Perpetual Nowever
miscellaneous disturbances
The Calendar Riots (The Billiard Room, Leam, Grindleford, Derbyshire, S32 2HL, 32pp/13x20cm approx, Free for 5x2nd class stamps).
This is the opposite of a 'work diary', with which workers 'compare diaries' to arrange the desolation of the self. Calendar Riots is the ultimate refuseniks non-weapon. It will ensure an absence of organisation and will enable staying in bed too long. The revolution is, after all, just another form of 'improving' work designed by middle class control freaks to screw up the already exploited persons of the world. In this annual of disorder, there are dates but no days of the week. It could be any year, as indeed it is. The diary section starts with April 1st and then follows the 'real' calendar through its alleged 365 days. You fill in the days of the week (if you want), there are helpful day-plates to enable this. "Festal and free time have been progressively stolen from us as the intensification of exploitation has emptied the calendar of nearly all content save that of the deadening routine of the planetary work machine." In the face of work and the work police, proletarian playtimes from the past are listed under their glad day. Wildcat strikes, riots, mutinies and other acts of revelry are included, reviving traditions apparently destroyed by television and 'leisure pursuits'. Some are just fun. 30 December: Poachers gather in a militia forty strong to terrorise Colonel Kingscote in his home while comrades go shooting on his private estate in Gloucestershire (1825). 23 November: Eqyptian pyramid workers stage the first recorded stoppage of work (1170 BCE).
psrf 49 Loyd Dunn (Static Output, POB 3326, Iowa City, 52244, USA, 32pp/22x18cm approx., $5 equivalent for one issue).
Using anti-art techniques to strip away any feeling of domesticity about cultural products, Static Output makes de-commodified products. If that sounds like a sales pitch, consider the content of issue 49. The language of psrf 49 (which might also be issue 10) is semi-intuitively based on English. Some words you can read once you get into it, for some you need to go to the ÆLFABET or the Key. "Der frst prodject was rūmrd tū hæv bēn a læŋguidj rēform." As I type I'm listening to the Tape-Beatles CD, Good Times (Synthety no.5). The Tape-Beatles are Lloyd Dunn, John Heck and Ralph Johnson. By way of a recommendation, Rolling Stone has dismissed Good Times as "…a compendium of misguided social and economic disaffections… possibly the most ideologically wrong-minded American-made recording of the past year." The CD is emphatically anti-work. My only criticism is that it is hard work listening to it, which rather defeats the purpose. You can visit without any obligation to buy at http://www.detritus.net/ or you can try a sample at http://soli.inav.net/~psrf. Email the rep who will be happy to visit you at home at [email protected]. This art may help you to stop working.
Neil Armstrong's Second Trip to the Moon Historical Research: by the Babynous Group (110½ State Avenue, Bremerton, Washington, 98337-1241, USA, 12pp/28x10cm approx., unpriced).
This booklet gives a brief over view of the development of space flight, from the launch of Sputnik by Portugal to the North American space programme, designed to take ocean liners "out beyond the orbit of Neptune". In the medieval period North America was a third world sweatshop. Later, it all ended up with Neil Armstrong's frontal lobes being transplanted into a cat, which then went to the moon (his second trip) to try to find a magic mirror. The cat didn't return, instead it sends messages to earth from a place populated by cats with huge domed heads. On the first moon trip they collected "old cans, gum wrappers, disposable diapers & over 200 pounds of assorted Plastic tips from archaic shoelaces." Edwin Ebenezer Aldrin "sculpted 32 Craters from a substance very much like playdough…" The moonscape is made, it is up on stilts, nothing is natural. The Babynous Cult can be contacted via [email protected].
Proletarian Antiquarian 3, West Anglia Survey (47 Silver Street, Norwich, NR3 4TT, A4/stapled pages, free for stamps).
