Vice July Literary Reviews

Dirty Hand
Paddy Jones
Self Published

You might have noticed Paddy’s work sneaking into these pages slowly over the last few months. We discovered the spidery 19 year old Camberwell student through staff photos guy Jonnie Craig who could basically hangs out with talented, skater babes professionally if he wasn’t so good at the whole taking photos thing. Anyway, if you thought Paddy’s doodles of Hitler riding an Alsatian or Caligula buggering a horse were weird wait till you see this thing. The fancy ink on card presentation may draw you in but once you get up close and personal you are confronted by guys like ‘Vampire Penishead’ and a whole host of gorilla hand puking twenty eyed troll things. If he doesn’t go fully insane first Paddy could well be one to keep an eye on in the not so far away future.

Myspace.com/gentgentgent

Obnivorious
Frederic Fleury
Nieves

I Googled ‘obnivorious’ and it came back with nothing so I am guessing that Fleury just made it up. It’s a good word though. I hope I never get stumped in a crossword and obnivorious is the answer but Google laziness has prevented me from ever knowing what it actually means. If he did make it up though I am totally fine with it because as well as running the amazing Editions 57 publishing house with Emanuelle Pidoux and being a founder of Frederic Magazine Fleury has managed to put out one off my favourite Nieves books in a good while. Just check out the weird grim reaper fella on the back if you don’t believe me. As always it’s limited to just 150 so don’t sleep on it.

nievesbooks.com

Apesma
Jo Robertson & Pierre Cupp
Bad Taste

Jo is one of those people who seems to pop up everywhere: on stage making music with whatever free noise dude is in town on any given night, presiding over openings, and showing work in way more galleries then you ever even knew existed. With that schedule fuck knows where she found the time to squeeze this one out with her buddy Pierre, let alone make a seriously haphazard and busy collage of card, tracing paper, line drawing, typed poetry and found images. It’s kind of how I’d like to imagine it is like being in Jo’s slightly skewed head is every day.

noggallery.com

The Hidden Hand vol. 1
Self Published

I have known Nathan for a pretty long time but when I sat down to write this I realised that I have no idea what his surname is. Weird. His MySpace name has always just been ‘Nathan Awesome Rape’. I met him when he used to work at Anarchy Records on the Mansfield Road in Nottingham. These things should give you some insight into the kind of stuff that The Hidden Hand covers. I think Nathan moved back to his parent’s council flat on some grim estate the size of Mordor in Sunderland or something so this zine has been a long time coming but boy is it worth the wait. Screened woodcuts on heavy-duty card, nice paper, features on Moss, The Shitty Limits and Glyn from Scrambled Design, some great and seriously warped illustrations and even an unpublished interview with J.P. Morrow from 1997 conducted by a young John Gilbert from Red County War Ensemble. The next one will have stuff on Eyehategod, Pagan Altar and Pulling Teeth so watch out. Best music ‘zine we’ve seen come out of the UK in years.

myspace.com/unholyhandfanzine

BIG ONE:

Death Pits
Gary LaChance, Chris Noble and Mike Comeau
TV Books

We shouted about this on the blog at viceland.com a little while back after seeing a flicktime pdf but man, holding the real thing in your hands is like Allah handing you Buddah’s hand written transcripts of the Ten Commandments of all that is good. Death Pits was released on Tim Barber’s TV Books imprint after Tim was contacted by Gary LaChance though his Tiny Vices website. LaChance sent down a few scans of crayon and pencil renderings of intricate torture chambers that he and his buddies Chris and Mike had drawn in detention at the age of 7 and christened ‘The Death Pits’. Tim was immediately hooked and asked Gary to send him as many of the images as possible. LaChance went one better and actually sent the original homework binder that the friends had created the Death Pits in with the pages in the exact and obsessive order numbered Death Pit 1-33 that they had originally created all those years ago. The book is an exact reproduction of the binder. We are not sure what is more awesome: being able to peer directly into a group of bored but insanely creative 7 year olds brains, the sheer amount of ways these young kids came up with torturing people or the intricacy with which the whole thing is rendered and put together. There are all these complicated sluices everywhere that drain blood and TV cameras that monitor the whole thing. It’s incredible. In fact it is hurting my head thinking how good it is. Just go buy a copy.

tvbookshop.com

Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal no.7
Ed. Thurston Moore
Ecstatic Peace

Is there anything uncle Thurston the renaissance man of everything ever can’t turn his hand to? Probably not. Playing in the band every kid who has ever attended an ATP has in their default ‘best band ever’ memory, acclaimed solo artist, serial avant-garde collaborator, label owner, galleried artist and now… poetry journal editor! OK so the opening piece by Twig Harper might be a little indulgent in that it is just a bunch of random letters and alien symbols that look like only Major Briggs from Twin Peaks could decipher but the rest is pretty great. You get Byron Coley ranting about Condoleeza Rice, a Richard Hell and David Shapiro collaboration, Dylan Nyoukis doing couplets on an ‘avant dishwasher’ and even Mike Watt from the Minutemen doing a poem that sounds on the page just like how he talks in “We Jam Econo”. Wow.

ecstaticpeace.com

Narcisa
Jonathan Shaw
Heartworm

This book originally came to our attention because one of our buddies works at Heartworm, the publishing house set up by Wes Eisold who was in Give Up The Ghost, Some Girls, X O Skeletons and a bunch of bands like that. You get the idea. Anyhoo, as soon as we found out that the novel in question was by Jonathan Shaw we jumped all over the pdf quicker than a pack skag heads who’ve just seen box of out of date chocolate thrown out of the back of Asda. We were not disappointed: sweat, grime, drugs, crime and a destructive relationship between an ageing gypsy and unhinged prostitute. Shaw’s prose is still filled with stuff along the lines of: “Last night she’d been smoking for hours at the tail end of another long run. I’d fucked her till my dick was soft and sore and my eyelids were like little sandbags dragging
me down into dull realms of incoherence”. If you don’t like Narcisa it means that you probably don’t like ‘books’ and you should probably stop reading this section of the magazine.

theheartworm.com