Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Reaktion Books, 2009

Michael Sorkin has written an engaging, leisurely book that surveys issues of urban design and planning in New York. In addition to running his own architecture practice, he is professor of Architecture in New York’s City University. His background in the theory and practice of architecture and urban design thoroughly informs this work. Apart from anything else, it is a valuable introduction to New York’s urban history – and to urbanism in general.

Ostensibly an account of Sorkin’s daily journey from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his studio in TriBeCa, each chapter focuses on a section of his walk to work, beginning with the stairs, the stoop of his rent-controlled apartment building, and the block he lives on. His personal experience of each space is described, before he widens his focus to take in wider issues of ownership, public space and gentrification of run-down, usually working-class areas of the city – the ‘slum-clearance’ so beloved of urban visionaries such as Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. He moves from microcosmic detail to macrocosmic overview with ease, and the book is a pleasure to read.

In describing his itinerary across the city, Sorkin is stepping into the well-worn shoes of generations of illustrious urban wanderers. The walk through urban space has long been seen as a viable critique of the city: from Baudelaire, through Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists, to the Situationist dérive. And Sorkin clearly wishes to channel the critical possibilities of these urban perambulations, which were, in the case of the Situationists, construed as an avant-gardist riposte to the frankly anti-pedestrian, automobile-centric functionalism of modern urbanism.

Although the Situationists emerge briefly from Sorkin’s account as explorers of the political potential of the subjective mapping of urban space, the real hero of his narrative is Jane Jacobs, the urban reformer who, on a grassroots level, challenged the municipal master plans of Robert Moses in the 1950s and 1960s. Jacobs, with her emphasis on walkable neighbourhoods and a de-prioritisation of the visual in urban planning, finds a strong adherent in Sorkin.

Jacobs’ advocacy of areas of high population density has come to seem ever more persuasive in an era when rising fuel prices highlight the unsustainable nature of suburban sprawl. In this context, the ability to walk to work is desirable on a number of levels: environmentally, and from a quality of life perspective. Yet, largely because of the seemingly irreversible history of problematic planning legislation, walking to work has become a luxury few can share.

Overall, however, Sorkin largely succeeds in linking his own everyday experience of urban space with larger political issues at work in the vast metropolis. For example, his struggles with his landlord, while often played for laughs, come to embody the wider concerns of a tenant-owner relationship.

But, this is also where something of a problem emerges in the book: its admirable efforts to connect the personal experience of the city with bigger issues are somewhat constrained by the writer’s focus on a specific location (Lower Manhattan), and a specific person’s experience of that space. In being able to walk to work, and in being able to live in Greenwich Village at a comparatively reasonable rent, Sorkin is highly unusual. The part doesn’t quite stand for the whole. The poor have been largely cleared from the island, and, as Sorkin points out, fewer middle-class than ever before can afford to live there.

The process of gentrification is viewed as particularly insidious, and Sorkin documents the continual rent rises which force small businesses out in favour of higher-end stores. Gentrification encourages a mania for building-conversion and for the branding of neighbourhoods. Sorkin experiences both first-hand: firstly, when the building in which he rents his offices is converted by the landlord into condominiums, he is forced to move out. Secondly, when he has moved his offices to a new area, he discusses the desperate efforts of developers to rebrand the neighbourhood into something comparable to ‘SoHo’ or ‘TriBeCa’.

At the same time, in its focus on the kind of urban activism typified by Jacobs, the book is highly nostalgic: it traces the flooding of Manhattan Island with capital, but, in response to this influx, can only offer retreads of the arguments from what now seems a golden era of urban contestation, when heroes and villains were so clearly delineated. The present-day New York, at least in this account, appears to offer fewer opportunities for this kind of engagement.

The concentration on Manhattan – and, even then, on a specific corner of the island – is, for this reason, problematic. Even in the present day, capital doesn’t obliterate the contested border between urban viewpoints, but merely moves it to the periphery. Some investigation of this aspect of New York’s borderland would have been welcome, but, admittedly, that would have made it a distinctly different book.

Ultimately, though, it must be stressed that what this book does, it does extremely well, and it’s carried along not just by its charming concept, but also by its chatty voice and its deep erudition. Its numerous digressions are central to the story the author wants to tell. Sorkin’s colourful descriptions of the urban characters he meets on his journey exist alongside his precise accounts of the city’s history: where else, apart from perhaps the street itself, would you find these divergent strands rubbing past one another?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karl Whitney is a journalist, researcher and 3:AM editor based in Dublin, Ireland. He has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph.

Karren Ablaze was editor of the Leeds-based Ablaze! zine back in the 1990s. You can read about it in just about every book on Riot Grrrl. Now, she says her Top 5 English band songs are:

1. ‘Rock-A-Boy Blue,’ — Scritti Politti
2. ‘Thinking,’ — Champion Kickboxer
3. ‘Wings,’ — The Fall
4. ‘Prince The Boat,’ — Soeza
5. ‘Diplomatic Sugar, Naturally,’ — The ‘Club

After the success of The Recession Sessions Live, Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann, & Joseph Ridgwell invite you all to an evening of readings, music, & more on the theme of love & hate, featuring:

Will Ashon, Paul Ewen, David Oprava, Jenni Fagan, Mark Walton, Heidi James, Emily McPhillips, Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann, & Joseph Ridgwell - with music from Yardghost - plus mush & bile DJ sets.

A new feature at Buzzwords, a companion piece to our ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’, if you will. Every Friday, writers and 3:AM editors will discuss clips of pop promos of note (worthy of their love, no less.)

First up in the series is Kitchens of Distinction and ‘Drive That Fast’. KOD always sat uneasy among many bands of their day, the music press didn’t quite know what to make of their name, the fact that frontman Patrick Fitzgerald pushed his homosexuality to the fore lyrically and in interviews, and that such melodic noise could be made by three gawky types rather than a troop of big-lipped floppy-haired sullen boys from the Home counties. While their peers might have been content to pay more attention to the effects pedals deck than lyrics, KOD embodied a peculiar intellectual warmth, dealing with politics (the Thatcher death fantasy ‘Margaret’s Injection’) and, yes, love. Also of note is the pure psychogeography of a resolutely Tooting band (like fellow South Londoners Sidi Bou Said), both the video above’s use of the South London skyline and on tracks like ‘On Tooting Broadway Station’ (live clip here). For those less inclined to sneer, Fitzgerald’s emotional currency could be enjoyed by gay and straight alike. After a quartet of critically acclaimed albums, the band called it a day when Britpop altered the music press’ affiliations even further against their favour. A brief collaboration with Lush’s Miki Berenyi aside, Fitzgerald now records under the Joycean guise of Stephen Hero.

