Here is the end of his superb piece on Five Easy Pieces…

“Dupea thinks piano practice is just practice, a form of avoidance, and claims to have played a certain Chopin prelude better when he was eight than he does now. But then he can’t hear the soundtrack of the movie he is in, and can’t see the shots in which he is framed. There’s another sense of practice: not training to do something or faking it, but doing it.”

The review as a whole is a masterclass in dissecting a film technically and creatively without ever succumbing to the need to show off. Better still that last line… “there’s another sense of practice: not training… but doing it” perhaps it stuck in my head because I’m playing the piano more and more – a loud and cacophonous din that sometimes seems beyond improvement but never fails to delight me.

Rather, as I’m currently spending my days sat with my brother locked in battle with the next draft of “Hallo Panda”, something about that line keeps coming back to me. In redrafting are we engaged in practice or practice? Are we improving or doing? Is this a frustration, a training sequence through which we are passing, or is this the real work?

Unfinished screenplays are piano pieces written by the over eager… loud and cacophonous but delightful to play.

I’m going to misremember this quote because I heard it from beneath an ample quantity of wine and beer but I happened to see both of these lovely people last night and whilst thoughtfully pondering the menu Kate said that she wasn’t much interested in cooking but thought she was “a very good eater”. It seemed exceptionally appropriate for someone who doesn’t make films but is a far better judge of them than most who do.

It is common for defensive filmmakers who are being criticised to snap that until someone has made a film their opinions don’t count. “At least they’ve had the guts and courage to get up and do it”. It’s an attitude I appreciate but can’t accept.

We live in the age of the feed, where for almost everyone almost every waking thought is material for consumption. And, as if we lived in a stadium filled only with stand-ups, not a single feed line passes without a cacophony of punch lines as everyone competes to complete the joke. We deafen ourselves with our own desperate doing.

I am not blind to the irony here as I write my blog. In the past few days I also finished a feature film script and a proposal for a sitcom. Later this week there is a rehearsed reading of my play at the Soho theatre and on Friday my band play a gig at the Famous Three Kings in West Kensington. Like everyone else in this sprawling yet neighbourly city of the Internet I am constantly doing. Nor neither are either Phil or Kate backwards in coming forwards or slow to action. Phil rolls from the East End Film Festival to Branchage Number 3 with less than a pause and readers of Sight and Sound will already be aware that Ms.Taylor is a feed to follow.

However at their core both are “good eaters”. In an age when everyone is seemingly desperate to feed the frenzy, content to offer up more and more of themselves as content, it is important that there are people who actually care to pay attention. Without good eaters, without discerning taste, there is no need for quality. Without quality there is no need for any of us to pay attention to anyone else at all. We will end up finishing each other’s sentences with invitations to events we will only turn up to because of the compelling need to have something tweet to our followers, none of whom have been following anything – too tied up in writing down their own thoughts for no one else to bother to read.

If there is going to be any point to all this activity then we should all take some time to become good eaters.

I’m starting with this cake which was made by Tsugumi Matsumoto…

I generally find January to the be slowest, longest, coldest month of the year. Whilst technically no longer than most others it usually seems to persist for half a year before finally succumbing to February. However this year it seems to have trotted past in a twinkle of snow storms and sleeplessness and already the Oscar nominations have been announced to my usual utter indifference.

It’s all proof that I’m as busy as a monk in a plague. My brother and I are about to embark on the first draft of a new feature script, not merely a new draft but a new idea – the first time we’ve done this for over a year. This story, provisionally entitled “I’m Going To Kill You” is also the quickest that a thing has ever gone from an initial conversation between us to a serious effort to sit down and write it out in best. Could be that the draft will serve to show why we normally let things simmer but again it seems proof that for once we’ve started the year on a thaw rather than a freeze.

We’re also quietly developing something funny for a tv company as well as starting to put flesh on the bones of a film we want to make with a friend who’s a stand-up. Add into this the new recordings on my band’s myspace and an upcoming reading of a play I wrote and I can only see that it’s going to be March before the end of the week.

All of which is by way of a slight apology if I blog a bit less as this place tends to have the odd reverse life of being mainly written on when I have less to write about…

In 2006 we shot a music video for the sublime and deeply missed indie band “Special Needs”. They were newly signed, we were newly inspired to make music videos and we were all the best of friends. The result was this gorgeously silly Monkees-ish chase video. The coffin is lost in the loft of the Brixton house where my brother used to live (God knows what the current occupants think of that), the Spitfires are back in Duxford but the free-wheeling, battery-powered Dodgems are still in my garage.

Well, not for long – a need for space means I’m finally forced into selling them – http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130362281897&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_793wt_1167 – c’mon, trust me, when it comes to simple pleasures none is simpler nor more pleasurable than Off-Fairground/On-Road Dodgem racing…

I’ve played this night before at previous LSFFs and it was a joy to do so again with my current musical squeeze, the Glue Ensemble (of whom there is more here http://www.myspace.com/theglueensemble).

