3:AM Magazine

Decasia present: Stuckism, Shakespeare and Shoegaze

Tuesday August 7th Strong Rooms, 120-124 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3SQ

Free entry

8-9pm Stuckist artist Ella Guru (pictured) talks about Stuckism

followed by live music: the Lancaster Bombers

Film screening: Silent Shakespeare

DJs playing the best and obscure rockabilly/psych and shoegaze: Ulterior, Shot by Both Sides & Lady Himalaya

Another day, another Tao Lin interview (Gawker called him “irritating”, we call him irrepressible). This time it’s Tony O’Neill, who’s having a good week this week it seems.

TL: How does it feel winning Opium Magazine’s 2007 Literary Death Match in Washington Square Park? Is it better than heroin?

TO’N: I feel like I just shot 30 golden speedballs. It IS better than heroin. It’s almost better than the feeling you get BEFORE you go score some heroin. I can’t believe it.

TL: What do you plan on doing with the $10,000 cash prize?

TO’N: I am going to buy my wife expensive shoes. I am going to go to Burma and buy a holiday home. I am going to start an opium farm. I am going to pay a crack head $300 to kill the president and Judge Judy. I am going to give $2000 arts grants to 3:AM Magazine, Dogmatika and Straight from the Fridge. I am going to invest in slunks. I am going to put the rest in a Nigerian bank account.

TL: We bought alcohol before the reading; did you do that on purpose so you could put something in mine in order to impair me?

TO’N: No, but the Xanax I put in the beer was to fuck you up. I actually just wanted a mental image of Tao Lin, poet and author drinking Steel Reserve malt liquor from a paper bag in Washington Square Park. That alone was worth the $2.50 I spent.

TL: Without alcohol do you think you would have won?

TO’N: No. Intoxicants, preferably the cheaper the better (I am typing this having drank a bottle of morphine based diarrhea medication) act upon me in much the same way that spinach does to Popeye.

TL: After the reading your daughter, Nico, talked to me and said, “Good luck.” Did you tell her to say that just to remind me I didn’t win?

T’ON: Yes. Nico has the ability to slick a knife in your guts and make you feel like someone just tickled your belly. That’s my girl.

TL: Has CNN called you for an interview yet?

T’ON: Yes. I just got off the phone with Nancy Grace. She called me a “motherfucker” and hoped that I “burned in hell”. Larry King is giving me a back rub as I type this. My honest advice to anyone thinking of dropping out of school at 18 to do drugs and bum around with bands in the vague hope of one day becoming a writer is DO IT. You too can live my fabulous life. And get a tattoo. And remember, if drugs were really bad for you how come Keith Richards is still alive, huh?

TL: Can you say something nice about each of the other three readers (Me, Maureen Tkacik, and the other person (whose name I can’t find; on the site it says Joshua something read but he didn’t) so we don’t kill ourselves?

TO’N: Listen, I’ll be honest: I only won because I bribed John Wesley Harding, and also because he liked my accent so much. The English are kind of like the mafia like that. Also, I had my daughter go up to all of the other judges and look at them with her big brown eyes and say: “My daddy says that if he doesn’t win we can’t buy food tonight. Can you make my daddy win because I’m very hungry…”

TL: Who was your favorite judge and why?

TO’N: I loved them all equally. They are like family to me.

TL: Should I have won instead of you?

TO’N: I think your performance was too ahead of the curve for them. I would have picked you. If you’re reading this and you weren’t there, Tao’s poem was one of the most moving things I have ever heard, and an art prank all rolled up into one. In the proper setting people would have called you a genius and other poets would have killed themselves out of respect. But like so many pioneers, Tao was misunderstood in this context. After the reading Tao found a used syringe on the grass and tossed it over to me. It was a Turemo 28guage ½ cc needle, the kind I used to use. I disposed of it properly. I imaged how ironic it would be that I survived years of IV drug use and had nothing worse happen to me than a couple of my teeth fell out, and then I contract Hep C or HIV at a poetry reading.

TL: Toby Litt chose your first novel, Digging The Vein, as a “Book that defined a generation,” for the “Now” generation in Esquire UK recently. I read your second novel and liked it a lot. What’s your next novel going to be about, the third novel?

