Milan

holiday

I'm off to Milan. See you all in a couple of weeks time. Meanwhile, here's something to look at while I'm off screen.

moral panic revisited

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is at it again. This time he is objecting to the photograph on the cover of this month’s Art Monthly Australia. The picture, taken five years ago by Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou, is of her daughter Olympia, aged six. Papapetrou’s partner, the critic Robert Nelson noted: "It's interesting that if the Prime Minister comments on, say the greenhouse effect, he gets expert advice first . . . I would like to know which art expert advised him on this." In The Age’s report he said the photo was one of Olympia’s favourites and that "even my nine-year-old son said: 'Don't people understand that photography is acting?"' The usual suspects condemned the magazine. Joe Tucci, the chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation told the paper "a young child cannot understand how, with today's technology, the picture can be distributed around the world . . . It could haunt her when she's thirty and wants to be a lawyer or teacher". Somewhere somebody seems to have lost all sense of perspective and the Prime Minister’s readiness to weigh in isn’t going to help matters. Probably quite a few of us have naked photos taken at ages zero to whenever. At age thirty we are more likely to be embarrassed by something we did when we were twenty than when we were six.

thursday night in London, sunday in Sydney

At last night’s Crossing the Line reading (sorry, again none of my own images) Sophie Robinson and Peter Philpott (above) read from new work. A sequence by Robinson, read in the first bracket, will appear shortly in Jeff Hilson's Reality Street anthology of contemporary sonnets. This is an eagerly awaited production, gathering poems from across the Anglophone world (some of my own pieces will appear in it). Peter Philpott’s two brackets consisted entirely of an intriguing work performed in a number of voices and guises. Its tonal complexity managed shifts from the (relatively) sober to the slapstick, even incorporating elements of vispo that I wish I’d been able to photograph. These were blu-tacked to windows and mirrors, the act itself part of the performance. And if I were able to astrally transport myself to Sydney on Sunday afternoon I'd certainly be going to a reading by three Salt authors: Pam Brown, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Kate Lilley. From this distance all I can say is: 'break a leg'.

the small press squeeze

On one of the British poetry lists Ken Edwards notes some of the problems faced by a small press and the advantages and disadvantages of print-on-demand technology. The advantages are well enough known by now. Once the initial costs (the technology) are covered, the press doesn’t have to worry about housing back stock or dealing with bookshops on the usual sale or return basis. The major disadvantage is that bookshops won’t (generally) stock POD titles and the mass media won’t review them. It’s all down to the web and word-of-mouth. Amazon will supply POD titles (though the firm has been making threatening noises lately about publishers having to use its in-house printers). Meanwhile even good independent distributors like SPD make it uneconomic for non-American small presses to use their services. I am an inveterate buyer of books who will chase something up on the web where necessary, though I also make considerable use of bookshops. In London, places like Foyles and the London Review of Books store have sizeable poetry sections, though the titles are often weighted towards the conservative end of the spectrum. I was pleasantly surprised to pick up a copy of Jackson MacLow’s New and Selected Works (at the LRB shop) recently. This was however, a U. Cal title. In these shops and most of the good ones I know small presses need not apply (the only place I can think of that still stocks books like this is Melbourne’s Collected Works). I know my Sydney friends at Gleebooks (another good place) won’t approve of my use of Amazon and such sources but it’s not as though I have any real choice.

dash or hyphen?

Magic Sam

Here’s some more archival material: the covers of the complete run of Ken Bolton’s Magic Sam. I don’t have specific dates for these but the magazine ran from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. It’s a gestetnered affair with screen-printed covers and artwork from the years before general computer use changed the appearance of journals utterly. It’s still the finest example of this kind of production that I’ve seen. Some editors embraced the ratty nature of gestetner and produced magazines that walked the low-tech talk (I think here of Paul Buck). Ken, with his toes in the art world, wanted to do something that would look as good as was possible. The covers and most of the internal designs are his own (with occasional help from a few artist friends).

Issues #3 and #4 (with the near-identical covers) appeared together. One of them even contained a ‘free 45rpm record’:

All of this was done from a house looking out over the Tasman Sea at Coalcliff on the coast between Sydney and Wollongong. A corner of the living room sagged perilously, its foundations eaten away by erosion. The floor was, likely enough, carpeted with visitors, down for poetry readings in the ‘Gong sleeping overnight. They might be roped into helping Ken and Sal Brereton if Magic Sam was coming out. Ken later went on (in Adelaide) to edit Otis Rush though, with the physical production taken out of his hands, this magazine (though always terrific with its content and the art work within) lacked the classy hand-made feel of its predecessor.