Tonight’s Pick: Thurston Moore and Byron Coley at Politics & Prose and the Corcoran

Thurston Moore’s and Byron Coley’s photo history No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980 has a black-and-white-and-puke-green color scheme, which feels appropriate: The movement’s music was designed to be both stark and a little stomach-turning. Playing the role of Lower East Side oral historians, the Sonic Youth guitarist and longtime music journalist interview the scene’s prime movers, including James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Rhys Chatham, and, most provocatively, Brian Eno. Glenn Branca vents about No New York, an Eno-produced compilation that spawned jealousy among those not included (”what [Eno] did destroyed No Wave,” he says). But Eno wasn’t wrong to call it “one of those sort of flames that burns very brightly for a short time and then goes out,” and the dozens of photos included capture evidence of the fire: a chainsaw taken to a guitar, a scrum between Chance and critic Robert Christgau, and lots of empty lofts and rooftops reclaimed for art’s sake. Moore and Coley discuss and sign copies of their work at 4 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Free, (202) 364-1919; at 7 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW, $22, (202) 639-1770. —Mark Athitakis

(Also, see our interview with Marc Masters, local author of his own No Wave book, which was published earlier this year.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Books, People, Punk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.