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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-10-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2013. PAGE 5. Are you up for a visit to Choquequirao? Probably not. It’s hard to pronounce and even harder to get to. Choquequirao is nothing but ruins now, but five or six centuries ago it was a fabulous mountaintop refuge for Incan royalty. They called it “The Cradle of Gold”. It was – and is – an exclusive destination. To get there nowadays you have to fly into Cuzco in Peru, and then drive for four hours on potholed, hairpin-turn mountain roads (watch for flash floods). Following that, it’s a brisk 12- to 16-hour scramble along an often-terrifying mountain trail – and you’re there. But all that is about to change. The Peruvian government has approved construction of an aerial tramway that will span a deep canyon, connecting the ruined city with a highway that is only 15 minutes away. They reckon when the tramway’s complete Choquequirao will be able to host 400 visitors an hour. I have two words of advice for the Peruvian government: Please don’t. I’ve seen this movie and it doesn’t end well. I’ve been to Venice. The City of Bridges, aka City of Light, City of Water has also been around for six centuries. Its founders also thought they could insulate it from the rest of the world, not by going to the top of a mountain but by choosing a location surrounded by water. Didn’t work. As a matter of fact, it’s water access that has doomed that most beautiful of cities. Because it is accessible from the ocean, monster passenger ferries and giant cruise ships can sail right up to the city limits and disgorge their cargo – human rubberneckers from around the world. Sixty thousand tourists invade Venice every single day, unleashing an entire urban populace on the narrow medieval streets and lagoons every 24 hours. Visiting Venice is not the soul-stirring spiritual experience it ought to be. It’s more like going to Disneyland on Discount Saturday. Obnoxious Russians jostle with boorish Brits; tour leaders with amplified megaphones bray commentaries in French, Spanish and Italian. Children whine, flashing cellphones wave at the end of arms like clumsy daisies. Sweating hordes in plaid shorts and t- shirts mosey and meander and jostle disconsolately. Funny how we do that. We love things to death. We poke and prod and tweak and facelift until whatever it was that attracted us is smothered, bloated and unrecognizable. Not far from Venice, another exercise in historical revisionism is unfolding. Italian archaeologists in Florence are picking over some mouldering bones in Florence’s Santissima Annunziata Basilica. They’re looking for the skeletal remains of a little boy, the son of Lisa Gherardini. You know the mother better as Mona Lisa, the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous portrait. The archaeologists think that they already have her bones from an earlier grave robbing. They’re seeking a DNA match to confirm the identity. Sylvano Vinceti, a burlesque art huckster heading the team of – sorry, I don’t know the Italian word for ghouls – says that if the DNA match is confirmed, the project will move on into “its most exciting phase – the reconstruction of Mona Lisa’s face.” Scusi, signor, but that’s already been done. Perfectly. By a chap named da Vinci. Why don’t you go down to Rome and play in the traffic? Arthur Black Other Views Loving our treasures to death Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Breaking Bad is an American-produced television show about Walter White, a man diagnosed with cancer who, on his mere teacher’s salary, won’t be able to afford the treatments for his (originally) terminal illness without breaking his family. Eventually, (and by eventually, I mean in the first two episodes, I guess, as I’ll get to later, I haven’t really watched the show), he starts “cooking” methamphetamine as a means of paying for his expensive medical bills without destroying his family. Paired with a former student of his who had connections to the drug underground, White, calling himself Heisenberg, starts to get into the drug scene and the program showcases his dealings there. At least, that’s what I’ve figured out so far. It seems like a good show and I’ve always been a fan of Bryan Cranston (who plays White), I’ve just not found the time to dedicate to watching it. I’m still trying to catch up on shows that are two or three years past cancelled. That said, I won’t begrudge anyone who accidentally ruins the ending with spoilers for me after a certain amount of time. It seems that, as I write this, everyone is discussing spoilers and spoiler alerts. For those who aren’t familiar, spoiler alerts aren’t anything new, they are a pre-cursor to a sentence, story or statement that involves information that someone who hasn’t experienced a media event could find upsetting because it ruins the surprise for them. Some specific examples would include, back when these media franchises were more relevant, spoiling the end of Friends, or broadcasting the identity of J.R.’s shooter in Dallas before everyone had the chance to see the season premiere in November, 1980. Or, to quote Anna Maria Tremonti on Monday morning’s episode of The Current on CBC radio, and her guests film columnist Matt Cohen, pop culture professor Robert Thompson and Now magazine Senior Entertainment Editor Susan Cole, who were debating spoilers, it would be like explaining the significance of Rosebud to someone who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane. In essence, spoiling is robbing someone of the opportunity to experience something fantastic, however there have to be some reasonable expectations placed on when you can and when you cannot spoil something. There are some works, like Citizen Kane or Romeo and Juliet or even television shows like Dallas where you can freely talk about the endings because they are so old that anyone who hasn’t viewed them has to have no interest in them. There are other intellectual properties like The Avengers where you assume the good guys win, after all, it’s a comic book movie. (Heck, even if someone died, they would be brought back somehow in a few months anyway... except Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben always stays dead. Sorry, little comic geek comedy there.) Honestly, I can say that, aside from catch