It’s almost here again, our contemporary version of Dawn of the Dead (1978) in which hordes of consumer-goods-obsessed zombies storm retail outlets with abandon, many of these creatures camping outside the store overnight so as to snatch a discounted TV come opening time. Some of the scenes are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. What a time to be alive. Mutants.
I first heard this album as I wandered aimlessly around Stockholm in December 2008, bar to bar and park to park apropos of nothing; I was merely documenting with some shitty camera phone the Venice of the North in winter. I was by no means lonely as I caught up with various travelling characters at the hostel after sundown, but the Kanye West soundtrack that accompanied daylight and early evening certainly had a great effect on me.
Drottninggatan.
I’ve always thought that music elevates the normal up into the cinematic, that there’s an extra reverence thrown in the mix. I had nothing profound to think about but ‘Street Lights’ or ‘Coldest Winter’ synced to me staring at a pigeon eating a discarded Subway butty was rather transcendental. Stockholm was the city for this moody music, and a walk back from Systembolaget to City Backpackers through Sodermalm with a £40-equivalent bottle of manky rum and additional ’08 Auto-Tune was a most brooding adventure.
I know nothing about Kanye West but this soul-searchingly depressing album – at times it’s like a self-pitying drunk crying about how his/her life went down the pan – is a cracker. I like the miserable and Kanye West is the one for me.
Further reading:
https://djbooth.net/features/2017-01-05-defending-a-masterpiece-808s-heartbreak
Stonehenge – Americana-style. This peculiar piece in Alliance, Nebraska is an aesthetic lifted from Return to Oz (1985). I fear the Wheelers when I look at this, not the Druids.
38 spray-painted vintage cars put together in 1987 by local Jim Reinders as a memorial to his father. I like the idea of that, a gnarly construct to the departed, not some grim, dull statue for an inebriated plonker to stick a traffic cone on.
Further reading/viewing:
Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.
Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.
And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.
Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45910189
Dundee was briefly passed en route to Montrose; I didn’t like the look of ‘Yes City’ and I am most confused as to why the it has two football teams, their stadiums yards apart. Montrose was alright, though, and it has a Last of the Summer Wine feel to it (aside from the Lidl, Aldi, and Farmfoods). I went for morning runs in fields of wheat à la Theresa May, but mostly sat in a cottage all day drinking spirits and watching movies whilst my travel companions did stuff. How a getaway should be.
We also played cards using candles instead of chips. And it was so cold a fridge wasn’t required for the beers. And that’s Montrose.
Gorgie, Edinburgh is by all accounts a total toilet, a veritable shithole, a bloated haven of the tracksuit, the smackhead, and the football yob.
Sometimes it’s quiet and the sky looks nice.
I don’t really know what was happening here. Normally on a stroll by the castle I glance up at the beastly fortress and briefly envision the Wars of Scottish Independence as I whistle a chunk of James Horner. This Sunday, however, I saw some randoms chucking around a large fluffy dice. Weird.
I am fistpumping like Nadal today because I reached the magic 10. That’s 10 folk to whom I’ve now disclosed the crucial trivia that Phil Collins is the cop in Hook (1991). It took me until the age of 28 to realise this. It was a Saul on the road to Damascus moment.
Phil Collins immediately elevates a film a couple of stars.
Fuck knows what Terrence Malick was doing between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). Malick goes period again, the slaughter of Guadalcanal complete with a who’s who of Hollywood ‘big names’. One could be forgiven for thinking this a contemporary The Longest Day (1962), a spot-the-star marathon. Malick clearly used these ‘stars’ as a means for making this entirely personal ontological exercise.
The least political war movie ever, the battle starts and ends and the company depart, characters question their place in the grand scheme of things, quite the number die. The cinematography is breathtaking, the score transcendental. It’s the closest ‘commercial’ motion picture to extended movie montage, à la Koyaanisqatsi (1982). There are no stock good guys and bad guys or retreading of traditional war movie tropes.
Martin Scorsese summed it up quite well: “The Thin Red Line” is so important. You could come in the middle of it, you can watch it. It’s almost like an endless picture. It has no beginning and no end. People say, “Well, sometimes I can’t tell whose voiceover it is.” It doesn’t matter. It’s everybody’s voiceover.”
Rose Street is somewhat like the famous York Shambles but with more pubs and less Romans. Princes Street is an adjacent hellhole – chav clobber galore and rickety buses – but Rose Street almost takes the stench away. A lovely street.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 