“I ain’t got nothing but time Mr Garrison”
THAT quote. THAT film. The concept of time. And my love for Salvador Dali.
THAT quote. THAT film. The concept of time. And my love for Salvador Dali.
So what could possibly link the titular quote (which is hardly a Hollywood Hall of Fame contender) contained within the as yet unnamed film, the craziness of the concept of time and the majesty of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali you may ask? The answer naturally is only within the confines of my tiny mind, but after watching three games of baseball and riding the highs and lows of watching my team (Los Angeles Dodgers) still on the brink of franchise sporting history, and after drinking flagons of industrial strength tea and still suffering from the interminable affects of insomnia, these questions come easy, and, if I can keep this rambling nonsense on track I may also be able to finagle in the two lost loves of my life and then, and only then, we will all be able to collectively breathe again. Who knows?
It’s been a long night.
Partway through Oliver Stone’s totemic, polemic and cinematic treatise of the assassination of John F Kennedy, or, if you prefer, the ramblings of a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who should’ve slunk away from tinsel town after winning Oscars for Midnight Express, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, comes a somewhat innocuous quote that never fails to raise a smile. 30 years ago, Kevin Bacon wasn’t yet a mobile phone salesman and was in fact at the beginning of the prime of his cinematic life. Squashed between two stand out and headline performances in “Flatliners” and “A Few Good Men” he cameoed in Oliver Stone’s oft unfairly criticised but overlong cinematic classic “JFK”. The cinema cut of the film runs at 3 hours and 9 minutes and if, like me, you have the director’s cut, you can add almost another hour to the running total. The only criticism I accept of JFK is that it is too long. But buried within this overlong behemoth is a short scene of Willie O’Keefe (Bacon), an imprisoned homosexual male prostitute who brings the short scene to a close by propositioning Kevin Costner’s character with a flirtatious and cheeky comment and by first greeting him in a far more surly and sinister way with his throwaway comment of “I ain’t got nothing but time Mr Garrison”. The scene comes and goes in but a handful of popcorn but, like so many cinematic, artistic, or song writing lyrics of my age, I hold it dear to my heart. We’ve all got time, it’s just that some of us have still not figured out what to do with it.
Rambling musings
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JFK has hundreds of competitors for the title of my favourite all time film but 30 years on it continues to beat them all into a cocked hat. As the shameless plug above partly testifies to, I’m a film obsessive. Contained within the film only blog above are films from Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction is my second favourite all time film BUT not my favourite Quentin Tarantino film), which aptly demonstrates why I’m such a confused and contrarian character!. The blog also contains classics from Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and the masters themselves, The Coen Brothers. But we all have a favoured child and despite many of the creations of the above named directors being superior to that of JFK, I steadfastly remain completely and unashamedly in love with Oliver Stone’s dissection of one of the greatest tragedies to have befallen the human family in the 20th Century. But why?
Well, as those crazy days of the 1980’s drew to a close I became intrigued and quickly obsessed with the JFK assassination and if you believe that a “lone gunman” (it’s always a lone gunman isn’t it? Or indeed a “loner”, who seems to have a family, and a job, hobbies and a life, but still, he, and it’s always a he - is a “loner”) shot and killed John F Kennedy from an impossible angle and was caught, imprisoned and murdered himself within 48 hours, with no help whatsoever and with scant to no incriminating evidence against him, then I have a bridge over the river Kwai to sell you. So books were purchased, documentaries watched and then, unbeknown to me at the time, Oliver Stone was putting the final touches to his magnum opus that would rely heavily on two of the books I had already read and I feverishly awaited it’s release. I could embellish this tale and say I watched it on opening night at the cinema but 30 years on I don’t remember, but I have subsequently watched this incredible breakdown to the lead up to the assassination, the court room drama and the unsatisfying ending that, even 30 years later leads us nowhere near receiving a truthful and publicly acknowledged resolution many, many times. JFK was murdered by a Cuban/Russian sympathiser, a loner. End of story.
Move along please. There is nothing to see here. And, as Oliver Stone wrapped up his overlong epic, he posited the statement, “What’s past is prologue”. Now Mr Stone is far more eloquent than this humble narrator, but 30 years on, and certainly in the ever quickening years since the turn of the century I would say that “history is for chumps”. Move along everyone! There’ll be more history for you soon. Don’t worry about that *other* history. We have some new history, today. Just for you! But let’s not disappear down that particular rabbit hole as we could be here all day. And we might find Wonderland. And Alice. We may even find a “magic bullet” (they had those back in Dallas in 1963). So let’s just sit upon the ground of this grassy knoll and briefly appreciate the magnificence of Oliver Stone’s creation.
