When the time is right, I’m a real sucker for those quirky low budget 90s movies, and Desert Blue is the latest one that I heard of but couldn’t find online. It’s one of those stories that doesn’t make sense on so many levels, which usually is a recipe for something really bad or pretty good. It’s all meta, because I haven’t seen it, but when it comes down to it: does it really matter?
The story takes place in the desert in town that has the largest ice-cream cone in the world. A woman passes through town and possibly some other lost souls. A dangerous chemical is spilled on the roads going in and out. The FBI is called in to investigate. People are locked in the town and that’s where much of the story takes place.
At heart it’s about a community that’s cut off from the rest of the world, which is magnified because it’s already a desert town. It hints towards Under the dome, which hints towards other works of fiction. It’s more than just that, because it’s also about the desert, that vast region, that vast nothingness, that empty space. There’s just something about the desert where it borders on an actual physical place and a state of mind, the place that’s most hostile to life, which then becomes much of the reason that people go there, or they cast themselves out to a place as such.
This links back to Westerns, with some bad elements and a stranger rolling into town to set things straight. Who ends up in the desert anyway? Prospectors, maybe. Merchants selling picks and hoes, maybe. Misfits, maybe. On some level it’s all a variation on a theme, with the desert as a state of mind, a last refuge and all that stuff, but when you stretch that notion up: so is life, if you think about it.
I’m currently reading The Dark Tower, I’m down to book 5. The story takes place in a desert where people from different places and eras have ended up. It’s a good enough story, but with most of King’s books, there are vast parts that can be left out without any harm to the overall story. In my opinion book 2 and 4 are completely skippable and are just not interesting. But that’s on a side-note.
Ulro, then, at least: my definition thereof
William Blake described the desert as Ulro, an empty place, a sort of last refuge. Ulro is a state of mind that comes down to being in a spiritual desert (one among many interpretations). This is where we should go to figure out our next move, and it’s where we should commit ourselves to the future and choose one thing over the other.
And it’s all between the lines, it’s all things unsaid. It’s visceral, it’s hitting rock bottom and doing what seemingly comes as a flash of insight, but by the same token comes down to a sort of condensed instinct.
On some level it has Nietzsche written all over it, where extreme nothingness will ultimately give you a sense of purpose and direction, where you strip everything away and then figure out what remains after all that. Is this existential? Very much so. Is this the material of the quarter-life or the mid-life? In some way.
I recently started following this channel on YouTube: it’s about a guy who sunk all his life-savings into an abandoned mining town in California. That’s exactly this story, it’s the desert, it’s the nothingness, and the weekly 40-minute episodes narrate the process, the findingness, the nothingness, the everythingness, but also the direction and purpose in defining and figuring out a next move.
All that lies in the desert, be it literal, be it physical, be it a state of mind, or the notion of a desert on some far off real or fictional planet. The desert is always there. It’s always vast. It’s always unforgiving. It might just be what we need from time to time. And we might get something out of it for a while, much like Cerro Gordo produced half a billion dollars worth of silver, and now and in its future history it’s a place of imagination, both because of the proximity of extreme physical hardship in a prior past, but also extreme riches.
We were somewhere around Barstow,
And this is also more or less where it touches on other works of self-obliteration and exploration, where Thompson drew up the rest of the line, and where Barstow spins off towards some bender, and a binging in that big desert town that used to be grand, and that has literally been emptied out since the plague came around in recent times.
One of my all time favorite movies that I rewatch every now and then is Rum Diary. It’s one of Thompson’s stories and it narrates the lives of a group of misfits that have taken a job at a local newspaper in the turmoil of the sixties of Puerto Rico when it was colonized by the Americans. Somewhere after that time the official language seized to be English, the resistance is palpable, but it’s still a place of opportunity, but also self-obliteration, and at the far end of that, self-destruction.
Rum Diary is a whacky story, and in a way that line that was slung out in a far-off desert applies to life on a small island as well, and also the notion of the weekend-junkie that plays a more prominent part in The Bird Man, in an attempt to understand how essential great places can fall through their knees, when guys with dictatorial tendencies take control, and a lot gets destroyed in the process.
I still believe in that story, especially against the 2020-background, even though it isn’t literally mentioned, but it does go down that same hole, much in the same way as Rum Diary, much in the same way as that notion of Ulro, buying a mining town, the gunslingers from The Dark Tower, and all of such things.
How it continues, that Barstow line:
,on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
I guess that it was another place, another time, another era, and another notion of what was needed to hit that old rock and that old bottom. The location is spot on though, on the edge is where it is, because it might be solid advise to have one foot in each location, else you might just about loose your grounding.
That’s why that channel of that guy in the mining town works: by documenting, by interacting, by building community, by creating a place that people will want to go to, he kind of has that bridge between those two places, where you can dig deep and strip everything away for a while, only to return.
That’s why, ultimately, Rum Diary is a reminder of a time and place, but it doesn’t move beyond what it is, because it doesn’t connect to any larger narrative, be it literal, visceral or any other way. I believe that we always look for silver linings, that small sliver of hope that shines through, that makes us believe that we live in a just world, and a world that makes sense. That’s at least what I aimed for with The Bird Man, and on some level I think that’s what all good stories are all about.
The most recent confirmation of that is the most unlikely place to get any of that: a country-song by Tom Green. I used to be a huge fan of his comedy skits in the late 90s and early 00s, but it wasn’t exactly more than what it was: it was all at the surface.
This song, Right now is the right time is one of the best songs that I heard in a good long time. Where did he find inspiration you ask: the draught and the dust, the nothingness and the everythingness after spending weeks on end traveling the desert in a van.
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