3:AM Magazine

The Edgier Waters: 5 Years of 3:AM Magazine, edited by A. Stevens and published by Snowbooks (Small Publisher of the Year 2006), is now available in a smaller, glossy format for only 99p from Waterstone’s. Here’s an extract from Peter Wild’s review in Bookmunch: “It’s rare, a book like Edgier Waters… Just ask yourself how many books you’ve bought and read this year that suffer from a surfeit of ideas. Not too many I’ll warrant. This is the kind of book we should cherish. This is the kind of book we should all have on our shelves, to show the world that we’re not afraid of being challenged, not afraid of thinking. In point of fact, I feel sorry for the average reader, the he or she who can’t deal with a book that reads like a thrilling magazine (and you have to ask yourself how they deal with life and all the things that life throws at them, if their tiny brains can’t deal with the shift between a story and a poem and a piece of non-fiction). They’re missing out. They’re missing out on so much. But most of all they’re missing out on Edgier Waters… How dull life must be in the shallows”.

Mountain 7 had this to say: “There is something so right, maybe inevitable, about Michael Bracewell invoking Kathy Acker in his foreword to The Edgier Waters: 5 Years of 3:AM Magazine — she is a constant presence in the collection as it totters across the broken glass path between punk and sex; indeed it could be said that she, along with writers like Jim Thompson, Derek Raymonde and the ubiquitous Ballard are like the book’s bone marrow, its bristling DNA. This unholy quartet informs the anthology’s queasy aesthetic and gives it its thrusting energy — one leaves smiling, feeling frustrated, dazzled, pummelled, pissed”.

A weird reaction to the Offbeat scene from Sean McGahey, the Editor of The Beat (a zine I’ve always liked), who has published a poem entitled “Off-beat Generation” in Zygote in My Coffee:

“In-beat, off-beat, fat-beat, dead-beat, beat-beat / It’s all a load of bull! / Cliquey bunch of Londoners / With nothing else better to do / Kissing each others [sic.] arse! / It’s not what you know / It’s who you know!! / I give them 6 months. / Ta ta”

Cry? I almost laughed. Wait till he hears about the Brutalists! Sans rancune, Sean.

(Via the divine Dogmatika. Picture: Matthew Coleman, Poster Boy of the clickey, parasitic, sycophantic London branch of the Offbeat Generation.)

Possibly the first literary movement to be launched via MySpace:

“BRUTALISTS is a movement of new writers and poets. Founded by Adelle Stripe, Ben Myers and Tony O’Neill in the long hot summer of 2006, the BRUTALISTS are young, hungry and rejected by the mainstream. We take inspiration from writing and music that is raw, brutal, pounds the senses, comes from the heart. We create the culture we deserve. We are the BRUTALISTS. Fuck you.”

Today’s Independent on Sunday reports on the “vicious feud” between Stuckist co-founder (and 3:AM friend) Charles Thomson and his former wife, artist Stella Vine:

“As an act of naked revenge, it is a work of art. The artist Stella Vine, who found fame when Charles Saatchi took her under his wing, is laid bare by her former husband in a series of explicit, humiliating nude portraits at a major exhibition. The artworks will reignite a simmering feud between Vine and Charles Thomson, which has seen them trading verbal salvos in media interviews without actually exchanging a word with each other. Thomson — co-founder of anti-conceptual art movement the Stuckists — himself concedes the works will leave her ‘pissed off’ and ‘angry’. His paintings, to be exhibited at the Stuckists’ first major central London exhibition, are titled simply Stripper and Strip Club, though it is clear who inspired them. The publicity material for the show, which opens next month, even spells out that they are ‘explicit images of his ex-wife’. They will be seen by many as an act of revenge for the brevity of their marriage. Thomson, 53, said the works were not intended as a public attack, more a way of privately dealing with his own emotions through his art after their relationship crumbled.

…Thomson, who stood for Parliament in 2001 against the then Culture secretary Chris Smith, has not spoken to his former wife for four years, although they have traded vicious barbs in newspaper interviews. She has claimed he ‘exploited’ her and is ‘full of shit’, while he has branded her ‘a mercurial character who thinks nothing about he pain she puts others through’. Thomson said it was the gallery that chose to exhibit the nudes, but he was unapologetic about showing them in public. ‘She will probably be very pissed off. She’ll be angry and very upset because it is one rule for her and another for everyone else. She expects people to understand when she does it. She does Diana with blood coming out of her mouth and looking traumatised and it’s fine, but that woman is a mother and her children are still alive. She claims it comes from deep within her and it is the same with my pictures. It comes from deep within me and it is important. If she does feel upset, it can’t be half as upset as the parents of Rachel Whitear or Diana’s sons.”

You’ll find details of the Stuckists‘ London show here.