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.
Ryanair are fucking dreadful. A flight with them is always an ordeal. The gate is called and you rock up to find a big fuck-off queue with no plane in sight; the staff are pumped-up scavengers, stalking the heaving gate for any carry-on item with dimensions bigger than a tub of Bold 2-in-1 Washing Capsules; their luggage policy metamorphoses weekly from nuts to bonkers to insane then back to nuts; the interior of the plane makes one sick in its tackiness; you can’t get a wink of sleep for lottery or scratch card announcements and trolley-dollies peddling hyperinflated savoury snacks. What else? Oh yeah, there’s quite the high probability that your flight will be cancelled. This is when the ground staff disappear into a bush which features in a Homer Simpson meme.
Ryanair staff in a crisis.
Worst airline ever. Yet we still fly with them in droves because we’re either poor or miserly.
It’s 22 April 2013, and Man United run away with the league by some margin (11 points), Sir Alex Ferguson’s final squad easily his weakest ever to dominate the 38 matches of England’s top tier. It was the meekness of the competition at the time, coupled with a peak van Persie, what done it. Captured from Arsenal in the summer, here was a flying Dutchman – and formerly a ‘sick note’ – hell-bent on a first Premier League title after a near-decade spent languishing with post-Invincibles Arsenal.
Not many saw Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement coming that year, but the omens were there in Groundhog Day gloom in the Champions League. In retrospect it’s as if he knew the outfit couldn’t get any further in Europe, that it was time to release himself from continental heartbreak.
That volley, though. In this simply majestic goal the best of the Fergie years are encapsulated – the pure aesthetic qualities of football, the possibilities beyond 4-4-2 Anglo-Saxon ‘hoofball’. Moyes, van Gaal, and the snores of Mourinho, the Red Devils haven’t had a moment like that volley since. Bring back Fergie.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 