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...

Robomanticism

Edinburgh Art/Music collective FOUND unveiled their emo-robot band creation, Cybraphon at the open of NewMedia Scotland's Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition at the InSpace gallery yesterday.

Cybraphon embodies the type of new-old-new aesthetic I was talking about previously. "Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe" (although the majority of Cybraphon's functions run off custom software). For the how, go here. The why, go here. It reminds me a little of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's "Opera for a Small Room" that was exhibited last year.

Cybraphon is resolutely modern too, being obsessed with social networking and the web, to such a degree that its prowess and popularity online impacts on its emotional state, which in turn has an effect on the music it composes. There are rumours that Richie Hawtin consulted with Cybraphon on Myspace and stole some of its ideas in surveying fans about what they'd like the return of Plastikman to look like.

Cybraphon, like many others, is naturally livid with Hawtin. Not because he stole his idea but because Cybraphon only sees the online component of its existence as informing rather than directing its practice as an artist.

There's a face off between FOUND and Cybraphon next week, unfortunately the website is saying it's sold out. Hopefully Cybraphon will notice I've written about it and grant me some sort of special robo-guestie.

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.

We're jammin'

As the weekend approaches I wearily notice I haven't updated this in an age.

Work is the curse of the discursive classes. Or some old winsome guff like that.

Any road. This week is the last chance Edinburgh residents will get the chance to check out the unmissable Francesca Woodman retrospective. Anyone who doesn't bother to do so is on the shit list forever. Or at least goes into the book as a philistine who chose not to take a rare opportunity to gawp at a distinctive and unnerving body of work by a fascinating and obviously uniquely talented photographer.

There's some great background information and online galleries at the Ingleby site for those of you who can't make it along but it's well worth the trip. There's a limnal, haunted melancholy to Woodman's work, the circumstances of her death (by suicide, aged 22) amplifying the already creepy and disturbing erasions and distortions in the pictures- it's absolutely incredible to think that many of the earlier pictures featured in this exhibition were taken by Woodman when she was (by my calculation) only 13 or 14. This poignancy is heightened by the knowledge that few prints saw the light of day during Woodman's lifetime.

The exhibition coincides with a smaller collection of Woodman's work in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of the Artists Rooms series.

The experience of being in the Ingleby pristine, quiet, sun-drenched gallery is slightly disconcerting as the building previously housed Edinburgh's legendary dark, sweat and booze encrusted "Venue".

Anyway. Event of the weekend is the Firecracker night at Jam the Box in GRV.

Local friendly vinyl pusher Fudge Fingas goes back to back with Linkwood Family member House of Traps in a three hour vinyl pile-up. Hopefully it'll whet appetites for the forthcoming Disco 3k weekender in Croatia.

Deviants may want to check the bizarro burlesque bacchanal Confusion is Sex tonight with FriendOfClom Kris Wasabi playing bangers in the main room after Gutter Klinik, a band "specialising in gayer-than-cum-on-a-moustache pop". Indeed.

I'm tempted but I'm a one-night a weekend man this weather.

More to come soon, I promise, including something about all these fuds who've retrospectively decided they never liked Sonic Youth because they were never really a band anyway more a late-capitalist curatorial project enslaving us all in some sort of po-mo whorl of tasteful countercultural signifiers until you just can't tell what's properly avant-garde anymore! Or you can obviously, and do, with a side order of obfuscatory dialectical mince.

Politics, Protest, Resistance.

While I generally find a lot of online political discourse pitifully by-numbers and prone to simplistic, "so, what's in the papers" nodding-dog-ism you occasionally stumble across a screed of online opinion that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Below is possibly the most inspiring thing I have read this week.

Some small edits from the posted article and addition of my own emphasis.

" My experience of union meetings though is that there is a vast reservoir of libido waiting to be tapped; at meetings, there was an animated disaffection with auditing and new bureaucracy which immediately dissipated when the 'official' agenda - pay and strikes - was dutifully returned to.

New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism.

For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members...

What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without.

Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it's time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up the crisis - their crisis, our opportunity... - to begin to rid public services of business ontology. (When even businesses can't be run as businesses, why should public services?)"