The Roaring Twenties

I don’t know why, but there were many times
in my twenties
when I was plagued by the blue blues,
a strange, re-occurring black cloud of depression
that followed me around for months and years
and as a good chunk of my twenties was spent in Australia,
these thoughts often occurred while I pounded
those sun-baked Sydney streets
or along those rat-infested back alleys of The Cross.
Kings Cross.
I lived in a succession of cheap apartments.
I can remember the names of the streets;
Bayswater, Roslyn, Ward, Macleay, Elizabeth,
Darlinghurst, Kellett, Barncleuth, Orwell, Victoria,
William, Hughes, McElhone.
I can also recall the interior of each apartment;
peeling paint, gloomy kitchenettes, poky rooms, and rotting bathrooms
and it was always summer, black summer,
hot, dusty streets, tarmac melting in the burning sun, hissing and popping,
heat waves shimmering.
I was working and drinking, drinking and working.
I never wrote anything
but instead thought about writing, compiling notes, and character sketches
convinced that one day I’d write novels, poems, and short stories.
Hundreds of thousands of words, describing those end of century Kings Cross scenes,
I would plot up in my apartment, drink beer, and stare at the walls.
It was my roaring twenties, but often I felt dead and listless.
Everything seemed to oppress me;
work, women, cheap wine, the day to day living,
everyone trying to outdo each other,
petty little one-upmanship’s, grubby aspirations, flawed ambition.
I felt more empathy towards the street hookers, bums and alki’s.
Somehow they seemed more real, open and honest.
The tediousness of so-called successful lives always shocked me,
the monotony and drabness most people were prepared to put up with
just to stay one step ahead of the game
was depressing
but there didn’t seem to be many options.
People had been dealt a lame hand
by God, or Satan, or Jesus, or science, or flashing unknowns.
I’d walk to the botanical gardens and sit and watch the ducks.
The life of the average duck appeared preferable
to the life of the average human being.
Sometimes I spot a bug walking along a window ledge
and figured I’d rather be a bug
then I’d walk to the harbour and peer into the gloomy depth
wondering if it would be possible to just swim away,
swim away into nothingness and the blue void of the lonely night.
It was my twenties, my roaring twenties
and the world ran away
and the days ran away
and the moon was false and the sun sick
and all that was left was to teeter on the cusp
of the abyss
and smile.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Ridgwell is the author of two books of poetry, Load the Guns and Where Are The Rebels?. Both published by Blackheath Books and a novel, Last Days of the Cross. His work has appeared in short story anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and numerous online publications. For more information on Ridgwell’s writing click: In Search of the Lost Elation.

The Sohemians leave the claret fumes of Fitzrovia behind by organising a guided walk (led by Benedict Newbery), a literary journey in Hampstead to be precise, following in the footsteps of Le Carré’s George Smiley. The walk will trace the action in the novel Smiley’s People, introducing key landmarks from the book on, and around, Hampstead Heath.

Those wishing to participate should rendezvous at Hampstead underground station (Northern line) at 10.45 on Saturday July 11. The contact will be carrying a copy of Punch magazine under his left arm and will be wearing a quizical look. The contact will then lead the group off at 11am. For those who arrive late, the first assignment will be at the Tin Pavilion - indicated on the A-Z as the Sports Ground. Those who have not been terminally ‘health-adjusted’ en route will end up at The Magdala Pub, South End Green (where, incidentally, Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, shot her lover David Blakeley) at approximately 1.30pm.

July 8, 7pm
KGB Bar, NYC

Rob Plath is a 39 year old poet from New York. He is a former student of American poet Allen Ginsberg. Rob has published 7 books of poetry: Ashtrays and Bulls (Liquid Paper Press 2003), An IV Bag Full of Bile (Scintillating Publications 2007), Whiskey and Clay (Pudding House Publications 2008), Squeezing Blood from the Alphabet (erbacce press 2008), Tapping Ashes in the Dark (Lummox Press 2008), There’s A Little Hobo In My Heart Who Forever Gives The Finger To Humanity (d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t press 2008) and Nicotine Stained Scribblings From A Hammock In The Void (Good Japan Press 2009). He has a monster collection of new poems 300 pages in length called A Bellyful of Anarchy (Epic Rites Press 2009) coming out in April. Rob has also published hundreds of poems in nearly 200 different magazines and journals both nationally and internationally. He is co-host of infamous blogtalk radio poetry show ‘Rob & Jack America’ and is editor and creator of an online zine called The Exuberant Ashtray.

In a previous life Tony O’Neill played keyboards for bands and artists as diverse as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles his promising career was derailed by heroin addiction, quickie marriages and crack abuse. While kicking methadone he started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and he has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel DIGGING THE VEIN was published in Feb 2006 by Contemporary Press, in the US and Canada. Wrecking Ball Press released a UK edition April 2007. SEIZURE WET DREAMS, a collection of short stories and poems was released in the UK on Social Disease January 2006. A volume of poetry, SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY was released on Burning Shore Press, Spring 2007. DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE, his new novel, will be released in October 2008 by Harper Perennial. He also is the co-author of HERO OF THE UNDERGROUND, the memoir of Jason Peter [2008, St Martins Press]. He lives in New York.

(clip: Tony O’Neill at the 3:AM event, KGB Bar, 2007)

3:AM Asia contributor Roland Kelts will be in conversation with acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away/Howl’s Moving Castle) on July 25 at the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley. Roland tells us it will be the first (and likely only) time Miyazaki has consented to such an interview/conversation in public (and probably his last trip outside of Japan.) Tickets for the event are available from UC Berkeley ($25).

By Attila the Stockbroker.

Just about to leave for Glasto last Thursday morning, one final email check…among the spam a message from my footie mate Alan. Title: ‘Have you seen this?’ Open it. Link to Philadelphia Weekly: ‘In extremis: Steven Wells says goodbye.’ Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Two days previously I’d emailed him a poem I’d just written. Must have arrived in his inbox hours before he disappeared off this earth.

Swells, I always thought you’d pull through. I’d read ‘The English Patient’ - your brilliant, witty, moving piece about your simultaneous battle with cancer and the US healthcare system - in the Weekly, swapped emails where you sounded as, well, Swellslike as ever and thought: you’ll make it. This is one roaring, iconoclastic, larger than life, indestructible, stupidly clever, logically illogical everything-demolishing mouth monster who won’t be demolished himself by something as mundane as cancer. But no. Seething Wells is dead. ‘Swells’ and ‘dead’ in the same sentence. We’re all going to die, sure – and our biological health dictates when, not our brain, our spirit, our love of life or our capacity to write verse with the caustic power of concentrated sulphuric acid or prose which immolates crap rock bands, pompous sports stars or anyone else we feel like taking on – but…oh, fuck.

There have already been some fine tributes, mostly from his music journo friends. Here are my memories, and they start at a slightly earlier time. For me, despite his long ‘career’ (he hated that word!) in music journalism, Swells was first and foremost a poet, and then some. I first heard from him in 1981: I’d christened myself Attila the Stockbroker and had started getting up on stage performing energetic political poems between bands. He wrote to me, enclosing his fanzine Molotov Comics, saying he was doing the same up in Bradford, and so were some friends of his including Little Brother, Joolz and Slade the Leveller from a then unknown band called New Model Army. He called it ‘ranting poetry’….and from the moment I heard the phrase so did I.

