Beverly Hills, Glasgow

Sounds like a contradiction does it not, Beverly Hills and Glasgow. But it's not. There are a couple of areas in and around Glasgow that remind me of that ultra-wealthy enclave of Los Angeles. One of them is Pollokshields with its mansions, villas, and embassies, and its large spacious car-free boulevards. There is history afoot here with much of Glasgow's wealth from shipbuilding, textiles, tobacco etc. ending up here in the stonework, the architecture, and the neighbourhood itself. It is perhaps the only inner-city suburb that does this, all others being significantly further out from the city centre. At any rate there are pamphlets and books available that tell you more. Here, for the moment, a few images...

Missing Cat

 

The Seat As Cage

Once upon a time, long before you were born, to be seated was a form of punishment. Like transportation, sitting someone down was a penance. Because it meant that you were in a cage, and that you couldn't stand up, and that you couldn't walk. Nowadays however, such is the state of our memory - history being a luxury that most people cannot afford - we have no idea that the very foundations of modern society - transport and sedentariness - are steeped in torture methods of old. Who would've thunk it?

Don Peyote

 

My sacred plant - are not all plants sacred? - arrived today from down south. I had initially thought them illegal in UK but they're not. 

“Hallucinogenic cacti are not illegal in the UK, unless prepared for consumption as a hallucinogen. This could include drying them, or cutting them into edible ‘buttons’

At any rate, I had tried germinating some seeds I bought online from Germany but not only were they terribly expensive but even with my grow lights and tents I found them difficult to get going. And so, I bought one that was already mature (about 5 years old). So, here's hoping it's not too stressed after 5 days in a box (the chap sent it second class!). Next year, all things being equal, it should flower and produce seeds. And then we'll really be cooking with gas.

Exit-ability: Ease of Exit

Exitability, not to be confused with excitability, is one's capacity to exit and leave a city's confines as effortlessly and smoothly as possible. The parameters are simple: no car, and bicycle (no electric bikes) and trains are allowed. So, the question then becomes: How quickly can you get into the hills, into the unpeopled realm, into the unpolluted and undomesticated dimension? I have an idea of attempting a project which sees me being dropped into the centre of a major city and then having to root my way out of it. In Glasgow, I can do it in 30minutes. Do you think you could trump that? And no racing and rushing. And what about New York or Tokyo? How fast do you think you get into the outside from these places? What about London? I imagine we're talking hours here not minutes. And so, exitability is a craft, a skill that the wild cyclist attains and finetunes simply through the regularity by which he leaves the city. He knows the train stations, the different lines and timetables, the rat-runs through residential areas, and of course the location of the pot of gold. And with this local knowledge (is there any other kind?) he exits the city, and by doing so, enters something else.

Haole: White Man at Silverburn

Haole is a term used by native Hawaiians to describe non-native foreigners and the white man. The word means 'without breath, wind, or spirit'. When I worked and lived in Senegal they used the word toubab to describe the pasty-faced invader. When I cycled thru Pollok this morning however, past the monstrous Silverburn shopping mall, a giant car park if ever there was one, and through the heavily polluted air (the M77 being a few hundred metres away), I had never seen a white man as white as Pollok man. Indeed, this 'white' wasn't so much white as it was an absence of colour. This absence of colour itself was an absence of the outside combined with an absence of the moving blood. I honestly felt like a different species compared to these peely-wally skins and faces that made the proverbial 'death warmed up' look lively. They all looked like junkies with their bedraggled bodies and withered faces. But they weren't. These were ordinary people. And even though they aren't junkies in the traditional sense they are junkies nonetheless since it is 'junk life' - cars, processed food, bullshit jobs - that these people are addicted to. Which kinda makes them a different species, a species that is no longer 'human' in the sense that they are close to the land and in harmony with it, but post-human. This post-humous entity is as the word suggests not really alive, sealed in as it is to gas chambers (cars) and coffins (offices and apartments). Modern day man - Homo pollokus - is an entity without breath, wind, or spirit, and the animating power of the Earth. Which goes in some way to explaining the pasty-faced nature of these live-action corpses.

The Sun In November

This past week alone we have had three golden days of full sunshine. The temperature has been a mild fifteen degrees during the day. And so there is no excuse not to get on your bike and head out and up into the hills. I took a selfie yesterday up beside Glenburn reservoir behind Paisley and it looked as if I had a sun tan. And yet, the only sun I've had is this Scottish one. But it's not just the sun that works its way into the lining of your skin. It's the rain, the wind, the fresh air, the occasional colliding insect, the mud that my bike throws up... Nature in other words, raw and cosmic. This is the real cosmetic that doesn't so much cover your skin as invest it and imbue it with a radiance that is normally reserved for aborigines and wild birds. But then, I am an aborigine albeit with a bicycle, a wild bird (because of the bicycle), who has aligned myself Nature and thus the self-cleansing and not with the industrial and the self-filthying. Obvious, isn't it?

Not so much weather-beaten as weather-loved ;)