Of the Plate-River, that is, the Silver-River.

Excerpt From: Bartolomé de las Casas. “A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.”


Some Captains since the Year 1502 to 1503 undertook Four or Five Voyages to the River of Plate, which embraceth within its own Arms great Kingdoms and Provinces, and is peopled by rational and well-temper'd Inhabitants. In the general we are certified, that they were very injurious and bloody to them; but they being far distant from those Indians, we frequently discourse of, wer are not able to give you a particular account of their Transactions. Yet beyond all Controversie, they did, and still do go the same way to work, as others in several Regions to this present time do, and have done; for they are the same, (and many in number too) Spaniards who went thither, that were the wicked Instruments of other Executions, and all of them aim at one and the same thing, namely to grow Rich and Wealthy, which they can never be, unless they steer the same Course which others have followed, and tread the same paths in Murdering, Robbing and Destroying poor Indians.

After I had committed to Writing what I have prementioned, it was told me for a great Truth, that “Cruelly and Bloodily with these harmless People, at a horrid rate, having a greater Opportunity and Convenience to be more Infamous and Rigid to them, then others, they being very remote from Spain, living inordinatly, like Debauches, laying aside, and bidding farewel to all manner of Justice, which is indeed a Stranger in all the American Regions, as is manifest by what hath been said already. But among the other Numerous Wicked Acts following this is one that may be read in the Indians Courts. One of the Governours commanded his Soldiers to go to a certain Village, and if they denyed them Provisions, to put all the Inhabitants to the Sword: By Vertue of this Authority away they march, and because they would not yield to them above Five Thousand Men as Enemies, fearing rather to be seen, then guilty of Illiberality, were cut off by the Sword. Also a certain number of Men living in Peace and Tranquillity proffered their services to him; who, as it fell out, were call'd before the Governour, but deferring their appearance a little longer than ordinary, that he might infix their minds with a remark of horrible Tyranny, he commanded, they “they should be deliver'd up, as Prisoners to their Mortal Indian Enemies, who beg'd with loud Clamours and a Deluge of Tears, that they might be dispatcht out of this World by their own Hands, rather than be given up as a prety to the Enemy; yet being resolute, they would not depart out of the House wherein they were, so the Spaniards hackt them in pieces Limb by Limb, who exclaim'd and cryed aloud, "We came to visit and serve you peaceably and quietly, and you Murder us; our Blood with which these Walls are moistned and sprinkled will remain as an Everlasting Testimony of our Unjust Slaughter, and your Barbarous Cruelty. And really this Piaculum or horrid Crime deserves a Commemoration, or rather speak more properly, the Commiseration of all Persons.”

montevideo spring

Butoh in the Sala Verdi

In the late afternoon he goes running and Gershwin's Rhasphody in Blue comes on the headphones. The vista is broken into two. Sea and skyline. Eclectic buildings arrange themselves around the waterfront. The sun begins to fail.

At night, with C rehearsing Henry the Fourth, Parts 1&2, he goes around the corner to the Verdi. There's a Butoh dancer from the States performing. In his other life he would never go to a see a Butoh dancer from the States perform on a whim. It would cost too much, it would involve travelling too far. But this isn't the other life, this is this one. It's round the corner and it's free. So he goes, meeting a friend in the lobby.

The Butoh dancer appears. In her opening sequence, she is caught up in a vast red sail, struggling to escape, writhing in the most deliberate of fashions to music by Phillip Glass. In the next, she is naked on a plinth, contorting her body into bizarre, challenging, impressive but uncomfortable shapes. In the third, she is naked again. Again, her body is contorted. Her shapely figure struggles against gravity. Her hands become one with two branches lying on stage. She gives birth to the universe. At the climactic moment, a phone rings. The dancer is immune. She is giving birth to the universe. My friend suggests this must be the end. I say there's plenty more to come. I am right. Now that the universe exists, it needs to be populated. The next phase is a film. The dancer, naked, contorted. Her mouth held open in an eternal O. As though meditating as she turns herself into a living sculpture. Soon she's back in person, only now the projection is there too. She's double dosing. Now she achieves an even more impressive feat. Not content with giving birth to the universe, the dancer now gives birth to herself. Petals fall from the ceiling. Transcendence is back. In spades. Old ladies shuffle in their seats. The theatre creaks. So much nudity is not good for its blood pressure. Acknowledging this, the dancer puts some clothes on for the final sequence, a Butoh parody of a ballet, all strained limbs and minimal movement. She appears for her curtain call. Montevideo rises to its feet.

