It’s been a rollercoaster of variety already: funny, serious, questioning,
confrontational… Here’s what I’ve got up to at this year’s Queer Contact so far.
Life’s A Drag is a piece by artist Jez Dolan looking at Manchester’s drag
history, and present day, and these live performances represent the first
fruits of an ongoing project. Written with playwright Chris Hoyle, Life’s a
Drag is a meta-comedy where we see two drag queens preparing backstage for a
show. While they bitch, kvetch, laugh and take us on a journey back in time via
the make-up box, they teach one another about the relevance of their own particular
school of drag and gayness, from Polari to RuPaul. We encounter legends and
legendary nights out, from Foo Foo Lamaar to the Hulme drag ball, and it’s all done
with such a light touch that it feels like a genuine eavesdrop, even as they
kick down the fourth wall with heels. There’s a superbly moving moment with a
pair of earrings that crystallises what the piece is about for me, plus an
astonishingly good musical medley at the end, sung across the decades, but no spoilers
as to the songs…
FAdoubleGOT and The Daily Grind worked well on the same bill. The former is Jamal Gerald’s very personal story,
encompassing bullying, education, a second-generation immigrant experience,
youth, sexuality and life in a Northern town. Using monologue, symbolism, music
and pop culture, it’s performed with a charming combination of earnestness and
sass that perhaps even its very young creator isn’t fully aware of. He’s also a
terrific poet and his verse threads neatly through the piece as he goes. The Daily Grind is the work of a slightly older, very serious theatre maker, all about life on dating apps. Don’t be surprised
if you feel vulnerable and discomfited as much as moved to laughter. The dissonance of the performance comes from its single performer and writer,
Laurie Brown, flitting between friendly, camp, menacing and monstrous. For
anyone in the know it mirrors convincingly the Jekyll and Hyde nature of online
encounters. The last five minutes of the show were a borderline genius move.
A personal highlight so far has been Outspoken, the poetry and spoken word event. A real triumph of
curating, the breadth of writing styles and extremely high standard of performance,
not to mention the content which ran from surreal to sad to hilarious to
too-damn-true, made for a really inspirational evening. Such a treat to see Jackie Kay
perform, and a first real life encounter too with my online favourite, poet AJ
McKenna. Also introduced me to astonishing work from Paula Varjack and Keith Jarrett
too. Seek them out.
Another personal favourite was STUD,
a bizarre and hilarious journey through masculinity and the world of horses (yes,
horses). Created and performed by a truly confident and accomplished performer,
like no other show on the bill the audience were in this performer’s hands
from the opening seconds. It’s hard to even describe the show or why it works
so well, suffice to say after twenty minutes you stop even noticing the
glorious pubic bush that’s constantly on show. It’s a piece that gently
terrorises gender, with a handsaw, a raw carrot, whatever comes to hand or hoof. Eilidh
McAskill, I salute you.
Still to come for me: Our Lady J, which will be a Valentine musical weekend
sensation, and a religious experience in the shape of Jesus Queen of Heaven, on
a Sunday of course… Full line up is here,
and check out the pics from my own Queer Contact event right here.
See you soon…!
Victoria Baths, and Ancoats, and now Number One First
Street… The soft launch of HOME is bringing us ever-closer to HOME itself and
it’s a genuinely exciting feeling. From the makeshift theatre foyer on the second
floor of this smart office building, serenaded by a live guitar player, and
with a lovely craft beer in hand, you can look out (through snowflakes in my
case) and see the new building emerging over the way.
On Tuesday, fittingly, I saw ‘Tuesdays at Tescos’ inside
the pleasant temporary performance space. You might have seen me Facebooking
about how good it was. The final performance is tonight, and you should treat
yourself. You can even get half-price ticket deals on the HOME website.
The play is a one-hour monologue spoken by Pauline,
a trans woman renegotiating her relationship with her ageing father now that
she has been able to reveal her true self, or, ‘Me. As I am. Now.’, as she
says, softly and repeatedly like a mantra.
I came
away feeling very moved by Scott Kentell’s performance. He brought a
gentle sincerity to a very good script. His performance was assured and insightful
(I can’t imagine Simon Callow’s was a better, and I’m a fan).
The director Sue Womersely and performer Scott Kentall are interviewed here:
‘Tuesdays…’ is part of the 2015 Re:Play Festival, an annual
selection of theatre that gives audiences a second chance to see the best work
from the previous twelve months.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday gives you another
chance to catch Jenny May Morgan’s portrayal of a questionably-talented author of
women’s erotica pushing her latest work, complete with mucky novel extracts… An
Evening of Filth and Despair promises to reach into dark and delicious Julia
Davis comedy territory.
