Festival (Edinburgh)

Brief, synoptic rundown of things i saw, did, enjoyed, hated.

Art:
Jane & Louise Wilson "Unfolding the Aryan Papers" (Talbot Rice Gallery):
Stunning, visually overwhelming meditation on Stanley Kubrick's abortive "Aryan Papers" film, abandoned after months of pre-production and characteristically meticulous research by Kubrick. Repetitions and revisitations of history, archive and memory. Cinematic without being vacuuous. Images, both from Kubrick's archive and orchestrated by the artists that live long in the memory.

Eva Hesse "Studiowork" (Fruitmarket):
Lots been written about this, endless coverage and 5 star reviews. Fragile and enigmatic sculptures. Really interesting in terms of how these small experiments constitute "work"; masterclass in how process and practice rather than finished artifacts are the elements that artists themselves find most interesting/worthwhile. Or something.

Theatre:
The sound of my voice. Citizens Theatre adaptation of Ron Butlin's superb meditation on alcoholism. Intense stuff which possibly hewed a little too close to the text to let the production really come alive theatrically. The cramped setting heightened the tension as the narrator descends into a white knuckled, mud soaked alcoholic white out. Billy Mack's performance elevated things. I definitely preferred the book which permits sufficient shades of grey to allow you to begin to like the profoundly disfunctional protagonist.

Up. First play by a good friend of mine. About a man committed to an NHS psychiatric institution, replaying the circumstances of his commital to an unseen ward-mate. Funny as fuck and dark as pitch, a really successful meditation on mental illness, depression, sexuality and alienation. Really well written, thrilled (if a little jealous) of James for his success! Laurie Brown's performance was nothing short of astonishing, he got nominated for a Stage Award for it and well deserved it.

Books:

Tons of stuff as I was working as part of the childrens festival. For fun I saw...

The Moth: Baffling New York based storytelling night relocated to the Spiegeltent for one night only. I hated it while it was happening but was thinking about it for days afterwards. 4 storytellers got onstage and had to tell a 10 minute true story. Some were good. Some were awful. There was a definite disconnect between the american performers expectations and a characteristically sceptical Edinbugh audience with many pregnant pauses for applause lengthening into chasms of silence. Also, not entirely sure the atmosphere was helped by the setting, a large, billowing tent with every emergency vehicle in the city (and a military plane fly by for the tattoo) disrupting the vibe on a number of occasions, more suited to a darker, more atmospheric situation. Definite highlight was George Dawes Green's breathless Georgian saga.

Alasdair Gray: True to form Alasdair Gray departed from his brief to read from "Fleck" his adaptation of Faust to read from "Voices in the Dark". Magic, anarchic and occasionally infuriatingly digressive it was vintage Gravian fare. I got my copy of "The Book of Prefaces", Gray's amazing anthological history of introductions to a thousand years of literature inscribed to me by the man himself which was a massive, massive thrill!

Colm Toibin & Patrick McCabe: Two of my favourite writers on the same stage. Probably the most enjoyable hour I spent at the festival this year. Real knockabout fun, both authors have clearly done this before and managed to provided insight and entertainment despite disappointing chairing and an unavoidable "What does it mean to be Irish" line of questioning.
Audience seemed to be more interested in Toibin than McCabe but both writers engaged in a meaningful, if meandering discussion with one other. You can get the audio from the EIBF website. It's well worth a listen.

That's it for the time being...

Tiny Hairy Disco Deathmatch.

Get yourselves along to Kris Wasabi and David Barbarossa's disco grudge-fuck* at Sneaky Pete's tomorrow (Saturday 15th) night.
6 hours of non-stop disco shennanigans.
I'll be there.
Dressed as Grace Jones.
On the cover of Island Life.
In my mind.

Mega, mega busy round this way. Even though I'm on holidays. And have spent most of the morning on teh internets.

And another thing, i'm increasingly thinking that the festival is Edinburgh's Christmas. It's impossible to walk down the street without meeting someone you know and inevitably ends with the question "Fancy a scoop?"

