Rise of the Nu Mohemians
In broken English and through a translator he goes on to tell how he felt disturbed by the repetitive cycle of observing chicks arriving to the scene, enticed by the appeal of darker life, slipping into a world of wrist-cutting, drugs, prostitution, debauchery and occasional degradation. From his bar he assembled a team of groupies who spilt their stories to him. He emerged as a writer making notes on his phone about the new faces’ demise.
Kirsty Allison on what gaijin writers can learn from Tokyo’s m-novel scene.
Sunday Lunch at ATP
That, after a glorious night blasting our ears out to the triumphant return of The Jesus Lizard and the awesome sonic overload of Sleep, six of us writers, poets, performers and oral fetishists would be airing our Horribly True Confessions in ATP’s first Spoken Word event. Lydia has done more than probably anyone else to push the spoken word as a vital artform, joining Henry Rollins while he flexed his tonsils to the task and luring her formative inspiration Hubert Selby Jr out of obscurity in the Eighties was only the beginning of her working.
Cathi Unsworth reports from the spoken word stage of last weekend’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.
Punk Fiction
There were stories about the Notting Hill riots, there were stories about Bored Teenagers and there were stories about Being Stranded. There were stories about Outdoor Miners and Germ Free Adolescents and Orgasm Addicts. All punk was about a story. It was about living the story in your own head, good or bad. Whether that story was fact or fiction didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t boring.
Johnny Marr talks about a new anthology of short stories inspired by punk.
Down the Recession Session
It’s still a recession, even if it’s a recession of the mind. There’s been no sudden shortfall in resources. No less food has been produced. Technology still marches forward. But people are still suffering. The only failing seems to have been in the collective imagination — and the only solutions to the problem lie within the human brain. A good time then, for writers to flex their muscles — if only to provide a bit of escapism. There’s a lot you can say against spoken word events like The Recession Session — but at least it was an attempt at… what? something…
Sam Jordison braves the bear-pit of drunken writers and writer-wannabes to report from the recent 3:AM/Beat The Dust live showcase.
A History of Violence
[Reverend Jeremiah] Wright was as much parodied as he was pilloried by the press for his arguably ill-timed message, but it’s hard to argue with his criticism of America’s history of violence and hypocrisy. ‘Blessed Are They Who Dash Your Baby’s Brains Against a Rock’ sets the tone for the rest of Gutter Tactics, an album where each song is a dense construction of industrial noise, relentless drones, and hypnotic grooves, with caustic lyrics raging against the various machines, namely the criminal injustice system, the military and prison industrial complexes, vampiric multinational corporations, etc.
By John Madera.
Fire Up Those Lava Lamps
On their first-full length, the Miniature Tigers pay homage to their heroes in what unfortunately sounds like souped-up demos. Tell It to the Volcano itself is like a lost sketch from The Kinks. I can almost hear Ray Davies’ sardonic whine all over this tune. On ‘Hot Venom,’ some kind of cartoonish calliope, or something from an old Atari game like Breakout, rings throughout. A Casio-keyboard patch provides the clave beat on ‘Tchaikovsky & Solitude.’ On ‘The Wolf,’ the Miniature Tigers’ lips are flaming to the beat of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You.’ The Beatles-esque ‘Giraffe’ breaks apart into grunge madness and static. And their homage to ‘Annie Oakley’ has the requisite hand-claps to lift up another average pop track.
By John Madera.
Elvis Lives
His mournful lyrics continue, as one might expect, in “Doomsday” but a live performance of this track would have you guessing at its apocalyptic bent: Nick Kinsey on an enormous marching bass drum, pounds away like a wind-up tin automaton. Elvis’s harmonica takes on a kazoo-like quality. A pair of bearded beauties, step in time to the slide of a trombone and the whiz of a saxophone and all that seems missing is the street to march down. All this and they still, rather inconceivably, retain enough energy to sing about the preferable avoidance of death! The ‘lalalas’ therefore become sarcastic, sardonic, and Kafkaesque.
A review of Elvis Perkins at the ICA by Fi Barham.
Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad
I wonder, is it the languid pace that draws, or rather, sucks me in, drags me down, to its mournfulness? Is it the bouncing-off-cave-walls background vocals? Perhaps it’s those sizzling maracas. But maybe the answer lies in its unabashed logorrhea, on the verge of “misspelling disaster.” One can only stand in awe, or should I say audacity, before the mouthful of “Tenuous at best was all he had to say when pressed about the rest of it, the world that is from proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans, Greek Cypriots and Hobis-hots, who hang around the ports a lot.” Has this guy been reading John Ashbery? Or Wallace Stevens at his most wonderfully inscrutable? ‘The Comedian As the Letter C,’ for instance. It’s that silver blur, that energetic opacity, but with a slippery tongue-twisting all his own.
John Madera thinks Andrew Bird‘s a Noble Beast.
The Scene That Celebrated Itself
As if to illustrate a huge blank canvas with what followed in that post-C86 era, da Bank kicks off the album with the honey-dripping and not at all un-famous via a certain OST (oh no) ‘Just Like Honey’ by East Kilbride’s finest JAMC. New York’s Ultra Vivid Scene, 4AD stalwarts and pretty much the innocent bystanders in the flurry of arguments against the self-reverential scene, gently progress matters with the almost pulsating drone of their biblical ‘Mercy Seat’ (”ring that bell as loud as you please / it can only make me well”).
Andrew Stevens reviews Rob da Bank‘s
Sohoitis XIII: Soho is Changing, But Into What?
I can hardly bare to walk down that end of Dean Street now and look at where once the Colony’s green doorway reigned and you knew that a hidden treasure of an afternoon lurked inside, and that not even the promise of a sunny day could cajole you out from the magic of some lost hours of laughter. Ah well that’s gone. Things have to change… even the sign has been removed.
Sophie Parkin mourns the passing of Soho’s glory days and wonders how we will dream away our five o’ clock deadlines in the future.
The Wife with a Double Life: A Memoir
Marriage brought me an expansive love out of a Russian novel. Monogamy, the first stage in our romantic cycle, gave way to a “tolerant marriage.” In the seventies love was in the air along with pot fumes at parties apt to start one day and end whenever. Our sexual horizons expanded along with our consciousness. Some years later a m énage à trois evolved that incorporated Letha, our significant other, whom we met in Paris.
Barbara Foster on m énage à trois.
Is David Seabrook Dead?
What started as a trickle of email and phone call rumour yesterday, had by today turned into a flood of conversation. The first message was from true crime author Neil Milkins: “Are you able to tell me if David Seabrook has died. I have had an email saying he died January 2009.” When Cathi Unsworth contacted me about Seabrook today, I was able to trace the rumour mill carrying this story back through a network of my friends via novelist David Peace to film director Paul Tickell. So I called Paul to get the story.
By Stewart Home.
