Fair to say that my focus has slipped a little bit in the last couple of days. The top has not toppled, but it may have faltered. I’m getting ready to do some serious page layout work in preparation for a couple things I’m going to publish in the next week or so. So as I had settled down to do some work on writing definitions for the Media handbook on the desktop machine upstairs (too cold and wet to work outside), I thought I’d better do a quick trial run with InDesign. Turns out the installation was all stuffed up. Spent most of the day troubleshooting it. Done now, but a day in which a felt not very productive from a creative point of view.

New focus now though. Retrieve the eye from the bottom of the cup, pop it back in, and you’re good to go.

The flip side of this argument is that texts are artefacts that have cultural significance, and that interfering with them is an act of vandalism. As the BBC Breakfast presenter pointed out, few people would have any time for someone who wanted to modernise the dialogue in Dickens novels. It’s the issue of whether the sanctity of the artefact is more important than how it meshes with modern culture. If doesn’t mesh, then do the work to make it mesh. Learn the old vocabulary and the quirks of the old syntax – now a much easier undertaking in the mindset of the Googleverse. Some might say. Others might say that texts are and always have been essentially fluid, so the notion of sanctity is necessarily a slippery one. Chaucer’s work was never printed in his lifetime: the technology did not exist. Does that mean that we should really only distribute copies of his work in medieval handwriting? What we take to be authoritative versions of Shakespeare plays, widely studied in schools an universities, are the product of centuries of editing – modernised spelling, choices made by editors between disputed alternative versions, modernised punctuation, added scene divisions. The text we now read is quite a long way from editions published at time the plays were performed.

Translations. Is the Russian version of The Philosopher’s Stone actually a different novel? Languages divide the world up differently from each other, and our reality is very much determined by our native language. If we shouldn’t modernise Enid Blyton, should we therefore not translate Tolstoy but learn Russian instead? There’s also the argument that the practice of modernising old stories is not new. Witness Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare (1807).

I think in the end I’m on the side of expecting kids to deal with words like gosh. They’re perhaps a bit alienating, but children need to learn the habit of thinking about words and expanding their vocabulary. The mode in which a text is presented need not necessarily be the idiom of the moment.

The real test of a committed publisher would be providing free upgrades to the latest editions of a text, once you had bought the first edition. Now that would be something.

In other news, the hole our roof is finally fixed. Bring on the rain. It was nothing major – just some flashing near a chimney and a couple of slates. But breaches in your domestic space, especially from above, do create a sense of unease. So they do.

Harry Brown is an easy watch. Contrary to popular wisdom, I’ve always struggled to see Michael Caine as an actor with any credible range at all – just a lucky guy who’s been cast in a few iconic roles over the years. I think the reverence we all now feel for him is down to him being old and still cast in high profile roles. That said, this is a serviceable vigilante movie but has nothing like the subtlety of Gran Torino.

Another movie hyped beyond its actual merit was The Hurt Locker. Its opposition to Avatar in the public media-fuelled Oscar war was absurd, and based on little beyond an entirely invented rivalry between the two directors. I saw or heard little evidence that this rivalry had any basis in how those two people felt. The Hurt Locker is beautifully filmed but to a large extent vacuous. It follows the Hollywood Top Gun narrative and representational framework more closely than you might think, and at one point risks defining itself unambiguously as a guys-on-a-mission film.

First two were blu-ray ventures. Crazy Heart was a cinema trip – to the partially preserved Picture House in Hebden Bridge. Partially because a good deal of money still needs to be spent on it, particularly in the toilets, but the cinema does boast more leg room than Air Force One, and the volunteers who serve coffee and biscuits on a Thursday morning are very much appreciated. The film’s principal talent is Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I still think has twenty times the acting talent of her brother, apart from in Donnie Darko – arguably the defining sci-fi fantasy movie. Arguably. Jeff Bridges is of course excellent too, convincing as the country star whose light has faded under the influence of a long term alcohol habit. It really helps your appreciation of this movie if you like country music. Highly pleasant pub lunch afterwards in the White Swan, a pub I frequented when I worked at Pennine Heritage in the mid eighties. Another pivotal memory from that day is checking my email on the bus and seeing that I’d been sent my first block of ISBN numbers.

