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Issue 617

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The Cathouse

Clubbing birthdays

13 Nov 2008

Three Scottish clubbing institutions hit big milestones this month: rock club The Cathouse is 18, the Art School’s regular soul night Divine is 18, and Slam’s techno hoedown Pressure is 10. We asked three regular punters just why they love these clubs…

Inside Deep Throat

Porn in the movies

13 Nov 2008

Platonic friends Zack and Miri one day decide that in the current economic climate the only way to diminish their respective personal debts is to make a pornographic film together, but the world of amateur porno filmmaking is not as easy as it seems. So…

TV on the Radio

TV on the Radio

13 Nov 2008

Three years ago the alternative music industry seemed determined to talk itself into a coma. You couldn’t open a magazine or turn on the radio without suffering some whinging executive complaining about the internet killing music. Fans who downloaded…

Social networker

Social networker

13 Nov 2008

How many times have you heard some over the hill rap star attempt to dismiss any attempts at innovation and excuse creative treading water by claiming their doing it ‘old school’? I still hear it a lot. This rosy, Ray Ban-ed view, which in actuality was…

Sara Maitland

A quiet life

13 Nov 2008

It would seem that we’ve all become a little wary of silence. The sizeable majority of British society who own mobile phones may agree. Plug in, jump online, talk in libraries, and you’re doing OK. Withdraw however, and you have issues. Accomplished…

Lost in Fiction

Lost in Fiction

13 Nov 2008

It’s been eight years since the much-missed John Smith’s bookshop on Byres Road closed its doors and turned into a branch of Starbucks. At the time, many residents of Glasgow’s West End saw it as another, depressing, sign of the times. John Smith’s…

Calistoga Central

Calistoga Central

13 Nov 2008

The first hurdle to clear is that this is an American restaurant that doesn’t serve burgers. The best explanation of this is that it’s not an American restaurant but Californian. Calistoga has been around in Edinburgh since 2004 on St Leonards Street…

Fernando Meirelles

Visionless Express - Fernando Meirelles director of Blindness

13 Nov 2008

‘What’s the most challenging thing about making a film about blindness?’ asks Fernando Meirelles, the relentlessly upbeat director of relentlessly downbeat mood-blackeners City of God and The Constant Gardner. ‘Trying to establish relationships between…

Glass Baubles

Shock! Markets!

13 Nov 2008

Something gets into the air about halfway through November, something that compels otherwise rational people to stand at tables – maybe decorated with fake snow or tinsel – offering genuinely original presents. There’s really no excuse to give anyone a…

Taste Test - White beers

Taste Test - White beers

13 Nov 2008

Black Isle Organic Wheat Beer, Colomba, Grolsch Weizen, Konig Ludwig, Hefe Weizen, Weihenstephaner Dunkelweiss

Heer Ranjha

Heer Ranjha

13 Nov 2008

Shan Khan should be the epitome of calm. Speaking to me on the phone during his first holiday in three years, he’s staring out across the tranquil waters of Lochgilphead. Yet, the subject of theatre clearly has his hackles raised. Since bursting onto…

Sneaky Pete’s

Born Sneaky - Sneaky Pete’s

13 Nov 2008

It’s still hard to discuss Edinburgh’s club scene without referencing the Cowgate fire which claimed La Belle Angele and the Gilded Saloon in December 2002. The event, along with the demise of the Venue on Calton Road, was a hammer blow to the city’s…

Open Field

Open Field

13 Nov 2008

Artists’ residencies sound like wonderful things. Who wouldn’t appreciate the opportunity to go somewhere new and moon around with a paintbrush? Unfortunately, this is not the reality of most residencies. Instead, pressure is often piled on artists to…

Big time

Big time - Metro Ecosse film competition

13 Nov 2008

It’s been too long, but you know how it is – one thing leads to another and then it’s Christmas time again. Anyway, the time has come to check up on the progress of the second film competition. To recap – back in December 2006, The List launched Metro’s…

Derren Brown: The Specials

Derren Brown: The Specials

13 Nov 2008

(4DVD) 196min Almost five years ago to the week that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were threatened with being burnt at the stake, another witch-hunt was conducted for another man merely seeking to thrill us. In October 2003, Derren Brown asked a…

John McCusker’s Under One Sky

John McCusker’s Under One Sky

13 Nov 2008

Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Tue 25 Nov; Music Hall, Perth, Fri 28 Nov; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Mon 8 Dec John McCusker’s head has been in the clouds a lot lately – flying all over Europe and the Americas in a private jet, courtesy of Mark Knopfler. ‘Yes…

Last word: Mark Gatiss

Last word: Mark Gatiss

13 Nov 2008

Actor, screenwriter and novelist Mark Gatiss is best known for his role in The League of Gentlemen and acting in Doctor Who. Here he talks trousers, baked beans and sheds.

