Robert Sharp

A couple of council tower blocks in the Oxgangs area of Edinbugh were demolished yesterday. They drop pretty quickly.

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Scotland win this particular line-out, but were outclassed overall by the Aussies.

I don’t know what other residents of Edinburgh think of rugby weekends, but I’ve always enjoyed the flash floods of kilts and colour down Corstophine Road and Dalry Road. I the atmosphere which surrounds rugby matches is of course more festive and friendlier than football. This is probably because the football matches in Edinburgh are usually at club level, where the rivalries art local and more acute. Rugby matches, on the other hand, are internationals, meaning the visiting fans treat the match as an excuse for a holiday. Inside the ground, home and away supporters are not segregated, and we saw Australian flags waving alongside the Saltire.
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A few days ago, a fifteen-year old Sikh boy was assaulted by a gang in Pilrig Park, Edinburgh. During the attack, the gang took a knife, and cut off the boy’s hair. Sikhs, of course, believe that hair (“Kes” or “Kesh”) is a gift from God and a source of spiritual power and faith. So the crime was a violation not only of the body, but of the soul too. It was in effect an attack upon all Sikhs, an entire section of our Edinburgh community. I am ashamed it happened.

This is a photo of a vigil held this afternoon, Sunday 19th November, at the site of the attack. Plenty of tam o’ shanters and turbans in attendance. You can also see Labour MP Mark Lazarowicz at the centre of the picture.

Update

Sikh teen lied about hair attack

Lothian and Borders Police confirmed the attack had not taken place and said the boy had expressed remorse. They said no further action would be taken.
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The teenager is believed to have had personal problems and was also having cultural identity issues brought about by differences between his Sikh upbringing and Western society.

This is one of the overlooked aspects of multiculturalism. The different and conflicting identities that exist within an individual are as important as the different groups that exist within the country.

Two ‘New Media’ events in Edinburgh in the next seven days:

First, I’m going to try and get along to an event this Saturday 18th called Cathay House Blend, curated by ‘Intercultural Artist’ Kimho Ip. He’ll be collaborating with Scotland’s electro-pop chancers FOUND, who’ve just returned from gigging in London at the BBC Electric Proms. It is at the National Museums of Scotland.

Second, New Media Scotland are invoking the Scottish Enlightenment, and giving away free glasses of anCnoc whisky at the Poker Club, next Thursday 23rd November at the Beehive Inn on the Grassmarket.

Meanwhile, Devil’s Kitchen hints that he may be starring in some kind of epic drinking theatrical extravaganza, This Lime Tree Bower, in late November. He hasnae publicised the date and location details yet.

I was on the Isle of Colonsay last weekend. The dunes were unspoilt and beautiful. This picture shows a south-west view over to Oronsay in the foreground. That’s a ‘pap’ of Jura in the background, on the left.

The sky was clear on Bonfire Night, so we had a good opportunity to look through a telescope at another “magnificent desolation“, the Sea of Tranquility.

How odd, then, to hear that four days later, the peace of the islanders has been disturbed. There has been a crime on Colonsay! Apparently someone stole a couple of cars and went for a joyride.

I heard the news on the radio late last night, but can find no mention of it online this morning. I do not imagine that the perpetrators have escaped… so perhaps there’s been a cover-up on Colonsay too. Some friends of mine return from the Island today, so I will glean some more information from them over the weekend (unless, of course, they have been detained at Oban Police Station).

Update: I think I may have misheard. Armin Crewe’s Islay Blog has found some more details about housebreaking on the Island. The car thefts were a few years ago.

Meanwhile, my friends are stranded on the island. Poor weather meant their ferry never managed to leave Oban.

NHS ‘moles’ are like the Malawian Orphans of the British blogosphere.

Doctor Crippen and Devil’s Kitchen think they are soooo clever with their inside information, don’t they? The Doc reports on the persecution of junior doctors, by revoking their right to prescribe drugs; while the Devil has a bizarre story about nurses secretly performing medicals on asylum seekers.

Well, I’ve got one too (actually, I have five or six, but let’s not be boastful). I’ve been forwarded a particularly amusing letter from Mr Mike Grieve, University Hospitals Division, NHS Lothian. He is leading a financial recovery team to reduce over-spending, which is currently running at £1 million per month.

Our immediate task is to return to a position of month-on-month income and expenditure balance … Much of this is incurred in four areas of expenditure namely, the cost of doctors in training, bank and particularly agency nursing costs, clinical supplies and some medicines.

So, they need to cut costs in the areas of: doctors, nurses, medical supplies, and medicine! Is that not, like, everything that goes into making a hospital a hospital!?

To be fair, at least they are on the case, and trying to get back on budget. My source is not impressed:

Without bank and agency nursing staff the service would collapse. There is a high level of sick leave amongst nurses, due to high levels of stress, low morale, poor pay, shift working etc.. A ward not well staffed by nurses is not safe.

What is interesting is there is no mention of managers, the ones who clearly fucked up in the first place.

