A thousand memories abound but the only incident especially memorable in a cinematic way is of a rather short human firing a gargantuan water pistol at a bobby on the beat.
It will have been part of the Edinburgh Festival (or whatever), your annual sub-Lynchian adventure into being and nothingness.
Haymarket is a bit of a toilet at times but a charming one. And that bar you see, Ryrie’s. So many fond memories, life moments! We used to (and might intend to in the post-pandemic future) get utterly fucking wasted there on a Sunday school night and end up on an unscripted adventure with a troupe of travelling actors (Shakespeare in Murieston Park) or tourists on a three-week bender.
I’ve met some good pals in that bar. And that’s what bars are for.
This area is a bubble of sorts, with a Notting Hill (1999) vibe to all proceedings. I’ve never seen a tracksuit or a fight, and the locals can string sentences together.
I find it extremely disconcerting.
Just off Glimore Place, Edinburgh. I don’t know who it is and it is starting to vex me.
Until the other day I thought this photograph, the so-called ‘Leap into Freedom’, was the criterion for liberty, no less. A cursory Google search (the snap came up in some morbid conversation about David Hasselhoff’s ‘Looking for Freedom’) says otherwise. The power of images is propaganda above all, the human story often discarded. It appears Schumann was the prisoner of *our* image, and reading about his life post-1961 – depression, solace in alcohol, his eventual suicide in 1998 – one can’t help but feel for the guy.
That primary life-changing decision with all its what-ifs, and he had to be reminded of it daily, us lot ascribing meaning to the photograph that wasn’t there, like we’ve owned his experience.
20 years later.
I suppose the contemporary equivalent is becoming a meme and spending your life trying to supersede it.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-leap-of-hope-that-ended-in-despair-1167101.html
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/conrad-schumann-defects-west-berlin-1961/
http://100photos.time.com/photos/peter-leibing-leap-into-freedon
https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/famous-people-from-memes-then-now
It’s official – spring has hit Gorgie. Cue shirtless chavs, the foreboding jingle of ice cream vans, rammed buses, and a general increase in noise levels. I prefer the ghetto in winter because it sends these things back into the woodwork where they should remain. Happy Easter.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 