A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included. Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher. Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader. Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader. Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.

A sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a path he did not go, this book calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, Fumi Okiji makes the case for jazz as a model of "gathering in difference."Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.

White/ Other is a strange hybrid beast – part poetry, part polemic, part sectarian graffiti – a long lyric essay that grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the position of the absent subject: that is the white working-class “other” within neo-liberal culture. White/ Other is memoir remixed, cut up and spliced with passages of cultural analysis and moments of feral lyric riff to ask what it means to be politically reviled, socially abjected, and economically disenfranchised, alive at the sharp end of everything, language included.'One of the unique joys of being a “white, other” is that you present an opportunity for nice, white middle-class people to comfortably indulge both their racism and their classism without ever having to admit to the existence of either. They don't see your class because you do not present to them like a “typical” working-class person according to the tropes they themselves invented, or because they do not believe the class system exists. They filter class out of their world-view in ways that remove the experience of class-based oppression from black and minority ethnic people, while refusing to acknowledge the roll racism plays in the perception and treatment of white working-class others...' Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of seven poetry collections and of numerous chapbooks, most recently Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Fran has recently completed her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled, "Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma". She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters and she currently teaches at Poetry School. Fran is currently working on 2 books for the87press

Joseph Jarman (1937 - 2019) was a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist best known as a founding member of trailblazing avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jarman was responsible for the Art Ensemble’s signature face paint and elaborate costumes as well as the pioneering theatrical and multimedia elements of their shamanistic performances, which could include dance, comedy, performance art, surreal pranks, and—notably—the recitation of Jarman’s poetry. In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman’s Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman’s flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman’s photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience’s consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago’s South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement. --- With a new preface by Thulani Davis and an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards  142 pages 8.25 x 6.75 inches Paperback, perfect bound edition of 2,000

Most books of poetry either greet us with the expected lineaments or else ask that we modestly reorient ourselves towards the slightly unfamiliar. Emily Martin's "Marking a Salt Ridge" is that rare book that seems actually to reconfigure sites of poetic writing and reading—to find new nodes and wormholes in the graphic text. More impressively still, it locates the points at which its medium appears to buckle into the refulgence of the plastic arts, turning recursive cadence and motif into a paint-like material through which all of the richly textured pentimenti are visible. A spectacularly conceived and executed book, as well as a beguilingly moving one.

36 pagesprinted in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm Between 1976 and 1981 Rock Against Racism and the youth of Britain unleashed the explosive rebel chemistry of Punk and Reggae bands in a five year festival of multi culturalism. Under the slogan ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’, Rock Against Racism took on the orthodoxy through 5 Carnivals, and over 500 gigs throughout the UK. In those five years the National Front went from a serious electoral threat into political oblivion.  

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36 pagesprinted in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm Format Photographers launched in 1983. It was, uniquely, an agency run by women photographers, for women photographers. It closed in 2003. “From its beginning, the Format ethos and working practice were based on three key principles. The agency aimed to encourage its members to develop their creativity and careers, while remaining sensitive to the context in which their images were used and distributed. It portrayed people and issues that were under-represented in the mainstream media of the time. By photographing women and men in non-traditional roles, its members aimed to break down gender stereotypes, and changed the way women and other marginalised groups were seen”. Helen Trompeteler prev. Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery London, Curator and Director of Programmes, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburg, USA. Images by: Maggie Murray, Brenda Prince, Joanne O’Brien, Raissa Page, Pam Isherwood, Sheila Gray, Jenny Matthews, Jacky Chapman, Val Wilmer and Melanie Friend.

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36 pagesprinted and manufactured in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm I often think back and thank my lucky stars that I just happened to arrive in Manchester in 1988. I’d enrolled on a Photography Course at Manchester Polytechnic and while still only 22, I was ready for a new chapter in my life after leaving behind my past in Birmingham. I had no idea that I was about to walk into the global phenomenon that the media called “MADCHESTER”. The Years of 1989–91 in Manchester saw an incredible explosion of creativity across many art forms and it certainly wasn’t just the music scene that benefitted. If you’re thinking Madchester only meant Happy Mondays & the Stone Roses then think again. There was also the poets, comedians, designers, entrepreneurs, journalists, DJs, photographers, — artists of all descriptions, as well as all round chancers that helped give the city an incredible buzz and ensuring the rest of the world was looking on with envy. As a Photographer I was perfectly set up to cover what was developing. I’d set up my Photo studio and darkroom where I was living, which at the time was a squat in one of the four big crescents which dominated the district of Hulme. Squatting in Hulme was really convenient, not only did it mean all my money could go on photography but also meant I was walking distance to the centre of Manchester, where all the fun was. I couldn’t help but get caught up in all the general mayhem, momentum and energy that these years provided. I became determined as much as possible to document what was going on around me.