Our first meeting was performing on the back of a lorry at a Right to Work demonstration in London in November 1981: coincidentally, Paul Weller was headlining a poetry event at the Young Vic theatre that night, and I persuaded Swells to come and ‘crash’ it with me and try and blag a few minutes. Organiser Michael Horovitz, bless him, gave us ten between us and the audience loved it. So did Paul Weller – two weeks later we were supporting the Jam at Hammersmith Odeon. NME editor Neil Spencer was there to review the gig and was impressed as well, sending budding writer and soon to be Redskins leader Chris Moore to do a big review of us at another gig a few weeks later. A music press ‘ranting poetry’ fad was born. And so was a pugnacious punk poetry partnership…

Swells and I did an EP together, ‘Rough Raw & Ranting’ which hit the indie charts, then a book for Unwins ‘The Rising Sons of Ranting Verse’ and for the next few years we saw a hell of a lot of each other. We gigged together, wrestled, drank, argued, and shouted together, watched bands together, went on demos together. But underneath the roaring exterior (and many people will be astonished by this) Swells never really enjoyed being on stage: many is the time I remember him throwing up before we tackled an audience. I guess it was this, plus his realisation that he could reach many more people writing for papers like the NME than as a ranting poet, that made him make the transition, first to Susan Williams, social surrealist feminist rock critic (many fell for it!) and then to the Steven Wells loved (by bands he liked) loathed (by bands he didn’t) and feared (by bands who didn’t know whether he was going to like or loathe them) everywhere.

I carried on being a poet, but we kept in touch as the years went by and every time we met the same roaring, hyper-opinionated clash would ensue. I’d take the piss out of him for choosing nerdy trainspotteresque behind-the-scenes music hackdom as the vehicle for his scattergun obliterations of everything Middle England held dear rather than getting on stage and doing it in front of a live audience like what a REAL stroppy bastard would do. He’d take the piss out of me for stubbornly carrying on being a ranting poet despite the fact that the entire collected ranks of nerdy music hackdom he hung around with thought ranting poetry was FINISHED and RUBBISH and that everything to do with Attila the Stockbroker was complete and utter DOG FAECES.
We’d agree to differ.
Then we’d smile, get pissed and wrestle with each other. And slag off Morrissey.

In the 90s I tried to coax him out of retirement and instigate the Seething Wells Comeback and got as far as booking him for a gig at the performance poetry series I was running in my home village near Brighton – but he phoned a couple of days before to cancel. So I gave up that idea and just enjoyed his demolitions of shit bands, shit football and shit politics in all the publications that would have him. (Plus the humanity, insight and above all the supreme intelligence which imbued all his writing – but I never told him that bit…)

The last time I saw him was by chance - he was was a loud Swellsian vision in a pink satin suit by the Thames as I walked through London with my wife- and stepchildren- to-be. ‘John! John! John!’ Then he moved to the States to be with Katherine, the woman he loved, and and our occasional contacts and spats became more occasional and less memorable – apart from anything else it’s impossible to wrestle via email. For a couple of years, silence. Then one day in 2006 I thought ‘I wonder what Swells is doing now?’ and, because you can these days, Googled him. To my shock and sadness the first thing I found was the ‘English Patient’ article, and I got back in touch and stayed so to the end. A month ago I was congratulating him on a great piece on the corporate hijacking of football and he was doing the same to me about the football poems on my website. (Maybe we were mellowing in our old age). Last Tuesday I emailed him a poem, ‘Dad Rock Antidote Manifesto’ which I thought he’d like. Same old Swells. He was up for the battle, that’s for sure. I can’t believe he’s gone.

This morning I re-read that last piece he wrote, on the edge of death but so full of life, so stark, so self aware, so unutterably Swells. Then I went to visit my much loved old mum, battling bravely against Alzheimer’s, deafness and blindness, saying with dignity and calmness for the hundredth time ‘I’ve had enough, John. I want out.’
Fuck me, life can be unfair.
RIP Swells, you wonderful, stroppy, clever bastard. We’ll miss you.

THE NIGHT I SLEPT WITH SEETHING WELLS (1982)

A far off town and a late night bash
And a double bed was our place to crash
So listen here – ‘cos this story tells
Of the night I slept with Seething Wells!

I didn’t mind – or so I said
But I wish I’d had the floor instead
Cos you’d never imagine the thousand hells
Of a night in bed with Seething Wells….

When he got undressed I had to retreat
From his shaven head and his mouldy feet
The feet that launched a thousand smells
In that fragrant night with Seething Wells

So I kept right close to the edge of the bed
And I pulled the blankets over my head
But eerie snores and stifled yells
Soon woke me, thanks to Seething Wells

And, turning, I came face to face
With a massive boil in a private place
And a couple of hairy bagatelles
Made me run like hell from Seething Wells!

And I vowed right then that if need be
I’d spend the night in a cemetery
Or sleep with dogs, or DEAD GAZELLES
But never again with Seething Wells!

I have been afraid but not like this. This is a tingling sense of fear; the fear that comes when you are ready to step out of your comfort zone and tackle the world in all its uncontrolled and unknown glory. It is a time of courage and cutting the strings of everything familiar and safe. It’s time for practicing the fact that life is the greatest form of art and it’s been fermenting for a long while.

Not the “fuck everything and run” fear; the “feel the fear and do it anyway slash leap and the net will appear fear.”

I don’t have to understand things and I am ready to play with fire, walk across it strong and unyielding. It doesn’t matter if the cards are stacked against you on paper or in logic, as long as you feel the inherent itch to fling yourself, you must. After a long time of securing the soul, you know you can, and you can gracefully.

I am embarking on a new sense of life after being a mom for 18 years and sticking to my geographic circle where days became years towards fortifying my daughter’s core. I have been like Michelangelo in his wooden box with his piece of marble, day after day, making sure my creation had the proper nutrients while I stayed single mindedly focused on that outcome. During this time I wrote and made art and had two long-term relationships but it wasn’t until the last few years that I wholeheartedly became myself. I learned that life is the greatest form of art; thus my new venture into documenting this new era of flight. I am free and the world is my oyster.

Credo:
1. Do not buy anything except for reading materials, art supplies, clothing, food and drink, and travel expenses.
2. Dance whenever I get the chance.
3. Stay home more.
4. Cook.
5. Mind my words. Only say and do what I mean and intend. Nothing else.
6. Work out daily to cultivate a strong presence on this earth.
7. Only enter into relationships whether casual or serious with people who can communicate and are healthy and maintain a passionate respect for life, wasting not a single minute on platitudes for others but a brash and ballsy swan dive towards authentic reality.

Seems pretty simple.

I find an accidental lover and it is nice. It is new. It is different than anything I am used to but it’s more real than not. It is now and that is what I focus on, enjoying the experience without needing to know of an outcome. Like art, it is spontaneous and genuine but also completely unbounded by prior knowledge.

