TheDrouth
8th November 2024
An essay from 'Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town Centre' - a limited edition art book that documents and explores Cumbernauld Town Centre and its imminent demolition through the eyes of its residents, past and present. During their 18-month-long research project, the award-winning artists of Recollective - Alison Irvine, Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller - gained exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Cumbernauld New Town’s iconic Town Centre.
29th October 2024
Dutch artist Jonas Staal's new book on the pending Climate Catastrophe continues his concerns about propaganda - the good and the bad of it; reveals who are the culprits planning to exploit and profit from it and what the rest of us can do about it. Johnny Rodger reviews and puts it in the context of Staal's broad politically-committed artistic oeuvre.
29th October 2024
Since their first gig two years ago, Glasgow band The Tenementals have played solidly round the city and elsewhere to full houses and released several singles. With a line up of eight musicians, and sometimes more, they sing the history of Glasgow into being and conjure up the glories and the disasters, and the pride and the shame of it before the citizens. Norry Wilson of Lost Glasgow will introduce them on stage at the launch of the first album in Oran Mor on Wednesday 27th November. Here he tells us why he is delighted to present them on the occasion of the release of their first major recording. (plus free track!)
1st September 2024
The film Orlando: My Political Biography only went into cinemas in general release here this summer, so, although it was first shown at the EIFF in August 2023, it seems to be up for discussion again. The gender issue(s) is/are, indeed, still way up on the social agenda - as Johnny Rodger puts it, 'We are all on our social stages ... all in our social cages'. Preciado's openly self-constructed cage is a particularly intricate one, and he inhabits it with his own peculiar and provocative panache.
8th June 2024
What has been the scope of bigotry, racism, oppression and prejudice? Owen Dudley Edwards telescopes a whole history of the entanglement of those evils with the struggle for freedom, justice and truth into a compassionate and humane reading (and most importantly, an Irish reading) of the cornering and silencing of Diane Abbott, who was the first ever black woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.
5th June 2024
A unexpected quality, at once refined, maverick and committed, is given to the the term polymath in the work of Pippa Goldschmidt. She has written as much about exploration of psychic space in Freud and Lacan as about the astrological and intergalactic type. In her wonderful new book Night Vision she writes about her formation as an astrophysicist, and her description and history of anti-colonial outer space exploration is a reassuringly politicised view of the physical universe, free of the usual Hollywood astro-fantasies.
11th March 2024
As Emma Stone picks up an Oscar for Best Actress in Yorgos Lanthimos' film of Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things, people are dancing in the streets of Glasgow! David Archibald reviews a film that coulda, shoulda, woulda...
21st February 2024
A history of seventy years of popular music in Scotland by Simon Frith, Martin Cloonan and John Williamson is fascinating and comprehensive in its introduction to the story , writes Sheena Macdonald in review.
COALITION OF WATERS:
On Wounded Bodies in Capitalistic Time
Rupali Patil & Agnieszka Kilian