January 11-17
SATURDAY 11 Recycling In The City is an occasional opportunity to get rid of any surplus homewares, furniture, bric à brac or anything you’re done with that might have a new life elsewhere, in another home. It is run from our local church and the whole day takes on the feeling of villagey congestion as people fill shopping trolleys and push-chairs with old tat, trundle it to the church for the “give” session in the morning then return later after lunch for the “take” session to get more of the stuff they just gave away, but different.
📌 Watching Liverpool play Accrington Stanley in the FA Cup was a great chance to check out the skills of the teenagers.
📌 We were expecting Nickel Boys to be a conventional narrative film, with maybe a documentary feel. It’s an art film, the great beauty of which you can only fall into step with once you have hurdled the early part of the film in which the camera acts as the principal characters, probing, witnessing, looking away, and all the time trying to make sense of the fragmented and often random sights, sounds and impressions of an open teenage mind. Once you get the cinematic idea of seeing through the eyes of others, the story of racial abuse and exploitation in 1960s Florida is already a swirling presence in your head, which makes the dramatic “escape story” that follows even more powerful.
SUNDAY 12 I can’t say that I don’t enjoy it when I find that someone I secretly detest is equally detested by others.
📌 I’ve just started stitching a frog. It will take a long time to finish and I’m not sure I’m that much in love with it.
MONDAY 13 Trying to separate the character of Benji in the comedy film A Real Pain from the character of Roman Roy in Succession is hard because Kieran Culkin essentially plays the same quick-lipped ball of super-confidence whose presence is never far from the top of the agenda. He “lights up the room” whenever he enters, with his heart on his sleeve, his spirit alive and kicking. Or seems to. But Benji is actually a tightly coiled ball of pain. His repressed cousin David is a solid ball of pain too, and what emerges when they together embark on a Holocaust Holiday to Poland in search of their dead grandmother’s backstory, is that they show us that we all wear our pain in different ways, like outfits, and it might look different every day. Not in uniform.
📌 Alfie came to look at our leaky roof, then went away again seemingly confident that he can solve the problem in a trice.
📌 Someone on the estate WhatsApp group rudely asked that no messages be posted before 8am. I suggested she turn off Notifications, but she said it wasn’t that simple “in my case” (!). Someone else suggested, with diagrams, that she use the WhatsApp Archive function to dip in and out of messages. Then it emerged she has “age-related” memory problems and could not complete any of these tasks, so everyone suggested she contact social services for some support. All I really wanted to tell her is that I thought her WhatsApp manner needed considerable improvement.
TUESDAY 14
📌 Michelle said that a problem for her is that the interpretive stitchworks I do of other people’s drawings often eclipse the original work in terms of hours and detail, so working out a balanced authorship, and the payment split, is difficult. So in future she wants me to do more of my own work rather than use the work of others. We agreed that I will do two, maybe three, more of Sam’s drawings, then explore my own ideas. This is exactly as I’d wanted it.
WEDNESDAY 15
📌 RIP Tony Slattery, 65.
📌 The AI revolution is already upon us and Keir Starmer is right to mount the surfboard asap, says Rafael Behr. But he still desperately needs to do something to show British voters he can bring real change to their day-to-day lives. The cost-of-living crisis cannot be rubbed out with wise words.
THURSDAY 16 Did some more prep in the studio for the Dayroom Project using cut-ups of collage and block-colour landscapes. I want to concentrate early on having good conversations with the patients and interrogating what a World of Wonder looks like to them. I might start a stitchwork of a moonscape to work on during the sessions. But the basic idea is to use lots of different combinations of the “landscape” on which they will layer up their dreams and desires, be they people, places, close to home or far away. Tap into their inner worlds is my mission.
📌 The Headway writers group will soon be joined by a poet, the aim being to write a poem for an upcoming book by the filmmaker Lotje Sodderland (My Beautiful Broken Brain). All I could come up with was two lines…
Every day, same surprise
Shit, I’m still alive.
📌 At a screen talk after the showing of the 2000 Christopher Nolan film Memento, the actor Guy Pearce cried when talking about Terence Stamp, who he appeared alongside in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert. Pearce also said that after that 1994 film he was told by dozens of drag queens around the world that his character was based on them. I wanted to tell him that I personally know dozens of people on whom his character in Memento is based. A fresh viewing of the film did at least offer up another line of poetry when the Guy Pearce character Leonard mutters to himself…
How can I heal, when I can’t feel time.
FRIDAY 17 Have just discovered that my job title for the Dayroom Project at the Royal London Hospital is “creative practitioner”. That makes me sound almost like a doctor.
📌 We joined Sue for a visit to the Museum of the Home followed by a Vietnamese lunch then a drink in a very cool bikers bar we’d only ever gazed at, terrified, from outside. The Museum of the Home was previously known as the Geffrye Museum until its patron, the 18th Century merchant Robert Geffrye, was named as a slave-trade profiteer. It has recently been remodelled to include displays relating to poplar ideas of “home” and “place” alongside its traditional archive of mock living spaces from past centuries. And I think it works. On each visit my understanding of what makes a home grows.
📌 We’re on Season 2 of True Detective and I’m already very bored by the aggressive male detective archetype. It’s like the writers are auditioning for a job on the next big gangster series.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 