Nothing of note happened on this wee adventure to the land of the Pole. I drank lots of alcohol, sat in a square all day, watched some bad movies on my tablet, and smoked a packet of fags. I also saw a pigeon. Bye for now.
Getting pished in Wroclaw.
Tenzing–Hillary Airport.
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
Edinburgh workies.
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.
Sat on my arse in Frankfurt.
Guzzling ethanol and listening to deadmau5 in my chav trainers. And that’s Frankfurt.
The Truman Show – 20 years on.
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/
Edinburgh – summer in the city.
The great junction of Leith Walk/Elm Row/London Road in all its splendour.
Such rotten images would ideally be on the front cover of Edinburgh Festival Fringe pamphlets. If you’re going to market a city at least be honest and leave the propaganda at the door. This is the reality of summer in Auld Reekie, and to paraphrase Rocky Balboa – it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Someone took a shit in that roundabout a few years ago; it didn’t make the evening news. Sad.
Human Traffic – the dark side of nostalgia.
If you mute a movie and it looks infinitely worse then it’s a bad film. I can’t recall who said this but it’s a reasonable proposition. Such is Human Traffic (1999), a truly garish and ugly remnant from the late nineties, a poor man’s Trainspotting (1996) that on a 2018 viewing comes across as a student film cobbled together over a weekend. Like any nostalgic longing, it’s best just consigning these matter to the past where they belong.
In 1999 I thought this was the shit; now it’s just shit, a pilotless, plotless, theme-less advertisement for ecstacy, executed with the craft and subtlety of a sledgehammer and featuring some of the most irritating and insipid ‘characters’ in a British movie ever. I’ll never handle a floppy disk again, and I’ll never watch Human Traffic (1999) again.
Good tunes, though.
Siberian airspace during the USSR.
I thought an 11-hour, 6,000-mile flight from London to Tokyo was hell on earth, a suspended furnace of ghastly smells and even worse movies. On such claustrophobic ventures I do enjoy unearthing the laptop for a disaster-themed bonanza – Flight (2012) with the inimitable Denzel, Air Force One (1997), and an Air Crash Investigation bumper pack. If you’re going to reek worse than durian in a hobo’s socks, you’re going to be subjected to terrifying plane crash fun.
A wee peek into the Cold War glory days of grim and we find an 11-hour trip today the relative Shangri-La of a plane journey. For obvious reasons, the communist paradise of the Gulag restricted its airspace, with only Soviet planes allowed to fly above the Soviet Union. The solution was for Western airlines to traverse the Arctic, stop at Anchorage, and then proceed to Tokyo. This sub-zero town in Alaska was for a semi-epoch the transport hub for travel to Asia. With the fall of the Soviet Union it is now once again a backwater, the perfect milieu for the very bleak Christopher Nolan movie Insomnia (2002).
Today, Russia wields enormous power through its control over the Siberian flight corridor, and the country chooses which airlines have access (with great cost to the airline). Post World Cup this summer, one of the greatest fears of commercial airlines is that escalating tensions (some might say warfare, this proxy or cyber) between Russia and the West will usher in another airspace ban, with passengers once more forced to city-hop en route to their desired destination. The nineties and noughties – 9/11 aside – just might turn out to be the Golden Age of flying.
We don’t want shit like this happening again:
Forrest Gump wasn’t complete shite.
Forrest Gump (1994) is without qualification the cheesiest, corniest, most simplistic depiction of the American Experience and the ‘everyman’ possibilities within the shebang, the movie a ’90s version of Being There (1979) without the wit and pathos. Gump has been labelled a conservative’s wet dream – live like Forrest, i.e., be respectful of authority, drug-free, don’t question your surroundings, and you’ll succeed despite your worryingly low IQ. Wander Uncle Sam’s peninsulas in the manner of his perpetual unrequited love Jenny, by all accounts a free-spirited hippie/druggie sex bomb, and you’ll kick the bucket. There’s something of the ’94 Republican Revolution going on here.
It does, however, work as an elementary and indeed extraordinary introduction to the second half of the 20th century. I knew literally nothing of even the existence of the following until I saw Forrest Gump in 1996 two years after its release: Presidents JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the song San Francisco performed by Scott McKenzie, The Doors, Elvis, John Lennon, the Black Panthers, and the virus popularly known as Aids. True story. Primary School taught me none of these things, but I did memorise a lot about Henry VIII ….
The movie has little commentary on any of its historical snippets, such is the processional structure and concentration on scope over depth. It does abridge, though, forty-odd years of American history in a running time of 2:22:09 minutes in a Zelig-like visual glossary. Without Forrest Gump, I would have had to watch five more ridiculous films. Thankfully, I didn’t.
It’s not that shite.
Cheers, Forrest.
France, 1940 – debunking the ‘Halt Order’.
Up until last year and the release of Dunkirk (2017), it was generally assumed by the layman and amateur historian that the successful evacuation of Dunkirk was due to the lax, complacent attitude of the German Army, this a direct order from Hitler to halt the armoured divisions as a benevolent peace offer to the British. Only now has consensus gathered amongst us part-time carnage bookworms that this is nothing but a fallacy. Myths are embedded within official military narrative and it happens because they are convenient, an easy answer to overwhelmingly complex logistical and political issues. The laziness, with exceptions, of the modern historian is so rampant that contemporary sources are taken as gospel, i.e., works by peers. It’s as if the archives don’t exist.
James Holland’s recent digging into this seemingly forever contentious event now appears to have silenced the Hitler apologists (that he didn’t want to intensify war with Britain, bla, bla). The order quite simply came from the frontline generals, and Hitler’s subsequent involvement was as an intervention between competing branches of the German military. For an in-depth anatomy of the whole mess, I highly recommend this piece on Holland’s own website: http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2016/07/17/dunkirk-1940-hitlers-halt-order/
Fittingly, the Russians just this past week let forensic experts analyse Hitler’s teeth, dispelling, one would hope, the belief that he fled to Argentina in a U-boat or emigrated to the Moon.
Further reading:
http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2016/07/17/dunkirk-1940-hitlers-halt-order/
https://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/04/15/no-hitler-did-not-let-the-british-escape-at-dunkirk/
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-24/why-the-germans-blew-it-at-dunkirk
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/06/the-war-in-the-west-review-james-holland
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 