I like Ian Penman a lot

I haven't seen much of the famous NME stuff he made his reputation with (which might be a good thing, going on the one piece I've seen: an Elvis Costello review which remains, to this day, the one piece of music writing I can remember that made absolutely ZERO SENSE to me from the first word to the last).

I've never noticed a Penman influence in your stuff Jess.

I'm not sure if it's endearing or sad that he still clings so tight to Derrida.

But yes, the Tricky thing is great. Not enough other great stuff in Vital Signs to make me understand why he's so revered. Would definitely like to see a better collection.

xpost - he's revered partly because he's so influential.

(Those two points contradict each other a bit, oops.)

xxpost - Enrique are you using Derrida as a stand-in for 'any French theory' there?

I wonder what % of ppl bought Vital signs bcz of his music writing instead of all the other stuff he writes abt.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being into Derrida per se. I just would have expected someone who's been into him for that long to have developed a slightly more critical relationship.

My fave Penman stuff wd be the 'Barthesian' stuff abt non-musical, non-highbrow stuff.

natalie -- yeah, Simon R quoted him about it for the Ucunt postpunk article the other year.

Which begs the question of why he's so influential...

Actually I can probably guess the answer to that. I would just "get it" better if I had read more really good stuff by him. VS is so patchy.

It is sad he's stopped doing it but personal blogs like that have a definite lifespan. It's a very rare blog - of whatever quality/style/subject - that stays as good as its first six months.

that's quite a sad sentence, jess.

i re-re-re-read his tricky piece for the first time yesterday and it is phenomenal.

i dunno if i've told this before, but -. the only proper fan mail i ever got ws from ian penman when i wrote my 69 ls thing. i opened up the email and it just said '69 thing: WOW'. i don't think any feeling is better than a note from one of your heroes.

i know what you mean about the wire making you unhappy but Rob Young has stepped down as Editor so there's hope. The New Editor is David Keenan.

(Nah its actually someone called Chris Bohn)

The best thing chris could do is bring those kind of features back, the worst he could is concentrate on the 'industrial' music side of things (they should def expand the things they are covering but whatever, it will have to get REALLY bad for me to stop buying it).

x-post: apparently so. But a scary one.

but I think its a bit more complicated: their coverage of clasical increased but there was some funny stuff (dizzee being high on the writers poll but not even getting a feature, or a proper review, in the mag).

x-post: yeah that was funny. i get it was the handover cover and it would be a bad sign.

(as well all know it can be hard to get hold of that kind of stuff)

x-post

Marcello got it right - Wire is becoming a magazine for 40 year old ex-Goths. Fuck Coil/ Current 93 and all that garbage.

I like Ian Penman too but he overdoes the punning and wordplay and he likes Coil.

maybe next month we can look forward to that long awaited alec empire reappraisal... total destruk-shun the only solu-shun la la la

(and current 93 can be marvellous).

x-post

x-post: which one tico? I have 'sleep has his house', mostly short songs, very pared down folk and the last track is palestine like minimalism (he of course cut the karenina double CD on david tibet's durtro label). Its my only one of theirs but its triffic!!!

mark s = Mark Sinker

Duh! How hilarious.

i've seen ip several times since his blog froze, and he wz fine, but only spoke once since j.balance died (which hit him v.hard) so what jerry said :(

hi dada! sorry i wz so taciturn on thur, i wz just v.tired and somewhat preoccupied

"Here we are again with the problems of producing music, hearing music writing about same. Here we are again with... on the one hand, a proposition such as The Fall, on the other such doleful music press hacks and cultural consumerist quacks as practice little more than daily breadwinning, more concerned with the width of a riff than the quality of language."

Ian Penman, NME, 1980

"And so we come to the business of constructing pop in 1986. Of tugging, tearing, forgetting, pretending. Of joy, despair, artifice. And still we find falling in love and saying "no" communicated in simply awful cyphers scraped on bright red plastic. The haircut appears to be mightier than the word."

