Author Archives for Jay Babcock

Arthur’s first issue in four years reviewed in Portland Mercury

A Coffee-Table Newspaper
Arthur Magazine: Back from the Dead

by Ned Lannamann (Portland Mercury)

IT’S BEEN four years since we last held a hard copy of Arthur magazine in our hands, but it’s made an unlikely—and very welcome—return to the printed medium with issue 33. Editor Jay Babcock has teamed up with Jason Leivian of Portland’s Floating World Comics, who’s now co-publisher, and while the new incarnation takes on a very different format from those last issues of Arthur, the ideas and attitude are happily the same. Arthur’s lens is on fringe music, art, and ideas—the “New Weird America” scene, as some have termed it—and perhaps due to Leivian’s involvement, there’s more of a visual emphasis on comics than before.

Issue 33 is something new: a coffee-table newspaper, printed on 16 immense pages of newsprint with minimal ads, and almost every inch covered with words or pictures. The cover, a gigantic piece by surreal comics artist Rick Veitch, is gorgeous, and the crispness and clarity of the print is perhaps the best I’ve seen in a newspaper…

continues: Portland Mercury

Housekeeping note

Subscriptions to Arthur are not being offered at this time.

A large-scale subscription service is extremely resource-consuming to maintain.

For now, we are asking our readers who prefer mail order to purchase each issue as it becomes available via our Store.

You can purchase Arthur No. 33 (official pub date: Dec. 22, 2012) now for $5 plus shipping and handling.

Please click here to go to the Store and do that thing.

OUT OF BALANCE

Indigenous cultures across the planet have been warning for eons that American “civilization” (entertainment-technology complex) undermines us all by devoting so much of itself to pandering to teenage boys’ worst impulses in such an overwhelming way.

Don’t believe it? Check out In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander.

Or, watch this one-hour documentary about Ladakh. See what happens when the American entertainment-technology complex enters a stable, peaceful culture:

http://vimeo.com/21643212

ALL THE RIGHT-ON BEAUTIFUL ANARCHO-TAOIST-FEMINIST WISDOM-FABLES YOU NEED

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The Unreal and the Real

by Ursula K. Le Guin

published November 2012

For fifty years, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have shaped the way her readers see the world. Her work gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power. Le Guin’s writing is witty, wise, both sly and forthright; she is a master craftswoman.

This two-volume selection of almost forty stories taken from her eleven collections was made by Le Guin herself, as was the organizing principle of splitting the stories into the nominally realistic and fantastic.

More info: Small Beer Press

INFO FOR RETAILERS WISHING TO STOCK THE JUST-PRINTED ARTHUR NO. 33

If you wish to stock Arthur Magazine, please click here to contact us via email and we will respond near-immediately with details on how to order quantity directly from us.

Alternatively, if you have an account with Forced Exposure (Mass.), you can order Arthur through them.

Or, if you have an account with Forte Music Distribution (UK), you can order Arthur through them.

ANOTHER TREASURE FILM FROM HISHAM MAYET

Above: Sublime Frequencies announces a new film by Hisham Mayet: The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel. Condensed from 40 hours of footage shot between 2007 and 2012, The Divine River is an exhilarating, hallucinatory, harrowing record of music, ritual, life, and landscape along the Niger River — which the Tuareg call “Egerew n-Igerewen,” or “River of Rivers” — as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger.


Purchase the dvd for $18.50: go here for info