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Oro De Rhin

The Germans get everywhere. They didn't have much of an empire, ever. Which probably didn't help. But, just like the British, whose influence reached parts you would never expect, the Germans had long tentacles.

So here I am sitting in one of the city's oldest cafes. Which looks like something out of old Berlin or Vienna. Pretty tablecloths and faintly art nouveau chairs. A place inspired by Mittel Europa and populated by the descendants of elderly Spanish ladies. Who are now, on the whole, elderly Hispanic ladies themselves. Drooling over their cakes and elaborate coffees served in glass cups with emaciated handles. Piped Brazilian music waxing over the airwaves. So tasteful you can almost smell the odour of the Motherland. Although it's not clear which one.

In theory this is the sort of place where Lenin plotted the Russian revolution or Klimt dreamt up eroticism. You don't really get the feeling anything too radical is on the cards here. If anything it has the feel of a place which should feature in a movie involving a neurotic mother of two grown up children who believes she used to be beautiful but no longer is who finds love one last time in life with the unlikely figure of a manic depressive former rock god whose star has now waned and who wiles his days away creating sculptures of celebrated pre-Colombian monuments out of guitar plectrums. Sort of Julian Cope meets Kirsten Scott Thomas. I can picture them now, whispering to each other in a corner, struggling to find a way to say how fascinated they are by each other, the man twisting a plectrum in his hand inside his coat pocket, the woman fearful that her mobile phone will ring even though it's switched off, knowing that people know her mobile phone is never switched off.

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Another Kind of Bar

This is where a whisky nacional costs 25 pesos. Just across the road from the bus station. On a day so grey it could be the 1st day of Autumn, forget about Spring. A small bicho crawls across the table. Might be an ant. Might be something uglier. An old man struggles to stay standing as he tries to read the paper and drink his whisky at the same time. The music is Bryan Adams. The waiter has grey hair which touches his nape and bifocals. He looks like he should work in advertising. Have three children by his first wife. One with the second. A stepchild he gets on with better than his own children. A house that backs on to the river with a half acre lawn and plans for willow trees. Says he doesn't like work and complains when he gets home but he'd be lost without it. The ant crawls across my hand. The waiter stares out of the window. He's got some great ideas for the Persil account. The anti-white. An ant crawling across an iceberg. A fly on a woman's petticoat. The detergent that will annihilate not just stains but your enemies too. Clean up your bank balance. Your conscience. Your carbon footprint. The ideas are endless. They spill out of him. If it wasn't for the customers interrupting his train of thought he'd be rich.

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Cafe, Plaza Independencia

We've started rehearsing in SUA. SUA is the actors' union. Their offices are in the centre of town. One of those old, inordinately high-ceilinged buildings which were constructed by rich families in the late twentieth/ early twenty first centuries. When Montevideo and Buenos Aires would become the new Europe, eclipsing the tawdriness of the States, describing possibilities which Borges alone fulfilled. In the pages of his books.

We rehearse in the ground floors. The embossed wooden doors are the giraffes of the door fauna. So tall and elegant they should be on a catwalk. Three D tiles, designed by the computer graphics merchants of the 1920s adorn the floors. The sound of water and voices permeate. The influence of the Alhambra is there somewhere.

In this space, the work flourishes. My pair of distressed loners find a way to communicate without words. They dance and repeat themselves and make strange noises which betray the feelings which words cannot reveal.