As the spatial concepts imposed by hierarchy via education continue to 'erode', all manner of depth opens up around language (superstructure) and alphabet (base). So, when the tide went out one time too many those local die-hards who still imagined 'Norfolk' through the lens of socialisation became unfocused, leading to coastal erosion, sexual fantasies and laziness. At once a 'sea henge' appeared, raising the stakes and the landscape, placing Norfolk in a megalithic ideal, creating a new capitalist superstructure in the otherwise terminal moraine. Issue 3 of PA gives an account of the struggle for meaning in a pleasantly bland landscape. Ultra-rightists organised themselves behind an absurdity - Megalithic Retribution. Norfolk provides scant cover for neo-fascists, but they don't need it in Turkey County (which the US airforce, on holiday from their East Anglian bases, honoured during the last 'gulf war' with their 'turkey shoot' tribute jokes - a discourse in which elite Iraqi troops were likened to tasteless East Anglian birds). As in Wessex, so in East Anglia. A newly independent spirit - which means a regional hierarchy, a localised alienation - seeks to define and expand itself. East Anglian regionalism is a threat to all those who know that the A12 leads nowhere. The fascist 'heathens' of Megalithic Retribution, attempting to force their reactionary fictions of paganism through the cultural orifice of 'Celtic' romanticism may or may not have started the fire at the Flag Fen archaeological centre (the temporary home of the sea henge), but they are keen not to deny it. As has been seen in 'Wessex' and Kent, the far right are organising around regional and cultural constructs. Proletarian Antiquarian tracks their activities and exposes the shoddy thinking, the violence and the bad art associated with fascist reactionaries. Just say no to locality.
Monas Hieroglyphica 11 Jamie W. Spracklen (58 Seymour Road, Hadleigh, Benfleet, Essex, SS7 2HL, 36pp/A4, £1.50 each).
There are those who think that Goths are just a bunch of poseurs, mirror conscious vamps with a taste for effeminate boys. In gothdom these days frilly shirts are passé, though some still wear them. Goths of my acquaintance are in denial - they say they aren't Goths and pretend that repression has blocked those memories. Nowadays, overarching modernist fashions are broken up into niche markets - industrial, trance - I'm a pagan not goth - yes of course you are. This copy of MH is 2 years old now, and Jamie may have caught the amnesiac bug, but issue 11 is/was a classic goth zine. A cheesy line drawing of a hot long-haired chick a with serpent bottom half (a rock chick harpy elsewhere), interviews with authors from the fantasy end of the pulp novel market (think trilogies, etc.) and gloopy reviews of zines and CDs. For instance, the review of Poetry Monthly - newly deodorised and with even bigger wings for complete poetic confidence whilst playing tennis - includes this, "the editor has a sound, down to earth view on poetry which means he gets some good genuine material." One gets the feeling that Jamie might be a frilly shirt expert but he wouldn't know a good poem if it sucked his bloody monthly out of his penis.
Land & Liberty 1202 The magazine of the Henry George Foundation (Suite 427, The London Fruit and Wool Exchange, Brushfield Street, London, E1 6EL, 22pp/A4, £15 for 4). www.henrygeorge.org.uk
The HGF continue to make the case for the Land Value Tax (LVT) - a fiscal device that would remove the economic benefits of owning land by sharing them with the community. In its pure form, it would remove the need for Income Tax thus liberating Labour and Capital to achieve their potential. The benefits derived from the Land - meaning all natural resources - would be a commonwealth. Issue 1202 looks at events in Zimbabwe and how different it might be if the government had taxed the farmers according to the economic benefits of the resources their forerunners had enclosed. Namibia, which has a problem of landless people and post-colonial patterns of land ownership is implementing LVT as a way of progressively shifting patterns of tenure whilst maintaining production of food and commodities. In the UK of course things haven't changed since the feudal system was mutated into our clepto-democracy. Oddly, the board game Monopoly was originally designed by a Georgist. There were two games for the same board, the capitalist one in which the losers are bankrupted and a Georgist version in which LVT is paid and everyone prospers. For some reason the nice one got stitched along the way. Odd that. Anti-capitalist campaigners, who never have an alternative to what they oppose, might consider playing the Georgist version next time they take to the streets of London, though Georgism isn't anti-capitalist per se and thus attracts suspicion from some radicals. Better to be a beautiful anarchist than try out something less spectacular that might work.
Counter Information 56 newsletter (c/o 17 W.Montgomery Place, Edinburgh, EH7 5HA, A4/folded sheet, 4pp/Free for stamps). www.autonomous.org.uk/ci
CI monitors the struggles of communities and individuals around the world, providing networking opportunities and information about events, demonstrations. Going out to play is good for us and most people don't do it enough. The street, in Britain at least, is less of a place of social circulation and more a repressed memory. If you feel that you are ready for Street Recovery Therapy then you can find those to help you make those first tentative steps here.
Stonehenge Campaign newsletter (c/o 99 Toriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX, A4/folded sheets, 8pp/Free for stamps).
