One of the things I really like about it, other than its reminding me of the excitement of discovering these film-related ideas for the first time, is that it lets me rediscover some of these things.

In his radio and TV spots (which I download through the podcasts because I don’t listen to the radio or watch TV on a Saturday morning anymore), he talks about the trends in film now and how they’ve come to be. Sure he reviews recent releases but he does a lot more than that, too. He seems to be doing to film what the Channel 9 commentary team did for cricket in the 1980s.

I mention all of this because I was watching his one of his recent TV spots (which I’ve conveniently included below) and in all this talking about shaky camera-work and the way it’s currently he used to distract us from poor writing, he also goes back to de Sica and Bicycle Thieves from 1948.

A long time has passed since I last saw Bicycle Thieves and when I first saw it I was concentrating too much on the low-fidelity sound and the dodgy print that the cinema got its hands on. I could tell it was an emotional story but I was distracted somewhat and not sufficiently concentrating on how the director was putting his story across.

In this tiny clip I saw everything I needed to get me excited about good film again. Yes, I have strayed but mostly because I struggled to find the wonder. But in the clip Marc’s chosen, where the father loses his bicycle and only form of income, everything that needs to be said comes across in the actor’s face. He goes through the phases in about 4 seconds from “hey, that guy stole my bike” to “how am I going to support my family”.

We see enough of the thief himself to know what’s going on, but the story is told in the father’s face. It’s in his reaction and the subsequent choices he makes. In that tiny moment we are given a glimpse into this man’s future and none of us like what we see. It’s a beautiful film moment.

It’s the emotion that tells a good story. It’s the story-teller’s job to strip away all the artifice, all the distractions, and give us the emotion.

For more on directors working closely with actors on portraying the minutia of emotion, listen to John Malkovich on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell.

For now, please to enjoy Marc Fennel telling it like it is about film.

As new things came up, became popular and were subsequently identified in the mainstream media as “time wasters”, the message came down from on-high that it had to be blocked.

I also once worked for an institution that had its own email system and wanted to force all involved to use only that email system. So they blocked as many webmail clients as they could. Nothing else was blocked. Just email. When someone tried to access Gmail, for example, they saw a notice telling them to use the email account given to them by the institution. They were also, quite unhelpfully, told to give all their friends that email address. Unhelpful because they couldn’t access their accounts to download address books.

All of these things say to me that there are people, people in authoritative positions who don’t understand the nature of the internet. They just don’t understand the freedom we’ve been given and subsequently don’t understand the anger we feel at having these freedoms taken away from us.

A business that does not create an atmosphere of trust amongst their staff is actually encouraging staff to find their way around these problems. Really. There will be backlash.

Businesses are in the fairly unique position of being able to choose who becomes part of their organisation. They select their staff. They vet them. If staff members aren’t doing their work then they need to look at the cause of the problem. Checking Facebook several times a day is a symptom of a bigger problem. An employee who is challenged, encouraged and excited by their job will complete work before taking on something extra-occupational.

Adults do not want to be treated like children. The removal of freedoms is the mark of despotism but a good business should be more like a hierarchical community.

That’s the plan, anyway. It doesn’t always happen like that and often I forget myself and let myself go. The mindfulness I’m talking about requires a lot of energy in vigilance to start with, but the idea is that it just becomes habit.

Mindfulness also means sometimes having to throw caution to the wind and making a quick decision because to debate the pros and cons will create a chasm between the action and its effectiveness.

So with that in mind, I realised today that the enemy of mindfulness is not the chaotic nature of acting without thinking, but small-mindedness instead.

Small-mindedness is the inability to see potential and a fear that deviating from the status quo will only lead to peril. It is a surrender to an idea that because we do something one way, flawed though it may be, it’s better than the unknown future provided by the alternative.

The adage of “better the devil you know” is a perfect example of small-mindedness. It seems like such a good idea but in the long run you will find yourself stuck.

Mindfulness requires confrontation on occasion. Decision-making is a form of confrontation. Passive-aggression is small-minded, petty and downright unattractive.

These are just some thoughts that have been running around in my head. Make of them what you will.

This film reminded me so much of Ben Elton’s dreadful ‘Maybe Baby’ in its poor direction and terrible story development that to think about it much more would only serve to make me angrier.

I haven’t read the book and now I never will. The characters had little to no development and there were so many travelogue type establishment shots of New York that there was a moment I thought the director must have gone to the Ed Wood school of using found footage but he had obviously never graduated.

I could go on but I think you get the point. Avoid this film.

Of the things I’ve always thought were always holding me back from writing more, the inability to update my blog from my phone was well up there. It really was. I am really that deluded.

Somewhere I know that this new found convenience is not really going to make me write more often but wordpress has an app for the iPhone and when I saw that I thought “yes, at long last I can do what I’ve always wanted”.

Is it really what I’ve always wanted? Of course not. I use these things as a distraction.

Procrastination comes in many forms, my friends. This is just one of them.