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A writer requires these moments. Those that fall between stools. Which don't belong to anyone. Whose redundance permits vacillation, pedantry, impermanence. Space for the words to slip through.

The wind gets up and the flies, which have only just hatched, prepare to die again.

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winter in las piedras

Las Piedras isn’t much to look at. It’s a twenty minute drive from Montevideo. Named after a ninenteenth century battle. Which only matters if you’re Uruguayan. All in all Las Piedras is a bit like Beckenham or Plaistow, only less glamorous.

“La Sala” is Las Piedras’ only theatre space. It’s situated on a back street which no-one seems to have heard of. The front is brightly painted, but as soon as you go inside you realise this is a space with minimal resources. Basically it’s a shed with a stage at the end. A stage which can only be accessed by a rickety set of steps at the front, unless you want to risk life and limb climbing up from the back. There’s no fixed seating, just an empty auditorium with some bucket chairs stacked in a corner.

It feels a long way from Montevideo, with its urban theatrical know-how. And it feels like a million miles from London. We’re here as the last stage of our one-week only, three-venue tour of Jon Fosse’s complex but beguiling play, Winter. The first performance, on Tuesday was in Montevideo, to a packed audience of actors and theatre buffs. The second, in Libertad, on Thursday, was in the smart theatre of La Casa de La Cultura, with a keen, youthful audience. Now we’re in Las Piedras and we don’t know what to expect.

There’s a woman, Natacha, in the tiny, impromptu café at the front. She seems tired. She’s cleaning up and offers us coffee. Otherwise there’s no-one else. The woman tells us she’s going to have to go in a bit as her three children need looking after. Everything feels ad hoc and underwhelming.

Our company, (myself, Claudia, set and lighting designer, and the actors Carlos and Margarita), decide on how we’re going to use the space. The play consists of four acts, two in a park and two in a hotel. In Montevideo, the staging took place in an old house with a courtyard in the back, which we used for the park. Here we decide to use the stage as the park and make the most of the open plan auditorium by doing the hotel scenes there. The spectators will just have to swivel their seats around between acts.

Another young woman appears. She seems to be in charge of the lights. With Claudia’s assistance, she and Natacha being rigging. We don’t need much. The play has been set up with the aim of being something that can be done in almost any space. Our scenery is a bench, a lantern and a bed. The bed is some wrapping paper which we tape against the wall. The lantern is hung from the ceiling. For a bench we scout around and find two beaten-up brown leather chairs which look like old car seats. Natacha offers to find something to cover them, but they’re perfect as they are. She tells us that they found the chairs in the street and co-opted them.

The story behind the theatre gradually emerges. Natacha and her husband, Seba, took over the space almost ten years ago, wanting to do something in Las Piedras. Over the years they have put on their own shows and welcomed other groups. Companies from across Latin America have come to this unlikely backwater, with workshops hosted by Spaniards, Colombians and anyone who passes by. Last August, they raised sufficient funds to buy the space. Now, bit by bit, they’re doing it up. One of the first things they did was put in an alarm system, having being burgled weeks after finally taking ownership. The three of them work at the theatre for nothing, as a labour of love.

Sebastian appears with their three children who run around for a while before being taken away by their grandfather so Seba and Natacha can watch the show. I ask how many spectators they expect. Natacha is unsure. Anywhere between 2 and 20. At 9pm, the scheduled start, there’s no-one. They tell me not to worry, people are always late. Sure enough, in dribs and drabs, over twenty people appear. We even have to put out extra seats. I give a brief introduction and the show is ready to begin.

Fosse has few supporters in the UK, something he seems philosophical about in interviews. For some reason British audiences have found him dense, impenetrable, gruelling, even though his plays are not overly long. However, around the world he’s revered. I was offered the opportunity to work on the play by Margarita, and the project received the support of the Montevideo equivalent of the Arts Council. It’s part of the reason we’re here now, in far-flung Las Piedras. We’ve dedicated our brief rehearsal schedule not just to working on the play, but also to devising acting techniques which help the actor get under the skin of Fosse’s sparse language and demonstrate the dynamics at work. This process has been facilitated by looking at a few clips from the work of Ostermeier and memories of Nübling’s version of Stephens’ Three Kingdoms. I explain some of this before the show starts, in my pock-marked Spanish. No-one seems phased. It’s accepted here that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. When so much devotion is dedicated to doing theatre for nothing, there’s no reason not to experiment, and this has been one of the joys of working on the project.

