Clusterfuck

An aimless rant for reasons that will be made clear.

I’m writing this with a sense of deep frustration (and some rage) on an old model Mac Mini using a 20 year old Apple display. I’m also killing time.

On Monday afternoon, the display associated with my ‘work’ hard drive shorted out. It died. It was 5 years old. It was 32 inches of high quality, colour calibrated perfection. It was also now dead and I had a lot of work to do. Unfortunately, my 3 spare Apple displays are all over 5 years old - so incompatible with the 4 year old hard drive I’m using for work - at this point I curse Apple for their built in obsolescence. (Please don’t message and explain how I can hack a connection with 3 adapters and a dongle from China - I went through all of that) I back up regularly but suddenly realised that everything from the last week and all my current work - including days of edits, are on the new hard drive, which I cannot now access without a screen. I am in the middle of a lot of artwork that has to be consistent and colour correct - I can’t fuck about here.

As a result, I had to make the decision to max out my credit card and order a new Cinema Display - which will arrive today.

I am, of course. Really, really angry.

I was not expecting this expense or the chaos it has caused me. I can still use an old model hard drive (with old screens) and my iPhone - but neither of them are what I need. To make it worse - although all my admin and personal stuff is accessible via a GDrive - attempting to access via a new hard drive has it’s own complications as I will constantly need to go through security ‘confrontations’.

48 hours of forced ‘not working’ and I’m crawling the walls. I really didn’t need this and I certainly can’t afford it. I will try and get hold of an engineer at some point who may be able to figure out where the electrical short is on my old screen - I suppose it will be another ‘spare’ - but nobody needs this. Especially me.

I’m currently using a 23 inch screen - the downscale from 32 is quite frustrating.

In other news. I had an email from my mortgage company telling me they are upgrading their digital platforms and have decided that their customers no longer need to access their balance and account online - and have to do this by phone from. I am, of course, massively pissed off by this counter intuitive bollocks. Checking how much my mortgage debt has gone down by each month is one of the free bright lights in my life. Having to call, piss about for half an hour on a waiting list, go through complicated security measures and then have to ask nicely just seems like a total waste of time and resources.

Also - later this week I have been persuaded by the Whippet rescue charity I sometimes help out to take in an emergency foster for a short stay (last time that happened was 6 years ago - she’s still here). This small, blue whippet is on a kill list and needs a place of safety - he will be here today or tomorrow when transport is arranged. I can’t afford to keep him so don’t get any ideas.

The vision in my right eye - the one I had a new acrylic lens surgically upgraded with last month - has blurred significantly. This is apparently not uncommon and caused by swelling and adjustment within my healing eye. It’s also a pain in the arse. I’m really struggling with the multiple different pairs of glasses I have to use throughout the day and need some resolution.

Another unfortunate series of events forced me to briefly boot up my Amazon Prime membership briefly - something I normally do just for Christmas. I worked my way through all the films and there was nothing whatsoever I wanted to see (except The Long Walk - which I will need to be in the right frame of mind for). I did, however - pad out my forced obsolescence waiting for my new screen by watching two absolute stinkers.

Greenland / Migration.

An early scene in Greenland/Migration that just establishes that the entire first film was a a pointless waste of time and everybody dies anyway

Even I will admit that the first Greenland film was actually pretty good - it had unexpected depth and intelligence and didn’t patronise us with too many effects - whatever lessons they think they learned in the first film were squandered in the 2nd. A lazy, unimaginative, clunky, cut and paste mess. None if it made any real sense and it was as if they couldn’t be bothered to think through anything. In the first film, for me - the key scene is quite early on, when ‘the wife’ argues with a servicewoman at the airport in an attempt to get her diabetic child onto an evacuation plane - despite repeatedly being told it was impossible. She argues with the Sergeant and asks what they would do ‘if it was their family’ - “My family didn’t get selected, ma’m” - that was the line that defines the whole film - pretty much everyone is going to die and yet people still commit themselves to helping others - there is even a scene with a news report of firefighters continuing to put out fires despite knowing that they will all be dead tomorrow anyway and people gather on rooftops for parties as the comet that will soon hit the earth looms in the night sky above them, it was almost as if they were making the point that trying to survive at all costs wasn’t actually the best option. In the 2nd film, there is nothing - no ideas, no message, no real exploration of the human condition - and somehow, 5 years after the apocalypse you can still get a bottle of red wine, a packet of cigarettes and there seems to be plenty of petrol for cars (reader - it will all have evaporated by then, even in cans).

Dracula (The new one by Luc Besson).

Caleb Landry Jones reading his reviews and wishing he could die.

Nothing to see here except stunning visuals, beautiful sets and fantastic costumes. Apart from that - it’s a dull, pointless rehash of everything else I’ve ever seen, and somehow - it’s really, really boring. I ended up doing a load of washing, cleaning the house and briefly going to the supermarket without missing anything. I have no idea why this exists. I also have no idea if it was meant to be a comedy or not - it was tonally all over the place, A serious scene that should have been emotionally draining was ruined by the dead woman’s head bouncing around the room and knocking her fiancé out.

Madonna.

‘Presents’ is a bit dishonest - Julia Garner appears in the film for between 2 and 5 seconds - if that.

I was up at 5am this morning for some reason and looking for things to do so I ended up watching the new Madonna ‘film’ - it’s about 15 minutes of Madonna spending money. I was never a big Madonna fan, but I totally ‘get’ why she’s so important to so many people. The only time she ever worked for me was a brief moment around ‘Ray Of Light’ and more specifically ‘Don’t Tell Me’ where she seemed to be maturing into a credible, inventive, significant artist who had everything important and original ahead of her, age had finally made her free of the limitations of who she ‘was’ and able to break new ground.

I’ll be 100% honest - this new work did nothing for me. I was surprised to see in the credits that there was 5 separate songs here - it all sounded the same. It all seemed so artificial, calculated, mechanical and false - there was no life in here - everything was choreographed and micromanaged second by second, it was dead, flat, lifeless and soulless. I was never a huge club or dance person myself but there seemed to be nothing in here that made me feel alive. There were literally hundreds of people in the credits including a massive number of post production people and everything split between VIP and ‘talent’ - the guest spots seemed like fillers and the cameos jarred. At the moment Julia Garner appeared I thought briefly that they had de-aged Madonna before realising it was, of course - product placement for the upcoming (eventually) Madonna biopic. The Cumberbatch / Richard E Grant parts were toe-curling and gruesome, and I have to be honest - her daughter doesn’t seem like a particularly nice girl. It reminded me of the worst parts of her ’Sex’ book - the least sexy book ever published.

Obviously - Madonna can do whatever the fuck she likes, she doesn’t need my permission (or anyone else’s) for anything she choses to do - but this just left me cold. I was struck by the complete lack of feeling and excitement here - there was absolute nothing ‘creative’ here - it was all contrived and controlled. Storyboarded and edited into oblivion. I fully accept now that many, many people will wish me dead after reading this.

All I can think about now it the jaw dropping thrill of seeing the dance sequence from Climax for the first time. That’s how it should have been.

If you have not seen Climax - it’s a 2018 film by Gaspar Noe - set in 1996, it’s technically a horror movie. A talented French dance troupe lock themselves away in an old school to spend a few days creating and rehearsing a dance routine. At the ‘after party’ someone spikes the punch with LSD. The first half of the film is us getting to know everyone, the 2nd half is us seeing what monsters the drug has turned them into. It’s exceptional. The dance sequence is here - and yes, it’s a single shot.