Pick of the Publishing Pops 2012

I first visited the London Book Fair with Salena Godden in about 1997. I had press tickets, and we raided the complimentary wine at 11am, and rolled through shrieking like ill-informed head-cases. In 2010, I visited again, wearing neon-pink eyeliner, “Who let the writer in?” I overheard a publishing suit comment – this year, I dressed more like them, and trawled the hard, Earl’s Court floors for 2012′s dukes of publishing, the writers who’ll be paying for their suits and propping them all up at the bar IF authors don’t all decide to self-publish and leave them jobless. Obvz, I’m not including the trash-writers, or the genre-busters, nor cookbooks and self-help, nor pissy little gift-books…Here’s my pick of the super-shiny, major-leaguers for the rest of 2012…

• Woolgathering, Patti Smith. Re-issue from 1992, with new material. May. Bloomsbury. Kerching.

• Leaving The Atocha Station, Ben Lerner. July. This started on a small New York-based imprint, Coffee House Press, now being published in the UK by Granta/Portobello. If you loved Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (which I did), this will apparently make us happy.
• Lionel Asbo. Martin Amis. June, Jonathan Cape. Bless this man’s soul. I live on Lionel Asbo Road.
• How Music Works, David Byrne. October. Canongate. This is the book which (hopefully for David) does what album sales can’t…The legend of Talking Heads brings us all that knowledge he had stuffed inside his shoulder-pads.

Embarrassingly, I get him confused with the world’s first artifical voice, Max Headroom (which was British technology, so y’know…):

• Landfall, Helen Gordon (fellow contributor to Ambit, I AM A NEPOTIST – sung Johnny Rotten-styleeee), paperback out in July, Penguin.
• Umbrella, Will Self. August, Bloomsbury. (The Willie’s use of dying words used to piss me off, I could imagine him sitting like Scrooge, hunched between his typewriter and dictionary, giggling to himself, but his masterstroke of snorting smack on a plane with Prime Minister Blair is what really made me hate him. I thought it was so square to be with the politicians…why not do your smack on planes with rockstars like normal people? I like his writing more now.)
• Winter Journal, Paul Auster. September, Faber. ANYTHING this man delivers I lap up. Like an idiot. Especially with a title brought out in Autumn, called Winter – what can it mean?
• A Prince Among Stones, Prince Rupert Loewenstein. September, Bloomsbury. (For those with a fondness for rock gossip, this is a memoir by the guy who Mick Jagger recruited to teach him about money, “Rupie the Groupie” as Bianca used to call him. An accountant’s biog, only in a recession folks…)
• Waging Heavy Peace – NEIL YOUNG!!! October, Penguin. Christmas? What would Neil do?

Poster by Jeremy Deller, the Turner Prize 2004 winner, who I used to go and speak at when he worked in Sign of The Times in Covent Garden.

• Miss Eartha Kitt. Biog. Quercus, August. Sounds like a reasonable movie. I’d watch it.
• The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco. September, Quercus. A long book, probably. Smasheroonie.
• Decades, Cameron Silver. September. Unsure if I shall agree upon this man’s interpretation of style eras because my polemics on such trends are so severe – and the structure of time – oooo, we’ll have to see.
• Gulf Women, Prof Amira El-Azhary Sonbol (out already but I wanted to keep note of her name). I would like to do a popular version of this, Do Gulf Women Play Golf?
• Quant by Quant, reissued on V&A in paperback, September. It’s a book described by Luella Bartley as her inspiration. Inventor of the mini-skirt, she just made them shorter. Economical, ecological and fashionable. Let’s get naked and pretend this is the sixties.
• Muslin, Sonia Ashmore. V&A. November. If it’s good enough for Dame Westwood…
• Copendium, Julian Cope. Faber, November. I was hoping the Sean Penn movie, This Must Be The Place would have more Julian Cope-isms and Spinal Taps. This will be a truly alternative history of contemporary music, no doubt. I understand the methodology used in the Copendium is through Julian’s vibes with the music’s energy.

Trendwise, this article about NarcoLiterature is interesting: [http://www.englishpen.org/against-narcoliterature/]. NarcoCinema is unique to Mexico’s drug culture, low-budget movies demonstrating the lack of power the government or anyone has against the cartels [http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-film/mexican-narco-cinema-part-1-of-3]. The paperback of Narcopolis also recently appeared on Faber, about Mumbai’s dope culture.

