3:AM Magazine

New Year also sees Kathy Acker given an overdue evening of films and talks at the ICA in London on January 12. Beginning with the Acker-penned Variety, the evening Sex Positive: A Night of Film + Fiction also features several shorts and a reading by Ali Smith.

You can read Kathy Acker’s 1997 feminist essay/interview with The Spice Girls, now hosted at 3:AM and me on the event over at The Guardian.

2007 was a good year for reviews at 3:AM, here’s some you might have missed:

The People of Paper - Salvador Plascencia
The Uncomfortable Dead - Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Piercing - Ryu Murakami
Graffiti My Soul - Niven Govinden
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
Gold - Dan Rhodes
Hospital - Toby Litt
Joshua Spassky - Gwendoline Riley
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
Going Postal - Mark Ames
The Human War (1) - Noah Cicero
The Human War (2) - Noah Cicero
Best of Young American Novelists 2 - Granta
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
Rant - Chuck Palahniuk
Kingdom Come - JG Ballard
Softcore - Tirdad Zolghadr
Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years - Frédéric Beigbeder
The Little Girl and the Cigarette - Benoît Duteurtre
A Pretty Face - Rafael Reig
Psychogeography - Will Self
In A Room Darkened - Kevin Williamson
Veronica - Mary Gaitskill

Cathi Unsworth will introduce 1960 classic Beat Girl at a screening by London’s Barbican cinema, as part of their series of literary takes on seduction in cinema, on January 23.

An great in-depth interview with Jeffrey Brown in the Comics Journal (#287): “I do read a lot of comics. Other than that, I don’t know where it comes from. I think, just in general, stuff I’ve done outside of comics, like dabbling with the idea of doing sketch comedy or stuff like that… a lot of the timing issues play in the same way. Then it’s just trying to find a way to translate that into comics. So when I’m drawing comics, I’m already essentially translating how I would want a story, the timing of how I tell stories in general. As far as the artwork goes, that just all comes from drawing. And the cartoony style… if you look in my sketchbooks there’s a lot of different styles, but I just latched onto that for the autobiographical comics when I started doing those. Just because it was a way of recapturing how I drew comics when I was a kid.” + Tom Spurgeon talks to Joe Sacco: If you look at my work subsequent to it, you’ll see elements of Palestine in there, some of the craziness of the angles and all that. Which actually really comes from my Yahoo books. If you look at the Yahoo material, I think that’s where it really comes from. It sort of reached full fruition in the Palestine work. I just use it when it’s really necessary now. I think that sort of manic energy that’s in the Palestine book really reflects in a way who I was at the time and how I was approaching the material. I was much more jumpy. Much more overwhelmed by the things I was seeing and how I was trying to get the story. I was unsure of myself. Not so much in the drawing, but when I was there. And it reflects that.” + Comics Should Be Good on autobiographical comics: “I’m sayin’ that writing memoir is not inherently self indulgent. It can be, and if it is it’s probably not done well. But even in that case I’m not convinced that writing crappy, self-indulgent memoir is moreso of either than, say, writing crappy, self-indulgent fan-fiction about Optimus Prime having sex with all the Pokemon in alphabetical order.” [Journalista!]

Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler is excerpted in the First Post. Jason was the subject of Ned Beauman’s most recent comics column for the Guardian Unlimited, Plenty to say for wordless stories: Though Jason employs no dialogue and only two facial expressions (happy and indifferent), you soon feel like you know the protagonist intimately - I don’t have a clue how he does it. One gets the sense that [Tom] Neely and Jason, like poets writing sestinas, are testing their powers, letting the fierce constraints of the form reveal new possibilities, and it’s a wonderful thing to observe.” + The First Post also take a peek at R. Crumb’s Sex Obsessions, yours for a cool £400. + The Watchmen blog. + Douglas Wolk reviews Alan Moore’s latest: Black Dossier is a thoroughly postmodern book, in the sense that it’s entirely built out of allusions and associations — preexisting bits of meaning. That raises the question of what meaning it has on its own, or whether its light is entirely reflected. As David Foster Wallace (riffing on a John Barth line about postmodern fiction) put it: “For whom, the proles grouse/ Is the funhouse a house?/ Who lives there, when push comes to shove?” Moore does have something of an answer. The key line of the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, reprised here, is “The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.” (Somewhat surprisingly, that’s Moore’s own aperçu, not a quotation from somebody else.) The premise of the whole series is that pulp fiction and popular entertainment are the ways the deepest anxieties of culture bubble up into narrative: Nemo and Mr. Hyde and the invading Martians of The War of the Worlds exemplified Victorian England’s fears about science, empire and “foreigners.”

[Holy crime and punishment, Batman!]

