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.

Give me my mother-fucking money

The battle to recover funds owed to me by that cunt - sorry, the director - from the Lit Tour edges towards tedium and deadlock, with him stealing unpaid-for work, claiming that none of the stuff I sent to him months and months ago is useable and, best of all, that he wishes me luck in my future endeavours. It sucks being the little man in all this, without a proper written contract or the proverbial pot with which to micturate in. The best thing in all this is that he has employed someone else to do a mini-site (using my photos, again upaid for) for the Bus Tour (and if I have to type those two words again I will toss my laptop through the window) and it is so painfully wide of the mark and so badly-designed that it seems to prove what I thought all along, that this guy has absolutely no idea of what constitutes good, or useable design and, worse still, is that kind of media fag that likes to have "his" designer in the same way that he has "his" favourite skin product and "his" favourite seat at the bar in the Traverse. Furthermore, I was warned long before starting off this project that I would end up out of pocket and frustrated beyond belief, not to mention wishing the guy would be run over by a #31 at some point - this from a former employee. I once spent a thoroughly uncomfortable 30 minutes in his company in the Cafe Royal while he acted like a total, total fuckface to the poor 18 year old barman. He practically spat out the olives onto the bar, then offered me a lift home after 3 or 4 pints of IPA, which I turned down. Perhaps the greatest way is to shop him to the police the next time I see him out on the town.

In a fruitless attempt to level the balance between being fucked over and trying to get my money, I wrote a remarkably-restrained email to him pointing out just exactly how I viewed the whole thing - something like completely opposite to the way he did. This helps little besides getting off my chest - no more than 50% of - the things I wanted to say - in a horrifically wordy way, full of placatory language like "appreciate", "favourable" and "fair". What I should have done, given that there is probably no chance of getting the £600 (yes!) this worthless fuck owes me back, would have been to write a deliciously-vitriolic letter, on A4 ruled paper stained with brown sauce and dirt, addressing it to "Dear Fucko" and signing off with "I hope you'll never have children. The world is too full of cunts as it is. I hope you get warts on your japs. I AM LONO". I haven't written that letter, yet. Let's see what pops up in the inbox tomorrow and then get the old Corona typewriter primed. Or, failing that, a short phone call to some Russian heavies who drink vats of vodka and are scratchy for casual violence.

Pinhole Loveliness

St. Patrick's Cathedral, NYC
Originally uploaded by xiao_shan.

I find that my love of photography is deepened by a lot of the stuff available on Flickr. It's a real time-sucker, but searching for and finding shots like this one, from xiao_shan seems to be the best way to learn, to innovate, and the best way to spend an afternoon indoors when the rain is pelting down determinedly outside.

Gato y raton

After the useless football match, in which world-beaters England puked, scuffed and fluked their way to another victory, a few bottles of Rolling Rock and Sunday dinner, a spot of levelling. I got into my photography course, but may not qualify for funding since the government gave me £300 a year between 1994 and 1998 to do my MA and now they may not give me any more. Furthermore, the guy who runs the Scottish Literary Tour Trust, for whom I have been doing work now for almost a year, looks to have stiffed me out of a considerable (for me, anyways) sum of money. He's ignoring phone calls, texts and emails that run mostly like "Where is my money? Qu'est-ce que tu fabriques?". I have, as we all do, bills to pay. Then, stepping outside for a midnight cigarette, my old buddy the big ginger cat comes bounding out from under the hedge for some purring (him) and rubbing (me, and him). Then, he disappears for a bit and so do I, to watch the Flaming Lips do Sabbath's "Warpigs" on Jools Holland. Fucking genius.

