3:AM Magazine

:: Latest Features

You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson

Forty years on, it seems astonishing not that people watched Fat Man on a Beach, but that it got through any commissioning process, let alone on ITV, now notorious for its pursuit of the lowest common denominator at any cost. Given the contempt in which 21st century television holds its audiences, to be explicitly told that “Now might be a good time to get a cup of tea” before Johnson recites his poetry feels like being credited with an unusual level of intelligence — at least, the viewer could opt to refuse to be patronised, and be rewarded for choosing to stick with the host.

Juliet Jacques reviews You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson BFI Flipside DVD.

Fat of the Land

One-hundred and fifty years ago, a famous battle from a great war spilled blood on the fields behind my family’s home. Now, these long summer days, we chase away men wearing dark baseball caps and bulky headphones, metal detectors swaying wildly at their sides. Other days we crack off pistol-fire into the air and watch as they retreat to their little cars, great clouds of dust dispersing over the roads as they tear back to town.

By David Peak.

:: Interviews

Habermas, Adorno, Politics

Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gordon Finlayson.

without concepts

A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edouard Machery.

:: Non-Fiction

You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson

Juliet Jacques reviews You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson BFI Flipside DVD.

The luck of the game

It gives us a picture of Blair’s Britain which is, refreshingly, less than flattering. Britannia is unremittingly icy, not cool. Crime-based films have long shown London at various stages of its history and Croupier is no exception. The Long Good Friday captured London on the eve of the East End’s transformation from dead docklands to financial hub whilst Mona Lisa portrayed Soho on the verge of change, post-Groucho Club new sophistication, pre-rainbow-flagged gay village gentrification, and with old-style gangsters still around.

Nicky Charlish on the 15th anniversary of Mike Hodges‘ Croupier.