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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

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Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped drive her to her death – the blonde waves and the fake breasts; the pill addictions and the airheaded pronouncements about men and sex and diamonds; the years spent tumbling down the rabbit-hole in search of somebody with cash willing to play at being Daddy; the Playboy cover and centrefold, and the unwise sexual exhibitionism, and the occasional moments of bleak honesty that nodded at some formative abuse – and yet still she achieved twice the thing that Monroe never did: for four days, from 7 September 2006 to 10 September 2006, Anna Nicole Smith was a mother to two children As it had for Monroe, who confessed in her last year that she had wanted children ‘more than anything’, motherhood held as much significance for Smith as big-time fame did, her desire to be the world’s hottest chick only commensurate with her certainty that she should procreate ‘I’m either going to be a very good, very famous movie star and model,’ Smith told Entertainment Weekly at the height of her success, in 1994, ‘or I’m going to have a bunch of kids I would miss having a career, but I’ve done my acting, and I’ve done my modelling I’ve done everything I wanted to do’ She did not become a great actor, even if for a short time she was one of the biggest models on earth She did not make it to 40, even though she outlived Monroe by 3 sad, medicated years, dying at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida at just 39 years old, in 2007   One thing she did make was herself Vickie Lynn Hogan, born 28 November 1967, was a flat-chested brunette At five, she announced her intention to become a supermodel; shortly after, she revised her statement and suggested that, in fact, the thing she really wanted to be was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe (Not an impersonator, note, or an entirely different starlet who took Monroe as her inspiration: the same woman, occupying the same body, not

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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Interview

Issue No. 17

Interview with George Saunders

Aidan Ryan

Interview

Issue No. 17

The American short story writer George Saunders has the kind of reputation that makes one hesitate before typing his...

feature

January 2012

The Common Sense Cosmos

Ned Beauman

feature

January 2012

Worthwhile philosophy is like building matchstick galleons. When Lewis says that all possible worlds are just as real as...

feature

Issue No. 2

Gay Madonnas in Montevergine: The Feast of Mamma Schiavona

Annabel Howard

feature

Issue No. 2

We are crowded into the medium-sized piazza before the sanctuary of Montevergine. There is no town or village; it...

 

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