The Skinny November 2020

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November 2020 Issue 178

SCREEN TIME From digital film festivals to live-streamed music – escape into the arts

January 2020

Books

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Art January 2020

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The Skinny's soundtrack playlist Seu Jorge - Life on Mars Kim Jung Mi - Haenim Corona - The Rhythm of the Night Air - Playground Love Cat Power - Sea of Love The Ronettes - Be My Baby Quincy Jones Orchestra - Soul Bossa Nova The The - This Is the Day Minnie Riperton - Les Fleurs Michael Kiwanuka - Cold Little Heart Iris DeMent - Let the Mystery Be Anthony Willis - TOXIC (score) Dies Irae from Mozart's Requiem Felix Da Housecat Vs Pop Tarts feat. Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green & Chloë Sevigny - Money, Success, Fame, Glamour Funkadelic - Hit It And Quit It Nina Simone - Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter Sufjan Stevens - Mystery of Love Listen to this playlist on Spotify – search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

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Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked – If you could escape into a fictional universe, which fictional universe would it be?

Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "The 1990s."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "The Pixar universe – it has rats that can cook!

Toys that can talk!

Complete ecological collapse!"

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "Snowpiercer, but the specific bits where Chris Evans is hot and overthrowing capitalism."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Cheers' bar. ‘Sometimes you want to go, where nobody has the plague.’"

Tallah Brash Music Editor "One that has the aesthetic of a Wes Anderson film, the wackiness of The Mighty Boosh and the acceptance of Schitt's Creek."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "Mordor. Or is that too realistic?"

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "Black Books. Wine, books, escapades, more than one friend allowed near you at any one time. Bliss."

Katie Goh Intersections Editor, "Lyra's Jordan in His Dark Materials.

Daemons! Child abduction! Religious fanatics!"

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "The magical wonderland of climate change denial, complete with spin-off series Plandemic: a Fantasy. 'Ah, the bliss of delusion. "

Heather McDaid Books Editor "The Good Place (hopefully), the Medium Place (more likely)."

Sales & Business

Production

Rachael Hood Art Director, Production Manager "I like this universe, I just want it to be better."

Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor "To be taken in a musky cloud of sparkles to the Radical Faerie realm."

Fiona Hunter Designer "Twin Peaks for a slice of cherry pie at the R&R."

Sandy Park Commercial Director "One where we can legally see actual people in person, not on a screen."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "Given the general state of humanity I think it's time to hand the keys over to benevolent AI overlords so I'll go for The Culture (Iain M Banks)."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Yes."

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Finland."

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Editorial Words: Rosamund West

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November 2020 — Chat

ur November issue is loosely themed around the escapism offered by screens at this point in history. We’re reliant on them, right now, for connection, communication, dreaming, remembering. The shift of cultural events into a digital realm has been one of the many marked effects of 2020’s social restrictions, and it’s allowing us to maintain a connection with the arts (and even help support artists) while we’re all stuck at home (again).

This month, some more of the autumn’s annual film festivals have pivoted to online presentation, offering the opportunity to engage with some specialist world-leading cinema without the need to go outside or put on trousers. We’ve got a rundown of some of the rare opportunities on offer through Africa in Motion, Scotland Loves Anime and French Film Festival, which may provide you with a renewed resolve to engage with their fascinating programmes once you’ve finished exploring the Real Housewives universe.

Further film features include a pair of articles by writers participating in early career development programmes we have had the good fortune to partner. Scottish Queer International Film Festival published an open call for a Scotland-based QTIPOC writer to cover the festival for The Skinny, and you will find their round-up on p19. We’ve also been working with Disability Arts Online on a project since the beginning of the year, and are excited to finally be in position to publish the first fruits of their labour, as one writer offers an appraisal of Netflix’s Ratched in the context of feminism and mental health. We also meet director Henry Blake to discuss how his experience as a youth worker has informed his debut County Lines, while Mogul Mowgli director Bassam Tariq shares a little of the film’s formation, including working with Riz Ahmed to dig into second-generation Pakistani immigrant identity.

Edinburgh Art Festival’s annual emergent artist showcase, Platform, has, like everything, been delayed, but this month arrives at City Art Centre offering a prominent er… platform... to four artists. We talk to Mark Bleakley, Rhona Jack, Susannah Stark and Rabindranath A Bhose to learn about their diverse practices.

In Music, we meet Scottish hip-hop’s fastest rising star, the now-SAY Award-winning NOVA aka Shaheeda Sinckler, to hear about her incredible year of ascendance. The ever-innovative Cryptic have launched an ambitious new approach to live streaming, soon featuring Ela Orleans and Heir of the Cursed (whose Instagram Live on Quarantine Cabaret was a definite highlight of my Lockdown 1).

We meet artists Luke Fowler and Vikki Morton to learn more about Sotto Voce, their project formed through a collaboration between Glasgow gallery The Modern Institute and record label Redstone Press with an impressive roll-call of production and design. Kobi Onyame talks to Glasgow-based rapper Jubemi Iyuku, aka Bemz, about his life and musical journey ahead of the release of his latest EP, The Saint of Lost Causes. In a return for our local music page, we talk to Glasgow’s MEMES for a trackby-track guide to their new self-titled EP. In Theatre, we speak to writer and director Hannah Lavery about paying homage to Sheku Bayoh, the father and Kirkcaldy resident who died in police custody in 2015, in her new play presented by National Theatre of Scotland through a pay-whatyou-can live stream this month. Books meets Rebecca Tamás to discuss the relationship between the human and the non-human and her new essay collection exploring this era of tipping point between man and the natural world. In Comedy, we talk to some of the performers whose Twitter videos have captured the energy of the comedy club during the long period of live closure.

Intersections presents a deep dive into the murky world of social media moderation and its long terms effects on the mental health of those doing it. And one Scotland-based American shares the difficult experience of watching another divisive Trump election season play out from across the pond.

Closing the magazine and our film / screen special, our regular Q&A is this month answered by a lyrical Mark Cousins, who reveals why you shouldn’t have oysters with Roman Polanski (in case you needed to be told) and why the arctic tern is the bird to be, its annual globe-trotting migration offering an impossible dream for 2020.

Cover Artist Viki Mladenovski Viki Mladenovski is an illustrator living in Berlin. She creates colourful, surreal images intertwined with feminist and environmental themes. Besides digital art, she mainly works with risography and lino cutting. You can check her work out at vikimladenovski.myportfolio.com or @viki.art.studio on Instagram.

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Love Bites: Back in My Body Love Bites

This month’s columnist reflects on how learning BTS’ dance routines put her back in her body Words: Katie Hawthorne

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November 2020 — Chat

here’s this moment in the music video for BTS’ hit single Dynamite when Park Jimin twirls. He’s dressed in double denim, lit with a golden-hour glow, and he just spins and spins as if gravity’s a myth. I copy him and feel weightless for a split second – before crashing into my wardrobe.

Back in January, my head left my body. I’d been depressed before, but not like that. My tight, horrible little brain was drifting somewhere above my useless sack of a body, totally disconnected in a way that made all physical activity feel pointless. I started medication a month before lockdown began, so, in a weird twist of fate, the world shut down just as I was ready to rejoin it. All I wanted was to be in a crowded club full of friends and strangers, spill drinks down myself and feel the bass in my gut: to experience the kind of carefree, physical joy that would finally put my body back together.

Until then, I’ve found an alternative source of dopamine: learning K-Pop choreography in my bedroom. I tie up my hair, put my thermal leggings on like a real dancer, queue a playlist and flail my way through BTS’ dizzying, all-out dance routines.

I’m terrible at it. I can’t touch my toes, and yet the seven members of the world’s biggest boyband remain intimidatingly glamorous even while hopping on one leg – the key move in my favourite of their songs, Baepsae. The foot-shuffle required in Boy With Luv makes me look like a garden gnome and the high-kick gymnastics of Idol render me a health hazard. But when I catch my attempts in the mirror, and laugh outright at myself, it feels like a gift. I’m back in my body. Silly head on silly shoulders, finding fun in the world again.

Crossword Solutions Across 1. ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS 11. GUILTY PLEASURE 12. PENCIL CASE 14. EMANCIPATE 16. WELL STOCKED 18. SIMBA 19. THE WITCH 20. BEMUSEMENT 23. DOT MATRIX PRINTER 28. TEACUPS 30. EDDY 32. CLEANSE 33. A BETTER PLACE 37. LURKING 38. TABLEWARE 39. INSTANT 40. TWIST YOUR ARM 41. PIGEONS 42. SERF 45. EGOTISM 46. MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO 48. PROPRIETOR 49. FORSOOTH 52. CROWN 53. DISOBEDIENT 57. SORRENTINO 58. MAID MARIAN 59. BETTER CALL SAUL 61. ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES Down 1. AUGMENTED REALITY 2. IMITATE 3. ANTICLIMAX 4. CAP 5. SPACESHIP 6. NORTHBOUND 7. WHEEL 8. IGLOO 9. OZARK 10. STEED 13. COSTUME DESIGNER 15. PAC 17. EMBER 21. ESCAPISM 22. ESPLANADE 24. RELIGIOUS LEADER 25. X-FACTOR 26. RASPBERRY 27. EMBRACING 29. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS 31. DERRING-DO 34. THE BEEB 35. DICTATOR 36. DEN 43. FEVER DREAM 44. BOYS IN BLUE 46. MORAN 47. HYMN SHEET 50. OAR 51. ORIGAMI 53. DUMBO 54. SCI-FI 55. BAMBI 56. ECARD 60. AMY

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Heads Up

In keeping with this month’s screen theme (and, um, the increasing restrictions), we’ve compiled an extravaganza of digital events taking place throughout November, as well as a few in-person treats to offset any blurring vision.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Heads Up

City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until 29 Nov Edinburgh Art Festival’s annual showcase of the best up-and-coming talent in Scottish arts, this year’s Platform spotlights four outstanding artists – Rabindranath A Bhose, Mark Bleakley, Rhona Jack and Susannah Stark – whose work spans sound installations, film, printmaking, sculpture and more. Through each artist’s highly individual practice, Platform comes together to ask how the contemporary art scene is responding to our strange new world.

Lament for Sheku Bayoh

Rabindranath A Bhose

Online, 18 Nov, 6:30pm A celebration of the best of new Scottish music, this year’s Scottish Alternative Music Awards are taking place online via their official partner Twitch. The ceremony will be hosted by DJ Jim Gellatly and spoken word artist Leyla Josephine, with live performance from Glasgow quintet Walt Disco and Edinburgh DJ, rapper and producer Nova.

Online, 20-21 Nov, various times Originally performed as part of the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival, Hannah Lavery’s Lament for Sheku Bayoh is more urgent than ever, a heart-wrenching, multi-layered response to the death of Fife resident Sheku Bayoh while in police custody. Featuring music from Beldina Odenyo, AKA Heir of the Cursed, this is essential viewing, screening online through the National Theatre of Scotland and Lyceum Theatre’s websites.

Scottish Alternative Music Awards Photo: Courtesy of M2 Films

French Film Festival UK Online & various venues, 4 Nov - 17 Dec The UK-wide celebration of French cinema is back, with dozens of curated screenings in cinemas across Scotland – from Oban to Dumfries – as well as digital screenings for select films.

Highlights include the ground-breaking revolutionary drama Les Misérables, modern-day fairy tale The Lost Prince, and warm comedy Arab Blues, starring internationally renowned Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.

Poppie Nongena

Africa in Motion Online, until 29 Nov This year’s Africa in Motion film festival has moved online, with a rich programme of films and events available to watch throughout the UK. Tickets can be bought for individual films or entire festival passes are available for £20. Highlights include the Queer Africa and Diaspora strands, workshops on creating comics, and a series of animated shorts from South Africa, Egypt and Senegal.

Our World, Our Impact: Our Planet Online, 16-29 Nov

Arab Blues Glasgow Science Centre: Curious About Our Planet

Photo: Max Breakenridge

Helen Booth: This Divine Quiet &Gallery, Edinburgh, 7 Nov - 2 Dec

As wildfires continue to ravage California and the glaciers continue to melt, it is vital that we confront the effects of climate change on our planet. Our Planet is a digital festival put together by the Glasgow Science Centre that encourages us to be open and excited about protecting our planet, through a series of fun workshops, interactive talks, and creative exhibitions.

Fierce, Fearless and Free: Reading with Dean Atta Glasgow Zine Library, Online, 18 Nov Photo: Hussina Raja

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Brian Sweeney ONE IN-ONE OUT

Lament for Sheku Bayoh

Photo: Helena Spring Films

Photo: Neil McKenzie

Scottish Alternative Music Awards

November 2020 — Chat

Photo: The Scotsman

Photo: Viola Zichy

Platform: 2020

In Touch; Max Breakenridge, Spacebody, 2019

ONE IN-ONE OUT, RE-ND-ER-ED

In Touch: Exhibition Being Human Festival, Online, 12-22 Nov

Glasgow, 20-22 Nov Helen Booth, This Cold Heaven, Oil on Canvas, 28x28cm

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Dean Atta

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Online, 11-24 Nov Independent dance artist Tess Letham will be taking centre stage this November, as part of a series of live arts events curated by Hidden Door Festival. The project sees her taking over Hidden Door’s social media in the two-week run up to her performance, giving a unique, behind the scenes glimpse into a dancer’s creative process, before streaming live from Edinburgh’s DanceBase studio.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Abi Ponce Hardy

Tess Letham: Hidden Door Live

Tess Letham

Tramway, Glasgow, until 14 Feb 2021

Morwenna Kearsley, Sundae for Lee, collage, 2020

Inspired by the life and legacy of Lee Miller and her later creative work as a gourmet cook, Morwenna Kearsley’s exhibition uses Miller’s recipes and biography as a catalyst to think through the relationship between aesthetics and food, and the similarity in capturing an image and perfecting a recipe. Bold colours and unusual compositions swirl together to ask: how are we changed by the images we consume?

Credit: Lauren Morsley

The first UK exhibition by Sri Lanka-born, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera, Traveler brings together many of Perera’s most characteristic influences, including magical realism, Indian miniaturism, and scientific illustration, in order to explore personal experiences of migration and diaspora.

Presenting a series of vignettes imagining the potential experience of the eponymous “Traveler”, Perera turns to the mythic past in order to imagine our potential, dystopian futures.

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, until 15 Nov

Heads Up

Photo: Courtesy of Private collection

Rajni Perera: Traveler

Morwenna Kearsley: Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly

Rajni Perera, Traveler Photo: Courtesy of Zinzi Minott

Zinzi Minott: Fi Dem III Transmission Gallery, Online, until 25 Nov

Social enterprise print studio Out of the Blueprint have assembled an exhibition to celebrate their 5th birthday.

Featuring risographs printed at the studio by 19 handpicked artists, comic makers, and illustrators, the work forms part of a broader art installation filling the studio hall, offering an unusual, vibrant look at grassroots Scottish creativity in the midst of a disorienting year.

Summer of 85

Film screenings DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, various dates and times With multiplexes throughout the UK closing their doors, there has never been a better time to support your independent cinemas. Alongside their unique exhibitions and creative spaces, Dundee arts hub DCA offer numerous film screenings throughout the day: highlights in November include the explosive Mogul Mowgli and heady queer romance Summer of 85.

Seamus Killick, Thirteen Moons, 2020

Havana Glasgow Film Festival

Seamus Killick: Thirteen Moons

Online, 10-15 Nov

Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, until 5 Dec Scottish BAME Writers Network Conference

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Sulaïman Majali: strange winds The Common Guild, Online, until 31 Dec Photo: Courtesy of the artist and The Common Guild

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Online, 7-8 Nov Credit: Jacky Sheridan

Photo: Producciones de la 5ta Avenida

Scottish BAME Writers Network Conference

The Extraordinary Journey of Celeste Garcia

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Sulaïman Majali, strange winds, 2020

November 2020 — Chat

This specially commissioned film from Transmission Gallery, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Spike Island in Bristol sees previous Tate-resident Zinzi Minott, an artist renowned for her creative, radical exploration of race, queer culture, and class, use performance and movement to respond to the legacy of the Windrush Generation, in the third part of an ongoing series.

Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh, until 28 Nov

Photo: Courtesy of Diaphana Distribution

Zinzi Minott

Walk Don't Walk

November 2020

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5 Meet the Team — 6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up 12 Crossword — 36 Intersections — 39 Albums — 41 Film & TV — 43 Art 44 Books — 45 Food & Drink — 46 The Skinny On… Mark Cousins

Features 16 Screen time! Film festivals are presenting virtually – enjoy the highlights of Africa in Motion, Scotland Loves Anime and French Film Festival from the comfort of your own home.

20 How Ratched is giving the ‘castrator of a nurse’ an empathetic reappraisal.

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21 Country Lines director Henry Blake on taking his experience as a youth worker into his debut feature.

23 Bassam Tariq explains how his debut film Mogul Mowgli digs deep into Pakistan's cultural heritage.

24 Edinburgh Art Festival’s annual Platform exhibition of four emergent visual artists is back! IRL art!

26 We meet Scottish hip-hop's fastest rising star, SAY Award winner NOVA.

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28 Glasgow luminaries Cryptic are taking an ambitious new approach to live streams.

