Alberto and the Boy

Alberto and the Boy
Originally uploaded by Jonathan Tonberg.

He doesn't realise it yet, but in five years I will be haunted by those Japanese fingers.

Girl Mariano

Girl Mariano
Originally uploaded by albie_clark.

My new board, one day after exchange. I was up at my old school, avoiding Moray RoadRunners and people taking their motorbike efficiency tests, scralping edges off the harsh ledges at the Academy. Good times. Horrible yellowing Spitfires do nothing when you have a white board, but you have to be riding Indie Stage 9s.

Twenties and Thirties, Or My Thirty Years

When I was a kid, seminal events like birthdays and Christmasses were spent in a blur of excitement, anticipation; a prolonged excuse to be spoilt and indulged. As I became a teenager and bolstered my affected disaffection with long hair and smoking and scowls, which was really no more than a foil because I was actually blissfully happy and fulfilled, even in a small town which contained young men who would want to beat me up at school or grown men who saw long hair and trucker caps as threatening to their tiny, comfortable view of what the world should stand for. I haven't spent as long in this small town for years - summers home from university were almost always spent, thrown away as times you were away from the big city itching to get back, and pretending you were more worldly-wise than anyone else at 18 or 20 or 21 was. So, I am writing after a week of hard, back-breaking work and a day in the sun today and after having revisited Richard Ford's Independence Day, and seeing that same great potential stretching out ahead of me, speaking of Fuji, darkrooms, staring through viewfinders and hanging work on walls.


Goodbye the Twenties. Were they roaring? Perhaps. What now, what next? I'll tell you; being an uncle, being a better person and making more of life's little things, like watching out for the person flying a bright green kite over the main road yesterday, it soaring over buses and lorries and white vans like a child's bright hope. Of life being able to soar, to blast and to give you a little bump into gear when you sit back, put up your feet and just let it happen for a while.

Goodnight.

The End of Toil*

In one of those poetic confluences that happen only once in a while, and have the capacity to pass you by if you do not stop and contemplate them for a spell, my jobless life has been replaced with seasonal employment at a soup factory - I work at Riverside, on the soup line that is called "The End of Toil*". How ironic then that my working day is filled with what you could call the limit of toil. I love it like no job I have ever had, even when I was the painter and decorator for the guys at New Media Scotland, which was great because I got to wear a boilersuit, dictate my own work schedule (in at 10, paint 'til lunch, bacon roll and The Guardian at 1, sleep until 2, home 5:30) and join the secret brotherhood of white van man. Starting on Monday, with no health and safety training, no induction and the merest hint of a clue what we were doing there, I entered a world that had previously terrified me. To elaborate, most of the people who work there are from east of Fochabers, most of them from Buckie or Keith or Portsoy or any of the other dead-end towns out that direction. It's such a pronounced (and let's get onto pronunciation forthwith) difference to towns to the West, and one which saw me wrestle for all of five minutes with my middle-class, man with an MA ego until something strange and unexplainable and pleasant happened to turn it all on its head. And it involved convincing myself of the notion that there is some kind of genetic manual labour trait that seems to go back many generations. Let me try to explain.

In what might turn out to be the genetic trait I pass on to further generations of my own, I was horrendously hungover on Monday. I decided that because it was the last Sunday of my twenties that I would get drunk on red wine and confront something of the milestone that turning 30 represents, or claims to represent. Pressured more by friends' comments than by any epiphany of my own, I found myself this last little while counting every small event as some marker of leaving my twenties behind and entering a new phase, one where I might start to grow into myself and not be so dependent on clinging to a notion of youth that, really, petered out a long time ago and was blasted into dust when I split up with the ex. The truth is that I am no closer to feeling 30 than I am to feeling 21, or any of those other ages with import. I realise that in the past 4 or so years the process of ageing, that for so long the facet of youth held at bay - nay, poked its red tongue at - was now becoming more visible. A widening of the middle that was not just the evidence of a large meal; the slight yellowing of the incisors that spoke more of tobacco habit than negligent oral hygiene; the laughter lines that my Spanish novia in Japan thought were cute becoming trenched crows' feet; less "snap" to the skin on the back of my hands - thickening veins underneath. Like irritating party guests, all these things crept up with stealth but refused to leave once they had arrived. They did not bother me in the same way that the scars and broken bones and abrasions I have had through 16 years of skateboarding have not bothered me. Quite the opposite seems to have happened; I take a kind of pleasure in the slow degredation of things (I suppose that is quite the most unhealthy perspective to take), the breaking down and the breaking-up.