TO’N: I just finished co-writing the memoirs of an NFL player called Jason Peter for St Martins Press. Jason had his own struggles with addiction and what have you. It’s a great book, if Hunter S. Thomson had written about his life as a pro football player it might have come out like this. My first priority is to find a sympathetic publisher for the book you read, Down and Out on Murder Mile. I think when I write my next book it will be an existentialist book set in a small town against a backdrop of alcohol, glue, late night buses and doner kebabs. Like if Hunger had taken place in Warrington instead of Christiana.

According to Toby Litt in the latest issue of Esquire, Tony O’Neill’s Offbeat masterpiece, Digging the Vein, is today’s answer to On the Road: ‘Digging the Vein fits neatly with our confessional times: there’s no dignity, there’s no road, only the death drive’ (more in dogmatika ).

In other Offbeat Gen news, Brutalist Ben Myers wonders if spoetry (spam poetry) is ‘the new poetry of the 21st century’: ‘Real spam poems require human input; they need a sense of order, otherwise they end up as unreadable gibberish reminiscent of artist Jake Chapman’s Metaphysics. This is typing not poetry. No: the best spam poems are those that twist the bastardised language into something new, something readable. Frequently, spam-mails are filled with incongruous yet titillating combinations of words or excerpts from science fiction or westerns. Spam poetry is therefore the literary equivalent of recycling; it takes off-cuts and lets them ferment into something new and occasionally exotic. A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard, someone who knows which pieces of fat need trimming, who can use a spam-mail as a spring-board into his or her own imagination. And though there are no rules, I happen to believe that the best spoems are those that can be crafted in a matter of minutes…’ Also well worth reading is Lee Rourke’s Guardian blog entry on his hero Blaise Cendrars and Joseph Ridgwell on the Brutalists and Offbeats: ‘The antiquated monolith that is today’s corporate publishing industry has, by blind default, forced this disparate group of artists to connect with each other and form the most vibrant underground lit scene since the Beat Generation’. Matthew Coleman, who is editing the Offbeat Gen anthology with me, is interviewed by Sean McGahey over at The Beat. 

Tom Vague edited an influential punk fanzine called Vague and contributed to Zigzag magazine. He has since written the liner notes for the Clash’s ‘London Calling’ CD set and continued Vague as the London Psychogeography series of books and websites.

In the summer of 1977 I was 17 and living in the middle of nowhere; Mere in Wiltshire, on the A303 between Stonehenge and Glastonbury (my dad was from London, my mum from Bristol and that’s where I ended up); suitably bored and frustrated with small-town life. I’d just dropped out of Salisbury Tech College for the first time and was about to embark on the only year of my career (so far) in full employment, in some of the worst jobs in history: a couple of weeks working in a fibreglass factory - when “Pretty Vacant” came out – and the rest in an abattoir. How about that for punk cred?

To be honest, at this stage I was more of a football hooligan than a punk rocker, with glam, prog and soul records; mostly Bowie, some Who, Pink Floyd, Supertramp and Stevie Wonder. I was still playing football for the local town/glorified village team and, to my undying shame (greater even than that which I carry for once possessing a Supertramp album), occasionally going to Man Utd games in the “Red Army” hooligan days (I’ve always been an Everton supporter). The highlight of my playing career was a college charity match against a celeb XI, in which I hacked down the drummer of the group Kenny (of “The Bump” fame).  

There was already a punk scene at Salisbury Art College, featuring the legendary Richard and Nancy – I remember green hair, Oxfam suits, plastic sandals – and Gareth who looked like Alex Harvey. Richard knew the Buzzcocks, and they saw the Pistols at the 100 Club punk festival. Richard and Gareth were photographed at the front of the queue, and duly brought the word back to the west country. In my Bowie/bootboy tech scene, they were originally referred to as art college freaks. In early ’77 I saw the Pink Fairies, the attempted street hippy freak-punk crossover group, at the college but only remember it as a pub rock experience, and the art college punk group Elliot Ness and the G-Men performing in the college canteen, but missed the Doctors of Madness with the Pat Travers Band at the City Hall. At this point, the jukeboxes in the college common room and the Salisbury rock pub the Star featured Lynryd Skynyrd’s “Freebird”/”Sweet Home Alabama”, Genesis, Supertramp, Led Zep and Black Sabbath, but also the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Count Bishops and of course “Silver Machine” by Lemmy’s Hawkwind. My first proper punk moment was playing “Anarchy in the UK” at a predominantly James Brown soul party; I acquired my copy from my school football mate Tim’s sister, the actress Jane Gurnett (of Casualty and Crossroads fame). My first copy of Sniffin’ Glue fanzine came from my biker mate “Skin” (Derek Skinner), who got it at a gig by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Count Bishops and The Boys at Bournemouth Winter Gardens. Skin also possessed a New York Dolls album.

