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22/05/12: Self-employed urbanists
To call a city a slough of despond, or a great wen, or a cesspool, is to give it a functional identity, to fix it in the mind as surely as Bradley Headstone is fixed in Dickens’s novel. The city, like the people in it, lends itself to this sort of moral abstraction. Oddly enough, cities, for all their big-ness and complexity, get tagged with hard-edged images much more readily than small towns. What mental picture is conjured by, say, Chicago or Sheffield? Isn’t it more definite, more dominant, than that of Banbury? … One might add that, in England, the single feature of the city which has adhered most strongly to writers’ minds is its dirt, and dirt is one of the few objects whose moral connotation is as definite and public as its physical characteristics. The presence of dirt provides us with the elusive key we have been seeking, and the English have been quick to seize on dirt as the single defining quality of the big city.
– Jonathan Raban, Soft City (1974)
‘One Day in the City’, the UCL Festival of London and Literature, takes place on June 15 (tickets available here).
The line up includes Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit and Will Self.
21/05/12: The Missing Links
Unprinting. * Tom McCarthy and Ben Marcus at the Horse Hospital in London on 7 June. * Ten short films by Stewart Home from the 80s and 90s. * The making of The Rings of Saturn. * Walter Gropius on Utopianism (MP3). * Alain Badiou: a life in writing. * Why Alain Badiou stopped voting. * Five works of theory you should consider reading. * The beginner’s guide to Deleuze. * Boris Groys: under the gaze of theory. * Mitchelmore reviews Gabriel Josipovici’s The Story of a Moment. * McKenzie Wark interviewed. * A tumblr devoted to writers’ routines. * Ten years without Joe Strummer. * Sam Jordison on Hemingway in Paris. * Silver Jubilee Day (The Times). * The Paris launch of Her Royal Majesty 12. * Rosy Lamb paints Harriet Alida Lye (video by Sam Gordon). * Malcolm McLaren’s cowboys t-shirt: mystery solved. * The Washington D.C. punk revolution. * Patti Smith in Warhol’s Interview magazine, October 1973. * A necessarily unfinishable novel. * End of Oulipo, The? * Ben Myers on A Clockwork Orange. * Ben (now Benjamin) Myers interviewed. * A Death in Mexico by Jonathan Woods (trailer). * Donna Summer R.I.P. * Christiana Spens’s daily artworks. * The Smiths dub style. * Epic tea time with Alan Rickman. * Akotombo’s new album, False Positives. * A new Banksy in London. * Banksy artwork destroyed by builder. * Children’s TV shows on the BBC (in pictures). * Jerry Nolan’s Rolling Stone ad, 1969. * Alice Bag profile. * London timelapse. * George Steiner podcast. * An interview with David Arnoff about his punk/post-punk era photographs. * On the new Clarice Lispector translations. * Oldest porn in history? * 1950s Calendar Girls. * Danny Byrne reviews Karl Knausgaard (My Struggle). * John Cheever reading “The Swimmer,” 1977. * Roxy Music, live at the BBC, 1972. * René Clair’s Paris qui dort, 1925. * An interview with Lars Iyer. * Factory Records exhibition. * Alain de Botton: in defence of self-help books. * Bukowski woodcut. * An introduction to phenomenology. * The King’s Road music and fashion trail. * The Fitzgeralds in Hollywood. * Prince Philip’s top 10 gaffes. * Ed Piskor’s Wizzywig (book trailer). * Dennis Hopper and Iggy Pop get their tits out. * Classical nudes get a 21st century makeover (see top pic). * The mermaids of Florida (see other pic).
19/05/12: 3:AM In the Mix: Stanley Invites You for a Quick Refreshment.
A touch of the Decemberists and an even stronger nod in the direction of Neil Hannon’s melodramatic, elegant pop : Scottish indie rockers Stanley are one of the very good surprises I found in my inbox in the past few months. Their Debut album is out and promising.
Check out their video, for single “Sandwiches and Tea” and their track “Join Hands” on their Soundcloud.
17/05/12: New Track by Jhameel
3:AM favorite Jhameel has a new track out, ‘Are You Free’. It’s got more of an agressive/rock vibe than usual and Jhameel’s trademark, brilliant pop flair. Very summery too if that’s your kind of thing, and you find June is a little slow to come.
