Discovered Strange Attractor through The Midnight Bell. Looks lovely. Might be able to find a copy in London while I’m back in Blighty for Christmas. (From 30 degrees to 3 degrees. Deep joy).
Strange Attractor reminded me of the three Rapid Eye anthologies edited by the late Simon Dwyer, which had a big impact on me when at university. My friend Mal brought the first two volumes home one day and the pair of us couldn’t stop reading and talking about the stuff in them for weeks afterwards. Rapid Eye 3 was perhaps the best of the lot in its big art book format, but sadly Simon Dwyer was hospitalised as it was published, missing the launch party and dying not long after due to complications from AIDS.
Rapid Eye was pre-Internet days for me – or just as I was discovering the internet – and the range of voices assembled in these books seemed, at the time, not only rare but difficult to find, stuff that Dwyer had dug up and made easily available again or published for the first time. While there was a fair bit of the “covered in shit and blood in the name of art” brigade featured in Rapid Eye, which I personally always found a bit dull after the initial shock value had worn off, the majority of these books featured really interesting writing – as in, cogent, articulate arguments, polemics or considerations about people, art, music and culture. That Aldous Huxley featured on the cover of Rapid Eye 1 to launch the series was significant, I think – there was little posturing and no ageism or wilful trendiness to RE, more an interest in well-expressed, different ideas and positions wherever and whoever they came from.
So, this is a very small, very belated thank you to Simon Dwyer for Rapid Eye. Creation Books still publishes a Rapid Eye anthology, but get hold of the originals if you can. They might make that funny exploding noise at the back of your brain too.
Bonus links: Alexander Laurence’s interview with the gentlemen behind Creation Books, which mentions Simon Dwyer; and Pan’s review of the Rapid Eye books who had a similar experience to me with them. I couldn’t find any old interviews with Simon Dwyer which was a shame.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Chris – nice post – it was real blast from the past to see you writing about Rapid Eye! Boy, that takes me back. I have got a first edtion (large art book format) up in the loft somewhere. I think, if my memory serves me well, it might even be signed…I didn’t know he was dead.
So you’re heading back to Britain for the festivities. Well, once over the culture shock/physical shock, you have yourself a bloody lovely little Christmas!