Bellringer

People get compartmentalized, you get labelled, and I thought: "I don't want anyone to label me as anything other than the Funny One." Because if they say: "She's the Funny One" they haven't then got to say: "She's the Ginger One" or "She's the Speccy One". "She's the Funny One" and that's it. I wanted "funny" to define who I was (...) I suppose it is a survival instinct, and it is one I think I still use now. I would still rather... I just think if people think that I'm funny, they are not going to look any further. They're not going to delve any deeper. "I'm funny, don't look at me! Look at me with your eyes closed, look at me with your ears."

- Catherine Tate, Girls Who Do: Comedy

Red Dot

I think I've finally triangulated the exact position of my "let's write another blog entry" button. The formula is: if I'm at least a little bit drunk, and too tired to log into WoW, but not yet incapacitated enough to just lie down and watch something before going to sleep, AND if Ana is not online for me to dump whatever happens to be leaking out of my brain at the time... on.

As you can see it's a tiny spot indeed. And I'm already talking to Ana...

And now I've updated the borgs, and I'm completely out of steam again. Until next time.

I felt like I was cheating, so I figured I'd at least throw in a song. It's one of those bands that popped up on too many websites and was advertised by too many of my music-savvy friends for me to ever properly check out, but it played in the background on our last evening in Bham - the only one, I think, during which we flirted with some sort of collective nostalgia - and got inset into that snapshot. I've since listened to the whole album a bunch of times and now know that I only like 2 songs from it, so it wasn't exactly a miraculous conversion, but still. This one's really good.

Previously on...

Hello, dear diary. It's been ages, as usual. But I'm tipsy and retrospective, so let's try to rehash the last month or so.

For a long while I've been convinced that if I ever was to have a piece of music that got played whenever I entered a room (you know, my personal intro), then it would be the guitar part from Hazy Shade of Winter. Because obviously.

Now I'm listening to Hazy Shade of Winter on YouTube.

Anyway, there's another contender. I think it's an intro for those precious moments when I feel totally in touch with my mindblowing sexhualitay:



Seriously though, it's pretty haunting.

We went to Birmingham for about a week. It was yet another one of those low-intensity episodes, and I couldn't shake off the thought that it's weird to fly all the way to Britain to play WoW in the evenings and go to movies and stuff... but when I was able shove aside this nagging and somewhat abstract preconception of a "foreign adventure", it felt great. We went to a really fun poetry event, which incidentally is a phrase I have just retired, as I doubt I'll ever use it again. We saw Stratford-upon-Avon, and don't. And we went to Jamie Oliver's restaurant, which for some reason became my most vivid memory of the batch. I think it's a case of retroactive retouching, but I really loved the place, as a space to sit around in and feel vaguely jubilant (the food itself was ok, but so not the focal point). In hindsight it seems so warm and golden-bronze. I'd get into details, but i don't think I can do it justice, and I'm not even sure there's any justice to be done. It's just one of those subjective time capsules, and I've already dwelled on it more than enough.

If I have one regret it's probably that Karolina was so overworked and tired from the baby's antics, that we hardly had a chance to have any "moments" (I'd say "talk to each other" but it's sort of a different animal).

Ok, I was certain I had enough fuel for a huge sprawling tirade, but I'm literally falling asleep at the desk, so that's it for now. Hope to continue at a more convenient date.

Sun pokes through my lashes

I have a new wallpaper. It brightens my day:

I firmly believe that blond stubble can cure cancer.

I'm also much better, although I did puke unexpectedly at 8a.m. Didn't see that one coming.

For 29 years

I had a mild, extended anxiety attack today. That was fun. A kind of dull, barely palpable pain in my chest and a slight shortness of breath I've learned to associate with either pre-exam stress or a distant aftershock of heartbreak, suddenly emergent. I identified the immediate basis, but the feeling lasted - lapsing when I had company - until midnight, at least. Even though I was utterly certain I had nothing to feel anxious about. It dissolved only after some mental gymnastics which finally revealed other, underlying causes. All the necessary buttons got pressed and I'm fine and dandy now, but that was a fucked-up episode. I hate not knowing where my emotional responses come from.

I'm closing up. As if something kicked in, a latch fell into place, and I've begun nesting. Except I'm plugging the holes up with just me inside.

The observer worries, the glacial drift continues unaware and unabated.

Ana sent me this a short while ago, saying she heard it first when she was 29.

Out of words now.

5:25

I'd much rather be sleepless in Seattle.

