Issue 567

Working lunch

It’s New Year. Time for a lunchtime revolution. Le

17 Jan 2007

Lunch can be a rushed affair, that precious hour or half hour of down time all too often descending into a mad dash to the local supermarket or chemist chain to shell out cash you can ill afford on unpleasant meal deals, composed of chilly sandwiches…

Good food - fair price

Dining on a budget

16 Jan 2007

Dining on a budget should not be limited to eating cheap food amid dire surroundings. Restaurateur David Ramsden, formerly of (fitz)Henry and Rogue, and now working with The Outsider and Apartment restaurants in Edinburgh, sees value for money options…

Ethical chic

What’s the human cost of your £10 catwalk-copy

16 Jan 2007

The backlash against cut-price clothing starts here. Bin your £2 T-shirts and call off the search for the low-budget version of Kate Moss’ latest tote, because fashion just got serious.

Rome on a budget

The cheap life

16 Jan 2007

The Romans have a saying: ‘you’d need a lifetime to see all that Rome has to offer’. This seemed a laughable notion as my partner and I only had a few days in Italy’s capital. After not having taken a holiday in over three years, I was determined to…

Rage - A good deal these days is hard to find

A good deal these days is hard to find

16 Jan 2007

RAGE Departs Newcastle, 20:40, say the tickets. I glance up at the departure board. Newcastle, 20:40, platform two, it says. Five minutes before, we shuffle up to the tracks. A train arrives at 20:38 - destination Edinburgh - and three weary…

Remote Control - TV round-up

Remote Control

16 Jan 2007

So British dramas don’t hold a candle to their American counterparts, huh? We may have taken this as read for years but could a seismic shift be happening. Not that our home-grown shows are lifting themselves up to a higher plane, but our pals across…

All My Sons

Sons and slaughters

16 Jan 2007

A brilliant, but profoundly uneasy evening awaits the ‘Well, Saddam was a son of a bitch, so the war was justified’ school of thought at the Lyceum. So, too, the ‘we can only vote for the Tories in power or those awaiting power’ mindset will face some…

Julie Roberts

A woman's work

16 Jan 2007

After a century of feminism and post-feminisms, the word ‘woman’ has been constructed and deconstructed in such an enormous collection of philosophical and psychoanalytic tomes by some of the world’s greatest minds (Freud, de Beauvoir, Lacan, Kristeva…

Authentic Bangladeshi food

Naan finer

16 Jan 2007

Don’t let the celebrity TV chef con you. Cooking at a restaurant is barely comparable to cooking at home.

Leech - sucking the blood of popular entertainment

Leech

16 Jan 2007

So, farewell then, Magnus Magnusson. You started, you finished and somewhere inbetween you delivered the finest reading of Flaubert this literary Leo Sayer ever heard. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to…

News extra

16 Jan 2007

Terry Riley is to make three rare appearances at the Usher Hall this year as part of Triptych. The minimalist pioneer will perform his groundbreaking composition ‘In C’ at the Edinburgh Usher Hall on Wednesday 25 April and a reworking of his electronic…

There’s No V In Gaelic

Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow. Thu 25-Sat 27 Jan

16 Jan 2007

New Work People can be curiously disparaging about Gaelic as a cultural force for anything larger than localised music events, often with little personal experience on the topic beyond the odd maligned episode of Dotaman. The news that £1.3m worth of…

Stage Whispers - theatre news

Stage Whispers

16 Jan 2007

As New Year hangovers begin to lift, the theatre often stirs, slowly, to life in January, shaking off the grip of panto season with the first halting steps of a restarted season proper. Whispers finds no exception this year, with things not yet entirely…

Aye Write!

The write stuff

16 Jan 2007

Aye Write!, the west coast festival which celebrates Glaswegian writing and the best of Scottish and international literature, has cut the red ribbon on its 2007 programme.

Grapevine - showbiz news

Grapevine

16 Jan 2007

Worst casting decision of the fortnight (month/year/decade/trillennium) must be the one which has placed Mike Myers in the plum role of Keith Moon for the 2009-bound biopic of the Who drummer See Me Feel Me... That crazy blazing squad Arcade Fire are…

Aggregate, Jamie Shovlin

Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh

16 Jan 2007

PAINTING, FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY, INSTALLATION Museological stirrings are already afoot at the Talbot Rice Gallery. London-based artist Jamie Shovlin has pulled out multiple dusty copies of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species from the University of…

* Hitlist

Hitlist

16 Jan 2007

Julie Roberts - The New Woman Artist Roberts’ paintings manage to bring feminist politics into the gallery and kick centuries of misogyny in the head, in images that revisit and reinterpret early archival photographs of women artists working in the…

