From: Chad Childers Subject: trip report from Scotland Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 17:53:48 -0400 (EDT) My review of WolfStone, the first act I've seen at the International Festival: The first time I saw Wolfstone was at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see them here at the Festival. The staging, lights, and smoke at Queen's Hall added something to the performance, and although they got off to a slow start, as soon as the audience started responding, the band went into their usual pattern of starting off each song with a gentle, traditional Scottish melody, and then kicking into high gear and rocking the house down. The fiddle player is fantastic, the lead guitarist and vocals are harmonious and wonderful, the bassist and drummer know their action, and the bagpipes show what amplification is really meant for. Jethro Tull, eat your heart out! The audience had them back for an encore... if you go see them, get up and dance, and clap, and they'll play twice as well. This is a band that really responds. In addition, there was the usual piper on a streetcorner, and another rock pipe band, Tartan Amoeba, was playing in the square. This Festival is simply INCREDIBLE. My accomodations at the University must be grad student's digs, they're so nice, comes with a shower and bath in the room, for cheap! Iain, I've obviously found Cyberia - 88 Hanover St., across from the Castle off Princes Street. PC's, but it's okay. If you want to find me, I'm at at Masson House, in Pollock Halls of Residence, U of Edinburgh Ground Floor, G07. Leaving the 23rd and back to Glasgow. Trip seemed to take FOREVER, switching modes of transport, but I'm happy now. I'm here From: Chad Childers Subject: Trip report #2 Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 07:35:42 -0400 (EDT) Yesterday was my time to check out the theatrical part of the International Festival. Took in four plays, starting with Man of La Mancha, a youth theater piece at St. Ann's Community Center. The story of Don Quixote, this was the least impressive play of the day, but still good enough to bring several tears to my eye. Oops, I forgot, I'm tough! I'm from Detroit! I didn't cry, no, not at all. The staging was interesting, the lead character shifted several times, so all the good actors (just kids, HS, maybe college age) got to play Don Quixote... one boy would take off the armor while delivering a speech, hand it to a girl, and she'd be Don Quixote for a while. Other additional characters, the mule drivers, for example, were played by puppets, which the actors would pick up and dance around with, while holding them in front of their faces, and reaching around them. Worked pretty well, and Animal Farm, later in the day, also at St. Anns, used the same puppet idea. Met the cast of Man.. while waiting to see Animal Farm, and the kids were elated that I recognized them and wanted to know what I thought. Orwell's masterpiece was really a much better performance and was quite packed. Never seen the play before, and I can highly recommend it. Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad! All Animals are Equal... but, the Pigs say, some are more equal than others. Perhaps the best experience of the festival was called Total Tea Theatre: a novel-tea experience, by a group calling itself Synaesthetes or Synaesteasia. You enter the room, smell various tea leaves, and sit to be presented with the first of five brews... you are instructed to first savour the aroma, then taste, as a dance, verse, and human tea explosion related to the flavour, smell, and history of the tea you're tasting takes place on stage. Then they come out with another tea to try and the whole experience repeats itself. China Rose tea has lovers by a brook, Earl Grey is an experience in High-Class life... the dance and performance (not to mention the tea) were outstanding. John Woudstra and Sharon would have just LOVED this, I think. The director and cast came out afterwards to talk about the experience, and they were having a lot of fun with it. They are also working on West Side Story, which is wildly popular this year, got five stars in the Scotsman. I think I had them half convinced to take it on tour to Detroit... think John would like to do lighting? That's the one sensory thing they DON'T play with. Finally, to finish off the evening, I went to one of the main Festival plays, Lanark, at the Church of Scotland Assembly Halls. There are about five plays in the main Festival, and about 300 varied plays and events in the Fringe. Lanark is a Scottish play, about a Glasgow man who is split into two persons, his memories of 1950's Scotland, and his far future... or perhaps... he keeps shouting out "This is Hell!" It really seems like it. He meets the same people again... a girl at a party suddenly brings back a memory... "I killed you!" (she was a prostitute, and he really did kill her it seems) He becomes famous as the Athiest Marxist money-grubber who paints a huge church mural for nothing... but it all comes outwrong in the newspaper, and the preacher, who is a CLASSIC scot, loses his church, but still lets Lanark... Duncan go on. A little funny... but it gets deathly serious saying that the world WILL end like this... the author comes on stage to tell Lanark "sorry,no, I can't give you a happy ending. If I did, anyone who knows how the world works, how politics works, would laugh at me and know I was lying." All lanark wants is to see the sunshine...in a dark world. Off to the book festival, another part of it, thenback to Glasgow for WorldCon! -- Chad From: Chad Childers Subject: Trip report #3 - the WorldCon Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 18:23:56 -0400 (EDT) Well, the con is over and I'm back in Edinburgh. Even though access at the con was free, I didn't get around to compiling a trip report there because there were always impatient people waiting in line behind me to use the Net connection. Besides, the connection was sower, and the CyberCafe is cool. Got to the con, picked up my badge, and spotted Seth Briedbart to go out to dinner. This was the first of many Indian dinners... Glaswegians don't seem to eat anything else! I finally got a t-shirt with Death from Discworld talking about murdering a curry, an got lots of comments on it the last day of the con. It was a SMOF dinner, with Neil Rest, Sharon from Boston, Ctien, etc. Also deadhead discussions. You know, it's a bad thing to have a panel early on the first day of a con. The next morning was the first official day, and I had Cyberspace Intro in the main hall, Science room. It was nice having it right next to the computers, but we shared the hall with the Dealers' Room, Art Show, heck, we could even hear the bagpipes from opening ceremony (which I had