Scotland
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.
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.
2nd July 2023
Everyone, like Samuel Johnson, has an opinion on Macpherson's Ossian, but few of us ever manage to get a hand on an actual copy of the works. Fortunately, Murdo Macdonald does the bibliographic work for us, and details the doggedness of his desultory browsings and subsequent musings which led to the composition of his own versions. (is there ever anything but versions to work through here?) So, this is the big chance to find out what it was about the versions of this poetry that set Europe aflame with romantic passion and melancholy, and, as Napoleon himself put it, 'Devour Ossian!'
9th May 2023
Scotland's foremost Irish historian and Ireland's finest Jockstorian, Owen Dudley Edwards, finds a textless chronicle of the farcical and chaotic politics of Jockland in the 2020s. It's to be sung swiftly, though it's no song of Solomon. The rulers from Laputa assume they have (in the jargon of the period) 'taken back control', but none of them can actually determine where Jockland is, or if it even exists ...
16th April 2023
The hutters at Carbeth dwell in the forest -when they can get there. They have a history: it's a green one and a working class one; it's one of urban folk in the countryside, and they're prepared to fight for it. Greg Thomas speaks to a couple who make and remake their stand in the forest.
30th March 2023
Nights when people, places and stars align to create an unforgettable experience very rarely happen. A few weeks ago I attended a unique event in The Revelator in the historic Barclay Curle Shipyard. In this extraordinary space – a handmade Wall of Death – I watched a live gig from the band The Tenementals and listened to a rectoral speech from RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch. Nights like this are never to be repeated.
29th March 2023
Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.
WELCOME TO THE SHIPWRECK by Rory Olcayto