(pictured above: Bang! Bang! You’re dead!)
I was always moved by those military funerals with the three gun volley salute. I thought it was really clever how they fired guns over the grave of someone who had probably been shot. Paying tribute to someone by fetishising the means of their demise has a lovely symmetry to it. It kind of book-ends things if you will. It’s neat.
Keen to emulate this ingenuity, I decided to pay tribute to my late Uncle Stan (who had been run over by joy riding youths) by stealing a hearse and using it to do a series of handbrake skids over his freshly filled grave. The family looked on bewildered as loose earth flew up and hit them in the face. The fact that I got out of the car and played Taps on my Stylophone did little to help matters and everyone had a real attitude about it at the sandwiches and tea part back at the pub. My gesture had gone right over their heads.
Could’ve been worse I suppose. What if Stan died of cancer? What could I have done then? Sprinkle tumours on his tombstone? That’d be a tall order. Jesus, it could have been even worse than that. Imagine if Stan had been savaged by wolves. There would’ve been carnage at the burial. People being chased all over the graveyard. Screams and howls. Hmm, maybe it isn’t an appropriate approach after all.
3 comments:
hahaha! good one...i always liked to imagine, when the provos shot that volley of shots in the air, that from the sky would fall the angel variation of their slain comrade who would be bedecked in the tricolour and breathlessly mouthing the words of the soldiers' song as blood seeped from his wounds...
Well, I mean...talking about fetishes. That’s a can of worms for most people. Speaking from the outside, as it were; as an Englishman I can’t say what’s behind the shooting. Balaclava’s are an integral part though, that’s certain. What I mean is...you need a mask of some description. That’s where the thrill comes from. Anonymity. The shooters are a bonus, a prop, your whip substitute...but if you go back in history...take Adam and Eve. You would’ve had your role play there. Two weeks after being chucked out of Paradise they’d already discovered the concept of pleasure/pain. Another paradise! A piece of a branch, freshly cut from a tree... SWISH!!... right across the bum. Have that! Just a flick’s enough to send a tingle of ecstasy round the body. Possibly the bang of the gun’s the moment of...you know....of ecstasy
Great minds thing alike Danny. I wrote a film once where people went angel hunting. They fired up into the sky as if for pheasants and angels came tumbling down from the heavens and landed dead on the ground. Then they fired up in the sky and a huge figure came plummeting down and landed on top of the hunters, SPLAT! And the huge figure was a white robed, white beared God and he was dead. Needlesss to say, the film wasn't funded.
Barrymore, I don't think there's much harm in all that kinky stuff as long as there's no one being lashed out of it with a yardbrush (as someone once pointed out to me) or blown up in a shop when all they wanted was to buy a dinner and not get caught up in a boundry pushing adult game.
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