I grew up watching Superman, The Cisco Kid, O.S.S., hearing war stories, chasing down moth-eaten army uniforms back when milk arrived in a horse and cart, marvelling at the colour, style of actual coca leaf content in Coke bottles, blinking at motor cycles, Dick Van Dyke falling over a couch, cowboy films shot in daylight B&W and in colour at night, or at my father’s home-grown vegetables. I was born with words in my mouth -’gimme-that’ , ‘how-dare-you’ and later I guess ‘what-the-fuck’- ideas as fixed and eternal these days it seems as the Iraq war. My world grew into Kidnapped, bicycles, desert boots, Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, DisneyLand, Rear Window,Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, and the senseless annual anxiety of packing the car at holiday time, the essence of each and every moment forever mysterious. Parodies of life or art weren’t even an option. I knew the Beatles before the Monkees, Bogart before Belmondo, and can’t say I either recall the Summer of ‘42 before it was an idea a moviemaker or some clown from Mad magazine conjured or parodied, or whether it co-existed at the same time in the northern hemisphere in some dinky toy mind like George W. Bush’s. I believe I’m not alone in being bewildered by the incoherence of everything, the products, images and texts that have surrounded my life from birth setting out to arrest me. My natural river environment in the far southern climes was severely challenged by the commercial and cultural crap that suddenly appeared to blot out my childhood but I can no more claim that I knew or regretted this then than I can claim that my natural world was not a parody of some story I was told by my mother, any more than I can pretend the baked sidewalk I stood on hearing JFK was dead, or pink socks on the rock ‘n rollers, were moments, things or events in themselves sent by whoever up there to make life even more dangerous or curious than it normally is, or that any of it was a direct result of the existence of the industrial military complex, Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry even. I simply didn’t know jack shit of politics, origins or influence.
And boy, whew! If that wasn’t enough.. then there was George Bush’s stuttering but heartfelt concern for life and death around the world – he was so worked up about us all – everything so pretty and organically interconnected, woven into beautiful cordant threads – take that great general valuelessness! We all were held held dear by so many in the years on from that day when morality lost its head and footing on the street, that guy left the back of the Limo. He didn’t do it deliberately, did he? We all motored on blinded by camera flashes thinking of that spot.. when, what the…? Hope? A brand new day? Broad daylight?