In Gillingham, in Dorset, where I went to school and worked for a year, some of the older soul boy guys were wearing peg-top trousers and plastic sandals; one of them, “Dogs” (Colin Doggerel), had been to northern soul discos; and in the summer of ’77 my football drinking mates went punk. This consisted of spiked-up hair, big badges, ripped up blazers with crisp packets and beer mats attached by safety pins, straight jeans and baseball boots, pogoing at village hall discos, spitting at the DJ and each other, and generally benign vandalism. After I’d gone to London for an oil rig job interview and first visited the King’s Road on Jubilee night, the coolest soul boy-punk, “Coke” (Keith Dukes), was going to beat me up for “wasting taxpayers’ money” by dropping out of college. But senior football hooligan guys, Doug and Den Knox, took me under their wing on a flag collecting expedition around Dorset.

Shortly after the Jubilee, I ended up bloodied but unbowed outside the sports centre disco – with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” playing – after attempting to attack the Radio 1 DJ Simon Bates, on a rum and black session. Then the punk hairdressers Deb and Chris got the Unwanted to play at the Red Lion pub in Gillingham, but I was banned for being implicated in another hooligan incident which caused a village hall disco to be closed down.

In the wake of the Jubilee and my split with Chris and Deb, I drifted away from my football mates and teamed up with the other two punks in my village, Christine Nugent, a former Carnival queen T Rex fan who had seen the Damned supporting Marc Bolan, and Jane Austin (not Austen), who I had a west country literary punk romance with. Our first forays into the outside world were to the Frome Hexagon Suite punk nights in Christine’s Mini, listening to tapes of The Clash, Damned Damned Damned and the New Wave US punk compilation album. The Frome lot were particularly into Patti Smith’s “Piss Factory” and the pub jukebox featured “Oh Bondage Up Yours” by X Ray Spex. (After, punk Christine got into horses and has since become a fervent huntswoman, apparently.)

Our first proper punk gig was the Clash, with Richard Hell and the Voidoids and the Lous at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens. This was a youth club trip in a handicapped kids’ minibus, much to the embarrassment of Coke who insisted that we park some way from the Winter Gardens, and Ditcher let the side down turning up without having a haircut or taking in his flares, draped in a Union Jack flag. I was wearing the then regulation Fonz-style black leather bomber jacket, ripped and safety-pinned T-shirt, big punk badges, turned-up drainpipe jeans and baseball boots. Sniffin’ Glue and the pre-Vague Salisbury fanzine were being hawked outside, and there was a bit of a punk riot in which a few rows of old seats collapsed from being pogoed on. (This contributed to the Pistols’ ’77 tour being banned.) My main memory of the gig is the bald Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine playing with green gob on his forehead. We duly missed the Pistols at the Bristol Bamboo Club on the SPOTS tour, after the venue (which was owned by the yachtsman Tony Bullimore) burnt down, but over the next few months saw the Clash a few more times, the Damned and the Dead Boys, the Jam, Generation X, Slaughter and the Dogs and Eater, Buzzcocks and Penetration, Adverts, X Ray Spex and Sham 69, mostly at the Bournemouth Village Bowl. At its height, the Bournemouth punk scene was the hippest outside London; featuring peroxide hair, leather jackets, Sex and Seditionaries shirts and bondage trousers, lots of speed (in the form of French ‘blues’ pills from Southampton) and heroin, the punk/vintage clothes shop Katz (which also had a branch in Salisbury), Armadillos record shop, the Double 0 Egg caff and the Triangle punk quarter. I had a pair of peg-top trousers from Katz that Coke approved of but said I didn’t wear properly. The Bournemouth nightclub complex, incorporating the underground car park Chelsea Village venue and the Badger Bars punk hangout, was owned by Jimmy Saville (of Radio 1 and Jim’ll Fix It notoriety). Punk gigs were attended by the notorious England football and cricket mascot Ken Bailey, and the equally renowned glam rock drummer Mickey Finn of T Rex was also on the scene.

