Med Firewaters slogan Real music-Hard liquor har klubben på Sauchiehall Street i centrala Glasgow väl sammanfattat receptet på en lyckad kväll. Många klubbar lovar mycket men levererar lite. Detta gäller inte Firewater. Redan nedanför trappan i källaren pryds en hel vägg med Strummer & co i The Clash och förbererader dig för vad som väntar. M a o vill du höra RnB så hör du inte hemma här. Alkoholen märks helt enligt vad som lovas och musiken som spelas är som om DJ:n har blivit hembjuden till mig för att göra lite shyssta mixar av min egen skivsamling. Hela kvällen slungas ut kanonmusik från Kasabian, Courteeners, Stone Roses, View, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, The Clash, Glasvegas, Franz Ferdinand mm mm mm…. Fullkomligt lysande! Missa inte klubben eller den närliggande The Cellars (som förövrigt har omslaget till Joy Divisions Unknown pleasures som skylt) om du har dina vägar förbi Glasgow.  

This is Glasgow Cathedral, with the Museum of Religious Life on the left hand side. The lamps with what look like white crescents are actually showing the Glasgow coat of arms (the white crescents are the fish).

Hello!

Can I remind you that the STV online writer contest runs until Dec 6th. I have probably another 4 articles to go up on the site between now and then, and hits & comments generated go towards deciding the winner.

You can find my articles here: STV Write Factor

If you could comment on them I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

New gadget uses pulses to convince brain that stomach is full. £99. That’s quite steep for beans & lentils isn’t it?

41yr old adoptee in USA traced his real dad & found it was Charles Manson. You know adoptive parents are going “Ha! Win!”

‘Celeb’ chef Gino D’Acampo did time for stealing guitars from Paul Young. Him & Sam Fox have crimes against music in common.

My last comedy gig got rave reviews. A couple of guys with glow sticks blowing whistles throughout.

Next time a zookeeper gets attacked by animals, should it be released on dvd with Motson shouting “only the keeper to beat!”

Slight mix-up. My girlfriend told me she wanted Cam fun. I beat the shit out of my mate Cameron.

This self-assessment form is confusing. I’ve just done the self assessment, but can’t find where to put ‘no lumps found’.

If you got hooked on the intensity of farewell sex, would you be bye-sexual?

Manual labourers – when will they get good enough with the spade not to need the manual anymore?

Apparently kids develop their motor skills most during the toddler stage. So the little fucker’s got no excuse for crashing.

The Data Protection Act. When will our MPs realise that Star Trek The Next Generation isn’t real?

I made a reservation at the hotel. Manager was a bit annoyed, but the people of the Cherokee tribe seemed to really like it.

I won a promotion at work then got sacked. Supervisors tend to frown on Championship Manager.

Tailor’s dummies – I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying a suit from a man who still sucked a dummy.

If meat is murder, is Quorn attempted murder?

If Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, does that mean Jesus’ dad had weekend custody?

I played an origami expert at poker once. He folded.

I love throwing a ball for my dog, but he hates having to put on a dress and do all that dancing.

I used to paint landscapes. Until environmentalists complained.

I used to be a prize fighter. In my time I defeated a carriage clock, a book token, and a goldfish from the fair.

My girlfriend’s got a nice rack. She’s very into her medieval torture devices…

Condoms are an effective form of protection. When my girlfriend’s husband caught me I used one to strangle him to death.

Young people. Those who think listening to ‘New Order’ refers to switching on the shuffle on your iPod.

To be fair to Blairites/Brownites, we were all taught at school that division of labour leads to greater efficiency…

I can only seem to get gaelic programmes on my telly, and nothing at all on Sundays. I thought that wasn’t how you spelled Sky…

I’m not sure the Irish are over the Henry incident. They’ve written to DC Comics to ask to play in the Justice League.

Why aren’t lesbians referred to as ‘Kings’?

Just bought a sex manual. It’s basic stuff though. Entry level

The mind-altering powers that mean we can never beat the bookies: “What are the odds? They’re evens.”

If David Dickinson lost his perma-tan, would he pale into insignificance?

4 Politicians face jail over expenses claims. You know they’ll ask the Reliance driver for a receipt when he drops them there.

If you pass these jokes on anywhere, please credit www.comedyteddy.wordpress.com in doing so. I publish these gags up here for free to try to showcase my skills so I don’t think that’s much to ask. Thanks.

Teddy x

I think that this recession has allowed employers to get away with stuff they wouldn’t normally be able to do.

