sneaky feelings 'better than before'

I woke up around 6:20 with two cats on my bed and this song in my head. It is one of those songs (unquantifiable, there are surely hundreds if not thousands) which 'live in my head rent-free' as idiots on tiktok will sometimes say. In my head, it played right from the beginning which by the way is cut off in the video I linked to above, but who knows if that youtube version will last a long time, I don't, the song was 'Better than Before' by Sneaky Feelings.

Of course although the version in my head was pretty fine, I wanted to hear it IRL through my actual ears, so I looked for it on spotify - no. I thought well maybe it's not by Sneaky Feelings and I got that wrong, so I went searching on just 'Better than Before' and - no. Raising my blood pressure was the fact that spotifuck has no faith in my / our ability to remember song titles, so I was presented with numerous incarnations/interpretations of Fleetwood Mac's 'Don't Stop', in amongst songs actually called 'Better Than Before'. So then I gave up on that platform and looked for it on discogs to just establish whose song it was. Yes, Sneaky Feelings, and they do have a couple of LPs on spotifuck but not that one. So I got to it finally on youtube, a video I had never seen/have no recollection of ever seeing, which was/is cut off at the beginning so the bit in my head, the unaccompanied intro, is still only in my head but that's OK. It's a fabulous song, and a fun video of its time (1986), which would surely have been a huge production and I suppose largely improvised on the spot ('and then there were these school kids who just showed up' etc). (+ subtext 'you couldn't do it these days, they'd all need notes from their parents'). I've never been to Dunedin but I assume this is a sentimental journey from anyone who lived there in the mid-80s. I bet in real life it wasn't so washed out. 

The other SF song I always really loved was this one. But reading about them on wikipedia it sounds like their two most recent albums (the only things of theirs on spoti) are critically acclaimed by people with taste, I think I should check them out and if you like, or I do actually do this, I'll get back to you about it.  

any day now/ ensilumi

This is a really fine movie about asylum seekers in Finland which is apparently based on the writer-director's own experience. However even without the pervading tension/fear that dominates the film (the family is waiting to hear if its request for asylum will be granted) it would still be a very impressive coming-of-age story. The actor who plays Ramin, the young boy at the centre of the film, is Aran-Sina Keshvari and he is excellent, but the whole cast is tremendous. I saw this about a week before Helene and I was trying to place Laura Birn, who's the star of that film, and finally I got it - she has a small part in this as Ramin's teacher. 

It's called Ensilumi in Finnish which means 'first snow', to my mind a better title than Any Day Now which puts focus on the family's wait for news of their status, rather than on their experiences in a new environment, though I am also intrigued by what is not mentioned in this film: not once is there an explanation of where they have come from or on what grounds they are seeking asylum, etc. That's actually fine, but does it make us as an audience start to regard them as 'everyfamily' or does it make us wonder why even more? 

Note the first quote on the poster above which translates rather rattily via google translate as 'life-affirming First Snow is a star bead that radiates the warmth and light of the heart of domestic film autumn.' Of course what caught my eye was the word 'helmi' which I had not realised was not merely a name (the middle bit of 'Wilhelmina', which is why I chose Helmi as the best Finnish woman's name for a beloved cat) but also the Finnish word for 'bead' (or more commonly I think 'pearl'). 'Tähden' means 'at', 'for', or 'for the sake of', which is fine, but believe it or not 'tähden helmi' means 'star bead', which only leads me to wonder what the helmi a 'star bead' is. But it's 'all good'.

Helene

I saw this film on Sunday it was pretty good, particularly Pirkko Saisio who played Helene's mother Olga and who is always cross/disgusted/repelled/irritated. 

Eero Aho and Pirkko Saisio in Helene

I don't want to give too much away and spoil it but there are two things you should know when you go to see this film, and I feel OK saying this because I really suspect that for most viewers, this is knowledge they would have going in. One is that Helene Schjerfbeck was 60something (or approaching it) in the 19teens-twenties when the events in this film are taking place. However, Laura Birn who plays her was only just about to turn 40, and I don't even care what cinema conventions are - you can't know that a 40sish woman (person!) is playing a person at least a decade and a half older unless at very least someone says 'Helene, you have been on this earth 58 years now and...' The other thing is that, well, this is embarrassing but I didn't know that Helene Schjerfbeck was real and I was really perplexed why all the paintings she was doing in the movie varied so much in style and even subject - if you know what I mean. They looked like three different people had done them and I thought, 'at least be consistent with these approximations of paintings from a hundred years ago'. Well, turns out she had a long and varied career and she tried on a lot of different styles over that time. 

This last image is of Einar (played by Johannes Holopainen) who she has a pretty solid thing for over most of the movie, and that is one thing I am not entirely sure about - I'm naive but really I have to wonder, what's so good about Einar? But overall I found it a pretty sumptuous, if slightly gloomy, film with a lot of very beautiful Finnish countryside and some pretty amazing actors. 

Oh one more thing. A lot is made of them writing letters to each other. Einar goes to Lapland and Helene says, we will write each other a long letter. Great idea, Helene! We never get any sense of what was in each other's letters, and we see quite a bit of Einar in Lapland but no sense he is writing a letter at all. Weird. At the end of the movie we are told that the two of them wrote each other over a thousand letters. Well... cool... in the film all they seemed to do was talk about it.

Oh also my brother (who I saw the film with) later referred to the subdued sex scene. I'll tell how subdued it was. I didn't even realise it was a sex scene. Hott. 

it's saturday morning

Image pinched from this
You may remember my complaintsplanation a few years ago about why I was blogging so little, and it was the pathetic reason that it was so hard to log on. Blogger fixed that, now it's super easy. But for some reason - and this has nothing to do with Blogger and might be just related to my laptop? - I now can't use airdrop. Or has airdrop been superseded and no-one told muggins? I don't know. Anyway, it doesn't work. So I can't easily grab pictures off my phone, of things around me etc, and instead I have to email them to myself and that's a dragorama. And I do like to use a picture, now, though I didn't always. 

This week has been very busy, as I work hard on a possible new project that might be an enjoyable enterprise in historical study I'm very comfortable with and which is also very relevant to my day job. I won't jinx it by discussing it here. Also, nothing might come of it and then I will look back on this post in a few years and think, fuck my luck. 

What have you been doing? I've done a lot of work this week, but also found time to play my new guitar, pat the cats, buy some second hand shirts, eat too much sometimes and not enough other times, walk almost enough to maintain my 10 000 steps/day average (actually I think I probably have maintained that... I don't know... it got a bit confusing there with very long walks some days and tiny nothing walks in others). I saw a pretty great Finnish film called Any Day Now, which I fully recommend if you get the chance. I wish I had had time to read more, but I have certainly written a lot. And will continue to do so. 

By the way, what's your feeling about starting a sentence with 'And'? To tell you the truth, though I did it above, I did it mainly to see what it looked and felt like because generally speaking, I never do that. I actually think it's a shit move. I don't know if this was drilled into my head somehow by some herself-very-poorly-educated-but-that's-not-important-anyway-she's-probably-dead-now teacher, back in the 70s or whether I somehow happened on this rule on my own. Either way it feels dangerous and not in a good way. I also wonder, do you think blog posts need to adhere to conventions of argument construction, or can they just end in mid-thought. 

happy fiftieth birthday wild life

 London Evening Standard 4 December 1971 p. 13

Los Angeles Times 'Calendar' section 12 December 1971 p. 56

Hartford Courant 18 December 1971 p. 14

Chicago Tribune 19 December 1971 'Arts & Fun' section p. 26

music

In a stupid, rash act which I don't really regret, I bought another guitar. I liked the look of it and how it felt to play it. It seemed somewhat easier to play than the guitar I've had for five or six years, it's another Epiphone. Of course 'easier to play' (ie for my tiny hands) is reductive, the more I play the new guitar the harder it'll be for me to play the old one. But I am enjoying it anyway. All I want to do is get into the habit of writing a song a week. It wouldn't really matter if they were versions of the same, the point is to keep them coming. My go-to chords (I'm sure I am not alone in this) are easy ones like E and Am and if I feel fancy, G. Hey, even B. 

I just think it's good for your brain, physically, to be doing things like this and drawing, as well, it's worth retaining/developing the skills. Also, I enjoy it, obviously, it's very absorbing and time goes really fast (which I don't necessarily want it to but it suggests that it's a deep process). I have no strong ambitions to take my music to the world (it's not that great. I do think about how, if I had actually learned to play guitar when I was 20, which I didn't because I was fearful a guitar teacher would try to make me learn Blowin' in the Wind, and it would be humiliating, rather than teach me how to play um Armalite Rifles or something, then I might have had the opportunity to write and record some songs that might have had some currency with some people in like 1989, but then, fuck it what difference does that make and I would also have had a stronger capacity to do some really embarrassing things too which I might well have). 

Trying to find a picture to illustrate this post I found there are a lot of people with the name Guitar, which surprised me, and made me wonder whether guitars are actually named for a person, but no they're not, according to wikipedia anyway the word guitar is derived from arabic via greek. So the name Guitar is either a complete coincidence? Or one of your ancestors played the guitar? I suppose the latter is more likely, but it's all still really confusing, although there should be a better word for it because 'really confusing' seems like, 'I'm holding my head, baffled, unable to do anything until I sort this out' rather than 'I'm a bit perplexed but I'm just not going to think about it anymore'. Instead, I'll go on to wondering what the hell 'thumb deaths' are. 

delayed rabbits

 

Been a bit distracted. Sorry Barry looks a bit scary. He's not.