Washington Post on Arthur’s return to life

Arthur magazine, a counterculture favorite, returns to print

By Chris Richards

December 25, 2012

When the aughties weren’t horrifying, they were tough. Wars raged, SARS spiked, economies crumbled and America decided that its pop singers would be elected to fame via reality television, which, while pseudo-democratic, remains humiliating for all parties involved.

We needed a friend. Someone who could tell a weird joke, hip us to unheard music, teach us how to forage for food in the wild, or give us crash courses in magic. We needed Arthur.

A decade ago, free stacks of the counterculture magazine began materializing at coffee shops, bookstores, nightclubs and galleries across the country. These unsuspecting little newspapers were packed with fantastic reads — articles for, by and/or about rockers, radicals, astrologists, herbalists, poets, punks, believers, debunkers, cooks, comedians, cartoonists and Dolly Parton. But in 2008, as the great recession sent so many indie publications into death spasms, the magazine went kaput.

Four years later, Arthur has risen. “It’s good to be alive again, doing something that we love,” writes editor and co-publisher Jay Babcock in the magazine’s new issue, which features a definitive interview with late outsider guitarist Jack Rose and an almost hallucinogenic appreciation of Waylon Jennings’s finest album, “Dreaming My Dreams,” by Stewart Voegtlin.

And then there’s the biggest surprise: You can actually hold this thing — a beautiful, 16-page broadsheet — in your hands…

Continue reading: Washington Post

THE SOURCE by Charles Potts

The Source

Vertical integration in the United States once meant
White people on top and everybody else layered in below.

It has come to mean control of a product and its profits
From conception to consumption
Employing all the formerly middle men
Into one sleek unit of production and delivery.

In the case of poetry I’ve done that:
Dreamed of a poem
Captured the poem in the dream
Reduced it to representational linguistic fragments illustrated on paper
Bound it with other plausible reductions
Into the pages of a book
With barcodes, prices, photographs, and blurbs
On the back cover and covered it with the art of friends
To be sold if not in open markets
Then at the Walla Walla farmers market for years.

Does this make me then a farmer of dreams?
I decline to bring any more dreams
Thru the trap door of commerce
From which they so turbulently spring.
Retired dream farmer in a collapsed poetry market.

The poems and the dreams to which they are inextricably attached
Remain hidden in the dream verse
One of many multi verses I am told.

—Charles Potts

WHAT WE COULD HAVE AGAIN

othernyc

“In Thierry Cohen’s series, Darkened Cities, we think we see bright night skies over cities. Actually, what we’re seeing is the opposite. These are the skies that we don’t see. By traveling to places free from light pollution but situated on precisely the same latitude, [Cohen] obtains skies identical to the very ones visible above the [too-bright] cities a few hours earlier or later. He shows, in other words, not a fantasy sky as it might be dreamt, but a real one as it should be seen…”

http://thierrycohen.com/pages/texts/text.html

(Link via Ann Magnuson)

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.