The film is one of many ‘quota quickies’, B-featurettes shown in cinemas, an unintended side-effect of the Cinematograph Film Act of 1927.

Director Harold Baim seems to have had a real suburballardian fascination for motorways, multi-storey car parks and tower blocks.

Discovered thanks to a wonderful documentary by Laurie Taylor, which just finished. (I’ll upload it tomorrow after it appears on Listen Again.)

Update: The good people at Speechification, an excellent weblog that posts highlights from Radio 4 and other ‘intelligent speech’ stations, have archived the documentary.

To walk the streets of Edinburgh in August is to feel such rage and hatred for one’s fellow man that it is damn nigh impossible to avoid committing terrible, violent acts.

I just manage to avoid ripping off my own arm and using it to beat the living shit out of every fat, lumpy child wheezing their way along Princes Street by engaging in a calming mental exercise: looking at people, and placing the people I see into a number of categories. With apologies to Mr. Borges, they are as follows.

Those that are untrained

Anyone who practices their circus ‘skills’ outwith the confines of a big top. An obvious target, for sure, but stilt-walkers (tall beggars), jugglers (beggars with balls), magicians (just plain twats) deserve the full weight of your hatred. If you wish to give money to someone in unusual clothing with no discernible talent, there are blanket-wrapped homeless people conveniently placed every 200 yards along the city’s major thoroughfares (some of them even have little dogs with them!).

Unfabulous ones

Weak-chinned, furrow-browed inbred fuck-knuckles from a minor public school or insignificant Oxbridge college who believe that the absolute pinnacle of avant-garde theatrical thinking is to mount a production of a Shakespeare play in modern dress (preferably Nazi uniforms, which they self-consciously wear at all times). These over-priviledged mouth-breathers deserve to have their lavishly printed promotional flyers jammed up their aristo bumholes.

Those that may belong in one category or another

Everyone plays ‘Gay or European?’, don’t they? Just in case you don’t, this game rests on entering the mindset of a Daily Express-reading bigot and assuming that gay people wear a lot of pastel shades and furry-collared leather jackets, and knot their jumpers around their shoulders. Gay men don’t do this, but European men do. So it’s quite an unsatisfying game, as the answer is always ‘European’. Still, passes the time. (Similarly, my lovely friend Hannah and I invented a game in Budapest, called ‘Loving Couple, or Mother and Son?’, because there’s either a lot of intergenerational knobbing going on beside the Danube, or Hungarian culture allows young men to walk arm in arm with their Mums without everybody they pass suppressing an Oedipal retch. This one is playable in Edinburgh, but the mystery pairings don’t appear all that often, to be honest.)

Those that should be set on fire with their stupid cigar

Bit of a one-off, this [and it no longer makes much sense], but I saw pompous fatso ‘comedian’ Mel Smith this afternoon, slouched at the entrance of his hotel, and doing a rubbish slack-jawed Churchill impersonation while puffing away on a fat Havana. Not satisfied with drumming up publicity for his no-doubt-shite play by threatening to smoke on stage in contravention of the perfectly sensible anti-smoking laws of Scotland, Mr. Mel ‘I haven’t made anyone laugh since Not The Nine O’Clock News’ Smith was actually smoking pointedly in the street in the hope that someone would bound up to him and applaud his glorious fight against the Evil Bureaucrats and for, er, the precious right to give people lung cancer with second-hand smoke. What a cunt.

Those that resemble twats from a distance

…but actually turn out to be totally fucking cool, so briefly restoring one’s faith in humanity. Two sub-categories for this one.

1. Teenage girls from Japan. It’s a truism, I know, but no one dresses better than an absurdly wealthy Japanese teenager (except, possibly, an absurdly wealthy Parisian woman of a certain age). Today I saw a gaggle of them all dressed as Axl Rose circa Appetite for Destruction. And they totally pulled it off. Amazing. Hats off to them.
2. Happily married American couples over the age of sixty five who wear almost-matching beige outfits and absurdly huge sun visors (women) or absurdly huge baseball caps (men), and spend their entire day beaming with deep pleasure at the sight of buildings actually built before they were born. Bless.

Those in hats

Previous sub-category excepted, anyone in a hat in Edinburgh during August is a total fucking shitweasel. Examples: Americans proclaiming their Americanity by wearing a ten-gallon stetson. Outrageously pissed rugby-shirted toffs in ‘See you Jimmy’ bonnets complete with matted ginger wig attachments. 50-something purse-lipped theatrical gentlemen unironically sporting fucking berets. Those women who dress like your Primary School art & craft teacher, with their amber beads, floaty peasant skirts, and big stupid floppy hats that serve to emphasise the fact that their free-thinking eccentricity is bought out of a cheaply-printed catalogue that comes free with some middlebrow Sunday supplement. &c. &c.

Those who can give you directions

Spotting the natives is easy. Once again, two sub-cats:

1. Plump, ginger, pasty women stuffed into two-sizes-too-small trouser-suits from TK Maxx, smoking furiously. Only on the streets at lunchtime, or just after 5.30pm, but they will know where Thistle Street North East Lane is.
2. 30-something men in outrageously expensive but grease-stained casualwear and blessed with the sunken cheeks, hollow eyes and scabbed-up hands that only two decades of dedicated heroin use can give. Their directions will be vague, and they may require a donation of a cigarette, but you will probably get an amusing story about them pissing themselves in a train station along with the best way to get to Gayfield Square.

