February 2011

The Archives

  • 02.28.11
    Shipping up to Boston Uncategorized | Comments Off
    The Rev Murphy's recent reading at the Paramount Theatre in Boston is now online. All thanks to Culture Ireland, Emerson College and Forum Network. View it here: http://forum-network.org/lecture/peter-murphy-reads-john-revelator
  • 02.24.11
    Notes from a Ghost Town Uncategorized | Comments Off
    Jerry Dammers wrote the Specials' swansong 'Ghost Town' while touring the UK in the winter of 1980. The band were exhausted by in-fighting. England was riven with strikes, racial tension, the rise of the National Front, Thatcher incoming. The song topped the charts the following summer, as the country was torn apart by riots. The era is vividly reconstructed in Dorian Lynsky's excellent new book 33 Revolutions Per Minute – A History Of Protest Songs (Faber). I drafted this dispatch the day after returning to Enniscorthy from the US. The taxi driver who ran me home from the train station told ...
  • 02.07.11
    John the Revelator US mini-tour Uncategorized | (1)
    Selections from John the Revelator, read by the author. Feb 10: Paramount Black Box, Paramount Center 559 Washington Street Boston, MA 02111, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm Feb 14: South Lounge, Lowenstein Building, Fordham University, 113 W. 60th Street (9th Ave.), New York, NY 10023. Reading at 5.30 pm Feb 15: Woodlawn Heights Library, Tuesday, 4355 Katonah Avenue (at E. 239th St.), Bronx, NY 10470. 5 pm If you're around, come on down. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/7wjHrnqAY48" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
  • 02.03.11
    Death Valley 69 Uncategorized | Comments Off
    "A direct connection to Manson was something we had no interest in. Living in New York we were meeting up with people like Lydia Lunch who were expressing this very sort of nefarious imagery in a way, going back and re-evaluating Manson’s iconic images. And Raymond Pettibon this classic caricature of the Manson hippy with the peace sign, and underneath it said, ‘Watch His Other Hand!’ “The Manson thing was so intense in America in ’69/’70 that when he was put away, all of a sudden The Carpenters was in and it was like, ‘The ’60s is dead, let’s get rid ...
  • 02.02.11
    Desolation Row, revisited Uncategorized | Comments Off
    "I'm a casual Bob Dylan fan, but I am a Bob Dylan fan, and I've had friends of mine that turned me onto more of his stuff. Zack (Snyder) had this idea that he wanted to start and end Watchmen with a Dylan song. He wanted 'The Times They Are A-Changing' for the opening and 'Desolation Row' for the end. I said, 'I feel like this movie has this kind of fuck-you energy to it, and that's probably the note you want to end on,' and I brought up this Jim Carroll song – the guy who wrote The Basketball ...
  • 02.02.11
    The Write Stuff Uncategorized | Comments Off
    RTE's Hot Press documentary The Write Stuff screened last night. Take a look on Real Player. http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1090459 [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/LjH5KEtXB8k" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]