Smith/Stewart: Enter Love and Enter Death

15 Nov 2007

SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION Royal Botanic Gardens, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jan Simply entering Smith/Stewart’s new exhibition is difficult. Faced directly with a black horizontal girder, one feels tempted to advance, yet hesitant.

Tattoos

Written on the body

11 Dec 2006

A glorious butterfly is gazing up at me. It has a cutesy, cartoon face and curled lashes. Its larger than life wings are a dazzling explosion of pop-art colour and bubble dimensions. Flowerheads, blasted with vibrant, glowing blocks of green and red ink…

Into The Hoods

1 Aug 2007

One of the undisputed hits of last year’s Fringe is making a welcome return to Edinburgh.

Behind the scenes at Scottish Ballet

6 Sep 2007

As Scottish Ballet gears up for a move to its new permanent home in Tramway, the company is throwing open the doors and inviting the public in to see exactly what they do when not putting on performances. As well as demonstrating how they intend to…

Tickets go on sale for Edinburgh Hogmanay 2008/09 street party

3 Oct 2008

This Friday, 3rd October 2008, starts the official countdown to Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebrations as passes go on sale for the world-famous Street Party. Revellers will be able to log on to www.edinburghshogmanay.com or call 0844 481 2009 to scoop their…

Paolo Nutini

21 Aug 2006

He has some beautiful tunes and cheekbones to match but Mark Robertson reckons Paolo Nutini has what it takes to make the successful transition from aspirant roadie to international superstar. Reclining in the June sunshine on the verdant grass…

Scottish Dance Theatre

6 Sep 2007

In the past ten years, Scottish Dance Theatre has commissioned over 30 works, none more captivating, emotive and engaging than Liv Lorent’s Luxuria. So it’s little wonder that for its 21st anniversary tour, the Dundee-based company has chosen to…

Finding Nemo on Ice

4 Sep 2008

Frozen water usually spells disaster for our aquatic friends, but the shoal of fish heading to Braehead Arena feel right at home on the ice. Featuring 38 competitive skaters, who have swapped medals for make-up, Finding Nemo On Ice mixes technical…

Lady Godiva

17 Jan 2008

ROMANCE (12A) 95min According to legend, Lady Godiva was the wife of an 11th century nobleman, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in a successful act of protest against her husband’s taxation of his subjects. Here, in her debut…

Christopher Kane

Sexy Boy

27 Mar 2007

Imagine you’re a 23-year-old fashion postgraduate from Motherwell. Your work is featured in Vogue in an article on student designers, and then Anna Wintour herself turns up at your degree show. She recommends that you meet Donatella - yes, Versace - and…

Hadouken! - Music for an Accelerated Culture

10 Apr 2008

INDIE/RAVE/GRIME/PUNK/ELECTRO (Atlantic) The so-called new rave scene has been responsible for spewing out a load of old meaningless tosh since it was coined by desperate music journalists two years ago, but its latest wrong comes in the form of the…

Glasgow grins and bares it

29 Nov 2007

Celebrate your cellulite this Christmas! Professional ego-booster Gok Wan is in town for the live How To Look Good Naked roadshow. Two audience members will get the full-on nudie glow, and a host of hairstylists and make-up artists will be doling out…

The Cool Kids

14 Feb 2008

HIP HOP Ego, Edinburgh, Sun 17 Feb For the past few years hip hop in the states has been suffering. In 2007 album sales nose-dived and the ‘hip hop tycoon’ icon with clothing labels, butlers and perfumes finally crumbled under street level scrutiny.

Horrid Henry Day

27 Mar 2008

The naughtiest boy in children’s fiction has his very own day – 1 April, but Borders is getting in early to capture the weekend crowd. Help celebrate the tomfoolery of Francesca Simon’s most famous character at this fun session of Horrid Henry stories…

Naked Portrait

1 Aug 2007

In contrast with the ‘nude’ figure in western art history, the naked portrait still manages to present a sometimes shocking and raw view of the sitter’s personality that reaches beyond their public façade.

