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)

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.