Category Archives for Alan Moore

BRIAN ENO, interviewed by Kristine McKenna, with an appreciation by Alan Moore (Arthur No. 17, July 2005)

a17_cover

Available from the Arthur Store


INDOOR THUNDER: Landscaping the future with Brian Eno
by Alan Moore

Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics.

The first half of the twentieth century saw all energies and the agenda that had driven Western culture from its outset reach their logical albeit startling conclusions in the various fires of Auschwitz, Dresden, Nagasaki, after which we all sat stunned amongst the smoking fragments of our worldviews, all our certainties of the utopias to come revealed as flimsy, wishful, painted sets, reduced to vivid splinters, sharp and painful. There was scorched earth, there was shellshock, there was no Plan B. Hiroshima rang through the traumatized and anxious mindset of the 1950s, through Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, its shuddering reverberation somewhere between funeral knell and warning seismic tremor. Our response to the bad news carved a division through society, between flat denial on the one hand, paralyzed hysteria upon the other; between those who doggedly refused the notion that tomorrow might be different from today, and those fixated by the mushroom clouds who scorned the notion that there might be a tomorrow. Both these attitudes, you’ll notice, have conveniently avoided any need to think creatively about the future, have dodged any obligation to consider the Long Now. Tomorrow is today with smaller radios or it’s strontium and ashes, and in either case there’s no need to prepare.

Continue reading →

NOW AVAILABLE: "25,000 YEARS OF EROTIC FREEDOM" by Alan Moore

eroticfreedom

25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, with text by Alan Moore, edited by Eva Prinz, is out in hardcover now. It is adapted from Alan’s 12,000-word essay on the subject from the sold-out Arthur No. 25, “Bog Venus Versus Nazi Cock-Ring: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography.”

The promotional text from Abrams:

“Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.”—Alan Moore

With each new technological advance, pornography has proliferated and degraded in quality. Today, porn is everywhere, but where is it art? 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom surveys the history of pornography and argues that the success and vibrancy of a society relates to its permissiveness in sexual matters.

This history of erotic art brings together some of the most provocative illustrations ever published, showcasing the evolution of pornography over diverse cultures from prehistoric to modern times. Beginning with the Venus of Willendorf, created between 24,000-22,000 bce, and book-ended by contemporary photography, it also contains a timeline covering major erotic works in several cultures. 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom ably captures the ancient and insuppressible creative drive of the sexual spirit, making this book a treatise on erotic art.

Dodgem Logic: a new underground magazine edited by Alan Moore

dodgem.jpg

Er…gawsh…

Forty years after the uproarious heyday of the alternative press, writer Alan Moore is launching the 21st century’s first underground magazine from his hometown of Northampton, a community that is right at the geographical, political and economic heart of the country; one which has half its high street boarded up and is at present dying on its arse, just like everywhere else.

Drawing upon an overlooked and energetic pool of local talent as well as numerous friends and co-conspirators from comic books, the arts or entertainment, Dodgem Logic sets out to provide a splash of subterranean exotica in a bleached-out cultural and social landscape. Published every other month by counter-culture veterans KNOCKABOUT, Dodgem Logic is a forty page full-colour spectacle that, in addition, has an eight-page local section in each issue, thus inviting other areas to publish regional editions by providing their own inserts.

As cheap and beautiful as a heartbreaking teenage prostitute, Dodgem Logic has a cover price of £2.50, with its content similarly tailored to the fiscal toilet-bowl that we are currently engaged in sliding down. Regular columnists provide delicious, inexpensive recipes, wide-ranging medical advice, simple instructions for creating stylish clothing and accessories from next to nothing, guides to growing your own dinner by becoming a guerrilla gardener, and, in the first of Dave (The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible) Hamilton’s environmental columns, a bold experiment in living with no money. The same approach to helping readers deal with socio-economic meltdown and a blitz of repossessions is there in upcoming features on the present-day resurgence of the squatters’ movement, or in our communiqués from the Steampunk/ Post-Civilisation gang on how to start rebuilding culture and society before those things have broken down completely and our children are reduced to battering each other to a bloody pulp with their now-useless X-Boxes in a dispute over the last tub of pot noodles.

Not only seeking to give practical advice on getting through a rough stretch, Dodgem Logic is also committed to alleviating the attendant sense of anguish and despair by brightening the world with the astonishing cartoon-work of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s sublime Kevin O’Neill or that of underground legend Savage Pencil; the musings of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Book’s own Graham Linehan or of the nation’s sweetheart, the implacably positive Josie Long; even a delirious commemoration of the lunar landing’s anniversary by the masterful Steve Aylett. In addition to a variously-hosted women’s column launched by Lost Girls co-creator and erstwhile underground cartoon artist Melinda Gebbie, Mr. Moore will himself be contributing a lead feature on the history of underground subversive publishing from its origins in the thirteenth century, along with various illustrations and words of advice. All these and many other sterling features, including a free CD of magnificent home-grown Northampton music over fifty years, will be contained in the historic premiere issue, sporting an hallucinatory  front cover by digital artist Tamara Rogers and debuting this November. Wake up and smell the fairground ozone! No ramming!

Via Moore & Reppion.

Corrections to Arthur 25.

Page 12
A set of production errors resulted in Erik Davis’s article on Joanna Newsom being published without some minor changes he had made to the text, and with the entire first paragraph garbled. That paragraph should read:

Last February, in Los Angeles, Joanna Newsom took to the stage at the ArthurBall and performed, for the first time in their entirety, the five loonnggg songs that make up her new album Ys. Many folks present were already chest-deep in the cult of Joanna, a fandom that made 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender a leftfield indie hit and that turned Newsom herself into the sort of music-maker that inspires obsessive devotion as well as pleasure. At the time I admired Mender, but was, as of yet, no acolyte. I dug a handful of songs, but like many listeners, I found the eccentricity of Newsom’s voice sometimes rather grating. I also feared that the outsider waif thing was just an underground pose stitched together with lacy thrift-store duds and an iPod stuffed with mp3s of the Carter Family and Shirley Collins.

Yikes. Our deepest apologies to Erik, and to our readers. The complete, correct version of the article is now available here.

Page 32
The Rops artwork is reversed.

Page 33
The visuals on this page have been incorrectly identified in the caption. They are actually, from left to right: a photo of Oscar Wilde, a photo of Aubrey Beardsley and a drawing by Robert Crumb.

Page 34
The “Pricksters” comic strip at the top of the page is by Robert Crumb.
The correct title of the Aubrey Beardsley drawing is “Examination of the Herlad.”
The covers of the Tijuana Bibles appear to the right of the caption.

Page 42
Chuck Dukowski’s wife is named Lora (not “Nora”).

Also, we should’ve printed a special thanks to John Coulthart, Arthur’s Man in Manchester, for his generous work in providing appropriate images to illustrate the Alan Moore essay. Cheers John!