Metal Bridge, The

Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until Sat 20 Jan

16 Jan 2007

DRAWING, FILM, INSTALLATION. The Metal Bride - Group Show This small group show brings together the work of four artists - Steven Claydon (London), Thomas Helbing (Berlin) Craig Mulholland, and Duncan Marquiss (who both live in Glasgow). The…

* Hitlist

Hitlist

16 Jan 2007

C-90 by Daniel Kitson Daniel Kitson returns with his Fringe hit of 2006. A warm, cuddly kind of monologue, it tells the story of a man who archives old cassette tapes sent by lovers and hopeful amours to their muses over the years. The curator himself…

Comedy Cuts

ITV2, Thu 18 Jan, 10.55pm

16 Jan 2007

COMEDY Some people hold the view that since the demise of The Tube, TV’s commissioning heads haven’t really taken live music seriously. Well, what of live comedy then? Apart from the Stand-Up Show, Scotland’s Live Floor Show, and the odd bonanza on…

Arts intervention

Artists take an academic approach to their work

16 Jan 2007

A trio of leading Scottish artists is crossing over into the world of academia in a bid to reinvigorate the way in which the arts are taught at higher education institutions.

Tartan Turns

The Jam House, Edinburgh, Sun 21 Jan, 6.30pm

16 Jan 2007

CHARITY EVENT There’s a certain appeal to a night of variety entertainment that many in the cognoscenti don’t really like to admit to. For this reason, it’s great when someone gives you an excuse to go by making it a charity night. So it is that we…

X Factor Dance

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thu 1 & Fri 2 Feb

16 Jan 2007

CONTEMPORARY DANCE Arriving in Edinburgh to work with X Factor Dance, Philippe Decouflé was faced with an unexpected array of talent. ‘I was surprised at how good the dancers are,’ says the legendary French choreographer. ‘They’re very experienced…

Scrooge

16 Jan 2007

There’s no doubt that Michael Barrymore has had his share of troubles over recent years, but he’s shown resilience and a good deal of talent in his riposte to the travails that have beset him. In this adaptation of Dickens, his performance as the…

Bobby - Martin Sheen interview

Love and a bullet

15 Jan 2007

‘Emilio told me the concept that he wanted to take fictional characters and mix them with the reality of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign footage. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I encouraged him as much as I could. It was a long journey. He started it in…

Celtic Connections Americana

The new world

15 Jan 2007

Is Scotland slipping across the ocean. Are young Scots morphing into Americans? The broad church of Celtic Connections has from its inception flown performers across the Atlantic, to audiences who might make the delighted discovery of a new musical…

DVD Round-up

15 Jan 2007

‘January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me.’ Yes, it’s that cruelest of months where our bank accounts are empty and the sofa becomes our best friend. Good thing really because it turns out there are actually some superb DVD releases and…

Bollywood Round-up

15 Jan 2007

Director Priyardashan’s Bhagam Bhag (PG) 157min (2 stars) has all the boisterous energy of his previous work (Hera Pheri, Hulchul). It’s based on the innocuous premise of an Indian theatre group embarking on a London tour minus Anjali (Tanushree Dutta)…

Black Book - Paul Verhoeven interview

15 Jan 2007

Dutch master Two decades after he left Holland for Hollywood’s dream factory, Paul Verhoeven has gone home to make his first Dutch film in 24 years. Having established himself as a critically and commercially successful maverick talent in Tinseltown…

Norma Jean

King Tut’s, Glasgow, Fri 19 Jan

15 Jan 2007

HARDCORE Let’s blame it on Sir Cliff. But the perception of Christian music is of something rather dull. Strange, considering musical greats and notorious hellraisers, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis had such strong ties to the…

Babel

15 Jan 2007

Somewhere down the crazy river there’s a little shack where screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) churns out his indentikit scripts. This is how he does it. He looks at his holiday snaps, and then he imagines a catastrophic event, say…

Dispatch - Vic Galloway

The Dispatch

15 Jan 2007

In my first column of 2007, it seems only right to join the tipsters of the world and look forward to the remaining 11 and a half months with a selection of ‘ones to watch’. The Scottish music scene is in extremely good health, and as usual, away from…

L'Occidentale Dr Fanfare

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Tue 30 Jan

15 Jan 2007

CELTIC CONNECTIONS First, a credo. ‘We have arrived at the time of Fusion. The era of conventional folk music had to travel through the social and cultural storms of the 20th century in order to emerge fully in the 21st. Some medievalists claim that…

