Cabaret versus Mogwai

One of my speculations about cabaret’s status as performance – it gets short shrift compared to
scripted theatre or even Live Art (which few people really like) – imagines that it is disregarded because it is the domain of ‘the other.’ It covers life-styles rarely represented in high drama, and has a larger proportion of female and LGBTQ performers than other genres. It adds the taint of musical theatre, thanks to the musical choices and aesthetic – Gary Barlow’s notorious ‘too cabaret’ comment really referred to the musty and cheesy melodrama of singers who would be happier belting out one of Lloyd Weber’s numbers than the diverse styles of the various artists who joined Frisky and Mannish in their protest song.

Debbie Chapman does come from that particular musical tradition. She has been in The Wizard of Oz and done her time on a cruise ship. Her show, Queen of Hearts, threads together her personal experiences and ‘heartfelt song’ in an attempt to understand why ‘she’s always the bridesmaid and never the bride.’

Chapman's influences are not mine - when I think of cabaret, I think of Dusty Limits seducing male members of the audience to sing along to Portishead. She references Judy Garland and Barbra Streisland. It's a reminder that cabaret isn't as monocultural as Barlow suggests and, like my abortive attempt to make up a top twenty of female performers for the Fringe, an example of how picking a broad genre to discuss or define rarely does justice to the individual artists.

TREMers in association with

Theatre Bench presents

DEBBIE CHAPMAN

QUEEN OF HEARTS

18th August 2013 - 18:10pm

19th-21st August 2013 - 15:55pm

Space Cabaret (V54) - Edinburgh Festival

Cabaret's strength is perhaps in its sense of play: Mogwai, by contrast, seem to be getting more and more serious as they age. I remember them as the cheeky chappies who called their first album Young Team: now they do art projects, like their soundtrack to Zidane, a film by Douglas Gordon (conceptual artist) about a footballer.

A quick blast from the press release helps make my point.

One of the most beguiling portrayals of an individual in recent cinematic history, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a football film like no other. Using 17 cameras, the film tracks the legendary French midfielder Zinédine Zidane throughout a 2005 Spanish league match at Madrid’s imposing Bernabéu Stadium — on and off the ball, in the thick of the action and on its periphery. The result, from directors Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, is a dramatic, hypnotic and deeply beautiful depiction of one of the world’s finest footballers performing on one of the sport’s grandest stages.


The film’s soundtrack was composed by Mogwai — and for the first time, the band will be performing it live alongside the movie in a series of three UK concerts beginning with the World Premiere of the event at Manchester International Festival ‘13. The Glasgow quintet have built a deserved reputation for the fearsome intensity of their live shows, and this show at the incredible new event site 220 Broomielaw offers a rare chance to see them in action in a very unique setting.





Sunday 21st July, 2013, 6pm
Venue: 220 Broomielaw, Glasgow, G1 4RU
£25 in advance STBF
Over 14's (over 18's bring ID for bar service)

I have been taking football quite seriously lately - mainly because Watford FC started giving it the old champagne style and almost got into the Big Corporate Division in England. But the respect afforded to Zidane in this film goes beyond my childish cheering for the Horns. It seems almost... hagiographic?

Compare and contrast - cabaret and post-rock. Can they learn from each other?

Aquatopia The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep

I want more exhibitions like this.

I have to admit that Glasgow is well served for visual art. If it isn't a new gallery opening up in an old industrial space (The Whisky Bond), there's an intriguing curator exhibition dealing with a current aesthetic issue at the CCA. But a recent visit to Nottingham got me on the mailing list to its contemporary art gallery, and they are on a touring circuit that gets this sort of thing.

Aquatopia
The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep
Opening Event

Fri 19 July 2013
6.30pm - 11pm

If you haven't already booked your place to join us for the launch of Aquatopia, please do so now as places are limited.

The exhibition launch is followed by our Summer Party until 11pm. There will be a BBQ on our sun terrace along with a limited number of complimentary drinks courtesy of ABSOLUT Vodka.

The music set times will be:

6.30pm DJ Winston, Island reggae - Cafe.Bar

8.15pm The Futureheads, acoustic set - The Space

9.00pm DJs Arne VB (Field Day and FTS Radio) and Mark Emmanuel, Mutant Disco - Cafe.Bar

Aquatopia brings together contemporary and historic artworks that explore how the ocean deep has been imagined through time and across cultures. Artists include JMW Turner, Hokusai, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Spartacus Chetwynd, The Otolith Group, Simon Starling and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Admittedly, I am not that fussed about having a reggae disco (Mungo's Hi-Fi rocks Glasgow anyway), and The Futureheads have sadly failed to live up to their promising name. It's the names of the artists that gets me - Turner and Chetwynd in the same room? Sweet.

This kind of exhibition fits in with my current suspicion that it is the curation, not the individual art objects, that is emerging as the new art of the twenty first century. This makes sense - there's so much information knocking about these days, the trick is not in making it, but making sense of it.

Besides, anything that gets some of the old masters out of storage and veneration, and reconnects them to contemporary currents is alright by me.

Prelude to the Giants

I am about half way through my mission. So far, I have taken trains and buses, cycled and hitched across large swathes of Scotland, even dipping briefly into England (Berwick –upon-Tweed, admittedly a location that has had its share of border conflicts and now best known as the answer in quizzes to ‘what English football team plays in the Scottish league?’), made a guest appearance at T in the Park and spent a day off being driven deep into East Lothian. I spent a weekend teaching the next generation of critics at the National Festival of Youth Theatre in Glenrothes, which has the largest pound shop I have ever seen, and have been without phone signal and Internet for days at a time.  That last is oddly disturbing and liberating.