Poetic faith

Gosh, it's been a while. Checking in since I'm not quite sleepy enough to collapse, but already too braindead to do anything constructive or even relaxing. Obviously a perfect niche for blogging then. There's your marketing campaign right there.

So, what's new... I guess the main thing is I got published on Pajiba, a site I've been reading daily for... God knows how long. Actually, two of my pieces already went up, and I just submitted the third one, which constitutes a big deal in and of itself. The first two were history articles, i.e. novelty items, since it's a film/tv review site. I was offering an off-kilter distraction and writing with some authority (even if it was but a thin veneer) about stuff most people don't know anything about. The piece I just sent them, however, is a TV review. Actually, it's a review of my favorite TV series , so it's kind of a different ballgame, both stress-wise and since they're actually going to publish something non-historical of mine. And so soon, too.

Seems someone's looking out for me, at least in this regard. I wrote them after they published a short piece on the Hungarian revolution of 1956, figuring that if my favorite site was getting into history, it at least wouldn't hurt to ask if I could contribute. The author took his time responding, but it turns out he's writing a thesis in political studies on post-communist countries, or smth, so my Polish pedigree at least gave my email enough anecdotal value for it to be passed on to the chief editor, who in turn liked my history stuff, and so it happened. A month later I randomly wrote the editor asking if they'd ever pimped Slings and Arrows on the site, since they totally should, and he replied that it's funny I should mention it, as he just finished the 2nd season, is in love with it, and was going to do a write-up, but I could do it instead if I wanted to. Kismet struck yet again.

It's been an interesting experience. I've always dreaded creating things from scratch on a daily basis. I figured translating is the perfect venue for me - it allows for some creativity, but you're always just riffing on a source, you don't have to whip anything out of thin air. Now I know I couldn't do it constantly (and on a deadline), but I also learned that there is something there to be plucked from the ether. And it's a completely different process, which right now feels exhilirating. These ready-made sentences or concepts just pop into my head, completely out of the blue, and I get to move them around, looking for ways to piece them together and make the narrative flow smoothly. And then people actually read it, and some of them like it.

At this point it's basically a dream scenario. I don't get paid shit, but I can write about whatever I want, at the pace I want to write it at, and am pretty much guaranteed it will get published. I can exorcise my historical fetishes without having to force them upon random and often unwilling friends, and just now got to preach about Slings and Arrows to a whole bunch of strangers. I'm still smelling the roses.

That being said, writing about the series was quite difficult, and it was the first time when I had to force myself to even begin. God. "It was the first time..." - and I'm only on my 3rd text. Great. Anyway, it's really hard to do justice to something you like so much, and I'm not exactly thrilled with the end result, but I know it's the best I can do for now. It's possible it would have been a bit easier had I rewatched all 3 seasons, but I've seen them at least 4 times now, so it seemed a bit excessive. And I prefer to think that in this case there's no escaping this feeling of vague disapointment. Nothing I could have written could have lived up to my - completely abstract, of course - vision of the perfect ode to Slings and Arrows.

As for other stuff... Behold my mighty youtube-bending skillz, as I make the song start at a very specific point! (Don't mind the absurd video - couldn't find a different one.)

Probably my favorite lyric of the last few months, Freudian slip and all.

Self-preservation continues to be the name of the game.

Census

In 1593, John Sanderson compiled a list from information given to him locally to show the population of Istanbul, which arrived at a total of 1,231,207 inhabitants, but what is really interesting about this list is how the census is framed:

Viziers (I say Viseroys) ....................................................................................... 6

Muftie ................................................................................................................. 1

Women and children of all sorts, christians, Jues, turks, etc .................... 600,000

The U Factor

In yet another attempt to burn through my backlog of movies, I watched Eulogy and Elegy. The first one was pretty atrocious - I actually groaned outloud several times. An ensemble dramedy with a lot of wasted ensemble. Elegy was better, but unfortunately too remote to make some sort of connection. It dealt mostly with aging and adultery, subjects I'm not intimately familiar with, so my mind wandered. Still, it had Patricia Clarkson (in a small role, unfortunately), and was quite beautifully constructed and shot. Very subdued, but evocative. Only once the credits rolled did I realize that it was one of Isabel Coixet's - which was probably why I got it in the first place.

And there was one brilliant exchange, between the main character, played by Ben Kingsley, and his estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard). I've uploaded it here, if anyone feels like watching 2 minutes of solid acting with a deliciously scathing conclusion.

Sebastian

Winter is here. Beautifully irrefutable, Eastern European winter. I wish the moon was out, it always brings the resonance up a notch for me.

