Ian Penman (born in 1959) is
a British
writer and,
latterly, blogger. He began writing for the
NME in the autumn of 1977, later contributing to
various publications including
Uncut,
Arena,
The Wire,
The Face,
The Guardian,
The
Times,
The Sunday
Times,
The
Independent,
Screen and
German Vogue.
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 in
Publishers
Weekly:
- 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, 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.
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