Scotland

Karine Polwart performs “James Hutton and The Restless Earth”

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Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of geology.

With specially performed music and song, she explores one of Hutton’s most radical and challenging concepts – deep time. Hutton was the first to hypothesise that the formation of the Earth had taken unfathomably long stretches of time, far, far longer than the eight thousand or so years that studies of the bible had suggested. And that radical theory would be confirmed by a discovery Hutton made when he and his two companions stepped ashore from a boat trip to Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland in June 1788. What he saw was sandstone eroded away to reveal sharp vertical shards of the rock greywacke laid down some 60 million years earlier -what geologist today would call an unconformity.

Recreating that journey for the programme Karine is joined by geologist Dr Angus Miller and David Farrier, writer and Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.

Angus explains just how influential Hutton’s theory became through the writing of his companion on the trip – John Playfair

“The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible to how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”

The truth that Hutton revealed was indeed far stranger than fiction, not only upending the received wisdom about the age of the Earth but would have far reaching consequences, giving successors like Charles Darwin a timescale that would allow the incremental changes of natural selection to take place.

For David Farrier Hutton’s discoveries opened up not only the deep past but the prospect of the deep future. His book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looks at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future.

Karine weaves these ideas together in the music threaded through the programme blending the events of Hutton’s visit with these challenging ideas about our responsibility to those far off generations to come.

The idea of seeing intimate, human connections to the geology of the planet is taken up by the artist Illana Halperin. Her work explores where human time and geological time scales intersect most notably in how she shares a birthday with the Icelandic volcano Eldfell that she visits on every major milestone as they age together.

The programme builds to a crescendo of all these ideas overlaid and blended into a powerful message of how we’ve become a planetary force capable of great feats for both good and ill.

Written, composed and performed by Karine Polwart

Sound design and additional music by Pippa Murphy

Piano: Dave Milligan

Producer: Peter McManus

The Scottish director who failed to salvage Burt Reynolds’ career

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The biggest danger to Burt Reynolds‘ career was always Burt Reynolds, with the actor developing an unfortunate habit of shooting himself in the foot.

There are only so many times an established star can turn down a game-changing role before they’re no longer an established star, and by the time Reynolds reached the end of the 1980s, his unbroken five-year stint as the biggest box office draw in American cinema seemed like a distant memory,

To be honest, he didn’t really have anyone to blame but himself. He should have continued striking when the iron was at its hottest, but instead, he kept knocking back parts in acclaimed, awards-worthy, or crowd-pleasing smash hits in favour of making rubbish action flicks, thrillers, and comedies, which gradually saw him slide down the Hollywood ladder and into irrelevance.

After all, you can’t turn down Die Hard, Pretty Woman, Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning gig in Terms of Endearment, James fucking Bond, and Star Wars‘ Han Solo, go on to make Stroker Ace, Stick, Malone, Rent-a-Cop, and Striptease, and expect that everything will turn out alright in the long run.

Even Paul Thomas Anderson failed to drag Reynolds back to mainstream prominence, with his career-best and Oscar-nominated outing in Boogie Nights leading to absolutely nothing, with the veteran quickly falling back into the habit of knocking out B-grade genre fare, and he even turned down a reunion in Magnolia because he hated the director so much.

However, there was a brief silver lining, which was more of a false dawn than anything else. In 1989, Reynolds deliberately shed his marquee leading man baggage for the first time to play a character part, accepting top billing in Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s Breaking In, albeit only after Nicholson and Paul Newman had passed.

Acting his age for once, the 1989 crime caper saw him playing an aging burglar with eyes on retirement, but only after he pulls off the fabled ‘one last job’. When he does, he accidentally discovers a protégé instead, with the unlikely duo forging a bond that finds the old-timer teaching the newcomer the tricks of the trade.

“No, it wasn’t a risk,” Gregory’s Girl director Forsyth told Film Talk of hiring Reynolds. “He had played the same roles successfully in those big movies for more than 15 years. There’s a certain point in your life as an actor when you are becoming older. Time is telling on you, so you can’t play the same action comedy roles, and also, you’re maturing. For him, it was time out after playing the endless Burt Reynolds type of roles.”