I have seen many adverts for jobs with employers asking for photos. As far as I knew this was illegal or at least heavily frowned upon. Furthermore people desperate for work will not question it. I have applied for jobs where they have wanted you to do extra duties that would be classed as another higher paid job. e.g. glass collector for club £5.80 ph. includes cleaning the toilets. How much cleaning, just sweeping up or full wash down? Cleaners get paid around £7-10 ph. Would the bar staff clean the toilets? Male or female? I posed these questions to the employer and never received a reply. I have no problem with cleaning. I do tons of it at home and don’t get paid for it.

I recently applied for a job with a “reputable” Glasgow cinema as a marketing and festival assistant/administrator. On interview I was told that on top of the substantial list of duties (bear in mind its minimum wage) I would have to work in different locations, work unpaid weekends and nights and work and clean the cinema bar.

I would like to add here that I have worked since I was 14 and have never been out of a job untill I was made redundant. I work hard and play hard. I see it unfair that due to a shortage of jobs employers take the mick.

Claw

As we’ve not had a geek dinner since May we thought it would be time to have not just one, but two.

The first dinner will be in Edinburgh on Friday 4th December at 19:30 in the Amber Restaurant at the top of Castle Hill.

The second dinner will be in Glasgow on Saturday 12th December at 21:30 in La Tasca on Renfield Street. We will be meeting in a pub close by at 19:00 to get the evening going, but if you prefer you can just come for the dinner.

Registration is required as we need to know numbers. More details about each are on the registration page.

[Register for the Edinburgh Geek Dinner] – [Register for the Glasgow Geek Dinner]

8 years since I moved to New Zealand from the UK. 8 years since I hugged my family and boyfriend goodbye and got on the first of 3 flights with no idea of what I was heading to. I cried most of the way from Glasgow to Heathrow, but thankfully got it together by the time I got to London. Just as well, as I was required to identify my bag on the tarmac after a x-ray revealed a ticking, metal object in my suitcase. Innocent enough (my mum had given me a Charles Rennie Mackintosh clock as a leaving gift), but taken very seriously as I was flying only a few months after 9/11 and tension at all international airports was running high. That goodbye ended up leading to 8 years away from my family and friends, although I had orginally intended to stay away for 6 months, maybe 1 year maximum.

It was in hindsight both the hardest and the wisest thing I have ever done. I grew and experienced in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible had I stayed in Scotland. I endured huge insecurities as I set up a new life in New Zealand, based on nothing more than knowing one person who was happy for me to sleep on his couch for a week or two. I was massively homesick and full of indecision, but I arrived in Auckland in the middle of a beautiful summer and I began to fall in love with the beauty of my new surroundings almost immediately. Anyone who has visited New Zealand will recognise this feeling. It is the little country that could. Full of humour, culture and pride – it might just be a little island in the middle of the Pacific but it has everything you need if you want to live in a country where people love their outdoor environment . It contains unbelievable scenery which, given the easily driveable size of the country, reveals awe-inspiring views  literally around every corner. You can ski (on a volcano) and surf in the same day. You can experience dramatic black sand beaches on the west coast, drive an hour and be sitting on a white untouched paradise on the east. 

I saw it all. Well nearly it all. Towards the end of my first year in New Zealand, I took my orange VW kombi camper and drove solo around the country for 2 months. It was amazing. It was also hard; travelling alone even in a country so welcoming is sometimes intimidating,  sometimes challenging but ultimately immensely rewarding. I might have preferred to have someone with me to enjoy everything I saw, but apart from that I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

It marked a trend for me to travel alone. Not always through choice. As I have got older my friends are settling down, many with houses and children and marriages now, and it becomes less viable for them to pack up and take off for several months. But I’m the kind of person who would rather go and experience something alone than miss out through lack of travelling companions. I think I’d like that to change. The next time I go somewhere new, I would like someone to share it with. For one, I might have some photographs of myself in nice places. As it happens though, I have several photo albums of beautiful landscape shots if anyone is interested.

I want to go back to New Zealand. I’m currently in Australia and will soon be returning to Scotland for the duration of my masters which starts next September, but I still call New Zealand home. I think I always will.

Key Professional Partnership Ltd (KPP) consists of two firms of Accountants – Richard Beattie & Co in Glasgow and GW Reid Associates in Ayr.

Although they mention individuals on their website much of the offerings seems to be aimed at businesses, both small family run and large companies, as they emphasise the payroll, bookkeeping, business planning and many other business advice services that they provide.

