Retired? Enjoy life. (While you can....)

THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

I once again live in the city which hosts the largest annual arts festival in the world, so August is a crazy month for culture consumers.  Whatever you might want you'll find it here.  (And I will get around to looking back at my personal highlights of the 2014 Fringe in a post coming soon.)  But it's not like there's a lack of things to do during the rest of the year.  And last week provided us with one of the most culturally varied seven days imaginable.

On Monday we went to see Tony Benn : Will and Testament, as mentioned on this blog a few days ago.

Tuesday evening saw us return to the Leith Folk Club, our first visit since January, to see the young band Dallahan.  They were our favourite musical discovery of this year's Fringe, an eclectic mix of Scots, Irish, Americana and Hungarian influences.  The singer, Jack Badcock, has a surprising voice, more crooner than folkie at first acquaintance, with an incredible range.  Their arrangements are constantly surprising, with that Balkan influence creeping in regularly.  A varied set covered traditional ballads, gypsy jazz, celtic dance, bluegrass and culminated with a comedy calypso piece (originally made famous by Lance Percival in the sixties!).  They have also realised there's a lot more to being a live band than simply playing and their gabbing between numbers was both informative and funny.  Their CD has since been getting a lot of plays chez Crawford.  Oh, and they have one of the coolest bass players you will ever see.

If it's Wednesday it must be musical day.  And so it was off to the Playhouse for my second musical of the year.  Which is about two more than I'd normally see.  My standard view of the genre is "get on with the plot oh there isn't one", a view confirmed on the other occasion I ventured to the same venue and saw We Will Rock You.  They didn't.  We Will Bore You.  How did Ben Elton ever sink so low?

So I ventured to see Jersey Boys with a mix of trepidation and open mindedness.  Amazingly the latter won out.  It might not be something I'd rush to see again, but I did genuinely enjoy myself.  There is an actual plot, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and it whizzes from scene to scene at Linford Christie pace.  I'd heard of them, vaguely recalled about three of the songs from the sixties and seventies, but most were new to me.  There's some good pop tunes in that there catalogue, and all the main singers had excellent voices, especially the guy playing Mr Valli.  Where musicals usually come unstuck is in recruiting the cast it's singing and dancing abilities that are prioritised, leaving acting chops a poor third.  But this lot, by and large, made the grade.  All four leads took it in turn to act as narrator, a device that worked well in holding the time and scene shifts together, and a real test of stage presence and audience management.  And, with the exception of a cedar-like series of monologues from the Bob Gaudio character, all of them handled it well and brought genuine emotion to the part when required.  I might not go quite as over the top as this review from the local rag, but I did have fun.

Away from the live entertainment we had a couple of art exhibitions we wanted to see on Thursday.  At the City Gallery the theme was Common Wealth, both in it's more widely known sense of a group of post-imperial nations, and the more important meaning that the wealth of a country is there to be shared amongst all it's citizens.  Other than a fabulous video history of land ownership in Scotland, viewed in some kind of giant patchwork Wendy House, there was little I found memorable.  An additional exhibition on the top floor did have some wonderful pop art style pictures and a great cat sculpture, but overall the visit was a bit of a let down.  Some days you just aren't in the right frame of mind.

But we crossed the road to the Fruitmarket Gallery and found the Jim Lambie retrospective.  No, I've never heard of him, but I've learned that one of the great features of exhibitions here is the video room upstairs where there's a film interview with the artist in which he explains the works on display and his motivations in creating them.  Thus armed the actual viewing makes a lot more sense and becomes simpler to enjoy.

Vibrant colour highlighted the unusual juxtapositioning and transformations of familiar objects.  Objects of intrigue and beauty.  My favourite was the room filled with floor to ceiling ladders, some with mirrors, some without.  You never knew if you were going to look through into another scene or see your own setting reflected back at you.  A real life set from Oz.

So that's a film, a folk gig, a musical and some visual art.  It must be time for some proper theatre.  One of the best things Glasgow has exported to the capital in the east is regular seasons of A Play, a Pie and a Pint.  Which pretty much describes the experience.  For a measly twelve quid you get your choice of pies (worth getting there a bit early to avoid being stuck with the stodge encased in stodge option that is the macaroni cheese pie....), the choice of a pint, glass of wine or soft drink (whatever that is - I went with the excellent local brew, Stewarts Traverse Ale), and then down into the bowels of the building for a one act play.  Value, eh?

Last week the play was Mrs Barbour's Daughters, a modern look back at one of the most important women in Scottish history, yet one I'd never even heard of before.  She achieved fame in the First World War as an agitator for social justice and an opponent of the rampant profiteering of landlords.  Which sounds familiar....  We could do with more like her today to help counteract the dire consequences of unfettered neoliberalism on most of the population.  There are plans to erect a statue to her memory in her native city and maybe that will help to encourge wider knowledge of her objectives and achievements.  An evening of entertainment and education.  And pies.

Saturday didn't quite work out as planned, thanks to our continued search for a new home and an estate agent with little sense of geography or planning.  We saw three flats, but as this involved criss crossing the city each time a lot of the day passed on buses.  So the planned visit to see a free comedy music gig resulted in us seeing only the last ten minutes of The Priscillas, a sort of electro-pop version of The Nualas (Who they?  All will be revealed in a future post....).  The venue was the best secondhand book and music shop in all Edinburgh, the brilliantly named Elvis Shakespeare.  If you come to the city you should visit it.  Yes, you should, just go there.  And buy stuff.  This man deserves your support.

