Essays

Inside my first night’s hotel room, a bulky television set tilted semi-securely on an overhead wall bracket–that is as long as no one accidentally opened the door too far. In such a case, the careless soul would instantly be snatched from the gene pool by natural selection. If one avoided death-by-Sony, the ceiling fan wobbled like a fat kid with a hoola-hoop at approximately gringo eye-level. If one bypassed the whirling cornea-transplant, the shower offered a water-heating device consisting of an on/off switch attached to tangled wires wrapped around the showerhead with exposed live ends dangling inches from the water flow. After surviving this mid-range Guatemalan hotel, it seemed only fair to me that those living in safe little hovels should have to contend with execution squads.

By Lyn Fox.

We would watch practices and only practices, the intricate placing together of notes to form an adapted jazz standard while future erotica models, future dead girls, and future regulars spun flags into the air, the metal hitting the ground from time to time with a vibrating hiss like the crackling of telephone wires or a comedic gun. This statue I remember fondly, surrounded by wet mulch, stains in schools telling me to keep the bible hidden in the couch, beeping messages from wilted salad days via the nearest rollerskate, mistaking it for the eyes of the whole.

By Brian Oliu.

I enter. Another woman with a buffo hairdo and huge tits sees the camera and tripod I’m carrying and says “Hey, honey, let’s go in the back room and take a picture of these!” as she spreads open her blouse and gives an extra push to her push-up bra. I force a smile, then move on to the other end of the bar, sit down and order a beer from a lady behind the bar named ‘Carol,’ but otherwise keep quiet. The place is in every sense nondescript: filled with video games, a couple of overhead televisions — both showing today’s Mets versus Cubs game — and a foursome playing a very loud card game.

By Russell Bittner.

For me the most irksome thing about this year’s Man Booker Prize wasn’t the eventual ‘post-British’ winner, or the hubristic Judges’ comments, but the sheer temerity of Louise Doughty’s vainglorious use of it as a platform for her own self-promotion. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the sole reason of a literary prize to heap praise on exciting authors and writing and not to highlight the conflicting opinions of those selecting each title? Shouldn’t any panel of judges remain firmly outside of the media glare, especially in the run-up to the award itself?

Lee Rourke hails two literary prizes that reward the art of writing.

“I believe this place is full of bum-pushing faggots?” Did Sebastian really say that? Sebastian Horsley opened his set, thank god I could stop him after nine and half more minutes I thought, watching the gay contingent of the Green Carnation shift uneasily in their seats. Sebastian was Non Fiction for the night: who the fuck was going to be able to follow that diatribe AGAINST saving the planet? I could see people thinking, “He’s worse than Sarah Palin!”. There was only one man for the job, rough and tuff: Tim Wells on poetry, romanticising Betty Grable’s arse into looking like a bag of groceries…

Sophie Parkin reviews the first 3:AM/Pen Pusher event at London’s Green Carnation.

I don’t know why Serota considers himself hard done by at the hands of the press: “You can’t have it both ways; on the one hand we’re criticised for not having bought Rachel Whiteread’s house or Damien Hirst’s shark, and then when we do go out and buy a Chris Ofili or a Peter Doig, we’re also criticised.” It seems to have escaped his earnestly pained attention that Ofili and Doig were trustees, and Whiteread and Hirst weren’t. This is a difference that other people, including the Charity Commission, see as being of considerable significance.

The second part of Charles Thomson‘s 3:AM column.

Serota’s rationale is in his 2000 Dimbleby Lecture: “For the late twentieth-century museum director there is no more certain prospect for audience acclaim and sponsor success than those Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who were so reviled a century earlier.” His identification with artists who were battling in the face of disapproval from the art establishment is a completely false analogy: the art that Serota promotes is the art establishment — a multi-million pound industry of museums, arts bodies, galleries, curators, auction houses, collectors and critics. It’s just that the art establishment is now at odds with the general public instead of synonymous with it.

Charles Thomson on Sir Nicholas Serota and the BritArt establishment.

It seems there’s a smugness to Montreal hip. Even the twenty year olds profess to appreciate black-American jazz and Quebec-government-funded documentaries about white-American racism. Yet, do these fashionistas realize that the Southern slave system wasn’t so much abolished as expanded to include them, that the textile plantation big house now extends from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Sea, that beyond our privileged borders–shackled by barriers to free competition–the global masses sweat and toil to keep our teenagers sweet and spoiled with the style of the moment?

By Lyn Fox.

Am I imagining it or were we a lot safer when the so-called leader of the free world was getting blowjobs in the White House? Isn’t it better to blow off a little steam in the face of a willing victim than to take out your sexual frustrations and pent-up aggression on endangered species or countries half way around the world, blatantly lying about democracy and freedom in a thinly veiled disguise to suck the juice out of a hole in the ground, while the rest of us are stuck at the Exxon stations holding gas pumps in our fists like big limp dicks that we pay out the ass to get perpetually screwed by?

The Lydia Lunch guide to the 2008 US presidential election.

I was the youngest at 17 and meant to be studying for my A levels but I wisely thought being in Andrew Logan’s groundbreaking competition was a better education and a higher qualification for life than any ordinary exam could give me. I was right in all senses, and Rebecca was too drunk for the steps and fell down half of them. I cannot tell you how glamorous the whole occasion was, backstage in the dressing rooms where fabulous creatures (I would hesitate at describing them all as humans) donned extravagant creations, where men became women and women became animals and Francis Bacon art dealer, James Birch, became a hamburger with fries.

3:AM‘s very own alternative miss world Sophie Parkin previews An Evening Of Alternative Miss World at the Portobello Film Festival.

Was it fathers or mothers that made all those grown men cry in that back street in a Borough pub The Gladstone, the other week? Or, was it the fact that it was an old man croakily singing, forcing them to watch their own mortality rocking before them? None of those songs came near to triggering a liquid response from me, maybe because I never felt betrayed: his songs may have contained clich és of dime-a-fuck girls and drunken feckless men but they were full of truth and the small-town Southern ways of scratching at life through dirt.

Sophie Parkin explains why Larry Jon Wilson didn’t make her cry.