Ian Penman

A collection of essays from the legendary music critic Ian Penman, exploring the work of James Brown, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Steely Dan and Prince.

Objects & Essays, 2012-2018

It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery - Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.

Terre Thaemlitz

Tom Burr

Michel Auder

Fanni Tutti

T.J. Wilcox

Sylvie Fleury

Future Has A Silver Lining, The

Alongside Greil Marcus, Nick Kent, and Lester Bangs, Ian Penman is one of the most important cultural critics of his generation. Long the star writer for Britain's NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS, Penman achieved something few music writers even dream of--he changed the way the subject was written about. VITAL SIGNS is the first collection of his writing.

Music, Movies and Other Manias

Vital Signs

Philip Brookman

Storylines

Robert Frank

When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and 'cross-colour' awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince - black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points (Brian Dillon, frieze), Ian Penman's first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.

RaMell Ross

Rebecca Bengal

"Paul Graham curates a subtle thesis and revitalising manifesto for photography. The dynamic and diverse work gathered here advocates an unashamed, but not uncomplicated, dedication to the brilliant tangle of reality. Without being tempted by the artifice of the studio or the restrictive demands of conventional documentary, these artists tell open-ended stories that shift, warp, and branch, attuned unfailingly to life-as-it-is. Included are Gregory Halpern's Californian waking dream ZZYZX; Vanessa Winship's peripatetic exercise in empathy she dances on Jackson; the human assemblages of Curran Hatleberg's Lost Coast; Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa's rich and multitudinous One Wall a Web; the mortality-tinged America of Richard Choi's What Remains; RaMell Ross' visionary documentary work South County; the collaborative project Index G by Emanuele Bruti & Piergiorgio Casotti; and Kristine Potter's disorientating exploration of the American landscape and masculinity in Manifest. All these works are brought together in harmony and enlightening dissonance, as Graham teases out a new photographic form"--Publisher's description.

Recent Photography from the World

But Still, it Turns

Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Edited by Tom Holert and Heike Munder. Essays by Ian Penman and Terre Thaemlitz.

Ian Penman

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