I go outside 15 minutes later or so and no sign of the cat, but a rustling under the big hedge. There's a beam of light from the kitchen shining past my vegetable patch to the entrance to the hedge, but you can't see much. The cat seems very animated in that "I have caught something small and defenceless and am now going to torment it, then eat it" way. Sure enough, I get the big Maglite from its perch under the stairs and shine it into the hedge, where the cat is batting about a little mouse. The little fella is tiny, I mean TINY. Small enough to fit into a Swan matchbox if he were flattened. I miss my chance to grab him from under the cat's gaze (he's concentrating so fiercely that I risk a clawing myself, and this cat has bitten me before) and try to shoo the cat away. He's having none of it, so I crawl on hands and knees to try and catch the wee bugger before the cat finishes him off. Coaxing the cat out from under the hedge with that smoochy mouth thing isn't working, so I head into the house and get some of the leftover roast beef from the fridge. It takes a good two minutes for the cat to cotton on that I have meat in my hand, by which time I hope the mouse has made a run for it under the azaleas. The cat eats the beef obligingly, but then I start to worry that I've just triggered his bloodlust and he wants the warm, twitching kind of meat, the kind that needs pursuit and claws. I sit very still at the back door listening for tiny rustles, but hear none and head back into the house.

Perhaps a lesson to be learnt is that it's a harsh, ruthless life, this one, be you cat or man or woman. You should torment and then eat those who are smaller and weaker than you. Or, more realistically (and, when I think about it, completely contrarily), that you should stand up for yourself and not take shit from anyone. Which is what I will be trying to do tomorrow, when I put in a stern phone call to the guy at the Tour place. Would he have known that I tried to rescue a small mouse tonight? I become ever more convinced of the notion that Raymond Carver had it all so right in Where I'm Calling From, in that, it seems, life is no more than a series of tiny epiphanies and that it is only when you step back from it that life comes into focus and starts to bloom. Or that you should leave cats to the killing and get on with looking forward to turning 30 instead.

The Drink for Drunks

The stupidity of drinking alcohol, and the way in which it affects normal, rational people has always staggered me. Last night I went out and drank lots of beer - crappy, cold cheap beer. I met some French military personnel and spoke drunken French to them. Making the universal sign for "Big tits", they enquired as to where they could get laid in Elgin, and where the highest concentration of "mouches" (slags, I think) could be found. I told them that women don't wear many clothes in Elgin. They thought I was telling them that women get naked in the nightclubs. They seemed excited at this. I told them to go to Joanna's, the local shithole.

On the way home, I decided to walk along the railway line. I forgot that there was no real way to get back up off the tracks (nearest station: Keith, 16 miles), so I clambered through undergrowth, over somebody's wall and crunched up their driveway as the sun started to come up. I stopped off at the graveyard near my house, touching the tombstones of my two friends that died almost 12 years ago to the day. They were 17 - killed by a boy racer over-taking on a bend doing 100 miles per hour. Their car caught fire with them in it, burning them to death. My two friends Scott and Andrew, themselves classmates of Euan and Grant, ran from their houses nearby to watch the blaze. They didn't know who was in the car, but the news spread through school the next day. We had all left school by then. I would spend my 18th birthday in Paris two weeks later, smoking Camel cigarettes on the 17th floor of an apartment in the 17th arrondissement and trying not to cry since I had just got contact lenses and didn't know if they would slip out of my eyes.

Something of that summer came back to the drunken brain last night, and there was no-one about, so I took off all my clothes, stacking them in a neat pile on Euan's grave, and lay on my back staring up at the stars. I walked the 5 minutes home like that, naked, through the estate. It felt liberating until a taxi rolled up on Quebec Place, 50 yards from home, disgorging a gaggle of drunken ladies, one of whom yelled in incredulity, "Is he naked?!" I thought I'd just try and look casual, like walking through the streets at 2AM sans vêtements is just the most natural thing in the world. I got home and fell into bed, leaving my neat little pile of clothes, now covered in leaves and dirt, at the foot of the bed.

Today was Fathers' Day, and I wrapped Dad's copy of the Rough Guide to the Western Isles and the Highlands in a page ripped from a magazine. We went fishing in the afternoon. It was vaguely meditative, staring out and over the water, following the ripple of the line snaking its way into the loch, the end sinking slightly with the garish lure I had put on. The silence was punctuated every half an hour or so by the crushing of little fishes' skulls. The little truncheon you use to bash in its brains is called a Priest. Ha! No need for the Priest for us, though. Not a bite for 2 hours, but distractions of 6 ducklings and humorous locals. Happy Fathers' Day, Dad.