Paul Mathur, Melody Maker, 1986

Mathur went on, of course, to write books about Oasis.

But I think Penman's style, the kind he still uses on his blog (and I see traces of it in Mark S's cryptic infoldings, showy opacities and loose grammar) has dated very badly. The surprise winner of 1980s UK rock writing's Posterity Awards is (for me, at least) the Smash Hits school pioneered by Neil Tennant, Chris Heath, Sylvia Patterson, Tom Hibbert. I have no idea whether any of these people have blogs. I hear Neil has a band, though.

When he does this he seems to me to be in thrall to a romantic / authenticist paradigm, in which the purpose of music is seen as a channel between those who are able to feel that bit more deeply than other people.

Even the "fun" involved sounds like hard work.

It's like a peculiarly rockist anti-rockism and I suspect that the trajectory that Paul Morley's writing has taken is in part inspired by a reaction against it.

Just noticed that his name is misspelt as Ian Menman on the back of the Wire/Scott Walker book

"Ian Penman, who started writing for the NME in 1977, is working on a novel about music and terror in 1970s Britain."

And I for one can't wait.

Not gonna happen

His stuff for the lrb has been really good

I like the idea of it.

Oh me too! But I remember that his byline always used to say he was "working on" books about Bryan Ferry and Billie Holiday (the latter even had a title, Pretty White Flowers)

His twitter is the best:

https://twitter.com/pawboy2

Charity shop finds, his reading, what he's watching on daytime 5USA, BBC2 etc. Pics of writers and their cats.

Thinking I might even get a twitter account now.

I was kidding btw..

yeah when I looked at twitter that was the main one I looked at

I see his contributing to the LRB at the moment.

oh look, someone already said that.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/ian-penman/wham-bang-teatime

This was good although some of these pieces (taken together over time and I'd need to re-read and check) begin to read like 'well I read every biog of (x) and this one from (y) year does the job'. A lot of reaction against the shape of 'legacy' and how that is being written-up.

The section on Morley was a nice lesson on writing about someone you are fond of when they don't do a good job.

Gently rips into Reynold's thing and fair with it.

I'm sorry he didn't acknowledge Bowie-scepticism more, and this detail is simply wrong (I think he's thinking of Al Jaffee's fold-ins, which appeared on the back cover of Mad) - It’s impossible to imagine something like Bowie’s masterpiece Low (1977) coming out now, an album split down the middle like an old Mad centrepiece

beautifully written and well-thought, one of the best things I've ever read about Bowie. absolutely agree with his assessment of the middling middle years and his frank/fair take on both Reynolds and Sheffield.

What a turn of phrase:

...golden youths picked up and polished then abandoned by Machiavellian gay managers. (One key difference between Mark Feld and David Jones was that the latter was maybe happier to go that extra inch.)

So much shade thrown in this piece.

^ Yes, and thank god for that. Morley/Reynolds/Sheffield get thrown so many free passes and none of these books look, on the surface, to be terribly inspiring.

think he's thinking of Al Jaffee's fold-ins, which appeared on the back cover of Mad) [...] split down the middle like an old Mad centrepiece

You're both wrong, it's the IBC and Jaffee is still doing them

omg someone has to write a pedantic letter to the lrb

I say this as a fan both of the piece and of pedantic letters to the lrb

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/fitzcarraldo-editions-acquires-music-critic-penmans-first-book-20-years-954786

So it looks like this will be a collection of some of his work for the LRB.

Oh nice. Fitzcarraldo publishing it is maybe a good sign that we might actually see this “novel about terror and music in the 1970s” too

Penman on Kraftwerk in LRB! But two major errors, in the second paragraph! pic.twitter.com/QExMLAtqp8

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) September 2, 2020

Penman has turned his attention on Kraftwerk and it's interesting how the reception for these LRB pieces are in a bit of a turn around. Don't remember them inviting as much criticism at the beginning.

