Since launching the anti-literary Sylvia Plath Fan Club in 2015, I’ve been doing more gigs, as a poet. What does that even mean, huh? Basically, I stand up on stage – often between bands, MCing, introducing, doing poems – y’know? Come see me…and you’ll get it…
I published my first collection late last year – got it on billboards outside the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch. Thanks Daylite LED Media. So easy.
The cover was designed by Luke McLean – one of my fave people, and designers (Supergrass, London Field Brewery, Wrangler etc). You can buy Unedited on the Cold Lips website, or from me at gigs for a fiver… [here’s something nice on it by fellow Lazy Gramophone member, the brilliant skateboarding performance poet, Mat Lloyd].
My nearest gigs are tomorrow – Thursday – the last night of the residency I’ve been doing with Saint Leonard’s Horses at the International Club’s Winter Conclave at the George Tavern in Whitechapel, then on Saturday 18th, I’m doing my first out of town gig for Cultural Traffic.
Sometimes I do readings with film – this is work in progress…
My first reading was for Ambit, nearly 10 years, I was terrible – it was a 2000 word short story, called Lyla, and I just got up and read it cold to some poor darlings above a pub in Soho. After that, my ol’ pal Salena Godden started the Book Club Boutique. I’d been working on my novel, and needed to break up the style, and found poetry a good way to find a more honest voice, away from the corporate writing, and paid media work I’ve grown up doing.
Now people say nice things:
“Kirsty Allison is the most rock n roll poet in London” Kelli Ali
“Wordsmith wizardry” Adam J Harmer, Fat White Family
“Her poetry is the only that gives me goosebumps” Delilah Holliday, Skinny Girl Diet
“She’s a modern day Patti Smith” Johny Brown, Band of Holy Joy
Beyond the editorial, read why in a piece for the Literary Platform
Look at these gorg photos by Charlotte Freed from the London Fashion Week party at The Library. Thanks to DJs, Gil De Ray and Feral is MC Kinky, and all the amazing performers, and supporters. Massive appreciation to London Fields Brewery for keeping artists happy
Was my pleasure to MC amid left-bank optimism in the wilds of Brixton. Johny Brown – frontman of legendary folk-punk heroes, Band of Holy Joy invited the gorgeously French band over, A Singer Must Die
– so it all went pretty indie.
Packed crowd also got to hear Morton Valence. Love. Robert ‘Hacker’ Jessett looks like George Michael undercover, Anne Gilpin’s more bonnie than her Hacker Clyde.
When doing my homework, I discovered how poetic translations can be – finding zillions of versions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud & Verlaine. Being the kind of girl who has to order the first thing she sees on a menu, in fear of indecision, I went freestyle and opted to make my own really bad translations below…
—-
Enemy. Baudelaire. Kirsty translation v1.
My youth was nothing but a tempest storm
Broken brilliant with sun rays
The thunder and the rain have ravaged me
And sickened fruit in my garden lays
Voila – touched by the autumn of my creative life
I prepare my shovel and pick
To reassemble the earth and soils
Arrêt – this water must not lick through cracks to tombs beneath
And who knows if the flowers that I dream
of finding in this sun will root or wash away, a tragedy,
Never finding the mystic thing which offers their vigorous beauty
O doulear! Alas – time eats life
and the obscure enemy locked to our heart is blood lost,
growing from this fortified dust…
In response to my enemy
Time is my enemy
Not nature
I fight in bars
On dancefloors
In praise of love
Of life raw
Lost
At the aftershow
Before there was Burroughs, shooting his wife, Rimbaud shot Verlaine.
And after Rimbaud came Penny Rimbaud (creator of anarchic band, Crass)
Established in 1998, The Illustrated Ape features 100% original creative fiction, pictures, poetry, pop – and never, ever reviews! It has won popular acclaim, most notably the Creative Review ‘Best In Book’ award for design, and was one of only five British magazines selected for the Jam Anglo-Japanese exhibition. It is widely regarded as the most exciting and influential creative, illustration, graffiti, and writing magazine to come out of the British urban underground, and is a primary resource for anyone seeing insights into popular culture.