On Saturday night, Chris Hoyle’s play Two Spiritsdramatises the
story of the three Sioux Warriors who came to Salford in the late
nineteenth-century as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show. This coming together of disparate cultures
was researched heavily by the playwright during time spent in Dakota and a
documentary about his time there will screen after the play. Theatre and film
for one ticket, not to be missed.
Re:Play is not only a great chance to see quality
new work so cheaply but it will also whet your appetite for the big HOME-coming
too…
Lord
knows I love Larry Kramer but I was underwhelmed by the 2014 adaptation of The Normal Heart, Kramer’s drama about the
formation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first body to attempt to tackle the mysterious
illness we now know as the AIDS pandemic. The play was originally staged in
1985. Kramer then wrote a screen version for direction by Ryan Murphy last year,
in which there was somehow less of a sense that the world didn’t care about a
disease killing New York’s ‘undesirables’, than that the disease itself was actually
only happening to a dozen people in a telephone crisis centre. The world felt
oddly remote, and not for the right reasons. In 1969, Kramer’s sexy screenplay
update of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
won him an Oscar nomination, but time didn’t seem to be working in his favour for
a twenty-first century Normal Heart. There
was something of the clunky and anachronistic exposition we are all supposed to accept
in this post-Downton Abbey world, but
I was oddly unmoved by it, plus I straight up did not rate Jim Parsons. Having
said that, Julia Roberts gave a great turn as the Virginia Woolf-like scientist providing
a lone voice of reason and restraint as the virus gathered pace; Mark Ruffalo I
could happily watch sanding door frames with the sound off; and Joe Mantello’s
manic diatribe as the body count hopelessly increased, was, I think, award-winning
stuff. But the road was full of rocks to get you there.
If you want a lesson in narrative grace, watch Transparent.
In fact if you want a lesson in most of the important skills of contemporary drama,
Transparent has them – script, pace,
casting, story, you name it. And it doesn’t make things easy on itself. Turning-point
scenes happen off-screen, there are numerous flashbacks, temporal dislocation, narrative
uncertainty. But it’s all water tight, and so consistently and persistently
emotionally fraught that it’s best to sit back and not speak for a while after
each episode. It’s also the most genuinely queer thing I’ve seen in ages. The fluidity
of gender and sexual identity is practically torrential in Transparent. It’s a story that’s as much about navigating human
desire across all manner of boundaries/binaries as it is about a trans woman –
the blindingly talented Jeffrey Tambor as Maura – coming out to her family of
adult children. It’s listed on IMDb under ‘Comedy’ but I can’t think what for –
other than as some kind of categorical titillation to prevent a straighter
audience being deterred. Regardless, it does have plenty of funny moments,
effortlessly and circumstantially funny that is, and therefore real comedy, the
comedy of life rolling on with pitfalls and errors. What I like most about it
though is that it has is no discernible interest in ‘normalising’ trans or
queer experience – doing so would cost the story the uniqueness that convinces you
that you have never seen anything like this before.
At this year’s re:play festival, comedy pair Katie Norris
and Sinead Parker continue their occasionally macabre and wilfully tasteless sketch
‘n’ song showcase ‘All Our Friends Are Dead’, as seen at the Edinburgh Fringe
and elsewhere. Political correctness is ditched (seriously, nothing and nobody
is out of bounds) in favour of jaw-dropping ‘you can’t say that’ moments driven by the twosome’s strong character-based
comedy – think Little Britain rather than
Mel and Sue.
Amongst audience favourites are corrupt versions of Disney songs,
less ‘bastardised’ and more ‘made orphans of’. For instance, contrived individualism (‘I’m reading Sylvia Plath actually, but in Japanese…’)
and gimmicky personality add-ons (‘Can I
have a latte, and can you write my name in the foam please…’) are hilariously
pulled apart in ‘Everybody Wants To Be A
Twat’. I’m still singing it now.
At this point Norris and Parker’s formidable performance
skills are a small step ahead of their writing but the pace is so rollicking and
the material so broad that if you don’t like one sketch there’s another one just
around the corner with your name on it.
