Day 115: Unwrapped

Image via Unwrapped

I went to Unwrapped on my way home from Fran's this morning. What's Unwrapped? I hear you ask with a breathless sigh. Simmer down. I'm literally about to tell you.

Unwrapped is the new zero waste grocery store on Crookes high street, just round the corner from my house. It's fabulous.

I've walked past a few times, never gone in, I guess because it always looks empty and kind of imposing, and because I didn't know the Procedure, and new places make me anxious when I don't know the Procedure. Maybe I'd walk in and there'd be a secret handshake required and I wouldn't know the handshake and I'd be dropped down a hidden chute and into a monster's cage to be devoured alive. Maybe I'd enter into a room full of hipster artist supermodels and all my clothes would fall off and the artist supermodels would stand around me in a circle pointing and laughing. Maybe the till would be cash only and I wouldn't have any cash and I'd have to face that utter social defeat.

So I never previously went in. I just felt sad and went to Sainsbury's instead, did my sad food shop, tramped sadly home.

But not today. I threw caution to the wind and pushed open the door of Unwrapped, and let me tell you, what I found inside was a positive Shangri-la of tranquillity and delight and Ecover-branded cleaning goods.

Let me explain how it works, in case you too were thinking of popping in but were scared by the unknown Procedures:

The shop sells lots of staples like pasta, pulses, cereals, nuts, tea, coffee, herbs, spices, as well as soaps, shampoos, shower gels, and washing up liquid. The items are all stored in upright dispense containers, like you get for the pick n mix at cinemas.

You take your own tupperware, or any containers you fancy, or there are recycled paper bags on hand if you need them (I used the bags, as I went in on a whim and hadn't planned ahead). If you bring your own containers then there are scales to weigh them, and pens and paper to jot down their weight so they can be subtracted from the total weight at the till. Then you just fill them up with whatever you fancy. Go wild.

Finally you take your haul to the counter, and the nice person behind the till charges you for what you've bought, and you give them the money (cash or card!), say thanks a lot, and you mosey on out of there and get on with the business of being a complete unmitigated badass. Easy peasy lemon breezy.

So come on. You have hand soap in your bathroom. I know you do. And you've got Fairy Liquid in your kitchen. The plastic bottles in which these are stored are made from the blood of dead Iraqi children, basically, and if you throw them away after one use they'll be burned in a landfill or buried underground to make Wall-E sad in ten thousand years, or they'll find their way into the sea and bob along into the North Atlantic Garbage Patch where they will fuck a little fish's day right up.

That's your fault, that is. Image via inhabitat

So rinse those bottles out, take them to Unwrapped, weigh them, then squeeze in some more soap. It's cheap and it's easy and it's one genuinely nice thing you can do for the world with your miserable entitled consumerist life.

And while you're at it get some pasta, because if you get that from the supermarket it comes in single-use plastic. And cereal, which comes in single-use plastic and cardboard. And kidney beans and chickpeas, which come in tins that leave a substantial footprint through their manufacture and collection and recycling, if you even both to recycle them.

So grab your empty takeaway tubs, that glass Kilner jar from the posh biscuits from Christmas, and go fill them with yummy food from Unwrapped.

I know for a fact that some of you reading this live in Crookes or Broomhill or Walkley or Hillsborough, so you guys have less than no excuse for not popping along. If you live elsewhere in Sheffield it's only a short bus ride (52 or 52a from outside the Cathedral), and you can go every few months to stock up on bits and bobs, and trundle back to Netflix and 24-hour-rolling porn feeling just a tiny bit more smug about yourself. And if you live anywhere else I bet you've got a similar zero waste store nearby. You probably can't spit in London for fear of hitting fifteen or so zero waste stores.

Just go! You better goddamned go. I'm going to be so fucking pissed off if you don't go.

Come on. For me. I'll love you forever.

Go go go go go. Go.

Go.

Day 114: Peaks

Got a migraine. My thoughts are all jumbled, my vision loose.

Family meal last night, Liz and Jamie and my uncle all up from London, meal at my mum's with Fran and the dog. Avocado and walnut and quinoa salad, vegetable samosas, hummus, Yorkshire pickle, cheeses, breads. Piling on helpings, buttering slices, eating far past the point of being full.