But today, and these past three days, I have been part of a workforce, and that word itself has so much more meaning than it is generally attributed with. When I worked as a web designer, the techies and managers and creative directors combined were not a workforce, in the same way that a Ford Transit is not a juggernaut and companies that use the suffix "direct" in their name are not literally connected to your home through a system of pulleys and levers. "Sofas Direct to your home!" they say, and you picture a man aiming a giant couch-cannon that fires a 3-seater leather reclining set through the air, missing all power lines and other obstacles and that reaches a certain velocity before being slowed by invisible wires so that it plops with a carpeted doof on your doorstep. No, to be part of a workforce you should be aware at all times of your place within the chain. I don't mean that you should know that your boss hates you (s/he probably does - that's why they're the boss) or that your promotion prospects are slim this year (and probably next) or that the presentation you gave last week where you told the joke about the horse and the nuns was infinitely more excrutiating to listen to than to tell. I mean that in the workplace where physical graft is a necessity, that you should aim to be as well-oiled as the rollers beneath the conveyor belt, maintain that kind of loose, confident ease of movement that you saw on that Foreigner video of the guys building the skyscrapers. I have too much to write about it tonight (it's pushing 1am, and I am riding the adrenalin high of 8 hours humping heavy machinery), but I'll end for now by saying that there is a perfect "h"-shaped bruise on my right inner arm that is so much like the yin to the metal basket yang that I have worked with today that it looks like a kiss rather than an abrasion. Goodnight, for tomorrow I may make Rotormat Man.

* Addendum: It's actually the end of TOYO, not T-O-I-L. I apologise for my misinterpretation of the accent. But doesn't TOIL sound better?

Poetry Blast #2

Boris Totiev Plays Accordion in a Picture His Mother is Holding

I was looking at myself sideways

In the full-length mirror in our room,

Pulling in my stomach that had –

This past summer –

Swelled out grotesque and proud

Of its own accord, it seemed,

When you called me through with the voice

You usually reserved for trouble, or tragedy.

I was, for a short while, half-pleased

When it turned out to be the latter

Because your horrible cousin had died

A week ago and you felt guilty that you didn't cry

At the funeral

In Windygates

And we sat eating birthday strawberries

For your twenty-eighth year

While we waited for something to open up and crack

Five minutes ago

You were swearing at your new phone

And cursing reception with 'fucks' under your breath

And out loud

That I still heard through two walls.

Then, together we watched the footage

Of old men in suits and jumpers

Looking

Lost.

And you could see unapologetic gaps

In their mouths, missing and black teeth

Behind lips drawn back to the molars.

Their heads thrown back to wail made me think of the stupidest thing,

Of skinny men doing hair metal

Guitar solos,

In videos from the '80s

You had the sound down

So we watched the tanks and the people and the subtitles

And tried to pronounce "Bes-lan"

As we imagined Trotsky might

If he were alive and a television reporter

My tea went cold –

You cried a little –

As we watched one mother

Subtitled on the screen saying,

"Do you need a photo of my child?

Will you film a photo of my son?"

The Long Slow Fridays

Tonight I lay on the grass with no shirt and sent long slow cigarettes in arcs above my head and spat ineffectually onto my face and neck and not the lawn. I had watched Visitor Q and Punch Drunk Love and thought of the redemptive powers of cinema that, after wine and contemplation, seemed more like set-pieces at some cinema World Cup than me sitting, reclined, in front of a paused Larry Clark DVD or the true thoughts that might work between fingers and brain at this late, late hour. I thought of missing Japan and its inherent madness, and felt regret at being no more than a bush-league amateur and voyeur, a vessel with no real destination, and how I would like to go back on a holiday and go to the places I should have gone to. Even though I have travelled a lot, I am not an adventurous person. I am 30 in 7 days and even as I look down at these hands, these real hands that are scratched and veined with cuisine and skateboarding and not much graft, I feel that the continuing business of my life is in becoming a storage facility, a graveyard of memories.

Downtown USA

Downtown USA
Originally uploaded by albie_clark.