Including images of The Roxy, Sunsplash, the Marquee, The Tunnel NYC, Rock Against Racism, Notting Hill Carnival, Exploited, Empire Ballroom, Wetlands, Gossips, Glastonbury. David Corio began his freelance photography career in 1978 after leaving art school at the age of 18. Moving to London he began taking portraits and going to concerts and clubs across the capital for personal projects and as assignments for New Musical Express, Time Out, The Face and Black Echoes. He worked at London listings magazine City Limits in the early 1980’s helping to write the music listings and editing their Nightclub section. He moved to New York in 1992 for 16 years continuing to shoot musicians, nightlife and the arts for the New York Times, The Times and various reggae and hip hop record labels and magazines. From daytime bhangra shows at Leicester Square’s Empire Ballroom to the first hip hop club in Soho’s ‘Gossips’ and the first Jungle Club in NYC, this collection of Fans and Clubbers, taken over an 18 year period shows many different musical genres in their infancy - their energy and excitement still fresh and raw. David Corio’s photographs are held by the National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The ICA and The Photographer’s Gallery, London and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC and the Institute of Contemporary Photography, NYC.

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36 pagesprinted in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm Nirvana, Manchester Polytechnic 1989Steve Jameson, World Domination Enterprises, Manchester Ritz 1988Mudhoney, Manchester International 1 Backstage 1989Fugazi, Manchester Boardwalk 1989Nirvana, Manchester Polytechnic 1989Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth, Manchester University 1989Edwards No 8 Night Club, Birmingham 1989Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth, Manchester University 1989Nirvana, Manchester Polytechnic 1989Howard Devoto, Birmingham Burberries 1988Slum Turkeys, Manchester Boardwalk 1989Stretch Heads, Bradford 1 in 12 Club 1990Psychic TV, Manchester Poly 1988Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Manchester 1988The Membranes, Manchester Boardwalk 1989Godflesh, Birmingham 1988Gun Club, Manchester Poly 1988J Masics, Dinosaur Jr. Manchester 1989Bjork, The Sugarcubes, Birmingham Burberries 1987Pussy Galore, Mermaid Pub, Birmingham 1988Dub Sex, Manchester Boardwalk 1989Mike, Manchester 1988Kirsten, Bradford 1989Julia Cafritz, Pussy Galore, Mermaid Pub, Birmingham 1988Boz & Rat, Bradford 1989Nick Cave, Ritz Manchester 1988

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It was Saturday night, the year was 1993, and I had recently moved to London to try to push my photography career along when I went down to the 100 club where they play rare American 60’s and 70’s soul music.  I had been on that scene up until a few years before and was curious to see where it had gone in the meantime, so I took my camera along with me. Going down those stairs into that dark basement, seeing those shadowy figures moving energetically in sync with each other made me hesitant. The scene had gone further underground, the crowd older, little new blood, the records more obscure and the attitude on the dancefloor was as fierce as ever. Could I really take pictures in this place? As I suspected, the blast from my first flash altered the atmosphere. I braved it to shoot a few more from different angles but things felt worse with each blinding shot. The relief I felt when I heard the familiar opening bars of ‘This Won’t Change’ by Lester Tipton. A fast, raw, jerky, but tender sound. I pushed the camera bag under a chair and got lost in the shadows until morning.   I very soon became a regular again, travelling to different venues around the country but I’d often wait till morning when the lights came on before taking any pictures. Mostly though I went to dance and enjoy the music with friends, leaving my camera at home. Elaine Constantine 2023 Pictures were taken in varied venues including the Manchester’s Ritz, London’s 100 club and in a lad called Steve’s kitchen, plus other places too numerous to remember.

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