Andy Blade: Plastic Penny & The Strange Wooden Horse
By Nick Ashton. Andy Blade’s marks his return to the fray with a new album set for a September release, along with accompanying touring schedule that will see him performing not just all over the UK, but for the first time ever, in Japan and the US towards the end of the year, and into […]
ANNE PIGALLE: NOT DEAD
Private View: 12 August 2016 – 6pm – late Open: 13 – 14 August 2016 from 12 – 8pm G511ERY, 511 Seven Sisters Road N15 6EP Seven Sisters tube (White Hart Lane Exit) There have been rumours that Anne Pigalle, The Last Chanteuse, was dead! The Last Chanteuse – who grew up with punk in […]
3:AM Asia: Up Yours! Tokyo Punk & Japanarchy Today
Red Gallery 3 Rivington Street London EC2A 3DT August 18-28 A photography exhibition documenting the five years Chris Low spent immersed in Tokyo’s underground punk scene: its faces and places, bands and fans. Having played for a number of punk bands popular in Japan Chris was welcomed into the thriving Tokyo punk community and was […]
Means to an Ending: A Review of Iain Reid’s debut novel
The most poignant thought along the drive comes from our narrator, when she relates a story about her driving instructor. He had claimed he’d met the best kisser in the world, but she’d demurred at this, noting that one person alone could not possibly be the best kisser in the world: “It’s like not playing the guitar or something, where you’re alone and you know you’re good at it. It’s not a solitary act. There needs two to be the best.” Here we’re given the symbolic meaning, the interplay between loneliness and companionship, embedded in a concrete, quotidian phenomenon. It’s this kind of philosophical dialogue that drives the first act, and sets up the novel’s overarching symbolism.
Brian Birnbaum reviews I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid.
The Poetry of the Paragraph: Some Notes
I want to talk about paragraphs, the shapes paragraphs take in the fiction of some writers I admire, but I probably have to talk first (at least a little) about individual sentences and what goes on in them when a writer is fully awake to their creation. What has struck me is how the writers I return to again and again are uncannily attentive to sound, not just to rhythm and cadence but to the patterns of vowels and consonants. In discussions of prose fiction, we are so accustomed to thinking about plots and characters and themes and such that we often lose sight of the fact that a story proceeds one sentence at a time and that a sentence is ultimately an object, a thing, a layout of language. It took me many years to realize how a sentence in prose can afford the reader many of the pleasures we have been taught to regard as being exclusive to the precincts of poetry.
By Gary Lutz.