San Francisco is full of light. Louis Vuitton stores are three hours late with their Dan Flavin-esque tubes of color in the window displays and the neon is opaque rather than ethereal but they are trying and the unquestionable influence of the art world is the notion that sticks pleasantly. James Turrell is communing with the sun in the Southwest and fashion is still playing with the crayons. I buy a cinder block surrounded by a three dimensional square of neon light by Nathaniel Rackowe from a friend who is the owner of the most progressive gallery in town.

The first piece of art that I found stunningly beautiful until I ventured beneath the story (only to find it poignantly beautiful) were the images of Ana Mendieta’s that lined a wall in Chicago’s DCA Museum during a photography show that I felt privileged to catch. All of my favorites, some new, and my introductory vision of Ana’s nature/spirit collision photographs. Each separate piece was of a beach scene where a body shape was hollowed into the damp mud near shoreline. But it wasn’t your typical chalk crime scene form; it was as if a person had plopped face and belly first into the land. Death and life enveloped each other in the eerie powdered pigments of deep red, earthen ochre, and cadmium yellow that peppered the concave-ness.

The form enveloping an insinuant story was the basis of my lust for Sherin Guirguis’ work as well. Egyptian-born, her work involves cutting the traditional Middle Eastern patterns of mesh and scroll and tradition into wood and/or paper to create beautiful veils within an overall work that is connotative of various bomb clouds: the H, the atom, etc. The cut out sections are reminiscent of the veil the women in these areas wear covering their personalities; too scary in their potential domination towards love and good will and education. The work portrays a subconscious fear that is born of knowing and consistency; one that numbs to the background yet forever looms clear in the outpourings of the artist’s psyche.

All of us walking around with certain undertones: a.k.a. the fruits of the ideological ego wars of existence.

What we become as a result of that is important.

My friend Steve and I did a car exchange recently so he could cart art with my square box on wheels and I felt incredibly sexy driving home in his sleek, silver BMW with his wife’s high heels discarded on the passenger seat floor along with a script she’d been practicing, her parts highlighted in yellow. It was a notice of experience and the various kinds that exist when one doesn’t look for—one just yields to and enjoys—the flow of existence opening up like a lotus blossom.

On the way home from San Francisco at the tail end of gay pride, (both David Byrne AND Wilco gave credence to the historical weekend in Greek ampitheatre shows) I noticed two lesbians sitting in a bar at a high table, playing cards while waiting for the same plane as me. As I sipped my merlot, feeling ready for bed, I felt comforted in the fact that they had their game to fall into between them.

Sitting outside my center is the basis of the fear year. After finally finding that grounded middle, I am ready to add to it’s perimeter, to mushroom out the circle towards a more global integrity.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Nichols is a writer/artist living in the California desert. Her column Diary of a Californicator was a long-running 3A.M. original and she’s the author of a book of literary fiction titled Mad Anatomy. She writes on art/politics/culture for publications around the world, is consistently at work on her perpetual conceptual art project Hundred Proof Bordello and dances every chance she gets.

When Skateboards Will Be Free, Said Sayrafiezadeh, The Dial Press 2009

Just so you know, this is not the life of some new millennium Chekhov. Nor the hard times of a literary bandit cast in the mold of William S. Burroughs. Said Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free is the bittersweet story of a kid left alone a lot while growing up. And who, growing up in America in the final quarter of the Twentieth Century, can’t identify with that?

Said’s father was never home. Too busy passing out copies of The Militant, the newspaper of the fringe Communist party in the U.S. Said’s mother spent her days working as a secretary, her nights attending meetings and rallies of the Socialist Workers Party. In between there was little time for Said, who was left to entertain himself and puzzle through life’s lessons on his own. Sounds like the plight of a million American kids.

Besides his disappearing acts from Said’s life, often for years at a stretch, Sayrafiezadeh senior was a hedonist of the revolution. As a fanatical member of the Communist Party, first in the U.S. and later in Iran after the fall of the Shah, Said’s father tilted at windmills, but always it seemed with his arm around some attractive woman of the barricades. Here Said describes his father’s worldview:

He believes that the world is quickly spiraling downward, of course, that poverty is unresolvable, that wars are constant, but these thoughts do not distress him in the way they distressed my mother and me. Instead he is invigorated by them. The revolution will come, certainly, and when it does, all will be well. Until then there is work to be done, food to be eaten, wine to be drunk and sex to be had. I am sure my father will live to be a hundred.

Said’s mother, an ardent Jewess named Martha Harris, lived a modest proletarian existence first in Brooklyn and later in Pittsburgh. She too was a diehard Communist.

That’s different. Growing up in America with parents who were diehard Communists.

Both Said’s parents were seriously disconnected from reality. No one in the U.S. of A in the 1980s and 90s gave a shit about the revolution of the proletariat. It existed as the group hallucination of the small band of diehard brothers calling themselves the Socialist Workers Party. A dead end. Said’s mother also suffered from depression.

Said’s mother and Sayrafiezadeh senior separated when Said was less than a year old. Another circumstance lots of readers will identify with. But there were no fat alimony checks. Just a drab apartment cluttered with stacks of The Militant newspaper.

The great strength of Said’s coming-of-age memoir is its depiction of growing up in an archetypically dysfunctional late 20th Century family. Said writes fluidly with a proletarian simplicity that impels the reader along. Mostly I flew through this memoir.

Said is also very funny (though mostly about his father, not his mother). Here he describes having dinner with his father the buffoon. Out of the blue Sayrafiezadeh senior invites Said to an Iranian restaurant in New York City to celebrate Said’s 30th birthday. At the restaurant Sayrafiezadeh senior orders a bottle of chardonnay.

The waitress places a carafe of chardonnay in front of us.

My father looks at her ass as she walks away. Then he looks at the carafe of chardonnay. Then he looks at me.

“This is white,” he says to me.

“It’s chardonnay.”

“I wanted red.”

“Chardonnay isn’t red.”

“Never?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit,” he says to himself.

A great sense of isolation pervades Said’s story. From his unpronounceable name, to his spouting at school of socialist rhetoric learned from his mother, which alienated him from his classmates, to long school bus rides ending in the echoing rooms of an empty apartment. Ah, the alienation of youth. We can all dig that.

When Said is sixteen, his mother abruptly quits the Socialist Workers Party. But she can’t resign from her depression.

Yet Said remains distinctly resilient. He makes friends, especially at the pickup basketball game at a local park. He does well in school. He kisses girls. He even masturbates. Like the rest of us, Said is a survivor. Much later he secures a good paying job at the Martha Stewart Company designing marketing programs and a cute girlfriend. She likes to rest her leg over his when they ride the subway together and celebrate her birthday with champagne and take-out from Benny’s Burritos.

The U.S. edition dust jacket has a color photo of Said, looking bemused, a tree-lined Brooklyn street stretching behind him. Despite all his parents’ weirdness, Said the author at age 40 sounds like he’s got his act pretty much together.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jonathan Woods is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. His collection of noir crime stories entitled No Way, Jose & Other Wild-Ass Crime Stories will be published in April 2010 by New Pulp Press. When not writing he works part time at the Dahlia Woods Gallery.

