Hatin' on Hipsters

I am listening to the radio commentary of Chelsea vs Watford (FA Cup, 2015), so can't really do my usual slap-dash analysis of academic essays. Instead, I'll do some brain-dead click-bait about why we all hate hipsters.

1.They are just like everyone else
I had a big burst of hate for this guy who was riding a bike on the pavement in Sauchiehall Street this week. I called him a hipster (in my head), although I had no idea whether he had a mountain man beard, idiosyncratic piercings or vintage jodhpurs. I was just annoyed, and it was the first insult that came to mind.

I did see a proper hipster couple in the window seat at the iCafe two minutes later. She was a punk, with sculpted blue hair and a leather jacket all covered in slogans. He had a waxed moustache and a rather warm looking woollen jumper. They had clearly spent some big money and attention to their respective outfits.

And I thought: a hipster is just a young person who uses conspicuous consumption to express their identity. They look expensive. They look defined, polished, conscious of how clothes maketh the man. 

And I thought: I do that. Even my leather jacket with all the stuffing hanging out is an act of conspicuous consumption. It announces my lack of concern about clothes. And hygiene, probably. I am a hipster too: I am just shit at it.

2. They are cooler than they are intelligent
No-one has a good definition of the hipster (I think the concept began when a woman with an eating disorder opened a cafe that served only toast and lemon juice). It might be about an interest in artisan quality bread, or obscure coffee, or growing ostentatious facial hair.

Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker could have defined them as 'idiots' in the frighteningly prophetic Nathan Barley. There are plenty of blogs that use hipster to mean 'hateful person who dresses funny and has more money than me.'

I decided that a hipster is anyone cooler than me - which opens it up to just about everyone not wearing glasses kept together with masking tape. And also not as clever as me, which brings it down a little bit. But not much.

Critics to Look Out For

It's The Fringe, and every company has got a five star rating from somebody. In this highly competitive market, the critic has become powerful, but it is difficult to tell who is worth reading. The Vile Arts has decided to make another click bait posting in a blatant attempt to get the numbers up.

Joyce MacMillan

Critic for The Scotsman, Joyce MacMillan is also a political commentator of some renown. Her status as one of Scotland's premier critics is most noticeable by the plays that she covers during the Fringe: she gets to go the Big Stuff, like the International Festival and The Traverse programme.

MacMillan is a tireless champion of theatre, and covers more ground than entire magazines across the year. Her knowledge of Scottish performance, especially scripted drama,  is unsurpassed and if you can't afford to buy The Scotsman (which does come with a goody bag during August), check out the posters. Her quotes so often express the essence of a piece that they are frequently printed in public.

Mark Brown
Brown's writing can be found all over the internet, as he contributes to Scotland on Sunday, The Telegraph and The List. His enthusiasm is for international theatre and, as a lecturer at Strathclyde University,  he brings a cerebral, yet passionate, approach to his criticism. Known for his direct use of language and an energetic celebration of challenging theatre, he can also be found giving post-show discussions.

Lorna Irvine

This year's new kid on the block, Irvine has been contributing a shed-load of reviews to The List, revealing an extensive knowledge of theatricality from Live Art through to comic turns. As an award winning short story writer, Irvine spices up her criticism with bursts of precise simile, making her reviews more entertaining than the actual shows, sometimes.

Her work can be found on Exeunt and Across The Arts and she has made her name covering the diverse scenes of Glasgow performance, being at home with wild performance antics and Pinter's pauses.





Andrew Haydon
As his Postcards From The Gods demonstrates, Haydon is a restless The Guardian.
writer, fascinated by the evolving nature of theatre and can persuade the skeptic that the script still has life in it. As theatre editor on Culture Wars, he has a tough style, getting involved in discussions about the nature of criticism as well as reviewing for The Guardian.

Haydon is another of the generation of critics who knows his onions: frequently a visitor to other nations, he has a feel for German theatre and is capable of matching his coherent opinions with a depth of wisdom that he shares generously and often.



