Best foot forward

Job searching, today. Which means keeping an eye out. Which can also mean, holding up a camera to put the lens between myself and the challenges, anxieties, of seeking and calling in and offering my CV, my record of experience.

The gates of Greyfriar's Kirkyard, in the last of the sun

Candlemaker's Row, past the Kirkyard, where the light was still good

I tried in a whisky shop, a cheesemongers, a couple of independent clothing shops, a whisky bar. I like whisky and know it a bit, appreciating how each kind carries in a sip the complexities of water and soil and salt from where it was made.The manilla envelope holding my papers has a particular smell, stronger when I first opened the packed. Unplaceable scent, from the paper mill in which it was made. Almost like – some spice, dried on the stamen. It will remind me of this trip, now, but it will never quite be made ordinary.

One of the many small, closed off shops selling things not quite readily antiques, not quite junk. Evidence of estate sales, emptied attics, living rooms

A courtyard down a covered close, Grassmarket

An idea I had while listening to the crooning of The National as I wandered about (not the most uplifting choice… but it fit to the melancholy feel of last light) was to make up a booklet of some of my pictures, Edinburgh first, perhaps expanding outwards. Or placing cities in opposition to one another, to see what each contrast brings out from the last. Whisky photography, in a way. I’m not sure the way to go about this. I saw an advert in a gallery for a class on how to arrange photography in books, but I don’t think I’d need a class, this time. Just lots of white paper, ink in the printer, a needle and thread.

As to the title of this blog post? Well, I was coming back from the expedition, and decided to motivate myself. Best foot forward:

And just as I finished, I looked up to see the neighbour downstairs smirking

Oh well, it still motivates me, no matter.

All in the telling…

Victoria St as it grows night

The closes that slide by either side of my tenement building are full of strange howls and small thuds as revelers celebrate All Hallows Eve. It is seven ten, and has been dark for many hours, and I am in the mood to be feartie.

 

So, I began watching a bizarre Japanese horror from the seventies called ‘Hausu‘ or House. It centres around the relationship between a group of school girls, and happily, the treatment of them (so far) has been far from sexualising or demeaning. Except perhaps the one who keeps being called fat (even though she is rather slender). The atmosphere is really what makes it – dreamy, absurd, and with every film trick in the book (before the advent of CGI). The backdrops and sets are gorgeous and completely unreal, and it is genuinely unsettling, mostly because it is so…odd. It’s been interrupted for now, but I will be right back into it shortly. I’d love to read a book that had the same sense to it.

 

I’ve just finished with Amrita -which ended up being frustrating and enlivening in equal measure, because the naivety of the story marred the occasional sparks of translucent beauty. Now it’s onto Jean Rhys’ Quartet, a different sort of horror all together, that of human nature…