Sure, it's fun to complain but there's something in the air this year.

* I know, eww.

Retro Stylings

Two seemingly disparate articles looking at similar tendencies in disparate musics floating around just now.

Philip Sherburne's column on Pitchfork looking at the return to analogue prevalent in the post-minimal climate. He's got some interesting points, most notably about Clone's increasing quest to refine and redefine the electronic canon, looking at the (small c) "continuum" of musics that have been growing out of the roots of disco/house/boogie/techno/acid/etc. Talk of innovation (although Sherburne uses the neat phrase "sonic novelty" in addressing the excesses of the minimal boom) has moved to talk of authenticity, a phrase that in all cultural forms is loaded with as much baggage as i've seen being lugged through the streets of Edinburgh this week.

Michael Tumelty's piece in the Herald looks at the Edinburgh International Festival's current programme and the furore over the sheer volume of Early/Historical/Authentic music in this years lineup. His point being that after a number of years where Historically Informed music was percieved as a niche, specialist pursuit it is now ready to go (for want of a better word) mainstream.

There's a lot of pleasure to be gained in seeing artists who've grown in relative obscurity getting plaudits for their mastery of their chosen form. I'm eagerly anticipating watching Legowelt break out his boxes at Substance this weekend just as Tumelty seems excited at the prospect of seeing Bach Collegium Japan.

So this is really just a wee screed, saluting all the interesting music programming this year in all its forms in Edinburgh's festival this year. It's a welcome relief from the depressing uniformity of a lot of the fare on offer at the major Fringe venues- acres of posters on boards plastered with easily recognisable visual references on posters.

Bookshelves, Carpentery and The Living End

And so begins another Edinburgh Festival. A few posts ago I referred to it as the Truly Detestable Edinburgh Festival, largely to shoehorn a gratuitous Edwin Collins pun into a moribund review. It's also because every year I feel an ache of apprehension at the invasion of this sleepy burgh by marauding hordes of fledgling PR's with gawping turistas cluttering my normally serene progress through town. Then it starts and I spend the first week manically running around going to a scatter of varied events and staying up way too late. The festivals are what they are and what they are is a fantastic excuse to to run around going to a scatter of varied events and stay up way too late while dodging fledgling PR's and gawping turistas.

First up was the launch of the Edinburgh Art Festival with the Cockburn Street Party joint-hosted by Stills and the Collective Gallery. Thanks to superbly timed downpour the "street party" become "two openings opposite one another with people pegging it between the two". The Stills exhibition of the Martha Rosler Library is right up my street being, well, a library. Had a great time riffling through things finding some superb book titles. Favourites being a translation of Paul Auge's "Non Places: an introduction to the anthropology of super-modernity", "The New Mauve- a collection of flower arrangements by Constance Spry" and the sublime "Grammar of Motives". The library is Rosler's own collection as such has loads of postcards, tickets and other ephemera stuck in as place markers.

It reminded me of Myles NaGopaleen's business idea for "Buchhandlung" in which the libraries of the rich and vulgar are finessed by a qualified person to make it appear that the books had been read. This would be on a sliding scale to suit all pockets:

"Popular Handling" would ensure that all books would be:
"well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket...or other comparable item inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark"

"Premier Handling" would involved each:
"volume being thoroughly handled...a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil"

"De Luxe Handling" would leave smaller volumes with:
"the impression they have been carried around in pockets..., an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book mark, not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter and whiskey stains, and not less than 5 volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors. "

Then we come, inevitably to the Superb Treatment or "Le Traitement Superbe, as we lads who spent our honeymoon in Paris prefer to call it" in which books are subjected to all manner of thorough and learned handling by master handlers:
"who shall have to his credit not less than 550 handling hours...suitable passages in not less than fifty per cent of the books to be underlined...and an appropriate phrase from the list inserted in the margin, viz:
Rubbish!
Yes, indeed!
Yes, but cf.Homer, Od, iii,151.
Well, well, well
I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me."

