More festival things.
Aug. 24th, 2008 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeI know that people will have been on tenterhooks since the last time I posted, asking themselves just what ill-formed and obvious thoughts I've been having about what I've seen. Wonder no more.
I went to the best of Irish comedy at The Stand again with Sarah. I cannot for the life of me remember who was there, except Grainne someone, who was pleasant enough but not very strong, and Neil Delamere, who was flyering afterwards and making sure to tell everyone that his show was entirely different.
Then we saw Stewart Lee. Only a few tiny changes from the first time I saw him this year, but still pretty ace, of course.
The Riot Showgrrls club was quite lovely. We were greeted with cava and labia cakes (butterfly cakes with appropriate decoration, and red icing for the menstruating ones). There was audience interaction but friendly, seeing who recognised people. I was apparently first to recognise Joe Francis, well done me. Also we had to draw a feminist. It was kind of basic, but still more nuanced than general discussion about porn, and their singing was lovely.
Girl and Dean do short sketches together that were really charming. I especially liked the posh accents for how to ascertain whether the person you're talking to is a German spy. The last sketch involved far more people than they had members, so they put the front rows of the audience in hats and made them be suspects. Then at the very end they held up a sign saying "please leave the hats".
Rosie Wilby does her thing about the brain, and memory, dressed in a white lab coat with a bikini underneath. I remember bits about it, like that there are only seven slots for short term memory, but the reason I remember that is because she said that's why bands aimed at children only had up to seven members, but what about S Club 8? Although I suppose that's an argument about why they weren't all that successful.
Kristin Hersh was simply amazing.
Stand Up for Freedom was the suggestion of a colleague, and it ended up being a sort of works outing. Andrew Maxwell was compering, and the comedians were Hans Teeuwen, Wendy Wason, David O'Doherty, Reginald D. Hunter and Brendon Burns. I was very pleased anyway because Jo Caulfield was due to appear but didn't, and I really do dislike her quite substantially. Anyway, Hans Teeuwen was brilliant, utterly strange but compelling. There was a song, and an out of sync sock puppet, and drumming and singing his name to various things. Baffling, and I want to see him properly.
Geraldine Hickey was the first person I saw as part of the free fringe, and was a bit worried in case it was mostly me in the audience, but there were quite a few people. She was talking about being sent to a psychiatric care unit when she tried to kill herself. It was funnier than it sounds by quite a way. Also she did a card trick. I thought she was really great.
This was Peter Buckley Hill talking about his journey to Edinburgh. He turned 60 and so got a free bus pass, and decided to try to get to Edinburgh only using his free pass. He was a lovely storyteller, and told us when to make noises of surprise, anticipation or thrills. I think we might have got to cheer feminism but I cannot now remember why. Sarah also adamantly booed his slip into a paid train, because it was not a bus replacement rail, so it didn't count. He didn't like the 24 hour clock because it sounds like dates, so he told us what happened in history on the years he arrived in places. It was very good.
This is a mix of people, and on the night we went they had Alfie Moore, Rob Heeney, Moonfish Rhumba and Jeff Kreisler. Alfie Moore talked about the news entirely so that he could tell a joke about perverting the horse of justice. Rob Heeney...I seem to remember liking him mostly but being put off by misogynist stuff, but I can't remember what it was. Typical reactionary humourless feminist. Moonfish Rhumba I do remember because they were utterly bizarre - songs and dancing and simulated sex and rabbit heads. Weird and kind of great. Jeff Kreisler did that annoying thing of berating the audience for not getting it when didn't react how he wanted, and also made a joke about unfinished metaphor man when it clearly should have been simile.
Honourable Men of Art is Daniel Kitson, Andy Zaltzman, David O'Doherty and Alun Cochrane, though Alun Cochrane only showed up right at the end on this night because he was compering something else. It was pretty brilliant. They made someone from the audience play speed scrabble with Kitson (and I couldn't see the board, but from the garbled commentary the player wasted a huge number of chances) and then somehow it ended with him wrapping sellotape round his whole head to try and stick to the tiles.
