Jenny Ringo Saved My Life: Prologue

She did, in some ways.  And she isn’t even real.  This is the beginning of a series of blogs about the role that this fictional character has played in my life over the last eleven years, and how she came to be the subject of two short films I have produced.  Its not a particularly long story; it's a little sad in places, but as far as there is an ending, it is more or less a happy one.

You might have found this blog because you know me, or someone involved in the film.  You might have been kind to the strange people at EMS giving out lollies and free films and signed up to our mailing list.  You might have serendipitously stumbled across Jenny in the vast landscape of the internet.  So to get you all up to speed:

Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw is a 25 minute horror-comedy we shot on a shoestring budget in the summer of 2010.  Post production was slow for various reasons and the completed film was unveiled in September 2011, by which time we had started planning the sequel, Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret From Hell, which we shot 11^th-17^th February this year.  The film is just entering post production and our goal is to finish it by the end of June 2012. 

 If you fancy seeing the first film, sign up to the mailing list at www.jennyringo.com and you will get a confirmation email with a link and password to the film online.  We don’t spam you, it's just to keep you up to date with the progress of the second film once a month.  Here is the trailer:

Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw Trailer from Chris Regan on Vimeo.

 and if that doesn’t convince you, previous viewers have likened it to Spaced, The Mighty Boosh, or a kids tv show with swearing in it.  We’re generally pretty happy with these comparisons!

Over the next few weeks, I’m intending to blog about the inside story of Jenny Ringo, what she means to me and why its important to me that other people get to meet her too, through these films and future projects.  If you also want to know about the ‘outside’ story of Jenny Ringo and the making of the films, check out my husband’s production diaries for the first film, starting here.  If big chunks of text aren't you thing, how about liking us on Facebook and getting your updates in nice little bitesize pieces?

Sadness

Most readers will know this anyway, but for the sake of completeness, my twin daughters were born very prematurely on 28th July, and died within an hour.  We named them Wolf and Fox.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

(Raymond Carver)

The Pregnant Feminist

So finally I can explain why I've been pretty slack about blogging this last couple of months; as well as thoughts about impending motherhood getting in the way of my usual outrage and indignance, I've found it pretty difficult to summon the energy to sit typing in between bouts of throwing up and extreme tiredness.

Now I'm in my second trimester I can expect three months of feeling pretty healthy except for a stuffed-up nose, so its time to get blogging again.  This isn't going to be a blow-by-blow account of the rest of the pregnancy, birth and subsequent nappy-changing, because I'm sure you won't find that too interesting.  Equally, I can't promise to keep the blog completely baby-free because it's obviously going to have a rather big impact on, well, everything.  Oh, I did say it was twins, right?

Wish us luck!

Who Needs a Bookshop?

This isn't a blog about my work, because its my day off and that would be boring.  Let's assume for a minute that it's a massive coincidence that I work in bookshop because this blog is about being a reader, a book lover and a book buyer, and what that means in today's world.

Two big things have happened in the book world recently.  One is last surviving national specialist bookselling chain Waterstone's have been sold by owners HMV to a Russian billionaire, who, depending on who you listen to, is either the saviour of the human race or a man with more money than sense. 

The other is that in the book industry's annual awards, General or Chain Bookselling Company of the Year has gone to Sainsbury's.

If Mamut hadn't bought Waterstone's, and no one else had either, there is a strong possibility that HMV would have gone down in flames before the year was out, and Waterstone's would have gone down with them.  And the question I've been asking myself for the last couple of months, is, would anyone have noticed?  Who uses bookshops these days anyway?  Many of my close friends, avid readers with whom I swap book talk on a regular basis, have ereaders now.  Actually, what they have is Kindles, which means they buy all their books from a retailer who sells everything Sainsbury's does except cans of beans and petrol (and if they could figure out a way to fill up your car, I'm pretty sure they would).  No one has been up in arms about Amazon winning Direct Bookselling Company of the Year.