“To say he had a way with words is something of an understatement – a way with rampaging, amphetamine-crazed, cock-shaft metaphors was closer to the truth. He was a journalist who didn’t so much write as spit, curse and hyperventilate. He was brilliant.” Tim Jonze on the late Steve Wells. More here. * Coming soon from Damaged Goods Records, Archive From 1959 - The Billy Childish Story, a 51-track triple vinyl or double CD compilation. * Ben Myers’ (postcard) Message from the Country. * Bukowski letter sells for $1,500. It reads: “Hold, dear, hold to the fucking walls, and soon you’ll be laughing, you’ll be thinking, how did I ever let it get hold of me like that? All we need is time – to straighten out, feel better, and then make the same mistake all over again.” (via @bookdepository) * Kevin O’Neill’s report on the Michael Moorcock / Iain Sinclair / Alan Moore event (via @stml) * Michael Moorcock’s call to preserve memories of London: The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths that I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd (with Chatterton), Alan Moore (From Hell) and Will Self (The Book of Dave) were searching out among the virtual ruins of a London that was becoming a shadow played out on the newly tarted-up walls of Notting Hill and Shadwell. * ‘Literary London’ is dead. Good riddance * Suburbia needs a new literary champion * Derek McCormack’s The Show That Smells day at Dennis Cooper’s blog * Tropic of Cancer, Ewan Morrison’s book of a lifetime, the “only book in my parents’ bookcase which was turned the wrong way round with the spine hidden” [read Ewan in 3:AM here] * Courtesy of A Piece of Monologue, William Burroughs and Susan Sontag on meeting Beckett: “He received us in a very courtly way and we sat at a very big long table. He waited for us to talk. Allen [Ginsberg] was, as usual, very forthcoming and did a great deal of talking. He did manage to draw Beckett out asking him about Joyce. That was somehow deeply embarrassing to me. Then we talked about singing, and Beckett and Allen began to sing while I was getting more and more embarrassed.” * Is this the future bookstore? * Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book is back! * Poetry sells! * ‘”The death of literature”, or something’, an interview with Brandon Scott Gorrell [read his 'Two Poems', 'Hardware' & 'my personal ad from the stranger’s dating website is entirely unsuccessful' in 3:AM] * Maud Newton & Alexander Chee on Jean Rhys‘ & Ford Maddox Ford’s affair and the vengeful novels they wrote afterward * [Image: Alphbunny]

21st Century Breakdown - Green Day.

“My generation is zero/I never made it as a working class hero” - Billie Joe Armstrong.

Let’s face it, Green Day are an unfortunate phenomenon at best. They came to world prominence in 1994, shortly after Kurt Cobain had blown his head off. The kids of America (and, by extension, the rest of the American-electronically-colonized world) needed a bit of comic relief after this grim (or hilarious, depending on your view of Cobain) musical moment. Then along came this bunch of young spiky Clash-wannabe pop-punks trailing tales of masturbation and getting stoned and sexual confusion and anger-lite in their wake, as well as cries of ‘sell-out!’ from tedious jealous gutter-mutter punks…and the youth fell in love. The Day lit teenage fuses and enthusiastically infused the mourning musical world with capital-f Fun and everybody enthused about them when ‘Basket Case’ came out. I myself remember the moment like it was only, oh, 15 years ago.

So yeah. Time rolled on, and Green Day kept putting out albums. Their major lyrical concerns seemed to reflect singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s own seeming alienation and isolation (you know, the usual late 20th century clichéd leitmotif life-motive crap) and damage incurred by his father’s untimely death when the frontman was a mere ten years old. I bought a couple of their albums, but as the years rolled on the quality of the releases got less and less, with each album only really having a couple of standout singalong-songs treading water in an airless sea of emotionally-retarded-sonics filler. They were seemingly slowing down and losing speed and scream-steam as they grew older and more financially secure and away from their obscure Berkley, California roots. And it’s like any band that you like a bit when you’re younger. You hear of them occasionally, and are almost surprised to hear that they are still going as you grow older and move on in your own life, shaking your head in the distance at their seeming time-standing-still stance.

Then all of a sudden a half-decade ago came the sonic juggernaut ‘American Idiot,’ and Green Day were back on top again.

Now. In the history of music, there has rarely been an album as over-hyped or credited with being much more political than it really is than ‘American Idiot.’ Basically what it encompasses is some disaffected cokehead (the ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ – if you ever want to see hilarious po-face humorless clichéd-rebel emo garbage, I suggest watching the nonsensical video to this song) who leaves home, kicks around in the world a bit, then goes home again after his headspinfluential tormentor-mentor punk hero ‘St. Jimmy’ kills himself. All set to music. Quite stunning. It really only got as much approbation as it did because it came out during the Bush years and the title song (with a riff ripped off wholesale from ‘Doublewhiskeycokenoice’ by Dillinger Four, who should have sued) was a rallying cry for liberal types in America to declare that, yes, they too didn’t want to be an American idiot, and they liked prepackaged pseudo-anarchy too. Oh yeah, and Armstrong (know around my house as Billy Bob, after his skewering in the novel ‘Weasels in a Box’ by John ‘Jughead’ Pierson of Screeching Weasel, whose guitar sounds like a lot of the string-strumming on this album) sang “Sieg heil to the President Gasman” and hilariously declared the band “outlaws” for doing so. So any concerned lefty liberal citizen could chant along and feel self-righteous and angry and anarchic…as the war in Iraq went on and Chimp Bush raped the world for his own fun and profit and it was big business as usual.

Green Day made absolutely no impact whatsoever on real-world politrix far from the morose hormone-decimated teenage bedrooms of the angsty snotty kids who sullenly chanted along to the meaningless songs on the album. I mean, how could they truly impact on anything with ‘lyrics’ (in the loosest sense of the word) like “a gag/a plastic bag on a monument” or “The town bishop’s an extortionist/and he don’t even know that you exist” or “City of the dead at the end of another lost highway/signs misleading to nowhere”? The album was just vapid shallow muddlebrain shite and sold over six million copies for the band, being exploited for a full five fucking years before the new platter by the band came out a few weeks ago in May. Which may seem like an eternity in the modern flashfastforward world, but, well, they just stuck a new single out from it, and will no doubt be looking to squeeze it until the pips squeak for quite some time to come, so why shouldn’t I take a literal stab at reviewing it?

I got ‘21st Century Breakdown’ (good start – a clichéd meaningless amorphous read-anything-into-it title) from the local library. I never bought ‘American Idiot’ either; haven’t bought an album by them in over a decade; don’t want to make these American idol idiots any richer than they already are. So I listened to it, expecting very little after hearing the horrendously bad opening salvo track ‘Know Your Enemy’…and I was not disappointed. Let me say this: ‘21st Century Breakdown’ is a piece of complete and utter garbage from a band long grown stale and outdated and irrelevant, and should never have been released. I have rarely heard such a slick, bored, ball-less, uninspired, emotion-and-inspiration-free piece of junk from a major artist. Well, actually I suppose that’s a lie, but I almost didn’t expect something this bad from this band, and I have actually liked many of their previous songs in a throwaway way. Actually, scratch that, that’s a lie – I (un)fortunately did expect something this bad.