Sunday.  Day of rest?  Sod that.  My perfect winter Sunday.  Stick something in the oven and head up to The Stand comedy club for the free lunchtime show.  That's free as in no charge, at all.  Yes, free.  Should be rubbish then?  But people, like us, come back time and again.  Stu and Garry's Improv Show, aka Whose Lunch Is It Anyway?, is a consistent chest hurter.  I've seen many 'big name' comedians and I don't think there's one who's made me laugh more than these guys.  They have been doing improvised comedy together for something like fifteen years and provide the nearest thing you'll see to telepathy.  Somehow I ended up on stage manipulating parts of Garry's body, but Ill leave that to the more warped and diseased corners of whatever passes for your mind.

The route home took in another flat (I think this is what's called multitasking), the oven produced the goods, and then we were off to our final cultural event of the week.

I lie.

But it was definitely live and definitely entertainment.

To The Fridge of Dreams, aka Murrayfield Ice Rink, to see the Edinburgh Capitals SNL team take on Moray Typhoons.  If you aren't keeping up let me tell you this is the fastest moving team sport around, ice hockey.  There were goals, fights, and we posed for a photo with the man or woman in the smiley lion outfit.  Plus a win for our guys.

And all in the most beautiful city on the planet.  I may just be winning at life.

Greed overrides people every time?

CARING CAPITALISM

Unless you live in Edinburgh you probably won't have heard about this example of the joy that unfettered capitalism can bring into our drab little lives.

Childish?  Bitter?  Pathetic?  All of these things and more.  The symbolism is perfect, targeting the relatives and friends of people in hospital as revenge for failing to retain a council contract.

And there still people out there who can't understand why big business is not fit to run public services? Who do not comprehend the essential importance of a public service ethos?  As if the Passport Office weren't warning enough....

Mr Benn - Yes or No?

THE WRONG TONY

A couple of days ago we went to see Tony Benn : Will and Testament at the Cameo cinema.  Long awaited (we first saw an excerpt from it over two years ago) it lived up to my expectations.  Often, sad, even moving me to tears at times, it was, largely, inspiring.  A man who stuck with his convictions, unless evidence were presented to the contrary.  A man who went up against the system no matter how much The Establishment vilified him for it.  Their efforts to marginalise him stand as the very testament to how much he hit raw nerves and came close to cracking the united facade that the rich and powerful put up to deceive the majority of us.

Benn wasn't always right - he freely admitted as much himself - but he was always honest (much to his cost when he was a minister) and spoke his mind according to his own beliefs.  Even his opponents admired (and feared) him for that reason.  That and his sharp intellect and analytical mind.  One of the few leading politicians who genuinely applied themselves to the betterment of their constituents and the wider society they served.

One the closing statements of the film struck a strong chord with me, one that has an additional resonance in the light of recent events.  "The battle is between Socialism and Barbarism.  And I know which side I'm on."  And in the decades since the Thatcher governments began to reverse all the progress which had been made by Attlee's administration, and kicked off the social decline which continues to see inequality in the UK grow and grow, the barbaric nature of capitalism becomes ever clearer.  The idea of "Capitalism with a human face" becomes ever more risible and evidence accumulates of the duplicity that those in power will resort to.  After the Tory domination of the eighties and early nineties the election of a Labour government felt like a chance for the slate to be wiped clean, for a new social direction.  But, despite some advances such as the Minimum Wage, in most respects the Labour of Blair proved to be no more capable of the kind of change needed than it's predecessors.  What we got was Tory-lite, a Thatcherite party in all but name.  And the death of any real pluralism of choice.

Is it any wonder that voters have become increasingly disenchanted with the political mainstream when all three of the old traditional parties look ever more and more the same?  The loss of Clause Four, and a commitment to state ownership, destroyed the socialist Labour movement that Benn had pinned his flag to.  Although he remained a Labour man to the end it was obvious he did so with only a few vestiges of hope remaining.  The Labour party of the Twenty First century has little in common with his honest values and commitment to a fairer society.  We did indeed end up with the wrong Tony B leading our state. Just look at Mandleson....

Benn was opposed to EU membership, throughout his life.  In this I think he was wrong, although I sympathise with the anti-capitalist thinking that guided this view, for the biggest failing of the EU, and the ECHR, is the commitment to the sanctity of property.  It remains a charter for the rich.  Equally he expressed his opposition to Scottish independence and might have even spoken on behalf of the No movement had been around to do so.  Or would he?

There are many reasons to be sad at Benn's demise, but from a personal view I'd have loved to know what he'd have made of the Yes campaign in the final weeks leading up to the Referendum.  Whilst many of the public faces remained the expected politicians - Salmond, Sturgeon, Harvie, Sheridan et al - the Yes movement had taken on a life of its own, above and beyond political parties.  It had become a genuine people’s movement, operating outwith the boundaries of party loyalties.  It had become exactly the kind of movement that Benn had inspired, and been inspired by in the past.  It had also, in the closing weeks, become a target for everything that The British Establishment could throw at it.

Benn was once described by a national newspaper as "The most dangerous man in Britian".  If only.  He received much worse than that, and only once they considered him relatively harmless was he accorded National Treasure status.  Most papers hated him.  The TV stations found him hard to handle, easier if ignored.  And he had opponents in both his own and opposing parties lining up to declare him borderline insane.

Tony might have recognised all this in those final days leading up to 18 September.  We'll never know what he might have made of it.  And I recognise my own confirmation bias, and wishful thinking, in imagining that he would have come over to our side.  Perhaps recognising the Yes movement for what it was - the biggest democratic attack on the UK's rich and powerful since the days of the Attlee government.  I wonder....?