Travel with me to 2099AD, deep arse space, a place of over edited fiction, where Planet Prada, Comet CHANEL, Land of Louis Vuitton and all manner of planets preferable to earth leave a few rebels behind… X
This voyage of discovery is yours for a fiver from SOLID distributors of the creative visual word form – also included in this once in a lifetime offer: moonshine recipes, and a dystopia survival kit (a beermat soaked with poetry).
—
Established in 1998, The Illustrated Ape features 100% original creative fiction, pictures, poetry, pop – and never, ever reviews! It has won popular acclaim, most notably the Creative Review ‘Best In Book’ award for design, and was one of only five British magazines selected for the Jam Anglo-Japanese exhibition. It is widely regarded as the most exciting and influential creative, illustration, graffiti, and writing magazine to come out of the British urban underground, and is a primary resource for anyone seeing insights into popular culture.
Jamie Reid – the design king of punk, Julie Verhoeven – described in Taschen’s modern design bible, Illustration Now as one of the world’s top designer/illustrators, Paul Davis – award winning illustrator, John Lennon (previously unpublished work), David Hockney (previously unpublished work), Michael English, Martin Sharp – sixties design icon, Felix Dennis – OZ and MAXIM magazine founder and poet, David Sims – fashion photographer, Ryuichi Sakamoto – composer and film-star, Junko Mizuno (HELL BABIES) – manga artist and author, Jason Atomic – illustrator, Honey Manko – alt-diva, Heather Jones – songwriter and HOLE founding member, James Berry – poet, Michael Horowitz – poet, Tim Wells – poet, Cheryl B – New York feminist poet, and hundreds more acclaimed heroes of the pen and pencil.
Shoreditch’s RED is the creative force engaging local communities through facilitation of the continuing Cultural Revolution in the heart of East London.
This versatile, multi-functional space has welcomed a myriad of creativity through its doors since opening in 2010; transforming a derelict group of buildings and unused land into chameleon like art studios, galleries, live events venues, offices, screening rooms, open air event setting, incorporating a street food market and bars.
In keeping with its ethos of cultural guardianship, RED has actively encouraged not only artists and local residents to engage with the facilities, schools such as St Monica’s Primary have utilised the space and in keeping with their continued commitment to communitas, RED plays host to an annual symposium of the religious arts initiative Urban Dialogues, bringing together people from all faiths.
A year in the making, MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING documents elements of the magic that takes place behind the doors (and often on the walls) of RED through interviews and photographs.
To celebrate the launch RED will be hosting a photographic exhibition and in keeping with its anti-hegemonic practice, 2000 copies of the book will be distributed at the launch.
Additional commentary from visionaries such as Stirling Ackroyd’s James Goff, Tom Burger Bear – one of the chefs who led Time Out! to dub Red Market as being the birthplace of ‘the new food revolution’, curators and artists such as Alice Herrick of Herrick Gallery, Jerwood Prize winning Svetlana Fialova, Paul Sakoilsky, Chris Bianchi, Matthew Hawtin of Minus, former street artist, Part2ism,Dimitri Hegemann of Tresor Berlin, trends author Dr. Lida Hujic , fashion designers: Roggykei, patron Nick Winter, Stephen Shashoua of 3 Faiths Forum, music consultant: Juan Leal, Gary Means’ Alternative London street art tours and more.
Time: A Lazy Gramophone Press collaborative project
“an obvious shift in tone appears in adolescence-adulthood, one that is particularly apparent in Kirsty Alison’s entry, ‘Oscar Wilde Said Youth is Wasted on the Young – so Let’s Get Wasted’… This hilarious submission marks a clear transition between the previous age and the one we are now moving into, which is not only amusing and perhaps a little embarrassing, but also somewhat poignant.”
I’m part of the LAZY GRAMOPHONE collective – misfits of the modern world.
A few years ago, founder and editor, Sam Rawlings approached us with an ambitious project that catalogues TIME – Childhood, Adolescence, Wisdom.