In order to keep life simple you tend to introduce yourself as one thing or another. There are times when even saying I’m a writer/director feels like I’m giving the impression of being horribly unfocused. The truth is that, with my brother, I write, direct, edit and where necessary he’ll also shoot, grade and even handle all the tricky encoding and uploading that comes with most modern filmmaking. That’s a horrible bundle of ideas to throw at someone so we generally say that we’re filmmakers. It feels like somewhat of a treat then to be allowed to out myself as a filmmaker who also plays instruments and writes songs…

Likewise my friend and cohort the filmmaker Lee Kern has recently outed himself as filmmaker who is also a stand-up comedian.

For proof of this come with me to a gig Lee’s playing this Tuesday at the Green Man, Riding House Street, Fitzrovia. He’s sharing the bill with the brilliant Robin Ince, Nick Helm and Richard Sandling and, just in case you’re reading this and thinking “but Ben, I have no life outside of filmmaking, unlike you and Lee I’m totally dedicated to the one true craft”, well, to you I point out that all the comedy will be themed around films and the film industry.

It’s £6 to get in and the show starts at 8 and doors open at 7.30 so get there early to get a seat.

I thought Rage Against The Machine had split up and become Audioslave. Even if they’ve got back together the idea that a song from ten years ago going “head to head” with the X-Factor winner represents anything other than the height of banality leaves me baffled. As far as pop culture goes this is about as incendiary as Jon Lydon’s butter adverts.

What does pain me though is the suggestion that the reality TV show the X-Factor has anything to do with filmmaking. Just because they make it using cameras doesn’t mean it falls within our world. Granted if it stopped being made then camera hire companies would lose revenue, in the same way that if no one got married for a year the slump in the wedding video market would lead to a glut in the Z1 category on eBay, but please don’t imagine either impossible event would cripple the British film industry. We may not be in the rudest of health at the moment but we do not live on Simon Cowell’s table scraps.

Even more horrifying was the attempt to draw a parallel between aspiring filmmakers and the programme’s contestants. True, at first glance, both wannabe filmmakers and wannabe singers are chasing what for most will be impossible dreams. But the dream on offer in the X-Factor is always the same dream. The hopefuls compete not for their chance to share their unique gift but for their chance to have their unique gift homogenised into something that sells. Is that really all we’re trying to do? If it’s fame you want then making films seems like a funny way of going about it, at least not without first moving to LA and getting your teeth fixed.

Shocking as it may seem but some of the people I know still do things for reasons other than fame and money. For instance, tonight one of my bands, The Glue Ensemble, are rehearsing and we’ll be playing the closing night of the LSFF in a few weeks time. None of us are being paid for tonight’s rehearsal, nor for that gig (though we do get paid money at times…) and yet none of us seem to mind because we’re all doing it for… what’s the word… love.

Similarly when my friends and I went to Jersey a few months ago to make a film we didn’t do so for profit but for the sheer crazy pleasure of doing something difficult and beautiful. We didn’t sleep, we froze, we climbed hills, we made a film that tried to capture some thought about forgiveness and all just to make our lives both harder and more enjoyable. This is what the past ten years of my life has been about. Telling stories with pictures because me and a bunch of other people I like wanted to and slowly finding out that a bunch of other people want to watch those stories, often time and again.

So as a final sprig of holly on your christmas puddin’, can I respectfully suggest that you shut the fuck up about the national minimum wage.

The decade long campaign to grind Shooting People into the dust for its support of creative work where no one gets paid comes from a good hearted place but is fundamentally wrong headed. I am completely in favour of being paid and completely against people engaged in someone else’s commercial activity not getting a fair recompense for their work. However a great deal of the work that is created through Shooting People is not a genuine commercial activity because, no matter how much the creators may wish otherwise, there is no market for it. Does that mean they should be banned from making it?

In a world driven entirely by commerce it is right that we protect jobs and wages. A world driven entirely by commerce gives us the X-Factor and a constant repackaging of the same tired idea. Thankfully, even at Christmas, we don’t have to live in that world.

However, that’s not all I’ve been doing because I stumbled across a rather good site called The Open Video Project which offers an astonishing collection of old films for public use. On the whole they are non-fiction, but since this includes all those stunning public information films of the fifties and sixties, not to mention a seemingly endlessly supply of jaunty newsreel footage sponsored by Chevrolet, it is a veritable treasure trove of oddity and delight.

To prove my excitement here’s a video I cut together from a couple of films about the perils of drink and drugs amongst the youth of the 1970s. Who could ask for more!

