![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Working for the weekend
Aug. 4th, 2003 11:24 amOn Friday evening, just outside Finny P tube, I saw the blind leading the blind. Literally. One blind man clearly knew the way better than the other. Or perhaps the blind follower's white stick was defective, who knows?
Shortly afterwards I saw![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
suicideally. Pleasant though it always is to see Ally, she was still a mild disappointment given she's not the literal manifestation of a proverb. Yet.
Yesterday, I finished Robert MacFarlane's excellent Mountains of the Mind, a cultural and psychological history of, yes, mountains. His final full chapter details Mallory's obsessive and ultimately fatal attempts on Everest. It seems likely, as Rob tells it, that Mallory accepted his fate - that he was prepared for death or glory, but not surrender and failure. He was a victim of the noble, if intermittently destructive, aspect of human nature which has to conquer things because they're there, which insists on pushing the boundaries.
From this, straight into Warren Ellis' Orbiter, essentially a declaration of love for spaceflight. The Ellis-by-numbers tendencies which have dogged most of his recent work are almost absent, and though as art it's flawed, as a reminder of how much we've given up through faintheartedness, and how important it is that we dust ourselves off and get out there, it's stunning.
Thence, to Flugtag. Where an astonishing number of peons converged to watch people do dance routines before jumping into the Serpentine. Spot the sudden disjunction here?
Most of these supposed efforts at 'manpowered flight' were self-evidently not going to fly. The flamingo, which when we left was in the lead, was the one most obviously doomed to plummet. The whole spectacle was pathetic, an insult to the presence of cross-channel glider Baumgartner as one of the judges. I had expected something like the doomed flying machines one sees in old black and white newsreels. Those people tried, and they failed, and yes it was funny. But this was just...nothing.
I suggest that to encourage a little commitment, next year rather than staging it over the Serpentine they use Suicide Bridge as their starting point.
Is everyone going to Scarlet Soho and Schmoof at the Archway Tavern tonight? Jolly good.
Shortly afterwards I saw
suicideally. Pleasant though it always is to see Ally, she was still a mild disappointment given she's not the literal manifestation of a proverb. Yet. Yesterday, I finished Robert MacFarlane's excellent Mountains of the Mind, a cultural and psychological history of, yes, mountains. His final full chapter details Mallory's obsessive and ultimately fatal attempts on Everest. It seems likely, as Rob tells it, that Mallory accepted his fate - that he was prepared for death or glory, but not surrender and failure. He was a victim of the noble, if intermittently destructive, aspect of human nature which has to conquer things because they're there, which insists on pushing the boundaries.
From this, straight into Warren Ellis' Orbiter, essentially a declaration of love for spaceflight. The Ellis-by-numbers tendencies which have dogged most of his recent work are almost absent, and though as art it's flawed, as a reminder of how much we've given up through faintheartedness, and how important it is that we dust ourselves off and get out there, it's stunning.
Thence, to Flugtag. Where an astonishing number of peons converged to watch people do dance routines before jumping into the Serpentine. Spot the sudden disjunction here?
Most of these supposed efforts at 'manpowered flight' were self-evidently not going to fly. The flamingo, which when we left was in the lead, was the one most obviously doomed to plummet. The whole spectacle was pathetic, an insult to the presence of cross-channel glider Baumgartner as one of the judges. I had expected something like the doomed flying machines one sees in old black and white newsreels. Those people tried, and they failed, and yes it was funny. But this was just...nothing.
I suggest that to encourage a little commitment, next year rather than staging it over the Serpentine they use Suicide Bridge as their starting point.
Is everyone going to Scarlet Soho and Schmoof at the Archway Tavern tonight? Jolly good.