Zoe Gardner's Fault. I liked this an awful lot, though somehow it wasn't something that made me laugh hugely throughout. It's all character comedy, and included a toddler holding a tea party, that made us all gasp in horror when the nasty man in the front row actually took the cake he was reluctantly offered.
1000 Years of German Humour is Henning Wehn and another man whose name I have tragically forgotten and am too lazy to look up in the programme. Otto Kuhnle, I think. It was great, lots of taking the piss out of English attitudes towards Germans. And lederhosen, accordian and Wagner.
Some of the people I work with wanted to see him, so I went back again with them, as I was more than happy to do so. He'd changed quite a bit of his material since I saw previews, including a nice diatribe against Jeremy Clarkson, and it was even better than before. He's also the nicest comedian I've ever seen when people need to leave in the middle of a show.
The Stand's £7 comedy cabaret was half price, so really the £3.50 comedy cabaret for me. Jason Cook was compering. I've heard his solo shows reviewed really well, this year and last, but when I've seen him do compering it's been competent but somewhat pedestrian. The acts were Dan Nightingale, who I liked a lot, Kevin someone, who was pleasant if unmemorable, and Wendy Wason, who has a joke about Trinny and Susannah doing a "What Not To Wear: Rape Special", which is fairly enraging. I think I would actually quite enjoy the joke if it were contextualised differently. As it is, she simply says that she was nervous one night, and then wondered "if there's an outfit that attracts them". Which is just ridiculous and lazy invoking of a rape myth that could easily have been avoided.
Terry Pratchett was pretty awesome. He talked about writing The Nation, and the book he's working on now which is all about Romeo and Juliet and football. He was very pleased with himself in a lovely way, excited about the clever bits he'd written and wanting to share them with us. The bit he read involved him singing a bit of a hymn he'd made up.
Apparently they had booked Rick Shapiro, but he didn't show up, so instead they grabbed a 16 year old boy from the audience, who was very sweet and actually very funny, which was a relief because there was a short while where it seemed like it might be very embarrassing to watch.
Richard Sandling mostly talks about how much he likes VHS and not DVD. He also talked a bit about doing comedy at a con and bombing, especially after he criticised new Who and Rose, and then decided that their reaction meant that he probably shouldn't go on to do his Torchwood material. Also he called people Trekkies. I can imagine that that didn't go very well. Four people from the front row walked out. Richard Sandling said that usually people don't like him talking almost exclusively about video, but they walked out when he was talking about immigration, so in my head I've decided that they're racists. He was quite sweet about it.
Fullmooners was in the big top on top of Calton Hill which was usually full of Footsbarn doing A Midsummer Night's Dream. I sat next to a slightly annoying man who demanded to know how I could possibly enjoy a late night gig without drinking. I'm not sure why he thought that singing, breakdancing and comedy were insufficient to secure a good time, but he was quite bemused. The comedians were Jason Byrne, Carl Donnelly, Ed Byrne and Glenn Wool. I'd only seen Jason Byrne on TV before, where I had pretty much hated him, but was pleasantly surprised and he was pretty funny. There was a small child in attendance, but she turned out to be French so it was less disconcerting.
The Impressionism in Scotland exhibition left me a bit cold. I was therefore pleased to read a review that said it was a bit of a mess and didn't have a coherent theme so that I could pretend that that's what I thought and not just that I'm not very good at art.
The Book Club was doing three shows as part of the free fringe, so I joined a long queue in some rain in order to cram into a not too hot room with many others. It was nice, though lots of it was the same as the show I saw last year, Johnny Candon's stories and many of the books Robin Ince read from. There was an American woman called Sarah reading from a book about how Real Men in the 1980s pulled women, mostly by not eating quiche.
Then I went to another pub a little way up the road to queue to get into a rather hot basement. This was to see Robin Ince, who was pretty great even though I was mostly stuck behind a large pillar. I especially liked the story about a whole train carriage of people conspiring to keep an arsehole asleep so that he would miss his stop.
