SPRING-CLEANING MY HEAD:
My second-most catastrophic trait as a journalist – after my mild phonephobia (=semi-unable to interview ppl or hustle editors!!) – is that i am totally allergic to the buzz of the NOW! I have endless subconscious strategies to postpone reading happnin books, listening to happnin records, watching happnin TV (it’s like my brain tells my mind that i don’t have the right head on just now, and *i* don’t have a say in the entire process grrr)
anyway at the moment i am a small way into realisation of RESOLUTION #2 = get the archives for my REAL ACTUAL BOOK (contract signed 1991 urk) into order, which means – ideally – up and circling in my middle consciousness
so i. i built some more shelves for my videos and am going through to rewrite all the ones whose labels (esp.those written in red ink have faded)
ii.initially this simply meant i used less “important” videos as the bricks to balance planks of wood on to house the more important ones (stratification based not on use-value but on some untangleable analysis of the complexity of the many things on any given label)
and i wz getting on well w.this and finding lots of things i’d totally forgotten i had*, and finally at last watching movies i recorded when at S&S (or else more generally rewatching my complete set of godzilla movies: my next bfi project will i think be on GOJIRA tai HEDORAH = godzilla vs.the smog monster which is the WEIRDEST and BEST FILM EVER MADE, it includes a sequence where the Kids of Tomorrow put on a psychedelic rock festival pn a mountain-top to undo the effects of industrial pollution (better still, their plan fails)
iii. anyway i wz a way into this early part of the massive tidy-up project of my um “external brane” (someone who came to my flat did once describe it as that) and my lovely friend GLYN phoned to say, as i wz in the middle of sorting stuff, wd i like 6ft x 6 ft of AUDIO CASSETTE TAPE SHELVING which he wz chuckin out of the studio he just moved into (500 yard down the yard in hackney), and when i ‘d negotiated him down to 4ft x 4ft he brought it over and installed it for totally FREE, all in like the space of 90 mins (from first call to last nail)!
iv. which freed up eight housebricks, so i could haha DECONSTRUCT my new videoshelves made of videos, and house ALL the videos (even the ones i NEED to watch so had naturally built INTO THE FURNITURE ITSELF) so they can be accessed and watched and learnt from (possibly)
*(my favourite old-time find so far is an ep of the YOOF TV CLASSIC “South of Watford” — it’s abt the Frank Chickens, who a short film w.Sistrah Becky when she wz at Film School, which wz nice to see in an old-friends-revisited kinda way (and reminds me i haven’t spoken to kazuko for AN AGE) (she wd love freaky trigger i think), but the best bit was the GHARSTLY THEMETUNE (“motorway runs like a videogame at a hundred miles and hour/the engine groans and the wheels complain but i can’t go any slower”) and a young fresh-faced BEN ELTON (for it is he) as the unintended parody of the worst-ever “bouncy trendy youth presenter” in youth-TV history