Macbeth

6 Sep 2007

There’s nothing particularly new about updating Shakespeare’s medieval Scottish tragedy to a modern criminal underworld setting - see the 1956 American mob movie Joe Macbeth - but Australian filmmaker Geoffrey Wright nevertheless makes a decent stab at…

American Gangster

15 Nov 2007

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster opens with callous urban cruelty as a man is tied to a chair, doused with petrol and set on fire. But the reasons behind this violent act are less to do with anarchy than with good business, or at least that’s the lesson…

Vintage clothes in Glasgow and Edinburgh

20 Sep 2007

Throwing out old clothes can be an emotional task and parting with that ripped pair of jeans you wore every day when you were 19 can be hard, but with a little imagination and some creative stitching, rips, tears and pinching waistlines need no longer…

State of Matter

9 Aug 2007

The stark lighting and simple uniform of black tailcoats characterise the restraint that permeates this performance by Hereford’s 2FaCeD DaNcE Company. There is no narrative to this show, rather it is a collection of unrelated set pieces, the…

Shop - Clothes Swap

MULTICOLOURED SWAP SHOP

28 Feb 2007

Photography: Kate V Robertson Additional research: Diana Kiernander I hate this dress. I bought it in a sweaty panic in the tenth shop I’d run into, after discovering that a boyfriend’s sister’s birthday party was going to be more formal than…

Tilda Swinton

2 Oct 2008

It says an awful lot about the rise and rise of Tilda Swinton that, during the course of the teaser trailer to one of her forthcoming films (the Coen brothers crime comedy Burn After Reading) three legends are flashed up on the screen: ‘CLOONEY’…

Hair today, gone tomorrow

15 Sep 2008

A good hair cut usually gets put to the bottom of the to-do list when you're a student. It's hardly surprising when a cut and colour can cost more than your monthly food bill. Bad dye jobs and drunken fringe trims are regular occurrences when home…

Vanity Fair Portraits

5 Jun 2008

We didn’t need Princess Diana to die to know we live in a celebrity-obsessed age. The love/hate relationship between the people and the famous is now more fraught than ever. Fame has never been so easy to come by, but we seem to take even greater joy in…

Pick-up techniques - interview with Neil Strauss

31 Jan 2008

IceDragon, Scotland’s number one PUA (pickup artist), is trying to lock me into conversation. However, he’s quickly surrounded. Deep Vertigo has perched at his shoulder and five other members of the Glasgow lair are hovering on the fringes. Chance, 20…

Hogmanay in Glasgow and Edinburgh 2008

13 Dec 2007

Kirstin Innes looks at the options for celebrating Hogmanay in Glasgow this year while Allan Radcliffe discovers the traditional meeting the contemporary in a diverse programme of events for the capital’s Hogmanay.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

2 Oct 2008

Screenwriter, producer and director Bob Weide has spent his two score and ten odd years genuflecting at the altar of American comedy. A foremost knowledge on the life and work of the Marx Brothers (along with our own Simon Louvish) and, arguably, the…

Lazytown Live!

4 Oct 2007

From Jamie’s School Dinners to Honey, We’re Killing The Kids, there’s no shortage of advice on how to feed our children. But perhaps the most successful TV programme to combat rising levels of childhood obesity, is aimed at the kids themselves. Created…

The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA In January 2004, British photography student Tom Hurndall died after being left in a coma for nine months, the victim of a bullet fired by a member of the Israeli Defence Force. The fact that the killer, Taysir Hayb, was handed an 11-year…

Found Magazine

2 Oct 2008

We’re a curious bunch us humans. We seem compelled to concern ourselves with the business of others, be it people-watching in bars or gazing into strangers’ front rooms. Now, there is a quiet phenomenon coming to our shores from America, offering a…

Mary Poppins

18 Sep 2008

MUSICAL In 1964, when Mary Poppins opened at the cinema, it immediately amassed an army of fans. One woman, however, was distinctly unimpressed by the all-singing, all-dancing Disney adaptation – the novel’s author, PL Travers. Thirty years later…

Ansel Adams gallery expands opening hours

27 Mar 2008

Following the success of the Ansel Adams retrospective at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, the gallery has extended its opening times to meet demand for the show. The Centre was due to re-establish Sunday opening from Sunday 6 April and has now brought…

Apocalypto

(18) 138min

3 Jan 2007

ACTION/ADVENTURE Welcome to the jungle. A place where pierced savages josh and jest as they rip the flesh of a freshly speared boar. Life is simple, life is good, but trouble is hiding in the undergrowth and young family man Jaguar Paw (Rudy…

Last word: Lesley Garrett

2 Oct 2008

First record you ever bought ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon & Garfunkel. Last time you were chatted up Last weekend at the Eurovision dance contest – that Len Goodman really is very saucy! First film you saw that really moved you…

