Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until January 26th 2013 4 stars If the Obscene Publications Squad are on the case of this first solo exhibition in Scotland by a York-born painter possessing a name like a pulp fiction hack, rest easy. Ellison’s monumental depictions of dog-eared Penguin book designs down the decades may look like the sort of behind-the-counter smut peddled under plain cover, but it’s the titles themselves that show off the real art of fiction. On the one hand, epic tomes such as the punk-inspired ‘Fuck Art, Let’s Dance’, the scientifically inclined ‘Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore’ and the possible Off-Broadway smash, ‘Born to Get it in the Tits Every Single Day Though’ are masterpieces of cock-snooking fantasy-wish-fulfilment obscenity a la Joe Orton’s adventures in Islington library. Beyond pop savvy fun and games and the Rude Kid style relish with which sweary-words are employed to flirt with the forbidden (as with old-school porn emporiums, the rudest title here is kept under lock and key), lies a darkly subversive intent. In what looks like the filthiest library in the world, try shushing that one up. The List, December 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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