For those unaware of the film, it’s a masterpiece of filmmaking and I’ll turn my focus albeit briefly to the protagonists and Stone’s screen creation. I’m keenly aware I’ve jumped way ahead of myself above and already covered the real life conspiratorial aspects to a sitting US President’s assassination but 30 years on I humbly posit the notion that the stellar cast of actors have never subsequently been better or more accomplished and much of the praise for this falls to director Stone. The rollcall is immense. Costner, on his way to 1990's superstardom with Dances with Wolves, The Postman, The Bodyguard and Field of Dreams (a film I adore but struggle to watch with it’s Father/Son connotations) is sublime as Jim Garrison, the only District Attorney ever to bring a court case against a possible conspirator to the assassination (Clay Shaw played by Tommy Lee Jones in typical laconic and pitch perfect tone). Costner here is magnificent, driven to distraction and obsession, for truth and justice and the elongated court room scene is something to behold. Gary Oldman excels as the “patsy” or lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and as has been proven time and again since, a method actor supreme as he embodies Oswald’s mannerisms, tics and bewildered, out of his depth demeanour. Ed Asner and Jack Lemmon, both already Hollywood legends, play off against each other perfectly as possible “dark actors” in this twisted human play and Michael Rooker (latterly of Guardians of the Galaxy fame) supplies the in house argument against Costner’s obsessive assertions that a conspiracy has taken place in broad afternoon daylight. Rooker has a larger and more drawn out part in the scenes added back in by Stone in the four hour director’s cut of the film. Walter Mathau cameos, as does Kevin Bacon as noted earlier before it falls to two greats of modern cinema to add their conspiratorial flourishes. First, Joe Pesci portrays David Ferrie, a rumoured CIA asset and middle man and rather than the rumours, let’s marvel at Pesci’s angst ridden, chain smoking, scattergun take of yet another human tragedy disposed of in this whole sorry mess of contemporary history, and to Donald Sutherland who, in just a few minutes screen time as Mr X (based on real life Colonel Fletcher Prouty) who unravels and possibly embellishes (depending on your viewpoint) the entire reason(s) for the assassination.
30 years on, JFK remains a masterpiece and a national treasure but then again, I can be rather myopic on such things. But one thing cannot be denied and that is that 3 decades have now passed since it’s release and time waits for no wo(man) and it is to time, that strange concept that imprisons our actual physical earth “time” to which we turn.
Time can be the enemy of those of us struggling with the health of our mental faculties and daily well being and too much time can often lead to an ever darkening hole. The common refrains we all share are that we have too little time or we question where the time has gone. Do you have the time? What time is it? I just don’t have the time. What time does the football start? How much time will this game of baseball take up (and why are there so many blooming adverts?). Some people charge for their time. The lucky ones take time to re-charge their bodily batteries. It was a golden time, a time of the past, a dark time, a loving time. Time. Time. Time. I’ve always struggled with time and I now I stress with time. As you may have noticed with this ramble, I have too much time on my hands at the moment! But therein lies a problem, or rather my problem. Time can be a distraction. If you are flat out with work/a relationship/family/hobbies, even thinking about time could be a distant, archaic concept. I don’t have the time for that! But I do, and have, and especially so since the beginning of the lockdown, and whilst I’ll save you from the gory details, I had no alternative but to close my mini independent business as it relied very heavily on people not being in lockdown and free to go about their everyday activities. My business was barely breaking even but I was independent, very, very busy (that concept of time again) self sufficient and whilst I had a ginormous tosspot (I swear like a Sailor but I’m trying to keep these blogs as clean as possible and I like this old fashioned, typically English non-swear word!) every now and again, I was enjoying being busy, being independent, earning my own living and “time” flying.
Time has kind of stood still for many of us since March 2020 and if it hasn’t for you, perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones. The concept I’ve struggled with is having a list of obsessions as long as a giraffe’s neck, and all the time in which to indulge these obsessions, yet I remain distinctly and ever deeper in unhappy and unhealthy moods and being unable to enjoy the time afforded me to delve into my obsessions and hobbies. Hence this blog and my attempt to use my time in a more healthy and constructive way, of emptying my chattering mind or perhaps more appropriately trying to quiet it from those anxiety demons chastising me for wasting my time or constantly questioning why I’m not using this time more effectively. One of the many contradictions to all of this is that I don’t need any more hobbies or obsessions, or at least I don’t think I do. I’ll never live long enough to read all the books I want to, music ended in 1997 when Radiohead released “OK Computer” and I have all the sport, art and films I’ll ever need (not that I don’t wish for more, but I have enough to see me through). There is one thing I need, but that one thing is neither an obsession nor a raison d’etre but that simple human emotion of to love and be loved. But I won’t veer down this particular road here and will merely shine a light on this in the concluding part that follows. But first, guess what?
Time doesn’t actually exist! Yes. After all of that rambling nonsense above and of it being one of the principles of this meander through my mind, time does not exist. And why am I so certain of this? Because Salvador Dali told me so!
