A snippet from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) came to Gorgie today. An eerie stillness, a surreal chav-free mise en scène. And one car was blasting out ‘The Boys of Summer’.
Traffic jams aren’t always rotten.
Category Archives: Edinburgh
Adjuster – a cheeky short.
A shitty wee movie I have made. Uploading the beast took longer than making the actual thing (seven hours of shooting). The sound ‘design’ is fucking awful, but some of the visuals look decent.
Trying to capture album covers.
Ventured into some vinyl shop on Cockburn Street, Edinburgh the other day. I wished to recreate the truly gnarly album cover of DJ Shadow’s truly spellbinding Entroducing (1996).
Entroducing (1996).
I was loitering around the venue for a good 25 minutes, the owner becoming visibly vexed with yours truly. He didn’t like the cut of one’s jib, nor the fact I was papping his customers.
I managed to get a half-decent snap out of the 1,835 taken, and this was of some random not even in the fucking shop.
I’ll see you in another life when we are both cats.
Aldi was drama-free today.
Where are the tracksuits?
No chavs, no nutters, no shoplifters, no screaming kids, and not a single person this evening decided to whistle at the top of their lungs (vile behaviour which should be a private avocation).
What a rare day of serenity in Aldi.
Gorgie, Edinburgh – The Ghetto.
Ah, Gorgie. They call it ‘God’s Country’. The place is hardly the pearly gates. Lots of aggressive creatures, Chewbaccas on crack and all that jazz. It does look kind of cinematic, though, in a grim and manky way. A new Hovis advert should be made here with a tracksuit-clad junkie on a stolen tricycle.
Princes Street wasn’t always a toilet.
I fucking hate Princes Street. It’s dire, chock-full of stores that appear designed exclusively for desperate housewives. There are also mobile phone shops and a budget book place – this curious number sells no novels, the only items on display autobiographies of pointless celebrities and road maps of Denmark published in 2004. All very bizarre. Added to this is the plethora of American tourists crawling about with their bumbags on, elephants in the In Bruges (2008) sense.
Princes Street looked decent in 1858, though. No spackers to be seen here.
Rambling around Sofia.
It’s always the same at a hostel. Why they insist on giving you a 20-minute monologue about the city I will never know. Pointless chat. Just hand me the keys to the room. Minging.
I don’t see a single person in the hostel building (for private rooms). I christen it the ‘Overlook Hotel’ and bash the bathroom door in with my e-cig. The hovel was dangerous, the Vertigo (1958) staircase a neck-breaking scenario waiting to happen. Thankfully I didn’t die, but I was terrified every time I went up or down the fucker.
Like all post-communist countries, it’s backward. Street urchins are everywhere, Bugsy Malone (1976) rejects wandering the alleyways in search of shrapnel and fags. Bar staff are just awful. They scowl and grimace – pure hatred in their eyes. And they do this to all tavern visitors. Taxi drivers are scam artists. It’s the usual let’s-drive-around-in-circles nonsense. Scum.
There were some highlights: I like the trams because they appear to be sent via DeLorean from the GDR in the ’70s. Also, the supermarket selection is eclectic. The Lidl was once again the crème de la crème. It was located slap-bang in the middle of a social realist nightmare of a housing estate, dirty-as-fuck matchbox apartments out of the age of Stalin.
The booze is cheap. The city is ugly. It’s cold. And that’s Sofia.
Turquoise anomaly.
Abbeyhill/Meadowbank is a veritable toilet, by all accounts a shithole. George Best once drank here at the Artisan Bar when he played for Hibs. That’s the legacy of this ghetto. These days it’s a junkie paradise. However, this building is nuts, totally #peacocking. Scenes.
Edinburgh Christmas Market.
The Xmas Market is back, Edinburgh’s ‘winter wonderland’. Stalls selling tacky clobber, ‘German’ food and drink at Weimar Republic-level prices, and jingle bells noises.
Personally, I think it’s shite, but it lures in the tourists and scares away the junkies because they get too confused by bright lights and the smell of warm food.
Saughton Park – refurbished.
Slap-bang in the middle of the Saughton ghetto is this anomaly. All around crime is rampant and social housing derelict, but I believe millions have been spunked on the park’s upgrades; the epicentre must be a beacon of light. It’s always chock-full of chavs, though, creatures who resemble those chortling Toon Patrol weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). But the park looks lovely, doesn’t it?
Further reading:
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/info/20162/saughton_park_project/924/saughton_park_restoration_project
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 