Ian Macartney
August 3rd – November 23rd 2023
, & it was the summer where it rained for half an hour then blared the other... it was something under the jetstream. Work notifications kept noticing this on my behalf, Start bar informing, all my efforts to stay world-naïve to dust
, & the climate and a winding Anderton Path
, & suburb-bizarre, landmarks in the way
, & a church in red brick that looked like one large brick
, & Livingston and onward to the phototherapy for my chronic eczema
, && O the strange bodily solidarity of eczema
, &&& Twice a week. August to November. Bus to Glasgow Queen Street then the Low Level to Livingston North then the 25-minute walk by motorway. Then wait in the café for ten minutes then sit outside the room for ten minutes then in, curtain drawn, go naked, look at the rose-petal patches all over, O everywhere. You could feel stretched, all the time, in this condition. Tense presence – eczema lives in the present tense. Then out to reverse the two hours
, && Glasgow Queen Street Low Level. I fantasise about living on the concrete island in the middle, an ovaloid with pillars. Maybe I am an ovaloid with pillars. A coot hanging out in the partition
, && the lack of a desk on the Low Level train. It’s an hour, the entire ride. Laptop on lap, water spill sloshing down the corridor. High Street Bellgrove Carntyne Shettleston Garrowhill Easterhouse Blairhill Coatbridge Sunnyside Coatdyke Airdrie Drumgelloch Caldercruix Blackridge Armadale Bathgate Livingston North
, && the Howden Café (café of the hospital, St John’s). A wooden sign, window to the pebble garden where there is “David’s Fountain”, resembling a brutalist thing. I aim to go to the tables at the very end, the counter, beneath a TV which flips between bus scheduling and train times
, &&& yellow floor, £2.15 coffees, kinda-instant. Tuna and cucumber sandwiches. I go for diet Irn Bru (there’s no full-sugar options) if I had already got coffee at one of the two warring stalls in Queen
, & the phototherapy process, actually. I have to put on these red goggles, then hold on to the bars in what is essentially a sunbed, elevated, vertical. Nothing but a sock over genitals. We start at 19 seconds and by the end remain in for 2 minutes 40 seconds. The nurse is one of those “camp men with wives” which usually scares me, as a queer man, but I get used to his quirks
, & walking by motorway, to the hospital! Hmm. So much of Scotland is the motorway. Petroculture of the road! O petro-surface of emollients — rivers of cream to the hospital, the captured rays relegated back to me and my broken skin, its Martian craters and coarse breadth
, && An Aura of Plasma Around The Sun by Maria Sledmere! This is a guiding light for this. I guide the light and reclaim solarity, it does things to my body I don’t even feel, feeling the heat is a different way. To be essay, then poem, then sun emoji. Yeah, I take that wholeheartedly, I eat it like a nectarine
, && Season of Renewal by Santiago Taberna! The other tome I’m considering. The diaristic element, the fact of its ample generosity, pure playfulness. It even contains chords besides the poems-as-lyrics
, & on February 19th 2020 Kinbote, Matt Gibb, released Lips Destroy Sun, a sublime EP to paint further (the final before his Lost Map debut Shifting Distance) his sonic world. I LISTEN TO MY BODY WHEN IT’S SORE, soars the vocoder topline, the vox, as there’s something brassy which jaunts on. Ambient snippets, glimmers almost, that don’t make to the crystal quite of Shifting Distance. I love them for this, preciousness nestled in a corner of a Bandcamp. Searching online the three things below the EP is webpages called things like, Who called me? Is this a scam? This is NOT a scam, it is genuine, it it is light in all its intuitive winking-on-the-water senses. Synth I can only describe as fizzy, that warm tone, the tumbling drums
, && knock knock, it's fake sounds!
, && think of me as solar twink. There’s a Russian song Caspar Bryant translates as "Brighter", by a band called… hmm that’s Cyrillic too. The song lives on a playlist called UNTYPE for the ones beyond my alphabet, the Livingston of Alphabets is the English-users’ keyboard, so the song lives on for me, I can tap and access the way I could access a word by using it by typing it. The song has a frantic drumbeat, like sunlight spilling crazy on a wavy waterfront by way of that genre of reflection. But it’s exuberant in an indie-pop way, you know they’ve got that jangle down good
, &&& muggy! Worst of both worlds! 26 degrees for what!
