3:AM Magazine
Welcome to Buzzwords. Peddling mind porn to the chattering classes since 2000.
23/01/12: The Missing Links
Marcel Duchamp on French TV, 1963. * A new short story by Lydia Davis. * Tim Parks vs David Shields. More here. * A critique of logocentrism. * Installing the Lloyd Johnson exhibition. * Justin Taylor interviews Gary Lutz. * Unsaid Magazine. * Mark Fisher on the non-places in Steve McQueen’s non-film. * The atemporality of “ruin porn”. * Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! * William Gass. * Hari Kunzru and The Satanic Verses. * Twitter avant la lettre: Félix Fénéon. * Mark Baumer’s 50 books in a year project. * Generation X - live! And on the box (introduced by Marc Bolan). * Ned Beauman on Quentin Meillassoux. * ‘Killing Digital Curation’. * Günter Grass, artist (via @BibliOdyssey). * An extract from Noah Cicero’s The Insurgent. * David Winters on Ben Marcus‘ Flame Alphabet. * Blake Butler interviewed. * Guillaume Apollinaire’s Little Auto reviewed. * The wait for Harry Crews is over. * Trotsky speech in Copenhagen, 1932 (video). * Geoff Dyer’s Zona. * “Powerful documents of 1950s discontent & its alternatives.” The TLS on the newly re-issued Terry Taylor, Colin Wilson & Laura Del-Rivos. * The New Inquiry’s Un(der)known Writers series. * Simon Critchley on the eurozone crisis as Greek tragedy: “Tragedy requires our collusion with that fate. In other words, it requires a measure of freedom”. * Amazing pictures of Hells Angels, 1965. * Alain de Botton attacks art for art’s sake. * An American documentary on David Bowie from 1980. * Kafka’s Modernist lineage. * Roberto Bolaño on Neruda, Kafka, and the abyss. * Luc Sante on Patti Smith. * A Kevin Cummins / Joy Division exhibition. * The Waterstones 11 (includes Jenni Fagan). * Vintage London newsreels. * London’s Soho in 1973. * Robert Birnbaum interviews Russell Banks. * Sport as literature. * Mark SaFranko interviewed. * “Cinema has become more hyperbolic and I think that a lot of movies bludgeon you with, if not simplistic, but simple ideas.” David Fincher. * Will Self on the joy of slow. * Adam Mars-Jones on Jeanette Winterson. * The Last Resort. Catalogue here. A skinhead culture Timblr. * What was J.D. Salinger writing all of those years, and is it any good? * The rise of Groupthink. * An interview with Mark E Smith. * David Foster Wallace’s 10 favourite books.
15/01/12: The Missing Links
Andrew Gallix on death of literature. * Why write novels at all? * Is literary fiction a sham? * Photography-embedded fiction. * W.G. Sebald’s eleven books to read for a class on major trends in European fiction (via @timesflow). * Why brutality makes David Lynch laugh. * On Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse. * Inside Billy Childish‘ art studio. * David Foster Wallace’s annotated books. * ‘Invisible Girls & Phantom Ladies’, Alan Moore’s 1983 article on sexism in comics. * Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. * Will Self on psychiatry. * Michel Foucault lectures 1978-80, English & French [MP3]. * “What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write.” Raymond Chandler writes to Hitchcock. * Reassessing the Saul Bass & Hitchcock collaboration. * Harry Houdini’s great rope escape [video] * 10 legendary bad boys of literature. * Writing the City. * Dubravka Ugrešić on the writer in exile [PDF]. * Lines that shaped Manhattan, in praise of New York’s 200-year-old grid. * Owen Hatherley on why not all skyscrapers are built by phallic capitalism. * Downton Abbey, a reading list. * Akira Kurosawa’s hand-painted storyboards. * A Clockwork Orange location pictures. * Juan Pablos Villalobos interviewed. * Gerhard Richter, the sublime on a postcard. * 100 essays by Jacques Derrida. * Julian Barnes on Félix Fénéon. * Lee Rourke reviewed. * Paul Mason on Northern Soul. * Trinie Dalton interviewed. * Patti Smith on Rimbaud [video]. * 10 great silent sequences in sound movies. * Velvet Underground vs. Andy Warhol. * Gil Scott-Heron vs. Jim Carroll (via @vol1brooklyn).
