3:AM Magazine

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)

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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].

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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).

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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.]

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04/05/12: Pig Iron

Benjamin Myers reads from his new novel, Pig Iron.

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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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09/04/12: The Missing Links

Jon Savage on Subway Sect. * George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought reviewed in the TLS. * Donari Braxton’s new film, Themes from a Rosary. * The Post-it ghost. * Snatch (see our interview with Judy Nylon). * Simon Critchley interviewed at Full Stop Magazine. * The New Inquiry on Albert Cossery. * Teju Cole on W. G. Sebald’s poetry in The New Yorker. * Introduction to Antiphilosophy. * Will Self: walking is political. * Will Self in conversation with David Tennant. * Darran Anderson’s The Magnetic Mountain book launch (video). * Mary Hawthorne on Robert Walser. * R.I.P. Cynthia Dall and Harry Crews. * Punk and the 60s. * Lars Iyer interviewed. * How to be an academic failure. * Situationist aesthetics. * An interview with Gee Vaucher of Crass (video). * On Blank City. * James Chance & The Contortions, live at Max’s Kansas City, 1979. * Benjamin Walker on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (podcast). * PiL go to Heaven. * The Los Angeles Review of Books on Ben Marcus. * Updike vs Wolfe. * A review of Richard King’s How Soon is Now? * I love total destruction. * “I started on the outside, I simply prefer to be independent”: Roger Corman. * An interview with Karl O. Knausgård (video). * A great women in punk blog. * Slavoj Žižek riffs on Kung Fu Panda. * [Pic: Ho Ryan Lee.]

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27/03/12: The Missing Links

Christine Brooke-Rose R.I.P.: “I’ve always tried to avoid the expected word”. From the Guardian: “[A]s her close acquaintance Roland Barthes said, it is only once the voice loses its origin that writing may begin. Was Brooke-Rose ever really with us?” * Antonio Tabucchi R.I.P. * A new biography of Richard Brautigan. * David Lodge reviews Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head. * Great interview with the fascinating Dylan Trigg. * Literary Paris. * Special issue of Modernism/Modernity dedicated to Beckett. * Orson Welles and Kafka. * Forgotten Bookmarks. * Harold Bloom reviews Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic. * Suburbia gone wild. * Blank City. * 100 Punks Rule. * Ripped & Torn has a revamped website (which includes the Punk: The Early Years and I Swear I was There documentaries). * Jah Wobble and Keith Levene play Metal Box. * The look of music. * The return of Mad Men. * The Los Angeles Review of Books on Mad Men. * The man behind Mad Men. * A literary guide to Mad Men. * Real-life Mad Men-era photos. * Steven Mitchelmore reviews The Art Kettle. * An interview with Mark Stewart of The Pop Group. * Dennis Morris on growing up black. (Wonderful pictures of black London in the 60s and 70s here.) * The mighty Sam Jordison on The Alexandria Quartet. * “London’s Overthrow” by China Miéville. * Screenshots of despair. * How indie labels changed the world. * On Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar. * Richard Hell shirt for sale. * Who has the right to write in the UK today? * Zadie Smith on Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno: “…line upon line of textured black, a perfect rendition of nothing”. * Life after people. * The 1985 Jesus & Mary Chain riot. * Modern British design. * Umberto Eco: “There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte”. * Ho Ryon Lee’s ‘double exposure’ upskirt paintings (see above).

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22/03/12: Soho Nights

The Sohemian Society presents at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, North Soho, W1

‘Nights Out — Life in Cosmopolitan London’
Speaker Judith Walkowitz

London’s Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its fin-de-siecle buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a centre of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theatres. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be “outside” the nation.

Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London’s urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area’s foreignness, liminality, and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

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: Fantastisch Global System: Ann Radio

Shoegazing from Ukraine anyone?

Ann radio - Fantastish Global Systems by FantastishGlobalSystems

Fantastish Global Systems was formed in 2007 and consists of: Fantastish (guitars, vocals, producing) and Aladdin (drums, vocals, producing). Check them out.

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