Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Ian Penman. Ian's a journalist and music critic whose work spans several decades in art mediums.

He began writing for the British Music Magazine New Musical Express in the 1970s and has since written for many popular and special interest publications, including Uncut,

site and sound, The Guardian, and of course, City Journal where he's been a regular presence

for several years now, writing wonderful essays on Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, journalist Joan

Didion, novelist Jean Reese, philosopher Walter

Benyman, and others.

He's the author of It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, and has just published Faspender,

Thousands of Mirrors, a marvelous new book that looks at the life and work of the German

filmmaker Rainer Verner Fasspenter.

So today we're going to discuss Ian's new book and Fastbender's work and influence.

So Ian, it's great to see you here in New York.

It's great to be here.

Glad you could visit.

So to dive into this book and Fastbender as this larger-than-life personality,

he combined self-destructive behavior.

He died, I think you could say from that behavior at the young age of 37, yet with this extraordinary, in fact, to me, hard to imagine the level of productivity and work.

So you note in the book that he was ruled by excess, including in terms of his capacity for work.

So could you talk a little bit just about how productive he was, how many movies he made,

and about how he could be so productive, given the kind of self-destructive aspect of his personality.

Well, I think one of the interesting things, I think there's a lot of tensions and contradictions in him and in the book.

And one of them is that thing where he is, we would in general, I think, say of a person that they're well adjusted if they're productive.

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