Poetry Blast #1

While I decide which parts of the book to put up, here's a poem I wrote in the depths of winter, inspired in some measure by watching Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. I had read the book not long afterwards, as well as seeing the excellent adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. I suppose I was struggling to find the language of my own book, and feeling that disassociation that the chill of December can bring to bones and brain. I, too was feeling a bit like Newton and Motes, and started off with a great quote from the film as a base:

"Twas like where you're from weren't never there. Where you're going doesn't matter. And where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it!"

This Outsider's Season

Winter's done its worst work,
Set into cruel motion
The freeze and crack of this little earth -
A lens that vaselines
The skin of a silver birch and
Runs a rheumy eye
Over the surface of a pond, there.

Wanting the reward of a new scarf
Bought with hot pocket coins,
The battle won
For a little while.
“Mesopotamia,” a whisper,
Floats on and through the air.

The felling of trees
And the black-throat insults of
Roosted crows, trapezing on their branches;
The sounds to democratize
This outsider's season.

Before long, he's learnt the words
"Priority" and "effervescent",
Used their weight to sink their shapes
Into a stranger's bus conversation,
The 33 to the Bridges.

Hearing a siren for the first time
Prickles the scalp
As a single, lone lung of cloud sighs past,
Obscuring the sun's view of midday earth.

“You've replaced no-one in coming here,”
And, he's told,
“No new news from afar.”

Polish

polish
Originally uploaded by Emma Jane.

A lovely summer's day shot from a great photographer with an ace collection of shoes - Emma Jane. How my sister would be jealous.. Her flickr shots are a nice way to spend an afternoon - something like how you'd imagine a day in the park to be, all the time. Thanks, toes!

The Bad Sleep Well

The Bad Sleep Well
Originally uploaded by albie_clark.

A still of Toshiro Mifune, one of my favourite actors, taken from the Kurosawa film "The Bad Sleep Well." It's another outstanding piece of cinema that should be watched in a dark room, with sake and pea-flavoured crisps.

The Hacienda

One of those rare, rare days today.

I've been to this abandoned hacienda-style outpost near Forres three times now and each time it reveals wonder and beauty. The first time was after a visit to the Knocking Tree (photos to be uploaded soon), a huge redwood-like tower shooting up 70 feet from the middle of a single-track road. The top was shorn off by a lightning storm sometime (google can't help you, or me, on this) and the bark is almost soft, permeable, so that you can knock on it and it sounds hollow.

The second time to the hacienda was on Sunday where my folks and I walked around, stepping over serious mounds of pigeon guano and exploring nooks and crannies. I took a few shots that 100ISO film and my shitty Minolta did no justice to. I had an interview for a photography course on Monday, and had thought I could get by with a brief flick through the Japan shots to use for a portfolio, but the interview process called for shots of your surroundings. I've often thought there's nothing worth shooting around here, but that defeatist (and frankly silly) notion has gotten me nowhere, and is a constituent part of my belief that all my good photography was torn from me by the neon and madness of Osaka, but the hacienda experience (round III) kicked that, and me, in the ass.

Being dropped off with my bike and a 10 kilo slab of photo gear on my back, I loaded the two cameras with film: 200 Fuji for the Dynax 8000 with the sweet wide-angle 1,8; 400 Fuji for the workhorse Dynax 7, and began shooting. Being all alone in an abandoned building is reason enough for jitters, but the occasional fluttering of a pigeon escaping his bolthole above your head makes a steady shooting hand a distant hope. There was also a door banging shut at random intervals ("The wind, the wind", I kept telling myself) and the entire right side of building one is in darkness. Luckily, I had a 1,000,000 candle mantorch to light the way, and to provide some kind of ghetto slave/illumination. Unluckily, the fucker was not charged, so died after 3 shots of the 8000. I was getting a bit nervous.

This place is amazing. Seemingly over-run by pigeons, it spans an area around the size of a football pitch, with debris of long-forgotten farming equipment (a plough called "Albion" beside the garage, a scarlet-red old fire extinguisher in the barn, cracked mirrors and tarps in the outhouse). There's a lot of guano. What looked to be some kind of grain silo is packed six feet high with pigeon keech. I was wearing shorts, so when I rose from a kneeling position to set up a shot, 90% of the time there was a little pearl of dried-up shit on one of my knees. I found a dead pigeon or three, and a rat that was in an advanced state of putrefaction, having gone a kind of milk-yellow colour. I set up a piece of blue wood next to it and took a shot in one of the bedrooms, where the slats stick out like ribs through the fading wallpaper.

