29/01/17: Another three months of life without testosterone This weekend's diary post isn't easy; it's still January, I'm continuing to cough from my bubonic-plague-cough of a few weeks ago, and my sciatica is back, making me get up from library chairs like I have toiletary issues. I'm now wondering if I should delete that last crude sentence, it's...
27/01/17, Ghost in the Shell (1995) It came and went in a single night on special release; I was lucky to catch even that. Having turned up casually at the Cameo asking for a ticket for Ghost in the Shell , I was told it had sold out days before. I stayed in the lobby until the trailers were finished and with a few seats untaken, the staff let me j...
What's On? 26/01/17 I'm in Edinburgh and it's only the day after Burns Night, so I have to mention T2 (Trainspotting 2) , which is showing this weekend at the Cameo and probably everywhere in Edinburgh. Actually, I'd like to mention the smoke-machine-laden, shiny and spot-light lit premiere for T2 at Fountainpark last week, because I really didn't ...
22/01/17 My Grail Story: Is Life Really Over After 25? My beloved magazine lay there yesterday on the sofa, open at a certain page and left forgotten. I was alone and needed something to read; I picked it up. Empire magazine's expose on the coming of Trainspotting 2 ('T2' for short). Being based in Edinburgh, I'm aware of the film's extra importanc...
20/01/17, Silence Having decided not to watch Split due to its depiction of a cross-dressing male psychopath, and the resulting feelings of discomfort this would give me in a cinema, I went instead for Martin Scorsese's Silence . This had the kind of existential quest narrative in a far-away land that I could watch in detachment. Not being religiou...
What's On? 19/01/17 Nothing fills me with foreboding like the release of a film with a cross-dressing male. My experience is they're usually psychopaths (literally: Psycho , 1960) or some similarly unhinged murderer, like in Dressed to Kill (1980) or Silence of the Lambs (1991). No less uncomfortable are the films that play it for laughs (Some Like...
16/01/17, Underworld: Blood Wars I'm not sure what was more comforting last night in Cineworld , the film or the audience, who all seemed to be in their thirties and forties. The Underworld series has created a particular following, and for good or ill, I am part of it. I'll start with the film's design. It has better settings than the previous ent...
What's On? 14/01/17 I fell in love with Underworld when it came out in 2003. What a great time in my life, that was, back in Szczecin in Poland. I had a really nice girlfriend, believe it or not, an American of shiny reddish hair and angelic skin who was passionate about directing cinema. We produced a school play, and watched great films together ...
14/01/17: Back From the Void Have you ever had an illness that left you damaged? I'm returning from one now, my eating and sleeping habits a distortion of the old, normal me. I went through a week of insomnia, overdoses of paracetamol and accompanying hallucinations. Of walks back home from University that felt so bad, so sickly that you counted ev...
07/01/17: New Year Message I had things to share about my Christmas, but it can wait. I'm ill today and don't know when it started, this dry cough. Last night I couldn't sleep, I was cold, it was so cold in my Edinburgh apartment. Under the covers I shook and was unable to stop shaking with cold, despite adding socks halfway through my restless nig...
05/01/17, Passengers I enjoy films that present moral dilemmas; no matter how good or bad the film is, you leave the cinema with a 'what-would-I-have-done' contemplation. Batman Dark Knight involves one such point of reflection, a test set up by The Joker to play two ships of passengers against one another with exploding devices and a whole lot of ...
23/12/16: Christmas message I'm going away to a place without the Internet for a while. I won't write over Christmas, will be back in early January. This is my chance just to give everyone a season's greetings. And to say a few things, just some reflections. I guess it's been quite a tumultuous year, globally, I don't think I need to explain why. O...
21/12/16, Star Wars: Rogue One (the film The Return of the Jedi should have been) It didn't start promisingly, a lot of jumping around from planet to planet, scene to scene, trying to establish different characters in different situations. The cast is good, not all are well-known (a strength), but plenty of charisma and people you can empathise wit...
​With my debut novel going out in a few hours on Amazon Kindle, I've included a blurb to describe it on the Amazon site. So that anyone visiting this site wonders what the story's about, here is the blurb: 'You're a hit man who doesn't hit much, and isn't much of a man, by your own estimation. Then one day you and your companions pursue a girl...
My debut novel: Utopia in Danzig (20.12.16) It was eight years in the making, the novel where I learned how to write, by writing, and re-writing, and it's about to be available on Amazon Kindle in the next few hours. You may have lots of questions; I'm going to try and anticipate some of them here, and hope my answers satisfy. Why are you writ...
Gina's Trans Diary, 18.12.16: entry 18 Horcruxes and Other Things The photo accompanying this piece is of last weekend's Trans Remembrance Evening. In the photo you'll see the poetry student Avery, and in the centre, the playwright Jo Clifford, whose talk became increasingly a mesmerizing experience for the thirty people in the room. For this photo...
What's On? 15/12/16 I was once a hard core fan of Star Wars. Born in the seventies, I remember Return of the Jedi (1983) was wonderful, was in fact the centre of my universe. I remember the hype on early morning news, the playground re-enactments, the Panini sticker book that my brother managed to complete with his friend. When you're eight years o...
11/12/16, Snowden / The World I Live In (2) The Trans Remembrance Evening at Edinburgh University had been and gone, months of prep and then the release after a beautiful, intense evening. I wanted to watch a movie in the cinema again. Not just any movie either, I had suddenly become politicized after reading an article by a journalist I respect, J...
What's On? 08/12/16 I've just spent an hour copying and pasting the names of eighty-three transgender people killed in hate crimes, then cutting up the papers and attaching blue-tak to each piece. They'll go on display tomorrow at the Trans Remembrance event I'm organising. Yes, it feels disturbing to do something so banal, involving the names of a...
Gina's Trans Diary, 05.12.16: entry 17 In the Blink of an Eye The picture accompanying this post is of a French graphic novel that I came across once, I'm in love with the otherworldly images. The girl in the picture is a version of me, or of an attitude of me. Life, this image says, is sometimes an ocean bearing monsters. You face it with att...
