The Drouth - Editorial

Friday

Apr272012

RUBBING OFF THE CORNERS

Issue 45: FRAME

With issue 45 we give some attention to the edging we put around our soft centres... and welcome Charles Darwin to our editorial team. Along with absolutely everyone featured on this cover. (See if you can spot them...)

Our frames this issue range from the visual to the social. In our field of vision we have cover artist Marisusz Tarkawian's pictorial evaluative frameworks, Gavin Mottram on Douglas Gordon's contemplation, at 24 frames per second of the masculine force of Zenadine Zidane and Tony McKiver's exploration of Zizek's psychoanalytical critiques. Is there are a social framework more ambitious - or bent out of shape - than the mother Church? (That is not Owen Dudley Edwards's central question in his essay on Cardinal Keith O'Brien, but he offers plenty of useful suggestions).

Frames are there to be resisted, remade and spilled over. In Scotland, we consider how the framing device of our society can be remade using various political, historical and constitutional frameworks, a process thoroughly re-examnined in Catriona Macdonald's survey of the Indyref. If in Scotland, we can be assured that this debate (however ill-tempered and dyspeptic it may become) is unlikely to break out into war, but the release of Drouth editor David Archibald's The War that Won't Die: The Spanish Civil War in Cinema reminds us how history frames spectacles of various tints. We present an extract here, alongside Chris Buckle's thoughtful and considered review that places Archibald's scholarship amidst the wider context of anti-war films.

The scope of this issue is delineated by two modernist artists, the cosmopolitan emigre Igor Stravinsky (whose The Rite of Spring celebrates its centenary this month) and the Orcadian poet-mystic George Mackay Brown. As Iain Matheson and Linden Bickett demonstrate, the works of either man representing in its own way, modernism's response to the staggering depth and profundity of the traditions they sought to transcend.

Matheson's 'La Sacre Lunaire 100' appears on this issue's sampler, alongside Johnny Rodger's dissection of the recent debacle over George Square. Click on the cover to read them.

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