3:AM Magazine

» American Rimbaud: An interview with Steve Richmond

Ben: That’s my impression, of what your Gagaku’s mean, ‘cause they are short. They seem to come in a massive wave, sort of almost like having a stroke, they just come flying out with all this stuff, and you get it all down, almost the way…
Steve: That’s the way it used to be. Now it’s survival. I use it as a sort of last resort. When things really get… months will go by…I got the music right next to me, it’s like math, it works. It’s just, you know, time to write…usually lasts about 25 minutes. I don’t even submit ‘em anymore, unless somebody asks.

Ben Pleasants catches up with Meat Poet Steve Richmond.

» An Icelandic Personal Culture: An Interview with Eileen Myles

Oh, for better or worse we are trained to use the actual pattern of our thoughts. We don’t just take positions, we describe how they occurred. I think there’s a real community in every poet. Like… that multiplicity of positions that is an individual is not a suppressed element in our speech or discourse. I think politicians (and newscasters and much of the talk that goes on in public political life) is endlessly creating a myth that simple hard positions are possible, manly, and necessary. In a really complex time they are dumbing down thinking. What a disservice!

Sophie Erskine interviews the poet Eileen Myles.

» Momentary Players in an Infinite Narrative: An Interview with Roger Frederick

I just enjoy writing. It makes me feel good. I imagine religion, drugs, cruelty, pain, sport, shopping, luxury chocolate products, etc., offer similar outlets to others. I don’t avoid or reject any of these things. The one thing I genuinely hate about some religions is the way that they subjugate women, denying them self-expression, education and the freedom to write. Unfortunately, those centuries-old cultures and practices are hard to escape. Most people are forced to live their lives a very specific way by circumstance, necessity and oppression. If you have a choice to do something different, you really should explore that.

Sophie Erskine interviews novelist and e-publisher Roger Frederick.

» Wide Boys Never Work

It’s a consummate dime novel, and doesn’t try to bitch continuity to hell. That fact alone can hide the catastrophe of incoherence that is Jim’s story, and it can also suggest a kind of fashionable nihilism that would be a complete travesty. But there are other possibilities – I’ve outlined one such – and nothing should be settled too soon.

Richard Marshall reviews Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work (London Books).

» Good Riddance Lenin!

Toni Negri has been an important, sympathetic intelligence for most of my adult life. He has also shown a great courage over that time. In the 1960s and early 70s he was acclaimed as a wide-ranging academic in the academic world. By 1979 he was accused of being “morally responsible” for the violence of the Red Brigades, a highly infiltrated Bolshevik style urban guerrilla group with whom he would have little in common. His crime, which he repeats in this book, to say that resistance to state and capitalist oppression might involve violence, and that this was justified. This lead to many years of exile in France and imprisonment in Italy.

John Barker on Antonio Negri.

» Cat Life

Love is death to the protagonist, though she is resurrected into a fuller life — she asserts that ‘like a cat she has nine lives’ and with each death (or experience of extraordinary love) she is enriched. The hurtling narration affirms her vitality, her Uber-Mensch squandering of self; she consumes life. However, hers is not only a body that loves, but also a body that writes, she is concerned utterly with the act of writing and the process of interpretation.

Heidi James on Clarah Averbuck’s Cat Life.

» The Idea of Fellowship: MySpace, Facebook and the Online Social Networks Phenomenon

Not unlike the online social network to which you belong in order to read these words wherever you are in the world on the World Wide Web. No doubt, some of us have blood relations on our list (a fraternity or sorority with real brothers and sisters). For most of us, acquaintanceships, friendships, relationships, were formed and are forming and will continue to form. Lest we forget the “haters,” since this is a free vehicle for the exchange of ideas and images, no doubt there will be ones with whom we don’t gel well.

By Binh Nguyen.

» In The Land of Mickey Mouse

The images are far more thrilling than any backwoods smut flick, with some part-time cocktail waitress who can wipe the DNA off her face (and the cameraman can take the donkey back to the U-Haul) at anytime. Derek’s gonna be in jail forever, just like Benny M., old, senile & toothless, hasn’t had a real glass of Florida orange juice since 1951, when a proud bat-swinging store clerk forced gun-packing Benny to graduate from theft to homicide. Hey, Benny: wake up! We put a man on the moon. There’s football on Monday night. The Olsen twins grew tits.

By Raymond Cavanaugh Jr.

» Kill like a girl

Qaddafi’s efforts to promote the idea of women in the military, has often had the “F” word – feminism - tossed his way like a hand grenade by Arab critics. He has deftly sidestepped this potentially explosive accusation by charging the women with not just the guarding of his body, but more importantly, the guarding of an ideology. Throughout Shadows of a Leader, both men and women will repeat this sentiment, that the women are guarding not just a leader, but an ideology. And part of that ideology is women’s military participation will not come at the expense of their femininity. As if to emphasize this notion, Colonel Fathiya Tabishat who is centrally featured in the documentary, is shown purchasing make-up and a purse in a fist-sized store as two bemused shopkeepers watch.

Andrea Fischer on Rania Ajami’s Shadows of a Leader.

» Bobby Sands, Hunger and How to Make a Nation Disappear

Split knuckles bathed in warm water. An orderly sloshing bleach and urine back into the cells. A snowflake melting on the skin of a prisoner. Each close-up is harrowing and oddly beautiful in equal measure. Treat us like animals the prisoners wordlessly say and we will actualise this for you. It is almost an artistic statement in itself and the prisoner’s almost artists, holding the cracked mirror up to a rotten society with the only things they have left - their bodies and their waste. Piero Manzoni may have done it for satirical effect and the money, the blanketmen paradoxically did it for their dignity.