15/05/12: Studs Terkel bridge rededicated.
By Robert O’Connor.
Over the weekend, the Studs Terkel Memorial Bridge in Chicago was rededicated. It’s a run-down dingy bridge built in 1904 - eight years older than Studs. It’s one of many events that are taking place around the city to celebrate his 100th birthday this Wednesday.
Before the event, organizers sold copies of his books in a nearby tent (it was cloudy, windy and raining during the ceremony). They also sold a map of Chicago with places of interest related to Studs Terkel marked.
The bridge is Division Street when it crosses the Chicago River at Goose Island. There are thousands of those brown street signs around the city called vanity street signs that commemorate great Chicagoans. The Studs Terkel bridge was dedicated 20 years ago, when Studs was in his early 80s. He was confused about the dedication, but accepted it. The street sign was put up crudely and a few days later it was gone, never to be replaced. So for many years, people have driven or walked over it not knowing it was the Studs Terkel bridge.
On the sidewalk outside, people carried signs with pictures of Studs on them and people honked their horns in support. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn was supposed to speak, but couldn’t, but he did issue a proclamation about the ceremony, read by state senator Pat McGuire (Joliet, pictured on the right in the green shirt).
U. S. Congressman Mike Quigley (Illinois 5th district) also spoke, as did city alderman Peter Waguespack (above)
The re-dedication began and ended with a raucous performance by Mucca Pazza. The city council has also decided to tear down and replace the bridge, and there has been a contest to design a replacement bridge.
The event began with Chris Walz (above) singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and ended with him leading the crowd in “This Land is Your Land.”
(photos by the author)
13/05/12: The Missing Links
Tom McCarthy in conversation with Marita Gluzberg. * Dylan Trigg on disorientation and uncanniness. * Roland Barthes: myths we don’t outgrow. * 1977: the Queen’s punk jubilee. * Palettes of famous painters. * Three early short films by Peter Greenaway. * Black and white pictures of life inside the Chelsea Hotel. * Stiv Bators interview, 1986 (video). * Henry Miller in Paris, 1969. * In Paris with Malcolm McLaren. * Tin House on the Paris Book Club at Le Carmen. More here. * Paris’s iconic Village Voice Bookshop, which opened in 1982, is to close down. * Where to find a vintage photo booth in Paris. * Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923). * The Late Walter Benjamin. * Antiphilosophy. * Vintage lesbian pulp fiction. * Heidi Julavits on The Believer. * An intriduction to Italian neo-realism. * Sid Vicious in Norway. * Portlandia. * Will Self on transvaginal probes. * Will Self on his own “Kafka’s Wound“. * Nicholas Lezard on sex and punishment. * Borges’s Norton Lectures, 1967-8. * Literature: cupcake or cure? * Jenni Fagan on being pregnant. * A review of Ivan Vladislavic’s The Loss Library. * Cooking an ink-black calamari risotto with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld. * Climbing Up tights. * Anders Petersen’s photographs of London’s Soho. * Tim Adams on the William Utermohlen retrospective: “A nurse who loved Utermohlen’s work encouraged him to keep working, to try to draw Alzheimer’s from the inside”. * Some of Adrian Sherwood’s best dub productions. * Steve Mitchelmore reviews Knausgaard’s A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven. * Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Reticence. * Jacques Lacan, 1972 (video). * Flowchart: what is weird fiction? * Death in the age of Facebook. * Dante’s Circles of Hell in Lego. * A documentary about Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood in Las Vegas, 1973. * Portraits by Man Ray [see Lee Miller above].
