Ended up here at the end of my stag do on Saturday. I can’t say I remember much.

A few more shots from last week’s ride around Vesterbro. It’s been so long since I took the D-Lux 4 out but I’m going to use it more.

This is an astounding production – brilliantly cast and just the right level of mystic symbolism.

From the amazing album Immunity. More about the director.

This afternoon I strapped Gerda into her seat on the front of my bike and we went and explored Carlsberg.

While still the corporate HQ of the company, the area is being comprehensively redeveloped – 3,000 homes are going to be built here – but it’s currently a charming hodgepodge of adventure parks, artificial beaches, playgrounds, and assorted event arenas, sprawling in the long shadows of the mostly defunct industrial buildings.

Our route there takes us through Humleby, the maze of beautiful terraced houses originally built for employees of Burmeister and Wain, and then up the main cobbled street and into the heart of the area. We poked around the Boxland Bazar – a temporary flea-market housed in shipping containers complete with beach bar – and then strolled around enjoying the sunny weather and taking pictures.

Animals aside, Copenhagen Zoo is a beautiful place to spend some time. It’s expertly landscaped and planted, especially over in the quieter side where the petting zoo is, and where the layout allows for plenty of peace and quiet in secluded corners, away from the crowds.

The zoo has been getting plenty of praise for two recent high-profile additions – the Norman Foster-designed elephant house and the Arctic Ring - but these are crowded, especially at the weekend. And besides, it’s the smaller things that the zoo does well that really make it so enjoyable – plenty of green space for picnics, handy push-carts for transporting tired children and provisions, fun ways to inform and engage kids, and a pleasing lack of stalls selling tat and junk food. Go zoo.

Regularly, memories wash over me. It’s consuming when it happens. Like someone has emptied a bucket of my own recollections over my head. For a second of time, those memories – piercingly clear but so fleeting it’s impossible to trace them fully – overwhelm the present.

It occurred to me recently that I’ve lived in Denmark long enough now for me to be nostalgic about my first few years here. The course of that time is dimming in my mind – the memories are increasingly apocryphal and I’m beginning to imbue them with impressionistic associations. I feel the memories, in other words, rather than remember them. My narrative of the last seven years is a positive one of self-discovery and economic upward mobility. It’s little wonder that my earliest memories of my time here tend towards the wistful.

Hollywood – or at least the Hollywood John Fante knew, all cigar-wielding moguls, scriptwriters passing one another on the road, on their way in and out of bars, the doorways lit up under neon signs like electrified siren calls, the dream of the Golden West, palm fronds biting the sky (blue of course) – has a tight hold on my imagination.

A hold that’s fuelled by nuggets like this, pruned from a cursory roam around the Internet after an initial pointer from Covenger & Kester.

Bezzerides’ most famous script was Kiss Me Deadly, which was a masterful film noir and influenced many directors in France shortly after its release. Bezzerides transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make “the great whatsit” the Pandora’s Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: “People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn’t think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, “You don’t taste like anybody I know.” I’m a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun.”

]]> http://www.somethingrotten.dk/?feed=rss2&p=2136 0 http://www.somethingrotten.dk/?p=2116 http://www.somethingrotten.dk/?p=2116#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:46:58 +0000 Aaron http://www.somethingrotten.dk/?p=2116

A few of the better pics from the latest roll of film. I’m not thrilled with these. I was in Amsterdam when I bought the film, some kind of Fuji, and I think it lacks something, maybe a bit of grain. The finish is quite metallic. I still love shooting film though, even if it costs me an arm and a leg to digitise.

There are a few more shots on Flickr.

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