Mark Sinker
Related: The Wire (magazine) - British literature - music criticism - music journalism
Biography
Mark Sinker (born June 7, 1960) is a British writer (educ. Shrewsbury School, New College, Oxford University). While working for the New Musical Express (1983-88) and briefly for Melody Maker (circa 1989) he also wrote for The Wire from 1985. He then became its editor from 1992-94 and remains an occasional contributor. He is a contributing editor at the film magazine Sight and Sound, and has worked on a critical history of music and technology, The Electric Storm, since the mid-1990s. Recent projects included a book in the BFI Film Classics series, on Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If..... --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sinker [Oct 2006]
On black science fiction
The triumph of black American culture is that, forcibly stripped by the Middle Passage and Slavery Days of any direct connection with African mother culture, it has nonetheless survived; by syncretism, by bricolage, by a day-to-day programme of appropriation and adaptation as resourcefully broad-minded as any in history. But still, the humane tradition - of warmth, community hope and aspiration - central to the gospel roots soul of the southern black tradition is, if treated as the principle that underlies all, a way of hiding from these facts in plain sight: that this tradition is no more uniquely "African" than the Nation of Islam is "Islamic", that this culture is still - in its constituent parts - very much a patchwork borrowing; necessary of course for physical and psychic survival, but not an unarguable continuity. Mark Sinker, 1992 The Wire http://www.pulsation.com/documents/loving_the_alien/
On Lester Bangs
On 29 April 1982 his musician friend Nancy Stillman discovered Bangs dead in his apartment. On his record deck was the Human League’s Dare, LP hit of that winter, just bought, and actually still revolving, the needle crackling in the run-out groove. Just think — for a moment — of Bangs’s own ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms; just relish this bandname, this LP title, this rich (daft, hideous, unlikely) coincidence. -- http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html