What shook me most about this rather terrifying revelation was that it passed so unnoticed. True this is largely because there were only a handful of other people in the station besides myself to notice it, but even had it been the height of the rush hour you wouldn’t expect large crowds to gather and point. This is not a comment on our attitude towards global warming, which exactly fits the sci-fi stereo-type you would expect. After all, were this a film it would only be the audience who were shocked by the notice, the massed crowds of prole drones passing the news by without comment would be comment enough for the bitter filmmaker intent of reinforcing his point about how shit the future will be. Rather what struck me most was the incredible power of a vast led screen to simultaneously attract and distract.

These screens are now in all the major train terminals in London and are increasingly popping up all over the place, shouldering their way in front of the more prosaic printed poster billboard. Being massive and glowing they can’t help but draw your eye, especially if you are waiting either for a train or for news of train which possibly ceased to exist somewhere around York. I presume that they have been sold to advertisers on the grounds that they are more eye-catching than mere posters and doubtlessly taken on by public minded locations on the grounds that they are more than just advertising. A feed of Sky news provides a public service, giving us all free headlines, financial news, celebrity gossip and sombre warnings about the end of the world.

However despite, or perhaps because of the ever changing content of the display all you ever really look at is the screen. Quite how something huge and glowing can become entirely invisible I’ve no idea but something about these screens renders all the multifarious things they display into one single slab of homogeneous content. This is what shook me about the announcement that flowers were blooming in February; it was not the announcement at all, but the fact that this shocking piece of science-fiction news didn’t really register as anything untoward until I was sat on the tube and had time to address the nagging doubt in the back of my mind. It was just more content. A new car, a new phone, a new camera, George Bush, market statistics, the weather, Ken Livingstone, David Beckham, Amy Winehouse, Gordon Brown, a new car, a new phone, a new camera, an earth quake, thousands dead, a new car, a mysterious virus wipes out China, a new phone, Amy Winehouse, aliens take human form and only architect Roy Vincents can save the world, Gordon Brown, a new camera, David Beckham, market statistics, the end of the world, a new car. I imagine you could broadcast hardcore porn straight off Gary Glitter’s hard drive and still most people would just stare at it with dead-eyed uninterest and wonder diffidently if they should perhaps have a cornish pasty after all.

A similar thought strikes me later as I scroll up and down the electronic programme guide on my freeview digital television searching for something I can hook my exhausted mind onto to stop it from screaming. The myth of choice has, astoundingly, rendered all forty or so free digital television channels entirely free of interest and I end up watching the appalling “Lark Rise To Candleford” on the grounds that it is Mark Heap in it and I like him. Interestingly “Lark Rise”, which I see has already been commissioned for a second series, is based on the odd premise that in the past everything was basically all right. Massive child mortality, a generally shortened life expectancy, grinding rural and urban poverty, a near total lack of rights for workers or women and the hegemony of a conformist, conservative religious dogma are all tidied away beneath the comforting sunny glow of the pleasures of honest hard work. All of which merely shows that when imagining the future we only see the rainy dehumanised worst and when picturing the past we prefer the bucolic fantasy of rosy cheeked girls rolling in the hay.

What really struck me though was the number of stations now devoted to simply rebroadcasting what had already been shown earlier that very day. For a long time critics of television (as opposed to television critics) have railed against the UKTV Gold style of broadcasting which, rather than making new programmes, simply generates advertising revenue from rebroadcasting classics from the past. However when you add into this mix channels devoted to broadcasting the crap of the last week, and those for the crap you literally just missed, you soon realise that the only choice that digital television offers is as to when, not what, you watch. However the choice of when you watch something is a power that was granted to us all back in the 1980s with the invention of the video recorder.

Once upon a time I used to use a video recorder. If there was something I wanted to see but couldn’t see at the time of broadcast, I’d set the machine up, it’d watch the programme for me and then tell me all about it when I was good and ready. Now I don’t bother. If there’s something I have a mild interest in watching but I’m not around at the moment it’s first shown then I think, oh well, I’ll probably catch it later. It’s bound to be shown again, either on C4+1 or constantly every time I turn BBC3 on or via the VOD via the internet. It’s almost impossible for me to miss this programme so I’m not going to make any effort… consequently I generally never actually watch anything very much. I might browse a bit, dip into this, dip into that, stick around to see the stupid ugly people being humiliated for not being able to skate or cook or dress or buy a house or sing, not long enough to care about them, just long to enough to watch the tears pricking at the back of their eyes.

Now that all of this is constantly, continuously available none of it has any value. Recording something had two meanings, on one level it was an enabling act that allowed me to watch something I’d other wise miss. But deeper than that it was a preserving act, grabbing hold of something I wanted to keep. But these valueless programmes aren’t anything worth keeping. Constantly available they are like water or the air and the flowers blooming in February will tell you how much we care we take of those.

I also really enjoyed Chris Mills on Friday – I only caught the end of his set but Signal/Noise, his last song, was fantastic and made me an immediate fan.

On another note, check out this Bat for Lashes vid, it’s funny: