The Queen's Speech

In keeping with the spirit of Christmas, I won't be sending any cards this year: I've just bunged a couple of quid to some charity so I don't have to bother writing and sending a bunch of generic greetings. And I can tell you that I gave to charity instead, and you can bask in my generosity, knowing that the gap on your mantelpiece is actually paying for some dog-food or something!

However, I realise that this might disappoint some people, so I'm reviving another Yuletide tradition: the annual report from the family, photocopied and slipped inside a Christmas card, full of details about how amazing my family is, and all the cool things we did in the past year. 

Only I don't have a family, so it'll be the fragmented selves that torture my daily life with their nihilism, suppressed violence, frustrated desire and existential despair!

Happy Winterval!

I thought it might be nice to offer a selection of cards, so you can cut out and keep them. If you want. Not really too bothered at this point.

Anyway, it's been an amazing year for the Vile Arts! Our chief critic and primary consciousness (not forgetting his physical manifestation) was homeless for two months at the end of the summer! 

Not only did this give Gareth the chance to tell everybody about his situation, it led to some hilarious misunderstandings with members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who insisted that he wasn't really homeless - in much the same way as they aren't really serious about smashing the state! Quipped GKV: 'it just goes to show that I'll never really be destitute, just as long as I don't conform to some hideous stereotype of poverty!'

This did have a happy ending though: Gareth has been admitted to study at Glasgow University. Although his thesis concerns comic books and theatre, he's out-sourced some of the workload to other members of the Vile Collective. Consequently, Mad Cyril has submitted a first draft of All Dramaturgs are Bourgeois: Conversations between Diderot and a Lap Dancer. 

Speaking of Mad Cyril, we're delighted that his series in Japan - Gor Blimey - has been recommissioned for a second series! After he got banged up for a few months - don't worry, Yewtree wasn't involved! - Cyril became a celebrity in the Far East, with images of him throwing a bin through a sushi shop window making the national news! 

Anyway, Cyril got his own show out of it: based on that Channel 4 racist classic, Banzai, it encourages viewers to gamble body parts on the outcomes of a series of competitions. The highlights of the last season included a whelk eating contest, a 'who loves their mum the most' shoot out (with Babs Windsor and Katie Price as the mums, no less!) and a Feed the Japanese Mick Jagger Lookalike with Mushrooms phone-in! 

We even got Shaun Ryder to do some indents, saying bits out of Performance. Rumour has it that Guy Ritchie wants the film rights.

Stay tuned for more news (or check out YouTube to see Mad Cyril's trailer for season two, which features lots of flashing colours, psychedelic flying dustbins and Cyril's catchphrase Do You Want To Get Sucked In).

Criticulous, meanwhile, has been keeping a low profile. With The Vile Arts going academic, he's been locked in the CCA cleaning cupboard until he can explain what research as practice means.

He did manage to escape for a couple of appearances though: who can forget his routine on The Limmy Show? Apparently, even though he just stared at the camera and explained how he was rejecting existentialism on the grounds that having a body was a form of essence and therefore its humanistic manifestos were inherently contradictory, no-one seemed to notice it was him and not one of Limmy's sketches!

Apparently one BBC producer said that he might as well take over the writing for the entire series, since Limmy was still trading on the goodwill from his old on-line videos, and they were squeezing his comedy into a medium that undermines its humour already! 

Criticulous is already promising an epilogue to his Trilogy, although his original concept - an intimate performance that is a mimetic version of a date - has been rejected by Creative Scotland and around seventy-six women he asked in the CCA in one evening!

Hmmm... The Real Criticulous?

Rock'n'roll's Alan Partridge

This afternoon, it’s time for a big shout out to Peter Paphides. He put up a really helpful guide to the new Daft Punk Album. Concluding with some marketing advice for record labels, it’s an object lesson in how not to write a critical response and I hope that the young critics of Glasgow are reading it, laughing and wondering why owning Sting albums is something to mention in public, let alone boast about.

Having spent a great deal of time pondering the role of the critic, and being painfully pompous in my attempts to describe possible functions, Paphides cuts to the chase. The job of the critic is, obviously, to tell people why they are not listening to music properly. He reminds me of Mr Didcot, my school music teacher, shouting at the class of twelve year olds for not showing real respect to Mozart.

Upset by the negative reaction to Daft Punk’s latest opus, which will doubtless take its place alongside Figaro in the twenty-fifth century, Paphides gets annoyed with the haters. He constructs his response in the form of a numbered list. It’s hilarious, especially when he bangs on about owning Sting albums. This apparently makes him an authority. 

Funnily enough, he starts off well enough,  pointing out that just because the album is not what was necessarily expected, that doesn't make it bad. But he quickly leaps into the worst critical persona: the arrogant know-it-all who understands the precise detail of an audience's listening experience. 

Apparently, paying for product makes the consumer appreciate it in more detail (possibly true, but I don't know if there is any evidence, and Paphides provides none). The listeners have nothing in their record collection that sounds like a particular track (no sophisticated meditation on originality or influence here, just a bold accusation). And Columbia's marketing department hadn't done enough research on how to disseminate the release. 

