Scene & Herd

Righto, time to launch the promotional campaign for Poor But Sexy, now after the book hit the stores just over two weeks ago, as you have to do these days! The launch at Calvert 22 gallery took place on April 9th DREAMING THE LOST COLLECTIVE (here the link to the event and some photos), but there's several other events in the pipeline, conveniently each focusing on different aspects of the book, not to make people bored and to showcase all five short books compressed into one: one on current politics of the former East, one on pop culture generated out of the late cold war paranoia in late 70s/early 80s, then one on eastern European mysticism, then one on contemporary art meets Socialist Realism and finally, one on the different strategies of modernity and consumption in the Soviet Bloc and in the West.

There has been and there are forthcoming articles in the press, linked to the book.

In the Wire #362, there has been my Epiphany, in the prestigious series where authors are revealing music that influenced them somehow. I wrote on Franz Schubert and the influence of his song cycles such as Schone Mullerin on my later fixation with effeminate men in synthpop and Neue Deutsche Welle.

At the Quietus, book excerpt focusing o the popfuturism in Polish pop-culture - how we invented capitalism, that wasn't there (and how we predicted things to come). Two posts ago on this blog I made an appendix to this fragment.

Apart from that, I wrote recently for the Guardian about women's rights in Ukraine and elsewhere in East Europe

Icon monthly had me recently twice on the specificity of Soviet and Polish graphic design, on Soviet film posters in GRAD Russian Gallery, London, and Henryk Tomaszewski's retrospective in Warsaw in the forthcoming, June issue.

I'm also to have two pieces, on Vera Chytilova's Daisies and two para-long thingy for the Marguerite Duras Centenary in the forthcoming, #32 issue of Five Dials magazine, edited by the one and only, wonderful writer Joanna Walsh. it will also include a great short story by Juliet Jacques. Stay tuned for this one!

Here are upcoming events:

22.04 Cafe Oto, London: Dancing across the Iron Curtain, w/ Esther Leslie and Chris Bohn

2.05 KUAD Gallery, Istanbul,Turkey - part of the Turkish-Polish Year, I'll be speaking at the opening of the exhibition of Polish art since the 90s, my abstract here

14.05 Manchester, UK, Atelier

16.05 London, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies 

Discussion around themes of What’s the East and the West? How do we perceive the East and its transformations? What’s behind post-1989 developments?

4.06 Warsaw, Poland:  Museum of Modern Art

21.06 Berlin, Germany: Pro Qm Bookshop (with guests)

15.08 Wales, Green Man Festival,  greenman.net  Q & A with Alex Niven (of Folk Opposition and Definitelky Maybe book for 33 1/3 series fame)

Forthcoming in September: Pages of Hackney, London and Housmans Radical Booksellers, London.

Last but not least, very happy for this pretty uncanny celebrity appreciation, more of that please, some accolade from Martin Gore or David Bowie, for example?

that's all for now, folks!