The others drinking wine, insisting on midnight adventures walking Fran and me back. Liz jogging ahead with Mission, running back, turning behind us, pushing her way back through. "Out the way, grannies, important business, we got places to be, come on." Mission wagging his tail, trotting with the funny woman, bemused at humans and wine.

This morning long walks in the Peak District. Grindleford and up to the edge, Surprise View car park, down to Padley Gorge and back through the woods to the cafe. Fran stayed at home and had a recovery day, so we took Mission and wore him out.

Stones lined with lichen and moss. The swaying of bracken. The air up on the edge clear in our lungs. Silver birch whispering. The soft sounds through the tree line. The muffled warmth of the woods. And the complexities of families. The calmness of families. Not knowing what to say. Saying nothing. Then discussing the nature of mind and of memory, discussing religion and politics, making nice small talk, then not knowing what to say. The dog limping. Liz recognising that Jamie was flagging. Everyone thinking how far to the cafe. Then arriving, and ordering, big plates of sausages and egg and chips. Yorkshire puddings large as your head. Stained mugs of tea and coffee. The dog collapsed under the bench trying to get comfortable on my coat.

Saying goodbyes to Liz and Jamie, finally home to Fran's. My migraine coming on, taking codeine and lying on the sofa, as Chris and Fran watched Orange is the New Black. Me not taking it in, then finding myself involved, then wondering if I'd been asleep.

Migraine too much to eat tea, lying with the dog massaging my temple, letting the muscles around my eyes all go loose. Letting the world wash out and out and out.

Now in bed beside Fran, as she checks in with her zombie Island, and Mission sighs at the bottom of the bed. The windows wide open, the lamplight soft and red.

Day 113: Dailies

Eeugh. Daily blogging is stressing me out. I'm trying to write full articles and there's never enough time, I keep staying up struggling to get the post to some kind of a finished state, and then it's 3am, and all I've got is a jangled mess, and I have to put that up and it never feels good enough, it's always disappointing, and I go to bed feeling down, and then I'm exhausted the next day, and it all begins again.

But I guess this is the point. I should stop worrying about creating perfect little gems to reflect me in the best light - silly ego stuff - and focus instead on simply doing the work. Every rambling, unsuccessful draft is another day's practice. Every paragraph that fails to make a comprehensive point, every pat or cliched phrase, every crutch word that I fall back on a little too often ("ostensibly"  - I'm always saying things are "ostensibly" this and "ostensibly" that. And "trope" - everything is a trope at the moment) - this is all part of the training. It's all part of seriously forcing myself to become a writer, someone who writes regularly. Being aware that something isn't working is the first step to getting it working, after all.

And if I run out of time each night and have to repeatedly show the world (well, all fifteen of you) my workings, the cramped and messy space behind my curtain -  well, that's probably very good for me.

I can only write as well as I can actually write. I could keep the truth hidden and polish up my work until it makes me look better than I am, put up blog posts once a week, but what's the point? I'm learning more like this, and the ego stuff would be a lie. Might as well accept that I am who I am. Might as well just put up what is imperfect and move on.

As long as I do move on. As long as I keep writing. That's integral. Maybe if I can't write the way I want to write in a year, if I've not made any progress and it's getting me down, then I'll give myself the option to give it all up as a pipe dream. Or let's say five years. Or, no, ten.

Despite the daily stress and frustration, I'm having far too much fun at the moment to even consider stopping.

Day 112: Bourne Supremacy

Right-o let's get to it, lots to cover and it's stupid late at night already. Here are my jumbled thoughts on the second Jason Bourne film, 2004's The Bourne Supremacy. There will be spoilers, if you care about that.

After a first film that came out swinging from its opening shot, the sequel gets off to a shakier start. It's a prosaic first act, leaden and workmanlike, with an over-reliance on cliches of the genre. Lots of exposition, news reports about important characters conveniently playing on televisions, Marie staring at couple photos of her and Bourne to show us they're still in love, a scrapbook she leafs through that lets us know Bourne is struggling to regain his memories - there are news clippings of murder stories with annotations next to them like "Was this me?" and "Who am I?" and "Dear diary, I wish I could get my memory back, it's so frustrating how I still get partial flashbacks filled with smash cuts and Dutch angles and odd snatches of dialogue that will probably become important later on."

