Doors Open

And as another Festival fades away (although the city is still busy with tourists - that ebbs and flows according to season but never actually stops) there are still more things to look forward to, including this year's Doors Open Day on September 29th. That's when many buildings, a lot of which the public normally don't get into (or if they do there are parts they never normally see) allow people in free to explore their city and appreciate its culture, architecture and history - its really a great day, getting to see things in buildings you pass regularly but had never seen within. And I was quite pleased when I was asked if a couple of interior shots I took at last year's Doors Open could be borrowed to be used for illustrating this year's. You can get details from the Doors Open page on the Cockburn Association site here.

End of the Fest

Well, that's the quickest couple of weeks of the year - holiday time - gone past already in a blur. Back to work this week and with the Fringe, Film Festival and Book Festival over the city seems so much quieter, all that's left behind of the world's biggest arts festival are the many posters for shows now finished and gone, slowly peeling off walls and panels with that same sort of melancholy you get from Christmas decorations still up after you've gone back to work in the New Year. Still, we've got the huge fireworks concert to come this Sunday night and luckily Gordon has invited Mel and I along to his work again, which has a long conference room with views out to the Castle; they also very nicely put on some food and booze to go with the event - certainly much nicer than jostling with a 100, 000 others on Princes Street to watch it.

I enjoyed a bit of Fringe while I was off, took in the Book Festival (actually I was invited to the launch party this year which was nice of them, bumped into several folks I used to work with a few years ago, which was even nicer), caught a very good panel on graphic novels there (first year they have covered the genre, went very, very well, I'm pleased to say) and as usual caught a pile of movies at the Film Festival (sadly the last time they are planning to hold that during the rest of the Festival in August, boo). Mel and I were right there on opening night to see the adaptation of Peter Jinks novel Hallam Foe which starred Jamie Bell (all grown up from Billy Elliot) and which was largely shot in Edinburgh, so that was fun to see some of the city on the big screen (also a pleasure to see the Film Fest's Hannah McGill who as well as being involved in running a great film festival always looks so glamorous and gorgeous at these events) and we were there on the final day when they do Best of the Fest to reshow some sold out films. Documentaries, foreign language films, science fiction, fantasy, comedies and animation all in a few days then chilling with a drink outside afterwards and Joe is a happy boy.

Day Watch, the sequel to the surprise international hit from Russia, Night Watch, was excellent but my favourite film of this year's fest (and Mel's too, actually) was the movie adaptation of a book by one of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman (and illustrated by the quite wonderful Charles Vess), Stardust. Was a little funny for me to be watching this film since I remember hosting a reading and signing for Neil for that book when it first came out back in the 90s and still recall sitting chatting after a totally packed event in the bar of the lovely, old Cafe 1812 as he doodled a picture on the inside of my copy and signed it after the fans had all gone (I even remember him being impressed when a friend of mine produced his copy of Violent Cases to be signed and Neil at once recognised it as a first edition). Back then he had talked about possible movie work and here we were years later watching our second Film Festival screening of a film based on a story by Neil (MirrorMask was the year before last).

By Neil's standards the story is very simple and straightforward, not as layered as most of his other work in prose or comics, but as he said back at that event in the 90s he really wanted to make a straight fairy tale but for adults and that's also what the movie version brings. It doesn't try to be clever and postmodern, to reinvent the wheel. Instead it gives you a gorgeously warm fantasy with evil witches, a quest, romance, swashbuckling, magic, corrupt princes, an innocent hero and as a bonus Robert de Niro in a lady's bloomers dancing to the can-can. I mean what else do you need? Leave your cynicism at home and just wallow in a beautifully shot fairy tale (much of it shot in the islands of Scotland) which boasts a great cast (including Michelle Pfeiffer who just doesn't seem to be getting older, does she? Although ironically she ages in the film every time she uses her magic). Everyone left the cinema late at night with huge smiles on their faces, its just one of those sorts of films; you're never too old for a magical fairy tale. Of course some people think they are too old for such things, but that probably means they need it more than anyone, poor souls. It should get a general release in the UK this autumn (I think it has just come out in the US), so watch out for it.