, & business call from Livingston North. I’m at an out of order ticket machine and I scribble notes on notebook on the bench, that uncomfortable blue incline, in the train shelter. I shift to a silver bench. My work requires me to organise a three-day conference featuring senior executives from global pharmaceutical companies. Doing this, while in service of a medical procedure, at first seemed startling – it seemed it should have been startling, I mean, this plurality of scales. But I was more nervous of being in trouble than anything else, despite leaving the office only on a health matter
, & I am being friendzoned, I think. What a 2013 concept. Being sent the most inscrutable messages. Exclamation marks appear out of thin air, the navel of sentences, like ! that. I am patient. I say this is frustrating but I am willing to understand. Of course I want friendship out of this. Pauses begin to make sense, but there is the melancholy afterglow of the summer romance, here for a bit, until it’s gone in the blip of a train snapping through the sunset, entering the tunnel
, & what if there was a Pokémon Winchburgh/Bathgate. Maria Sledmere’s pamphlets are like Pokémon, trying to catch them all! On a train from Leuchars I say, and she laughs at this, You could call a book of yours a “late Sledmere” before you were thirty.
, && the Five Sisters, the shale bings, would be such an opportunistic space for legendary Pokémon. What would constitute their legends? Energy and History? Industry and Memory?
, &&& the Tally Ho. The one pub in Winchburgh. There was a time that any meet-ups with friends from the hometown (Linlithgow – I call a dream-version of that Luxglow, most of the time) occurred there. It’s actually really nice, somehow balanced for all groups
, &&& Winchburgh is getting “nicer” and “nicer” as populations expand and resources get complicated in our ownership histories, the streams of commerce. If we can create the shale bings, the waste products of extraction becoming a sublime hill, then we can make Winchburgh a New New town, now Livingston is old in its newness, being a New Town in the 60s.
, & Isaac Harris comes over. I can’t touch half their back, they just got a tattoo of the Ten of Swords, except with, like, hundreds of swords. Only one half of this session was endured – the result resembles an angel wing, one half of their back matte red. Ink stains the bottom sheet. Red wine upon whatever. So drunk but it was good, talking and pints in until everyone had left, so to the best queer bar I’ve ever been to, Bonjour (now gone), then boomeranging back here. Mine. They don’t mind my single mattress. No, I like sleeping on the floor actually, they said. This was sincere, even
, && next morning I offer oranges and they look quizzical, but Trust me, as Caspar let me know, This is the best solution for hangovers! But they just take the brunt and meet up with their ex for a catch-up
, &&& they’re now back in Virginia
, & I hyperfixate on “Sun God” by Australian electronic-rock outfit Cut Copy. It’s a 15 minute cut, the finale to 2010’s Zoetrope, i.e. whirling light, a glowing circuit, momentum in the movement making such light. Why do the antipodal locales bring out super-dance? So much good beats from the blinking dawn of Millennium Three, the dance-punk, that’s Australian
, && an artist called Muscles! For example! I found a weird video of his gorgeous elegiac shrink-wrapped-synth-as-shrapnel anthem “Ice Cream” set to photos of jocks with eyes all red from the primitive flash digital cameras back then. Summer football camp. Maybe it’s because they are on the frontline of the Anthropocene, the place where the ozone peels back to show an ultraviolet actuality, that makes it impossible, not to get all Dionysian here
, && Orb Party! The flat warming, just before! Wow June and July were the best months of 2023 and up there in my life
, &&& imagine making up a year out of the top 12 months you have ever had… it would be a mash of childhood nostalgia and wedding vibes and elderly peace. Maybe January would be a giggling toddler and December would be DMT-induced death
, && the theme was spheres and orbs (the sun is a member of those categories). We had a drum, the base for a metal sculpture, full of four inflatable globes, one flattened and shrivelled
, &&& this was because of me having the possessions of an Iraqi artist
??? EXPLAIN????
Okay sure. O having intimacy with those objects for a few months, that was a fiesta alright! Basically there’s another Caspar, who lives in Beirut. I know them from doing a Masters in Goldsmiths. One day he phoned, saying, Hello, my friend is an artist from Iraq who has moved back after nabbing a degree from Glasgow School of Art, and they couldn’t take back the pieces made for the degree show, these sculptures of bronze. They were made in the form of bombs; they were the facsimiles of bombs. For some reason airport security wouldn’t like the idea of a Middle Eastern person taking through things that look a lot like bombs. So can you (me) keep them until they sort out a courier situation? And I said yes, lol. But cue the day when the curator who had been keeping them in her gallery rocked up, and the six-seat taxi is filled to the brim with suitcases. I forgot to look in detail at the picture the artist sent, the contents of their storage unit. Thankfully the new flat had so much storage, a deep walk-in cupboard, so we just about made it work… as a thank you, the artist promised to paint me something orange, in the style of Hilma af Klint
!!! OK COOL NOW GO BACK !!!