Will Young

Will Young

13 Nov 2008

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Thu 20 & Fri 21 Nov It’s hard to believe that it’s nearly seven years since Will Young shot to fame as the first winner of ratings-grabbing TV talent search Pop Idol. What’s perhaps more surprising is that he still enjoys…

Exposure -The Phantom Band

Exposure -The Phantom Band

13 Nov 2008

The latest in a long line of great discoveries by Chemikal Underground Records, Glasgow sextet The Phantom Band mash a coarse mix of influences – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Can and the theme to Crocodile Dundee among them – into a fine experimental…

Jason Cook

Jason Cook

13 Nov 2008

Jason Cook is a happy man. Today, he cheerfully tells me, he has purchased a new Xbox game. But Cook has other reasons to feel upbeat; his 2007 début fringe show My Confessions was a critical hit and was successfully followed by a show about happiness…

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky - The Essential Chomsky

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

(Bodley Head) For over 40 years, ‘the world’s greatest public intellectual’ has been not so much a thorn in the side of the West’s establishment structures as a battering ram to everything held dear by liberals and conservatives alike. Now fast…

Five reasons to go and see: Death Cab For Cutie

Five reasons to go and see: Death Cab For Cutie

13 Nov 2008

1 They toured with Neil Young Which gives Ben Gibbard and his fellow Washington makers of schmoopy, winsome guitar pop a more legit reason than any of the other army of young copyists to continue in his vein. 2 They’ve become a fixture on US TV…

Joe Zawinul & The Zawinul Syndicate - 75th

Joe Zawinul & The Zawinul Syndicate - 75th

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

JAZZ JOE ZAWINUL & THE ZAWINUL SYNDICATE 75th (BHM/Birdjam) The concert represented on this live 2-CD set was recorded on the late Joe Zawinul’s 75th birthday on 7 July 2007 in his native Vienna (he died only a couple of months later). Despite the…

Ross Clark & The Scarfs Go Missing

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

The Mill Live @ Oran Mor, Glasgow, Wed 5 Nov. Glaswegian Ross Clark has been around as an alt.country/pop/folk soloist for quite while now, crying out for an ‘and The Somethings’ to back him. The Scarfs Go Missing are it – an electric band augmented…

Artur Pizarro - The Complete Piano Works of Maurice Ravel, Volume Two

Artur Pizarro - The Complete Piano Works of Maurice Ravel, Volume Two

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Keenly awaited second volume of Ravel’s piano works recorded by the Portugese pianist does not disappoint. There is a graceful clarity to Pizarro’s playing that suits Ravel to perfection. The Sonatine may not be as familiar as the ever-popular and…

Dialogues

Dialogues

13 Nov 2008

Informatics: it’s the future. This study of ‘the structure, algorithms, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems’ has been around since 1957, when German computer scientist Karl Steinbuch coined the word, ‘Informatik’.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 149min Based on the non-fiction book by Der Spiegel editor and journalist Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling and engrossing attempt to explain the trajectory and political position of arguably the most incoherent post-war…

Conversations With My Gardener

Conversations With My Gardener

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

(12A) 108min When a successful Parisian painter (Daniel Auteil) returns to the rural childhood home he has inherited in the Rhone-Alps region of southern France, he places an advert for somebody to rejuvenate the property’s unkempt garden. The first…

Blindness

Also Released - Film

13 Nov 2008

Outlanders (15) 98min ●●● When his father dies, young Pole Adam (Jakub Tolak) sets off to find his older brother Jan, a former football player who was last heard of in England. The journey brings him face to face with the UK itinerant illegal labour…

Midsummer

Midsummer

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

ROMCOM WITH SONGS Ah, the romcom: an often-derided form in cinema, easily discarded as lightweight. In the decidedly heavyweight world of the theatre, it’s unmentionable. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary to make art out of the sheer joy to be found…

Choke

Choke

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 92min Unrepentant sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has always believed that life is about making other people do stuff for you. By day he does as little work as he can at a historical theme park and by night he cons money in restaurants…

Body of Lies

Body of Lies

(2 stars)13 Nov 2008

(15) 128min As with 2001’s Black Hawk Down, South Shields’ most famous filmmaker Ridley Scott again attempts to pull a callous zeitgeist from international news headlines, with unconvincing results. CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo Di Caprio…

Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 90min An animated feature about war, memory displacement and the hideous genocide committed by Christian militiamen on Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanese War may not sound particularly inviting but, like last…

Max Payne

Max Payne

(1 star)13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min The film noir influences on the Max Payne video game series made a cinematic outing inevitable, but John Moore’s abortive fantasy-thriller exemplifies everything that’s wrong with console to big-screen crossovers. Jockstrap-fresh from…

