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…

Mark E Smith with Austin Collings - Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith

8 May 2008

MUSIC BIOGRAPHY (Viking) The real joy of Mark E Smith and The Fall has always been expecting the unexpected. His music has always stuck to a rigid formula but is somehow never formulaic, and he’s survived every British musical subculture since punk…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Festival Books - Mark Watson

Eco-friendly, my dear Watson

21 Aug 2008

According to Mark Watson, saving the planet would, at the very least, ‘look pretty smart on all our CVs’. With an already sterling comedy résumé, Watson takes on environmentalism in his latest book, Crap at the Environment, which through the author’s…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Perfect Vagina

Channel 4, Sun 17 Aug, 10pm

14 Aug 2008

Get set to cross your legs and grit your teeth as Lisa Rogers fronts a very different kind of scrapheap challenge as part of Channel 4’s The G-Spot strand. We’ve all read the headlines and overheard the news that women are literally queuing up round the…

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…