I am personally recovering from exposure to the funny/bleak persona
of Brian, with his carton of juice, urine-stained trousers, and tiny wife in
the attic with nothing but a hotline to Domino’s and a rocking chair to keep
her company. Until now… Single to Royston Vasey please…
The Smiths were a major part of the reason I moved to
Manchester half my life ago, although I wasn’t expecting to find them still hanging
round the Arndale Centre (or maybe I was…) In any case they were
done and dusted by the time I arrived in September ‘96. The city centre was in
shreds after the Corporation Street bomb in June, the Hacienda was a few months
from shutting up shop for good, and even Morrissey’s solo career highlights were
largely behind him.
I’ve always enjoyed the unique line Morrissey manages to
tread between potential tabloid fodder and pop’s last enigma. The confessionals
are there on the records if you want them, but in terms of the life lived
behind the songs there was always a certain gravitas that came with not knowing too much. Someday soon we will
no doubt be faced with Morrissey: The
Movie made by a twenty-four year old Californian newly-besotted with The
Smiths, and it will be monstrous, and Morrissey is wise to get his version of
events in first. But, as Germaine Greer said of Michael Jackson’s never-to-be
comeback tour, I for one was dreading it…
A great lyricist doesn’t necessarily make for a great prose
writer of course, and when it emerged that Autobiography
would be packaged in advance as a ‘Classic’ – a bit like those two-year old
Disney films you’ve never heard of – I feared Morrissey’s literary aspirations might
bury his story under pretension and hyperbole. The opening pages threaten to do
just that. Where you might expect the standard biographical establishment of
family line, or in this case perhaps a grisly flash-forward to the notorious Smiths’
royalties trial, the introduction is at least original and is given over to the
city of Manchester itself, as Morrissey finds it and as it finds him, ‘where everything lies wherever it was left
over one hundred years ago.’ There is added sentiment for me in his naming lesser-known
Mancunian locations that I know well and could cycle to in minutes: Mayfield Road,
Longford Park, The Three Legs O’ Man. But the city is hard, and is only the
most brutal character in a brutal line up. At home the Dwyer/Morrissey family
cossets, but school and the streets are a Darwinian assault course where the girls
start the fights and the boys, including our hero, take it on the chin.
Morrissey’s prose style is verbose, riddled with adverbs, often
rambling, and, like his later studio albums, you have to take the rough
with the smooth. So for instance, while we might have coped with slightly fewer
film plot synopses, these are offset by glorious descriptive passages on 1960s television, destined
to be quoted in academia. But for the most part, what Morrissey has written is an
accomplished, moving and occasionally hilarious present-tense narrative, which,
when he can take control of his writing, rings with the bold veracity of a
semi-ordinary boyhood and a truly extraordinary adult life. In one scene he is
a child, mesmerised, watching David Bowie establish his extra-terrestrial magic
on the television – in the very next moment he is back in school witnessing the
needless abuse of a classmate for biting his nails. The sensation of yearning
for something bigger, more exciting and more civilised is painfully tangible in the contrast.
Morrissey is at his inflamed best when discussing music. The
New York Dolls are ‘the slum of all
failures, had nothing to lose and could scarcely differentiate between night
and day.’ Siouxsie Sioux is ‘a black-eyed
shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame’, the
music she makes is ‘a strict ice-bath of
nightmare and caution.’ Oddly then, when it comes to his own music, Morrissey’s
powers run dry. Of that batch of immaculate early Smiths songs that seemed ready
to burst, perfectly intact from a Stretford bedroom and drafty rehearsal space,
the author is quiet to the point of frustration, and before you know it The
Smiths are off on their first US tour. While we learn that the Algonquin Hotel is
riddled with cockroaches, or that 80 per cent of global warming is attributable
to the meat industry, That joke isn’t
funny anymore has been written, and Shakespeare’s
sister – described by Morrissey at the time as ‘the song of my life’ – with no mention of how, or why. Now is the time to say! Instead we receive
a statistician’s dull smorgasbord of Billboard positions and venue capacities in
American cities, and suddenly The Smiths are through.
There is plenty of humour along the way though. At a Roxy Music
gig, singer Bryan Ferry ‘shuffles crab-style
from stage left to stage right like someone who’s had his food dish removed.’
Of a flamboyant teenaged acquaintance Morrissey writes, ‘I am astounded at his survival in child-eating Collyhurst.’ Russell
Mael of Sparks, ‘sings in French italics
with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree.’ These cultural snapshots
suit Morrissey well – in his oblique way he suggests it might even have been the words of poets
John Betjeman or W. H. Auden that persuade him to be a performer – anything
more monumental (Thatcher, Nature, the justice system) and he resorts to histrionics. An uncharacteristically restrained summary of singer Sandie Shaw’s music is later explicated
as a grudge held over Shaw visiting Germany with The Smiths and leaving Morrissey
at home. Morrissey is the man, let’s recall, who knelt at Shaw’s feet clutching
a rosary, and the antennae are thereafter poised for other personally-motivated revisions.
