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...
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Self Service (Polemic 2)
The current furore surrounding writers, child protection and school visits sheds more light on the self-serving imaginary landscape around which of the appointed cultural titans roam. It is a classic demonstration of writerly vanity and illustrates the vacuity of much commentary about culture in our society. It's a manufactured, orchestrated bunfight in which the shrill voices of our doomsaying heroes drown out any semblance of reasoned or illuminating discourse.
The bunfight centres around new requirements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland requiring everyone who wants to work or volunteer with children or "vulnerable people" to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The requirement will make it compulsory for anyone who has "regular" or intense contact with children or vulnerable adults have the checks.
This provoked the following measured responses from a predictable assembly of people what write kids books and have publicists:
"The whole idea of vetting any adult who visits many schools, but each only for a day, and then always in the presence of other adults, is deeply offensive," (Anne Fine)
"It's actually rather dispiriting and sinister. Why should I pay £64 to a government agency to give me a little certificate to say I'm not a paedophile.
Children are abused in the home, not in classes of 30 or groups of 200 in the assembly hall with teachers looking on." (Philip Pullman)
"In essence, I'm being asked to pay £64 to prove that I am not a paedophile.
After 30 years writing books, visiting schools, hospitals, prisons, spreading an enthusiasm for culture and literacy, I find this incredibly insulting."
(The database)...poisons the special relationship that exists between children and authors they admire". (Anthony Horowitz)
What is revealing about this is the manner in which the systemic insult is personalised.
No matter that this requirement covers a massive range of people who work with young people, this is transmogrified into an attack on the integrity of some of our most beloved childrens authors. Particularly hard to stomach is Pullman's sanctimonious, simple-minded assertion about abuse; coupled with both Pullman and Horowitz having the moxy to suggest that they'll be paying the £64 (unlesss blockbusting authors have ceased engaging the services of accountants these days?) we're left with a masterclass in vanity and self-regard disguised as social conscience.
For the thousands of us up here in Scotland who for a few years now have had to go through the Disclosure Scotland procedure when starting a job working with children or vulnerable adults it's less of an insult than an inconvenience. I don't believe for a second that my potential employers think that I'm a paedophile, it's just that they have to check. And that's fine. Although my flexibility in this regard may have more to do with the fact that I have to work to earn a living.
The likes of Horowitz, Pullman and Morpurgo, for all their undoubted talents, can afford to hold forth at length about "sinister" "insults" from a faceless bureaucracy. Just don't expect me to applaud their fearless decision to stop bothering to do something they don't need to do very often anyway.
It's heartening to see that the new childrens laureate, Anthony Browne offering some some much needed perspective:
"I feel that as writers we shouldn't necessarily be granted an exemption. If all people who work with children have to be vetted by the police then we shouldn't be an exception. It seems a bit odd that we have to pay for it, though."
Don't worry Anto, I'm sure you'll be able to write it off against tax.
Even better was Robert Muchamore's suitably combative Twitter message:
"Irritated at another round of whinging by the usual grey haired mafia of 'renowned' kids authors"
Anyone who works with vulnerable and damaged young people will tell you that even ordinary experiences require extraordinary effort. In their unwillingness to demonstrate even the slightest flexibility in this matter our heroes have demonstrated the true extent of their commitment.
The bunfight centres around new requirements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland requiring everyone who wants to work or volunteer with children or "vulnerable people" to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The requirement will make it compulsory for anyone who has "regular" or intense contact with children or vulnerable adults have the checks.
This provoked the following measured responses from a predictable assembly of people what write kids books and have publicists:
"The whole idea of vetting any adult who visits many schools, but each only for a day, and then always in the presence of other adults, is deeply offensive," (Anne Fine)
"It's actually rather dispiriting and sinister. Why should I pay £64 to a government agency to give me a little certificate to say I'm not a paedophile.
Children are abused in the home, not in classes of 30 or groups of 200 in the assembly hall with teachers looking on." (Philip Pullman)
"In essence, I'm being asked to pay £64 to prove that I am not a paedophile.
After 30 years writing books, visiting schools, hospitals, prisons, spreading an enthusiasm for culture and literacy, I find this incredibly insulting."
(The database)...poisons the special relationship that exists between children and authors they admire". (Anthony Horowitz)
What is revealing about this is the manner in which the systemic insult is personalised.
No matter that this requirement covers a massive range of people who work with young people, this is transmogrified into an attack on the integrity of some of our most beloved childrens authors. Particularly hard to stomach is Pullman's sanctimonious, simple-minded assertion about abuse; coupled with both Pullman and Horowitz having the moxy to suggest that they'll be paying the £64 (unlesss blockbusting authors have ceased engaging the services of accountants these days?) we're left with a masterclass in vanity and self-regard disguised as social conscience.
