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.
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
The Corn Exchange at Chesser isn’t used to grandiose events. The progressive house master did, however, give us locals a two-hour treat, reeling off classics from ‘Longest Road’ to ‘Strobe’. Lots of folk looked like they were on eccies. Sadly, I wasn’t. But I wish I was. Nevertheless, this is the most exciting thing to ever occur at Chesser since a flasher was lifted in the Asda car park a few years back.
It’s almost here again, our contemporary version of Dawn of the Dead (1978) in which hordes of consumer-goods-obsessed zombies storm retail outlets with abandon, many of these creatures camping outside the store overnight so as to snatch a discounted TV come opening time. Some of the scenes are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. What a time to be alive. Mutants.
I first heard this album as I wandered aimlessly around Stockholm in December 2008, bar to bar and park to park apropos of nothing; I was merely documenting with some shitty camera phone the Venice of the North in winter. I was by no means lonely as I caught up with various travelling characters at the hostel after sundown, but the Kanye West soundtrack that accompanied daylight and early evening certainly had a great effect on me.
Drottninggatan.
I’ve always thought that music elevates the normal up into the cinematic, that there’s an extra reverence thrown in the mix. I had nothing profound to think about but ‘Street Lights’ or ‘Coldest Winter’ synced to me staring at a pigeon eating a discarded Subway butty was rather transcendental. Stockholm was the city for this moody music, and a walk back from Systembolaget to City Backpackers through Sodermalm with a £40-equivalent bottle of manky rum and additional ’08 Auto-Tune was a most brooding adventure.
I know nothing about Kanye West but this soul-searchingly depressing album – at times it’s like a self-pitying drunk crying about how his/her life went down the pan – is a cracker. I like the miserable and Kanye West is the one for me.
Further reading:
https://djbooth.net/features/2017-01-05-defending-a-masterpiece-808s-heartbreak
Stonehenge – Americana-style. This peculiar piece in Alliance, Nebraska is an aesthetic lifted from Return to Oz (1985). I fear the Wheelers when I look at this, not the Druids.
38 spray-painted vintage cars put together in 1987 by local Jim Reinders as a memorial to his father. I like the idea of that, a gnarly construct to the departed, not some grim, dull statue for an inebriated plonker to stick a traffic cone on.
Further reading/viewing:
Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.
Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.
And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.
Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45910189
Dundee was briefly passed en route to Montrose; I didn’t like the look of ‘Yes City’ and I am most confused as to why the it has two football teams, their stadiums yards apart. Montrose was alright, though, and it has a Last of the Summer Wine feel to it (aside from the Lidl, Aldi, and Farmfoods). I went for morning runs in fields of wheat à la Theresa May, but mostly sat in a cottage all day drinking spirits and watching movies whilst my travel companions did stuff. How a getaway should be.
We also played cards using candles instead of chips. And it was so cold a fridge wasn’t required for the beers. And that’s Montrose.
Gorgie, Edinburgh is by all accounts a total toilet, a veritable shithole, a bloated haven of the tracksuit, the smackhead, and the football yob.
Sometimes it’s quiet and the sky looks nice.
Four years ago today consisted of crawling from Warsaw to Gdansk on some shitty crapper of a bus, absolutely melted into oblivion. Both cities were hellholes, but the booze was cheap as fuck. And that’s all that matters.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 