Week 17: Kansas

"And now I know that you are going to laugh
 But I've just got to take a photograph
 Because I've never seen you look this way
 And you've not told me yet if I can stay;
 I don't care where this lands us I'm sure,
 But I don't think we're in Kansas any more..."
 - 'Kansas',
The Wedding Present

Ha! Shows how much David Gedge (or, for that matter, Dorothy Gale) know. Because we are in Kansas, for the first time since our stay in Dodge City en route for The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

I'm thinking Kansas, and I'm thinking that we're travelling on a Greyhound bus, mile after mile and hour after hour as featureless dust bowl pasture blurs past the window, fence-posts and telegraph poles. It's not too far from our last stop in Iowa, just a quick cut through the corner of Missouri or Nebraska, black bruised clouds lurking on the horizon. The only thing to break the monotony are the tunes on the radio, but there must be some interference because they are all getting jumbled in my head as I start to drift off to sleep in my room in my fugitive motel somewhere in the dust bowl. I hear you singing in the wire, I can hear you through the whine and I know that I must carry on, wayward son, to find somewhere over the rainbow, way up high. Maybe Kansas is a state of mind: a lonely restless yearning for something that we cannot quite grasp - a lover, a dream, a life.

I've forsaken the easy film option of The Wizard of Oz this week - after all how much of it was ever really set in Kansas? Instead I shall be watching:

• In Cold Blood (1967)
• Capote (2005)
• Splendor in the Grass (1961)