Bourne and Marie are hiding out in Goa, but shady folks have hired Karl Urban's Russian agent to sabotage a CIA mission helmed by new face of the agency Pamela Landy, a competent and focused professional played perfectly by Joan Allen - and Urban has planted a fingerprint framing Bourne for the sabotage, in which Landy's field agent and his contact are murdered.

Urban then heads to Goa and is spotted by Bourne rather conveniently, and Bourne's spidey-sense starts tingling and he rushes to get Marie and to escape in their Jeep. But Urban is hot on their tail, and cue a car chase that showcases new director Paul Greengrass's approach to action, something that becomes a calling card for the franchise.

It's a combination of shaky cam, quick cutting, and the partial framing of subject, as if the camera is perpetually struggling to keep up with the action. The style has become de rigueur for action movies these days, a cliched technique that is often used as a way for mediocre directors to mask uninteresting content behind chaotic and nausea-inducing filming. Look at something like the fight scenes in the Transformer movies for the worst examples of this.

Yet here the technique still feels fresh, and Greengrass is careful to show us just enough of the set up and each subsequent beat to ensure we get the gist - Urban is racing after Bourne and Marie, Bourne swaps seats with Marie, Marie cuts the Jeep across the fields, Urban is out of his car with his rifle racing to a vantage point - but within each beat the cuts come just too fast, the framing is just too close and claustrophobic, for us to relax within the shots. We get the information, but no time to appreciate or to process. It's breathless, we race onwards, always a brain jolt behind the action - and then Bourne and Marie have escaped, they're driving over the bridge to the mainland, the tension eases, the cuts slow, we get a chance to rest here in the intimacy of the car with the two of them-

-Quick cut back to Urban aiming his sniper rifle - Then cut back to the car-

-and Marie's head is snapped forwards and the Jeep swerves off the bridge and plummets into the river.

So, yes. Bourne's one emotional connection is torn from him, and he is thus motivated to re-enter the world of espionage and conspiracy and busy European cities, seeking retribution for, or at least understanding of, the death of the woman he loved. It's hackneyed, for sure, but it does the job - though only really because the first film worked so hard to build that tenderness between Bourne and Marie, which the sequel then trades in for a pre-packaged burst of pathos. Cheap, yet effective. We as the audience are there with Bourne as he burns Marie's belongings and prepares to go searching for answers.

And from here, through the second and third acts, the film doesn't put a foot wrong. There isn't the character development of the first film, which really was such a brilliant exploration of what it means to take responsibility for your life, to cast off the persona foisted upon you by an external world and to craft a new identity of your own choosing - but what there is instead is a fevered, unrelenting thrill-ride filled with loneliness and isolation and unease, a cat-and-mouse chase where Bourne holds all the skill and determination, yet the wider world embodied by Landy and Brian Cox's section chief Ward Abbott holds the power. Put Bourne in a room with three cops and those cops are going down. But then Bourne has to escape the building, hide from CCTV, dodge checkpoints, avoid monitored areas. Bourne is implacable, but every step he takes draws attention, and the net around him is shrinking.

The scope of the film is wider than the first, its story further reaching, but in the plotting of scenes there's the same care taken over realism, and the same satisfaction in watching Bourne struggle through set-piece after set-piece as the tension inexorably ramps and you wonder when you'll be able to catch your breath.

It's smart, it does have a heart (embodied in Bourne's refusal to take the lives of those who caused the death of Marie, and in the final taking of responsibility for the actions of his past), and it looks superb, replacing the muted low-fi aesthetic of the first film with a lagoonal world of greens and blues, all swanky yet lonesome hotel lobbies, stark interrogation rooms, and rainslicked motorways stretching into the night.

The machine of The Bourne Supremacy's action does take time to get rolling, but once it does it never lets up, and it rolls to such a well-structured conclusion that a third instalment was all but guaranteed.

Let's see what that one was like!

Day 111: Re-Bourne

Well, after watching the execrable Jason Bourne the other day, I couldn't resist going back to the beginning of the series to see whether 2002's The Bourne Identity actually had anything going for it, or whether it was just nostalgia clouding my judgement...

