If you are reading this, I am flying somewhere over the Pacific. One of the four (!) books accompanying me on this long haul is a book called Nostromo by Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness fame. I picked it up because the title reminded me of Sigourney Weaver’s ill-fated space barge from Alien, and I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of inspiration and themes the filmmakers pilfered from the book.
Inspiration indeed! Flipping past the introductions and onto the first chapter, imagine my surprise when the first sentence I read contained the word Sulaco (if you know your Aliens, you know what I’m talking about). How a hundred year-old story about the mining industry in turn-of-the-century South America fit into a series of movies about slimy, salivating Xenomorphs simply blows my mind.
Things are simplified when you are buckled down onto a chair in the slim fuselage of a commercial Boeing carrier. Highways that hug the curvatures of impossible hills and long stretches of asphalt carved on desert wastelands are no longer testaments to the inherent industriousness of man, but premature wrinkles on the earth’s epidermis. The Grand Canyon is downgraded from a geologic formation formed by centuries of water erosion to the remains of a pint of chocolate ice cream in the hands of a hungry four year-old with a soup spoon.
Some things, like the human mind, take strange turns (something to do with regulated oxygen, maybe). One instance of such strangeness takes place in the in-flight shopping catalogue of one American airline: it offers everything from recliners to vintage hot dog carts. What I covet is the friendship of the person who boards an airplane and thinks “Hey, I’d really like to buy a vintage hot dog cart right now.”
On a sombre note: goodnight, Aleksandr. My wonderful little workhorse, a four year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3, has been retired, its duties downgraded to harmless internet surfing. Taking its place will be a shiny black MacBook running OS X 10.5. I will miss that little bugger, it has been very kind to me.
If this post reads like a scatterbrained English major, then this has been poor reading.
That’s It Man, Game Over Man, Game Over!
Posted on January 19th, 2008
