Dirt Bike Kid

When your week takes a wobbly nosedive and you wake up feeling tender and more reclusive than usual, when you write off the day and shelve your plans, when you fill up a hot water bottle and an oversized mug of coffee and settle down to finish an escapist book, when you contemplate going out to choose another book but decide it looks chilly out and you'd have to make the effort of finding some less-hobo clothes and comb the tangles out of your hair, which you'd much rather not have to do.. not just yet.

When you want to hide in a cocoon just a little while longer.

If any of this applies, I recommend a dose of 1980s kid films. They cure many ills.

I love the dirt bike kid.  He is awesome. Truly.

Possess me sometime

Tonight I watched the film Baraka, sitting in a wildlife garden, wrapped in a scarf, with a tub of curry doused in lime chutney.

The film has no dialogue, it's just a rolling wave of time-lapse photography and sweeping shots of the world. A snapshot of 1992. The music pins the scenes together. An aerial view of cars dancing between New York's grid of traffic lights, tribes chanting and jumping like pogo dancers with deadpan faces, the shift from a crowded tobacco factory to -with the crashing crescendo of a drum- a man lazily inhaling from a cigarette. It's in a similar vein to the quatsi films if you've seen any of them -Baraka's director was the cinematogropher on Koyaanisqatsi.

This is a video of the Kecak monkey chant in Bali, Indonesia. It's incredible!

The brilliantly crazy looking lead chanter is said to be possessed by the monkey spirit. Kecak has its roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance, and in the 1930s it developed into a drama, depicting a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight evil King Ravana. I love this battle part of it. It's like a surreal version of the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story..

Some say the drama element was the influence of Walter Spies, a German painter and musician who intended to present it to Western tourist audiences. Others say the Balinese were already developing the form when he arrived on the island. Whatever, it's fantastic.

All dolled up

Until the cold feet come tap, tap, tapping.. Soon big black heavy boots are crunching through my head. There is a war raging in my stomach.
I sit here in my purple tights and my eyeliner and gaze down into my tea. I wonder how my legs have grown into these tentacle roots that grip my chair and lock themselves in thick tangles to the house. It has a curious iron hold. I will wipe off my make-up and start again tomorrow.