THE BRIDGE

The one thing in California that I am constantly drawn back to is the Golden Gate Bridge which is rapidly approaching the 75th anniversary of its opening although, like a lot of things which become “instantly iconic” landmarks, it really does seem like it should have been there forever.

The bridge has featured heavily in every single visit that I have made to the so-called “Golden State” over the years. Every single time I feel drawn to it, as if I need to see it because the bridge impresses me… and perhaps the bridge obsesses me… or even possesses me… even though I know that this is just melodramatic hyperbole and it’s just because, as bridges go, I do find this one particularly beautiful.

Every single time I take a ridiculous number of pictures of it, and yet every time I return to it, I still feel the need to take some more, often from the very same viewpoints that I took the last lot from, and looking very much the same as it did six, eight and sixteen years ago.

The very first time that I saw it “in the flesh” as it were (or should that be “in the steel”…?) was during that very first trip, and the very first thing I did, after becoming ridiculously excited as I exited the road tunnel immediately to the north of it on that long-ago February afternoon, was to drive across it. There it was in front of me, the north tower and, before I knew it, that now familiar “clunk, clunk, clunk” as the tyres passed over each panel of the roadway was being made by the green Mustang that I was driving and I was actually driving across the Golden Gate Bridge…!

Little old me from Nowheresville, Eng-er-land. Who’da thunk it?

The next day I walked along the Fisherman’s Pier on the sea front, just down from Pier 39, and took a ridiculous number of pictures of it as it “spanned the gate”, and then I drove across it in the other direction, parked up at the vista point, and walked across it and back, snapping away with my old Nikon, in what has turned out to be one of those more thrilling personal “moments” that we sometimes get to remember in our lives. Then I drove up onto the headlands, to the rather more famous viewpoints, and took a load more pictures.

And every single time I am lucky enough to return, I pretty much go and do exactly the same thing, more or less. One time that walk was taken after walking across the city and through the Presidio all the way from the Coit Tower and yet the excitement of being on that bridge again and taking those same photographs again almost managed to make me forget quite how much my feet were hurting.

On another visit, to those headlands viewpoints, a sea fog had rolled in which almost made the bridge invisible, but still worth the visit, even if my pictures taken in the fog were nothing like the beautiful ones which feature on so many of the postcards. How many pictures of that bridge could I possibly need? And yet it constantly draws me back, and I constantly find myself clicking away on the shutter of whatever camera I happen to be carting about with me this time.

I even buy books about its construction, (sometimes with the excuse that I once intended to write a play about it which I never seem to actually get around to doing…), or pictures to hang in my little house of the eye-wateringly vertiginous views that were taken whilst it was being built back in the 1930s, which I never could have taken if I’d been the photographer, such is my fear of heights.

I know that a lot of the workman involved in its building were there because of the absolute poverty brought on by what we now call the “Great Depression”, but I’m still pretty sure that I couldn’t ever have been persuaded to go up onto those high towers to hammer in any rivets, no matter what they were offering. I still get mildly giddy if I walk on the pedestrian sidewalk next to the roadway, and, strangely, I find myself feeling more queasy when I stand next to the towers and look up at them than when I look down at the drop towards the waters below. I even get slightly wobbly when the cyclists whizz past me as, in my mind’s eye, a topple over the handlebars could take you over the handrail and the inevitable sad outcome.

This time around, however, we did actually manage to find a new angle on the bridge. At least it was for us at any rate, although I’m sure millions of tourists both before and since have seen it in much the same way. We took one of those hour-long “Red and White” cruises to go out into the bay, pass under the bridge itself and then return via the island of Alcatraz, which gave us opportunities to see both of those iconic tourist destinations from what were completely new points of view as far as we were concerned. It’s always good to look at something familiar in a new light - It quite changes your perspective on it.

The problem with anything that is quite so familiar and (possibly – although I would have to dispute that) over-photographed is in finding a “new” way to do it. For example, this year’s San Francisco Visitors Planning Guide, to celebrate that 75th anniversary of the bridge, has it on its cover, photographed from a spectacular “new” angle (although I suspect that the agency employed to deal with it did have to wonder long and hard as to whether there were any new ways of taking a photograph of it) taken looking straight down the north tower on the Marin County side and it’s a pretty breath-taking shot which certainly caught my attention.

I can also be fairly certain that it’s not an angle which I will be considering photographing the bridge from myself any time soon, if I ever get the chance to return. That last angle, I think, will always be denied me. After all, the only real option to do so, apart from applying for a job in bridge maintenance which, I think you’ll agree, we’ve already pretty much ruled out, is to trust my fate to one of those helicopter trips, and, to be frank, I don’t think that you’re ever, ever, going to persuade me that getting into a helicopter is a good idea.

Even if it was to fly over that most iconic and beautiful of bridges.

A SMORGASBORD OF THOUGHTS

There have been a few issues spinning around in my head recently, none of which are particularly and individually “blogworthy” in themselves, but all of which are probably worth the slightest of mentions if only to get them out of my head and help me to sleep better at nights.

For example, I find myself worrying about suspension bridges. Not because I find them to be intrinsically unsafe or less than wonderful from an engineering point of view, but because of the parallax. If you stand near to one of the suspension cables the eye will fool you into believing that the two cables on either side of the road surface being suspended are not in the slightest bit parallel, despite the fact that you know that, seen from a distance, and indeed because the bridge you are standing upon is not falling down, they must be.

