Last week I posted Fatboy Slim’s Praise You, and it is featured in the next episode of XaW Files. I thought at the time that I’d included it in the book, or one of my books, but didn’t know where, or that it was just a few episodes away.
Honey G’s Trying to be Good As Can Be
This episode also reaches the moment all regular readers, great greenYgreyliens, AAW-WOWers and POPolutionaries will have been waiting for: the start of the Bill and Ted‘s Apocalypse Now Battle of the Bands.
The Battle of the Bands title mixes two very different movies: one comedy musical, the other horrific war. These are common threads running through the book… and my mind. Most people try and focus on the former, and ignore the latter, and I think that’s the best way to stay sane… allow happiness to remain.
War Movies Examine Male Minds
I wasn’t interested in most modern wars until I studied them in university: the Balkans, Middle-East, Ireland; I just saw them as endless conflicts that self-perpetuated themselves. There are kinds of peace in the Balkans and Ireland now, but with tensions still simmering.
I was more interested in past wars, as presented in the movies: Westerns and World War Two when young, and Vietnam in my youth. Vietnam War movies became popular in the 1980s, after Platoon‘s release in 1986, just before I started travelling in 1987. I read books like Meditations in Green and Dispatches while On The Road, inspired by the greenYgreyesque mixture of 1960s American cultural thought set in the beautiful landscape of Vietnam: some heavenly minds seeing and wanting the opportunity of a peaceful utopia like never before, thrown into a hellish conflict environment of brutal warfare on the ground and in the air. Apocalypse Now preceded that craze, released in 1979.
Showing the negative side of greenYgreying, boomeranging and POPing!
As Platoon would contrast the good and bad sergeants Elias and Barnes, through the narrative of a rookie soldier, Apocalypse Now contrasted the good and bad through Willard and Kurtz. It’s probably that psychological thread that makes them my two favourite Vietnam movies, and I think they’re the two most highly regarded anyway? I just remembered Rambo, which also came out in 1986, and definitely wasn’t one of my favourites. Its predecessor, First Blood, had been though, released in 1982, and is my third favourite Vietnam War movie, although it’s about a veteran, and takes place in an American country town.
Apocalypse Now had just been another war movie to me until the late 1980s Platoon-initiated craze created more interest in it. Maybe that’s what’ll happen to XaW Files and the others in my trilogy, once fantasy rambling by web maps takes off, and becomes as popular as POP art! Be ahead of the crowd… and maybe you’ll be the one to write the books/films that POPularise it!
Chapter 4 Episode 22
I lost the words between episodes, becoming occupied with titles, and changing identities. However, I’d been chasing them for so long now that I felt like I really knew them; knew how they looked and sounded, the way they formed, their very structure.
Meaning of Meaning of Life Lost Overnight
If the words weren’t there to chase, it would provide the freedom to have a nice entertaining episode, with a friendly Battle of the Bands, but would it be interesting enough for you then, and would you always wonder what the were words were, and if they really had any meaning; the words that have now become a meaning of life metaphor in this paragraph.
Reading the above paragraph a day later I wondered what I meant by the last sentence at first, but after absorbing it I think I meant that most people can have nice comfortable lives, but are usually looking for new experiences and challenges, whether having a life-bringing baby or going on a life-threatening endurance challenge.
Come a Long Way From Cluj-Napoca
While I’d heard of Bucharest for years, but didn’t know where it was in Romania, I hadn’t heard of Cluj-Napoca, but think I had heard of Cluj through their football team, without knowing what it meant, or that it is a city.
As we entered Bucharest’s The Oldies Club for Bill and Ted’s Apocalypse Now Battle of the Bands I noticed a lot of the same crowd from Cluj-Napoca, and thought we’d all come a long way together, reminding me of that Fatboy Slim song.
The Cluj crowd had travelled 300 miles south, while we’d travelled to Moldova and back, learning a lot along the way, and creating a slightly epic vampires and werewolves story inspired by seeing we weres were in Transylvania.
Of course, we’d only travelled it on Google Maps… while they’d flown straight from Episode 9!
New Members of New York Dolhascas
The club filled up as the night progressed, and just before midnight the New York Dolhascas made their appearance. They looked the same, except they seemed to have a couple of new members… that looked like Mary and Jack.
They had been drawn to appear just before the Dorohoi – Zdob și Zdub alliance, which meant there was only two bands to go before NYD played. I felt like I had to try and talk to Mary and Jack before they played, but was it already too late?
Travel Quest Twist
I was pondering how I could
approach Mary and Jack,
when I felt a cold finger
creeping up
the fur on my back.
I turned around to see it was the New York Dolhascas frontman, and my shock was doubled the next moment when I looked closer… and closer… and closer… until realising he looked just like our Andy Warhol Andy Wolfhol; only colder and more vampirish.
My shock was doubled again the next moment, as the first words he spoke were the exact words I’d been chasing for the last two episodes:
They told
you
I’m
a furry werewolf
and not
a bipolar writer
They
told you
they’re heroes
and not
vampires.
Available to buy or borrow on Amazon and some great big bookshops.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/XaW-Files-Beyond-Humanity-Fantasy/dp/1516969065/
greenygrey3 