Where are the tracksuits?
No chavs, no nutters, no shoplifters, no screaming kids, and not a single person this evening decided to whistle at the top of their lungs (vile behaviour which should be a private avocation).
What a rare day of serenity in Aldi.
What an experience this spin-off was.
I first saw the Wolfgang Peterson stunner (1981) in April 2000, purchasing the VHS tape with The Phantom Menace (1999) in HMV, Princes Street. I had no idea what it was about but the movie was £4.99 and Empire magazine called it scintillating in a retrospective. The writer wasn’t wrong, unlike their four-star review of the Jar Jar Binks fiasco.
The movie works within the most claustrophobic milieu of pre-Nuclear warfare. It was apolitical, much like the Kriegsmarine’s attempts to portray themselves after the conflict, this despite them nonchalantly torpedoing ship after ship.
This reboot more expansively amplifies upon the rampant extremism of the submariners, their appropriation of ideology as an alternative to the Allies’ eventual superior resources and sound tactics. There are also thriller elements, La Rochelle, home of the U-boat pens, the backdrop to French Resistance efforts to disrupt the German occupation. This place also has a special meaning for me: on a French exchange trip the police chased us around the town centre because one of our party set off a firework in a gift shop. Ah, the memories.
That score as well, used in both the film and this masterwork. Oaft.
Further reading:
“HS2 will change things.”
I remember the chat well. This was eight years ago when I was doing soul-destroying manual labour/customer service in Edinburgh Waverley train station. The job was well paid and a laugh – colleagues were cracking banter and all hit the sauce like pros – but the “civilians” who ventured into that station. Fucking hell. Never again. Members of the general public are the dregs of humanity.
Anyway, I heard this HS2 topic daily, a colossal event on the horizon. The railways in Britain are a shambles. No-one knows why and not a soul has a solution. It’s been like this for the past century. No-one knows why. HS2 is meant to be the panacea for the chaos.
HS2 trains, expected to be operating by December 2026, will be 400 metres long, travelling at up to 250 mph – the fastest in Europe, apparently – and able to hold 1,100 seats, the initial line between London and the West Midlands. Following this, ‘Phase 2’ will connect Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.
The new lines will connect to existing standard-speed lines, with ‘classic compatible’ trains running on both high-speed and classic lines. The idea is that classic lines will benefit from HS2. The London to Edinburgh journey time, for example, will be 3:38 hours instead of 4:23.
Guaranteed they will still cost a fucking fortune, though.
I can get a flight to Dublin for £6 but a train to London King’s Cross is £194. And this for the privilege of being sat on some rickety rocket chock-full of intoxicated bairns.
Trains are torture.
Further reading:
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/77763/hs2-route-uk-cities-development/
Many of us have been guilty of the ultimate faux pas when it comes to ‘adulting’ (or one’s departure from it). Yes, the selfie, the pursuit the Snowflake and Y2K lot get up to. The folk who partake in such behaviour are usually the tossers who acquire Gameboy watches or sit in cafes bashing thoughts into a rusty typewriter when they have a perfectly operational laptop at home. “Working hard,” is the caption, the image a flipped shot of a checkered shirt and scruffy beard holding aloft a smug face you want to clobber with a shovel.
The selfie goes way back, though. Way, way back. Some might consider the earlier examples art forms due to their self-reflexive dimensions and knowing playfulness.
Joseph Ducreux, for example. Well, it’s a painting we’re talking about but … ‘life-like’, a self-portrait but premonition to a selfie future. And the bloke became a meme. He also looks like Emperor Palpatine.
Portrait de l’artiste sous les traits d’un moqueur.
Or the inimitable snap from/of Robert Cornelius, a self-portrait from 1839 and quite possibly the world’s first portraiture.
The selfie is the need to be *in* the world and be seen to be so, evidence of ownership and the experience, though there have been stories of folk photoshopping backdrops into their snaps.
I experience a certain sense of shame every time I succumb to the zeitgeist. All the delicate painstaking effort Ansel Adams put into a single snap and here I am posing with a bottle of Coke Zero in a budget airline departure lounge. There’s that classic meme featuring Neil Armstrong and a random lassie in a bathroom. Sums it up, really.
I am forever reminded of Travis Bickle staring in the mirror, the definitive portrait of solipsistic absorption.
I’m off to take a selfie with the cat.
Further reading:
Ah, Gorgie. They call it ‘God’s Country’. The place is hardly the pearly gates. Lots of aggressive creatures, Chewbaccas on crack and all that jazz. It does look kind of cinematic, though, in a grim and manky way. A new Hovis advert should be made here with a tracksuit-clad junkie on a stolen tricycle.
