A hidden gem of pure delight in Scotland.

I’m not one for massages, but Jeana couldn’t think what to buy me for my birthday and finally, in desperation, remembering a holiday experience many years ago in Turkey that we both enjoyed, she stumbled upon Turkuaz Turkish Baths and Spa.

It’s an unassuming frontage next to a Turkish barber shop and a Turkish takeaway, in a side street in Dunfermline.

And it doesn’t initially scream out “This will be an awesome experience at an extraordinarily good value for money price.” And yet, that is exactly what it is.

For two hours Jeana and I were soothed, scraped, massaged, chilled, chatted to, and in every way possible made to feel a million dollars.

Jen and Katie are Dunfermline lasses, Jen’s married to the owner and both are simply wonderful. Gentle in their administration of their massages and exfoliation but strong enough to dig in to those critical points in my back that most needed release.

On a marble slab in a steam filled room we whiled away two hours of bliss.

I cannot recommend this highly enough.

It’s the only genuine Turkish Hammam in Scotland and it’s a fantastic treat.

Find out about it here.

You’ll thank me.

Another Cracker from D&AD

This is one Christmas ad I’m betting you missed. Well, never too late. J&B’s Christmas ad from Spain. You’ll need to go to YouTube to watch it.

Something from D&AD this year

This is rather fun . From Ogilvy Thailand.

Hings by Chris McQueer: Book review

The centrepiece of this extraordinary collection of short stories is called, simply, Bowls. It’s on an epic scale (for McQueer), stretching to nearly 40 pages and telling a class-driven story of Big Angie “a horrible overgrown ned” (middle aged and dressed in trackies and Rangers tops). Big Angie is a class bowler and an even classer Bingo player. The trouble is she hates everyone and everyone hates her. That is, until she strikes up an unlikely companionship with the wife of her male nemesis at the bowling club. This relationship having been established, McQueer can take this story wherever he likes, as he usually does.

Two belter lines that sum McQueer up drop in this tale and had me both laughing out loud on the bus but also quoting them in the office.

“Aw fuckin cheer up. We’re gawn tae Blackpool, no Auschwitz.”

“Look pal, if ah wanted tae hear an arsehole talk” looking the boy up an down “Ah wid’ve farted.”

His cast of characters in the book include ne’erdowells, rogues, daft laddies and talking budgies.

He brings a distinct lack of logic to his tales and, yet, they all make sense.

Some of them are even quasi science fiction.

I’m reminded often of James Robertson’s recurring Jack character in 365 Stories, a parody of daft Jack in Jack and the beanstalk. Many of McQueer’s characters are just as daft, but that lends them an air of charm.

There’s a story about people’s knees bending backwards, not forwards, and the hilarious havoc that ensues.

There’s a strange shark-like monster called Ethan (that talks – of course it talks) and befriends a rigger.

And it’s all written in hilarious Glasgow dialect – there’s nothing new about that having been put to great effect recently by Ely Percy in Duck Feet, and James Kelman has made a career out of it. But neither express themselves anywhere near as joyously funnily as this, and neither even approach the curse threshold, or maybe even 10% of it, that McQueer does. I love the way he portmanteaus anycunt on a regular basis to capture the genuine street rhetoric of Glasgow.

All in folks, this six year old collection from 404 Ink (Bravo) is a belter.

A pure belter in fact.

Enjoy.

Still:A Michael J Fox Movie: review

You probably know Michael J Fox is Canadian, made Back to the Future and has Parkinson’s disease.

What you might not know is how resilient, brave, funny and charming he is.

What you probably don’t know is he falls over a lot and walks like Billy Connolly doing the Glaswegian drunk man impersonation.

In this documentary that is brilliantly directed by Davis Guggenheim there are two stars.

Michael J Fox who narrates the movie, to camera, with his mangled voice often quite difficult to comprehend and Michael Harte, the editor.

It’s a piece of magical illusion because somehow the directing/editing team have managed to piece together snippets of Fox’s work to sit alongside Fox himself in ‘telling the story’. It has echoes of my all time favourite documentary, 102 minutes that Changed America, in that it’s essentially ‘found footage that’s used to tell the story. It’s remarkable.

But at its core is the sad (not sad) sight of Michael J Fox, that lovable little scamp, at 61 looking like a wreck, but still, somehow defying the hideous encroachment of Parkinsons with dignity and humour.

It’s very moving and it’s very great.

Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: Book Review

You’ll have seen its gaudy cover everywhere because its ubiquitous.

So, I’m not sure I can add much to the clamour about this universally loved phenomenon.

It feels like it’s written by a woman for women (a copywriter as it happens).

But I’m a gadgey, so here’s my take.

Although it screams women’s lib in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a man, I really liked it.

I was reading it on the back of my favourite American female writer’s Privileged (Curtis Sittenfeld) – also a take on girl power but from the 18th century transposed to the 21st.

It turns out to be a clever political read that challenges male dominance (including acceptable rape) and puts sand in the oyster.

That sand being Elizabeth Zott.

She’s a character.

She’s amazing.

She’s the book.

Everything about this novel is about Elizabeth Zott. Crazy name. Crazy girl.

It becomes a thriller having started out as a character study but really, it’s just a about humanity, and love.

I could tell you about the grief, bullying, corruption and all that.

But all that matters is you love this beautiful, strident, complex woman and her battle with convention, with scientific prejudice (essentially women didn’t do science in the 1950’s) and with the television industry that, even then, objectified women – no-one though was going to objectify Elizabeth Zott, unmarried mother, scientist and hater of domesticity.

Gramus does a great job of constructing a spider’s web of a plot that all comes together beautifully in the end and creates a character that we all fall in love with as her difficult battle with integrity unfolds in 400 delicious pages.