29 Artists Luke Fowler and Vikki Morton introduce their collaborative project Sotto Voce.

30 We speak to writer and director Hannah Lavery about paying homage to Sheku Bayoh.

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34 Janey Godley, Brett Goldstein and The Pin on their comedy club energy-full Twitter videos.

35 Rebecca Tamás ponders the true complexities of the relationship between the human and nonhuman.

On the website...

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Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Our Lady of the Nile; Ratched; Courtesy of BFI; Rob Youngson, courtesy of Pulse Films & BBC; Courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival; Zaynab McGroarty; Euan Robertson; Andrew Wilson; Lament for Sheku Bayoh; Andrew Low; Matt Stronge; Robin Christian

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More from NOVA on her SAY Award triumph, news on the Creative Edinburgh Awards, a look at the cottagecore aesthetic of Studio Ghibli, and the chance to buy our 1 of 100 collab T-shirt...

November 2020 — Contents

32 Kobi Onyame chats to Glasgow-based rapper Bemz about his life and musical journey.

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Compiled by George Sully

Down

November 2020 — Chat

Across 1. Escape to a fantasy island via your Nintendo Switch (6,8:3,8) 11. Something you enjoy despite it being unpopular (6,8) 12. Container for writing implements (6,4) 14. Free (10) 16. Abundantly filled, especially of a fridge or pantry (4,7) 18. He just can't wait to be king (5) 19. Robert Eggers' spooky 2015 debut film (3,5) 20. Puzzlement – numb esteem (anag) (10) 23. Old-school machine for producing documents (3,6,7) 28. Receptacles for hot brewed beverages (7) 30. A small whirl in water (4) 32. Purify (7) 33. Euphemism for where we go when we die (1,6,5) 37. Hiding – loitering (7) 38. Collective term for crockery, cutlery and glasses (9) 39. Moment (7) 40. Pressure you to do something you don't want to do (5,4,3) 41. Grey birds common in cities – go snipe (anag) (7) 42. Feudal farm worker (4)

45. Self-absorption (7) 46. Studio Ghibli animated film feat.

Catbus (2,8,6) 48. Owner (10) 49. Super archaic word for "indeed" (8) 52. T he ____, Netflix's popular royal drama (5) 53. Refusing to follow the rules (11) 57. Italian director behind Youth (2015) and The Young Pope (2016) (10) 58. Robin Hood's bae (4,6) 59. B reaking Bad prequel series (6,4,4) 61. Netflix sub-genre, eg Tiger King, Making a Murderer (8,11,6)

1. Technology overlaying your view with computer graphics – ugly animated tree (anag) (9,7) 2. Copy (7) 3. A disappointing end in spite of the build up (10) 4. Hat loved by baseball players and Super Mario (3) 5. Interstellar craft (9) 6. Heading up the way, but like, in a map sense (10) 7. Round thing, notoriously difficult to reinvent (5) 8. Snow home (5) 9. Michael Bluth flees to Missouri to launder money for the cartel (5) 10. A horse for riding (5) 13. Person responsible for creating outfits for film, TV or the stage (7,8) 15. ___-Man, yellow chap, loves dots, hates ghosts (3) 17. Cinder (5) 21. Distraction from a shit reality – the literal theme of this issue (8) 22. Promenade - nae pedals (anag) (9) 24. A faith's authority figure, eg The Pope or Dalai Lama (9,6) 25. Simon Cowell's vocalist gauntlet (1-6) 26. Fruit base of Chambord liqueur (9) — 12 —

27. Accepting (9) 29. All the advantages of two situations (4,2,4,6) 31. Old-fashioned (i.e. weirdly spelled) term for tales of heroism (7-2) 34. Affectionate nickname for the UK's public broadcast service (3,4) 35. Autocratic ruler (8) 36. Cosy hideout (3) 43. Sleeping hallucination brought on by illness (5,5) 44. Slang for policemen (4,2,4) 46. Irish comedian and actor, Dylan ___ (5) 47. If you sing from the same one as someone, you agree with them (4,5) 50. Paddle for rowing (3) 51. Folding for fun (7) 53. Underage circus performer gets exploited on account of his large ears (5) 54. Stories using technology and theories to speculate about our future (3-2) 55. Friend of Thumper (5) 56. A virtual alternative to sending handwritten season's greetings (5) 60. 2015 documentary about a British soul singer (3) Turn to page 7 for the solutions

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November 2020

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October 2020

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Carry on Screening Illustration: Viki Mladenovski

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hances are you’ve spent a large proportion of the last seven months in pandemic seclusion, with life condensed to the few rooms of your home and a handful of streets and parks around your neighbourhood. If you’ve managed to stay sane in this shrunken world, it’s probably because screens give access to the old, much more expansive lives you used to live. Zoom calls have replaced nights out with friends at the pub. We now attend gigs on our laptops, galleries on our tablets and theatre on our phones.

Lockdown combined with streaming has turned us all into movie buffs at the very moment cinemas are having to close their doors.

This issue celebrates the screens that have kept us going through this pandemic, and more specifically the TV shows and movies and live streams and videos and festivals-on-demand that have kept us connected so far and will continue to entertain us through the autumn. We’re all itching to get back and support the bricks and mortar institutions that we love. Until then, we have screens.

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Film

Window on the World Against the odds, three of our favourite festivals return this autumn. After months of lockdown, the fresh new perspectives of Africa in Motion, French Film Festival UK and Scotland Loves Anime should be cherished – and offer more than simple escapism Interview: Jamie Dunn

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November 2020 – Feature

irror or window? That’s a question that’s often asked about the nature of cinema.

Do the movies reflect the best and worst of society back at us? Or do they give us an opportunity to escape to new worlds? Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, it’s film’s capacity to transport us beyond the handful of rooms in which we’ve been quarantined that’s been most welcome. Our screens have taken us to happier times, when touching another human being wasn’t outlawed and isolation wasn’t prescribed by the government. By living vicariously through these images, we’ve felt less trapped and alone.

“The arts have been absolutely crucial to keeping us all sane during these trying months” Liz Chege, Africa in Motion “Cinema has always managed to transport people outside of their everyday lives and that’s especially important at the moment,” agrees Richard Mowe, director of French Film Festival UK, which returns this month, bringing with it newly minted francophone stories from around the world.

“We all need wider horizons and a bigger picture to remind us of how life was and how it will assuredly be again. It’s a way of preserving one’s sanity and satisfying the primaeval urge of listening to the stories of others.”

This chimes with Africa in Motion’s director Liz Chege. “For many, as always, the arts have been absolutely crucial to keeping us all sane during these trying months,” she says. “Providing options for people to participate, watch and listen to a variety of art forms has brought a sense of

Our Lady of the Nile

calm and serves as a reminder that we are a global community that need each other.”

The transportive powers of cinema and its ability to bring us together, even when we’re apart, are keenly felt in Mowe and Chege’s festivals, which return this autumn despite the increasingly trying circumstances for film festival exhibition.

They join Scotland Loves Anime, which has been running since 26 October. Africa in Motion will present its 15th edition entirely online, while Scotland Loves Anime and the French Film Festival, in their tenth and 28th years respectfully, take a hybrid approach, blending IRL events in cinemas with online screenings.

A global pandemic is not the ideal situation in which to launch your debut festival programme, but that’s exactly the situation AiM’s newly — 16 —

appointed director has found herself in. There was no question of not going ahead with the festival.

“It was important for us to continue sharing the work of incredible talents across the African continent and the diaspora,” says Chege. “We want to lead by example and continue to support marginalised voices and express perseverance.”

While all the screenings are online, Chege tells us that she hopes households and bubbles across the country can create their own festival atmospheres. “I’m particularly excited that families can sit at home, interact and enjoy the festival together, not just in Scotland, but across the whole of the UK. For example, we have a digital ‘dine & view’ to go along with our screening of Algerian film 143 Sahara Street, where one of our partners, Kuche, provided an Algerian recipe that people can

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Three French Film Festival UK must-sees Mama Weed Isabelle Huppert plays a police translator who infiltrates a huge drug trafficking network. I’ll watch that. 4 Nov, Filmhouse; 18 Nov, GFT The Translators A claustrophobic whodunit in which an all-star international cast play a group of translators, one of whom is leaking a future bestseller they’re all transcribing. 11 Nov, Filmhouse; 13-14 Nov, GFT

make at home and enjoy while watching the film.”

Mowe was similarly determined for the show to go on, despite the difficulties that COVID-19 brings. “Putting together a festival takes almost nine to ten months, so earlier in the year we had to make a decision to go ahead rather await events unfolding,” he tells us. With the mighty Cannes cancelled, along with many other film festivals, the hunting grounds on which Mowe and his team find new titles were diminished, although that hasn’t made this year’s programme any less rich than previous years.

“We all need wider horizons and a bigger picture to remind us of how life was and how it will assuredly be again” Richard Mowe, French Film Festival

Africa in Motion, 30 Oct-29 Nov, africa-in-motion.org.uk

Three Africa in Motion must-sees I Am Samuel An intimate vérité documentary following the young gay Kenyan man of the title, as he embarks on his tender first relationship, and all the hardships he faces by being open about whom he loves. 7 Nov, online Our Lady of the Nile Gorgeous adaptation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s semi-autobiographical novel set at a Rwandan Catholic girls’ boarding school. Set in 1973, the class division between the pupils reflect the tensions that will tear their nation apart in the 1994 genocide.

26 Nov, online Air Conditioner Left-field humour and sci-fi tinged strangeness abound in this idiosyncratic tale from Angola following an easygoing security guard on an odyssey to find his overbearing boss a new aircon unit. 28 Nov, online Three Scotland Loves Anime must-sees Weathering with You A beautiful tale of awkward teenagers finding each other and falling in love amid a climate apocalypse from Your Name director Makoto Shinkai. Watch on Screen Anime Lupin III retrospective An overflowing collection of films and series featuring the outlandish adventures of the world’s most wanted master thief, Arsène Lupin the Third. Watch on Screen Anime On-Gaku: Our Sound A stylishly minimalist deadpan music comedy about three knuckleheads who give up their thuggish ways and form a band. 7-8 Nov, Filmhouse; 15 Nov, GFT

French Film Festival UK, 4 Nov-17 Dec, frenchfilmfestival.org.uk Scotland Loves Anime, throughout Nov, lovesanimation.com — 17 —

All in-person screenings subject to change due to local lockdowns

November 2020 – Feature

Spurred on by the success of hybrid editions of Venice and London film festivals, Mowe’s programme, as well as featuring screenings at 28 cinemas across the UK (although all subject to change if local lockdowns crop up), will also include strand fff @ home, a week of online screenings from 27 November to 4 December. This fff @ home strand features seven titles, only one of which (How to be a Good Wife, starring Juliette Binoche) is shared with the physical programme.

“We felt it important to keep faith with independent cinemas who seem to be faring better than multiplexes at the moment,” said Mowe. “The festival will be in 28 different cinemas from Oban to Plymouth – and programmers, despite being faced with difficulties, have welcomed the festival back on their screens.”

Solidarity with indie cinemas is also the story with Scotland Loves Anime this year. While the majority of their lively programme mixing old and new Japanese animation is available with a pass on streaming site Screen Anime, they’re also screening two new films (3D anime adventure Lupin III: The First and oddball music comedy On-Gaku: Our Sound) at their regular venues Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh Filmhouse, as well as Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen. Furthermore, the festival will be sharing its 2020 proceeds with GFT and Filmhouse, and is running a crowdfunding campaign to help support these independent institutions.

“Supporting cinemas through what has been a tough year is something really important to all of us at Anime Limited and Scotland Loves Animation,” says Andrew Partridge, founder of Scotland Loves Anime. “We can’t wait to show off what the festival has to offer on Screen Anime and help out our friends at both the Filmhouse and the Glasgow Film Theatre as much as we can.”

Back to the original question: mirror or window? While the opportunity to immerse yourselves in a frothy Gallic comedy like Emmanuel Mouret’s Love Affairs from the FFF programme or dive into the Afrofuturist perspectives of AiM’s shorts should be embraced, escaping one’s own head isn’t the only reason why we need film festivals in our lives. For one, they give space for perspectives and stories that don’t always make it into the mainstream cinema conversation.

This is certainly the case with Africa in Motion.

“In a year that has galvanised so many across the world in support of #BlackLivesMatter, reckoning with racial and migration injustices, #EndSARS and many other movements, we wanted to continue elevating these voices and showcase a variety of stories that interrogate the contours of our dreams, obstacles, joys, love, hopes and all the territories in between,” says Chege. “We are also a women-led organisation and continuing to bring female-led stories to the forefront is paramount to us.”

The French Film Festival’s determination to go ahead this year is no less political. The significance of celebrating the cinema of France in the year the British government officially cleave us from our friends across the Channel isn’t lost on Mowe. “The festival began in a spirit of optimism in December 1992, the same year Edinburgh hosted the Summit of the European Council,” he says. “Funding was awarded for an arts festival giving a cultural reference to the occasion – and the French Film Festival was one of the beneficiaries. Almost three decades down the line, the festival has proved the worth of that investment and confidence, even if this year marks the end of the transition period and the exit of the UK from the EU. The FFF remains proud of its Europefriendly credentials.”

Mirror or window? Well, the answer is clearly a bit of both.

The Sleeping Car Murders Pick of FFF’s classics is this punchy but little-seen murder mystery and the first feature from the great Franco-Greek director CostaGavras. Filmhouse, 21 Nov; GFT, 21-22 Nov

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How to be a Good Wife

November 2020

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World Building This year’s SQIFF looked a bit different, taking to cyberspace in the age of pandemic. One writer reports back on how our increasingly dystopian world was reflected back at us in SQIFF’s Every Utopia is a Dystopia strand Words: Eilidh Akilade

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Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story

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nology and parallel realities. At times, it’s hard to follow: it doesn’t grip to any one character, it slips between German and English (sometimes even leaving us non-German speakers subtitle-less), and it sacrifices explanation for exploration. While this isn’t an easy watch, it is a watch for our times: connection at a time of disconnection. This is a film that knows what it’s doing – even if you don’t.

Certainly, there is no knowing what Flaming Ears is doing. Set in 2700, this sci-fi entanglement of three women pushes conventions. It’s hard to put your finger on what’s going on – pyromania, comic books, club nights – with lurid shots, shadowed frames, and little narrative coherence making this all the more difficult. Between rollerblades and red plastic, its aesthetic is as queer as its sex scenes, ensuring that the film draws you in visually even when lacking narrative clarity. If parties are ever a thing again, this is a film to bring up while rolling a cigarette amid a mildly pretentious conversation, casually dropping it in to impress the art school lot.

From forceful sci-fi to a gentler variety, Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story returns us to home comforts. The film takes us through Glenn-Copeland’s life and music, with a focus on the resurgence of his Keyboard Fantasies, a 1968 album which effortlessly blurs electronic and folk. The film is a kind celebration of life and art – one to save for your weekly pandemic burnout.

Some of its most touching moments are scenes of the band’s live shows: Glenn-Copeland opens with a sense of closeness and intimacy to the live audience, so true us laptop viewers feel it too. It seems science-fictional now – a packed room, un-masked, un-sanitised, un-distanced. Its existence, and the existence of Glenn-Copeland’s story, — 19 —

is powerful in itself, queer art transcending timely constraints: it revives itself, it travels in time.

Keyboard Fantasies, finding its audience several decades after its original release, reminds us that better things are coming, no matter how far off – an essential for queer audiences now more than ever.

Time is bent yet again in SQIFF Shorts: Every Utopia is a Dystopia. The three unconnected shorts in the programme – 35, Transmission and The Fathers Project – rest on this intersection between grief and hope: both are present, existing not in opposition but in harmony. These films offer a tender look at life and death, playing out with a carefulness that each narrative is then eager to disrupt in a powerful dismantling – of time, of systems, of realities. Perhaps the collection’s finest programme, these films are personal, political and purposeful.

If every utopia is a dystopia, is every dystopia a utopia? Probably not. But there is joy even in the bleakest dystopias – and SQIFF 2020 was one of those joys. To be displaced into the realm of impossible possibilities is grounding. To know that our queerness knows no bounds is affirming. To return to science fiction, to the alien – whether outwith or within us – is a reminder that there is always more.

We don’t always understand this ‘more’ – my sincerest apologies, Flaming Ears – but it’s always there: to guide, to comfort, and to offer hope.

Eilidh Akilade was selected from an open call for a Scotlandbased QTIPOC writer to cover SQIFF for The Skinny For more of Akilade’s writing, head to twitter.com/eilidhakilade_ sqiff.org

November 2020 – Feature

his year has been stranger than fiction.

Queerer than science fiction. And SQIFF has revelled in exactly that through its Every Utopia is a Dystopia collection. Scottish Queer International Film Festival in 2020 has been a homecoming; for many, we found our queer identities online. To find ourselves, and our queerness, on a laptop screen once again was a welcome comfort. The collection ranged from the normal to the abnormal, exploring queerness both subtly and overtly. These films are escapism – in the most necessary and queer way.