And Holy Damon, is this film a good 'un! It's a mainstream thriller but with indie sensibilities, invigorating and energetic, assured in its storytelling, grounded in character and emotion.

Looking fresh faced, still with the wiriness of youth, Matt Damon plays Bourne with a wounded vulnerability that juxtaposes nicely with the efficiency and brutality of his instinctive actions. The amnesia plot device is inspired, taking the idea of the macho, walking weapon that is the archetypal movie secret agent, and making that all the stuff that Bourne has no control over. He can't help knowing how to fight and how to scan a room in half a second flat for potential threats, that's just something that happens without him meaning it to - but who he actually is, who he chooses to be, from the beginning of the film when he's dredged up onto a fishing trawler with bullets in his back and no memory, is someone caring, sensitive, and easy for the audience to relate to.

By shearing the constructed amalgamation of Bourne's personality from his present moment existence, the film turns its protagonist's search for answers into an almost existential question - can we be defined as the sum total of everything we've previously done, or do we exist somewhere deeper than this? Is Bourne weighed down by the baggage of the person he's been, or was he effectively born (or, yes, sigh, Bourne) anew in that tempestuous ocean at the film's outset?

It's this question that provides the film with its emotional heart, as well as acting as a natty technique for ensuring the audience are firmly in Bourne's shoes, discovering the story at the same exact pace as Bourne himself.

In this regard Damon is the perfect fit, a supremely likeable everyman finding himself endowed with superhuman abilities, not unlike Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker in the Spider-Man film released the same year as this. Filled with turmoil and confusion, yet possessed of preternatural strength and control over his environment when danger dictates it, Damon pulls off both with aplomb.

Franka Potente as Marie, the drifting and rootless young adult caught up in Bourne's mess, is wonderful as well, strong willed and imbued with agency, yet fragile, overwhelmed, shocked by the violence, providing the necessary balance to Bourne's flattened affect in extreme situations.

It's not rocket science but it's insane how often films get this stuff wrong. You can turn the noise and the bombast up as high as you like, but it's not going to work unless you have relatable and believable main characters to whom the story's events can happen.

Here we care about Bourne and Marie, and so even small moments matter when their safety is put on the line. This is coupled with a solid script and excellent direction from Doug Liman, coming off the indie hits Swingers and Go. There's a feeling of realism that helps centre the tension, helps elevate scenes that might otherwise be formulaic.

So like as an example, early on Bourne has just been to a bank in Zurich and found a lockbox under his name with loads of passports, money in various currencies, and a pistol. Exiting the bank, keyed up from this discovery, wondering who the hell he is, he notices he has caught the attention somehow of local authorities. A traffic warden across the street is paying him attention. Bourne immediately moves off in the other direction. As he turns the corner two police officers step out in front of him. But they're only on patrol, and not after him, although they turn to stare as he walks away. A siren suddenly wails. But it's just an ambulance passing. Bourne paces on. Two more officers coming towards him, and, without breaking stride, direct and full of purpose, Bourne steps across the path of an approaching tram, which barely misses him, putting distance between him and the officers. Bourne glances back. The officers are following, receiving instructions on their radios. Shit. Bourne pushes forwards, but two cop cars come wailing down the road from the direction he's walking. Panic. Bourne looks about. Spots an American flag. A US embassy. Before thinking his US passport is in his hand, he raises it to the guard on the gate, and he's inside, just as the Swiss police behind are stopped by the same guard ("Hold it. Wait. You've got no jurisdiction here."). But out of the frying pan, into the fire...

It's a strong scene, taut and tense, and it works despite its simplicity because we're invested. You don't need rooftop motorbike chases and crashing through windows this early on; we empathise with the character and at this stage it's stressful enough imagining being alone in a foreign city not knowing who you are and suddenly finding the police following you.

Oof, it's so late at night, once again, I desperately need bed.

What else, quickly?

The film looks gorgeous, overcast skies and sombre streets, a film of muted colours, with a palpable connection to the physical world, to tin coffee cups and coils of rope, to peeling paint and rusted metal, to beat up old Minis and ageing shotguns, to neon hotels hidden away down winding Parisian backstreets. The cinematography is great, and the visual storytelling is so assured as well, showing much with the elegance of simple match cuts and the continuation of lines of motion.

