my dreams have moved · 27 August, 09:53 am by Michael Traynor
I’ve now merged this dreams and films blog into my other blog on this site. Also all the old posts from this blog are there. It seemed simpler.
The body I had to bury · 13 August, 10:01 am by Michael Traynor
A gloomy and tense atmosphere. I can see into a mausoleum or a mortuary. There is a body in an open coffin that I have to go and take out and bury in a grave. I never quite see the body but I know it is dark bluey-greyish and is possibly me. Martin agrees to help me but I can’t find him. I tentatively ask Steve and he is uncertain. He says he has only done this kind of thing once before and it went a bit wrong. He says something about having a face covered in dark dirt. I realise he thinks that I want help to embalm the body.
Later, or in another dream, I am waiting around in some public area, the foyer of a shopping complex or offices of places that I have worked. It is very late at night or rather early in the morning and I am with my boys and I am chatting to a man who I can see is covered in white luminous paint from a show he did earlier in the night. The whole place is seedy and the shops are selling pornographic videos. I am waiting to leave and I think I know I have to deal with the coffin in the morning. (In reality I had to return a hired van that I had damaged the next day.)
Underground areas and a man who is a lion · 25 July, 09:48 am by Michael Traynor
It is like a film or, I am thinking, is this a computer game? We follow a woman around as she, with trepidation, discovers an underground apartment hidden under a house. There is a strong feeling of danger.
Then I am outside on the street with a woman and we are waiting for someone. It is a smart part of a town. We are with a man who is somehow a lion, a dark lion and he has four long dark tails trailing on the ground. Suddenly our lift appears, a man driving a silver open top Mercedes and he drives over and parks on the man-lion’s tails. I say to the man-lion that this must hurt but he doesn’t seem to mind.
Tell No One · 21 June, 07:32 pm by Michael Traynor
Nice French thriller with all the right ingredients, red-herrings that throw you off the track, a twist at the end then another twist. Its pulse quickening. However, it lacked the aesthetic vision of films like Diva which another director could have brought.
Scott Walker 30th Century Man · 21 May, 05:47 pm by Michael Traynor
This film has stayed with me over the few days since I saw it. I always loved the old songs but was really alerted to him listening to tracks from his latest album on Late Junction. The songs were harrowing and sometimes difficult to listen to.
The film showed him intelligent and thoughtful about his work, and surrounded by producers arrangers and musicians who are also serious and excellent at what they do.
To educate myself I’ve just bought the flop ‘Scott4’ released then deleted in 1969 (From Fopp for £5), via Nightlines (I think it was called) I plan to come upto date with his last two releases.
My Cat is coughing up broken glass · 5 May, 06:24 pm by Michael Traynor
My cat is somewhere in the house and starts coughing up large pieces of broken bottle and blood, or is it wine? I look around and see he has broken a bottle by knocking it on the ground. I start to panic and wonder how I can call the vet.
The Lives of Others · 21 April, 08:56 am by Michael Traynor
florian henckel von donnersmarck, germany, film
Last night I saw The Lives of others, the much acclaimed debut feature film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Maybe because of the last vestiges of jet lag I found all the preceeding adverts and trailers boring and tiring so that by the time the film started I was already flagging. It played in a packed screen 1 at the cambridge picturehouse i.e. lots of people.
Its a good film, very plot and character driven, exploring the reign of the Stazi, state security surveillance in former East Germany during the 1980s before the wall came down in 1989, the year of my older son’s birth. The plot centres around a writer and his girlfriend (who is signalled to be sensuous in virtually everyshot). The real focus is around one Stazi surveillance expert who is detailed to listen in on their bugged flat and record any incidents of transgression on a nice old manual typewriter in the block’s attic (echoing Casablanca’s radical idealist couple, the operation is called ‘operation Lazlo’). Like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the interloper, Weisler, becomes drawn into the values and lives of the couple, and eventually sabotages the Stazi’s final plan to arrest him. Finally we see him in post-reunion Germany but I won’t say too much. The best and most poetic moments for me are when we see Weisler reading from a Brecht volume that he has stollen from the writer’s flat, and later see him moved to tear’s by the writer’s playing of Beethoven (I think) on his piano after a director friend has committed suicide. In a largely plot driven film, I found there was little poetry and economy and sometimes things felt rather laborious. However, overall this was a moving film and probably worth seeing.
Identity theft · 31 March, 02:59 pm by Michael Traynor
It is a kind of art installation. We see a room full of people, then two invisible men in black hooded costumes come in and silently marshal away two of the people and take them outside. Strangely, the people are still present in the room but they are lifeless grey forms now and their friends and relatives shake them in panic but cannot rouse them to respond. A caption comes up. It reads ‘Don’t be a victim of identity theft’.
going for refuge to Leonard Cohen · 5 March, 10:22 am by Michael Traynor
I am on a holiday, perhaps a coach trip to Edinburgh or Paris or somewhere else. There is some confusion or hiatus in the trip and I am alone for a while. I find myself in a cafe or cinema with Leonard Cohen and I am in tears, saying ‘I’m still a young person but already I am thinking about loss’. I am wondering how he will react. Then I am in a lift with a nurse and paramedics being taken to the emergency department. I am talking to them about my medical problem deciding whether to go to get help or not, being doubtful that its either serious or could be helped
The Science of Sleep · 19 February, 10:43 pm by Michael Traynor
Starring Gael García Bernal who I think should know better and Charlotte Gainsbourg, this film about French (and Mexican) youth in Paris somehow completely missed my sensibility. The dream scenes were whimsical and a moment of GGB’s acting reached the passion we know he is capable of, but the script and Gainsbourg’s acting irritated me. Not a memorable film for me. (Unlike Tarkovsky’s The Mirror which I bought on DVD yesterday… )