The increasing managerialisation extends beyond education into every sphere of social engagement, the necessity that outcomes of unstarted programmes be drafted and agreed on before anyone's got in a room to discuss the practical work of funded projects, pervades most forms of cultural engagement (in the broadest sense, including the arts, sports and any form of work with young people). The priority to legitimise all money spent rather than the boring, invisible, yet substantive and crucial element to any form of engagement, namely the development of human relationships and the time and effort required for these to bear fruit.

This managerialisation prioritises an immediate, ephemeral, illusory impression of work ahead of the sloppy, unreliable, frequently tardy yet real and lasting reality of any form of constructive and deeply engaged practice. With the papers full of spending squeezes and efficiency savings the overriding impression is that more time will be spent accounting for money spent and less time spent engaged in actual activity.


In times when there's less money around surely the one resource we should be afforded more of is time?

Upside to Downturn with Downsize Reprise

Belated bleating return to the lately neglected posting.
Last Friday saw the long awaited return of Downsizesound, a sort of preparatory post-apocalyptic hoe-down.

Volk-mensch Drew Wright aka Wounded Knee ("A man hard at play"- Plan B, "a collaboration between Scatman John, Steve Reich and Alasdair Roberts"- Alternative Ulster, "Tuvan-Paul Robeson throat singing"- Buzz, "We won’t be needlessly cruel, but avant-garde is still French for bullshit"- NME) was joined by Alisdair Roberts, Issho Taiko Drummers and One Ensemble's Peter Nicholson for an evening of strange, ageless chicanery, electricity free.

Wright's opening gong assisted incantation welcomed us in a cheery, well considered hymn before getting down to his purple scanties, jaunty socks and snug fitting vest in a shameless piece of exhibitionism designed to get a large turnout on side. Mission accomplished and away we went. Plugged in the Knee ranges over a lot of territory, incorporating ideas from super traditional Scottish folk to noise, to Sun Ravian freeness, to house music and out to a ever sprawling transit through world musics. In downsizing he still managed to fit a lot in, an audience-assisted noise piece dedicated to ill friend, collaborator and drone prince Fordell Research Unit, some old favourites (21st century worksong "Lanyard", the hummable, plaintive ecological call of "Canary"), devastating, age-old folk songs like "Glenlogie" and "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow" were interspersed with illuminating and engaging introductions to the songs and great singers and recordings of them. He finished positing the interesting and convincing theory that come a world where our worst predictions are realised that the humble cassette tape will be our only remaining available connection with recorded history before wondering whether his final tape would be the ones we treasure more. He pressed play on a battery operated tape machine and a tape of birdcall, complete with RP-inflected commentary. A magical and evocative beginning from someone who is clearly comfortable in their skin, practice and possessed of a burgeoning creative energy. Well done fella!

A quick pee and beer break later and One Ensemble's Peter Nicolson launched into a stirring set with a (open to correction) Central European folk song that suits his soaring voice and cello to a t. He played a longer free piece that was riveting, as he careened up to the bridge, playing high, jarring staccato, jagged wrong notes and leaping around matching his voice to each and every note. I don't know enough about Nicolson's work to speculate but he's a virtuosic player without ever shutting an audience out, although some people I spoke to found it really intense, coiled and nervy and dark. Not necessarily a bad thing.

I was a bit overawed by the Alasdair Roberts performance, had heard a couple of his albums but never really returned to them, this was the first time I was able to see him live after repeatedly been too lazy to go and see him. It's difficult to describe the music he makes, you could call it folk or traditional or even stick him alongside the likes of Smog or Will Oldham or Joanna Newsom but I don't think it really does him justice. Some of the new songs from his new album "Spoils" are absolutely fantastic, especially "Eternal Return" and a hilarious and cynical about the three aspects of Man that inspire us all to be "complete bastards". His lyrics are complex and on the surface can seem a bit hokey, there's much talk of types of trees and birds and esoteric heraldry but have a pleasantly baffling contemporary resonance. He's a really inquiring, questing writer and his lyricism is occasionally flabbergasting. Sometimes when he delivers a line it's a bit like the sun coming out, it actually warms your face to hear it, the lines elemental inevitability is exhiliarating. Steady!

