FATHER/SON BONDING

Blog repeat alert. I actually put this on Black Lodges, but Steven has decided to call it a day on the magazine side as he’s got bigger fish to fry in terms of family and workload.

Last week saw what would have been my old man’s 64th birthday so I celebrated the occasion by watching ‘Rockers’ again. While my dad’s fixation with black music may, in no small dose, have permeated my tastes, his engineering skills bypassed me completely, leaving me working with athletic footwear for a living.

Oddly, my fondest memories of father/son bonding was watching reggae-related flicks and anything with Steven Seagal in (until ‘The Glimmer Man’ with Keenen Ivory Wayans which we mutually deemed substandard). If you asked him his favourite films, he’d cite, “Deliverance’, ‘Klute’, ‘The Harder They Come’ and that one where Steven Seagal hits a man with a pool ball in a towel…” Respect.

Indeed, the pool hall ruckus, was a moment of shared awe for us, and our joint (pun very much intended) admiration of Horsemouth (not to be mistaken with the infinitely less sensitive Rasta portrayal, the villainous ‘Screwface’ in Seagal’s ‘Marked For Death’ – though we gave that repeated viewings too) strapping and sparking monster zoots in Ted Bafaloukos’s dubby 1978 opus. It was the closest we ever came to sharing tokes, and I swore to one day blaze one up like Horsemouth. Until I grew up. Three puffs these days and I’m concentrating…very…hard…on…speaking.

I’ll cherish these shared moments over any number of bullshit Gillette commercial high fiving and hugs. Fuck that. I’m the one getting emotional when Tommy Lee-Jones gets a knife to the cranium in the conclusion of ‘Under Siege’.

Anyway, as a paternal tribute of sorts, here’s two classic scenes. One is significantly more conscious than the other…