renaissance man
This is interesting. A friend has mentioned this guy to me numerous times. Not re this video, but more his off-grid and smithying, etc.
I was watching a video about making a super cheap forge (below), and trying to find the follow up video, about making your own charcoal.
I failed to find the charcoal video. But I found this instead. I’m watching it with great interest.
Well, I’m having a glass of red wine. Please let me be capable of self control! I had a pint of shandy a few days ago. And I survived that. The issue is: 1) Can I refrain from drinking too much? 2) Can I also refrain from other foolishness?
Yesterday I had two delivery shifts. The first was a shorter one, delivering groceries on behalf of Morrisons. Simple and mostly straightforward.
The second was delivering solely for Amazon, in Cambridge. I’m not super keen on town deliveries. Country stuff suits me much better. Both occasionally present access issues. But towns, generally, in my experience, much more so.
And Cambridge more so than most, partic’ with the University (students in halls, porters in their lodges, unable or unwilling to be very helpful, etc.). Flats and other weirdly located places present issues of access vs time. I had a very troublesome instance of this yesterday.
What I’ve learned from these repeated experiences is that:
1) I have to take extra time to try and locate viable access routes (not made easier when customers don’t answer texts or calls!); 2) I must remain calm, even in the face of unreasonable folk (not necessarily anything to do with work, per se*); 3) If I can’t gain safe trouble-free access, within a reasonable time frame, return the package to the depot.
I hate doing the latter, as it can seriously impact on overall time taken/fuel consumed, etc, and thus affect earnings. But it’s preferable to nasty scenes with irate ne’erdowells.
* In yesterday’s instance, it was a busybody totally unrelated to the delivery, getting very hot and bothered about where I was temporarily (with hazard lights flashing; having made unanswered texts and calls to the customer) parked.
Hmmm!?
I paid £1 for this at a book stall in our local Tesco. And I kind of feel had!
I’m surprised in fact that I’m persisting with reading it, to be honest. Life’s too short, frankly!
The author’s style is very run of the mill, and unremarkable. But much worse than that, his central character – the protagonist for whom we should be rooting – is a bell-end.
A feckless and not to be credited (in any sense of that expression) gambling addict, who moves from down on his luck gambling dildo to ADC to Caulaincourt, on the eve of the 1812 invasion of Russia.
I collect stuff on 1812, so I thought I’d take a punt. And it’s also useful for me right now to have brainless diversions from the fall-out of the last eighteen months of travails. So it’s really just on those two counts that I persist.
Waaay back in 1989, Trump was calling out Donald Trump for the criminal he has always so very proudly been. In Crumb’s comic book world of wish-fulfilment Trump is literally flushed down the toilet.
I’m not usually one to wish ill on anyone. Well, I didn’t used to be. But several extremely unpleasant experiences in the last few years have changed that.
I’m 100% with Crumb in wishing and hoping fervently that Trump and his ilk be publicly punished, and indeed humiliated, and that their disgustingly venal self-serving ways be fully exposed for what they are.
I’ve read that Trump has been found guilty of all 36 charges against him, in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. Excellent. Let’s hope this is just the first in a tidal wave of successful prosecutions.
And let’s hope he spends the remainder of his life in jail. Sadly I suspect his hyper-wealth will protect him from such an outcome. I hope I’m proven wrong.
Trump is allegedly a great businessman. Well, he’s certainly very rich. But according to hundreds of former ‘business associates’, or more plainly victims of his ‘sharp practices’, he’s just a non-paying bully and criminal.
As Adam Gabbatt tartly observes, in a piece on Trump’s recent Bible sales gambit, for The Guardian ‘Trump owes more than $500m as a result of civil court convictions. He is facing 88 felony charges, in five different jurisdictions, and lawyers cost money (unless you don’t pay them).’
Just as Crumb saw Trump clearly for the criminal he is, so too did Joni Mitchell understand where we’ve all been headed, as the 1985 lyrics to ‘Dog Eat Dog’ testify:
It's dog eat dog, I'm just waking up
The dove is in the dungeon
And the white washed hawks pedal hate and call it love
Dog Eat Dog
Holy hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
And big wig financiers
Dog eat dog
On prime time crime the victim begs
Money is the road to justice
And power walks it on crooked legs
Primetime, Crime
Holy hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
And big wig financiers
Where the wealth's displayed
Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
The slaves will be taken
Some are treated well
In these games of buy and sell
And some like poor beast
Are burdened down to breaking
Dog eat dog
It's dog eat dog, ain't it Flim Flam man
Dog eat dog, you can lie, cheat, skim, scam
Beat'em any way you can
Dog eat Dog
You'll do well in this land of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
You could get to be
A big wig financier
Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away
Dog eat dog
People looking, seeing nothing
Dog eat dog
People listening, hearing nothing
Dog eat dog
People lusting, loving nothing
Dog eat dog
People stroking, touching nothing
Dog eat dog
Knowing nothing
Dog eat dog
A sign outside said ‘Welcome, we are open.’ But it was locked shut. Damn! There was even a doorbell. I rang it a few times. No idea if it worked or not. Nobody answered.
Between The Butcher’s Arms and the cathedral, there are some ruins. Poss an old Abbey, or Abbey Gatehouse? They now enclosed a small municipal park. Lovely!
The next gallery is us walking down the steps to the cathedral.
Blah..
Friday evening we all – well, nearly all – met up at The Butcher’s Arms, in Cardiff. To celebrate Abbie’s 26th birthday. With a meal, a drinks, for all. Followed by a ‘painting party’, for the ladies.
