Vital
Signs
Music, Movies and Other Mania
by
Ian Penman
Ian
Penman (born in 1959) is a British writer and, latterly, blogger.
He began writing for the NME in the autumn of 1977, later
contributing to various publications including Uncut, Arena,
The Wire, The Face, The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times,
The Independent, Screen and German Vogue.
Many of Penman's essays and reviews were collected in his
book Vital Signs: Music, Movies and Other Manias (Serpent's
Tail, 1998), praised by critic Bhob Stewart in Publishers
Weekly:
"After
a peripatetic childhood in the Middle East and the UK, Penman
was set to start art school in 1977. But during a year off,
he began reviewing for the UK's leading music paper, New Musical
Express, and became one of its star writers. In his first
collection, Penman pulls together pieces from the back files
of NME, as well as The Face, The Sunday Times, Ikon, The
Wire and Sight and Sound.
"The
two pieces that bracket the collection, a firsthand essay
on the drug scene and ruminations on underappreciated
'70s U.S. singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, indicate, however,
that the volume disserves Penman by not including more
of this sort of offbeat commentary..." |
"With
more than 45 essays spanning from 1979 to 1995, Penman coasts
over the full pop panoply from Amis to Warhol and Zappa, leaving
quotable passages in his wake: Jackson Pollock 'painted like
he drank: messily, but with a secret logic in pursuit of the
ultimate liquid line, the Big Slur.'Norman Mailer 'stood for
that raw roller coaster feeling, the pure starburst energy
of post-war American birth and becoming.' Hunter S. Thompson:
'The only person he caricatured convincingly now was himself.'
"An
interview with Harry Dean Stanton ('last of the great white
Dharma bums') becomes a prismatic prose poem. A few pages
on Quentin Tarantino turn into an all-out attack: 'Despite
their spitty hissy tom-cat woozy-Uzi male-violence malevolence
these are real 'feel-good' movies... The only film he could
convincingly make would be about the Film Festival circuit.'
"These
commentaries, profiles, reviews and interviews are packaged
neither chronologically nor thematically; however, the closing
taglines sometimes make a free-associational link to the opening
paragraph of the next entertaining essay. Penman's pages have
few wasted words, and amid his clever barbs are genuine insights."
Gordon Flagg, writing about Vital Signs in Booklist,
noted, "He is a dextrous and invariably entertaining
writer, but too many of the subjects herein are now either
irrelevant (e.g., a dozen-year-old interview with rock duo
Was (Not Was) or overfamiliar (profiles of overexposed celebs
like Oliver Stone and Steve Martin)... The two pieces that
bracket the collection, a firsthand essay on the drug scene
and ruminations on underappreciated '70s U.S. singer-songwriter
Tim Buckley, indicate, however, that the volume disserves
Penman by not including more of this sort of offbeat commentary."
©
1998 Ian Penman/Serpent's
Tail
|