Wanderings and … wonderings.

Hotel Münchnerhof.

The hotel is in Marc Augé’s characterisation, a ‘non-place’. I never meet another guest and the reception is forever empty; I interact only with tacky paintings on the walls – a giraffe the most verbose raconteur. I spend my yawning rituals before sleep concerned that Jack Torrance may be about to break down the door with an axe. On the Thursday night I hear disconcerting sounds from the communal bathroom. Someone appears to be constipated. I never meet this person but the introductory smell sufficed.

Wheels.

Either cycle on the road or the pavement; don’t indulge in the twin pursuit of hogging both spaces. It vexes me terribly. The nuisance didn’t reach Amsterdam levels but with the scooter element thrown into the cacophony of wheeled pastimes, my ‘vexed meter’ rose. I can understand kids hopping on scooters – it’s a childhood thing, the speedy thrill an adventure in an otherwise torporific narrative of cartoons and Coca-Cola. An adult on a scooter, though. One judges.

This bloke knows his etiquette.

Stalin’s Gift?

I stumbled across this anachronistic tower/tunnel ‘thing’ 20 minutes into a morning jog. I thought I’d time-travelled back (and east) to the good ol’ days of the Soviet Union. I don’t know what it is, but it made me immediately think of simpler, more Manichaean times.

Trams.

The trams were a godsend. Wondrous as hell (pardon the oxymoron), they traverse almost every millimetre of the city. A curious fellow was screaming on one of them and bashing a battery-operated fan against the window. I think he might have been on day-release from an institute. This aside, they were a serene experience. No one seemed to be paying to jump on the things despite the ticket machines littering the stops. I assumed they were for show so didn’t pay either.

Tinguely Fountain.

This Jean Tinguely fountain of machine sculptures constructed in 1977 was made, I have been informed, as a tribute to the old city theatre company who performed on the very same spot – industrialised nostalgia.

With all the kinetic apparatus on display, coupled with the scooters and roller skates screeching around its perimeter, it wouldn’t have been out of place for the much-feared Wheelers from Return to Oz (1985) to join in on the action. It’s how I imagine all fountains will look in our dystopian future once Skynet take over and the oil runs out – machines miming actors.

Wrong Turn.

Thank you, sign. This could have been a worrying narrative. Thankfully, France was avoided.

Secret Garden.

Of all the ethereal structures suggesting another age, this was the highlight. I sat here for a good 45 minutes thumbing through Leo McKinstry’s Operation Sealion. It was my secret garden, yet only a stone’s throw from the hustle-bustle of Elisabethenstrasse.

Wee charming enclaves, Basel has them aplenty, including this artfully placed urinal behind the Kunstmuseum.

Ice Cube.

The only ice cubes I could locate required transportation back to the hotel in a wheelbarrow. I patiently queued for 6 minutes to reach the refrigerator by the till, but was confronted with a bag of ice the size of a behemoth coal sack. I didn’t purchase the ice.

Lidl.

I couldn’t find one.

I find the most captivating ‘holiday movies’ to be the ones in which the jaded protagonist ventures off in search of relaxation – a chance to charge those batteries and perhaps experience ‘something new’ – but ends up losing the plot in a quagmire of, well, insanity. There’s a picture-postcard theme of the holiday embedded in the Lonely Planet narrative and the airport page-turner. The reality can sometimes be quite the opposite. Cinema has on occasion captured the nightmarish fever of being totally vulnerable in an alien environment.

Frantic (1988).

A cracking performance from Harrison Ford here in a masterful Polanksi thriller. Dr. Richard Walker and his wife hit Paris – the city of their honeymoon – in an attempt to rekindle the passion in their marriage. What results is his wife’s kidnapping and a haphazard travail through the murky criminal underworld populated by petty crooks, shady governments, and international terrorists. It’s a film way ahead of its time. Paris is (strikingly) depicted as a sprawling mess. The opening scene in the taxi is an introduction to the French capital as not the romantic destination of lore but of a dark and menacing city-circus.

The Beach (2000).

In the tourist trap that is ‘The Land of Smiles’, an unimpressed few in their pursuit of travelogue perfection seek an idyllic paradise, serene vistas without the holidaying masses. The book is a masterpiece depiction of what happens when overly impressionable humans get together in an unspoiled paradise they assume is the aesthete’s apex. The film loses its way in the final third, but for a good hour it is stunning cinema, truly capturing that obsessive pursuit of the Shangri-La. Even the ridiculous All Saints track synced to a cheesy interlude in the ocean works.

The Passenger (1975).

The Passenger channels that temptation seeping behind many an excursion – keep the holiday going, recant one’s existing life of drab conformity, construct a new identity. If no one knows you then you can be anything, so goes the dictum. The past has a way of catching up with you, though, or the circumstances of your switch to a new life are tainted. The film is a devastating picture concerned with fate, the impossibility of reinvention, and the indifference of the landscape to your psychological crises.

Don’t Look Now (1973).

I was in Venice last September. It was sublime, borderline magical, and wholly civilised. All I did was drink wine in restaurants and saunter about the alleys, a wannabe seeker of the ‘Venetian feel’. I saw a pair of underpants hoisted on some blinds and considered this window symbolic.

Anyway, that was my drama. Let’s consider Don’t Look Now (1973). The impediments to recapturing past serenity, the simultaneous allure and fear of the unknown, the idea that in an unfamiliar milieu one can transplant a spark that existed in another epoch. Metaphoric to the max as the movie is, I’ve seldom seen such a *real*, evocative portrait of holiday hell.

Sexy Beast (2000).

I love the central conceit of this: your retirement is all fine and dandy until a fellow (admittedly psychotic) Brit turns up to ruin the party. It’s very apt that the film is set in Spain. Sun and solitude ruined by a foul-mouthed ape – it’s most likely how the locals view British tourists swaggering about the Costa del Sol.

Hills, sheep, cows, fishermen, and walkers. 

Gettysburg, July 1863 by Timothy H. O’Sullivan.

The apex of war photography is attributed to World War Two and the snappage of Robert Capa. So much about this image captivates, though. It’s a disturbingly beautiful and haunting capture, even transcendental, one might say.

Who are these people in the frame? What is their narrative, their hopes and proverbial dreams? Does is warrant a book? No one seems to know. Is there a way to know their spouses or their antecedents?

The U.S. Civil War is another world, a so-called bygone age.

In the extant southern states today, though, the conflict defines them. The old Grant-Lee face-off is now a political one, a culture war where bitter hyperbole and myth prevails.