At this stage Le Traitement Superbe is only getting into its stride,
"Not less than 6 volumes to be inscribed with forged messages of affection and gratitude from the author of each work, e.g.,
'From your devoted friend and follower, K Marx.'
'Dear A.B.,-Your invaluable suggestions and assistance, not to mention your kindness, in entirely re-writing chapter 3, entitles you surely to this first copy of "Tess". From your old friend T.Hardy.'"

This is by no means the full extent of Traitement in store for the hulking libraries of the wealthy illiterate and I would heartily recommend finding a copy of "The Best of Myles" from which these incomplete and completely un-authorised quotes were culled.

Anyway, I digress. The exhibition is a fascinating and compulsive space for a book lover. It could also serve as a fantastic resource for passing new bands who are looking for names! The launch itself was quite busy so not really conducive to the really deep pointless browsing that the exhibition deserves. X and the Living End deserve special mention for providing tunes and flawless crowd control.

Over the road then to Collective and The Golden Record which is a cross platform/cross festival event that looks to recreate a record portraying the diversity of life and culture on earth. More than 100 artists contributed work to the exhibit in the gallery. This is combined with a weekly comedy hustings in which a variety of comedians stand for election in the vote to decide who is the Representative of Planet Earth. There was a projected film in the back with BBC4-esque narration that makes this sound a lot less interesting than it probably is. I have issues with stand up comedy, I enjoy laughter but would tentatively suggest that the last thing Edinburgh needs in August is more comedy. That said, the lineup is good and John Hegley's record cover in the exhibition is a thing of stark brown-baggy beauty. Collective are brilliant at joining things up and have done some great stuff in the past with the Book Festival and National Library of Scotland.

The launch was rammed and good fun with Karen Carpenter (she's looking GREAT) entertaining the crowd. I'd forgotten how much I loved "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft". Entertaining raffle too with Karen and Miss Le Bomb holding court!

There's loads more in the Art Festival over the month and I hope to cover more of it in the coming weeks. More to come from the Book, Fringe and International festivals too.

Comments, quibbles, gripes and declarations of undying devotion gladly accepted.

Errol Morris and the Power of Nightmares.

Hannah McGill served up a massive treat when she booked Errol Morris for an In Person event to accompany the screening of Standard Operating Procedure at the Edinburgh International Film festival last Saturday. Morris is the Oscar-winning director of Fog of War, a commercial director who makes visually stunning and thought provoking nonfiction films on a "not for profit" basis. That's not to say he redistributes millions in box office green, just to say that the man doesn't seem to make money on his documentaries. This is as baffling as it is depressing; his consistently interesting, provocative work represents one of the great achievements in modern film.

Morris isn't to everyone's taste, a criticism often levelled at him is that the films are as much about Morris as they are about their subjects. This is a wilful and rather gratuitous slander in a period where popular documentary film is personified by the Ordinary Joe tendency. Morris is iconoclastic and his approach is distinctive using re-enactments to enhance the narrative but you never feel driven by his authorial voice. The interviews in Fog of War, Mr Death and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control allow their subjects to speak for themselves and generate wildly divergent opinions as to their likeability/believability. This is where Morris' genius lies, in the ability to challenge the contemporary fallacy that there is a "right answer". When asked why he decided to interview Robert McNamara for Fog of War he said that he felt that people's "first instinct with Robert McNamara is to shout at him" and that anyone who didn't do so was somehow "morally comprimised". For me, this goes to the heart of Morris' work and was the central theme in the extended conversation at the In Person event. Morris' isn't an easy raconteur, his laconic thoughtful ramblings frequently slow down and stop mid-sentence. But it was illuminating, thought-provoking stuff. Morris' films require us to think and look again at what we think we know. Mr Death, his mindbending profile of death-engineer and holocaust denier Fred Leuchter Jr is a fantastic meditation on vanity, self-destruction and delusion. It creates a humanity to this toxic self-important functionary, requires us to see the man as human, even likeable, one of us. A member of the audience picked up on the scene with Leuchter in a death chamber with a cup of coffee all his films are peppered with stunning visual ideas that enhance the story Morris is trying to tell. Morris refers to McNamara talking about his work on developing automobile safety and dropping skulls down stairwells- about the visual idea taking root in his head as McNamara described.