When I first started in bookselling, I would meet new people and tell them what I do.  'What a great job!' they'd say.  'I love bookshops.  I bet you get to read loads of books when they first come out.  I'd just read all day.'

Now when I meet new people and tell them what I do, they say 'I love bookshops.  I buy all my books online because its cheaper'. 

Now, I am the first to hold my hands up and say, yes, shopping online is cheaper.  Its more convenient and you have an infinite range at your fingertips because a warehouse is, I don't know, about a squillion times bigger than my 3000 sqm shop.  But imagine if you couldn't go into a bookshop, because there weren't any.  You could still buy books in the real world, sure.  You can buy them in supermarkets, or at the airport.  But the only things you'll be able to buy there are 'bestsellers', authors who are 'brands', although, of course, you could get anything you wanted online, and if you rummage down a hidden side street in a middle-class chocolate-box town you might find a marvellous independent bookshop, but I wouldn't bank on it.

Now imagine that you also don't have a local library, and the closest one you do have really only has bestsellers, authors who are 'brands'.  This basically means that in physical terms the only books you SEE, with your eyes, in 3D, are books that you seek out and purchase, or books that are lined up by the till point while you are doing your grocery shopping.  Does that matter?  We have been close to being there by the end of 2011.  In time, I'm sure more excellent independent bookshops and small chains would open in a variety of towns and cities across the country, but not before many publishers had been irrevocably damaged by the instant loss of almost 300 shops.

Apparently in a high street bookshop for every 100 paying customers, 43 are ' browsing, with the intention of buying online.'  So without high street bookshops, even online sales could fall.  I'm glad that, at least temporarily, the future of the bookshop on the high street has been secured.  The new team at the head of Waterstone's promises some exciting changes that if successful will bring high street bookselling into the 21st century and at the same time restore some of the good old-fashioned bookshopness, which has lost its lustre in the struggle to compete with the supermarkets and the internet.  But it don't mean nothin' if all those people at parties who tell me how great my job is don't use them.  Chains, independents, anywhere which celebrates the glory of the book in any shape and size, where the books you find are ones chosen by experts who just want to sell you any book and pick the best ones, rather than marketed at you by publishers who have decided to make x author their next big thing, and paid a premium to get them on the shelf in the supermarket to ensure this will be the case.

Which brings me onto Sainsbury's.  Now one of the things I love, love, love about my job, is the customers who aren't traditional booklovers but just read the new Dan Brown and couldn't put it down and want more like that please.  I don't care if they only read memoirs about abused children (although if I had the choice I'd really rather they didn't), reading and sharing literature of any kind is one of the most important things we can do to develop empathy, creativity, vocabulary, and knowledge on an infinite number of subjects.  But my shop can be a daunting place for people who don't know what 'fiction' means.  If Sainsbury's has a role to play in helping those customer find the books they like in a way that feels more comfortable, I salute them.  They are securing a literate and book-loving future for those customers and their children, which is one of the things bookselling is about.

But it's not all bookselling is about.  Its also about creating an audience for new writers, without whom the world would be a poorer place. Its about helping people fulfill dreams (one of my all-time favourite customers - he wears a bowtie and is the world's politest gentleman- is spending his retirement reading a lot of ancient greek/roman classics in their original language thanks to us finding him dictionaries, texts and background reading material), its about creating readers at birth and nurturing them with the proper care and attention as long as they keep coming back for more.  Libraries are marvellous places and can do many of the same things (and often more).  But I have always loved choosing a new book and knowing it is mine.  You don't get the same thrill from a library book.  And I find it hard to imagine you can get the same thrill picking up a book at Sainsburys. 

Unsurprisingly, booklovers everywhere have been somewhat unimpressed with the news, but who would you have given the award to?  Waterstone's has been closing stores, British Bookshops and Stationers have disappeared completely, Foyles won it last year and while they could easily win two years in a row, the judges argue that Sainsbury's hit every critera for the award.  Personally, I'd rather them than Asda.