Drinking Bailey's out of a martini glass, contemplating the merits of self-preservation.

Books

This one's long overdue, but oh well.

I've finished reading The City and the City a while back, and was really impressed, though it resonated mostly on an intellectual, rather than emotional level. Which was either an inevitable side effect of the way it was constructed, or indeed the whole point of the book. It starts out with a pretty fantastic premise, and then, as the plot develops, the mysticism is gradually, almost imperceptibly chipped away. When you reach the final act, there's almost a sense of disapointment in how... realistic the entire affair has become, but still - there's never a big reveal, any sort of "Ha-hah! And in reality, this is what's been going on". It's still an evolution, and the best part is that things are not revealed as being different than previously described - they're instead simply being described in ever greater detail. The book doesn't change its course, it's the reader who is forced to gradually abandon his overblown preconceptions.

Another cool thing is that the mercurial aspect of the twin cities is carried through the entire novel. At first I felt this itch at the back of my brain, because I couldn't quite place the city on the map. But with time (and information), it turned into another kind of frustration - one born out of being unable to visualize the actual layout of the cities - the way they intersected, and the way their boundaries worked (or didn't).

But the best part, at least for me, was that once I resigned myself to the tedium of truth, everything clicked into place. Again - there's no twist. It's just that everything could be now interpreted differently, in retrospect. And you could actually come to the conclusion that there were absolutely no supernatural elements to the story whatsoever. You didn't have to, but the door was at least half-open. And I absolutely adore such stories, to the point where I cooked up a ridiculously convoluted theory* about The Prestige where you could completely dismiss the Tesla part of the plot. It's also why I really love Like Minds, which I have to admit is a middling film at best.

And now I've moved on to Lords of the Horizons which I was really disapointed with for the first 10 pages, and now can't seem to put down for even a moment. So much hilarious Ottoman trivia!

* unfortunately, it collapsed under its own weight; still like the movie though

Mother dear

I visited my folks today, to check in on them, and to give my mom The Sputnik Film Festival catalogue & assorted merchandise, which Marta benevolently gave me last night hoping she'd get another welcome package today, with her press credentials. Which she didn't. Sucks to be Jesus.

Anyway, it was the regular stuff - a tote bag with the catalogue, a screening schedule and assorted promo trash. I was sitting with mom at the kitchen table, waiting for the soup, and idly rifling through the stuff, when suddenly two condoms fall out from between some cosmetics brochures. My brain went AAAAAAAAAAAA! and I instantly palmed them and slipped them into my back pocket, which was no easy feat. Half a minute later another condom-looking packet appeared, and was also spirited away (I had become a pro by then, apparently). All the while I was trying to avoid thinking that I just almost re-gifted my mother condoms.

Back home I took a closer look at them and it turned out they weren't actually condoms, but hand cream samples, and there's actually some red-headed girl weirdly almost-kissing a middle-aged woman on them (which would make for a somewhat confusing condom wrapper), but trust me, they look the part. And now for some choice quotes (in Polish):

(przegladajac katalog mama natrafia na sekcje dziecieca i wlacza jej sie nostalgia, z pelnym zaangazowaniem i wzruszeniem) ... ale moja ulubiona bajka to byla taka szwedzka, Carsson (sp?), o panu z broda ktory mial smiglo w tylku i odwiedzal male dzieci...

(o kompocie, ale znienacka, nowa mysl) Wiesz, bo ja to po prostu robie do dzbanka.

It was a nice interlude.

And the weather was great. Very windy, but warm, with heavy, rolling clouds racing across the sky. Perfect for walking, though it did remind me a bit of a cartoon someone told me about: a gray cityscape filled with downtrodden, gray people, and a gray strip across the sky, with the caption "A Rainbow Over Warsaw".

I promised myself I wouldn't harp on about weather so much, because at one point it seemed all I did was weather, music and obfuspeak, but I can't help it, I get such a kick out of just watching the city skyline. Also, tried a little experiment and it's amazing how many different shades you can pull out of those clouds depending on whether you're listening to this, this or this.

AFF, revisited

This one's been sitting on my hard drive for almost a week now. I'll try to wrap it up somehow, but things have gotten a little hazy by now...

***

It’s the last day of the American Film Festival, and I’m not sleepy at all so here we go with another update. Unfortunately, the Internet at our suites went bust yesterday, so I’ll probably post this tomorrow evening at best.

