Some Mean City: Just Another Saturday In The Capital Of The World

And so, another Saturday and another ~Streetlamp~ assault on the cultural spread of our favourite city (that's Glasgow in case you've not been paying attention).
We congregated in front of Monorail Music, just in time to see a seven foot Amazonian 'Tank Girl' arranging the outside clothes-rack in front of retro fashion emporium 'Mr Benn'. Griff remarked that his day was already complete and we needn't progress any further. But progress we did....we headed across to The Scotia, Glasgow's oldest pub for a little early afternoon sustenance. The Scotia is the very birthing pool of many of Glasgow's most noted Folk and Acoustic musicians, including Billy Connolly, Gerry Rafferty, Rab Noakes and Hamish Imlach. It's a place that regularly jigs and reels to mass Folk jams, but unfortunately it was too early in the day when we arrived but we've already agreed to go back one night.

Passing through the consumerist belt we headed up to the GoMA with the intention of catching Katy Dove's exhibition of short films, accompanied by the music of Katy's band, Muscles Of Joy. Before we headed up to see this we caught Karla Black's breathtaking Turner Prize nominated exhibition on the ground floor. This consisted of 16 TONNES of various sawdust arranged into a huge, yet fragile looking slab. All three of us resisted the temptation to jump into this massive and inviting looking spectacle. 

Then it was up to see Katy Dove's enchanting and hypnotic films. Griff has already proffered a full Blog on this exhibition which you can read here....
In the other galleries there was a running theme of 'life in the city'. This included a video installation by Emily Jacir that showed parallel life in New York and Ramallah. Simultaneously occurring images from a call centre, a food stall, a hairdressers and a public bar. We were really impressed by the way everything, right down to the lighting and positioning of the people in the dual shots matched each other.
By the time we left the GoMA, the blazing sunshine we arrived in had been replaced by pouring rain....

The rain clouds, so soon after the bright sunshine, bathed Glasgow in a surreal light that recalled the otherworldliness of Bertrand Tavernier's eerie Glasgow based Sci-fi 'Death Watch'; a film long unseen that's about to be re-issued....thank goodness!
We decided to head over to The Lighthouse, which meant walking through Buchannan Street. The street was filled, as usual, with awareness raising stalls, street entertainers and people peacefully protesting. Griff chatted a while to the people at the Refugee stall whom he had met up with at the rally a few Sundays ago. Ray and I shot the breeze with the guys on the Socialist Worker stand, whilst all around us people did football based acrobatics, and the guys from Anonymous walked about in their V For Vendetta masks....

Our main reason for visiting The Lighthouse was to stand in the viewing platform, from which you can look over the whole of Glasgow. On the way up the stairs we came across a small exhibition called Craig Johston's Apiological Network. This is an entire false world in which Scotland has developed a major industry based purely on the cultivation and manufacturing of honey. It included a bogus TV documentary which was very effective, and the whole thing had the feel of one of those early 1970s creepy TV series like 'The Changes' or 'The Stone Tape'. I found the whole project surprisingly woozy and moving, and it was one of my favourite things of the day.
National Apiological Network from Archiprix International on Vimeo.

Up on the viewing gantry we laughed in the face of Ray's vertigo as we gazed out over the rooftops of this mean city, the fractured filmy light rendering a chiaroscuro shimmer to the domes and steeples that spread out for miles. Looking over, we spotted that the adjacent MacKintosh Tower was even higher, so we sprinted up that to get an even better view of the metropolis. As we looked down onto the rooftops below us, Griff began enthusing over-verbosely about wanting to live in one of the shacks on the roofs, much to the amusement of the foreign tourists who were sharing the platform....

Back on the streets, we wandered through the Merchant City where the Yuppie Scum and affluent tourists attempted to dine alfresco as the Weegie Weather snarled unforgivingly at their indifferent arrogance. We in turn scoffed at one establishment's offer of soup-and-sandwich-combo for £5:00, whilst the aforementioned Scotia pub offered up a two course meal for £4:95!! Austere times my friends!
All this smell of food made us aware that we ourselves had not had lunch yet so we headed away from the overpriced nonsense, and found a small eatery unfortunately named MacDonalds (no!... not THAT one) where we ate heartily for a pittance. The cafe was just around the corner from Monorail Music so we decided to pop in for a scout around.
Whilst Griff and Ray just milled about the shop, I bought a few CDs including the new album by Laurel Halo which I was keen to hear (Griff: are you sure it wasn't because it had Japanese schoolgirls on the cover?).