I had been disappointed in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and so I was trying not to have any expectations at all for Wild Child, despite being secretly very excited indeed. I needn't have worried, because it was ONE OF THE BEST FILMS EVER. It had a lacrosse team getting unexpectedly to the final (with a different uniform each time), girls getting to know and love each other, power-hungry prefects and a put upon fag, a really lovely headmistress, Anglo-American misunderstandings, matron, an honour court, and general BRILLIANCE. It was really funny as well. I loved it hard. I went with two people from work, one of whom had been to boarding school and put up with us hissing "did your school have communal baths?!?" at her with grace.
I went to see Debo at the book festival. The queue was full of accents for which cut-glass was somewhat of an understatement. It was somewhat odd to watch, as the interviewer kept asking Charlotte Mosley (who seemed very nice) to confirm facts about the Mitford family, such as whether or not Muv wrote to the children, which meant that she was talking about Debo as if she weren't sitting right there some of the time. Mostly they just read out some of the best letters, and it was kind of magic to have actual Debo reading her actual letters. Most of the questions were a rehash of things that you'd already know from reading any of the biographies. Debo said that she hadn't known Tom very well at all. Her (great?)grandchildren fall about laughing if she says lost or gone (lorst and gorn), which someone had asked her to repeat. She talked about why she called the Queen Mother "Cake" (which I think might be in the letters collection).
Henry Rollins went for 45 minutes longer than scheduled, and since this was past midnight on a work night I was not overly happy about it. Also, his stories were kind of rambling, so it didn't feel like you were just getting more, only that he could have repeated himself less and we wouldn't have to sit and sweat. He was okay, really energetic and quite funny, but I did feel that a lot of his material seemed to be about how great he was to have gone to Pakistan, and crowd-pleasing for Europeans about the stupidity/self-centredness of Americans.
Gladder to be Gay was part of the politics festival, and was Simon Callow talking about changes in his lifetime, and answering questions from the audience. It wasn't a very heated discussion, or really a discussion at all as much as memories and thoughts, but he's very good at those, so it was good. It was in the parliament building, on the chamber floor, so I got to sit and pretend to be an MSP. I was a bit miffed by the woman convening introducing Callow by saying he was one of the first high-profile people to be open about his sexuality. Actually, people have flaunted their heterosexuality for a very long time. Sexuality is not something that happens to other people, which I think might be a misquote of Lauren Berlant.
Women and the Vote turned out to be much less about voting and more about getting more women into parliament. The speakers, whose names I've forgotten, were great - very passionate and knowledgeable about the issues without being incomprehensible. The man from the Labour party talked about the importance of positive action, which was nice, but then the questions were a bit odd. One woman asked if we weren't concerned about the plights of all the children who would be abandoned in 24 hour childcare if women became MPs. We weren't, terribly.
Lloyd Woolf's 10 Shows I Abandoned is snippets of Edinburgh shows he thought about doing, including making people be social, acting bits, how awful is Jeremy Clarkson and spreading lies about celebrities. I thought this was great, possibly because I'm getting a bit overwhelmed and my attention span is shot.
The Plan is a play written by Lynn Ferguson (who I'd heard and liked on Banter), where she is Death, acting out little bits of people's lives when they die.
I read Kate Smurthwaite's blog sometimes, so I thought I would see what her show was like. Eh. It was about apes, unsurprisingly, but neither very informative nor very funny. Also, I'm an atheist, but if I have to listen to much more ill-informed and unfunny bitching about religion I'm going to become a proseletysing Christian. And probably have to learn how to spell proslytising.
I liked John Gordillo very much indeed - only two slight peeves. The first is that he kept mentioning that he always overruns on the show, in which case he should make more of an effort not to. The second is that shortly after criticising a circus ringmaster for misogyny he told a really vile joke about Fearne Cotton needing 20 minutes extra in make-up to remove the cocks from her mouth. Apart from those, it was a lovely, funny, interesting show about his relationship with his Marxist father, and his relationship with his own son.
I went to see Mike Wozniak after he'd been nominated for the newcomer award. I'd seen reviews saying that if you shut your eyes it was like listening to Stewart Lee and omg it SO is. Not just the tone, but the repetition and the pitch and the accent. He was very funny indeed though. The venue had decided against chairs in favour of communal floor cushions, so I spent half of it leaning uncomfortably against a bar, and then gave up and sat just on the floor, at which point a very kind woman came over and gave me a cushion to sit on, which made me feel happy.
Mark Thomas was talking about his new book (not yet published) about Coca-cola and their murderous and generally evil tendencies. It sounds great, and he was a really good speaker. THe questions afterwards were mostly from people wanting him to take up their pet cause, and he dealt with them really nicely, even though it must be quite frustrating.
I really liked the Tracey Emin exhibition. I do find her handwriting hard to read, which is a slight problem as a lot of her work involves sheets of writing. My favourite was a line drawing of the bottom half of a woman in heels, lying supine and lifting her hips up away from the viewer, with "oh, fuck her..." written on. I also really liked the video of her and her mother in conversation about having children, and how adamant her mother was that Tracey having children would be a failure, and how glad she was that she didn't. I thought all of the works were really interesting.
Then I walked along the Waterway of Leith to Stockbridge, and went to Romeo and Juliet in the Botanic Gardens. Amazingly, it did not rain, though there was lots of switching between layers. It was a scaled-down Globe company, and pretty good. The only set was a camper van.
I'd missed seeing this in the film festival, and it was really good. The two boys were excellent. My only quibble is that I don't know how Tommo got to Paris when it was very unlikely that he would have a passport.
Bethany Black tells her story about being male to female to transsexual, from telling her parents to now. It's more interesting than funny. She says "this is absolutely true" a lot, and maybe would have benefitted from less verbatim retelling. The show ends not only on a Moral, but a Moral told to us over music.
This afternoon I am off to see Posy Simmonds with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
debodacious, which is technically the last thing I have planned for the festival, but there is still Monday.
I went to the best of Irish comedy at The Stand again with Sarah. I cannot for the life of me remember who was there, except Grainne someone, who was pleasant enough but not very strong, and Neil Delamere, who was flyering afterwards and making sure to tell everyone that his show was entirely different.
Then we saw Stewart Lee. Only a few tiny changes from the first time I saw him this year, but still pretty ace, of course.
The Riot Showgrrls club was quite lovely. We were greeted with cava and labia cakes (butterfly cakes with appropriate decoration, and red icing for the menstruating ones). There was audience interaction but friendly, seeing who recognised people. I was apparently first to recognise Joe Francis, well done me. Also we had to draw a feminist. It was kind of basic, but still more nuanced than general discussion about porn, and their singing was lovely.
Girl and Dean do short sketches together that were really charming. I especially liked the posh accents for how to ascertain whether the person you're talking to is a German spy. The last sketch involved far more people than they had members, so they put the front rows of the audience in hats and made them be suspects. Then at the very end they held up a sign saying "please leave the hats".
Rosie Wilby does her thing about the brain, and memory, dressed in a white lab coat with a bikini underneath. I remember bits about it, like that there are only seven slots for short term memory, but the reason I remember that is because she said that's why bands aimed at children only had up to seven members, but what about S Club 8? Although I suppose that's an argument about why they weren't all that successful.
Kristin Hersh was simply amazing.
Stand Up for Freedom was the suggestion of a colleague, and it ended up being a sort of works outing. Andrew Maxwell was compering, and the comedians were Hans Teeuwen, Wendy Wason, David O'Doherty, Reginald D. Hunter and Brendon Burns. I was very pleased anyway because Jo Caulfield was due to appear but didn't, and I really do dislike her quite substantially. Anyway, Hans Teeuwen was brilliant, utterly strange but compelling. There was a song, and an out of sync sock puppet, and drumming and singing his name to various things. Baffling, and I want to see him properly.
Geraldine Hickey was the first person I saw as part of the free fringe, and was a bit worried in case it was mostly me in the audience, but there were quite a few people. She was talking about being sent to a psychiatric care unit when she tried to kill herself. It was funnier than it sounds by quite a way. Also she did a card trick. I thought she was really great.