Rough Trade Records emerge as a collection of the stupidest people ever to end
up in the wrong profession. In particular Morrissey is able to recall verbatim the countless idiot statements
that leave the unfortunate mouth of label owner Geoff Travis. Producer Stephen
Street he admires, and Mick Ronson, and Angie Marr, and, for a long time,
Johnny himself – until the trial.
When the trial arrives, in which Smiths drummer Mike Joyce
sues Morrissey and Marr for a quarter of all Smiths royalties (despite there
being no contract to that effect), down comes Johnny from his pedestal for the
crime of collusion, and in Morrissey’s eyes The Smiths are irrevocably toppled
too. It is a convoluted and bizarre miscarriage which you might be forgiven for
thinking is happening in real time. Fifty pages are consumed by it (whereas a
ground-breaking song like Asleep, for
instance, about
which whole essays have been written, warrants not a mention). Throughout the trial,
the book, and his life, Morrissey is unaccountably unable to find a good
manager, a viable lasting record deal, or any decent legal representation
(while his penniless ex-drummer romps to victory on the strength of free Legal
Aid). What this sad litany of underperforming individuals undeniably have in
common is Morrissey himself. The greatest insights in Autobiography might exist between those lines – Morrissey simply cannot
deal with other human beings – but then he did tell us that before, once or
twice...
As in life, there are no chapters, barely any paragraphs and no index, therefore no skipping ahead to Jake Walters or Alan Bennett or the
Finsbury Park debacle. It’s written in US spelling throughout, for whatever
reason, and ‘The Smiths’ are apparently ‘the Smiths’. These
things count. As a special mention, the blurb is atrocious, obsessively listing
chart positions and sales, name-checking Tel-Aviv and My Chemical Romance (!)
but not Johnny Marr. For some reason Morrissey is horribly mean about fat
people and occasionally denigrating about women's bodies. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it… And as for Mike Joyce – who
was apparently able to galvanise all of the dislike towards Morrissey that had ever
existed into crippling monetary fines and a public humiliation – there’s a tiny
bar just a few doors down from my flat in South Manchester where Mike DJs every
Thursday night. Whether he plays for love or money, I couldn’t say. Listen: Morrissey: Autobiography, the music.
Is it just me or does everyone else end up buying new headphones every
couple of months? I’m fed up of it. To date I have been through two of those
little white thingies for my iPhone, a black pair of similar, two sets of those
gym ones that go over your ears (lost the rubber ear-shaped thing both times), then
I bust my lovely Sony MDR-V500s in a messy DJ brawl one Halloween. Now I DJ
with some shiny Numark Redwaves but those bad boys don't leave the house unless
it's for a gig. So for everyday use I've
plumped for some Sennheiser HD 201s. So far I like them. They’re sounding great
from my stereo, my iPhone 4S and my laptop. They make the most of the volume and I'm hearing neat little treble detail I never heard before, plus they keep
the bass in and the city out. I have a problem with weighty headphones that dig
the sides of my glasses into my head. These do not; they are light, and the
cushions line the outside of your ears so your ears can breathe and your
glasses aren’t pressured. It would be better if they had the cable going to just
one side of the headphones, but it’s a minor quibble. I’m taking extra good
care of them...
CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) is a very modern charity. It was founded in 2006 to help tackle the alarmingly high suicide rate amongst young men in the UK (though CALM helplines are open to all). About three-quarters of suicides are men and if you’re under 35 and living in the UK it’s statistically the biggest killer there is.
Tony Wilson was a founding trustee of the charity and his personal investment in it needs no explanation. Appropriately enough it is Factory Foundation who have issued Thirty One,a double CD of music, chosen and compiled by Dave Haslam, to help raise enough money to keep the CALM phone lines open all week round for the people who need them. Thirty One is not only the number of tracks, it is a dangerous age for a young man to be. As Dave points out in the liner notes, many of us know someone who didn’t make it. The need for a charity like CALM is self-evident. Having an opportunity to be open and upfront about how you feel is essential for good mental health. Unfortunately ours is a culture that seems to discourage this skill in young men. It’s ten years since I took my first steps in that direction and contacted a kind lady down the road from my house in Chorlton with a much-needed friendly ear. Once a week I would talk and she would listen and between us we would try to piece together why I was falling apart. The act of talking seemed like a newly-discovered valve for releasing everything poisonous I’d wanted to keep inside. Prior to that I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I was living with my three best friends and couldn’t say a word to anyone about how unhappy I was. Talking to a concerned outsider helped turn my life around, and that’s the very thing CALM are experts at.