Don't get how the first sentence fits with the rest, also Kraftwerk not always "lush," Detroit techno not always zombie pock glare: seems like too big a hurry w the news of yore.

That para aside I think this is pretty good, much because he doesn't like Kraftwerk (which I disagree with -- surely Kraftwerk were more knowing and not so celebrating of rationalisation and tech, for one*) or the book he is reviewing (sounds terrible from the quotes).

*and Stockhausen is a gap when he gets to mapping out West German culture

And an... interesting mention of Mark Fisher that is sorta left there lol

Although I wish the LRB give him a go at Warhol instead of Colm fucking Toibin.

Yah this is crap

P crap issue

At least Frances Stonor Saunders has closed the case, not that anybody cared.

lol i was going to ask if anyone was reading that

I envy him for inspiring Robyn Hitchcock to write "The Lonesome Death of Ian Penman," which is prob even better than "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fuckin' Dick," not that I've ever heard better.

ever heard EITHER! SHIT!

is he the "tantalizing enigma of The Cure" guy as per 'grinding halt'?

At least Frances Stonor Saunders has closed the case, not that anybody cared.

i skipped to the end to see if she opened the suitcase. spoiler: she didn't.

lol, i don't even know what that is

the kraftwerk bit is so annoying because he uses so many incorrect facts to reinforce his arguments and is very condescending about knowing more about west german pop culture in the 1970s than you although in actual fact he just mentions a couple of bands, painters and film directors that literally everybody knows. its a bit sad. but yeah the warhol thing jesus. that gopnik book does sound atrocious from the bits he quotes

He used to be active on Twitter, but has disappeared in recent months.

I remember his takedown of Bonnie Prince Billy in The Wire, which felt a little unfair

"very condescending about knowing more about west german pop culture in the 1970s than you although in actual fact he just mentions a couple of bands, painters and film directors that literally everybody knows."

Kinda, would your LRB reader know about Fassbinder and Neu, some would but maybe a quite a few wouldn't? (That ofc says a lot about the LRB, or how I perceive it) I liked that he didn't mention the literature of the time.

The point seemed to be that all of the stuff he mentioned stood the test of time a lot more? It's not really true when it comes to the other German stuff but Moroder, that Soft Cell single etc...I think he was more interested in destroying the elevation of Kraftwerk above say disco as described in the book and in that sense it scanned for me.

I think the weird bit was when he blamed KW for not anticipating Brexit and Covid on Europe Endless.

Ha! One of my work colleagues sent me scans of this piece, but I got so eye-rolly at the first thing I saw - which was one of the footnotes, uncritically repeating a well-worn joke (which is actually completely factually untrue) which has become part of the whole ~Kraftwerk mythos~ - that I didn't bother reading the rest of it until this morning.

It's just riddled with errors and assumptions, but granted many of those assumptions may be down to the shoddiness of Schütte's book. Which I was actually quite hotly anticipating, as he is the professor who instituted the academic conferences on Kraftwerk, and should know his stuff - but found incredibly disappointing. Schütte's whole schtick was that he is a serious professor of German language and German culture, so he was going to ignore ~personal gossip~ in favour of culture and serious criticism - the end result being, that he had almost zero first-hand sources, and so very little factual material at all.

I'm going to lay bang my usual drum here - the joke that Schütte repeated and Penman quoted, was about how "women were banned from KlingKlang". If you actually bother reading the liner notes for the records, you will discover this simply wasn't true - Barbara Niemoller, Rebecca Allen, Sandhya Whaley are three women I can think of just off the top of my head, who were in their studio and involved with their records. But for Schütte, as for many ~writers on Kraftwerk~ it's a sexist landgrab, about removing the *many* actual women from Kraftwerk's story, as a way of rendering Kraftwerk's oevre and subject matter - computers, cars, nightclubs, techno - as male space. It's gross.

