Jad who? I hear you ask. Well, the lyricist and singer on this quirky collaboration with the Scotchy guitar poppers is an obscure offbeat American musician and visual artist whose approach to painting and music is basically one of child-like innocence. The cute cover art is therefore a good indication of what to expect inside.

Sounding like a candy-store Lou Reed, Jad Fair talks-more-than-sings his screwball cartoon lyrics against TFC's excellent musical backing. Just like when we were age 11, Frankenstein and Superman constantly get name checked.

Once the mild irritation factor wears off, you realize that it's actually very effective, as on the rocking "Crush On You," where Jad sings: "Well, if your looking for a love song/ you've come to the right place." Or the hilarious "Always In My Heart," where he admits, "I might not be a Beatle/ but I've got needs like a Beatle/ All I need is love."

It's postulated that once the Universe stops expanding, it will start contracting and that Time itself will start running backwards. Musically, this has already started to happen with certain bands like Gomez, who continue to develop by rediscovering the richness of the past.

Since their debut in 1998, their main charm has been their laid-back 'retro' feel, very reassuring for those of us who don't want to leave the golden age of rock too far behind. Titles like "Detroit Swing 66" also help. This doesn't mean that their music is stale or predictable. Far from it as the aforesaid track demonstrates with its juicy mix of brass, funk, stonking blues and hip hop.

The self-produced English 5-piece make the kind of music that rewards repeated listening by building up complex aural textures from diverse elements with a firm grounding in blues/rock. For those reluctant to leave the heartland of rock but sick of playing their remastered CDs to death, Gomez represent a healthy way to recycle the musical Universe.

"My work is not representative of dreams but comes from the same place as dreams" -- This is perhaps the best explanation of the work of photographer Diana Thorneycroft.

Using a range of sometimes disturbing props and masks, and naked or semi-naked models, including herself, Thorneycroft creates images in the dark using a flashlight and long exposures. Bypassing the visual, rational world, the often nightmarish images created explore issues of sexuality and vulnerability on a subconscious level. As she puts it, "The body speaks a language the mind doesn't."

Intriguing, but not everybody's cup of tea, which probably explains why this book is so expensive.

America's involvement in World War two was bookended by two Humphrey Bogart movies. Going into the War, there's Rick in the classic Casablanca; coming out of the War, there's Joe Barret in Tokyo Joe, but basically they are both the same hard-boiled-with-a-heart-of-gold guy. As if to emphasize this there's a nightclub in each, the Tokyo joint eponymously named "Tokyo Joe's."

The movie kicks off in 1948, as Joe Barret comes back after 7 years away to occupied Tokyo to take care of some unfinished business, soon getting into a playful Judo bout with his old friend and nightclub partner, Itoh (Teru Shimada). There's more unfinished business than he reckoned on, however, as he finds out that the beautiful wife he thought was dead is still alive. But this is no Madame Butterfly in reverse. The lady in question is Trina, a White Russian played by an actress with great cheekbones but with none of the smouldering quality of Ingrid Bergman. The writers lay on the twists thick and fast as we discover that Trina is now married to an Occupation bigwig, Mark Landis (Alexander Knox), and she has a kid which is Bogey's.

In order to protect Trina from a blackmail scam, Bogey gets sucked into a plot led by the evil Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa) who bears an uncanny resemblance to former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone. This scheme to revive the Black Dragon organization by smuggling Imperialist leaders back into Japan, is implausibly attributed to the Communists. The climax comes when Bogey's chubby little daughter gets kidnapped and Bogey's Japanese nightclub partner blames himself and commits hari-kiri.

"Still covering up for Kimura," Bogey admonishes him as he realises his old buddy won't be helping him with his judo practice anymore. "Don't you understand what guys like that have done for you? For a thousand years they've made suckers out of you. All they've wanted was the gravy and guys like you down on their hands and knees to hand it up to them. You think we're the real enemy because we're occupying Japan. You know why we're doing it? To help the Japanese people stand up on their hind legs, like men and women and have a right to in this world."