Yasmin Sulaiman
Currently acting editor on The List, Sulaiman's status is, like that of Joyce MacMillan, best understood through the quality of the shows that she has reviewed.

Her wide experience - she is also a great book reviewer - brings both a broad culture knowledge and a concise writing style to her critiques, and her ability to balance an awareness of content against theatrical techniques makes her articles and reviews compelling introductions to various events.

Gareth K Vile
Preening, pompous and pretentious, Vile's work for The List has fortunately been kept in check by Editor Gail Tolley for the past year. This unhappy task now falls to Yasmin Sulaiman: his blog reads like the documentation of a mental breakdown.


Look out for part 2, coming soon.

Five More reasons that the Fringe is Crap

6: Lady Gaga is not performing

After the success of my previous post - quite clearly, all this hard work to develop new forms of critique could have been more productively spent on lists of My Little Pony  related stories - I am back with more Vile Bile. Thank you to Kate Stannard for suggesting these: but let's cut straight to the Hate!

1. Cost
It is not cheap. The escalating cost of theatre in the Fringe means that a good day out with three or four shows will cost a couple of ponies - you could get half a good meal at an Eric Clapton concert for that.

For a single show, it's not too bad - but why go to the Fringe to see one show? The whole point is to see tons of stuff, to compare and contrast. The price system plugs into that problem of different sorts of shows (community, student, professional) not being clearly delineated. Flinging a Pavarotti at an accomplished South African company doing a heist thriller with ironic cultural undertones (Silent Voice) is one thing, a couple of double nuggets in the bucket for The Creative Martyrs is a fair return. But splashing out a pinky and ending up at three versions Macbeth by a school companies is a liability.

2. Ethics
It's a bit rich for a critic to bang on about integrity - I refuse to go to shows if I have to pay - but Kate pointed out that some companies compromise their artistic integrity to get audiences. It is time for the bum story.

Once upon a time, there was a critic - we'll call him Margaret - who went to see a student production of Artaud-based antics. He ought to have known better, but he fancied finding out how Artaud, a real theatre wild-man, might translate into the modern idiom. 

On the whole, he found the sight of a woman in a naughty nurse outfit, a man dressed as a priest and another as a centurion pretty hilarious. Other audience members didn't, and walked out across the stage, shouting that Artaud would be turning in his grave. But the critic - let's call him SpinOza - stayed on.

There was this one bit where the naughty nurse laid down right in front of the critic - his name is Criticulous - and kicked her legs in the air, exposing her bum. The critic got a little distracted by this and cast his eyes upon the bottom.

His thoughts, which weren't really being held by the performance, pondered the ethics of the situation. Did the young performer recognise how she was exposing herself? Was she aware of the thin line between exploitation and challenging sexual normativity? Does an audience member have the right not to be presented with a bare bum, whether that bum is monstrous or attractive? It was a tough series of questions, and the critic got very involved in considering them.

Suddenly, he heard laughter from across the stage. He looked up, thinking that something funny was happening in the Artaud antics again. Sadly, the audience were pissing themselves at the sight of the critic staring at the actor's bum. 

Two stars.

3. Science
While this won't apply to every show that uses scientific theory as a theme or narrative, there is a tremendous amount of performance that mistakes a poor understanding of natural selection, or the Higgs Particle, as a signifier of intelligence. If I wanted to learn about relativity, I'd ask a physicist, not a playwright or actor.

This does imitate a Facebook trend: people who share 'I f-ing love science' memes. Science does enrich our lives, and a working knowledge of the correct meaning of 'theory and hypothesis,' 'experiment' and the difference between 'natural selection' and 'evolution' would help everyone (not least so that I don't mock you for not recognising the last entry). But vague gestures towards quantum theory in a version of The Antigone or hour long rambles about how cool technology is does not move theatre into new territory.

