Coffee-Table Notes

Mort Sahl – Comedian Born May 11, 1927; died October 26, 2021   Mort Sahl, who has died aged 94, was a mould-breaking stand-up comedian, who brought political satire and spontaneity to a 1950s circuit then dominated by mother in law gags and cheap smut. His topical based routines drew from the newspapers he brought with him on stage, and tapped into a sense of opposition that was building among a younger generation in America’s post World War Two climate. One early commentator referred to Sahl as a ‘Rebel Without a Pause’.   Sahl’s casual, dressed down approach was a million miles both sartorially and ideologically from the tuxedo-clad wise-crackers who dominated mainstream comedy. Sahl’s freewheeling monologues influenced a new generation of stand-ups, including his peer, Lenny Bruce, while TV talk show host Steve Allen called Sahl “the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy.” Sahl became something of a cause celebre among hip intellectuals, and his shows became a ho

I Read the News Today. Oh, Boy!   When The Clash released London Calling at the end of 1979, the politically charged title track of the first generation punk band’s third album sounded like one more much needed call to arms. Coming at the end of a year in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected to government for what turned out to be eighteen years of misrule, the lyrics to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ composition were a lot to take in.    Police brutality, the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island earlier that year, and the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the River Thames flooding were all in the mix. The song’s line ‘Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ also pointed up what was probably a first hand observation of the impotence of a rock band to be able to change things in the face of those who put faith in them.    Coming less than a decade after Liverpool’s 1960s pop saviours split up, the line was in keeping with punk’s willingness

Going Underground   The Arches began and ended with civic failure. Neither was the fault of those in charge of the Glasgow city centre arts lab that existed between 1991 and 2015 in a cavernous interior beside Central Station that was both physically and metaphorically underground. The first failure was down to what had gone immediately before, and which accidentally birthed The Arches on a wing-and-a-prayer idea founded on punk-hippy idealism. The final act of civic vandalism that forced what by now had become one of the most important creative spaces in the world to close its doors was down to even worse external forces. Some might call it capitalism.   In the quarter of a century in-between, The Arches captured hearts, minds, souls and imaginations. It changed lives, perceptions and, in at least one theatre show, clothes. Its messy mash-up of ‘lets-put-on-the-show-right-here’ recklessness and hedonistic excess was the most exploratory of adventures for both artists and audiences, wh