To position Jamie Crewe’s horror Ashley as science fiction makes it all the more terrifying, forcing a further confrontation with the boundaries of mind and body, as the film explores. It follows Ashley, played by Crewe, attempting to escape their troubles on a weekend away to an isolated cottage. Rather, it sees them grapple with their identity and their past, while something more sinister seemingly lurks. The internal monologue, voiced by Travis Alabanza, creates this dissonance – the self is undergoing a splitting, and it’s painful to see Ashley struggle with it on screen. We view Ashley, as a character, with such closeness but they are ultimately out of our reach – and this creates an even deeper empathy for them. It is a film of simultaneous comfort and discomfort, and, arguably, that’s what we all need right now. Ashley is a haunting joy of a film.

Likewise exploring gender identity are Prototypes I and II, the first two instalments of Doireann O’Malley’s recent trilogy. Set in the modernist Interbau housing development in the Hansaviertel area of Berlin, the film looks at trans identity through psychoanalysis, speculative tech-

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Ratched Reclaimed Netflix’s smash hit Ratched imagines the early years of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s ‘castrator of a nurse’. We look at how Sarah Paulson’s portrayal paints the fearsome caregiver of the classic book and movie in a more empathetic light

November 2020 – Feature

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Words: Katie Driscoll

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ith new Netflix series Ratched, the ever-prolific Ryan Murphy – along with newcomer Evan Romansky and Murphy’s frequent collaborator Ian Brennan – enacts a world of institutional torture and medicinal control via septic green hospital wards and Douglas Sirkian melodrama. The show’s eight hour-long episodes are an ode to cinema – complete with Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear score and De Palma’s use of split screens – but also to one of the most reviled villainesses in cinematic history: Nurse Ratched, made infamous by Louise Fletcher in Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) is the rare female version of that classic character in American culture: the drifter. She is unmarried and childless, living in a motel that’s just as adrift as she is. It’s a haunted, ghostly abode above the rocky sea in the California town of Lucia (‘light’), shrouded in just as much mystery as her past: who is she, and why has she come here?

Romansky, the show’s chief creator, paints Mildred as the angel of mercy, and Paulson plays her as a subtle Jekyll and Hyde figure – brutal one minute and tender the next. What differs from the earlier adaptation is that she is cast here in an empathetic light. Mildred is a woman submerged into the patriarchal system where women can only wield power in snippets or behind backs. In Forman’s counterculture film, Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) may believe he’s taking on the tyranny of a cruel, unyielding bitch, but in reality, Nurse Ratched was told what to do, how to medicate and neuter her (mostly) male patients, by her male superiors. It’s the same system!

Kesey described Mildred as a ‘castrator of a nurse’, and it is the misogynistic readings of her character – as the stern mother figure who won’t let Nicholson have any fun – that have prevailed. As with most cultural artefacts, women have become the scapegoat, the symbol of the horrors of a frigid man-made institution. Ratched shows that the real evil seems to be the barbaric medical system, as symbolised by the head of the hospital – and Mildred’s boss – Dr Hanover (Jon Jon Briones). Not only is Hanover under the thumb of Governor Willburn (Vincent D’Onofrio), a man hopped up on the electric chair, but also has a price on his head from his botched treatment of Henry Osgood (Brandon Flynn), the son of eccentric heiress Lenore Osgood, who’s played with electric camp by Sharon Stone.

So why has Ratched become synonymous with cold evil? This can be answered with one word: femininity (and its expectations of grace, goodness, maternity). During the first and second

world wars, nursing was a heroic act, one in high demand, and one of the few means of employment for women pre- and post-war, embodied by Florence Nightingale types with their elbows deep in the guts and blood of the trenches. Then, in 1948, The Snake Pit was released, showing the regimented bureaucracy of psychiatric institutions. It not only utilises many of Dr Hanover’s pioneering techniques – hypnotherapy being one of them – but also starred a cinematic villain in Nurse Davis, creating the trope of the wicked nurse that has since been overshadowed by Louise Fletcher’s 1975 performance as Nurse Ratched, for which she won an Oscar (after many a Hollywood starlet turned down the role, not wanting to be that unlikable). Also, given how sadism is typically associated with men – violent sexual offenders, rapists, murderers – both in newspapers and on our horror movie screens, the novelty of a sadistic woman is milked for how truly shocking it is.

Despite Mildred standing in earlier adaptations as the symbol of conventional society, Ratched shows that our nurse rebels against the norm: her sexuality, her lack of children, and lack of a husband are all against the social mores of the time (the show is set in 1947), when it was not only frowned upon to be anything that wasn’t heterosexual, in a nuclear family with 2.5 kids, but downright illegal to be queer. Here, Mildred’s relationship with Gwendolyn Briggs (Cynthia Nixon) is the one force that peels back her ice-cold layers – and when embracing her sexuality, Mildred extends kindness to two patients punished for their lesbian trysts.

The monster movie visual gags keep the show from tipping into full empathy for its lead figure, though. Instead, consider the show a campily feminist whitewashing of the past, showing how women were tainted with the ‘crazy’ brush for their sexuality, their sexual orientation, their desires, only able to score power from beneath the floorboards, behind closed doors, muttered under breath.

While Ratched succeeds in painting its title character as a flawed-feminist symbol, it doesn’t do right by every woman in the show. It veers towards exploitation in its representation of multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative disorder), villainising and blatantly using this mental illness — 20 —

as a convenient plot device in the finale; and like a lot of Murphy’s vehicles, its on the nose politics paints with a broad brush, leading to generalisations, like that every bad act or person is motivated by a hidden trauma.

However, amid hired contract killers with secret identities, governors paying off the heads of psychiatric hospitals and doctors who torture their patients, Ratched makes us empathise with our eponymous anti-hero by making everyone else around her just as horrifying as she is. Or better yet, leading us to believe that she is a product of it all due to circumstances beyond her control, someone navigating the violence of the world in the only way she knows how.

Ratched is streaming on Netflix Katie Driscoll is one of the participants in the Diverse Critics scheme, produced in partnership with Disability Arts Online and Creative Scotland

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Empathy Machine Henry Blake takes his experience as a youth worker into his debut feature County Lines, which he hopes will change perception of the kinds of young people he works with, who often find themselves exploited into a life of crime Interview: Josh Slater-Williams

“I’ve seen a lot of violence. So, I wanted to try and get as close as I can to what I’ve seen and create an uncomfortable distance to it” Henry Blake How did you first get involved?

In my early 20s, my friends were doing it and my wife, Victoria, was doing it. And I ended up doing it just out of sheer necessity; living in London is expensive. But what happened was I ended up be-

ing especially good at working with the most vulnerable, desperate cases. It took a toll on me, for sure. But if you’re good at something, it’s very hard to stop doing it. Here we are 11 years later, and I’m still doing it while also making films.

Was part of the motivation in writing the film to correct common public misconceptions and prejudices about the young people involved?

The goal with the film was to create a very deep emotional resonance with the issue, because if there isn’t an emotional resonance then it’s very easy to cast aside, to dismiss and deflect responsibility. But this is a community issue at every level. It’s about trying to build a public awareness which has a deeper emotional resonance, rather than just chucking people a load of statistics. You need to chuck people the human element of this so they really understand what’s at stake.

It’s all about creating an emotional and psychological landscape and making choices along the way. And I think you can really succinctly say what you want to say with a powerful, singular narrative film. I really wanted to just essentially bathe people in a quite tough but poetic, compassionate character drama.

Photo: Courtesy of BFI

The violence and gruesome content on-screen are really interesting in terms of the blocking and naturalistic sound design used – it’s not just blood packs exploding.

I’ve seen a lot of violence. So, I wanted to try and get as close as I can to what I’ve seen and create an uncomfortable distance to it, not just go handheld on everything and then whip up to a bloodsplattered wall. It was more about how when the violence occurs; you should feel like you can put your hand into the frame but you’re just out of reach to help. It was all about judging distance.

When someone does get hit, blood doesn’t go everywhere. The thuds are really awkward; skin hitting skin. I wanted it to be very uncomfortable and that’s what real violence is. It disturbs and disrupts you in a way that’s very unnerving.

This approach was presumably beneficial to the film getting a 15 certificate instead of an 18.

Maybe if I’d been a bit more Gaspar Noé about it, it probably might have gotten an 18. But I think it’s the more interesting film for the choices that have been made. A lot of it, also, is implied, and what’s so interesting is the audience is still having to work. I find cinema like that really thrilling.

County Lines is released on 20 Nov by BFI bfi.org.uk/whats-on/bfi-film-releases/county-lines

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November 2020 – Feature

You did, and still do, work as a youth worker.

What’s the general daily routine of that?

I work with very vulnerable children. When I was doing one-to-one work, I would see a child up to three or four hours every single day. And within that, your goals would be to educate, to try and address certain behaviours and issues that the child might be experiencing, and then to relay that progression, or lack of progression, back to social workers, parents, foster carers or the local authority.

And then within group work, what you do a lot of the time is you take a theme or an idea and then you discuss that with the group. You might try and unpick certain myths or certain perceptions of that issue or theme and offer a new perspective.

And a lot of youth work, when you’re working with vulnerable, traumatised children, is really to try and re-empathise that child. That trauma can have a really devastating effect on their wellbeing; on the outlook that child has on the world. You’re there to try and build a deeper style of trust as an adult that that child probably has not experienced, or if they have, that trust has been broken.

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thoroughly absorbing though deeply upsetting drama, County Lines is a remarkable debut feature from New Zealand-born writer-director Henry Blake. Inspired by his own experiences as a youth worker in East London, the film explores how personal and economic factors lead to 14-year-old Tyler (the magnetic Conrad Khan) being groomed for involvement in the eponymous drug-dealing networks that exploit vulnerable children into trafficking Class A drugs, primarily heroin and crack cocaine, from urban areas to rural or coastal towns.

Co-starring Ashley Madekwe and Harris Dickinson, County Lines is a vital empathy machine concerning a difficult subject sometimes prone to bad faith discussions when it comes to the young people who get caught up in the trafficking. But with genuine cinematic verve and complex characterisation, it’s far from a didactic tug on the heartstrings.

Speaking to us at the Glasgow Film Festival back in February, Henry Blake discusses some of his intentions for the project…

November 2020

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Digging Up the Past Bassam Tariq’s electric debut film features Riz Ahmed as a British-Pakistani rapper on the cusp of stardom when he’s struck down by a debilitating illness. Tariq explains how he wanted to tell a story that dug deep into Pakistan’s cultural heritage Interview: Anahit Behrooz Film

Photo: Rob Youngson - Pulse Films & BBC

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go to the bathroom, to begin treatment – he is made to confront the ways in which he has always been entangled with his parents and their history.

“Family is so important in our cultural experience,” Tariq stresses. “Every decision we make has a ripple effect with our families. We knew this couldn’t just be a singular journey; this isn’t La La Land,” he laughs. “We’re all connected in this, and that is what is so beautiful about our heritage and our cultural upbringing.”

“Riz and I were like, ‘Let’s look at the tropes from our side of the pond, let’s look at our tradition and see what we can pull from there’” Bassam Tariq It is this emphasis on the blurred boundaries between self and the wider community that lies at the heart of Mogul Mowgli. Zed finds voice in Ahmed’s trademark biting, lyrical rap, slowly bringing in aspects of his father’s past into his work. His parents pray quietly in their son’s hospital room, their private devotion made collective. In a way, Tariq hopes the film will build this same sense of community for audiences. “The thing about film that I’ve always loved is how it creates a space for people to experience things and then talk about it.

It’s very similar to, I don’t know, having a butchery or a restaurant. Eating a meal and then talking.”

Mogul Mowgli is out now via BFI Near the Jugular, a season of films that inspire and influence Bassam Tariq and Riz Ahmed, runs at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player until 30 Nov mogulmowgli.co.uk

November 2020 – Feature

t began, as maybe the best stories do, in a butcher shop. “I own a shop in New York City,” Bassam Tariq explains, recalling his first encounter with Riz Ahmed, the co-writer and star of his directorial narrative debut Mogul Mowgli. “My friend [told me], you’ve really got to meet this guy Riz. I was like, man, if he wants to I’m going to be at my butchery,” he laughs. “So that’s where we met.”

Six years on and their unorthodox meet-cute has culminated in the explosive Mogul Mowgli, which premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival in the run-up to its current UK-wide release. Co-written by Tariq and Ahmed, the film centres on up-and-coming BritishPakistani rapper Zed (played by Ahmed), who succumbs to a debilitating autoimmune illness days before his first international tour while reluctantly visiting his parents in London for the first time in two years. Tackling family trauma, the legacy of Partition, and experiences of dislocation head-on, Mogul Mowgli is remarkable for its unflinching voice, and for the specificity with which it handles second-generation Pakistani immigrant identity.

“I think generally when our stories are told, we use tropes that are familiar to Western audiences, whether it’s the mould of Shakespeare or the mould of Jane Austen,” Tariq reflects. “‘We’re going to tell a brown story, so we’ll use Bruce Springsteen’s music, or The Beatles.’ We understand those stories are important: they’re real and they need to exist. But we wanted to go deeper into

our own cultural heritage. Riz and I were like, ‘Let’s look at the tropes from our side of the pond, let’s look at our tradition and see what we can pull from there.’

Being Pakistani, we inherit a lot of Persian culture, whether it’s Rumi, or Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. That’s the kind of stuff that we looked at.”

The result is an electrifying, rarely-seen exploration of the strange simultaneity of being both tied to and severed from your homeland and its traditions, and what homeland even means to those still processing intergenerational geopolitical trauma. “We don’t really talk about Partition,” Tariq says, highlighting Zed’s recurrent hallucinations of his father’s unspoken childhood escape from the violence of the historic conflict. “There’s nothing that memorialises it. The funny thing is, at one point I even wrote out Partition […] I was like, ah well, who will care? Because there’s this feeling that we have, even within ourselves, that our stories don’t matter. [But] we’re living through a time where the generation of people that went through Partition are now dying. We need to be talking about it.”

This absence of conversation is what haunts Zed, the spectre of his family’s past evaded and suppressed until sickness permeates his body – an internal conflict made suddenly, viscerally manifest. “What’s interesting about immigrants is that they have higher numbers of autoimmune illnesses, because their bodies have a hard time adapting to the environment,” Tariq explains, pointing to studies he read through with the film’s medical consultant. “Your body is literally having an existential crisis. At a molecular level, there is a battle [taking place]: your body is attacking itself because it cannot recognise itself.”

Tariq’s depiction of illness is devastating in its everyday horrors, its metaphoric implications sitting alongside the acute physical deterioration that such chronic sickness entails. As Zed is increasingly forced to depend on his family – to

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Showcase

Shoving From All Sides The annual showcase of emerging Scottish artists Platform returns for its 2020 edition, featuring four diverse practices. Mark Bleakley, Rhona Jack, Susannah Stark and Rabindranath A Bhose introduce their work Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf

November 2020 – Feature

Photo: Brian Hartley

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ach year, the four-person exhibition Platform runs concurrently with the Edinburgh Art Festival, showing the work of four emerging artists selected from an open call. This year, it’s a standalone exhibition. Rather than organise the artists around a singular theme or topic, the artists selected usually have lines of association that motivate the group that emerges during the selection process. This year, there’s a delicate line of solidarity between the artists, as they each consider (from different directions) collective principles of sharing, recycling, free appropriation and equity.

For artist-choreographer Mark Bleakley, the body itself as a physical heft can be shared and loaned. He says the work here is informed in part by “the protest die-ins when you physically give weight to a cause, and the power of that.” In the first part of his film Giving Weight, Bleakley shares fragments of a workshop he facilitated, where participants were asked to think through the concepts “grounding, groundlessness and inertia.”

These come from his inquiry into “the spaces that create collectives, like the rave, or a mosh pit or religious ceremony.” The second part follows the Jeopardy! gameshow format as answers are given as clues, before revealing the question. “What’s taking the ground from you?” is one question. The suggestions for answers include: “the state, or bigger social structures that have a control over your body, your weight or how you exist.”

Bleakley cautions, “I’m not trying to make grand statements, but provoke the viewer to think about how your weight is active and passive...

Throwing your body into a mosh pit is like a surrendering, or marching at a protest is a stamping and it’s an affirmation of your body in space and time.”

He also refers to chain linking, used by protestors and police alike, “trying to think about this spectrum when you’re actively using [these body-based tactics], versus when somebody is actively using [them] against you... Because I work with dance, I always come back to the principle that we are thinking with our bodies. Thought is not just [in the head], it’s throughout us.”

Similar to Bleakley’s understanding of thinking with the body, Rhona Jack speaks about the importance of actively moving while she’s making and forming new ideas. “A lot of the processes I’m using are repetitive so they leave a lot of time for thinking. It’s a lot more difficult for

Mark Bleakley, UR- Prototyping, Performer: Mark Bleakley

Work by artist Rhona Jack (pictured) as part of Platform:2020 presented by Edinburgh Art Festival

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Work by artist Susannah Stark as part of Platform:2020 presented by Edinburgh Art Festival

Susannah Stark shares Jack’s interest in working with found materials, whether literally with objects that her mother finds on the shore, or more broadly by collaging together existing images and field recordings. For instance, within Stark’s audio piece, she combines musical elements and songs responding to histories of habitation in Scotland with field recordings, made while walking in and around Pictish Brochs, in peat bogs, and around her home in Glasgow. The locations are often where there are very real present-day socio-political effects that stem from the oppressive expropriation of the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. The installation of this soundwork itself is inspired by brochs, an ancient form of dwelling found in Scotland, the archaeological remains of which show they were round in their structure, centred around a hearth. As well as creating this “sense of space”, for Stark this work is also about “the expressiveness of the voice. I’m really interested in softness, so I tend to utilise that a lot in the work. Something that seems soft and gentle, there can be lyrics that are more loaded or come from a really specific source. A strange combination of being lulled into something but then there’s also an intention within it.”