This was Peter Buckley Hill talking about his journey to Edinburgh. He turned 60 and so got a free bus pass, and decided to try to get to Edinburgh only using his free pass. He was a lovely storyteller, and told us when to make noises of surprise, anticipation or thrills. I think we might have got to cheer feminism but I cannot now remember why. Sarah also adamantly booed his slip into a paid train, because it was not a bus replacement rail, so it didn't count. He didn't like the 24 hour clock because it sounds like dates, so he told us what happened in history on the years he arrived in places. It was very good.
This is a mix of people, and on the night we went they had Alfie Moore, Rob Heeney, Moonfish Rhumba and Jeff Kreisler. Alfie Moore talked about the news entirely so that he could tell a joke about perverting the horse of justice. Rob Heeney...I seem to remember liking him mostly but being put off by misogynist stuff, but I can't remember what it was. Typical reactionary humourless feminist. Moonfish Rhumba I do remember because they were utterly bizarre - songs and dancing and simulated sex and rabbit heads. Weird and kind of great. Jeff Kreisler did that annoying thing of berating the audience for not getting it when didn't react how he wanted, and also made a joke about unfinished metaphor man when it clearly should have been simile.
Honourable Men of Art is Daniel Kitson, Andy Zaltzman, David O'Doherty and Alun Cochrane, though Alun Cochrane only showed up right at the end on this night because he was compering something else. It was pretty brilliant. They made someone from the audience play speed scrabble with Kitson (and I couldn't see the board, but from the garbled commentary the player wasted a huge number of chances) and then somehow it ended with him wrapping sellotape round his whole head to try and stick to the tiles.
Zoe Gardner's Fault. I liked this an awful lot, though somehow it wasn't something that made me laugh hugely throughout. It's all character comedy, and included a toddler holding a tea party, that made us all gasp in horror when the nasty man in the front row actually took the cake he was reluctantly offered.
1000 Years of German Humour is Henning Wehn and another man whose name I have tragically forgotten and am too lazy to look up in the programme. Otto Kuhnle, I think. It was great, lots of taking the piss out of English attitudes towards Germans. And lederhosen, accordian and Wagner.
Some of the people I work with wanted to see him, so I went back again with them, as I was more than happy to do so. He'd changed quite a bit of his material since I saw previews, including a nice diatribe against Jeremy Clarkson, and it was even better than before. He's also the nicest comedian I've ever seen when people need to leave in the middle of a show.
The Stand's £7 comedy cabaret was half price, so really the £3.50 comedy cabaret for me. Jason Cook was compering. I've heard his solo shows reviewed really well, this year and last, but when I've seen him do compering it's been competent but somewhat pedestrian. The acts were Dan Nightingale, who I liked a lot, Kevin someone, who was pleasant if unmemorable, and Wendy Wason, who has a joke about Trinny and Susannah doing a "What Not To Wear: Rape Special", which is fairly enraging. I think I would actually quite enjoy the joke if it were contextualised differently. As it is, she simply says that she was nervous one night, and then wondered "if there's an outfit that attracts them". Which is just ridiculous and lazy invoking of a rape myth that could easily have been avoided.
Terry Pratchett was pretty awesome. He talked about writing The Nation, and the book he's working on now which is all about Romeo and Juliet and football. He was very pleased with himself in a lovely way, excited about the clever bits he'd written and wanting to share them with us. The bit he read involved him singing a bit of a hymn he'd made up.
Apparently they had booked Rick Shapiro, but he didn't show up, so instead they grabbed a 16 year old boy from the audience, who was very sweet and actually very funny, which was a relief because there was a short while where it seemed like it might be very embarrassing to watch.
Richard Sandling mostly talks about how much he likes VHS and not DVD. He also talked a bit about doing comedy at a con and bombing, especially after he criticised new Who and Rose, and then decided that their reaction meant that he probably shouldn't go on to do his Torchwood material. Also he called people Trekkies. I can imagine that that didn't go very well. Four people from the front row walked out. Richard Sandling said that usually people don't like him talking almost exclusively about video, but they walked out when he was talking about immigration, so in my head I've decided that they're racists. He was quite sweet about it.
