"Heard you talking on Radio Wales so I looked up your blonk. Glad to hear you love cosmopolitans — also my favourite. Although, that's where our things in common end. I'm supremely good at giving head."
— a surprise message from my long-lost friend, Glen.
When I was thirteen I made two new friends, Natascha and Krista, who were sisters from Brighton — the polar opposite of Snowdonia, as far as I was concerned. Krista had a white-blonde bob and wore a ripped army shirt, and Natascha had a superfluous letter in her name. How much cooler could you get?
They had better shops in Brighton than in my little Welsh village. In Brighton you could buy all your clothes from the Army & Navy and get your eyebrow pierced; in Dolwyddelan you could buy half a pound of bacon and the Daily Mail. So one day the three of us were traipsing around some hippy shop when Natascha — who was a couple of years older than me and about a hundred times cooler — picked up a packet of hemp joss sticks and sniffed at them.
"Mmm," she said, breathing in. "Smells like marijuana."
Um, what? Isn't that what Kurt Cobain smoked? Or was that Heroin? Well, whatever: same thing.
"Marijuana?" I whispered, my eyes widening in awe. "You smoke marijuana?"
"Occasionally," said Natascha, giving a one-shouldered shrug and putting the incense back in the rack.
Isn't that the coolest thing you ever heard in your life? It was as if I'd asked if she ever watched Neighbours, or visited the dentist. "Occasionally," she'd said, nonchalantly. And so for the next year I practiced that one-shouldered shrug in front of the mirror, in my ripped army shirt and combats, just in case anyone should ever ask me a difficult question.
This proved useful later on, when my parents asked why I was running around dressed up like a little soldier. I never really understood that myself — wasn't the army bad? — and so I didn't let on; just gave that nonchalant one-shouldered shrug and hoped for the best.
My first short film, this thing that I've been working on for the past two months, is only about two minutes long — and due to the massive number of people involved in its making, the credits run for two and a half. How is that even possible?
We're cutting the first edit this weekend. There's some good footage, and some slightly dodgy footage, and quite a few gaps in the footage, but overall I'm hopping up and down with excitement and can't wait to show off the finished thing. It's likely to be another couple of weeks before the sound mix is down and the film is ready for its international premiere (i.e. "posting it on my blog") but for now, here are some stills from the shoot:
My friend Eavan is planning a costume party for her housewarming in Cork next weekend. I say "costume party" and not "fancy dress party" like we say in Wales because I don't like using the word "fancy", not even when I "fancy" a guy — it reminds me of teacups and saucers and crap stuff like that.
Anyway, I came up with the brilliant idea of a religious theme, seems her new home is on "Friar Street", but she objected, reckoning everybody would just turn up as nuns or preists, or, worse, bald friars in old brown sacks. I did point out all those crazy nativity characters in the bible, plus her boyfriend Geoff said he could get maximum results with minimum effort by wearing a turban, but in the end I just had to back down and remind myself that it's not my house, just my new holiday home, and so now the theme is open.
Now I don't know what to go as. Obviously I was all ready to turn up as God, in my cloud-shaped skirt, but without a house full of nuns to boss about it's not as much fun.
I just read over at Bock's place that a man in Scotland has been sentenced to three years probation after getting caught having sex with his bicycle — in private.
Three years for sex with your bike? Christ, what happens if you get caught with your washing machine? Or a root vegetable? Or a rabbit?
*worried*
My brother Fergus came up from Galway last night, and so we went out for some lovely pints. Sometimes when we're out in the pub together the people we meet have a hard time believing we're brother and sister. This is because Ferg is kind of short and I'm a skyscraper — although if you ask him about this he'll tell you it's just my heels.
But the real reason we're so different in height is because we have different fathers, which means, of course, that we have different grandfathers too — and Fergus's grandfather was one of the shortest men in Europe. In fact, he was so short that the King of England at the time, George VI, commandeered him to work as his butler.
It seems strange, doesn't it, that the King would want an extremely short butler, when a large part of a butler's job is, presumably, to reach for things. But the truth is that King George was a very short man himself, and so he hired two very short men as his butlers to stand either side of him whenever he was having his photograph taken.
And that's why people sometimes have trouble believing us when we say we're brother and sister.
Being at film school is like being on one of those horrible reality television shows. We have votes, and fights, and somebody to record the whole lot for the "making of" documentary we have to submit. You know when you watch Big Brother and think to yourself, "I'd never behave like those imbeciles, especially not on tape". Well, that's what I thought too, until I actually did.
Well, I've had my "creative differences" with people, as we're calling them, especially with one guy who is perplexed as to how I ended up directing when I have trouble just switching the cameras on. Okay, I'm not a technical person, it's true, and it's unlikely that I ever will be, but you know what? THAT'S WHAT THEY PRINT THE MANUALS FOR.
Still, this making-of documentary is something I just don't ever want to watch. Apart from all that "creative difference" stuff, the morning of the shoot saw me running off to the bathroom every time I felt my stomach start to climb out of my mouth, forgetting that I was still hooked up to the microphone.
The best thing about directing your first film is being able to tell all your friends and family and any strangers you meet in the pub: "I'm directing my first film". Which is about a million times more exciting than standing on an old tablecloth in front of the mirror pretending to be on the red carpet like I used to do. The worst thing about directing your first film is actually having to go ahead and direct, which I found terrifying and terrifying in equal measures.
The film is about an old teacher who gets busted for correcting a grammatical error in some graffiti on a schoolyard wall. This sounds simple enough, doesn't it, but it took us 10 hours to shoot on 6 rolls of film and meant we had to work with children — which I'm sure the head of course has been smirking about all term, waiting for me to realise that clichés are only clichés because they're true. At least the dog I had scripted into the street scene pulled out at the last minute, and "dog dragging woman" was replaced with "woman dragging suitcase" instead — more of which this woman, my new best friend Jenna, has blogged about over here.
But anyway, it's all shot now, and overall I'm just happy and excited to see the footage, which arrives back from England tonight, and am looking forward to editing it into something presentable over the next couple of weeks.
Bjarni chuckles away to himself while he sits with his laptop, surfing the world wide web.
"What are you laughing at?" I ask him, looking up from a very long and very dull book about the history of silent cinema.
"Web comics," he replies.
"Oh," I say, trying not to sound disappointed. "I just thought maybe you were reading my blonk."
"You sound disappointed," he says. "But you haven't written anything on your blonk in weeks!"
"I know. But you could at least be reading the archives."
He goes back to his comics.