My parents came through to visit before going off on their own holiday; I had a cunning plan to take them out for a cruise on the Maid of the Forth which would have been an early anniversary present and a way to spend the day with them too (sails from right under the mighty Forth Bridge down the river and includes a trip to the islands to visit the old monastery) but sadly that was the only day they weren't sailing because of some liners coming up the river that day. So we'll need to try again at some point, but at least we did get a fun day together anyway and a lovely lunch out at the canalside pub in the village of Ratho (great spot for food and drink). And then my old mate Bob through with his wee boys too, so again we all had fun. The boys are convinced I am a pirate because of my bandana and since they love pirates that makes me cool to them :-). Naturally I don't want to disappoint them and try to keep up my swashbuckling ways for them. They also like knights and swords and kept asking if they would see knights at the Castle - so when we found men in plate armour posing just down the slope from the Castle you can imagine how big their eyes opened! Movies, shows, books, drinks, food, friends and family, what a great break...

Nagymama

I love this very cool animation of a grandmother's tale:

Fantasy wimmin

While I've been off this week I noticed that the BBC was repeating the Munsters in the morning; I remember the repeats of the Munsters and the Addams Family from when I was a kid and it's interesting to see that they still keep getting repeated to new audiences (and those already converted like me) - and that they are still brilliant. Yvonne de Carlo who played Lily Munster passed away earlier this year, but it is nice to see her again in her prime (she was well-known as a very glamorous actress in the 50s before the Munsters came along). Like the Addams the Munsters plays with the conventions of the sit-com in a way that is pretty remarkable for the period, its still funny and the characters are great - watching the repeats has put a big smile on my face. It also reminded me of how much I fancied both Lily Munster and Morticia Addams when I was younger; I still do and suspect they played a major role in shaping my adoration of Gothic gals. So for no particular reason I thought I'd pick out a few women from the fantasy genres who have to rate as gorgeous.

1) Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams - the epitome of the luscious Gothic femme, long before it became a popular image or subculture and her demure performance was the perfect foil for John Astin's manic Gomez as he would grab her arm and kiss his way up it. And just how did they get even such a slim woman into that tight dress??? I do wish someone could sort out the various rights problems to reprint a collection of Charles Addams' original New Yorker cartoons which started them all off though. Meantime I make do with teasing my uncle who has a remarkable resemblance to the Addams' Uncle Fester.



2) Yvonne de Carlo as Lily Munster



If you do a bit of Googling you can easily find more pictures of Carolyn from her Hollywood Days in films like Salome, when she was considered a tremedously glamorous and sexy actress. The Munsters was never quite as good as the Addams Family, but as my dad once said, being slightly worse made it better in some ways. I loved the way Yvonne played the exotic Lily utterly straight, like a regular mother and wife, underplaying for comic effect perfectly and delivering a different sort of beauty from Carolyn's Morticia but just as enticing.

Canadian comics banned in middle of Fringe performance

The Evening News tells of The Underground Comedy Invasion, comics from Canada, who have been performing at the Three Tuns pub, who were stopped in the middle of a show by a senior member of staff and ejected, their Fringe run there canceled. Apparently they had told jokes about child abuse, which is certainly in bad taste, but part of humour, especially underground humour, is to broach subjects which we might often find uncomfortable and distasteful - one of my comedy heroes, the great George Carlin has always stood up for that principle, where he says bollocks to anyone telling him there is any subject he can't make jokes about because the jokes are a way of talking about something, they don't imply support for something or condoning it - in other words a joke about something doesn't mean you are saying yeah, let's do it for real, nor should a joke be confused with reality since telling a joke is not the same thing as doing something. And really, you agreed to host some underground comics for the Fringe then you act outraged when they tell jokes you don't approve of??? Er, what a shock, distasteful humour in a Fringe stand-up show... Besides which, the altercation - seen on the video below - seems to have come about not when the comedians repeated the joke but when they tried to talk about how the management had told them not to repeat the joke - so telling the joke is a no-no and telling the audience that you aren't allowed to tell a particular joke is also apparently a no-no, which regardless of the content of the original joke seems a bit damned stupid to me.

Obviously this short clip is taken out of context, but the staff member comes across rather badly in it, just steaming in to shut the comic up as he tries to explain he can't tell a joke because he's been ordered not to, while the staff member also seems to confuse the joke with reality, shouting at audience members (his customers!) do you want your kids fingered??? Er, no-one is doing anything to kids there, man, you were talking about a fucking joke - this is like the cobblers in the media when Chris Morris did his Brass Eye special on child abuse, where he was showing how attitudes in the public and media go crazy over anything to do with it, precluding discussion in favour of extreme reaction. I doubt any of the comics are really trying to promote child abuse, this is a comedy act using bad taste and uncomfortable subject matter, but then so do a lot of comics, its a legitimate area for comics to explore. And asking them not to cover a subject in your venue is the right of the manager, of course, but then trying to shut them up when they tell folk about being gagged is just being OTT. Jeez, if we banned every comedian who told a joke that might be offensive to someone we'd never tell a bloody joke again anywhere (another point Carlin makes well). You know, instead of being grossly offended, if I find a comic's material to be offensive and/or unfunny I don't demand their head, I just don't laugh - let them stand there in silence on stage. Not gag them. Then tell them not to mention the gag and equate that with actual abuse.

