Two recent articles by me, written for 3:AM Magazine: a review of Tom McDonough’s new Situationist reader, and an interview with Eric Hazan, radical publisher and author of The Invention of Paris.
Archive for the ‘arts’ Category
25
Aug
The first issue of The Kakofonie is launched tonight in the Pygmalion Bar, South William Street, Dublin (near the Powerscourt Centre). Events begin at 7pm, and at around 7.45pm I’ll be interviewed by the journal’s editor, John Holten, on my thoughts about urban space and memory.
22
Jul
This evening in Berlin, a new literary journal will be launched. Titled The Kakofonie, and edited by John Holten, the contributors come from Italy, Germany, Ireland, the USA and Denmark. In the first issue, American cruciverbalist Charlie Stadtlander provides a crossword puzzle, French-based Irish artist John Lalor provides a textual exploration of notions of the void, and there are stories and poems from Luke Sheehan, Patrick O’Beirne, Christian Ward and Andrea Bedorin. In addition, I contribute an essay on Georges Perec and urban form. The first issue is available for download in PDF format here.
10
May
Laura’s started a blog about caricatures, looking at contemporary chaps what draw (Steve Bell, for example) and auld fellas from years ago (Daumier, for one). Expect a post on why noted pioneer of photography, Nadar, was also an underrated cartoonist, and other engaging tales from mid-19th century Paris. Read her blog here.
04
May
My interview with legendary ex-NME writer Nick Kent is available in full from 3:AM Magazine here.
07
Apr
Last night myself and Laura went to see David Byrne in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It was a quite brilliant show – drawing on Byrne’s work with Brian Eno, but transcending the fashionable concept of clapped out artists retreading classic albums in the name of nostalgia. First of all, it was a real spactacle: the band were all dressed in stark white outfits, and they swapped dance moves with three roaming dancers throughout the show – even Byrne himself. Also, Byrne performed a particularly silly version of ‘Burning Down the House’ – tutus and all – near the end of the gig (video from the Paris performance here). I also wrote a preview of tonight’s Belfast concert for last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph here.
David Byrne on the Colbert Report here.
23
Jan
Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:
It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.
My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.
(Strategic Questions website here.)
09
Oct
The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Fair play, etc. What caught my attention was the statement from the Swedish Academy:
As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality
As a fan of the ‘degenerate state of everyday speech’ which so enlivened the twentieth century novel (particularly in the works of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Raymond Queneau) my initial reaction to this statement was a terse: ‘fuck you’.
See NY Times here.
