3:AM Magazine

Does this sense of detachment as I gaze down on the board in mid-flip suggest mastery or loss of control? Maybe this is what the Situationists meant by psychogeography, the invisible influence of the “terrain.” Guy Debord writes in “Theory of the Dérive,” “In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” I find myself timing my snap to avoid the lines on the court.

An essay by Zack Anderson on skateboarding and the politics of free fall.

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And thus will dark academia become another collection of dead images, nothing remaining but the husks of its erstwhile influence. Its proponents will grow up, move on, and maybe find a book or two they genuinely enjoy. But the schism between Old World and New World will remain, a schism that art broadly, and literature, in particular, is finding difficult to straddle. If it is true, as Vargas Llosa suggests, that images are replacing ideas, then literature has a new obstacle to surmount in its perpetual struggle to endure.

An essay by Elroy Rosenberg on the aesthetic of Dark Academia.

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In a culture on the brink of absolute psychosis, the voodoo-magic of a weaponized peace is cantilevered over the abyss of nowhere is safe. It’s a devastating exchange of intolerable sadness and despair, for the mask of hysteria is normalized at the very limits of what it is to be human, or human as we’ve known it.

Part II of “The Replicant Real,” an essay by Jeff Wood.

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“I think I swallowed a bug,” Brando announces. He had. And I had. There was no difference, in those looping late-night moments, between what was happening on the screen behind my eyelids or in front of them. Apocalypse Now had crossed the blood brain barrier of the symbolic and fictional real, just as The Day After had done, and Blade Runner would eventually do in the looping future of itself that has lasted until precisely now.

In the first installment of a two-part essay, Jeff Wood considers how we arrived at our hall-of-mirrors world through an exploration of film and television.

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Though sidestepping the laddish puns of her male peers, her photomontages are suitably placed in the veiled-erotic, Freudian hinterland of the surrealist imagination. She provokes the thought of a finger pressing into the libidinous wetness of a mollusc curled inside its shell in Untitled (hand and shell) (1934), while in Forbidden Games (1935) a curious child peers from under a desk as a melancholy figure grips a man between her thighs and rides him around the parlour.

Hailey Maxwell reviews Dora Maar.

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The necessity to pay has been revealed in countless signs to be interpreted as letters of demand that must be answered. Intensifying heat, melting ice, rising seas, violent storms, drought, flooding, failing crops, mass migrations, and extinctions: what they point to is impossible to say except in terms of future finance, or the terms by which the presence of the debt may be restructured. That the nature of those terms cannot be thought about with any understanding in advance of their acceptance is no reason not to hope that that might happen.

By Christopher Clifton.

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If séances are less of a therapeutic staple in the twenty-first century, and the ‘spirit’ element of photography no longer a requirement of its consolatory power, the drive to brandish visual records as proof of something nebulous remains compelling. If, in 2016, I clicked like a metronome through a desktop file of images from the previous half decade, the motivation arose not from any need to prove the continued existence of their subjects’ souls, but certainly from a need to affirm the significances of a life that now felt previous. Such comfort was, obviously, elusive. To trace, in a photograph, the line between my former boyfriend’s face and my own, as though to isolate and circle the point on that vector that signified love, felt as dumb as it was manifestly desperate. A child of the postmodern era, I should have known better than to search for objective meaning in an image.

By Amber Husain.

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It’s all DIY  – hardly proof-read and done too fast in between day jobs to be anything but jump-start writing. So forget about the writing. What matters is what its about. It adds up to a boss reading list and a cranked up gang of characters smoking up the haunted back bars of the eerie early morning. 3:AM’s been around since 2000 and I joined Gallix’s punkstorm early on. It’s one of the oldest literary sites on the web. And back in the early days there was hardly anything out there so we were literally making it up as we went along.

Keep Up: a 3:AM backlist.

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