I Carried a WaterMelon!

I had a fabulous Saturday night! It's been the Belfast Film Festival all this week, and I have been indulging my love of culture - a Chris Marker documentary from 2002 about yellow cats on walls in Paris on Wednesday, a Jennie Livingstone 1990 documentary called Paris is Burning about the 1980s Harlem ball scene on Thursday, and a Japanese animation tonight. But Saturday night was the best! The Film Festival transformed the Harland and Woolf paint yard into a huge outdoor screening site and we went to a drive-in movie. Six of us drove down in a two car convey, bought hot dogs and popcorn, and tuned in our radios, for a wonderful evening of Dirty Dancing. What a great movie. What a great soundtrack. And so much fun watching it in a car, making silly remarks about the plot inconsistencies (like the way "Baby" gradually dances in fewer clothes so at one point she is in bra and shorts!), lighting up cigarettes after the sex scene, and singing at top volume to the songs. Altogether now: I've had the time of my LIIIIFE and I. OWE. IT. ALL. TO. YOU...

Of course, I had a moment of reflecting upon Belfast and the radical changes that city has lived through. As we drove over the Lagan, the new Belfast glittered at us - the Waterfront Conference Hall, the Liberty statue (a woman in steel), the Hilton, the Odyssey concert arena. Then we turned into the paint hall, a massive space in the middle of the shipyard that used to be used for painting the enormous ships constructed here in the early decades of the last century, including of course the Titanic. Harland and Woolf was the heart of the city, and the two huge yellow cranes, Samson and Goliath, are still symbols of Belfast. But now it is deserted, a barron, desolate wasteland, used only to screen cheesy Americana. The industrial past has gone, and the city's future is one that looks towards post-modern plays of images. But this in itself has to be an improvement on the parochialism and sectarianism that has blighted this area (Harland and Woolf would only employ Protestants for example). As we left the yard singing and everyone tootling their horns, my heart soared with love for this city that has seen and survived so much.