Seven Pounds strengthens my opinion that Will Smith is a serious acting talent – not just a Hollywood A-lister. Check him out in as a teenager in Six Degrees Of Separation giving Donald Sutherland a run for his money.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Valkyrie, largely because I’m usually profoundly bored by filmic representations of historical events. This one maintained the tension throughout, even though everyone of course knows how it turned out. Also has a nicely visceral surround track. Good reference scene near the start for calibrating your sub-woofer. If you’re so inclined.

Terminator: Salvation is one of those you watch because you feel you have to see the latest episode in the franchise. It lacks Arnie, apart from an absurd bit of CGI near the end where they recreate him in shiny plastic. Technically, a competent movie which explores some of the elements of the whole Terminator thing with reasonably engaging degree of competence. Kind of. Some enjoyable low frequency thuds.

9 is a post-apocalypse animation about beings made of cloth.

I’ve been through several shifts my opinion of Dead Poets Society over the last couple of decades. In the end, it’s close to my heart because it’s about the process of engaging students in the educational process as emotional beings – not faceless conduits for the production of data, as is the fashion now.

Nowhere Boy features the early career of John Lennon. Engaging in parts, but it’s still hard to escape the observation that all this stuff is a matter of historical record.

Now Paper Heart does not draw lazily on historical events, and just happens to be a charming experiment in form that pretty much pays off. Part documentary, part fantasy, it features Michael Cera as the anchor to the somewhat chaotic performance of the stand-up comic Charlyne Yi – the girl who doesn’t believe in love. Check it out. The only disappointment was that Cera was not interviewed in the DVD extras. Maybe he wanted to preserve the mystery about why he involved himself in this project.

Narrative experiments always get my attention. 500 Days Of Summer selects in a non-chronological way from some of the five-hundred days of Tom’s relationship with a girl called Summer. That’s it really. But that’s all there needs to be. It’s great. See it.

Oh yes: I remember Body Of Lies now. One of those where the under-cover operative gets emotionally involved in his under-cover life and wants to stay there. Iraq is the context. Very serviceably done by the now very adept Leonardo DiCaprio. Not the finest movie Ridley Scott has ever made, but more honest than The Hurt Locker. By far.

Four Lions. Now there’s a film. Sustained roar from the consistent firing of all eight cylinders beneath the bonnet of Chris Morris’ comedic muscle car intellect. A difficult subject to do with any sensitivity, but Morris succeeds in creating suicide bombers who we can relate to as humans, even if their ideology is at best questionable. I challenge you not to laugh against the depths of your better judgement.

This next paragraph consists mainly of the statement I made on Facebook at the time. It is a truth universally to be acknowledged that there can never be too many viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s a movie that may one day save the world.

Knowing is good sci-fi. Nothing very much to redefine the genre, but it works. The specific sub-genre is the one where aliens know more than we do about what’s going to happen to us, and communicate through children.

Much as I wanted to like it, and in line with warnings I was given before I saw it, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is rubbish. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson revolves in his grave at 10,000rpm as the story is rationalised into a conventional polarisation of good and evil, and the mise-en-scène looks like it’s the product of the “Tim Burton” preset in Final Cut Pro.

It was great to see Brazil again. Although this I time realised that Sam Lowry is actually an idiot. Maybe it’s an age thing.

Which brings me to Inception. Is there any more I can add to what’s already been said? First movie of the summer holiday. Still feeling that other-worldly transition from term time to summer break. Despite what people who don’t teach might think, the end of the summer term is actually a rather strange, flat experience; so you can imagine how this movie distorted my perception of reality even further. We’re two weeks into the holiday now. I went into it with the resolve that it would be the most productive of my career so far. And so far the top is still spinning.

Youth In Revolt was reviewed by Eric Kohn as “Superbad meets Fight Club.” In the end that’s not a very helpful concept. It’s actually better than Fight Club. Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, I’ll explain that I’ve always thought Fight Club was a massively overrated film. So Michael Cera’s light foray into alter ego came as a scented breath of snow-kissed Alpine air compared to the self-involved halitosis of Tyler Durden. Oh – and it’s not as funny as Superbad but it is funny and it makes you feel good. It’s a feel-good movie, so it is.

That’s it. I’ve caught up.

The movie is a triumph of representation. Eastwood has succeeded in exploring the ethnography of the Hmong people with sensitivity and respect. As one of the cast points out in the “making of” doc on the blu-ray extras, he could so easily have used professional Chinese or Korean actors, but he chose to cast from the culture he was trying to represent, and his care in bringing to public consciousness a people that most would not claim to know much about, definitely shows.