Alongside the sound work, Stark has also been developing collages of visual materials, which include as one of their elements images of Scotland used in tourist advertising. She speaks of — 25 —

Platform, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until 29 Nov

November 2020 – Feature

me to try sitting cold and coming up with an idea.”

Jack’s installation comes, in part, from being surrounded all her life by immediate family members’ skilled textile practices, and plotting this personal experience within the history and the global economics of garment manufacturing. “The conditions in textile factories in most cases haven’t improved in 100 years. It’s just that they exist in other parts of the world.” While Jack is conscious of the exploitation of workers in factories making mass-produced clothes, she juxtaposes this with what is produced, namely “clothes that become special to the person wearing them.

They can be a really comforting thing, a way of expressing your personality. At the same time, they’re tossed away. I’m showing the textiles I’ve handmade alongside these mass-produced textiles, and I want to bring forward the sense that a person made these, as well.”

This work also follows on from Jack’s commitment to working with recycled materials. She describes being known by people around Dundee for finding uses for materials that would otherwise be headed for landfill: “They’ll contact me about something they think I’ll be interested in, and ask me, ‘do you want this?’ I’m starting to realise how easy it is to get anything you need, and it doesn’t have to be new. I’ve seen how art can be very wasteful so more and more, I’m trying to use what’s around me”.

Showcase

Work by artist Rabindranath A Bhose as part of Platform:2020 presented by Edinburgh Art Festival

these as a “reckoning” of some of the stereotypical postcard fantasies of Scotland. “I use a lot of red [in these works]. It casts these promotional images in a different light. Some element of criticality comes with recolouring them, they’re not just washed out in this dreamy way. They become quite heavy images.” For Stark, Scotland “is sold as idyllic, that it’s good for your holiday because it’s empty and there are unspoilt beaches and woodlands. It’s clean and pure. But people do live here, and they always have. A lot of people have been evicted so maybe that’s why it’s emptier than it used to be. People were put out [of] the way to make profit.” She refers to Andy Wightman’s book The Poor Had No Lawyers as a key text for understanding the development and persistence of an exploitative system of land ownership in Scotland.

With Stark referencing stone circles and ancient dwellings in her arrangement of her AV tech, a similar collision of ancestral, mystical and contemporary materials comes in Rabindranath A Bhose’s large vinyl drawing installation of an elephant trunk and its reference to Ganesha. Made from arrows, and pointing limbs and other directional symbols, it moves from floor to ceiling. Alongside this large-scale drawing, Bhose also includes a pamphlet of new writing. Speaking of their themes and intentions, Bhose notes: “I think in terms of methodology or what mood I want to go for, it’s just a feeling of perversion, as a form of disruption. The texts that I write are often quite perverted. That comes from a homosexual [and transmasculine] history, and also a history of bodily abjection.

Perversion, humour, disruption, speculation... it does all come from a place of love as well, and hopefulness, wanting to call into being modes that can feel cathartic or have a possibility to build on, or just a little moment of redemption. By sharing the texts with people and having it resonate with them, or when they find it funny or strange, it really makes a difference from just having [images, words, stories] rattle around your own head.”

Within the work, Bhose describes making a metaphorical “quilt” that incorporates symbols, myths, imagined and biographical elements. “For me the whole purpose of making this work, or to be honest of making any work, writing or engaging in any art practice or conversation with others, is really a seeking of a personal spirituality or trying to piece one together. And I’ve noticed other people doing that too. You might be culturally embedded in some religions or mythologies, but I definitely have to make my own piecemeal, like a quilt, to feel that I have some faith and motivation.

I feel like in queer worlds, especially queer creative worlds, that’s where you find other people trying to do that... When the systems around you don’t make sense for you and the people you love, you inevitably seek out other systems of knowledge or of making sense.”

As each of Platform 2020’s artists tend to their respective fields of social, personal and political enquiry, there is the reminder of American poet and anarchist activist Diane di Prima’s tender advice from her 1971 poetry collection Revolutionary Letters, that: NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

THE SKINNY

On the Rise Music

In a year that’s seen her win the 2020 SAY Award and performing at this year’s virtual SAMAs ceremony, we meet Scottish hip-hop’s fastest-rising star, NOVA, to talk through her incredible year Interview: Nadia Younes

November 2020 – Feature

Photo: Zaynab McGroarty

S

haheeda Sinckler could never be described as a one trick pony. On top of her already established presence within Scotland’s music scene as a DJ, producer and rapper, throughout lockdown she’s also added video director, costume designer and part-time baker to her never-ending list of talents. Even as we sit down to catch up with her about her year over Zoom, she’s just been honing another new skill. “I just roasted a pumpkin – very October,” she says.

Since releasing her debut album as NOVA, Re-Up, at the start of the year – the follow-up to her 2019 mixtape Risin’ Up – Sinckler hasn’t let the global pandemic stop her from continuing to build momentum on her career. “As soon as lockdown hit that’s when I started working on getting Status Quo ready for release, because I recorded, produced and mixed it myself,” she says. “I got that out and then I had to finish the college course that I was studying at the time… And then I was working on the Status Quo video, so I’ve always had something still going on.”

While Re-Up did have its melodic moments, Sinckler’s latest single, Status Quo, takes a much more definite turn towards a more pop-focused sound. Featuring a beat by her friend Yesha – who also assisted in the creative direction, styling, camera work and editing for the track’s accompanying video – Status Quo is the most radio-ready track Sinckler has released to date, but that’s not to say she scrimps lyrically. On it, she tackles the current political and societal chaos seen locally and globally, as a result of capitalism, racial tensions, the mishandling of Coronavirus measures and much more.

“It feels like you can make a difference, in terms of representation and equality” NOVA on the SAMAs

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THE SKINNY

“I’m really interested in the younger artists, like the 18/19-year-olds, because they’ve got so much potential”

“I came up with the name [for the show] a couple of years ago... then I used that for a college project, and I ended up really liking what I’d come up with, so I was like, ‘you know what, I’m gonna upload this to Mixcloud, I’m gonna share this’,” she says. “And then, that exact day, Andrew [Thomson] sent me an email saying, ‘Hey, do you want to do a show on the radio?’”

The original concept for the show was based around showcasing “underground, experimental and ambient electronic music,” she says, but when Sinckler was given the opportunity to take the show onto Edinburgh-based station EH-FM, as part of a Clyde Built showcase, she decided to do something a bit different. “I did a Local Litness special and had all local artists that were mostly doing R’n’B and rap, which is obviously more similar to the music that I make, so that was really fun,” she says.

“It was really fulfilling and I think the artists that are featured enjoyed the process as well, and enjoyed being on my show and hearing my thoughts on it, so I think I might find a way to pursue that Local Litness special,” she continues.

“I’m starting to get really interested in the younger artists as well, like the 18/19-year-olds, because they’ve got so much potential and they’re so cool.”

Given how much she has achieved in the space of a year, it’s easy to forget that Sinckler is just one official album into her career as NOVA – and that’s just one facet of her musical persona.

With lockdown providing Sinckler the additional time to really experiment with her creative (and culinary) skills, it feels as though her rise is just beginning.

The virtual ceremony for the Scottish Alternative Music Awards will take place on 18 Nov officialsama.squarespace.com facebook.com/novascotiathetruth — 27 —

Nikhita (@__nikhita) “Nikhita is another young artist based in Edinburgh who is more on the contemporary R’n’B and soul side of music. I found her through Instagram and got my hands on her demo for my recent Local Litness Special on EH-FM. She has an amazing voice AND she self-produces! Although I’ve not met her in real life, I feel super proud of her talent and I’m really looking forward to seeing where she takes her career.”

CLING (@c.l.i.n.g) “CLING is a young artist in Edinburgh reppin’ the mandem. He’s a fresh-faced, unapologetic rapper with plenty of style and wit. I first got to know him through a stint of volunteering with local diversity charity Intercultural Youth Scotland, then I studied alongside him at Edinburgh College last year. CLING & Kiko – the class troublemakers – teamed up on Too Versatile, a joint album released in October. I’d recommend checking that out if you want to learn more.” $am Brodie (@sam.brodie) “$am Brodie is a melodic trap artist whose music I have recently become obsessed with.

In particular, his tracks No Sleep and Tainted Love have been fully on repeat. On his album, Leone, some of his tracks have a pop-y feel and he just has a really cool style. He’s got a cute music video for his track Ask Anybody, which is a collab with LOVEMENOT – press play on that to get to grips with his aesthetic.”

Aiitee (@aiiteeofficial) “Some people say this title belongs to a different artist, but to me Scotland’s Beyoncé is Aiitee with no doubt. Her voice and lyrics convey so much emotion and depth, and there’s a real maturity and richness to her music. Her latest release, Love Don’t Fall, includes some pretty cool conceptual interludes and juxtaposes the male and female voice in urban music. Go stream it now.”

Honourable mentions: Louis Seivwright, Alliyah Enyo, Lyrix Winters, Chelsea Keir

November 2020 – Feature

Sinckler’s non-stop attitude has undoubtedly had a huge impact on her rapid rise in the last year. Her rise has been so great, in fact, that it’s seen Re-Up shortlisted for this year’s Scottish Album of the Year Award, which she describes with a massive smile on her face as the “best news ever.” Nominated alongside the likes of Bossy Love, Cloth and SHHE, being a fan and champion of new Scottish music she is particularly excited to see so many debut albums on this year’s shortlist. “I think there’s eight debut albums on the shortlist as well, so almost all of them are our first albums, which is really nice,” she says. [As we headed to print with this month's issue, NOVA was revealed as the winner of the 2020 SAY Award.]

Her passion for championing young Scottish artists has even led to her being asked to be a nominator for the Best Hip-Hop category at this year’s Scottish Alternative Music Awards, having been nominated in the category herself just last year. “When I first got asked I was super excited… because it feels like you can make a difference,” she says, “in terms of representation and equality and stuff.” In order to select this year’s nominees, Sinckler worked alongside two other nominators – hip-hop promoter Alana Hepburn, who Sinckler describes as being “really instrumental in hip-hop and rap in Scotland,” and Mobolaji Agoro, head of Glasgow-based creative collective FORIJ. As a result of COVID-19 restrictions, however, this year’s SAMAs ceremony will be going virtual and will be streamed for free worldwide. It will feature two pre-recorded live sets from Scottish acts, one being Sinckler, who was glad to be able to pre-record her set in Glasgow studio Up 2 Standard, following a series of technical difficulties with live-streamed shows throughout the year.

“They were tough… I just had a whole bunch of issues for different live events,” she says. “The last time it happened I was actually pretty upset… But I’m glad the industry has started doing these pre-recorded ones.”

Another way in which Sinckler has been able to channel her passion for championing up-andcoming Scottish artists is through her radio show The Litness Test, which she debuted on Glasgowbased community station Clyde Built Radio in May this year. Sinckler’s ties with the station’s manager Andrew Thomson go back several years, with one of her productions as Nova Scotia, I Dreamt, featuring on the Clyde Built 4.0 Compilation, released on Thomson’s label Huntleys + Palmers in 2018.

Jayda (@itsmissterjay) “Jayda is a young artist based in Edinburgh with their own unique style, which always shows an artist with potential. I discovered them at an open mic at The Bongo Club, then I had them on a special International Women’s Day radio show on EH-FM last year. Look out for The Lotus Mixtape, which is out now. Jayda is also reppin’ the non-binary peoples, which is great for diversity within the culture.”

Music

NOVA

NOVA’s Local Litness Test

THE SKINNY

Sound and Vision With COVID-19 showing no sign of abating, Glasgow luminaries Cryptic are taking an ambitious new approach to live streams

Photo: Euan Robertson

November 2020 – Feature

T

he pandemic rolls on, and with 2021 looming, there remains no clear indicator of when we might expect something like normality in terms of live performance. The heady days of the early lockdown in March and April seem like the distant past now, partly because of the misplaced optimism of promoters (how many tours were put back until June in the hope that we’d be past the worst of it by then?), and partly because the webcam-and-acoustic-guitar live streams keeping us entertained already look primitive relative to what’s followed them.

Sensing that chances of a wholesale return to the touring circuit will stay remote for a while, and that there’s an appetite for more considered online musical entertainment than quick sessions over Instagram Live, myriad artists have been putting together ever-slicker productions, ranging from the handsome – Angel Olsen’s gorgeously delivered premiere of her new album at an empty amphitheatre in August, for instance – to the borderline crass; a telecoms-giant-backed Phoebe Bridgers show last month urged viewers, in truly dystopian fashion, to “scream into the mic” on their devices as if they were there in person. You suspect they did so, but perhaps not for the reasons the organisers desired.

Still, there remain beacons of hope in this peculiar new cyber-live climate, one of them being

Cryptic’s new Sonic Bites series. The legendary Glasgow arthouse, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, has risen to the challenge of delivering fresh and genuinely engaging content with a daring new collection of audiovisual works intended to be consumed in short, sharp blasts: “something cultural to enjoy in the daytime,” as founder Cathie Boyd puts it. “Hopefully, a welcome distraction from emails, Zoom meetings and everything in between.”

A week before the initial lockdown hit, Cryptic had streamed their first show live from the Glad Cafe in their hometown, with an eclectic line-up (Alex Smoke, LinhHafornow, Aeger Smoothie) that spanned disciplines and continents. When venues closed just days later, Cryptic went back to the drawing board. “We took time to plan and see what we liked or disliked about the different formats people have been exploring over the past few months,” explains Boyd, “and ultimately, I think Sonic Bites was in response to the many online streaming events that I felt were of poor quality.”

Accordingly, Boyd commissioned a series of short-form works that both delve into Cryptic’s expansive archive and incorporate new, experimental material from their current roster. “For its many negatives,” she says, “lockdown has also opened new windows of opportunity for artists.

Josh Armstrong is collaborating with Heir of the Cursed on The Terror, and that Sonic Bite is a pre-cursor to their live performance for the next couple of years. It’s also given Ela Orleans a chance to experiment with artificial intelligence ahead of her commission for 2021.”

“Embracing all mediums that get our work and art across is imperative – especially as we’re faced with a government who doesn’t want to support the arts” Beldina Odenyo Onassis, Heir of the Cursed Orleans, a Polish-born Glasgow veteran of Night School and now Cryptic, after having signed back in January, is preparing for an imminent move south to London, but has found time to put together a remarkable short piece that ties in with her Heir of the Cursed

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Photo: Tamyra DeNoon

Music

Interview: Joe Goggins

Ela Orleans

PhD work at the University of Glasgow, where she’s focusing specifically on Gustave Moreau’s L’Apparition. “I shot some video in Salle des Fêtes, which is this very grand reception room at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where L’Apparition is exhibited,” Orleans explains. “I wanted to bring the past and the future together, so I took footage from this very grand room, full of golden chandeliers, that’s stayed the same for decades, and I’ve combined it with music that’s arranged by artificial intelligence, and I’m going to play trombone on it, which I’ve learned to play during lockdown. It’s a meeting of analogue and digital elements that, I hope, will seem pretty futuristic.”

Orleans admits that she deliberately steered clear of evoking pandemic-related ideas directly – a tricky task, given that she usually concerns herself thematically with matters of life and death – and while the forthcoming collaboration between Glasgow singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo Onassis, better known as Heir of the Cursed, and interdisciplinary director Josh Armstrong might not directly touch upon COVID-19, it is a deep delve into negative emotional responses – namely, night terrors. The appropriately-titled The Terror grapples with the intense emotional experiences that provoke such episodes, as well as the inherent fear that comes with surrendering the self to the unconscious. “We need to find new definitions and not cower in the face of adversity,” says Onassis of the urge to break new ground with the Sonic Bites series, “so I think embracing all mediums that get our work and art across is imperative – especially as we’re faced with a government who doesn’t want to support the arts or what it represents.”

Cryptic Sonic Bites broadcasts at 1pm on the second and fourth Thursday of each month. Ela Orleans’ commission streams on 26 Nov, and The Terror closes the series on 10 Dec cryptic.org.uk

THE SKINNY

New Direction A collaboration between Glasgow gallery The Modern Institute and record label Redstone Press sees artists Luke Fowler and Vikki Morton come together for their first release as Sotto Voce. They tell us about the new project Interview: Nadia Younes

Luke Fowler The Klee EP is due for release on Glasgow label Redstone Press this month as part of a collaboration with contemporary art gallery The Modern Institute, where both Fowler and Morton have previously exhibited their work. The EP’s liner notes read almost like a Hall of Fame of the Glasgow music scene: produced by Sam Smith at Green Door Studios, mastered by James Savage, with artwork by Oliver Pitt of Golden Teacher and distribution via Rubadub. But this is merely “a set of coincidences,” says Fowler.

“I think it’s really important to look for things closer to home and to do it yourself, and that’s — 29 —

really what we were striving to do,” he adds. “I mean, there’s an element of convenience about it, but it is genuinely through enthusiasm for the people that are around us and not needing to look further afield than Glasgow.”