My Best Friend’s Girl

My Best Friend’s Girl

(1 star)13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min From Howard Deutch, the auteur behind the seminal teen movie Pretty in Pink starring Molly Ringwald, My Best Friend’s Girl is a 1980s throwback rom-com, updated with scatological language. Dane Cook, so disagreeable in last year’s Good…

Quarantine

Quarantine

(2 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 89min Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s grimly effective Spanish-zombie movie [REC] gets the Hollywood treatment in John Erick and brother Drew Dowdle’s scene-by-scene remake. Quarantine purports to be the surviving document of what happens…

Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Forget the salacious sounding title, Zack and Miri is a Kevin Smith movie so it was never going to be a Ron Jeremy skin flick. Indeed, it’s an archetypical Smith movie – an over-sentimental tale in which boy knows girl, boy and girl have relationship…

Tigrero

Tigrero - A Film That Was Never Made

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

(E) 75mins Diminutive, pugnacious and legendary director Sam Fuller (The Big Red One, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) returns to the Amazonian jungle where 40 years previously he had attempted to make a harsh on-location adventure film with…

While She Was Out

While She Was Out

(2 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 82min This urban chiller executive produced by Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro and starring the enduringly gorgeous Kim Basinger and evergreen teen-alike Lukas Haas starts off promisingly but all too swiftly proves as lame as its pedestrian…

Postal

Postal

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

(18) 99min Uwe Boll doesn’t have the best pedigree in movies; he’s an oft-reviled director with a penchant for videogame adaptations. But one thing you can’t dismiss is that the man has balls, and Postal is flat-out in-your-face nutzoid entertainment…

Saxon

Saxon

(2 stars)13 Nov 2008

(15) 92min Semi-blinded Eddie (Sean Harris) has to pay off his debts otherwise he’ll lose an eye to the gangsters who plucked out the other one. He’s handed a lifeline by childhood sweetheart, the wealthy Linda (Sarah Matravers), who is looking for…

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Red or dead

13 Nov 2008

Bernd Eichinger is best known internationally as the writer and producer of Downfall and after having forced the German public to look back at their relationship with Hitler he has now turned his attention to the Red Army Faction (RAF). Whether these…

Pumpkin Pie

A bluffer’s guide to Thanksgiving

13 Nov 2008

Call it the Americanisation of Britain, call it another excuse for a slap up meal, but Thanksgiving has grown in popularity. Celebrated on the last Thursday of November, it’s akin to a grown up Christmas without the gift buying or wrestling with…

Ace Trucking Co. Vol.1

Alan Grant, John Wagner and Massimo Belardinelli & Ian Gibson - Ace Trucking Co. Vol.1

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Born out of the 70s and 80s-mired misapprehension that CB radio talk was the vernacular of the future (let’s blame Burt Reynolds for that), this weekly 2000AD serial nevertheless became one of the British comic’s best for a while. That’s partly down to…

4.48 Psychosis

4.48 Psychosis

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

MODERN CLASSIC It doesn’t seem right to say you have enjoyed Sarah Kane’s final play. Written not long before her suicide in 1999 and staged posthumously, it is a poetic evocation of the mind of someone in the depths of clinical depression. There are…

Digitalism

Profile - Digitalism

13 Nov 2008

Also known as Jens ‘Jence’ Moelle and Ismail ‘Isi’ Tüfekçi. Occupation German purveyors of funky and discordant dancefloor filth. Where are they from? Moelle and Tüfekçi founded Digitalism in 2004 after meeting at a record shop in Hamburg where…

Blake Baxter

Blake Baxter

13 Nov 2008

BLAKE BAXTER Cotton Cake at the Sub Club, Glasgow, Fri 21 Nov. Brush up on the history of Detroit techno DJ and producer Blake Baxter for a bit and one of the first adjectives you’ll come across in many of his biographies and career summations is…

Derrick May

Subculture

13 Nov 2008

PREVIEW TECHNO & HOUSE Studio 24, Edinburgh, Fri 14 Nov. This fortnight Subculture comes to Edinburgh after Studio 24’s manager, Gill McArthur, witnessed their programming of T in the Park’s Bacardi B-Bar by chance and felt she could make the night…

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Starting with a plane crash and ending with a coyote-on-human chow down, Afraid is a rattling good read for those who have the stomach for it. When a mutant military force turns up unannounced at the friendly law-abiding town of Safe Haven (population…

Unreliable Witness

Unreliable Witness

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

MIXED MEDIA Who says the world isn’t flat? Not, one suspects, any of the six artists playing with personas, pseudo-science, imagined histories and parallel universes in a show that creates a set of brand new myths made in their own (self) image. The…

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