For the thousands of us up here in Scotland who for a few years now have had to go through the Disclosure Scotland procedure when starting a job working with children or vulnerable adults it's less of an insult than an inconvenience. I don't believe for a second that my potential employers think that I'm a paedophile, it's just that they have to check. And that's fine. Although my flexibility in this regard may have more to do with the fact that I have to work to earn a living.
The likes of Horowitz, Pullman and Morpurgo, for all their undoubted talents, can afford to hold forth at length about "sinister" "insults" from a faceless bureaucracy. Just don't expect me to applaud their fearless decision to stop bothering to do something they don't need to do very often anyway.
It's heartening to see that the new childrens laureate, Anthony Browne offering some some much needed perspective:
"I feel that as writers we shouldn't necessarily be granted an exemption. If all people who work with children have to be vetted by the police then we shouldn't be an exception. It seems a bit odd that we have to pay for it, though."
Don't worry Anto, I'm sure you'll be able to write it off against tax.
Even better was Robert Muchamore's suitably combative Twitter message:
"Irritated at another round of whinging by the usual grey haired mafia of 'renowned' kids authors"
Anyone who works with vulnerable and damaged young people will tell you that even ordinary experiences require extraordinary effort. In their unwillingness to demonstrate even the slightest flexibility in this matter our heroes have demonstrated the true extent of their commitment.
Friday, 10 July 2009
Polemic 1
Irksome post on the guardian bookblog gives way to discussion in which the usual observation-commentary-extrapolation continuum betrays one of the classic intellectual blindspots of our times whereby broad, uninformed statements based on imaginative interpretation of a strangers behaviour is presented as some sort of psychological/sociological insight.
Where Sebastian Faulks WWI snoreathon "Birdsong" soothes the savage Staffy-wielding proletarians our heroine is forced to share public transport with, the spectacle of a man reading a novel by a national treasure is a transparent (and creepy) attempt to seduce and destroy. I acknowledge that my irritation probably stems from the possibility that people would misinterpret my adoration of Smith's work as an attempt to curry favour with the sisterhood rather than the fact that she is bloody marvellous.
Anyway, this tendency seems to extend throughout the literatosphere: the use of observation as a springboard from which the (normally reasonably well established) author can vault headlong into a soup of their own anxieties and present them as a problem for society. Frequently, observations of this nature reveal more about our author than it does about the subject. This is something that makes my heart sink as the "hook" for the author is that the subject is, in itself, interesting.
An example?
Let's have a look at a recent profile of arch-charlatan Sue Palmer trailing her latest notional treataise on the plight of 21st Century boys:
"NOT SO long ago, Sue Palmer was walking through Edinburgh's Queen Street Gardens. She had her dog on the lead and was minding her own business, when she happened upon what she describes as a "dreadfully upsetting sight".
"There were these three young women from a nursery having a chat, and they had nine little children with them on leads," says the Edinburgh-based author, who has published several acclaimed books about modern childhood. "I looked at those children and thought, 'they're getting less attention and time than my dog'. I don't think the women were being uncaring, but the fact that the children were on leads was just symptomatic of the fact that we seem to have comprehensively lost track of one of the most important elements of raising children: personal, loving contact."
I don't know if Ms Palmer has ever experienced the butt-quaking terror of trying to organise a group of young children anywhere out of doors but it does betray the fact that the origins of many of her theses reside in a school of thought we can call Nosey-Parkerdom. Furthermore, there is no indication as to whether Ms Palmer made any effort to ascertain to what extent these children were being denied personal, loving contact. Is the fact that these young children in nursery in itself neglectful? Or is it the use of leads? Coupled with Palmer's suggestion that children should not enter primary education until age 7 we're right into stay-at-home-parent territory aren't we?
"We've got screen saturation in our homes now, and we've got lots of ways little boys can and do end up in front of screens. We've got faster and faster in terms of the amount of technology we now use, and we've sort of forgotten that children are still the same creatures they've always been. They're born with these stone-age little brains and in order to bring them up well we have to slow down a bit and acknowledge they exist in biological time not technological time. We're fastforwarding them into the 21st century and that is contributing to an increase in emotional behaviour and social problems."
