Issue 578

Antiworld 070707 Festival

29 Jun 2007

If, like many others, you have missed out on tickets to T in the Park, or if it just dosn't have the electronic line up you crave... Get yourself down to Aldershot for Antiworld's debut 070707 festival of live electronic music and arts. This massive…

News round-up

19 Jun 2007

Visual artist Matt Patinson, aka Culprit, who suppiled the artwork for The List’s feature on artists with interesting day jobs a few issues back, is putting on a show of screenprints at the new Hula juice bar/gallery in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket this…

Music lovers asked to walk on fire for charity

19 Jun 2007

Music lovers heading for this summer’s Belladrum festival are invited to take part in an exciting challenge - a fire walk across hot embers to raise funds for the Highlands’ Cancer Caring Centre. The Maggie’s Blaze Firewalk Challenge will take place…

St Peter’s on endangered list

19 Jun 2007

St Peter’s seminary in Cardross, the subject of an exhaustive List campaign after the Archdiocese of Glasgow allowed it to fall into ruin, has been placed on the World Monuments Fund list of the world's most endangered buildings. Gillespie, Kidd and…

LongPen technology brings Mailer and Munro to Edinburgh

19 Jun 2007

Words: Allan Radcliffe (Image: left to right - Ben Okri, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro) With the announcement of its programme for August 2007 an intriguing new chapter has opened for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The…

Eat - Side Dishes

19 Jun 2007

• The Grill Room at Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand has raised the ‘beef stakes’ in Scotland by introducing Australian prime Wagyu beef [pictured] to its menu. A version of the vaunted Japanese Kobe, it’s hand-massaged and fed on a diet of grain and beer.

Eat - Mrs Majhu's

19 Jun 2007

The Meal Byres Road, the undoubted focal point of Glasgow’s West End, is a celebrated street for dining out. With the venerable No Sixteen near its base and the long-popular Café Antipasti nearer the top of the street, there is strength and…

Home games

19 Jun 2007

Criminals, genetically modified super-cops and a bunch of kids sniffing out crime with their wisecracking Great Dane. When thinking about Scotland these aren’t the first things to spring to mind, but for game fans this is what we’re all about. Here in…

Eat - Smooth sailing

19 Jun 2007

The Ocean Mist’s story is long and colourful. A steamer-trawler fitted out by the Royal Navy at the tail end of the Great War, she arrived too late for active service, and seemed fated to rust on the dockside. Thanks, however, to KE Guinness (a member…

Hitlist - The best film & dvd releases

19 Jun 2007

The Golden Door Dreamy and surreal tale of Europe to US immigration in the early part of the 20th century starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. See interview and Also Released . Cameo, Edinburgh from Fri 29 Jun. Jan Svankmajer A dizzying selection of films…

Shakalaka Boom Boom

DVD

19 Jun 2007

MUSICAL/DRAMA Suneel Darshan’s Bollywood remake of Milos Forman’s Amadeus modernises the story in a transatlantic setting, where naturally gifted but arrogant young upstart Reggi (Upen Patel) challenges experienced champion of Indian pap/pop AJ…

The Beast Must Die

DVD

19 Jun 2007

HORROR Made in 1974, this British monster movie produced by Hammer-alike outfit Amicus attempted to bridge the transatlantic divide by capitalising on the post-Shaft blaxploitation craze and casting handsome African-American actor Calvin Lockhart in…

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

19 Jun 2007

COMEDY Written by Peter Cook, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, this 1970 political satire was panned on release, yet now looks startlingly prophetic. Cook was never more charismatic than as the mysterious Michael Rimmer, arriving unannounced at the…

DVD - Round-up

19 Jun 2007

‘Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.’ The great American writer, actor and boxing analyst Al Bernstein wrote that. But then he also said, ‘A fool and his money get a lot of publicity’ so perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to…

Also Released

19 Jun 2007

Hostel: Part II (18) 93min (3 Stars) Further exercises in extreme horror from Tarantino acolyte Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel). This time three young Americans studying in Rome set off for a weekend trip with a beautiful model from one of their art…

Film Books Round-up

19 Jun 2007

In Talking Movies (Wallflower, 4 Stars) Jason Wood interviews more than 30 contemporary filmmakers including Carlos Reygadas, Richard Linklater, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, Elia Suleiman and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Wood’s project is wonderfully…

Shutter

19 Jun 2007

HORROR In lieu of a forthcoming US remake, this half arsed 2004 Thai ghost story is getting an overdue and limited release. Driving home after getting drunk with a few of his old friends, photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and his girlfriend…