Anyway, Bogey manages to rescue his daughter taking a bullet in the process. This leads into a noticeably fudged ending. There are two possible ways to look at it. Either Humphrey dies as he is carried away out on the stretcher or he doesn't. The way the camera fades on Trina in the last scene, suggests that Joe has in fact passed on, but this is so vague that it's left open for those people who prefer a happier ending to imagine that he gets better in some unfilmed future after the movie.

The first possibility naturally packs more emotional punch - Bogey sacrificing himself once again and conveniently getting out of the way so that Trina can continue her glamorous life with Landis who turns out to be a thoroughly decent chap. But I've seen Bogey take too many knocks in too many movies not to try and imagine the second possibility.

Stephen Hawking is a phenomenon of our age. We are all familiar with his tragic form: confined by Lou Gehrig's disease to a wheelchair, unable to move, his great mind reduced to communicating through the medium of an unearthly computerized voice. Just as we sometimes believe the blind are gifted with second sight or uncanny musical ability, most of us can't help suspecting that Hawking has been compensated for his disability by being granted a special insight into the true nature of our Universe, that he has somehow seen privileged to see the face of God.

Such notions were no doubt behind the incredible success of his first book, "A Brief History of Time" (1988). Considering the difficulty of the subject matter, which can best be expressed through complex mathematical formula, and the fact that it was the first book of its kind to top bestseller lists around the world, this work soon became notorious as the most unread book of all time.

With the release of "The Universe in a Nutshell," the great physicist has descended from the Mount Sinai of scientific wisdom with a fresh set of tablets engraved with the secrets of the Universe. Keen to avoid the mistakes of the first work, this book is markedly more accessible, less text heavy, and extremely well illustrated, with half the book consisting of various diagrams that enable the reader to get the gist of such advanced concepts as 11-dimensional supergravity, multi-dimensional spacetime, p-branes, string theory, and time loops, to mention a few.

Most of the concepts presented here are pure mathematical constructs that have little chance of being empirically proven or disproven for some time yet. They therefore exist as a kind of Buddhist mandala, helping us to contemplate, without fully understanding, the immense mystery of our Universe.

With a style reminiscent of the science writer Isaac Asimov, the book succeeds in being a lot more readable. Inevitably this has brought charges of 'dumbing down' and oversimplification. "The Universe in a Nutshell" nevertheless remains a challenging and entertaining read, and ideal as the kind of book you want to leave lying around at home to give visitors an idea of just how deep and intellectual you really are (even if you aren't).

For Westerners Ivan the Terrible is in the same mental pocket as such unlovely characters as Rasputin, Vlad the Impaler, and even Joseph Stalin. Although he definitely had a brutal and bloodthirsty side and looked rather creepy, he was also one of RussiaŐ's greatest statesmen (probably because he was so brutal and bloodthirsty and looked so creepy!).

Although depicting the achievements of a Tsar, this film got the go-ahead from the Communist authorities because Comrade Stalin identified with the central character and wanted to encourage patriotism. Eisenstein's ambivalent treatment of the nature of power in Part 2, however, offended Stalin who withdrew persmission to complete what was originally intended to be a trilogy

The two films that we have were made in the aftermath of the defeat of the German invasion as the Russian armies rolled West rather as they had rolled East in Ivan's day when Kazan and Astrakhan had fallen to the rising power of the Russian state.

When I first saw this film, it was a little like the first time I heard "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors: it just completely STOOD OUT from everything else on TV and in the cinema. I was immediately impressed by its intensity and uniqueness.

Every shot and scene are powerfully stylised, every statement emphasised and dramatised. Watching this, you realize how bland, wishy-washy, and sloppy most movies are by comparision. Artistic energy and craftsmanship are never absent for a moment. Nothing is left to chance, nothing is wasted; everything is touched by the central guiding genius. It is dense and muscular, and tense. The scenes have the same gravity and power as the scuptures and paintings of the great Michelangelo.

Some people might be amazed that such artistic heights were reached under a Communist system that repressed free expression, but here in the West we also have our own form of repression, perhaps even more insidious than the whims and dictates of Comrade Stalin. I refer to the pressure of making a buck! This was one pressure that Michelangelo didn't have when the Pope commissioned him to paint the Cistine Chapel, or Eisenstein when Stalin allowed him to make the first two great parts of this triology.