That, of course, is not unusual, but I do find myself worrying about the people who are building these things. Just how on Earth did they manage to successfully construct these things if their eyes were telling them what their brains knew to be different. It beats me, but I can’t help but be impressed.

I’ve also been pondering upon James Cameron’s career. I once read an article that claimed, when you boiled it down to the fundamentals of things like a piece of advanced technology going wrong and suchlike, “The Terminator” and “Titanic” are basically exactly the same movie. I would go as far as to say that all of his movies are pretty much the same in terms of structure, too, but I’ve only ever seen two of them, “Titanic” and “Aliens” and there’s only one of them that I really like (and it’s not the one with the big ship sinking in it…).

This is all because, I suppose, that I recently read a headline about Cameron plunging to the depths (of the ocean) and I thought they were talking about our unbeloved Prime Minister , despite the fact that I read it on the same day as his strange movie about blue people cropped up on television. I’ve decided that, given the box office receipts it made, I must be one of the few people left who hasn’t actually seen “Avatar” but, to tell the truth, given the five minutes I saw that day, I don’t think I missed much.

Strangely enough it was on at the same time as that other much-watched movie that I’ve never seen, “E.T.”. That used to be my test question for people when I met them, and I would categorise them on whether they were one of the “seen” or “not seen”. I gave up on this after a while, and it might very well explain why I spent so much of the 1990s alone…

I suppose it’s just that vague sense I get that much of the audience for “Avatar” was made up from the kind of people who prefer to see impressive C.G.I. rather that impressive word-wrangling, which is also, I think, why “Titanic” was so popular at the time it was released. After all, as a dramatisation of historical events it is, rather sadly, lacking in any of the sense of respect that its predecessor, the rather wonderful “A Night to Remember” had*. That and the fact that “Rose” had to be a thoroughly modern 1990s heroine and not act in any way like you would have expected her to has always annoyed me. I clearly remember leaving the picture house I saw it in thoroughly impressed by the re-creation of the ship, and thoroughly depressed by the dialogue, not to mention all of the messing about with established known facts of the tragedy.

I do get rather deflated by this modern trend towards dramatising history on television with actors acting as if it was a Channel Five documentary, but I suppose it gets the story across and engages those who it is aimed at in a way that books no longer seem to do. But then again, modern telly tends to leave me feeling rather deflated at the best of times. I don’t watch any of the “soaps”, but I’m constantly amazed by the quality of the actors they seem to be able to persuade to appear in them nowadays (“It’s work, luvvy…”). Pretty much of those heroes of my youth from Freddie Jones to Patrick Mower, from Amanda Donohoe to Linda Thorson, from Nigel Havers to Sir Ian McKellan, from… ah, you get the point. I suppose that it reflects rather poorly on the lack of other good dramas to appear in, but  I suppose if you are going to give people television where they know exactly what’s going to happen and that it’s going to continue to happen over and over again, you might as well let them watch some good actors doing it.

Other movie-related nonsense has also recently crossed my mind, like why did an actor with such an impressive track record as Kevin Costner had suddenly vanish from our screens? Granted both “Waterworld” and “The Postman” were not great successes, but neither of them should have convinced us that he was less of an actor than he is, and he did make some pretty decent films, even the ones without the late, lamented Whitney Houston in them. I have a friend who is convinced that “Avatar” is essentially a remake of “Dances with Wolves” which is probably why I was thinking about old Kevin and what became of him…

We now have another Hollywood financial disaster doing the rounds, “John Carter”. This massive black hole for Disney’s cash was based upon a series of novels written by Edgar Rice-Burroughs in the first half of the last century and set on the planet Mars. Given that his other literary creation, Tarzan, had always been popular, I’m sure that it seemed to be a sure-fire hit when they were planning and making it, but I don’t suppose that many people nowadays have even heard of the books so, perhaps not.

Mars was, of course, of huge interest to the authors and readers of what the British think of at least as the Edwardian era and for much of the early part of the 20th Century. Herbert George Wells envisioned us invaded from there, and that other Welles, Orson, made us believe that they had. Flash Gordon made a trip there and plenty of other fictional characters had there own run-ins with the Martians. Strangely enough, Mars itself has been shining very brightly in the night sky of late as the planetary alignment (of Doom!) approaches, so you can believe that, with all the discoveries made in observing the planets at the turn of the last century, and with it being such a visible object for pretty much anyone who noticed it, the fascination with our neighbour in space must have been very widespread, and a great inspiration for any writers of fiction who wanted to make a few quid, and you can’t really blame them for that now, can you?

I suppose you could say the same of James Cameron, when you think about it, which probably doesn’t help me deal any better with my general dislike of his films, but, I will grudgingly accept that he’s probably made a lot more people happy than I ever have.

*Any mention of that most famous of shipwrecks today must, in some small way be used to mark the centenary of  that very real, very tragic “night to remember” which occurred upon this very morning, one hundred years ago, but enough people have been talking about it at such great length recently that adding my own perspective to the mix would seem to be rather superfluous, although the posting for this date - or thereabouts - one year ago should get the point across (http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/titanic-tales.html).