In that time we’ve had so many wonderful guests and hundreds of adventures. It’s amazing, as well, how seemingly popular, while also considerably unknown the concept of podcasting has become in that time.

Maybe it’s time to do a refresher course on How To Subscribe to a Podcast.

For as long as I’ve had the ability to randomise music (starting with a button on my first CD player in 1989) I’ve never wanted to. I’ve always thought that an album was created as an album. I never really bought compilation CDs and never had much interest in a best of/greatest hits collection.

I want to know exactly what my favourite bands were doing at one particular time and I feel it’s, in some way, disrespectful to just give a cursory glance to the last 10 years, or whatever the contrivance for the latest collection was.

Also, albums as a whole work like a time machine for me. I can put on REM’s Document and remember being in my friend’s basement, playing it for him and waiting for his reaction to this wonderful discovery I’d made. A single song from that album won’t transport me back to that day in year 10. It has to be the whole thing.

It’s the same with Sonic Youth, Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Superchunk, Sebadoh… I could namecheck for hours but I think you get the point.

Probably this all comes from my wanting so strongly to control my environment. I feel like listening to this particular artist from this era and I’ll go on a journey with them. Fuck you if you don’t want to come with me. It’s where I am and where I’m going and you never understood me anyway.

Yes, it brings out the tediously rebellious teenager in me. So what? Like you don’t have one in you? Don’t judge me.

If I want to throw caution to the wind and two seemingly unrelated songs back-to-back I’ll listen to the radio. Garry Seven’s “Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em” on 3RRR on a Friday night is perfect for this. It’s always full of surprises, all of them curious and exciting. When each song starts it puts a smile on my face and makes me wonder at how Seven came to put those two songs together.

Another reason I rejected the random play function is because, so often when I was at a friend’s house for a party or a little get together and the random was selected I was disappointed for two reasons: There was no filter for when the shit songs in my friend’s collection came on (songs my friend likes but potentially fill me with the urge to stab); How lazy my friend was that they didn’t take 30 minutes to put together a playlist of some sort.

So I’ve never put the random function into play on any of my music devices and maintained my snobbery. Until last week when I accidentally started playing the Top 25 Played playlist on my iPod. As it was playing I thought: I like all these songs but I’ve heard them so much (derr).

I have almost 4000 songs on my iPod. So much that I’ve forgotten a lot of what’s there. So I decided to start playing in shuffle mode. AND I LOVE IT!

I love it because all the songs I have on my little device are grade-A, 100% superbly rockin’ tracks. There’s almost no room for disappointment (except for the discovery that I have a Death Cab for Cutie album on there — must remember to delete). Every song is a surprise and puts a smile on my face. It’s just like listening to the radio but without any breaks and without the danger of having any songs I don’t like.

Now I understand why shuffle/random is so popular. It’s taken me so long and I feel like such a doofus. Bring the random. Free me up. Remove the control from my listening and just throw those songs at me.

I’m off to rediscover the buried treasure in my music collection. Excuse me.

Nb: Just because I’ve started embracing this sort of freedom does not mean that I’m becoming like all those goddamn sandle-wearing, sun-loving, ‘ooh look at the pretty flowers’ people who are happy and enjoy life. I still use the music to block all that shit out.

I’ve found the joy and frustration of global conversation. I don’t really understand why I like it. It has something to do with feeling connected without actually being connected. It’s a false intimacy, and that sounds like a bad thing but it isn’t.

A couple of months ago I was at the MODM meeting talking to some people who were having an entire conversation about what had happened on Twitter that day. I hadn’t really dabbled then and I didn’t get it. Somebody tried to explain it to me but it made no sense. Why would anybody want everbody to know what they were doing? Why would they give up their privacy like that?

The magic with Twitter is the way different people use it. Some use it like status updates on Facebook, some use it as conversation, but the most interesting are the ones who use it as a nanoblog. A link with a punchy description can pique my interest. A comment about the world I can’t see outside my window might spark an idea.

The other thing is the very nature of writing in only 140 characters. It takes a lot of discipline to get as much of an idea out as possible in around 20 words without using txt shortcode.

I’ll probably get sick of it the way I got sick of Facebook (yes, sick of Facebook but still love playing scrabbulous, what a dilemma) but for the moment I’m trying to rock the nanoblog vibe and really enjoying it.

This is comfort food for a comforting dinner. Also, I had some in the freezer and I’m lazy and didn’t want to go to the supermarket. Laziness, is comforting.

The need for comfort food tonight comes from having a night at home all to myself. Early on during the Comedy Festival I caught a cold and somewhere along the lines I thought the wise idea would be to just power through it, dose myself up on cold and flu tablets and keep going out every night.

Apparently the thing needed to get rid of a cold is plenty of rest. Who knew? So I’m taking two nights off. I will see no shows. I will rest. I will catch up on all the TV I need to watch for Boxcutters. I will eat bangers and mash and try to forget that there’s a world outside continuing without me.

Anyway, for those interested, I’ll be trying to cover my movements through the Comedy Festival on Twitter. You can read/follow/stalk at http://twitter.com/sealfur.