For any Scotsman (like me), this must prove an enthralling read. The idea of the 'Scotsman on the make' is well established, but imagine what it does to our fluttering national ego to learn that this same 'Scotsman on the make' was actually MAKING the whole modern world and everything in it!!! Heady stuff!

But, actually, this is a false pleasure. A similar case could be made for just about every major European country and a few minor ones (Holland,Portugal, and Greece). This makes me wonder about the whole point of having such a book. The writer is apparently an American academic, and with a name like Herman we can't suppose he is one of our long lost clansmen whose ancestors were exiled to the wild and barren New World after 'coming out' in the '45.

I therefore suspect the author is being a little manipulative. By overstating his case, raising a few hackles, and puffing up the pride of a little nation that is more susceptible to this kind of pat on the back than most, he knows he's going to shift some books. Maybe he even intends to do a whole series, working his way down to the Baltic States or Iceland. Or maybe he's just trying to ride the Braveheart phenomenon.

But remember Scottish Greatness - like the greatness of any European country - didn't occur in a vacuum. Herman recognizes this by concentrating on the 18th and 19th centuries when Scotland had entwined its fate with that of its large neighbour to the South.

Rather than stirring up petty, parochial, 'down-with-England' nationalism, therefore, the achievements catalogued in this book should remind readers how beneficial to Scottish greatness the Union with England was. This, more than anything, gave Scotland the stage that its recent upsurge in petty nationalism threatens to take away.

In this play about three low life thugs, Mamet was trying to take a shot at America and its business ethics. The Indian associations of the title was a loose attempt to suggest the fundamental chicanery of a society whose founding act was the dispossession of the former owners of the land. But the problem with this play is that BOB, DON, and TEACH are so 'dumbed down' and their dialogue so impoverished that all Mamet can do is create a moral fog.

America may well be founded on the crime of dispossession and the genocide of the Indians, but a buffalo's head on a coin in a play hardly suggests any of this and is certainly incapable of presenting the rights and wrongs of the case. The logical extension of capitalist drives may indeed be a criminal society, but a few petty criminals mouthing off phrases of capitalist jargon, obviously detached from the comprehensive arguments of capitalist ideology, hardly proves this inherent criminality or reveals the complex processes by which capitalism encourages crime.

In the play TEACH defines 'free enterprise' as: "The freedom of the individual to embark on any course that he sees fit." In dialogue like this Mamet is apparently hoping to link the amoral self-interest of his characters to the principles of the American Revolution.

But the characters' relevance is limited by a number of factors. First, their ignorance and inability to express themselves severely limits any exposition and critique of society. Also, because Mamet is attempting a particularly bleak and stark form of realist drama. There is no opportunity, as with, say, the early plays of Eugene O'Neill, to present us with archetypal characters embodying whole race or class positions. Who does TEACH stand for besides himself?

Because of the 'literalness' of his form, if we want to find a critique of society, we must look for it more directly in the evident relations of the characters to the broader society. Such an avenue, however, remains firmly blocked as the characters are isolated from society. Indeed, they seem to belong to an almost self-contained little universe, centering around "Don's Resale Shop."

If Mamet is attempting in this play to present us with a 'reductio ad absurdum' showing the inherent criminality of American business ethics, then, he has painted himself into a corner. His characters lack consciousness, social relevance, and symbolism, all factors that allow a playwright to tackle social and moral problems. "American Buffalo" is extremely limited in the extent to which it can refer outwards to the greater society. All he can give us, in effect, is the 'absurdum' without the 'reductio', the criminality detached from the social forces that create it.

This play is a failure, but Mamet was able to return more successfully to these themes in "Glengarry Glen Ross." where the greater eloquence of his characters, dishonest land salesmen, allowed him to express more coherently the amorality of American business imperatives.

True surrealism is the most profound form of art because it tackles the absurdities and contradictions of our modern world and helps us to work them out through our Subconsciousness and dreams. The first time I saw an exhibition of de Chirico's works, I had extremely vivid and memorable dreams for a week after and felt "cured."

