Essays

Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest and oldest ports, it is a working, modernist’s multicultural vision, threaded with canals, and criss-crossed by bridges that look like swans. It is Amsterdam minus tourists, with its heart bombed out by the Germans on May 14th, and still commemorated. Never forget the bombing raids that stripe and cross the city. Ever since 1940, the city’s been filling those gaps with glassy sleek, weirdly balanced, imaginative skyscrapers that defy Newton’s Law of Gravity. Some are very odd.

Sophie Parkin swaps De Hems in Soho for the real thing when she ups sticks to Rotterdam.

At the heart of every writer lies a paradox. Whereas the other art-forms have a natural communal element, writing necessitates a monkish solitude but also a desperate clawing desire for recognition. The turbulence between these two states is the stuff that can make or break a person. Added to this are life’s natural disasters and the neuroses/bohemianism of creative types which have blazed a trail of glory and destruction from John Clare through Sylvia Plath and d.a. levy to David Foster Wallace. Whereas every successful writer’s path is more or less the same, every doomed one has a unique tale to tell.

Darran Anderson considers the phenomenon of the disappearing writer.

And that’s the thing about IFD. They are a mix of contemporary and retro, and as such provoke and invoke an interesting mix of sounds and emotions in the listener. And indeed in the musicians playing the stuff. They all look to be in their early 20s, and the NES was released in 1985, before they were probably born, so they’re being oddly nostalgic for their own childhoods, but putting a new twist on it and selling it to a modern audience. For a person like me, in their late 30s, the Super Mario Bros. music, and that NES sound in general, holds specific youthful memories…

A review by Graham Rae.

Why do ‘Stonehenge’ or ‘Big Bottom’ need reworking? Why meddle with brilliance? On this occasion, the musicians on the album now include a member of the House of Lords – rock royalty indeed – but suffers from being performed and recorded by men now in their 60s. Guest, McKean and Shearer have contaminated the Tap brand before, 1992’s Break Like The Wind acting as self-parody of a parody (a ‘serody’, as one of the band might put it). The Return of Spinal Tap (1994) was barely an adequate sequel to the film, suffering from the lack of a good script, a barely worked out concept and no Rob Reiner directing. And yet, there’s something brilliant about two of the reworkings on this album.

Andrew Stevens groans as the amps go back up to 11 with Spinal Tap‘s Back From The Dead.

Noise as a musical genre has long since been passe because it got so huge. Suddenly thousands of indie musicians hung up their basses and ran toward drum kits and picked up music theory textbooks and everybody was a noise artist. Shows were overflooded with drone, people looked at it as a fad instead of a movement. Some artists were working before it all blew up and some never stopped, Oneohtrix Point Never has been working at creating a higher plane of musical thinking officially since 2004, though equally before then throughout his career and life, and there is nothing passe about him.

By Nicolle Elizabeth.

Little did I know back when Jane and I passed the Packard in the carport, it would become Ed’s coffin. Bob Helm tells the story to Chris Sublet, one of my artist friends that went to see the German artist’s wood sculpture show. Ed owned several hundred acres around Hope including the mountaintop where he is buried. Ed’s son, Noah, drove a backhoe to the site and dug a huge hole with an approach way to it. Ed was positioned sitting upright in the passenger’s seat of the Packard and Nancy drove it into the hole.

By Richard Twedt.

You may have gathered by now that my friend was something of an aesthete. He prided himself on being born on the 15th of October and sharing his birthday with Frederick Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and Michel Foucault, all of whom he quoted constantly (it was impossible to ever get his opinion on anything without him whipping out a quote or aphorism to throw back in your face). My old friend always lied about his age (wildly), some people thought him in his forties, others in his twenties; he claimed that books had made him an old man by the age of eighteen. He liked to think of himself as ‘un-timely’ and often claimed that he would have been happier living in the late 19th century, in the time of decadence, dandies and death by consumption or syphilis.

Ewan Morrison reveals the background to M énage, his new novel.

The form enveloping an insinuant story was the basis of my lust for Sherin Guirguis’ work as well. Egyptian-born, her work involves cutting the traditional Middle Eastern patterns of mesh and scroll and tradition into wood and/or paper to create beautiful veils within an overall work that is connotative of various bomb clouds: the H, the atom, etc. The cut out sections are reminiscent of the veil the women in these areas wear covering their personalities; too scary in their potential domination towards love and good will and education. The work portrays a subconscious fear that is born of knowing and consistency; one that numbs to the background yet forever looms clear in the outpourings of the artist’s psyche.

Kimberly Nichols‘ column about current life and art.

Now. In the history of music, there has rarely been an album as over-hyped or credited with being much more political than it really is than ‘American Idiot.’ Basically what it encompasses is some disaffected cokehead (the ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ — if you ever want to see hilarious po-face humorless clich éd-rebel emo garbage, I suggest watching the nonsensical video to this song) who leaves home, kicks around in the world a bit, then goes home again after his headspinfluential tormentor-mentor punk hero ‘St. Jimmy’ kills himself. All set to music. Quite stunning. It really only got as much approbation as it did because it came out during the Bush years…

A review by Graham Rae.

In the blue corner, from London, we have James Johnston, Terry Edwards and Ian White, collectively known as Gallon Drunk. Their decades’-long journey into the low dives and wrecked lives of the capital’s gutterati has thrown up a succession of albums that fuse the live power of the Pistols and Suicide with a connoisseurs’ knowledge of soundtracks and jazz. All presented in sharp, East End style, suited and booted like the last gang in town. And in the red corner, from New York, the No Wave Nostradamus herself, Lydia Lunch.

By Cathi Unsworth.

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.