We departed on Friday. I was supposed to meet up with ao, pauli and her suddenly new boyfriend at ao’s place, which meant I found myself on the subway, on a weekday, at 8 a.m., with a pretty sizable travel bag. I was not prepared. Not exactly Tokyo at rush hour, but quite an ordeal nonetheless. Oh, the sheltered life of a languid freelancer.

Once there, we packed ourselves into ao’s Micra and off we went. The drive was pretty uneventful, but also very pleasant. We listened to various mix tapes, including the one from Piaskowa (according to pauli, that was five years ago. Jeez.) with some songs no one but me liked, and others with songs no one else but me objected to. It was kind of funny to realize how easily we (i.e. me and ao) can relapse into this catty back-and-forth which characterized the first years of our interactions, but also comforting to see we both now know to rein it in and pull out of the contested zone once we notice the pattern.

Oh, we also saw a wonder of WTF architecture called “The Highland Inn”, which stood in the middle of the Mazovian plain, and looked like a mountain cottage gone berserk. It was this enormous, baroque… castle, really, except one made from the building blocks of Carpathian mountain cabins. It completely blew my mind, and also – incidentally - reeked of manure.

We got to Wroclaw at 3 p.m. or so, and my companions went to see the Banksy movie, while I saw Sons of Perdition – a documentary about teenage runaways and exiles from this Mormon sect which still practices polygamy. The movie was excellent, and told me that Big Love is ridiculously well-researched. There wasn’t a single element of that reality that wasn’t somehow touched upon in the series, and sometimes the similarities were so striking that I started wondering if the show wasn't based on this particular community (I’m not sure if there is more than one sect, but there are many different communities – the movie focused on the one in Colorado, or Arizona, or both, I forget, but there was also talk of one in Texas). The screening was followed by a Q&A with the directors, which was conducted by a friend of mine who was so competent at what he did (both translation- and moderation-wise) that it made me seriously ponder trying to take a crack at it sometime in the future. Which is saying a lot, since I’m terrified of public speaking.

The day ended at the Kropka HQ with quite a lot of alcohol and a joke about the theremin that made me and Iza have a total meltdown – unfortunately, it requires visual aids. At one point Blazek started a story with the words “There’s this guy on the Internet who criticizes stuff…”, and that became his thing for the duration of the festival – later on he also described a movie as “being about people”. I also remember talking to Asia about something, and then suddenly it was 5:30 a.m. and I was asleep.

On the next day I left my cellphone AND my earphones at the apartment, and was unable to retrieve them despite having both the code for the buzzer thingie and keys to the apartment (I was sure I was pressing “2” when in fact I was pressing “3” on the dial, and the front door key sometimes didn’t work, so I couldn’t get into the building). That was fun. Then we waited for an hour to get served at a restaurant, and ended up having to cancel our order, or else we’d have missed our movies. The ones ao, pauli and her suddenly new boyfriend went to started at 4:15 p.m., mine started at 4:00. They made it.

3 hours of background frustration later, I rejoined ao and we went to see Please Give. Which was fantastic. Catherine Keener is always great, but so was Rebecca Hall, who I’m starting to really like, and – surprisingly – Amanda Peet. Very funny movie, and very, very well-observed.

Afterwards ao went to raid Sunwell, and I tried to join her, but the Internet was down, and my laptop refused to acknowledge the unsecure network ao was leeching hers from, so out I went into the city with my less-than-trusty laptop, looking for hotspots. To make a long story short: I ended up back at square 1 one hour later, sitting next to and her watching her do stuff. Which was riveting. But then we went out to join all the Kropka people, and stayed in Mleczarnia until they threw us out. At one point Blazek got accosted in the toilet by a strange man, who tried to sell him a ticket to the land of eternal bliss using a picture of some poor lady's vadge. True story. And towards the end I unexpectedly had a very serious and honest conversation with Rafal. Or rather, listened to him having a serious an honest conversation with me. It was in equal parts eye-opening and warm-feelings-inspiring.

Sunday was opened with a really good documentary on the Star Wars fans' complicated love/hate relationship with George Lucas (The People vs. George Lucas was the title, I believe), and at 7 p.m. we went to see the one we had all been waiting for - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It was glorious. I hate watching stuff I translated, but this time the awesomeness that poured from the screen was so overwhelming that I forgot to cringe at my - supposed or actual - slip-ups. Most of the time, at least. For some reason I have a very strong emotional response to it. To date, there's only been one movie that really made me want to inhabit the world it presented, and that movie was Angels in America. I totally wanted to be a witty gay dude living in picturesque New York. Obviously, not necessarily dying of AIDS. I remember this very acute longing that stuck with me for over a week, completely shoving aside reality, and then lingered for... months, probably. Well, I kind of had the same reaction to Scott Pilgrim. Granted, it was much less powerful, but for a day or two I really wanted to be young and in Toronto. There wasn't a false note in the entire film, as far as I'm concerned. I love absolutely everything about it.

