3:AM Magazine

Congratulations to the mighty Shane Meadows, whose latest film Somers Town has won the Michael Powell Award for “Best British Feature Film” at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
Singling the work out for the £20,000 award, the jury celebrated the film “as the freshest, most imaginative, maverick work.”

As Galleycat notes, Book Expo 2008 started so well for Tony O’Neill: from trading books with Slash, to talking William S Burroughs with director John Landis and catching up with Dan Fante and Jerry Stahl. Then,

It was right after meeting Jerry that I caught Vanessa’s eye. She was frantically gesturing for me to join her. When I did I found her deep in conversation with – oh God, she’s deep in conversation with Ron Jeremy. Ron was busy signing one of Vanessa’s breasts, looking like – well - he looked like Ron Jeremy. Which was pretty fucking strange in and of itself.

“This is my husband, Tony.”

Ron looked up from Vanessa’s breasts for a moment and said, “Oh, hey Tony. Nice to meet you….” before he got back to work. I took a picture. One for the family album. So I share a publisher with Ron Jeremy. That was a wild bit of news. As we were hanging out, Ron invited us to a party in the Valley.

“A lot of people from the industry will be there. It’ll be fun! There’ll be a pool and a lot of naked girls. It’s not an orgy or anything! Just a get together…”

Just then Carrie [my publicist] arrived. She didn’t seem entirely surprised to see that we had found Ron Jeremy. By way of introducing himself, Ron offered to sign one of Carrie’s breasts, too. I began to realize that Ron Jeremy signed breasts in the same way that you or I might shake hands. I started to wonder about all of the breasts across the world that have felt - at one time or another - the lascivious caress of Ron Jeremy’s sharpie. 

“Hey Tony,” Carrie said, “How’s it going?”

“Uh, Ron Jeremy wants us to go to the Valley with him for a porn party.”

“Great!  You gotta go!”

“Really?  I mean… what if we get stuck in the valley at a porno actress’s house with no way of getting home? I mean, what if Ron gets laid? That’s gotta happen, what – once, twice a day?”

“Then get a cab!”

“From the Valley? It’ll cost a fortune!”

My resolve started slipping. Then my publisher started digging around in her purse, and shoving twenty-dollar bills into my hand.

“As your publisher I insist you go!”

“Oh shit.”

I took the money. I guess I was researching my new book tonight.

Click on through to Tony’s blog to find out why he looks so surprised. It’s Ron Jeremy we’re talking about, people. Consider yourself warned.

New art from Japan * Way out of my price range, but the estate of Timothy Leary are auctioning off a William Burroughs shot-gun painting. There’s a blog to accompany the auction as well as a Shotgun Art Flickr set (tks A.) * Talking of estates, Adrian McKinty had an interesting (if unofficial) offer from Hemingway’s: The secret policeman wasn’t smiling. It just looked like that because his false teeth didn’t fit correctly. I was relieved. If Russian writer Isaac Babel is to be believed it’s when secret policeman start grinning at you that you should begin to worry. “Think about it,” he said as he ran his fingernails along the right lapel of a navy double breasted blazer that was miles too big for him. His eyes were dark and squinty and his skin yellowy white. He was small, grey haired and not terribly menacing. “I’m sorry?” I said, unsure that I had heard him correctly. He repeated his offer. “Any book in Hemingway’s library for two hundred dollars,” he said in carefully enunciated English. * While Popmatters celebrate the world of used books (via Syntax of Things), Chas Newkey-Burden gives them a wide berth: “I’m not all that keen on my hand sweat, dust and bogeys. No offence, but I’m even less keen on yours, so I’ll buy brand new every time, thanks all the same.” * Guy Dammann on the rather nifty Five Dials * _Musical interlude_ “It’s not like they are flamboyantly intellectual, but in a world where it’s alleged that Noel Gallagher has read just one book, they are not afraid of literature, and books have even influenced their songwriting.” Franz Ferdinand’s bookclub * The Story of The Fall, every Fall song blogged (via Largehearted Boy) * “You’d love to fuck me, but you can’t afford it,” the brief return of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks * Music has always had its place in literature and a number of contemporary writers, including authors such as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Sarah Champion have cleverly used the music scene as a cultural touchstone and as a way of exploring contemporary mores. In this month’s special feature we examine how writers delve into the significance of music upon their characters’ psyche, their physical and emotional responses to what they hear, and the environment in which they hear it. * Musical Rooms, “the spaces that people choose to be creative in” and hosted by the very lovely Sinéad Gleeson * David Byrne, sonic architect * I, Axl: An American Dream _End of musical interlude_ * An interview with author and Impetus Press publisher Jennifer Banash * Richard Lea sits down with Amélie Nothomb: “I have my own manner, which, right or wrong, seems very recognisable. There’s a particular smell to my work - a smell which, by the way, I don’t like very much - but it’s a fact, it’s the smell of my books. And I don’t find this smell elsewhere.” * Denis Johnson’s new novel is being serialised in Playboy; the LA Times’s Jacket Copy is reviewing it in installments (via Maud Newton) * Finally, Rod Liddle is a little upset with the “future classics”: “Which recently published and acclaimed books will be seen as similarly purposeless 30 or 40 years from now? Not, I think, the ones that shocked or disturbed: Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Iain Sinclair and so on. Kicking against the pricks seems to imbue a certain staying power. Nor books that are distinguished by their weightiness (WG Sebald) or their experimentalism (Ben Marcus). More likely, it will be those that tick all the right boxes, books that accord so perfectly with what our civilised, liberal middle class wishes to believe in that they might almost have been created spontaneously from the collective willpower. Books that are so terribly of our age, they cannot hope to see beyond it. The obvious contender here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a politely written tome of consummate vapidity, from an articulate, photogenic half-black writer, that tells you, in the end, nothing.”

Sad news this Monday morning: George Carlin has died.