Reflections on being

When I haven’t been catch­ing up on work recently, I’ve been watch­ing film fest­ival films. The week­end has been par­tic­u­larly reward­ing: I highly recom­mend Al Gore’s An Incon­veni­ent Truth about cli­mate change and global warm­ing which I saw yes­ter­day, and the three films I saw today: C.R.A.Z.Y., a Québé­cois pro­duc­tion about a family of five boys, with the fourth one, Zac (the Z in the title) deal­ing with his sexu­al­ity and a homo­phobic father as he grows up through the 60s and 70s – the soundtrack is superb; Zizek!, a mad, ram­bling doc­u­ment­ary of every­one’s favour­ite Marx­ist Lacanian as he travels the world on a lec­ture tour; and the utterly bril­liant Global Hay­wire, Bruce Petty’s animated/live action doco about where the world machine man­aged to go from what seemed like a rel­at­ively good idea (borrow some sci­ence from the East, start the Enlight­en­ment and throw off the shackles of Cath­olic fun­da­ment­al­ism) to the utterly cata­strophic she­mozzle we have today. The detours through excel­lent the­or­ists and writers (George Mon­biot, Noam Chom­sky, Tariq Ali, Gore Vidal, Arand­hati Roy) are com­pel­ling and well put together, the meta­phor (the free­dom machine) is great. A must-see film.

In between I’ve been steal­ing every second to work, so I apo­lo­gise to those whose social func­tions I didn’t make it to. I *did* make it to qamar’s hen’s night, which was amaz­ing – divine dinner at Soul Mama and then ritual on the beach fol­lowed by karaōke – and to Matt’s party last night.

Matt’s party was fun, and it turns out, bizar­rely, that a guy there from The Age who was poin­ted out to me but who I didn’t end up chat­ting to is the guy our new ad man­ager men­tioned to me as a good friend. Small world!