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August 2008
The Archives
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08.29.08Will PowerWill Self blogs in the New York Times: http://self.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/garment-district/ When Mr. Self was in Dublin doing press for The Butt, we conducted a walkabout interview at the William Burroughs/Hans Christian Andersen Cut Outs and Cut Ups exhibition at the IMMA in Kilmainham. (See The View review here). Here’s Will’s side of the story. …and here’s ours: Will Self may be used to walking long distances (last year he famously hoofed it 26 miles from his front door to Heathrow, caught a transatlantic flight and then trekked a further 20 miles from JFK to downtown New York), but for the purposes of the Hot Press books ...
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08.28.08Blake’s 70The Proverbs of Hell In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. The hours of folly ...
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08.27.08Write in the VonnegutThe late, great Kurt Vonnegut on how to write with style…
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08.25.08Orwell’s Blog70 years later, George Orwell blogs on. http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
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08.24.08Re-enter Sand ManThe Revelatorium is currently reverbing to the sounds of the new Giant Sand album proVISIONS. Twangy guitars, boom-chicka-boom drums, Howe Gelb’s travelling man baritone. Plus guest appearances from Isobel Campbell and Neko Case. It’s a Barry Gifford book set to music. Speaking of Ms Campbell: Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Sunday At Devil Dirt (V2) **** Campbell and Lanegan’s debut Ballad Of The Broken Seas was a play for oppositional voices that used Lee and Nancy as the template but stopped just short of cute. Sunday At Devil Dirt, the follow-up, is deeper, darker and even more substantial. The record opens with ‘Seafaring Song’, the ...
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08.21.08The Ties That BindF was my best friend from the ages of 15 to 18, that period when time seems compressed and yet stretched out of all proportion. I can barely remember my own PIN number, but I recall almost every song on the radio and every film released between the years 1984 to 1987. That’s teenagerdom for you: intensely in-tense, an everpresent present. I first met F in the schoolyard around the age of 10 or 11. He was 18 months older than me and owned an issue of 2000AD that I coveted (the one in which Judge Dredd was unmasked, his ...
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08.20.08The Doc Knight ReturnsCan’t shake the notion that Heath Ledger’s Joker is blood-related to Brad Dourif’s Doc in Deadwood. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pw5yRXmLBw&feature=related
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08.19.08More Byng For Your BookOn foot of Canongate's republishing of David Simon's Homicide – A Year On The Killing Streets, we thought we'd share the full account of our meet with Canongate boss Jamie Byng last summer... It’s about three in the afternoon when Canongate boss Jamie Byng, long-haired and casually dressed, totes a big bag of books into the foyer of Buswell’s hotel on Molesworth Street. Actually, it’s less a bag of books than a mobile portal to some Borgesian dimension composed entirely of Canongate’s summer catalogue – the imminent reprint of Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’; Kate Grenville’s ‘Lilian’s Story’; Scarlett Thomas’s ominously packaged ‘The ...
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08.18.08Wire ServiceSince its premiere back in 2002, HBO’s The Wire has, over the course of five years, garnered a reputation as the only serious contender for The Sopranos’ title of greatest TV show of all time. The final series aired on the small screen this year and will be out on DVD next month. Hot Press, in association with Canongate Books, HBO and Fox, will be acting as official media partner for a special screening of The Wire in the IFI on September 19th at 6.30pm. The event will be attended by the series’ creator, executive producer and writer David Simon, who’ll be ...
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08.15.08Hold OnHow come songs with the phrase ‘Hold On’ in the title are such heartbreakers? Don’t answer that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om58QtEsP-4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPnOEiehONQ