Mock Duck

Edinburgh Fringe: First Blood

Well it's here.

The Edinburgh Fringe.

The Edinburgh Festival, the book festival, the politics festival are round the corner.

The Jazz Festival already been and gone.

But through it all - the Fringe. Massive, unprogrammed. Thousands of shows. A monster. It's back.

"Are we going to see anything in the Fringe?" the Geek asked for the umpteenth time, causing me to fling a copy of the Fringe programme at his head. (Pretty dangerous in fact as it is something resembling a telephone directory these days.)

"You choose! I can't choose! I can't bear it. Can't BEAR it! How are you suppose to tell? Every time I find something it's booked up. There's people crawling EVERYWHERE. I'll catch a cold. I'll get claustrophobia. You sort it out!"

I used to be a great fan of the Fringe. It was massive and monstrous but you could always find a gem or two in amongst the mess, and - crucially - it was cheap. Not any more. Now it is quite an undertaking to commit to a show - many upwards of £8. You feel less inclined to just try something out when it is so dear and more cheated and angry when it turns out to be rubbish.

Plus, I've seen so much of it all before. University sketch shows where everyone thinks it's terribly funny to act a bit camp. Endless one-man or one-woman shows where the one man or woman involves puts on hundreds of funny voices and plays a variety of "hilarious" characters without much plot or structure. Off the wall theatre shows, endless versions of the classics done by school groups and community groups and...well just lots of groups really.

"The thing is," I said to the Geek. "I want to see something different. But not the usual kind of different."

(The usual kind of different being the sort of show called things like, "I Stalked Roger Moore" or "The Extremely Hilarious and Edifying Story of a Victorian Explorer and his donkey called Bottom")

"I want nothing with innuendo in the title (that rules out about 80% at a stroke, no physical theatre, no impoverished classics or community group Shakespeares, no sketch-shows, no dance, no stand-up - unless we know its going to be very very good - no one man shows, no famous actors doing snippets of roles they've played before,  no wannabes looking for their own tv show, no angsty young people trying to do something "muscular" and "powerful" (which usually boils down to lots of shouting)...In fact, let's play it safe - let's have no actors at all...But no puppets," I add hastily. "I'm just not in the mood."

"Hmm," said the Geek, uncertainly. "How about this?"

So, here we have it. The ultimate different experience. No actors, no play, no puppets.

Wheels of Life from Sharmanka Travelling Circus at The Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh is half an hour long and not too expensive. We had no idea what to expect as we were handed binoculars at the door.

We saw a scene something like this:

These are "kinemats" or mechanical sculptural machines with cogs and wheels and little figures and strange flying contraptions and humanoid-looking robot-type sculptures and beautiful constructions from singer sewing machines and other devices, covered in animal figures - some funny, some friendly, some grotesque - and people and death figures and sex figures and birds and and and...

It is hard to describe how it works. The audience sits there and the lights come on - highlighting a lone figure on a kinemat - often just a tiny detail. Giving a sense of loneliness and isolation. Then the machine start moving - turning the wheels, ringing bells, twisting around. You watch through your binoculars - a weird and powerful idea in itself - like a voyeur. It makes the experience all the more powerful, detailed and - even though shared - private. Then another light will go on and you will suddenly see the dark underbelly of the scene - a death figure, a frightening creature with a flickering tongue. Music is used to incredible effect - folk music and Bach and jazz - making you think of the history of the twentieth century and all it saw. You think of Hieronymus Bosch. You think of the darkness of fairytales, the dark side of childhood, but you also see the beauty of existence and the fun and the humour. It is a show that is a piece of art because it does what art should do: capture the sense of the complexity, the tragedy and the absurdity of human beings and human society: their loneliness, their need of others, the civilised side, the animal side, their capacity for joy, their capacity for horror. Life and death.

All in all it is a deeply moving show.

 I contacted them over the weekend and asked if I could post some pictures, which make give some sense - though not really - of what I am talking about. They said I could, although I should say that these images are have full copyright reserved. More can be seen on Flickr here. And there is more about the fascinating history of the creator of the "kinemats", Eduard Bersudsky, the creation of the Millenium Clock in Edinburgh and the history of the company, which was founded in St Petersburg, on their website.

If anyone ever has a chance to see this, do go. It is like nothing else.

Rain, covers for girls and books for boys

Sorry, I've been monumentally lazy and haven't posted for ages. So much has been raging on the net too - debate about whether thrillers should be included on the Booker list, people up in arms about book covers - whether "chicklit" style covers are being used to misrepresent more "serious" texts...etc.