A collage of information, paste-up pics and cuttings, quotes, slogans, invocations to the blurry gods and goddesses of neo-paganism, a compendium of contacts - just about every grassroots campaign group, direct action outfit and loopy lib cultural phenomenon are listed - it's just a shame it rained. The goddess, sometimes she takes the piss. With some sign of compromise and trust beginning to build, some of the heat has gone out of the solstice sunrise (brrrrr), but someone has still thought to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Stonehenge. The horrendous police actions of the past, with the annual hippy cull and smashing up of buses - memorialised in the Revenge Henge slogan is slowly being eclipsed by Be There With Love. If English Heritage grit their teeth then love and a bit of psychic ky jelly should make for an early morning crusty playtime. How to deal with the 'Druid' infestation though?
Spiral Tribe/United Systems Dope on Wax (c/o 54 High Street, CO5 8JE, A4/newletter, Free for stamps). www.cropcircleconnector.com
"The flying saucers responsible for crop circles want us to look toward South America… in the year 2023 huge interstellar craft from other human planets will arrive in Peru to take us back to their world as the earth's poles will shift and this is the reason flying saucers are here making crop circles." Information on secret underground bunkers, drugs and the arms trade, pyramids, Krishna, Avebury and the coded messages appearing everywhere, left by the occupants of invisible flying saucers. No reptilian aliens these, nor any bum probing going on at all, the aliens are humans (so why shouldn't they pass unnoticed, their technology is less strange than ours). On 23 December 2012 there will be a joint onworld/offworld party - travellers from a Sirius planet will be there with alien drugs and advice about war. Pro cannabis, anti heroin with a liking for figurative communication through the medium of abstract art. Global Peace Concert to follow.
Sabotage Editions, BM Senior, London, WC1N 3XX
Fasting on Spam, Stewart Home (56pp/A5, £3.75).
Punk and pub rock, the rip-off world of culture and the job of building a proletarian revolution that works. Stewart Home is a prolific writer of novels and cultural critiques. In between the books Sabotage Editions publishes or republishes articles, rejected drafts of articles and interviews. The only modern psychogeographer to make a standing stone ejaculate, this midhusband of the transgressive babe translates his own genetic code into English and then bathes in it. "What I'd say to struggling writers and artists is that they ought to feel completely pissed off, because it is their labour that valorises the work of their successful peers. In other words, they are being exploited. If you look at the prices paid for certain books or art works, then it is utterly ridiculous even in capitalist terms if you work this out in a wage per hour. However, if you take the total amount of money paid to all artists and writers and divide this by the time all artists and writers have laboured, then the hourly rates start to make sense. You can't have successful art and literature without unsuccessful art and literature, they produce and mediate each other. Likewise, it is stating the obvious to say that cultural rewards aren't doled out on merit." (from Loose and Juicy: Stewart Home in a dirty Groove) Writers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your idiocy.
Jean Baudrillard & the Psychogeography of Nudism, Stewart Home (68pp/A5, £3.75).
Home explores art terrorism, the replication of punk, the Neolithic nonsense of Julian Cope and much else beside in his uncompromising prose style. In Incendiary Device: a critique of Terrorist Chic, Home maps the reaction of terrorism and the ideology of those who attempt to mimic spectacular anti-humanism. "To take just one example, a group calling itself Molotov recently claimed responsibility for a "guerrilla exhibition" in the toilets of the ICA in London. Shelves were hastily installed with fruit and vegetable animals placed upon them. The result was so crap that it made the works officially on show at the ICA look good in comparison." He concludes, "There's absolutely nothing radical about a handful of idiots deciding to engage in "armed struggle". Attempting to simulate these infantile and ultimately impotent forms of rage in an art gallery is also obnoxious." On the subject of the arts and money: "While our lives remain distorted by the cash-nexus, a more creative and combative culture would emerge if all arts subsidies were cut and the money that presently funds a bloated bureaucracy was pumped into a comprehensive welfare system… since this would enable those who wanted to take time out from work and/or poverty to get their shit together, whilst simultaneously avoiding the absurd biases that characterise current arts funding. It is repugnant that vast sectors of the population are excluded from access to arts money…" There is no argument to contradict this, which is why none is ever made.
Anamorphosis, Stewart Home (48pp/A5, £3.75).