Recommended.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld: Book review

I have Romantic Comedy, Sittenfeld’s latest, teed up to go – but first I read this.

Now anyone who follows me knows just how highly I rate Curtis Sittenfeld.

Her book before last Rodham (my discovery book of hers) was book of the year for me, that year.

American Wife is a masterpiece and I don’t understand why it’s not better known.

Sisterland is a good read but I’d say her only average book, but even average isn’t average in the hands of Curtis.

Prep, her debut, is a cracking read.

So what of Eligible?

Like Bridget Jones, I suppose, it’s a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice.

So far so what?

She sets it in Cincinnati among the super rich but, of course, our heroine Liz is not super-rich. She’s a late thirties, and pretty decent magazine writer with a bit of fame behind her. She suffers a hideous but hilarious racist, classist, pretty much everything-ist hag of a mother, a disenfranchised and long suffering, but realistic, ailing father, one great, pregnant sister and three brat sisters.

The title comes from the name of a Love Island type of show in which sister Jane (the other nice pregnant one) has fallen, mutually, in love with the star. Until he finds out she’s pregnant, but not to him.

Liz, meanwhile, is in love, not in love, in love, not in love with a super rich surgeon called Darcy Fitzwilliam (bit of a clue there to the source material) – the Eligible star’s bestie.

What makes the book so great is the fact you know she is honouring, but piss-taking, the Austen classic but in such an uproariously funny way that I constantly caused my fellow bus passengers to turn and look as I bellowed form the back seat of the number 43.

It’s absolutely fucking hilarious. Now, Sittenfeld does a good line in humour.

The whole premise of Rodham is built on that, but this is another league. It’s spit your wallies out funny. It’s choke on your own phlegm funny.

I need say no more other than just read this MF, and don’t worry about the Bridget Jones comparison.

Hungry Beat. The Independent Pop Underground movement (1977 – 1984) by Douglas Macintyre, Grant McPhee with Neil Cooper: Book Review

Oh dear. There was so much to desire from this book. A history of my informative years in which two Scottish Labels (Fast and Postcard) were making Scotland the centre of the musical universe, right here in my own back yard. It was an amazing time.

Add to that the fact that the two central characters, the svengalis of the scene, were Bob Last and Alan Horne and that I know Bob well (indeed he is chair of the Leith Theatre on whose board I serve) and you have a recipe for greatness.

To be fair no stone is unturned in the research and there are thousands of interview snippets from the likes of Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice, Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, Davy Henderson from Fire Engines, Phil Oakey et al from the Human League – alongside contributions from Altered Images, Josef K, Scars, Rezillos, Gang of Four, Joy Division, The Bluebells, Associates, and many more including Geoff Travis of Rough Trade.

Between these myriad interviews is a good, strong chronological narration of the times but, the trouble is, the interviews themselves are often flabby and repetitive with sometimes several renderings of the same topic. It can get really tedious.

Putting that to one side, and it’s a big put-aside, the story is great with Last coming out of it all as a hero and Horne a bit of a dork.

Consequently it can only possibly be of interest for a thin sliver of the boomer post-punk generation and even then it’s a marathon, not a sprint. If it comes out in paperback I’d recommend a tortuous visit to the editor’s room.

But, for those interested in the scene it is a must read. I just wish it had been leaner.

Evil Dead Rise: Movie review

I’ve been to see all four of the proper Evil Dead movies and also loved Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, but, of course franchises have a habit of going pear shaped so I approached this with caution.

It starts, as all the others do, in a cabin in the woods but quickly transfers to a creaking 13 story townhouse block in LA, approaching demolition, in which a single mum and her three kids are joined by her pregnant sister.

The 14 year old son discovers the dreaded “Book of the Dead” in an old vault in the basement after an earthquake strikes.

Of course that’s the invitation for all hell to break loose.

The plot, from now on is kind of irrelevant, because we all know it’s simply a battle for survival.

What the movie does with great pleasure is takes the Mum out first and turns her into the manifestation of evil which allows the splendid direction, SFX and script teams licence to play with family values as it becomes mum v the kids.

It’s magnificently and outrageously cleverly gruesome with a few decent jump scares, but Evil Dead is really about veiled humour and this does not let us down.

One final point to make is the volume of fake blood needed to make this movie must have broken all production records. It truly is a blood bath and all the better for it.

Fantastic fun. And definitely not pear shaped.

A Streetcar named Desire by Scottish Ballet: Review

Every time I go to a dance performance and review it I claim that I am no expert. But this is my third ballet this year after the rancid Peaky Blinders (Rambert) and Matthew Bourne’s excellent Sleeping Beauty. I also have four dance shows booked already for the Festival in August so maybe I do have a point of view. Well, if I don’t I’m giving you it anyway.

It’s quite a thought taking on a play that has so many famous productions. The first starred Karl Maldon and Marlon Brando and there have been many famous Blanche DuBois’ in the following 3/4 century.

The story is nuanced and deeply culturally and tonally nuanced given that the whole deep south aspect of it drives many of the most famous performances. So, to translate this into dance and to tell such a complicated tale seems almost unthinkable and yet that is unquestionably achieved, along with the opportunity to showcase really seductive and wonderful Corps du Ballet work – the scene when the female corps come on stage en point is simply breathtaking. Both the opening, in which DuBois’s past literally crumbles in front of our eyes, and the finale, with the Corps dressed all in black with red flowers in their months, are just two of many visually stunning moments.

Great work by director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabel Lopez Ochoa.

I’ll stop there because I’ve already overstepped my technical mark, but if you get the chance to see this on the rest of its tour I’d strongly recommend that you do.