Admittedly, Breaking In was a flop, but it was nonetheless the star’s best-reviewed film since Semi-Tough, which was released 12 years previously. It was also his best performance in just as long, if not longer, and should have opened the door to a new era as a character man. What were his next headline roles? The woeful comedy Modern Love and the awful Cop and a Half, so not a single lesson was learned.

Source: The Scottish director who failed to salvage Burt Reynolds’ career

To That Man Robert Burns

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Woody Guthrie

In this letter-poem, Woody Guthrie points out the similarities between himself and Robert Burns, and the deep connection he felt to the poet, as well as reminiscing about visiting Scotland as a torpedoed seaman during the Second World War.

Dear Robert Burns,

You skipped the big town streets just like I done, you ducked the crosstown cop just like I ducked, you dodged behind a beanpole to beat the bigtime dick and you very seldom stopped off in any big city where the rigged corn wasn’t drying nor the hot vine didn’t help you do your talking.

Your talking was factual figures of the biggest sort, though. Your talking had the graphboard and the chart and had something else most singers seem to miss, the very kiss of warm dew on the stalk.

Your words turned into songs and floated upstream and then turned into rains and drifted down and lodged and swung and clung to drifts of driftwood to warm and heat and fertilize new seeds. Your words were of the upheath and the down, your words were more from heather than from town. Your thoughts came more from weather than from schoolroom and more from shifting vines than from the book.

I go to the church halfway between the farm and halfway into the town and halfway back. I sing and dance at just one altar only and cry with the folks that would like to be more fertile. If there’s a bench I kneel down to laugh and cry on, I suppose it’s this bench with the kids waiting along it while us dads and us mamas stamp and stomp around looking for something to give our trip more sense. I worship in the limbroof arbors of pure fertility and very little else makes sense to me. Like Robert Burns and Jesus and some others I believe we ought to learn how to make a law or two to help us brothers love the sisters more.

I bought your little four-inch square book when I was a torpedoed seaman walking around over your clods and sods of Glasgow and the little book says on the outer cover, Fifty Songs of Burns, the price 4d, and I read from page to page and found you covered a woman on every page. I thought as I picked the book up here at home that maybe the book ought to have some kind of a new name. Like, Fifty Pages of Fifty Women, enlarged upon by Robert Burns.

Well, Rob, it’s awfully rainy here in Coney today. Been drizzling like this now for several days to make some folks happy and some folks sad, since this is a big resort town and folks pay good money to come here from all over. Some like the rain today and some folks hate it. I like it and love it for several reasons, like you’d love it, to see our new seeds grow in this old trashy back yard, and to see these green shoots, roots, limbs and leaves start dancing like Tirza and her Wine Bath. And because Marjorie just painted some flowers of a wild and jumpy color on the pink wall of the baby’s room so when he does squirm his way out here to see his light of the day he’ll see some twisting flowers like you seen all around your rock hearths and heatherhills there all over your Scotland. This rain is making the grass and flowers spud out, the roots to crawl like guerrillas, and the house to take a better shape, so’s our little shoot and shaver can have these growing limbs to give him such a good fast start that maybe he can grow up in four years with us giving him pushes to be as happy and dancy and glad and joking and pretty as our little Stackybones was on that Sunday’s afternoon when she got dressed up her very prettiest in her pinkest dress and greenest ribbon to look just as nice and sweet and glad and pretty as any of your fifty girls you raved about. And fifty times fifty. The only good part about living you really did miss, Bob, was not to get to stick around a house like Marjorie keeps and see a kid like Cathy dance and grow. You died at thirty-four which was a bit too young for you to get to see these things I’m seeing in the faces of my kids.

This is why I’ll keep you posted and brought up to date as the year leafs out and me and Marjorie have more kids of the kinds you missed out on.

Published in Woody Guthrie, Born To Win (Macmillan, 1965), pp. 213–15.