Speaking to people with experience of working with young men who would be considered as having what is charmingly titled Social Emotional and Behavioural difficulties I can't see how screen saturation (or technological exposure) necessarily feeds into their specific problems. The vast majority of their problems stem from broader social problems, poverty, neglect, deprivation, delinquency, early exposure to alcohol, drugs, solvents, absence of a strong or coherent community outside a peer group. You know, the kind of stuff that doesn't really stoke the ardour of Conservative Party Conferences as much as the simplistic Modern Life is Rubbish agenda peddled by high profile chuckleheads like Palmer.
"Boys need a lot of outdoor activity and play in order to develop the control of their limbs and minds that will allow them to sit down in class. If you have a little five-year- old boy trying to make a den or build a fort, it doesn't matter in play whether it falls down or not, but if we put them under pressure with targets in a classroom, they know this is the grown up world and they've got to please grownups, and if they're not capable of doing that at that age and they fail you've got a good chance of turning them off for life."
Here again we have a simple, innocuous statement (children need exercise) acting as a springboard for a Flying forward one-and-a-half somersault, pike
into an imagined pressure cooker school where p1 & 2 where boys are expected to knuckle down and forget about all that nonsense about playing and sharing or ever going outside again.
We have the imagined world of worried little boys, locked up inside with no place for creativity and fun, this is a world which, in the interview, has been entirely fabricated without recourse to any basis in fact. It is the authors OWN NIGHTMARE.
This, again, doesn't tally with experience of working with young people on the sharp end of the behavioural spectrum. The circumstances that lead young people to fail at school and to be turned off education for life are likely to have more to do with disruption in their educational experience. Every local authority will have a number of children (boys and girls) who from an early age are percieved as being SEB. The profound sense of alienation from education they will almost certainly experience will be learned by these young people as they are bounced from class to class, school to school, unable to settle into groups and perpetually viewed as a burden on the schools physical and human resources. This has precisely nothing to do with Palmer's imagined dislocation and everything to do with the all too real psychological horror of vulnerable children being pushed to the margins of mainstream society at an age when their need for basic education is most pronounced.
"With teenage boys, the peer pressure is to be edgy – to do bad things that are anti-establishment, anti-education and anti-social. They want an edgy, cool image that comes from media and marketing and computer games."
The gobsmacking revelation that young men want to be seen as individuals in their journey towards adulthood is so self-evident and banal as to inspire skepticism of practically everything that's gone before.
So what's my point? That the current urge to pathologise every aspect of youth development only fuels the profound sense of unease with young people, the fact that this perspective is marketable by publishers to an affluent and influential class of people who are psychologically and socially remote from the vast majority of ordinary society only serves to tighten the discursive circle where a diminishing clique claque about the "crisis" in their imagined childhoods.
Where previously a tension existed between the adult worlds instinctive protective instinct and natural generational distaste at adolescents, the adults are now locked out in the cold. The adult world observes, annotates and wrinkles its nose in distaste at a youth culture they can't understand and so they attempt to imagine they understand. And by imagining they understand the problem, their solution is rooted in how they imagine the world rather than how the world actually is.
Important caveat: This is merely an anlysis of the profile of Palmer and not a review of the book (which, despite my deep seated reservations, I will read on release and attempt to trawl through it without harrumphing the world back to the stone age).
Where Sebastian Faulks WWI snoreathon "Birdsong" soothes the savage Staffy-wielding proletarians our heroine is forced to share public transport with, the spectacle of a man reading a novel by a national treasure is a transparent (and creepy) attempt to seduce and destroy. I acknowledge that my irritation probably stems from the possibility that people would misinterpret my adoration of Smith's work as an attempt to curry favour with the sisterhood rather than the fact that she is bloody marvellous.
Anyway, this tendency seems to extend throughout the literatosphere: the use of observation as a springboard from which the (normally reasonably well established) author can vault headlong into a soup of their own anxieties and present them as a problem for society. Frequently, observations of this nature reveal more about our author than it does about the subject. This is something that makes my heart sink as the "hook" for the author is that the subject is, in itself, interesting.
An example?
Let's have a look at a recent profile of arch-charlatan Sue Palmer trailing her latest notional treataise on the plight of 21st Century boys:
"NOT SO long ago, Sue Palmer was walking through Edinburgh's Queen Street Gardens. She had her dog on the lead and was minding her own business, when she happened upon what she describes as a "dreadfully upsetting sight".
"There were these three young women from a nursery having a chat, and they had nine little children with them on leads," says the Edinburgh-based author, who has published several acclaimed books about modern childhood. "I looked at those children and thought, 'they're getting less attention and time than my dog'. I don't think the women were being uncaring, but the fact that the children were on leads was just symptomatic of the fact that we seem to have comprehensively lost track of one of the most important elements of raising children: personal, loving contact."
