3:AM Magazine

On Donald Barthelme. * Tariq Ali on the legacy of 1968. Gilbert Adair reminisces too. (See May 68 posters here). * French women? Bof! * Tracey Emin’s campaign to save Brick Lane. * Literary Fitzrovia mapped out in Time Out. * Sebastian Horsley, who was interviewed in 3:AM last year, has been barred from the US on grounds of moral turpitude! * Toby Litt digested. * Patti Smith edits Libération. Also: Smith’s exhibition at the Fondation Cartier (in Paris) reviewed. * Has Iggy Pop lost it? * Pillow Fightclub! * Will Self in NME: “I’ve also developed a virus that only destroys U2 albums and is so persistent — it’s like a musical ebola — that it can destroy every written down lyric, every analogue and digital copy of a U2 song. It can even eat into the brains of Bono and The Edge and destroy the next song they’re going to write. I’ve got it here in a little bottle”. And in The Guardian, Self on satire: “One of the things that animates young satirists - and usually the young satirists are the good ones - is a very childish cynicism about the world: ‘You’re all shit! It’s all shit!’ This sort of adolescent, lurking in his room, popping his spots in the mirror and writing in pus”. On his drug-taking: “Later, he bridles at a suggestion that his famous drug problem started in adolescent rebellion. ‘No, no, no,’ he says, ‘not at all, none of it, none of it. That’s a misreading. I’m an arch-conformist. In fact, one of my favourite movies is The Conformist. I’m exactly what my parents would have wished me to be. Obviously, the hard drug addiction was very upsetting for them. But I went to Oxford, I’m a writer — where’s the rebellion? They were left-wing, middle-class intellectuals. Like me’.” * The great cake escape. * The Action. * The rise of digital short stories. Read them here. * Aaron Hemphill of Liars on P. I. L.’s The Flowers of Romance: “Certain records cease to be records, they become resources, like an encyclopedia in a library. No matter where you are, no matter which level you’re at in your own music, you can go back to that record and learn something”. * Drinking for England. * Sean O’Hagan interviews Paul Simonon ahead of his new London exhibition:

“‘It was intense back then,’ he nods, when I mention how violent a place Britain was in the late Seventies. ‘People wanting to fight us, jumping on stage to punch us. If you had short hair and looked at all like a punk, you wouldn’t get served in many pubs. Then, you had the Teds, who really took it all personally. I remember walking down Shaftesbury Avenue with a girl, and seeing this blur of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was this big Teddy Boy running through the traffic to have a go. Mad.’…

…’I want nothing to do with all that stuff,’ he says, settling down with his Scotch and coffee. ‘I’m not mentioning any names, but most so-called art made by rock stars is fucking dreadful.’ Simonon’s paintings, just in their painterliness alone, seem like they belong to another time. ‘Paul’s not a conceptualist who parades his intellectual pretensions,’ says Williams. ‘He really belongs to an older English tradition, to Augustus John and the Edwardians.’ Even as a teenage art student, Simonon had little interest in being contemporary or cutting edge in his painting, preferring the likes of Constable and Sickert to Warhol and De Kooning. He won a scholarship to Byam Shaw but lasted a year-and-a-half, dismayed by the teachers’ total espousal of American abstraction. He points to a painting on the wall of his studio, an angular urban landscape that, were there elongated figures in it, might have been painted by Edward Burra….

…Simonon’s traditionalist approach to painting is surprising given that, within the often volatile creative dynamic of the Clash, he was the conceptualist, the one who paid most attention to the visuals, the image. He painted the backdrop to the Clash’s rehearsal studio, and designed some of the later stage sets, including the dive-bombing Stukas that echoed their often explosive performances. You could tell the Clash were art-school punks from the start, what with those shirts stencilled with slogans and that paint-splashed bass guitar. ‘That was the art student in me trying to find a look that would make us stand apart from the Pistols,’ he says, laughing. ‘The Buzzcocks were very Mondrian, and we were Pollock. As a painter, though, I’m essentially old-fashioned. Conceptualism just doesn’t do it for me. I love Walter Sickert, Samuel Palmer, Rubens and Constable. That’s just the way I am. I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.’…

…’I was on top of the Shell Mex building for weeks,’ he laughs. …He’d read somewhere that Jeffrey Archer, then still a Tory MP, had an apartment overlooking the Thames, so he wrote to him, asking if he could paint the river from his balcony. ‘He wrote back and said OK,’ says Simonon, grinning. ‘I was there for a week. I think he got a bit pissed off with this hulking great bloody canvas in his kitchen every morning, but, I have to hand it to him, he didn’t go back on his word and chuck me out.’…