On one level this is kind of Magnum Force meets Up, but on so many other levels it is much more. It won’t win prizes for experimental narrative, but we don’t need experimental narrative every day of the week. Only alternate days. Consume as much beer as you want, stay as thin as Clint, polish your Torino, making sure you get down low to check for smears. Oh, and while you’re out there, fix the neighbourhood will you?

A Serious Man will please those who hark back to the earlier, more experimental output of the Coen brothers and lament their more mainstream ventures of recent years. Of course, the reality is not so polarised. The movie definitely lives at an opposite pole to the garbage that was The Ladykillers, and has none of the tributes to conventional comedic values that made Burn After Reading so easy to watch. At the same time, it also doesn’t have the (in my view heavy handed) darkness of No Country For Old Men or the fairytale life affirmation of Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy. The best characterisation of A Simple Man I can give is that it represents the Coens’ venture into a style much more typical of Jim Jarmusch. It also has quite striking stylistic similarities to Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, one of my favourite ever films. The central pairing of Michael Stuhlbarg and Richard Kind is entertaining, if a little gross at times. Definitely worth checking out of you’re a Coen Brothers fan and you don’t mind doing a bit of hiking through a narrative, rather than being propelled through it at high speed.

And the whole blu-ray experience. Our CRT TV finally got stuck in standby irretrievably, a week ago yesterday, so we sallied out and replaced it with a Panasonic Viera, LCD 32 inch. Not spectacularly specified, but LCD technology is now a match for mid-range plasmas and they’ve sorted out the viewing angle issue. The room size also doesn’t really warrant a massive screen. SD picture quality is excellent, and that’s an important factor as there is likely to be a heck of a lot of SD programming for quite a while to come. Blu-ray is of course very clear and very sharp, and it has a noticeable edge on upscaled DVD. 1080p has just over twice the resolution of standard def. Those are the figures. That’s the effect. Party on. For those of you who are wondering, yes Dolby TruHD and DTS-HD do downscale automatically to their legacy counterparts, seamlessly. The overwhelming answer to the blu-ray question is “Why would you not?” And, er, forget Blockbuster: their blu-ray selection is crap. Rent them from the library for half the price.

Since opening a Twitter account in March I’ve sent over 5000 thoughts into the micro blogging vortex. Micro blogging is obviously easier than traditional blogging, because each post is a work in its own right, and they don’t take long to do. Grow a tiny thought, snap it off, drop it into the furnace and watch its ore render down into the hot, liquid hive mind. All the while, things are happening in the real world and people are doing things in the real world. Or are they? At first, I found Twitter liberating. It gave me a sense of structure that I’ve always found difficult to create in my everyday life. Accomplish a task, say that you’ve accomplished it and then move on to the next task. A kind of accountability. Before long, though, the tasks are taking longer because you’re stopping to check your Twitter responses and send out the thoughts that you were planning while you assembled the first two pages of your Ikea wardrobe. So then your Ikea wardrobe takes the whole day. (Exaggeration for effect.) I’ve also found myself redrafting tweets in my head, in that soulless void between the blank DVDs and the kitchen utensils in Asda. Which means that putting the shopping away is pretty much an obstacle in the way of committing that tweet to the ether. The cycle unwinds. Your life unravels.

But that’s only if you accept the somewhat Luddite and reactionary distinction between electronic media and real life. It used to be commonplace to accuse people who read for a large portion of their lives of not living in the real world; but literacy will be saved from widespread stigma because of its symbiotic relationship with knowledge and education. Literacy is a requirement for using the internet, and the internet has created new forms of literacy and many new forms of interaction based on those new forms of literacy. Yet people will continue to assert that the internet is not real life. Friends that you have on Facebook are not real friends. People who follow each other on Twitter are not real friends. You converse with them, debate with them, make a conscious decision to read their thoughts, share jokes with them, watch their interplay with each other, look at their family photographs. Still, some would not have it that they are real friends unless you regularly talk to them on the phone or spend time in their physical company.

