Edmund Hardy There is power and its modes, the democratic nature of speech, and the politics of wit; thus, satire. Aisle16 are a collective of six stand-up poets, “poetry’s boyband”, and their book hopes to be “The poetry book it’s not embarrassing to be seen carrying.” It collects over fifty of their poems. When we […]
Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind
Edmund Hardy The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside, […]
Loretta Lynn : Van Lear Rose
Edmund Hardy I’m never quite sure what I’m going to order until I find myself saying “a sloe gin fizz please” or “white beer” or whatever – and – if the bar is somewhere like Wapping – the sloe gin arrives and I wonder why I suddenly thought of it. “Well sloe gin fizz works […]
Rem Koolhaas – Content
Edmund Hardy Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors. Actually, the connection is more an art-historical musing: we want to see people doing things indoors, and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas […]
Doris Lessing – The Sweetest Dream
Edmund Hardy Our sweetest dreams are, apparently, ideological. Those seductive systems of thought which attract people who want to save the world on their own terms, but who end up mired in disillusion or pedantry. There’s prime potential for grim humour when people play at being revolutionaries, and Lessing is well-placed to crack the jokes: […]
El-P : Fantastic Damage
Edmund Hardy There’s something bleak and claustrophobic brewing in the beats and rhymes of New York City, and here it boils over into a seventy-minute scream of anger, apocalypse and funkiness, shot through with a menacing surrealism. The music is manic, pushed into extremity because that’s how El-P can express himself in a perceived world […]
Lou Reed – Pass Thru Fire: Collected Lyrics
Edmund Hardy Lou Reed is the craggy man in black leather, a permanent member of rock’s avant-garde without trying. Popular in all his guises, as Velvet Underground punk progenitor, as Seventies glam decadent, or as Nineties eagle-eyed chronicler. Or maybe just as the guy who wrote the original ‘Perfect Day’. But a book of song […]