Really, the only people we have to blame for this is ourselves.  After all, the winner of the Independent Bookseller of the Year was Bath's Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights which I have never visited but just fell a little bit in love with online for their gift vouchers (A 'Reading Spa Treatment', anyone?  Or a 'Year of Reading Delights'?).  If this is what we want the future of book buying to look like (and who doesn't?) we can make that happen with the following simple steps:

1) Use your local bookshop- eg, business where books make up at least 50% of the place, whether its a chain or independent.  Regularly.  To buy things, not just browse.
2) Every now and then, buy something there you didn't go in for, just coz it looks good.
3) Feedback - tell them what they are doing well, what they should do better.
4) Go home feeling smug and read a new book.
5) Don't buy books in the supermarket.

Happy reading!

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside!

Okay, okay.  I wrote this a couple of weeks ago but have only just got around to editing, finding pictures and posting it.  Many apologies for extreme tardiness.

Today I watched Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God - be Back by Five.  Its good, you should watch it.  Its all about high school friendships and the places we find ourselves, unexpectedly, ten years later.  But it's just as much about Coney Island.

WTCIOAMFG,BBB5 trailer

Have you ever been?  Not many people I know have.  Its a very difficult place to explain.  It has all the decaying charm of any seaside town, but double it, add some fading magic and several ghosts. That's bascially Coney Island. I love it.

Maybe its partly that it was the first day I spent in New York, late September a few years ago in glorious sunshine.  We got there early and nothing was open.  Its a long subway ride from the centre of the city and we thought we might have made a massive mistake.  We spent an hour or so walking along the boardwalk, went to the Aquarium, and when we came out everything was getting going and the place was really filling up.  I think it was at that point we got swept into the Freak Show, after watching someone hammer a nail into his brain up his nose.

The freak show was great, it cost maybe six dollars, I think, and it was worth every penny.  Mostly it was kind of burlesque circus acts - Heather Holiday, a tiny sword swallower/contortionist, Serpentina who danced with a massive albino... snake of some kind, Angelica who breathed and twirled fire, all compered by Donny Vomit who did a few tricks and reminded me of my first boyfriend, and there was also the Black Scorpion/Lobster Boy who did tricks and comedy based on the fact he has 'lobster claw syndrome' hands.   It wasn't slick or glamorous, it felt like a bunch of misfits were doing this because it was somewhere they could fit in.  Of course, that was probably part of the act itself too, they probably do it because they make a heap of money at it over a summer.  But it felt really honest, in a way that La Clique in the West End for four times the price, despite having slickness and glamour in bucketloads, didn't.

Maybe it was partly that I'd read The Electric Michelangelo, the second section of which takes place on Coney Island as the young tattooist from Morecambe escapes there and falls in love with the Tattooed Lady.  His Coney Island, if not exactly in the heyday (it has been in gradual decline almost since its boom around 1900) is certainly considerably less decrepit than it is today and Sarah Hall's exquisite prose (really, you must read it) made me fall in love with somewhere I'd never been.

Maybe its partly that the seaside is in my blood.  I spent the first ten years of my life in a crappy seaside town, Southend-on-Sea in the 1980s.  Okay, its technically on the River Thames, or the Thames Estuary, which could be one of the reasons its got all the tackiness and not much of the rustic charm of the real seaside.  Goodness knows what percentage of my childhood weekends were spent rollerskating along the promenade, walking along the World's Longest Pier (its so long there's a train back), paddling in the 'sea'.  And how much of my pocket money I spent on the rides at Peter Pan's Playground, now Adventure Island.