In 1978 I went back to tech college, got into post-punk and reggae – Adam and the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, the Pop Group, PIL, Slits, Rough Trade groups – and started Vague fanzine; more for something to do, other than attempting to play guitar or sing, than with any literary aspirations. The Bournemouth punk scene ended pretty violently, with Bobby glassing Iggy for shoving Sharon in a Vague editorial dispute at a Cure gig, and a drugs bust. After a post-punk on the road period, hitching round the country following tours of the Ants and Banshees, selling fanzines/programmes and T-shirts, and writing for Zigzag, I dropped out of the music business and spent most of the 80s squatting around London – in Brixton, Elephant and Castle, Islington, Stoke Newington – attempting to be a cyber-punk Situationist or something; finally becoming a fixture on the Ladbroke Grove scene. I’ve been trying to write the radical history of Notting Hill, to counter the media hype, ever since.

Check out the previous episodes:
The Summer of Hate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8

Some great photos from the Tom McCarthy event at the Calder Bookshop recently. Audio to follow.

Nick Antosca has a piece up over at the Huffington Post on Noah Cicero and the recent 3:AM party at the KGB Bar. Nick also answers a few questions from Tao Lin on Noah here:

TL: You visited Noah Cicero in Ohio recently, is this true?

NA: This is true. I stayed at his house for a few days.

TL: What was in Noah’s refrigerator?

NA: Not much. Some water, maybe some hot dogs.

TL: What did Noah eat for dinner?

NA: We had the combo meal at Lone Star Steakhouse one day. It included shrimp, steak, and steak soup.

TL: In the evening did you and Noah sit in his living room in front of a blazing fire in the fireplace smoking cigars with your feet on a bearskin rug? If not, what did you do?

NA: No, we went to a strip club where a lapdance costs $5. We played pool with the dancers.

TL: What brand toothpaste does Noah use?

NA: No idea.

TL: Did it seem like Noah cleaned his toilet before you got there?

NA: I can’t remember thinking the toilet was either clean or dirty.

TL: Is there a framed portrait of Jonathan Safran Foer in every room of Noah’s house?

NA: No. There is a picture of Natalie Wood, a picture of Jayne Mansfield, a lot of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, and some other pictures I can’t recall. There are only three rooms in Noah’s house but there are actually quite a few pictures up.

TL: Can you reproduce for us a sample conversation between you and Noah?

Noah: There’s a steel mill.
Me: Looks depressing.

TL: Will Noah ever write a 500 page novel with a plot centered around a current event with flashbacks to create a feeling of urgency and suspense and then get profiled in the New York Times Magazine standing on a bearskin rug wearing black-horn-rimmed glasses, do you think, based on what you learned about him on your visit?

NA: I doubt this very much.

TL: Does Noah live in a five million dollar mansion and have five manservants all named Bertrand who collaborated to write his books, The Condemned, The Human War, Burning Babies, and Treatise for him while Noah lectured them about the sentagraph while bathing naked in a solution of cherry juice with cucumber slices over his eyes? If not can you describe his living conditions for us?

NA: He does not. He lives in a three-room house with a lot of books and with Bernice Mullins, who is charming. An ice cream truck drives by playing the melody to that Quaker song that goes, “‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be true [etc].” The ice cream truck sells ice cream bars whose wrappers are emblazoned with the names of professional wrestlers like Macho Man Randy Savage. Noah buys these and sits out in the sun on a lawn chair that leaks watery rust if there has recently been rain.

Provided the rest of England isn’t immersed under water by then, The Idler will be hosting a tent at the Secret Garden party near Huntingdon, Cambs this weekend. The Idler’s Matthew De Abaitua will be reading from his debut novel The Red Men (”makes Houellebecq seem like Enid Blyton” says Matt Thorne) at the event, which you can now read an excerpt of here.