This event, centered around the new book by Agata Pyzik, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, will bring into focus cold war culture and the emergence of the unique dialogue between two sides of the Iron Curtain. Agata Pyzik will give a talk, where she'll present the book accompanied with film and music fragments and will be joined in conversation by Chris Bohn, the editor of the Wire and Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Poor But Sexy is an attempt at a holistic look at the conundrum of the 'East' - a cold war notion, that still nonetheless influences our seeing of the world. Music used to play a great role in this, and the book looks at how especially post punk and pop took sides in the mutual fascination between the East and West. Young people from both sides, deprived of information, started to dream about each other. The event will explore how this mute dialogue proceeded and how, after the collapse of the divisions in the world, this aesthetic formation collapsed too, loosing its previous political compass. And how the emergence of the new, transparent global market made, especially in post-communist countries, pop music startlingly homogenous and unoriginal and killed the flavour it had before.

www.zero-books.net/books/poor-but-sexy

AGATA PYZIK

Agata Pyzik is a writer who came to London from Warsaw in 2010 and since then has been active in music, art and daily press. She covered Eastern European Politics, art and experimental music for the likes of The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wire, Frieze, Calvert Journal an many others. Poor but Sexy is her first book.

nuitssansnuit.blogspot.com
poorsexyeast.tumblr.com

ESTHER LESLIE

Esther Leslie is lecturer in English and humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and Hollywood Flatlands: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde.

CHRIS BOHN

Chris Bohn is an esteemed music journalist, who has been a vital contributor to New Musical Express in the 1970s and 1980s, and is a long-time editor of The Wire magazine.