Stray hacks

Workshy Anglowegian journalist snobs with anger control issues who spend 15 whole minutes ranting impotently and pretentiously on a weblog instead of revelling in the fact that they get a) paid and b) pissed for free any night of the week in return for wandering around Edinburgh looking at beautiful things. Twats.

A slightly off-putting title for a show, maybe, but it fits. The three artists, Steven Anderson, Dougie Morland and Javier Ferro don’t have much in common on the surface, but the more time you spend with their work, the more the links between the three become apparent.

The best stuff is by Dougie, I think - he has made a great big looming wing thing based on a drawing by a psychiatric patient, that has a really black front and a softly glowing back. The result is pretty disconcerting, as if the wing is a shadow casting its own shadow made of light. He’s done a couple of drawings too, of branks—tongue torture devices used to silence and punish uppity women in the 17th Century—one of which looks like a Rorschach inkblot test with only one possible interpretation. That all sounds a wee bit goth written out, but it’s really an attempt to draw together ideas around the collective unconscious, psychoanalysis and superstition. Disclaimer: I’ve known Dougie for yonks, but if I thought his work was bibble, I would definitely say so!

Steve Anderson’s work is right up my street, too. He’s a bit like an ethnographer, or an anthropological archaeologist of the present, and looks at the social interactions around an absent performance by collecting up broken bits and bobs—snapped guitar strings, busted drumsticks—from the floors of rehearsal rooms, and photographing folk as they arrive at a gig. I missed his own performance on opening night, but it seems he’s working on wordless folk songs made up of overheard exclamations, which is pretty intriguing.

Javier Ferro is the weak link, really, but in this context his work stands up, especially the concrete table with an unfinished letter on it, reading, weirdly, “Dearest, I have to think about you everywhere I am. I am therefore writing to you from my boss’ office whom I’m representing at the moment”.

So, yeah, good stuff: lots of fizzing little connections between the work, which all touches on potential futures, half-remembered pasts and undefined relationships. And, for once, this is a show about memory—the current de facto curatorial justification for every sodding group exhibition you see—that’s actually about memory!

Update: My review of the show for The Herald.

(Via Information Aesthetics and Boing Boing.)

As part of a continuing series on hazing in the Russian military, the anonymous author has found some stunning drawings by ‘the guy who collects stories from Russian army’ which document various forms of ill-treatment meted out to new recruits by their superiors:

Addi by Simon Periton, 2006, blue mirrored perspex.

I’ve posted about Simon before: back in 2003 I interviewed him in advance of a show at Inverleith House.

The current show is on until February 24th; my review will run in The Herald this Friday.

As “design” continues to seep into every crevice of our culture, counterfeit goods also offer a level of authentic undesign that legal corporations are practically incapable of producing. The off the books and in the shadows production style might be focused upon replicating name brands, but it also generates an environment ideally suited for the art of the machine and the art of the accident to thrive. The counterfeit good is all about “brand”, but it also lives free of a brand manager. It’s all about design too, yet it is made without any concern to the designers intent. And in this freedom mistakes thrive beautifully.

My guess is that Henry Coombes, whose recent film work I loved, Lucy Skaer and Tony Swain will be the highlights of the show, but it’s certainly a strong, and varied, group.

The exhibition concept is interesting, too. I wonder if, in dwelling on Scottishness and the peripatetic nature of contemporary art practice, curator Philip Long is launching a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable mealy-mouthed whinging in the Scottish press that some of the artists selected are—gasp!—not Scottish, or are based outside the country?

Also of note: four of the six are represented by doggerfisher, my old boss Susanna Beaumont’s gallery.

Photo by STML

You’ll have to watch Eastenders in the coming months to find out, but, believe you me, the answer is a hairpin culturebend.

Increasingly, rare and avant-garde films are showing up on sites like these, best known for hosting homemade video spoofs. On YouTube, there are 1969 art videos by Nam June Paik, a 1967 student movie by George Lucas and an iconic 1930 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as a clip of Dalí in a chocolate commercial.

It’s the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies. In many cases, these rare film clips are posted by amateur film buffs who’ve scooped up film reels or rare VHS tapes from eBay or local sales, and then digitized them for online viewing.

You can read the remainder of the piece here, and get stuck into the Grey Lodge’s picks of the best art, music and avant-garde video content here. For yet more arty cinema, check UbuWeb’s fabulous Film section.

Talking of art films, my review of Henry Coombes’ Laddy And The Lady—now showing at the Tramway—will run in tomorrow’s Herald. It is about an unruly dog at a pheasant shoot, with nods to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu¹, an odd undercurrent of sub-dom perversion, and a skew-whiff exploration of class. Highly recommended. (I’m not sure of the Herald’s policy on posting pieces written for them to the web—their online archive lives behind a paywall—but I’ve written about Coombes before.)

And (if you’ll excuse a tenuous segue) talking of Jean Renoir, his impressionist dad Pierre-Auguste’s The Painter’s Garden stopped me in my tracks at the newly-refurbished and wonderfully rehung Kelvingrove last week: don’t forget that the museum and gallery reopens in, at the time of writing, 1 day, 15 hrs, 36 mins and 35 seconds (ie, next Tuesday). Go see, it’ll knock your socks off.

Update: Looks like print versions are free, so here’s the review.

1. Thanks to top film lady H.J. McGill for pointing that out.↩