I mean, I like Live Art, and it is far more disliked than Daft Punk. There's a whole episode of excellent sit-com Spaced devoted to mocking it. Yet I have managed to avoid writing a list of ways to enjoy it properly...

(Actually, I did just that once. A prize to any reader who can find it.)

I'm done. Paphides has a bit of form on this - another article he wrote was about the Coldplay wristband he had glowing in the dark. Here's thanks to Limmy for starting the twitter row that made Paphides' article come to my attention - although a bit less time on the internet and more on writing sketches that don't trade on your wide-eyed innocence for the next series would be nice, Limmy. 

And for a little balance, Paphides' book, Lost in Music, is still worth a read. That's a passionate and personal account of how music shaped his life. 

Oh sorry, that was Giles Smith. It's just the quote from the song on Paphides' blog confused me....  

Articulating Adolf

This article is an apology to Neville Tranter. Just before Christmas, he sent me answers to an interview about his Schicklgruber alias Adolf Hitler. I have spent the last fortnight sitting on them, unable to work out how to approach an article on a puppet version of Hitler's last days. I have found the limits of my philosophy.

The easy starting point would appear to be a comparison with Downfall, a film that starred Bruno Ganz in a stunningly virtuoso performance as the dictator: unfortunately, my concerns about its representation of Hitler led me down a pathway so entangled by questions of good and evil that I could not pass. Any attempt to critique the film slipped into difficult questions of morality. That article is sitting on my computer, waiting to be  posted at a time when few people are likely to read my meditations on the difference between Christ and Antichrist.

The scale of Nazi atrocity seems inevitably to encourage my theological tendencies. 

Tranter acknowledges that taking on a subject like Hitler is "delicate." His research, which included collecting 300 hours of songs and auditioning five writers before finding Jan Veldman, took three years to complete. While the YouTube video shows a performance that echoes the irreverent satire of Weimar cabaret, complete with comedy number about joining the Luftwaffe, the juxtaposition of larger than life puppets and the icon of twentieth century evil is a struggle to discuss. Like Giselle Vienne's Jerk (manipulate 2011), the mixture of object manipulation and difficult content combine to create an impact that is made more potent by the apparent mismatch. 

Extract from (Highly Pretentious) Essay on Musical Performance

The connecting strand between Ben Frost's live re-enactment of his By The Throat album, the Minimal festival's evening of Arvo Part's choral music and Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers - all appearing in Glasgow in a single week - is not so much in any shared musical heritage as each performance's balance of the theatrical and the musical. Taiko drumming comes from a Japanese tradition - made explicit by the welcome guest appearance of Mugenkyo's teacher - while Part's compositions are very European: the use of language on stage during the recitals, Japanese and Latin respectively, emphasise that the manipulation of noise into music is culturally determined and while Frost and Part share bits of their audience, Mugenkyo attract a very different crowd. Despite the simple categories of newspapers and magazines, grouping these three shows together is not as obvious as it appears.

Although the word "performativity" has been heinously misused in recent years - originally part of Judith Butler's attempts to disassociate ideas of gender identity from naturalism, but now a bland catch-all for the performance potential of any action, and flung about with abandon by critics and students to describe anything that has had a performance made about it - it might be the best approach to understand both the similarities and differences in the three events. Disconnecting it from any feminist context, perfomativity will be defined for the rest of this essay as being the qualities of performance that are defined by the nature of the art. This definition does not address the problems of misapplying Butler's original idea, but it does help to clarify how Ben Frost's live show is fundamentally different from Mugenkyo.

First of all the actual instruments and performers used during each of the three performances need to be considered. In brief, Ben Frost predominantly uses a laptop, slings on a guitar to build up some treated and distorted loops, sits down at a piano for a spot of mutant honkytonk - the Jools Holland collaboration may be expected in the next decade - and invites a drummer on-stage for the occasional bash on a classic rock kit. Two performers - Frost himself, doing most of the work, and the percussion. 

Although the Arvo Part performance features a variety of line-ups - the first half alone has assembled choir, choir with added big drum, solo voice and organ - it works around a combination of the untreated voices of  highly trained singers and acoustic instrumentation associated with western classical music. Stabat Mater, which made up the second half of the evening, pitched two trios together - violin, viola and cello against soprano, alto and tenor. 

Mugenkyo Taiko, meanwhile, had a wide variety of drums from Japan. They all looked really cool and, not coincidently, very foreign to the western tradition. The core Mugenkyo team consisted of two women, who also looked really cool piling about the stage and whacking big drums, and five guys who had this sweet martial artist meets rock'n'roll vibe about them. They were joined by their teacher and two of his students - these three were given much respect by Neil Mackie, Mugenkyo's main man and the compère for the evening.

Even this limited and increasingly fatuous analysis of the three events clarifies the fundamental differences between the artists. Despite the writer's apparent inability to maintain the academic tone of the first paragraphs, and the sudden descent into self-referential analysis, each event offers a different foundation for musical performance. That both Ben Frost and Mugenkyo had their kit set up before they arrived on-stage suggests that the instruments themselves were offered as a form of introduction: the spectacular array of Taiko drums or Frost's tangled electronics present a clear setting for the subsequent mood of the performance - even if the musicians would later subvert it.