Fog of War is a riveting portrait of a man struggling with his own conscience, a man loathed by people of Morris' generation. Why does Morris work against prevailing orthodoxy, why pick demonised and unrepentant protagonists like Leuchter, McNamara and Lynndie England? Morris answered "because if they're not like us, where does that leave us?"

We're in a period where the "right" way of thinking has become essential to social acceptance. It is no longer socially acceptable in certain circles to dissent from conventional wisdom relating to a whole raft of topics. This, for me, represents a denial of our humanity, of our inherent flexibility. It transposes the media-fed Red/Blue state view of the world where we are Liberal/Conservative/Religous/Secular/Hungry/Thirsty/Rapidly losing the will to live and shouldn't hang out together. This isn't even a debate anymore, it's become an industry where newspapers, blogs, TV news, zines and films tout opinions as products, creating a world where a persons position on current affairs become a surrogate for thought. This is pernicious nonsense and Morris is one of the few mainstream non-fiction filmmakers attempting to challenge this. Morris' work requires the viewer to draw their own conclusions, to think about the work and come to ones own conclusion. That's not to say Morris doesn't have his own view, one which was voiced at the In Person event and the Q&A after Standard Operating Procedure- but he doesn't allow his view to be expressly stated in his films.

Standard Operating Procedure is one of the first mainstream films about Iraq to avoid editorialising as to the morality or otherwise of the misadventure/catastrophe/oil-grab in Iraq. As Morris said in the Q&A "there's plenty of other product in the market" that treat of this issue.
The film treats of the evidence that emerged from Abu Ghraib, attempts to put it into context and allows those who took the blame to articulate their sense of rage, frustration, anger and hopelessness at what transpired. This sense transmits to the audience (at least from where I was sitting) where we're all sat at the end wondering how the hell we got here and despairing at providing an answer as to what we should have done about it. The film is interesting in providing a snapshot of how unaccountability at the command level contributes to despair which in turn drives a disassociating effect from the immediate circumstances. This could apply to Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman and Roman Krol(easily the most sinister and unrepentant character in the film) or just as equally to the US/UK itself, inured the the horrors played out daily throughout the world but completely devoid of any idea of how to resolve the problems. The photographs are returned to again and again and again.

Morris said that it has been his ambition to make a film "where the audience would wish they'd never been born". In Standard Operating Procedure (the term means the lawful manner in which prisoners can be mistreated without the act being, in itself, criminal) he comes close to achieving the goal. We are forced to confront our complicity in the acts that created Abu Ghraib, a POW camp in the middle of a free fire zone, devoid of authority and accountability in which the lowest orders were punished for preparing prisoners for the undocumented and enhanced abuse at the hands of CIA and Military Intelligence interrogators.

Standard Operating Procedure refers to the lawful manner in which prisoners can be mistreated without the act being, in itself criminal. In a harrowing sequence in the film an army CID investigator differentiates between photos depicting criminal acts (those featuring sexual humiliation, threatening inmates with dogs etc) and those depicting SOP (the most famous being the Hooded Man but others including men chained to railings and left to stand for hours). This is where the film really achieved Morris' goal of a non-fiction Horror movie; we now live in a world where prisoners can be chained, standing against bunks for hours before interrogation and strictly speaking there's nothing criminally wrong. It makes you feel dirty.

And that's before you get to the substantive issue of the photos which are central to the confusing and upsetting litany of degradation and horror that follows. The film is very ambiguous about the photos, their inspiration and the content- there is clear enjoyment of the act of photographing prisoners, corpses and abuse. There are revelations in the film which are profoundly disturbing and made me unsure about my disgust at the photos given that they are the only ones surviving from a damage limitation exercise- the horror at what you see gives way to the horror at what you haven't seen. It is the limitlessness of the despair of these conclusions that we truly wake in Morris' nightmare.

