MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Marxist Notes on Music: January 2, 2023
Tone-deaf budget embarrasses and insults in equal measure
HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: Scottish contemporary dance artist Charlotte Mclean presents her solo work And at Dance Base, Edinburgh, as part of the Made in Scotland Showcase during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
DECEMBER 15 2022 saw the Scottish government announce its budget for 2023-24 and though not as damning as what is on offer from the Tories in Westminster, as Roz Foyer of the STUC said “we needed strides, not steps.”
Despite the wonderful PR and public image — bold is not one of their strengths in this circumstance, and realistically the STUC proposed alternatives weren’t really radical either — it just demanded enough of a spine to carry them out.
However, as the Marxist Notes on Music columnist, I’ll focus primarily on yet another attack on culture. The main cultural body funded directly by the Scottish government, Creative Scotland, had their fund cut by £7 million, 10 per cent down on their 2022 funding. Depending on how you measure inflation, this means Creative Scotland would have been £4-10m short even if its budget remained unaltered.
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