Behold the spring delights of Edinburgh in this wee montage of recent snaps I’ve taken. No poverty or bar brawls here; it’s my propaganda piece.
Category Archives: Travel
Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) – appalling movie, transcendental tunes.
Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) – it’s barely a film, more a hotchpotch of childish, pointless, often cringeworthy scenes. It has nothing to say and no reason to exist. The movie is the cinematic equivalent of jizz on a tissue. The music, though. It’s fucking magical. God, those were the days – Ibiza at the turn of the last century, when falling asleep in a pool of your own vomit was considered a trailblazing activity.
The soundtrack to Kevin & Perry Go Large is trance music at its zenith.
Right, time for a bit of Eyeball Paul. Pass the eccies.
I am a travelling slob.
On every one of my wee city adventures I have pre-trip visions, grandiose plans for culture, a desire to immerse myself in the local community, a wolf in the sheep pen (something like that).
All I ever end up doing is getting fucked up and sitting on my arse. A ten-minute museum cameo and I’m back to the pub for another intake of liquid delights. Sometimes I think I’d be better off just staying at home, necking Lidl’s own-brand Scotch from the bottle whilst furiously wanking away to Apocalypse Now (1979).
This snap defines my ‘adventures’. Copenhagen in spring. Winning (maybe).
The Lost City of Z (2016).
Z was such a pleasant surprise. It’s so rare these days to see an old-fashioned adventure movie that’s classically crafted, with a concentration on very few themes but these taken all the way and succinctly explored. It borders on David Lean at times, but peppered with vignettes of early Herzog.
Based on the exploits of Percy Fawcett, the film brought out the seeming wonder (and danger) of travel at a time when something called The British Empire actually existed, as risible the proposition now looks. Not that the film was nostalgic; merely, it captured the mores and eccentricities of the age, and the obsession with new discoveries that went with it.
These adventuring … pioneers, I suppose, are held in high esteem because they paved the way, accomplished things most men couldn’t. It’s films like this that do them service. And there isn’t a single sighting of a CGI monster or a nincompoop in a cape. Refreshingly old school.
Further reading:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/lost-city-z-review-transporting-profound-piece-cinema/
http://www.history.com/news/explorer-percy-fawcett-disappears-in-the-amazon-90-years-ago
Orient Express.
A wee trip back into the luxury high-end voyages of the past here, with Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet doing the Orient Express thing sans the Agatha Christie plot mechanisms. Nothing matters outside the train, the roving slice of the Victorian beast a world unto itself. It’s a charming doc. And I’m never travelling with ScotRail again after viewing this.
Hong Kong – The Handover.
‘I have relinquished the administration of this government. God Save The Queen. Patten.’
Last Governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten transfers sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997.
Nothing quite encapsulates the spluttering anticlimactic end of the British Empire as does this dreary, pitiful snap. No drama, no tension, just a timorous ceremony and this accompanying image for posterity.
Sometimes watershed moments of history produce underwhelming accounts. I hate goodbyes, too.
Gorgie – Cloud City.
One of the very rare occasions on which a wander down Gorgie Road has resulted in a photo opportunity. Look at that sky. It’s something out of Cloud City … with the added bonus of an ALDI and a manky McDonald’s resting underneath.
Holidaying under the Iron Curtain.
A cursory Google search finds voluminous clips and blogs offering snippets of trips to former communist countries before Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History. Many of these comprise vintage polaroids from the ’60s and ’70s or VHS-C camcorder footage from the ’80s. A sequence shot of a Saint Petersburg Metro journey in the time of Brezhnev would ten years ago appear a trip down an irreconcilable lane. Born in ’85, I even whitewashed my early years, banishing the Cold War and its messy aftermath to the dustbin. Not so now.
Millions of westerners briefly experienced life behind the Iron Curtain and a not inconsiderable number of easterners did the same in the west, this with greater restrictons imposed by their home governments. Hammer-and-sickle enclaves were popular destinations for a kind of ‘police state tourism’, the almighty Soviet Union the predominant attraction.
The Soviets’ need for hard currency was the driving factor in this contradictory embrace of the outsider. Exchange rates were highly inflated, and what you could and couldn’t do was restricted. The visitor was obliged to stick to one’s pre-disclosed itinerary, and, officially, not trade on the black market. This was, however, unoffically permitted as a stimulator of commerce which the often struggling economy needed.
I’d rather travel to the Soviet Union of 1985 than the Russia of today; astonishingly, it appears more hospitable and the people more cordial yet at the same time more exotic. My experiences the past few years have been a mixed bag – so many cities are so alike in their banality that after a mere six hours in them I long for the return flight home as I recall that memorable line in Fight Club (1999): ‘Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.’ I could be in Frankfurt but it may as well be Milan – much-vaunted landmarks aside they both house the same old shit and the same faux-charming narratives, with English the certified Esperanto of the city experience.
We are, however, as a reaction to the ill-thought-out effects of globalisation now less likely to dance around the Schengen fire to kumbaya and exalt in the multicultural utopia. Just east of the EU, Russia as it is today in its hideous incarnation makes those archive clips on YouTube appear a snapshot of a more civilised time. For good or bad, as the European federal project continues to erode from within, we may return to the fully autonomous nation state system our parents dismantled. It perhaps makes travel more purposeful, with destinations the more fanciful. We’re going back to building walls in order to bridge a way foward.
Further reading/viewing:
Leipzig in the 1950s:
A rather depressing video of a mile-long queue for a newly opened McDonald’s:
Dean Village.
It’s always a treat passing through Dean Village, the soft underbelly of the Edinburgh experience. It’s how I imagine J. R. R. Tolkien conceived of an urban idyll. There’s nothing much to do here save waltz around, but one is briefly transported into a real-life Arcady.
Dean Village.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 