09/05/12: The Missing Links
The wonderful Deborah Levy interviewed on France 24 (video). *A review of The Space Between curated by Michael Bracewell. * Robert Walser’s Thirty Poems to be published by New Directions later this month. * Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren (on Mallarmé) reviewed. * László Krasznahorkai interviewed: “You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, anymore than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life”. * Cain Todd on pornography. * The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head (based on Dylan Trigg’s 3:AM essay). * Simon Critchley: “[L]iterature for me, it’s what everything comes back to, it’s essential”. * Marcel Duchamp interviewed by the BBC, 1966. * Four Man Ray films from the 1920s. * The 10 best movie credit sequences. * Will Self on J. G. Ballard (video). * 3:AMer Richard Cabut’s Desert Island Discs. * John Peel’s record collection. * James Bridle on the commercial possibilities of fan fiction. * The sky over Europa. * Derek Jarman: Life as Art, Part 1. * 3:AM’s David Winters reviews Eli Friedlander’s Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. * Elif Shafak on Walter Benjamin: “One doesn’t read him to feel better. One reads him to feel”. * Bauhaus: art as life. * The Emperor of Wyoming. * Jonathan Lethem and Andy Zax talk Talking Heads. * The fictitious Parisian address. * Now I wanna sniff some glue. * The myth of the suffering artist. * An extract from The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland. * Saint Etienne. * Teddy boys on the loose. * Terry Richardson’s Lady Gaga photoshoot (”Blank Generation” soundtrack).
05/05/12: The Crackle of Information
Tom McCarthy’s brilliant essay, Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works, is published as a Vintage Books eBook Original on 22 May. Here’s an extract from the blurb:
“In his novels Remainder, C, and Men in Space, McCarthy explores the theme of signals and transmission. Now, he blows the concept wide open and identifies the signals that have been repeating since the dawn of literature. He takes us back to the Greeks and the origins of literary meaning to show that information, rather than being a natural or abstract phenomenon, is always based in artificial media—in ones and zeros, dots and dashes, signals and noise. He takes us through Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett and others to re-imagine the very idea of what a writer does, and what the act of writing is. Rather than praising individual creative genius, McCarthy re-tunes our ears to the crackle of information as it has passed through the feedback loop of literary culture.”
In other news, Tom’s “Dodgem Jockeys” appears in this month’s Believer. His third novel, C (K in German) has been shortlisted for the German Foreign Fiction Prize.
[Pic: Tom McCarthy, London, April 2012 by Andrew Gallix.]
04/05/12: Pig Iron
Benjamin Myers reads from his new novel, Pig Iron.
15/04/12: The Missing Links
Jean-Luc Godard’s abandoned 60s manifesto. * Sometimes the only cure is to disappear. * Vanishing films. * A rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose: “Innovation has a strange way of surviving. In those distant days (the late 1950s), there was active prejudice in England, led by C. P. Snow, against the new fashion from France. But who even mentions Snow now, or his followers? For if the prejudice against experiment persists, the novel nevertheless has changed, and if Robbe-Grillet himself is also perhaps no longer read, some of his technique has insidiously survived, in a way that Snow’s has no”. * Jennifer Egan’s “Notes for Innovative Fiction“. * A blog devoted to John Cage’s writings. * A documentary about Jacques Rigaut (France Culture, 24 April). * On Lars Iyer’s mystical idiots. * On Joseph Roth’s letters. * Iain Sinclair on David Gascoyne: “‘Is it true that you actually knew Max Ernst?’ demands a persistent interviewer, stalking the poet’s stair-lift retreat, on the outskirts of Newport. ‘Knew him? I had him over the back of a grand piano in 1926.’” (See also, Darran Anderson on Gascoyne.) * The Cramps live at a mental asylum, 1978. * Simon Reynolds on Retromania: “But it [the book] also came from everyday use of the internet: downloading out-of-print albums from file-sharing blogs or trawling through YouTube, and entering a state of atemporality where the past and the present are intermingled and indistinguishable, in an eerie way”. * Instagram’s instant nostalgia. * Heidi Julavits on Tumblr. * Tumblr tips for writers. * The Jam, live in Paris, 1981. * Slow Toe. * Two legends: Andrew Klimeyk and Chris Yarmock. * The sound of loneliness. * Wonderful Polaroids. * Julian Barnes revisits Le Grand Meaulnes. * An interview with Ben Marcus. * Stanley Kubrick’s first film, 1951. * Martin Scorsese’s first three (short) films. * Hitchcock’s definition of happiness. * Benjamin, Barthes and the singularity of photography. * Wim Wenders on photography. * Is it still possible to write philosophical novels? * The BBC’s Modern Writers archive. * Writing death. * Joyce collection published online. * The toning down of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. * The full moon myth. * The editors of The White Review interviewed in Bookforum. * The Gun Club live, 1984.
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