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Taken from Rankin: A Photographic Essay of The Macallan Estate (£40), www.themacallan.com
BOOKS Photographer Rankin is to pay homage to the Scottish Highlands in upcoming book Rankin: A Photographic Essay of The Macallan Estate (£40) to be published in May this year. Rankin was commissioned in 2008 by the folks at Macallan to create a limited of photographs for the first year of their series, The Macallan Masters of Photography. edition
series
COMEDY Funny lady Ruby Wax is set to appear in Glasgow with musician Judith Owen as part of new show Ruby Wax: Losing It. Check her out at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on Wed 19 May.
FILM Following this year’s Film Festival, Glasgow Film Theatre continue their NT Live series, showcasing live plays filmed at the National Theatre in London and broadcast live by satellite to 230 cinema screens in the UK and worldwide. The Habit of Art, a new play by Alan Bennett, which imagines a meeting between Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, will screen on 22 Apr. While down the road at the CCA, three new film strands have been introduced: Distant Voices, Beta Movement and Reflections on Black. Look out for a screening of Scottish classic, I Know Where I’m Going, as well as Aurélien Froment’s Théâtre de poche (Pocket Theatre).
MUSIC Groove Armada, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Shed Seven, Kate Nash, We Are Scientists, The Black Keys, DJ Yoda and Adam Beyer are joining the bill 8 THE LIST 1–15 Apr 2010
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for TiTP. Elsewhere, the first acts for this year’s Wickerman Festival, (Fri 21–Sat 22 Jul), have been announced with Ocean Colour Scene, Futureheads, Sons and Daughters and Codeine Velvet Club all making an appearance. Lastly, 11 years after the band’s Bowlie Weekender launched the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, Belle & Sebastian are to curate the ATP event in December, at Butlin’s, Minehead. ‘Bowlie 2’ will round off a year of ATP tenth anniversary celebrations.
T H E AT R E National Library of Scotland have launched their latest roster of free events. The programme, which begins on Thu 15 Apr, launches with Dramatic Developments: Scottish Theatre From the Seventies to the Nineties, a lecture exploring the roots and nature of theatre in Scotland and its lasting trends. See www.nls.uk/events/booking for more. VISUAL ART And finally, check out Air Iomlaid [On Exchange], which runs at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from 10 Apr–9 May and shows the culmination of an 18-month long project, funded through the Scottish Arts Council, linking children from Tollcross Primary School in Edinburgh with children from Bun-sgoil Shleite on the Isle of Skye. The exhibition will show the children’s sketchbooks and drawings, as well as large-scale artworks in which the landscapes of Skye and Edinburgh are interpreted from the perspective of both residents and visitors.
Channel Hopper
Dispatches from the sofa, with Brian Donaldson
■ An entertainment magazine discussing a TV programme analysing the corrosive nature of our celebrity world might be a shocking example of culture eating itself, but True Stories: Starsuckers (More4, Tue 6 Apr, 10pm) is deserving of our attention. Sure, some of the observations in Chris Atkins’ film might be a tad obvious: more people than ever before want to be famous; aiming advertising at kids is a really, really bad thing; and having a five-year-old go on a publicity whirlwind might just have a negative impact on his schooling. And what would happen if we mocked up a paparazzi frenzy with snappers chasing a non-celebrity couple: would people stop in the street to try and catch a glimpse of the fleeing duo? Well, duh, who wouldn’t?
Watch this, suckers
But when the documentary delves into its meaty core, the truly disturbing aspects to our obsession with fame bob to the surface like Elvis’ dead poo. In a world where proper journalism is being squeezed into extinction by newspaper cost-cutting and the internet’s ‘info-chaos’ and where crazy concepts like ‘fact- checking’ are considered to be quaintly old-fashioned, we see Atkins’ team phoning the ‘Got a Story’ desks on a bunch of tabloids with made up tales of B- list excess. Later on, we witness secretly filmed sit-downs with some blood-guzzling hacks who don’t envisage any harm in illegally obtaining medical records of the stars. I mean, how much do we really care if AN Other-Celeb has spent their cash earned through years of treading the red carpet on a chemical peel?