Coffee-Table Notes

Summerhall until September 27th 2012 4 stars Torn-up lack and white images of a woman taken almost half a century ago are laid out on the floor in criss-crossing strips, as multiples of the woman's face stare out. This is Carolee Schneeman, performance artist, avant-provocateur and feminist icon, and she has been ripped to shreds. This altar-like assemblage deconstructs images taken from Schneeman's 1964 Eye Body series forms a brand new contribution to this scaled-down retrospective of sorts featuring three recent video installations and a hitherto unseen set of photographs, Ice Naked Skating, from the same era.  These feature a decidedly un-chilly looking Schneeman skating while holding her cat. Used for years as 'objective observers' of her work, other cats feature in 2008's Infinite Kisses – The Movie, a series of blurred close-ups of Schneeman and her pets getting affectionate. They're there again in Devour, a split-screen montage of stock car crashes, suck

Until September 2nd 2012 5 stars It only takes a few seconds, and the lunchtime Calton Hill day-trippers may not even register the three-note female vocal harmony emanating from Nelson's monument, and which segues into the faint sound of a cannon being fired for the One O'Clock Gun. In its clarity, however, as Susan Philipsz's major city-wide intervention ricochets into the ether at exactly the same time in five other sites on Waverley Bridge, North Bridge, Old Calton Cemetery, the National Gallery and West Princes Street Gardens, it becomes an ancient siren's call that transverses history as well as geography. Inspired by the electrical cable hung between the monument and Edinburgh Castle in 1861 to mark out the speed the sound of a gun travels at by way of Homer's Odyssey, Timeline is part classicist gift-wrapping, part Enoesque jingle that permeates the air with a purity that transcends the cannon-fire, and arguably makes the daily ritual even more iconic. Of co

On the edge of a run-down Warsaw housing estate beside the railway, things appear to be kicking off. A small huddle of people are waiting to go inside the headquarters of radical theatre troupe, Komuna//Warszawa to see Future Tales (Sierakowski), a fantastical science-fiction critique of Slawomir Sierakowski, a leftist Polish intellectual idolised by some for his ideological radicalism, lampooned by others for seemingly becoming part of a new establishment. As they wait, a bare-chested man marches briskly out of one of the still residential blocks, and appears to make it his business to barge through the group rather than navigate his way around them. Instead of assorted excuse me's and apologies, an argument ensues, which, with neither party prepared to leave it, threatens to turn physical. Only when the bare-chested resident gas vented his spleen on the person he barged into with what turns out to be the harshest swear-words in Polish before storming off do things die down. Stran

4 stars Off-duty Tattie Toes drummer Shane Connolly and band-mate Jer Reid alongside Arab Strap-and-a million-others guitarist Stevie Jones form the core of this low-key side-project super-group, but on this organic-sounding debut are emboldened by an all-star cast of similarly off-piste mavericks, including pianist Bill Wells, viola player Aby Vulliamy and vocalist Nerea Bello. The result on these six instrumental workouts veers from angular Mediterranean thrash to post-Tortoise twang, with wonky piano and viola scrapes pulsed by busy drum patterns. Beautifully textured, it beguiles one minute before going into orbit the next, a bit like a post-rock Mahavishnu Orchestra with all the indulgences chopped out. Lovely. The List, August 2012 ends

Mick Foley has just arrived in Tampa Bay, Florida, and is kicking his heels before he starts work.  What that means for the American wrestling legend turned stand-up comedian is literally showing some younger guys the ropes at a 'developmental group' run by WWE, the big-league wrestling promoters Foley has recently rejoined after several years on the independent circuit. In the meantime, what's keeping him amused is a real-life story that came straight out of Tampa, but which sounds truly stranger than fiction. In-between laughs, Foley christens the protagonist of the incident, which hit world headlines, “Bath-Salts Man.” Bath-Salts Man, it seems, was the Tampa drug addict who, according to Foley, was so high on the amphetamine-based drug known as bath-salts that he ran naked from the woods and “ended up eating most of his room-mate's face off. They've donated his brain to science so we can learn from our mistakes.” While the story didn't quite pan out the way F

Theatre Uncut – Traverse – 4 stars One Hour Only – Underbelly – 3 stars XXXO – Pleasance Courtyard – 3 stars Theatre Uncut was a wonderful idea that brought together living playwrights to pen short, off-the-cuff miniatures responding to the world's ongoing economic collapse. Performances of these were co-ordinated worldwide to produce a global day of theatrical action. The idea took root, and this year the Traverse are presenting three programmes of bite-size works taking place each Monday morning in the theatre bar. This first one opens with In The Beginning, a pithy dialogue between a young advocate of the Occupy movement and his disappointed dad. If the title at first suggests the biblical roots of protest, the exchange that follows reveals one more rich kid slumming it as much of the original hippy movement did. Lena Kitsopolou's The Price finds a consumer friendly couple finding the ultimate supermarket bargain in the shape of a cut-price dead baby. The Br

When Les Dennis opened a show headlined by Lena Zavaroni at the London Palladium that was broadcast on prime time television, you could perhaps forgive the still young comedian for thinking he'd hit the big time. The next night, however, saw Dennis back in his home town of Liverpool playing the somewhat less salubrious confines of Croxteth British Legion in one of the roughest parts of town. Such, then, were the vagaries of life for the northern English working man's club comic in the 1960s and 1970s. At their peak, such spit and sawdust institutions as Croxteth British Legion were bread and butter for acts like Dennis, especially after Saturday night TV show The Comedians turned the likes of Bernard Manning, Frank Carson into stars. The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club went further, recreating the atmosphere of beery night out in a TV studio. The rise of the 1980s wave of alternative comedy put paid to these boom years with right-on abandon, and pretty soon