By Darran Anderson.

» Stuck Inn V: What is Wrong With Sir Nicholas Serota? Part II

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.

» Stuck Inn V: What Is Wrong with Sir Nicholas Serota?

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.

» A little bit of intellectual shit, diversity and wit

You often read interviews in the media with band members, but crafting lyrics seems rarely to be discussed in depth. So I thought I’d contact Randy Fitzsimmons just to say what he had to say about writing exciting lines or phrases or verses. Some of you may be aware there has been some controversy about the very existence of this offstage-svengali-sixth-member of The Hives. A few years back the student indie-spindustry popaganda rag NME broke a story that the lyricist was actually guitarist Nicholas Arson, a ‘revelation’ which pissed the band off, being flatly denied.

Graham Rae interviews Randy Fitzsimmons.

» Overwhelmingly Bearded

Autechre live are technically inscrutable but sonically fluid, cutting and snipping events together almost seamlessly, quite unlike the new album’s discrete pieces. The performers are lit, but barely; the main focus of the crowd’s rapture appears to be two Apple laptops, not the heads bobbing around behind them.

Andrew Fleming on Autechre live.

» We Need to Talk About Kevin

I am standing at the back of The Roundhouse, but during “When You Wake You’re Still In A Dream” I am starting to shake from the floor. And by the time they hit the twenty-three minute version of “You Made Me Realise”, this is the equivalent of standing under a jet plane taking off. The sound is so loud that I want to vomit, but somehow I start to wonder if Kevin Shields planned this all along? Purification via noise terrorism. I can feel every vein in my body. From the spleen outwards my head pounds, and fingers shake.

Adelle Stripe reviews My Bloody Valentine live in London.

» The Woman Rebel

Outside the Brass house, I reflected on stuff. I pulled out the scrap of paper. Maybe I should help her, I thought. Then I had a moment of clarity. I scrunched the paper into a ball and threw it over my shoulder. Instead, I decided to use the experience to write a play for the BBC. Those liberal clueless fucks will love something like that, I thought boozily. ‘White middle-class English male meets Bosnian sex slave whilst teaching English as a foreign language to illegal immigrants. Falls in love, divorces dutiful but predictable wife and then discovers a dark side.’

By Joseph Ridgwell.

» i am somehow apart

I am somehow apart. I write on red leaves that stain my hands with their powder and pocket soil to save for later. I like to put a handful of dirt in a stranger’s hand, lean close and whisper, “here,” and walk away. I am the whore, whispering secrets to the young and virginal and the filthy and decrepit. I am the priest, baptizing those who are born to sin in the arms of their parents. I am the wraith, falling apart as the trees fall to pieces. Fasting today because tomorrow i am doing the cactus drug again.

By Maria Anderson.

» England Ahoy

Inside the woman was bent over a vat of the bubble-and-spit all gnome like, a gnomey, gnomey gnome. The feller, the Chinese, with the big smile, his wrinkles were smooth. Like the floor, shining at him, the rush streaming out of it, through the soles of his shoes, his socks, his feet up and up, a loose weave python of sparklers, up some more, then seamless on and on. Walter smiled back right through the colours of infinite pattern.

By John Barker.

» Samurai Avenger

I’m on my break in the back by the service entrance when I see two men robbing a woman in the parking lot. I recognize her. For the last hour she sat alone at my grill top and polished off a shrimp & chicken combo special, two dry martinis and an Asahi Black. She is one of those half-pretty women who always seem slightly out of focus. Her fitted gray pinstripe suit makes her look corporate and malnourished.

Back in the parking lot one of the thugs holds a high-tech Beretta against her forehead. She’s on her knees, giving him a blowjob. When he comes he almost pulls the trigger.

By Jonathan Woods.

» Not Doing Enough Everyday

Friday night, I’m alone with a bottle of Garanacha from the year I was as young as she is now, plus her Facebook photo, the profile picture (since she’s de-friended me) blown up to the size of my desktop screen. Narratives of masturbation tend less toward the titillating than the banal, getting mired in all the minutiae of description, the angle of thrice-folded toilet tissue and the sounds made, verbal and non.

By Spencer Dew.

» The Vagina Monologues

In the dressing room for the opening of the Vagina Monolgues the cream of English actresses from stage and screen are preparing their vaginas for the long night ahead…Some lesser known lady thespians are used as clitoral fluffers, adept in a variety of speed settings of the tongue. The elusive clitoris is the holy grail of the play, its central and binding motif. Countess Diane Rigg, once a Purdey, is now in her own words ‘an avenger for the vagina.’ She is practicing her opening lines with a small cucumber microphone.

By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.

» Six Poems

The chief inspector leans back in his chair
and picks his teeth with a matchstick.
The dead aren’t missing much, he muses.

My right arm hangs dead at my side.
Perhaps I’m bleeding from somewhere as well.

His men, spread out across the plateau,
rap smartly on the doors of empty apartments.
I only escape because they let me.

By Howie Good.

» Four Poems

They know me as that fat man
who eats half
eaten burgers
outta bins
outside the Rock chipper
in Rathnew

they know me as a fat man
who goes to every funeral,
glad of the sandwiches,
provided after
in Rathnew

By Alan Kelly.

» LATIN II

The class was reading Cicero
‘s De Natura Deorum.
He wrote the daily text across her pink smear.
She licked her lips
raised her tennis
shoes on the wire rack
of the next desk up.
He strained to see her panties. Nothing showed.

A collaborative poem by Ben Pleasants & Rafael Buñuel.