Co-founder of the Traverse Theatre and champion of the counter-culture
Jim Haynes, one of the founding fathers of the Edinburgh Fringe, has died in Paris at the age of 87.
The impresario was a pioneer of the permissive 1960s, champion of the avant-garde, and co-founder of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.
The Louisiana native came to Scotland with the US air force and decided to stay, founding a paperback bookshop in Edinburgh which became a bohemian hangout.
It hosted Fringe performances in the early 1960s, and in his autobiography, Thanks For Coming, Haynes wrote: ‘The bookshop also became the first real centre for the fast-growing Edinburgh Fringe - before that the fringe festival had no real centre.
His father was a drinker – by his 40s, Jim had sworn off drugs, alcohol, tobacco and even coffee – who nonetheless taught his son a lesson that dominated Jim’s life: “When you do something nice for somebody, forget it immediately. When someone does something nice for you, never forget it.” This led to tolerance of all kinds of people – one of Haynes’s books (with Jeanne Pasle-Green) was called Hello, I Love You (1974). He claimed that his ambition was to have everyone in the world in his address book.
In the mid-60s, having been forced out of the Traverse by financial difficulties and internal squabbling, he moved to London and began seeking a “space”, where people could gather and make things happen. “One of the nice things about being in a theatre which is open to new ideas”, he wrote in his engaging memoir Thanks for Coming! (1984), “is that you meet lots of people. Anyone who had a new idea was told, ‘See Jim Haynes, you can do it there’; and they wer
TRIBUTES have been paid to “legendary internationalist” and “serial entrepreneur” Jim Haynes, one of the most important figures in the evolution of Edinburgh Festivals. He was the co-founder of Traverse Theatre and responsible for events in the 60s that helped shape the capital as one of the most culturally significant cities in the world. Louisiana-born Haynes arrived in Scotland in the 50s while serving in the US Air Force, opening the UK’s first Paperback Bookshop in George Square in Edinburgh in 1959, shortly after being demobbed. He helped organise the 1962 international writers’ conference, where 70 of the world’s most celebrated writers came to Scotland to discuss the world of literature.
David Medalla Multidisciplinary Filipino Artist Dies Age 78 / /
The multidisciplinary artist, David Medalla b.1942 in the Philippines, has died age 78. Medalla enrolled at Columbia University in New York upon the recommendation of the American poet Mark van Doren age 14. In the late 1950s, he returned to Manila and met the Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma and the painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala, who became the earliest patrons of his art. He lived and worked in London, New York and Paris.
His practice is informed by complex combinations of memories and evolving relationships. His work often reflects rhythms and systems found in the natural world. His work incorporated painting, participatory work, performance and kinetic sculpture, including the pioneering ‘auto-creative’ sculptures that he first made in the 1960s.
Photograph by Fay Godwin
The son of an English businessman, J. G. Ballard was born and raised in Shanghai. For the past twenty-odd years, he has lived more or less anonymously in Shepperton, a dingy, nondescript suburb of London lying under the approach to Heathrow Airport. Ballard’s writing is so often situated within the erotic, technical, postholocaust landscape, and so often concerned with the further reaches of postmodern consciousness, that it is inevitably rather droll to come upon the man himself. On first meeting, Ballard is standing somewhat shyly in the doorway of a modest two-story dwelling similar to all the others on the block; one would take him as a typical suburban lord of the manor. He is wearing a brown sweater over his shirt, protected against the faint chill of a summer afternoon.