at the sign of The Pink Pig

Down East, Up West: London Jewish Novelists

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  December 15, 2011]

So there I was, reading "A Kid for Two Farthings."  It's a long short story by Wolf Mankowitz about a little boy who buys a lame, runt goat in the market, thinking it's a unicorn.

It's collected in a paperback volume entitled Espresso Bongo, after a very short short story set in the world of Soho coffee bars.  A film was released under the same title starring pop sensation Cliff Richard.  Hence the cover.

There's No Stewart Like Home

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  November 22, 2011]

It has been Stewart Home month in New York.  Not officially, of course.  There's not much official about Stewart.  For me he provides reassurance that my generation (okay, he's a couple of years younger) understand the world.  Oh, and how to change it, of course.

After all, changing the world should be easy enough.  As easy as standing on your head.  In a strip club.

Derek Parfit's Big Philosophy

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  September 16, 2011]

I read Larissa MacFarquhar's portrait of the English philosopher Derek Parfit in the New Yorker's 'Annals of Ideas' deparment earlier this month.  Then I looked at a copy of his first book, Reasons and Persons (1984) which I bought when I was a graduate student and part-time teacher in the subject at the University of Bristol.

The cover is a photograph of Venice by the author.  He has taken photographs as a hobby for many years.  But he only photographs a few places, and he photographs them only very occasionally.  Then I read the MacFarquhar profile again.

A Close-Up View Of Rock'n'Roll's Chitlin' Circuit

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  September 1, 2011]

When did writing on popular music come of age?  Sure, we still have the ghosted autobiographies, thin and sketchy works of fandom and conveyor-belt histories of whichever act just arrived in the chart.  In addition to that, we have a growing library of seriously researched, luminously written accounts of popular music styles and, especially, their evolution from folkloric (or roots music) forms. 

Welcome to the front ranks of that collection a new book by Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin' Circuit (And the Road to Rock'n'Roll).

Readings: Wilde, Ashbery

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  June 2, 2011]

I've written here before - at a length which surprises me - of the decadent end of bohemianism as a triangular trade between London, Paris and America.  Although I was roughly aware at the time of Huysmans' influence on the whole London and New York "decadent" scene, and specifically the influence of his book À Rebours, I had not at the time read Oscar Wilde's single novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

It's a literary commonplace that Wilde's 1890 work owes something to the novel by Huysmans published six years earlier, but I was hardly prepared for the full-scale, lengthy pastiches of Huysmans one finds in Wilde.  To recap briefly, À Rebours is the story of a young aesthete of agonizing preciousness who retreats from his life in Paris to a luxurious home constructed as a palace to sensual enjoyment, jewel-encrusted turtles and all.

Onward And Upward: A Spiral Ascent

 [The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  May 10, 2011]

There was a British actor called Edward Woodward.  He was a household name in the U.K. for playing one of two seedy private eyes who dominated television in the days before we started importing them from the States.  He was Callan.  The other one was played by Alfred Burke, and I don’t remember his name.

Despite an outstanding screen performance in the movie “Breaker Morant,” and a leading role in the camp cult classic “The Wicker Man,” Woodward never became an international star.  He used to joke that his name held him back.  As most people pronounced it, it was basically “Ed” followed by an indeterminate number of “W’d” noises.

The author Edward Upward never achieved wide fame either, although you’ll find his name in most books about British writers of the thirties.  He was a friend, you see, of Auden and Isherwood.  Probably of Day Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the rest of the crew too.  That generation emerged after the war with reputations in various states of repair.  All of them, however, had ceased to be fellow travelers with the communist cause, with which all had – rightly or wrongly – earlier been associated.

John Ashbery Dusts Off His French

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  March 8, 2011]

Truly there are only a handful of poets writing in English whose each book publication is an event.  I won't provide a list, as lists are mainly good for arguing about, but if you start counting them on your fingers you will find that they are to novelists what duckbilled platypi are to ducks.  Very rare.  There's no serious argument, however, that John Ashbery is one of them.

A True History Of Pop On The High Seas

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  February 8, 2011]

A review of the 2009 movie Pirate Radio, originally released under the lame title The Boat That Rocked would be forlornly belated.  The few who saw it will recall a well-written and acted ensemble comedy based very loosely on events surrounding the British government's closure of the offshore pop pirates in 1967.

December Reading: Beware Hobbits

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  December 2010]

Did anyone follow the Atlantic Wire's intriguing series, "What I Read"  in which various writers and new media luminaries share their daily strategy for ingesting the information bomb which explodes around the clock?  I devoured the columns guiltily, as I have yet to find enough hours in the day to read what I need to read for work reasons. 

Of course, this is because my habits of reading for pleasure are unassailable.  Take this weird December, for instance.

David Wojnarowicz: A Martyr's Destiny

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  December 14, 2010]

I wrote a short piece here last year about the riveting 1999 retrospective of David Wojnarowicz's work at the New Museum (when it was still in SoHo).  Who could have imagined then that the artist, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1992 aged 37, would be victimized in 2010 by reactionary activists?

The response to the Smithsonian's cowardly removed of his video, "Fire in My Belly," from a current show has been heartening - especially the announcement by the wealthy Andy Warhol Foundation, co-sponsor of this show, that it will not fund future Smithsonian exhibitions.

The episode is a disgrace.  The video (not the full-length version) can be seen on YouTube.  It is a chilling and very painful work, but then death is a chilling and painful subject.

YouTube account required to view.