This is just such a good ad. Made by Droga5 as part of Under Armour’s Rule Yourself campaign, it features the world’s greatest-ever swimmer Michael Phelps training hard for one final Olympic push this August. The soundtrack is The Last Goodbye by The Kills.
Based in cafes in and around Dunfermline town centre, Cafe Music Live provides a friendly and relaxed live music environment for young performers. The concept is the brainchild of local live music organiser Jonathan Cairney who, as a teacher and a musician, was keen to provide both a platform for younger performers and a destination for young music fans. The ‘tea-time’ gigs are free and will feature vocalists, solo musicians,
Bit of a coup for Oakley Library tomorrow, 17 March, when it hosts a talk by award winning, bestselling author Gavin Francis. Francis will be discussing his hugely successful Adventures in Human Being, recent winner of the Saltire Society Awards Non-Fiction Book of the year 2015 and described by Hilary Mantel as ‘A sober and beautiful book about the landscapes of the human body: thought-provoking and eloquent.’ A Sunday Times Bestseller, the
Dunfermline author Caroline Copeland was much struck on a trip to America by the way a children’s book about the ducks in Boston Public Gardens is used to promote the city. Make Way for Ducklings is available at every bookshop and tourist attraction in the area and its characters have been immortalised in bronze (below). Caroline thought how much more beautiful Dunfermline’s famous peacocks and Glen were than their Boston counterparts
Cartoonist Jacky Fleming’s very funny new book, The Trouble With Women, was originally going to be about exceptional women consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’. However the more she researched these women, filling eleven notebooks with their names, she discovered that brilliant, capable woman were far too numerous throughout the centuries to be described as exceptional. The book then became about they ways in which limitations have been placed around
To celebrate Dunfermline’s first, and now sold out, Comic Con this weekend, here a fantastic series of very witty images by local comic book artist Colin Maxwell. Colin teaches design at Fife College and writes comic books in his spare time. His first book, King Robert the Bruce and the Wars of Independence, was published in 2014 and this weekend he launches Guardians of Scotland which he both wrote and illustrated.
The new photography exhibition at the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum is intriguing both for the photographer and the subject matter. John Maher is best known as the drummer of The Buzzcocks but, since 2002, he has been living on the Isle of Harris and and documenting deserted croft houses in the Outer Hebrides. The result is a sublime and haunting photo series, Nobody’s Home. ‘These abandoned croft houses lie scattered throughout the
Auchtermuchty Cake Company specialises in hand-made cakes, puddings and pastries made from gluten free flour blends which taste as great as traditional home-made baking. The company is launching an online shopping facility soon but meanwhile the team are regularly at Edinburgh, Stockbridge and St Andrews Farmers’ Markets, their Creole Fruitcake is available at Selfridges and you can order other products from the range from Yumbles and Freshfoodexpress.co.uk. To buy from Auchtermuchty Cake Company directly, send a
If you enjoyed the recent BBC production of War and Peace – and perhaps even more so if you didn’t – you may be intrigued to see this wonderful clip of the ballroom scene from the epic Russian version directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. The film was made in 1966 and was over six hours long on release. Bondarchuk, a great hero of Russian cinema, himself took the role of Pierre with
CoBrA was an artist group formed in 1948 by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam whose painting style was highly expressionist and inspired by the art of children. The name is taken from the first letters of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam where the group’s founder members lived. As a group they had active social and political concerns and felt paintings ‘should appear on the canvas as naturally and quickly as a sudden