08/01/12: The Missing Links
Modernism and music in 2012. * Remembering Josef Skvorecky & Michael Dummett. * Camus offers half-time analysis of a Paris-Monaco match (not quite Monty Python). * Michael Moorcock on Alfred Jarry, “one of the most influential writers of modern times”. * Details of the three panels to be devoted to Tom McCarthy’s work at the forthcoming Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. * A Jean-Michel Basquiat interview from 1983. * Nihilists have feelings too, The Millions on Michel Houellebecq. * Wyndham Lewis‘ Tyro 1 & 2 [PDFs]. * “It’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing.” Adrian Tomine. * A Surrealist party hosted by Salvador Dali. * The Image Bank Post Card Show, 1978. * Travis Jeppesen & Rachel Kendall interviewed at Horror Sleaze Trash.* Iggy Pop and the vacuum (cleaner). * Rhys Tranter asks Robert Darnton if books have a future. * Jenny Diski on the future of publishing. * Can experimentation help print compete with digital? * Sid, Nancy (sounding like Vivienne Westwood) and Stiv Bators on NYC cable TV in 1978. * A Lloyd Johnson retrospective in London. * Youth Culture History. * A Dave Eggers monologue printed on a shower curtain. * Jennifer Miro (The Nuns) R.I.P. * The Pistols, Stranglers and Blondie on Dutch TV, 1977. * EU copyright on James Joyce works ends. * Gordon Bowker on the posthumous power of the (Joyce) literary estate. * The twilight of blues music? (via 3QD). * Where Sibelius fell silent. * Kid literary characters & their grown-up counterparts. * The Rumpus launch letters in the mail. * Natasha Wimmer on translating Bolaño. * Samuel Beckett’s notebooks for Watt. * Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape. * Slavoj Žižek’s jokes are no laughing matter. * Pingu in The Thing. * F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lost road trip. * When binge drinking used to be the height of fashion. * Christopher Hitchens on Charles Dickens‘ inner child. * A pre-punk Nina Hagen, 1974. * If famous writers had written Twilight. * A brief interview with Richard Hell whose autobiography (up to the age of 34) will be published by Ecco (HarperCollins). More here. * Richard Hell pictures on Tumblr. * Books that are never done being written. * It’s ok to have a point, a defence of literature with an agenda. * Remembering Walter Benjamin on the 120th anniversary of his birth. * “Walser’s work, has come to represent for me language’s failure to adequately represent experience, even as it rails against this.” * A 1966 interview with David Bowie. * On Adam Mars-Jones on Yasujiro Ozu. * Tarkovsky on art. * George Grosz’s drawings for The Good Soldier Švejk. * Lars Iyer on Blanchot & on the situation of American writing. * A literary satellite. * Thanatography. * Words of disorder. * Internalization of crisis. * “The Marbled Swan is something of an homage to Robbe-Grillet, although not in the way you might expect.” Dennis Cooper. * Bob Gruen’s New York Dolls documentary. * “I especially feel sorry for painters, or writers, too, because they don’t get a chance to see their audience.” Laurie Anderson. * Nicholas Lezard on Ellis Sharp’s Intolerable Tongues. * Marc Newson’s tribute to Malcolm McLaren. * Back to 1977. * A Derek Boshier exhibition. * Edmund White: a life in writing. * Daphne Oram & early electronic music. * Man Ray’s home movies (see above pic).
06/01/12: No subject is terrible if the story is true
And, via Bookslut, James Campbell’s ‘Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster” in the TLS.
