted from at some point.
…started keeping a sense diary. One of the assignments we’ve been given this week is to keep a diary of ten sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells each day. The general idea is to show us how much more attentive and productive we can be if we keep our focus, noticing things that we’d never acknowledged before or perhaps seeing them in a whole new light. Three days in and it’s already pretty tough going, but it’s one of those really good ideas that I’m going to get all excited about before realising that it’s realising easy to run out of either enthusiasm or ideas. Not at all like this blog then. Still if I keep it up it could be a great way of generating ideas for writing, as well as honing my powers of description (I’ve already realised that I’m pretty rubbish at describing smells).
…been rediscovering songs. Not that I’ve ever gone off music or anything, but I guess I’ve become a bit lax when it comes to paying attention to the lyrics, probably because I’ve been listening to so much predominantly beat- or rhythm-driven stuff recently. We’ve been looking at song lyrics for a couple of weeks at school, and at how often the sense of the words and the rhythm of the music don’t always go together that easily, with single thoughts often being split up to fit the melody. It all sounds a bit technical, but hearing some of my classmates singing their songs with a renewed emphasis on conveying the lyrics was really inspirational, with the result that I spent far too much time last night shuffling around on my iTunes library trying to look up as many lyrics to as many different songs as possible. It reminded me of something I used to do when I was younger: get hold of an album by a band that I liked (often with a view to seeing them live in concert – which I don’t do as much now) and then learn the lyric book from cover to cover so that I knew every song that they might possibly sing. The work we’ve done at school has made me rediscover a lot of the music that has been gathering cyberdust on my laptop. It’s funny what you can discover about a song that you think you know really well when you check what the lyrics are (so that’s what the first line of Virtual Insanity is…).
