Sliema was a cracking wee jaunt – booze, sun, pigeons. My personal highlight, though, was a troupe of clueless Yanks asking the bus driver for directions to a “fish market”. The bloke behind the wheel took off his sunglasses, looked the ringleader of the muppets up and down, and retorted “Nah” before closing the bus doors.
Epic.
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.
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.
Many of us have been guilty of the ultimate faux pas when it comes to ‘adulting’ (or one’s departure from it). Yes, the selfie, the pursuit the Snowflake and Y2K lot get up to. The folk who partake in such behaviour are usually the tossers who acquire Gameboy watches or sit in cafes bashing thoughts into a rusty typewriter when they have a perfectly operational laptop at home. “Working hard,” is the caption, the image a flipped shot of a checkered shirt and scruffy beard holding aloft a smug face you want to clobber with a shovel.
The selfie goes way back, though. Way, way back. Some might consider the earlier examples art forms due to their self-reflexive dimensions and knowing playfulness.
Joseph Ducreux, for example. Well, it’s a painting we’re talking about but … ‘life-like’, a self-portrait but premonition to a selfie future. And the bloke became a meme. He also looks like Emperor Palpatine.
Portrait de l’artiste sous les traits d’un moqueur.
Or the inimitable snap from/of Robert Cornelius, a self-portrait from 1839 and quite possibly the world’s first portraiture.
The selfie is the need to be *in* the world and be seen to be so, evidence of ownership and the experience, though there have been stories of folk photoshopping backdrops into their snaps.
I experience a certain sense of shame every time I succumb to the zeitgeist. All the delicate painstaking effort Ansel Adams put into a single snap and here I am posing with a bottle of Coke Zero in a budget airline departure lounge. There’s that classic meme featuring Neil Armstrong and a random lassie in a bathroom. Sums it up, really.
I am forever reminded of Travis Bickle staring in the mirror, the definitive portrait of solipsistic absorption.
I’m off to take a selfie with the cat.
Further reading:
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.
An excellent wee doc here from DW, the anything-goes bacchanal of the Weimar Republic captured in all its glory. What a time to be alive – left vs. right, paramilitary chaos, Fritz Langesque serial killers, rampant crime, easy credit, and in the middle of this ‘Golden Twenties’ expressionist bonanza, Berlin’s loonies shagging, drinking, and sliding down poles. Just lovely.
Further reading:
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.
I finally got around to viewing this epic 26-episode series from 1964. It’s an incredible compendium of WWI in all its participants’ hubris and misguided adventurism, and is majestically narrated by Sir Michael Redgrave (this bloke sounds more Laurence Olivier than Laurence Olivier himself).
This is how to do a documentary – with sweeping scope and intricate detail, no half measures. With terrifying archive footage and an expert use of primary sources read by contemporary actors, as well as interviews with those serving on the military and civilian fronts, it set the benchmark for such works, acting as a precursor to The World at War (1973).
The wonders of the Internet ensure it is free to binge-watch.
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.
You could be a trainee astronaut – if there is such a vocation – or have a Gary Kasparov-level IQ, but if you’re blessed with a thick West Country accent you just sound … profoundly thick to me. The dialect is essentially someone throwing up all over their vowels. Horror show.
Home of John Cleese, a.k.a. the lankiest goose-stepping mustachioed Python in history, Jeffrey Archer (cunt), and … Jill Dando, the highlight is the pier, scene of quite the transcendental moment in The Remains of the Day (1993) when Anthony Hopkins’ loyal butler realises his life was a waste of oxygen. He could have married Emma Thompson but nah, he instead opted to polish ornaments for James Fox. A truly tragic movie in the most understated way. The pier aside, the town is a shithole that makes Edinburgh look like Athens in the age of Aristotle.
I am reminded of that Rust Cohl quote in True Detective when he rocks up to a hick village: “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading.”
But it was still better than Blackpool.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 