Clerkenwell, And Short Films

O Northern Line! Where are you when we need you! A convoluted route took us to the Clerkenwell Festival, which feels more like an open air members-of-bands party than a festival. We missed the Dog Show (oh how I loved last year's lookalike competition, with the sad bulldog and the sad bulldog owner!).

Everyone was in the distance or close-up: I chatted to Ruth Tidmarsh, Peter Momtchiloff and Mike Slocombe, and traded waves and smiles with almost everyone else. We'd missed some of the jumble although I was tempted by an enormous Hawaiian shirt with colourful vinyl records printed all over it, but decided to savour the memory of last year's Cowboy shirt instead.

Everything was running a bit late and I missed Swell Maps' set as I headed over to Hoxton on the bus to the Art 'Otel (awful name) that's built on the grave of that superb pub, The Foundry. Oh, it tries very hard to be hip but ends up being more like Elon Musk's enormous echoing tin bowel. 

It was hosting the Kino Festival of Short Films, and my friend Valerie's son had produced one of them. All of last night's films were under the umbrella of Is This Where I Belong? and were documentaries about displaced people. I don't know how long this link will be active but here they are: https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/wwmk6n-kino-london-short-film-festival-where-i-belong-30th-aug-artotel-london-hoxton-london-tickets

They were all very, very different and were incredibly moving. Daniel's film In The Clouds tells the story of a little Iranian girl whose imaginary playmate is an older sister who has perished at sea (you don't discover this until the end of the film). Some of the films were utterly chilling (The Long Spring, about a group of people trafficked in a container, which was based on a true story), some heartwarming (Karim, about a Syrian boy who finally makes friends with a fellow football fanatic in the Netherlands), and some angering (a beautifully-shot film, We're All Black Down Here, about the consequences of racism towards a Caribbean miner in a coal mine in the 1950s). 

In The Clouds was touching, sad and charming in equal measure. Beautiful.

The films had a very deep emotional effect on me and I left feeling the seriousness of the terrible imbalances of power we have as humans. Documentaries are really important: the people who make them spend time thinking about constructing a reality out of an unreal format, film, that conveys the intensity of human situations. Things we see out of the corners of our eyes are brought into full focus so we can't ignore them. 

Strangely, the night before I'd watched Wham! Ten Days In China and there was a very odd disjunction between that and the content of short films- especially knowing what eventually happened to George Michael. Life turns some people into stars and some people into victims of terrible people and terrible circumstances. It's probably best (a) never to compare your circumstances to anyone elses, and (b) enjoy every second you possibly can, because every second matters.

The journey home by tube was populated by people returning from Notting Hill Carnival, many of them very sparkly, and some of them clearly having imbibed a jolly amount of booze.

Nothing to report on the recording front, apart from some fiddly editing in passing this afternoon...