, well, it was packed, the party. Caspar (of St Andrews/Cornwall poet, not Beirut) had just been back from some mixology course in Berlin and shaking out the most exquisite basil gin smashes. The amount of limes he left over caused a fruit fly infestation for the following weeks but I forgive him. Tom Byam Shaw had brought a bunch of leaflets from something called GANJIN, which was a new internet from an offshoot of that organ-harvesting Chinese dance spectacle cult. That caused a lot of the 4am delirious hilarity
, &&& Caspar and I spooned, fitted somehow to the single mattress, easy for me to turn one way and his arm to reach over the waist too
, &&& memories flooded in from August 2022, of course. The inability to unhook. Experiences flooding in like dawn on the coldest February day
, &&&& this was the job previous to events management for global pharmaceutical goons. This was facilitating the delivery of 60,000 units for a prestigious book festival. During lockdown they had got rid of the warehouse department. I was the warehouse department. I was 23. It was my first proper job out of uni. My colleague, who managed the staff, was older than me. He ordered in stock without telling. There are things here that we need we don’t have, he said, as if there weren’t a dozen bookshops in Edinburgh, all providing the same thing
, &&&& after day one of the festival, wandering dazed into the Lothian Road Sainsburys, I heard a fight nearly break out on the pavement. I had been let go early because of my first mental breakdown for the month. The sun had left us all raging. August always brings out an anger and panic in me. Has done since 2018. The experiences flooded in, from that distance to the epicentre
, & taking one Airpod out while crossing round the two roundabouts, then the other for the next step. Always speeding traffic
, & Astra King’s EP, First Love! I write about it for the Scottish cultural magazine The Skinny. Its cover art resembles those DK Encyclopaedias I remember so vividly as a kid
, && according to Aesthetics Wiki, this winking subset of TikTok style is called “Utopian Scholastic”
, & I love and relisten to the four songs. They sing of “me” and “I” like a self-effacing joke from a schizophrenic. Really similar to Max Blansjaar, actually, whose ballad(?) “Going Backwards” I also adore. Something about us (Gen Z) and the ever-mirror of our experience, or whatever? What struck me, Matt tells me after linking him the Spotify address, was how weird the chords were
, && in the gleaming rim of dusk of PC Music, before it ceased after a decade, but so crisp and fresh, laundry in the sunny Sunday morning. Though she’s in LA, where there might be ash raining to the ground
, & there is an eyeless dog on a Glasgow subway advert for the Dog Lovers Show. She is called "Amazing Abby"
, & Saturday September 2nd 2023. Sunny day suddenly comes as a surprise. I overthink in Civic House an hour before the show. Heavy weight in me, me in shorts, walking to Dandelion Café but it’s the Children's Faire, of all things, it’s super-packed. Towards Verse café, then, on the backroads/actual lives of Shawlands. There’s those street banners with locales of other places that confuse me, incorrectly distant train stations right by a different train station. I get a little coffee and sit outside and read
, && baristas are abrupt the sexy way you kind of want them to be, but it’s too much after the anxiety of today, pre-Civic House, a club night called Coorie Doon. The group I’m going with are all in their 30s, which actually creates an elevated relief in me, their chill and fun. Aye, the night is actually super-fun. Like, I always remember it as fun, and totally forgot about this awkwardness I felt the need to detail, until shored up the notes into this paragraph-line-stanza
, && sitting in a field in Pollok Park, sunny evening. Santiago talks to me about resentment. How do you distance yourself from people? I sip an IPA from a can and consider the impossible
, & several doors have been left in the landing of the flat. They are not gateways, because they have not been installed. They cannot open, but they do present an idea of where you would like to go. Where would you like to go? Is that a good place for you? A bit to the left, yes
, && autumn leads to nonsense, now we are in its dawn. My mental health deteriorates, and the eczema – which has been its best in 15 years – returns. Phototherapy does nada
, && psychotherapy starts. This is different to photo- because it actually works. Am wondering about the Grecian etymology, now. Maybe words have an answer? Other than the splitting of process, obviously
, &&& it’s like a room out of time. I imagine I am talking to a crystal pillar. I’m almost hysterical, in the first one. It dawns on me how much I cannot stand silence. It takes a while for it to feel like it needs filled, that I’m wasting my money if we just sit with the feelings. Session two I confess what I feel is my darkest secret, which turns out to be merely surface, versus the actual issues. My obsession with resolution, see
, &&& the sessions continue. I learn to listen to my body. I begin to imagine my body an aquarium, the feelings inside like fish, manta rays doing somersaults in the spiritual fluid of myself. Are these feelings part of you (my therapist asks), or separate?