That was the high note. And on the next day there were car problems, tow trucks, mechanics, complications, and eventually - the long train ride home with The City and the City, which I've already covered.

All in all, I'm totally going next year.

Crosshatching

Back in Warsaw. The festival was great, and I'll try to do a proper post about it, but only after I've gotten some sleep.

On my way back I dug deeper into China Mieville's The City and the City, and I really like what it does with my head. It starts out as a pretty straightforward noir crime novel, but as the camera pans out, you learn it's something much more complex. And you're not really given any sort of systematic backstory to all the weirdness, you have to kind of reverse-engineer the big picture from various everyday practicalities. These hints are delivered so subtly that at first I actually took them for witty turns of phrase.

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling way. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

And with a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrasz after all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent (...) after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away...

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite literal. Without giving away too much, it's the story of two cities (city-states, really), Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupying the same space, with parts belonging to just one (referred to as being "total" from one's perspective, or "alter" from the other's), and a whole patchwork of shared areas. The citizens of both are trained to only perceive their home city, or rather, to fail to perceive the other one, and its inhabitants. Openly and deliberately noticing the other entity is a very serious existential offense (again, trying not to reveal too much), and inadvertently doing so causes great unease:

I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passerby who tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintly over fucking couples they assidously unsaw.

The fun part is both cities are sovereign entities and it is for example revealed that they were on opposing sides during World War II, and that to this day Ul Quoma is the target of an American embargo (think Cuba). Another neat, and I'm hoping deliberate twist is that you can't pinpoint the city's whereabouts. You are given plenty of context: ther's mention of Balkan refugees, direct flights from Budapest and Istanbul, and Beszel street names sound decidedly Hungarian... but then, the city is a sea port. So whenever you are given another scrap of origin information, you feel this low-level anxiety/frustration as the exact location keeps eluding you - which echoes the descriptions of people "unseeing" its phase-shifted streets.

I read most of the book on the train from Wroclaw to Warsaw, and when I got out of the train station, I couldn't help but look for glimpses of the city I just left - fully realizing how silly it was. I couldn't shake it even on the tram home, and kept comparing the two, noticing how empty Warsaw streets look in comparison.

Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

You couldn't get in

It's been quite a while. Guess it's a testament to how... settled my life's become (the word "routine" was quietly put down behind the shed before it had a chance to get a foot in).

Anyway, tonight was unusual and hilarious.

It started out with a delicious dinner at tiny new Sri Lankan place (although they use the name Ceylon, which I thought was politically incorrect - go figure), followed by the Warsaw Film Festival opening gala. The gala itself turned out to be something of a black tie event, with an actual red carpet and stuff, so we - me and... let's call her G, as she always makes a fuss about being featured in online stories - were a bit screwed from the get-go (her moreso than me), but hey, free champagne and people in costume! Yay!

We immediately devised a score system - 3 points for every celeb you spot, 2 points for a pretty person, and 1 point for someone you personally know. G was way ahead of me within minutes ,so I decreed she was cheating (she claimed 6 points for someone she then refused to point out in the crowd, for example, how's that kosher?). It didn't help matters that the first familiar person I saw was someone I didn't really want to interact with - one of those very distant, awkward acquaintances - so I ducked out of sight. G schooled me in the best way to deal with these situations: you avoid eye contact, and if for some reason that fails, you look them straight in the eye, say "Hello!" and walk right past them. And sure enough, that's exactly what they did two and a half hours later when we incidentally locked gazes.

The movie itself was pretty bad. The best part was when halfway through half of the screen was filled with the logo of the subtitle projector - the machine went into some sort of standby/screensaver mode, so several minutes of the huge fucking festival premiere in Sala Kongresowa went without Polish subtitles, while the tech guys scrambled to restart the system (we even got a glimpse of Norton Commander, how old school is that). For someone who knows people who work in subtitling it was the equivalent of a spectacular nip slip.

Afterwards we mingled, bumping into various acquaintances, including G's friend Ewa, who in my cosmology features as probably the only strikingly beautiful girl I know who is also perfectly aware of her good looks. She isn't obnoxious about it, or anything, but it seems like she certainly knows how to get her way. I also met another friend of G... but for that, we need to go back ten years.

