The fox says a thousand words per frame ("The Big Country")

Turning from the fox, I'm looking at an epic western song - not an epic western remix, but an epic western original.

Last month I wrote one of my wandering posts that touched on everything from a Star Trek encounter with pure energy to the Talking Heads song "The Big Country."

While the primary emphasis of the Talking Heads song is the urban protagonist's negative reaction to middle America (David Byrne himself would come to love middle America by the time of "True Stories"), a secondary theme within the song is the fact that the United States is...a big country.

Patrick J. Fox's video emphasizes the latter aspect of the song.



The visuals are derived from one of the last verses of the song.

I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere.

Or, as Patrick J. Fox himself put it:

VIDEO MADE for 1979 song The Big Country from the LP More Songs About Buildings and Food - made on flight from New York when landing in New Orleans - shot whilst listening to the song by happenstance on iPod Shuffle on September 11, 2007. True Story. Px.

I can relate to this right now, because my family is hosting a foreign exchange student. While her home country is, in its own way, a big country, geographically it's nothing like the United States.

And the exchange student has certainly seen her share of airplanes in the past year. First she had to get to the United States from her home country. After arriving here, she has taken plane trips to San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Honolulu. She's certainly seen her share of farmlands - and, in the case of the Hawaii trip, water.

But all of those airplane rides did not prepare her for her next trip - a trip across the United States.

Not by plane.

By train.

This 2011 video is a 15 minute condensed version of a cross-country trip. An actual cross-country trip takes much longer.



All aboard!