To finish the evening off we had the Ishoo Taiko Drummers. Four Taiko drums dominated the setup all evening and I alternated between excitement and apprehension, I've been to too many places where bombastic, directive massed drumming completely batters any sense of nuance out of a performance. Ishoo are a fundamentally "plugged" group, as a band member said early on the show required a significant rethink of how they'd perform. A beautiful introductory piece with restrained taiko tempos, acoustic guitars and flickering flute stops quickly dispelled any fear this was going to be a juddering, predictable drum circle. A later piece used four tuned acoustic guitars played with steel skewers, letting the reverberations echo through the space. A later piece saw two performers demonstrate the xylophone's hypnotic synthy possibilities in a piece that was strongly reminiscent to everything that's wonderful about Steve Reich, a sort of motorik, percussive Mogwai.

I ended up buying a CDR on the strength of the performance which was a great end to an interesting and varied evening. Well done and thanks to Drew to organising it.

Hopefully I'll get some pictures from the evening.
Everyone loves pictures of a man in purple pants.

Adjective invective

Jonathan Meades, broadcaster, writer and most wonderful man on the planet sticks his exquisitely polished loafers into "iconic" and its lazy, arbitrary usage in a profession that is evidently aware, but way past caring it's on its deathbed.

"Here are some nouns and compound nouns that have been prefixed by this most dismal of vogue words. These are all found constructions of recent provenance: none is my invention.

...

iconic injury-time winner, iconic itinerary, iconic jihad target, iconic jigsaw, iconic jingle, iconic jockey, iconic joke, iconic kitchen utensil, iconic knife, iconic knowledge, iconic lawnmower, iconic leprechaun, iconic light fitting, iconic lion, iconic lip balm, iconic mascara, iconic milkshake, iconic mittens...iconic radiator, iconic relationship, iconic restaurant, iconic retail mall, iconic robot, iconic rodent, iconic saddle, iconic sandwich, iconic sausage, iconic shampoo, iconic shoe, iconic shoehorn, iconic shop, iconic silhouette, iconic snack food..."

Impassioned, erudite, thought provoking and delivered with characteristic rhetorical élan, I could read his prose all day and night.

For those who haven't entered the invigorating, sardonic cult of Meadues you could do worse than to dig up the BBC DVD of Jonathan Meades Collection which is a compilation of some of his unique TV programmes from 1990-2007.

Try to ignore the fact that the dullards at 2entertain didn't bother their lazy arses licensing the original music and you're left with dreary MIDI tracks where a brilliant soundtrack enhanced Meades' high-falutin' grand guignol on topics as diverse as 1960's church design, uterine yearning in Finnish modernism and East Anglia as a marooned extension of Holland.

There are also links to a number of articles on Clive James page who describes him as "an educated upstart who not only doesn’t know his place, but knows far more than his allotted share about all the other places."

More Meades related wonderfulness in the New Statesman in which he digs up Kenneth Clark and defiles the memory of the respected"Civilisation" series saying "If the Edwardians had had telly, this is what they would have put on it: it was stately, formal and ponderous."

Dirty Deeds Done Dead Cheap

Amazing stuff here with an inventor/creator/mad genius making an instrument a day for a month. There are so many great ideas here, the best/most useful design is probably the mobius strip but i think the garden turntable (pictured) is the barkingest, most wonderful thing I've seen this year! Photos, videos, sound samples; follow the link.


This was a part of a wider "Thing-a-day" project where people made one item per day for the entire month of February, the kind of thing that makes me feel phenomenally lazy.

Seen on and stolen from AudioLemon.

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.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Again.

Adrian Searle gets it wrong wrong wrong in his analysis of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's excellent "The house of books has no windows" exhibition which has upped sticks from Edinburgh's Fruitmarket and moved close enough to London for the esteemed London art critic to bother his behind attending. There's the statutory London bashing out of the way. Lovely. I saw this exhibition in Edinburgh and have rattled on about it at length already but some of Searle's arguments are ill-construed and occasionally just plain wrong.

