| HERE”S A FEW THINGS THAT
FILLED THE VOID OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF MONTHS.
THE JOY OF TEXT
The most rivetting page turning book I’ve read lately is a
piece of faction, thoroughly researched & racingly written by
Village Voice reporter FRANK OWEN . “CLUBLAND CONFIDENTIAL
“ has characters, plot, sex, drugs, crime & violence that
would seem over the top in most novels but is actually a sorry tale
of what really happened in the rise of club culture in New York
& Miami & is based around a grisly murder commited by club
kid Michael Aleg, also the subject of the book/movie “Party
Animal” featuring Macaulay Culkin as the deranged drug fucked
misfit currently languishing in jail for some of his crimes. Then
there’s the homicidal club owners’ rivalries played
out like outtakes from “Good Fellas”, while all the
time the beat goes on on the dancefloors & the drugs get taken
anywhere & everywhere, Owen is himself a former club goer, so
his writing on drugs, in particular Ketamine, has an authentic first
hand tone. Stranger than fiction.
JONATHAN LETHEM is a versatile & prolific
modern American writer who has a deftness of style & an almost
invisible presence in his writing that gives his imaginative flights
a lightness & quiet compassion missing in many of his contemporaries’
work. “MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN “ is as good a place as any
to start, a convoluted & confusing crime plot in the style of
Dashiel Hammet with the added twist of having a protagonist who
has Tourette’s Syndrome solving the people puzzle in spite
of his inappropriate outbursts & wordplay explosions, it’s
all splendidly entertaining. But the real star of the show is Lethem’s
subtle storytelling style.
Over 10 or so novels CARL HIASSEN has established
himself as the master of the comic thriller in the great tradition
of Elmore Leonard, hilarious characters, outrageous plotting &
gritty street smarts. His latest, SKINNY DIP, dedicated to his friend
Warren Zevon with whom he co wrote songs, is one of his best. Set
in his beloved Florida as most of his books are, the plot hinges
on a murder that didn’t happen & dirty dealings in environmental
exploitation, but it’s really his cast of misfits & miscreants
blindly bumping into each other that keeps you compulsively turning
the pages. Genuine fun.
I’ve had an on again off again relationship
with Van Morisson’s music over the years, but his peaks are
so transcendent & so uplifting that I’ve been curious
about the man behind such masterpieces. So CLINTON HEYLIN’S
“CAN YOU FEEL THE SILENCE “ new biography promised a
lot, but unfortunately delivered not much other than that Van is
an intensely private person, that the rumours of his ill temper
are well founded & that many of his classic albums were created
almost off handedly & patched together arbitrarily. Perhaps
some great works are best experienced naively, independent of their
creator.
NEVER MIND THE POLLACKS by NEAL POLLACK is based
on a great idea, a fictional Zelig like rock journalist who hangs
out with Bob Dylan, lives with Joan Baez, seduces Patti Smith, hangs
out with Bruce Springsteen, takes Iggy Pop to Woodstock, scores
drugs with Kurt Cobain etc.., a back dated version of LCD Sound
System’s “I’m Losing My Edge “ track, where
the protagonist finds himself at various rock music zeitgeists.
Cool. As I said, a great idea, but unfortunately Pollack is not
a skilled or funny enough writer to really do it justice, so it
reads as a diversion rather than a dazzler. Shame, now I can’t
write it.
LOOK BOOKS THAT HAVE FED MY VISUAL ADDICTION
The best rock photography can speak as loud & powerfully as
the music itself, the moment captured but barely contained, the
reaching out of the body to float into eternity, the fear in the
eye, the sneer on the lips, “THE CLASH “ is a 300 pages
plus large format collection of black & white & colour photographs
that are exactly that & more. Veteran photographer BOB GRUEN
met The Clash in 1976 & photgraphed them over an 8 year period,
developing a rapport that can be seen in the relaxed attitude that
the band had to being photographed candidly on a continuous basis.
The Clash always looked like a gang that happened to play music,
enigmatically they were a band that contained only one good looking
member ( Simonon, obviously ) but when photographed together they
all looked somehow better looking. The on stage snaps are of course
electric they were a band that no matter how good or bad they sounded,
they always looked like they sounded great, staring into the headlights
of Big Brother’s on coming tanks, defiant & totally commited.
The photos from their American tour are equally as fascinating,
strangers in a strange land, the real band on the run. It’s
sad to think that Joe didn’t get a few more years when you
see him at his most concentrated peak in these pages, but really,
this book, a copy of London Calling, some beer & a spliff, I
guarantee that you’ll have a real rockin’ good time.
BLINK is the latest book in a series of radical design statements
on Phaidon press, previous editions have come enclosed in a plastic
tablet, but this time they’ve gone for an oversized hefty
400 page plus format that could work equally well as a doorstop,
it’s a magnificent brute. It features 50 photographers from
everywhere doing everything, 10 equally diverse curators & 10
writers from around the globe. The book has amazing variety &
integrity & excellence of execution in form & content, it’s
great to wrestle with this beast every so often, there’s always
more to see & read.
Of all the arts I think that architecture is
the most audacious, that an idea that might begin as merely an inspired
scribble or a folded up piece of paper can end up as an enormously
complex construction that reaches through time & space never
ceases to amaze me, the insight, the courage, the vision & the
ambition is often breath taking. American architect Frank O Gehry
is one of my trail blazing heroes, pursuing his personal vision,
constantly renewing & refining, always the teacher never the
preacher. FRANK . O. GEHRY THE COMPLETE WORKS is exactly that &
more, including drawings & models of works from the early 1950s
into the late 90s, the private, the personal & the public works,
detailed photographs with essays & critical notes, this weighty
tome is an authoritative & thorough testament to his genius.
Unfortunately it does not include his more recent Seattle Music
Centre project, but that probably deserves it’s own book or
at least a visit.
REM KOOLHAAS is an architectural hothead from
a younger generation, his company started in New york & has
expanded globally & he has an enormous ego to match his talent
& so every so often he fires a salvo across the bow of the architectural
establishment, the latest is CONTENT, an incredibly dense &
innovatively designed assemblage of text, photos, graphs, graphics,
maps, politics, facts, figures, colour & opinion crammed into
over 500 pages that works as catalogue, propaganda & subversive
book/ magazine hybrid. It’s almost too much, but of course
it’s really never enough. Overload.
Some of you may know WINSTON SMITH from his work
with The Dead Kennedys, he designed their logo & album covers
& posters, but since then he has experimented with his own idiosyncratic
montage techniques as chronicled in 3 books, the latest being ALL
RIOT ON THE WESTERN FRONT, an eyeboggling collection of his works
that confound time, context & perspective to create their own
dimensional reality. As you can guess from the title, there’s
a sly political agenda to his works that makes them strangely transgressive,
a disturbing subtext to his strangely disorientating creations.
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