to miss most of because of the panel ... the Provost of the city had lots of fun Douglas Adams jokes and such, though). Everyone on the panel had sore throats the next day from shouting. Fortunately, they had gotten microphones by that time. Also attended a panel on Scottish writers, and one on the Gaelic language, where I learned, amoung other important things, that there was a Ceilidgh Saturday night (dance, music, song, whisky). Met up with two people from my Electronic Privacy panel, and we spent the next couple days hanging out together and planning things for the panel... Henry Balen moderated, and Phil Wadler from U. of Glasgow also did a great job. L. Warren Douglas, a Michigan writer, was also on the panel. Anyway, Henry, Iain & Jenny, and a bunch of Henry's friends from Glasgow all went out to dinner (you guessed`it, curry) and Henry and I managed to get work done on the panel. Parties that night were mainly the '98 bid parties, all together in one huge room. Atlanta was just going through the motions, and actually one person on the committee said "please don't vote for us". Baltimore, obviously, won. Sad news at dinner, John Brunner died at the convention. The general concensus was that he would have wanted to go that way, and he will be sorely missed, even if his work was depressing, it was some of the best writing in the genre. They were collecting for his widow, and I bought some of her artwork to try and help out... very sweet lady. Met Steve Glover and Danny Lieberman in person at the convention for the first time... (well, maybe I'd met Danny once before) and talked rec.arts.sf. fandom stuff... Steve also gave me some very good Scotch called Caol Isla, which made for a lovely two hours. (okay, so it'd probably be one sip for most people, but I savoured it SLOWLY) Big grin - this is the first time I've actually finished a whole drink of anything, but 16 year old Islay is simply too good to throw away. Actually, I managed the rum punch at the Baltimore party more smoothly, I sipped a little for my sore throat, and gave the rest to an editor for Paper Tiger who was flirting with me and wanted a drink. Heh... maybe she just knew I wasn't really going to drink it. In general, I'd say this WorldCon was better than a US WorldCon. Met tons of european fen, primarily from Scotland, England, and Ireland, but also Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Croatia (lots of them from Croatia and Poland, behaving in a manner all their own... their artwork in particular was quite unique... one of them did a real medieval style tryptych (bad joke, a HOLY new experience) and lots of very dark, very Giger-like work, particularly from one guy from the Ukraine who really discovered capiltalism). I dragged one of the Croatian bidders into the SMOF party and subjected her to unabashed flirting from Seth and I... I think he nearly sold her th Brooklyn Bridge. Well, hrmm... they're closing up the CyberCafe on me, so what else is new and important? Lots of dinners, met Dave Clements and John Bray from Science Track programming, who were wonderful... and then, of course, the part that everyone wants to know about, the Michigan Party. Holly Wilper from Conamazoo and I went out and did the shopping. Iain got dim sum, and Iain & Jennie's Glasgow friends brought pakora (aagh, more Indian food!). I'd brought Vernors, which was VERY popular (Danny was running around looking for some after we ran out) and loads of good cheese. The party was originally supposed to be in the Central Hotel, but they didn't allow room parties, so I moved to the Forte Crest. Iain did all the signage, and put most of it up while I filled the tub with ice. Then the party ran about an hour and a half with around 50-80 people before the hotel came up and asked us to move downstairs to the Gallery Suite, free of charge, they were just worried about fire code with so many people. It moved very smoothly, everyone grabbing something, and then even MORE people came. I needn't have worried about getting rid of all our supplies. Finally, after another couple of hours, some filkers came down and wanted to use the suite, so I gave them our last litre of apple juice and sat in on the filk for a while. Think that's when I ran into Bill Higgins. Anyway, it was a lovely convention I had a marvelous time, and I'm extremely glad I went! -- Chad - back at the International Festival From: Chad Childers Subject: Trip report #4 Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 16:30:08 -0400 (EDT) Well, I'm waiting for the play Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens (that or a Rocky Horror Tribute) to start down the street, so I have a little time to finish trip reporting. Probably won't have a lot of opportunity to send email after this, as the Festival is ending and I'll be leaving Edinburgh. The festival has been fantastic... saw two notably good things today, an HP Lovecraft inspired play, about what I think is one of his characters, John Cox, killed for witchcraft around the time of Salem and then comes back and takes over his great grandson's identity. Properly dark and forbidding, they went to the effort of pulling a great gauze piece of fabric up over the audience when things got too scary in the catacombs. This evening, saw a one-woman show of songs and stories about Robert Burns, Toasting the Lassies. Liked it so much I got Sharon the CD. Also saw the Cirque Surreal last night, a French circus with all kinds of wierd artistic stuff, I'd almost call it Dance. The most impressive bit was the guy with the bicycle... two people cavorting on a bike is impressive enough, but he actually managed to roll up on a full-size trampoline with the thing, and after chasing another performer around the edge, bounced on it with his bike, and managed to do full flips and such with it. Also saw Dr. Faustus, Sweeny Todd, The Lottery Ticket (more cannibalism, when they decide not to win the lottery... quite good) since the Con. Just saw an obituary for Brunner in the paper here. Can't think what else to say about the WorldCon. Is David Koresh short and fat? If so, he handed most of us ontthe Privacy Panel a floppy after it ended. He signed it, anyway. Can't wait to virus-check it and look at it. :-) It really was fun socializing with the Privacy bunch... we had lunch afterwards, since everyone wanted to talk more. I missed the Hugos because of another panel, and getting ready for the Michigan party, but heard they had fireworks afterwards. Missed pretty much all of the Extravaganzas, but made a lot of good panels, a lot of good parties, especially Baltimore, NESFA's dead dog, Neil Rest's Antartica party... (the most original bid sticker - it was a plain white dot that blended into the badge!) Anyway, later everyone, miss you all! -- Chad