It’s also been fruitful with regard to the play. The audience seem hooked from the moment Margarita’s brittle but beautiful woman totters into view, entering via the side door and almost literally crawling up the steps to reach the stage. It’s the third time we’ve done the show and the actors have now got the bit between their teeth. These two bizarre but loveable characters, caught up in the unlikeliest of love affairs, charm the audience with an other-wordly grace and the use of their curious, sometimes comic gestures. Rather than proving to be a downbeat study of degradation, Fosse’s play becomes a story of redemptive love. Perhaps a London audience would question our techniques or the dramaturgy. But a Las Piedras audience is open and generous, happy to go on the journey along with these two flawed characters.

The net result is one of the more remarkable nights I’ve spent in a theatre. Reminding me that theatre is all about transformation. Taking a space which initially looks like a deserted warehouse and, with a text, two actors, some love and a bit of stagecraft, turning it into something else altogether. A hotel, a park, a field of dreams, a space for the old magic to occur.

what was playing at the theatre in moscow 1919

“Opera at the Great Theatre.—"Sadko" by Rimsky-Korsakov and "Samson and Delilah" by Saint-Saens.

Small State Theatre.—"Besheny Dengi" by Ostrovsky and
"Starik" by Gorky.

Moscow Art Theatre.— "The Cricket on the Hearth" by” “Dickens and "The Death of Pazuchin" by Saltykov-Shtchedrin.

Opera. "Selo Stepantchiko" and "Coppellia."

People's Palace.—"Dubrovsky" by Napravnik and "Demon" by Rubinstein.

Zamoskvoretzky Theatre.—"Groza" by Ostrovsky and
"Meshitchane" by Gorky.

Popular Theatre.—" The Miracle of Saint, Anthony" by
Maeterlinck.


Komissarzhevskaya Theatre.—"A Christmas Carol" by
Dickens and "The Accursed Prince" by Remizov.

Korsh Theatre.—"Much Ado about Nothing" by Shakespeare and "Le Misanthrope" and "Georges Dandin" by Moliére.

Dramatic Theatre.—"Alexander I" by Merezhkovsky.

Theatre of Drama and Comedy.— "Little Dorrit" by Dickens and "The King's Barber" by Lunacharsky.”

Excerpt From: Ransome, Arthur. “Russia in 1919.”

Sanjinés on the script

“A script, the spirit and soul of a film, can lay out the means whereby the true and profound dimensions of reality can be conveyed, transforming everyday life, reinventing it, deforming it, changing it, through a process, that is to say art, that goes beyond rational intelligence, that is closer to the power of intuition, so as to bring to us the true nature of things in a marvellous way…”

(Sanjinés 1999: 34)

Solanas & Getino on cinema narrative

“a film that is closed in on itself casts the viewer down into a passive, spectatorial role, with the option of approving or rejecting. A film that transmits experiences and knowledge that are not yet concluded, and that invites its audience to complete them and to critically question them, transforms the viewers into co-authors and live protagonists of the action.” (Solanas and Getino 1973: 163-4)[19]

on sea levels

At the end of the Ice Age, over a 10,000 year period between 17,000 and 7000 years ago -- just before the supposed beginnings of civilization -- 25 million square kilometers of what were then the most habitable lands on earth were flooded by rising sea levels as the ice caps melted. That's a landmass roughly equivalent in size to the whole of South America (17 million sq kms) and the United States (9.6 million sq kms) added together. Its an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined. And it's also an area on which hardly any archaeology has ever been done. How can we be sure, therefore, that archaeology has got the story of the origins of civilization right when so many of the places where our ancestors lived shortly before what we think of as the start of civilization have never been studied by archaeologists at all?