If the shit can be tolerated (and getting used to the pigeons takes all of ten minutes, a hunched stance and a hooded top), this place contains gems that are not so much hidden, rather waiting to reveal themselves. After shooting a couple of rolls in the main building - and scaring myself a little - I walked over to the gatehouse, expecting the door to be locked. Unlike the one around the back, with the big warning exclamation on it that prevents you getting to the second floor, this one was unlocked. I walked into what could have been a real-world "When The Wind Blows" set. All the electrics had been ripped out of the kitchen, the bathroom fittings had been similarly dispatched, but the kid's bedroom still bore stickers and murals of Winnie the Pooh. All that was missing from the house was a human presence besides myself. It was heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. I took seven or eight pictures. One of them was of a dying bee, its porcine body limping its last into a frond of spider web. It was a humbling sight. I watched it for a moment, gathered up my equipment, and pushed on down the road to the little church on the road out. There must have been someone who got a great deal on burgundy paint, as nearly every windowframe - and all of the outside clapboards of the church - is painted in this weird, blood-red burgundy. The clouds parted long enough for me to fire off the last two shots on my 8000, and I slung my gear on my back and headed for home.

It should have been an hour or so back, but I took a detour to Kinloss, where it started hailing, and my back was starting to kill from the two cameras, three lenses, flash and mantorch. I sucked down a banana between breaths. I couldn't stop thinking about the hacienda. I got home in an hour and a half or so, chafed but jubilant, then walked the 2 miles to the job centre and signed my little signature. I wanted to tell her about the hacienda, but I couldn't. I don't want anyone else to know.

I'll be posting some of the pictures on here once Boots fuck up the developing. I won't tell you where the hacienda is. You'll have to embark on that little escapade yourself. You might find a cigarette butt or two there. Take them with you - I forgot to.

Birds and Birth

As summer approaches those elsewhere on the island, the garden here is in full bloom. Clematis curls pornographically around the leaf-green gazebo at the back; the first few shoots of my shit-in-by-a-cat vegetable patch are starting to show; the wild garlic, purloined from the Altyre Estate grounds, bends with the wind. And, in the birdbox and around, the activity that accompanies a new birth. Sparrows have been tending to their new arrival for a few weeks now, congregating at the side of the garage and feeding in worms to its gaping maw. They alight on the branches of the rose tree and it gives, elastically, a perch for a few frantic moments. This morning there was an unusually enthusiastic chorus of tweets and clicks - something new was happening. I rolled up a cigarette at the back door and, ignoring the cold that fingered my chilly toes, bereft of socks, passed a while watching the scene.

Most of the birds were on the roof of the garage, sitting in strange poses, as if displaying their bravery. Other birds swooped and dove from the branches around the opening of the box, as if to coax out the youngster. It dawned on me that they were trying to help the baby out, to set its wings to air for its inaugural flight. It must have been a tense moment. Would the baby plummet to the gravel and lie there twitching, not knowing why it had to do these things, or would it soar onto low thermals and join its family on the wing? I didn't find out as the phone rang, me running like an idiot to answer a call from the Halifax bank, who must be the greatest cunts in the entire universe, both for ruining this moment and for making some surly Northerner phone me EVERY DAY to see whether or not I can make a payment. But today, of all days, I wanted them to go away for good. There were things happening outside. I lied, told them I was away, and hung up with a slam of the phone.

A surprising thing greeted me when I went back to the scene. On top of the garage, and depositing a small, black shit from between spindly legs, sat a fluffy, fat cuckoo. It was almost twice the size of the sparrows, and I realised that the sparrows had been so dumbly attentive to their baby, that they had been feeding this spy, this alien, for weeks, not knowing this was not theirs. They seemed almost stunned, as one-by-one they went slowly silent while the cuckoo baby peered over the edge of the garage, deciding whether or not to fly. It was a crippling moment. I forgot about my cigarette burning in the ashtray and thought of the sparrows and their fat, illegitimate kid. The phone rang again. I let it ring, forgot about my cigarette again, and went for a shower.