Hurrah! We have another enthusiastic singer in the courtyard. Whether he is also talented remains to be seen, but this blackbird does not lack volume and ambition. He immediately opts for the highest stage: in the evening twilight he sings at the top of his lungs from a mast on top of a roof terrace. The creature thus claims the entire courtyard as its domain. Take care little guy, pride goes before a fall and the cats come before your chicks.
Hopefully it will be a productive keeper that we can hear a lot about this spring and on summer evenings. His morning song escapes me. Sometimes I hear fragments when I half wake up, after which I doze off on the electric bed for a few more hours. This has recently been on loan here and should help to cope with the physical disabilities. It is another big step in a new life that I did not choose. Muscle diseases are forced on you, it is punishment without motivation. But an electric bed is always preferable to an electric chair, especially an American-made one.
The upper room still functions properly. The electric brainwave immediately takes me back to a crazy performance by the half-decayed drag punk band Wayne County & the Electric Chairs in a nightclub in London and reminds me of Old Sparky, the pet name that vengeful Americans use for the chair on which the death penalty is carried out. Punks and Puritans, that’s the crazy discord of the United States in an electric nutshell.
Giant ape King Kong as a bonus animal
That brings us to today’s question: where do we and those bloodthirsty Americans get the necessary power from? From the socket of course! That’s right, but I mean it in a broader context. You have to zoom out, like they do in movies. From the socket to an entire city panorama in a breathtaking widescreen, so that you can see Godzilla looming on the horizon and you can look forward to the demolition work that is to come. There’s a good chance that he will first destroy a power plant or a distribution station outside the city, because then you get sparks and fire and that increases the entertainment value. All bow to Godzilla!
The radioactive colossus is back on solid ground again this week Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth film in an American series of giant monster films that started dead serious ten years ago and became increasingly frivolous. The arrival of that very expensive Hollywood production with giant ape King Kong as a bonus animal was overshadowed last week by a historic Oscar award and a tirade from Oliver Stone. That Oscar went to the makers of the widely acclaimed Japanese monster film Gojira -1.0 (2023), which was released in Dutch cinemas in December with the English title Godzilla Minus One.
The award fell in the Best Visual Effects category and that was actually a victory for Tom Thumb, because the gigantic Godzilla and post-war Tokyo were brought to life by just thirty-five Japanese trick specialists. It is interesting that the relatively small-scale production leaves all American monster productions behind. The thirty-seventh Godzilla film is considered the best since the classic Big Bang Gojira (1954), in which director Ishiro Honda dealt with the trauma of the nuclear bombings and atomic tests. The radioactive giant monster embodied the well-founded fear of the devastating impact and radiation of the atom.
Nuclear energy scaremongering
The American filmmaker Oliver Stone detested the beast last week in Amsterdam, when he attended a presentation of his film pamphlet Nuclear Now ran against unnecessary fear-mongering about nuclear energy. Well, blame my good friend cum plastic roommate for the fear of radiation diseases, meltdowns and nuclear bombings! It cannot be the fault of Uncle Sam, Vladimir P. or Kim Jong-un and their generals. That roaring rot monster from Japan has scared people for seventy years, causing the climate crisis and the hole in the ozone layer. That’s why Stone is shouting it from the rooftops: Stopzilla Now.
I say: that’ll get you the cuckoo, Steen! I don’t know your Godzilla, but mine watches over Mother Earth and her living creatures, and sometimes he flattens some cities to make it clear that we humans have to slow down with our constant production and consumption. Godzilla urges us to calm down. Godzilla calls for reflection. So that we can enjoy the song of our neighborhood blackbird in peace and quiet on our beds (electric or not) at dawn and dusk. Do your best, blackbird!