We have to remember that the world was very different just before the end of the Ice Age. Huge expanses of the northern hemisphere that are centres of habitation today were then buried beneath ice caps three kilometres thick and almost as uninhabitable as the surface of the moon. Our ancestors were forced to migrate -- typically to low-lying coastal areas close to fertile river deltas and the resources of the sea. They could not have anticipated that the ice-caps from which they had fled would melt, causing sea-level to rise more than 400 feet, flooding for ever the lowlands on which they had taken refuge.

In many ways it's a quixotic and seemingly hopeless quest. The sea covers 70 per cent of the earth's surface and as recently as 1997 a chain of submerged mountains 1000 miles long and almost 10,000 feet high was discovered on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The point is that if things on the scale of underwater mountain ranges can go undetected until so late in this age of high technology then it's obviously not going to be easy to find much smaller targets like flooded cities and monuments.Even at the crude mapping level, it's one of the absurdities of scientific priorities that we now have a better map of the surface of Venus than we do of the 88 million square miles of our own planet's sea-floor.

posted by: bargepoled

quoted from Guardian comments but this would appear to come from Graham Hancock's website:

http://www.grahamhancock.com/archive/underworld/

fosse on fosse

His own plays are written in the New Norwegian, or Nynorsk, language, a synthetic form "which is never really spoken by anyone. It's the same with French and German theatre: their theatrical language is not the way you speak in the streets. In England, theatre is connected to dialect and what level of society you're speaking from. Elsewhere, it's a poetical reflection of the basics of life."


Pero me interesa cómo trabajan los directores con mis textos. Cuanto más fuertes son las voces de los directores, y cuanto menos buscan imponer mi presencia, más puros aparecen mis textos. Es extraño. Uno de los peligros es imponer la voz del autor.

‘We live in a time that comes after the great ideals, since the great ideals have lost their power these days. My plays may reflect that condition, though I don’t mean that their power only comes from the time they come from. You can something. But I can’t quite say what it is. Perhaps it is something to do with a slight feeling of religiousness. Life is bigger than our image of life. I have often experienced that in my plays: there is another presence that suddenly becomes visible in the writing.’

It is not our identity but our interpersonal relationships that steer our lives. And the theatre is the only art form that is able to mirror this social game.

As an individual I can be remarkably intolerant. It is only as an author that I am tolerant – every character is right in his own way.

http://www.fib.no/en/Learn-more/Melancholy-and-drama-in-Jon-Fosses-plays/

tewkesbury mustard

According to the book "Traditional Foods of Britain" by Laura Mason, a type of mustard made in Tewkesbury was so famous in the 1500s that Shakespeare even wrote it into a line in his play Henry IV: "His wit's as thick as Tewkesbury Mustard" - an insult used by character Sir John Falstaff.

Tewkesbury mustard was originally made with ground mustard mixed with horseradish. These were then made into balls and dried for storage, which could then be combined with vinegar or wine to make a paste.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/0/19370526

sean penn on tree of life

"The screenplay is the most magnificent one that I've ever read but I couldn't find that same emotion on screen," Penn told Le Figaro. "A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly."

referencing Sacks' The Anthropologist on Mars

In a case study in that book he was talking about a man suffering from paralysing nostalgia who painted watercolours. He suggested that the impulse to become nostalgic comes from the same part of the psyche as does the impulse to create, and that both creativity and nostalgia are born out of a need to repair things that are broken or to complete things that are interrupted. So we feel nostalgic about the experiences we feel were interrupted and ended too soon and they are also the experiences that might lead us to want to write. And I think all of the plays I’ve written in some sense have kind of been an attempt to complete something or to repair something. And I think as well that all of the plays in that sense have kind of failed, and so you write another play to have another go, or to look at it from a different perspective.

phillip french on the lady vanishes

The screenwriters, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, both much influenced by Hitchcock, had radically reworked the plot and the characters and most significantly had invented the insouciant cricket-loving Englishmen, Charters and Caldicott. As played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, they were to become the greatest comic duo ever created in the British cinema, national archetypes that stamped themselves on several generations of moviegoers. The role played by Wilfred Hyde-White in The Third Man was originally written by Graham Greene for Radford and Wayne, and they were much admired by Harold Pinter. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/jul/24/my-favourite-hitchcock-lady-vanishes

dear roland, tan frances

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. ― The Pleasure of the Text

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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself). ― The Pleasure of the Text

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All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

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Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.

