ian penman's back

My impression of Ian Penman was fixed forever in the remote past. It happened when I read a very long essay by him in The Wire. The pretext of the essay was Billie Holiday. By the end of it I had only one thought in my mind: I must never be permitted to read anything this bad ever again..

The Wire had another reviewer at the time who maintained a more consistent level of badness. But somehow that Penman essay stood alone, unmatched.

serves you for reading the wire

I became very angry with The Wire for giving him print.

I think Penman's Pill Box blog was one of the more entertaining of its kind while it was still going, being refreshingly loose and acerbic and with a broader cultural range than most. He does have his ponderous moments though, which I fear the Jackson piece might be an example of, but maybe I'm wrong.

an insanely huge social history of Britain told through the story of Roxy Music

Perhaps the entire history of Britain could be told through the story of Roxy Music? With liberal use of analogy I think it could be pulled off, i.e. Brian Eno's exit from the band = the beheading of Charles I etc.

http://thequietus.com/articles/03545-the-resistible-demise-of-michael-jackson-reviewed

At the bottom, there is a small extract from his recent MJ piece.

see that bracewell book about roxy music is widely remaindered.

This book was kind of a bust. It covered the right stuff but, like all Bracewell, isn't that perceptive. It also has a weird thing where it'll spend a paragraph explaning who someone like, say, Andy Warhol is but will then namedrop some cybernetics pioneer with no explanation like you should know who they are. On Some Faraway Beach, the recent Eno biog, did a much better job of covering that side of things, and hopefully if Penman's ferry book appears it'll render the Bracewell completely pointless.

I effing love Penman so I hope his Ferry book does appear.

I probably wouldn't disagree with the lack of insight - Bracewell usually seems to be onto the right stuff, but without anything great to say (England is Mine felt like that) - but since I didn't know anything much about that world, it was informative. oh wait we've had this conversation before.

May look at that Eno biog - had written it off, can't remember why.

Lolz the Frith was pretty informative (knew half of it by piecing bits from music revs, which probably sourced from that bk anyway) but yeah a slog considering how exciting that subject is.

I think about that piece on the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as one of my faves of recent years. Paris Hilton thing also good. And so much else. But blogging is so 2002 or some such. Dislike that he isn't writing there anymore but its for the best.

He's never had a good collection => Vital Signs I loved at 18 or so but the pieces on Fassbinder/Jim Thompson aside its sorta unreadable now. I read Dave Hickey's Air Guitar a few weeks ago and I think if there could be a collection of essays with an agenda of sorts behind it, whereby you could a strength of feeling, his conceptions of things he writes about...maybe I could get behind that.

“It-don’t- matter-if-you’re: black-or-white.
It don’t MATTER
It isn’t matter
I am not matter
I am neither black nor white, I am black and white, black AS white, sometimes black sometimes white, sometimes beyond white...”

Ick.

yeah... mm.

i think in circumstances like these, the only thing you can do is blame the editor.

Vital Signs I loved at 18 or so but the pieces on Fassbinder/Jim Thompson aside its sorta unreadable now.

idk, really? i don't think this at all. it's not perfect. i think i like penman best when he isn't being a pale theory boy, ie reviewing TV for the NME. or taking down tarantino. actually wtf dude? 'vital signs' has that takedown of zappa which is one of the best bits of music criticism i've ever read ever! the theory stuff dates very badly, whereas dissing robert elms doesn't -- dats my opinions anyway.

to clarify: i like him best when he's just reviewin' tv shows, or spoofing celebrity memoirs, or taking down hip (tarantino was basically hip) sacred cows. not when he's in jacques derrida mode.

I agree entirely. It's strange the way someone who's capable of such irreverence and irony is also in thrall to a lot of, "When I am sitting down, I am actually standing up, but merely with a greater emphasis on the horizontal. I think a system of gradations of horizontalism would be more semantically satisfying than the stark sit down-stand up dichotomy." etc etc.

"'vital signs' has that takedown of zappa which is one of the best bits of music criticism i've ever read ever!"

Totally. I reread that essay about once a year.

