Since Last We Spoke
I was back on the west coast last weekend and spent the Sunday at the Glasgow Book Festival badly hungover from the night before due to cousins, karaoke and home brewed limoncello. The highlight of day was a talk on the Sunday evening by Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead. Lochhead is a terrible name dropper but an excellent storyteller and she was thoroughly entertaining. I'm not a huge fan of her poetry which on the whole I find quite bland but a couple she read were real gems, of course I can't remember the names of them now. Her real talent in my opinion is as a playwright and while I was disappointed she didn't read from Medea she did do an excellent turn from Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Misery Guts.
This weekend I toddled along to Holyrood Palace to see their exhibit In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion. This is the first time I've been to one of the exhibits on my own so took the audio guide which was excellent as it was an audio-visual touch screen extravaganza! There was even contemporary (to us not the Tudor or Stuarts) music choices to accompany some of the art works. The tracks picked were...variable but it was a nice idea I thought. They also have for sell a mock 17th century fashion magazine which I of course had to purchase.
I also popped along to one of the art house cinemas in the city to see The Double which on the whole I enjoyed. It succedes in being accessibly strange and Kafkaesque, even though it's not Kafka it's Dostoyevsky.
One night during the week I found a spare two and a half hours to watch Lincoln which I found to be one of Spielberg's stronger efforts with excellent performances from Daniel Day Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones. It would have been a stronger film if the last couple of scenes had been omitted.
On the book front I have finished Property by Valerie Martin. Throughout it I kept thinking of the wife of Michael Fassbender's character in 12 Years a Slave and what a thoroughly unpleasant person she was. It's told from the point of view of an unhappy creole woman married to a plantation, and slave owner, obsessed with one of their female slaves. It's well written, engaging and thought provoking which is not to say it's enjoyable.
This weekend I toddled along to Holyrood Palace to see their exhibit In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion. This is the first time I've been to one of the exhibits on my own so took the audio guide which was excellent as it was an audio-visual touch screen extravaganza! There was even contemporary (to us not the Tudor or Stuarts) music choices to accompany some of the art works. The tracks picked were...variable but it was a nice idea I thought. They also have for sell a mock 17th century fashion magazine which I of course had to purchase.
I also popped along to one of the art house cinemas in the city to see The Double which on the whole I enjoyed. It succedes in being accessibly strange and Kafkaesque, even though it's not Kafka it's Dostoyevsky.
One night during the week I found a spare two and a half hours to watch Lincoln which I found to be one of Spielberg's stronger efforts with excellent performances from Daniel Day Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones. It would have been a stronger film if the last couple of scenes had been omitted.
On the book front I have finished Property by Valerie Martin. Throughout it I kept thinking of the wife of Michael Fassbender's character in 12 Years a Slave and what a thoroughly unpleasant person she was. It's told from the point of view of an unhappy creole woman married to a plantation, and slave owner, obsessed with one of their female slaves. It's well written, engaging and thought provoking which is not to say it's enjoyable.