GLASGOW COOL OF ART: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library by Johnny Rodger reviewed by MURDO MACDONALD

3rd June 2022

GLASGOW COOL OF ART: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library by Johnny Rodger reviewed by MURDO MACDONALD

A new book 'Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library' takes a personal, artistic, intellectual and critical view of the two fires in Mackintosh's masterwork. It attempts to square the trauma that the fires caused by looking at the effect on a wide range of people -adults, children, citizens, academics, artists, architects, and as Murdo Macdonald notes in review, addresses the challenge of the international worth or otherwise of that great building.
22nd April 2022

POSTING MAY DAY: The story of International Workers’ Day through Trade Union Posters by LORNA MILLER

The Story of May Day as the celebration of International Workers Day, and specifically the organisation of the Glasgow May Day festivities over the last few years, is told by artist and political cartoonist Lorna Miller in a wonderful insight into her work in creation of posters for Glasgow Trades Council.
26th March 2022

Black Magic with a Bitter Orange Centre:
Just Another Saturday
by David Archibald

David Archibald’s essay on Peter McDougall’s play Just Another Saturday, published with thanks to BFI Video Publishing, also appears in the 60-page book accompanying the new 3-disc Blu-ray set, PLAY FOR TODAY – VOLUME 3, released by the BFI on 11 April. It can be pre-ordered now from the BFI Shop and other outlets. VOLUME 3 contains six plays including Just Another Saturday, Edna the Inebriate Woman and A Hole in Babylon
13th January 2022

Repointing the Brickwork:
The birth of the Arches PART II
intro by Raymond Burke

Our recent review of the new book on The Arches by Bratchpiece and Innes noted the great achievement of the work in showing how that institution was at the heart of a grassroots creativity in Glasgow. But before the internationally famed club came the prelude -the Theatre company that kept the Arches open and made it all possible. Raymond Burke has set the record right on this, collecting and introducing the story of the Arches Theatre through the words of the actors themselves. We publish in two parts: this is PART 2
6th January 2022

Repointing the Brickwork: The birth of the Arches Theatre
intro by Raymond Burke

Our recent review of the new book on The Arches by Bratchpiece and Innes noted the great achievement of the work in showing how that institution was at the heart of a grassroots creativity in Glasgow. But before the internationally famed club came the prelude -the Theatre company that kept the Arches open and made it all possible. Raymond Burke has set the record right on this, collecting and introducing the story of the Arches Theatre through the words of the actors themselves. We publish in two parts: here is PART 1- the story goes on.
26th October 2021

Underneath the Arches :
building the foundations to fail better
by Neil Cooper

The loss of The Arches as a site for the eruption of anarchic creative collaborations of a generation through all forms imaginable was a shock. Did the forces of conservatism conspire to finish it off in 2015... or maybe its work was done there, and the spirit needed to move on anyway? Neil Cooper's review of Innes and Bratchpiece's history of the venue is epic and elegaic: it deserves all that and even more ...
11th May 2021

The Greenock Industrial and the Greenock Pastoral in ‘Just A Boys’ Game’ and ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard’
by David Archibald

On 17th May the British Film Institute (BFI) released a 3 Disc Blu-ray box set to celebrate fifty years since the first transmission of the BBC's 'Play for Today'. David Archibald has written an accompanying essay for the two Peter McDougall plays which appear in volume 2 of the set. Archibald's piece is a retrospective on a way of life and the art it produced -in special arrangement with the BFI we bring the essay to The Drouth readers' attention.
7th June 2020

On Peoples’ Palaces
by Hailey Maxwell

Having quietly endured almost twenty years of managed decline, writes Hailey Maxwell, it is crucial that we consider the possibility that the Peoples’ Palace on Glasgow Green – a valuable civic asset and monument to Scottish history and working-class life may presently be at real risk of being neutralised, misappropriated and entirely co-opted into a neoliberal agenda. Spaces and places which were once public are being repurposed and reimagined not for the benefit of the citizen but for the property developer, the multi-national corporation and the tourist.