We jumped in the car and headed for the South side of Glasgow. I shoved the Laurel Halo Cd in the car's music player and the glacial electronic ethereal music filled the car like perfumed nerve gas; a perfect accompaniment on this strangely lit afternoon as we headed down the unfamiliar streets South. A sudden abundance of Halal butchers and shops with signs in Arabic told us we had arrived, so we parked in front of the Tramway.
Ray has already posted a fine Blog detailing the main event we went to see at the Tramway; Antonia Hirsch's Komma, and you can read it here
The two charming female members of staff in charge of this section were impressed that we lasted the whole 16 minutes of the performance and chatted enthusiastically with us about the other exhibits that were on. We took in the installation 'Dissonance & Disturbance' by Lis Rhodes which included a short film called Dresden Dynamo, which is a 'film made without a camera'. This transpired as a strip of celluloid which had been defaced so that when it played through the projector you witnessed the animation effect coupled with the 'music' the film played as it ran. It made an ideal companion piece to Katy Dove's experimental films, and don't tell Griff And Ray this, but I actually preferred Lis's film to Katy's, especially when I realised the music was being created by the film itself.


After this, we took a stroll through the hidden gardens at the back of the building. Here we found a 'Wishing Tree' where people had hung their wishes from the branches. The rain had caused some of the wishes to dissolve, but we hoped that this was because they had been granted. The wishes veered between the moving and the avaricious; someone wished they could spend a little time with their Dad once again, others wished for world peace, some wished for extreme wealth and fame, and one or two wished they could marry Liam from One Direction! Crazy, I know....I don't know what Griff and Ray were thinking of!!

And that pretty much was that! As we said our 'goodbyes' we watched Griff head off through the back streets of the South Side, we aimed the car at the Kingston Bridge and 'Pastel Blue' by Sister Vanilla (another track from one of the CDs I purchased) patterned in the air as we left Glasgow on the M80 ramp and headed away from our favourite city....back to reality....another Saturday well spent....

~Gordon~         

Ray Got His Gun - Antonia Hirsch's Komma

After Griff wrote yesterday about an art event that has just closed (see 'here') I thought I would restore our reputation for getting on at the ground floor by writing about an amazing installation, currently running at Tramway until July 1st, which you can all go and see for free this month (if you live near Glasgow). Regular readers will be familiar with the Streetlamp team embarking every so often on a spiritually refreshing 'day of culture', and our most recent included a trip to the 'South Side', a rare treat for me and Gordon, who don't often get down that way. Our destination was Tramway a contemporary visual and performing arts venue based in a former tram depot in Pollockshields. If you've never been to this venue before then try to make time for a visit as it is a wonderful performance/exhibition space.

So what brought us there? That's what I want to share with you all - an intense and visceral installation, by Canadian visual artist Antonia Hirsch, entitled - Komma (after Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun) Presented in an installation context, is a 16mm film based on Hollywood script writer Dalton Trumbo's seminal anti-war novel. 

The central device of Trumbo’s novel is the horrifying predicament of the protagonist, a young American soldier who, tragically, has lost his face and both arms and legs during combat. Unable to see, speak, hear, smell, or act, he is fully conscious, but seemingly completely without agency. As he struggles to come to terms with his personal tragedy, he strains to communicate with ‘the outside world.’ 

Set around the time of World War I, the novel with its—then particularly inconvenient—anti-war message, was first published in 1939. The book came into true prominence during the Vietnam war era, after its author had re-emerged from McCarthyist blacklisting throughout the 1950s. Disturbingly, Trumbo wrote his novel after being inspired by an article he read about the then Prince of Wales' visit to a Canadian veterans' hospital to see a soldier who had, just like the fictional character, lost all of his senses and his limbs. Interestingly, the entire book was written without commas, though all other punctuation conforms to established conventions. This stylistic idiosyncracy makes sense when you consider that the term comma is derived from the Greek komma, meaning 'something cut off.' 

Hirsch's 16mm film takes this irregularity and runs with it, featuring the novel's text as a spoken word audio track with flashes of illumination marking the pauses where the commas should have been. The voice we hear speaks the internal dialogue of the central character but is rendered emotionless by being computer generated. This is intended to contrast the idiosyncrasies of articulation with binary modes of communication.This distinction, between negative and positive, light and dark, on and off, forms a rhythm, the black voids and illuminations highlighting the use of the comma to underpin the relationship between the voice and the written word. Hirsch explains the work as follows:

“It was the lack of commas in Dalton Trumbo's original novel that initially sparked my interest.

Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter in Hollywood, he is behind such movies as Spartacus and Roman Holiday. Yet in the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten. Although he continued to write during this time under a pseudonym, it struck me how the novel's author had also been temporarily robbed of his voice that he couldn't "own" his voice during this period.

For my film I extracted those segments from Trumbo's novel where the protagonist reflects on the sensation of his own body, and most of this is a terrifying discovery of all the parts that are missing.”

I can assure you that the film is indeed an uncomfortable experience but one which everyone should force themselves to confront. After being ushered, by torchlight, into a pitch black screening room the viewer finds themself cut off from any point of reference other than the impersonal voice of the 'narrator' and the occasional sudden bright and blinding flash of light directly in the foreground. Truly, it makes for a very powerful and moving work of art, one that we here at The Streetlamp, highly recommend. So, take a trip down to The Tramway, we’re sure it will be an experience not to forget. 

Ray