But the purpose of my mission has been both the drive to my enthusiasm and has provided highlights. I am seeking out the Giants in the Forest, a series of sculptures placed around Scotland. Sometimes they are remote – one destination was the Bowhill Estate in the Borders, a good hour from the nearest village – sometimes to hand – The Edinburgh Giants are five minutes walk from the office of The List. And although they are all based around a similar design, each set (they come in threes) has its own distinctive identity.

Looking back over my written and recorded responses so far, I can see themes emerging. The first week was spent in the Borders – dropping down to Berwick, then hooking across to Galashiels, then Peebles before rising back to Edinburgh. My writing is full of timid attempts to capture the thrill of travelling outside of the city. There’s a similar problem in the day trip to see the Holyrood Giants: I am worried that my thoughts are unremarkable, a trite collection of obvious tourist comments.

I recognise how predictable, how mediated my responses are. The first day, an extract from my original introduction, makes vague comments about how ‘escaping the city’ encourages a ‘more open, gentle state of mind.’ Nature is probably going to be described as beautiful and calming if I read on. Then I start contrasting my usual urban anxiety against the spiritual warmth of the countryside.

Then there are the photographs I took in Edinburgh. A vista that takes in Arthur’s Seat and an old graveyard: a panorama across Holyrood. They are generic, and even as I click the shutter, I sigh at the realisation that what I am seeing is never going to be captured on film, or in words.

I am spreading out my recollections in front of me. I flicker between styles: here’s a stab at beat poetry, this one is a parody of a travel article from a broadsheet paper. Every so often, I fall back on my standards; acting like everything is an exercise in aesthetics. I am on an adventure, but I struggling to find the way to relate it back to my critical writing.

Let’s start with a cliché, then. You can take the man out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the man. 

Coming Soon... Vile Meets The Giants

He has reviewed shows that did not exist. He was trounced in print by Rob Drummond. He ran a dance magazine at the Fringe. Gareth K Vile has been many things in his career, and most of them have helped him to blot out the memory of his years as a Latin teacher.

But this time, will he go too far? Many years ago, Vile cycled out to Skye. Ostensibly to catch an NVA performance at the Old Man of Storr, it became a battle against his deepest emotions and the elements. Since that day, Vile has stuck to the cities.

This summer, he is heading back on the road. Join him here as he travels in pursuit of The Giants in The Forest. Scattered around Scotland, these Giants merge technology, creativity and nature. The mixture of community action and art was too much for Vile to ignore - and like a Pokemon obsessive, he's gotta get them all.

Thrill as he gets lost in a square mile of forest in the middle of the night.

Laugh as he falls off his bike into the gorse.

Weep at the moments when he finds the glade of the giants.

Wonder why he has decided to pretend he is a beat poet.

Ponder with him on the nature of urban and rural life.

And share the adventure...

Hitler in the bunker

After a week of Christmas celebrations with my family, the story of Adolf Hitler in his bunker has a familiar resonance. Admittedly, my nephew doesn't have a silly mustache and the stakes aren't quite as high, but the temper tantrums, the looming sense of guilt for past behaviour and the claustrophobia are as visceral as in that scene from Downfall when Bruno Ganz kicks off about the officer classes.

I've always been less ambivalent about making stupid claims like this than I have been about Downfall: much as Ganz deserved praise for his performance and I've enjoyed the various YouTube remixes, I remain concerned that Hirschbiegel's film failed to uncover anything original in its representation of the monorchic maniac. Ganz stomps about shouting and cursing, and the historical detail is sufficiently accurate: but the portrayal of Hitler is determinedly monstrous. His late wedding to long-time partner Eva Braun, or his fraught friendships with the rest of his ghastly gang, aren't portrayed as humanising but just more madness. The lack of emotional control, the general inability to accept responsibility: it's Hitler as madman, as evil, as the source of all terror.

By the time of Ganz's rant, Hitler is less an individual than a symbol of a nation gone mad. It's pretty easy to understand why the Holocaust happened and why Germany ended up getting soundly defeated if someone like Ganz's Adolf was running the show. He becomes the scapegoat for the Nazi years, a convenient hanger for every manner of insanity and cruelty that happened in Europe between about 1933 and 1945.

And this is strangely old fashioned, an emphasis on history as the story of 'great men' rather than a collection of diverse narratives. The economics of the Weimar Republic, the willingness of ordinary people to grass up their neighbours, systemic social antisemitism, the cowardice of British politicians in the face of Nazism's rise: none of these are accountable when it's easier to blame one crazy Charlie Chaplin lookalike.

Whether Downfall is historically accurate, or whether it deserved its success, are irrelevant to my worries. The way it presents Hitler - and interestingly, when I wandered onto a neo-fascist discussion forum, the posters were pretty keen on Ganz's version - allows him to become an excuse, a way of explaining away one of the most disturbing episodes in human history. Effectively, the responsibility falls onto one man - like some kind of inverted Christ, Hitler dies for the sins of the world.

It makes me sick to write that sentence.

Here's the thing: as a representation of a particular moment in history, Downfall is acceptably accurate for my tastes. The script, the cinematography, the performances are all superb. But in its emphasis on Hitler as the source of all evil, and quite possibly insane, I find it morally reprehensible. The Nazis did terrible things, and a serious attempt to assess their meaning fails if it limits responsibility to one man, or even a cabal of idiots.

Meanwhile, here's a spectacular website about Antichrists.