*Good* writers on Kraftwerk actually bother getting into how *intertwined* Kraftwerk were with disco - they loved disco and discoteques and dancing? This supposed elevation of "Kraftwerk over disco" is a bizarre interpolation which has nothing to do with contemporary Kraftwerk. The review is kind of a confused mess, riddled with factual errors and ahistorical assertions - but so is Schütte's book, to be fair.

xp I also thought that, but if that's the case the article is even more useless, what does it tell you at all about Krautrock? About the german new wave? About the welfare state, youth culture, drug scenes, government support for the arts in germany? Its just a list of bands that the reader has presumably never heard of. All it adds to the article is to register that the author is "an authority." I could find you a similar authority in every record shop in the country and round up legion of them in the youtube comments under 'Ananas Symphonie.' The main problem with this information is that its just in the article not doing anything, not informing anyone - its just additionally annoying that its so smugly deployed.

I can imagine the 'women were banned' being a mistranslation of "Wives/girlfriends were banned" but I don't know if that's true either

Both Barbara Niemoller and Sandhya Whaley were girlfriends, so...

The thing that's frustrating is that Schütte *IS*, technically and absolutely, an "Expert". He has done more serious scholarship on late 20th Century German contemporary music than anyone else currently working in the country, and his contributions to Kraftwerk scholarship are enourmous.

But that actually just points to the seriously depleted state of German (or indeed any kind of continental European) scholarship in the UK - which does fit into the whole brexit / ignorance of Europe narrative.

branwell you shd totally write a letter to the LRB -- you're a kraftwerk scholar! maybe not all the mistakes lol but definitely pick up the girlfriends error, since it's a tired repeat tale well worth skewering, and the flaws in the schutte book despite his being an expert, since IP is not learned enough to know this

you owe it to their readership (me xyz and pinefox)

i fear they're beginning to use IP as their all-purpose pop-culture correspondent, just tossing all the books of a certain kind on the penman pile -- which is a v bad trap for him if so (most pop-culture bores him these days as i think this probably proves, and his sensibility is these days far better directed at non-music things that interest him) (filmns! tho that's probably tied up tight as well)

lol i'm pitching an idea to them RIGHT NOW so i am invested in them getting a shiver of doubt abt this being his patch and his alone -- commission me u haughty fvcks im dying out here

all the books of a certain kind -- which often turn out to be shitty books and in process of responding to shitty stuff in them he's filling his essays with kinda shitty stuff? I am pro-penman and take no pleasure in reporting this

"also thought that, but if that's the case the article is even more useless, what does it tell you at all about Krautrock? About the german new wave? About the welfare state, youth culture, drug scenes, government support for the arts in germany?"

Yes I would like to read more on this but wouldn't it be outside the scope of the article? The book -- as presented -- seems to be using Kraftwerk to re-draw German pop/avant-garde in relation to Anglo pop, hence the anxious comparison of Kraftwerk to the Beatles and Kraftwerk as grandfather to strands of Black American pop. Penman was more interested in drawing attention to that, but he's engaged with quite a lot of the culture Kraftwerk are coming from, so he includes that to ask 'Why Kraftwerk? They weren't even the best that place had to offer!'?

xps

I am like there is good there is bad in this. But I think LRB towers are perhaps too easily impressed by the good, and they don't have the ppl/desire to fact-check the bad because their heart is not in it.

exactly >:(

they shd pay ilx to fact-check and style-police their articles

I'm not saying Schütte is careless about basic acts of scholarship and factchecking, but when David Stubbs interviewed him at the book release, they tried to make quite a feature of "this is the first book about Kraftwerk written by a *German*!!!" which rendered me almost apoplectic in the front row, immediately raising the point, "Actually, it is at least the THIRD, the first two German books about Kraftwerk were written by gentlemen named Herr Flür and Herr Bartos!!!" at which point I got shushed and they stopped taking questions from the floor.

