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.↩

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