Firstly the Killing Machine, the “interactivity” (the installation is activated by pressing a mundane red button, like you might find on a building site) which Searle derides in an infantile manner is entirely the point. It is an effective and vivid statement about capital punishment and the public discourse in the US relating to the state sanctioned murder of wrongdoers. It is a mechanical and dehumanised process which has become disinfected of all the messy business of stoning, shooting or beheading. This antiseptic process is perfectly elucidated in Erroll Morris’ “Dr Death” in which “death systems engineer” Fred A. Leuchter shamelessly declares himself a humanitarian for speeding the passage of his charges. The cabaret/disco/entertainment elements of the piece are surely echoes of the legal/media and political circus that surrounds the death of the condemned, all distractions from the ugly clacking truth of the chair in front of us.

And on we go to the risible notion that Opera for a Small Room is less successful than a Tom Waits song. It’s a little tragic when art critics start talking about music, especially when they appropriate Waits’ vocal affectations (“He don’t need no etc…). If anything Opera… evokes the more recent work of any number of Godspeed! You Black Emperor/Silver Mount Zion projects. There’s doom, regret and isolation in the narrators voice, Waits’ world teems with humanity, his lonely songs sung when everyone’s gone home, not alone in the dark in a shed with an owl. The real treat, as in the Killing Machine, is in the clanking eccentric mechanics of the piece (in a way, this is where Bures Miller & Cardiff actually do share something with Waits)- the way that automation is used to create an unnerving post-human atmosphere in both pieces contributes to the eerie, uncanny atmosphere that both pieces but particularly Opera for a Small Room, evoke. When left to themselves the machines will find their own way to express themselves, recontextualising the work of long-disappeared humanity.

It appears that Searle didn’t even bother to go back for a second look at the Dark Pool which is packed with funny/silly/spooky little details, a tense repetition of words chopped out from books that become a declaration of love laid on a musty old jewellery box, a patented wishing machine, fractious back-and-forth arguments to be listened to through ear trumpets, scratchy radios evoking Dorothy’s deserted home after the tornado in Kansas. All of this is done from memory and it’s months since I’ve seen the work. Perhaps Searle has tasted and tested too much. Dark Pool was lovely, a bit impenetrable at first but I returned to it a number of times over the months it was at Fruitmarket such was the “purchase” it made on my imagination.

The final and most glaring oversight in Searle’s review is that he doesn’t once mention the title piece “The House of Books Has No Windows”, perhaps he walked sniffily past thinking that a big house made of books doesn’t merit the Guardian art critics attention. And that is his loss. This is the newest piece and was commissioned by the Fruitmarket and Modern Art Oxford specifically for these exhibitions! encapsulates a lot of what they’re about beyond the mechanics and the creaks. It’s a house, made of books, with no windows. I loved it, climbing inside the door was profoundly moving, an immediate, emotional experience that evokes the disappeared who once owned the books, the smell of the books triggering memories of clearing out the houses of the dead, the moldering smell of disuse, obsolescence and forgetting, the slow impassive solitary death of objects as a counterpoint to our own messy, rapid and smelly fate. If you want quiet, undirected understatement Adrian, this is where you’d have found it. But you wanted to climb in the chair.

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.

Calling all kids

Wild Combination: A portrait of Arthur Russell is a documentary by Matt Wolf about the strange magic produced by Russell throughout his too-short life. Anyone who isn't aware of him should, in my opinion anyway, drop everything and get listening. Although you may have heard his music before, in ads, in clubs but the strange thing is, for such a supremely talented avant garde disco savant to remain so slept on is nothing short of incredible. The story is unremarkable at the outset, talented but mixed up cello-playing MidWestern kid runs away to San Fran in the late 70's and joins a commune. What transpires afterwards is like a skewed version of a folk tale in which, befriended by Allan Ginsberg, Russell decamps to New York where he lives in a building with the aforementioned Ginsberg, Richard Hell and no end of pale and interesting residents. Here Russell, who was sent to the closet by his fellow communards to practice his cello, set about creating a bewildering array of music starting as from a singer songwritery to becoming an amazing bandleader through making "Instrumentals 1-5" with former Modern Lover Ernie Brooks and Saxophonist Peter Zummo and a number of other players. Russell worked in collaborations on a type of Buddhist Pop music that even now sounds bizarrely contemporary- a few years ago while on holiday i put on "First Thought: Best Thought" which contains the aforementioned Instrumentals. Difficult to describe, these instrumentals have a strange, almost ritual quality, slightly off kilter, trancelike but still rock music, reminiscent of a very breezy Tortoise. That's Tortoise, although the similarity extends to our little shell-wearing buddy too as it has a persistent unhurried charm and seems entirely self-contained. Laboured metaphors abound when dealing with Russell because his music is so unique and unfathomable that coupled with his early death earns him the unhelpful "lost genius" tag. Wolf prefers to use "Icon" which i think fits well. Russell, at this stage developed a reputation as being frustrating, difficult to work and collaborate with and obsessively perfectionist (Tom Lee, Russells lover describes how he took nearly 6 years to complete the title track That's Us/Wild Combination!)