One of their specialist areas is acting as IR35 Accountants in Glasgow and the surrounding areas. For a mininal monthly fee (if you are a contractor) they will do your day to day bookkeeping and invoicing, process expense claims, VAT, PAYE and NI returns and complete annual accounts. They also offer to check your current and any future contracts to make sure that they are IR35 compliant thus saving you possible hassles with HMRC over your employment status.

Gawd Damn!

The wind is wild here. The days are gray, the rain is solid. It beats down on me as I walk through it,  with the wind blowing through my bones making them feel as if they were damp cloth. The streets are flooded.

It feels like winter just snuck up on us. I usually like stormy weather but not having cash makes it seem all the worse. I was particularly annoyed with having to cross a flooded car park. Shouldn’t that be flat, not curved like a bowl. Not only that the streets are perilous. I’ve noticed that busses don’t horse through the huge puddles any more, or at least a little less. But I have seen people in cars deliberately pull into the bus lane to hit the puddles near people.

I think if someone does that deliberately (accidents do happen) then I think you should be allowed to retaliate. Bounce a 2p coin of their back window.

I’m lucky to live near one of those Glasgow gyms. I’ve taken to the sauna/steam room to try fight the blues. It’s fairly cheap take a book. If you can afford it they do an unlimited use pass for £16 a month or you can buy month to month. You can use all the facilities as much as you like. I’m not preaching but a healthy body does equal healthy mind. I find that once I’ve been to the gym/sauna or whatever, that at least I’ve done something productive no mater how small.

Stay on.

Claw.

tattie toes play a kindof semi-made-up (isn’t everything?) basque balkan jazz folk strammash. with a bit of velvet underground violin screech and ceilidh stomp and shanty wooze. a rhythmic fucking delight. big ballsy gutsy singing from small lady. and a clattering kinetic rattle that reminds me occasionally of sunburned hand of the man. felt like dancing, but one beer don’t make me fleet of foot. totally digging this, despite the short set. so good i bought one of those wee record things that i have far too many of.  available from the fine people at nuts and seeds.

muscles of joy are like if the shaggs bred, had all their instruments stolen and were forced to go on stage, sing a cappella and play whatever bits of percussive tat and old instruments were lying out back. at a push you’d say pop music with a weirdy arthouse mentality. they might have had a song about packed lunches. but then again i’m an ultra-literal fella. anything with an accordion gets my vote. plus there were more ladeez on the stage last night than have cumulatively been at all the gigs i attended this year. which either says something about me, the music i chow down on, glasgow, women or all four. i dunno. this was a rather pleasing multilimbed beast.

finally, and equally brevitous, we arrive at volcano the bear. touring this time round as a terrible twosome of padden and moore. what it is, is stupid. what it is, is clever. what it is, is exotic erotic and strange. exhilarating. funny. funny haha. funny weird. funny satie. at it’s best it’s the eccentric colliding with the mundane. exemplified by a lidl carrier bag filled with tin goblets and seventies stainless steel ice-cream bowls. the juxtaposition of the sweaty realness of folk and jazz with the absurd tootling of musical straws and tracked and taped concrète. it’s the grin of slight and knowing silliness tempered with the smashing of drum and mangling of geetar. it was fun in the same way the residents are or sun city girls were. which is odd since this kindof thing is usually po of faced and stroked of chin. hell i found my feet tapping and hips aswaying every now and again. so there you have it. a tonic for the mind and body that’ll put you in a buggered trance while hollering into yr faceholes. like red bull that doesn’t taste like tramp piss. you can sticker that on the next record fellas.

9:30-12:00 Holy Liturgy in the Romanian Church

12:00-14:00 Lunch in the New Hall,behind the Romanian Church building – please bring something to eat and drink for yourselves, preferably fish or non-meat food,due to Christmas fasting-period.

14:00-15:00 Boys Brigade Show in the Shettleston Old Parish Church of Scotland,beside the Romanian Church building; there will be over 100 Scottish people attending and we are also invited.

15:00-16:30 Christmas Carols Concert
- Romanians in Aberdeen’s Choir
- Romanians in Glasgow’s Choir
- A Russian Choir- still to be confirmed

Va asteptam cu drag!

Veripelto
Mina, Denise
Like, 2008

Skotlantilaisen Denise Minan dekkareiden teemoja ovat mm. naisiin kohdistuva väkivalta, lasten seksuaalinen hyväksikäyttö, perhedynamiikka, sosiaalinen epätasa-arvo ja syrjäytyminen. Rankkojen aiheiden lisäksi kirjojen miljöö Glasgow on rähjäinen ja sateinen, eivätkä ”sankarittaretkaan” ole perinteisiä kaunottaria, tai edes yksiselitteisen hyviä ihmisiä vaan tavallisia kuolevaisia, jotka vaihtelevalla menestyksellä yrittävät selvitä ”elämästä hengissä”.

