10am Sunday morning and I'm dragging myself along Lothian Road as the bin men lug the soiled waste from the strip-joints. I'm accompanying my compañero Don Bernardo to a private screening at The Filmhouse and I'm running late, comme bloody d'habitude.
Bernardo's been invited to the preview of a debut movie by Dianne Bell (above) and I'm here for immoral support. The film is set in Arizona and follows the journey of an obsessive librarian and a free spirited Scot. It is beautifully shot and has a confident inertia. In my half-awake state I couldn't stop puzzling over the title "Obselidia". For a first movie it's a testament to Dianne’s ingenuity, dedication and creativity- bravo!
After the screening we headed 100 yards to the Sheraton hotel for post match analysis and refreshments. Gaynor (Howe), the girl with curaçao eyes and co-star of the film, is here with husband Liam (Howe).
Liam, music producer and former member of Sneaker Pimps, is from my neck of the woods and tells me he has been working on new material with a mutual friend Edwyn (Collins)- small world.
Jules (Duncan) renowned for his creative debauchery can't stop effusing about the film.
I entrap the illusive songstress Jerry (Burns) who cranes her neck to talk to me, her four-inch heels bringing her chin in line with my naval. Jerry's voice of honey-glazed gravel is so voluminous it's unfathomable how she compresses it into her diminutive frame. 1pm and Lothian Road is waking as I make my way home, au bloody lit.
Got the comps, joined the queue and we were funneled into the Playhouse, flanked by my photograph of tonights act - Dylan Moran. The 3,000 seater is a sell-out, packed to it's claret rafters. Projected behind him loomed my shot. This came as a surprise; I hadn't realised my photograph was going to become part of the set.
Tonight he's playing to his adopted home town of Edinburgh. Performing to locals and family is a mixed bag of excitement and pant-soiling fear. Dylan defiantly surmounted his nerves and left the audience with withdrawal symptoms.
Edinburgh Festival 2009
I was urban somnambulating, on my way to the college art shop, Hypocanthus at the controls. My co-pilot was hijacked by a cacophony of power tools and generators coming from the college grounds. Perfect timing: city is under excavation and it appears the college isn’t exempt.
A look behind the tarpaulin and my simmering rage was taken off the heat. Inside a sculptor was mercilessly attacking a slab of rock. This was to be a stage for a month long performance.
Eleven shelters, each housing a sculptor and a block of stone, was the setting of Milestone- brainchild of Scottish sculptor Jake Harvey. He had the inspired vision to display 10 international sculptors (and a graduate) at work in the grounds of Edinburgh College of Art. Artists from Japan, the USA, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the UK were assembled, each demonstrating their mastery and differing styles. Over the next month they would create a finished sculpture from scratch. Through gritted goggles they assaulted, smashed, gouged and beat their hapless victim into submission. The creative fallout covered everything in a blanket of white.
In sculpture evidence of the trauma and struggle between creator and creation is usually polished away before put on display. Here was a visceral demonstration of destruction in the quest for beauty - for art. Quarrying sculptors remorselessly destroyed in order to create: they are not art nihilists. Superficially their acts appear as wanton destruction, yet are demonstrations of a fevered desire to consummate their relationship. The rock never submits without a fight. The two find their way together with psychometry and ardor. The course is set in stone, dictated by the flow of the petrified veins and mille-feuilles. Milestone was an insight and a revelation. It helped me to better understand my processes and draw some analogies. My subject, like the sculptors stone, is defined by the light of it's surroundings. It too is impassive and acquiescent to its environmental conditions until I start to reveal with my light. With light I can obscure, hew and expose with surgical precision.
Once a week, for the span of the event, I made my pilgrimage and kept a record of the consequent acts on this stage.
Priest paying homage to Jake Harvey Scott's creation.
Hayashi Takeshi Japan
Joel Fisher USA
Sibylle Pasche Switzerland
Gerard Mas Spain
Susanne Specht Germany
Peter Randall-Page and David Brompton-Greene
Jessica Harrison Scotland
Atsuo Okamoto Japan
Daniel Silver Israel/UK
Carlos Lizariturry Moro Spain
The Edinburgh Festival is about to kick off and Mark (Borkowski) is already here casing the joint. I first met Mark 23 years ago when he was promoting chain-saw juggling clowns from French circus troupe Archaos.
For many years we were creatively conjoined and intent on creatively twisting the public's melon. We share a kindred Carney spirit and appetite for subversion. Mark is now a legend in his field and a published authority on the art of the publicist.
One of his many clients, James "Tappy" Wright is in Edinburgh promoting his new book 'Rock Roadie'. Tappy, a former roadie, claims in his book that Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager. My uncle Terry, a porter in the London morgue at the time of Hendrix's death, joked he had trouble screwing the casket shut due to the size of his legendary member. Terry was the final nail in the coffin.
The usual story- I met Kamikaze in a disused abattoir in the l'aisselle de Marseilles where the fetid stench of rendered carcasses clung to the walls. The site was trailer trashed; strewn with crippled and cannibalised caravans. The Kamikaze Plaza was an oasis of land-mine cacti in the slaughter-house's Esquina Latina. Tin baths, oil cans, pre-mulched toilets and piss-pots provided shelter from the bonemeal mistral.
I had flown a thousand miles to discover that when he wasn't travelling he stayed just 2 miles from my door. Kamikaze reigns from the Principality of Pilton. His pathological impulse to bring laughter courses through his galvanised veins. Kamikaze's motto is 'C'est la Fuckin Vie' and his métier is cracking smiles in granite. We are each others star-gate. That was 7 years ago and now he's come knocking. Kamikaze's got a present for me hidden up his sleeve. He's been waiting to surprise me since returning from Peru and now he's inching-up his shirt cuff. There amongst the hallowed tapestry of tattoos stood the syringe-spined silhouette of the Cactus Gardener. My work is now indelibly mortalised.
Next week he's off to India for three months of laughter making and tea tasting- La Dolce Vita!