Russell was at this stage "out" and immersed in the New York underground disco scene. Here was a new, emergent subculture that allowed him to mess with a whole lot of equipment, techniques and instruments. Ideal. Russell produced some of my favourite disco records and when Go Bang! appears I practically fainted with pleasure. There's a good treatment in the film of this period although by Wolf's own admission at the Q&A afterwards he does get feedback that it doesn't deal with disco in enough detail. For me that is the tragedy of Russells life and more broadly the disco era, AIDS and drugs decimated this subculture and this is palpable in the film by the absence of so many people. In my opinion this is a strength of the film and the absence of so many key players communicates the sense of loss that many of the contributers felt (and obviously still feel).

The film uses interviews with Russells parents, lover, collaborators along with a few others. There are reconstructions of the Loft and Iowa which put russells music into a sort of context as well as a beautifully realised recreation of Arthur listening to his own tapes on the Staten Island ferry. This evocative image was the first thing that sparked Wolf's imagination to make this affectionate portrait of Russell. His parents are funny, worldly people who loved and encouraged their strange little boy. Russells partner Tom Lee is really moving and a real sense of the love between them is exquisitely portrayed. The music Russell left behind (hours of reels of tapes, DATS, regular cassettes- all unreleased) is the real legacy- songs that never saw the light of day are now being released by Audika. Many of these songs (particularly on Another Thought and Calling Out of Context) describe togetherness, the kind of mundane spiritual wonder that you feel on a boring Tuesday evening when sat on the couch together eating crisps. Other work is entirely individual, like being alone on a pier in the middle of the night. The magic of Russells music is the way the music creates this transportative power in ordinariness, the zen of living completely in the moment, whether losing your mind on a wild dancefloor, cuddling on the couch or listening to music on the deck of a ferry.

Hannah McGill paid tribute to Optimo's DJ Twitch for introducing her and countless others to Russells music. He deserves it, Optimo have been pushing the NY Disco sound long before the haircut brigade cottoned onto it. For my own part I have Greg n' Shane to thank for introducing me to the wonky rhodes organ wonder of Loose Joints.

She got one thing wrong though, the "best club night in the world" is obviously Subculture!

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.

Sardinian Salve.

Just back from a week's holiday in Sardinia. Relaxing.

Myself and the missus took drive into the mountains to check out the mural art in Orgosolo.

Orgosolo is a small rural village in the mountains in the islands interior. From a distance it looks like every other sun-baked italian hill town. As you approach the town you see the "Hungry Landowner of Orgosolo" a haunting image painted on rocks which brought to mind Titan's "Saturn devouring his son".


There are hundreds of murals all around the small town. Is that Robert Burns below?





It's really inspiring, the murals were initially painted by local schoolchildren in the '70's. The first murals were actually posters stuck up throughout the town.

Early themes covered the commemoration of resistance from World War II but also local issues such as the controversial proposal of a National Park in Gennargentu which would have displaced traditional shepherding in the area.

The Shepherd is a totemic figure in Sardinian culture and is a recurring motif in many of the murals.

Other themes cover the traditional obsessions of the Italian Left over the last 30 years, the war in Vietnam, industrial dispute, workers rights, political corruption, fascism and violence among the police.



The majority of murals have been painted by Francesco Del Casino and Pasquale Buesca with help and input from local children and citizens of Orgosolo. There is a real sense of vibrancy in the murals, contemporary subjects include the attack on the World Trade Centre, Gaza, the war in Iraq as well as global poverty, AIDS, debt and profiteering.


