Werner is Cheney

So watching The white diamond, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was a bit... off about it till she said to me "don't bogart that joint Mark Anthony". It's true, they were all stoned. Werner allowed an amazing shift in tone from a man crying about how his dirigible killed a film maker to one of the locals (Mark Anthony - the hero of the film in a way) talking about how great his rooster was. Allowing Herzog to laconically voiceover about how he had to meet this wonderful character. So they took the film ("in celluloid we trust") to the chicken. A minor Herzog really. I like the flexibility he exhibits in going where the situation seems to be leading him (as in Finnisterre where he allows the film to be completely taken over by the beauty and power of the burning oil wells), but none of it is very substantial. He didn't make a nature documentary, he didn't make a documentary about flight, or about British Guyana, or about the waterfall...

It does include the classic line, when the scientist was insisting on flying the machine alone for the first flight, "there are different kinds of stupidity, there's dignified stupidity, heroic stupidity... but this is just stupid stupidity". For Herzog of course a dangerous flight is not the stupid part, but doing it without a camera on board - that's just stupid stupidity...

127 Hours

Watched this tonight, as I may have mentioned before my active pursuits mostly include nursing my arthritic joints and raising a glass to the heroic doers of this world, and while we enjoyed it we felt something lacking. It fizzed along very well and at 90 minutes it didn't outstay its welcome. Despite its horrifying premise it wasn't chock full of body horror and actually at its worst it resembled Disney Torture Porn: somehow facile, video game, music video, Tarantino, denaturedviolence purely for aesthetics, shits, and giggles... The shocking violence of the film rarely felt as painful as the single golf club to the knee that resonated with waves of pain throughout Funny Games for example. Which is fine really as the story was much, much more upbeat: pretty Hollywood boys and girls leading the active life. Outdoorsmen youknow.

It was fun. In a music video kind of way. Much more "artistic" than the climbing movies I've been watching lately. And much more shallow.

But fun.

Books for 2011

So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.

Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.


Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."

Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?