No-one had linked the ultra-rightist politics of the Green Anarchist Federation with the bizarre series of sex crimes occurring around bakeries and 24 hour bagel shops of swinging London. What links the revolutionary Society for Cutting up Bread to Larry O'Hara, spook-buster and a small group of survivalists? In Anamorphosis, Home explores his own personal sense of horror at being stalked by a self-styled nemesis of 'state assets' everywhere. This is perhaps the strangest of this batch of Sabotage Editions. At one point Home was invited to speak at the Fortean Times Unconvention, at which point Green Anarchists decided to picket the event "as part of a general struggle against the activities and influence of the secret state…" The people from Fortean Times, pleased at the absurdity of the intrusion, opted to join the picket, "taking time out from organising the event to pop outside and demand that they should be shut down as enemies of the people." Truth is stranger than friction.
Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB
Fates and Destinies, Charles T. Scribner MD (32pp/13x18cm approx, £1.50).
"When I started to look at the [night] sky with the unaided eye and translate the dimensions of the stone circles, I learned they were also textbooks of Astronomy the builders of those circles used to teach their children how to look at the sky, think clearly, and count." The author's faith that stone circles are in fact astronomical primary schools seems a little forced to me. I like the idea of Avebury as a prehistoric high school though, where "6th graders who were wandering around the late summer campsite that brought many tribes together to celebrate the end of that season and summer's activities [learned] how many synodic months would bring Venus and Mars back to one another and how long it was until the meeting of Mars and Venus that would allow them to get married." Dating was obviously a complex thing to Neolithic teenagers. The rambling prose does not indicate the 'clear thought' the author seems to assume he is blessed with. Scribner's obsession overwhelms sense, this work will curdle your mind, rather than clarify it.
A Word in Your Eye - an Introduction to the Graphic Poem, Steve Sneyd (36pp/A5, £3.75).
By graphic poem, Steve means poetic content or expression delivered in the form of a comic strip. In terms of identifying a poetic comic strip, it would be a case of feeling the style to be poetic (as opposed to the content or form). I'm not convinced this type of poem exists. Shapewords, concrete poetry and Red Wheelbarrows are fine, as are Steve's Spidergrams, but a comic strip that is more than an illustration? I could claim my garden to be a poem, or my dinner, but beyond the claims of installation art, I can't see why I'd bother. Why not call political cartooning graphic poetry? Pictures and poetry can work well together, as can poetry and music, but the term graphic poetry is one I would rather apply to the multimedia works found on the internet (see the Beehive review on page 41) than a comic strip. These 'new media' workings have much more in common with the Ferroconcrete poem by Vasily Kamansky than the comic strip examples given here. I'm not sure this is an ignored art form either, I know far more people who are into comics than I do who read poetry.
Gnawing Medusa's Flesh - the science fiction poetry of Robert Calvert, Steve Sneyd & David Jones (42pp/A5, £2.99).
This contains everything you could possibly want to know about the deceased Hawkwind member and his poetry, except the poems themselves. Unless I'm a page short of a picnic on the moon, I couldn't find any. This is one for the Calvert and/or the sci-fi poetry enthusiasts. Steve really does include every reference to Calvert's poems he could find. I wonder if the following was worth including "Andrew Darlington (poet): "his penchant for cosmic profundity but not without interest and humour." What about it?
The Star-Seer's Aerial Voyage, William Dearden / Spin, R.I. Barycz (14pp/A5, priceless).
Two short cosmic voyages, the first by a 19th century epic poet from Hebden Bridge and the latter by someone who wrote SF poetry in the 1970s. For me, The William Dearden was by far the most interesting poem. Steve's Forword (his spelling), which takes in Shelley's wonderful Queen Mab - a mix of Barbarella and Spencer's Faerie Queene - and Milton's Paradise Lost, places it in a context with space exploration and 'off-world' literature in general. Overall, this booklet works very well - it provides a sense of where sci-fi has been, of the utopian roots of a genre. I'd like to see the complete text of Dearden's epic, rather than just the bit that takes the hero into space. It would make a good film (Steve, a screenplay?). As ever, I am outside a genre looking in. What I feel is that if I gathered all of Steve's Hilltop pamphlets together I'd have the definitive history of the sci-fi poetry genre. Hopefully this massive tome will one day get written, if Steve doesn't do it some unsympathetic academic with an eye on their career will do it instead, and they could not do it as well as the man in the moon.
Page(s) 55-61
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The