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63.
The Moving Times.
Np. (London): self-published, nd. (June 1966). Fifteen foolscap-size sheets, mimeographed, all but six of them printed recto and verso. Staple-bound along upper edge. Designed to resemble an issue of My Own Mag. Cover uses Project Sigma’s The Moving Times single-sided poster, trimmed to just the title and upper section.
Jeff Nuttall later described his initial reaction to it: “It’s a magazine. A rich and powerful gesture of honesty and complete disgust… It names its editors as Trocchi and myself. It is a mock My Own Mag, full of cut holes, with a burlesque facsimile of the original My Own Mag No. 1 cover…” (Bomb Culture, pp.245-247).
Its contents include two letters from Tomazos to Dr. Aaron Esterson (a Glaswegian psychiatrist and co-founder of the Philadelphia Association); fragments of quotes from My Own Mag and other underground documents “sliced in”; a letter from Esterson to RD Laing; a forged letter from Tomazos to Alexander Trocchi; “Artaud’s famous indictment of trivial form in art, attributed here to Anthony Caro”; a letter from Phil Cohen (John Latham’s assistant, later ‘Dr. John’ of the London Street Commune); a letter from Jeff Nuttall to Tomazos; “a scramble-up of Fainlight’s ‘Spider’” (a poem famously scrambled by Fainlight himself during his performance at the Royal Albert Hall twelve months before); a letter from Carl Weissner; a forged letter from Phil Cohen to Nuttall; and “Farting’s Jolly”, a cut-up falsely attributed to William Burroughs (a parody of “Martin’s Folly” from The Moving Times poster).
Illustrations include “Apollo sliced down the middle and stuck onto burned figures - the atrocity photos from the sTigma” (item #8). Old pages from the Mag and Amaranth. Bomb drawings.”
When Nuttall phoned RD Laing to let him know that he had nothing to do with it, Laing told him that “All you can do is spread the word around that the guy’s a nut case.”
Small stain to front cover, o/w Very Good plus, together with a separate sheet printing an uncredited drawing by Criton Tomazos.