Schütte's point, that he is trying to make in the book, is that he is *trying* to recontextualise Kraftwerk within the German Art-and-Pop-Art culture of the 70s, which is fair enough, a noble game. Kraftwerk were extremely underappreciated in their native land for the bulk of their success, most journalism - and scholarship - on them is in English, often written by English and American writers who were weirdly fetishishist about their Germanness - often in hugely negative ways. (He discussed at length, the Lester Bangs interview where Bangs repeatedly baited them, trying to get Hütter, who was waxing enthusiastic about technology, to use the phrase "final solution" haha, gotcha, Germans are all nazis, but fortunately Hütter was actually clever enough to recognise what was happening, and pulled back sharply from the conversation.) Hence why Schütte was trying to place them within the context of German art, the famous art school at Düsseldorf feat. Beuys, the Bechers etc - and would portray Kraftwerk's relationship with African-American music as being one-way, rather than the mutal appreciation it actually was.

I'm not sure I'd even know *how* to write a letter to the LRB, where would I find their address? Do they even have email? Also, can I be bothered to chase down the origin of that quote (Schütte's book, annoyingly, has no index). My memory is, it was a joke that Schneider made (ironic, given it was Schneider's girlfriends who turned up in the credits most often) - but whether he made the joke to a journalist, or indeed to Rebecca Allen, or if it was something that Flür repeated in his book (Given Flür's antics, it wouldn't be a surprise if they didn't allow *his* girlfriends) would provide a lot of context about what was actually intended.

Doing proper "dig out the books" fact-checking is not fun when you're not getting paid for it!

But I certainly support LRB giving all their dosh to Mark S to write something proper.

the email address for letters is lett✧✧✧@l✧✧.c✧.u✧

i feel that all you have to do is say
(a) but girlsfriends DID visit (list of names appended) and
(b) also contributed to the project (example of credits)
(c) the source of this was almost certainly a joke to a journalist (probably florian's joke)
(d) ironic considering whose girlfriends are most often credited etc

and then be catty abt some of the failings you've already listed, given the potential strengths

it's not a footnotey place (the letterspage least of all)

Thanks for the tips - but that's an awful lot of wingdings, Mark please could you email me the address? (if you've forgotten my email, the webmail for ILX does currently work for this account)

lol sorry i forgot that would happen

sent via ilxmail

Cheers! I received it - and also the old email you have for me is still correct. ta x

xx cool

Haven't read the Penman/Kraftwerk piece yet, but I wonder if his scepticism is in some ways a response to Paul Morley's effusiveness in a recentish tv documentary on Kraftwerk ("more influential than the Beatles" etc) - Penman & Morley being something like the Hutter and Schneider of English rockwrite for readers of a certain age.

I can't believe he's not Hutter. apologies, threadbanned myself.

It’s this passing of the baton [to black dance producers], as much as any merit their own music may possess, on which Kraftwerk’s inviolable reputation now rests.

Eeeeeeyikes

re context of German culture: the earliest Ralf-Florian music I've come across on YouTube, incl. Organisation's Tone Float, the first two Kraftwerk albums (also the third, [possibly reissued as] Ralf and Florian, which I heard and loved in the late-ish 70s), also some very early live sets, incl on TV, are v. different than later, yet unmistakably them, with this exuberant, confident, already expert (in terms of they know what they think and feel and how to make up *this*) response to jazz, r&b, rock: of thee tymes-to-times, '69-70 and steps beyond----and I wonder: how they were received, by colleagues, crits, the kids, man!? Play that flute, Florian.

Like if they were welcomed as part of the scene(s), then I wanna go there, at least in more music and histories---point me toward the gateway, please.

i know but everybody had such bad hair/outfits

Another mistake in that Kraftwerk piece:

"If Kraftwerk’s inarguable four album apex – from Autobahn (1974) to Computer World (1981) – does stand up, one of the reasons is that its unique sound hasn’t noticeably aged."

They put out five studio albums between 1974-1981, not four. I mean, these errors aren't life or death, but there are quite a lot of them in this one.

