Latest Features
Not Jesus Yet
By Steven Hall. The green room is green. Like the inside of a plant. Green green green. Walls, furniture, fish tanks, fish, pinball machines and carpets; everything in the green room of my house is exactly the same shade of — oh my god, you’re so meticulous Harrison — green. It’s the next day and I’m walking with Barry down the corridor towards it. “But I need to know something, give me something.” “No you don’t.” “No? No I don’t? How can you possibly think that, Harrison? How can it occur as a possibility in your head that I wouldn’t
Drugs Are Nice
I suppose the weirdest thing for me was in this sex club I went to, this guy had his ear up to a wall listening to his girlfriend do it with a midget! It’s called ectoism or echo-ism or something like that. He was explaining it to us. He likes to hear but not see his gal doin’ it. I think that the other guy was a midget was just a coincidence, not part of the plan.
Noah Cicero interviews Drugs Are Nice author Lisa Crystal Carver for 3:AM.
Dark Entries
“I’ll do anything to try and stimulate interest in the books. I offered to do a tightrope walk for Counterparts, although I balked at slicing my knob in half. I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears, such as last summer I was all set to declare myself “Writer in Residence of Cheadle Bleach Works (Disused)”, as a stunt. Have my picture taken down there with a laptop and a hard hat. In the end I didn’t do it. Maybe next time. I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock. Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.”
Andrew Stevens interviews Nicholas Royle about his latest novel, Antwerp.
The Vulgarian Invasions
Chappism is all about maintaining dignity and panache in the face of penury; donning a silk cravat to claim benefits, spending your last fiver on a dry martini. Very few of the readers I have met come from privileged backgrounds. Our manifesto urges followers to turn ancient rituals of courtesy and etiquette into revolutionary acts. There is nothing elitist about good manners and nobody is going to object to being treated more civilly.
Andrew Stevens interviews Gustav Temple of The Chap magazine for 3:AM.
Ghost Town
The pipe went round a few times, with the usually intensity of a crack sessions with strangers. Conversation was stilted and forced and tended to drift off as we watched each other load the pipe and take a hit with starving eyes. Things only relaxed when the pipe was in my hand and I could concentrate on putting a rock on the gauze, holding a light to the stem, filling my lungs with the smoke, bellowing out plumes of white cocaine fumes, feeling the rush dizzying me and almost as quickly starting to fade as I passed the pipe on and resumed watching intently and awaiting another turn.
By Tony O’Neill.
The Morrissey Exhibition
Beware. The balding curator of the Morrissey Exhibition sees everything. Watching over the proceedings, wryly, from a raised platform in the foyer, maintaining an impenetrable mask of enigma. (Is that a smile on his face? A tear in his eye? Who can truthfully tell? And what is his ultimate purpose? How does he spend his free time outside of the Morrissey Exhibition?)
By HP Tinker.
Three Pub Reviews
I needed to drink fluids, while my bucking, talcum-smelling passenger clearly needed to dispense with them. Another old woman clearly needed to also, as she too fortunately passed us on her path for the Ladies, stopping aghast with a vein laden hand across her mouth at the sight of myself and the first good lady floundering in the huge armchair. ‘Help me!’ cried my bony-elbowed old woman of good intention, thrusting her hand out to the other woman who was only slightly in less need of a pee than her good self. Well, wouldn’t you know it?
By Paul Ewen.
Alliances Severed Once More
So you might think that You Are Quarry is something of a cerebral examination of searching issues of English identity and globalisation. You’d be vastly mistaken as the album is pretty much front-loaded in that regard, the first two songs offer an upbeat beginning but it’s a bumpy ride musically and lyrically thereafter. ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ and ‘Come Back to Camden’ are flat and go nowhere, ‘The First of the Gang to Die’ suggests some promise and revisits earlier Morrissey song themes but leaves the listener merely wanting. ‘All The Lazy Dykes’ is ‘You’re The One for Me, Fatty’ without the Polecats’ chugging bass and spiky guitar licks. In fact, the album suffers on the whole from over-production by Jerry Finn (who is more accustomed to working with the likes of Blink 182) and backing music that would, depending on the tempo of the track, be more suited to David Gray or Republica. It’s almost as if he wasn’t consulted on the music to be used, as if he just laid down the vocals and allowed someone else carte blanche on what to put them over.
Andrew Stevens on Morrissey‘s You Are The Quarry LP.
Looking Back at Anger
“All I can say is that we couldn’t know then what we could only know today. Things that appeared possible 30 years ago — and the way to achieve those ends — wouldn’t work today. Times change, as do tactics and strategies. The currency of that particular form of gestural protest has been debased since the mid-1970s with the murderous campaigns targeting innocent bystanders run by the IRA and ETA, culminating in the crusade-like slaughters of 11 September and the recent Madrid train-bombings. The philosophy and attitude of these guys is exactly the same as Franco’s old Foreign Legion commander, General Millan Astray whose constant watchword was ‘Viva la muerte!’“
Andrew Stevens interviews the Angry Brigade’s trial defendant, Stuart Christie — the man who tried to assassinate General Franco.
For All The Fucked-Up Children of This World
My reaction to hearing that Dreamweapon was being written was that it was the third person who’d wanted to write such a book, but I could tell Erik was serious from the start. Knowing that he’s a proteg é of Victor Bokris gave me enough faith in the project to help him as much as possible. I think Erik has got to grips with Spacemen 3’s influences and sound, though while much of it is his own interpretation, he’s been very thorough in his research.
Peter Kember reviews Erik Morse‘s biography of Spacemen 3, Dreamweapon.
Keep Warm This Winter – Make Trouble
Richard Cabut interviews Jamie Reid, the self-styled “socialist druid” who turned the Sex Pistols into a work of art. Cookie Mueller, late NY art critic and associate of trash king John Waters, said of 80s artist Jean Michel Basquiat “He’s doing some kind of shaman work, some voodoo hoodoo, like automatic writing”. Some of us have been similarly affected by the work of Jamie Reid. The Croydon-born artist’s work has prodded and inflamed since the early 70s with graphic digs at consumerism – “Keep Warm This Winter — Make Trouble”, “Save Petrol — Burn Cars” – via work with the
Literary Sparring
“Writing loads is really important,” he says, “When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you’re doing is not any kind of public show, until you’re ready for it. There is a kind of mysticism to writing. Every kind of book I’ve written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven’t re-invented the process every time but I almost have. I enjoy the freedom of the blank page. You have to respect the mysticism of writing; you’re always going to learn things that will work subconsciously and stuff that won’t. You can’t tear yourself apart with it either. If you become too self-conscious about it, it shows up in the work, so you’ve got to enjoy it as well”.
Alan Black interviews Irvine Welsh for 3:AM.
Maintenant #60: Luljeta Lleshanaku