3:AM Brasil Top 5: The Futchers
Not so much Brazil’s answer to Billy Childish as posers of the question, but Bahia’s The Futchers‘ frontman Rodrigo Chagas‘ Top 5 Buff Medways songs are: 1. ‘Troubled Mind’ 2. ‘No Mercy’ 3. ‘Sally Sensation’ 4. ‘Fire’ 5. ‘Medway Wheelers’
Reality Squared
I’ve got a friend whose son is doing maths and physics at university, and he was depressed the other day. I asked him why, and he said it was because of subatomic particles, which I agreed can be kind of depressing. I told him, half joking, that the answer to that was to read Nietzsche, and his mother looked at me very seriously and said, ‘So which one should he start with?’.
Dan Coxon interviews Scarlett Thomas about her new novel and “our experience of being trapped together in the hell of the signifier”.
Japanamerica: Whither Youth?
Inside Japan, specters of darker hues shadow the horizons: an aging population and a declining or stagnant birthrate; an expanding class of young, part-time workers (freeters) with checkered resumes and scant skills; and so-called NEETs (“Not in Employment, Education or Training”), with their CVs and skill sets suspended in mid-youth. Stories of pathological young shut-ins (hikikomori), who withdraw into their bedrooms and virtual worlds to avoid the real ones, and Internet suicide pacts, through which young loners meet one another online in order to kill themselves together in the bricks-and-mortar world off, have begun haunting headlines at home and abroad.
Roland Kelts‘ latest dispatch from the global pop juggernaut that is Japan for 3:AM.
Two Poems
I can feel
her body
pressed tightly
against mine
as our hips
come together;
rubbing and
gyrating —
genitalia now
alive,
thriving
with a life of
its own.
By Matthew Coleman.