Gianni Schicchi/L’heure espagnole

RSAMD Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Fri 19 &Sat 2

15 Jan 2007

OPERA DOUBLE BILL USA and Canada, England and Wales, Sweden, Iceland, Singapore and Brazil are all countries that are fielding singers in the RSAMD’s comedy double bill of operas from Italy and France. Although a one-off blip means that Scotland is…

Wil Hodgson

15 Jan 2007

STAND-UP Bespectacled John Peel impersonator Robin Ince has been known to tell a story about how his pal Wil Hodgson was verbally abused by some blokes in the street. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carr was one of the experienced comics who offered the mohicaned…

Fit for 2007

All venues, all year, times vary

15 Jan 2007

HEALTH AND WELLBEING As I write, the sun kisses rain-damp pavements outside my window, but it’s likely to be only a respite in a month of cashless gloom and bad weather-induced misery. Indeed, University of Cardiff psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall…

Rocky Balboa

15 Jan 2007

Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) hits the nail on the head when he answers the put down ‘Was that something from the 80s?’ fired by his foe Mason Dixon (real life light heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver) with the retort ‘More like the 70s, actually.’ Forget…

World Beneath my Feet

Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 19-Fri 26 Jan

15 Jan 2007

EXHIBITION Where we grow up, and the landscape that surrounds us, plays a big part in who we are. Putting that into words, however, isn’t always easy. Which is why Giant, the Glasgow-based art organisation, gave children another way to express…

Ghosts

15 Jan 2007

Documentary-maker Nick Broomfield’s first dramatic feature since his ill-fated toff murder tale Diamond Skulls some 17 years ago, Ghosts traces the events leading up to the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers in February 2004 off Morecambe Bay. Like…

Aereogramme - album review

Aerogramme

15 Jan 2007

INDIE The sound of a band fulfilling their potential is always a heart-warming thing, and so it is with Aereogramme. This third full-length album sees the band moving onto a whole new level of accomplishment, transforming them in the process from…

Black Book

(15) 145min

15 Jan 2007

With his creativity curtailed by Hollywood’s dream factory since 2000’s underwhelming Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven has gone home to Holland, where he’s also made a return to form with this pacy, provocative wartime thriller. It’s a companion piece to his…

Cascade

Strathclyde Suite, Glasgow, Thu 1 Feb

15 Jan 2007

CELTIC CONNECTIONS Cascade is a new project featuring a number of familiar names from a diverse range of musical backgrounds. The five-piece first got together at the London Jazz Festival in November, and this will be their debut in Scotland. The…

Justin Currie with The Poems

ABC, Glasgow, Sat 20 Jan

15 Jan 2007

CELTIC CONNECTIONS Every year Celtic Connections’ programme throws up nuggets of thoroughly insightful booking, and this gig - showcasing green pastures new for a couple of Scottish artists whose musical careers seemed consigned to yesteryear - must…

Willie Nelson

15 Jan 2007

5 REASONS TO GO SEE 1 He’s a country music legend Dozens of albums, a string of hit singles (he wrote ‘Crazy’, the Patsy Clyne one though not the Gnarls Barkley one, sadly), countless awards, half a century of outsider genius. The 73-year-old hippy…

The Fountain

15 Jan 2007

Plagued with production problems - most infamously star Brad Pitt exiting over creative differences, causing the film to close down - Darren Aronofsky’s labour of love has been a long time coming. Before rewriting the script and recasting a scaled down…

* Hitlist

Hitlist

15 Jan 2007

The Kerrang! Tour featuring Biffy Clyro, The Bronx, The Audition and I Am Ghost The bible for the rockingmost draws together some new faces headed up with our finest exponents of wilful, joyful noiseisms. Barrowland, Glasgow, Tue 23 Jan. (Rock & Pop)

Bobby

15 Jan 2007

Writer-director Emilio Estevez has created a hagiography of Bobby Kennedy and posits that his death marked an end of a political dream in the United States. The action takes place at the scene of the crime - the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June…

Rough Cuts - film news

Rough Cuts

15 Jan 2007

It seems the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Ecstasy has run into a heap of bother on its way to the big screen. Production was supposed to start in November but clashes between the Scottish production manager and the line producer and Rob…

Ridicule - DVD review

Ridicule

15 Jan 2007

COMEDY/HISTORY /DRAMA Wit is indeed the ultimate weapon and there was no place more dangerous than the doomed opulent court of Louis XVI in 18th century Versailles. Into this world comes an impoverished French nobleman Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy…

Venus

15 Jan 2007

This film would probably make more money if they renamed it Withnail and I: The Pensioner Years, because that’s what it most closely resembles when it’s good. Maurice (Peter O’Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips) are a couple of veteran actors who spend…