Picpus magazine - Michael Bracewell on Morrissey

An anonymous person writes:

New PICPUS Magazine out New according to

@simoncgrant / Twitter:

Our new issue of Picpus is coming out soon - includes Michael Bracewell on Morrissey and Jen Higgie on the wondrous Huguette Caland




Has anybody access to that magazine? It's not an online mag!

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'd just like to go on record as saying I think Morrissey is wondrous.
 
I bobbed into WH Smiths this lunchtime but they didn't have it. Soz.

P.

do you think theyd carry it at a barnes and noble? if so i live very near the hopkins one and will be there tomorrow to pick up some stuff and can look if no one else can get to it. ive not read it before and dont know how common the availability is.
 
Why on earth would someone call a magazine Picpus?
 
Why on earth would someone call a magazine Picpus?

It's a cemetery in Paris. Magazines are where intellectual ideas go to DIE unless people BUY THEM AND STOP READING ONLY THE INTERNET.

(Sorry, I love magazines. The Magazine Coordinator was the only position I turned down at B&N because I knew I wouldn't get shit done.)
 
It's a cemetery in Paris. Magazines are where intellectual ideas go to DIE unless people BUY THEM AND STOP READING ONLY THE INTERNET.

(Sorry, I love magazines. The Magazine Coordinator was the only position I turned down at B&N because I knew I wouldn't get shit done.)

It sounds like a rectal fissure.

I've been to Pere Lachaise. Amazing. I've been six feet away from Edith Piaf. She wasn't at her best, but still... Six feet.
 
MICHAEL BRACEWELL ON MORRISSEY AT THE LOS ANGELES SPORTS ARENA, 8.00PM, MAY 10TH 2014

Slow astern! And imagine if you will that your time machine slips smoothly back just three decades… And there you are, at night, high above a soot-blackened city somewhere in the north west of England. You gaze down into damp dark streets as they were in the spring of 1984, your vision spiralling Earthwards with the motion of a spun coin, to alight (through the roof of an Edwardian theatre) upon a white-lit sea of young, upturned, ecstatic faces – their owners crowded together, borne on pop’s wild ocean, a gale blowing in their heads, oblivious, mad with joy, pushing forward, pushing back, riotous, hooked, given voice… The sun shines out of our behinds

And now it’s thirty years later. It’s been blazing today in Los Angeles, and the dusk feels heavy with heat. Around the approach to the L.A. Sports Arena, on S Figueroa Street, along the W Martin Luther King Boulevard, down S Park Drive the traffic backs up – it’s crazy. A Ford Camaro with custom paintwork slides by as though on grease, bedecked with psychedelic italics that spell out, declaim – as if we didn’t know – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out… This capacity crowd of God knows how many thousand people, but a lot, is filled with Hispanic Americans, Latinos, boys who look like bleached-out photographs of rural American mechanics circa 1949, girls, ditto; squads of ordinary looking people with extraordinary hearts and minds.

There had been much talk in the press that the only begetter of this chaos, this mass celebration of heroic contrariness, Morrissey, had invited two legends of British pop music – Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Tom Jones- to be special guests at his concerts in New York City and Los Angeles respectively. All tickets were sold before you could say ‘Rediffusion’. And here in L.A. – MozAngeles – Tom Jones and his band took the stage with a gentlemanly graciousness, the burgundy velvet jacketed ease of Las Vegas hotels, before letting rip with an incantatory cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Tower of Song’ just to point out that they weren’t mucking around.

Jones’s voice retains the force that made Elvis describe him as an equal; but he has a lightness of touch – the lounge bar charm – we’d like to do another number in the rock and roll style for you now – that truly tempers his steel. He blasts off Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘End of The Road’, chucks in ‘Delilah’, and when he gets to “Thunderball” he’s whipped the ocean into a dark but thrilling storm. He can do this so well, and he does; it’s like you just saw Galileo, over there, now; and like his host for the evening, Jones and his band make pop music a primal force, an archetype if you will, in which your innermost desires and truths and regrets can be found and felt…
And because life is not a gap year, we need Morrissey.

morrissey_with_special_guests_tom_jones_and_kristeen_young_may_10_los_angeles_sports_arena_poster.jpg