Anyone who has immersed themselves in Twitter has experienced at least one crisis of Twitter Faith. I’m using capitals there to annoy people who see Twitter as a total waste of time. Many can’t even say “Twitter” or “tweet” without at least a frisson of amusement in their voice – most notably the phone girl on The Wright Stuff. (It is always a girl: I’m not gender stereotyping.) Anyway, Tristram Shandy be damned. I was talking about Twitter Faith. There are times when you think “Wait a minute. This is madness. I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’m running out of things to say.” My latest episode was last weekend. It was prompted to a large extent by the esteemed horror and thriller novelist Sarah Pinborough and the accomplished writer and director Julian Simpson deleting their Twitter accounts almost simultaneously. I was alerted to it by one of Sarah’s updates on Facebook. As writers, I think they’ll both understand and won’t mind me saying that their Twitter presence was in each case based on a constructed persona. I do it too. I decided early on that the medium was meaningless unless I’d adopted a position before the 140 characters were up. That position then has to be compressed and consequently sometimes distorted. These distortions give it an edge – an edge made sharper and more dangerous by the speed of the updates, more so as you follow more people. But the challenge lies in controlling tone and ambiguity so that misunderstandings can be corrected quickly. Doesn’t always work. Hence some people unfollow – an act I confess I have trouble not taking personally. But that’s just me. Julian and Sarah went with the flow, did it effortlessly, did with frequent use of taboo language which as a practising teacher I’m simply unable to match online, did it without giving a flying fill-in-the-missing-word about who unfollowed them. They were entertaining and engaging, notable highlights being Julian’s recent “holiday” and some exchanges I had with Sarah about the most recent episodes of Torchwood.

Twitter is different things to different people. (Yes, I know, but I’ve learned that avoiding all clichés is a mistake.) To some it’s just unwinding over a glass of wine and sharing views on X-Factor contestants. For me, the bottom line is that I have real friends online, who I have never met. I’m aware of all the safety issues, but it is now possible to meet people and become friends with them without ever sharing their physical presence. That may happen. It may not. But it is not a prerequisite for friendship anymore. So, I was sad to lose Sarah and Julian as friends on Twitter, but I’ll be staying in touch with them through the other available channels. The thing that hit me hard on Saturday was that they are both writers. I aspire to write more, to be a better writer, to have the discipline of self-denial that it takes to be successful. I therefore admired their decision and wondered if I should follow them. Quixotically, I hope to develop my writing while maintaining my Twitter habit and new found Facebook habit. I like to think that in specific ways social networking has honed my writing. Facebook is nicer and more chilled. I’m tending to hang there when I need some headspace.

So, for Julian and Sarah, it’s “Time Enough At Last”. Just don’t break your spectacles. As for their tweets – “tears in rain”.

First dark morning of BST. Leeds Fest tickets on sale tonight. Not sure what’ll happen with that. Don’t have time to queue at HMV. Don’t really hold out much hope of getting any tickets online. It’s really irritating that they don’t announce the headliners until minutes before the tickets go on sale. It’s not as if they’ll have any trouble selling the tickets. Seems almost as though they want the process to be chaotic.

Plenty of things need to be done, but inhabiting that space for a couple of days and nullifying all real responsibility has quite a cleansing effect. Neurones that are beaten down by the daily routine dust themselves off and fire up again. Somehow your brain rehydrates and the future is so much more plausible.

Watched Ptang Yang Kipperbang early evening, after a tea of stuffed red peppers and baked potatoes. Every bit the reminder that I hoped it would be – the central epiphany of the squashed spider and the appearance/reality motif have stood the test of time an then some.

Then Close Encounters bought this afternoon in Asda for a fiver. Very pleasantly surprised to learn that it has a DTS track. Pulsed the sub at the appropriate UFO moments, and was overall very politely balanced. They’re good finds – old movies with DTS sound. Somehow it seems they make more effort when remastering an old movie. The ultimate is Duel.

It’s all about adding content now. The odd little tweak here and there, but the structure is in place and the content is the thing.

Remember to back up.

Part of the reason for posting this is to nudge the Christmas Tree off the top spot. It has to go. Funny how we live Christmas from November until late December, and then suddenly it has to go. Don’t normally leave it until early February though, but I can seen the thought process whereby that electrician wanted to keep it going all year round. That blues period in January can be crushing. I think I offset it to a large extent this time, but I didn’t zap it away. Still lurking in the shadows, holding my coat and snickering. Nothing beats that time when we had to go in on 2nd January.

Bored with snow and ice now. Should keep the bugs at bay in the summer. Should prune at Half Term.

Good in a way that a band have done a cover of Desolation Row, but MCR have made a bit of a dog’s breakfast of it. What does a typical dog’s breakfast actually consist of?

Hey ho. Fast forward.