Why did I, do you ask? Well, it’s like this. When ‘American Idiot’ broke big, somebody unfortunately told Billie Joe Armstrong that he was Intelligent and Important, the Voice of a (de)Generation, and had Things To Say – when, patently, none of those things were true. For spewing out the Rorschach pile of meaningless verbal dribble that constituted ‘American Idiot,’ Billy Bob got to hang out with the Egomaniac Wank Messiah Bono and record a song about New Orleans and Katrina (the pompous ‘The Saints Are Coming’), record a John Lennon song (‘Working Class Hero’) and put out ‘21st Century Breakdown.’ Any reviews I have seen of this album make me all the more contemptuous of the incestuous relationship the media has to the artists they review. They often shy away from giving a piece of bad product (and I did not choose the word ‘art’ on purpose) a bad review in case they don’t get all the freebies and access to the band that are part of the perks of being a working journo. Giving this album great reviews is just a complete mystery to me. It blows my mind that anybody but the mid-teenage self-mutilating self-absorbed black-clad emo teens would actually l ike this work, let alone rate it highly.

I suppose there’s meant to be some sort of story behind this put-the-con-in-concept album, or at least there is according to the sycophantic Rolling Stone review for it, but I can’t be bothered trying to join any supposed tale-dots. What I hear is a band bored out of their brains following a cookie-cutter formula form formed with ‘American Idiot,’ and boring the vaguely perceptive or older (i.e. me) elements of the audience silly as they do so. There are a lot of songs that start out slow and low and melancholy, building some sort of preprocessed ‘rebellious’ melancholicoholic atmosphere…then ITGETSREALLYLOUDANDFASTANDSHOUTYANDPSEUDOPUNKY…then slowing down and getting wistful and wishful again…then rinse and repeat to the defeat of the astute listener’s patience with the whole sonic smorgasbored.  Musically, this album rattles the chains of the ghosts of The Who (of course, seeing as how ‘Tommy’ was the main inspiration for the first laughable ‘pop-punk opera’ ‘American Idiot’ in the first place), Queen(!), AC/DC(!!), Marilyn Manson(!!!)(but the song here that sounds like MM, ‘East Jesus Nowhere,’ was just MM ripping off 70s British glam rock anyway so it’s a rip-off of a rip-off), Elton John(!!!!), Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets(!!!!!)(maybe not entirely serious about that one)(maybe being the operative word) as well as The Clash (more expected) and The Ramones. It’s good to know that they even keep up the plagiarism angle, by wholesale ripping off ‘Main Offender’ by The Hives with ‘Horseshoes And Handgrenades.’ They certainly never miss a slick trick anyway. John Lennon is a major influence on this album as well, and there are a few Lennon-alike piano-crooned cringeworthy tunes during the running (well, limping) time.  Seems like Billy Bob has gotten to thinking he is some sort of ‘meaningful’ working class hero a la Lennon, and it’s gone to his head.

Actually, it’s funny (actually, amend that; there is no humor on this album whatsoever, which is another thing to hate about it, the fact that they’re taking this no-laughs laughable pish so seriously). Lyrically, all the singer here is doing is recycling the same sort of angsty, self-absorbed, narcissistic, solipsistic, pseudo-nihilistic burned-out horseshit he has been soft-peddling for two decades. There has been no real evolution in his thinking or worldview; he got handsomely rewarded for it on their last album and, well, why fix it if it ain’t broke – and if you aren’t capable of doing so anyway? The older this band get the more pathetic this whole thing becomes. The words on this album are some of the most pointless, meaningless and poorly-written verbal sludge it has ever been my misfortune to encounter in decades of popular music listening, made all the worse because the writer obviously thinks they’re deep and meaningful (you would assume, unless he’s having a laugh at the expense of the fans)(you never know). Representative sample lyric or two? “Raise your hands now to testify/your confession will be crucified/you’re a sacrificial suicide/like a dog that’s been sodomized” (with the latter being one of the weirdest, most deranged, most hilarious lines I have ever heard) or “I text a postcard sent to you/did it go through?/sending all my love to you/you are the moonlight of my life every night/giving all my love to you/my beating heart belongs to you/I walked for miles ‘til I found you/if I lose everything in the fire/I’m sending all my love to you.”

The latter is the sort of pish that a depressed mournful teen girl would write to some guy she has a crush on in high school and doesn’t have the guts to approach, and it’s actually incredible to think a man of 37 wrote this shit (and don’t try to tell me he’s writing as a ‘character’ cos I won’t buy it – his vocab and quality level has never risen much above this in any of his songs). But that’s the rub though, isn’t it? The band now know their audience and market, and how to tailor their lyrics and music towards them, in played-out Play-Doh cookie-cutter fashion victim-of-themselves form. Their audience is depressed trouble-free-life middle class teenagers, basically, so the man has to write down to a level they can understand and relate to. Which is basically where his mind is at in his late 30s, so it’s no great stretch. Here’s one last microcosmic syllabic-and-syntactic-tactic example of what I mean. “Runaway/from the river to the street/and find yourself/with your face in the gutter/you’re a stray for the Salvation Army/there is no place like home/when you got no place to go.” A lot of the lyrics on the album are just like this: no rhythm, no rhyme, no scanning pattern, no bounce, no flair, no nothing, just the dead empty hum of uninspired can’t-be-bothered worksmanship. This is a man and band putting out an album they are absolutely uninterested in except from a financial point of view, which is fine except then don’t try to pretend it’s anything but what it is, a product from the long-established huge-selling Green Day franchise.

You can almost sense Armstrong (who sings in a ludicrous fake English accent I’m sure the wee American idiot lassies just love to bits) sitting bored as hell at the laptop on this album with a lyrical to-do list: “Anger, check. Angst, check. Anarchy, check. Self-mutilation and self-hatred, check. Sodomizing dogs, check. Depression, check. Few expletives here and there to keep things slightly edgy and piss off the parents, check. Some vaguely contentious unfocused diluted statements about the evils of organized religion and government, check. Covert reference to GG Allin that practically nobody will get, check. Smiths album title reference – they’ll think I’m sensitive – check. Stuff about blowing shit up with gasoline, check. Societal collapse, check. Broken hearts, check. Doomed teen love, check.” And if you think I’m being cynical about this, well, I’m sure as Hell not being as cynical as the man who actually wrote this sub-teen sniveling drivel, trust me. And why would I even care about this stuff? After all, I’m 39, hardly the target audience for this corporate triumph of the swill. Well, I grew up on American punk music, and have always been a lover of good lyrics. Armstrong clearly and ludicrously thinks he’s some sort of wordsmith: “I am a sonofabitch and Edgar Allan Poe,” as he put it on ‘American Idiot,’ so he gets graded more harshly. Plus one of my all-time fave bands for many years were Dead Kennedys, who had political lyrics that actually meant something, addressing subjects outside of depressed melancholic navel-gazing in lyrically and musically scorching fashion. Judging Green Day against that sort of standard, I have to find the pop-punk skunk-stinkers laughably inept and boring and stupid and pathetic. The sheepherd-mentality unthinking approval ratings Billy Bob gets for this shite nauseates me, because this album and its predecessor just represent everything wrong with contemporary tempo music to me: no emotion, no interest in topics sort-of presented, bombastic amped-up production to detract from the unoriginality of the musical and lyrical material on display…and on and on and on. It’s all just too familiar (OK, there may be no such thing as new music anymore, but at least fucking try, you know?) and uninteresting and pedestrian – basically everything punk originally reacted against in the late 70s. Listen to the album if you can be bothered and tell me if I’m wrong.