I got to write a poem about ADOLESCENCE…all the pieces interlink and it’s a spectacle of book, immaculately conceived – I am super-proud to be included alongside some excellent poets, writers and illustrators.
You can read my poem and see the beautiful illustration by super-cool artist, Lola Dupre by purchasing the book – leave a comment with your email and I’ll send you 20% discount code.
Time is a vast collaborative book project containing short stories, poems and artwork by fifty-five contributors. Ever since the project’s inception, the idea has been to create an environment where independent writers and artists could come together in order to share their work. The result of this endeavour is a collection of stories, images and poems based around the theme of time, its pages placing particular focus upon the relationship between words and pictures. By sharing in this way we hope to inspire each other as well as those around us, to draw a diverse audience and so help to illuminate the work of alternative artists and writers everywhere.
The Sex Pistols’ gfx guy, Jamie Reid, fash illustrator, Julie Verhoeven, musical visionary,Ryuichi Sakamoto – and double-bubble-popping-yay-yay-yay, KIRSTY ALLISON … all published by iconoclastic design and culture bible, The Illustrated Ape. Niiiice.
Deeeelited to be included in the Torchsongs & Firehoses edition of the ever-inspiring, trend-jutting, The Illustrated Ape. Est. 1998, it has come in all formats, this one is proper lo-fi comic-style by Jason Atomic & Honey Manko.
Here’s a picture at the launch (by Honey Manko). Buy it here (or rather exceptional outlets), or read more about it here…
Busy times on the All Star Kirsty Bus…you may remember some posts from Paris last season, I developed a live rap powtrey in response to the catwalk…here’s one from an off-schedule* show earlier, rammed to the gullet…
It was for Bumni Koko, a right superhappy homegirl.
Weird England crowd bit future punk/Bladerunner, long way from Paris. Okay, here we go, catwalk powtrey. Kaleidoscopia, A/W11, sci-fi film, neon retro futurism, birth on another star, hoop skirt, nets, silk rock, orange, black psych neons, mid length, glamingo flamingos, structure shoulders, old McQueen. Purple royal, pleat shoulders, EEEEEEmu. Leopard tribe, rose silver, peach silver, Bootsy gets to planet E. Cut lurex. Panels, zip backs, sequin inserts, PVC tails, evening Daft Punk retro ladies, tie die my acid eyes.
Video from her previous season:
The best shows can be seen here: http://www.londonfashionweeklive.co.uk/ and of course, Style.com. Fashion East tmoz will be a total fashion moment – my fave today – “What is it we’re going into?” “I don’t know, it’s just fashion”). Beyond fash on, the film has been going bonkers – we’ve been lucky enough to sit aside multi-million productions on the pages of every paper from The Times to The Sunday Mirror, there have been some lovely observations. Oh, quick note on: tie-dye leather by Felder Felder, super.
I’m also working on an edit of my beloved novel, lecturing and doing a bit of styling…sounds like a Dear Diary moment. Hmmmm. Libya, eh? Who’s behind it, gearing up for Sarah Palin’s entree in camouflage?
But yes, I am terribly behind on uploading my images from the past weeks (multiplied by about six, I think) but they are coming forth, have been documenting, just not uploading. Did finally go through my exploding drawers and file some of the stuff that’s been catalogued – and now, how smoothly my drawers slide.
Wool and leather, so next season, so AF Vandevorst Friend. McQueen leather with my favourite thing of the moment – my vintage, hand-knitted, uber-poncho. McQueen skirt.
*Off-schedule: independent shows. (Largely) shitter, rougher and fresher than the official LFW** catwalks
What’s the point in being rich when I’ve got pocket full of soul and a soul full of rich.
I got a purse that sings salvation to a bankrupt nation,
But with money so expensive, what’s the point in being rich?
I got a pocket full of soul and a soul full of pitch…a whore for the filthy expression, mortgaged up to our idols like Paris Hilton, a nation full of chicken nugget travellers and pound shop luggage…inbox full of links, it stinks.
