This week’s visuals: Daniel Mróz, Herbert Huncke, Chip Kidd, posters of the Japanese avant-garde, comic books as cheap paperbacks, Karel Teissig, Bear Alley Books on Spillane.
“Herzog likes to respond to and collaborate with his subjects; if he bends fact – by inventing dialogue, for instance – it is to the ends of ‘truth’.” / The Mark E. SmithPale Ale / “A mistress of metaphor & sparking detail, with more punch than Proust.” / David Grossman & postwar literature [via Bookslut] / Finnegans Wake as a short film [via @brainpicker]
The Guardian on how downtown New York changed British theatre:
Wandering recently through the Barbican’s brilliant exhibition on the New York downtown scene of the early 1970s, I felt I was encountering not just a curated series of works, but the memory of a place. Here were the fragments of a particular moment in a particular city; an archive of encounters with New York itself. New York is a city uniquely fixated on its own re-invention. The work of the artists in this exhibition isn’t so much a product of that restless environment as a set of strategies for thinking about and encountering it. This is work that embeds itself in the city, that navigates you through it.
3:AM‘s Andrew Stevens on the fall and rise of Downtown literature:
The so-called brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney may nowadays be considered at one with the literary establishment (Tama Janovitz has also slid out of recent obscurity and signed with Scott Pack’s Friday Project) but traces of the Downtown heyday remain. The Prix de Flore-winning Bruce Benderson is releasing a new collection of essays and commentary, Sex and Isolation, which deals with the post-Downtown subcultures. And Between C & D co-editor Joel Rose‘s Downtown classic Kill Kill Faster Faster has been given the big screen treatment, which could well propel the book into the commercial big league. It may be difficult for some to believe that the Downtown scene of the 70s and 80s ever existed, but developments such as these do much to keep its lineage alive.
Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s
3 March 2011 – 22 May 2011 Barbican Art Gallery
Tickets: £8 online/£10 on the door
Chris Petit‘s The Museum of Loneliness. * A brief history of appropriative writing. * If streets are sentences. * Celebrating the A303. * An interview with Glenn Branca. * The Japanese have a name for it: tsundoku. * What next for Joshua Cohen?: “It’s the book Nabokov would’ve written had he liked Joyce”. * Robert [...]
Our job is done: we’ve finally made it into Private Eye‘s legendary Pseuds Corner! OK, it’s cheating a bit. The offending article — which appeared in “The Missing Links” — is in fact a quote from Dan Holloway about his wordless novel Evie and Guy. Thanks Dan, we’re sharing this accolade with you.
Hello, I am editing fiction for 3:AM Magazine this summer. Guidelines. A couple of things I would like to add: Ezra Pound’s poem “Portrait d’une femme” was “rejected by the North American Review in January 1912, according to Pound, on the grounds that ‘I had used the letter ‘r’ three times in the first line, [...]
Hi. Susan Tomaselli is taking a well-earned sabbatical from 3:AM this summer, so I’ll be stepping in as co-editor in chief, focusing on non-fiction. I’ve been commissioning for 3:AM since 2011, so some of you will know me, and will have worked with me already. But I’d like to say that, right now, I’m open [...]
The many identities of Fernando Pessoa. * Rare 1952 William Faulkner documentary. * The London nobody sings. * Kindergarde. * The Academy of Modern Ruins is turning an abandoned petrol station on Route 66 into The Philosopher’s Library. * Nostalgia for the Net. * Rhys Tranter‘s fascinating interview with Rick Cluchey. * 3:AM‘s Anna Aslanyan [...]
