Coffee-Table Notes

William Hurt – Actor   Born March 20, 1950; died March 13, 2022    William Hurt, who has died aged 71, was an actor who won an Oscar for his role in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). Adapted from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, director Hector Babenco’s film cast Hurt as Luis Molina, a gay prisoner sharing a cell with a political activist during Brazil’s then current military dictatorship. Luis survives his ordeal by recounting scenes from the wartime movie that gives Babenco’s film its title.   It was a bravura role for Hurt, who came to prominence several years earlier in his big screen debut, playing an obsessed scientist in the Ken Russell directed Altered States (1980). The run of films that followed saw Hurt play a small town lawyer opposite Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981), then a Vietnam war veteran reuniting with college buddies at their classmate’s funeral in The Big Chill (1983). Both were directed by Lawrence Kasdan. The same year as The Big Chill, Hurt playe...

John Stahl – Actor Born June 23, 1953; died March 2, 2022   John Stahl, who has died aged 68, was an actor who was latterly best known for his regular roles in two iconic TV series’. In Game of Thrones (2012-2013), Stahl played Rickard Karstark, taking over from Stephen Blount in series two as a chief member of Robb Stark’s war council, who vows revenge after his two sons are killed by Jaime Lannister, only to end up himself executed by Stark in series three.    Three decades earlier, Stahl began a lengthy stint on Take the High Road (1982-2003), the rural Scottish Television soap opera later rebranded as High Road. Stahl was farmer Tom Kerr, better known to viewers and other characters as Inverdarroch. Both characters utilised Stahl’s towering presence, which combined a commanding sense of authority tempered by a benign empathy that was never far away.   Beyond these two high profile roles, Stahl was a stalwart of theatre in Scotland, appearing in most of the countr...

The cultural landscape looked a lot different to how it does now when Barry Esson first started putting on events at the start of the twenty-first century. This is evident from the three initiatives he and Arika, the socially minded production company he heads up with long-term collaborator, Briony McIntyre, currently have on the go.   Already up and running at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London is Decriminalised Futures, an exhibition of thirteen international artists exploring experiences of sex workers. This is co-produced by Arika with the ICA and the Sex Workers Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM).   Later in March, in association with CCA Annex, the digital wing of Glasgow’s Centre of Contemporary Arts (CCA), Arika will present A Breath to Follow. This two-day series of online discussions and presentations investigates different aspects of Black and indigenous grassroots art, dance and music collectives in Brazil.   This week sees the launch of ...

Sally Kellerman – Actress, singer Born June 2, 1937; died February 24, 2022    Sally Kellerman, who has died aged 84, was an actress who came to prominence with her bravura turn in M*A*S*H*. (1970), Robert Altman’s adaptation of Richard Hooker’s Korean War set novel. Kellerman played head army nurse Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan, a text-book study of uptight efficiency and repressed sexuality that was in direct conflict with the laidback anarchy that prevailed elsewhere.    This was relayed in two scenes that made Hot Lips the butt of elaborate pranks. The first saw her exposed to a gathered throng when the tent she was showering in was ripped asunder. The second saw her liaison with Robert Duvall’s similarly tightly wound surgeon, Frank Burns, broadcast to the camp on loud speakers in an incident that provided her nickname.     Despite her character being on the receiving end of such chauvinistic antics, Kellerman had the last laugh, when she was nomi...

‘KEEP ON FIGHTING’ was the very first front-page headline of Aberdeen Peoples Press, the fortnightly community newspaper founded in 1973, and which ran until 1984. Priced at an economy busting 5p, this DIY alternative to millionaire-owned tabloids announced its agenda with a boldness born on its own doorstep.   This was clear from the words ‘says Mrs Simpson’ typed beneath the headline next to a black and white photograph of a local resident who looked a far cry from the earnest image of the era’s young radicals. In terms of making a statement, this calculated alliance of word and image demonstrated exactly how much this new publication was by, for and of those after whom it was named.   This exhibition of archive material from APP is presented by the Aberdeen based Peacock Visual Art, the ‘printmaking powerhouse’ founded in the same era. The connection is telling. Curated in association with the University of Aberdeen Special Collections, the selection of posters, photographs...

Liverpool Rising   ‘LIVERPOOL LIKE BRISTOL 1980 - RISE UP!’   No-one seemed that bothered by the chalked on words scrawled on a wall in the centre of town. That’s if they even noticed them as they bustled past on that busy week day lunchtime. The words were easy to miss if you weren’t looking for them, but for those who knew what was going on, and others like me whose eye accidentally caught them, they read like a call to arms.    I’d left school that summer, and had stumbled into a Youth Opportunities Programme with British Rail for £23.50 a week. The YOP scheme had been set up so Thatcher could massage the dole queue figures down to below the million they really were. I spent most of my £23.50 at Probe, the punky-hippy record shop where I’d probably just been when I saw the chalked on words, which stopped me in my tracks.   That April in Bristol there had been what came to be known as the St. Pauls riot, which happened after police raided the Black and White C...

Going Up   Sheil Road flats were considered to be the best high rises in Liverpool when me and my mum moved into the 16 th floor of Kenley Close. Kenley Close and the other two blocks beside it that made up Sheil Park – Kenley Parade and Linosa Close - went up in the mid 1960s, around the time I was born. We were allocated the flat at the start of 1982, which meant we could move out of the temporary hostel we’d been put in a few weeks before Christmas.   That was after the house I’d grown up in had been sold. The house was next to Anfield Cemetery, with my back bedroom overlooking the gravestones that loomed in the moonlight as I read in the dark by the window. The sale was part of the deal after my mum and dad’s divorce came through, which stipulated the house couldn’t be sold until I left school. Unfortunately for us, it all went through when the council was on strike, and we couldn’t be rehoused till they went back to work.    If I’d had any balls I would’ve moved...