Coffee-Table Notes

When a TV ad for Honda’s luxury Acura range of vehicles was somewhat incongruously sound-tracked by Where Were You?, a first-generation post-punk single by The Mekons released on Edinburgh’s Fast Product label almost forty years ago, old lags might have cried sell-out. For Jon Langford, Tom Greenhalgh and the rest of the original Mekons line-up, however, it prompted a regrouping which has seen the Leeds University sired band record an album of brand new material. Their ongoing reunion also sees them play three dates in Scotland over the next couple of weeks. “We’ve been waiting to sell out for years,” jokes Langford, the band’s original drummer who would later move onto guitar and vocals. “It was really strange, because someone contacted me to ask if they could use Where Were you? on this Honda commercial, and I had to contact everyone in the band to see if we could do it or not. I thought everyone would think we were selling out, but in the end no-one really cared. As Tom put it,

Rachel Maclean is sat in Film City to talk about Make Me Up, the Glasgow-based artist’s feature-length subversion of prime-time TV that’s about to be shown on BBC 4 prior to screenings in cinemas around the country. Holding court to a parade of journalists in the boardroom of what used to be Govan Town Hall seems fitting somehow for a film about women and, if not in, power. Following Spite Your Face, Maclean’s dark look at the corrupting power of money that formed Scotland’s official contribution to the 2017 Venice Biennale, Make Me Up dissects popular media clichés of female beauty in a deceptively prettified world. Here the wide-eyed and tellingly named Siri is put through a blender of choreographed conformity alongside a troupe of similarly well-turned-out would-be mannequins forced to compete in an extreme take on trash-TV talent shows where survival of the fittest is what counts. All this is overseen by a candyfloss-coifed ringmistress with a wig pink enough to resemble R

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three Stars On one level, Martin Crimp’s seventeen-scene dramatic collage is the perfect vehicle for drama students on the verge of becoming professional performers. This is certainly the case with the fourteen-strong final year BA Acting ensemble who perform Guy Hollands’ production of Crimp’s 1997 play. With no linear narrative or any apparent through-line to play with, Crimp’s text leaves everything to the imagination. This is done in a way that invites a forensic dissection of a possibly unreliable homage to its central subject, a woman called Annie. Except sometimes she’s Ann, Anya and possibly other names we’re not being told. Described throughout in the third person, Annie becomes a shape-shifting every-woman for all about her to project their own fantasies on as her various versions walk through history en route to someone resembling herself, whoever that is. She might be a terrorist, a suicide or a porn star, a poster girl for id