Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide
The idea was to get beyond the myth of a rock star who has indeed reached iconic status. I chose to write about him because Richey Edwards was a more fascinating and complex subject than most — on the one hand he subverted the idea of rock star by drawing on his literary intelligence and peppering his interviews with iconoclastic declarations, yet on the other he completely played up to that role: the look, the rhetoric, the descent into an addiction of sorts. So you have two perceptions at play at the same time: the Byronic beauty staring out at you from the cover of NME, and the nice young man who reads books, walks his dog and enjoys Sunday dinner with his family. I wanted to explore this contradiction.
Ben Myers talks Richard with Alan Kelly.
The Future of Landscape: Patrick Wright
I use archives a lot, but I don’t go to them only as a source of evidence: sometimes, indeed, they seem to work best as surreal alienation devices – a way of thickening things up a bit and of reintroducing confusion and complexity to an oversimplified if not entirely depleted and amnesiac public culture. I start investigations without knowing where they will lead, and because I have identified something in the present that seems to demand excavation and a new contextualisation. I get a hunch something needs to be understood differently, and try to set off not in search of proof for already established ideas, or even in pursuit of confirmation and certainty, but with the aim of reconfiguring my own presently inadequate understanding.
Andrew Stevens talks to Patrick Wright in the second of his The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image series.
Two Poems
This is not a time for clandestine poets
to hurl shoes over Jericho’s crumbling walls.
Stay calm. The stench of exploding verse
will not deter the invading tanks of Saul.
You bragged that the lost tribe of Israel
would not be dragged through the eye of a needle.
There would be corrective fury. An iron heel.
An eye for an eyelash. A fire truly biblical…
Holy revenge against David’s puny catapult.
Daniel dismembered by the lion’s savage maul…
By Kevin Williamson.
Frames
Being a public space, the pictures were in frames that screwed to the wall with a little brass plate on each side of the frame. It stuck me as a sad indictment that even in a hospital, particularly a ward like this, provision had to be given to stopping petty thievery. The drugs cabinet guarded maybe, but mass-produced prints of landscapes? Right beside his door were three identical frames lined one above the other to fill a gap too small for the standard poster of a riverboat or field of watercolour poppies. My apprehension about seeing him face-to-face after hearing about his deterioration meant I hardly noticed them when walking by on my first visit. On subsequent visits I barely gave a second glance, thinking them certificates of some description.
By Julian Baker.
ampere’s and
This week’s visuals: Canadian comics [via] & Victor Reinganum‘s cover for Muriel Spark‘s Ballad of Peckham Rye & Jardin de la Conaissance, 40,000 discarded books as “a structural garden element of wall, bench and bed, but also as a growing medium” & Western Motel, a 2009 exhibition on Edward Hopper‘s influence on cinema & his […]