It is 2000, I'm 18 and about to apply for uni. I'm taking these weekend preparatory courses in history, organized by the university, and so is W., my best friend from high school. I've always been too intimidated to yell out answers to the teacher's questions in class (omg what if I'm wrong?!) so whenever I knew one, I would mutter it under my breath to W. Now, there was this guy who sat in front of us, and whenever I muttered the answer, he would repeat it to the teacher, only outloud. I shared this observation with W. and at first we both thought that he might just know the same things I do, but we tried it out a few times, and he only spoke up in class after I'd croaked out the answer in my impotent nerdiness. Needless to say, he became our running joke for the rest of the course.

And so, who comes waltzing up to G at the gala? That's right. At first I wasn't sure if it was really him - it was ten years ago, after all - but it turned out he's my age and he majored in something that likely required a history test, so... Yeah, I got a giggle out of it.

Meanwhile, another one of G's friends called (they are legion - let's call this one "DJ friend") that there's some sort of party in the basement of the Europejski Hotel, so we decided to move there. The history prep guy actually works at the festival and said he'll try to get us to the venue in one of the festival town cars if we only pretend that we're some sort of festival guests. He sized us up and decided we should pose as "short film directors" which I thought was spot-on - "director" sounds impressive, and the "short film" part somehow gives leeway in terms of age and general blubbering idiocy, at least in my head. We agreed we'll pretend to be FOREIGN (because of course we did) and poured into the car spewing English platitudes. History prep guy immediately blew our cover by asking us something in Polish, so we spent the next couple of minutes trying to supress a bout of decidedly undirectorial giggles.

When we arrived at the spot, we learned that G's DJ friend would come get us in about 20 minutes. We weren't really sure how to get in there on our own, so we hung out in front of an inoperational automatic door to the hotel, watching equally confused people try to get in and bounce right back. Until suddenly, a girl with two guys walked up to the door and without missing a beat just pried it open with her hands, like they do to elevator doors in movies. We went "score!" and followed her inside, but once we entered the dark lobby, the girl turned around and said "I wouldn't follow me if I were you - I actually work in this place". This initially confused us, so we stopped dead in our tracks, uncertain, but before we could discuss this new development amongst ourselves, one of the girl's male companions apparently felt the force surge strong within him, so he extended his hand towards us dramatically (fingers spread out and shit), uttering with deep conviction "No! ^* Stop!" Ewa, as I mentioned, is very pretty, and probably oblivious to inadvertent Star Wars references, so this bizarre little display merely inspired her to walk right past the dude and into some random corridor. I'm good at doggedly following in other people's wake, so off we went.

Now, the party was supposed to be in the basement, so obviously G led us to a staircase leading up to the next floor. It's good that she did though, because the hotel was quite incredible at night - totally deserted, and really Shining-esque, except the corridors are green, and when you stand in them, the light reflected off the walls makes you look greenish as well. It's very creepy. Hopefully there's even a photo to prove it, but I didn't take it, so I'll have to get back to you on that.

It turned out that we went upstairs to find an elevator that would take us to the basement. Long story short: it didn't work out, we got caught by the security guy and asked to leave. We ended our little escapade just in time for G's DJ friend to appear and "get us into the club" which translated into paying 1/3 less than the regular folks, so not exactly the stuff of glamour fantasies, but at least we didn't have to stand in line. There was also a pretty hilarious "I got in, you couldn't get in" moment, as the DJ got stopped by the bouncer, and did a little "They're with me" spiel (even though we had already actually paid to get in), to which the bouncer replied "Great, dude, but where's YOUR pass?"

The music inside was the thumpy stuff of CSI murder-at-a-club montages. There was some more drama with additional passes to the "chillout room" which to everyone's confusion and dismay was revealed to be the nightmarish club next door, but apart from that, nothing else of note happened. To my surprise, there was quite a lot of talent around (that is what the kids are calling it, right? At least the sleazy ones?) but it was all of that peculiar variety that comes up as white noise on my scanner, so I honestly couldn't tell which ones - if any - worshipped the schlong. And that's sort of demoralizing, even if you're just window shopping.

Unfortunately, the free booze from the reception had evaporated from me around the time of our short film director town car extravaganza, so I soon vacated the premises, feeling a bit like I'd just recaptured a managable slice of the crazy youth I never had.

And now it's fucking late. Good night.

* ^ is voiceover lingo for short pause in delivery