When I look to my left I see an array of red-brick apartment blocks, three to five stories high, arrayed in a loop around a block of bright green that could have been drawn in with a felt-tip pen. Near to me there’s a sloping rock garden leading down to the driveway, to its left a small play area, a wooden tower with a pyramid roof and a slide rolling down from it in a narrow plastic wave. On the top floor of the nearest apartment block there’s a man in his twenties on the balcony. He’s leaning inside the sliding door to talk to someone else. He has a shoe on his hand, a black workshoe. On the balcony railing, looking down on the concrete path at the foot of the building, is a santa claus figure, two feet high with a smiling cherub face and waving his glove to the nonexistent passers-by. The trees to the left of that block have given up to winter already, their limbs bare or fuzzed with brown, but to the right they are still green, although fading. It has rained through the night and is starting to rain again. The drops come down thin and perfectly vertical.
These buildings make up the bottom third of the view. Beyond the apartment blocks is a hillside. It is an almost vertical slope covered with tall trees, almost all of which are bare of leaves. The ridge rises and falls sharply, echoing the shape of the children’s slide. The hillside makes up the middle third.
The top third is cloud. Cloud is heavy here, rarely lifting, sometimes casting tendrils of mist down into the valley where they settle or drift, sometimes enveloping the whole valley floor in a cloud so thick that one can only hear, not see, the destination of a thrown stone.
It’s a beautiful valley. A few days ago I went for a walk, it turned into a five-hour expedition, to see what I could see. All around there were hills and mountains, wreathed in fog that occasionally teased me with areas of clarity – snow on the pines here, a steep bank of green there. I walked from Stansstad village to the larger town of Stans, and kept going, following the road and railway line up the valley. Had I kept walking I would eventually, long after dark, have made it to the ski resort of Engelberg, at the foot of the Titlis mountain, one of the giants of Switzerland. This is also the place where Craig, my co-host and old friend, is teaching.
Titlis was obscured by intervening hills and mountains, but there was plenty to see around me. The valley floor has wide fields, impossibly green, agricultural stations mingling with the fringes of the towns. The sloping valley sides, as green and smooth as a pool table, play host to tiny gatherings of cottages, halls and churches, while in the centre a bright red train runs along a slowly curving line. It reminds me of nothing so much as the model railways my grandfather so enjoyed; too detailed and delicate and unblemished to be real. As the eye drifts up the slope the green shifts to white at the snowline, or sometimes to a line of white fog that had wiped away the upper parts of the hill like an eraser to a pencil sketch.
The clouds lifted as the day wore on and I was treated to more and more of the mountains until finally, late in the day, I had a clear view of the two nearest peaks, the Stanserhorn just above Stans and Stansstad, and the more distant and still taller Pilatus, both classic mountains, studded with dark green trees and steep slopes of rock and snow, towering paternally over the small villages.
And I’m told its even better in summer.
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Saturday night and Craig and Marcel were dinner party hosts. Eight of us gathered around their dinner table for a traditional Swiss raclet. Two hot grills were set in the middle of the table along with a wide variety of cut meats (bite sized), slices of cheese, small baked potatoes and gherkins. you cook for yourself at a raclette, putting the meat cuts on the top of the grill and plucking them off to your plate and your mouth when they’re ready, and melting the cheese slices in special trays with handles that sit under the element. When the cheese is good and melted you scrape it off the tray with a wooden scraper, over the potato or gherkin or whatever it is on your plate that you want to douse in cheese. And then you eat, and throw some more cheese on the tray and some more meat on the grill.
It’s reminiscent of the traditional kiwi barbecue, but it has more in common with the happy camaraderie of a good fondue party – that of course being another Swiss winter specialty. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, listening to conversations switch from English to German and back again and indulging my affection for cheese. I managed to completely cover my melting tray in a bubbling, browning crust of cooked cheese, clearly the sign of a rank amateur.
The Swiss love their cheese, and they also love their chocolate, represented at the dinner party by Craig’s ridiculously intense mudcake which gave me a glorious headache when I was halfway through the square-inch section I had.
(Craig, making the mudcake, checks the icing: ‘hmm. needs more chocolate.’ Unwraps an *entire block* of Swiss chocolate and dumps it in. Oh Lordy.)
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Sunday, Craig and I went driving. Switzerland is surprisingly small, since we went almost the width of the country in a couple of hours, travelling via autobahn from Lucerne in the German language area to Gruyeres in the French language area. This is a small, well-preserved medieval village with castle on a hill overlooking the lands the Count once ruled, and itself loomed over by a range of stunning alpine heights, which happily were under sun and blue sky when we arrived. It has given its name to the cheese, but I was more interested to find that the name comes from ‘Grue’, the heraldic creature on its coat-of-arms, a sort of fearsome heron. The reason we made this pilgrimage, however, apart from as an excuse to do a grand tour of the Swiss countryside, was the HR Giger museum.
Explanations. I’ll try and keep this short.
When I was 11, my friend Luke managed to source a bootleg video copy of Jim Cameron’s film Aliens, newly out to the rental market. We settled down in my lounge on a sunny Sunday afternoon to watch. It scared us so much we had
to turn it off half way through and go for a long walk before we had the nerve to watch the rest.
Thus Aliens became my favourite movie of all time (a title it holds to this day, still seeing off all challengers). Furthermore, I’ve long been active in the roleplaying game scene in Wellington, and between 1995 and 1997 years I organised a series of well-received events based around the Alien movies, involving nearly 150 people across all the different events. Thus my reputation as ‘the Aliens guy’. Since the last event, in December ’99, I’ve given the Aliens thing away through total burnout, but still my reputation precedes me and Craig had the Giger museum well and truly on the list of things to show me. And I’m glad he did.
Giger is the Swiss painter/sculptor who designed the creature in the first film, and the success of that movie is largely due to the absolutely terrifying nature of his design. It didn’t come out of nowhere – through the sixties and seventies he had created a series of airbrush paintings exploring the juxtaposition and integration of the biological (usually in
terms of the human form) and the mechanical. These are some very disturbing images; there’s something very visceral and primal about their impact, about combining biological elements with mechanical structures and experimenting
with different kinds of interface, not least the often overt sexual/death
imagery that is part and parcel of any exploration of biological reality.
Furthermore, while a surrealist, Giger specialised in realistic depictions
of coherent environments and landscapes – they don’t distance you through
abstraction, thus making the impact of the bizarre entities and structures
he designed still more profound. There’s a beauty to it, but there’s also
something abhorrent, and in a way it’s the combination of beauty and
abhorrence that is the most important thing about Giger’s works. (For more
on Giger, see www.HRGiger.com)
The gallery is spread throughout three floors of a house in the middle of
Gruyeres, and it included lots of things I’d never seen before, and lots of
things I had. Seeing the originals of images I had been familiar with for
well over a decade was a lot more exciting than I expected it to be,
particularly the originals of Giger’s little-seen designs for sections of
the first movie that were cut from the first draft of the script. The
filmgeek in me was most excited, however, by the extensive design sketches
Giger completed for Alien 3, almost all of which were not used and none of
which I’d seen before. I can see why they weren’t used – they were very,
very weird and disturbing, far too weird for mainstream Hollywood. Hell, if
Alien 3 was my movie I wouldn’t have used them either. But they were
absolutely fascinating.
Craig – thanks for organising this, because even if I’d known it was there,
I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go, and I really would have missed out
on something cool.
——–
My tan is fading.
——-
Be well you all,
morgue