03/01/12: Don’t Let Me Die in Black & White
Alan Moore’s travelogue through his beloved Northampton, 1993 (via Dangerous Minds).
02/01/12: That Was the Year That Was: Interviews
In 2011 3:AM spoke to:
Grace Krilanovich
Jayne Joso
Justin Sullivan
Kaaron Warren
The Cardiacs
Victor LaValle
Will Stone
Rachel Trezise
Stuart Evers
David Shields
Janice Lee
Brandon Tietz
Jenn Ashworth
Alan Moore
David Rose
Tony Black
A.C. Grayling
Jarett Kobek
Luke Kennard
Steve Himmer
Gary Lutz
Kevin Williamson
Max Wallis
Stephen Barber
Jonathan Trigell
Helen Walsh
McKenzie Wark
Ron Peck
Teju Cole
Iain Sinclair
Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori & Reza Negarestani
Jean-Michel Rabaté
John Holten
Ben Brooks
Lars Iyer
Alina Simone
Craig Taylor
Richard Bradford
David Enrique Spellman
Peter Carruthers
Diane Coyle
Josh Knobe
Brian Leiter
Scott McClanahan
And for Maintenant:
Christodoulos Makris
Tadeusz Dąbrowski
Aleš Šteger
Holly Pester
Anatol Knotek
Morten Søndergaard
Emilian Galaicu-Păun
Frédéric Forte
Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
Cia Rinne
Yuri Andrukhovych
Tomica Bajsić
Scott Thurston
Immanuel Mifsud
Tomas S. Butkus
Nikola Madzirov
Gabriele Labanauskaite
Luljeta Lleshanaku
Marcus Slease
Pekko Käppi
Colin Herd
Željko Mitić
Marco Giovenale
Valzhyna Mort
Kirmen Uribe
Ulf Stolterfoht
Márton Koppány
Ilya Kaminsky
Lies Van Gasse
Johannes Göransson
Lidija Dimkovska
Ailbhe Darcy
Anna Auziņa
Kārlis Vērdiņš
Maarten Inghels
Damir Šodan
Emanuella Amichai
Arnoud van Adrichem
Valerio Magrelli
João Luís Barreto Guimarães
Daniele Pantano
: That Was the Year That Was: Books
In 2011 we reviewed:
Fiction:
Andrej Blatnik’s You Do Understand
Dawn Raffel’s Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
Julian Barnes’ Pulse
Michael Peverett’s The Littlest Feeling
Brandon Tietz’s Out of Touch
Charlie Caselton’s Meanwhile Gardens: An Urban Adventure
Daniel Kramb’s Dark Times
Dan Vyleta’s The Quiet Twin
Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island
Richard Kalich’s Penthouse F
Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul and Other Stories
Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine
Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics
Gary Indiana’s Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975-2010
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
Oliver Rohe’s Vacant Lot
Best European Fiction 2011
Edward St Aubyn’s At Last
Michael Crummey’s Galore
Jayne Joso’s Perfect Architect
Blake Butler’s There is No Year
Jenn Ashworth’s Cold Light
Édouard Levé’s Suicide
Emma Jane Unsworth’s Hungry, the Stars and Everything
Patrik Ouředník’s The Opportune Moment, 1855
Marc-Edouard Nabe’s L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child
Ben Brooks’ Grow Up
Ivo Stourton’s The Book Lover’s Tale
Teju Cole’s Open City
A.L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book
Lars Iyer’s Spurious (3:AM Novel of the Year 2011)
Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole (3:AM Publisher of the Year 2011)
Enrique Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris
Paul Kavanagh’s The Killing of a Bank Manager
Benjamin Markovits’ Childish Loves
Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman
Frank Kill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana
Gerald Kersh’s The Angel and the Cuckoo
Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1
Gavin James Bower’s Made in Britain
Gary Lutz’s Divorcer
John Holten’s The Readymades
Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
Joshua Mohr’s Damascus
New Cross-Fucked Musings on a Manic Reality
J.M. Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life
Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla
Simon Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy
Terry Taylor’s Baron’s Court, All Change
Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho
Laura Del-Rivo’s The Furnished Room
Poetry:
Jeff Hilson’s In The Assarts
Paul Stubbs’ Ex Nihilo
Eighteens
Eileen Myles’ Inferno (A Poet’s Novel)
James Davies’ Plants
Will Stone’s Drawing in Ash (3:AM Poetry Book of the Year 2011)
Maureen Seaton & Samuel Ace’s Stealth
Andrew Spragg’s the fleetingest
David Berridge’s BLACK GARDENS
Nathan Thompson’s Questions for Painters
Sean Lovelace’s Fog Gorgeous Stag
nick-e melville’s Stuff
James Mclaughlin’s Aeido
Megan Boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee
Non-fiction:
Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
Lawrence Rinder & Colter Jacobsen’s Tuleyome
Daniel Harris’ On the Road: A Journey Through A Season
Ken Worpole’s Dockers and Detectives
Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World
Darin Strauss’ Half a Life
Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage!
