What happened to Jimmy?

I have not posted for a little while.
I can not define a little while. Andy has kindly filled in.
Cheers buddy.

The last few weeks have been beyond hectic. Apologies, because hectic is a pretty stupid word.

I went and got lost in New York. It was like Escape from New York, with Kurt ‘Snake Pliskin’ Russel, but I was so lost that I couldn’t escape. Apparently I have no sense of direction. Have you ever been to Harlem? Do so. It is urban decay and pretty-vibe beyond all comprehension. Most of the people you talk to in the street have stories worthy of an odyssey.

The ‘Nam and Desert Storm vets are still sat, legless (like, without legs, opposed to inebriated) in the alcoves of sidewalks muttering about helicopters and friends come and gone.

I spoke to an old vet in Manhattan, as I was coming out of 116th Street station which is somewhere towards East Harlem. He told me that “the job of a hero is to kill foreigners, whilst the job of a soldier is to shoot his own side” and about ‘Jimmy’ who fell to the VC.

Apparently Jimmy loved cinema. The highlight of his rec time were the screenings in the makeshift barracks. This guy talking to me was sad that Jimmy would never see another film. It made me wonder, how many years had this homeless dude been sad about that? How many films had he seen since and gone away thinking about how much his friend would have loved that…?

What actually happened to Jimmy? Who knows.

I went away from the whole conversation realising the power and escapism film can bring to a person, and the emotion it can evoke. In amongst all of the crap put out there, always appreciate the films that hit it home for you.

The ones that you walk away from with the tight feeling and pensive vibe.
The 1995 masterpiece directed by Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, ‘KIDS’ always does this for me.
If you’ve never watched it, stop what you are doing, go out and find it. It’s about two skater dudes by the name of Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce) who bum around Manhattan with their friends smoking up, fucking and getting screwed. There is the girl, Jennie (Chloё Sevigny) and her friend, played by Rosario Dawson. It was Dawson’s first role in film, and she was found for it whilst chilling on a stoop in Manhattan. The actors famously play themselves, and most of the kids in the film were just kids in New York. It’s a long, complicated, truly beautiful and deeply cynical story of love, drugs and nothingness. Then everyone gets AIDS.

Apparently Jimmy the soldier who fell in ‘Nam would have loved it. Given that AIDS hadn’t hit by the time he died, it makes me think that maybe he just had a great taste in film from the outset.

Film does good things for people. May people continue making cinematic pinnacles of excellence.

On a total side point, CANNES in a VAN is picking up speed, getting closer to coming to be all it should be and some people have been noticing it. And these people are good people who represent good things. More on that in (impending) time.

After New York, where I also talked about film with some old Sicilian men in Little Italy and some total assholes in Tribeca, who clearly knew a lot but sadly were about as transparent as something astonishingly see-through, I spent a week in Birmingham. Riding motorbikes.

I went on a tour of the Triumph motorcycle factory as part of the course I was on, where amongst other things I learnt that the company have two factories in Thailand. Whist the business minds working in the factory openly admit that this is because against the Queen’s Finest Pound Stirling, the sum total of £1 to roughly 69Baht as an exchange rate allows for some serious revenue to be made; it leaves me wondering something. The sentence involves the words ‘labour’ and ‘child’.

There might be a story in that if anyone is interested…

Sadly no one that I met at the factory, or actually, anywhere in Birmingham knew very much about film. Or even where Cannes was. So that was unfortunate. There were however a lot of vans.

I am off to a shoot re CANNES in a VAN, so keep reading because one day I might write something interesting.

And go watch KIDS.

Jamie