Protected: Had a good laugh with Dad

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Do not cough in my ear…

…if we are speaking on the phone. It is unbelievably annoying. I find ‘coughers’ generally annoying anyway and just wish they would go away until they stop. Take some medicine. Don’t answer the phone or learn to TURN YOUR HEAD AWAY  from the headset if you are coughing. What do you think it sounds like for the person at the other end? If you were conversing with someone in the street, would you like them to step up to YOUR ear every time they coughed?  Well that’s what it feels like on the phone.

TURN YOUR HEAD THE FUCK AWAY!

What if? What if ? What if?

What if? What if ? What if?
The thoughts of a neurotic! Overand over procrastination . Endless procrastination …
Make a decision and stick with it! But the problem is how I make the decision on the first place. I’m always looking at endless possible scenarios in the future.

Sent from my iPod

I will never ever stay up past 12 midnight especially on some Skype chat with a nutty woman.

I will never ever stay up past 12 midnight especially on some Skype chat with a nutty woman.

I will also take first heed next time of any nutty behaviour and run a mile

I will not divulge any compromising material until I have met the individual

But MOST important I will not risk my mental health staying up late to chat. The rule will be bed to read at 11pm latest, all TV off at 10pm and recorded using DVD recorder for watching on rainy day…

New clarity of thought thanks to iPod Touch

Writing this -my thoughts- on my iPod Touch helps my decision-making process. I maybe prefer writing on paper. Life is short and at least this way there is some hope it may not be lost on little bits of paper.

Yellow is a better background colour than eye-straining White but white on black is better.

Race to Pole

Race to Pole
Cracknell is a deeply unsympathetic character. Doesn’t look after himself, is unsympathetic with others .
Ben Fogle is weak standing up to Cracknell, lots of tears all round. Jesus H. Christ it’s al a bit much. He’s let them down by not looking after himself early on. Didn’t look after his feet. Didn’t rest properly. Olympians aren’t normal people, they’re superdriven very self-centred and stubborn.

Everyone blubs constantly. Scott of The Antartic it’s not ‘…sometimes I wish you could be a bit more sensitive’ hardly ‘I’m going out for a short walk…I may be some time’ !

Sent from my iPod

I want Paul McKenna to cure my fear of flying

I like Paul McKenna. He has good taste (I saw him eyeing up my then girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival a few years ago.)

Paul McKenna I can change your life  Sky 3 late (2am). Tonight he attempted to cure a woman of her agoraphobia (apparently she’s been alone for only 10 mins total in the last five years). Paul went up to Hull of all places. He must be dedicated. Or they paid him a lot of money. What worked, the NLP or the hypnosis? He does speak very fast and uses a lot of gestures and taps.

NB She had CBT which didn’t work…

Later after he left, the panic came back. How much the original cure was it down to the force of his personality. Interestingly she says ‘Im panicking so I can’t remember all the thing she told me to think about’. She comes down to London for a second session (obviously Paul’s dedication didn’t stretch to another visit to Hull . She ends up cured but still living in Hull so swings and roundabouts really.

Also, he treats a gambler. He explains the Serotonin high due to gambling. He treats this by changing the association for gambling to a negative one. It seems quite simplistic. Reminds one of a weakened version of the treatment in A Clockwork Orange. Rewiring the brain.

Seeing the agoraphobic helps me because I can see that it’s just a condition that needs treating. It’s not something unique to me.

The best for me is the flying phobic who says ‘I just see that as an accident waiting to happen’. That’s just how I feel. I managed a short flight at Christmas but together is the fear of having an attack the other end, being so far from home He is resistant to Paul’ s initial NLP stuff but the hypnosis does it . After an hour he is good to go and flies. Paul McKenna is my new hero. The kind of change he manages in people in such a short space of time is pretty miraculous. I will blog more about his methods later (on this entry) when I have time.

Another shitty day

I feel like I’m going to ’snap’ at any moment. Maybe the 2 Starbucks coffee sachets I had this morning.

Neuroticism levels set to 8/10? 

Didn’t sleep a great deal; on the Skype/txt to Scandinavia last night til early hours. Now I have to go see someone. They called from a local organisation I help out with last night. Of course I have been offering to help all this week when it was convenient to ME but they dithered until it was inconvenient to me. I like to do things NOW when I’m in the mood/up for it. It isn’t a promisory note to be cashed anytime they feel like it. Unfortunately I need them quid pro quo so I have to go over and endure the fucking around.

 

Trying to remember what the Psychologist advice was.

Lars Von Trier: Fear of flying, depression

Lars Von Trier interview: Season in hell

 

Published Date: 12 July 2009

IF Lars von Trier hoped to find salvation in Antichrist, his critics had other ideas. The Dogme director tells James Mottram why chaos still reigns despite overcoming severe depression to try to resurrect his career

LARS von Trier is not a well man. As the sign painted in blood-red lettering on his office door says, “Chaos Reigns”. Jittery, nervous and unsettled, the 53-year-old Dane even jumps when his mobile phone rings midway through our interview.