• And also on power: Merchant, Soldier, Sage – A New History of Power by David Priestland, August, Penguin – explores our Merchant era where politicians communicate as sub-fief-letting-agents to the land-owners, phone-pushers, fabric hustlers, mineral fairs and iron guns – I’m guessing… Rupert Murdoch described corporate war with such genuine lucidity at the Leveson Enquiry- good time for an intellectual artifact to open such debate. Although this book may not be populist enough to compete with zeitgeist-determining products such as Prozac Nation, never mind how painfully self-indulgent it was to read, it defined an awakening. No Logo. The Female Eunuch. Classic non-fiction. I’m currently lecturing a post-grad feature writing class – we’re exploring Joan Didion, Gay Talese, all the people that exist beyond the psychedelic glamour of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe – the pair of colourful word-warriors I grew-up aspiring to become. The loudest generally getting heard by most people. Particularly those who don’t know any better. (I must upload some of my old gonzo travel-writing. It’s hilarious. Published. In that state. Of course I wanted to be Kate Adie too. Always wanted to get behind the barbed wire) – but, back to opinion – the only power of the middle classes – The Sunday Times reads that the rich are richer. And of course the poor are poorer. I believe there should be a universal social responsibility tax. As consumers, can we please demand higher standards – a human being has to sew the clothes on our back. Kids have to mine the minerals we have in our phones. If we stopped Starbucks from not replacing trees, surely we can beg the world to stop screwing each other. Whatever. What I really want is an expensive coffee table made out of the rarest wood, inlaid with blood diamonds, sweat sapphires and enamel made from the beak of the last remaining specimen of some exotic bird privately couriered in a rocketship from St Helena, then I will have a plinth for some of these beautifully branded, coffee-table ads, courtesy of Rizzoli:
• MIA. October. Collages – cooooool. So great to see a woman make it to my list…WHY WHY WHY are there not more women who defy the gender trap? We are subjected to behavioural controls through every media channel and consumption habit. Keep kicking against the pricks, ladies, and gents. Read Vagenda. We are in the third-wave of feminism, anti-Grazia-mag readers of the world, unite and take over.



• Pharrell. October. A nice man.

• Kishin Shinoyama. September. He likes naked people.
• Also out on Rizzoli this year: Dior (bought forward to keep that Raf buzz going, perchance?). Vreeland. Rykiel. Frye Boots. Vogue. Kate Moss. Antonio Lopez and Disco. And: Lydia Lunch Hedonist’s Cookbook (I love her – interviewed her years ago – le Tigre and the Riot Grrrls would be nowhere without her).
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ole_bRTdw]

I also heard David Bowie is writing a biography – I hope it’s sordidly honest…

Currently, I’m reading about 5 books, Danielle De Picciotto’s memoir of Berlin, The Beauty of Transgression, published by Gestalt. Also, obviously, as a former-DJ partner with Irvine Welsh, I’m reading Skagboys...then some old Russian stuff, and some Neu Journalism…plus I was given that Jennifer Egan book…and all the free shit that publishers are desperately poking us with, and the magazines and the aaaaaargh – I’m suffering from infoenza…later maters n paters. x



Please comment if you have other suggestions for this decidedly BLLLLLLEEEEEAK LIST!!!! WHERE ARE THE NEW VOICES? MOVELLAS.COM? C’mon people, be brave in your reading matter. It makes your head matter – groan. Y’know, what was most depressing about the Book Fair – how hard it must be for all those marketing folk to break new writers. WHERE THE HELL ARE THE NEW GENERATION? Please comment generously…of course, my book will be out later this year, if we are lucky – please subscribe for updates. I can’t promise it to be life changing, it is only my first, but it does have heart and soul.

[and a disclaimer: I haven't included the likes of Hachette, Harper Collins, PanMacMillan and Random House who didn't have New Title catalogues for me to peruse at the Book Fair, not even Argos-style 'catalogues of dreams', they referred my journalistic enquiry to their websites - I'm sorry, but I don't have time to do that right now - do I look like a staffer? Sorry staffers - but you won't be reading this because you're doing my job, and that of five others... Also, apols not to include anything from some of my fave indie publishers such as Old Street (read Sam Lipsyte), Cargo (Alan Bissett) , Black Spring (any classic) and Tindal Street Press (David Gaffney).]

I Art Therefore I Am ArtIst

‘ArtIsts’ we are (the I being the ego), dottIness extremus, the InfinIte I.  And few artists exemplify this better than the pre-Yoko Ono, single Japanese female, Yayoi Kusama – so conceptual she sacrificed her sanity for us.

