cover image Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias

Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias

Ian Penman. Serpent's Tail, $15.99 (374pp) ISBN 978-1-85242-523-4

After a peripatetic childhood in the Middle East and the U.K., Penman was set to start art school in 1977. But during a year off, he began reviewing for the U.K.'s leading music paper, New Musical Express, and became one of its star writers. In his first collection, Penman pulls together pieces from the back files of NME, as well as The Face, The Sunday Times, Ikon, The Wire and Sight and Sound. With more than 45 essays spanning from 1979 to 1995, Penman coasts over the full pop panoply from Amis to Warhol and Zappa, leaving quotable passages in his wake: Jackson Pollock ""painted like he drank: messily, but with a secret logic in pursuit of the ultimate liquid line, the Big Slur."" Norman Mailer ""stood for that raw roller coaster feeling, the pure starburst energy of post-war American birth and becoming."" Hunter S. Thompson: ""The only person he caricatured convincingly now was himself."" An interview with Harry Dean Stanton (""last of the great white Dharma bums"") becomes a prismatic prose poem. A few pages on Quentin Tarantino turn into an all-out attack: ""[D]espite their spitty hissy tom-cat woozy-Uzi male-violence malevolence these are real `feel-good' movies.... The only film he could convincingly make would be about the Film Festival circuit."" These commentaries, profiles, reviews and interviews are packaged neither chronologically nor thematically; however, the closing taglines sometimes make a free-associational link to the opening paragraph of the next entertaining essay. Penman's pages have few wasted words, and amid his clever barbs are genuine insights. (Aug.)