The other panelists are Alex Orr, whose bonkers-sounding horror flick Blood Car is screening at the Festival, Mike Gubbins of Screen International, Mark Adams from the ICA and Eddy Leviten from the slightly scary Federation Against Copyright Theft, who should ensure that the discussion doesn’t end up being a big file-sharing love-in. So will I, in fact—despite the two terabytes of media obtained by questionable means currently littering my hard drives, I’m pretty ambivalent about, you know, nicking things people have worked hard to make.

If you’d like to come along, it’s at 6pm on Wednesday 25th June at the Traverse and costs a measly fiver.

In other EIFF news, vote for Hannah in The Herald Fashion Awards! Should she win, I will be demanding a credit for spending countless hours waiting for her outside the changing rooms of fashionable boutiques.

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.

It was a slightly tricky piece to write, because the show shoots itself in the foot, to great effect. As the subtitle suggests, its premise is that you can split Warhol’s work in two - life on one side, death on the other - which is hardly a new idea, and, before seeing this show, one I pretty much agreed with. But after seeing it I’m inclined to think that almost all of Warhol’s work, even the most obviously jolly stuff, is more about death than anything else.

Admittedly, this might be down to the fact that I’m always inclined to kick against didactically curated shows, but seeing the relentlessly morbid work - the skull paintings, the death and disaster series, the Marylins and Jackies, most of the self-portraits - alongside cheery Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, soup cans and celebrity portraits really does cast the latter lot in a new light.

In this context, the portraits become attempts to preserve the living, not celebrations of beauty/celebrity, and the standard reading of work like the Brillo boxes as, in part, being celebrations of egalitarian American sameness (“All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good”) collapses, and they begin to look something like (cue spooky music!) grave goods, with Warhol’s post-Duchamp handmade readymades less a studied removal of the artist’s presence in the work and more an artistic suicide. Okay, so I’m going a wee bit far there, but that possibility will at least colour the way I think about Warhol from now on.

Anyway, it’s a really great show, chock-a-block with work that’s never been shown in Europe before, brilliantly installed (especially when it comes to the recreation of installations), and I very much enjoyed the way that its curatorial conceit pushed me away and pulled me back in, prompting a bit of a re-evaluation of an artist I thought I had all worked out years ago.

I’ll be doing meandering reviewlets like this for most of the shows at the EAF this month. Next up: Alex Hartley at Fruitmarket.

More details of the 2007 programme are available here. And, if you’re wondering how one makes an international film festival, here is a hint.

Nice work, Han!

The EIFF’s new Artistic Director, Hannah McGill, announced today that this year’s Festival, taking place from August 15-26, will have an overarching screenwriting theme – Cinema and the Written Word. The initiative is the first introduced by McGill who took over as Artistic Director following last year’s Festival.

The new theme arises in recognition of the increased international interest in the practice of screenwriting, and the rise to prominence of auteur screenwriters. Through panel events, master classes, workshops and discussions with filmmaker guests, the 61st EIFF will explore approaches to screenwriting and literary adaptation, relationships between screenwriters and directors, and the position of screenwriters within the international film industry.

“The screenwriting theme extends our enduring remit to look beyond the image on the screen in order to explore the structures and individuals who put it there and make it fascinating,” said McGill. “For me, it’s an intriguing shift that writers like Charlie Kaufman and Peter Morgan suddenly have more currency than some directors and that script development is such a focus of the international industry.”

1. No Wikipedia entry for Chimpy? I am shocked, shocked I tell you! Not shocked enough to write one, mind you.↩

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.

How about a Jarman retrospective next year, Han? You know you want to.

The terms of sale will not include any safeguards to preserve the auditorium, and the indescribably naff nightclub-owner Stephan King is in the frame as a potential buyer, so the historic building at the heart of the Edinburgh International Film Festival will likely be turned into a haunt for the city’s braying alcopop-swillers.

Thanks for that, City Screen. Thanks very much.

Image © Guy Veale

1. Plan to turn Tarantino’s top cinema into a big bar
2. Pub plan unveiled as historic city cinema is put up for sale
3. Fears raised that capital’s oldest cinema will become a ‘super-pub’
4. Save beautiful historic building to keep city in arthouse picture, says Hannah

Update: There is now a campaigning website to Save The Cameo, with links to news coverage, and information on how to object to the planning application that, if passed, will allow the cinema to be gutted. I tried to make a little banner for anyone wishing to link to the Save The Cameo site, based on their design, but I’m no good with fancy graphics. Anyone fancy doing a better version? (You couldn’t do a worse one!):

Here’s a little snippet from the email Tim, who works at Prospect, just sent me:

So please cast your mind back over the last three years to that moment when you drew up in a strange town, got out of the car and then… got straight back in again. Then put your foot to the floor, taking the speed bumps laid out on the otherwise empty high street at full pelt. Or that time when you stopped dead in your tracks by the sheer goddawfulness of some new building or housing estate.

Early contenders for the Plook on the Plinth include Kilwinning and Ardrossan. But who do you think should win? Have you been to Nitshill, Boghall or Harthill? Do you know anywhere worse? Which town has left you shuddering at the sight of grey estates stretching out into the distance? Which town’s windswept car parks have left you breathless? Have you seen the new SMG building in Glasgow? Seen anywhere worse?

The thing is, when faced by the sort of place nominated for awards like this my reaction isn’t to flee, it is to wander around taking photographs, enjoying all the concrete, litter and vandalised signage. Which is probably an even worse reaction than setting up an award to rub salt in the wounds of folk who find themselves living in failing small towns (which is what this feels like to me, however much Prospect spin it as a positive call for better built environments). So, I think my vote will go to that slutty piece of eye-candy on the other coast, Edinburgh. It’s so needy, that place, like a not-quite-pretty-enough bridesmaid in too much make-up, dancing on her own at the wedding of History and Beauty, desperate to bag that rich American uncle holding court at the bar. Or something.

(Click to view full-size)

1. Prose, poetry, sculpture, gardening - do you see these as different, discrete disciplines, or do you see your work as a whole that happens to be expressed in different media?

Working in different mediums has never been a problem, that is to say, a question, to me, so I have no answer to your question.

2. Little Sparta - from the garden’s name on, Little Sparta seems to be rich with allusion and reference - is it a garden in a traditional sense, or a large scultpure, a space to exhibit, a sort of literary work, a little utopia? What were your aims when planning and creating Little Sparta?

Little Sparta is a garden in the traditional sense. It is perhaps not like other modern gardens, but I think that other times would have had no difficulty with it. It is emphatically not a ‘sculpture garden’ as might be thought. My aim was always to make a garden but I was not influenced by the example of other gardens round about (as it were) but of gardens as traditionally understood. I was genuinely surprised when people found difficulty in accepting it as a garden rather than as a literary work or whatever.

3. Following on from 1 and 2, the show at Inverlieth House seems to blend different types of artistic practice too - what prompted the idea of having a show made of sentences? Is the show to be seen as a companion piece to the garden, or a reflection on it? Has the setting of Inverlieth House had a bearing on the work?

Inverleith House seemed a perfect setting for an exhibition of sentences. I admit that an exhibition of sentences is perhaps unusual but just becuase a thing is unusual doesn’t mean it is wrong. The sentences had their origin in my gardening and the reader/viewer must make his or her own mind up as to whether an exhibition of sentences is reasonable or not.