phrases and the occasional comic about how Breaking Bad would never work in Canada, or any first-world nation except the U.S. I really haven’t run into a lot of spoilers about it. The comics usually go like this: Doctor: I’m afraid you have inoperable lung cancer. White: Oh my gosh, what can I do? Doctor: Well you can have these treatments. White: How will I afford that? It will ruin my family! Doctor: Afford? What kind of barbaric nation would make you pay for this kind of necessary medical treatment? It seems that the people I deal with on a regular basis either don’t watch Breaking Bad or don’t talk about it, which, when I finally do have a free, snowy weekend to shotgun a dozen episodes or so, will work out to my benefit. Spoilers are something that pop up in the oddest places. Whether you’re working and can’t see that baseball game, so you record it, only to have someone with a smart phone spoil the ending or whether you’re reading something about an actor and someone discusses the ending of one of their shows or films, ruining any chance you had of discovering that on your own. It used to be simple, before the creation of social media and smart phones, to avoid the news you didn’t want to hear. Another show I watch, How I Met Your Mother, did an entire episode about the extreme lengths you need to go to during this day and age to avoid something as simple as the score of the big game a day after the event. However, spoilers are also something that we have to deal with here in The Citizen office. We don’t sit around the water cooler discussing movies or television shows. We do, however, review the plays put on at the Blyth Festival. Every year Shawn and I split up the season’s plays and review them, and then often see the ones we don’t review anyway, and we have to walk a tight-rope of not revealing too much while, at the same time, trying to reveal enough to get people interested. Trying to describe what made Dear Johnny Deere or Beyond the Farm Show great this year (and last year) without tipping your hand somewhat could be nearly impossible. However, you do need to show people enough to give them an idea of how good you think it was. We only have to do that two, or maybe three times a year while people who review 365 days a year have to walk that very thin edge every day. It’s not an envious position. I guess no column about spoilers would be complete without mentioning what some may call the original spoiler alert, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. At the end of the play, normally, patrons of whatever theatre company is producing it are asked not to reveal the twist ending. Oh, and just in case you didn’t know (spoiler alert) Kristin Shepard, J.R.’s ex-mistress, who was pregnant with his child, shot J.R., Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man saves the day at the end of The Avengers and Clark Kent is Superman. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Spoiler alert: there will be some spoilers Touring bad With the closing of AMC’s Breaking Bad on Sunday another classic anti- hero’s story has wrapped up leaving audiences not quite sure who and what they should be cheering for. The trend of television, and movies, in recent years has been the emergence of the anti-hero. It’s certainly not a brand new concept, but it has risen to prominence in recent years with television characters like Tony Soprano in The Sopranos and the ensemble cast in HBO’s The Wire , often called the greatest television series of all time. The anti-hero is, of course, our main character, the person we can all relate to and find ourselves cheering for, despite their transgressions. The concept of the anti-hero takes the black- and-white, hero-and-villain worlds of The Lone Ranger and Batman and turns it on its side. The anti-hero is a person who often has a good heart, but commits heinous acts for reasons we can all relate to. Breaking Bad’s Walter White is a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who has cancer and, not wanting to leave his family with a mountain of debt, uses his chemistry skills to cook crystal meth in a thriving New Mexico drug market. He is cooking meth, which is bad, but he’s doing it for his family, which is good. Viewers are then caught in a web where it’s easy to cheer for someone who fills the streets with drugs and kills those who threaten his empire. This fascination with the dark side is nothing new. People have always been interested in those among us who, for one reason or another, choose to “break bad” as Walter had. Just last week, in fact, I was floored to hear about the ridiculously successful ticket sales for tours of the now-closed Kingston Penitentiary. With just a three-week window for tours, proceeds from which will benefit the local United Way chapter, the demand for tour tickets was such that the ticketing website crashed due to the excess traffic. When the dust settled, tickets for the three-week-long block of tours were sold out in under an hour. The penitentiary opened in 1835 and officially closed its doors on Monday. Its cells have seen the sickest and most depraved criminals this country has ever produced, including Paul Bernardo, Russell Williams, Michael Rafferty and Wayne Boden. James Donnelly, the patriarch of the Black Donnellys even spent a number of years in Kingston. And people can’t wait to get into this place. This is nothing new of course. Alcatraz, the famous prison off the shores of San Francisco, was closed in the 1960s and then opened to the public for tours in the 1970s. Alcatraz, of course, has housed some of the most notorious criminals the world has ever seen, including Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. While media outlets, both major and community-oriented in nature, are often criticized for their coverage of criminal trials, these are stories that have proven, again and again, to have massive appeal to audiences. The interest in these cases, again, is more of a reflection of the state of humanity than it is the sensationalism of journalism. If people want to read it, journalists will write it and if people want to tour a historic prison and money can be raised for charity, someone will find a way to make that happen. So whether it’s Walter White or where Paul Bernardo used to lay his head at night good people will always be interested in the dark side of the moon, to them, that is crime.