Q: WHEN IS THE NEXT ISSUE OF ARTHUR MAGAZINE COMING OUT?

A: Arthur has been on hiatus from print publication since December, 2008, when for the first time in Arthur’s six-year history, we were unable to go to press, due to repercussions from that year’s financial catastrophe, fatigue, mounting debts, etc etc.

It’s February, 2011. Although I’ve been able to clean up almost all of Arthur’s debt (magic works!), I still do not have the logistical means to resume print publication. Arthur needs a West Coast-based someone to handle its business affairs—that is, a publisher/co-owner—cuz I sure can’t do everything myself. It’s a challenging gig, fer shure, but… Know anyone? Please be in touch.

Jay Babcock
editor-owner, Arthur Magazine

http://www.arthurmag.com/contributors/radio/

This aerial footage showing one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil was filmed by the BBC for their new series “Human Planet” and released via uncontactedtribes.org on February 4, 2011.

“Without proof they exist, the outside world won’t support them,” says José Carlos Morelos, whose job it is to monitor the endangered tribe’s land and protect it from invaders. “One image of them has more impact than a thousand reports.”

“I insist on sensuality. I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet as jealously as any miser guards gold. They can do far more to protect me from what we humans have become: insensate, insensitive, inhuman. For the millions of years of evolution that made us, the ability to fully sense food and sex was the foundation of our humanity and the core determinant of survival. For ten thousand years, those same pleasures have been reserved for a few of us. Complete indulgence of sensuality is rare, and, as a rule, the purview of the rich. For ten thousand years, Homo sapiens has been unable to take its humanity for granted. Those who would resist dehumanization do so by daily staking a claim to it, by self-consciously adopting an aestheticism our hunter-gatherer forebears practiced by simply living. With the advent of agriculture, those qualities that united us—in fact, quality itself—came to divide us. Civilization did indeed modify the human genome, but only slightly, around the edges. We remain at our genetic core largely what our hunter-gatherer history made us, which is to say, sensual beings. All of humanity at some level still requires the aesthetic. What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.” —Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (North Point Press, 2004)