So continuing with the theme of time (which this Spanish madman convinced me didn’t exist) we return to the late 1980’s and my first exposure to the surrealism art of Salvador Dali. I remember the exact location where I first came across one of his master works but don’t recall the exact painting/print but my memory suggests it was “Swans Reflecting Elephants” (above top left) and it was in a bric-a-brac/everything under one roof type of shop on Fratton Road in my hometown of Portsmouth. I didn’t buy anything that particular day but returned shortly thereafter and did and another obsession was born. One of the first journey’s I undertook after passing my driving test in 1992 was to the Tate Gallery in London and my only reason was that I’d read in a pre internet magazine that it demonstrated works from the Great Master. And luckily it did as I got to look at, first hand and in all their glory (but much, much smaller than I imagined) The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Mountain Lake (top right above) and his famously strange art piece lobster telephone, which, as the title suggests, is simply a red lobster atop a black telephone. In the years/time that has followed I have made further pilgrimages to see his works in the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, Castle Fine Art in Birmingham (where I worked for a short time and had the duty to clean their Dali exhibits, which was naturally a horrible chore!) and by chance when in London in 2010 for a music gig, there was an exhibition of his pencil sketches by the London Eye. An already amazing day turned surreally to the unbelievable.
Dali’s art transfixes, bemuses and very definitely inspires me. He was incredibly unique, refused to bow to any authority, had a singular vision and despite obsessives like me believing we know everything about him, he remains caped in a beautiful mystique that will never fade. He may be famous or indeed infamous for his elongated and ridiculously twirling moustache, his juxtaposition of unrelated objects and his twisting of normal/natural objects into objects of ugliness or a cause of revulsion or shock, his reflections, being a pioneer of the surrealist art movement, of the “man in the moon” or a rockface from his birthplace being in many of his paintings. He’s also famous for being a renegade, a rebel, a lover, a thinker and, so the legends tell us, a consumer of his own bodily excretions.
He is of course probably most famous for his “melting clocks” and his supposition that time doesn’t exist as we believe it to be in a linear fashion. Time is liquid, moveable, non-linear and his beliefs surrounding the omnipresent images of melting clocks/watches was his internal angst at the mastery this man made concept had over the subjugation of humanity. 32 years since the Great Master’s death, see the preponderance now, and ever quickening use in modern media and cinema of time travel, black holes and quantum physics positing the very ideas Dali, and many more intellectual thinkers of our age have stated regarding time as a non-linear concept. There is no denying that time is a man made construct and nor is there any doubt that before this concept, when humanity rose and slept to the rising and falling of the sun and when the natural circadian rhythms of life were predominant, that we were (generally speaking) a happier, more content species. There is nothing natural about waking to a shrieking alarm clock (a digital, shrieking alarm clock that, should you desire, simply press a few buttons and change the “time”) and nor is there anything natural about waiting to an appointed time for a football match to start or a soap opera on television. Ah but Stephen, society would collapse if these constructs were not adhered to you silly, Salvador Dali loving sausage! But would it, really? Or have we just been born into a construct, of time, calendars and nagging bosses who tut when you spend 2 minutes longer than allowed when daydreaming on the toilet with that day’s newspaper or return from lunch five minutes late you damn heathen? Time doesn’t exist any more than a calendar does (they deleted 11 days from September 400 years ago just to make it “fit” — see Gregorian Calendar!) and time doesn’t exist any more than the tooth fairy or the fat chap in the red suit that doesn’t venture down the chimney that doesn’t exist in your 15 storey apartment complex.
So why I am so anxious about bloody time, all the time?
For me, Dali allowed me to be me (in my more confident times) and especially so as we time travel in conclusion to the mid 1990’s and a character we shall call “The Older Lady” (all names changed to protect the innocent). For it was this lovely lady (who shall appear in a subsequent story or two) who did precisely the above, allowed me to be me. Self regarding narcissistic nonsense aside, being me, the authentic me, has been a challenge I’ve railed against for far too long, for too long a “time” and she allowed me to be precisely that. Me. No mask. No stress. No anxiety. No conformity. The Older Lady also welcomed my interest in Salvador Dali, encouraged it and furthermore encouraged me to broaden my horizons alongside the mad old man from Spain. To think sideways. To read a book outside of my norms. And who cares what other people think? We were poles apart, I too young and childish, she too mature for a rogue like me. If only I had Dali’s free spirit and wasn’t constantly anxious about the “time” that seemed like a chasm between us.
I ain’t got nothing but time dear reader. Time to think, to stress, to overthink and to be anxious about. Empty time in an empty mind, to worry about a concept that doesn’t exist and despite the encouragement of a generous and beautiful lady and a beautiful madman, 30 years on I’m still taking the time to think about time.
Have you got the time?
