Hello.
As a human in 2020, I was under lockdown for a couple of months. During this time I was expected to learn an instrument, master that instrument and subsequently headline Glastonbury via Zoom. Barring that I should have at least watched every film not produced by Harvey Weinstein, listened to every album not released by R Kelly and read every book not written by, erm… JK Rowling?
Naturally though, I did absolutely nothing. I spent the better days sitting on the sofa vegetating in front of the same old TV shows I’d seen a dozen times before, the worse days lying on the sofa watching YouTube videos I had no interest in. Meanwhile I barely made a dent to the list of films, albums and books I wanted to experience. I managed to rationalise this by reassuring myself, “life is pretty strange right now, you’ll have time for all those things later”, the same lie I’d been feeding myself since I was 18. I was convinced that once I had a full-time job everything would settle down and there would be plenty of time for consuming the mountain of multimedia I had backlogged after years of neglect.
Well, at the start of August, I started my first “proper” full-time job and, unbelievably, nothing changed. I would get back from work and vegetate (although for a considerably shorter time than those lockdown days) until it was time for bed. After a few weeks of this, I decided it was time to make a start. I’d tried before but this time it was for real. By the time I’d looked through all the available films, half an hour would have passed and no decision made; a similar situation when choosing albums.
Thats’s when I had an epiphany; inspired by my mate’s quarantune of the week and James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds podcast, I decided I would live (culturally speaking) for a week in one of those better years gone by. For the foreseeable future I will randomly select a year from 1950 through to 2020 and live by the following rules:
1. Watch five films and listen to five albums per week from the selected year.
2. No films or albums I’ve already seen / heard.
3. At least one non-English language film and at least one non-British / American album.
4. Standalone films only. No sequels.
And that’s it really. I decided to create this blog as a way of preserving my time travel adventure, mostly for myself, but if it’s an inspiration for others I’m okay with that. Along with incredibly short weekly reviews of the films and albums, I’ll also write some news stories to give an insight into what the world was like back then. Hopefully we will see that life is generally good; but more realistically, and much more despairingly, I expect that the world has always been terrible, only now we have a window in which to see it so easily at hand.
So come with me now on a journey through time and space…
Where we’re going we don’t need roads.
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