, & Suntub by ML Buch! It means organic, she uses a guitar, a kind of minimalism, primitive, what was once early internet aesthetics but now actually means offline digital application, the word .doc and the stretched photo. But nature. Not verdant, subtle rather, maize fields, canals in the Central Belt of Scotland. The lens flare in a 2000s way without a glossy wink – the mid-fi – a nostalgic churn of even 2011! It’s equine, the neck of a guitar. Is “Clearing” of documents, or in the middle of a forest, a byword for glade? It makes me think of climbing a shale bing and finding a bathtub randomly up there at the top, full of emeraldine water, still from the rain, uber-glowing
, & November. The sun is so bright. I need sunglasses. The three-day conference approaches. Breath becomes consolidated in the air, it is visible, it has a gleaming aura, which is what Maria and I decide to call our radio show for Victoria Road’s Radio Buena Vida
, && that’s also a café. Leo Bussi tells me they serve this caffeinated beer Germans love
, & there’s a guy from Cumbria on this train. He asks for the time. I tell him. Then – Sorry if this is too personal, but do you have eczema? I tell him I do. He begins to tell me about a Chinese cream he bought on Amazon called Smiles and Joys. It’s made in San Francisco. It will literally change your life, he says. I am convinced, because how could a stranger market something with any iota of cynicism, so spontaneously? As startling as an angel
, && he finishes by discussing his nightmarish commute: Dublin to Belfast to Edinburgh to Galloway to this train
, && I get the bus to Linlithgow, the last few times, going through West Lothian. I am fascinated by what a high school boy is watching on TikTok, in the window reflection – his screen upon a wider glass, which means I am subject to a different feed. It’s a clip from Family Guy. Then he opens Snapchat, zooms in on some of the locations nearby, Winchburgh spruced up on the app’s map, then messages to see if a friend will be online for a game tonight
, & triumphant to have the sun so autumnal in winter
, & always front-facing for the journeys, moving even if I can’t do what isn’t backwards. Sunset through West Lothian, after
, && I closed my eyes and it was like an idea of the womb, again and again
, & lavender over the empty Starbucks cup, illuminated so clearly, standing on the table like a vase in a pre-1900 painting. I think of fidelity
, & I add echo to a voice clip on the train. Maria is reading a concrete work in the audiobook version of Cocoa and Nothing, a book she wrote with Colin Herd
, && one time, I bump into Alice Tarbuck. We have a great chat about writing and PhDs and career. It’s best to take a break, she says, because then you come to it like it’s a job. There’s a distance one needs, in other words, to not make the ambitious research your life’s work
, & on the train there is this really hot young bear, staring intently on his phone. Grabbing himself, legs spread. Twin intensities – it’s transgressive, I should look away, but it’s the kind of scenario I’d want to happen, happening. I wonder if it’s Grindr. I wonder who is on the other end. Breathing shallow, a lagoon of his breath. Plus the sun’s spinning out, out there
, && I am too tired to make the apps, there’s a hesitancy all summer, once I knew Caspar is a friend (brilliance, gleam on a Sunday, off the steel wall)
, &&& sometimes I orbit intense platonic relationships thinking them romantic, like that’s a requirement. And it is so good to know otherwise. But it is only until Gavin Stevens makes me install Hinge a half-hour after midnight in Oran Mor’s new basement piano-bar bit that we get rolling, i.e. I mean Vish, Vishal Kumar, hi Vish I hope you are doing well, even though you are in the next chapter of my life, a chapter I’d rather not write the way I have done so, for solarity, reclaimed, this is kinda different to our relationship in all its gloriousness
, & one time I am struck by how Maria opens the thesaurus app on her Mac, to start writing. Thus explaining the lushness. Sledmere-ish, that’s what’s needed, something that shrugs, not the eloquent fencing-stab French of -esque, nor the statesmanlike -ian. My name also describes the style: Macartneyian. Of course my name conjures a game, even in pure description
, & final phototherapy session. Follow-up appointment for 4-8 weeks but otherwise last of the low-level. Pigeon in the central island, and it’s a bright November. A kind of orange for the bare trees, they look alive with the sun setting so early, golden hour at 1:30
, && tonight is the Brilliant Vibrating Interface launch, the anthology I’ve been co-editing for months as part of SPAM Press, for November 2023 is the impure month of pure culmination, of stress and heightened awareness, fight-or-flight, assuming release, hoping for it
, && the three-day conference for the global pharmaceutical people is also later in the month
, &&& then the Bristol launch for my short story collection, The Infinite Fury and other stories. How much fury have I felt during this stretch, the summer of 2023
, &&&& perhaps this is why God permits chillwave to return to my algorithm, Tycho’s entire 2011 album Dive for the journey. I listen and re-listen and respond and beam and praise a million glittering forces dancing over surface upon surface, which is to say I praise the sun, go solarpunk despite my best efforts (and Tom’s hatred of the phrase), feel hope in a world too complicated for gestures that remarkable… praise even the broken things. My skin, in a dream of repair. Text my Vitamin D. Text my sunshine.
Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot, but for how much longer?