Architecture, Neurosis and Death
Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel: Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see […]
Poetry Submissions Reopened
We are reopening poetry submissions. Please send them in a Word doc to Darran Anderson, 3:AM‘s Poetry Editor. Don’t forget to include a short, third-person bio and attach a picture (if you have one). Please be patient. We may not be able to respond to everyone. If you haven’t heard back from us within a […]
It’s an Uphill Climb to the Bottom
We were the first mod-skinhead group. The Who weren’t, their management said: look at your audience, you’ve got to dress like them. They were all greasers originally. The Neat Change were from the audience for The Who, that’s why I say we were the first, because no one told us to dress like skinheads. We were the audience members who got up on stage and played. Bands like The Action and The Creation were more naturally mod than The Who, but we stood out by becoming skinheads. Steve and Brian in our group looked at these American servicemen and what they were wearing, and there weren’t many skinheads at all in the mid-sixties, about 10 in the whole of London and two of them were in The Neat Change. They just looked at what the black American GIs who were going to the jazz clubs were wearing and dressed the same. Sta-Prest, fell boots, Harringtons. The reason they had crops was that when they fought no one could grab their hair.
Stewart Home interviews Jimmy Edwards who spent 20 years of his life as rock’s next big thing.
Under Me Sleng Teng
Plenty to get excited about this autumn with This is England ’86, the scooterboy sequel to Shane Meadows’ skinheads and solidarity film. There’s an advance showing of the Channel 4 series at the BFI Southbank on August 25.
Children of the Sun
Lunatic occult beliefs were very deeply rooted in the Third Reich itself — in the whole myth of the Aryan race, for a start — and they’re very present in neo-nazi discourse as well. One tends to rationalise this stuff, and of course I wouldn’t for a moment deny the socioeconomic context, but the nazi occultists are far from a little group off by themselves, whom the mainstream will have nothing to do with. Colin Jordan and John Tyndall both associated with Savitri Devi; Combat 18, the ur-thugs, put her on the cover of one of their magazines. Order of Nine Angles material turns up in Scorpion, the closest thing the British far right has to an intellectual journal. And so on.
Andrew Stevens speaks to author Max Schaefer about his secret history of homosexuality on the far right.
3:AM Cult Hero: Witold Gombrowicz
“Our element is unending immaturity.” Andrew Gallix on Witold Gombrowicz’s most famous character, as an embodiment of modernity as immaturity: Joey Kowalski provides us with a thinly disguised portrait of the author as a young man. In the opening pages, we are even told that he has written an unsuccessful book bearing the very same […]