Back cover blurb
GH is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled "Little Life" which is looking at those small but lasting moments of existence which profoundly affect the direction of our lives. Among other things, it will look at teamSUPPORT and its impact, childhood mortality and his mother's battles with vascular dementia.
Extract
Film critic Leonard Maltin does not share my enthusiasm for a movie called Grand Canyon. In fact, he bemoans that “...the results are mushy, superficial and unconvincing” and gives it a flaccid two-star rating.
I’m perpetually disappointed when experts imply I have no taste. While they are possibly correct in their assertions, when they snub something I really like and have even extracted a pseudo life philosophy from, they may as well have publicly stated that my girlfriend is ugly.
Sure, it’s a preachy little film, but it is one which has always resonated with me for a myriad of reasons. I love movies crammed with multiple characters whose fictional lives shift, intertwine and cross with each other, sometimes quite profoundly, at other times fleetingly. Like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Lantana (to name a few flicks which proceeded it), I have always been fascinated when large casts play out a narrative ordered by similarities and contrasts of experience and, perhaps more pointedly, where coincidence plays an important part in drawing these people’s lives and associated messy plotlines together.
In Grand Canyon, Mary McDonnell’s character of Claire encourages her husband Mack to embrace a string of recent coincidences and to follow them through rather than run away from them. She encapsulates the thrust of the whole film when she says:
Something has happened. You can’t go back and have it not happen. Some kind of connection has been made and it has to be played out.
Eventually, Mack heeds his wife’s advice and, as a result, the movie culminates in its entire cast of characters strangely drawn together to a place of awesome natural beauty in northern Arizona. I can relate to this and often take loved ones to share with me places of natural splendour and majesty. Years later, I wrote in a poem how places:
have their own internal rhythms
and pull, insisting
on your recall, your return
for reasons nostalgic, elegiac.
I went on to suggest that special places can “expand forever across the disturbed puddles of the present” and have an intrinsic power to gently clear a confused head, realign a lost sense of direction and soothe an unsettled soul. I figure that’s why a lot of us go bush. And in the final reel of Grand Canyon, the vast panorama presenting itself before the protagonists seemed to be putting each and every one of them (and their problems) back into their relative and miniscule place in the grand scheme of things. It also simultaneously implied that there is an indefinable thread that weaves through our small existences, much like that tiny river flowing around, between and betwixt those majestic canyons of the Colorado Plateau…
