Chicane's "No Ordinary Morning"

When I discovered the video (after having been familiar with the song), I was struck by this particular interpretation of the lyrics.

A man leaves a woman. A woman chases a second man through a parking garage with her BMW. He escapes narrowly. At the top of the garage, the sun has set and the woman gets out of a car, approaching the first man who left her. He is now holding a bottle of champagne. The man and woman embrace and share a moment of intimacy. She throws the bottle of champagne over the edge, which dissolves into nothing upon hitting the concrete. And then she pushes him from the parking structure. He grabs her arm and she falls with him.



But what is striking is the ending, after the "cut." Both the first man and the woman land on a air pillow. She is congratulated by her crew. The first man walks to a set trailer and glares at her intensely, as if in the "real" world he is the one in her position.

From Mann's Magic Mountain

"Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness, giving us back our primitive, unattached state."

Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

1979 Penny

That fateful image towards the end of Jeannot Szwarc's Somewhere in Time (1980), when Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) pulls out the 1979 penny from his pocket, and is transported irreversibly back to his own time, leaving his love Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) in 1912.



What if one were to think of this time-travel romance as a metaphor? Across space or across ideology. The irreversible, insurmountable gaps that separate us, making no distinction between ideal and material existence.

Is heaven to come or is heaven that which is reflected back upon?

The eternal beckoning, "come back to me..."

Protesting Inconvertible Money

A cartoon by George Cruikshank, parodying the form of the bank note in order to protest the government authorizing the Bank of England to temporarily refuse to change bank notes for bullion.

21

The young Americans are very angry when they drink. They traipse about the city with threats and intentions. They hate everyone. They force-feed liquor down the throats of one another with vicious counting games. One wonders if they take pleasure from the excesses of hedonism. Or whether the excesses of hedonism simply entail the pleasures of hatred.

A man snorts complaints about the "bitch that fucked his sister's boyfriend." The horror, the horror. The bitch who fucked his sister's boyfriend was a teetotaler. "What a bitch -- she wouldn't drink... Just like that fag there." The snorting man approaches the "fag." Tousles his hair violently. Nudges him in the chest. The "fag," drunk but sober enough to realize he must stop drinking or lose consciousness, head-butts the snorting young American.

Violence as an excuse for human touch. Hatred to open up the possibility for love.