Its final act is rushed, tying up the complex threads too easily, with a ludicrous and too-willfully-violent escape from Bourne to cap it off.

I love Clive Owen's character as a rival assassin on Bourne's trail throughout the film. Culminates in a set piece at a farmhouse full of tension that instead of providing the drawn-out fight we're expecting suddenly explodes into a clash that is short-lived and messy and utterly lacking in glamour, exactly as I suppose it would be.

The relationship between Bourne and Marie is tender, heartfelt, well observed. Too often the quieter moments in Hollywood films feel like generic filler, like placeholder scenes that weren't important enough to be replaced, whereas here they're approached with the same care and attention that is brought to every scene, and they are successful because of it. The intimacy of the love scene, all glances and gentle initiating contact, with the camera pulling away as the two finally embrace, retreating out of the room, then out of the hotel, down the street, leaving it all behind as the neon flashes and the night hums in silence and we fade to black - man, it's a really nice moment, that.

And so that's Bourne Identity. A Hollywood blockbuster that's smart and believable and cool as all hell, liberal leaning in its politics, focused on character rather than bombast, asking subtle questions about the nature of personality, yet taut and thrilling all the same.

I wonder what the second one is like...

Day 110: Things I like

Got the sadness tonight, the wailing blues, but determined not to be ruled by it, so instead here are some things that make me happy:

- When you open the coffee bag in the morning and the fresh, chocolatey aroma hits your nose and you feel like maybe you'll be able to make it through this day after all.
- Reading a novel and finding a line about a far off city twinkling in the sunlight, or a fabulous hidden garden, or a vast mountain range marching to the horizon, and getting a shock of realisation at the breadth of the world and how much magic and beauty there is waiting in every direction.
- That first spoonful of fudge brownie ice cream before it's become sickly when it's still gloriously rich and indulgent.
- Becoming aware of how your vision isn't passive, like light hitting plates behind your eyes, but something active and alert and living, a reaching out into your environment, an exploratory hand of sight sweeping the world, touching it, caressing it; a meeting of self and other, at the mystical liminal boundary where the two merge. And then catching someone's eye and sensing your alert gaze entwining with their alert gaze. Feeling all the mechanisms of defence and caution you both erect to protect those pathways through the eyes that lead back down into the depths inside you, but sensing the possibility that these mechanisms could, perhaps only for the briefest of moments, be dropped.
- The first days of autumn when the breeze comes hard and cold and the leaves begin to turn and the air is clear and the light is fading and it is all so beautiful, so delicate, so doomed.
- Miles Davis and red wine by candlight.
- That opening paragraph of The Pale King, starting, "Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust," and ending with the line, "We are all of us brothers."
- Pretty much any camera movement in a Scorcese film.
- The listening booth scene from Before Sunrise.
- The sensitive, stubborn humanity of Kurt Vonnegut.
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, how he writes courageous and complex female protagonists matter-of-factly, as if it would be ludicrous for other male writers not to all do the same, which of course it is. How he refuses to allow his antagonists to meet grizzly ends getting the comeuppances they deserve, because in real life there are no real villains, no monsters, only human beings each with their own vast internal universes whom we should treat with respect and courtesy and love.
- That video doing the rounds on social media about the importance of the 60s American show Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood, what Rogers did for race relations, having a black policeman move in as his neighbour, inviting him round in a scene when Rogers was bathing his feet in a paddling pool on a hot day, asking the black policeman if he wanted to take his shoes and socks off and join him, which the policeman did, and the two men sat there, white and black feet naked and almost touching, the scene quietly telling children across the US and the world that this was normal, a million times normal, that, to borrow from The Pale King, we are all of us brothers. And for me now to think about this in days that grow dark with portents, as demagogues seek to divide us, and to remember that art can change the world, that there is always a choice between love and hate, always only one choice that matters, and that we are free to make it in every moment in which we still exist.