The one that annoyed me most was the suggestion that the neon signs appeared when they expanded to four members and started looking 'spiffy.'

Neon signs were already in place by the album cover of Ralf und Florian (at the very latest) so...

It's just that the endless number of small but easily avoidable errors do point to the fact that he knows very little about the band - and that his piece wasn't edited or even factchecked in any way, which is a problem.

LRB said they were 'considering' publishing my letter, which they probably say to everyone.

...I don't actually have a subscription, so if anyone sees a letter from KDT, please let me know!

the letters page is free to read I believe
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/letters

So he's not mad about their music, he doesn't seem to know that much about them . . . so why was he chosen to write something about them at all?

I say this as someone who never saw Penman's 1970s/1980s stuff but has enjoyed most of the things he's written for the LRB in recent years.

I actually felt in some sympathy with IP about Kraftwerk's reputation being out of proportion to their music or achievement -- yet I thought his review was also terrible in many ways.

The irrelevant reference to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, frantically signalling that he's read it but failing to show any connexion between it and Kraftwerk, is trumped by the dire last couple of columns in which he makes snide offhand remarks about EU politics he knows little about, in a context that has almost nothing to do with the book or the band.

sadly he's now the LRB's designated expert on *all* music-centred pop culture

i mean it used to be eagleton: it's a step up from him bcz IP does actually know quite a lot about some music

Give the LRB rock critic gig to Perry Anderson you cowards.

Give the LRB rock critic gig to Perry Anderson you cowards.

I suppose we should be grateful they haven't given it to Runciman.

it's kind of a triumph they've opened the door this far tbh -- it comes at a cost, it's not remotely aimed abt super-knowledgeable music-board nerds and there's a risk the correction will just mean the shutting of the door

I'm a pretty casual kraftwerk fan and not at all a music nerd thank you and I spotted several

Mark S: what music did Terry Eagleton review for the LRB?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n06/terry-eagleton/allergic-to-depths

^^^a review of richard davenport-hines's gothic: four hundred years of excess, horror, evil and ruin: i have not read this book (it may well be bad) but other reviews correctly mention goth-the-music as a key vector in the story it tells, of the return of the gothic. TE doesn't.

also, early on, he writers this: "an english film, made in 1962, was responsible for five thousand fainting cases in cinemas, 75 per cent of them male"

if this film exists he should name it! at the time (pre-internet) i strongly doubted its existence (outside dodgy marketing claims), and researched and could find no candidate, and considered writing a letter and actually jotted notes towards one which i probably still have lol

anyway the pattern is identical: TE is assumed to be an authority in this territory, and is allowed to make sweeping claims abt a pop-cultural (music-related) item and no one fact-checks or pushes back

Does the existence of this review suggest that TE was, before Penman, the LRB's "designated expert on *all* music-centred pop culture" ?

ADDING (bcz my blood is now up):
there ARE some notoriously gory hammer draculas which are possible candidates once you overlook the incorrect date: i suspect this is a botched description, complete with bogus marketing bullshit abt male cinema-goers fainting en masse, of terence fisher's 1958 dracula, or of one of its successors (none made in 1962: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Film_Productions#Dracula_2)

so: date wrong, no title, highly unlikely reception-theory anecdote guilelessly regaled, important music-related pop-cultural connection simply flubbed and no one involved knew or even noticed

(in the interests of fact-checking myself, 1999 is not strictly speaking "pre-internet" but it is pre the use of google as a quick fact-checking tool and also pre the kinds of sites that gather such information in easy-read fashion)

xp: i don't think they had anything so focused back then, or imagined they needed it -- "all this stuff is the same and factual accuracy doesn't matter" is how i break it down to an extent

LRB first mentions suggests that Jeremy Hardy was the first person to review a book about pop (CSM's Hendrix book 'Crosstown Traffic'), but that the most frequent pop contributor has been... Dave Haslam. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

haslam did land that gig, yes, but i always felt he was pitching stuff to them rather than vice versa -- i haven't spotted his name for an age tho

I'm afraid it was Jeremy Harding.