Fullmooners was in the big top on top of Calton Hill which was usually full of Footsbarn doing A Midsummer Night's Dream. I sat next to a slightly annoying man who demanded to know how I could possibly enjoy a late night gig without drinking. I'm not sure why he thought that singing, breakdancing and comedy were insufficient to secure a good time, but he was quite bemused. The comedians were Jason Byrne, Carl Donnelly, Ed Byrne and Glenn Wool. I'd only seen Jason Byrne on TV before, where I had pretty much hated him, but was pleasantly surprised and he was pretty funny. There was a small child in attendance, but she turned out to be French so it was less disconcerting.
The Impressionism in Scotland exhibition left me a bit cold. I was therefore pleased to read a review that said it was a bit of a mess and didn't have a coherent theme so that I could pretend that that's what I thought and not just that I'm not very good at art.
The Book Club was doing three shows as part of the free fringe, so I joined a long queue in some rain in order to cram into a not too hot room with many others. It was nice, though lots of it was the same as the show I saw last year, Johnny Candon's stories and many of the books Robin Ince read from. There was an American woman called Sarah reading from a book about how Real Men in the 1980s pulled women, mostly by not eating quiche.
Then I went to another pub a little way up the road to queue to get into a rather hot basement. This was to see Robin Ince, who was pretty great even though I was mostly stuck behind a large pillar. I especially liked the story about a whole train carriage of people conspiring to keep an arsehole asleep so that he would miss his stop.
I had been disappointed in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and so I was trying not to have any expectations at all for Wild Child, despite being secretly very excited indeed. I needn't have worried, because it was ONE OF THE BEST FILMS EVER. It had a lacrosse team getting unexpectedly to the final (with a different uniform each time), girls getting to know and love each other, power-hungry prefects and a put upon fag, a really lovely headmistress, Anglo-American misunderstandings, matron, an honour court, and general BRILLIANCE. It was really funny as well. I loved it hard. I went with two people from work, one of whom had been to boarding school and put up with us hissing "did your school have communal baths?!?" at her with grace.
I went to see Debo at the book festival. The queue was full of accents for which cut-glass was somewhat of an understatement. It was somewhat odd to watch, as the interviewer kept asking Charlotte Mosley (who seemed very nice) to confirm facts about the Mitford family, such as whether or not Muv wrote to the children, which meant that she was talking about Debo as if she weren't sitting right there some of the time. Mostly they just read out some of the best letters, and it was kind of magic to have actual Debo reading her actual letters. Most of the questions were a rehash of things that you'd already know from reading any of the biographies. Debo said that she hadn't known Tom very well at all. Her (great?)grandchildren fall about laughing if she says lost or gone (lorst and gorn), which someone had asked her to repeat. She talked about why she called the Queen Mother "Cake" (which I think might be in the letters collection).
Henry Rollins went for 45 minutes longer than scheduled, and since this was past midnight on a work night I was not overly happy about it. Also, his stories were kind of rambling, so it didn't feel like you were just getting more, only that he could have repeated himself less and we wouldn't have to sit and sweat. He was okay, really energetic and quite funny, but I did feel that a lot of his material seemed to be about how great he was to have gone to Pakistan, and crowd-pleasing for Europeans about the stupidity/self-centredness of Americans.
Gladder to be Gay was part of the politics festival, and was Simon Callow talking about changes in his lifetime, and answering questions from the audience. It wasn't a very heated discussion, or really a discussion at all as much as memories and thoughts, but he's very good at those, so it was good. It was in the parliament building, on the chamber floor, so I got to sit and pretend to be an MSP. I was a bit miffed by the woman convening introducing Callow by saying he was one of the first high-profile people to be open about his sexuality. Actually, people have flaunted their heterosexuality for a very long time. Sexuality is not something that happens to other people, which I think might be a misquote of Lauren Berlant.
Women and the Vote turned out to be much less about voting and more about getting more women into parliament. The speakers, whose names I've forgotten, were great - very passionate and knowledgeable about the issues without being incomprehensible. The man from the Labour party talked about the importance of positive action, which was nice, but then the questions were a bit odd. One woman asked if we weren't concerned about the plights of all the children who would be abandoned in 24 hour childcare if women became MPs. We weren't, terribly.