The current retrospective at the Tate Modern in London – sponsored by Louis Vuitton – is curated as a human story. 

The first room – the micro-struggling illustrations of a young girl in a world where death lies at the end of the phallus-twisted tunnel.

[Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation of Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization) 1950]

The second room – making it big in America – with obsessive, fish-scale canvases -

[Yayoi Kusama, Pacific Ocean, 1960]

…which remind me of the beautiful off-white, suede Louboutin for Giles boots I was lucky enough to borrow for a shoot…

She sells well, netting success with her ‘mind-net’ pictures but wants to escape the confines of her work – only way out is on a boat – and it’s filled with cocks, wriggling to get inside her…

[Yayoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 1963]

The exhibition then goes pop!  She makes a film about herself, a pretty geisha vs the entire ugliness of an industrialised city.

O, the 60s! Send a letter home.

[Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation: Airmail No2, 1966]

The next rooms get preeeeeetty psychedelic.  Learning from pop-meisters, and being in contact with Georgia O’Keefe, who possibly advises on lifetime themes, dots start to appear in Yayoi’s work.  She brands herself with the burning stamp of dottiness – polka polka polka dotty dotty dotty.  And she looks good on a horse.© Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

[Yayoi Kusama, detail of Self-Obliteration No.2, 1967]

And she puts dots on the horse.  And rides the horse.  And puts dots upon herself.  And takes the horse to water.  And puts dots on water.  And the cat gets polka-ed too…Self-Obliteration – the movie of these events is wonderfully pre-computer, and so is she…

Opening a concession in Bloomingdales’ selling dresses made of transparent PVC and flowered-up suitcases- it’s a period so fabulously of its era,

-they inspired the S/S 2012 Louis Vuitton collection…

[The future vision of Louis Vuitton and Kusama is destined to be dotty...where Murakami added colour and cutes-i-ness, Kusama will add strong-woman circles, in yellow on black and white on red.]

The exhibition moves on to chart happenings in her apartment, although not orgies because she was scared of venereal disease, it was about real love rather than sex, a peace mission – everyone gets naked, and she is the star.  The posters are wonderful, even the desperate, hand-written ones.

The naked venus of her own parties.  Putting the I into Artist – I mean, would we bother otherwise?

But after all the parties, the result – it’s too poetic for words, because, after a hallway of amazing collages, she sections herself, works in a hospital studio, art therapy, and the phalli are back, leaping out of boxes, like bad thoughts from a spaghetti-ed brain.

[Yayoi Kusama, Heaven & Earth, 1991]

I nearly cried at the burned-outness of the next pieces…which I cannot easily find pictures of, and to revisit it, I only have to flick through my mind.  No, you can’t come in.  I’m busy.

Too many microdots, all over the walls…and the snakey phalli…

[Yayoi Kusama, Yellow Trees, 1994]

To a magic room, where we entered her installation house to ask – “Do you take dots? Drop more spots in your tea?”

[Yayoi Kusama, I'm Here But Nothing, 2000]

She’s still an inpatient, cooked for, paying for an organised life, looked after – she has a studio over the road – she must have paid for the whole hospital…art, we get sick if we don’t do it, sick if we do…the 82 year-old said this to the Guardian,  “I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair. I’ve been doing it physically — it’s hard labour — throughout my life.”

(Many contemporary artists follow the lead of the Italians, and have studios of assistants making their art for them – commerce – greed – I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I want more art on my walls, now, do you hear?  Ok, Ego!)

If you’re prolific, you have to be looked after – Virginia Woolf would surely agree.  Kusama is the queen of her own disco – this exit piece, Infinity Mirror Room moves right on from the mirrored rooms at the Serpentine show in 2000.

Try turning the screen brightness up and down, up and down and project this to your brain…with a dance remix of your own Garageband – it’s a 1993 co-lab with Peter Gabriel:

Here is a Louis Vuitton co-lab from 2006  (yes – that’s Marc Jacobs):

EXTRA NOTES ON NAKEDNESS:

I saw naked pictures of Patti Smith recently  -not these ones unfortunately, although almost undoubtedly also taken by Robert Mapplethorpe – the others had more vulnerability…

there are so many pictures of me knocking about, in dirty old filing cabinets in the wastelands of youth.  Who cares?  Do the most crazy ‘I-people’ get naked?