Denise Minan dekkariuran aloittaneen nk. Glasgow-trilogian (Garnethill, Pako ja Päätös) tapaan ”Veripellossakin” rikoksia selvittää nuori nainen. Kunnollisesta, työväenluokkaisesta katolilaisperheestä lähtöisin oleva Patricia ”Paddy” Meehan työskentelee lähettinä Scottish Daily News -sanomalehden toimituksessa. Toimittajan työstä haaveileva, kunnianhimoinen Paddy kiinnostuu rikoksesta, jossa kahta poikaa syytetään pienen lapsen raa´asta murhasta. Rikos koskettaa Glasgow’n katolista yhteisöä joten Paddy joutuu miettimään journalismin etiikkaa. Samalla hän itsenäistyy väistellessään perheensä odotuksia ja venyttäessään katolisuuden asettamia rajoituksia.

Fiktiivisen toimittaja-Paddyn tarinan rinnalla kulkee omituinen tosikertomus pikkurikollisen Patrick ”Paddy” Meehanin (1928-1994) elämästä.  Mielestäni em. ratkaisu tekee fiktiosta todenmakuisemman, mutta ei välttämättä miellytä kaikkia lukijoita.

Veripellon tapahtumat sijoittuvat 1980-luvulle, jolloin Britannian pääministerinä oli Margaret Thatcher ja maata repivät lakot ja valtava työttömyys. Ajankuva tarkentuu ja hieman kevenee viittauksilla musiikkiin ja muotiin.

Veripelto on ensimmäinen viidestä Paddy Meehan-sarjan dekkarista, kakkososa Suden hetki on ilmestynyt tänä vuonna.

Ira Palvanen

Veripelto Ratamossa

Kirjailijan kotisivut

Hi,

Two new articles from me in the STV contest have gone up. I need you to read them and post comments on them (on the STV site) to help me…

One article is on our attitudes to space travel, sparked by me reading about the death of a cosmonaut from the 1960s, and the wife of a current astronaut giving birth while he was in space:

Astronauts article

The other article is about a Canadian singer called Justin Bieber tweeting about a personal appearance, which led to a crush. Because “his people” initially refused police demands to tweet telling the crowd to disperse, an executive at Def Jam records was arrested:

Power of Twitter article

Teddy x

Not far from the old bridge is this clock tower – I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it so can’t say anything learned about it! It reminds me of the Tollbooth Steeple on nearby Trongate – the colour of both the stone and the clock are the same.

I wrote this essay for the artists Bik Van Der Pol (http://www.bikvanderpol.net/) in connection with their recent exhibition at the CCA, Glasgow.

MICHAEL STONE: INVOKING THE GHOSTS OF GULLIVER

In the UK, we are used to the popular derision of contemporary art practice – if tabloids relish the opportunity for incredulous puns about the antics of crackpot artists, elsewhere  commentators deplore the loss of virtuosity and pronounce discomfort at the thought that someone somewhere might be taking us all for (an expensive) ride: the Emperor’s new clothes are (not) on show. There is something liberating in the fact that the popular consciousness allows for “crackpot” art, even if that is only in derision. But what does it mean for someone like Michael Stone, a convicted loyalist terrorist, to claim his action in throwing a rucksack packed with assorted weaponry into Stormont was “performance art’?

Stone was jailed in 1989 for killing 3 men, and injuring dozens more, in a sectarian attack on mourners attending a funeral at Milltown cemetery, North Belfast, 2 years previously. Sentenced to a total of 684 years, he was released in 2000 from HMP Maze under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, by which time he had taken up painting as a hobby. In the years between his release and his Stormont re-arrest, he occupied himself as an artist, whose paintings fetched between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds work. In 2001, the Engine Room gallery in Belfast hosted an exhibition of Stone’s work, the Belfast Telegraph noting that “he seems genuinely committed to an artistic career” and (approvingly) that “There is no suggestion that he is involved in any of the rackets – drugs, prostitution, protection – that have become a career for so many of the other men released early under the Good Friday Agreement”. Even though Stone sometimes tackled contentious subjects in his paintings without engendering much effect, gun-touting poses he re-enacted for photographs in 2004 were condemned, and the Stormont action – apparently titled “Never Say Never” – had Stone jailed and branded a lunatic. If prisoners are encouraged to pursue an interest in art while incarcerated, as Stone was, are we to impose limits on how that interest manifests itself, or impose restrictions on the subject matter they can tackle? Stone was very much isolated, (the volatile, misunderstood artist of Romantic construction), but if we want art to converge with social practice, are there caveats to that? How far does art encroach on criminality?