That’s fine, but I can’t shake the worry that this would be not so different if the running of hospitals were sub-contracted out to private companies. What’s to stop them cutting the same costs and services to maintain profit margins?

I have said before that the operative word in ‘citizen journalist’ is not the latter, but the former. Fay Young’s short, personal report on the happenings of an Edinburgh City Council meeting seems to be a good example of ‘citizen journalism’ and the importance of new Internet technologies. The happenings at the meeting were probably not newsworthy enough for The Scotsman or even the Edinburgh Evening News, so a reporter might not be paid to file a report on it. Now, Fay is an established journalist, but it was in her role of ‘citizen’ that she was present and able to post her report (“Hot air stifles climate change debate”) on her blog. More information for the rest of us, which we hope leads to a more accountable, participatory democracy.

Fay was not impressed by the councillors’ collective time-management:

The meeting rattles through some fairly important stuff about poverty … Then the meeting spends 25 minutes debating whether to replace or restore the old Davenport desks and chairs. Finally one Labour councillor protests at this waste of time when there is still a motion on climate change to debate, not to mention the capital city’s alcohol problem. Still they drone on, and it is another five minutes before they vote [27 to 29] to replace the old heavy mahogany with something that can be easily shifted and stacked when it is not in use.

I wonder if Fay Young has read C. Northcote Parkinson’s eponymous Parkinson’s Law? This is a fantastic compendium of satirical essays, first published in the Economist, and collected in book form in 1958 (I have a fourth edition from that year, which carries some delightful illustrations by Osbert Lancaster). In his essay, “High Finance; or, The Point of Vanishing Interest”, Parkinson describes a committee that bears a remarkable similarity to that which Fay witnessed last week. Finance committees are, he says, made up of people who know nothing of millions, but well accustomed to thinking in thousands:

The result is a phenomenon that has often been observed but never yet investigated. It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

So, Fay’s experience seems all too familiar! Parkinson also presents an amusing essay on the ‘Coefficient of Inefficiency’, definied as the size at which a committee ceases to be of any effective use whatsoever. This he puts at somewhere between 19 and 23 members. It is interesting to note that the number of councillors voting at Fay’s meeting was more than double that estimate…

Whatever the accuracy of his theories, Parkinson’s Law is a great read, and a highly recommended stocking filler for the economist or policy wonk in your life.

I’ve been pottering about quietly in my flat, with the windows open. It is a still kind of day here in in Edinburgh, and the sound from Tynecastle wafts over the tenements. In this manner I deduce that Hearts are beating whoever it is they are playing.

I’m reminded of my time in Rio de Janeiro, living near the Parque Guinle, in the shadow of the Corcovado. If Fluminese or Botafogo happened to score, the city would erupt in a joyous cacaophony, like a jungle awakening.

Sometimes I find it is nice to live in a noisy town. The disturbances, like the roar of Tynecastle, or the One O’Clock Gun, are a kind of language of the city, one that you can pick out and understand above the hum of the traffic. It is a communication (of sorts) with your neighbours, who are elsewhere and enjoying themselves. “We are here,” they say. “You are not alone.”

Creating the play

In a small and half formed garden in the quaint town of Pitlochry, Sweet Fanny Adams became incarnate in a human form. Playwright Judith Adams‘ creation Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden was performed by a troupe of actors in the Scottish Plant Collector ’s Garden. They were assisted by: costumes; a container of props; some sets; a sound system; and an array of sophisticated digital technology. In two hours they told the stories of three women, three men, and a little girl dressed in red (who may have had wings). Audiences were on the whole delighted by the piece, which combined the fairy tales of their past with a distinctly 21st century sense of humour. Sweet Fanny Adams & was a promenade performance, with scenes taking place simultaneously across several locations around the seven-acre space. Despite this ambitious approach, reviews from favourable across the board. In common with the audience, the summary was always I’ve never seen anything like it!

And “You’ve never seen anything like it” is spot on - It is the conclusion to this article. It may appear a paradox therefore, when I declare that the reviewers to a large extent missed the point. Despite a lengthy briefing by the playwright herself in the pre-show interviews, there was little comment on the way in which the play had been created. In failing to do this true nature of the achievement escaped the reviewers, like a butterfly from a net.

After the Stellar Quines Theatre Company commissioned Adams, she began researching the characters and the gardens upon which it was suggested the play should be based. She quickly found that there were myriad ideas and several interlinking themes, swimming around in her own head, and in the writings and words of her subjects. How to connect them in a way that made sense?

Collaborating with the design and multimedia production company Fifty Nine Ltd, Adams found that existing Internet authoring technology could be adapted to her needs. As the characters’ words were typed into the computer, so too were the links between the scenes, and ‘core texts’ to which they referred.