[Dame Vivienne Westwood, selling anti-consumption since 1971, by Juergen Teller]

Is it a stand against drab normality?  The ancient Greeks would say so.  In Berlin recently, it was interesting to find out nudity was seen as an act of rebellion and freedom in the old Soviet DDR lockdown of the East Berlin ‘rescheming’ regime.

Fame and the quest of fame is seen as a contemporary sickness – a trap of our commercial and marketed times – but for Kusama, Patti Smith, most female icons of the last century and the twenty-first (beyond our dear Royals,  and those of a more Middle Eastern persuasion – who intelligently stand against idolisation, or have no power to use the politics of ‘shock and awe’) – stripping off and whoring ourselves is to rise above those that won’t – I wasn’t born with a fiefdom, life is so fast – we are who we lie next to.  Paris Hilton, we are indebted to your ‘I-matter’ legacy.  Or we die in the bland ocean of normality and conformity.  Extremes – nakedness is beautiful, it is vulnerable, it is who we are.  Nakedness is so brave.  So intimate.  So NOT fashion, but everything fashion is about.  As a true riot grrrrrrl – it is only flesh.

In an interview in Index about her Self-Obliteration/naked period, Kusama says it was a time when she hated herself.  However, she was more famous than Andy Warhol.

Her dresses helped take her there.  Particularly the ‘hole dresses’ where hooded ponchos are slashed to expose our breasts.

I was disappointed by the exhibition, to discover at the heart of the art was an ego – a crazy, I-sacrificing soul who would never have become so famous had she not been determined to make herself the star of the show.  The Serpentine did it better, that show was about the product of selfishness, THE ART, not the person that created it.  However, without I, there would be no ArtIst.

I Art, Therefore I Am…

(photography copyright © Harrie Verstappen, The Looniverse)

Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography is out now…the octogenarian has also illustrated a fabulous, turn your kids into trip-heads, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland…

Donde esta la fiesta? Top of chops. Feel la musica.

Want to transcend the noise?  Turn your phone off, stick on CULT WITH NO NAME (aka CWNN).  Their fifth album, Above As Below is an uber-thinky, muy beautiful, neo-Frankfurt School platter (the Frankfurt school were a bunch of WWII academics championing the elite to progress culture).  Artwork is by a David Bowie design collaborator, Jonathan Barnbrook.

Singer of CWNN, Erik Stein looks like the guy in the poster for W.E. – the film by Madonna, released in London whilst her ex-hubby’s second tribute to opium-addled Sherlock still haunts the screens.

Feat. guest vocals by my dear pal Kelli Ali,  this is an intense album lightened with the dark humour of a true gothic heart.

There are about 14 tracks, and you can find samples on CD Baby, Last Fm, MySpace – or just buy it for less than a London travelcard on iTunes (and it’ll take you further, maaaaaan).  Updates on Facebook.

Out on Trakwerx, the production is all John Foxx-y synthy pianos but excels to filmic scores and twisted Andrew Eldritch-hooks; there are songs that get in your head, songs that take you to bed, songs that spread a smile like a Nightnurse med.   It’s an album that makes every second count, slows you down to bring you up.  Like a sunrise over an ocean.

Hard copies, I am assured, will be available soon.

Yup – they need a video…and I’m seeing them tomorrow – maybe we’ll go to the Paul Morley talk about dead heroes at the Southbank.  My book, which is nearly at completion (again, you yawn) has a bit of a dead rockstar theme…

My other music top chops at the mo are:

• The Whip (for getting places fast).
• Killaflaw (ACDC meets Booker Shade).
• Lulu James (new, unsigned, hot, stylish).
• Darkstar, super-excited about their upcoming release on Warp.
• Genuflex.
• Black Bananas.
• And there’s this out soon:  Bobby Gillespie collab with The Pop Group’s frontman.  This vid is by Douglas Hart (Jesus & Mary Chain). Mark Stewart meets Bobby Gillespie

Keep a rockin your freeeeeee worlds, bludz.  x

And here’s a nice look in Barrio de las Lettras in Madrid.  

The Rule of Jefferson Hack

KIRSTY ALLISON*:  What should I do?

JEFFERSON HACK:  Fill this book …(Jefferson presents a snow-white, well-bound blank notebook with high quality paper, he makes an artistic scrawl on the hard cover: “THE HOUSE STYLE* RULES”)

How long does it take to write a book?