The final piece of the Glasgow puzzle comes in the form of a guest spoken word verse from Turner Prize-winning artist Charlotte Prodger, who recites lyrics from a book entitled The Archaeology of Skye and the Western Isles on one of the EP’s tracks, Trapped Overtones. “It was really nice to hear [Prodger’s] vocal on the track, and it’s a very different sort of vocal part,” says Morton. “And [Luke] thought that [Prodger’s] voice would be particularly good for that.”

Having both worked with Prodger on different musical projects previously, the collaboration is just another way in which the duo were able to celebrate the incredible talent Glasgow has to offer. While they might not think so themselves, with the Klee EP Fowler and Morton have proven themselves more than qualified musicians, while also honouring Glasgow’s vibrant and thriving music scene in the process.

Klee EP is released on 6 Nov via Redstone Press

November 2020 – Feature

“I think it’s really important to look for things closer to home and to do it yourself, and that’s really what we were striving to do”

Clubs

Photo: Andrew Wilson

Y

ou may not be familiar with Sotto Voce, but you’re likely to be familiar with its members, or at least with their work. The duo are Luke Fowler (a Turner Prize-nominated artist and filmmaker, and member of Glasgow-based four-piece AMOR) and Vikki Morton (a visual artist, who also plays music in Muscles of Joy and Rev Magnetic).

Fowler and Morton met while studying at Glasgow School of Art and the pair previously worked on music together for an AMOR project, but despite their varied musical backgrounds they remain reluctant to refer to themselves as musicians. “I’m a non-musician. I come from an art school background,” says Fowler when discussing his role in AMOR, and Morton shares a similar view. “I think of myself as an outsider musician,” she says. “That’s quite often how I feel when I’m working with people that are really in the music world, and that’s their first creative output.”

They needn’t be so humble though, as their latest project proves them to be musicians in their own right. The idea behind Sotto Voce – an Italian phrase, often used in classical music terminology, which means to sing below your normal volume – was to make as many sounds as possible with one instrument. In this case, the instrument is an EML 101 Analogue Modular Synthesizer. “That was the starting point; to really push the limits of this one instrument and then to bring in other voices,” says Fowler.

The pair also took influence from the work of Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee, particularly his Pedagogical Sketchbook; so much so that they have even named their first release after him. “We had all these ideas, and we were looking at Paul Klee’s Pedagogy – the written text – and sort of responding to some of the ideas in that, and I think they did relate to the coldness that was in the music,” says Morton.

“There’s also this idea in his teachings in the Bauhaus where he’s talking about looking to nature for inspiration, and biosystems and feedback loops, and a lot of it is very cybernetic, like a precursor to cybernetics, looking at natural cycles of things,” adds Fowler. “I think that definitely has been an influence on my ideas to music-making and synthesis, looking for the organic, the chaotic, and the random within these binary systems.”

Theatre

THE SKINNY

Say His Name We speak to writer and director Hannah Lavery about paying homage to Sheku Bayoh, the father and Kirkcaldy resident who died in police custody in 2015, in her new play Interview: Eliza Gearty

November 2020 – Feature

H

annah Lavery is no stranger to the subject of grief. The Edinburgh-born poet, performer and playwright has addressed the pain of loss, and the power of what it can conjure, in her work before. Her 2019 show The Drift focused on the loss of her father, a Scottish Black man who was largely absent during her childhood.

Through the prism of that personal loss Lavery explored broader questions of legacy, identity and shame, bringing to light Scotland’s history of colonialism and slavery, and the continuing racism inflicted on people of colour in the country today.

Now Lavery is revisiting Lament for Sheku Bayoh, a play that was first written and shown as a rehearsed reading at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2019. Like The Drift, Lament... is an expression of grief for the loss of a man’s life, and a call for accountability from a society and a system that remains determined to look the other way. It tells the story of Sheku Bayoh, the gas engineer, husband and father of two young children who was killed by police on the streets of Kirkcaldy, Fife in 2015. He was 31 years old.

Lament... “came out of a conversation with David Greig about Sheku Bayoh,” Lavery says of its conception. “I felt like I wanted people to say his name, to create a lament in which we remembered this deeply loved man.” Not many people she spoke to had heard of the killing of Sheku Bayoh – “no-one seemed to know about it” – which only pushed Lavery to see the project through with more urgency. She began finding out what she could about him online.

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THE SKINNY

Hannah Lavery

Theatre

“We were looking at the questions that have been unanswered for the family,” she says. “[The play] is not an investigation – it’s an exploration of what was out there in the media.” The media’s depictions of the circumstances of Bayoh’s death led her no closer to discovering who he was – some included racial tropes and pre-existent racist narratives. “I was looking at what I could see, what I could read, what I could find and how that affected me. My response as a person of colour... was a desire to say his name, and to get other people to say his name with me.”

One powerful aspect of the Black Lives Matter Movement is the ‘SayTheirNames’ ritual that takes place both online and in physical spaces of resistance – a demonstration of fury, a practice of respect, a cry for change and a lament in and of itself. With Lament..., Lavery draws on this process, saying Bayoh’s name and creating an artistic space in which he can be mourned. The play is written in the style of a lament, one of the oldest forms of poetry in human history, and one that has been observed across many different cultures.

“I am writing in that tradition of the lament, in the tradition of keening [the action of wailing in grief for a person who has died],” says Lavery. “It’s about grief. It’s about loss and what that says to us – as citizens, as a country. Art creates a space for empathy. This work doesn’t necessarily demand any action from you, except your empathy.”

A lot has changed since Lavery first wrote

Photo: Hannah Mirsepasi

“ Art creates a space for empathy.

This work doesn’t necessarily demand any action from you, except your empathy”

Hannah Lavery

Photo: Courtesy of the family of Sheku Bayoh

Lament for Sheku Bayoh will be available to stream on a paywhat-you-can basis on 20-21 Nov Sheku Bayoh with his children

nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/lamentforshekubayoh

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November 2020 – Feature

the play – a public inquiry into Bayoh’s death has been announced, and the murder of George Floyd in the US provoked global protests and a worldwide cultural reckoning with racial injustice. How did it feel returning to the piece in 2020? “In so many ways we’re in a different place,” she responds. “But also, we’re not.”

“There’s been an addition to the play in terms of making it clear that the public inquiry has been announced, but the body of the play hasn’t changed.” She pauses. “I don’t think the play’s changed, but maybe the audience will have.

People know who Sheku Bayoh is more since when I wrote it. I don’t think there will be as many people saying ‘who’s that?’

“There will be points in the play that resonate more than they did last year because of what we’ve experienced this year. But the Black Lives Matter Movement existed when I wrote it. It’s more [embedded in] the popular imagination now – society has changed a little and the public has changed a little. How much by still remains to be seen.”

The world has, of course, changed in other ways too. Lament for Sheku Bayoh will be performed to an empty auditorium in the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and streamed online for viewers to watch at home.

Lavery hopes that it will be shown to a live audience one day, though “streaming is more accessible in some ways, so that’s a silver lining.”

“It’s certainly different!” she says, “but I’m just glad it’s getting made.” So are we.

Music

THE SKINNY

Making Moves Ahead of the release of Bemz's latest EP, The Saint of Lost Causes, Kobi Onyame chats to the Glasgow-based rapper about his life and musical journey up until now Words: Tallah Brash

kind of took a downer [...] My mental health took a bit of a dive, so that had an effect on my music [...] I got caught in a trap of kidding myself on that I was a perfectionist... I just wasn’t confident. I didn’t believe in my music. I was hiding my insecurities as being a perfectionist.

Kobi Onyame: Tell us about yourself.

Jubemi Iyuku: I’m a 26 year old Nigerian boy based in sunny Glasgow. My story starts in Nigeria where I was born and raised until I was about three, then I moved to London where I [lived] until I was about 14. Then I moved to Stranraer.

KO: It was a very honest project and that’s what drew me to [you]. Let’s talk about the new EP, The Saint of Lost Causes. What inspired the title?

JI: I’ve got a Nigerian name, Jubemi, and I’ve got an English name, Jude.

And that was the name I used a lot when I first moved to Scotland [...] A lot of people, I don’t know if it was lack of trying or ignorance or whatever, struggled to pronounce my name. It wasn’t until I came to Glasgow that I was like, ‘Look, I’m starting anew and I’m being Jubemi full-time.’

But Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and despair [...] When I found out I was like, ‘Oh my fucking god’, I’m so sorry for my language, but [it was] the most fitting thing for me and for the way I was feeling [...] Being able to write six tracks that explained the struggles I’ve been through…

Making a conscious choice to remove myself from the negative things that I was doing and focusing on my music. I knew I had to make a decision – either I was caught up in this lifestyle that was gonna end bad for me or I put all that energy [into] music.

KO: That’s where the ferry goes from across to Ireland? I once got a ferry from there to Belfast, it was quite a dodgy experience.

JI: Yeah [laughing], I spent four years there, and then I moved to Ayr. I done a lot of my growing up there. I stayed for six/seven years and then moved to Glasgow.

KO: You opened up for me at Stereo about two years ago. Tell us a bit about your journey as a musician.

JI: Prior to [that] show, I’d released Black Kid, White City, which is interesting because I was actually staying in a place in Ayr called White City. I was the only Black person there. So I used that to tell my story [...] Then I was getting ready to drop a threetrack EP called Life [...]

I was gaining a bit of buzz. And then the email came through, ‘Yo, do you want to open up for Kobi Onyame?’, and I was so gassed! For me that was an honour.

Within those next two years, everything just

KO: Life was the first release I heard… In Glasgow that EP sounded very fresh for me. It sounded like a real artist, a real person who was making music... it sounded like I heard Jubemi.

JI: I don’t shy away from my mental health issues, and I use my music as therapy [...] To hear you say that is a big compliment and I’m happy that what I was trying to portray, people could see it.

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“I was hiding my insecurities as being a perfectionist” Jubemi Iyuku KO: A lost cause is defined as a person or thing that can no longer hope to succeed, or be changed for the better. Have you had any times that you’ve experienced a loss of hope, or anything in particular and how did you overcome that?

JI: I’m not going to say that I’ve overcome the things Photo: FORIJ

November 2020 – Feature

“I

want you to stand on my shoulders and just do a lot more than I ever did.”

Even before their chat properly gets underway, when speaking via Google Meets to Jubemi Iyuku, who performs as Bemz, Kobi Onyame imparts the warmth of an older brother who just wants the very best for his younger sibling. But the pair aren’t related. They met on the Glasgow gig circuit a couple of years ago, and have recently recorded a track together (Suddenly) as part of Bemz’s new EP, The Saint of Lost Causes. At the start of October, Onyame introduced us to Bemz via email and we loved what we heard, but it feels only right that we let Onyame do the honours and take the driving seat on this one.

Kobi Onyame

THE SKINNY

Photo: Andrew Low

Music

that made me feel like a lost cause. I lost my mother when I was three, I lost my gran, who became my mother; and my brother, he got stabbed and killed.

All this happened before I was 16, so these are a lot of issues that now affect me. But I was brought up by a very strict Nigerian dad, and he always said: ‘If something doesn’t physically hurt you, there’s no need for you to cry.’ I remember when I found out my brother got killed, I cried three times, and that was it, and I was like, you know what, we move.

All these issues are things that I’ve been facing my whole life. But it wasn’t until lockdown that I decided to do something about it, and that was seeking out therapy. But to relate that back to being a lost cause, mentally, I feel like no matter what happens, all these things, these past traumas, will still be part of me.

KO: Essentially you’re saying that... it is the ammunition you use to push yourself forward into the thing that you’re doing now, the EP, the music, to say ‘Look, this is why I‘m here, this is what I need to do and let’s just get on with it.’

JI: One hundred percent.

KO: It’s very refreshing to hear an honest rap artist spit what he’s living, because that’s what I’m all about […] So the EP is fantastic, the EP is great, I love it. Talk to us about the creative process, the people you worked with, your favourite track for example.

JI: The thing I feel I’ve done well, even though I’m an up and coming artist, [was to] get a lot of features from [other] up and coming artists that I rate [...] I believe in Scotland there’s a lot of brilliant musicians that unfortunately will probably never see the light of day, because the opportunity isn’t there for them, and I said that to Mark [Oyakhire, who features on What It Seems].

I was like, ‘If you being on my song gets you one new listener, I’ll take that as a victory’. And that was the whole mentality that I went into it with, and obviously I ended up on a track with you (Suddenly) [...] [which is] my favourite. The other songs on that tape, they all hold a place in my heart, especially the last song, Quarantine Freestyle.

Bemz

Jubemi Iyuku I spent the last two years watching what everybody was doing in the scene, people beefing each other, calling themselves the king of Glasgow, the king of this, the king of that [...] I had all this rage and anger for the Scottish scene.

Rather than building something everyone was here just trying to pull down each other. So [Quarantine Freestyle] is one of my favourites because it was

just raw emotion and just me, it’s my statement piece to Glasgow.

I feel like as a collective in Glasgow, we all need to do better. And shouting that you’re the king, and this and that on social media, is not doing better. Let people call you the king. Do things, make moves and do things that are kingworthy, build a scene, do that, and let people call you a king.

KO: I heard it all on that track, man. So I guess, to round it all up, 2020, obviously it’s been interesting... It’s brought its challenges for everyone, but I know you’ve got some good news.

JI: I’m gonna be a dad! [...] 2020 outside of music, it’s been a roller coaster… I spent a lot of time in lockdown doing a lot of self-reflecting... I’ve lost some close people, I’ve gained some close people. Trying to describe the feeling of 2020 is very very hard. All I can say is if I see 2021, I’m grateful for that. I’m still here, I’m still alive and I’m still breathing.

2020 made me realise that there were stupid — 33 —

things that I was stressing about as a young adult, that don’t really deserve a second of my time.

Having that lockdown period was great because I was able to channel all this emotion that I was feeling into subjects that actually matter to me, like my mental health, racism and injustice. I was able to focus and be more in tune and more at peace with myself, and be more sure. So when I say something now, I say it with my chest [...] I know 2020 was hard for everyone, but I’ve just got to take all the wins that came with it.

The Saint of Lost Causes is out now; In honour of Jubemi Iyuku’s friend Cleo Smillie, who sadly passed away this year, proceeds will be donated to both Diabetes Scotland and Minds Over Matter, a mental health charity based in Ayrshire bemzrtw.bandcamp.com

November 2020 – Feature

“I had all this rage and anger for the Scottish scene. Rather than building something everyone was here just trying to pull down each other”

THE SKINNY

Comedy

Lockdown Videos With stand-up on pause, Twitter videos are full of comedy club energy – and have been seen by everyone from politicians to film producers Interview: Louis Cammell

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on the year’s sweetest new show Ted Lasso – has also sought to lift spirits in lockdown. Yet alongside promoting Apple TV+’s newest offering, his other content couldn’t be more different. Lone Island is a homemade ‘Love Island’ parody that Goldstein has lovingly auteured. While Lasso has won hearts worldwide, he insists that his isolation-induced web series is his “magnum opus”. In it, Goldstein plays the perpetually topless Bradley Pea. He’s hirsute, he’s ‘over 21’, and he’s the only human contestant.

“Of all the work I’ve created, it’s the thing I’m most proud of,” he says. “The purest distillation of all my interests. Film, love, sex and puppets. It will either get me a BAFTA or sectioned, and that’s what I believe great art is.”

Like Godley’s videos, episodes of Lone Island capture that raw comedy club energy. Not for any shared ability to voice what’s on people’s minds.

Rather, for their sheer madness. If Godley’s videos are the political comedian who opens the night and has the house cheering in rousing agreement, Goldstein’s videos are more like that guy who comes on at the very end and does 20 minutes on how potted plants turn him on.

Comedy duo The Pin, on the other hand, embody roles closer to audience members. Their web sketches started as a thinly veiled excuse to just hang out. “After three weeks of not being

allowed to see each other, we discovered filming Zoom spoof sketches as the only real way to stop ourselves going completely MAD,” say Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen. “After a few days of working out how the youngsters film and edit this sort of thing – and realising it wasn’t using Excel or AOL – we began to have a great old time.”

But it’s also their everyman personas which make them easier to picture in the crowd of a comedy club than onstage. Their videos mostly take aim at the remote work culture that has emerged from the pandemic. In one video, Nick Mohammed (coincidentally, also in Ted Lasso) makes a guest appearance as a man who must convince his boss that a nonexistent four year old exists off screen in order to win his heart and score a promotion.

Yet, ironically, it seems the down-to-earth approach has landed them screen time on a project that is anything but quotidian. “On the rare occasion we’ve been allowed to see each other (when we were somehow asked to be in Jurassic World 3) it was bizarre seeing each other in the flesh.” The pair reportedly share scenes with the likes of Laura Dern and Sam Neill. Although they seem to have been too preoccupied by seeing each other in person to grasp the enormity of the moment: “It’s like he’s in HD.” Ben and Alex that is; not Sam Neill or their prehistoric foes.

Photo: Matt Stronge

November 2020 – Feature

s comedians continue to improvise through the coronavirus, social media has cemented itself as a lifeline. From the homes they’ve found themselves confined to for months now, comics have managed to distribute the laughs usually found in the comedy clubs closed nationwide through videos on social media.