4. Three Weeks
It is inevitable that a critic will bemoan Three Weeks, the student review magazine. I used to do it myself - on one occasion, I took a photograph of some friends in a creche and tagged it The Three Weeks Editorial Team in Their Office. I was being a snide ass.

It is that sort of complaint - that Three Weeks or Broadway Baby aren't proper critics - that I hate. Of course they aren't proper critics: they are enthusiastic students trying to learn how to write criticism. If they get it wrong, so do the paid critics. If their grammar is a little idiosyncratic, it's not worse than wikipedia entries on The X-Men.

These reviews are a place where people can learn, and they provide a service to those companies who can't afford a PR by looking at everything indiscriminately. While anyone who thinks that a Three Weeks review is better than mine is wrong (in a relativistic way, that is), they do provide another subjective opinion on theatre, encouraging the debate, offering new voices and allowing students to experience the full horror of working in the industry.

5. Shakespeare
Like everyone else who runs out of ideas, I just go with Shakespeare. Again.

Five Reasons why The Edinburgh Fringe is Crap

Every year, the Fringe Society announces that it is now bigger and better. Better seems to mean that there are more shows so, tautology aside, the Fringe - which was started off, to quote wikipedia, 'when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival in 1947' to provide an alternative to the mainstream productions - the Fringe is now 'the world's biggest arts festival.' So instead of being the place where the obscure, the challenging or the experimental can happen, it's the aesthetic equivalent of a student disco on a Friday night. The beats are predictable, the outfits almost fashionable and the only thing that anyone cares about is being pissed or picked up.

Of course, I don't really mean it. But I am going for some click-bait. So here's my handy guide to the Fringe's utter crapness.

1. 

Star ratings are more important than critical assessment.

A few years back there was a campaign to address the problems of 'star inflation' (critics marking shows up to get attention). Since one of the leaders in this campaign puts has posters for their shows that assign over 40% of the space to previous star ratings, it was lucky that it never went beyond Facebook moaning. 

But it does highlight a particular problem. There are so many publications, and so many reviews, that is difficult to tell what the ratings mean these days. One publication now marks out of seven stars, meaning that the former gold standard of five stars is as trustworthy as Tony Blair's opinions on the Middle East. The most successful business in Edinburgh during August is printing, as companies put in bulk orders for sheets covered in stars. 

The downside is, no-one reads the reviews. I might as well replace my finely crafted opinions with guest slots from rubbish villains from comics.

2.

Student Companies don't distinguish themselves from professional companies.

I love drama by young people, but I don't want to critique it in the same way as I do professional companies. It has an entirely different set of intentions. I've discussed this elsewhere, but the short version is that, last year, I saw a few student companies whose advertising suggested that they were the next step down from the RSC. Watching these works suggested all sorts of ways that I could critique their work - to their advantage - but I had to give them the same sort of review I would give to the RSC. I just hope I didn't destroy anyone's ambitions: the lesson is: don't pretend to be something you cannot be.

3.

There is too much comedy.

I don't mean in the comedy festival. I mean in the theatre section. The idea that theatre ought to be funny works up to a point. That point is when actors mistake getting a laugh for connecting with the audience. 

4.

There is too much Shakespeare.

If you need me to justify this... you don't actually go to the theatre. 

5.

Radical interpretations one year become the establishment the next.

Yep, from content to form, once an idea is given a Fringe First, expect it to come back in spades the next, and be agitating for its own section the year after. This refers especially to: gender swap versions of Shakespeare; feminist versions of Shakespeare; confessions of sexual failure or excess; lectures about science; comedians doing theatre (thank you Mark Thomas). This year, a Fringe First will go to a play about sex work. I have fifty quid on it down at Ladbrokes. Next year, the Fringe Society will have a workshop called From Pro to Professional: Making Your Sex Work work for Your Script.

Disclaimer: I just made this all up. I love the Fringe really. Mind you, I think all these points are worth debate. Try to show you've read the whole piece, trolls, by not making an ad hominem argument about my cynicism. I am actually being cynical about cynicism, see?