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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre.

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Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. ― The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France

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I am either lacerated or ill at ease
and occasionally subject to gusts of life ― Mourning Diary

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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die. ― Writing Degree Zero

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virginia's flights of fancy

Woolf also wrote about life in London that in the "street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime". From these overheard conversations, she suggested, it was possible to "penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others".

secret gift of reading 2

The act of reading is always an act of infidelity.

secret gifts of reading

Those periods in life when you can't find the energy, time or headspace to read books are tiring. The act of engaging with another mind over a number of pages is strangely calming. To be denied that means one flounders around in one's own mind, dealing with nothing but one's own thoughts. And this is tiring.

Guzmán y su mochilla

"Each of us carries a backpack on our shoulders; this bag cannot be removed. One carries it one's whole life. In this bag one carries a lot of important things. For example: the memory of your mother, your birthplace, the first day at high school, your first love, your first lovesickness. All this is never forgotten.

"That is the true homeland – somewhere you live during the first 20 years of your life – and that accompanies you until death. It is not necessary to be in a particular country to feel Chilean, Peruvian and Argentinian. One's homeland is carried in the depths of one's heart."

Patricio Guzmán

URUGUAY 1924-30 - courtesy Jonathan Wilson @ Guardian

URUGUAY 1924-30

1924 Olympic final Colombes, Paris

3-0 v Switzerland (Petrone, Cea, Romano)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Vidal, Ghierra; Urdinarán, Scarone, Petrone, Cea, Romano

1928 Olympic final Olympisch, Amsterdam

1-1 v Argentina (Petrone; Ferreyra)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Fernández, Gestido; Urdinarán, Castro, Petrone, Cea, Campolo

1928 Olympic final replay Olympisch, Amsterdam: 2-1 v Argentina (Figueroa, Scarone; Monti)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Piriz, Gestido; Arremon, Scarone, Borjas, Cea, Figueroa

1930 World Cup final Centenario, Montevideo: 4-2 v Argentina (Dorado, Cea, Iriarte, Castro; Peucelle, Stabile)

Ballestero; Mascheroni, Nasazzi (c); Andrade, Fernández, Gestido; Dorado, Scarone, Castro, Cea, Iriarte

Uruguay's success at the Paris Olympics is one of the great romantic tales. This was, first and foremost, a team of workers, including, among other professions, a meat-packer, a marble-cutter, a grocer and an ice salesman. They travelled to Europe in steerage and played to pay for their board, winning nine friendlies in Spain before they even reached France. Uruguay were the first Latin American side to tour Europe, but they attracted little attention – at least initially – only around 2,000 turning up to watch them eviscerate Yugoslavia 7-0 in their opening game in the Olympics.

Word soon got around. "Game after game," the poet Eduardo Galeano wrote, "the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball but these disinherited children from far-off America didn't walk in their father's footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling."

In four games they scored 17 goals and conceded just two in their four matches, beating a Switzerland side co-managed by the remarkable trio of Jimmy Hogan, Teddy Duckworth and Dori Kurschner 3-0 in the final. Uruguay, wrote Gabriel Hanot, the editor of L'Equipe, showed "marvellous virtuosity in receiving the ball, controlling it and using it. They created a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective". And British football? "It is like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to farm horses."

