About

Maybe 3 years ago I was trolling one of the private darknet sites where I get my bittorrents, looking for something new to download, watch, and delete, as usual. All that fat pipe Korean bandwidth going to waste is a crying shame, and I do my best to keep it humming, and make sure that the carbon doesn’t build up in the virtual valves. The Korean government (I’ve lived in Korea 10 of the last 12 years) gets a big thumbs up from me for their policy of relentlessly ramming bandwidth down the throats of their citizens (and the scruffy no-account foreigners who squeak in through the cracks), if not for many of the other decisions they stumble into.

So I was 4 or 5 pages deep in the movie forum, and there it was, with only a couple of peers on the torrent so far. I swear, my heart skipped a beat. I caught a whiff of those dusty sun-pummelled rocks of Southern California, and the rich stink of bubbling road-tar. A few notes of the theme song. A fleeting adolescent memory of perfectly conical 1960s-era brassiere-bound breasts. A shiver of the joyous goofiness of life’s meaningless serendipity. I hadn’t thought about the movie in decades, probably, media-starved and nomadic as I’d been during my wander years. It was, without exaggerating, one of the formative films of my young life. It helped make me the man I am today. I fired up the torrent and whispered a breathy ‘woo hoo’, so as not to wake up She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the downstream rate nudged its way up past 400KB/s.

I’ve since deleted my ill-gotten copy and purchased the DVD, and watched it more times in the last few years than is probably sane or healthy. Like I said on the front of the site, it’s a little hard to explain why it might be, but It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World remains, I think, my favorite movie of all time.

The first time I saw it was probably thirty-five years ago or so now, during one of the annual New Year’s Eve showings on television, and every time I watched it during those pre- and post-pubescent years, it set me dreaming of myself rakish and dissolute in a heavy steel-bodied convertible with a woman in a satin gown, racing across the California desert towards the Big W. Dreams I still have today, half a lifetime later. This site is my tribute to a movie I love, to a time that is lost, and in some ways, to the child I was, sitting in a warm living room in the far frozen north of Canada with my bowl of salt and vinegar chips, dreaming of a life full of laughter and adventure and wacky hijinks.

I remember how that seeing that arid Californian desert, so alien to me and so clean, how seeing those cars race through it set up resonances in my brain that I couldn’t explain. That I still can’t, for that matter. How the movie made me laugh. How it mixed with the heady fumes of newly-discovered sex, and filled me with an awareness that life was both utterly random and completely hilarious.

On some of those Friday nights at home since I’ve rediscovered the movie, when I’ve had my fill of beer and surfing the net, and I’ve sung along with a few Tom Waits songs, and am weary and hungry, I find myself firing up the movie and watching a few scenes. Imagining myself on that road. And I feel both rooted in a past that I frequently have difficulty remembering, and a little bit more free.

There’s much to love about the movie, I think, and it’s become like an old friend long-lost and remade for me in the years since I rediscovered it. Somehow it takes me back to a time when new worlds were opening wide, full of possibilities. Sex and the road, out there in front of me.

I’m not an expert, on this movie or on film in general, I’m just a fan who likes to dabble with web design, and after years of designing sites for myself and for friends, I thought it was time to make a little internet shrine, in the best internet tradition of batshitinsane obsessives, to something that has been a great source of pleasure to me over the years. You know, other than beer.