Adulthood

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 99min Despite a fairly miserable showing at the box office 2006’s Kidulthood has spawned a sequel. Like its predecessor Adulthood’s London-centric depiction of inner-city struggles won’t speak as immediately to a Scottish audience but it’s…

The Tiger Who Came to Tea

2 Oct 2008

STAGE ADAPTATION Uninvited dinner guests can be a pain, especially when they arrive armed with a big appetite. But it’s unlikely any of the readers of The Tiger Who Came to Tea haven’t fantasised about just such an occurrence taking place in their…

Belfast

27 Mar 2008

St George’s Market on a Saturday morning. High, tented ceilings filling up with barbeque smoke; cheerful art graduates selling hand-printed T-shirts side by side with grumpy, knowledgeable fishmongers and cheese merchants; stalls offering gourmet olive…

Arctic Monkeys

ROCK

26 Apr 2007

The weight of expectation hasn’t affected the Arctic Monkeys one iota. They’ve hardly broken their stride and have tossed off a second album of casual brilliance. It almost feels unfair how off the cuff Favourite Worst Nightmare feels; the lyrics are as…

One minute wonder

3 Jan 2007

The American Industrialist and philanthropist John D Rockefeller may have had a point when he wrote that ‘All competition is a sin.’ But let’s face it some competitions are less reprehensible than others and indeed, by that same measure, some…

Jason - I Killed Adolf Hitler

29 Nov 2007

IDIOSYNCRATIC SCI-FI I Killed Adolf Hitler (Fantagraphics) Having re-imagined heavyweight modernist writing icons Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound as criminals involved in a heist in The Left Bank Gang, and plundered George Romeo’s zombie…

The Stone of Destiny

2 Oct 2008

The pedigree highlight of Charles Martin Smith’s career so far was directing Air Bud, the story of a basketball playing golden retriever. So how did he come to be directing a film about the Scottish National Party? Stone of Destiny is a feature film…

5 Things you might not know about - Frankie Boyle

2 Oct 2008

1 Boyle had his first big break winning the Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award in 1996, beating off five other comics in the final, including one Noel Fielding. 2 He believes that while he was performing on BBC Scotland’s Live Floor Show, the mic he was…

The Foundation

2 Oct 2008

HIP HOP Random Aspekts are Scotland’s pre-eminent breakdance outfit having in seven short years forged a path from keen enthusiasts to career dancers, learning a thing or two about what their art owes to its aural inspiration along the way. So after…

Fallout

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA Channel 4, Thu 3 Jul, 9pm The issue of young people and crime is such a hot topic that it was only a matter of time before documentary-makers got in gear and happy slapped Channel 4 commissioners into submission with a series to mark the sorry…

Belle & Sebastian revealed as ‘Best Scottish Band of All Time'

1 Jan 2005

After a three-month public vote, Belle & Sebastian were named as the ‘Best Scottish Band Of All Time' at an exclusive Announcement Party at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. The prestigious accolade, sponsored by Orange, was announced in front of an…

No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums - Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long (1935)

1 Jan 2005

This cutting edge portrait of working-class life in the worst laid scheme in Scotland sticks out like a sore face. Rarely referred to by its subtitle or complimented for its subtlety, when it was first published Glasgow libraries refused to stock it…

Hancock

3 Jul 2008

SUPERHERO/COMEDY (12A) 91min The writers and director of Hancock take a hyper-powered leaf out of the Mystery Men and Return of Captain Invincible school of heroism with Hancock. Will Smith plays a nihilistic superhero who has fallen out of favour…

Nanakusa

28 Feb 2008

There’s no such thing as a Japanese restaurant. So David Wan concluded during a fact-finding mission to the Far East last year – just as he was planning to open up such an establishment in Glasgow. There was no shortage of specialist bars selling sushi…

Michelle Monaghan

4 Oct 2007

Background Monaghan studied journalism for three years at Columbia College in Chicago. To earn pocket money she worked as a model and ditched the typewriter to work as a fashion model when she quit her studies. What’s she up to now? Having…

Virgin to become Zavvi

18 Sep 2007

Sir Richard Branson has sold 125 Virgin record stores in the UK and Ireland, which will see the Megastores rebranded as Zavvi. The value of the deal has not been disclosed but the business – sold to a group of senior staff – will continue to be run…

Burlesque

Hello Kittie

10 Apr 2007

Frequently hailed as ‘the Queen of British Burlesque’, 25-year-old Kittie Klaw is at the forefront of the international burlesque renaissance. She is a founder of the Ministry of Burlesque which this month presents High Tease in Glasgow. She tells her…