In some respects Stone’s story resonates with the experience of one of Scotland’s ex-con cause celebres, Jimmy Boyle. Styled by himself (and others), as “’Scotland’s Most Violent Man”, “ the most notorious criminal in Scotland, a violent product of the Glasgow slums”, Boyle was a celebrity inmate and hardman serving a life sentence for the murder of a renown gangster, William “Babs” Rooney. Art therapy at HMP Barlinnie led to an apparently Damascene conversion, and, in 1976, while he was still in prison, he was commissioned by the Craigmillar Festival Society to design a large recumbent sculpture -“Gulliver”- for them. The Craigmillar Festival Society was pioneering in many ways, not least in its genesis amongst a group of local women exasperated with municipal indifference to the area and its people. In the 1970s, its profile as a model promoting the efficacy of community arts initiatives was international. Without doubt, this worked in Boyle’s favour, and on release, he enjoyed a high profile and reportedly high earnings as an artist. His transformation from lawless gangland enforcer to well-heeled, well-behaved sculptor is something of a civic and national proverb. We see the city in the man: we see the social and political value of art in its redemptive powers to integrate the disenfranchised individual with the powers of his own expression, in uniting the divided self and more than this, we see evidence of an economic miracle. These days – with notable contemporaneity  – Boyle appears in newspaper interviews as a multi-millionaire property developer, doing up riads in Marrakesh, while current cultural policy promotes the arts as almost failsafe engines for recession-proof growth, making Boyle something of a poster boy for the benefits of exploiting “creative skills”.

Boyle generates the type of expressive work that formed the bedrock of art therapy in its infancy and is still, in some contexts, pursued as an irrefutable good. It conforms to a model of practice long regarded as defunct in art schools – if it is good enough to provide respite from those personal or social problems identified by mental health or regeneration committees, it is not really good enough for professional art education (even if those so educated administer or deliver the therapy). Consequently, like Jack Vettriano, Fife’s self-taught king of stiffly nostalgic soft-core noir, the outmoded Boyle has been blindsided by the critical art establishment; his success has more to do with his notoriety than his significance as an artist.  Reciprocally, Boyle has dismissed contemporary art, emblematically marking “Sensation” “the biggest pile of rubbish” he’d ever seen, and making claims that he will not sell to Saatchi: “Because I don’t like what he does and can afford not to.” “Not selling to Saatchi” has become a well -rehearsed cliché even amongst currents of the contemporary mainstream, as if it were some guarantee of artistic integrity, of concern with “higher” imperatives than those of the market. So where does this take Stone, who not only claims he has sold to Saatchi, but whose declared forays into performance and re-enactment are much more in keeping with the general trends in the academy, in the museums, in critical analysis and the market? Can his action be determined “art”? Is he precluded from performance practice because he has not earned a degree? Because of his criminal record, and the specific nature of that criminal record? He has a demonstrable commitment to artistic practice, what does this count for? Are we to admit that there are, after all, objective standards by which art succeeds or fails? Are such standards moral, ethical or political, assuming they are not formal?

There are many interesting parallels between the propensities and systems of art and crime, not least of which is intent. Marcel Duchamp foregrounded the notion of artistic intent through the Readymade – particularly “Fountain” – proposing that a work of art could be enacted through choice (rather than manufactured through craft). Rejected from the open, avowedly non-selective, non-hierarchical exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was deliberately adjudicated “not art”. In 1967, interviewed on Canadian radio, Duchamp said “It’s not the visual aspect of the Readymade that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists.… Visuality is no longer a question: the Readymade is no longer visible, so to speak. It is completely gray matter. It is no longer retinal.” This statement came at a time when his influence on a generation was well established. Though he tacitly implies that at some point in it’s conception the Readymade was necessarily visible, it was in principle an idea which merely required the service of objects for its enactment. The object forms it adopted between 1913 and 1917 are important only so far as they are conceptual facilitators: conceptual and performative practice in the 60s and 70s developed and extended the remit of the Readymade beyond the object.

