Ian Penman
Encyclopedia
Ian Penman is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
writer and, latterly, blogger. He began writing for the NME
NME
The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...
in the autumn of 1977, later contributing to various publications including Uncut
UNCUT (magazine)
Uncut magazine, trademarked as UNCUT, is a monthly publication based in London. It is available across the English-speaking world, and focuses on music, but also includes film and books sections...
, Arena
Arena (magazine)
Arena was a British monthly men's magazine. The magazine was created in 1986 by Nick Logan, who had started The Face in 1980, to focus on trends in fashion and entertainment. British graphic designer Neville Brody, who had designed The Face, designed Arena's launch appearance.The magazine featured...
, The Wire
The Wire (magazine)
The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine, founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. The magazine initially concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music, but branched out in the early 1990s to various types of experimental music...
, The Face
The Face (magazine)
The Face was a British music, fashion and culture monthly magazine started in May 1980 by Nick Logan.-1980s:Logan had previously created the teen pop magazine Smash Hits, and had been an editor at the New Musical Express in the 1970s before launching The Face in 1980.The magazine was influential in...
, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times (UK)
The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...
, The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, Screen
Screen (journal)
Screen is a journal of film and television studies based at the John Logie Baird Centre at the University of Glasgow and published by Oxford University Press. It is co-edited by John Caughie, Alan Durant, Simon Frith, Sandra Kemp, Norman King, and Annette Kuhn.- History :Screen originated in the...
and German Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
.
Many of Penman's essays and reviews were collected in his book Vital Signs: Music, Movies and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998), praised by critic Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart is an American writer, editor, artist and film maker who has written for a variety of publications over a span of five decades. His articles and reviews have appeared in TV Guide, Publishers Weekly and other publications, along with online contributions to Allmovie, the Collecting...
in Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
:
- After a peripatetic childhood in the Middle East and the UK, Penman was set to start art school in 1977. But during a year off, he began reviewing for the UK'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: "Despite 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.
Gordon Flagg, writing about Vital Signs in Booklist, noted, "He is a dextrous and invariably entertaining writer, but too many of the subjects herein are now either irrelevant (e.g., a dozen-year-old interview with rock duo Was (Not Was) or overfamiliar (profiles of overexposed celebs like Oliver Stone and Steve Martin)... The two pieces that bracket the collection, a firsthand essay on the drug scene and ruminations on underappreciated '70s U.S. singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, indicate, however, that the volume disserves Penman by not including more of this sort of offbeat commentary."
Julia Kenna reviewed the book for Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, commenting, "Full of contradictions and witty one-liners, Penman uses language as an art form, playing with puns, synonyms, repetition, and punctuation for added effect... Two decades of politics, music and pop culture with a whip-smart wit and wisdom that draws you in and doesn’t let go."
Penman contributed the text to the catalogue of photographer Robert Frank's exhibition Storylines, Tate Modern 2004/2005.