Despite having working in the film (well, home video – the film business’s snotty-nosed, pain in the arse kid brother) business, I’m not one of those beardy film bore types. I probably watch a lot less movies than the average American and have managed to miss out on watching most of the classics.
So this blog is not going to be about movies much.
The Twentieth Century was good to me, particularly the 1990’s, when it seemed as if nothing could go wrong for me. I was living in Prague, had a company that was earning good money, a beautiful wife who loved me and I loved her, a decent apartment, nice car – lots of money in the bank. Life was good, albeit a little boring and predictable and lacking in challenges.
I still get nostalgic for the Nineties – it’s a decade that doesn’t seem to have dated too badly – not in the same way that the 80’s, 70’s and 60’s, etc. have. You don’t look at someone and say, “that bloke looks like he’s from the Nineties – what a complete twat.” There are quite a lot of things I miss from the Nineties. MTV Europe used to be good in the Nineties because they still played music back in those days. Does anyone remember Ray Cokes? Well apart from Ray Cokes and his mother, that is.
Anyway, I digress (something that I will be doing a lot in this blog).
It seems like we never really got that many good movies in Prague. I’ve never been one for big Hollywood blockbusters and, not speaking good enough Czech, I could never see anything in a language other than English as I’d never be able to understand the subtitles.
It was either in 1999 or 2000 that, after not having seen any good movies for ages, three good ones came at the same time. My wife and I watched them on consecutive days.
One of them was Jim Carrey’s Man on the Moon. I liked it – very poignant – but that one didn’t really say anything to me. The other two did though.
The next was Fight Club. There was just one line in it that really caught my attention. No, it wasn’t the famous “The first rule of Fight Club is that you you don’t talk about Fight Club,” (even though it’s a very good line).
No, there was a line in it that went something like, “you don’t own your possessions; your possessions own you”.
It really struck a chord with me, and I don’t know why at the time as it seems as if I was living to consume. I would buy any old crap then just for something to entertain myself - collecting action figures, hentai comics that I never read, Japanese porn, books – you name it, I bought it until there was hardly anywhere left in the apartment to store it all. My wife liked to buy shoes; I liked to buy crap.
It was only a few months after this that everything started to go wrong for me. I lost my main business as a result of trusting the wrong person who stole so much money from me that he bankrupted the company and then, one by one, all of my other sources of income disappeared. I used up all of my savings on a business venture that just didn’t work (the dot.com crash and the fallout after 9/11 being part of the reasons why).
By 2002. I was pretty much broke and forced to leave my wife in Prague and go back to live with my parents while I was looking for work, a period that took more than 18 months. Since then, I have had up periods and down periods but, even during the up periods, I’ve never forgotten the line about “possessions owning you”.
I think that it’s a very useful experience for everyone to go through a period in life when they lose everything, because it makes you appreciate how little you actually need to get through life. I don’t want to sound like some hippie-wierdo, because I am as selfish and greedy as the next person and I probably consume as much as the next person does – it’s just that I don’t buy much – I prefer to rent it.
Sometimes, when I have money in my pocket, I like to wander round shopping malls and look at all of the nice, shiny objects and think, “one of those would be nice”. But then I think again, “would it really improve my life to own one of them?” Then I think about how much hassle it’s going to be to move this and all the rest of my crap to my next apartment. I seem to move apartments every nine to twelve months and I hate moving. It’s so much easier just to dump everything than it is to move it to the next place and store it until the next inevitable move.
During what I call my ‘exile’ period – the time I was back in the UK desperately trying to get a job so that I could leave my parents’ charity and support myself and my wife again - I went to a career counsellor (a pretentious executive career counsellor rather than one from the DHSS or whatever they call it these days). He asked me what I wanted from a job, to which I replied (among other things) “money”.
“What does money mean for you?” he asked.
“Freedom”, I replied.
He paused for a moment, “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said.
I guess that “security” should have been the proper response. Maybe that’s what I would have answered to had I had a family and been less selfish but, to me, “freedom” is one of the most important parts of my life and something that I will fight hard to give up.
This is why happiness to me is not having an Aston Martin in the driveway and a 42″ plasma screen on the wall, but rather having a big pile of cash in the bank account or, better still, in a safety deposit box somewhere.
Which brings me on to the second movie that changed my life that weekend, which was The Beach, starring Leonardo di Caprio.
Unfortunately the movie was complete crap. The book by Alex Garland was supposed to be good, but I never read it (I’m not much of a reader really – especially not of fiction). In fact it wasn’t really the movie that caught my attention, but rather a track from the soundtrack from The Orbital and Angelo Badalamenti called ‘Beached’, which was set against a speech by Leonardo.
Here is the track:
It’s Paradise
This is where the hungry comes to feed
For mine is a generation that circles the globe
in search of something we haven’t tried before
so never refuse an invitation
never resist the unfamiliar
never fail to be polite
and never outstay your welcome
suck in the experience
and if it hurts
you know what… it’s probably worth it
you hope, and you dream
but you never believe that something is gonna happen to you
not like it does in the movies
and when it actually does
you expect it to feel different
more visceral
more real
I was waiting for it to hit me
Hit me
I still believe in paradise
but now at least I know it’s not some place you can look for
cause it’s not where you go
it’s how you feel for a moment in your life
and if you find that moment
It will last forever
Back then in 1999 (or 2000) it seemed a romantic notion, but not one that seemed to have much relevance for a married man, fast approaching middle age, with a relatively successful business to keep him tied down to one place.
So what does all this mean? I don’t really know. I am pretty drunk while writing this, and the title of the blog is Nick Pendrell’s Complete Bollocks, after all. In summary though, I keep coming back to these lyrics. Life has not been easy for much of the past few years but, when I look at the lives of some of my friends who have been stuck in the same jobs for the best part of two years, I’m not sure that I would change my life with theirs. I arrived in this ‘wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home’ lifestyle by accident, but I’m not sure that I could go back to the mundanity of regular existence any more, even if I could.
1 Comment
September 10, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.