Despite the Readymade’s initial and most complete realisation being in its exclusion from exhibition, presented in exhibition (from the late 1950s on), its effect in influence was to devolve the power of choice to the artist within the confines of the “White Cube”. However, just as the object form had a limited lifespan in relation to the Readymade, it seems that the “White Cube” context could be dispensible too: the gallery is only a surrogate for audience. Through enacting the Readymade, Duchamp imposed an active duty of intent on the viewer. This active duty is where the Readymade abuts with Situationist theory: Duchamp may have had to use an institutional context to effect the Readymade, but its true legacy is in the creative potential of the viewer, not the affirmation of the hegemony of gallery or museum. Situationist culture “introduces total participation…it is the organization of the directly lived moment…(in which) everyone will become an artist, i.e. a producer-consumer of total culture creation.” Some notion of “participation” has framed the development of recent cultural policy – much of the Creative Scotland Bill hangs off it. If everyone is (and can “participate” as) an artist, if active viewing is the minimum necessary foundation for establishing art art, what is there to prevent Stone formulating his action as art?

It is maybe appropriate at this point to consider Joseph Beuys’s conception of “Social Sculpture/Social Architecture”. In 1980, 4 years after Boyle’s “Gulliver” was installed in a field at Craigmillar, Beuys created a blackboard diptych during the Edinburgh Festival entitled “Jimmy Boyle Days”. Quite what Beuys made of Boyle’s output is hard to determine, suffice to say that Beuys was not suggesting that everyone should paint or sculpt in pursuit of being an artist: he was concerned with developing art as a “politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history… This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity….” “Creativity isn’t the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I’ve come to realise, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever.”

In this sense, and bearing in mind his abolition of entry requirements to the class of “Monumental Sculpture” in Dusseldorf, Beuys moved towards rubbishing the notion that “artist” is, or should be, a specialised, professional status. Indeed, in fulfilling Beuys’s ambitions for art to become a “politically productive force”, there must be universal creative emancipation – there can be no professional status: the artist claiming such status is a Pharisee. Equally, in terms of the Situationist imperative to introduce “total participation”, there can be no qualifications, no hierarchies. Art is whatever is chosen – and enacted – by the artist, that is by anyone behaving as an artist. Significantly that includes recognising art, “active aesthetics”, perhaps in the tradition of the flaneur, who configures urban experience in accordance with personal  narratives. Karlheniz Stockhausen was widely condemned for declaring 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”, but if 9/11 functioned as art for him, if his experience of 9/11 produced an aesthetic apprehension, who can deny it?

If everybody can be an artist (the current drive for participation underscores this); if art can be any choice, enactment or aesthetic experience – must art always be benign, therapeutic and economically productive? Are these values basic determinants of what art is? Is there a place for art to be anything else or does that necessarily take art into the ever expanding scope of illegality and criminality? Is art always “good”, “acceptable”? Stone was found guilty of attempted murder and criminal damage. In Stone’s trial, Peter Bond, an artist and senior lecturer at Central St Martins, was called as an expert witness in whose opinion Stone’s action could “come under the ambit” of performance art as long as there was no intention of using the weaponry or exploding the devices. Imputing Stone’s artistic intent depends on the planned failure of his criminal activity, what does this add – or take away from – the range of artistic practice?

Gerry lookalike on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross - from eBay.

 

By Cara Sulieman

SCOTTISH hunk Gerard Butler has shown his soft side by donating his teddy bear lookalike to Children in Need.

The big-hearted actor – best known for his testosterone charged role in blockbuster film 300 – has added his autograph to the prize.

The cuddly toy featured on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, where one was made of each guest on Friday 12 November.

Dressed in a red cape, brown pants and carrying a spear, the bear is styled on the star’s role as King Leonidas in the 2007 film which saw Butler screaming his way through the sword and sandals flick.

“This is Sparta!”

The stuffed Butler bear shouts “this is Sparta” when pushed in the tummy, and sports a drawn on six pack.

Made by Build-A-Bear – who make the official Children in Need Pudsey Bear – bids had already reached £430 last night (Tues), with three days left to go.

When the 40-year-old saw his doppelganger, he broke out into a big grin, saying: “I’ve had a couple of dolls made of me, but not a bear.”

And when he heard it speak, he added: “It sounds like my mum!”

The Paisley-born star was in the UK for the European premiere of his new film, Law Abiding Citizen, which was held in Glasgow.

It was also his 40th birthday on the day he appeared on the show – and a weekend of celebrations in London and Scotland followed.

As well as donating his signature to the cause, Butler filmed a link for the main Children in Need programme on BBC last Friday, urging people to donate to the charity.

See more of our pictures at our Flickr site and videos at our dedicated channel,  Deadline TV.

