Solon and Beegone...

Today I am listening to Talking Heads and Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens...


This morning I got a very precious two hours of uninterrupted reading time on the sofa...it's what Sunday mornings were invented for. I finished Douglas Coupland's Generation A. I highly recommend it...although if I am honest it was more of a VHS cassette than an DVD...a bit clunky and too linear! But well worth even the hardback price which is what I got... always read it with the slip jacket off...it automatically feels like a classic. The Bee's have gone and so has humanity's humanity and there is a link. I do not want to present spoilers but as with Generation X it deals with story and the telling of story. It tracks alongside this the story of Solon the drug which is everyones choice bar the lead characters and therein lies the plot. Where have all the stories gone and the story tellers, which used to be us, you, me, him, her, they, we etc. If you are breathing you have a story to tell and as in the book I don't mean what did you do today darling - although that is a good starting point - but to close your eyes and imagine a place and fill it with fine and friendly folk who go wrong and fall and get up and becomes heroes and monsters and, and, and...and then say it out loud as you do it. 
Sell the telly, bin the radio, close those laptop lids -  after you've read this -  and create language and let your ears and mind do the rest.
Tomorrow I am taking two teenagers from a pretty tough estate in Cardiff and we are going to interview some members of the same community who have clocked up at least 60 years each on this earth sandwich of ours and ask them 'What have you never given up on and how did you get through it?'
I have done this a few times myself with some older folk and made short films but this time the teenagers themselves will be behind the camera and asking the questions. The stories are true and from another time, a time when story was not reduced to an sterile linking of action scenes in a sloppywood movie. I can guarantee my two young friends will remember tomorrow and will tell the stories they hear again, both to themselves and to others, to steal a line from Douglas who says that friends are like money... ie of great value so stories have a currency, they buy you time, time when others will close their mouths open their ears and minds and be one with you. It's called a connection and there is nothing like it! I say again there is nothing like it.


Like Couplands 'Solon' David Byrne's vision of heaven is somewhat beautifully seductive and on one level sounds like the place to spend eternity and on another sounds like hell. It looped in my head as I read the decline of mans invention without the bee intervention.


I invite you listen to David and Douglas respectively and then read Generation A, but first remove the cover.