- Kyle Froman
- Ian Spencer Bell performing Wallkill Solo, from his Elsewhere (2014)
Last month I got to see the rock and cultural critic Greil Marcus, whose Lipstick Traces—recently described jokingly but aptly as “that book about how Johnny Rotten started the French Revolution”—was one of my undergraduate bibles. In honor of Marcus’s latest, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, the Poetry Foundation and the Old Town School of Music teamed up to present him with real, live former punks Jon Langford and Sally Timms of the Mekons, who sang and played and bantered at his side. It was a reading/show that, like Lipstick Traces, illuminated points all over the map.
As a dancer, he says, “I’ve spent most of my life thinking about the body”—and in a sense thinking through the body, as we all do, experiencing emotions as things like a blow to the gut, a current of rage, an exhilarating lightening of being. New York was and is another inspiration: he’s an inveterate walker in the city, and, he says, “I walk up and down these long avenues and streets, constantly engaged in how I’m feeling at this very moment” but also “considering something that might have happened many years ago, and it will be some physical trigger”—like Proust’s madeleine, and the flood of memory and longing prompted in the writer by the cookie’s smell.
Ian Spencer Bell: Geography Solos, Wed 3/11, 7 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, 312-787-7070, poetryfoundation.org, free.
