busy

I am always busy. Have no time for anything. Is this right? Is this how it's supposed to be? Today i was teaching for 6 hours, my throat hurts like mad and i feel drowsy. I go to work every week feeling like a phoney, i know i should be doing so much more than I am, my lectures could be so much better, my control over my life and my work could be so much better. But still I am, like always, a last-minute person. Will this ever change? Will I ever become this perfectionist who finishes things well in advance and feels on top of things? I don't know. And I don't care. All I want is for this term to end, so I can sit and do nothing for a couple of weeks, feel like myself again and try better next time.

Something tells me however that I will be writing a similar post in April....

I don't want to leave you with my grumpiness though, so here is lady gaga in her new, outrageous video where she wears skimpier clothes and dances like a cross between thriller and twist and shout. Genius or dramatically overdone?

You call it procrastination....

.... I call it psyching!

I've woken up since 7, in order to stay home and work in my paper.

Since then, I have:
(a) washed the dishes
(b) showered for millions of time
(c) done washing
(d) hanged the clothes
(e) done my hair, including trimming my fringe

and so on....

I thought I should beat myself up a bit and get working but you know what? I think that this is just trying to get ready and get psyched and immersing myself into work.

And now without further ado, I have to get back to work.

Why I love this city

I queued up today in a shabby building that houses the West Belfast Festival, in order to get free tickets to see Noam Chomsky. It was a lovely day here, still is, the sun is shining, and the tickets would start been given away at 1 in the afternoon. I have to say, I never expected to see a queue. I thought I lived in a country where people queue to get into stupid clubs (usually drunk and/or scantily dressed), pick up things from the post office, or pay their bills. But I guess I was wrong, as I also live in a country, or a city to be more precise, where people queue up to see Noam Chomsky, the world's most important intellectual alive. This made me smile and filled my heart with hope: people queueing up to get tickets to listen to a most uninspiring speaker talking for an hour on political issues. The funniest thing is that the people that queued up were various kinds: old and young, working class and well-dressed, women with dyed hair and old men with canes, young men with hoods, girls dressed in black with oversize glasses (that was us) and all other kinds of people. And everyone was there in advance, waited patiently, went in and picked up their tickets and went out with huge grins. People here grin because they got Noam Chomsky tickets. Beat that!!

I think that this made me realize what is I like about this city: people here have a strong political conscience. They have to, sure, this part of the world is filled with politically troubled past, and perhaps this is the only good thing about the troubles: they nurtured generations of politically active citizens. So politically active that people were, until very recently, willing to die for what they believed. How many places in the world still are there that can say that, I wonder.

Art?

This is the new video of Florence and the machine's new single, drumming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpLXQorSQe8

It's an excellent song and i love it, i was a bit taken aback though I have to say when i saw the video. The issue is that this is a video by Old Florence who is hailed as an underground-y, arty singer, quite the opposite of Beyonce for example. The woman nearly got the mercury prize for christ's sake, and in the video she has a choreographed dance, in a leotard no less!!! Choreographed like a Lady Gaga video, not a Feist's 1234, mind you. And it's not that I have anything against choreography, quite the opposite. I just think that if mercury prize nominees produce these videos, that are a cross between Madonna's 'like a prayer' and Beyonce's 'single ladies' then what should we expect from the ladies in question themselves?

Where is art heading towards?
Will Antony show us his abs, JLS style, in his new video, I wonder....

La tristesse

Et quand la tristesse on visite encore, je reviens a la même chanson encore une fois.
Même si il est un froid journée du Janviers, ou une journée qui pleut a Belfast, la tristesse es la même...

Sadness is always the same.

Undecided

I don't know what to write about today, I am not focused.

I have been having various thoughts and after a long time, I've been having blog-specific thaughts: is this thing post-worthy or not?

I was thinking of writing about inadequate people: people who have bigger shoes to fill and are constantly looking uncomfortable in the process. All of us feel like frauds occasionally (one day they will find out I'm useless and I'll lose my job or something like that)- but these people, these poor creatures go through life trying not to make fool of themselves. A truly sad sight.

But there are other things: the rainbow out my window, the new four tet remixed CD I bought (with the excellent remix of Sia's 'Breathe me'), how I am fixated on 'Lost' season 4 (the one with the flashforwards-genius!) and how I might buy a Mac Air (looks so good).

I will try to arrange my scattered thoughts another time and try to write other more focused posts, this one stands no chance, I think...

Tragedy and laughs

I like Martin McDonagh, i like him a lot. I liked 'in bruges' and i am convinced i am going to like 'the pillowman' when I get round to reading him. In my previous post about 'in bruges' i concentrated in the fact that the movie was a tragicomedy, in the manner of Shakespearian 'tempest' or 'twelfth night'. Such an interesting genre, tragicomedies are, and a very risky one at that. The issue with them, is that the atmosphere they build can be spoilt very easily. In the same way, Almodovar threatened to spoil his dark, sombre, tragic atmosphere, in 'Broken embraces', with his last scene (but didn't), tragicomedies are constantly walking the same thin line.

'The beauty queen on Leenane' runs the same risk: Martin McDonagh's first play, is a deep and profound tragedy of human inadequacy, laced with darkly funny one-liners. The issue is that the fact that this IS a tragedy has to remain clear to the audience throughout, or at least it needs to be prevalent after the tragic storyline starts to unravel. When i read the play, it was clear to me that this was a tragedy and the humour was just there to undermine but ultimately underline the tragedy of it all. When we saw the play on friday however, the audience made up of well-dressed mature women seemed to fall for the comedy rather than the tragedy part of the play. The result? A really uncomfortable two hours where I would hear the audience audibly laughing at every hint of humour, entirely disregarding the drama that was unfolding in front of their eyes. It almost felt as if they were desperate to see only the funny bits of the play, exactly because the dark parts were too dark and too tragic.

Talk about art being poignant...