Back in the days, Glasgow art-pop band the Yummy Fur, had members like Alex Kapranos and Paul Thomson(Franz Ferdinand) and were led by Jackie McKeown(1990s) or John McKeown. The band existed seven years, from 1992 untill 1999.

But for the fans (I don’t count myself as one), good news! The band is getting back together for the first USA tour ever!

McKeown and Thomson will be in the band, Kapranos will be not. Also, a best-of compilation will be released.

Yummy Fur reunion dates:

The Governement Actuaries Department (GAD) will be opening a new office in Glasgow in the New Year.

GAD provide actuarial advice to the public sector anywhere in the world and are growing their insurance team because, as they explain,

“Actuaries can play a key role in helping insurance companies run efficiently and effectively. They can also help insurance regulators and others in the public sector understand the work of insurance companies.”

The insurance industry focuses on the measurement and management of risk, particularly important in the current economic climate.

For more information about GAD and the insurance industry, read their latest newsletter.

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This is the third report for my How Do You Jew? project on Jewish identity.

Rose Suttner Barlow grew up a Jewish girl in Apartheid South Africa, a minority within a minority within a minority. Her minority status as a Jew within the white population in overwhelmingly black Africa was obvious. Her minority status within the Jewish community was a result not of demographics, but of the traditionally limited role of women in Jewish life at that time and place. Years later, as the Apartheid system was dismantled in her homeland, Rose learned of a more diverse, inclusive Judaism and gained equal rights as a Jewish woman thousands of miles away in her adopted country, the United States.

South Africa

Rose’s Jewish journey has been a lifelong one, and it has paralleled her physical travels away from her childhood home in a   tightly knit Jewish neighborhood in Johannesburg to Cape Town,the DeBeers diamond mines, England, Scotland, and finally to Marin County north of San Francisco, where she has settled to raise her family. As Rose increasingly engaged in the wider, non-Jewish world and encountered diversity that was heretofore unknown to her, she shed many of the communal and ritual aspects of Judaism that had never fully or satisfyingly been incorporated into her identity. It was only once she became a mother and came to live in the liberal, diverse and tolerant Bay Area Jewish community that she found that there was a way back into Jewish life that provided her meaning and purpose.

In many ways, Rose has reinvented herself Jewishly, but she believes she had done so on the basis of a strong cultural foundation. “Even though I was alienated from Jewish communal life [for many years], I was never alienated from my Jewish self,” she says. Rose’s parents became baalei teshuvah when she was in her 20’s and her mother became ill with cancer (she died not long afterwards in 1986), but this was many years after Rose’s experiences growing up with parents who were at the time ethnically and culturally Jewish, rather than shul-going shomrei mitzvot.

A South African farthing from 1960, the year Rose was born

Rose was born in Johannesburg in 1960 to a mother whose intellectually inclined family immigrated to South Africa from Lithuania and Russia during WWI, and a father who came from a more business oriented family that had been in the country for three generations. Her father was a member of the first generation in his family to go to college, becoming an electrical engineer and going into the family business manufacturing car radios (founded by his father who had had no higher education). Rose’s mother, whose own mother had been accepted to medical school and father was a lawyer, studied social work.

As a school girl, Rose attended a whites-only public school with a large Jewish student population owing to the fact that the neighborhood was predominantly Jewish. Her parents did not send her to a cheder or afternoon Jewish studies program, leaving her formal Jewish education to the once a week session in which Jewish children were separated from the other students into their own class (for religious instruction) and given workbooks on Jewish topics from which to teach themselves. The Jewish Board of Deputies had worked out this arrangement with the public school authorities, apparently leaving teachers to instruct the children out of the plan.

Although Rose’s father’s parents went to synagogue regularly (a Modern Orthodox one, which was the normative form of Judaism at the time in this particular community), her parents did not. They did not keep kosher or regularly light the Shabbat candles, but Rose and her younger brother were kept home from school on every Jewish holiday and her brother officially marked his becoming bar mitzvah.

She did participate in the Habonim Zionist youth group for a short time, though she did not attend its summer camp. Nonetheless, Rose developed a strong attachment to Israel from her first visit at the age of thirteen and from her knowledge of her mother’s close relationship with a cousin and good friend who lived there. Her self-education on the Holocaust through reading works on the bookshelves at home also helped shape her identity.

Perhaps if President Obama had been leading the seders, Rose's experience would have been more positive. It appears that the President knows how to engage a crowd, even around a seder table.