Nah, enjoyed it enough at the time but now I think its the weakest music related essay in that collection. Zappa was shit but its way to easy to shoot down the guitar geek crowd while propping up the dub constituency (in the Pablo essay) - we're all record collectors (as in over 17 and perhaps quite into listening to older stuff by mostly dead people) here and have our own damn quirks. Zappa is put down as a dabbler but he really dabbled in what seemed to be EVERYTHING. I never spent an awful lot of time on it but his ear always seemed so intent on sabotaging his ideas; it was really OFF in a weird way I've never gotten to the bottom of, maybe the point at which the counterculture really goes off (he discusses that in a great rant against John Sinclair). But Ian never even bothered, instead of going for an obnoxious 'I am a punk and I did not listen to punk to write about this'.

Compare that to the Tricky and Tim Buckley essays. Way more engaged, in both mind and ear.

I wouldn't separate the daytime TV watching Ian to the Derrida reading Ian. I guess I'm comparing Ian to Dave Hickey. Looking over Vital... there are lots of great pieces but plenty of flab (are those essay on curry, beer and drugs worth revisiting?). It would be nice if a selection came out where you got a flavour of what battles he fought and won and lost (I kinda know, then again I've read way more than what's on that book). Its all way too scattered at the minute.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_4_diarist-charity-shops.html

of all the places for him to turn up...

He is working on a book-length study of Billie Holiday.

i.e. a book

Pitiless on Patti Smith.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/ian-penman/ways-to-be-pretentious

Great piece and worth reading before/after watching the doc on Mapplethorpe that's doing the rounds atm. In that the cover for Horses is celebrated but the cover for Wave is not mentioned.

New book out today

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/14/it-gets-me-home-this-curving-track-by-ian-perlman-review

heard a sad story recently of one old NME star who now flogs his record collection from a table outside a tube station.

?

Can't say I'm that excited for these. A lot of them are fine enough at first but looking back they just seem like work for an audience that doesn't need these essays to exist (I think ILM has said what it needed to on the Prince one lol).

Really feels like he is running away from the work that made his name and I wonder what's up with that.

but where would "the work that made his name" be published?

I'm saying is this collection could've been a selection from his 80s work instead of re-printing essays published in the last 2/3 years?

he already has a collection of his 80s work tho

Hmm vital signs? I don't know feels like there are gaps?

well it's VS is his selection of his own work from that era (and the early 90s also) -- i mean maybe he'd choose a bunch of different stuff this time (but i have often had the impression that he doesn't actually *like* a lot of the work that others found important, plus a lot of it is very situational, as music-writing and TV writing tends to be, and doesn't quite work any more without more contextualisation than a collection of just his work cold deliver)

plus it would amplify the "didn't you used to be ian penman?" problem (i am not as big an unfan of his recent work as some tho i admit i have not yet tackled the prince piece lol)

if it's true he's not currently at his best that's more grist for the "LRB editors no longer pulling their weight" argument of course

Ok "more contextualisation" could explain it because what this collection comes off as a somewhat lazy re-print seeking to cater for the people who are chasing him for product. He could just tell us where to go, it's fine, but why do this instead..

(I do like lots and lots of VS btw, but yeah there was some of mid-90s Wire-era work that was real good in there, not just 80s)

Of the pieces in the new book I have only read the Mod one, and that one's tremendous, so I for one am looking forward to it. I am super-relaxed about IP and me both having the chance to be lazy.

Those Fitzcarraldo white covers are a menace, mind.

i mean i think this is very much part of LRB's own promotional backstroking outreach and self-funding project and to be honest rather IP than the lanch or AO'H!!

... genuine/apocryphal rock n roll rebel LoL ... someone sitting in back rows of last night's @LRBbookshop event tells me that when I mentioned my love for Frank Ocean, Solange & Lana Del Ray, a certain Mr B Gillespie shook his head in bewilderment/disgust... 😂

— Ian Penman (@pawboy2) September 11, 2019

good for him, what a self-congratulatory shithead

Ok, the piece on Prince wasn't good, got it.