The Flying Scotsman

19 Jun 2007

BIOPIC Riding your bike fast doesn’t make you a hero, but Graeme Obree’s well-documented battles with the external and internal pressures of professional cycling put him firmly in the Lance Armstrong class. As depicted in Douglas Mackinnon’s…

La Vie en Rose

19 Jun 2007

BIOPIC French singer Edith Piaf’s real life was the stuff of turbulent melodrama: she was abandoned by her mother and spent some of her impoverished childhood in a brothel, and she was discovered singing on the streets by an impresario, whom she was…

Paris, Je T'Aime

19 Jun 2007

SHORT FILM ANTHOLOGY For this portmanteau work, 21 directors from around the world have contributed five-minute shorts, which are set in 18 of Paris’ administrative districts. The project was intended as a cinematic valentine to the French capital…

Bollywood round-up

19 Jun 2007

In director R Balki’s Cheeni Kum (PG) 139min (3 Stars) 64-year-old temperamental London chef Bhuddadev (Amitabh Bachchan) falls for 34-year old modern Indian sophisticate Nina (Tabu). Comedy and drama arise from the age difference. Initial comparisons…

Lucky You

19 Jun 2007

COMEDY/DRAMA From The Cincinnati Kid to Casino Royale, a game of cards with heavy emotional stakes can make for high tension cinema, but auteur Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential, The Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, In Her Shoes) loads the decks far too heavily in…

Captivity

19 Jun 2007

THRILLER Since she stopped watching the clock as Kim Bauer in 24, Elisha Cuthbert has been typecast on the silver screen as the archetypal damsel in distress. In Captivity she plays the kind of girl that, if she weren’t already famous, would be…

Charlotte Gainsbourg

19 Jun 2007

Charlotte Gainsbourg is alluring. Tall and lithe with dark long hair dropping past her visage she’s far from a classic beauty. What she does have is a sense of mystery, and it’s this quality that Italian filmmaker Emanuelle Crialese makes use of in The…

Moloch

DVD

19 Jun 2007

Where his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky would often take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary, filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov frequently works a partial reverse. In his trilogy of ‘dictator’ films, Tauras (about Lenin), The Sun (about Hirohito) as…

Nightshade

19 Jun 2007

It’s an intriguing premise: commissioning seven of the most exciting young choreographers in Europe to create a striptease, working with real strip artists rather than professional dancers. Definitely worthy of a few good tabloid headlines . . .

T in the Park 2007

19 Jun 2007

In a matter of months Dumfries shelf-stacker Calvin Harris has taken the MySpace-sensation route to universally lauded electro producer, touring with Faithless and being linked professionally and romantically with pop icon Kylie Minogue along the way.

Hitlist - The best exhibitions

18 Jun 2007

Hanneline Visnes Visnes’ continues to blur the line between nature and culture by creating compositions that demonstrate that the natural world is a construct, invented by culture in hindsight. The large decorative canvases on show stage repeated…

Alex Frost

18 Jun 2007

Alexander Kennedy What work will you be showing at the Project Room? Alex Frost I’m showing two billboard scale mosaics (6 x 12 foot), one is being shown in the project room, the other is going outside on a wall in the hidden gardens. On one of the…

The Scottish Show

18 Jun 2007

DESIGN (Image: Leigh Ferguson) As part of the Six Cities Design Festival, The Scottish Show at Glasgow’s Lighthouse presents an exhibition of design talent that covers almost every wall and floor of the previously underused gallery, from the…

Hanneline Visnes: Sleepshapes

18 Jun 2007

DRAWING, PAINTING Within Hanneline Visnes’ intricately layered drawings and paintings one finds a multitude of mysterious broken and distorted references, where stories begin yet lead us nowhere. As an artist interested in the long history of…

Group Show: Irational.org

18 Jun 2007

INSTALLATION AND DIGITAL WORK (Image: Daniel Garcia Andujar) For those who struggle in vain to avoid the omnipresence of rectilinear electronic information boxes, irrational.org at the CCA may not be for you. This loose collection of media artists…

Venice Biennale 2007

18 Jun 2007

(Image: Gun Fight of the Mind by Tony Swain) The Venice Biennale is sinking. The 110-year-old international exhibition is fighting to keep its place as the world’s creative laboratory of artistic endeavour, consequently finding itself swamped with…