Anyway, onto the music. It’s often the case that charity albums are terribly worthy but content-wise, not so great. This is mercifully not the case with Thirty One. It will be a fixture on your stereo. It’s a cracking tribute to the breadth of style and talent in the North West, past and present. Intentionally or otherwise, many songs have a poignant connection to the cause behind the compilation. Guy Garvey’s spoken intro to an iridescent live version of ‘lippy kids’ (my love of which is well-documented) contains sage words about demonisation of the young, while the title of Jez Kerr’s ‘Reason I Feel Like An Alien’ speaks for itself. The mighty Everything Everything contribute their cover of Gloworm’s ‘Carry Me Home’, the lyrics of which reach out with new poignancy: ‘I did everything I could do. It’s just a phase in life that everyone goes through. Carry me home. Don’t be too long…’ Even the sweetly Northern title of Mr Scruff’s ‘Chin Up’ brings a lump to the throat.
Highlights elsewhere include Vieka’s ‘Never’; impeccably icy and avant-garde, built around Glass-esque piano and chilling samples of whinnying horses. Beating Wing Orchestra deliver a trademark global sound-clash with mesmerising vocals. D/R/U/G/S contributes an infectious and spartan bleep masterpiece while J.P. Cooper’s ‘Oh Brother’ is acoustic heartbreak in a jar.
Manc faves such as Noel Gallagher, I Am Kloot and The Whip nestle comfortably alongside young whipper-snappers like Delphic and Dutch Uncles and less well-known gems like Lonelady and Ruby Anne Patterson. Soul, techno, indie, it’s all here; imagine driving round and round the city all night in the summer with the windows open, that’s the sound of Thirty One. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for someone you love or someone you miss. Just buy it, here.
The CALM Helpline can be reached on 0800 58 58 58 and their website is here.
2011:I turned 33. It looks like I will outlive Jesus after all (touch wood). This little blog turned 3 years old. Look what I was doing back then; not much eh? This year I had my tenth anniversary working for Manchester University Press and my fifteenth anniversary of living in Manchester. I moved here in September 1996, three months after the IRA bomb. Mum wasn’t happy. Also this year I showed up in the Manchester Evening Newsand Attitude magazine with a load of Manchester chums. Click click flash flash darling.
I quit smoking in September, this time for good. I’m doing really well and enjoying life without cigarettes. *clicks heels* It was the right time. You should all try and quit this year. Apart from anything else it does wonders for your hangovers.
Our amazing dog Sam died this year. ‘Sammy Lammy Lambkin’ to those who loved him, and we really did love him. We had him from a puppy and he was ours for seventeen years. When I would pack up my bags to go back to University at the start of term he would sit on them to try and make me stay. He was a big dumb sweet thing and our family isn’t the same without him. Good bye Sammy…
In capital ‘P’ Politics, ‘Occupy’ and the ‘99%’ movement may have deftly solved a problem that Socialists have been mulling over for decades: how to make the middle class realise they are part of the working class, and how to make the working class feel enfranchised by middle class dissent. More power to it. The 1% canbe dismantled, I feel sure of it. They got the guns but we got the numbers.
In music, Morrissey ends the year without a record deal and I wonder/worry that we might have heard the last of him once again. In related news, Bon Iver overtook not just Elliott Smith but Morrissey himself as my most played artist this year. Times they are a-changin’…
Amy Winehouse died in July. Not long afterwards we went to Camden Square bearing gifts to say goodbye in the slightly flimsy but well-intentioned way that you might when somebody’s music has been in your heart through some important things. I’m so sad about it still. ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ always stopped me in my tracks but these days it sounds too sad to bear. It was a hot day in Camden and I’ll always remember the shadows on the High Street and the lovely friends I was with, and writing out lyrics with a silver pen on the train down to London like a teenager.