This was in around 1994/1995 in the Dazed & Confused offices in Old Street.  They’re celebrating their 20th anniversary, which prompted me to dig out this book from a boxful of notebooks stashed amongst my past.

The first pages are scribblings and relatively organised details for PRs representing bands I liked, the next entry is a note from a man called Al, whom I met under a tree in Portobello Road.  I fell in lust.  Hitchhiked to Glastonbury with him, so fast did we run away, we took no sleeping bags, no tent, just a sheet he’d bought back from India.  I went over the fence rather than collect my press passes, and disappeared into the horizon, down to Penzance for a month.  The book went with me, when I returned to write for Sky magazine, who paid better than Dazed could then afford, and Muzik, and Blah, and Mixmag, and The Face, and Scene, and NME, I soared as a young taste-dictator, soon presenting on late-night television.  The book stayed around.  I continued to contribute to Dazed and soaked up the world as I began to DJ.  When I started writing Medicine, and there is definitely a search for a book within the pages of this notebook, the ramblings became a springboard for the protagonist.  It’s bonkers to look at how far the novel’s come, the characters now dancing across the pages as individuals rather than portraits of different sides of my confused and dazed young-self.  Or, more honestly, is it impossible to write beyond the limits of our souls?

I love iPads, phones, laptops, apps but I love notebooks -oh, so much more.

This sells at around a pound a year...

HAPPY 20 YEARS: DAZED…THE BOOK, THE EXHIBITION

*Kirsty Allison had recently left art school after an exhibition on Portobello Road, and was just starting out, working on X magazine and as the only female journalism trainee on Loaded.

*House Style – the words, language, sentence structure, tone and topics of a publication.

Over the years, my personal house style was truly basterdized, having whored my skills across so many pages, I forgot who I was.   Re-writing a book over a thousand times has helped remind me who I am again, as does going on the road.

Photo of book: Alexander Snelling

In bed with Balzac

“Greeting one another with the flippant banter that in certain circles in Paris passes for wit…a young painter, who regularly dined at the Maison Vauquer, had infected his fellow guests with the habit (of inserting -rama, from Diorama, on the end of every sentence) …coldorama…nipporama…hellorama…corn-orama”

Henry Reed‘s translation of Honore de Balzac’s Pere Goriot is brilliantly alive.  It’s anti-costume drama.  Paris 1837, with a palette of nowness.

McQueen jumper, white shirt, charcoal and silver pinstripe trousers.

What day is it?

 What am I wearing? Feels like a pedicure because I wore espadrilles in the rain and now ropes hang from my toes.   WITH: Replay jeans, a striped Laura Ashley long-sleeve T, and a red, silk shirt-dress tailored by Romyda Keth in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia.

This (ultimate vanity) project, cached and stored for our delectation is now stretching the parameters of an unwritten manifesto about documenting 365 different looks for everyday of a year, but blogs are slogs to maintain daily and at Slack Alice Films (my fiancée, Alexander Snelling’s company), we’ve released a film since the last post.  Plenty a bloggy, corporate clone imitation with drone dullard tones *poetical interlude* …

All 365 up here,  locked and loaded someday.  Hurry time slowly.

One of my students requested immediate documentation of today’s looks – Nizaad Shah - you photographic superstar, this one’s for you…back atcha.

Hello boyz

I was gonna paste Paperself eyelashes all over this, but instead went for micro-synesthesia, you likin’ the illustration vibe?

Today was Man fashion, so many beautiful boyz, yup with a ‘z’.  There was a real split between old school England and “urban”.  Good to see old faces doing so well. Young Lulu Kennedy‘s peeps were great. Loving the furry Astrid Anderson; Matthew Miller’s morning-glo soles; and the silver Bunney badges.

As ever there’s the military vibe, as so keenly noted by Hardeep Kohli Singh, the Burberry Prorsum was fighting fit, and KTZ called to duty a collection of psychedelic-neon keffiyeh-prints (keffiyeh scarves are that dogtooth check on an Arab tip).

Other trends:  zips that make jackets into different lengths (cropped bolero/mid/long – or doing the same for sleeves).  Guess it’s something to do with investment in pieces that do multiple things.  Astrid did a great parka like that.  I loved a leather, by Martina Spetlova, and a goat-esque fur by Les Chiffoniers.

My romo-rock look:  boots, vest & leather, Alexander McQueen.  Leggings, TopShop.  Adidas hoody.  Lace jersey stripe, as before.