Remote Control

18 Jun 2007

Reports from the US are suggesting that the demise of the sitcom is virtually complete. I suppose we should have guessed something was going badly wrong when NBC remade Coupling for an American audience and word is that the networks will soon stop…

Tony Blair Season

18 Jun 2007

DOCUMENTARY One of the most striking cultural factors of the Blair years has been the relatively easy ride he got from the satirists. When you compare the last ten years to the Thatcher period, the comedy clubs, print media and TV shows have hardly…

Over The Wall

18 Jun 2007

NEW WORK George Peat, the new president of the Scottish Football Association, is calling for a new anthem to replace ‘Flower of Scotland’, which he described as ‘embarrassing’. But there may well be more than a few football fans who object to such a…

It Takes Two

18 Jun 2007

TOURING WORK ‘One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.’ Wilde’s wisdom on love is quite germaine to this performance at the Byre Theatre. Scenes from his plays, among others, feature in Red Wine Productions’ latest…

Guys and Dolls

18 Jun 2007

MUSICAL The latest industry to hop on the reality TV bandwagon, with shows like Any Dream Will Do and Grease is the Word, musicals are experiencing the biggest come back since Take That. Musicals are now cool (yes, even the Sound of Music) but…

Music at the Brewhouse: Helter Skelter

18 Jun 2007

NEW WORK If there’s something about the circus that thrills us when we’re children, there’s also a darker undercurrent within the spectacle of it all. This is perhaps why clowns have so often been lifted from their traditional locale and into horror…

Asylum Monologues

18 Jun 2007

REHEARSED READING Did you know that fish and chips were first introduced into the UK by Jewish immigrants in the 19th century? Or that the UK receives less than 0.5% of the world’s refugee population? Probably not, thinks Christine Bacon…

Detainee A

18 Jun 2007

POLITICAL DRAMA Cora Bissett has, for over a decade, been one of Scotland’s most respected performers, but when it was announced that she was directing a show, Amada, at the Arches, there might have been a slight twinge of fear among her many…

Hitlist - The best theatre & dance

18 Jun 2007

Detainee A Another major contribution to refugee week is this piece directed by Cora Bissett and featuring a cast of 21, which tells the story of an Asian family in Glasgow devastated by police raids and arrests. The Arches, Glasgow, Tue 26-Thu 28…

Gordon Barr

18 Jun 2007

There might be a groan from theatre critics at yet another summer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the park, but there's no doubting the resilience and popularity of the old standard. Also, as this upcoming production from Bard in the Botanics…

Also Released

18 Jun 2007

Simon Reynolds - Bring The Noise (Faber and Faber) Understand your iPod contents with this greatest hits of Reynolds’ music writing for the likes of Melody Maker with focus on hip hop and rock. Nick Cave - The Complete Lyrics 1978-2007 (Penguin…

The White Stripes

Album

18 Jun 2007

ROCK The White stripes are keen proof that there is a god. Or at least a benevolent force in the universe that occasionally, just occasionally allows a little bit of magic into this cruel, cruel world. Who else would have permitted this pair of…

Paul Towndrow Sextet

Album

18 Jun 2007

JAZZ Alto saxophonist Paul Towndrow and his new Sextet recorded this album in adverse circumstances, but there is nothing here that would give away the fact that it was made under unusual time constraints. Towndrow’s brand of inventive contemporary…

Paul Haig

Album

18 Jun 2007

ELECTRONIC Music has previously always struggled to keep pace with Paul Haig. His 80s angular Edinburgh post-punk outfit Josef K were way ahead of their time, influencing numerous contemporary bands (most notably Franz Ferdinand). His last few solo…

Paul Hartnoll

Album

18 Jun 2007

ELECTRONICA For those wondering what Paul Hartnoll has been up to since Orbital split in 2004, he has been hard at it in his Brighton studio, figuring out how to produce something far removed from his past output: ‘It just took time to discover what…

Editors

Album

18 Jun 2007

ROCK Editors have grown up since debut, The Back Room. There’s new confidence to Smith’s vocals, and anthemic ‘Weight of the World’ has a gravity that ‘Open Your Arms’ never quite attains. The sound has the urgency of shouts in the dark, and Smith’s…

Simian Mobile Disco

Album

18 Jun 2007

ELECTRO Have you forgotten how exciting electronic music can be? Well you’re about to be reminded as two albums released this year are set to totally revitalise the genre. One comes in the form of † by Justice, the other is this impressive offering…