Here’s what the rest of 2011 looked like from here. This write-up has been brought to you by THESE SONGS RIGHT HERE…
The family…
I became an uncle this year, not once but twice. After a somewhat agonising pregnancy for my poor little sister Clare, baby Jack arrived in January, complete with personality and appetite and sass from the off. He is the spit of Clare, ergo beautiful, but I sense a degree of forthcoming naughtiness previously pioneered by my brother Sean. Fun times ahead! Then in June little Stanley James followed for my big sister Emma and to start with he was just the opposite of Jack. He arrived a bit early and we had to worry and fuss over his weight, there was barely anything of him, he was like a little Victorian baby, all swaddled and passive. Then he just bloomed. I heard him giggle for the first time last week and, well, it’s just the reason you get out of bed in the morning isn’t it? Our two beautiful boys. There’s so much to show them, I can’t wait… *makes pile of books, records and travel guides*
The trips...
New York in March. Glastonbury in June. Berlin in September. Festival in Murcia. Loads of London and Stratford and Liverpool and Sheffield. And Salford...
The parties...
In the summer I DJ’d to help raise money for my friend Amber’s boob-job. In Liverpool I played at the Alternative Miss Liverpool pageant for a gorgeous crowd of gender terrorists in taffeta. Off The Hook had its first birthday party. Our new wayward disco baby Drunk At Vogue had her first outing after two years of daydreaming about it and several months of me and my friends working like disco dogs to make it happen. (Eyes peeled for more parties in the New Year). I’ve played at a gay wedding, a photography exhibition, on a boat on the Irwell, in a warehouse, a disused office, at Dalston Boys Club, Clique, Bollox, the Contact Theatre, the Northern Quarter Loves U Festival (before Mr Scruff!), in full Halloween make up and in my underwear at a fetish party. Good year.
The starfucking...
This year I met Jarvis Cocker backstage at the Town Hall after his wonderful interview with Dave Haslam. I ate some of his Pringles. I chatted to Victoria Wood at the International Festival. I slept in Elbow’s tipi at Glastonbury with Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers drinking on the grass outside. I saw the lovely Kirsten Dunst and the awful Lily Allen backstage. I drank and DJ’d with Joel Gibb in Berlin, swapped messages with John Grant about his Glastonbury appearance and the Weekend movie (more of which later), got invited to Spain by Jonsi, met Tim Burgess on Halloween, and had a full drunken body hug with Alan Hollinghurst. I think I’m done…
The movies...
‘I’ve been a lot to the movies lately; the last one ruined my heart...’ sang Jonas Alaska on one of my favourite songs of the year. He wasn’t wrong; a couple of real heartbreakers left their mark on me this year.
‘There was a mother who came to the [AIDS ward] and one... two... three times she lost her boys there...’
‘We really had a great time. We would go out dancing and then I would come home and sleep. Unfortunately none of those men are alive today...’
‘All of the guys in that office got infected. And they all died except one...’
‘Everybody in that study died but me...’
We Were Here was the documentary we were all waiting for. A handful of articulate and erudite voices talk us through their personal accounts of life in San Francisco at the time the AIDS epidemic hit the city. It was a time of weekly funerals and young gay men walking around ‘like concentration camp victims’ and of scarcely believable quantities of fortitude and love. Make it a duty to watch this film and pay your respects.
Like We Were Here, Weekend managed to be both life-affirming and terribly painful. Understated performances, incredibly sexy, and shot with the cinematic quality (and guidance) of a Quinnford and Scout photograph, this got under my skin in a way I hadn’t expected. As an almost-love-story it made a few people take a good hard look at themselves, myself included. I was supposed to go for post-movie drinks the night I watched it but I couldn’t; instead I walked around the city by myself for an hour in a cinematic and dreadfully upsetting fashion listening to ‘What’s In It For Me?’ by Avi Buffalo on endless repeat. But really, what’s in it for me? Maybe I should find out…
The boys…
Come off it, I’ve got to save something for the autobiography haven’t I?
The future...
Next year it will be ten years since I came out of the closet at the tender age of 24 (on my Mum’s birthday). To coin a 2011 phrase, It Gets Better. I’m making a list of resolutions as always; let’s see how life intervenes. I’m working on Novel Number 2 and maybe re-hashing Novel Number 1, or maybe not. DJing as much as I can, trying to make the world a better place, having a spring clean, the usual. As for the blog, I have an exciting project beginning in January. It’s called ‘Manchester: In Residents’ and every week or so I will hand the reins of Manhattanchester to a different fascinating individual to let them tell their own particular Manchester story; how they got here and where they’re at. Let’s see the city from the inside. I’ve already had some brilliant responses. Tune in…