There's a lot to the film and I'm still processing it. I quote Morris from memory as I (stupidly) failed to bring a notebook, any corrections, comments and gripes welcome. I'm also eager to get the book co-authored by Morris and Philip Gourevitch. Morris' site and blog are really illuminating resources and are probably far better informed, argued and written than this.

Smack my 'tych up.

So goodbye then Triptych. Since I first saw your natty posters and groovy lineups I've enjoyed your all too brief appearances on the schedules. Sure, your publicity did consistently and hilariously overegg the pudding, your tickets were pricey, you never brought in the weekend ticket I desperately craved and the Weejies kept all the good gigs but hey, it was fun while it lasted.

The world and its ma is doing a Triptych "memories" feature so I thought why don't I.

Best 5 gigs:

1. Wire/Liars/Pan Sonic all on the same bill? The best Wednesday night I've ever attended. Despite the hour and a half wait for Wire to start. Pan Sonic lay the bedrock for an evening of scary madness with juddering sub bass, Liars in full-on Blair Witch mode clatter and moan and squeal, then Wire lead a singalong in a room full of misty eyed drunk old men. All for 14 quid.

2. Animal Collective. Miles down a bill which included Explosions in the Sky (or as a wag in the crowd called them "I can't believe they're no Mogwai") and Four Tet, Animal Collective breezed through Sung Tongs and I fell in love with them. One of those moments when a band you've never heard of before suddenly gives you flowers. Also notable for the experience of seeing a very earnest drunken man give someone from Explosions in the Sky a bollocking for being "middle class white music" and that the "real shit" was downstairs where the Soul Jazz Soundsystem were playing. I'm not a fan of EITS but his response to this lord of irony("Hey, fuck you buddy, nobody's making you listen") made me love them a just a tiny bit.

3. LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip- A fantastic night at the late lamented Venue. Hot Chip seemed like the cutest thing I'd ever seen- like a cross between Belle and Sebastian and the Happy Mondays. A few hours later the place was rammed, the busiest I'd ever seen the venue and James Murphy and Co were tearing the roof off with their version of "Throw".

4. John Peel playing Teenage Kicks to a mixed crowd of techno nutters and reggae fiends a few months before his untimely death. Knifehandchop melting heads upstairs, Dr Alimantado being the Best Dressed Chicken in Town.

5. Maher Shalal Hash Baz. 2 days before I got married, my last weekend of "freedom" was a weekend to myself with a fistful of tickets to Triptych gigs. Watching this band, like the gentlest version of the Fall ever, you got a sense of the joy of discovery, of learning and friendship. If you get the opportunity to see this band drop everything and go!

Best memories:
1. Dancing with my pals when Optimo's DJ Twitch played their track just after LCD went off stage and the whole crowd went absolutely mental.

2. The hilarious publicity hyperbole. The 'Knee is right, pick ANY band- a veritable smorgasboard of superlatives!

3. Getting to see Madlib and Jaydee rip it up in the Venue.

4. Having a shite after Pan Sonic had rearranged my bowels.

5. Seeing Bob Moog and Jean Jacques Perry in conversation in the Queens Hall.

Biggest disappointments:
1. No shows. Danger Mouse, Matthew Herbert, Juan Atkins, Cannibal Ox. For shame!

2. Greedy Weejies: For keeping ESG, Model 500, Rhythm & Sound, Aphex, Derrick May, DJ Pierre, David Mancuso and countless others.

3. That Madlib and Dilla never got on the decks despite their constant reminding of the crowd that "we're just DJ's". And that Quasimoto turned out to be the "Very Special Guest".

4. The overreliance of a shallow pool of Glaswegian band talent. Triptych didn't really do anything for emerging Scottish artists over the lifetime of the festival.

5. The absence of a "Festival Ticket" that would have enabled festival goers to go to everything without having to pay for tickets and booking fee for every gig.

This weekend I'm off to see Jah Shaka, Theo Parrish and hopefully the RZA.

Goodbye Triptych, here's hoping we come up with some other way of luring maverick geniuses to Central Scotland!