It’s an all-too-truism to say that punk bands work best during oppressive political times in the West (where they won’t get tortured and torched for speaking out against the ‘terrible’ oppressive countries they live in), when they have hateful energy to feed off of, angry symbiosis as a smart career move, and the same goes for soft wee boy pop-punk blands too. Now that Boogeyman Bush is gone, the faux-political apolitical focus of ‘American Idol’ (sorry, ‘Idiot’) is gone and Green Day seems like a black flag waving without a cause celebre. Not, however, that they ever truly did have any cause whatsoever anyway. What Billy Bob and his bands of merry pranksters-cum-emo-clowns have taken eight albums to tell us is that they are burned out and have absolutely nothing to say. How many times do they have to say it before the audience takes the hint and moves on? How many times must Armstrong raid the outdated farcical arsenal of outdated 20th century extremist punk give-em-enough-rope tropes before the audience just tells them to fuck off and not come back? From my vantage point, these advantaged millionaires have come to the end of their sonic road and nothing they ever say or do again could be of any interest to me whatsoever. Armstrong, just give it up. You don’t have the brains or lyrical or musical talent to be some sort of anarcho-punk leader, you’re a Joe Strummer wannabe and your lyrics suck shit. Please take a hint and retire someplace. The world’s had enough. You’ve had enough too and it shows. On some level you know it too. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” as you yourself once sang.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Graham Rae lives in the Chicago suburbs with his beautiful wife and daughter and always-vomiting cat. He awaits the collapse of Western civilization with interest. He has been waiting for quite some time. Those teenage punk lyrics lied to him and, at 39, he should be old enough to know better. He just had a story published in Paint A Vulgar Picture, a book of Smiths-based short stories. And he continues to plot and write and wait.

The relaunch of 3:AM continues apace, with:

- a less cluttered, easier to read front page
- some new team members
- a new separate section for 3:AM Asia on the sidebar

You can also find us on facebook, both at the group and the 3:AM page.

The Devil’s Paintrush, Jake Arnott, Sceptre 2009

There’s a whiff of brimstone in the air. Or perhaps it clings to me. In any case, I seem to have been spending a lot of time in the company of Beasts lately. Aleister Crowley casts a long shadow over the 20th Century, and we’ve written about him before, but he just keeps on coming up.

The first encounter was in Jake Arnott’s new novel, The Devil’s Paintbrush, in which Arnott has another crack at his own brand of artful reimagining of histories. Arnott of course was the man behind the truly excellent Long Firm trilogy, dealing with the long legacy of 60s gangesterism, as well as 2007’s Johnny Come Home, entwining 70s squatters, glam rock and the Angry Brigade.

The Devil’s Paintbrush takes as its starting point an unusual synchronicity: Paris, 1903, and a chance meeting between The Great Beast and a fallen Victorian hero, Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, on his way home from Ceylon following accusations of pederasty. The veracity of such a meeting is unclear - they were both certainly in Paris at the time, but the claim itself is Crowley’s, and therefore entirely untrustworthy. Which is no matter for a novelist of course, and Arnott treats us to an entertaining tour of the upper echelons of British military society, and the lower echelons of Parisian occult society.

Arnott’s clearly done his research, as ever, and the Paris underworld is as well-crafted as his theses on the British Empire: a militaristic culture driven in large part by repressed sexuality, drawing in the mostly suppressed homosexual inclinations of Gordon of Khartoum, Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell and Kitchener as evidence. Macdonald himself is a tragic figure, wracked by shame and guilt despite his extraordinary achievements - a crofter’s son, he became a hero and rose through the ranks following great feats of bravery in the Afghan, Boer and Egyptian campaigns. It’s a sad irony that his lasting legacy was to be the figure depicted on tins of Camp Coffee, and a terrible indictment that salvation comes only through the damning machinations of The Great Beast.

However, there’s much lacking in the story too, a difficulty increasingly evident in Arnott’s recent works. Despite my admiration for his writing, I found that both Johnny Come Home and The Devil’s Paintbrush failed to fully convey the excitement of the milieu in which they find themselves. Unlike The Long Firm, which reveled in the dark glamour of its gangsters, starlets and rent boys, there’s a flatness to The Devil’s Paintbrush which doesn’t suit Crowley: he should leap off the page at you, as he did in life, but here the dual narrative seems to sap him a little, leaving him a deflated figure when, in 1903, a year before his fateful encounter with Aiwass in Cairo, he was approaching the peak of his powers.

Arnott is a great writer, and his handling of history - and, in particular, queer history - is quite unlike anyone else’s. But I think I’m waiting for him to cut loose his close ties to history as well: there are better novels lurking under here, suffocated by the weight of detail. Arnott should have the confidence to let them breathe.

My own recent synchronicity was stumbling upon an obscure work in Atlantis, London’s finest bookstore, that also deals, imaginatively, with Crowley. Richard McNeff’s Sybarite Among the Shadows finds Crowley prowling London in 1936, a shadow, indeed, of his former self, but still extraordinarily compelling, as he wheedles and needles his old acolyte, Victor Neuberg, into accompanying him once again on a magickal working, to a climax not so far removed from Arnott’s novel. Into this narrative, McNeff shoehorns Dylan Thomas (who Neuberg “discovered” while a literary editor), Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, Tom Driberg, and most memorably, King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

Set, like The Devil’s Paintbrush, over a single night, but with many entertaining flashbacks, Crowley in this incarnation is vividly brought to life, illuminating both his attraction, and his parasitical dependence on others, like Neuberg, who he requires to do his bidding, see the visions he conjures up, and supply the readies. The milieu, too, is both more real and more glamorous, the Fitzrovia of old, haunted by painters, poets and hangers-on, and the notorious Gargoyle Club on Meard Street, where 1930s socialites smoked opium and rubbed shoulders - perhaps - with disgraced royalty.

Published by the fascinating Mandrake Press, Oxford convenors of the Golden Dawn, McNeff’s novel grew out of a characteristically wide-ranging article for International Times in 1977 - probably the last period of serious interest in Crowley. Does Arnott’s novel, and new theatrical and artistic activity signify a new fascination with the Beast?

