at the sign of The Pink Pig

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.

 

Miles's London Calling: Demand Your Money Back

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  October 18, 2010]

And it looked so promising.  Published this year by Atlantic Books, a door-stoppping near-500 page survey of London's counterculture, from the bohemian 1940s through the underground 1960s and early '70s to punk and the post-punk 1980s.  From Nina Hamnett to Damien Hirst, the gang's all here.

Thankfully I didn't pay for it ($25, no less).  If I had, I'd want my money back.

All Popped Up: Tony Fletcher On The Sounds Of New York

[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis:  March 29, 2020]

The title of Tony Fletcher's survey of New York music, 1927 through 1977, is a bit of a giveaway.

"All hopped up and ready to go..." is a lyric The Ramones liked so much, they sang it twice.

Tony Fitzpatrick And The Big Easy

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  November 2, 2009]

I have written previously about Tony Fitzpatrick, the artist-poet of Chicago and his extraordinary saga of the Chicago streets - his and his father's - composed from old matchbooks, baseball cards, snatches of song, forming constellations around the human-animal avatars which populate his mythology.

A different city has been his focus for the last couple of years, New Orleans.  The N.O. of Comus and Proteus and ghost motels and moths.  An earlier part of the project is documented at his website, and an exhbition of new works has just closed at Ammo Arts in the French Quarter.

I wish the reproductions at Ammo''s webpage could be further enlarged, but they are sufficient to be inform on the progress of the project - and you can read the words.

She heard:

Rolling

Piano

Jazz:

And

The

Devil

Sat

Down

At

Her

Table

For more insight than I can give, Tony Fitzpatrick has been blogging here, and if you type his name on You Tube, you can view a gallery talk by him.

The Best Tale Of A Restaurant

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid:  August 10, 2009]

The reason I come to be writing this is really beside the point, but if you must know it's Alfred Hitchcock's fault.  I was inveigled into watching an ancient episode of his TV show recently, and it jogged my memory.

The Decadence Part Three: London Again

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: April 6, 2009]

I was rather pleased with my formulation of  late nineteenth century  literary "decadence" as a triangular trade between Paris, London and New York.  Then I came across this less geometrically precise but largely consistent comment:

"I remembered, as I read, that mood which Edgar Poe found in a wine-cup, and how it passed into France and took possession of Baudelaire, and from Baudelaire passed to England and the pre-Raphaelites, and then again returned to France, and still wanders the world..."

The Decadence Part Two: New York

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: March 23, 2009]

The doomed poets of the 1890s, the Yellow Book, parties at the Café Royale, Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel, Salome, Dorian Gray, Zuleika Dobson.