Visited a church in Wales today. At Illtud’s, in Llantwit Major. Very nice scenery in the locality. Sheep, greenery, an old Abbey gatehouse, or somesuch…
The tiny narrow winding streets of the older parts of Llantwit Major are charming, but tricky to navigate in a big modern car. We parked down a track near what may have been the old vicarage.
On the walk down to the church there’s a lovely grange gatehouse. and when you get to the church, there are lovely little enclosed sections of stream. The sound of running water is gorgeous. Very calming!
Obviously a popular tourist destination, this church has a kind of gallery, at one end. And then a newly built mezzanine. This latter is actually a nice space to sit, and view the gallery end of things.
Down at the far or altar end, there’s loads to see, as my pics testify. Funerary monuments, remnants of old wall paintings, and an amazingly ornate carved stone altar. Fabulous!
The number of wall painting fragments is greater than most churches I’ve seen so far. And the variety of them is also interesting. From parts of figures, to geometric or organic patterns. Fascinating stuff!
And finally, a pretty walk back to the car.
We’re off to Wales for a few days, on a short holiday break. Teresa just showed me the two above photos, that she recently took. A lovely reminder of our home.
I bought the fabulous Uncompromising Expression Blue Note book with me. It’s really terrific.
LATER THE SAME DAY…
We had breakfast, fairly late. And then went to Porthcawl, to the beach.
We had fish & chips, on the beach. And were joined in that by Hannah and co.
In the evening Abbie popped over, and we had a nice (if rather late!) dinner, courtesy of Tim and Hannah. We also gave Abbie her (slightly belated) birthday gift and card.
I first saw this film in my late teens, somewhere around the age of 16-18. I must admit, I found it not just shocking, but actually very traumatising, at the time.
All these years later, having just watched Rolling Thunder, I thought I’d revisit Taxi Driver. It turns out both are based on Paul Schrader screenplays. But whereas Schrader was involved throughout and liked the results, when working with Scorsese, the same was not true with Rolling Thunder.
I won’t synopsise the plot of Taxi Driver in any great depth. Most folk will know it chronicles Travis Bickle’s descent into a paranoid vigilante hell. In a NY that is sleazy and trash-ridden, the titular lonely insomniac ‘Nam vet’ unravels, with unrequited love, politics, and post ‘Nam violence all feeding into his brooding insanity.
Interestingly, the budget for Taxi Driver was less than that for Rolling Thunder ($1.9 million, as opposed to $2 million). It feels the other way around. TD is much, much, much better filmed, directed, acted, and conceived.
Music plays a very prominent part in Taxi Driver’s power. It was Bernard Herrman’s last soundtrack. He died only a few days after completing it (and the movie is dedicated to him, as a result). Jazz is frequently used to create that sleazy urban vibe, whilst sinister brooding orchestral sounds underpin the more ‘psychological’ stuff.
There’s even some contemporary mid ‘70s pop thrown in, with reference to a Kris Kristofferson track (Bickle buys the album for Betsy, the latter played by the enchanting Cybill Shepherd), and the inclusion of Jackson Brown’s song ‘Late For The Sky.’
Whereas Rolling Thunder seems, esp’ by comparison, like quite a sparse empty film, Taxi Driver is packed with layers, nuances and themes. And whilst almost all the characters in RT are wafer thin, and not too believable at that, almost all of those in TD have depth, subtlety, and are – for the most part – very believable.
Taxi Driver tells a pretty grim story, frankly. And leans heavily on such cheering themes as alienation, paranoia and violence. But it has within it many other moments. Such as the brief romance between Betsy and Travis. Which Travis swiftly ruins, by taking her on a first date to… a porno cinema.
That gets us to one area of the movie that doesn’t quite add up. Travis Bickle is a mess. Taciturn by and large. But also prone to offer unsolicited opinions very forthrightly. Clever enough to journal and make a modified handgun rail; for concealment. But dumb enough to take Betsy to a porno, for a first date!
It’s a strange movie. Very much of its time. The post hippy-era comedown from a few summers of love. It’s horribly dark. But it is also beautiful. Beautifully filmed – the opening and closing credits, for example, are gorgeous – terrifically directed and acted, and with a fantastic score.
Scorsese is, undoubtedly, brilliant, as a director. He’s fairly horrid as a character, within the movie; one of Bickle’s graveyard shift fares, seething with vengeful and racist anger. And his New York is a squalid hateful place.
But his skills as a director are sublime. The attention to detail is stunning. Witness the split second moment during the end credits, when a momentary glitch in the smooth shot/soundtrack signifies Bickle’s unsettling volitility.
And the God’s eye view of the bloody crime scene in the brothel? That’s clearly inspired by scene of crime photography. And shows both the breadth of Scorsese’s inspirations, and how he used such ideas creatively.
Just as the above mentioned aerial crime scene shot – a brilliantly conceived and executed long overhead pan – references infamous crime scene photos, so too does the poster image make what I believe to be a deliberate sly and subversive pop culture swicheroo.
I’ve not seen anyone else mention this, but what about the above? In this image we get a cold, gritty urban NY vibe. But it’s basically positive. The Taxi Driver version substitutes the lonely alienated figure of Bickle, sans girl. Still amidst brownstone tenements and traffic. But now, instead of cars and fire escapes, it’s all sleazy fleshpots. Visual poetry, but with a sour taste.
What this shows, and especially if one contrasts Taxi Driver with Rolling Thunder, is how differently similar material can be made to feel, in the hand of different creative and directorial hands. Both are very dark movies. Thunder is ok, I guess. But Taxi Driver really is a great movie.
They’re both so grim I hesitate to actually recommend anyone watch either, to be honest. But they are worth seeing. Well, Taxi Driver is.
