Contacts | Submissions | Buzzwords | Twitter | Facebook
© 2000-2017 3:AM Magazine | Design & build by Rhys Tranter, Florian Kräutli and STML
The vanishing of Soviet power at the end of the century did nothing to undo the primacy of the image. Indeed, the first decades of post-Soviet Russia coincided with a period of intense image-proliferation. Never have citizens been bombarded by so much surface: broadcast into their living rooms, carried in their hands. Yet the Russian state has proved itself proficient at keeping a firm grip on the sources of these images. We all live in a world of surfaces, today. In Russia, the state retains a central role in their manipulation and distribution.
By Thomas Evans.
Jerry was very clear that he wanted a movement which would offer youth an alternative to the National Front. As Cathyl from Madness argues, you can’t lance a boil from a 100 yards away. The power for change was in the songs and the joy of a thousand other rude boys and girls skanking to the irresistible rhythms of ska and reggae. The NF were crushed and humiliated in the 1979 General Election. But Margaret Thatcher had as much claim to that outcome, as music and the cultural opposition of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.
Andrew Stevens talks to Daniel Rachel about the music and politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge.
Practical Criticism is about pedagogy, public education, politics, not the production of an elite hermeneutic cadre or an exquisite academic in-group. Contrary to commonly-held belief, the ‘close reading’ method I.A. Richards pioneered was not intended as a donnish amusement – it had a broader social purpose. It is this purpose which Joseph North’s book hopes to reclaim, or at least to remodel.
Brendan Gillott on Joseph North‘s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History.
Tableau Vivant inspired me when I saw Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” and the audiences adverse reaction to it, while they had none to Chris Burden sitting in his own excrement for days, or shooting himself in arm, or nailing himself to a car like Jesus and backing it out of driveway. No, the audience was more horrified when a woman pulled a harmless scroll out of her vagina and read from it.
Continuing the States of Anxiety series, Jana Astanov interviews Gabriel Don.
A few years ago in the Louvre’s Salle Rembrandt, though, I heard an old man softly crying as he sat before Bathsheba at Her Bath. Though it felt sinful to listen, listen I did. (It was Graham Greene, I believe, who witnessed a mother at her son’s deathbed and realized without enough shame that he was taking notes on the scene.) My French was just good enough, and the old man’s whisper was just loud enough, that I understood him when he told his granddaughter— who had managed to get him there despite his obvious grave illness — that he was crying because it was the last time he would see his favorite painting.
The entire museum was eerily empty that day in a way that I have not seen before or since, and I left them alone. When I returned an hour or so later to gaze at Bathsheba myself, the old man and the young woman were only just leaving and his face was still wet.
By Elise Blackwell.
The horror that slides across the book is a terminal dread, ‘a white sea, a white death’. The dread is clenched in clean icy prose that, as the blurb has it, results in an incantationary text which includes all the usual suspects from occult literature: ‘robed figures and furry men, ice caves and deserts, god and serpent, shapelessness and sacred geometry, mysterious artifacts and unfolding perceptions…in a pentangle of overlaid story bodies, each sinking deeper into its own true consciousness, while at the same time constructing an indexical sequence of translation from raw sense to mediated artiface, a primer of the dissolution of life into text.’ What else it raises is the spectre of Miltonic and Shakespearean whiteness, and the failed theodicies of Leibniz, Malebranche and Arnauld.
Richard Marshall reviews M Kitchell‘s Hour of the Wolf.
Different moralities must share some general features if they are to perform their functions of coordinating beings having particular kinds of motivations. Morality is a cultural construction in something like the way bridges are. There would be no bridges unless human beings used them to move across bodies of waters or depressions in the earth, but a good bridge cannot be designed according to whim, but rather according to what would adequately fulfill their function and the nature of the materials that are available for their construction.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Wong.
After arriving in LA, I saw a chance to make my own money, and that seemed better for me than the tenure-track line. I bought apartment buildings that give me some rental income, and that allows me to decide when to teach, and for whom. I’d be in a very different position now as a writer if I didn’t have that income. I always felt strongly about the singularity of my work, and knew it wouldn’t be easily fundable. Which means you have to either have family money, or marriage money, or make your own. It takes a long time for me to write a book — as much as five years. I write catalogue essays and journalism for extra income in between, and give lectures and readings, but if I were completely dependent on that income, my work would be completely different. I couldn’t do the work I do now without an independent income. This is awkward, maybe, to disclose, but I think it’s important — especially in the US people are led to believe that there’s something wrong with their work if it doesn’t result in financial security. When in fact, many of the most prominent artists and writers have relied upon outside support for at least the first part of their careers.
Alison J Carr interviews Chris Kraus.
A man walked into a bide with me.
shift and the Tsunami deal. The breakfast brexity brevity. There is nobody moving
A man
through the rooms in 97, not even a blurry ghost taxing the frosted glass. The global
A man
gag has been stuffed into the mouth of poetry. What is Ian doing? Actualising
A man walked into a four year Zebra dance
Duos #1 : new collaborative poetry by Ian McMillan & Robert Sheppard.
Organic life was born as the contingent effect of a confluence of material causes that are rationally intelligible without thereby implying an intrinsically meaningful raison d’être . David, an android named after the Michelangelo sculpture, is told by Weyland, his creator, to seek out a different answer to creation concealed beyond the Copernican sun of our galaxy. What David finds is not our alien origins, as the film suggests, but an allegory of the alienation constitutive of subjectivity.
Matt Ossias reflects on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and subjectivity.