A buyer’s world for namedropper queens, rapist kings of the city, strange hotel girls waiting for their yachts, going to the bar to find the names they’ve dropped.
Parties are for lost souls, nightclubs for devils dancing, hanging on Skint Street, lost in the shadow, don’t be a hero, get on the blower, someone call China, and get us notes over.
The riches are blind with botox glows, the darling accessories of it’s all a show, we’ve always been a credit nations, I mean what do we do? The Hacienda was the last time a factory was new.
Tokyo’s streets are a homage to sci-fi fantasy, seventies style. Fields of mirrored skyscrapers are snaked by webs of towering monorails, glass-fronted mainstreet superstores flash with phosphorescent adverts. But like every Big Brother backdrop, a revolution occurs a few alleys back from the sheen, and in Tokyo, mazes of traditional cubed houses hold a variety of secret Steppenwolf doorways.
Behind one such door in the North of the city is a library bar with vintage issues of Visionaire and opulent Japanese-edition fashion photography books, it stands as a temporary salon for writers who don’t use pen & papers, or laptops, they write novels on their mobiles.
Drinking an £8 coffee, Ryu, king of the new ‘mohemians’, explains how he came to be credited as the first m-novelist,
“It came from necessity, I was working in a bar in Shibuya where the girls with the orange faces are” begins the 23 year old whose profits from his first m-book have allowed retirement to a desert island, where he’s profoundly in love with the local delicacy of octopus balls. In broken English and through a translator he goes on to tell how he felt disturbed by the repetitive cycle of observing chicks arriving to the scene, enticed by the appeal of darker life, slipping into a world of wrist-cutting, drugs, prostitution, debauchery and occasional degradation.
From his bar he assembled a team of groupies who spilt their stories to him. He emerged as a writer making notes on his phone about the new faces’ demise. “I sent the first notes and chapters to girls fresh to the area as cautionary tales, they told their friends, and their friends” Using emoticons to signify character moods and shortcuts of text speak, he uploaded test chapters to a website which got downloaded to phones. Ryu’s high octane writing appealed to girls across Japan, the site received unprecedented traffic and a paperback publisher soon clocked the sounds of the underground; his maverick m-novel, Tokyo Real, went on to sell three million hard copies, 32 million have been issued via the website.
“I didn’t plan to begin as a counsellor, or a writer, but the notes on my phone became chapters. The book was then published and it was made into a film, manga and anime.”
This organic progress has now been gazumped by market manipulators, and Tadashi Izumi, who has a PhD in Victorian literature from Cambridge, and Honjo Sae, who formerly wrote traditional books, have picked up on techniques to exploit this new market, they’re at the helm of this epoch which sees around three million people across Japan self-publishing in this way, students are it, teachers do it in their lunch time. In a society where texting is way more polite than speaking on the phone in public, it’s an acceptable form of creativity that fits in your pocket. The process operates in one of two ways, either via subscription, where users sign up for a certain amount of content a month for however many yen, or they give it away free. Apparently giving it away for free is favoured, as with most creative acts on the web.
Tadashi Izumi recognised the largest audience being teen girls, so began writing stories specifically for this audience, cannily, he also designed merchandise ready to rock.
“It’s a marketing dream,” says Tadashi, “The audience have time on their hands, they are always on their phones, killing time. We call them the Oyayubizoku generation (the thumb tribe). I created merchandise to tie in with Crossroads, my first m-novel. The characters wore a perfume and necklaces already available in the shops when the book was launched online. They thought they were real, pre-existing products, but the book worked as a kind of advertisement’ he says.
Crossroads sold 2m copies in just one week, the website receives around 12million hits per month. Izumi’s follow up book, Cross Overhas a diamond necklace available in select boutiques which sells from 100 000 yen (over £700), he’s trying to break into an older demographic. “Shakespeare would have been a mobile novelist” he claims.
Honjo Sae was recruited by Japan’s biggest record label, AVEX to write stories which include members of bands, as a cross-promotion, multi-platform, 360 PR megamix.