…Back in 1976, it was the wily Rhodes who instructed Mick Jones to recruit Simonon to the group that would soon become the Clash, simply because he looked the part. ‘I was a bit Bowie, a bit suedehead back then,’ says Simonon. ‘And, more importantly, I was at art college. Mick liked that. He was always big on pop history. He knew all about Stuart Sutcliffe, who was Lennon’s best mate in the early days of the Beatles, and a proper artist. I remember Mick introducing me to all his mates: “This is my new bass guitarist, Paul. He can’t play but he’s a painter.”‘…

…In September 2003, Paul Simonon made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Hebridean Isle of Raasay, where Strummer’s ancestors came from. Chris Salewicz accompanied him. ‘It was absolutely extraordinary,’ recalls Salewicz. ‘We spent days finding this derelict cottage miles from nowhere in this stunningly beautiful setting. Then Paul carted this big canvas up there and started painting. Suddenly the heavens opened, and the wind started up and his boots are so waterlogged he’s taken them off and he’s painting barefoot on this canvas lashed to a big stone. He was like a madman on the deck of a ship in a storm. Just incredible.’…”

Enfant Terrible of the Offbeat Generation Matthew Coleman reads ‘Dream Poem’:

Further: The Offbeat Generation / The Offbeat Generation Film Channel

Films by Richard Hell, Richard Foreman, Frank Moore, David Wojnarowicz, Jaime Davidovich, Lenora Champagne and Stuart Sherman will be shown at NYU Cantor Film Center (36 8th Street) at 7pm (free entance). The highlight will be the first screening of Hell’s Meet Theresa Stern. Here are his comments, followed by a press release:

“It’s wordy and overwrought, but the words do include, ‘Did you know there’s a nerve running directly between the heart and the brain? Scientists call it the Hershey Highway,’ and ‘You wouldn’t really bite my dick off, would you?’ Plus it looks really great.”

“In 1990 Richard Hell made a twenty minute 16 mm film called Meet Theresa Stern. It was a teaser excerpt meant to help get financing for a planned feature length film to be called The Theresa Stern Story. The short film starred Kate Valk (of the Wooster Group), Will Patton (of numerous film credits, as well as originator of a number of Sam Shepard stage roles), and Hell, and was enabled by an all-star crew, including: Declan Quinn, cinematographer, who’s since shot Leaving Las Vegas and Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ among a lot of other movies; Melody London, editor of Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train; Tom Verlaine of the band Television, who supervised and composed the music; Kelly Reichardt, the film’s art director, who recently got a lot of acclaim for directing her movie Old Joy; and terrific clothing designer Amanda Uprichard, who oversaw the costumes/wardrobe.

The twenty minute excerpt never got beyond the work print stage, and Richard eventually dropped plans to make the full length feature. Now NYU Fales Library Downtown Collection has supervised the creation of a print of the film, the first true print (Richard has occasionally shown a video projection of the beat up work print), and will screen it on Thursday, April 3rd in a program with other short films and videos from the Fales. This will be the first ever screening of an edit of this movie actually projected from film.”

Thursday 27 March
Pixels vs Paper 7-8pm, £5/£3

The Newsroom, Guardian and Observer Archive and Visitor Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA.

Does short fiction belong online or in hard copy?

Should published mean “in a paper format”? A chance to meet and speak with 21st century publishers of short fiction and find out where they stand in relation to the paper/online divide. Speakers Pete Carvill of 3:AM Magazine (online), Nina Rapi of Brand magazine (paper), Mike Fell of Litro (paper and online) and Heidi James of Social Disease, will be joined by author Mark Liam Piggott, whose writing is published on and offline and whose debut hard copy novel is due out in May. Introduced by Jarred McGinnis.

Travis Jeppesen writes:

After many months of conspiring with BLATT Art Director Mario Dzurila, author/critic/Social Disease editor Heidi James, and a few select others, I’ve decided to launch Disorientations.com.

Disorientations.com will serve as a virtual extension of my forthcoming collection of art criticism, Disorientations: Writings on Art from Central Europe and Beyond, to be published by Social Disease this summer. This volume will make accessible to a wider audience a selection of essays and reviews that were originally published in small or obscure journals and magazines, such as Umělec (the Czech contemporary art magazine), Prague Pill, Prague Literary Review, and Think Again. In addition, there will be a smattering of some of my better-known pieces from such publications as ZOO, Flash Art, and New York Press. Overall, I hope the collection will generate interest in the fervent artistic activities of this oft-overlooked region over the last two decades.

I view Disorientations.com as a vehicle for prolonging my engagement with the art of this region in a public context.

