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[9.9.05] [Andrew Gallix]
THE MISSING LINKS
 Eugene Hutz, leader of gypsy punks Gogol Bordello who appears in the film version of Everything is Illuminated (for which he also wrote some of the music): "Hutz has no shortage of bugbears, among them world music ("we're here to bury world music as a marketing concept"), certain fashionable New York bands ("it's just modelling with guitars"), most of the city's burgeoning Gypsy-punk scene ("they're not Gypsy and neither are they punk") and American rock in general ("they talk about freedom and preach the rebel mind but in reality they bash out the same boogie-woogie"), but the one thing guaranteed to make his blood boil is a critic who accuses him of overplaying his background". * Jah Wobble in The Independent: "They always say music trends follow art trends 30, 40 years on. That post-punk period is a bit like post-war modernism and expressionistic art. It's kind of modernist, monolithic. Maybe because me, John, and people like Sid, grew up on council estates in towering modernist architecture, it's towering, brutal music". Wobble's new album, Mu (out on Trojan), is inspired by parts of north London: "It's as close as London gets to New Jersey. But it's one of my favourite places for walking, through the Lee Valley. It gets beautiful in that urban way, but then you go through soap factories up near Ponders End. It's got a wonderful, dislocated, alienated feeling." * Sigur Ros put their entire new album Takk on MySpace. * The New Brasil film festival runs from 14-18 September at the Old Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane. * Douglas Coupland's Toronto exhibition reviewed. * Chris at Splinters on Hunter S Thompson's suicide note which ends thus: "Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt". * dogmatika on Anne Rice and Poppy Z brite's reactions to the events in New Orleans. Andrei Codrescu on why writers love New Orleans: "Writers have fallen in love with the city as soon as they came here, since Mark Twain," says Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian expatriate writer and poet who once called Baltimore home but has lived in the New Orleans area for two decades. He teaches at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "It has such a mixture of elements -- danger, sensuality, freedom, the sense that the night is more important than the day," he says. "It's an edge that's been walked here for a very long time". From the same article, this definition of New Orleans as the last American "somewhere else" by James Nolan: "I think it's really a Caribbean city that by accident is part of the United States," says James Nolan, a writer and New Orleans native among a dozen refugees at Codrescu's house in Baton Rouge. "It's the last somewhere else left in the United States. As more and more of the country gets homogenized, the few unique places left are mythologized". On the same theme: "The Bush administration wrote off New Orleans because it's not part of America, it's merely part of the coming American empire. The president referred to us as 'this part of the world'. Not 'part of our country,' but part of a world that, like Iraq, has to be secured by armies, not saved through compassion". More here. * Loud & Quiet Magazine. * Another interesting magazine, this one from the US: mstrmnd. * Chinese students in the UK. * Trolley spotting! (Via Londonist.) * Muffin the Mule revamped. * Breat Easton Ellis in Suicide Girls: "I never expected to hit any kind of audience. I literally was a musician in college. I thought I was going to be in a rock band. I swear to God that was my future. I wrote songs and played a band, that was what I was going to do. I wrote books on the side. I had Less Than Zero but I hadn't planned on getting it published". Ellis in the Minnesota Daily (via dogmatika): "I did not think, for example, that Less than Zero was going to be understood by anyone outside of Los Angeles. You would have to be my age and live in L.A. to connect with that book. And I get letters from kids in India, now, who weren't even born then, who read the book and said it meant something to them. If we're talking about that book in particular, I guess somehow I captured this feeling of youthful alienation that struck a chord. Or conversely, it's kind of a joyride. It's kind of an exciting book because these kids are acting so adult, and they're doing sort of naughty things, and isn't it all so cool how disaffected they are? But I guess there's something larger at play that I really can't locate. There's some sort of universal feeling the book generates that makes it still meaningful". Here he explains why he is less angry than he used to be: "I think you get older. You get mellowed out. You're tired. How angry can you stay? You get it. This is how the world works. Whoa. OK, I understand that now. Take a big breath. It doesn't really interest me anymore to grab people by the shoulders and tell them, 'Hey the world sucks. Look at it. Look at what's happening to our society. Look at what we're worshipping'. I think people know. I hope people know. And even if they don't, I won't be the one to tell them. Let them find out on their own". * Alan McGee. * You're probably aware of this already, but here's this year's Booker shortlist. The six contenders' profiles. And here you can check out Zadie Smith's controversial attack on contemporary English society: "It's the way people look at each other on the train -- just general stupidity, madness, vulgarity, stupid TV shows, aspirational arseholes, money everywhere. It's just a disgusting place, it's terrifying. Maybe I'm just getting old". Maybe she has not travelled much. And you can read about the Bungei Prize for Literature. * The Christian Science Monitor on litblogs: "Although no one's exactly sure how influential they are, bloggers like Sarvas have become the new darlings of the publishing industry. They're getting free review copies, landing interviews with prestigious authors, and trying to boost obscure writers -- especially writers in the literary fiction world where John Irving is a bigger name than John Grisham". The paper can't bring itself to write the word Bookslut, but we learn that Jessa Crispin has "gotten the odd marriage proposal -- four or five". * Ben Granger, Splinters' new recruit, on Patrick Hamilton. * Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame in The Believer (another link found via dogmatika!).
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