3:AM Magazine

The web also regenerates deep connections to the past; so cyberspace, this territory which stretches out from hypertext to the world-wide computer network, from virtual reality to video games, might also be theorized as the domain of Roussel’s idea of reduplicating without duplication, reiterating without repeating: his game-of-mirrors cosmos. His is a strident activity lost in an infinite navigation from one sort of encounter to another in which the affirmation of the other keeps appearing and disappearing in the play of mechanical manoeuvres (or mechanisms) destined to avert gratification. This is where the bachelor apparatus of Duchamp repeats itself ad infinitum by transmitting the machine via an alter-ego.

Joseph Nechvatal reviews the New Impressions of Raymond Roussel exhibition in Paris.

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We write to escape but the residue is what was written — the residue represents death while the process represents life. Writers speak stench (Kafka). I take great joy in deleting my most precious words. The stench of dishonest pronouncements often leads me to see I never lived a life; I only wrote, drew, sung, etched, acted, taught, to hide in the “about” which leads to the artifice which is the only truth: art. It is a secret. We are here. We are writing. And then we aren’t. And I think the ego is jealous of THE GREAT ERASURE and wants to imitate its eternity through non-existence.

By Bobbi Lurie.

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I’ve always found gas-masks to be frightening, uncanny objects, portents of a rapidly approaching apocalypse. The obsession started when I was a child. I used to love a comic strip called Charley’s War written by the great Pat Mills and published in Battle: Action Force during the 80s. Unlike other strips in the comic, Charley’s War was distinguished by the brilliant realism Joe Colquhoun illustrations and the storyline – instead of being filled with daring heroics – gave some insight into the horrors of trench warfare. I recall one cover in particular: a charge by spear-brandishing German cavalry, but both horsemen and horses were wearing gasmasks and moving through a ruined wasteland. I think that image stayed with me forever: its combination of the archaic and the modern seemed to presage some deeper and more troubling truth about the world that no one was talking about.

In the third in the series, the novelist James Miller picks five objects which have influenced and inspired his writing.

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In the production of anime, Japanese women may also be liberated by changes in the creation of the medium. Just as self-publishing models are enabling writers to reach readers without the third-party involvement of publishers, computer software provides artists in anime the means to craft their art outside of studios, which remain largely male-dominated environs.

By Roland Kelts.

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Keen seems to have rejected the label ‘pop artist’ and it’s not hard to see why. If pop art is about elegantly subverting existing art world conventions by substituting ‘pop’ content and styles for more traditional ‘high art’ content then the pop artist would have to have accepted that a distinction actually exists between high and low art. If he or she sees all kinds of images, executed for whatever reason in any medium, as forming part of daily experience, unmediated by these conventions, then he or she is probably not a pop artist, even if making use of the stuff that pop artists also use.

Bridget Penney on Jeff Keen.

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Ruins return. This is one of the great surprises that the ruin presents to us: its persistence in time alongside its disordering of time. Far from the waste matter of culture, the ruin always resists repression, finding ways to fend off the very decay that constitutes the ruin in the first instance. No wonder, then, given this complex structure that Freud elected the ruin to the principle metaphor not only for the practice of psychoanalysis but also for the mind itself. In the archaeological excavation of the ruin, Freud found the means to articulate a set of themes central to his thinking as a whole, not least the very preservation of the past in the mind. Why the image of the ruin? What can it tell us about psychoanalysis — and equally, what can psychoanalysis tell us about ruins? And moreover, if Freud’s concern is with the ruins of classical Rome and Athens, then how can psychoanalysis contend with the contemporary ruins of Detroit and Chernobyl?

By Dylan Trigg.

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Perhaps only someone who had come to the English language later in life would be capable of finding fault — and with such truculence at that — with such an easy turn of phrase. Clumsy, jealous linguists abound in Nabokov’s oeuvre, and are also to be found scattered among the works of that other adopted Westerner and distinctive stylist, Joseph Conrad. Nabokov accused James of not looking hard enough — in truth, it seems more a case of Nabokov looking too hard. The convert’s zeal of his surly outburst betrays the precise perfectionism that made his own prose so elegant. At its heart lies a chronic insecurity about linguistic correctness, an atavism from an earlier stage of the author’s cultural formation — the displaced foreigner within, that no degree of proficiency can ever fully efface.

By Houman Barekat.

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The experience of a film – in extreme solitude – can be so strong and engulfing that it accords with the experience of a coma. And the screen on which the film is projected forms the aperture which offers liberation, or leads directly into death. Guyotat describes the figure in the film of Andromeda, who is split in two, against her will, existing simultaneously in the world and in death. In Coma, her figure is no longer that of Andromeda, but instead that of a creature who has been reinvented, half-human, half-goddess, and engaged in an act of tightrope-walking, between the corporeal and the void. But the cinematic space also possesses its corporeal presence in Coma, and during the film’s screening, Guyotat descends a set of stairs beneath the auditorium, to vomit his pills in the toilets, but continues to hear, from that infernal subterranea of the cinema, the overhead voices of the gods battling over his future.

Stephen Barber reports on the legendary French novelist Pierre Guyotat’s lifelong rapport with film.

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It was Muriel Belcher who bought them all there into her private cocktail party where you could be yourself at a time of prosecuting homophobia, it gathered all the key components of Wolfenden and the Montagu case together at the bar. Her legendary charisma, warmth, wit and foul mouth, “If you joined all the cocks she’s had together, it would build a handrail across the Alps” and when Driberg tried to stop a compromising picture of himself and the Krays appearing in a book she commented, “Tom never complained when Ronnie Kray’s cock was in his mouth.” She had been active in the West End night club scene longer than she was willing to reveal later on. She had been involved in two other clubs prior to taking over the Colony. But she was in the business of building her own legend, not always from the upmost truth, perhaps it was easier to be known as ‘Muriel Belcher the Portuguese Jewish lesbian’ than denying it, perhaps it added to her glamour along with the lie that her parents had owned The Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham. We can all dream.

Sophie Parkin tells 3:AM about her forthcoming account of Soho institution The Colony Room.

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Several years later, the site was almost entirely razed and converted into a suburban ‘commemorative’ park for the citizens of Osaka, with Expo 70′s emblematic ‘Tower of the Sun’ allowed to remain standing at its entrance. Astrorama, too complex and cumbersome for commercial exploitation, also became redundant, and the original celluloid film-cans containing The Birth were stored-away without being documented, and forgotten, until researchers from the Hijikata archive at Tokyo’s Keio University re-discovered them, forty years later, in the Osaka storage-facilities of the Sanwa Midori-kai alliance of corporations whose previous incarnation had sponsored the Midori-kan pavilion.

Stephen Barber writes on the re-discovery of a lost film of the legendary Japanese artist and choreographer, Tatsumi Hijikata.

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