Day 109: Flogging a dead horse until it's Bourne again

Well I'm home after a close-open and I've done nothing this evening even moderately worthy of blogging about save watching the latest Bourne film, snappily titled Jason Bourne - because, you know, nothing says your franchise has run out of steam like releasing an ostensibly back-to-basics sequel announcing its intention to return to form via a stark, unadorned title - see: Fast and Furious, Rocky Balboa, The Predator, etc. etc. - and of course the film won't truly be a return to form, it'll be a dumb sequel like all the others, but naming it in such a way allows you to flog one more box-office return from the dead horse before you bury it for good. Or you reboot the franchise and start again. Or write a prequel explaining how the alien ship that no one cares about got onto the planet that no one remembers. Or you create an expanded universe tying your franchise to many other franchises. And Hollywood marches on.

Well, anyway, want to know what I thought of Jason Bourne?

I thought it was utter crap. Formulaic, paint-by-numbers dross. The first two Bournes were frenetic, no-nonsense European thrillers, slick and gritty and hip, hearty antidotes to the adolescent silliness of James Bond. Spy films not for 13-year-olds, but for... well, 16-year-olds. The thinking teen's spy film.

But Jason Bourne takes what could generously be described as the series' common elements and turns them into tired tropes, each existing with no internal logic or greater meaning beyond ticking off the hallowed checklist of Things All Bourne Films Must Contain.

So you've got your vulnerable potential sidekick who's killed off early on (spoilers), robbing Bourne of anyone with whom he could have formed an emotional connection. You've got your FBI or CIA or whatever director embroiled in nefarious schemes protecting a top-secret agency initiative.

Is there an assassin with preternatural abilities comparable to Bourne's own, referred to by the agency only as "the asset", brought it when bungling agents fail to get the job done, you ask? You bloody bet your sexy bum there is.

And how about a structure whereby Bourne is always a step ahead of the agency in every situation, except when the asset comes into play, which forces Bourne onto the back foot, until just as it looks like the agency has Bourne cornered it turns out his plan was an extra step ahead of them all along? Wow, you're good at this!

And if you guessed there's a female analyst character who realises Bourne isn't a baby-eater and comes over to his side when he needs her the most, and an interminable punch-up between Bourne and the asset, with both utilising makeshift weapons scavenged from the environment, and flashback scenes where shadowy memories from Bourne's past come back to haunt him, and a car chase where all the windows of the cars smash and the bonnets accordion and the bodywork crumples - if you've guessed all that then gold medals and meringues all round, because you sir or madam are right on the money.

That car chase: the asset, after being thwarted by Bourne, sneaks out of an expo centre while the cops are looking for him and into the fleeing crowds. Then this highly trained secret operative decides his best chance of escape is to knife a soldier in the back and steal a SWAT van, and he careens off into downtown Las Vegas with cop cars and helicopters and searchlights after him, as Bourne steals a Dodge Charger or something I think they said (I don't know cars) which was waiting with its keys in the ignition and obviously wasn't product placement paid for by Dodge (or whomever), and there the SWAT van is smashing into traffic and ramming cruisers, there's Bourne ragging it after him - and the scene ends up reminiscent of nothing so much as the inevitable conclusion to every play session of Grand Theft Auto ever, after you've got bored of the story missions and structure and everything and you decide to just steal the biggest vehicle you can find and smash through waves of police, shooting your Uzi out of the window, trying to hold out as long as you can before you're taken down in a blaze of glory, which takedown you don't end up minding so much because tea is almost ready and you're getting a headache and all this nonsense is a bit immature in honesty anyway.

That's Jason Bourne all over. An energetic shaky-cam dash through a plot that at heart is as nonsensical as any videogame, sticking to not just genre but franchise conventions with religious rigidity, falling eventually apart into noise and idiocy, as if everyone involved has realised their tea is ready and they're too old to still be doing this.

That chase scene culminates in Bourne and the asset wailing on each other in the moody shadows of a storm drain, back and forth, back and forth, two old men once possessed of killer instincts, now lacking the energy to finish the other off.

There's a metaphor for the entire series there somewhere, but it's too late at night for me to be able to quite find it, so all I'll say is that this film is so dumb that it literally has a character yell out a version of the "zoom and enhance" trope as if it wasn't the lamest plot device in all of screenwriting.

What a load of pish.