Murder and Rebellion in America
If you didn’t catch it last night (or don’t live in Britain), you still have a few days left to watch Paul Tickell’s documentary based on Mark Ames‘ Going Postal, over at BBC iPlayer. The British publisher of Going Postal, Snowbooks, is reporting that sales have risen dramatically since it went out last night. Related: […]
For The Love of God (or How Not To Be a YBA)
All the YBAs went back to Duchamp and his exhibiting of a urinal as an artwork in itself. The object trouve. It was kind of punk, Dada, kind of Warhol. Some of these YBA objects were harder to resource than others: while Sarah Lucas made art out of her used stockings and some fried eggs, and Tracey Emin exhibited her own bed (with some minor alterations for dramatic effect – see used condoms and an empty vodka bottle), others such as Hirst had to import large dead fish at great cost (which was, of course, later reimbursed).
By Ewan Morrison, author of the forthcoming Menage.
Can We Undo Psychosis?
Kate Moss consistently fails to turn up at the events, but finally during an A-list Venetian masked ball at Strawberry Hill House in Richmond, Jane dodges past security men into the depths of the mansion, until she is face to face with Pete Doherty and Kate Moss, who sweetly displays her engagement ring, while Pete gives Jane his phone number after she says she has done some paintings of him. Then Kate asks if she is a journalist, and looks horrified at the affirmative answer. Jane rushes out of the building with her scoop story, which makes a tabloid double spread (and is, to her chagrin, credited to another journalist).
Charles Thomson on Jane Kelly‘s prison teacher memoir Inside.
Leaving Tangier
In the Moroccan culture Jelloun describes, nearly the same level of ‘scandalous’ and liberated behavior that occurs in the West can occur in Morocco provided it is kept secret. In a society where women are expected to preserve their chastity until marriage, underground networks of not-quite-prostitutes make rounds to service men and get their own as well. For those who are anxious about providing proof of their virginity on their wedding nights, there is always anal sex–vis-Ã -vis a significant portion of abstinence-pledging teenagers in the United States.
Beth Harrington reviews Tahar Ben Jelloun‘s Leaving Tangier.