Rock Art

A stationary open-top mustang with moving background scenery created chase scenes; real cops and robbers stuff in the era of movie reels. We were transfixed. Ice-cream vendors with torch lights sold tubs at the intervals, eagerly digested by attendees at the Saturday night movie-house.

We moved then with the times to modern music videos with backdrops of the Taj Mahal or New York cityscapes gleaming behind the dude with the electric guitar. He, regardless of the decade wears too-tight trousers matched with the compulsory matching black leather jacket and Stratocaster.

Modernity has as its sport a focus on what we held and lost; memorials to the inbuilt destructive nature of the human race. The empty great plains of the Native American contrast with the still of the musician. It drags the eye to the sparse grassland.

What lies beyond the silhouetted mountains? Water perhaps or new life? Or the bones and fossils of a sacred history, reduced to stock photo pop art supporting the climb through the charts of the latest rock wannabe?