I am opposed to “blog writing,” and all other forms of lousy and lazy writing.

I am interested in exploring new avenues of expression, which I will continue to do in my books and through BLATT. Now add Disorientations.com, a one-man art magazine, to that list.

My first post is also the essay that will open the book. In the future, I plan on posting exclusive, unpublished work, but this piece – an early version of which was originally published in 2005 – is still the clearest outline of a poetics of art criticism I’ve managed to put forth. Let it thus serve as my DISORIENTATIONS MANIFESTO.

New material will be posted three to five times a week.

Visually, the site is still very much a work-in-progress. Mario Dzurila will be working his design magic in the weeks to come, so look out.

Bookmark me. Ride with me. Write me. Ride me.

In other news, BLATT Books have just published their latest title, C(o)urt Interpretations by Aleš Mustar.

C(o)urt Interpretations is the first full-length collection in
English by one of Slovenia’s most provocative young poets, Aleš Mustar. In Mustar’s court, consumerism stands on trial alongside “post-post-modernism” and Dostoevsky. With his witty philosophical riffing on the trappings and evasions of contemporary society, Mustar sharply demonstrates what it means to poeticize with a gavel.

Henry Baum lives in L.A. and is a musician and writer. His novel, North of Sunset, was winner of the Hollywood Book Festival Grand Prize 2006, and his first novel The Golden Calf (Rebel Inc / Soft Skull) will be reissued by Another Sky Press in Spring 2008. He has published in Identity Theory, Storyglossia, Scarecrow, Purple Prose, Les Episodes and—writing as sex worker Shirley Shave—the Best Sex Writing 2005. His story ‘Thirteen Mississippi’ can be read in 3:AM London, New York, Paris. Henry has recently been listening to:

1. ‘Yes We Can’
“I’ve been totally obsessed with the U.S. election. I’m for Obama but I kind of hate this song. Shows where my head’s at.”
2. ‘Aces High,’ — Iron Maiden
“John McCain has this horribly overblown campaign commercial where he quotes Winston Churchill. Reminded me of this Iron Maiden song that begins with the same quote. Still better than ‘Yes We Can.’
3. ‘Come On,’ — Ash Tree
“My own song. Finished it this week. Heard here.”
4. ‘Twisted,’ — Lambert, Hendricks and Ross 
“My dad had a performance of his play about shrinks at a party. He needed me to mix this song overlapped with some party chatter.” 
5. ‘String Quartet Op. 51,’ — Brahms
“Bought cheap someone’s old iPod with her songs on it.”

Comixology interview Super Spy’s Matt Kindt: “I LOVE spies. I grew up watching all of the James Bond movies and reading the Ian Fleming books. But the funny thing about reading the Fleming books — those are more like travelogues that happen to have some crazy spy plot in them. And that’s why I really like those books — armchair travel. So it’s the same thing with me and any genre really. Super Spy is really just about characters trapped in horrible jobs they want to quit and then trying to get out. It could just as easily be set in a modern day city. It just happens to have gadgets and gun and stuff blowing up.” {via Daily Cross Hatch} + In the current Bookforum, J Hoberman on Kirby: King of Comics and Chris Ware on Father of the Comic Strip: “In the winter of 1831, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, creator and appreciator of all things Kunst, was feeling blue. His loyal attendants, sympathetic to the great man’s depression, had heard of a taciturn Genevan educator who, in his spare time, wrote and drew farcical picture-stories to amuse himself and his students. So Frédéric Soret, tutor to the Duke of Weimar’s children and translator of one of Goethe’s scientific works, obtained one of these illustrated manuscripts and, placing it into Goethe’s hands, stepped aside. Thankfully, the gamble paid off: Goethe found the book “very amusing,” and it gave him “extraordinary pleasure,” though he chose to take this pleasure in small doses, so as not to suffer “an indigestion of ideas.” Soret also noted that Goethe thought the Genevan sparkled “with talent and wit,” and “if he . . . did not have such an insignificant text [i.e., scenario] before him, he would invent things which would surpass all our expectations.” The Genevan in question was Rodolphe Töpffer—the inventor of the comic strip.” + Who’s Afraid of Noir? An interview with Richard McGuire [and Chris Ware on McGuire: "Every once in a while an artist comes along who takes the accrued potential of his or her discipline and recasts it into a brand-new way of seeing or feeling. Cézanne did it with music, Joyce with writing - and Richard McGuire, I think, did it with comics."] {via Comics Reporter} + du9 talk to Charles Burns: “We’re moving on a little bit, this takes place during the punk — the advent of the punk era. I was in the Bay area, around San Francisco, from 1979. So it’s around the era when the whole punk movement was all beginning in San Francisco. There’s a relationship there to that. It’s my story about that time period in my life — partly. It’s also about … mortality. Not immortality, but mortality … and opiate. And William Burroughs. William Burroughs meets Hergé.” {via Journalista!}