Laurie Penny’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Gérard Garouste’s A Life of Disquiet: Self-portrait of an Artist, a Son, a Madman
Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Bruce Benderson’s Transhumain
Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009
Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook
Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class
Edward S. Robinson’s Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present
Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22
Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon
Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel
Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project
Gay Talese’s Frank Sinatra Has a Cold: And Other Essays
Luke Haines’ Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll
Fredric Jameson’s Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One
Clare Solomon & Tania Palmieri’s Springtime: The New Student Rebellions
Gavin Knight’s Hood Rat
Masha Tupitsyn’s Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film
Matthew J. Goodwin’s New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party
Stephen Duncombe & Maxwell Tremblay’s White Riot: Punk and the Politics of Race
Barry Miles’ In The Seventies
McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts
Roy Wilkinson’s Do It For Your Mum
Eric Schwitzgebel’s Perplexities of Consciousness
Sebastian Groes’ The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature
Joan Didion’s Blue Nights
Emrys Westacott’s Virtue of Vices
Charles Fourier’s The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy
Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality
: SI, Now
Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK – Friday 8th June 2012
Keynote: McKenzie Wark (The New School, NY), author of The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), Gamer Theory (2007) and Hacker Manifesto (2004).
Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points.
- Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961
Is it oxymoronic, heretical or just plain wrong to talk about Situationist aesthetics? The Situationist International (SI) condemned attempts to discuss its work in terms of aesthetics, but perhaps it is now time to brush the SI against the grain.
When it first announced its programme, the SI insisted that ‘There is no such thing as Situationism’. A few years later, before expelling its members deemed to be too invested in artistic production, the SI declared that in an age of spectacle any work of art produced by a Situationist must necessarily be ‘antisituationist’. The SI’s tactical intransigence regarding the political value of the aesthetic, and its refusal of the possibility of a specifically Situationist aesthetic, threw up problems that remained unresolved by the time of the SI’s dissolution. Since 1972, particularly in Anglophone contexts, Situationist practices have penetrated an array of cultural spheres, and much cultural production which the SI would have dismissed as spectacular has claimed some Situationist influence.
The SI located itself within but against culture. This symposium asks whether such a position is tenable, and what possibility might there be for Situationist aesthetics after all. Do cultural phenomena such as punk, or the current psychogeography industry, for example, work as or against Situationist aesthetics? Is it possible to identify art works and/or practices indebted to the SI that do not recuperate its politics but fortify and develop them?
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
· the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International
· the work of artists, writers, thinkers or film-makers proximate to or influenced by the SI
· critiques of the SI
· (post-)Situationist theory now
· détournement, plagiarism, and recuperation
· spectacular and anti-spectacular aesthetics
· the uses and abuses of psychogeography
· punk and art writing
Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words for papers or presentations of 20 minutes to Sam Cooper at situ.aesthetics@gmail.com by 16th March 2012. For further information: situationist-aesthetics.blogspot.com.