I don't really like rides.  I'm a wimp, I'll be the first to admit it.  To this day I haven't been on a ride on which you go upside down.  I don't mind going fast, I don't mind spinning round.  I'm not great at going high, and I'd rather stay upright if possible.  But my favourite 'ride' was The Crooked House.  When you walk in, you can't see anything, not even the floor, it's pitch black.  You kind of shuffle along until you come to these lit-up dioramas in which the 'Crooked Man' is shown in various domestic situations - feeding his cat and shaving are the two I remember - he might also be sleeping in one of them.  He is terrifying, although its hard to say why.  It could be that his head swivels all the way round a la Exorcist while he is shaving.  Then there are some crooked stairs and crooked mirrors and then you walk outside to a teddy bear band playing in the daylight, and the steps back down seem crooked because they are straight but you've just spent ten minutes getting used to wobbly ones. 

Okay, I can't explain it, just that it held a certain grim fascination for me, like this waxwork...

In  Went to Coney Island... a recurring question is, if you are going to wash up anywhere, why here?  And the responses echo each other: 'At night, they turn on the lights on the Wonderwheel.  it's pretty.'  Its an answer that explains nothing, of course.  But I understand exactly what they mean.

I can see the sea (real sea!) from my dining room window now, I sat on the beach today and just watched the waves for a while.   Since I've lived on the Sussex coast, the West Pier in Brighton has been collapsing.  I must have moved here shortly after the fire in 2003 which effectively put the nail in the coffin of the redevelopment plans.  I don't think it looks romantic and striking anymore, I think it looks really sad.  But for me, that's sort of how a seaside should be.

Quiet in a Noisy World

Rats, it's April!  What happened to my promise to myself to blog at least weekly?

Well, ironically when I have been massively busy, I haven't really felt like I have very much to say.  I've been doing all sorts of wonderful things in the real world, spending time with good friends, dearly-loved family, going on country walks, eating a lot of good lunches, making it to my dance class for a change, running my book club, going to Moviebar.  I haven't seen any films to make me angry about their gender politics (we'll gloss over 'Dr Strangelove') although I did get into a brilliant Bechdel Test debate with my chum Ash - proof that people really are reading my blog and paying attention, thank you!  Maybe I have already changed the world a very tiny bit.  This makes me happy.

But none of that is very exciting in the blogosphere.  I drafted a blog about how much I love people - I really do - but the moment passed and although I still love people, I sort of lost the feeling that prompted me to write it so that'll stay on the backburner until I love people so much I have to revisit it.

I drafted a blog about how, Mr Writer by Night, I don't have a feminist blog, thank you very much. I sometimes write about feminist things.  I also sometimes don't, as seen here, here and here.  It was going to be a long, self-examining post but really, as I said when I started this, I'm not going to declare a blogging manifesto.  I'd rather let my posts speak for themselves.

I baked some fairy cakes and I have made a resolution to do more knitting again.  I'm a process knitter.  I'm really bad at finishing things, I just love the therapeutic rhythym and the magic of seeing a piece of fabric take shape with my hands.  I don't care for making-up and precision knitting so that sleeves fit into armholes.  This is why I mainly knit scarves and other rectangular things.

Talking of which, I read this not long after I wrote my marriage post and I found it really interesting.  As I said at the time, I don't have a feminist argument for marriage and I can think of many against it.  Broadly speaking, I think of my marriage in and of itself, nothing to do with anyone or any history or politics other than my husband and I, just a promise we made to each other.  I don't disagree with all of Jaclyn Geller's arguments against marriage, but what I do disagree with is her assertion that not only are women still getting married, they are 'manicuring to hyper-perfection the very domestic idyll their mothers rallied to escape', and quoting among other things the resurgence of knitting as an example.  Among pretty much all of the young married women, and men, I know, I cannot think of anyone who can be accused of such un-feminist behaviour as doing unreasonable amounts of housework and I think (do correct me if I'm wrong) I'm the only married knitter I know.  I don't think knitting makes me a bad feminist.  I suppose it might if all I knitted was clothes for my husband but as he never wears the scarf I knitted him once, I haven't bothered since.  I knit for the sheer low-tech pleasure of the activity, not because I'm married or I confuse it with domestic goddesstry.  One of my most outspokenly anti-marriage friends has this fantastic recipe blog, and I don't think it undermines her arguments against marriage or her personal politics, she just likes to cook.  I think arguments like this (and I do accept that the journalist could be paraphrasing and generalising) damage feminism because they refer back to the outdated image of woman and domesticity bound up as one, rather than acknowledging that the two are separate, with a perfect right to both exist in the same person if that is what she chooses.  The same goes for the reaction to Natalie Portman's Oscar acceptance speech.  She's about to give birth.  No wonder she regards motherhood, right now, as being the most important thing in her life.  Does that make her unfeminist?  I don't think so.

