When I was a teenager, Edinburgh was a smugly small-town city dominated by the Kirk and ruled by the affectations of respectability embodied in the professional classes who lived there. Imagine then the post-war arrival of a maverick American ex-serviceman from New Orleans who not only opened a pioneering paperback bookshop and sold copies of the then banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover and who later became director of the UK’s first avant garde theatre.
I was aged around sixteen when I was first taken to the Traverse Theatre by the parents of a school friend. My own parents were worldly enough but I was uncertain whether or not they would approve. Shortly after the Traverse had opened a few years earlier, somebody was stabbed on stage. I therefore kept it a secret and told my parents we were going to the cinema.
It was a revelation. We heard the Australian-American Lotte Lenya sing the songs of her first husband Kurt Weill. That Old Bilbao Moon still resonates in my memory.
At this time, Jim was somebody who was seen around town but he inevitably moved on to London and Paris and it was to be years later that I got to know him during one or other of his annual pilgrimages to the Edinburgh Festival. He was part of an older set of larger than life transitory characters to whom this great capital of Edinburgh owes so much of its international reputation and not least among them is the mercurial Professor Richard Demarco who still inexhaustibly soldiers on.
I have been a Demarco groupie from an early age, hanging about in his various galleries as he blazed his precipitous financial trail of Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor and onwards to be the first artist to be elected a Citizen of Europe. Ricky and Jim have remained friends throughout their lives, and this is what this documentary Meeting Jim is all about – friendship and love. Jim’s philosophy has always been that if everyone was to meet everyone else and get to know one another, there would be no wars, no tensions, no unhappiness. If only?
Thus, this has become the fundamental raison d’etre for his monthly and now legendary get-togethers at his apartment in Paris. I can’t remember the exact number of those who have attended over the years but every now and then a friend from Berlin or from Sydney or from Toronto will call me up and say that they have been to the most extraordinary gathering held in an atelier in rue de la Timbe Issoire and met somebody who knew me.
A large, sartorially ruffled and gentle being, Jim looks rather more paternalistic and distinguished in his old age than the radical firebrand of his youth when he edited such magazines as Suck and the International Times. Society is no longer shocked by such inconsequential things in the way that it used to be and it is thanks to Jim that the world has moved on to become a more tolerant and less sanctimonious place. Ece Ger’s sensitive and endearing documentary says it all.
WATCH ‘Meeting Jim’ Citizen of the World – BBC Scotland – Saturday the 17th of August, 9pm
