Towards the end of last year the ravings that accompanied my albums were getting increasingly bad tempered - which shows what a bad writer I must be, because they didn't reflect my true mood - very happy really. I got drunk over Christmas, stayed drunk into the new year, recovered quickly, read lots of books, decided that I might be a bit down but then noticed that everyone around me was considerably more down, and so - it all being relative - I suppose I am still happy. The only difference is that I am no longer in the mood for bad-tempered ravings.
Last night over at Harbour Lights they showed 2001. The cinema (the larger one) was virtually full. Yes I sat in the front. I and some of my fellow schoolfriends saw this film when it first came out - a weekday - skiving - a tiny cinema that no longer exists just off the high street here, about where Shooropody (?) now is. I don't know what certificate it was, but it can't've been 18 or anything - after all we would've been about 7 years old, and even with forged documents that is a hard act to pull off. I remember that we arrived in the cinema a little after the film had started. Lots of apes jumping about. Of course, anyone would think they were in the wrong film. Then suddenly a spaceship. At the end of the film we decided that it didn't make sense and what with it being the days when films were put on a loop and once you were in a cinema you could stay for the whole of the rest of the day/evening, we watched it all again, this time from the beginning.
And of course it still made no sense. Until last night that was probably the last/only time I'd ever watched it sober. During the binges of my 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s I must've watched it hundreds of times. It is one of those films that solitary drinkers can happily get lost in forever.
Last night I was sober. I found the film rather disappointing. I think this was because I was seeing it thru the eyes of the people around me. Everyone around me was at least a generation younger than me. The way they talked about the film was full of cliches - things that they'd read and been told, and now they were regurgitating these things and trying to feel the way they'd been told to feel. I'm being unfair I suppose - but I felt throughout the film that everyone around me was just aching to take out their phones and catch up on their social media. I was aching for the film to end.
Though of course no one smoked in the cinema last night (unlike that afternoon when I first saw the film), lots of people beside me and behind me smelt of weed, and much wine was quietly drunk. I wanted to believe what they'd been told, I wanted to drink and smoke what they were on, I always want to believe that things are as great as we are told they are - I want to believe that Aftersun is a great film rather than (my true feelings) total crap, I wanted to believe that the novel I most recently finished, Andrea Lawlor's "Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl", was a great thrilling genre-busting life-affirming novel that all the reviewers had promised me. But nothing ever is. Nothing at all. I think this is why I was sounding ranty at the end of last year - old person realises that nothing much is worth anything.
But when I'm pointing that out I am not ranting - I am loving and embracing that discovery. Nothing much is worth fighting for, worth believing in, worth defending - everything is just lying low on this vast flat field all around us, we can go in any direction and not feel that we are missing-out by avoiding all the other untrodden directions - I find this very joyful - now I shall go shopping for cheap on-offer Appletiser - it's not mountaineering or falling in love, it's not checking my non-existent social media or drinking wine, it is nothing at all, like everything.
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