In the roaring darkness before his set, what could be a pageant of patron saints do their thing on a screen: Brian Eno singing ‘The Seven Deadly Finns’ on Dutch TV circa 1974, The Ramones at full throttle, Mrs Shufflewick (an alcoholic depressive British female impersonator, name of Rex Jameson, who dropped dead on Camden High Street in 1983 carrying a shopping bag of Guinness) cracking one liners that could pass undetected in a monologue by Beckett…. And beautiful doomed Nico… The gang’s all here. Morrissey, we know, has been the curator of his idols for decades: they are his overture, his spiritual ancestors and his reason for living. His songs and his embodiment of those songs have made a gift of their iconography to his fans. Patric Doonan, raised to wait – I’m tired again, I’ve tried again

Morrissey’s band of the moment could not have been leaner or meaner: Solomon Lee Walker, bass, Matthew Ira Walker, drums, Gustavo Manzur, keyboards, Jesse Tobias, guitars, and the great Boz Boorer - a musician of such immense style – also on guitars. You can imagine: ‘Hand In Glove’, ‘Speedway’, ‘National Front Disco’, ‘First of the Gang To Die’ – and yes, yes, yes… ‘World Peace Is None Of Your Business’; and we cheer because the bullfighter dies…

In the humid Los Angeles night, a world is brought to life in which Barlow Moor Road and the emerald lawns of Hollywood Forever fall in love; and the crowd goes bonkers. And the ceremony of innocence is drowned by the realisation that this last thirty years or so, from Preston to El Paso, the whole point of Morrissey, giving voice to the voiceless, has been to protest and protest and protest – from the point of view of those who have nothing, or feel they have nothing and who live by their dreams and their nervous systems and what they read or watch or listen to… Manchester Central Library circa 1975 or the ghetto, southern California, 2014 – With beauty and wit, Morrissey hymns an existence in which love, abjection, contrariness, refusal, comedy and loneliness become somehow synonymous with one another. The personal was always political for Morrissey – in the darkened underpass, between concrete and clay.

{c/o of PICPUS Issue No.15 Spring 2015, Edition: 4000, Editors: Charles Asprey & Simon Grant, Special thanks: Morrissey}
 
Bracewell; a man after my own art.

The Sports Arena was indeed a wonderful night, but he really should have been at Santa Ana (for all I know, he was...)

http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threads/130782-Article-Santa-Ana-CA-The-Observatory-%28May-8-2014%29-post-show?p=1986835783&viewfull=1#post1986835783

And so the promo blitz for the Spring UK Arena tour begins...or ends..here?

(In a quite beautiful, free, A5 - folded - broadsheet arts quarterly found in only the most discerning galleries & bookshops!)

;)
 
LA "Sports Arena" Land of bacon wrapped hot dog carts in the parking lot, gigantic white T-shirts with "wife beaters" underneath and shaved heads. Memories.....
 
Bracewell's been hammering out this type of verbose prose for over a decade now. Stop me if I think that I've read this all before.........................
 
A "Ford Camaro"? Did Bracewell mean a Chevy Camaro or a Ford Mustang or am I just an r-tard who knows nothing about the Ford Camaro? It wasn't my car anyway, but I do have a MORRISSEY sticker on my coupe (it just says MORRISSEY.) I also have these stickers: LESS HUMANS MORE HUMANITY, and STOP THE KILLING (with a picture of a seal.)

MICHAEL BRACEWELL ON MORRISSEY AT THE LOS ANGELES SPORTS ARENA, 8.00PM, MAY 10TH 2014

Slow astern! And imagine if you will that your time machine slips smoothly back just three decades… And there you are, at night, high above a soot-blackened city somewhere in the north west of England. You gaze down into damp dark streets as they were in the spring of 1984, your vision spiralling Earthwards with the motion of a spun coin, to alight (through the roof of an Edwardian theatre) upon a white-lit sea of young, upturned, ecstatic faces – their owners crowded together, borne on pop’s wild ocean, a gale blowing in their heads, oblivious, mad with joy, pushing forward, pushing back, riotous, hooked, given voice… The sun shines out of our behinds

And now it’s thirty years later. It’s been blazing today in Los Angeles, and the dusk feels heavy with heat. Around the approach to the L.A. Sports Arena, on S Figueroa Street, along the W Martin Luther King Boulevard, down S Park Drive the traffic backs up – it’s crazy. A Ford Camaro with custom paintwork slides by as though on grease, bedecked with psychedelic italics that spell out, declaim – as if we didn’t know – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out… This capacity crowd of God knows how many thousand people, but a lot, is filled with Hispanic Americans, Latinos, boys who look like bleached-out photographs of rural American mechanics circa 1949, girls, ditto; squads of ordinary looking people with extraordinary hearts and minds.

