blog.djstead.net

Oh the irony. Here comes a blog whining about the EU Referendum, at the almost apex of the culmination of weeks, nay months, of people going on and on and on about it. So I completely understand if you decide to skip over this one. - I would too, if I didn’t feel the need to write it… Rather than a comprehensive flowing essay, I’m going to jump between points. Why are we even having this? (read from bottom to top) @DavidAllenGreen on twitter makes a fair point. I tweeted the other way - if we’re going to have a referendum on EU membership; why don’t we have a referendum on retaining the NHS? Or scrapping trident? Obviously I sense the slippery slope here - and don’t necessarily mean that we should have a referendum on all of these things. But I do make the point again the #DemocracyIsBroken Why have I been given an arbitrary say in Britain’s membership of the European Union (something I am not aggressively educated about), and not about oth...

I tried writing a blog about Orlando. Specifically how disconnected I felt from it all. This blog will probably get off-track and into dubious territory pretty quickly, so probably best abandon all hope ye who enter here… I didn’t mean being disconnected *specifically* from that most recent event; I meant all ‘similar’ events (apologies if classing it as ‘just one of yet another mass shootings in the US’ diminishes people’s particular emotions with regards to this most recent one) - which expands to include the Paris shootings (Bataclan/Charlie Hebdo), “current events in Syria” [which frankly I just don’t know what that is anymore], and quite probably the countless tragic events/ongoing situations in recent months and years that have either passed me by; or just washed over me as yet another example of how I shirk the impossible task of fixing all that is wrong with humanity. Orlando is undoubtedly a tragedy; especially for the community that has been specifical...

I used to think that loneliness was next to godliness. And by that I am referring to my philosophical foundations of ultimately being alone; and being true to that reflection of existence. Because - ultimately - yours is the only life you truly experience, so everything else is a pleasant bonus. What this waffling actually meant was that I would be happiest alone, weaving an existence that flitted between hobbies/interests/friendship groups and I felt safe and secure. I think looking back that serenity was in part down to having a stable friendship group, but only needing good friends and nothing ‘more’. That started to change four years ago now, when the idea of forming a more direct close relationship with another person, not only became appealing, but it became part of my emotional make-up. For the first time in my life, the desire to be part of something with a specific other person ruled my decisions and - at times - every waking thought. - Of course the reality of human relatio...

Another blog post, another pretentious title. And already I am slipping into a familiar vernacular - talking to myself, whilst being aware that I might not be alone and others might be listening. Yet this is not about my outward narrative. This is not about how I am perceived; this is not what I am about; this is not ‘my jam’; this is not how I want others to remark on my existence (not that I expect that). This is literally about how I communicate. Or - more accurately - how I am failing to communicate. Okay, so strictly that isn’t true - quite clearly here I am communicating, possibly adequately, about my current mental hurdle. But this is the best I can do. I’m beginning to realise that I am not very good at talking to people. I rely heavily upon existing tropes, cliches, memes - parroting conversations I have heard from TV, film, theatre, books, radio, and so forth. And the form of my dialogue is deeply rooted in how I was educated, brought up, and sociall...

This may seem like the most obvious statement in the history of anything, but conversation is the only way in which we can put across our world view. [And by ‘world view’ I don’t just mean our philosophies/beliefs about Life, The Universe and Everything; I also mean what you thought of that episode of a TV series you watched, what you made of the food you’ve just eaten, etc.] You could argue that there are other ways in which you can communicate - art is often cited as one such medium - but how can you communicate something without the context of words, about a piece of music/painting/sculpture etc. Whilst I’m sure this has been attempted - a piece of music written expressly to convey a person’s feelings about another piece of music they have heard - I don’t believe that can be successful as it relies on the narrative in the composer’s head being successfully interpreted by the listener. Now I am fully aware that even putting words around the piece of music (say in t...

In November it has been (not all on the same date): British Sausage Week World Diabetes Day Alcohol Awareness Week Movember Transgender Awareness Week and (I kid you not) Counter-Terrorism Awareness Week Now there will be a myriad of reasons why these events exist - reasons of health, reasons of commerce, reasons of security, reasons of education, and so on - but one the reasons is to raise awareness. And some are done in a lighthearted vein; British Sausage Week is a harmless(?) commercial drive to push British Produce ™ and give something for breakfast DJs to have a lighthearted segment about: Movember is a lighthearted way of raising funding for some more serious issues. Others are born out of necessity - Alcohol Awareness Week is one way the strain on the NHS can be tackled (IE stop drinking so much - it hospitalises you) and presumably Counter-Terrorism Awareness Week is designed to remind us to help fight in the war on terror, by questioning all forms of u...

Unfortunately for me, a combination of AmDram commitments this week, and a training course Down South next week, meant my annual dabble into the Leeds Film Fest was limited to just three films this year. Here are my hot-off-the-press-and-probably-not-entirely-thought-through reviews… Victoria I’ll start with the one most fresh in my mind [it played this evening]. As a technical and artistic exercise, Victoria is very, very impressive. Shot in one single take over nearly two-and-a-half hours (and I believe the take they used for the film was only their third or fourth), it follows the story of the eponymous girl who has seemingly little to lose as she falls in with a gang of men she meets outside a Berlin night club, and seems complicit in going along with their plans late that night/early that morning. Whilst this film was a tense thriller; most of that for me was an uncomfortable feeling right from the start that Victoria should not have got caught up in the scenario she did, and wh...