Douglas Wolk does a nice holiday round-up of graphic novels for the NY Times: “The real glory of Exit Wounds is [Rutu] Modan’s artwork. Her characters’ body language and facial expressions, rendered in the gestural “clear line” style of Hergé’s Tintin books, are so precisely observed, they practically tell the story by themselves. Numi, for instance, spends most of the story slouching a little, as if she’s trying to hide her height; you can tell she’s got her guard down when she straightens up. And Modan’s Israeli landscapes, colored in flat, solid tones, capture the look of the country with spare precision: a few fluid lines describe a dingy bus-station cafeteria or a scrubby beach, echoing the book’s treacherous interpersonal terrain, where everything and everyone has sustained collateral damage.” + Michel Gondry is to direct Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York [Comics Reporter] + The Complete Review looks at Osamu Tezuka’s MW and Apollo’s Song: “Apollo’s Song is a great example of the best and worst of the graphic-genre: visually expertly presented — not just the individual drawings, but also the sequences and how they are presented — it’s an eye-catching, gripping read, but the story itself is consistently rushed and the dialogue and events (especially the ‘real-world’ events) often simply ridiculous, sustained entirely by the accompanying drawings.” + Joe Sacco in the Oregonian. + Posy Simmonds‘ Tamara Drewe and Nick Abadzis‘ Laika reviewed. + Peter Wild reviews the Complete Peanuts: There, lurking within its lush Seth-designed covers, was exactly what I’d been looking for: joy. The joy you get from reading something great. I was in a bit of a bad mood because of all of the unsatisfactory books and I was reading with half an eye at first because, like with early Simpsons, the characters didn’t look like the characters they later became. Charlie Brown was there, as was Snoopy (although he didn’t think and talk at first, he barked, perhaps unsurprisingly, like a dog). There was no Sally. Just a Violet who looked like Sally. Lucy’s hair changes colour from strip to strip. As the book progresses, Schroeder, the piana playing Beethoven loving genius appears. Towards the end we are treated to a baby Linus. These are old strips. More than half a century ago. You’d think they’d date but they don’t. + Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. + 20 questions for Garth Ennis + Roland Kelts suggests some seasonal gifts for the Otaku in your life.

3:AM NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2007
Our novel of the year could have been Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men or Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts, but we had to choose only one and that one is David Lalé’s remarkable but strangely-overlooked Last Stop Salina Cruz (Alma Books).

3:AM NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2007
Tom Bradley’s Fission Among the Fanatics.
A literary giant among pygmies.

3:AM ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2007
Puerto Merto’s Heaven & Dirt: Requiem For the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Fire Records).
Divine sleaze.

3:AM MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2007
Bad Idea
Everyday life, extraordinary tales. Indie publishing at its most ambitious.

3:AM PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR
Akashic Books
A decade of reverse-gentrification of the literary world.

3:AM WEBSITE OF THE YEAR
Dazed Digital
At long bloody last.

3:AM BLOG OF THE YEAR 2007
L’Excentré Magnifique
Jean-Luc Bitton’s site dedicated to his work-in-progress on literary suicide Jacques Rigaut.

(See the 3:AM Awards 2005 and 2006.)

Fred Chichin, one half of Les Rita Mitsouko, is no more (although there is more here, there and everywhere). * Our friend Tony O’Neill on Boris Vian. * Highbrow smut in Paris. * Who’s afraid of “JT Leroy”? * Jonathan Self on his brother Will: “When Will was three he packed a suitcase with toys — including my teddy bear — and ran away from home. He walked about three miles along the A1 and stood at a bus stop”. * Erotica 07. * The death of French culture (more here, here and here). * Ophelia of the Seine. * The cultural guerillas. * 80s underground New York. * Vivienne Westwood’s manifesto. * On Malcolm Lowry: “How do we parlay the author of one great book into “a great author”? It’s easy to stick to the great book, which you can read over and over, but you’re left with the problem of one. It’s odd to think how much a literary reputation depends on the author’s implicit offer — or threat — to do it again”. * Jon Savage mentions Paul Marko’s Roxy Club book in his 2007 round-up of rock books, as well as former 3:AMer Bertie Marshall’s Berlin Bromley: “The 30th anniversary of punk has not escaped publishers. In Berlin Bromley (SAF, £8.99), Bertie Marshall remembers being an underage gay boy exploding with bad drugs and an unhealthy Cabaret fetish — a true punk indeed. Although it has a cast of characters ranging from the Sex Pistols to Siouxsie Sioux, what sticks in the mind is just how hard it was to be gay in 1977″. * The “record Peter Ackroyd might have made” (Paul Simonon) is The Observer’s album of the year. * Britain’s rudest road signs. * A spanking new issue of The Great Small Fishes (see my interview in issue one). * Tristam’s new exhibition. Linder Sterling’s * Swells on the white English working-class: “The characters in Catherine Tate’s ‘Am I Bothered’ sketches might be white, but it’s hardly relevant. You hear the same half-affected, Punjabi-inflected, Afro-Saxon Estuary English from Radio 4’s stable of leftish comedians every time they ‘do’ a young person. The all but universal working/lower-middle class, southern youth accent addresses a massive generational gap, but it tells us nothing about the race of the kid being mimicked”. (Related: the absence of working-class people in novels.) * McGee on Lawrence. * An extract from Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s work-in-progress appears in the latest issue of Ligne de risque. * On Julian Maclaren-Ross. * An archive of Laurence Rémila’s articles. * Happy birthday to you dear Conrad. * Rare Strummer memorabilia to be published. (Related: Carbon/Silicon interviewed by ex Pistols Steve Jones.) * Jon Henley returns to London. * Les mots de la tribu. * Ginny Good. * Iain Sinclair on the disappearing Lower Lea valley. * Mozgate II. (Related: should Morrissey be the next England manager?!) * A merry festive season to you all!