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And there’s no question that Von Trier has a lot of fear and anxiety. Among his multiple phobias, his fear of flying means every time he makes a pilgrimage to Cannes film festival, he drives for five days from Denmark in a battered old camper van. 

This time, he arrived with the festival’s most talked-about film, Antichrist. Despite Cannes being his spiritual home – he won the Palme d’Or there in 2000 for his musical Dancer In The Dark, starring Björk – the film’s first press screening caused uproar, a mix of jeers and nervous laughter. Billed as Von Trier’s attempt at gothic horror, the film sees Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg retreat to a cabin in the woods to heal their psychological wounds after their young son fell to his death from an open window. What follows is a gruelling odyssey, as Gainsbourg’s unnamed mother becomes increasingly hysterical, turning on her husband – and herself – in a brutal last half-hour. 

In the press kit, in what he called the “director’s confession”, Von Trier dubs Antichrist “the most important film of my entire career”. The reason is quite simple: his depression had left him unable to work. Six months into his illness, he wrote a script as a cathartic exercise – “as a test to see if I would ever make another film”. Still, he was listless, completing the screenplay with little enthusiasm, adding scenes and images – often culled from dreams – with no concern for logic. Dubbing it “a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination, into the nature of my fears”, what spilled out onto the page was anything but pretty. 

Ironically, the end result is one of Von Trier’s most style-conscious films since the days of his early works Europa and The Element Of Crime. Take the bravura opening black-and-white sequence as Dafoe and Gainsbourg copulate in slow motion. It’s a far cry from the back-to-basics aesthetic of his Dogme95 manifesto, when Von Trier (who made 1997’s The Idiots under its so-called Vow of Chastity) urged filmmakers to shoot films on handheld cameras in natural lighting with no special effects. 

Nevertheless, Von Trier, who wanted to merge a documentary-like style with more “monumental” shots, was unhappy with the end results. “I don’t think I really succeeded,” he moans.

The closest we get to a laugh in Antichrist is when a fox – eating its own entrails no less – turns to the camera and repeats Von Trier’s office door slogan, “Chaos Reigns”. “As you know, I work very much from humour,” he says. “And we know that this (a talking fox] is a horror killer, but on the other hand, the fox demanded a line – so what can you do?” 

By the time Von Trier arrived in Cannes – infuriating one Daily Mail journalist in the press conference by refusing to justify the film and instead proclaiming himself “the best director in the world” – chaos did reign. When the film premiered, he left the screening without waiting to receive the applause. “I’m not a stable person,” he shrugs. “I felt quite a lot of hostility in the room, and then a stupid little thing (happened] like a light didn’t go on, and we had to sit there for seven minutes and wait for an endless time. I’m normally a very friendly man but at a certain point I couldn’t take it anymore. Then someone said, ‘People are clapping. If you go, it’s an insult to them.’ And that was enough. I was off!” 

With the film proposing that Gainsbourg’s character is the embodiment of the Antichrist, it once again raises the age-old accusations that Von Trier is a misogynist. Just recall Dogville and Manderlay – the first two parts of his as-yet-incomplete USA trilogy – and the punishments handed out to the character of Grace, played respectively by Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard. Certainly, a brief glance at Von Trier’s private life hints at where his problems stem from. Back in 1995 his mother made a deathbed confession that her late husband was not Von Trier’s biological father. Within a year he divorced his first wife and converted to Catholicism (hitherto believing he was Jewish). 

So what made him see woman as the Antichrist? “I am probably not very religious,” he explains. “It’s very obvious to me that religion is something that’s invented by man. So suddenly I saw that the Antichrist would be the woman because she wouldn’t accept the religion that was so typically manmade.” He’s increasingly come to believe he’s an atheist, he says. “I can’t be honest and say to my children (he has four], ‘There is a God.’ It’s not possible.” He lets out a long sigh. “I think you can say that I’m a pessimist. It’s the only thing that has come out of all these years of therapy.”

It’s there for all to see in Antichrist, a Freudian fairytale that’s arguably saved Von Trier. Did he accomplish what he set out to achieve? “It’s a good question,” he says, “but I don’t know. Because of this mental illness, I was not expecting so much. I was just trying very hard to be there physically and finish the film.” With no idea what his next film will be, I’m left with the impression that he still has a long way to go before he’s better. Certainly, the vitriolic reaction to Antichrist in Cannes has shaken him. No wonder he stops short of saying that filmmaking is always therapeutic. “That would be too easy,” he says. “Then I would be really, really healthy after all these films.” 

• Antichrist is released 24 July www.antichristthemovie.com

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/sos-review/Lars-Von-Trier-interview-Season.5451263.jp

The Last Tycoon

I’m watching this enigmatic film. Certain things strike me. Lead character Munro Starr played by Robert de Niro has his priorities right. He cancels things and doesn’t go to parties. How many times have I forced myself to go to parties just because I think I need to or ought to go in case I miss out on something.

I also love the set design in this movie.