Off the Page
Whitstable might not seem an obvious location for a summit on the musical avant-garde, but then, before 1946, neither did Darmstadt. This February and last, the Wire magazine and promoters Sound and...
View ArticleAtomic Guitars
Two canary yellow stratocasters, mounted on stands to face each other and wired into squat black amps, buzz with a tentative open string drone. Next to the guitars hangs the shell of a radiation-proof...
View ArticleWhite Camels Can’t Dance
Mittwoch aus Licht is the only opera I know of that calls for a Bactrian camel trainer. It’s also the only opera to feature both a helicopter-borne string quartet and instrumental soloists on trapezes....
View ArticleWhizz with a Circuit Board
Before the Second World War, American composers went to Europe. That was the way of the ‘boulangerie’, the group including Aaron Copland who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After the war,...
View ArticleIzzy Skint?
When I was a kid the Beano and the Dandy were like cats and dogs: you liked one or the other and your preference reflected your personality. I was a Beano fan. The difference between Dandy and Beano...
View ArticleJesus v. Wolverine
Has Jesus got what it takes to join the X-Men? He has no shortage of superpowers, though a lot of them are one-offs: walking on water, turning water into wine, turning a few fish into a lot of fish....
View ArticleEton Life
Earlier this year Jesse Norman claimed that so many Etonians end up in government not because they’re born into money and power, but because ‘other schools don’t have the same commitment to public...
View ArticleEllen Gallagher: AxME
How we look, and transform how we look, has been Ellen Gallagher’s preoccupation for the last twenty years. Throughout AxME, Tate Modern’s stunning retrospective, images of our mutable features – lips...
View ArticleBenefits of a Hangover
Writing drunk rarely works. Writing hungover, on the other hand, can be surprisingly effective. A bastard behind the eyes can still the frivolous part of the brain – the part that wanders off and...
View ArticleTooting on Kazoos
On my way to band practice last night, I came out of Camden Town tube station to find a group of men and women dancing about, singing songs and tooting on kazoos. They were, they told the assembled...
View ArticleThe Week in Self-Help
Every morning the postman delivers a sack of new books to the LRB office. The bulk of them turn out to be either books about religion or self-help books, which may say something about the apocalyptic...
View ArticleLive like Lenin, be buried like Hitler
People get uber-tombs when we don’t want to forget them, or when whoever’s in power wants us not to forget them. They’re a way of making sure that the dead don’t fully die, architectural avatars of the...
View ArticleTranslating Lorem Ipsum
Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into...
View ArticleOn the Katzenklavier
On April Fools’ Day, the Wire magazine put out an announcement for an avant-garde music festival in Poland. I was completely taken in; but then, none of the performances mentioned sounded unrealistic....
View ArticleOn Liberty Island
Liberty Island is a website for conservative ‘literature’ set up by Adam Bellow, son of Saul. A disproportionate number of the stories on the site’s front page are classified as ‘dystopia’ or ‘horror’,...
View ArticleThe Fear that Creeps
There are two types of fear, the fear that bites and the fear that creeps. Nathan Bland, the teenage protagonist of the horror story that David Mitchell recently published on Twitter, has had a strong...
View ArticleAphex Twin’s Genius
Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, the UK’s (arguably, but not that arguably) most innovative electronic music producer ever, has said he was suprised his record label Warp wanted to release...
View ArticleAt the Bedlam Burial Ground
Dead bodies are being evicted from East London to make way for the new Crossrail station at Liverpool Street. Crossrail is gentrifying the soil. Last week archaeologists began digging up skeletons from...
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