This chain of literary recreations is endless of course, but there’s at least one more that should be mentioned. Robert Irwin scores twice in this category. His novel Exquisite Corpse deals with the short-lived English Surrealist movement, and at one point finds itself in the same rooms as Sybarite: those of the New Burlington Galleries and the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition. Irwin and McNeff are both dismissive - in different ways - of the Surrealist exercise, but recognise the powerful influence it had on the artists and society of the time. For Crowley (in McNeff’s hands) the Surrealists are toying with forces they neither comprehend nor have any chance of mastering; for Irwin, they are mere provincial pretenders to a graspingly French throne, albeit entertaining ones. In both novels, the figure of the Spirit of Surrealism - an artist’s muse bedecked in white wedding dress and veil of roses - leads the protagonists a merry dance down Regent’s Street and through Soho.

Irwin’s second hit is set in 1967, the height of the first Occult revival, as Satan Wants Me chronicles the attempted operations of an apprentice sorcerer caught between the desire for enlightenment and the lure of sex, drugs and, yes, rock and roll. Crowley here is a nameless presence, but a forceful one: it is his malignant attraction that suckers the thrill-seekers of the Age of Aquarius, pushing their experimentation forward even as darker forces gather.

The greatest writer about Crowley was, of course, Crowley himself, and I don’t know any better book on him than his own Confessions (an “autohagiography”, as he put it). It’s a brick of a book, but for serious Crowley-addicts, as, we must presume, Irwin, McNeff and now Arnott are, it remains the lodestone.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
James Bridle, a contributing editor to 3:AM, runs booktwo.org, a website on literature and technology. He is the author of Cooking with Booze and My Life in Tweets, as well as the publisher of Bookkake Books, where this article originally appeared. [Photo: Tim_D]

Turning into the main lot, I am hit with the glare of hundreds of windshields, a product of high-powered security lamps exposing even the lot’s darkest corners.

At first glance, the only sign of sure parking potential is to turn immediately to a lot on the left. This lot’s purpose is obvious. These are not the cars of movie-goers, but of ticket-takers and floor-sweepers. There’s a shiny white Jeep that oozes Daddy’s Money; a blue hand-me-down Chrysler; a faded red Cavalier cobbled together from minimum wage.

Spotting clumps of empty spaces, parking here would be the safe choice. I don’t know what it is – something spontaneous – but it tells me to keep going. Something better waits. I keep straight, splitting two rows of cars parallel to the 24-screen multiplex.

One of the first spots I pass is empty, one I usually would have settled with. But glancing at my watch and running a quick calculation through my head, I hope for something closer, catching someone as they leave a 5:15.

Crawling along, I lose myself in the theater’s stunning marquee, its lights like solar bursts from something far from here. Faint images of stardom and old Hollywood flash in my head – zoot suits, Bugattis, fedoras and bombshells. The lights disappear for a moment as behind a sign to my left.

“Speed Limit 5.”

I chuckle, noting that the lowest my speedometer reads while the car is in motion is 8.

I come upon another vacant spot and ready the car for a wide left. At the last moment, I spot an open space two cars down and reflexively jerk the wheel straight. But if two are open here, I wonder, wouldn’t it stand to be one more space closer?

As I coast, the marquee grows larger by the moment, my head darts each way hoping for a promising sliver. My stomach tightens as I pass one car after another, nothing but bumpers, taillights, fenders, license plates. Oh! to be the owners of one of these cars: inside lined up for popcorn, whispering through opening titles, condemning coming attractions, all with the anticipation of a splendid story about to unfold and reveal itself.

Meanwhile, the marquee inches closer, the lights brighter. With every potential, my pulse accelerates a few beats, only to find a car has pulled up farther than its peers, a mirage.

Nearly parallel to the theater’s entrance, anything here would be a long shot but the ultimate payoff, just a jump to the ticket window. My car would sit amongst the other Haves, reflecting the dancing and dazzling lights for a splendid hour and 48 minutes. But without the spot, I’d keep driving, the theater shrinking in my side-view. The farther I drive, the longer the walk, my lateness becoming fully-formed.

And from nothing, something. An opening. A break in the bumpers. I check for the obvious handicapped signs and the subtle shadow of a car farther up than the rest. My eyes are intent and my blood pumps faster; I swing the car out to make a wide right into the promised land, giddy with relief. Then, like taking a bar stool between the shoulder blades, I see it. Something I hadn’t imagined: a motorcycle. As quick as it materialized, the vision crumbles.

Modified significantly since rolling from the factory, its colors are iridescent under the lot’s security lamps. Parked at a 45-degree angle, the bike doesn’t take up a third of the space provided.

“What a waste,” I mumble, as I stare down the bike, lost in its custom-painted flames. I study the mirror of chrome until I find the reflection of my car, small and distorted. A honk from behind interrupts my gaze and I am forced back into the creep.

But I might as well turn off the engine and pull the emergency break. I know I will not find another spot. I could drive the remainder of the lot, my head turning and searching. I realize I’ve had my chance, especially when I come upon another sign. “One way.” An arrow shows me the way out.

From here I could exit the lot, swing around the block and start over. Spots I passed before, I’d die for now. If I had taken one earlier I would be whistling into the theater.

I would have appreciated the walk. I would have noticed the crisp fall air for the first time that season and enjoyed the tips of my ears being cold. I would have watched a man drive by, thought how he looked like a professor I had in college and spent the rest of the evening wondering if it was him.

I would have passed a woman who reminded me of the girl whose invitation to a dance in high school I declined for reasons I can’t remember.

Instead, I continue creeping along, gripping the wheel, my head swinging from side to side, searching for something, anything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Holub’s work has appeared most recently at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Johnny America and Monkeybicycle, with an essay forthcoming in Connecticut River Review. He has an MFA in Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

Tonight’s Michael Moorcock event at the British Library (featuring Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore doing their sit down routine) has inevitably sold out, but you’ve three chances this week to catch Dennis Cooper’s JERK at the South London Gallery, with an author/director Q&A at the July 1 performance, along with readings from Ugly Man.

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘Percussion’ by Claudia Smith, ‘Morrissey Attack’ by Steven Wells (R.I.P.), ‘Flushed’ by Aliya Whiteley, ‘Ben D’Augusta’ by Olivia Kate Cerrone

Reviewed: Richard Marshall on Loose Watch: Lost and Found Times Anthology & Max Dunbar on Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives

Non-fiction: Stewart Home on J-cinema [see also, 3:AM's new feature 'Saturday Night at the Movies'; this week Cathi Unsworth]

Interviewed: Richard Marshall talks to Maxi Kim & Alan Kelly to Dennis Cooper:

I haven’t gotten a death threat in years. When I was first publishing books, people had this crazy fear that people might read my work and be inspired to rape and kill boys or something like that, which was based on this really dumb misunderstanding of my fiction. Of course that never happened, and in fact the most devoted readers of my work tend to be young people who relate to the young, attacked characters and feel strengthened by seeing their confusion and feelings treated with respect. Nowadays, I just tend to get these attacks that angrily complain about how critics claim that I’m a good writer, but that I’m overrated and actually just a vile smut merchant and things like that.