Great Driving Moments

I have been meaning to talk about Great Driving Moments for ages. I remember Jon Savage who wrote England's Dreaming talking about them during some TV programme the subject of which escapes me. I think he was driving some big open-top car around Manchester and talking about how the music matched the various locations, down by Palatine Road or over the flyover. The programme might have been the South-Bank show about New Order (New Order Story?) or just some random thing about Manchester which he does so well. Great films with the words just filling in the gaps when there no music a bit like a "Big Audio Dynamite" album.

Twice in the last few weeks I have hit exactly the same stretch of road as I was driving home when the track starting on the car radio is something excellent. The first track was by Hildegard von Bingen, and I will have to dig out the CD to tell you what the actual track was. Driving is always stressful and plainchant/polyphony always helps. Unfortunately, I can't remember the other peice of music.

I have just read a piece - Why the United States of America used the bomb against the Empire of Japan. I don't want to go into the rightness/wrongness of this but the bit that struck me was the mention of the upping of the estimate for the number of hospital beds required. I get an image of every available low white building in the South Seas being taken over as a hospital. The US WWII hospital is a very common image in films. I bet the reality was a little less inviting. You don't get the fever, the delriousness or the pain. Mark Helprin captured the atmosphere in Refiner's Fire though that was the Israeli/Arab War in 1967. Mark Helprin deserves a whole section. Magic Realism! Read Winter's Tale and live in a dream. I always thought that the style of this book meant that the writer didn't have to worry too much about historical accuracy but I suspect now that the opposite is true. In Winter's Tale, there is a section about the engineer who built the Golden Gate and other bridges. I can't remember the engineer's name but I never doubted the validity of the descriptions even though I really knew that the bridges ascribed to him were actually built by two different people.