“You have a smaller screen space,” she explains of the Keitai Shousetsu which are fast spreading across China and Taiwan, “It’s all about action, less description, and the sentences have to be short, with spacing to fit on the screen”. Honjo calls herself and Ryu ‘non-fiction novelists’ as they are picking the truth from real life and interpreting them back to the public. Fantasy is everyday for Tokyo people. This is the tech age where several generations cite all their heroes as cartoon characters. Atom Boy is cooler then Elvis. So manga houses are also providing hand drawn cartoons exclusively for the phones, there are m-soap operas, m-films, m-street art, customised screen savers and Comic Studio software which allows consumers to develop plots for all mediums where they are the protagonist. We are living in the future, and the immediacy of technology suits Japan’s mohemians, it’s a culture that embraces the moment. Tokyo is a socially connected city where a walk through town is like being in the ‘Ray of Light’ disco video, or maybe that’s the sleep deprivation, Daft Punk gone crazy.
Yet aside to tech love there is a tradition for respect which permeates everything from the one-to-one love binds of seaweed around sushi, where the consumption is intimate, dark, with low slung opium smoking seats to recline upon to suck the exquisite delights of Bachannalian feasts, where plethoras of health and happiness are served alongside iced jasmine tea, with or without alcohol, Kobe beef gently fed by the tit of people who want to eat happy cows, parma ham wrapped around samphor type of asparagus, creamy tofu with sesame sauce, pork steeped in dark illicit concoctions, and the finest tuna sashimi. A pool of heated water to have blanched mushrooms and soup or the temples of such world class gastronomic havens as chef Jeff Ramsey’s 25 course tasting menu on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, where views of red flashing lights create organized patterns in which to try and understand the city. It’s a joy to taste and behold. And perhaps this ritualistic respect related to the very art of writing, and communication and the painstaking skill required to use the pictorial scripts. The pride and manners expected from one another are perhaps a route of this servitude reflected in digital society, which sits within pleasuredomes of simplicity and intellect demonstrated at places such as the 2121 Design Sight, (a masterpiece cocoon to the art of design by Tadao Ando and Issey Miyake). It’s not as easy as ABC. But this complexity leads us to wonder how many adaptees to m-writing will blossom overseas. In Europe we’ve probably all now got friends who have bought a zillion classics for a fiver for their Nintendo DS, and perhaps downloaded some of the sample chapters that are getting provided digitally as promos from companies like Canongate. Transworld last year pioneered a programme of texting in for chapters, which proved moderate success, HarperCollins have the e-experimental imprint, The Friday Project, and 3 are adopting socially networked technology such as Skype calls to allow us to all integrate into the future and apply these Mohemian ways with handsets like the INQ. Soon the Espresso machine will print titles on demand in bookshop, to order – you want Lolita on pink paper in ten minutes, you got it. This means less shelf space, more data space.
The old guard will always prefer a book. But the advantages of being able to adapt screen colours, font size are incredible for the dyslexic or visually impaired. Also, as a study aid, or for those who like to flit behind a hundred books at once, the e-book is the answer, you can carry a library in your handbag. Genius.
But how many writers can give up words for text-speak is yet to be seen. There are numerous companies exploring ways to use mobiles to market novels designed for traditional paperback, particularly bestselling brand authors like Andy McNab although it may be left to indie kids to invent new ways with words, and today is our playground for the future.
Thanks to Takeshi Miura and Akiko Hamaoka for translation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kirsty Allison started writing professionally as a teenager on Loadedand Dazed in 1994. Her fiction has appeared in Ambit andKatalogue. She has recently been performing poems around London. She has been working on a novel set in 1990s Shoreditch since the 1960s.
I made an illustrated short story called BIG BANGS for Katalogue, for whom I also worked as a contributing editor. The piece first showed as part of a group exhibition at the Trafalgar Hotel in London last year, where an A1 signed print was purchased. Katalogue are currently showing at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It opened to the public on October 25th and has been extended until the end of March 09.