31/12/11: The Missing Links
Edward Gorey’s animated intro for PBS’ Mystery!. * Ill angelic poetics, a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Dream-Land’. * Portrait of A Bookstore as an Old Man, a 2005 documentary on George Whitman. * Writers & their addictions. * I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you. * When Christopher Hitchens met Jorge Luis Borges. * Samuel Beckett’s BBC Radio Plays, 1958-1991 [MP3]. * Do the classics have a future? * How digital is reviving subscription publishing. * Textal harassment. * Sukhdev Sandhu on his teenage passion for The Smiths. * China Mieville on M.R. James & hauntology. * David Lynch’s Ruth Roses & Revolver. * Ezra Pound’s daughter aims to stop Italian fascist group using father’s name. * Jenny Hendrix on the afterlife of Tintin. * Readings & interviews with Henry Miller. * Interview with Maurice Girodias. * Walter Benjamin’s Paris address book. * Saul Leiter & the typographic fragment. * Teju Cole’s Wall Street & Brooklyn Bridge. * Jamel Shabazz’s street snaps of 80s Brooklyn. * Stuart Kelly on the best books of 1911.
30/12/11: In Search of Barney Bubbles
BBC Radio 4, 4pm, Bank Holiday Monday, 2 January 2012
Written and presented by Mark Hodkinson.
Produced by Mark Hodkinson and Ian Bent.
Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Depeche Mode, The Damned, Hawkwind, Nick Lowe and hundreds more owe a debt of gratitude to the tragic artist Barney Bubbles for shaping their image through radical record sleeves and posters. Nymphs floating into outer space, Ferris Wheels sparkling against a cityscape, faces made from light bulbs, paper clips and cassette tapes… this is all the work of Barney Bubbles.
Bubbles (real name, Colin Fulcher) was a designer with roots in both the commercial world (he worked for Sir Terence Conran and created the ‘archer’ logo for Strongbow Cider) and the London underground scene of the 1960s/early 1970s where his Notting Hill-based company, Teenburger Designs, contributed to Oz and Friendz and numerous record sleeves. His work, often drug-fuelled, was an imagination set loose – colourful, playful, three-dimensional, merging the prosaic with the profound. He was appointed designer and art director at Stiff Records and devised innovative marketing concepts. Elvis Costello’s ‘My Aim is True’ included adverts in three UK music papers from which a poster of Costello could be constructed. Ian Dury’s ‘Do It Yourself’ sleeve came in 28 slightly different ‘wallpaper’ versions.
He was a key player in the explosion of 7” records in the punk and post-punk era. Before, singles had come in plain paper bags or with generic label artwork – Bubbles and his peers saw them as a mini-canvas to complement the music within. Later, he directed several pop videos, including ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials and singles by Squeeze, Fun Boy Three and Elvis Costello.
In the early 1980s Bubbles fell out-of-favour, with little demand or acclaim for his work. He had suffered regular bouts of depression and his behaviour had become erratic, involving incidents of self-harm. Amid personal and financial worries, he committed suicide in 1983 at the age of 43. Since his death, his work has been re-evaluated and its influence acknowledged. Sleeve art has also become seen as an art-form in its own right and its loss mourned in the download age. He is seen as seminal influence on the YBA scene of the early 1990s, inspiring the likes of Damien Hirst and Jay Jopling.
The programme looks closely at the times Bubbles lived through – hippy, idealistic 1960s to punk/new wave of the late 1970s/80s; his often-troubled life; and his lasting legacy. Key contributors include figures from the rock industry, close friends and family, and fellow designers.
3:AM for sale
The Edgier Waters: 5 Years of 3:AM Magazine
3:AM Teeshirts, Stickers and more.
Feed your head
The following are links to RSS feeds for 3:AM, Buzzwords, and the various categories therein.
All content © 2000-2012 / Designed & Built by STML
Email webmaster@3ammagazine.com with any problems.