A very odd cat. That’s his exercise done for today.
Author Archives: Ben Gould
Brande skyscraper.
Brande in Denmark has a meagre population of 7,000 and there is very little to distinguish it … until now.
The Danish clothing company Bestseller, its headquarters in the town, aims to put Brande ‘on the map’ with its construction of a 320-metre skyscraper, newspapers mockingly referring to it as the Tower of Sauron, this an all-seeing ‘evil thing’ in the Lord of the Rings works that didn’t quite make sense. And that wasn’t the end of the nonsensical with those movies – one could have summoned an eagle and had the fucker drop the ring in that volcano.
Anyway, back to Denmark. The skyscraper will house offices, a hotel, and some shops. More shite, just what an unspoiled landscape needs ….
Further reading:
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=2020721
Hutchison House, Edinburgh.
Grim as fuck, this one. It smacks of the ’60s – poverty and deprivation in the so-called swinging era. It’s the type of building a skag head would chuck himself off. Some things need demolished; this is one of them. Yuk.
Writing anything is torture.
Writing is waterboarding of the mind, such is the rolling artillery barrage of stimuli out there. As a part-time aspiring Gonzo in the knock-off Hunter S. Thompson mould (I don’t do drugs for fear of dying before the real-life Matt Damon lands on Mars), I cannot construct a sentence if there is a Wi-Fi connection. Why pen anything when there is Wikipedia and a mammoth page dedicated to the Battle of Austerlitz (1805)?
One must be unplugged from The Matrix.
Here is my photographic … representation of even an attempt to write anything with a correctly placed comma. And all music must be Enya or Enigma or any other kind of chillout music, nothing too high-tempo.
This photo ripped an hour from my life, by the way.
It’s how I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald carved his stuff when Zelda was out in Lalaland off her tits on cocktails galore.
Habitat 67.
I squirm at this but can’t stop staring. 146 apartments in Montreal, a breathing Lego kit with its own ecosystem. Designed by Moshe Safdie, this was meant to revolutionise affordable housing but its legacy is the opposite – a unit can set you back up to $1 million.
I guess it looks better than most dilapidated high-rises but for fuck’s sake, your crib is a tourist attraction. Every time you look out the window an army of Jimmy Stewarts are outside looking in, a Rear Window (1954) role reversal. Disturbing. What if you’re caught with a prossie?
If this is a glimpse of the future, I don’t wish to stick around for it.
Further reading:
https://www.mtlblog.com/lifestyle/what-a-1000000-apartment-looks-like-in-montreals-habitat-67
http://www.towertrip.com/inside-the-most-beautiful-habitat-67-unit-that-just-hit-the-market/
In a nutshell. Leith, Edinburgh.
Rambling around Leith today taking snaps. The port district is ugly but it has character. I would wager it has the highest concentration of junkies and creatives per square mile than anywhere else in Scotland. Everyone knows someone who’s on the smack, yet conversely their next-door neighbour will have aspirations of being this generation’s Bukowski.
The pubs also ‘suffer’ from deflation.
Edinburgh in a standstill.
A snippet from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) came to Gorgie today. An eerie stillness, a surreal chav-free mise en scène. And one car was blasting out ‘The Boys of Summer’.
Traffic jams aren’t always rotten.
Throwback Thursdays – Malta.
Sliema was a cracking wee jaunt – booze, sun, pigeons. My personal highlight, though, was a troupe of clueless Yanks asking the bus driver for directions to a “fish market”. The bloke behind the wheel took off his sunglasses, looked the ringleader of the muppets up and down, and retorted “Nah” before closing the bus doors.
Epic.
