It's a Friday evening after a tiring and imminently forgettable week and I'm feeling a little bit self indulgent. So, what better way to raise the spirits than with some rampant materialism as befits the festive season. Below is a list of what I want for Christmas. There is no place here for world peace, or charitable donations of a bewildered donkey to some fly specked mud hamlet in east Africa. This is a list based on unabashed, unashamed, self satisfying greed - consider it a consumerist slap in the face of a terrible recession.
So, in no particular order we have:
(1) Bruce Springsteen "The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story"
A 6, yes, count 'em, 6 disc set that runs to "8 hours and 33 minutes of audio and video". Sustained Bruce for anything over three minutes tends to drive Sanae up the wall, so eight and half hours of His Bossness may well end up destroying our marriage, but, c'mon, a full three hour 'bootleg' video of the legendary Houston gig from the Darkness tour back in '78. Man, you can't pass that up.
(2) The Thin Red Line (the Criterion Collection) Blu-Ray Disc
Back in the late Autumn of 1998, myself, Ben Graves and Ben Wilson, emerged blinking from a small cinema in downtown Sapporo after spending close on three hours watching this, Terence Malick's first film since Days of Heaven some twenty years previous. The two Ben wanted nothing more than to go for a couple of beers and maybe dance on a table or two at Rad Bros (while scoring some 'hot Japanese chicks' as was their wont back then. They are both happily married now, but Lord, what their wives don't know..). I wanted to immediately go back inside the cinema and watch it again. Actually, 'watch' is too prosaic a word; I wanted to immerse myself in this film again. For me The Thin Red Line epitomizes the pure potential of cinema as a combination of sense, sight and sound, that exceedingly rare film that elevates the medium to an art form worthy of both aesthetic and intellectual admiration. To others, its pretentious shite and no amount of my wide-eyed gosh golly gee rhapsodizing is going to forgive lines like "Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining".
As an aside, as the film ostensibly concerns it self with the fighting between Japanese and American forces on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, three hours of this may also wreck our marriage. Is there an unconscious pattern developing here?
(3) A Blu Ray disc player to play the above. Hell, now that my marriage is on the rocks, I'll even consider Korean brands.
(4) A subscription to the New Yorker. Yes, yes, I know I should be doing my bit for d'auld sod and taking out multiple subscriptions to the Farmers Journal, The Kerryman and Gaelsceal, but God, the sheer parochialism of it all would both rend the heart and shrivel the mind. Better to loose yourself in wistful fantasies about the alternative life you could have lived had you been born Jay McInerney on the Upper East Side.
(5) My body weight in Galaxy chocolate caramel bars. No, wait, that should be my mother's home made bread. No wait, damnit, Sanae's not going to like that either, Christ, there goes my marriage again.
(6) A pair of tickets to the Sawdoctors' New Year's Eve gig in Castlebar and a baby sitter for Cian so me and Sanae can make a night of it and try and salvage our marriage.
I remember that day vividly. Some tears were shed. A turning point in our friendship? And then I think I threw up in an elevator that night.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, the 'painting the walls' in the lift of the Lifort Hotel. Who amongst us can forget such a friendship defining moment? Certainly not the hotel management.
ReplyDeleteAnd your tears? Not shed in vain my friend, for you are not alone in being moved by such transcendental magnificence. See the essay accompanying the Criterion release at
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1603-the-thin-red-line-this-side-of-paradise