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Posts tagged memory

06.03.2013 / UK

Always Somewhere Else

 

Always Somewhere Else draws together our journey across the USA. It engages with the road as metaphor and the motel as a significant figure in the landscape, as well as being culturally important. A central element is the idea of the road as place, shifting and dynamic in its relationship with its associated roadside landscape.
Serendipity and the chance encounter are central, as well as an attentiveness to, and awareness of the richness of ordinary lives.

Edited during autumn 2011 & first screened at Cinecity Film Festival, November 2011
Brighton
UK

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03.10.2011 / UK

Returning

He left little in the way of material possessions: a Rosary, I have it with me now, always have, his name written in ink on the inside flap of its leather carrying case: faded, gone now. But I know it was there, his name. And stories.

Thinking back now, thinking back to the way imagination would fill the gaps. He’d say, ‘Listen, now here’s a curious thing’, and off he’d go, get distracted, pick up a stone, maybe find coins to supplement the Dole: it seemed we were always on the beach then, taking the dog for a walk, beachcombing.  ‘Where was I? No matter,’ and maybe the story would take a different turn. He’d grin, ‘Just forgotten that now, haven’t I? Whatever, as long as it flows and there’s a truth at the heart of it, what’s the problem with a few bits made up here and there along the way?’ Read More »

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28.09.2011 / California

Thinking Landscape

Mojave Desert 18th September

Now no longer only, but still in some way an imagined country. Standing on this desert road I hear you, remember the rhythm of your slow quiet voice; America inflected through Cumbria.

Three locomotives hauling never-ending carriages, stretching like the road, on into the heat haze.  On an impulse we both wave as the locomotives pass. Three short whistle blasts almost immediately absorbed: we’re left listening to the rhythm of the carriages trundling across this vast land. It’s here in this moment in the fleeting sound, at first piercing then all too quickly fading, that I sense something of you. Remember how you’d begin to talk about this land, these desert colours. Pause, Sit silently. Leave me to imagine what wasn’t spoken. But most of all it was the road, this road, cracked and dry, crossing this ancient land; a migrant route. Read More »

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23.09.2011 / California

Barbara’s story

23rd September
San Francisco

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18.09.2011 / California

skimming stones

You’d pick up stones, smooth, round. Say, ‘See how they sit between finger and thumb? Now, aim low, catch the water a glancing blow. See?’

What did you used to say? No more than a stone’s throw away. Watch the pebble hit the water, ripples radiating wider and wider, until they’re no more than an echo on an otherwise calm surface, still ripples radiate; still echo.

Picking up two flat stones, I mutter, ‘this one’s for you. This one’s for me.’ Thrown in quick succession, I aim low catching the water a glancing blow. Count the number of times each stone skims across the surface before it disappears.

18th September
B6 Motel
Barstow
California

 

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/ New Mexico

Unexpected encounters

-Draw me a picture

-Ok what’s it to be, this picture, what’ll I draw?

-Draw me…a stagecoach, yeah a stagecoach. And a story, a story too. Yeah, yeah.

Listening. Watching. Remembering that nervous spidery line travelling across the page, across cheap lined notepaper from Woolworths: watching the outlines of Mesas, drawn from memory, completed in the tales he told. For him a familiar landscape; a place I could only inhabit in my imagination, in the weekly visits to the local cinemas to watch the westerns you loved.

-I never could draw that well, could I?

-Dunno. No, you never could. But maybe those spidery lines were sufficient, were all I needed.

- Always only starting points, eh? And the stories were good, weren’t they.

Standing under a boundless sky, thinking that maybe this is enough, all I’ll ever need.

Days ago, sitting in the lobby of the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico.
Stained, fading photographs crowd the walls of the lobby, the balcony. Old movie stars, long gone. Faces that would have been all too familiar to you, fragments of childhood memory for me.

18th September
Barstow
California

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14.09.2011 / Texas

Listening to the wind

Driving across this dry land. Listening, above the rhythm of the engine, to the regular tock tock of tyres on pavement, the sound of Route 66. Stopping, scooping up earth, nothing but red dust in my hands, a scouring wind whipping dust devils in the distance. The remnants of railway tracks running near, glimpsed through coarse grass. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad; rusted metal. Were you here, did you travel this road? Ride flat cars, box cars on this line?
If you were here now, right here standing next to me, what would you say? Read More »

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01.09.2011 / Pennsylvania

Leaving NYC

Leaving New York City: crossing the George Washington Bridge it feels like we’re entering the next phase of this journey.

Driving through Pennsylvania along Route 80, heading west.  Dense woodland, open landscape, the road cutting through hillsides exposing red sandstone.

I hear his voice, listen to him saying, ‘That’s the colour, the real colour of earth. Look at that soil.’ This on a bus from Newcastle to Carlisle. We’re in Cumbria, had not long since crossed the border, with the bus bumping and lurching along the road.

The image flickers, fades into the vastness of the landscape opening up in front and around us, into the dawning realization of the distances we are about to cover.

Thursday
1st. September
Route 80
Pennsylvania

 

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