Jeremy Hardy might have been more entertaining.

That is one for "I always get those two confused" thread :0

Dave Haslam has now taken up the post of official Morrissey racism correspondent iirc.

I think it's being forgotten that JOHN LAHR has been writing lots of the LRB's music coverage in the last 5 years or so (I admit that years get hard to remember in LRB terms).

I once wrote a letter complaining about one of Lahr's reviews. On balance I'm glad it wasn't published.

It's possible that the history of LRB popular music coverage has been poor or lamentable. But Terry Eagleton would be bemused to hear that he had anything to do with it.

as ever his bemusement is my goal

A couple of Kraftwerk letters in the new issue, neither from Branwell, and a truly terrible, condescending and offensive review of Dylan Jones' New Romantics book by O'Hagan

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/andrew-o-hagan/i-m-being-a-singer

Can Mark S read the Dylan Jones book and write to the LRB in defence of it?

I'm sure the book is awful - Dylan Jones certainly is. But AO'H's review is even worse. New Romanticism was "the revenge of the poofs" apparently.

the only time i worked for DJ (c.1989) he accepted my pitch (good), was absolutely civil to work with (good), and failed to run my byline on the piece (bad ffs)

i own his book HAIRCULTS and have his OK-ish collection of music-writing on long er borrow from a ilxor who no longer posts (hence won't be reminded by this to grab it back)

I used to buy DJ's review copies/freebies (always an impressive haul) when I worked in a 2ndhand bookshop. Again, he was extremely pleasant to deal with, I'm sorry to say.

Doesn't sound good tbh. But I like films and comparing films. Which can get boring.

https://cinema-scope.com/books/the-self-in-shards-ian-penmans-fassbinder-thousands-of-mirrors/

The book market has been flooded with writerly autobiography for a while now...take a good few years for this fashion to pass.

Yes, doesn't sound great. I'll no doubt read it eventually.

book's out on fitzcarraldo in the UK but semiotext(e) in the US, which IP must be pleased about -- he might well be the portal thru which semiotext(e) arrived in the semi-popular domain in the uk

there's an interview-by-email abt it at the quietus

penman (like me tbh) is of a generation where bringing the writer into the body of the criticism was key to the project as an active political device: the name at the time for this was "the new journalism" and it was considered an assault on an earlier generation's claims to unbiddable cultural authority -- doubly so in music-writer terms when the revanchist editorial at Q magazine arrived to push back against it, a hostility to subjectivity (and "self-indulgence") that functioned primarily to establish the objective dadrock canon lol

as the board's leading dadrock melt (prefers film to TV) chairman alph cannot to be expected to grasp the politics here :p

Shame bcz that piece on Fassbinder in Vital Signs was a perfect introduction.

xp - sorry to break it to you mark but IP is writing about a guy who mostly made films. And he writes about books and films for the LRB!

This "new journalism" stuff is in the dust. The kids are voting for slow four hour films now as "best of all time".

New Journalism (a dull name I admit) was 1960s, though (Capote, Mailer), and Penman really started in the 1980s? -- so that must be quite a long tail of New Journalism by the time he arrives.

I don't know Fassbinder, but I reflect that IP has now written a book about German films and recently a long LRB essay about French poetry. I don't know how fluent he is, at this point, in either language. Does it matter? I think the short answer is yes. If I wrote a Fitzcarraldo book on French cinema I would expect to have to show them my credentials in the language, and I would probably take several months improving it (which would be good for me).

his best writing has always been abt TV (and fassbinder also made TV)

all polls are bad anyway, polls that don't include TV, youtube, vine & tiktok are mere reactionary sludge

xp to PF: the big "new journalism" compilation that ported the idea (as a named method and a shared stance) into the UK was published by picador in 1975; penman began writing in 1978 i think

so yes, while i think there *was* in a sense a long tail (the then not-unusual translatlantic delay in pop cultural matters), the upsurge of the approach in uk-based writing depended as much as anything on appropriate platforms not being available until the 70s (the alt-listings press and the rock press): the US in the 60s had an ecology of glossy monthlies and biweeklies, where the form was born -- the equivalent in the uk had long vanished (unsure why: need to explore this)

If only we could consult a big recent edited collection of essays about the UK music press in this period!

