Yesterday we properly touristified Madrid… or some of it at least, I’ll probably write later about what we’ve been up to, and you never know – Hannah may too.
Then in the evening we went to a gig with Laura, Elena and some others – it’s got to be said the music was pretty poor – above is an abomination of a guitarist – who thought he was God walking the earth.

Today we got up slow and shambled down to get sunburnt with Jo and Lisa in Retiro… then we artified the afternoon. Now we’re having a snooze before going out to meet with another gaggle.

Retiro is a big park in the centre of the city , in it there is a lake, it was beside this lake that we did our sunburning, on the lake, having a much more energetic form of fun than us, were people in boats:

Woo Hoo… Lovely Young Hannah has come to stay with me for a few days. This evening we met up with just-as-lovely Jo B who also happens to be here, had some food and a natter a natter a natter.
And they both brought me Marmite!
And Hannah came bearing more goodies – I’m back in the land of the photographic again – above is a picture from my new shiny camera, which takes photos at a ludicrous 12 megapixels… I’m not sure my computer’s going to cope so well crunching those.
Anyway – expect a lack of updates over the next couple of days – we have an exciting itinerary planned.
Speaking of which you know, you’re all very welcome to come for a visit sometime!

Ok, I consider myself a fairly open-minded sort of person, and when you live in another country, even one that isn’t so distant from your own, you learn to expect things to be done a little differently. The Spanish definitely have a more open attitude towards nudity and sex than we Brits do and I’m used to that – you kind of have to be if you’re a fan of Spanish cinema (the old challenge in Bangor used to be – name a Spanish film that doesn’t have sex in, go on, name one…). It was very interesting in my old job when I used to teach a lesson based around censorship, or more specifically film-rating and the effect that the content of films has on children – without fail every single one of my students (all adults, many of them parents) would rate sex and nudity right at the bottom of a list of media content that might cause them concern. Still, today one of the kids threw me a curved one when she showed me a photo album full of photos of herself as a baby. Everybody loves baby photos and these were all rather cute, but right on the first page was a photo of her mother, semi-nude and heavily pregnant, perched on the bed in the kind of mildly erotic pose that celebrities sometimes cause a splash with on the fronts of magazines when they’re pregnant. Now I’m down with pregnancy, I think it’s a beautiful thing (though my currently pregnant friend begs to differ), still, it freaked me out a little. I just don’t know if that’s because I’m a prudish spoon or not.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember doing something similar when I was that age and I took the particularly gory photo of me just-popped-out and covered in amniotic gunk into school.

Question – Mothers (if any of you read this), would you send your child into school with a picture of you half-naked and pregnant?

Ok, I think we’re back on the track with the fotolog… back on track that is with my little currently untitled picture series, and with the serialised story.
I think we’re done with Variations now too, for the time being at least. All my little projects turn out like this – Variations was initially a whim – to take a break from the normal pictures I’d been posting, which take quite a long time to make, I decided to make very simple ones, and then to justify them with variations. It started out as quick and dirty as possible – the first five images took an average of about three minutes each to make – but by yesterday’s I was getting more and more pernickerty and the reason that there were only three yesterday was that I spent a full half an hour working on the fourth and failing to get anywhere – pixels can only be tweaked so much I think. The March Project too, which is now finished, but you’ve still got to wait for the end of March to get them all, started as a really simple idea – I was just going to combine the simplest of geometric shapes, one at a time, with a single photo, using a script built in Photoshop to make each image more or less automatically. Then of course I conceived the idea of making it in four parts, showing some development through colour but still keeping with one image and one shape, then I decide I wanted to intertwine a series of different stories through the shapes, changing forms and complexity, and the whole thing turned into a mission. I don’t know how to take a simple idea and stick with it. Still, I’m enjoying being visually creative.

I’ve started Twittering, you can view my feed here. I don’t really know why – I don’t know a single other person who uses Twitter so it’s a bit pointless, but I had an account that I signed up to ages ago languishing (I sign up to quite a few services under the name snailsnail just to make sure no one else takes that name for if I find a use for it in the future – I’m a ridiculous geek I know) and, well, I think it’s probably going to replace the little-used micro blog section here. The reason I started with the micro blogs was to try and wash out some of the dross that flits between my ears during the course of a day, and this will be the same function that twitter serves, but I didn’t do much of it A) because I didn’t want to clutter up the blog with half-meaningless posts, and, more importantly, B) because they were too much effort – once I had a bloggable random thought I had to think of a title for it, and that’s difficult, and that adds to the load because then I had to fill in the Titulos page (which often takes longer than actual blog posts themselves) (Incidentally, as I can see that no one visits the Titulos page anymore, I’m probably going to stop doing it… as much as I like explaining myself and pretending I’m cleverer than I really am, it’s probably more effort that it’s worth – I thought it was a nice idea while it lasted though).
So, the twitter is going to be a mishmash of incoherent musings and the banalities of day-to-day existence, sometimes together, and I’d love it if you joined me – feel free to sign up for your own account and maybe we can create our own little sea of banal incoherence together.