Oops, I accidentally wrote a feminist blog again.  Maybe the Writer by Night has a point after all...

I forgot to make a book recommendation last Feminism Friday.  You can belatedly have my all-time favourite book, Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood.  I have read it at least 10 times.  Everything I know about life, I learnt from this book.

Feminism Friday: Winter's Bone

I didn't want my Feminism Friday blogs to just be me moaning, I wanted to talk about all the good stuff that women and feminists do in the world too, then last night after watching it, the Writer by Night said I should blog about Winter's Bone.  Obviously, like any good feminist I thought I'd better do as my husband said, and here I am. 

I'd like to stress at this point, that a good film and a feminist film are not necessarily the same thing.  If it wasn't a Friday, I might not even mention Winter's Bone, I don't watch things in order to deconstruct their gender politics because if I did that I don't think I'd enjoy another film again.  I will always notice, but it isn't how I choose films to watch, and many of my favourite films could not be considered feminist.  This is not a review of Winter's Bone, it's a reflection on the messages I find within it.


Chris actually liked the film more than I did, although I liked it too.  I will try not to give spoilers, in fact, I don't really need to say very much specific about the plot.  The good news is, it passes the Bechdel Test within about five minutes, but more than that, the film is full of female characters with names all talking to each other.  Amazing.  And even better, they all do it fully clothed, and in some cases, with woolly hats on.   It is the female community in the film that supports, advises and helps Ree, the central character - and although violence is threatened by male characters, the only real violence in the film is executed by women.  What's interesting about this violence is that it is committed in the name of protection; not revenge or power or personal survival.  Astoundingly, given the odds for escaping this in movies in general, no one is raped.

(I had to search really hard on Google for an image of more than 1 woman from the film.  Note to self: in future, avoid googling anything with the word 'bone')

So, is it a feminist film?  At first I thought not, because in this community men represent power, authority, they are still the catalyst for change and most of the progression in the plot.  Most of the conversation between the women is about men, and indeed the plot revolves around a man.  There is still a moment where a man comes to the rescue - but I am coming to the conclusion this is more in the vein of 'sidekick' than 'superhero'.  Some of the men try to be heroic, but they all fail through cowardice, greed or malice.  Ree on the other hand succeeds without becoming a masculine archetype.  She is still able to nurture, communicate and seek non-violent solutions to her problems.  She is brave, selfless and dignified.  The film does truly celebrate feminine characteristics without devaluing them. 

What interested me most though, was the number of women involved in making the film, reading the credits, there were women - usually plural - in pretty much every behind-the-camera department.  I think our commercial film industry is so skewed towards male stories and tells them in such a blatantly sexist way is because women generally have such a tiny part in the process, men genuinely forget about them.  Then women aren't interested because they don't feel reflected in cinema, and so movies just get made for young men and it becomes a viscious circle.  There was still nothing like an equal split but women clearly had a much stronger presence in the making of Winter's Bone, on a project led by women.  The more this happens, I hope, the more we will see an honest reflection of our world on screen.

While writing this I've been listening to Debra Granik being interviewed about Winter's Bone, and she makes the point that if we are to have any kind of 'biodiversity' in film making, we need to support the small films, because if they make their money back, the investors are happy and they get to make more films.  She's not talking from a feminist perspective, just any kind of independent film-making outside the glossy Hollywood model.  So I am making a resolution to seek out and pay for movies like this, in the hope that my one voice will go some way to ensuring I get to write more positive blogs!