Lloyd Woolf's 10 Shows I Abandoned is snippets of Edinburgh shows he thought about doing, including making people be social, acting bits, how awful is Jeremy Clarkson and spreading lies about celebrities. I thought this was great, possibly because I'm getting a bit overwhelmed and my attention span is shot.
The Plan is a play written by Lynn Ferguson (who I'd heard and liked on Banter), where she is Death, acting out little bits of people's lives when they die.
I read Kate Smurthwaite's blog sometimes, so I thought I would see what her show was like. Eh. It was about apes, unsurprisingly, but neither very informative nor very funny. Also, I'm an atheist, but if I have to listen to much more ill-informed and unfunny bitching about religion I'm going to become a proseletysing Christian. And probably have to learn how to spell proslytising.
I liked John Gordillo very much indeed - only two slight peeves. The first is that he kept mentioning that he always overruns on the show, in which case he should make more of an effort not to. The second is that shortly after criticising a circus ringmaster for misogyny he told a really vile joke about Fearne Cotton needing 20 minutes extra in make-up to remove the cocks from her mouth. Apart from those, it was a lovely, funny, interesting show about his relationship with his Marxist father, and his relationship with his own son.
I went to see Mike Wozniak after he'd been nominated for the newcomer award. I'd seen reviews saying that if you shut your eyes it was like listening to Stewart Lee and omg it SO is. Not just the tone, but the repetition and the pitch and the accent. He was very funny indeed though. The venue had decided against chairs in favour of communal floor cushions, so I spent half of it leaning uncomfortably against a bar, and then gave up and sat just on the floor, at which point a very kind woman came over and gave me a cushion to sit on, which made me feel happy.
Mark Thomas was talking about his new book (not yet published) about Coca-cola and their murderous and generally evil tendencies. It sounds great, and he was a really good speaker. THe questions afterwards were mostly from people wanting him to take up their pet cause, and he dealt with them really nicely, even though it must be quite frustrating.
I really liked the Tracey Emin exhibition. I do find her handwriting hard to read, which is a slight problem as a lot of her work involves sheets of writing. My favourite was a line drawing of the bottom half of a woman in heels, lying supine and lifting her hips up away from the viewer, with "oh, fuck her..." written on. I also really liked the video of her and her mother in conversation about having children, and how adamant her mother was that Tracey having children would be a failure, and how glad she was that she didn't. I thought all of the works were really interesting.
Then I walked along the Waterway of Leith to Stockbridge, and went to Romeo and Juliet in the Botanic Gardens. Amazingly, it did not rain, though there was lots of switching between layers. It was a scaled-down Globe company, and pretty good. The only set was a camper van.
I'd missed seeing this in the film festival, and it was really good. The two boys were excellent. My only quibble is that I don't know how Tommo got to Paris when it was very unlikely that he would have a passport.
Bethany Black tells her story about being male to female to transsexual, from telling her parents to now. It's more interesting than funny. She says "this is absolutely true" a lot, and maybe would have benefitted from less verbatim retelling. The show ends not only on a Moral, but a Moral told to us over music.
This afternoon I am off to see Posy Simmonds with
debodacious, which is technically the last thing I have planned for the festival, but there is still Monday.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 12:39 pm (UTC)I was at the Stand Up For Freedom gig too, and the one the week before. I liked Andrew Maxwell so much I went to his show last weekend. He can do a Belfast accent properly, so I'm smitten.
So much more stuff I want to go to now based on your recommendations, but it's getting a bit late now ...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 12:55 pm (UTC)I really like Andrew Maxwell - though I ended up seeing him four times in various guises, so I know his material pretty well by now. But it's still pretty funny the fourth time round.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 12:59 pm (UTC)Srsly. This does not compute. I can't process this.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 05:34 pm (UTC)Also, I have the programme Andrew Maxwell did of his gigs in Belfast. I can upload it for you if you haven't seen it?
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Date: 2008-09-26 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 12:49 pm (UTC)Am very sad I missed Terry Pratchett though.
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Date: 2008-08-30 05:38 pm (UTC)We got to shuffle the cards for Geraldine Hickey's trick!
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Date: 2008-08-24 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 10:46 pm (UTC)