I’m not gonna lie: that tower looks like hell. The first image which comes to mind is of tinned sardines on an Aldi shelf, or the whole budget aisle of canned fish, and not of the John West kind. Home is an island, a getaway from the loonies out in the wilderness. I don’t think anyone, in social housing or otherwise, should have to live like a sardine. Architectural abominations are omniscient in Alba.
Jurassic Park (1993) was the Jaws (1975) of the ’90s, another Spielberg game-changer, the apogee of the ‘blockbuster’. We’re five movies into this franchise now and the apple has fallen very far from the tree. I couldn’t believe the shit I was watching in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). The picture gave the appearance of having nine different screenwriters, and all of them penning scenes from a crèche. And it’s made a fucking fortune. And there will be another one released before the end of a decade. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy. Dinosaurs are fairly captivating; they are getting lazy coverage in these movies.
Livingston, West Lothian – home of shopping centres, food courts, car parks, profoundly mucky watering holes, and for some reason twinned with Grapevine, Texas.
Livingston also houses (in a cage) this most graceful arctic wolf. We exchanged this stare today. I was thinking, “What a poor bugger, locked up in Livingston.” And I’d like to wager he was thinking, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
Alcohol and darts – this is my life and it’s ending one minute at a time.
Back to Portugal again, but this time the heady delights of Porto instead of last year’s Algarve. Arriving in the middle of a heatwave, I sweat my tits off for the remainder of the trip; as milk was a bad choice for Ron Burgundy, so here was my predilection for trousers and sweatshirts. No matter, the situation was somewhat rectified (t-shirt donned) after a decidedly traumatising wait in a sauna of a taxi rank. It’s a lovely city replete with multi-layered sandwiches and aesthetically pleasing denizens eating the sandwiches. For the record, I didn’t eat any sandwiches. I did, however, source cheap mushroom pâté from a convenience store. Winning.
The Patrick Bateman Palace.
Phil Collins accompanied this cheeky vape in the apartment. “No smoking,” said the agent. I’d like to think I’m half-rebellious, but not full-anarchist. The place was plush, an impressively air-conditioned getaway from the sadistic Teletubbies sun.
Super Bock.
This is the de facto Portuguese national beer. In the local supermarket 24 bottles will set you back six euros. For some perspective on the matter, a warm, dirty pint in an Edinburgh boozer/hovel will cost you £4. Super, indeed.
Jumpers.
I thought this bloke was gonna chuck himself off the bridge, i.e., kill himself. I took a snap for longevity. Fortunately, he was a member of the local money-making youth, many of whom dive into the river for tourists’ shrapnel. I didn’t give him anything (because I’m stingy).
Arty-Farty pretentions.
There was a moment of sadness on this jaunt. I could have taken a simple point-and-shoot snap of an inviting building, but instead chose to shove my ersatz Liam Gallagher sunglasses in the frame in an attempt to arty-farty it up, to just be that shamelessly banal.
Ryanair.
And fuck Ryanair. Shockingly awful once again. No further comment.
An (alleged) airport a snail-crawling 25 miles from Mount Everest, with no radar system and entirely comprising a single 500-metre runway built into a cliff, I read that Sir Edmund Hillary himself oversaw its construction and that locals were ploughed with liquor (no one will reveal what kind) and asked to perform a ‘foot-stomping dance’ to flatten the soil and make it suitable for landing. I can picture the whole endeavour as a garish episode lifted from a peak Werner Herzog movie, with a Klaus Kinski Svengali lording over the ‘indigenous’, the martinet a grizzly Bavarian launching battered shoes and Jägermeister at them. This shockingly isn’t an apocryphal story, and the airport, a.k.a. ‘It’s a Trap’, was only paved in 2001.
It’s an appropriate precursor to an attempted scaling of Everest. The danger aspect would overwhelm this fat bastard and inject hubris into proceedings – “If I survive this landing the worst is over and I can surely surmount the beastly mountain.”
The list of accidents on the Wikipedia entry is a most disconcerting read, and I wouldn’t recommend watching one of the many bumpy landings should an upcoming flight be on the cards. Fuck knows how a plastered Denzel would have coped. As a passenger, I’d be stammering out of my mind on crystal meth birthed from Walter White’s RV just to endure the experience.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.tibettravel.org/everest-base-camp-trek-in-nepal/airport-for-ebc-trek-in-nepal.html
I’ve seldom viewed from a bus window such uniformity, and this of all places on a Chambers Street scaffold at 8:00 a.m. I immediately arrived at ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper‘ with its searing symmetry between the subjects. They seem rather contemplative in this Edinburgh snap; sometimes you’ve just got to take a breather and a look around.
Guzzling ethanol and listening to deadmau5 in my chav trainers. And that’s Frankfurt.
The Truman Show (1998) didn’t capture the zeitgeist; it largely predicted it. Much like how Scarface (1983) birthed glorified Gangsta rap – present hip hop artists unaware that Montana was a satire laughing at the emergence of the culture – it was the Jim Carrey ‘serious role’ vehicle which presaged the Big-Brother-by-choice bantz we now have. The eponymous ‘reality’ TV show, a zillion other ‘hidden camera’ programmes populated by tarted-up bimbos (yes, including The Apprentice), the omniscience of social media, the shameless supervision from the NSA and GCHQ. It’s as if Truman is a summation of 20 years of snooping, willfully and not, but before it happened.
I can’t even count the number of times someone has said to me they feel like they’re living a real-life Truman Show, such has been the ridiculousness of their day. Well, if directed actors and MacGuffins aren’t out there to construct the drama, you can bet you’re being watched, often by choice – think of all the selfies at crime scenes, the Snapchatting of break-ins, check-ins at weddings/funerals.
The Truman Show nailed the lot – the shallowness, the vanity, the essential neediness of modern society to not only feign happiness in its absence but inject meaning everywhere, to create a drama when none is needed.
And that Philip Glass score lifted from Powaqqatsi (1998) is quite the cracker:
Further reading/viewing:
http://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-the-truman-show-predicted-the-future.html
http://www.thrillmesoftly.com/2017/07/truman-show-big-brother/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 