Midget glues dick to hoover at Fringe

Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf from the Circus of Horrors at the Edinburgh Fringe had to be taken to hospital after something went wrong with his act, part of which involves dragging a vacuum cleaner across the stage with his willy. A Fringe act, a stage, a hoover, an exposed cock and superglue = trip to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The irony being the Circus of Horrors is almost next door to where the hospital stood for decades, before moving a couple of years back (the old grounds are being redeveloped for 'mixed' price apartments - in other words they will all go to rich buggers) so Captain Dan and his superglued dick and vacuum would have a much longer ride to the new hospital at the edge of town (handily placed for almost no-one in the city). Ouch. The lengths some men will go to get sucked off :-)...

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon...

This afternoon at the Edinburgh Film Festival I caught the UK premiere of the documentary by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon, detailing the glories (and the tragedies) of one of the biggest undertakings humans ever launched themselves on, the Apollo programme. As soon as I saw this in the EIFF programme this year I knew I was going to see it. I was born at the height of the Space Race; Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's astonishing, history-making flight to the Moon on Apollo 11 was still a year and a half away. I grew up with an astronaut space suit costume to play in while Gagarin and Armstrong were on posters as my boyhood heroes (they still are, some things you never grow out of); the idea of space exploration has lived inside me my entire life and as I approach the big four-oh birthday on the last day of this year I get a little sad that those promises of holidays in space we were told the future would hold have never materialised and it looks less and less like that boyhood dream will ever come true.

But still it weaves a magical spell on me; as the footage of those enormous Saturn Vs ascending the heavens on a column of fire flickered across the screen I could feel the old excitement rising - the boy in me is never far from the surface and images and ideas like this always bring it out. Much of the footage has never been seen before and is literally out of this world. The story of our first tentative steps out of the cradle of the Earth to our nearest neighbour is told in their own words by many of the NASA astronauts who made those epic journeys, voyages of discovery that stand in a long line of human endeavours such as the explorations of James Cook, Magellan or those unknown Polynesian sailors who crossed vast oceans on small boats made of reeds.

One of those men featured was David Scott, an Apollo commander - a man I actually met a few years back when his publicist came in to my old bookstore to say he was across the road in the Balmoral Hotel doing interviews with the Scottish press and would we like him to come across and sign some copies of the book he had co-authored with his friend the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first man to walk in space; his friend Arthur C Clarke would name a spaceship in his honour in the sequel to 2001). An ordinary day at work and then suddenly there I am chatting to a former astronaut and shaking hands with a man who had walked on the Moon; a man who got to live that boyhood dream of mine. Naturally I got one of those signed copies for myself; I've many signed books in my collection but only one signed by an author who has traveled far enough into space to look back and see the entirety of our world hanging in the void. We've all seen the pictures, but it wasn't until the crew of Apollo 8 voyaged around the dark side of the Moon that humans actually saw the entire Earth from space. They took the famous 'Earthrise' photograph, our world rising in the dark above the surface of the Moon, the furthest humans have yet been from our world.

Only a tiny handful of humans have ever seen that sight with their own eyes to this day, all now old men - to look at them in this film you could easily mistake them for someone's favourite uncle of grandfather. But in their prime these men dared death, road on a column of scientific dragon's fire further than anyone in the entire history of the world and in the process changed the way we see our little, beautiful world. It's so sad we've pulled back from those days; I'm not stupid, I'm well aware of my history and understand much of the colossal cost of the space programme was only met because of politics of the Cold War. And yet I can't help but feel we let ourselves become that much smaller as a species when we stopped pushing at the final frontier. Yes, I know we can spend the money on problems right here on Earth, but if we weren't so busy squabbling among ourselves we wouldn't need to waste so much on creating weapons - then we could spend that money on feeding and taking care of people here on Earth and have enough to explore, to go where no-one has gone before.

I still want to go.