Arthur (magazine) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Arthur magazine, a free bi-monthly 50,000-copy periodical, was founded in October, 2002 by publisher Laris Kreslins and editor Jay Babcock. It has received favorable attention from other periodicals such as L.A. Weekly, Print
Print (magazine)
The publication, Print, A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, was a limited edition quarterly periodical begun in 1940 and continued under different names up to the present day as Print, a bimonthly American magazine about visual culture and design.In its current format, Print documents and...

, Punk Planet
Punk Planet
Punk Planet was a 16,000 print run punk zine, based in Chicago, Illinois, that focused most of its energy on looking at punk subculture rather than punk as simply another genre of music to which teenagers listen. In addition to covering music, Punk Planet also covered visual arts and a wide...

and Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

. Arthur features photography and artwork from Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze is an American director, producer and actor, whose work includes music videos, commercials, film and television...

, Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...

, Susannah Breslin

Susannah Breslin

Susannah Breslin is an American writer best known for creating the blog The Reverse Cowgirl and for her on-camera reporting for the Playboy TV program Sexcetera. Her writing and television work tends to deal with sexual and pornography-related topics. She has also written for periodicals including...

, Gary Panter

Gary Panter

Gary Panter is an illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter's work is representative of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW, one of the second generation in American underground comix...

and Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a Canadian post-rock band which originated from Montreal, Quebec in 1994...

. Arthur's regular columnists include Byron Coley

Byron Coley

Byron Coley is an American music critic who wrote prominently for Forced Exposure magazine in the 1980s, starting with their fifth issue until the magazine ceased publication in 1993. Prior to Forced Exposure, he wrote for NY Rocker, Boston Rock, and Take It! magazine. Coley is one of the first...

, Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore

Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...

, Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck is an author living in New York’s East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich, a blog website centered around New Age philosophy and activism. He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012:...

, Paul Cullum, Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media...

, and T-Model Ford

T-Model Ford

James Lewis Carter Ford is an American blues musician, using the name T-Model Ford. Unable to remember his exact date of birth, he began his musical career in his early seventies, and has continuously recorded for the Fat Possum label, then switched to Alive Naturalsound Records. His musical style...

.

Arthur magazine is particularly drawn to noise music

Noise music

Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically...

, stoner metal, folk

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

and other types of psychedelia. The first issue of Arthur featured an interview with journalist and author Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck

(author of Breaking Open the Head
Breaking Open the Head
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism is a book written by author and journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, founding editor of the literary journal Open City...

); artwork by Alan Moore

Alan Moore

Alan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...

(Watchmen
Watchmen
Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins. The series was published by DC Comics during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently reprinted in collected form...

, From Hell
From Hell
From Hell is a comic book series by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell, originally published from 1991 to 1996, speculating upon the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. The title is taken from the first words of the "From Hell" letter, which some authorities believe was an authentic...

, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen); and an interview with Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

.

Previous to creating the publication, Laris Kreslins created the popular music journals Sound Collector and Audio Review. Jay Babcock was a contributor to Mojo magazine

Mojo (magazine)

MOJO is a popular music magazine published initially by Emap, and since January 2008 by Bauer, monthly in the United Kingdom. Following the success of the magazine Q, publishers Emap were looking for a title which would cater for the burgeoning interest in classic rock music...

and the L.A. Weekly.

Some of the magazine's influences include Joan Didion

Joan Didion

Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...

, Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...

, William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

, Lester Bangs

Lester Bangs

Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist, author and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and was known for his leading influence in rock 'n' roll criticism....

, Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...

, Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

, and Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...

.

Arthur magazine also releases CDs and DVDs under the imprint of their label (formerly called [Bastet]). On Labor Day weekend in 2005, they curated Arthurfest

Arthurfest

Arthurfest was a festival created by Arthur magazine editor Jay Babcock on September 4-5 2005 at Barnsdall Park overlooking the City of Los Angeles, CA.-Sunday Sept 4:Lawn Stage...

in Barnsdall Park; in February 2006, Arthur Ball in Echo Park; and in October 2006 Arthur Nights at The Palace Theater, in downtown Los Angeles.

On February 25, 2007, it was announced on the magazine's web site that it would be ceasing publication indefinitely. The hiatus was due to a breakdown in negotiations between Lime Publishing (Arthurs original publisher) and another unnamed publisher. In April 2007, it was announced that the magazine would return as Arthur Vol. II in the near future. The magazine resumed publication in September 2007.

In June 2008, owner Jay Babcock moved Arthur's headquarters from Los Angeles to New York, the seat of North America's publishing industry.

On March 6, 2011, Jay Babcock announced that the magazines would cease to exist in any form as of March 15, 2011, though its archive and store would remain active for an unspecified period thereafter.

External links

KCRW: Dragnet conversation with Jay Babcock

CalArts MFA Writing Program Visiting Artists Series 2005-11-02: Jay Babcock, Trinie Dalton & Daniel Chamberlin (November 2, 2005)

Arthur Nights Forum

Selected press for Arthur Nights (.pdf format)

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