Janey Godley has been a staple of such clubs for years. Over lockdown, her DIY voiceovers of politicians’ coronavirus briefings have gone viral and even garnered the praise of Scotland’s First Minister herself, owing to their unfiltered honesty.

In a video shared by Godley, Nicola Sturgeon says, “[The videos are] very, very funny… occasionally I watch them and I think, ‘Yeah, she must have an insight into what I was really thinking at that point, but I wasn’t able to say it.’”

Yet it’s when Godley’s own voice takes over, with lines like “Maybe quite soon comedy will be registered as an art form and we’ll be able to get some help for comedy clubs, and they’ll open up – I don’t even know why that came into my heid,” that catharsis happens for performers and fans alike. “I have loved making the voiceover videos during lockdown,” says Godley. “‘Frank Get the Door’ and all the other catchphrases have been fun during a dark time.”

Brett Goldstein – podcaster, actor and writer

The Pin

— 34 —

You can watch all of Janey Godley’s videos on Twitter @JaneyGodley, as those of The Pin @thepincomedy and Brett Goldstein’s Lone Island videos @BrettGoldstein. Janey Godley’s book, Frank Get the Door, is available at / janeygodleystore.com. Ted Lasso is available to watch now with an AppleTV+ subscription. Jurassic World: Dominion arrives in cinemas in 2022.

The Pin’s new audio mockumentary The Special Relationship is available on Audible now

THE SKINNY

Understanding the Nonhuman The impact of human existence on our planet is reaching its tipping point.

Rebecca Tamás, whose new essay collection considers this era, ponders the true complexities of the relationship between the human and nonhuman Books

Interview: Anahit Behrooz

— 35 —

of the natural world,” Tamás explains keenly. “And it also – I think – frees us from some of the more rigid structures [that dictate] what a human being needs to succeed, to matter, to have value. There is a joyful opening that comes from recognising those porous boundaries.”

Strangers is out now from Makina Books makinabooks.com/product/strangers/

November 2020 – Feature

After Tomorrow,” Tamás laughs wryly.

“The story is represented purely through a Western viewpoint. And the entire thing happens in about ten minutes, climate change just happens.

And oh no! It’s bad! Some people survive! And that’s the end. It’s so much simpler than the reality, which is that it will be a slow crisis that affects the worse off and is already affecting the worse off.” Indeed by 2050, Strangers tells us, there will be 200 million climate refugees.

“I really do believe that part of the reason that you see an obsession, or a re-inspired obsession, with borders in the US and in Britain is a subconscious relationship with the knowledge of climate change,” Tamás sighs. “I think people are very aware that the first big change that will come from climate crisis is the movement of people.”

What can be done in the face of so much fear and looming grief? The answer, according to Tamás, is both utterly simple and overwhelmingly monumental: it requires understanding, truly understanding, the nonhuman world as something that has a right to exist, simply because it is alive. “I think until we can overturn that use-value obsession in which everything has to have a clear benefit to us, we will really struggle to deal with the environmental crisis that we find ourselves in. I think it’s really important to recognise that the nonhuman is not just a backdrop, comforting because of its beauty or peacefulness. The environments that we interact with are alive: they have a particular experience of the world, a particular attitude, a particular way of moving.”

By acknowledging the intrinsic worth and latent agency of nature, Tamás believes wholeheartedly that we might shift not only impending environmental disaster, but the violent ways in which we behave towards ourselves and each other under capitalism’s exploitation.

“When we think about that collapse of boundaries [between the human and nonhuman], it changes how we see the human simply because it encourages us to recognise that we are also part

Photo: Robin Christian

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e are living through the age of the Anthropocene. Its traces are found throughout our planet’s geological and ecological systems: corals calcifying in oceans made acidic by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the air, non-degradable technological fragments embedded in the strata of our rocks. Defined as the period in which the Earth’s systems became irreversibly impacted by human existence on the planet, this has come to indicate not only our current geological age, but, for many living fearfully in its wake, the beginning of the end.

Rebecca Tamás’ new essay collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is, as the title suggests, intricately bound up with ideas of the Anthropocene. But for Tamás, understanding this time period means realising that the beginning lies much further back. “The history of that unequal relationship with the nonhuman, and in fact with other humans, is much older,” Tamás stresses, adding that it was Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None that helped her understand the ways in which the exploitation of marginalised people and the environment have always gone hand in hand. “She talks about the fact that industrialisation begins with the Atlantic slave trade, rather than with factories being put up in Britain, for example. It’s really important for us to recognise the length of that journey.”

For Tamás, reckoning with the full significance of this age and the concomitant environmental crisis requires this unflinching examination of the ideologies that underpin our society, of the ways in which inequality is manufactured and nurtured in order to make the vulnerable – both human or nonhuman – easily exploitable.

“It’s not as if we lived in perfect harmony with each other and with the nonhuman world before the Anthropocene,” Tamás emphasises. “We need to recognise that inequality in human society and inequality with the nonhuman are wrapped up in the same system of thought. Because it is people from the global south, working-class people who suffer the ravages of climate change. It’s important to recognise that an attack on the environment, an ignoring of the crisis that we’re in, is also an attack on and ignoring of the needs of millions of marginalized people around the world.”

Her essays, lyrical and aching despite – or perhaps because of – their troubling subject matter, explore both where such extremes of inequality can take us, and how they might, even now, still be avoided. “I have an obsession with the film The Day

THE SKINNY

The trauma of moderation Intersections

More and more social media content moderators are coming out with horror stories about their workplaces. One writer takes a look behind the curtains of what it’s like moderating for big tech Words: Liv McMahon Illustration: Monika Stachowiak

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November 2020 – Feature

hen I would report hate speech, violence or abuse on social media, I’d imagine the content whirring off into some vast digital matrix, circulating through loops of code and wires. We tend to forget, when constantly fed news from Silicon Valley tech bros applauding their apps’ unique algorithms, that while back-end social media practices are mostly automated, the most traumatising work of moderating these sites is still carried out by employees. With our increased reliance on the internet, maintaining this humanity in content moderation – providing depth, nuance and empathy that technology cannot – is vital. But at what, very human, cost?

Over recent years, horror stories from content moderators have surfaced despite the slew of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and a code of silence engulfing those moderating for big tech.

Last year, Casey Newton drew back the curtain to reveal the murky, unknown world of Facebook’s

content moderation. In detailing moderators’ experiences at a contracted site in Arizona, Newton’s piece shocked the world. It presents a decidedly dystopian picture of a workplace and global landscape of content moderation ‘perpetually teetering on the edge of chaos.’ Some moderators had panic attacks after repeatedly viewing footage depicting violence, animal abuse or suicide, while others slept with guns by their bedside. Since then, more and more content moderators have emerged from social media’s slicked-back world – presented as one of big money, big dreams and big change – with similar stories of being overworked, underpaid and traumatised by the mental and physical strain of their roles.

Earlier this year, Facebook was forced to pay a giant $52m settlement to 50,000 current and former content moderators whose time spent sifting through endless images and videos of violent content and hate speech left them dealing with PTSD and a range of mental health issues. YouTube is now also being sued by a former employee who claims the company failed to safeguard employees’ mental health with understaffing resulting in employees moderating harmful and disturbing video content for more than four hours at a time – the amount limited by YouTube’s best practices. Investigations even found that YouTube specifies in employment contracts that the job could give them PTSD in an attempt to avoid such lawsuits.

This year, the pandemic only exacerbated health and safety risks for those performing the relentless task of playing catch-up to an insurmountable tide of reported, harmful content; whether from home or when urged to risk their own wellbeing, and that of their families, to return to ill-equipped moderation offices. For content moderators like the anonymous Facebook moderators who took to Medium in April to express solidarity with a boycott of the platform amid Black Lives Matter protests – as Mark Zuckerberg stood idly by as racism and far right hate speech flourished on Facebook – the necessity of proper employment rights is clear. “At the moment,” they wrote, — 36 —

“content moderators have no possibility, no network or platform or financial security – especially when we are atomised in a pandemic and remotely micromanaged – to stage an effective walkout without risking fines, our income and even our right to stay in the countries where we live and work.”

The question of how we solve a problem like content moderation is undoubtedly a difficult one, as matters of human interest and accountability are dwarfed by the profit-driven, protectionist motives of big tech. “I think it all comes down to transparency,” says Carolina Are, an online inequalities and moderation researcher at City, University of London, who studies algorithm bias, online abuse and social media. “Through clarity and transparency, hopefully we will have more standard employment practices for moderators who may use employment tribunals etc.” Not only would this help moderators unionise “so that they can stop being mysterious, sometimes exploited workers behind the scenes,” she says, but it could restore user trust in opaque, confusing decisions made according to in-platform policies.

In April, leading academics at The Alan Turing Institute argued that “content moderators should be recognised as ‘key workers,’ given financial compensation and mental health support reflecting the difficulties and importance of their roles, and enabled to work flexibly with privacy-enhancing technologies.” This echoes demands made by ex-employees suing the social media sites they once moderated.

Foxglove, based in London, are helping content moderators challenge the third party companies tasked with moderating for big tech. Their support for content moderators across Europe has already increased awareness of workplace conditions for moderators, which Foxglove says could be mitigated by “better technology, more reasonable targets, proper psychological support, and higher pay.”

Facebook has previously called their content reviewers “the unrecognized heroes who keep Facebook safe for all the rest of us,” but with an increase in hateful content erupting across social media, content moderators are left traumatised and silenced by NDAs. Over the last decade, the sites and tools built to connect us have in fact helped to tear ourselves and each other apart. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As Are says, “until governments get involved to ensure platforms pay more attention to fairness and clarity, we’ll keep having the same problems.” Until then, moderators are the internet’s last safeguard.

THE SKINNY

News from across the pond The US presidential election will take place at the beginning of November. This American living in Scotland reflects on experiencing it from across the pond Intersections

Words: Andrés N Ordorica Illustration: Andy Carter

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I to talk life. In 2020, those ‘life talks’ have shifted more and more into politics.

Conversations with my parents during lockdown have felt revolutionary. We have broached many difficult and challenging subjects based on world events: indefinite lockdowns, an election year, politicians’ mishandling of COVID-19 and the systemic oppression of Black people in the US and elsewhere across the globe.

Underlying all of this is an understanding that change needs to happen and, for us, that partly begins with voting day this November. Some of my friends will choose not to vote in this election. Some will argue that current structures need to be completely dismantled so we can start from ground zero. But for my immigrant family, voting is one of the few acts that allow us to feel equitable in American society.

My parents are the daughter and son of Mexican immigrants who came to the United States in the early 1960s from the north and south of Mexico, respectively. We are a family of grafters, dreamers, and makers. All my life, my family has instilled in me a firm belief that it is my human right to migrate, to travel, to make home where I can best contribute, flourish, and benefit those around me.

Spending my late twenties and early thirties in Scotland has allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of self, of my values and beliefs.

Through my work with The Scottish BAME Writers Network, I have learned how to marry my love of writing with my passion for community activism. In doing this work, I have learned of many other — 37 —

For my immigrant family, voting is one of the few acts that allow us to feel equitable in American society Voting alone won’t change everything. Often, the most important changes come in the form of community activism, mutual aid, local government and grassroots organising. In Scotland, I have met numerous people fighting to create equitable opportunities for their communities. These people continue to inspire me during a time of such uncertainty. I may not know the outcome of the US elections, but I know that I have so much to contribute to my local communities and that provides me with some sense of hope.

November 2020 – Feature

he clock reads 4am when my husband nudges me awake. The window of our bedroom is opaque from autumnal condensation. But the lights of the red double decker passing by still shine through. Full of those returning from late night shifts or those just starting their early workday.

“What?” I ask him.

“She lost,” he tells me.

It is 9 November 2016, and he had spent all night glued to the television watching the US election results. I go back to bed but will wake up later to speak with friends and family. I will read the news, scroll through Twitter and cry twice, helplessly muttering “I’m with her.” Dread will soon surround me, and I will spend days trying to make sense of how we got here: Donald Trump as President.

Fast-forward four years and I am now sitting in my tenement flat in Edinburgh. I am, like you, trying to survive a global pandemic both mentally and physically. On top of that, I am facing another US election cycle in which the incumbent will go head-to-head with Joe Biden. By the time this is published, I will have sent off my early voting ballot. But I won’t know who the next US President is. Lately, life is about operating in a vacuum of not knowing what will happen next.

Every Sunday afternoon, I call my family in the US. We bridge the thousands of miles and six-hour time difference via FaceTime. I update them on my work, husband, and latest writing projects. My little brother shares stories about middle school, his latest athletic endeavours, and then wanders back to his room to play Fortnite, leaving my parents and

brilliant people in Scotland doing powerful work to better the lives of young Black and People of Colour Scots, those welcoming refugees, and providing practical support for asylum seekers.

I felt very lost during the last US election. My husband and I had just emigrated back to the UK after two years living in Ireland. We were navigating a complicated immigration system, I was unemployed and, like many others, we both were processing the reality that the UK voted to leave the European Union. We left our Irish friends not knowing what the future relationship would be between the EU and UK. My heart hurt knowing that freedom of movement was ending after what it afforded me and my husband so early in our marriage.

Even now, there are many times when I feel completely powerless and at a loss. It is easy to be jaded by politics. But I understand that to change the system we must challenge the idea that as individuals we have nothing to contribute. My FaceTime calls this year with family and friends have demonstrated the power of conversation.

Open dialogue allows us to reflect on what is happening around us.

THE SKINNY

Film as activism We meet Glasgow environmental activist, filmmaker and composer Cameron Mackay, who’s about to embark on a series of films for Glasgow Science Centre’s Our World, Our Impact programme, which marks a one-year countdown to COP26 in Glasgow next November Film

Interview: Jamie Dunn

November 2020 — Feature

Photo: Emma Woodham

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he great African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène once said: “Cinema is like an ongoing political rally with the audience.” In his own modest way, Glasgow-based filmmaker Cameron Mackay is part of this lineage. The 25-year-old specialises in short documentaries that are perfect for sharing across social media and come with a hopeful environmental message. “To make any kind of change I think you need to be hit very deeply, and I’ve never felt that graphs or academic papers alone can deliver that,” Mackay tells us from his flat in Glasgow over a Zoom call.

Mackay grew up in St Andrews, and his passion for the environment was instilled early on. Hiking in the Scottish countryside was his gateway. “This might sound a little Nan Shephard-esque, but there’s a real relationship you foster with the natural world when you’re walking in the Highlands.” He also plays the fiddle and composes, and reckons the rich storytelling in Scottish music was another influence. “I think if you look at trad music, it’s a link to the landscape. When you listen to people like Julie Fowlis and Duncan Chisholm, you feel this huge, almost spiritual connection with nature, so music really unlocked a lot of things for me.”

The idea to use film as a way of expressing this ardour for the natural world came later, during a trip to a mountain range that makes our Munros look positively dinky. “When I left school, I really wanted to do something big, so I went on an expedition with an organisation called the British Exploring Society to the Indian Himalayas.” The five weeks Mackay spent in northern India put a fire in his belly. “I came away thinking: we in the UK are emitting these carbon emissions, but it’s communities around the world – some of the most sustainable by today’s standards – who are the ones who are being impacted the most.”

The following year, while studying Geography at Glasgow University, Mackay organised his own expedition, but this time he documented it. “I’d just

“You can’t go in being like, ‘Here’s what you shouldn’t do.’ Instead, it should be, ‘here’s the opportunity.’ So I always try and emphasise that the sustainable option is often the cheapest, the healthiest, the easiest to do, and the most fun.”

You’ll be seeing more of Mackay’s films over the next twelve months as he’s recently teamed up with Glasgow Science Centre for its Our World, Our Impact campaign, which focuses on how people across Scotland can have an impact on climate change ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26, which is set to arrive in the city next November. “It’s a series of short pieces for social media, but together they tell a much bigger Cameron Mackay filming at the Glasgow Science Centre story,” says Mackay. The first film introduces the Our World, Our watched this film called Chasing Ice, and it was all Impact campaign and COP 26, with further films about time lapse cameras in the Arctic, and I was exploring the campaign’s five key areas: climate like, ‘Wow, film is the best way to communicate justice, food, energy and travel, the environment these stories.’” Returning to Glasgow with reams of and science, and our green futures.

“The Science Centre is an incredible place to footage, Mackay had to find a way of getting it to the discover science,” notes Mackay, “and they’re also public. Not lacking ambition, he opted for literally the biggest platform in the city. “I took the footage to so public-facing and fun, so they’re in a great position to do some really cool communications the guy who runs the IMAX at the Science Centre, and he was like, ‘If you can do a ten-minute cut, we’ll around COP26, being just across the water from where these conversations are gonna be happenplay it before one of our climate change films.’ That ing.” He’s also excited to be spreading the word was the first film I ever made.”

Throughout university, Mackay would take about activism in Glasgow. “I’m probably a bit his camera on more adventures, but his wanderbiased, but it’s a city that’s really issues focused, lust seems to have faded in the last few years. “I that looks out for people. I feel like if there’s began to realise that places like Greenland and something like COP26 going on here, the general Tanzania and the Amazon don’t need a wee Glasgow mood will be to support it.”