Words without Borders runs a translation of Phiippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian’s Lisa + Persepolis is banned in Lebanon + Trains are Mint’s Oliver East has a new column on British Comics in TDCH: “Small press in the States can include D+Q and Fantagraphics. In the UK, the term usually means self-published stuff, which I love. I love the idea of someone beavering away in their studio/bedroom/kitchen table to produce something they hope strangers will like. There are a few boutique publishers and people with beards keeping the dream alive over here, but the comics that we like aren’t appreciated in the same way as over on your side.” + Molly Flatt just loves graphic novels + Popcandy’s Comics Crash Course: 25’s of essential graphic novels, family-friendly titles, must-see series and personal favourites + The full-length interview with Tim Hensley from MOME 6:“I think the real thing that happened was that I had a band going at the time, and Daniel Clowes did the cover for the album I had done. I had just seen Lloyd Llewellyn, and I had ended up becoming friends with him through the mail. And as a result of that, I ended up discovering all the other comics that were around then too, like Love and Rockets, American Splendor, and everything, which I was sort of aware of already.” + Gary Panter on working on Omega the Unknown: “My friend Jonathan Lethem asked me to do a short section of the OMEGA comic series he is doing with [artist] Farel [Dalrymple] and I had to say yes. Jonathan is a very respected novelist and super-smart nice art guy, and that is one of the things I look for in life—to work with people I respect and admire.” {via ComicM!x} + PopMatters talk to Rocco Versaci, author of This Book Contains Graphic Language: “one of the points I try to make in my book is that comics and graphic novels have the potential to be politically subversive because they do lie on the margins of respectability.  I do believe that there’s something about the form, its history, and its dominant genres that will prevent comics from ever being taken completely seriously.  For whatever reason, we can accept that the medium of film (or prose, for that matter) is artistic even though there are some really shitty films, but the same understanding is not extended to the medium of comics.  I think that’s both good news and bad news.  I want more people to read and appreciate this form, on the other hand, I like their “outsider” status.  It’s that status, I believe, that problematizes “literature” and the “canon.””

CBR talk to James Kochalka: People who know you best for Superf*ckers might be a little aghast by the new book and how much it’s directed at younger readers. Are there any similarities? “When you get right down to it, the same sorts of themes are dealt with in all the books, just in different ways. A lot of them are about sort of inter-personal relationships. That’s what Superf*ckers is about. That’s what Johnny Boo is about. That’s not a Hollywood synopsis or anything. “This is about inter-personal relationships!” Really, Johnny Boo is about a little ghost and his pet ghost Squiggle. It’s about their relationship and their bumbling nemesis.” + Paul Gravett looks at more comics for children: “It’s easy to blame the plethora of today’s entertainment and technology choices competing for that precious pocket money for this problem, but Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist raised on Superman and Spider-Man, sees such excuses as ‘a cop out’. In his keynote speech for the Will Eisner Awards ceremony, the profession’s Oscars, held at the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con, he warned, “Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children.” Chabon has a point. The last twenty years in particular have seen authors and publishers strive so hard to make comics, formerly misunderstood as being solely juvenile, ‘grow up’ into graphic novels aimed mainly at adults, there is a risk that the medium will leave behind the children and youngsters and lose that essential next generation of readers.” + Art Scatter on graphic non-fiction [Joe Sacco, Guy Deslisle, Craig Thompson] {via Journalista!} + Fabrice Parme on working with Lewis Trondheim + A profile of Alan Moore, and a primer + A first look at Watchemen + Frank Miller is keeping a production blog for his directorial debut, Will Eisner’s The Spirit {via Comics Reporter} + “Sexually explicit comics account for a sizeable chunk of Japan’s 500bn yen manga market. Many feature schoolgirls or childlike adults being raped or engaging in sadomasochism. Manga belonging to the popular “lolicon” - Japanese slang for Lolita complex - genre are likely to escape the ban, as MPs are concerned that outlawing them could infringe on freedom of expression and drive men who use them as an outlet for their sexual urges to commit more serious offences. Other critics of a far-reaching ban say the characters depicted in scores of lolicon titles are fictional and so are not being harmed.” + Comics212 and Mecha Mecha Media on PiQ #1, the “chronicle of otaku culture” and replacement for Newtype USA {via Journalista!}

[Images: Matt Kindt's prints of James Bond, Sam Spade & The Shadow]