Browsing is something I've subconsciously abstained from in the Plague Year, but yesterday I found myself scanning the racks and shelves of the British Heart Foundation with an enthusiasm I hadn't felt since getting Netflix. Maybe the shortening days were making me feel festive or maybe I was just hoarding for the winter, but I found Anvil (full title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil) on DVD for 33.3recurring pence, and Joel Morris had recommended the documentary to me earlier in the week so I took it home and watched it with much crying which I hadn't expected but really this is a post about Stone Henge:
Lips and Robb, who've gone their whole life without a Plan B, visit the site after a particularly high stakes argument on the sixth day of recording their make or break comeback album, and it's only now that I realise this sequence was probably a nod to Spinal Tap, because all I was thinking as I watched was how unmysterious Stone Henge suddenly appeared in the context of their story, and how almost everyone alive has probably had experience of erecting something similar as an infant.
I don't know if it's a discovery each of us makes or if, unlikely as it sounds, we're all just copying an original, but when given building blocks, at some point we take one and stand it on its end, and then we stand a second block next to it, but that's still not a building, and then... and then we realise we can put a third on its side along the top!
And now we see that it is finished. And what we've made serves no purpose, it is just - although our infant minds don't recognise the baggage of this evaluation yet - cool.
I'm one of those who grew up distrusting the idea of cool, but the instinct to raise two freestanding objects and then place a third on its side along the top is an instinct I understand, and it's because it would be cool. And to do it on the scale of Stone Henge, with the collective energy such a project would require, would be incredibly cool. Which is maybe all the motive people needed to break their backs doing it.
It seems to be all the motive Anvil needed.
The true purpose of Jenga is to make miniature Stonehenges on the pub table. The whole topply-tower thing was just invented by the unimaginative one who says 'OK you've made it, now what?' and 'this would be better with some rules and a winner.'
ReplyDeleteA game of Jenga nearly always lasts longer than is fun.
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