Robin Carmody messaged me on FB to say he’d just been reading my le carré rereads on ilx, and enjoyed and agreed with them. Since one of my projects here is I guess to begin to centralise my boringly dispersed and rhizomatic self, I thought I’d link them here. This is the original, inset in a longer ilx thread: liveblogging Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is the same excerpted at FT (i.e. all the rest of the entertaining ilx chatter cut away). This was intended as a liveblog of a reread of Smiley’s People, except things ran away with themselves and I ended up just posting some thoughts (on an ilx thread no one else ever contributed to).
spotted recently on freaky trigger: sükråt of that ilk
Notes on Adam Ant (the “paper” I gave at EMP in Seattle this year) and the Spice Wars (feat.Russ Meyer and Buffy and the Powerpuff girls and early ilx); a long note on Lady Di and the old weird England in the Popular thread on Elton John and Candle in the Wind ’97 — and the beginnings of a response to the various questions Frank Kogan asked in comments on the Oasis post, a response which is VERY LONG (9000+ words) and RUMINATIVE and SEMI-THOUGHT-THROUGH, and covers Burke, Keats, Wallace Stevens, the internalised bureaucracies of the institutionalised intellect (and where music fits into them); and what we mean by the words “thinking” and “clarity”.
straight girls who identify as “rotten women” (腐女)
the meat of the story is a bit grim, but this fact^^^ isn’t: “”Irony is the glory of slaves” is the quotation Seth likes. See also Nüshu, the same story from a very different angle
via jamie kenny, yr go-to source for the chinese underbelly
kerze
Over at Popular, Tom’s reached 1997 and Elton and Lady Di — his essay is of course excellent, and so are many of the (currently) 120+responses, especially Phil Sandifer’s, which is all about Blake and a haunted political unconcious. I’ve been superbusy all week, so my (very late, very long) comment is way down the pack; so I’m reposting it here also. Continue reading “kerze”
schoolroom vs hallway vs hallway
or, Maybe this is the best place for my mean little joke about why they called their fanzine “monitor” hoho
Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Scargill and Richard Jobson, among others. Tom Ewing and Frank Kogan are already arrived in the comments on excellent form: my fantasy thread would eventually also include Mark E. Smith, Robin Carmody and Robert Christgau duking it out with Liam and Noel Gallagher and maybe even one of the Appleton sisters…
“shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)
It was called Virtual Space and there was just one issue, “issue zero: place-kicks”. We made less than 20 copies, mostly by hunting round town for a photocopier with an A2 bed. It was an experiment, a mockup for a magazine, and it had no date appearing anywhere on its pages. (But it was early 1989, I’d just quit NME and wasn’t on-staff yet at The Wire.) We were serious: we went looking for funding. The other of the two being designer Paul Elliman, who’d just left The Wire. (Note to self: I haven’t seen Paul in an age and must call him up.) Continue reading ““shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)”
xmas interlude: what my sister does
she works at Tate Britain and among other things is responsible for these films
(we are very close, except she’s not on the internet much at all and i’m never off it) (possibly this helps us stay so close!)
ketchup 2013
Three things I wrote recently (a catalogue essay and two reviews). Silence is an Irish film, about sound and memory (and between the lines a reflection on the work of John Cage). Michael and Cornelius Cardew, father and son, were a potter and a composer respectively: this (PDF: scroll to p.5) was for the catalogue to the Crafts Council’s Sound Matters exhibition. 
And this is the teaser for the piece I wrote about post-war electronic music in Eastern Europe, though you’ll have to buy issue 86 of Eye magazine to read the whole thing. All three pieces somewhat hover round the tradition of the graphic score (pictured: Boguslaw Schaeffer’s PR I VIII), which has been all over the place recently: if I were a better journalist, I’d have got in early on this little flurry of trendiness, and then maybe some of the discussion would have been better also haha.
I was also Bob Stanley‘s editorial consultant for Yeah Yeah Yeah, which I loved working on and heartily recommend, even if I seem to have failed to convince him that Def Leppard are tremendous.
“He blows up an electronic brain”
The Godard Film Generator: electronic brain 1, jeanluc g 0.
(Via Geeta D on twitter, see you soon d00d)
ps apologies for non-presence here, i’ve been writing writing writing all summer: some blogging turned into an idea for a book, a chapter of which has escaped and all on its own turned back into a (book-length) blogpost… MORE SOON I THINK
everything is art while you’re talking about it
My friend Tallita just started a blog with me, about art, basically: we go to shows and talk about them and I write up some of what we talked about. (We made the decision to do this at the Yayoi Kusuma show at Tate Modern last year, hence the picture.)
[Update: blog.com seems have been having server trouble the last few days — hence the images all appearing as broken-image symbols… ]