According to Scotland on Sunday, Han was chosen by the judging panel (including Elle McPherson and, er, Dinos Chapman) for her ‘signature smear of dark lipstick’ and ability to ‘work a pencil skirt with aplomb’. Is there an emoticon for helpless giggling? If so, insert here.

Having enjoyed countless hours over the past decade sipping warm champagne outside the changing rooms of high-end boutiques, saying things like ‘Ooh, yes, lovely! Buy it and then we can go for a pint.’ or ‘Christ no! You look like Christopher Biggins.’ at ten minute intervals, I trust I will merit a mention in La McGill’s acceptance speech when she inevitably and deservedly wins.

After Ruthie and Doug’s splendid performance collecting an award on Amy Winehouse’s behalf at the Vodafone Live shindig last weekend, I might have to add an ‘Award Ceremony News’ section to the site.

A slightly off-putting title for a show, maybe, but it fits. The three artists, Steven Anderson, Dougie Morland and Javier Ferro don’t have much in common on the surface, but the more time you spend with their work, the more the links between the three become apparent.

The best stuff is by Dougie, I think - he has made a great big looming wing thing based on a drawing by a psychiatric patient, that has a really black front and a softly glowing back. The result is pretty disconcerting, as if the wing is a shadow casting its own shadow made of light. He’s done a couple of drawings too, of branks—tongue torture devices used to silence and punish uppity women in the 17th Century—one of which looks like a Rorschach inkblot test with only one possible interpretation. That all sounds a wee bit goth written out, but it’s really an attempt to draw together ideas around the collective unconscious, psychoanalysis and superstition. Disclaimer: I’ve known Dougie for yonks, but if I thought his work was bibble, I would definitely say so!

Steve Anderson’s work is right up my street, too. He’s a bit like an ethnographer, or an anthropological archaeologist of the present, and looks at the social interactions around an absent performance by collecting up broken bits and bobs—snapped guitar strings, busted drumsticks—from the floors of rehearsal rooms, and photographing folk as they arrive at a gig. I missed his own performance on opening night, but it seems he’s working on wordless folk songs made up of overheard exclamations, which is pretty intriguing.

Javier Ferro is the weak link, really, but in this context his work stands up, especially the concrete table with an unfinished letter on it, reading, weirdly, “Dearest, I have to think about you everywhere I am. I am therefore writing to you from my boss’ office whom I’m representing at the moment”.

So, yeah, good stuff: lots of fizzing little connections between the work, which all touches on potential futures, half-remembered pasts and undefined relationships. And, for once, this is a show about memory—the current de facto curatorial justification for every sodding group exhibition you see—that’s actually about memory!

Update: My review of the show for The Herald.

It’s very funny, and very, very silly. Fake news—a report on the underground sport of Church Fighting—is leavened with a healthy dollop of puerile filth, like the trailer for blockbuster musical Dr. Screwlittle & His Suck-Me-Suck-You (from the makers of Kiddie Fiddler on the Roof!), or the scene in which an unfortunate serf is made to fellate a dragon. Go and have a listen.

Glaswegian readers may remember Innes as ‘that Angry Germans man’, famed for his S&M-riddled performances in Nazi uniform at top nitespot Optimo, singing that rousing child abuse/WWII anthem, Mount Florida’s Yo La Kinski:

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

Congratulations, Gerard and Jackie.

How about a Jarman retrospective next year, Han? You know you want to.

For your information: the entertainments begin at 8pm, and early on we’ve been playing lots of drone, noise, folk, prog, spoken word and esoteric hooting, largely for our own benefit, before moving on to skronk, punk, rock ‘n’ roll, dancehall, dubstep, very gay disco and outright populist selections - my Addicted To Love covers medley must be heard to be believed! - once the punters turn up. As if that wasn’t enough, you get first dibs on Optimo queue tickets, too.

So, join us this coming Sunday for our final stint, and limber up for the return of Spastachrist on April 16th, when he will be joined by William Bennet from out of noise whores Whitehouse, playing an uncharachteristic Italo Disco DJ set.

It’s about your life. Well, it’s about mine, anyway. Everything I ever taped off the radio. Every album I transferred from vinyl to tape so that I could listen to it while walking to school. Every compilation tape I made, for me or anyone else dumb and/or determined enough to listen to them. Every hour spent hunched up, surrounded by piles of records, finding something just the right length to fit at the end of the tape. Every car journey with my parents, frantically fighting for this or that tape to be played. Every album that I loved intensely for three weeks fifteen years ago, but haven’t thought about in years.

It’s about the fact that I remember Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade being recorded on a Sony UX Turbo 100 [“Ideal for Car Stereos”], with some Replacements on the end to fill the remaining 25 minutes. The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Psychocandy? A That’s MG-X 60, opened up and cut to exactly the right length for the album, because I was too lazy/impatient to piss about with fast forwarding to the end of the side. A taped-from-the-radio bootleg of Sonic Youth at Reading Festival, 1992, on a TDK SA-90, recorded on a September evening when I should have been studying for a French exam, and not listening to the radio and smoking fags out my bedroom window in a clumsy attempt to disguise it from my parents. This is all stuff that I have forgotten, years and years ago, and until I saw that page, I couldn’t have remembered even if my life depended on it.

That’s what it’s about.

That’s the comment equivalent of a non-stop cabaret of champagne and limousines, that is! (The preceding link will expire soon, sadly - please refer to Pseud’s Corner, Private Eye no. 1144.)

A great gig at the nightclub by Messrs Spastachrist and De Reve. Photograph stolen from veryape because mine are cack. Audio excerpt may follow shortly if the artistes grant permission.

Update: Leon “Birthday Boy” McDermott has more snaps and the hoped-for audio excerpt will not now appear, due to visibility issues when setting MiniDisc levels through a terrifying mask.

He has been given an excellent and sturdy name, too - Jack Dodd.

The last time I saw him, he looked like this:

He’s probably a wee bit cuter now.

(See also: It’s a girl!)

Here’s the little text I wrote for the show:

Jackie Anderson paints people in places, Toby Messenger paints the places in people.

Anderson’s portraits dispense with the relationship between artist and sitter, catching her subjects unawares, presenting their most private moments, those spent alone in public. These are works full of movement, too, sometimes doubling a figure to catch a shift in expression, sometimes painting only the place that her subject has been, will be, or, even, might never be. The public spaces through which Anderson’s subjects pass are reduced on her canvases to thin shadows and abstracted forms, just as her subjects pass by buildings, cash machines and doorways without seeing them, their surroundings rendered invisible by familiarity. This not only serves to foreground, figuratively and literally, the people painted, it also further absents Anderson from her work as a painter of portraits; the result is a communion between subject and viewer as private as the fleeting moments she has captured.

Messenger’s work is, for the most part, unpopulated, but he tackles landscape at a tangent, matching Anderson’s slippery approach to portraiture. In works made on daily walks in Sienna, always along the same route, Messenger is looking from the corner of his eye, turning his attention to the forms and spaces others might miss - he sees the curve of a roundabout, or the gap in a fence, ignoring grand architecture, blind to sweeping vistas. These are drawings of the spaces that enter memory, but are never remembered; the spaces, perhaps, that reveal more about a place than we realise. In the other series here, the quotidian again fills the frame. There are views from Messenger’s studio window, or chance glances around his working space. Here representation is almost, but not quite, irrelevant, with form and colour worked at for their own sake. These paintings are made not to describe, but because they must be made, like this.

On the surface, the work before you could not be more different. Anderson is ever precise, light, recording; Messenger moves heavy paint, suggesting, transforming. Beneath those different surfaces, though, both work to reveal the in between.