The message Rose received from her family and her community was that she was expected to succeed in secular life, but that advancement as an adult Jew was not an option. She recalls sitting at the foot of the very long Pesach seder table year after year, unable to hear anything but the mumbling of the older men at the head. The most she could have hoped for would be her eventual move to the middle of the table, to the women’s section, once she was a mother. She characterizes her Jewish upbringing and identity formation as overall positive. “I learned by osmosis by having been placed in my formative years in settings where I was surrounded by Jews.” But she adds, “The gender message remained problematic.”

By the time Rose was in late elementary school and high school, she was aware of the political situation in South Africa and that among those standing up against Apartheid were many Jews, most of whom were very secular and on the extreme left (In fact, a distant cousin on her father’s side was imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela). Many of Roses’s teachers were Jewish and exposed their students to the situation more than was done in other schools. Roses’s classes took field trips and was twinned with a school in Soweto. Rose herself, when she was an older high school student and in college, was personally acquainted with fellow young Jews who were members of the National Union of Student Leaders fighting against Apartheid, some of whom were conscientious objectors against the military draft.

Nelson Mandela revisiting his cell at Robben Island in 1994

“You could not sit on the fence,” Rose says about Apartheid. “Either you were for it or against it.” Against it, Rose chose contribute to the cause through her profession. She studied at the University of Witswatersrand for two years and transferred to the University of Cape Town to finish her Bachelors degree in psychology and industrial sociology. Upon graduation, she went to work in industrial relations in the mining industry for five years in the mid-1980’s. Rose was a member of a team that worked as change agents at De Beers, making significant strides toward eliminating the culture of (white) managerial violence against (black) mine workers through the implementation and enforcement of newly developed policies.

A book of interviews with Jewish South African activists, edited by Rose's brother, Immanuel Suttner,

Proud of the impact she had made, Rose chose to leave South Africa with her fiance (now her husband) so that he could return to his native England to pursue an advanced degree. Although the couple left for personal-educational reasons, it is evident that the question of the quality of their future life in Apartheid South Africa was lurking in the background. Unbeknownst to them, secret talks that would lead to the dismantling of Apartheid were already underway as the two of them were packing up and departing for London.

Rose and her husband, who is not Jewish and has not converted, were married soon after they arrived in England. They remained in the UK for seven years, living in both England and Scotland, where Rose worked in human resources in the oil industry. Rose claims that although she was not associating herself with the Jewish community during those years, she “never lost touch with [her] internal Jewish clock.” When a holiday came around, it was if she had “an atavistic impulse to get off the merry-go-round to contemplate or celebrate.” In 1994, while living in Aberdeen which was devoid of Jews save for Rose, she suddenly had the desire to have a Pesach seder – just for her and her husband. So, she travelled all the way to Glasgow to buy the required pesadik supplies.

In 1996, Rose, her husband and their baby daughter left the UK to start the next chapter in their lives in California. Here, they had a second daughter, and both girls are receiving a solid Jewish education in day schools,synagogue programs, Jewish camps and youth groups. Her older daughter has already become bat mitzvah and her younger one is preparing for hers next year. The Jewish Community Center (JCC) nursery school in their town was the gateway to an active Jewish life involving not only education for the girls, but also plenty of adult Jewish educational programming and a variety of volunteer, philanthropic and lay leadership roles in the Bay Area Jewish community for Rose.

Madame A.F. Aude and her two daughters, 1899, Mary Cassatt

Rose always had the Jewish proclivity for analysis and debate, and she has applied this to her recent study of Jewish texts. She finds that her increased Jewish and Hebrew literacy has allowed her to really grow in her Judaism. Rose describes it as “a virtuous cycle. The increased literacy promotes increased engagement, which in turn leads me to yet more learning.”

Rose is very grateful to now live in a community where Jewish pluralism is celebrated. When she was a girl in South Africa, she had no inkling that the Jewish community could include anyone other than Lithuanian and Polish Jews. Similarly, she had not had the opportunity to establish close connections with people of different ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds until she went out into the challenging world of the mining industry to try to make a difference. It has been through her discovery of the other that she has been able to rediscover and re-imagine her Jewish self.

It is not uncommon for Jewish women of Rose’s generation to reconnect with their Judaism and the Jewish community through their children. It is an especially pointed experience for a woman who felt Jewishly disenfranchised as girl to be able to empower her daughters. Few women, however, have travelled as far as Rose has in order to come home.

© 2009 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

A final picture for now of the old bridge, which I gather from one of the comments on a previous post is still used to carry freight (though I wasn’t aware of this – you can see how overgrown the bridge has got so I was surprised that anything is still able to move along the tracks!). This picture was taken mid-morning – I just happened to get the right angle at the right time.

Renfield Lane