Argentina, who hadn't travelled to France, were furious and, on Uruguay's return, challenged them to a game, winning 3-2 on aggregate after crowd trouble curtailed the second leg in Buenos Aires. When they met in the finals of the 1928 Olympics and the 1940 World Cup, though, Uruguay emerged triumphant. "Argentina," wrote the great Italian journalist Gianni Brera, "play football with a lot of imagination and elegance, but technical superiority cannot compensate for the abandonment of tactics. Between the two Rioplatense national teams, the ants are the Uruguayans, the cicadas are the Argentinians."

on being asked whether the film is political or not

The process of a director's Q&A obeys certain rules.

It is a public event, in front of an audience. But it must be born in mind that the filmmaker is not an actor.

- The first rule is that the filmmaker has to defend and promote their film. (If there has ever been a Q&A where the filmmaker has chosen to slag their film off, this could be seen as breaking the rule.)
- Secondly, given that this is a public scenario there is a minor obligation to entertain. There is nothing worse than having enjoyed a film and then being bored by the director's words afterwards.
- Next, related to the above point, the director needs to be concise. Even the best of points can be subverted by verbosity. The filmmaker will have spent hundreds, even thousands of hours working on the process of making the film. This cannot be encapsulated within the framework of a Q&A session.
- Finally, the filmmaker's ego should not come through too overtly. The film will be no better or worse for anything the director subsequently says about it.

Given all of this, and the other rules which will exist but have not been noted, there are all kinds of pitfalls to be negotiated which may impede fluency, spontaneity or clarity at the point at which the microphone is handed over.

There are things that need to be said and things that don't need to be said. Maybe there's a technique for striking the balance and finding the right words.

The microphone is indeed handed over.

Avoiding all eye contact, the co-director starts to speak.

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shard liggers

In a seemingly improvised bar at the back of the BFI they're handing out free beers. The art crowd who have just been to see a screening of a film about an obscure art-saint-fool who was the Goons before they were the Goons and was Duchamp after he was Duchamp and like everything unusual and British has been stuck in a margin somewhere that now equates to this bar - This art crowd. A crowd who should be too cool for free beers but isn't. Creating a surge at the bar which reaches its waveform peak within three minutes of the bar being open and then elides, fades aways, diminished until only the potted few, including us, return for the red wine which is all that now remains, the surge having washed the beer away. We prop up the bar and observe and discuss, as half-forgotten faces from London's demi-monde are remembered; as people talk with overstated enthusiasm about things that can't be heard from our vantage point. A film critic, one of the mavericks, appears. His film script has been eviscerated by a modern-day script guru. Who has told him that there needs to be three reasons for every shot. As though there are three reasons for every word. Or thought. Or tear. Perhaps there are, in the guru's world. There's so much Vivienne Westwood on display that the room collapses under its post-punk weight. People are fleeing. They're going to see the Shard lightshow. A transformative event. In the history of London. With three reasons for every laser. Later, after cheap Thai, we stand outside Waterloo and look up. A few half-hearted lasers are still ligging across the sky. As though searching out the last of the free beers.

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london fields

On London Fields they still play cricket. With some ferocity. Towards sunset swarms of cyclists arrive like a benevolent, fluorescent plague. This being London (and a field) you can bid farewell to 20 years of your life, mas o menos, without any great drama. Without any overarching sense of theatre. With an understated, barely acknowledged theatre. On a green, latterly fluorescent stage. With that graciousness which goes with London at its best, and fields, at their best. The act can be executed discreetly, even enjoyably, with random conversation and obscure cheese. For this reason, if no other, the city retains the charm it has spent millennia cultivating. As does the field.

courtesy of monsieur kabal in guardian comments

A familiar anecdote, but it bears repeating: Frank Capra's regular screenwriter Robert Riskind was so incensed by the number of times he heard people refer to "the Capra touch" as though Capra was the sole creative person working on the film that he sent Capra a sheaf of 100 blank pages with the note "Give that the fucking Capra touch!".