He just started following me on Twitter, lol

"his best writing has always been abt TV"

I think if I were to list my three short favourite pieces on Vital Signs these would be on Fassbinder, Jim Thompson and Rockford Files. Let's not put a limit here in the service of a not v convincing argument.

"all polls are bad anyway, polls that don't include TV, youtube, vine & tiktok are mere reactionary sludge"

You filled in a ballot in a poll that did not contain this 🤔

haha i just had a quick look at the "big recent edited" etc and yes, while New Journalism is mentioned several times it is generally treated by all and sundry there as a key liberatory precursor rather than the rubric under which ppl were still writing -- and to be honest when i'm not razzing the very razzable xyz i am probably more conficted abt its legacy than not

for example here in my um obit for tom wolfe: https://www.patreon.com/posts/invisible-dandy-18869032

🤔🤔🤔

i have to add that i haven't got past the second paragraph of that review yet, it is NOT enticingly written

I see that the review quotes Sinclair's praise of Penman. This reminds me that reading IP's recent Baudelaire article I saw how very very often he wrote like Sinclair, and I wondered which had influenced which, if either.

ILX..the board where all roads lead to Sinclair. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

Making my way through this review.

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/ian-penman-rainer-werner-fassbinder-thousands-of-mirrors-postwar-counterculture

"The music press became more corporate and poptimistic"

🤔

"Sharp and punchy and streamlined, his songs are like episodes of a TV series that had yet to be made by anyone."

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/chuck-berry-an-anthropologist-of-filth/

"I mean, cocaine was associated in the punk years with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and all this mellow, mellow rock, what they now call “yacht rock,” and I couldn’t work it out, because how could you mellow out if you’ve taken cocaine?"

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/writer-ian-penman-on-foucault-freelancing-and-the-films-of-fassbinder

two writers i can't stand, a real meeting of the minds

I like cocaine

Did I say cocaine? I'm sorry I meant reading poetry.

if you like Ian Penman so much why don't u marry him

I like everyone

The fassbinder book is good

How much of it is actually about Fassbinder

Enough

The fassbinder book is good

― Grandall Flange (wins), Friday, 16 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Will probably get it, that discussion was good

Just read through Owen Hatherley's piece on Fassbinder in the LRB. I love how Penman really reviews the book (the first review I put way up the thread was bad), wrestles with the content of it. The section where he writes about Fassbinder's abuse is powerful too.

Does Hatherley touch on the fact that Penmman barely mentions any of the actresses that Fassbinder worked with?

Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles aren't yacht rock ffs

xp: no, but I don't think it's a thorough study of Fassbinder?

Nitpicking but "Why Does Herr R Run Amok?" is not a "minimalist film noir set among the lowlife the Federal Republic".

Maybe he was thinking of “The American Soldier”?

Sorry my original post is how OH really reviews IP's book.

Of course

Maybe he was thinking of “The American Soldier”?

Well, there's three (interconnected) films that fit the description and Herr R isn't one of them.

Gotcha - I love OH and largely enjoyed the Penman book (and love Fassbinder too) so am excited to read, cheers for the heads up.

Anyone reading his book on Satie?

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/erik-satie-three-piece-suite/

There's a review of it in the LRB - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n14/jonathan-coe/don-t-we-all-want-to-be-happy

Yeah I saw...don't know if Jonathan Coe was the best choice of reviewer but I will look

Get that the the whole vibe he was going for was playful quotidian sprezzatura but felt quite insubstantial to me.