the devil’s plantation: drift 2 14Jun10 | 7

On the M9

As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a scale hard to fathom, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to compress time and space as he swerves and weaves across lanes onto the M9, the main drag into town. Any faster and I’ll either be dead or by some process of divine will and magic, find myself back on the M8 and home in time for dinner.
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The Devil's Plantation

May Miles Thomas is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Glasgow. This is the blog for The Devil's Plantation, a project supported by the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Awards. The idea: to explore the Secret Geometry of Glasgow and find magic in ordinary places. It's also about a journey in her home city. Dear green place or derelict dystopia? The project: a video-based website inspired by the writings of the late Harry Bell and her fellow fuguers - poets, writers, lost souls, piss artists, dossers and dreamers - that reveals the hidden tracks that cross the city, connecting the old and new. Here May stumbles over the city's myths and stomps on its remains: city of murder, architecture, industry, ill-health, feral violence, petty corruption, neddery, new money, crime and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Not so much Glasgow as Glasgone.