Since 1992 or thereabouts, one bar in Elgin has been head-and-shoulders ahead of all others in terms of sheer conceptual lunacy. When it first opened, it was notable for a number of things:

- Cheap happy hour - 8:30 - 9:30

- A huge, Wheel Of Fortune-style wheel that would be spun towards the end of the aforementioned happy hour, giving punters the opportunity to extend happy hour from 5 minutes to an hour to ALL NIGHT

- Two pints for £1.40

- The fact that the interior is a mockup of AN AMERICAN STREET, complete with barber shop, subway and washing lines

We used to love it when we were 17, but it's suffered a terminal decline since the heady days of 1992. Nowadays it's like every kind of shitty, ned-filled bar in every town in the land; like someone turfed the entire contents of Topman, Miss Selfridge and Lidl into one place and gave them aftershave to drink. Nevertheless, it retains a certain kind of scummy allure, one that ensures you'll go back again and again and again.

This shot is from the camera phone operated by a drunkard; drunk on one of the two kinds of draft lager they sell in there: the magnificent jakey juice that is Tennents.

Read what other poor bastards say about Elgin here.

A Wayne Coyne Medical

I had my first interview for about 4 years today. Given that I need money for a flat, to pay my tuition, to buy a new Bronica ETRS outfit, pay off all old debts and keep my folks happy with dig money, shit has really hit the fan and I find myself applying to Baxters, the local soup and beetroot factory. Interview goes well, then I have to do a medical, which is a first. Usual questions about general well-being, eyesight and hearing and TB (!), then a urine test, for which I have to piss into a cardboard coffee cup sitting on the nurse's desk (I do get to go to the bathroom to do it - I don't just whip wee Albito out and start pissing). I consider the irony of micturating into a cup bearing the logo of the soup factory, and manage to dribble a few drops into it eventually. Then, I have to do a lung capacity check which painfully exposes the effect of smoking on the lungs, i.e. the nurse's exhortations to breathe out a little more forcefully are met with a pathetic wheeze and an embarrassed shake of the head.

Next, I get to do some kind of Zaireeka-esque hearing test. I step into a small booth, banging my head on the ceiling (I have been measured and weighed - I am 1m80, whatever that means, and 78kg, whatever that means, and I find myself longing for imperial). The inside of the booth is clad in a kind of holepunch pattern, so that if you defocus your eyes for a few seconds it takes on a 3D-type trompe l'oeil effect. Then, I have to place a massive set of headphones on my head, reminiscent of Dad's old Panasonic jobs that I used to listen to the Jeff Wayne War of The Worlds soundtrack on. The left can is blue; the right one red. I have a weatherman-style trigger to hold as well which I am told to press and hold whenever I hear a sound in my ears. Then, tones of varying frequencies are piped into alternate ears, and I push the clicker as soon as I hear the tone rising, holding it down until it fades back into silence. Since I want to do well on the test - as if this will tip the balance in my favour - I push the button as soon as I hear the tone. The test lasts 12 minutes or so, and by the end I find myself zoning out a little, my vision blurred by the inside of the booth and finding more and more that I want to hear the whole tone, so I am starting to delay pushing the trigger more and more. I am reminded of an afternoon in Osaka, not long after buying Zaireeka where I connected up the two little portable speakers that came with my CD player and listened to track 6, How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crashendos), over and over again. It's recommended on the CD inlay that you don't operate machinery or drive after listening to this track, as 3 of the 4 CDs contain nothing but low, mid and high frequency notes. After ten minutes with the speakers jammed up against my ears, lying on my back on the tatami in my bedroom, I almost floated up and out of my body. I felt a little ill. Check the track notes from the 'Lips site for another track, Riding to work in 2025 (Your Invisible Now):

"Imagine, if you will, this tale set to a spooky swirl of sound - with drums that sound like they were miked in a submarine and angular guitars that leap at you from alternate corners of the sound panorama. Once you get it on your own four CD players in one room, the voice just creeps and floats through that sound web and it really does enchant you. Synchronised screams and two, then three interlocking drum patterns coming from all directions. Huge bass sounds fading into a glorious piano lick that is itself surrounded by voices and strings. Lush, deep, enriching and, above all, exhilirating. They just seem to have absorbed all music and put it back in a form so different that you really can't identify any of it any more. You find yourself thinking, "Well that might have been trip-hop but it isn't it's just... different."

I felt a little similar after the hearing test. I managed to get through the rest of the medical on autopilot, even flirting a little with the nurse. I hope I got the job.