But like any religion that can deeply touch people, Surrealism, once it became famous also attracted its fair share of quacks and charlatans. This is why de Chirico is so important: In the same way that Patti Smith was 'punk' before Punk Rock was officially invented, de Chirico was a surrealist before the Surrealist Movement took conscious shape with Andre Breton's shrill "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924. De Chirico didn't jump on the bandwagon. He was pulling it!

This worthy but pricey (therefore minus a couple of stars) book focuses on this early period when de Chirico was happily pursuing his own path into the twilight, undisturbed by the excessive fuss that the Surrealist movement and its showmen, like Dali, later whipped up.

Paintings like "The Endless Voyage" (1914) show a jarring clutter of objects setting up intangible lines of tension, often with humorous results. In effect, his art works like the human brain, abstracting images and objects from their natural context and relocating them to the landscape of the mind and memory.

Setting the stage with his deserted cityscapes painted with sharp contrasts of light and shadow, distorted perspectives, and a blurring of the border between interior and exterior, de Chirico evokes a haunting, ominous, but strangely relaxing dream world. This deep psychological aspect of his paintings has him constantly reinterpreting themes, leading to recurrent motifs. In these early paintings lavishly reproduced in this massive tome, he constantly uses statues as focal points, later replaced by his trademark faceless mannequins. Other mysterious objects further increase the element of enigma.

De Chirico was a surrealist more by accident than design and his work relied less heavily on overt humor and shock than the more famous surrealists who followed him, like Dali and Magritte. De Chirico's focus was always on beauty and the creation of moods through an appeal to a deeper psychological language. For this reason, while much surrealist work has dated like an old joke, Chirico's art is still as fresh as ever.

Glasgow is as far North as Moscow. In the time of Charles Rennie Mackintosh it was a tough, smokey, industrial city still living in the shadow of centuries of Scottish Puritanism. Not exactly the most promising environment you would think for an artistic movement that created the works of exquisite beauty presented in this book.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with a tight-knit group of fellow artists known as the Glasgow School, ensured that Glasgow at the turn of the century was an integral part of the international Art Nouveau movement, that was also flourishing in Paris and Vienna. The Art Nouveau movement is now seen as a major watershed in global culture because it was the first major art movement that drew inspiration equally from East and West.

As art evolved away from representative art, spiritual aspects came more into play. As with the Secessionist in Vienna, the German Expressionist, and the French Symbolists, mystical ideas became increasingly prominent, turning much of this art into a kind of ouija-board farce. The ghostly and heavily-symbolic works of the other members of the Glasgow School earned them the nickname of the "Spook School" and saw them marginalized.

But while much of the painting of the time reflects the faux spirituality of misunderstood oriental mysticism and sham seances, Mackintosh's work was distinguished by his deep, instinctive understanding of Oriental aesthetics, expressed unpretentiously in beautiful lines. This gave him the Midas touch at whatever he turned his hand to.

In his painting, posters, stained glass windows, furniture, and architecture, we can see the masterly interplay of straight and curved lines. Although John McKean's rather pedantic text in the book doesn't really emphasise this point enough, what we in fact experience in the stimulating tension between Mackintosh's straight and curved lines, is no less than a fusion of yin and yang, the 'female' and 'male' components of the Universe.

Fighting an uphill struggle in a city that didnŐt really understand his unique aesthetic, Mackintosh still managed to do an impressive amount of work as Colin Baxter's excellent pictures reveal. The greatest fulfillment of his art is in 3-D work, especially his furniture designs, which are notoriously difficult to photograph well, although here Baxter does a good job.

It was with furniture, especially in his many chair designs, that he most fulfilled his aesthetic. While most furniture designers of the period gave into the yin or the 'feminine,' with over-elaborate curves and rich decoration, creating a heavy effect, Mackintosh played these 'feminine' aspects off against the yang or 'masculine' by emphasizing simplicity and straightness, creating an uplifting tension that was not only beautiful in itself but also interacted with the curvature of the human form.

While much of Art Nouveau art and design is forever anchored in the historical period that created it, the work of Mackintosh continues to float with us into the future.