I took a day off from festival going and went to Glasgow.  I had lunch with Andrew in a very nice restaurant called Babs where I had this inspired and delicious Candy Floss Affogato for pudding.

After lunch he went home and I went out to Kelvingrove to see the Mary Quant exhibition.  It was gorgeous.  I never as much as window shopped in the Kings Road but was very aware of Bazaar and her fashion in the 60s.  When she added make-up to her repertoire I'm pretty sure Fiona had it around the house.

My next exhibition was the Banksy show Cut and Run that has broken all records for Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art.  It seems it was there before going anywhere else thanks to Banksy's admiration for the almost continuous appearance of a traffic cone on Wellington's head outside the gallery.  It's been running night and day and I was lucky to get a spot at 8.45pm.

That was a long time after Kelvingrove closed so I took in a film at the GFT.  The Innocent was the story of a son's dislike of his mother's marriage to an ex-con and his suspicion that his new step-father is up to no good.  The son finds himself involved in a robbery that the ex-con is obliged to participate in but it's a very light-hearted film and all ends happily, especially for the son who finds himself in jail but marrying his late wife's best friend who he's realised in the course of the robbery, in which she also takes part, he's in love with.  It filled in the exhibition gap nicely.

As for the Banksy itself, there was lots to see and marvel at.  There was a video of the famous moment at which one of his works set in an old master type gilt frame was knocked down for 800 grand at Sotheby's and then started to shred itself.  Either the actual work or a copy of it showing the mechanism and various earlier versions that he'd tried out were also on display.  Most of his graffiti was (and still is) done by preparing a stencil, holding it against a wall and scooshing an aerosol of paint at it. Lots of these were there, some with light shining through them that showed to great effect how the result looked.  I guess 99% of it was politico-social and none more so perhaps than the animal transport lorry that had animal heads sticking out between the slats and animal noises coming from within.  You can see a video of it here. There are people inside manipulating the heads.

Back at the festivals.

Life is a Dream - Calderon's great play performed in the EIF by CNTC from Madrid in Spanish directed by Declan Donnellan.  In my one and only visit to the Avignon Theatre Festival over twenty years ago I saw a wonderful production of Boris Godunov (the play) performed in Russian and also directed by Declan Donnellan.  He did a great job, quite a man.  This production was very different from the Lyceum's own excellent production of Jo Clifford's English version of Life is a Dream a couple of years ago.  Donnellan's was played on a bare stage across which stood a high green wall full of doors through which the cast dashed back and forth or lingered by.  There was a significant amount of fourth wall breaking and descent into the auditorium, all carried out with relish and energy.  Here's a review.  And here's another with which I am more in tune.

Thrown - The National Theatre of Scotland's contribution to the EIF in the close confines of Traverse 2 is a fast-paced, dynamically played and snappily directed examination of identities. National, racial, sexual, gender and personal identities all feature in a group of five women brought together as a wrestling team competing in Highland Games.  The play perhaps tries to do too much but overall deals well with its subject matter and entertains its audience.

The Insider - This show was part of an invasion of Danish theatre that I wish I'd seen more of.  On stage is a large perspex box containing a desk and chair, a filing cabinet and an actor.  The audience are supplied with binaural headphones.  Through a combination of projections, sounds, voices of the protagonist and others we learn about the Cum-ex scandal.  Our actor is a young lawyer who has turned state witness being interrogated.  He relives many of the stages and events of the scam.  It's terrific and well deserved the Fringe First that it won.  We hear him tell his boss that the dividend tax claiming strategy is illegal but in no time at all he's in it up to his ears, sniffing coke and spending millions.  However I confess to not picking up on the moment at which he tipped over to the dark side.

Andronicus Synecdoche - I was lured by a four star review into seeing this show by Polish company Song of the Goat.  The Guardian is more restrained with only three stars and I agree with every word they say while being disappointed that the show left me pretty cold. 

Follow the Money - A book by Paul Johnson of the IFS.  He's a well known economic commentator but this is his first book.  It is aimed at helping the general public understand how the government raises and spends its revenue which is of course our money.  It was a fascinating discussion of which I retain some small nuggets chief of which was his statement that all that the higher income tax levels in Scotland had done was to compensate for our slower growth rate compared to the rest of the UK.  Must read more.

Peter Howson -  I wandered down to the City Art Centre after listening to Paul Johnson, fortified myself with a coffee and brownie and then walked round the Peter Howson retrospective.  It's a super exhibition.  I haven't always been too keen on his work while admiring the tremendous skill with which he creates his mammoth canvases of muscled bodies but this exhibition blew me away.  There is so much about the artist as well from a number of videos.  There must be about an hour and a half of video content instead of the usual ten minute saunter through the artist's background.  Disappointingly neither of the canvases I particularly relished, The Last Supper and Barrier Sunset were available as prints or even postcards so I settled for fridge magnets of two self portraits painted thirty years apart. 

By then it was lunchtime so I had lunch in Princes Street Gardens at Contini's restaurant in front of the National Gallery.  Then it was time to wander back to the Art College for more literary sustenance.

Free Speech - This Book Festival discussion with Elif Shafak and Kübra Gümüşay is descibed in the brochure as being a nuanced discussion of free speech.  It was too nuanced for me thanks possibly to that glass of Trebbiano I had at lunch.

A Short History of Language - is how the Book Festival billed its last event which was also my last event of any of the festivals.  Not it seems to me a very accurate description.  The discussion was more about the use of language to reinforce or undermine hierarchies and stereotypes, to exercise control and the supposed role of language in setting one's view of the world and its peoples.  Much was made of the fact that some language or other has a range of pronouns beyond our he, she and it.  So for example when speaking of a tree you use a particular pronoun.  Does this somehow increase one's kinship with the tree?  I think not.  It seems about as unmeaningful as the prefixes that distinguish Swahili's nine noun classes or the different counter words used in Japanese for long thin things, flat things, machines etc.