The style isn't particularly sophisticated, Picasso and Miro seem the overwhelming influences with Guernica being the obvious and repeated touchstone. But other influences seem to intervene, TV news and even Banksy references crop up in some of the more recent murals.



It was a great trip and the variety of murals was mind boggling for somewhere so small. Street art, whether murals or graffiti, is predominantly seen as an urban art form and it was captivating to see this kind of work in an unexpected context. There's one mural outside the town where two people are pictured in an embrace under bushes. It's a touching and magical piece of work, largely because it represents an intimacy and romance that is unexpected in a form that's ostensibly propagandist.

Politically many might find the earnest declamations a bit naive but it's a geniunely engaging piece of folk art with a genuine sense of community and moral authority than an awful lot of bland impenetrable contemporary public art in more urban surroundings.


Orgosolo reminded me a little of Stokes Croft in Bristol in a way. The two environments couldn't be more different but the direct intervention of local people in forging an independent creative environment that reflects the world as it appears to them is something that's inspiring.

Sardinia itself is a really wonderful place. We stayed near Bosa in the west of the island. Ate our own body weight in superb seafood and just hung about. There was an amazing barbeque in the place we were staying so we had some great steaks and sausage! Yum!

Explored some Nuraghe and churches and sat on the beach (in my case hiding under rocks with things tied around my head reading and listening to tunes!). Read John McGahern's amazing "That they may face the rising sun" which is an absolutely stunning meditation on community, age, farming, love and the passage of time. The description of agricultural life in Leitrim amongst my grandfather's generation provided a neat echo of the serene agricultural rhythms of an island that hasn't yet lost its sense of the pulse of the seasons.

The sloping brow of a stagecoach tilter...

photo copyright Joanna Kane.
Somnambulists is a fantastic little exhibition of work by Joanna Kane a photographer and artist based in Edinburgh currently showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
It features photographic digital prints of life and death masks from the collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.

The photographs have been subtly manipulated to create an illusion of life from these casts. Through this seemingly straightforward process Kane has extracted an extraordinary amount of humanity from a subject that mightn't appear that gripping. Phrenology is seen as an unfashionable and embarrassing excess from the gold rush of scientific enquiry throughout the enlightenment. The notion that someone's character can be alluded to through their skull structure is laughable but Kane has created the impression that there's something more to these masks than the simple imprint created by the subjects head.

There's a variety of people featured, a fair few doctors and phrenologists, a couple of mining engineers from Leith, some unknowns and a remarkable smattering of early 19th century writers. The photograph of James Hogg's cast was a wonderful surprise as I have been fascinated with him since moving to Edinburgh and first reading The Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg's face is as I'd imagined it, a long drawn spade of a man reminiscent of Noel Browne in his later years. This got me thinking about the kinds of visual games you play with yourself when you go abroad and meet someone who puts you in mind of an old friend.

This also struck me when looking at some of the poets featured. Wordsworth's face is an absolute joy and was completely unlike I'd imagined him, somehow he's just too manly in real life. Keats and Coleridge are also there along with William Blake. Blake's portrait is superb, a stern blank canvas upon which you can project pretty much anything. There's a touch of Brando (as Kurtz) and more than a hint of Terry Gilliam too in his stern sleeping mask. The book accompanying the exhibition refers to a friend of Blake's expressing his disappointment that the cast captures none of Blake's good-naturedness. The book features extensive notes about all the photos and features a hilarious spat between Hogg and the Phrenological fraternity.

The whole exhibition is a fantastic evocation of a period before photography where many exciting ideas were flying around. Kane's photography is based around Phrenology and alludes in the title to Mesmerism which was a fashionable movement at the time.
It also has a great sense of Edinburgh as a place at that time with it's engineers and it's doctors and it's poets and philosophers.

I've always had difficulty imagining real people in the past. I've always had this irrational notion that somehow people looked different. This killed that notion stone dead, the photos could be of people you see in the street- all the more so in Edinburgh where I'm sure I've seen some of the "unknown" casts on the number 25 bus in the morning! They have a life to them that had me imagining them yawning and winking at each other after we had left and the lights blinked off.

If you're in the portrait gallery go into the gift shop and look at the portrait of Edwin Morgan by Alexander Moffatt over the door. It's a stoater.