Many scenes in Adams’ earlier work are characterised by a certain antagonism to linearity, with the various characters’ words and worlds overlapping and mirroring one-another, creating what may be described as a symphony of speech. Just like a musical composition, the individual instruments (in this case, human voices) are each a part of a greater whole. The Internet (or more specifically the HTML pages that may also be viewed on a computer without an online connection) provided a much better medium with which to generate this sort of writing. Overlapping and concurrent scenes may be presented just so. If a character repeats a refrain from an earlier scene, well, that scene with all its richness may be ‘linked’ to its counterpart in the later acts.

Of course, once the non-linearity of the medium became apparent to the playwright, the proverbial floodgates proverbially opened. If one were not constrained by notions of ‘before-and-after’ or ‘here-and-there’ (just like the fictional, fairy-tale characters, and just like our imaginations), why stay in one time, or one place? Presented with an entirely new method of writing plays, Judith Adams presented an entirely new type of play. Worlds collide. One word shoots a fountain of others in all directions. Embracing the medium, the playwright created scenes that did not require a place in a linear narrative.

Video was introduced as a means by which a character could physically exist in more than one place. Moreover, in this context of suppression and dominion, video also represented an alternative mental space.

A web of stories

Taking stock, then: The play that appeared as a scruffy CD-ROM in the hands of director Muriel Romanes was text based, but non linear. The constituent parts of the script (I hesitate to call them pages) existed in their very own piece of cyber space, one that neither preceded nor succeeded any other. They therefore made as much sense when put in one order, as they did in another. This matters, because non-linearity better reflects the human mind, thoughts, history. We are constantly affected by the actions of others, and each thought (indeed, each life) is affected not by one, but several narratives that have gone before. A scene has two meanings, one for each character. A scene may have two meanings, depending on what has preceded it. There is circularity to our lives and our history that is ideally represented by a non-linear medium.

Let it not be said that Sweet Fanny Adams has no discipline, or that the scenes are ordered without thought. A finite number of carefully considered words make up the text. No more may be added. In this way, the play is like any other. Eventually, a certain order was imposed on the piece so that it could be presented to actors and then used in physical rehearsals (Eight or more Palm-top computers were not available at the time). Fifty Nine used computer modelling to determine which combinations of scenes were possible in Pitlochry. The proposed order was carefully considered, with the writer, director and production team examining its implications, and the interpretations of the story that were likely to be inferred as a result of the imposition.

However, devising this order did seem a betrayal, and alteration of the piece. Clicking ‘print’ and creating a paper version was an act of adaptation, moving the composition out of its natural environment. While the audience were ultimately allowed to choose an order for the scenes themselves (and therefore the performance changed for them, depending on their whims and preconceptions), their choices were nevertheless limited to those possible within the space and time of the performance for which they had bought a ticket.

The current proposals, submitted to the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and Arts Council England (Yorkshire), push this audience interaction a stage further. They suggest the creation of an online version of the performance with specially recorded scenes. In this way, they seek to return Sweet Fanny Adams to is natural habitat. There in cyber space, each performance will be unique for each audience member. Indeed, the audience member becomes an important character in the play. They take over the role of Smith the Showman, who gives voices to, and then silences, the women he keeps under surveillance. That the audience may take on this role is the mark of true interactivity, something that only the Internet may deliver. So far as text-based performance goes, it is very rare for a play to even acknowledge the existence of an audience, let alone allow the character of the audience member to influence and bend the proceedings, according to that character. Even in Pitlochry and especially on the Internet, Sweet Fanny Adams achieves both these things.

The actors, their characters, and the audience

Leaving aside the creation of Sweet Fanny Adams in Hyperspace Eden, there is a second important point about the structure of the piece. This was very pertinent in the case of the Pitlochry performance. Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden requires of the actor a whole new type of text based performance, a subtly different type of acting that not all can master. The Pitlochry performance literally redefined what it meant to develop a character. On successive nights, the actors rediscovered what the website had demonstrated all along  that their words could be delivered in any order. Towards the end of the run (when usually the actors might be settling into a tiresome repetition, with one eye on their next audition) the Pitlochry cast were inventing entirely new scenes, and thus finding new meanings in the play, new insights into their characters. Crucially, this was not improvisation, because what could and could not be said had been clearly defined by the writer some months before, and rehearsed during the previous fortnight. Instead, they evolved scenes that revealed secrets about the world of Sweet Fanny Adams that even the writer had not consciously understood. The four-week run allowed the kind of character development that is not possible in media other than theatre, and rarely explored in conventional (linear) theatre. It was the unique construction of the script online that gave the actors the confidence and inspiration to play, create, and innovate in this way.

While Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden is conventionally entertaining, with a set of strong characters, and Fairy Tale themes given a defiant twist, it is nevertheless the method of its creation that sets it apart. This piece simply could not have been created before the advent of HTML language, and not practically before the introduction of web authoring tools (such as Adobe GoLive). It is one of the few examples of Internet technology being used as a medium for creation in itself, rather than as a substitute for the page or the TV screen. It is thus quintessentially of its time. Furthermore, it has inspired new techniques for actors, and presented an entirely new form of performance art to the audiences of Scotland. Back in cyber-space, it will bring this new art to the rest of the world.