Tomorrow I’m back to work, and I’m actually quite excited. It’s nice to have that kind of job (though I understand we’re still in the honeymoon period (On an aside, isn’t honeymoon an interesting word? Also it translates almost literally into lots of different languages. The wikipedia page disappointingly doesn’t satiate my interest – though I like the depressing origin)). Today I have been learning lots about English testing… I have discovered that the examiners, even though they’re trying not to be, are unremittingly scary. It also gives me the heebie jeebies remembering my own French oral exams, I can’t believe we’re making six year olds do that. Today I picked up some photos from being developed – man, it’s so long since I made proper photos… there were a load I’d forgotten about from our holiday in the New Forest like, how many years ago? two and a half? weird.
I have no way of showing them to you though, so you’ll just have to imagine, to help you out on that, here are other people’s New Forest pictures.

what I read
what I forget
all I left unsaid

what I look at
or what I watch
what problems I send in messages

[[found: http://www.hi.is/~eybjorn/]]

Reading Material

I was going to write about the books I’ve been reading recently – but in the end it just turned into a rant about Philip Pullman and adapting books into films. Here you go:

[[Spoiler Warning - if you plan on reading these books you gotta know, I'm going to give away bits of the end]]

I’ve just finished reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – yes, I’m a bit slow here, about eight years behind everyone else, but anyway.
I’d been wanting to read it for a while because, mainly, of Pullman – who is the kind of firebrand evangelical atheist that really intrigues me (and often gets my goat). He’s tried really hard with these books to lure the Church into a shouting match, going to the extent of describing them as “about killing God”, so it must really irk him that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is quite a fan, and indeed has recommended they be taught in schools as part of religious education.

The fact is that the books aren’t about killing God. The figure of God when he appears at the end of the third book is clearly meant by Pullman to be a symbol of impotence, but instead comes across as a symbol of the lengths that corrupt regimes will go to to justify their actions under the name of God. The books are rather anti church – because that’s what really come home – a quite profound spiritual notion of existence but a fervent hatred of organised religion, and indeed authority in general. Nevertheless there are some worrying traits to Pullman’s brand of Humanism which is a distinctly individual-centric one.

Pullman lists a number of literary inspirations for his work, the clearest being Milton, (who’s is quoted throughout and of who’s Paradise Lost the books are a deliberate inversion) Aside from his cited inspirations, Pullman owes another significant debt to Tolkein… this is very definitely a post-Tolkein fantasy novel. It’s not something I’d ever have the inclination to do but it’d probably be possible to make a blow by blow comparison of this trilogy with The Lord of the Rings.
For me this is particularly striking at the end where, as in the rings book, an immense battle is promised and what we end up with is the fairly pathetic strugglings of a couple of useless characters. Now, I’m probably in the minority there – I think a lot of people like that about the end of TLOTR, but I found it boring – and here we have the mother of all battles promised – all of creation – a multitude of creatures from across endless parallel universes, facing off against all of Heaven – and then we pretty much miss all of it and nothing happens.

How the films will deal with the end – with its death of God and all – we’ll have to wait and see (although don’t hold your breath – the first one behaved poorly in the box office) but I think we can guess. The first film reduces the obviousness of the church being the power over society and so enhances Pullman’s anti-authority bent (no doubt to reduce the risk of a Christian boycott at the box office) by changing them into a generic evil-fascist-movie-state. This is not a particular problem with the film. Of more concern is the horrendous opening – which destroys the whole slow reveal about the nature of existence that Pullman pulls off across the breadth of three novels, and the woefully truncated end, which eliminates Lyra’s motivation for the next two novels.

Everybody knows that things get changed when books are turned into films, and everybody likes to moan about how the book was better, and so on. But this is not that. Change is necessary and desirable – some of my favourite films are adaptations that take great liberties with their sources, and often books and films can be likeable for very different reasons. The fact is however that this is just lazy scriptwriting – or, rather, scriptwriting with an eye on popcorn sales.

Switching to another, better known franchise, I felt the same thing about the non-inclusion of Sirus’s gift to Harry of the mirror in the film of the Order of the Phoenix. It may be a minor point in the book – exactly the kind of minor point that gets dropped in the process of writing for film, but, in my opinion it is completely key to understanding the character of Harry. Through it we see his short-sightedness and pig-headedness and it sets him up for the swathes of guilt that plague him through the next books. It would take up a minor amount of screen time and enhance the characterisation across films immensely, also it would add the same kind of “Use the Mirror you IDIOT!!!” tension that we felt while reading the book.

Now adaptation for film is difficult, don’t get me wrong – but what you have to understand is these kind of works are not adapted by looking at the (for example) book and asking ‘how can we best change this for the medium of film?’ Instead they start with a cookie-cutter film construction – in the cases I’ve been talking about “family-centric fantasy-adventure” and ask ‘how can we fit the specifics (characters, milieu, epic battle scenes) of this book into that construction. What we end up with is less of an adaptation and more of a shoehorning in of a square peg into a round hole.

Ah well, all Hollywood film is rubbish, I think you know that I think that by now, I don’t really know why I torture myself with it. Anyway – I recommend the books if you haven’t read them yet. They’re an interesting read and I can forgive most of their shortcomings.