Kevin Williamson has lived in Edinburgh since 1979 and feels very much at home there with his daughter and his mates and some of his family and his football team and all the people he likes and the people he bumps into when he walks around aimlessly photographing things. He likes the historic bits of Edinburgh with cobbles and sandstone much more than the shiny new bits with black glass windows and computer terminals. He can’t get enough of Arthur’s Seat and Portobello beach and Leith Walk and the Botanic Gardens and the house where Robert Louis Stevenson was born and both the bars on the opposite corners of Iona Street and Buchanan Street and the back of the East Stand where folk meet for a smoke and a laugh at half time and the National Museum of Scotland with all the butterflies on pins and the view from the top of Calton Hill in the winter. Some days he likes watching bands at the Liquid Rooms or movies at the Cameo and others he likes watching folk lying around in the summer having picnics in the Meadows and taking the long and winding path along the Water of Leith from the Modern Art Gallery to the Shore and staring down at the burnt out shell of La Belle Angele from The Bridges wondering what would have happened if the Old Town had burnt down. In a previous life he was a publisher but can’t recall the details and some of his poetry has appeared here and there and some of the things he has done have worked out okay and others haven’t which aint a bad batting average.

I like Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast because it is set in an enchanted forest that is full of strange things and a castle where the walls have hands and love that can tear you apart and The Beast is actually Cocteau’s lover in real life. By the end of this dreamy, surreal, magnificent film I am convinced that cinema is the best technological thing to come out of the Twentieth Century. This is a masterpiece.

To read about the film on the Lenin Imports website, click here; for Derek Malcolm's article on the film on the Guardian Unlimited website, click here or to read about Cocteau's Orphic film trilogy on the Bright Lights Film website, click here

Sunrise is the silent movie that shines like an impossible star. It was made in black-and-white in 1927 and won the first ever Oscar for its Leading Lady – as they called them back then. A city slicker in stockings and slutty high heels seduces a country bumpkin with her wily ways and poisons his mind against his lovely wife. When she hypnotises him into killing her he snaps out of it at the last moment, realises his mistake, and takes his wife on a night of spontaneity and adventures and falls completely in love with her again. The narrative is riveting and compulsive and funny. Despite the advances in cinema technique this movie has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.

To read about the film on the Web of Murnau website, click here; to read about director, F.W. Murnau on the Lenin Imports website, click here or for a short profile of Murnau on the Art and Culture website, click here

When you watch this mesmerising brilliant film for the first time you soon realise that Greta Garbo is an even better actress than you ever imagined and that the mythology and mystique around her unfairly overshadows her genius. Queen Christina is set in Sweden in the early seventeenth century and may not sound like a must-see film but it is. There are angry mobs, social injustices, courtly betrayals, double-dealings, spirited idealism and not a little cross-dressing. And as for the tragic final close up of Garbo on the ship it sends a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.

To read about the film on the Windweaver website, click here; for the Greta Garbo: Ultimate Star website, click here or for the Garbo Archives website, click here

The very best Carry On movies always had both Sid James and Barbara Windsor in them. They were the Carry On films for me. Barbara Windsor only ever made nine Carry On movies and this is the most famous of them. It’s got all the smutty innuendos you could ever hope for and its got THAT SCENE in it. Carry On fans will know exactly which one I’m talking about. “S-t-r-e-t-c-h”… Boing! I love the music and the fact that every character has their own special score. Makes me laugh from beginning to end. Especially the clothes and haircuts.

To read about the film on the BFI's Screen Online website, click here; for the Carry On Line website, click here or for the Whippet Inn Carry On film website, click here

How this film got made I’ll never know. Where they got all the footage of those hidden civilisations and breath-taking natural phenomena is a mystery to me and one which I don’t ever want solved. This planet is so beautiful and mysterious and diverse and MacDonald’s can’t get everywhere. I’ve watched Baraka over and over again – it’s a late night thing for me. Whether it is the dignified ape at the beginning, up to its neck in a volcanic lake, or the guys going “cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha” in the eastern monastery… I’m just hooked on what this planet has to offer and this film helps you realise why we shouldn’t try and westernise and fuck up everything in our tracks.

To visit the MPI Media site for the film, click here; to visit the Spirit of Baraka website, click here or for Barak: A World Beyond Words, photographs by Mark Magidson on the Soul Catcher Studio website, click here

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SELECTED POETRY

by
Kevin Williamson

THE LUMINOUS FLAME OF ROSIE SAVIN

When she talks of her art
and that orange light glows
inside her palemoon head
I’m like a worm on a hook.

Her favourite colours (she tries to explain)
are like Chinese whispers.
Imagine John Coltrane (she says)
through the damp of an Edinburgh haar.

Her brushstrokes (she fills her lungs with smoke)
are a pastel jazz and charcoal grey.
She says primitive at best (exhale)
but it’s trance that does the trick.

I study her Landscape of Lips
and see Saturn’s rings,
Lon Chaney’s eyes, pinks
and a private antechamber to hell.

I don’t really understand
why the hairs on my neck
stiffen as she sings
that faraway song of herself.

© Kevin Williamson

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TO BE PERFECTLY FRANK

Joy without sadness
is inconceivable.

Just as pleasure without pain
can only be a shadow
of its own possibilities.

Likewise, I need Scotland
framed
by the neighbours from hell

and my heart torn out
by your own fair hands.

This is why I stand
at Easter Road
on a winter’s night

with poetry and love
in my soul

the moon and the stars
in a velvet sky

a world of infinite before me
a world of spectacle around me

and scream

with all that is beautiful
and perfect about the human race:

“Get into those Jambo bastards."

© Kevin Williamson

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CHRISTINE'S POEM

When you asked me
to write you a poem

I cringed:
“it doesn’t work like that”

I wanted to say
“its not like ordering a Chinese”

and anyway
I don’t do requests.

but when I felt the soft passion of love
on your beautiful lips

and when I thought of the way
you brought me back to life…

ah fuck it:
This one’s for you.

© Kevin Williamson

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MY FAVOURITE RAIN

is the one where sunlight
sparkles in every droplet

where the sky is the blue-grey
reflection of your blue-grey eyes

where the thunder purrs
the syllables of your name.

my favourite rain falls
indoors, in your bedroom,

inside the parched matrix
of your beautiful mind.

my favourite rain never
touches the ground

it hangs, on your words
drunk, forever.

© Kevin Williamson

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NOTHING TO SEE HERE

A pile of red bricks
are all the camouflage
it needs.

A fat cat
makes me smile
as it crouches
behind the bricks
tense twitching
its greedy eyes
focused on a finch.

Aye, right.

The finch has a hot sun
on its back
and other things on its mind
besides death.

As it darts over the hedge
it is blissfully unaware
of a fate involving feathers
claws and teeth.

I tickle the cat’s belly
and she rubs her fur
against my shin.

We’re alive
and in this thing together
cat, finch and me.
Today is a good day.

© Kevin Williamson

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POETRY HAS GONE SOFT

Poetry has gone soft.
Soft as Peter Sutcliffe's cock
in its inability to shock.

Poetry has gone weak.
Its head buried, like an ostrich,
so far up its own ass
it has two beaks.

Poetry has drowned.
Drowned in a sea of pricks
where even the rhymes stick
in the craw
as harmless metrical flaws.

O where is the poetry
that splashes its delight
on your face
like a hooker's piss?

© Kevin Williamson

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