bookcultures
>Remember the New Romantics?
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Nicky Charlish wonders why the New Romantics lack a literary recognition @ 3 a.m. Magazine.
This January saw a small but select gathering in London’s Covent Garden- the Blitz Club reunion. This wasn’t war veterans reminiscing about the London Blitz when the city was pounded by Nazi bombers night after night during the Second World War but the celebration of a club which played a leading part in the New Romantic scene of 30 years ago. Remember the New Romantics? Blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick, their leaders – singers like Boy George and Adam Ant, bands like Duran Duran and the Human League – cavorted across the nation’s television screens to the accompaniment of ethereal electro music and tedious tabloid shock-horror (’is it a boy or a girl?’). That night, the dance-floor heaved to old New Romantics – and young Neo-Romantics who weren’t even alive the first time around – bopping to tribal favourites like Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’, Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’. Onlookers wondered whether all this heralded the return of decadent glamour to the capital’s nightlife.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But this event raises another question. Almost every youth cult has its novels by which it’s defined, remembered. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s had Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. A decade later, Soho’s young criminals had The Gilt Kid by James Curtis. The youth of the Forties didn’t have novels – they’d be remembered by history books and war memorials. The early Mods of the 1950s hadAbsolute Beginners by Colin Maclnnes, whilst the Chelsea Set wide-boys of the Sixties had The Crust on Its Uppers by Robin Cook (later to reinvent himself as crime writer Derek Raymond). The 1970s skinheads would have the Skinhead series of novels by Richard Allen. Given their impact on youth culture – more of this in a moment – you might expect the New Romantics to have been similarly commemorated. But it remains the one cult conspicuous by its absence from literary recognition.
>The Art of the Smart vs. Actual Art
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| Cara Barer |
Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) considers the failures of literary fiction and the art of “urban intellectual fodder” @ 3Quarks Daily.
There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.
You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader — the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.
This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.
This art sure ain’t Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It’s more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.
It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.
It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.
For want of a better label, here’s a suggested honorific for this kind of art:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Urban Intellectual Fodder.
altimoniere 
>Margin Comments: Books do furnish a house
Posted on September 30, 2010. Filed under: bookcultures, Margin Comments, Phillip Lopate, TriQuarterly Review |
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Tri-Quarterly Review talks with Phillip Lopate about his bookshelves.
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