Rhapsodies

This one feels like phoning the whole thing in today. When the day’s scrap of paper told me I had to draw from Apocalypse Now, I suppose I could have drawn something with the patrol boat chugging up the river into the heart of darkness or I could have done something with a bloated Marlon Brando as the insane Kurtz. But I’ve been getting myself in a lot of trouble overthinking these things and on a low level the first thing I think of when I think of apocalypse now is the choppers.

From helicopters  rising into the air with the morning sun to the sound of  The Doors‘ “The End“ to helicopters attacking the Vietnamese village with rise of the Valkyries (or as my friends and I liked to call it “music to strafe villages by”) blazing on the speakers, the seem to a visual metaphor of casual and ultimately futile power. The kind of power that makes brutality easy. The attack on the village is the best example the fact that there were VC in the village hardly mattered. What did matter was there were some primo waves on that side of the river and “Charlie Don’t Surf.”