18-year-old boy from Scotland coming to tell their story for them. I was like, ‘Why am I trying to tell all these other people’s stories when Glasgow and Scotland mean the world to me and there are great Anyone interested in finding out more about climate change in Scotland, and the small actions that will create a big imstories to be told here.” pact, should sign up to the Our World, Our Impact newsletter Mackay’s most recent films focus on local at glasgowsciencecentre.org/ourworldourimpact activism and can be found on the BBC Scotland's The Social. They run the gamut from making your own environmentally friendly washing detergent to You can let the Science Centre know what you’re doing to help using the #OurWorldOurImpact hashtag on social media eating sustainably. The first thing that comes across is that Mackay isn’t preachy – he’s no influencer smugly deriding your profligate lifestyle. For more of Mackay’s work, head to cameronmackay.co.uk — 38 —

THE SKINNY

What’s New We take a closer look at three Scottish releases coming out this month, and take a dip back into what you might’ve missed in October. Spoiler alert: it’s all very good!

Photo: Harrison Reid

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EP Artifice under his solo moniker, Blue Tiger, on 27 November. Coming out on DIY indie label OK Pal Records, Artifice is a delightfully lo-fi, melancholic pop offering which in places calls to mind the likes of Beirut, Grizzly Bear, and even Gruff Rhys. With gorgeous vocal harmonies throughout, the EP’s mid-point (Ornament) also features soaring strings from Robyn Anne Dawson, and EP closer Alone With You has a very welcome guest backing vocal from Hailey Beavis. Artifice is a beautiful five-track EP that will provide a much-needed sonic hug to anyone who needs it this winter.

October releases you may have missed...

Here are a few things that caught our attention as October wore achingly on, starting with Lizzie Reid’s simply stunning single Seamless (16 Oct).

Hailing from Glasgow, you may know Reid as a member of raucous poppunk outfit Dead Pony (fka CRYSTAL), but her solo work couldn’t be further away from that of her band. Reid’s voice is, quite simply put, sublime, and the way she uses her impressive range to express vulnerability is unreal. If you’re a fan of Angel Olsen, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Rose, or just heart-on-sleeve songwriting in general, then Lizzie Reid is for you.

In Edinburgh, up-and-coming rapper and R’n’B artist Jayda released her 11-track Lotus Mixtape (17 Oct), filled with thought-provoking excerpts and slick vocals; Forever Alien released their kitchen disco-ready EP, Chasing the Dragon (26 Oct); and on 30 October Austrian singer-songwriter NANI released her six-track EP, Pure Frustration, describing it as a record “about finding the world extremely fucking annoying”, something we can all relate to right now.

On the same day, Paisley’s The Vegan Leather released The Gloaming, their first new music since 2019’s Poor Girls/Broken Boys; while Fife-based “queer-dad-poly-plum-producer” Ben Seal offered up DEATH & MORE, an album of — 39 —

Peter Cat

vibrant eccentric pop, certain to add a bit of colour to the greyest of days.

Finally, on 29 October Mogwai had the first play of their dreamy new single, Dry Fantasy, on BBC 6Music. Offering a glimpse of what we can expect from their forthcoming album, As the Love Continues, due on 19 February via Rock Action, at least we all now have something to look forward to next year.

theskinny.co.uk/music

November 2020 — Review

hile things may currently be a bit rubbish – understatement much? – at least we still have music! As is to be expected, along with the cold weather, November also brings with it a slew of new Scottish records worth turning the TV off for. Romanian-born, Scotland-based singer-songwriter Lizabett Russo is releasing her fourth album, While I sit and watch this tree, on 27 November via the Last Night From Glasgow label.

Recorded earlier this year during lockdown, While I sit and watch this tree features seven original songs and one traditional Scottish song, The Water is Wide; two of the tracks are also in Russo’s native Romanian tongue – Colo Sus Pe Un Mente and Valuri Si Ganderi, both of which “have an emphasis on the human connection with nature.”

As well as finding inspiration in Russo’s journey as an immigrant, she also draws inspiration from a recent trip to the Amazon Jungle in Ecuador.

In the album’s accompanying press release, Russo says: “These songs focus a lot on empowering people on their personal paths and speak about the need for us to respect and preserve nature and also remember our true nature which is not separate from mother Earth but connected to everything and everyone on this planet.” While I sit and watch this tree is delicate, considered and a beautiful listen from start to finish.

Earlier in the month, on 6 November, Glasgow’s Peter Cat releases his debut LP, The Saccharine Underground, via MoFi Records. It's a nostalgia-inducing glam-pop romp that brings to mind the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Jonathan Richman, The Divine Comedy and Belle & Sebastian; you can even hear a sliver of Donovan’s Mellow Yellow on (I Want to Break Down) In Your Arms, and can easily imagine a 2020 Elvis taking on crooner duties on If You Can’t Live Without Me, a feat that becomes all the more plausible upon hearing the opening lyrics of SO STR8.

In a world where more and more artists are turning to electronic technology to create their music, it’s also refreshing to learn that Peter Cat recorded The Saccharine Underground straight to tape with absolutely no digital instrumentation.

Also, it was produced by Catholic Action’s Chris McCrory, which is probably the most perfect pairing for this yacht rock, baroque pop record we can think of. A match made in heaven, if you will.

From one cat to another, Edinburgh-based Mario Cruzado, who you may or may not know from fronting Plastic Animals, releases his debut

Music

Words: Tallah Brash

THE SKINNY

Know Your Memes Local Music

Ahead of releasing their self-titled EP this month, Glasgow laptop punk-rock duo MEMES talk us through the record, track by track

Interview: Tallah Brash MEMES is released on 20 Nov via Fierce Panda facebook.com/memestheband

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t’s impossible to listen to MEMES without the corners of your mouth turning up slightly; you can almost hear the twinkle in their eyes through the rattling instrumentals and sneering vocals. Having only formed in 2019, it’s amazing how much this Glasgow duo have achieved already, especially given the absolute shitshow 2020 has been. Seemingly straight out the gate they were being tipped by BBC 6Music’s resident guitar music obsessive, Steve Lamacq, who had them in for a session last May, and in 2020 the pair were selected to perform as part of Wide Days’ coveted showcases. This year, that showcase – like most things – moved online.

MEMES are built for live shows and watching their set online for Wide Days back in July had us longing for sweaty gigs in dingy basements. Until it’s safe to do that kind of thing again, we’ll just have to make do with MEMES’ self-titled EP, due out on 20 November via London-based indie label Fierce Panda.

To tell us more about the EP, cousins John and Paul McLinden, who make up MEMES and like to refer to themselves as ME and ME “because we are selfish genes”, talk us through the record’s punchy 12-minute runtime.

SO WHAT “MEMES have a problem. In SO WHAT we confess to never listening to a song more than halfway through, and yet, we need you to listen to this song right to the end of its 103 seconds. All the work put in, all those ratty guitars and pogo-primed vocals, the rhythmic urgency and loping bass, would all be lost to listeners who gave up at the halfway point. ‘So What?’, you might say.

“Like most MEMES tracks, the writing of SO WHAT started with the bassline and electronic drums. We like the idea of keeping the tracks short and snappy, like song versions of memes.

It’s self-recorded and produced and it was one of those tracks that just came together very quickly.”

OLL KORRECT “The tempo’s wrong. The drumming’s wrong. The bass is wrong.

The guitars are wrong. The singing is wrong. But put together, it’s OLL KORRECT. We had no idea that ‘oll korrect’ was the genuine abbreviation for OK until recently, it seemed like a good starting point for a song.

“The track is based around the constant high-tempo pulses of the bass and drums. As usual, we kept things short and snappy and to the point. This is the only track on the EP that we recorded at a studio (Venice of the North Studio in Glasgow) and our mate Adam Parker played drums on this. Although we like to work alone and with electronic drums, this was a welcome change to get into a studio and get the raw energy of live drums.”

THE PERFECT STORM “This track is a slight departure from the punky attacks of the other tracks and even has real singing (backing vocals). It is still very much the MEMES sound with the thick crunchy bass, heavy electronic drums and shouty vocals, but there is allowance for a little bit of melody (just a little). We’ve also made more use of synths on this track as the nature of the song lends itself to synths. The idea for the lyrics is that social media is the perfect storm, and it’s brewing nicely.”

November 2020 — Review

Photo: Jannica Honey

J.O.B.S. “This was the first single that we released on Fierce Panda back in November 2019. The single we released prior to this (Happy Shopper) was a more melodic affair and with J.O.B.S., we wanted a return to a fast-paced and caustic sonic assault. We just didn’t know at the time that it would be so fast that we hang on its coattails when we play it live. Like all MEMES tracks, the basis is a crunching bass and a driving drumbeat. Throw some jagged guitars and shouting and you have J.O.B.S. “J.O.B.S. was written with a red pen, while we should have been working. We all share the thoughts of J.O.B.S. from time to time.”

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CHEER UP “Cheer Up is about cancelled gigs, environmental catastrophe and the importance of staying in to watch TV. It’s about heads of states and states of hands. It’s about lifting the gloom in an atmosphere of doom. It’s about fast food and slow internet. Streaming MP3s at 2MTRs distance. Stay home.

“Cheer Up is a constant muscular motorik groove. It’s a departure from our usual two-minute tirade (although we did consider doubling the BPM at one point). We have allowed this one to breathe with a long electronic/techno music-influenced introduction, but the thread of the MEMES bass sound holds everything together throughout.

This one is more LCD Soundsystem and Can than it is punk.”

THE SKINNY

In Cinemas

Patrick Director: Tim Mielants

County Lines Director: Henry Blake

Starring: Conrad Khan, Ashley Madekwe, Harris Dickinson

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Released 20 Nov by BFI; certificate 15

Starring: Kevin Janssens, Hannah Hoekstra, Jemaine Clement

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Flemish director Tim Mielants’ feature debut Patrick is a tender and funny tragicomedy set in a crummy naturist campsite in Belgium. It takes about a minute to get used to all the bobbing appendages on screen, but once you acclimatise, Patrick is a joy. Credit to Mielants and his co-writer Benjamin Sprengers, who resist the temptation to centre all their jokes around the nudity; instead the film plays like a Coen brothers-esque caper where everyone just happens to be naked.

The film revolves around the titular Patrick (Janssens), the site’s 30-something sadsack handyman who still lives at home with his parents, the owners of the woodland campsite.

When Patrick’s favourite hammer goes missing, the search for his tool sends

In Cinemas

Fourteen-year-old Tyler isn’t living in the real world. At school he is withdrawn, but it’s more than that.

He is drifting through a version of London contorted by a haze of unreality. Corridors and classrooms swim around him in alien, submarine hues; his family home has a sickly, oppressive glow. He’s boxed in by doorframes and windows; trapped in the architecture of adolescence.

And then he meets Simon, a guardian angel who shows Tyler a different world: daylight, no school, new trainers and burgers on the house. But the free lunch comes at a cost. The next day Tyler receives a wrap of drugs, a tub of

Vaseline and a train ticket. He hides them in a queasily familiar shoebox.

It’s a striking moment, capturing in an instant the exploitation of the County Lines gangs.

There are several such flourishes in County Lines: a film that confidently blends unfussy naturalism with an eye for telling details and neat cinematic phrases. Its opening chapter, where quirks of character and chance bring Tyler into Simon’s orbit, is particularly impressive. And while this form isn’t quite maintained, things rally in the final act. County Lines offers a mature reflection on the fallout of such grooming and makes this much clear: Tyler is a boy playing the part of a man. His illusion has been woven by an unscrupulous abuser. It cannot last. [Phil Kennedy]

him on a spiral of self-discovery and deep into the dark underbelly of the nudist camp’s internal politics. Among the residents are a louche rock star (played by Jemaine Clement) and his Belgian girlfriend (Hoekstra).

Mielants honed his craft on TV shows like Peaky Blinders and Legion, but his visual instincts are deeply cinematic, with most of the inarticulate protagonist’s emotions communicated through expressive use of the camera and evocative sound design.

Overflowing with oddball humour and a central mystery full of delightful twists and turns, Patrick is also notable for featuring the most brutal naked punch-up this side of Eastern Promises. [Jamie Dunn]

Released 20 Nov by Anti-Worlds; certificate TBC

Photo: Courtesy of BFI County Lines

About Endlessness Director: Roy Andersson

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Roy Andersson is on sparkling form with his latest Beckett-esque study in the human condition. Visually, About Endlessness is similar to earlier works: a static camera observes characters in wide shot as they act out a little drama of no more than a few minutes; invariably, the actors are wearing white makeup that suggests they’re walking corpses.

These short sequences tend to be mundane and everyday. In one, a middle-aged man and woman, presumably a couple, sit on a bench quietly watching the sun set. The woman breaks the silence with the melancholic observation: “It’s almost September.” A few capture moments of

historical note, and some characters make multiple appearances. A priest who’s losing his faith features across several tableaux, including one in which he has a nightmare of performing the Passion while his congregation beat and whip him. The effect is like watching a series of live-action comic panels.

As well as being gently amusing, Andersson’s genius is to pepper his comic sketches with genuinely moving observations. The simplest of sequences knock you for six, be it a father bending down in the rain to tie his daughter’s shoelace while she shelters under her dinky umbrella or three young women opting to have an impromptu dance outside a country pub. We’ve laughed more at other Andersson films, but About Endlessness might be his most endearing and humane. [Jamie Dunn] Released 6 Nov by Curzon and on Curzon Player; certificate 12A

The Boys in the Band

Patrick

The Boys in the Band Director: Joe Mantello

Starring: Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Charlie Carver, Brian Hutchison

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The world may be a completely different place to when Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band was first performed off-Broadway in 1968 (and filmed two years later by William Friedkin), but its dialogue still stings, and its spirit and lack of stereotyping make it feel as fresh as ever.

Producer Ryan Murphy and director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the 2018 stage version) bring together a lively cast featuring pretty much every young gay actor in Hollywood, and the venom flies.

Zachary Quinto sizzles as the guest of honour, Harold, at a birthday party thrown for him by best friend Michael (Parsons), who still harbours feelings

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for ex-lover/best friend Donald (Bomer). Murphy regulars Andrew Rannells and Charlie Carver are among the other guests, while Michael’s old roommate Alan (Hutchison), as the sole heterosexual presence at the party, is the disrupting force that causes them to all face their own internalised self-hatred.

The controversy of the original has somewhat dissipated in 2020, given the entire plot seems to hinge on how shocking it is to see a group of gay men together. Better to consider the film as a window into a different time: into the shame and guilt of the pre-Stonewall era that leads these men to lash out, and the way in which a lack of power can slowly erode away at you until even your own friends become the enemy.

[Katie Driscoll]

Streaming on Netflix now

November 2020 — Review

Starring: Martin Serner, Jessica Louthander, Tatiana Delaunay, Anders Hellström, Jan-Eje Ferling, Bengt Bergius, Thore Flygel

About Endlessness

THE SKINNY

ICYMI Did you know they made Mrs. Doubtfire in 1982 but starring better actors, jokes, and not a huge pointless pile of garbage? Stand-Up Krystal Evans has just found out

November 2020 — Review

Comedy

Illustration: Chiara Celini

I

had heard of Tootsie, and knew it was lauded as a brilliant comedy, but considering it’s from 1982 and about a straight man dressing as a woman, I just assumed it was a 120 minute gay joke.

I mean, can you blame me? Pre-1997, the idea of a man being gay was the punchline of 99% of jokes in all films and television in Hollywood. No, seriously! The scriptwriter would type “GAY MEN EXIST” into his typewriter, dust the cocaine off his hands, say “welp better turn this bad boy in,” then call up another guy friend and skip together down the sidewalk toward a sandy beach where they did old timey things like talk to each other and feel the full potential of their manly creative minds flourish in a world that accepted them, and only them, for who they were: assholes. And the audience, upon being reminded that gay men exist, would spit out their Tab and Funions in uproarious laughter all over their scratch n sniff slap bracelets while hurling money toward the movie screen. No exceptions. Ask your parents!

So, it’s also hard to imagine that in 1982, Dustin Hoffman starred in a film where he played an out-of-work actor who dresses as a middle-aged southern feminist woman in order to land a role on a daytime soap opera. Unbelievably, there are almost no punchlines which make fun of people who are gay, female, or trans (even though the word didn’t exist yet).

Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) gets so ‘method’ as Dorothy, he has a killer line right at the start of the film towards a very sexist male character: “Oh, you want some gross caricature of a woman.

To prove some idiotic point like ‘power makes women masculine’ or ‘masculine women are ugly’. Shame on you. Macho shithead.”

Get it, girl.

There are other surprising things. Jessica Lange’s character has a 14-month-old baby, Hoffman asks if she’s divorced, she says “No I’ve never been married” and that’s all that’s spoken of it – maybe she wanted to raise the baby alone. Who knows? They don’t address it, because fuck you. It’s not the point of the movie.

Likewise, when Lange resists her attraction to Dorothy, she never dismisses her own or Dorothy’s feelings, or shames Dorothy for being a lesbian (or so she thinks). It’s part of the brilliance of the movie.

May I gush? Even though I watched Tootsie by myself, I laughed loads like a total weirdo.

The soundtrack alone does that magical thing where it makes me nostalgic for a time I never lived through. Dustin’s long black hair and thick New York accent is swoon.