There had been much talk in the press that the only begetter of this chaos, this mass celebration of heroic contrariness, Morrissey, had invited two legends of British pop music – Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Tom Jones- to be special guests at his concerts in New York City and Los Angeles respectively. All tickets were sold before you could say ‘Rediffusion’. And here in L.A. – MozAngeles – Tom Jones and his band took the stage with a gentlemanly graciousness, the burgundy velvet jacketed ease of Las Vegas hotels, before letting rip with an incantatory cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Tower of Song’ just to point out that they weren’t mucking around.

Jones’s voice retains the force that made Elvis describe him as an equal; but he has a lightness of touch – the lounge bar charm – we’d like to do another number in the rock and roll style for you now – that truly tempers his steel. He blasts off Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘End of The Road’, chucks in ‘Delilah’, and when he gets to “Thunderball” he’s whipped the ocean into a dark but thrilling storm. He can do this so well, and he does; it’s like you just saw Galileo, over there, now; and like his host for the evening, Jones and his band make pop music a primal force, an archetype if you will, in which your innermost desires and truths and regrets can be found and felt…
And because life is not a gap year, we need Morrissey.

morrissey_with_special_guests_tom_jones_and_kristeen_young_may_10_los_angeles_sports_arena_poster.jpg

In the roaring darkness before his set, what could be a pageant of patron saints do their thing on a screen: Brian Eno singing ‘The Seven Deadly Finns’ on Dutch TV circa 1974, The Ramones at full throttle, Mrs Shufflewick (an alcoholic depressive British female impersonator, name of Rex Jameson, who dropped dead on Camden High Street in 1983 carrying a shopping bag of Guinness) cracking one liners that could pass undetected in a monologue by Beckett…. And beautiful doomed Nico… The gang’s all here. Morrissey, we know, has been the curator of his idols for decades: they are his overture, his spiritual ancestors and his reason for living. His songs and his embodiment of those songs have made a gift of their iconography to his fans. Patric Doonan, raised to wait – I’m tired again, I’ve tried again

Morrissey’s band of the moment could not have been leaner or meaner: Solomon Lee Walker, bass, Matthew Ira Walker, drums, Gustavo Manzur, keyboards, Jesse Tobias, guitars, and the great Boz Boorer - a musician of such immense style – also on guitars. You can imagine: ‘Hand In Glove’, ‘Speedway’, ‘National Front Disco’, ‘First of the Gang To Die’ – and yes, yes, yes… ‘World Peace Is None Of Your Business’; and we cheer because the bullfighter dies…

In the humid Los Angeles night, a world is brought to life in which Barlow Moor Road and the emerald lawns of Hollywood Forever fall in love; and the crowd goes bonkers. And the ceremony of innocence is drowned by the realisation that this last thirty years or so, from Preston to El Paso, the whole point of Morrissey, giving voice to the voiceless, has been to protest and protest and protest – from the point of view of those who have nothing, or feel they have nothing and who live by their dreams and their nervous systems and what they read or watch or listen to… Manchester Central Library circa 1975 or the ghetto, southern California, 2014 – With beauty and wit, Morrissey hymns an existence in which love, abjection, contrariness, refusal, comedy and loneliness become somehow synonymous with one another. The personal was always political for Morrissey – in the darkened underpass, between concrete and clay.

{c/o of PICPUS Issue No.15 Spring 2015, Edition: 4000, Editors: Charles Asprey & Simon Grant, Special thanks: Morrissey}
 
A "Ford Camaro"? Did Bracewell mean a Chevy Camaro or a Ford Mustang or am I just an r-tard who knows nothing about the Ford Camaro? It wasn't my car anyway, but I do have a MORRISSEY sticker on my coupe (it just says MORRISSEY.) I also have these stickers: LESS HUMANS MORE HUMANITY, and STOP THE KILLING (with a picture of a seal.)

That is a pretty stupid oversight. After you pointed it out I was thinking maybe he saw a clever chop job that night, but no roadster in their right mind would marry a camaro with a ford, unless they wanted their rat rod matte bod finish to be keyed.
 

Trending Threads

Back
Top Bottom