Waiting at the gate is an exploit I remember from that Friends episode (“The One with Ross’s New Girlfriend”, 1995) when Rachel – peak Jennifer Aniston with flowers in hand – waits for Ross returning from China, only for him to emerge with a new missus. Much like the whimsical innocence of mid-’90s sitcoms, we’ll never see such things in an airport again.
Looking at pre-9/11 airports is as if being confronted with an alien entity – the lax rules, the laissez-faire atmosphere of the buildings, the … freedom of the places. I flew on about seven flights prior to September 11, and even as a teenager I recall the airport endeavour was a doddle, much like crucifixion in the Python cinematic universe. It explains the success of the hijackers, especially when you consider box cutters and small knives were permitted on certain aircraft at the time.
I don’t think anyone with a modicum of concern for their own or another’s safety is bothered about making the ‘sacrifices’ of conforming to post-9/11 air travel rules. No bottle of Volvic allowed from outside the airport? Diddums. It’s a small price to pay.
The awfulness stems from interaction with passengers who are thick as fuck, and these are voluminous. Airports appear to be a breeding ground for the bottom-rung IQ scale of the general public. I’m talking about fuckers who line up at the conveyor belt oblivious to the omniscient signs on display indicating the liquid prohibitions, clowns who try and smuggle Prosecco on board, the haughty lot who protest at taking their shoes off, the numpties who insist on walking through the metal detector with a pocket full of shrapnel.
They are the real pain in the arse.
Further reading:
https://www.farecompare.com/travel-advice/9-ways-security-has-changed-since-911/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/my-short-life-as-an-airport-security-guard
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-airport-security-has-changed-since-september-11
https://www.cheatsheet.com/culture/things-you-could-do-at-an-airport-before-9-11.html/
A bit disappointed in Creed II (2018). Not that the Rocky movies didn’t regurgitate the same stale stuff (accidental alliteration) over and over and over, but the OTT formula worked for the majority of chapters in the franchise. My personal ranking is: Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa, Rocky III, Creed, and the total shitstorm that is Rocky V, a movie that is clearly mentally ill.
Sadly, this new episode is also rubbish. Stallone is basically the same ‘will = win’ verbatim figure as always – every line he spews out is Rocky Balboa (2006) and Creed (2015) put through a Microsoft Word thesaurus – but seems totally out of sync with the the hip hop Kendrick Lamar-soundtracked reboot surroundings. He’s an incredibly boring actor at times, and he sleepwalks through this.
And there’s not enough Drago. There are so many opportunities to develop dimensions in this character, but they are wasted. He remains a one-note villain, a snarling mute who may as well be a brick wall.
However, seeing Brigitte Nielsen look like a pancake chucked in acid was a highlight. Something out of a Brazil (1985) facelift, it’s the only item of curiosity in the snoozefest.
There is no reason for this movie to exist.
Bye for now.
An excellent wee doc here from DW, the anything-goes bacchanal of the Weimar Republic captured in all its glory. What a time to be alive – left vs. right, paramilitary chaos, Fritz Langesque serial killers, rampant crime, easy credit, and in the middle of this ‘Golden Twenties’ expressionist bonanza, Berlin’s loonies shagging, drinking, and sliding down poles. Just lovely.
Further reading:
2010, 2011, 2012 – I call those melted days the ‘Holy Trinity’. In your twenties you have carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want; my modus vivendi was getting absolutely melted at trance events on the continent. Sadly, those days are over, but I do enjoy a wee throwback video from time to time, drinking Peach Schnapps in my living room, swinging a glow stick around like a demented spacker.
As for Amsterdam, it’s a bit of a hovel (too many ruffians, too many bikes) but the Ajax strip is lovely and their stadium permits all manner of chav behaviour in the summer.
2021 and that’s the end for the Gulliver of the skies. Airbus – Boeing’s apparent nemesis – announced this month that their double-deck four-engine behemoth with its looney range of 8,500 nautical miles (with plush onboard bars), will no longer be made once its last deliveries are finished in 2021. Emirates were Airbus’ biggest customer, but once they cut their orders it was game over.
It’s another example of the economics simply not working despite the superior aesthetics on display, airlines opting for smaller twin-engine planes, i.e., more efficient, cost-friendly orders.
It’s not exactly a Greek tragedy but a bit of a shame. As James Cameron (perhaps apocryphally) once said, “Bigger is better.” However, we will still see the existing colossal beasts rampaging through the clouds in the decades to come and then, presumably, dwindle away like the Dreadnought battleship of the early 20th century, sold for scrap metal or converted into a niche hotel for plane spotters who habitually wear Concorde pyjamas.
Sad.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47225789
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 