And, never have I seen so many classic Hollywood movie tropes play out one after the other: a poor character with a huge NYC pad, a meet-cute where characters drop shit then find love in each other’s eyes, MAKEOVER MONTAGE, drink thrown in man’s face for being too sexually forward, man serenading someone from a balcony and New Yorkers screaming at him to stfu. I could go on.

The film comes to a head when the lead actor in the soap opera confesses his love for Dorothy, is finally invited up to her flat and full-on assaults her with an in-drag Hoffman trying to escape and saying “no, stop” etc. This is all (extremely uncomfortably) played for laughs. Luckily Bill Murray comes in and relieves the scene of all tension.

At this point, I’d lost a bit of faith in the wokeness of the film – but when Dustin Hoffman regales what has happened to Murray, he seems genuinely upset, saying “Don’t. Rape is not a laughing matter. I saw the look in his eyes. I was in big trouble.

You hadn’t walked in right then, I’d have been in the Daily News tomorrow.” That’s a better attitude than I’ve seen from some films made in the last decade. Still, docking points for assault as comedy, but at least it was addressed, sort of. A for effort.

After watching the film five days ago, I’ve been playing It Might Be You by Stephen Bishop on repeat and I finally realised what I’ve been looking for all of my life: a 40-yr-old Dustin Hoffman leaning against a Light Blue Ford Transit MK2 in 1982.

Which is why I’ll always be unhappy.

“That’s a better attitude than I’ve seen from some films made in the last decade”

You can catch Krystal on Twitch at twitch.tv/krystal_evans or on Twitter @Kraft_Evs

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THE SKINNY

Art Reviews

November 2020 — Review

On entering Tramway, there’s an ambient soundtrack playing. There are bird noises, but also synthetic sounds. This combination of the known and familiar with futuristic and uncanny elements is a recurrent methodology through Rajni Perera’s visionary paintings and sculptures.

Compositionally, the paintings refer to classical portraiture, taking their cue in places from Indian miniatures. The people of colour she paints wear traditional-looking South Asian garments but they may also have four to six eyes, or a bottom lip that extends into something like a petal. The carefully rendered patterns show existent styles of floral fabric. Nevertheless, the layering of flat patterns is built up in a way that gives a psychedelic sense of multidimensionality.

Taking on a further degree of relevance this year, Perera’s 2019 sculptures of face masks combine traditional South Asian textile decoration of folds, beading and weaving with branded 3M filters embedded. Other sculptures render in 3D form the kinds of figures seen in the paintings in large scale.

With the titles of works referring to Ancestors, Travellers and Sentinels,

alongside the dramatic costume, there’s a suggestion of a society with recognisable patterns of culture-making through ornament and shared symbologies. For example, one exquisite detail of a painting shows an eagle amulet balanced or hovering over the head of Traveller. This second layer of motifs follow the kind of patient world building that marks out the best instances of sci-fi and fantasy; the visual equivalent of creating a dictionary of Elvish or Klingon.

Perera’s exquisitely-made paintings are representations of a future that’s not often seen, where BIPOC bodies, histories and traditions are adorned, beautiful, and protagonists in a new and as yet unintelligible form of society. [Adam Benmakhlouf]

Caroline Walker: Janet, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 Dec, free, booking required

Photo: Courtesy of Private collection

Rajni Perera Tramway

Caroline Walker’s exhibition at Ingleby Gallery, Janet, focuses on her mother. These are simple oil paintings, not stylistically groundbreaking, and yet their subject is captivating.

The exhibition of just fifteen paintings works well as a series in which we glimpse snapshots of a neverending domestic labour. Janet – a silver-haired, trainer-clad, jumpertouting woman – potters around from canvas to canvas vacuuming, watering the garden, dusting, washing up, and performing a very relatable form of womanhood.

In Making Fishcakes, Late Afternoon, December we look from the dark outside inward at Janet under a golden light at work by the sink, a cluster of fish slices – her pot of tools – in front of her. In Tucking In, Late Evening, March we see Janet in the conservatory pottering around and preparing her plants for the cold night ahead. In Planting Decisions, Early Afternoon, May her gloved hands show her deep in thought

while looking down at trays of seedlings.

These are neat compositions, with a quality of light akin to Dutch genre paintings. The success of Walker’s work is in her ability to find this tender beauty in what could all too easily be a two-dimensional portrayal of years of oppression under patriarchy. Whilst there is no doubt that Janet is a woman produced by these circumstances, the paintings also probe Janet’s psychological interior, asking us to see her as an active female subject, not merely a passive submitter to gender stereotypes. Janet is a caretaker, caught in the act of taking care. She moves from room to room through the house, which she nevertheless maintains, perhaps out of love, or pride, or just habit. [Flora Zajicek]

Rajni Perera: Traveller, Tramway, Glasgow, until 14 February 2021, free, booking required Rajni Perera, Traveler, 2019, mixed media, 40,6 x 20,5 cm

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Art

Photo: John McKenzie, Courtesy of the Artist and Ingleby, Edinburgh Caroline Walker: Janet, installation view

Caroline Walker Ingleby Gallery

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

The New Abject

Cat Step

Xstabeth

What You Could Have Won

Edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page

By Alison Irvine

By David Keenan

By Rachel Genn

Taking its title from philosopher Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory, abject things are described as ‘border objects’ which trouble the distinction between self and other. These ‘disgust-inducing’ objects include commonplace things like shed skin, nail clippings, menstrual blood, or severed limbs. This anthology is an extension of the theory, dwelling on things that abjectly disgust us in both the psychological and social realms.

Most of the stories elicit a mix of physical disgust and deep-rooted empathy. It is astounding to realise that the majority of these were written pre-COVID, given their relevance to the strange purgatory the world finds itself in. There is an interesting anecdote from Ra Page about having a nightmare after finding a facemask in his box of discarded items, several years from now. Many of us can relate to him recoiling from pure disgust at the sight of one of the objects that define our existence right now.

Here, protagonists have shed their past selves, or temporarily climbed back into their own skin by becoming obsessed with innocuous, undesirable objects like stains, hair and eyelashes that fall out. These fixations are symptomatic of deeper, more personal afflictions like psychological trauma and abuse. The writers illustrate the ordinary yet disturbing notion of modern anxieties. Featuring literary powerhouses like Mark Haddon, Saleem Haddad and Margaret Drabble, this eerie, provocative anthology redefines modern horror for our era. [Rabeea Saleem]

When Liz, the mother of four year old Emily, leaves her sleeping daughter in the car while popping into a Co-op, she doesn’t expect to return to find strangers waiting for her, full of questions and scathing judgement.

In the minutes she was gone, she stopped being Liz – new arrival in a small Scottish town at the foot of the Campsie Fells – and became the mother who abandoned her daughter in the car, the mother who was lazy and careless, the mother who needs social workers and neighbours to keep an eye on her. Her split-second decision, one borne from reluctance to disturb her unwell daughter, unravels Liz and Emily’s attempts to start their lives afresh.

Cat Step asks us whether the societal expectation of mothers to be perfect caregivers is fair, and demonstrates the harm caused by harsh judgements we impose when women don’t meet this impossible standard.

In a welcome and refreshing representation of the complexities of motherhood, it demands we not look away from Liz’s brittleness, the rage that sends her spiralling, and the grief that haunts her, however uncomfortable it makes us and the people around her.

Irvine also delves into the importance of community and friendship, along with the significance of being part of something where kindness is offered unconditionally.

Skilfully constructed, Cat Step is gripping, poignant, and at times an absolute gut punch. [Sim Bajwa]

Xstabeth opens with a passage lamenting the death of a mad scribe named David W. Keenan, and it’s clear the author is up to his old tricks again. Across previous novels This is Memorial Device and For The Good Times, Keenan has honed a style that mixes the metaphysical and metatextual with the mundane – bar room banter about football, poetry, sex and stouts whirling off at a moment’s notice into psychedelic ruminations on the nature of reality. Each book is like a tale told by a drunkard with a twinkle in his eye, a true Zen lunatic with a thick Celtic brogue.

Xstabeth is lighter on its feet than its predecessors, focusing mostly upon the story of a young Russian woman named Aneliya, her father, and a mysterious presence named Xstabeth.

Through sexual adventures and philosophical debates, Aneliya reaches out after something beyond the boundaries of everyday life. She takes up with a famous musician and a more famous golfer, wanders the streets of St Andrews and wonders about the function of memory, the nature of goodbyes, the meaning of it all.

By the end it’s hard to tell whether the story is the ramblings of a madman or a blinding dose of pure cosmic wisdom. But it’s so much fun that it’s also very hard to care. [Ross McIndoe]

What You Could Have Won opens with pop-star Astrid and failing psychiatrist Henry on a nudist Greek island.

From the outset Astrid is portrayed as the forgetful, volatile addict. Henry is simultaneously unsympathetic towards anyone but himself and his work, and calculatingly envious of others – illustrated in the measured attention he pays to the penis size of the volleyball players he watches.

Astrid is there to recover from something she did at Burning Man, but what that was, we don’t yet know.

What we do know is that Henry is secretly feeding her other drugs amidst her own addictions, making notes of quantities and her actions.

From there, the chapters aren’t linear. We jump not only between their viewpoints but physically – from the Greek island, to their New York apartment, to a Parisian rehab. All the while we follow Henry’s toxic jealousy towards everyone around him and his attempt to drag Astrid even further down in order to build himself up. The effect is disorientating, but as the novel moves through time more becomes clear for both the reader and Astrid, who grapples with her dependence on Henry whilst those around her attempt to show her just how toxic he is.

Genn has woven a deft tale of toxicity, both in substances and relationships, which keeps the reader hooked and discombobulated in equal measure – just like Astrid. [Emily Hay]

Comma Press, Out Now, £9.99

Dead Ink, 5 Nov, £9.99

White Rabbit, 12 Nov, £14.99

And Other Stories, 3 Nov, £10

commapress.co.uk/books/the-new-abject

deadinkbooks.com/product/cat-step

whiterabbitbooks.co.uk

andotherstories.org

November 2020 — Review

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THE SKINNY

Home Comforts Food

We talk to two of the many, many people bringing exciting food and drink to our homes in lockdown – Manifesto Coffee and Afternoon Tea by Rose Interview: Peter Simpson

How did Manifesto come about and what are the motivations behind it?

We’ve been working in the coffee industry for about 20 years between us and we’ve both always been interested in the roasting side of things. Alex bought a small home roaster to try it as a hobby, but what gave us the final push and, in a sense, an opportunity, was losing our incomes due to COVID.

Photo: Rose Gregory Afternoon Tea by Rose

Ethical sourcing and transparency are really important to you; can you expand on that?

We wanted to create a business that positively impacts as much of the world we affect as possible. That’s why full transparency has been the goal of Manifesto since day one and with each new coffee, we get a step closer towards that goal.

As far as sourcing goes, we would like to be able to tell you what the farmer earns for each of the coffees we sell. We know that for people used to paying supermarket prices for coffee… while we can’t compete with these, we can tell you why our coffee costs what it does. That includes data on what we pay, what our costs are, and for some of our coffee (for now) what the farmer earns too.

What kind of response have you seen so far?

The response has been fantastic so far. Every day it seems more people are trying to ‘buy better’, caring more about what goes into what they buy and where it comes from.

A

fternoon Tea by Rose is… well, the clue’s in the name. A new project from Edinburgh-based bakery Rose Gregory, it’s a miasma of tiny cakes, dinky little sandwiches, and amazingly detailed bits to snack on. Gregory talks us through the story so far...

How did the Afternoon Tea by Rose idea come about?

I have always enjoyed afternoon tea and was planning to make one as a surprise for my friend’s 30th birthday in July and suddenly I saw it as a great idea for a business. I started getting really excited about making tiny food and spent the days following putting ‘mini’ before any food I could think of! Having been a chef, pastry chef and baker in Edinburgh for the past six years I was able to use everything I have learned to build a food business of my own. The original name was ‘Rose’s Afternoon Tea’ which one of my friends kindly pointed out abbreviated to RAT, not so appetising!

What kind of reaction have you seen so far?

Since the uncertainty of the first month’s deliveries, I have been blown away by the positive response that I have received as well as by the increasing demand! I have had a mix of customers; some just wanting to indulge and many booking to arrange a surprise for friends or family.

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Afternoon Tea by Rose

I think that there has definitely been a shift in the way people spend their money, striving to support independent local businesses. Lockdown offered a unique opportunity to slow down and appreciate high quality, hand crafted products.

After so many months of restrictions, people seem to finally be accepting fine dining at home as the new normal.

What are your plans for the future?

I am currently doing deliveries once every 3-4 weeks and plan to maintain this frequency as I am operating solo; the menu planning, recipe development and prep is very time-consuming on top of a full-time job.

As lockdown restrictions ease, I will start to think about pop-ups and collaborations with other local businesses and chefs. Potentially in the future I could see myself catering for small intimate weddings and private events.

manifesto.coffee instagram.com/afternoonteabyrose

November 2020 — Review

How have the various lockdowns and restrictions of the past few months impacted your plans?

The first lockdown sped things up. Lukasz and his wife had just moved to Edinburgh and a month later everything was shutting down, hence the loss of incomes. We decided to move in together and started roasting in the kitchen just to try and have a bit of money coming in.

Overall we’ve been quite lucky, as cafes being forced to close meant more people starting to brew at home and ordering coffee online.

There’s also the fact that without the initial lockdown we probably wouldn’t have had the time to put everything into the business as we have.

Photo: Rose Gregory

A

whole host of micro roasters are putting their spin on coffee beans from the other side of the globe, and Manifesto is one of the newest. Based near Perth, Alex MacIntyre and Lukasz Lewaszkiewicz founded their roastery during the early days of lockdown; they fill us in on how it’s all going...

THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

The Skinny On...

Mark Cousins Mark Cousins is always on the move with new projects, but he’s gone back to an old one this month, updating The Story of Film, his seminal 2004 book rethinking film history.

Here he reveals a love for Paul Weller, the colour yellow and bus route termini

What’s your favourite place to visit and why?

When he went to a new city, the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein liked to take a bus out of town, to the end of the line and explore there. I’m the same. I love city limits, transport termini, unfancy places. I walked to the edge of Minsk in Belarus at the end of last year. I knew no-one, but felt totally alive and at home.

Favourite colour and why?

Yellow, by a mile. Yellow is associated with disease, jaundice, fading and – in Western societies – cowardice, tawdry journalism and fiction (‘giallo’ thrillers, in Italy). But I love the yellow of gorse, my favourite architects (such as Alvar Aalto) liked yellow, and I recently died my hair yellow. I recently bought lots of yellow underpants online, but they’re far too big for me.

November 2020 — Chat

Who was your hero growing up?

Paul Weller or Gene Kelly.

Whose work inspires you now?

The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jane Fonda, Cornel West, Hélène Cixous, Beyoncé, Fintan O’Toole, The Vivienne, Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan.

(and have been known to leave them and take a bus to the edge of town...)

But, if I had to have one, I’d invite Cleopatra, the architect Eileen Gray and Catherine the Great. We’d eat in Livia’s Room in Rome, then go to Cardross Seminary, where David Holmes would DJ. What’s your all-time favourite album?

Probably Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the soundscape to my emergence from the rock pool.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen?

India: The Modi Years. Not an actual film, just a horribly cinematic giallo decade of unreason.

What’s your favourite food to cook?

I do all the cooking in our house, and run the gamut from fish finger sandwiches to Iranian khoresh (stew).

What book would you take to a protracted period of governmentenforced isolation?

Peter Watson's Ideas: A History.

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?

I hadn’t heard of dinner parties until I started moving in middle-class circles. When I first went to them, I kept thinking, “When does the dancing start?” I soon learned that it doesn’t, so I don’t like dinner parties

Who’s the worst?

Jair Messias Bolsonaro.

Esfahan in Iran – the most beautiful built thing I’ve ever seen – and when I stood in front of Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan.

What are you most scared of?

The death of my partner, looking stupid, becoming poor, not being able to see, not being able to walk.

When did you last vomit and why?

I don’t vomit often, but I massively did so after a lunch in Paris during which Roman Polanski made me eat oysters. I passed out on the way home, was raced to hospital and was told that if I eat oysters again I will (a) vomit a lot again and (b) die.

What have you most enjoyed watching on the small screen during Lockdown?

Kazakh films. Borat sends me back to the great, humanistic, sophisticated films made in Kazakhstan.

What have you most enjoyed watching on the big screen since cinemas reopened?

François Ozon’s Summer of ’85. It’s set in an un-fancy seaside resort in France, the end of a bus route perhaps.

Tell us a secret?

When you go to the movies you get a plenary indulgence – absolution.

Which celebrity could you take in a fight?

Deadpool.

When did you last cry?

Yesterday, at Marcus Rashford’s Twitter feed and Caroline Quentin’s love of dancing on Strictly. I’ve never not cried at DIY SOS. I cried when I walked into the Friday mosque in

If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be?

An arctic tern. They live for up to 30 years and migrate from the Arctic, down the coast of Africa or the Americas, to Tasmania. They see the world every year, from on-high.

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The new edition of The Story of Film is published by Pavilion and in good book shops now; Cousins’ most recent film project, Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, is available on the BFI player

THE SKINNY

October 2020

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November 2020 — Chat

The Skinny On...

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