I don't know if Ms Palmer has ever experienced the butt-quaking terror of trying to organise a group of young children anywhere out of doors but it does betray the fact that the origins of many of her theses reside in a school of thought we can call Nosey-Parkerdom. Furthermore, there is no indication as to whether Ms Palmer made any effort to ascertain to what extent these children were being denied personal, loving contact. Is the fact that these young children in nursery in itself neglectful? Or is it the use of leads? Coupled with Palmer's suggestion that children should not enter primary education until age 7 we're right into stay-at-home-parent territory aren't we?
"We've got screen saturation in our homes now, and we've got lots of ways little boys can and do end up in front of screens. We've got faster and faster in terms of the amount of technology we now use, and we've sort of forgotten that children are still the same creatures they've always been. They're born with these stone-age little brains and in order to bring them up well we have to slow down a bit and acknowledge they exist in biological time not technological time. We're fastforwarding them into the 21st century and that is contributing to an increase in emotional behaviour and social problems."
Speaking to people with experience of working with young men who would be considered as having what is charmingly titled Social Emotional and Behavioural difficulties I can't see how screen saturation (or technological exposure) necessarily feeds into their specific problems. The vast majority of their problems stem from broader social problems, poverty, neglect, deprivation, delinquency, early exposure to alcohol, drugs, solvents, absence of a strong or coherent community outside a peer group. You know, the kind of stuff that doesn't really stoke the ardour of Conservative Party Conferences as much as the simplistic Modern Life is Rubbish agenda peddled by high profile chuckleheads like Palmer.
"Boys need a lot of outdoor activity and play in order to develop the control of their limbs and minds that will allow them to sit down in class. If you have a little five-year- old boy trying to make a den or build a fort, it doesn't matter in play whether it falls down or not, but if we put them under pressure with targets in a classroom, they know this is the grown up world and they've got to please grownups, and if they're not capable of doing that at that age and they fail you've got a good chance of turning them off for life."
Here again we have a simple, innocuous statement (children need exercise) acting as a springboard for a Flying forward one-and-a-half somersault, pike
into an imagined pressure cooker school where p1 & 2 where boys are expected to knuckle down and forget about all that nonsense about playing and sharing or ever going outside again.
We have the imagined world of worried little boys, locked up inside with no place for creativity and fun, this is a world which, in the interview, has been entirely fabricated without recourse to any basis in fact. It is the authors OWN NIGHTMARE.
This, again, doesn't tally with experience of working with young people on the sharp end of the behavioural spectrum. The circumstances that lead young people to fail at school and to be turned off education for life are likely to have more to do with disruption in their educational experience. Every local authority will have a number of children (boys and girls) who from an early age are percieved as being SEB. The profound sense of alienation from education they will almost certainly experience will be learned by these young people as they are bounced from class to class, school to school, unable to settle into groups and perpetually viewed as a burden on the schools physical and human resources. This has precisely nothing to do with Palmer's imagined dislocation and everything to do with the all too real psychological horror of vulnerable children being pushed to the margins of mainstream society at an age when their need for basic education is most pronounced.
"With teenage boys, the peer pressure is to be edgy – to do bad things that are anti-establishment, anti-education and anti-social. They want an edgy, cool image that comes from media and marketing and computer games."
The gobsmacking revelation that young men want to be seen as individuals in their journey towards adulthood is so self-evident and banal as to inspire skepticism of practically everything that's gone before.
So what's my point? That the current urge to pathologise every aspect of youth development only fuels the profound sense of unease with young people, the fact that this perspective is marketable by publishers to an affluent and influential class of people who are psychologically and socially remote from the vast majority of ordinary society only serves to tighten the discursive circle where a diminishing clique claque about the "crisis" in their imagined childhoods.
Where previously a tension existed between the adult worlds instinctive protective instinct and natural generational distaste at adolescents, the adults are now locked out in the cold. The adult world observes, annotates and wrinkles its nose in distaste at a youth culture they can't understand and so they attempt to imagine they understand. And by imagining they understand the problem, their solution is rooted in how they imagine the world rather than how the world actually is.
Important caveat: This is merely an anlysis of the profile of Palmer and not a review of the book (which, despite my deep seated reservations, I will read on release and attempt to trawl through it without harrumphing the world back to the stone age).
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Swoon! Drool! Ooooh! Bok! Whoo!
"Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib?Isn't it chic?"
This kind of thing makes me feel all gooey inside.A sexy little updating of ideas from George Perec and assorted other difficult French avant guardians.
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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.
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