Godliman and Lane

wISEMEN OF gOODLIMAN

EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 14 AUGUST 2006

Godliman and Lane are competent comedy actors, interspersing their show with video and audio clips and persistently attacking mindless television, manipulative advertising and patronising media personalities. If their targets are easy and caricatured, rather than closely observed and original, they still maintain energy and a rapid pace.

The most imaginative sketch is the self-referential finale, a video of celebrities endorsing their show, but too often Godliman and Lane exaggerate their satire, expanding solid ideas into absurdity until they lose their bite, or repeating a theme into predictability. A pair of female sloans eulogise working-class pastimes, a couple of dumb presenters sell increasingly useless products, and bursts of radio urge the purchase of mundane items to the lowest common denominator: all are performed with vigour but made wearisome by repetition.

There are plenty of belly-laughs and concise individual sketches. However, over an hour, the material is spread thin and only the variety of formats holds the attention. Godliman and Lane are promising, but this show feels like an audition rather than a fully-realised act, despite the savagery and bitterness beneath the amiable surface.

I was a secondary punk (part 3)

All this grumpiness is appropriately punk, but it sounds rather like the attitude of a Daily Mail reader in 1978. I thought punk did represent those values, of rebellion and freedom - and probably though that 1977 was year zero for music (even though I recognised, thanks to The Cramps, that the original rock'n'roll was a template for punk's energetic resistance).

Punk is, to my older self, far more interesting within a genealogy of political art - there are echoes of the futurists in the love of violence, a Duchamp parallel in the deliberate ugliness of the images (a retinal shudder whenever I look at Linder's cover for Orgasm Addict). The punk that is in the exhibition Pretty Vacant is both US and UK - and I never had that much interest in the US scene (the straight edge punks, while I appreciated their attitude towards alcohol and meat, seemed a bit dour and the politics too earnest, when they bothered to turn up).

Musically, it is business as usual - that Green Day now have a musical based on their 'punk' album American Idiot, it is obvious that the form can be assimilated even into the most iconic tin-pan-alley format. The idea that 'not being able to play' is a liberating ethos has been killed by the arrival of boy bands - they can't play instruments either (although Bieber can whack hell out of the drums when he isn't insulting the memory of Anne Frank), but they are the anodyne opposite of punk's supposed rage. If the democratisation punk thought to bring ends with production line pop artists, it might have been better to leave Pink Floyd alone.

Then again, I have two controversial opinions on pop music. One is that it is all about recorded, not live, sound. The other is that all recorded music is in the thrall of the Dark God Commerce, and questions about authenticity, rebellion and the Man are shadow play. Very simply, without the Man, there would be no record players, no means of distribution, no advancing technology.

The Man, as described by Simon Frith (The Industrialization of Music) only started pressing discs to sell the gramophone. Originally designed for office use, it quickly became evident that the gramophone was best used for entertainment. And so, recordings of stars, the whole music industry, evolved.

Punk's claim to free the music is more an attempt to steal it. Fair enough, but the master's tools and all that.

I was a primary school punk (part 2)

The pride of Johnson's collection is a bunch of flyers, made by hands anonymous that 'epitomizes the immediacy and DIY aesthetic of punk.' Of course, he's got stuff by the names that would later become famous - Jamie Reid, who did the design for the Sex Pistols, Raymond Pettibone who cut his teeth on covers for Black Flag and Sonic Youth, before getting exhibitions in his own right... it's interesting that the collection has copies of Pettibone's flyers, not the original artwork. Does this reflect on Walter Benjamin's belief that, in an age of mass production, the aura of an art object has less worth? Or is it that this exhibition is less an art than museum gallery?

Krivine continues with the official line that punk had 'aggression, humor, the lack of hypocrisy and pretense—and the notion that there is no hierarchy we must pay tribute to, if you want to be in a band and make music.' This is more nonsense. Punk replaced one hierarchical set of values - those of the hippy bands that Johnson despised. As for hypocrisy, punk hardly evolved gender stereotyping (it is not until riot grrl that the issue of punk's hypocrisy towards feminism was examined), and when Krivine and Johnson pay respect to The Cramps, they are celebrating (an admittedly brilliant) band who had a rare sense of the theatrical. Unless I am very mistaken, they weren't really Human Flies. 

Teal Triggs, in Scissors and Glue, makes a clear connection between the punk aesthetic and the actions of the Situationist International (since Malcolm McClaren was well into all that, it is unsurprising that there is a lineage... and his attitude towards The Sex Pistols and subsequent bands was always more cynical, pretentious and witty than the bands themselves would like to admit). Not only does this suggest that punk was less of an innovation than it tries to suggest, but that it was defined, at least in the UK, by a fashion designer trying to flog outfits with a slogan of 'cash for chaos.'

Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic

Teal Triggs

Journal of Design History, Vol. 19, No. 1, Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design (Spring, 2006), pp. 69-83

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Design History Society

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3838674

Devil's Advocate@ Assembly George Street

EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 14 AUGUST 2006

Exposing corrupt US policy in South America, 'Devil's Advocate' is hampered by a Freed's verbose script. Set in Noriega's final hours of freedom, when he was chased into a Catholic sanctuary and assaulted with loud rock music, it is a chamber piece revolving around the justifications given by the general for his brutal reign.

A Jesuit Archbishop becomes Noriega's mediator and confessor: they argue theology and American foreign policy to a soundtrack of machine gun fire and hard rock. Noriega comes across as victim, then genocidal maniac: the Archbishop is well-meaning but naive. Neither performance convinces. 

Ignatius Anthony's Noriega has an uncertain accent and over-emotes while Peter Dineen's Jesuit is mannered. The script sacrifices characterisation to polemic. When Noriega explains the drug war's economics, it is difficult to decide whether he is insane or the writing is incoherent.

This is a brave attempt at explicitly political theatre, recontextualising a notorious dictator. Unfortunately, the drama is overwhelmed by commentary: although the intention is clear, the reasoning never clarifies the background. Failing to innovate, the political passion is mismatched with conventional staging.

I was an infant punk (part 1)

Like the people invoked at the start of this article, I just about remember punk as a vibrant subculture. By the time I got around to listening to punk music, the bands had broken up and I am less than pleased to note that one band I kinda liked are pretty much dad rock compilation fuller these days and... and...

collection of Andrew Kirvine

At primary school, Lee Bedford won the fancy dress in a punk outfit (designed by his brother). He had the sneer and everything (that was less fancy dress than a natural irritation of being made to stand about in the blistering heat). Someone dressed as a rocker came second. Alas, my Robin Hood was not placed.

However, I am interested in punk as an aesthetic (if not a musical) culture. I use my age to bemoan subsequent generations of bands who think they are punk (loud and fast and a bit shouty), while recognising that my punk phase was probably more to make Shen (a Bigger Boy) lay off my surname.

As far as it goes, the exhibitions in the article are a good example of why punk is very dead, and less inspiring that I would like. First of all, Pretty Vacant: The Graphic Language of Punk (Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia) came from 'the collection of Andrew Krivine, a commercial banker and punk-stuff collector since 1977.' Just to be clear, punk in the UK was a leftist movement - in fact, it managed to limp on as a musical presence mainly due to its connection with protest politics in the Thatcher years (I saw a band in 1994, in Stoke, still singing a song about how nasty Maggie is). Commercial bankers, collectors: neither of these roles seem to embody that punk ethos.

But Kirvine said he championed punk in the old days, as did Kaytie Johnson, the director and chief Curator for the Galleries at Moore and the curator of Pretty Vacant. She talks about the 'nostalgia' of looking through the archives - again, the austere punks of my primary school days were not about the past, or the future. Lee Bedford lived in the now: he rarely practiced on his recorder for our weekly class lessons.

The exhibition demonstrates how punk was not an isolated event - Krivine has stuff from T-Rex (very dubiously called proto-punk), The Velvet Underground (art sensibilities and a garage rock force), Roxy Music (Eno's anti-musician stance was kinda punk, as long as you ignore Brian Ferry's louche glamour) and bands off various post-punk labels. The choices Krivine made are probably more personal that the exhibition dares admit - it is perfectly possible for a punk fan to like other music, but that doesn't make it punk. Besides, false consciousness is one of the things that rock'n'roll has managed to bring to revolution, anyway.

“It’s retro, it’s cool, it’s loud and in-your-face, it’s anti-establishment, it’s analog," Johnsons says. "It’s everything students in their early 20s hold near and dear, especially art students. Punk’s appeal to subsequent generations of teenagers and young adults is a testament to its potency and legacy. Its visual codes and oppositional stance still ring true with youth culture, 30 years after the fact.”

Well, yes, because those codes and stance are completely fake, art students are going to dig them. Punk was based on celebrating a word used as an insult (one etymology is that it comes from the word for the guy who got bummed in prison), and while there are prouder reclamations (queer, for example), punk was feeding off an energy that goes back to Jean Genet's inversion of Catholicism, or the silly satanists of the nineteenth century.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being fake, or unoriginal, but the story of Darby Crash might give some pause to anyone championing punk as a civil rights movement. Equally, the idea of rock music as a medium for revolution is a trope that has been hawking its arse around any musical movement that needed a bit of hype (hello, Elvis - what about them hips? Hey Eminem, saying 'bitch' will get attention). Dear God, these days, outrage is the domain of Miley Cyrus. I am sure some cultural theorist is thanking punk for that.

Unknown artist, Circle Jerks Flyer, 1981, photocopy. Collection of Andrew Krivine.