The Happy Reader #12
It’s been a while, but we’ve found another Page 23 worthy of note. It sits in the middle of The Happy Reader’s interview with Laurie Anderson, a spread of black containing a brief visual archive of Anderson’s career.
The Happy Reader remains a favourite here at magCulture, but the enthusiasm with which I approach a new issue does depend on the subject of its lead interview – always a long-form piece, taking up half each 68-page issue. As a huge fan of Anderson, I’ve been excited about the arrival of the twelfth issue, and Emily King’s conversation with the American musician/performance artist doesn’t disappoint.
But it’s that visual archive that I want to highlight here. The right-hand page, page 23, includes an image of Anderson performing her epic ‘United States Parts 1—4.’ This four-night long show toured between 1979 and 1983, and included her surprise hit single ‘O Superman’. I saw the entire four nights in London and it was an extraordinary event that I would love to experience again. The audio recording didn’t do the show justice.
The second half of the magazine takes the usual form of a series of pieces tangentially linked to a single book, this time ‘Frankenstein’. Here we discover a bonus ‘23’ — the various pieces here are strung together as numbered series, ‘Twenty-three dreadful monsters’. Number 23 is Boris Karloff. We’ve waited a while to revisit this strand on the Journal and with this new Happy Reader we’ve hit gold.
Editor-in-chief: Seb Emina
Editorial directors: Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers
Design: Tom Etherington