Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
 What do you mean you didn't watch it? So the new Mission: Impossible movie came out. Yes, Reader, I saw it, and I liked it.
It must have been in September 1990. A year earlier the Berlin Wall had come down, and now the Gulf War was starting. One day my mother, excited, announced to us what she must have just read in the papers: a new Mission: Impossible series would soon be broadcast on Taiwanese television. I doubt many of you remember the 1988 TV revival of the original 1966-73 series. Apparently ABC green-lit the revival because of a threatened Hollywood writers’ strike, which prompted the studios to go back to the vault for existing scripts. And the fact is that, although the 1966 original might be considered something of a classic in the annals of American television, the 1988 revival was... not good. It was not surprising that it only ran for two seasons. Both the Washington Post and Rotten Tomatoes decided to remind me this week that it’s the tenth anniversary of one of the most influential films of our age, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Before those of you who are sick of superhero movies (or have always been too snobbish to enjoy them) start rolling your eyes, let me quote Roger Ebert (as the Post also does) in pointing out that The Dark Knight is a film that transcends its comic book origins to become “an engrossing tragedy.” And I am hardly the first person to read into the film something beyond the surface of its plot and action sequences. At the time of its release in 2008, many saw it as something of a metaphor for America in the age of the Iraq War and the War on Terror. Gotham might be a stand-in for Baghdad, and Batman a stand-in for the U.S. military, his very presence by the its violent and extreme nature inviting escalation and challenge. In the end, Batman wins a pyrrhic victory through mass surveillance like the NSA. At the more obscure end of commentary, the good folks over at Overthinking It (hey Mark) presented an interesting essay interpreting the film through the philosophy of Schopenhauer: Gotham as Will and Representation.  Warner Bros. Fair use. Regular readers of this blog, if any exist, should not be surprised by now that sometimes I nerd out about one thing or another. Last week I was in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, and it quickly climbed the chart of my favorite cities in the world. I won’t suggest that it was solely because of what Edinburgh represents in the annals of human achievement, but I won’t say that it didn’t play a role either.  Monument of Adam Smith in central Edinburgh. Yesterday, July 1, marked for me three years on the road. Three years. That’s as long as Jesus spent preaching. It so happens that I was reading Bruce Chatwin’s strange 1987 masterpiece of travel writing, The Songlines. The book begins and ends with Chatwin’s investigations in Australia into the Aboriginal practice of “the walkabout,” in which one would go walk and sing along paths or “songlines” that totemic ancestors once followed, sometimes for months at a stretch or even years. But halfway in, the book turns ruminative and begins to reflect on the meaning of travel itself and what it says about human nature. “Our nature lies in movement,” Chatwin quotes Pascal’s Pensées, “complete calm is death.”  Some images from the past year of traveling: This one of hiking in Alkhornet, Svalbard. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
January 2019
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