I was thinking about writing about a couple of those issues but realised, in the fuggy humid heat of the tropical torrential weather we have (most unusually) been experiencing here in Edinburgh, that I have not the energy for all of that. (Apparently there was a partial eclipse this morning but I would never have been able to tell - I was too busy constructing my arc and gathering up my neighbours pets - two-by-two.)

I might as well direct you to Musings from a Muddy Island, which has rather more to say about the covers question than I do. The guardian blogs piece she talks about - and moreover the comments on the Guardian blog - really make for quite interesting and revealing reading. I suppose I do start wondering, with this whole debate, whether it's really a case of misrepresenting "serious" books by "chicklit" covers or whether - for me - it is just a general despair that everything for women has to be blooming pink these days. I mean, when did that start? I'm sure it's a recent phenomenon. Comedy for women, books for women -  that is all excellent in my view. But why must absolutely everything - clothes, books, handbags, folders, stickers - you name it - be so very pink?

(And yes, before anyone points it out, I am aware that my own cover appears to have a strip of pink across the bottom. But it does also have a gimp mask and a penguin so I think that makes up for it. ;)

But the chicklit cover issue aside, there are other cover trends I keep noticing - like the tendency of most photos of the people on covers to look like models. When I looked in a bookshop recently there were a host of covers of bare women's legs on all manner of books.  It's not that any of them aren't good covers in terms of composition or image or anything. It's just that the modelliness of them makes them not look like real people/characters somehow.

Maybe it says more about society's relationship with a nice pair of pins than anything else.

I also saw a book called "What Rhymes with Bastard?" with a picture of a woman with mad green hair on the front. That appealed.

It seems to me that in the cover debate bloggers concentrate more on the covers they don't like rather than the ones they do. Musings seems to be suggesting plain - but I like images. So I shall list a few covers I have liked recently - just the first that come to mind for me. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a lovely looking book with a nice cover. Although the animal-lover in me would have loved a reference to a hedgehog on it somewhere...although that could have had the danger of turning twee I suppose.  But a nice-looking book. The Needle in the Blood is a fine-looking thing too, in my opinion and Space Captain Smith certainly grabbed my attention with the kind of ultra-detailed illustrated cover that you so rarely see nowadays. Feather Man is also a fine-looking book. Gods Behaving Badly is attractive too. In a more generalised way, I think I quite like retro. Except that probably sounds too much like I know what I'm talking about. So I better shut up quickly. I also liked the old-fashioned thing of finding an old painting to put on the front of classics. Of course I like paintings a lot so maybe that is why, but portraits, for example, can also fit so well with the time and period of the book and makes you better able to imagine the look and dress of the characters...but this is probably very old-fashioned now.

Are there any covers you are particularly drawn to? Is there a common look/theme? Can you tell what it is you like about them/what you associate with them?

Anyway, vague ramblings aside, and on a more serious note, I did want to flag up a really excellent interview with Keith Gray who wrote a book called "The Ostrich Boys". It seems to manage to cover most of the issues of the moment related to boys and young men and it is a very interesting piece. Here's a couple of quotes that particularly struck me:

I believe these are precarious years of adjustment for young men, because plenty seem to be struggling to figure out exactly what being a “man” entails these days.  The iconic male is so different to what he used to be.  No more Jimmy Stewarts, John Waynes or Clint Eastwoods.  But where was the fun in acting so repressed?  Then again, do we really all want to be metro-sexual Beckhams?  Do we really want to be grubby, druggy Pete Dohertys?  Maybe we’ll retreat into ourselves and live vicarious lives inside our computers.

And

...suicide is such an important issue, and an issue that touches so many people.  Just looking at the stats from up here in Scotland is shocking:  Two suicides a day; two out of three of those are male; it’s the leading killer of young men between the ages of 16 and 35.  I’m amazed more people aren’t writing about it.

Eve, who has been consistently covering more boy-related young adult/teen (sorry if I've got that wrong but I've never been quite sure of the difference) has run many interesting reviews lately on everything from knife crime ("The Knife That Killed Me" by Anthony McGowan) to suicide and lack of expression ("The Ostrich Boys") and I realise this is a whole area of books I know little about and I have become quite curious about them. I might have to investigate further.

*Note, I actually wrote this on Friday in case anyone is wondering about my mistimed eclipse.