Elbow Licking

The target is Omar al-Bashir. Youth organisations have named tomorrow "elbow-licking Friday" in a reference to Bashir's habit of calling opponents wishing to overthrow him elbow-lickers, people who attempt the impossible.

flashback

Recent events had summoned up the presence of N, even though it was twenty years since she had seen him.  The lottery of their days together. When, upon waking, she would never know which N she would be sharing her life with. That feeling in the pit of the stomach, akin, she imagined, to a soldier awaiting battle. Anything might be round the corner. Death. Boredom. Laughter. Victory. Later, once the relationship had come to its inevitable messy end, she found herself laughing at the theories of why women remained with an abusive partner. Most veered towards the Freudian analysis that they were seeking out a forum to explore their own weaknesses. Few seemed to recognise the truth that to her was obvious. That if you love someone you have no choice but to experience your life through theirs. When, of a late afternoon, perhaps, on a day which had been destined for battle, she found herself transformed, turned into a warrior, defending herself or him or them or some principle which would always be disposable, minor. As though having walked through the mirror into an emergency version of herself, one reserved for meteorite attacks or fending off crocodiles or defending her babies. She later accepted that this journey she was going on with N was one that demanded she too participate in the abuse, she too learn to cross the line into the world of the uncivil. When he grabbed her hair at a party, perhaps, yanking it back, accusing her of having looked at another man, the petty grammar of jealousy, the greatest challenge was not the pain or the despair, it was the struggle to resist joining in the game, to scream back at him. It was her refusal to play the game he provoked that was the greatest betrayal, the only betrayal. N's accusations were never serious in themselves; they were a tactic, a way for him to cope with the tragic stress he was burdened with, night and day. When the stress became to much he would attack. It was not a defence of him to understand this; there was no defence. But love doesn't care about defence. All love wants to do is share. She thought. And through the act of sharing there grew the dream, the fruitless dream, of overcoming. The dream of the dawn when she would awake and it would be like they had been washed up on the shore after the shipwreck. They would get up and walk. They would look around them, realising that they had reached safety, everything was alright now. The sea had been tamed.  N had left her in the end. In his account of what had occurred, she became the one who was unhinged. He became the wronged party. Their lives had veered apart. As though all that anxiety had counted for nothing. She had forgotten what it was like to wake in the small house with that feeling there, nestled in the bed, a quiet fear which lay concealed, under the blanket. Waiting to emerge in the hours that would follow if the spirit moved him.  Only now had it returned. And although he was gone, so far gone that he might as well be dead, it was like he was back. Watching her.  +++

on this day

I did all those London things. Woke up late. Hungover. Quasi jump-out-the-window. Not quite. Not really. Get out. Feel better. Drink coffee in an important office. Feel connnected in a disconnected office. Sniff out openings. Feel dirty for wanting to sniff out openings when all you really want to do is catch up with someone who happens to work in an important office. Relatively important. It's all relative. Experience an awkward British hug. Go to another office. Name drop a bit. Demonstrate some intelligence. Feel the carpet moving under my feet. Go home. Sleep. Go out. Drink. Connect. Get the tube. The pub I went to is one I used to live right next to. In Brixton. For years it never changed and now it's been redone. Kind of tastefully. I went there with N and H on a particular night. The night of the day that the death of SK was revealed. A day of stunned sense. Sense not having been negated by what in other cases might have been a senseless action. Stunned, because even if it was not such a surprise, after all, after all that people knew and didn't know, after all that had been written, death still comes as a jolt. A winding. Breath taken out of sails. And we drunk in the pub in the same place if not the same table as I drunk tonight, and we were not yet sad, though at some point, later that night maybe, we would be possessed of a sadness we didn't know we could possess. But that came later. At that point we were, if anything, frustrated. Even irritated. As though one of us had given up the fight. Although it's never quite as simple as that, is it? As though we had been left behind, whilst the other moved down the fast lane, leaving nothing but tail lights, as red as ever, to be chased. And there I am, a decade and more later, still chasing. Catching up. Ever closer. Doing all those London things. Which are only beats. In a story which is being imagined in the mind of someone who's never been here; never tasted beer; never talked in a pub; never known refurbishment.